Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Empire of the Summer Moon: Chapter 9

THE REST OF the Parker hostages—Rachel Plummer, Elizabeth Kellogg, John Richard Parker, and James Pratt Plummer—suffered very different fates. All were intertwined in some way with Rachel’s father and Cynthia Ann’s uncle James W. Parker, the man whose breathtaking lack of judgment had been largely to blame for the disaster that had befallen the clan in May of 1836. Like many other members of the Parker clan, James was a colorful figure. But he was much more than that. He was one of the most outrageous, extreme, obsessive, ambitious, violent, dishonest, morally compromised, reckless, and daring characters ever to stake a claim on the early Texas frontier. He was a man of more contradictions than anyone could keep track of: a prominent citizen who was accused at various times of being a murderer, counterfeiter, liar, drunk, horse thief, and robber. He was kicked out of two different churches for lying and drunkenness. And yet during his lifetime he was an elected justice of the peace, one of the original Texas Rangers, a representative at the legendary “consultation” that set the stage for the Texas revolution, and a friend of Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar. He was a preacher who once had his own church, a successful businessman who owned a sawmill and thousands of acres of land. Though an odor of impropriety, untruth, and general malfeasance haunts his life, he was never convicted of anything. Some of his neighbors believed that the raid itself had been the result of his shady business dealings. They alleged that he had bought stolen horses from Indians with counterfeit money, and that the true purpose of the attack had been to avenge the fraud.¹ Nothing was ever proven, and James himself mounted a spirited defense of his honor in a self-published pamphlet.² He admitted to killing five people, but they were all Indians and there were no criminal penalties in the Republic of Texas for murdering redskins.

And yet that was not how James Parker was mainly known. For all of the obloquy and misadventure, he was famous throughout the West as the man who searched for the Parker captives. The man who refused to give up. He made five trips, alone, into Indian lands between 1836 and 1837, mostly acting on tips about young white women—like his daughter Rachel—who had been carried off by Indians. He made another four or five excursions from 1841 to 1844, based on information he believed would lead him to his niece Cynthia Ann Parker, his nephew John Richard Parker, or his grandson James Pratt Plummer.³ He logged perhaps five thousand miles, much of it alone. The only remotely comparable captive hunter in American history was a former slave named Britt Johnson, who made five trips into the wilderness starting in 1864 searching for his wife and children, who were also captured by Comanches.⁴ (If James’s story begins to sound familiar, it was the basis for John Ford’s magnificent western The Searchers starring John Wayne in the James Parker role and Natalie Wood as his niece, the screen version of Cynthia Ann.)

Parker’s first trip in search of his relatives, to Nacogdoches in East Texas, was a stunning and unexpected success. His sister-in-law Elizabeth Kellogg had been purchased by Delaware Indians and brought in to that city to trade. The Delawares, presumably marking up what they had paid the Kichais (who got her from the Comanches), wanted $150 for her. James was both overjoyed and, as would be the case at various times in his life, “penniless.” He somehow managed to convince his old friend Sam Houston to put up the money.

Thus was Elizabeth ransomed on August 20, 1836, three months after the raid. History does not record what happened to her after that, though the social position of returned female captives in nineteenth-century America was deeply compromised. People were under no illusions about what had happened to them. They knew with great specificity what Plains Indians did to adult women, and thus repatriated captives were usually objects of pity. If they were married, their husbands often would not take them back. In several cases unmarried women captives were wealthy enough to attract husbands in spite of what had happened to them. Elizabeth probably lived out a life of quiet shame in the shadows, perhaps in the home of a Parker relative. She would have been an embarrassment: That may be why James says so little about her.

Between August 1836 and October 1837, Parker spent most of his time in the wilderness searching for the captives. He was mainly tracking his daughter Rachel, because in those early years his informants—traders along the Red River, Texas’s northern boundary—had heard stories only of young women and nothing about children being held by Indian tribes. His journeys are chronicles of hardship and near disaster. On his first trip, he found his horse could not swim across the swollen Red River so he abandoned it, crossed the river on his own, and headed off into the Indian territories on foot, an action that people of the day considered tantamount to suicide. He weathered a driving rainstorm that flooded the prairie to a depth of two feet and was followed by a blue norther that howled down out of the Canadian plains and froze it all. He was almost certainly going to die, in his own estimation, when he managed to start a fire by stuffing some cotton from his shirt into his pistol and firing it at a log that had somehow stayed dry in the torrent. On his next trip he ventured into the wilderness unarmed—again, tantamount to suicide—and this time went six days without food, breaking his fast by strangling and eating a skunk. On the next he spent a full month lurking around a Comanche camp, leaving messages in English by nearby streams. He knew that Indians forced captives to fetch water, and was hoping, though there would seem to be less than a chance in a million of this ever happening, to get his daughter’s attention. All his suffering was in vain. None of the stories he heard got him any closer to his daughter.

In October 1837 he returned home for the fourth time, discouraged and in poor health. While he recuperated, he dispatched his son-in-law Lorenzo Nixon (who was married to Rachel’s sister) to the Red River trading posts to see if there was any news of women captives. Now, finally, his luck turned. At one of the posts, Nixon was tipped that a Mrs. Plummer had arrived in Independence, Missouri, outside of modern-day Kansas City. He found her there a few weeks later. Her first words to him were: “Are my husband and father alive?” Nixon said they were. Then she asked: “Are mother and the children alive?” The answer to that, too, was yes.

Like everything else that happened to the Parker family in those early days, the story of Rachel Parker Plummer’s return is a strange and epic tale that stretches across several thousand miles of frontier. She was purchased from her Comanche captor in August of 1837 by a group of Comancheros. At the time she was probably somewhere on the high plains of eastern Colorado. She was put on a horse and taken on what she described as a “very hard” seventeen-day ride to Santa Fe, which was then still a part of Mexico. The Comancheros, who would actually not acquire that name for another five or six years, were one of the West’s most interesting subcultures. They owed their existence to the 1786 peace made by New Mexico governor Juan Bautista de Anza and the Comanches, after his defeat of Cuerno Verde in Colorado. From that year forward, Comanches could freely enter Spanish settlements to trade for horses, and New Mexican traders could operate safely on the plains of Comancheria. American accounts often described Comancheros as “renegades” or “half-breeds,”⁵ the latter referring to what was supposed to be Comanche blood. In fact they were half-breeds, or mixed blood, but so was almost the entire population of New Mexico. They were mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, as most Mexicans are today. They were less renegades than businessmen, though they were famously hard-bitten characters and occasionally rode with Comanches and Kiowas on horse- and cattle-stealing raids. The Comanches traded livestock, hides, and captives to the Comancheros in exchange for beads, knives, paint, tobacco, pots and pans, calico and other cloths, metal spikes for making arrows, coffee, flour, and bread. The trading took place in specific locations such as Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle and various places in northeastern New Mexico.

As years went by, more and more of the Comanchero trade was in guns, ammunition, and whiskey, and they dealt increasingly in stolen cattle, which they fenced to merchants who in many cases sold them back to their original owners, often the military.⁶ They were important to the Comanches for many reasons, but perhaps the most important was that they allowed the still-wild bands—the Quahadis, Yamparikas, Nokonis, and Kotsotekas—to stay out of the white man’s settlements, away from the blandishments of white civilization, away from the diseases that were destroying their southern brethren. (On the east, a comparable trading network evolved among the Kickapoos, Delawares, and Shawnees in the Indian country, offering the Comanches the same opportunities.)⁷ Comancheros also gave the People a way to trade and profit from captives. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Comancheros had dealt mainly in captive Indians from a variety of tribes for use as mine workers or servants. But starting in 1821 the Anglo settlement in Texas changed all that. Once it became clear that Texans would pay generously for captives, an active market sprang up. (When U.S. general Zachary Taylor announced in 1842 that the U.S. government would pay for any captives brought into Fort Gibson, in what is present-day eastern Oklahoma, the market went wild, as did the takings.)⁸ The Comancheros were soon doing a brisk business in white captives as well.

The men who ransomed Rachel Plummer were not speculators; they had been operating under specific instructions from William and Mary Donoho, a wealthy Santa Fe couple, who had told them to pay any price for white women. The Donohos were remarkable people, especially Mary. She was thought to be the first woman ever to travel the Santa Fe Trail, doing so in 1833. She was the first female U.S. citizen to live in Santa Fe; two of her children were the first Anglo children born there.⁹ They took Rachel in and put her up at the best hotel in town, which had dirt floors, where she enjoyed her first night in a bed in fifteen months. The Donohos were exceptionally kind to her, assuring her that everything would be done to return her to her relatives. The people of Santa Fe welcomed her, too, in spite of her deeply compromised status. They raised $150 for her to help her get back home.

But Rachel’s run of bad luck was not quite over. Her $150 was immediately stolen by the dishonest clergyman who had been entrusted to hold it. And then a violent rebellion broke out in the streets of Santa Fe. Two thousand Pueblo Indians ambushed two hundred government militiamen. A massacre followed. The rebels beheaded the governor, placed his head on a pole, and paraded it through the streets. They put a district judge in stocks, cut his hands off, and waved them in his face.¹⁰ The Pueblos installed their own governor.

This was enough for the Donohos, who were now fearful for their own safety. They fled east, with the hapless Rachel in tow, back to their Missouri home—a two-month journey of some eight hundred miles straight through the heart of Comancheria. In her memoir, Rachel dismisses the trip, which very few white Americans had made at that point, as a minor inconvenience:

The road led through a vast region of prairie, which is nearly one thousand miles across. This, to many, would have been a considerable undertaking, as it was all the way through an Indian country. But we arrived safely at Independence, where I received many signal favors from many of the inhabitants.¹¹

Reunited with her brother-in-law, together they departed, in the dead of winter, for Texas. The trip was long, cold, and miserable—yet another thousand miles. On February 19, 1838, Rachel arrived at her father’s home near Huntsville, Texas, north of Houston. She had made a nearly unbelievable nineteen-month odyssey across a huge portion of the continent, and it had taken a fearful toll on her. James describes her as being “in very bad health,” and observes:

She presented a most pitiable appearance; her ematiated [sic] body was covered with scars, the evidences of the savage barbarity to which she had been subject during her captivity.¹²

Curiously, he says nothing about her life back home. Instead, he describes a “protracted illness,” during which she prayed for her son James Pratt, and then her peaceful death.

She often said that this life had no charms for her, and that her only wish was that she might live to see her son restored to his friends. . . . In about a year from the time she returned to her paternal home, she calmly breathed out her spirit to Him who gave it, and her friends committed her body to the silent grave.

This strangely bowdlerized account leaves out most of the important events of the last part of her life. James does not mention Rachel’s pregnancy, for example, which was in itself a remarkable event. Her third child was conceived soon after she had returned, which meant that her husband, L. T. M. Plummer, had gotten over what so many others could not: the fact of her violation by Indians. They were starting another family. Nor does James mention another remarkable fact: Toward the end of Rachel’s pregnancy, his family was forced to flee their home because it was threatened by a gang of vigilantes who had vowed to kill him.

The vigilantes believed that he had murdered a Mrs. Taylor and her daughter, apparently in connection with a robbery. According to a letter James sent to Governor Lamar requesting relief, the same gang had staged mock trials and had hanged people.¹³ They had written James a note saying they were going to kill him and L.T.M. and destroy their property. James went into hiding, and insisted that his family, which numbered perhaps a dozen people, travel to Houston, some seventy miles away. Fearing that the vigilantes might try to kill them, too, they avoided the dirt road and instead made their way, in freezing rain and bitter cold, through thick brush and pine forest, often cutting their own trails. It probably took them a week. They slept out in the open with only the clothing they had hurriedly gathered before leaving. Rachel was very likely nine months pregnant at the time.

James does not mention this episode in his published narrative. He merely says that Rachel died of a “protracted illness,” and most historians have tended to let it go at that. But what killed her was the flight from Huntsville to Houston. In a letter he wrote to his friend Mirabeau Lamar on or about the date of Rachel’s death, James gave the fullest explanation of what happened.

I directed my family to move to the citty of Houston while at thare urgent solicitation I was induced to keep out of the way of those outlaws; but with such malignant Vigilance did these usurpers of the law watch us, that my familty to evade them was so exposed to the cold rain and inclemency of the weather as not only to endanger all thare lives but has actually taken Four of my beloved to thare long home; (among whom was my daughter Mrs. Plummer).¹⁴

Rachel died on March 19. Her infant son, Wilson P. Plummer, born on January 4, 1839, outlived her by two days.¹⁵ It is ironic that, after all she had suffered, and the thousands of miles she had traveled, her death was caused, indirectly, by her own father in what ought to have been the safety of her own home.

• • •

In 1841, James started searching again, now focused on the captives still at large: his niece Cynthia Ann, his nephew John, and his grandson James. His account of the next four years is again full of derring-do and near calamity. In late 1842 he heard that two boys had been brought in to Fort Gibson. He arrived there in January 1843 to replace his grandson and his nephew. James Pratt Plummer was now eight; John Richard Parker was thirteen. They spoke no English. James’s first reaction was to run away, and he had to be persuaded to come back. The three somehow made their way home, in cold and wet weather, partly on foot and without proper winter gear (nothing was ever easy with James), through the Indian territory and back to Texas.

In his narrative, James suggests a simple, happy ending for the boys, but it was more complicated than that. John seems to have been returned to his mother, Lucy, who had remarried in 1840 and divorced soon afterward and who had been mired in the settlement of her dead husband Silas Parker’s estate for four years. John was dispatched by her sometime around 1850 or 1851 (Lucy died in 1852) to try to replace Cynthia Ann and bring her back. Somehow he managed to replace her—an astounding story in its own right—though he had no more luck than Colonel Williams, Robert Neighbors, or Victor Rose.

In his report on his expedition to the headwaters of the Red River in 1852, Captain Randolph Marcy wrote that he had met John Parker around this time and spoken with him:

The brother of the woman, who had been ransomed by a trader and brought home to his relatives, was sent back by his mother for the purpose of endeavoring to prevail upon his sister to leave the Indians and return to her family; but he stated to me that on his arrival she refused to listen to the proposition, saying that her husband, children and all that she held most dear were with the Indians, and there she should remain.¹⁶

No one knows what happened to John. There were many stories. Cynthia Ann believed, as she later told interviewers, that he had died of smallpox. She was wrong, at least on the timing of his death. He was reported to have served in the Civil War under a colonel in the Texas Rifles. The most popular story was that John returned to live with the Comanches. In this version, he came down with smallpox, was abandoned, and nursed back to health by a Mexican woman who had been a captive herself (the “night-eyed” “Aztec” beauty). He became a rancher in Mexico, lived to a ripe old age, and died in 1915. Several newspaper accounts of the day suggested as much. Such are legends of the West.

James Pratt Plummer had a more prosaic fate. By the time of his capture, his father, L.T.M., had remarried, and had two children. When they arrived back in Texas, the elder James did something that was both bizarre and fully in keeping with his mercurial character. He refused to let L.T.M. have James Pratt. The reasons are not entirely clear but were most likely financial: James wanted money. He claimed at one point that he paid $1,000 for the two children, an apparent lie for which he was later banished from his church. He tried to hold L.T.M. up for some of that. He may have been trying simply to keep his grandson, who looked disarmingly like his beloved daughter Rachel. Unable to gain custody of his son, L.T.M. Plummer petitioned Sam Houston, who was again president of the Republic of Texas. Houston responded angrily:

Sir,

Your communication in reference to the detention of your son by Mr. James W. Parker, came duly to hand. . . .

In case of this kind, the attempt to swindle a distressed father on account of his long lost child is in every way deserving of the severest reprehension. Though I had some reason to suspect the professions of Mr. Parker, yet, until this case was presented, I had not supposed him capable of practicing such scandalous fraud upon his kindred and connexions. . . . His pretensions about his liability for two hundred dollars, etc., are utterly groundless. You will, therefore, take your child home.¹⁷

Little more is known of James Pratt’s life. He married twice, fathered four children, and died on November 17, 1862, of pneumonia while serving in the Confederate Army in Little Rock, Arkansas.¹⁸

• • •

James Parker’s last trip in search of Cynthia Ann took place in 1844. He presumably learned of Colonel Williams’s meeting with her and gave up. He was kicked out of another church, this time for drunkenness. He prospered. He was elected justice of the peace in Houston County. He died in 1864 at the age of sixty-seven, having outlived most of his children and siblings. By then the Parkers were one of the most affluent and influential clans in Texas. His brother Daniel had founded nine churches before his death in 1845, making him the leading Protestant clergyman in Texas. His brother Isaac was a prominent politician, an original member of the Texas Congress in 1836. He later served as a state representative and a state senator. Yet another brother, Joseph Allen, was a large landowner and prominent citizen in Houston. For all of their prosperity and success, they never returned to Parker’s Fort, which soon disappeared. Some said it was dismantled within a few years, its stout cedar posts used to build other homesteads farther to the east, where life was less dangerous.