WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

WHAT DO YOU KNOW about Cynthia Ann Parker? PERHAPS you have heard her tale. She was abducted twice. First when nine years old, she was taken by a Comanche band that had raided her parents’ ranch near Ft. Parker and bludgeoned her father to death in 1836. Thirty-three years later, Texas Rangers rescued the blue eyed squaw and her infant daughter but it was actually a second abduction. She had completely assimilated into life in the tribe. Later a son named Quanah would become a chief but that is another story for later. ____________________ The U. S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Texas had attempted to establish reserves where Native Americans could live and farm protected from aggressive white men and Indian fighters but it was complicated. Hatred existed between the lawless white men believing they were entitled to raw land in the new territory and the bands of Comanche who refused life on a reservation preferring the wild open plains. Some of the other tribes were aligned with Texas Rangers and with the U.S. Cavalry against the Comanche.____________________ In the 1860s, a force of Indians from the Brazos River reservation, under the command of young Ranger captain Lawrence Sullivan Ross (known as Sul Ross) were riding with 20 Cavalry troopers and 70 Texas militiamen to track a party of Comanche who were viciously killing and raping throughout Northwest Texas. What Sul Ross and his party found was a small camp with women and children packing to leave. The camp was cruelly ravaged. Ross and his men killed seven Comanche and four of them were squaws. One woman rode off but was caught and discovered to have blue eyes. It was Cynthia Ann Parker with a baby concealed in her robe. The white men believed they rescued her, but actually she was torn from her Comanche family, her husband Peta Nacona and her two sons, Pecos and Quanah. ____________________ Cynthia had no home. Her father had been clubbed and scalped before her eyes and her mother died in 1852. She was treated kindly by relatives in Ft. Worth but she was bewildered, had forgotten her English language and was oppressed by the confinement of houses. She ate with her fingers and slept on the floor in her buffalo robe. She was confused in the white man’s world and grieving for her warrior husband and her two sons. Daughter Prairie Flower died of brain fever, ironically at the age of nine. Cynthia Parker died a miserable and broken woman. ___________________ Sul Ross became Governor and inflated the story declaring it “a last battle between savagery and civilization.” But it was a famous chief of a Comanche band who arose to fight the last battle in the Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo, Texas. He was Quanah, the son of Cynthia Ann Parker. Carole Sikes 4/2022 References were from various Texas Histories