DECEMBER 18:

December 18, 1860:  Today, a Sergeant and 20 troopers from the Second Cavalry, captain Sul Ross and a contingent of Texas Rangers and several Tonkawa scouts, and volunteers under Captain Jack Cureton are on an expedition against the Comanches.  On the Pease River, near Crowell, Texas, they discover a Comanche village.  The soldiers attack and easily defeat the Indians.  During the fighting, Cynthia Ann Parker, captured on May 19, 1836, is "rescued" by the soldiers.  Despite her pleas to be allowed to stay with the Comanches, Parker is forced to return to "civilization" with the troops.
 
 
 

BACKGROUND:
 

From http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/PP/fpa18.html
 
 

PARKER, CYNTHIA ANN (ca. 1825-ca. 1871).  Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive of the Comanches, was born to Lucy (Duty) and Silas M. Parker in Crawford County, Illinois. According to the 1870 census of Anderson County she would have been born between June 2, 1824, and May 31, 1825. When she was nine or ten her family moved to Central Texas and built Fort Parker on the headwaters of the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County. On May 19, 1836, a large force of Comanche warriors accompanied by Kiowa and Kichai allies attacked the fort and killed several of its inhabitants.  During the raid the Comanches seized five captives, including Cynthia Ann.  The other four were eventually released, but Cynthia remained with the Indians for almost twenty-five years, forgot white ways, and became thoroughly Comanche. It is said that in the mid-1840s her brother, John Parker, who had been captured with her, asked her to return to their white family, but she refused, explaining that she loved her husband and children too much to leave them. She is also said to have rejected Indian trader Victor Rose's invitation to accompany him back to white settlements a few years later, though the story of the invitation may be apocryphal.

A newspaper account of April 29, 1846, describes an encounter of Col. Leonard G. Williams's trading party with Cynthia, who was camped with Comanches on the Canadian River. Despite Williams's ransom offers, tribal elders refused to release her. Later, federal officials P. M. Butler and M.G. Lewis encountered Cynthia Ann with the Yamparika Comanches on the Washita River; by then she was a full-fledged member of the tribe and married to a Comanche warrior. She never voluntarily returned to white society. Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors learned, probably in 1848, that she was among the Tenawa Comanches. He was told by other Comanches that only force would induce her captors to release her. She had married Peta Nocona and eventually had two sons, Quanah Parker and Pecos, and a daughter, Topsannah.

On December 18, 1860, Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross attacked a Comanche hunting camp at Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease River. During this raid the rangers captured three of the supposed Indians. They were surprised to find that one of them had blue eyes; it was a non-English-speaking white woman with her infant daughter. Col. Isaac Parker later identified her as his niece, Cynthia Ann. Cynthia accompanied her uncle to Birdville on the condition that military interpreter Horace P. Jones would send along her sons if they were found. While traveling through Fort Worth she was photographed with her daughter at her breast and her hair cut short, a Comanche sign of mourning.  She thought that Peta Nocona was dead and feared that she would never see her sons again. On April 8, 1861, a sympathetic Texas legislature voted her a grant of $100 annually for five years and a league of land and appointed Isaac D. and Benjamin F. Parker her guardians. But she was never reconciled to living in white society and made several unsuccessful attempts to flee to her Comanche family. After three months at Birdville, her brother Silas took her to his Van Zandt County home. She afterward moved to her sister's place near the boundary of Anderson and Henderson counties. Though she is said in some sources to have died in 1864, the 1870 census enrolled her and gave her age as forty-five. At her death she was buried in Fosterville Cemetery in Anderson County. In 1910 her son Quanah moved her body to the Post Oak Cemetery near Cache, Oklahoma. She was later moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and reinterred beside Quanah. In the last years of Cynthia Ann's life she never saw her Indian family, the only family she really knew. But she was a true pioneer of the American West, whose legacy was carried on by her son Quanah. Serving as a link between whites and Comanches, Quanah Parker became the most influential Comanche leader of the reservation era.
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY: James T. DeShields, Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture (St. Louis, 1886; rpts.: The Garland Library of Narratives of North American Indian Captivities, Vol. 95, New York: Garland, 1976; Dallas: Chama Press, 1991). Margaret S. Hacker, Cynthia Ann Parker: The Life and the Legend (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1990). Grace Jackson, Cynthia Ann Parker (San Antonio: Naylor, 1959). Paul I. Wellman, "Cynthia Ann Parker," Chronicles of Oklahoma 12 (June 1934). Women of Texas (Waco: Texian Press, 1972).
 

Margaret Schmidt Hacker
 

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>From http://www.powersource.com/gallery/womansp/cynthia.html
 

Cynthia Ann Parker - Comanche (Adopted) By Julia White

Even though she was not born of Native blood, the life of Cynthia Ann Parker certainly earned recognition and respect because of her devotion to Native life, her husband and her children. It only seems fitting that her spirit be honored here.

Cynthia was born in Clark County, Illinois and moved with her family to the headwaters of the Navasota River in Texas as a young child. The family developed a community around the church of her uncle, Elder John Parker, who headed the Texas branch of the Primitive Baptist Church. As protection against the Natives of the area, they built substantial walls around their community and created a company of Texas Rangers for the area. The settlement became known as Fort Parker.

In the Spring of 1836, Fort Parker was attacked by several hundred Caddo, Comanche and Kiowa who captured five residents of the Fort. Among them was Cynthia, who was 9 years old at the time. Within 6 years, all the captives had been returned to their white families - except Cynthia.

Cynthia was given to a Tenowish Comanche couple who cared for her, and who raised her like their own daughter. She became Comanche in every sense; was trained in Native ways and was totally devoted to her adopted parents. The memories of her white life quickly faded, and every attempt to ransom her was refused by the tribal council at her request.

She married Peta Nocoma, the young chief who gained fame for his many violent raids on white settlements in the territory. While it was customary for prominent Comanche warriors to take several wives, Peta never took any wife except Cynthia - a mark of extraordinary devotion and honor for her. They had 3 children: Quanah, Pecos and Topsannah (2 boys and 1 girl). In December of 1860, Peta's camp on the banks of the Pease River was attacked by Captain Lawrence Sullivan Ross. Peta was wounded, but managed to escape with their two sons, Quanah and Pecos. Whether or not Peta survived these wounds and lived is cloudy for he is not mentioned again. Cynthia was "rescued" along with their daughter Topsannah and the two were taken to Camp Cooper. She was identified by her uncle Isaac Parker, and subsequently taken to his farm in Birdville, Texas. Cynthia's every attempt to return to her people failed, and she was repeatedly caught and returned to Birdville. Even though she refused to speak of her Comanche life, many fanciful and fictitious stories were written about this strange and mysterious woman. "Historical fiction" was used to incite anti-Indian feelings, and these tall tales eventually became accepted as truth and fact. Never satisfied, and never at home in a society that was foreign to her, Cynthia was shuttled from one family member to another. Her grief and longing for her lost family never left her.

In 1863, Cynthia received word that her son Pecos had died of smallpox, and only a few months later, the daughter who had remained with her died of influenza. Heartbroken, Cynthia refused all food and starved herself to death in 1870 at the age of 43.

Only Quanah survived, and his name is legendary as the fierce, half-breed Comanche warrior chief. In his later years, Quanah began living in peace with the whites and went on to be very prosperous. He searched for his mother for most of his life and, upon discovering that she was dead, had the bodies of both Cynthia and Topsannah moved to friendly soil. When Quanah died in 1911, he was laid to rest beside his devoted mother.