Quanah Parker

Quanah Parker (c. 1900), who had adopted German Texan boy Herman Lehmann, was himself the son of an Indian and a white woman (Cynthia Ann Parker; painting) who had been kidnapped, raped and forced into marriage.

Quanah Parker (Comanche kwana, "smell, odor"; c. 1845 – February 23, 1911) was a half-breed (mixed race) Amerindian and war leader of the Kwahadi ("Antelope") band of the Comanche. After being civilized, he acted in several silent films, including The Bank Robber (1908).

Life

Capture of Cynthia Ann Parker by Kenneth Helgren (artist), in: Great Military Map of Texas

Renamed Naudah, Cynthia Ann Parker was forced to grow up as a Comanche.

Rachel Plummer's son being murdered

Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer (1819–1839)

Born about 1845, Comanche leader Quanah Parker lived two vastly different lives: the first as a warrior among the Plains Indians of Texas, and the second as a pragmatic leader who sought a place for his people in a rapidly changing America. Parker's birth was a direct result of the conflict between Native Americans and white settlers. His mother, Cynthia Parker, was captured by the Comanche as a child and later married his father, Chief Peta Nocona. In 1860, after Parker's father was killed by Texas Rangers, young Quanah moved west, where he joined the Quahada Comanche. Parker proved an able leader, fighting with the Quahada against the spread of white settlement. But in 1875, following the U.S. Army's relentless Red River campaign, Parker and the Quahada ultimately surrendered and moved to reservation lands in Oklahoma. In his new life, Parker quickly established himself as a successful rancher and investor. The government officials he had once fought soon recognized him as the leader of the remaining Comanche tribes. Parker encouraged Indian youth to learn the ways of white culture, yet he never assimilated entirely. He remained a member of the Native American Church, and had a total of seven wives.

Quanah’s Quahada band of Comanches refused to participate in the Medicine Lodge Treaty or relocate to a reservation, and instead spent years hunting the plains of Texas out of range of the U.S. Army. After a failed raid on buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls and increased pressure from the Army, the situation became untenable for the Quahadas, and they eventually conceded to being relocated to a reservation. While adjusting to reservation life, Quanah Parker was named chief in an attempt to unite the various bands of Comanches. In that role, he advocated for gradual cultural and economic assimilation with the Anglos. He helped found the Native American Church, which “blended traditional Indian beliefs, peyote use, and Christianity,” and he pioneered a land leasing program on Comanche lands, earning about $55,000 a year in “grass money.” Parker remained influential among his people until his death in 1911. One of his sons with wife Chony was Baldwin Parker (1887–1963).

Fort Parker massacre

In 1833, a group including the extended family and associates of John Parker, a Baptist minister and veteran of the American Revolution, began to relocate from Illinois to Texas. Of the thirty-eight people who accompanied Parker, a portion settled near present-day Groesbeck, east of Waco. After his arrival in Texas, Silas Mercer Parker applied for admission to Stephen F. Austin’s Colony on 22 May 1834, indicating that he was a married man 32 years of age, accompanied by his wife Lucinda, age 23, and four children. He received title to one league of land (4,428.4 acres) in Austin’s “Upper Colony” on the waters of the Sterling Fork of the Navasota River in present-day Limestone County on 1 April 1835.

Aware of the potential for danger on the frontier, including violence by Indians, Silas and his brother James William began building Fort Parker in the summer of 1834, prior to receiving title to the land. The fort, which covered nearly an acre of land, consisted of “a stockade of split cedar timbers planted deep in the ground, extending fifteen feet above the surface.” The stockade featured “port holes, through which, in case of emergency, fire arms could be used” as well as “two log cabins at diagonal corners” with their own firing ports. Inside the fort were “six tiny cabins” and a “huge double gate” facing south. Isolated from other Anglo or German Texan settlements, Fort Parker became a rallying point for eight or nine families in the area, who worked as farmers and hunters.

On 19 May 1836, at sunrise when most of the men from the fort left to work their fields, the settlement of the important settler family Parker, "Fort Parker" near Groesbeck (Texas), was attacked by an Indian alliance of several hundred (up to 700) Comanches, Arapahos, Kiowas, Wichitas and Caddos. Benjamin Parker, Silas’ brother, went out to parley with the Native Americans under a white truce flag, and upon his return to the fort, reported that he believed they wanted to fight. Against Silas’ wishes, Benjamin returned for further negotiation in hopes to pacify the situation, but he was attacked and killed. The Indians then attacked the fort, which had become “somewhat careless and restive” in the absence of any attacks. “Numbering but three men, wholly unprepared for defense,” it was quickly overrun. The final death toll included Silas Parker, his brother Benjamin, his father John, Samuel M. Frost, and Frost’s son Robert. The raid went down in history as the Fort Parker massacre.

Five settlers (including Cynthia Ann's 32-year-old father Silas Mercer Parker, his brother Benjamin, their father John, but also Samuel M. Frost and his son Robert) were killed in the raid. Mother Lucinda “Lucy”, née Duty, barely survived (1811–1847/52), being saved with two of her children by David Faulkenberry and his rifle. Nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker (1827–1871), her younger brother John Richard Parker (1830–1915), both abducted by the Quahada Comanche, her 17-year-old cousin Rachel Plummer, née Parker (1819–1839), three months pregnant with her second child, and her 16-month-old son James Pratt Plummer, and their aunt Elisabeth Kellogg were abducted. Survivors described the slaughter:

"‘The two Frosts, father and son, died in front of the women; Elder John Ross Parker (1758-1936), his wife ‘Granny’ and others tried to flee. The warriors scattered and rode them down. ‘John Parker was pinned to the ground, he was scalped and his genitals ripped off. Then he was killed. Granny Parker was stripped and fixed to the earth with a lance driven through her flesh. Several warriors raped her while she screamed [speared and left for dead, she survived]. ‘Silas Parker’s wife Lucy fled through the gate with her four small children. But the Comanche overtook them near the river. They threw her and the four children over their horses to take them as captives.’ The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward: All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Some were killed, some were tortured. Babies were invariably killed. The Parkers were no different – four male family members were pinned to the ground with spears and forcibly scalped."

Elisabeth Kellogg

In late May 1836, Elizabeth Kellogg (c. 39 years), after being raped numerous times, was traded to a band of Kichai Indians, which she took for "Kitchawas". In summer 1836, Delaware Indians purchased Elizabeth Kellogg and sold her to her brother-in-law James William Parker in August 1836 for 150 dollars (the money was sent by Sam Houston, other sources say she was delivered directly to Houston). She was reunited with her sister Martha, née Duty, James' wife, on 6 September 1836.

Rachel Plummer

Plummer was seized by mounted warriors who threw her up behind them, and watched helplessly while another seized her son. She witnessed her grandfather's torture and murder and her grandmother's rape. Her cousins Cynthia Ann Parker and John Richard Parker as well as her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg, née Duty, were also captured. All five of the men present in the fort that morning were killed. They had been forced to run naked tied by a rope to a horse for a day. That night the war party stopped, the tribes came together for the first time and did a ritual scalp dance, stamping on their prisoners, beating them with bows, and then raped the two women, who had been tied up. Her husband, armed only with a butcher knife, had followed on foot and remained searching for the next six days until he arrived at Fort Houston.

C. October 1936, she gave birth to a healthy boy. When her son was six months old, Indians killed her baby, strangling it with a rope and then throughing the dead body on her lap. She dug a hole and buried him in the wilderness. She was then made servant of an old, cruel squaw. Rachel was sold to Comancheros on 19 June 1837. Her rescue had been arranged by Colonel and Mrs. William Donaho, acting for the Parker family, and to whom she was delivered in Santa Fe after a journey of 17 days. Two weeks after her arrival, the Donahos, fearing trouble as the native population of Santa Fe was in virtual rebellion, fled some 800 miles (1,300 km) to Independence, Missouri, with Rachel with them.

Three months later, Rachel's brother-in-law, Lorenzo Dow Nixon, escorted her back to Texas, since her father was still out in the Comancherio searching for her. She was reunited with her husband, Luther Thomas Martin Plummer, on 19 February 1838, nearly two years after the Fort Parker Massacre. She was gaunt to the point of near starvation, covered with scars and sores, and in very poor health. Plummer became pregnant again, and on 4 January 1839, bore a third child, a son, Luther Plummer II. She died in Houston shortly thereafter, on 19 March 1839 (other sources state 19 February) at only 20 years of age; the child died two days later.

James Pratt Plummer

James Pratt was stolen from his mother (who never knew about his further fate), now a work and sex slave of her abducters, only shortly after her capture. Rachel was soon traded away to another Comanche band. Late in 1842, James Pratt Plummer was ransomed, and in 1843 he was reunited with his grandfather James William Parker (1797–1864).

Book

Her book on her captivity, "Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer in 1838," was published in 1839. During her captivity, the Indians wandered over the country, crossed the plains and, as Plummer says, went as far as the headwaters of the Arkansas, where a number of tribes of Indians in March, 1837, held a big council to get up a combined war against the Texans. She talks of being on the headwaters of the Columbia and even in Sonora. In describing a contentious run-in with one of her female captors, an old squaw she had to serve, Plummer writes:

"An enraged tiger could not have screamed with more terrific violence than she did. She got hold of a club and hit me a time or two. I took it from her, and knocked her down with it. So we had a regular fight. During the fight, we broken down one side of the house, and had got fully out into the street. I discovered the same diffidence on the part of the Indians as in the other fight. The whole of them were around us, screaming as before, and no one touched us [...]"

Cynthia Ann Parker

On 18 December 1860, after years of searching at the behest of the family Parker and various scouts, a band of Texas Rangers led by Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross discovered a band of Comanche, deep in the heart of Comancheria, that was rumored to hold American captives. In a surprise raid in retribution for recent Indian raids, the Rangers attacked a group of Comanche in the Battle of Pease River. Cynthia Ann and her daughter were freed, but she had to leave behind her both sons Quanah and Pecos (soon died from smallpox). Cynthia Ann’s uncle, Colonel Isaac Parker, was able to identify her.

In recognition of her ordeal, the Texas Legislature passed a special act on 8 April 1861, that granted Cynthia Ann Parker a league of land and named her cousins Isaac Duke Parker and Benjamin F. Parker her trustees. This supplemented another act granting Parker a pension of $100 per year for five years, “to the support of the said Cynthia Ann Parker, and for the support and education of her child.”

Daughter Topsana (Prairie Flower) died of an illness in 1863. Cynthia Ann Parker, refusing to speak, died by suicide by voluntary starvation in March 1871. The city of Crowell, Texas, has held a Cynthia Ann Parker Festival to honor her memory. The town of Groesbeck holds an annual Christmas Festival at the site of old Fort Parker every December. It has been rebuilt on the original site to historic specifications.

The Fort Parker Massacre and Montgomery County

On May 19, 1836 several hundred Comanche and Kiowa Warriors attacked Fort Parker in present Limestone County, Texas. Herein was the framework upon which developed one of the most heart-rending dramas in American History, a drama destined to delay until 1875 the closing of the Indian Wars in Texas. Players in this drama included, in a fundamental way, the Parkers of the original Montgomery County area. We will look at a few members of this remarkable family and explore the Parker connection to Ft. Parker. Daniel Parker was a preacher. With his brother, James W., he visited Texas in 1832, where he learned that he could not start a church in Texas. He could, however, return to his homeland and start one, then bring that church to Texas. This Daniel did and he performed perhaps the first Christian wedding in Texas on soil later included in the original Montgomery County. Daniel Parker, a minister, was head of the committee at the Consultation in 1835 which created the Texas Rangers. His brother, Silas, a ranger, met death at the Ft Parker massacre, while Silas’s son, John, and daughter, Cynthia Ann, were taken captive by the Comanche’s. Cynthia Ann became the wife of the omanche War Chief and the mother of Quanah Parker, the last and greatest of the American Indian chiefs. Cynthia Ann’s infant daughter died on Montgomery County soil, where Cynthia Anne was, for a few years, with her remaining Parker relatives. Also a ranger, as well as a preacher, was the brother of Silas and Daniel, James W. Parker. With Silas and others of the Parker clan, he came to later original Montgomery County in the early eighteen thirties before leaving to establish Fort Parker. After the massacre, he returned to Montgomery County. In 1839, W. W. Shepperd, an early real estate broker in the town of Montgomery, publicly accused James W. of causing the Ft. Parker Massacre by paying Indians counterfeit money for stolen horses. But Shepperd, it seems, was possessed of a basic tendency toward acrimonious verbosity. This is further indicated by his accusatory notice in the Telegraph and Texas Register on 12 February, 1836 berating the venerable Jared Groce, a major player in early Texas. The Texas Declaration of Independence, for example, was written at Groce’s Retreat. James W. Parker was never formally accused of wrong doing. Like most of us, it appears he was a good person saddled with tendencies to occasionally surrender to questionable judgment. As administrators, legislators, lawmen and preachers, the Parkers of original Montgomery County were indeed a remarkable family.

Stories of the massacre endure, and it was memorialized at the General Land Office by accomplished draftsperson Eltea Armstrong on her 1971 map of Limestone County, as well as by artist Kenneth Helgren on the 2006 Great Military Map of Texas. The location of the massacre is currently maintained as the Old Fort Parker replica historic site, north of which sits Fort Parker State Park.

Further reading

• Eastman, Edwin (edited by Johnson, Clark), Seven and Nine Years among the Camanches and Apaches: An Autobiography, Jersey City 1874
• John Wesley Wilbarger (German American pioneer; 1806–1892): Indian depredations in Texas – Reliable Accounts of Battles, Wars, Adventures, Forays, Murders, Massacres. etc, Austin 1889 (Hathi Trust, read online; Parker Fort Massacre, p. 302 ff)
  • From the preface: "I feel that for those who will read the description of the conflicts and Indian cruelty contained in this volume some preface which will introduce the author to his readers and which will explain the motives which inspired him to write this book is needed. I came to Texas over half a century ago, and am now an old man, the only survivor of three brothers who served Texas in her early struggles. Josiah Wilbarger, who was scalped by the Indians a few miles east of where the capitol of Texas now is, was my brother. He survived, as this book relates, the massacre of his companions, but afterwards died from a disease of the skull caused by injuries. Having spent the prime of my life among the pioneers of Texas, and therefore knowing personally about many of the fights and massacres described in this volume, the idea occurred to me many years ago that when the early settlers were all dead their posterity would only know from tradition the perils and hardships encountered in the early settlement of Texas. When I found that no one else seemed inclined to preserve in history the story of massacres and conflicts with Indians, I undertook the work myself. During some twenty years I have carefully obtained from the lips of those who knew most of the facts stated in this volume. For their general correctness I can vouch, for I knew personally most of the early settlers of Texas, and have relied on those only whom I believed to be trustworthy. Many of the articles contained in this book were written by others, who were either cognizant of the facts themselves or bad obtained their data from reliable sources."
• Gillett, James B., Six Years with the Texas Rangers 1875 to 1881, 1921
• Biesele, Rudolph Leopold, The History of the German Settlements in Texas: 1831–1861. 1930, 1964. Reprint, San Marcos: German-Texan Heritage Society, 1987.
• Zesch, Scott, The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, St. Martin's Press (books.google.de)
  • On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by an Apache raiding party. Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family. That is, until Scott Zesch, who graduated from Texas A&M University and Harvard Law School, stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. He is also author of Strangers in Two Worlds.

External links

• Quanah Parker: A Man of Two Worlds
• Fort Parker Memorial Park