The Life and Death of Cynthia Ann Parker
On October 28th of 1827, in Crawford County, Illinois, a woman by the name of Lucinda Parker gave birth to a baby girl she named Cynthia Ann.
If she’d remained in the state of Illinois, little Cynthia might’ve led an unremarkable life, but around the age of nine or ten years old, her parents made a monumental decision.
They agreed to follow their extended family into the heart of Mexican ruled Texas, to a place now known as Limestone County. There, the Parker family constructed a heavily fortified compound, consisting of several blockhouses surrounding a central defensive citadel.
It was christened ‘Fort Parker’, and within just a few short weeks, the entire Parker clan had been joined by a bevy of other Anglo-American settlers who dreamed of peace, piety and prosperity.
By the spring of 1836, the Parkers had tilled half a dozen plots of land, and were busying themselves in preparation to farm it.
The work was endless, the heat oppressive, and the land near-barren; but for a time, the Parkers were happy, healthy, and free. Until one day, when a man collecting firewood began to feel like he was being watched.
Over the weeks that followed, more and more of the family began to complain of that same creeping feeling, as if the nearby woods were haunted by some unseen apparition. In response, Fort Parker’s security contingent was doubled, with at least two men watching the walls at any one time.
Then finally, at the break of dawn on May 19th of 1836, one of the watchmen began to raise the alarm.
The terror in the young man’s voice was heard by each and every one of Fort Parker’s inhabitants, and as armed settlers scrambled to man the fort’s crude battlements, they immediately understood his fears.
A huge war party of Comanche and Kiowa warriors was galloping across the plain towards the fort, but just before passing into range of the settler’s muskets, the party halted, and began waving a huge white flag.
The settlers held their fire, hoping that the warriors had simply come to talk or trade. Jon Parker knew otherwise.
The Comanche and their Kiowa allies had quickly worked out that a large piece of white cloth had some kind of magical effect on the Anglo-American settlers.
Upon waving one in their direction, a heavily armed, well defended group would sometimes completely let down their guard, making them ripe for the slaughter. It only took one or two instances of this ‘feigned surrender’ tactic before outrage swept across the prairie, and Jon Parker knew all too well that it was a trap.
Cynthia Ann’s father, Silas, proposed that the settlers strike first, claiming that five good men would be enough to defend the fort if properly supplied and positioned. His brother Benjamin disagreed. The forty-eight-year-old knew how skilled the Comanche were at scaling enemy fortifications, and argued the defenders would last just minutes before being overrun.
According to Benjamin, the best they could hope for was to play dumb, attempt to negotiate, and buy the women and children enough time to mount an escape attempt when the assault finally came.
And at that, he volunteered himself to be the doomed emissary.
As the Parkers watched an unarmed Benjamin walk out of the fort, and towards the mounted Comanche, they knew it was the last time they’d ever see him alive. Yet they honored his last request, gathered up a few essentials, and prepared to flee into the nearby woods.
Silas took charge of the defenders, instructing them to open fire as soon as Benjamin had been killed. They fought like lions, and a handful of Comanche were killed by their musket fire, but they were drops in a torrent of violence, that spilled over Fort Parker with a terrifying speed.
Their final stand bought their families a few minutes, but for some, it wasn’t enough. Samuel Frost and his young son were cornered by the Comanche as they attempted to flee. Frost was forced to watch the scalping and execution of his young son, before he too was mutilated and murdered.
John Parker’s wife was almost out of the fort when she turned around for one final goodbye. Instead, she witnessed a trio of Comanche warriors castrating her husband while he wailed in agony. The sight was too much for her to bear. She collapsed to her knees, broken and sobbing, and was captured by the Comanche.
Cynthia’s mother and her two youngest siblings slipped away with the help of an armed teenage boy. Cynthia herself was not so lucky. She was quickly surrounded by Comanche warriors, picked up, then thrown onto one of their horses; then after looting and burning the fort, the warriors departed.
While it’s indisputably unfortunate that Cynthia was captured, her age meant she fared far better than most Comanche prisoners.
In the aftermath of a Comanche raid, grown men were invariably tortured, killed, then scalped. Older women were violated by groups of warriors, then tortured and executed in similar ways to the menfolk, while younger women were sometimes taken as slaves.
Babies and small children were also killed, but when it comes to children between the ages of nine to thirteen, the Comanches made an exception. Kids of that age were ripe to be integrated into the tribe, first as slave labor, but eventually a fully-fledged member of the tribe if they proved themselves worthy.
Cynthia, being around nine or ten years old at the time of her abduction, had been picked out by the warriors for this exact purpose; and although her life among her family’s killers was initially traumatic, her resilience marked her out as having massive amounts of potential.
As I’ve mentioned, Cynthia’s first few months as a Comanche prisoner were extremely rough.
If her experience was anything like other captives of the period, she was most likely treated with extremely contempt by the other females of the tribe, while being used as a source of menial slave labor. But after learning the Comanche language, and standing up to herself on a few occasions, she gained the respect of her peers, and began to slowly increase in standing.
She was given more and more freedom to do as she pleased, she long as she partake in the some of the more arduous camp tasks. She was taught to tan the hides of slaughtered buffalo, a gruesome process that involved painting the raw skin of the buffalo with it’s own brains. She learned fast, and her output soon rivaled those of even the most experienced Comanche tanners.
Depending on the source, she was given the name Narua, meaning “that which has been found”, and within just a few short years, Cynthia Ann was not only given free reign of the camp, but a great deal of responsibility.
Comanche bands would typically migrate approximately every two weeks and the women were responsible for all aspects of the move, Cynthia included. The fact she was given responsibility over the other people’s belongings speaks volumes to the trust and respect the Comanche bestowed upon her, and she was soon partaking in all parts of Comanche womanhood.
All except one.
It’s believed that around the age of thirteen or fourteen, Cynthia was introduced to a warrior who went by the name Peta Nocona.
The pair became fast friends, and after Peta was promoted to war chief, he proposed to her.
Although it was traditional for chieftains to have several wives, Peta refrained from taking another wife, and the couple were said to be deeply in love, and very happy together.
They would go on to have three children together, a boy named Pecos, a daughter named Prairie Flower, and a second son, who Cynthia named ‘Quanah’. To Cynthia’s knowledge, they were her only living family, and she was every part the loving, Comanche mother to them.
But Cynthia was also mistaken.
Several members of the Parker family had miraculously survived the massacre at Fort Parker, and once they were back on their feet, they set about searching for their missing relatives.
Decades passed, and time after time, they were told that Cynthia was most likely deceased. But the Parkers were also acutely aware of the Comanche’s habit of integrating children into their warbands, and they never gave up on looking.
Finally, in December of 1860, more than twenty-six years after the raid on Fort Parker, a group of Texas Rangers tracked a band of Comanche warriors back to their camp; a camp that was rumored to hold live Anglo-American captives.
As dawn broke on December 18th, Ranger Captain Sul Ross sent a detachment of twenty men to position themselves behind a chain of sand hills overlooking the camp, the goal being to cut off any potential escape route.
The remaining forty rangers then crept up to the crest of an adjacent hill, then attacked the completely unprepared Comanche in unison.
It was in incredible achievement. It wasn’t often that a people so tactically masterful as the Comanche were caught unawares, and the result was nothing short of devastating. The entire warband were either killed by the attacking rangers, or picked off by the blocking force atop the sandy hills.
At one point, a Texas Ranger found himself face to face with a terrified Comanche woman. He aimed his revolver at her, and prepared to defend himself, but hesitated when he noticed that the woman held a baby in her arms.
Having decided to take the woman prisoner, the ranger began barking rudimentary orders at her, gesturing wildly for her to sit down. But as he did so, he noticed that unlike her fellow Comanche, this woman had pale blue eyes, and a lighter, sandier brown hair.
The ranger asked the terrified mother in clear, plain English, “who are you?”, and in reply, she said...
“Me Cincee...Cincee Ann”
By 1860, the story of the massacre at Fort Parker had gained international infamy.
The Texas government had named a county after the family, with Cynthia Ann being household name in all four corners of the state. The ranger who found her must’ve immediately recognized who was sat in front of him, and it marked one of the most momentous recoveries in Ranger history.
Captain Ross rushed Cynthia back to nearby Fort Belknap, then summoned her Uncle Isaac to deliver the good news. At first, he didn’t recognize her, but the family resemblance slowly became evident, and Isaac was stunned to realize the girl was his long-lost niece.
To say that Cynthia’s entire world had fallen apart would be a huge understatement, and it wasn’t the second time she had endured such a calamitous event. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to have returned to so-called civilization, but she also acknowledged Isaac as her relative, and agreed to return to Isaac’s home in Weatherford.
Shortly afterward, the state of Texas compensated Cynthia by granting her five-thousand acres of land, and an annual pension of $100 for the next five years. They appointed her Uncle Isaac as her legal guardians, wished her a long and happy life, then left her to decompress.
By all accounts, Cynthia tried her best to reintegrate back into Anglo-American society; but adjusting to such a radical culture shift proved a feat too difficult to accomplish a second time.
Her Uncle Isaac would sometimes catch her performing intricate rituals involving fire and tobacco smoke, and he once asked her the purpose of such things. In broken English, she told him they were prayers. Prayers for the husband and children she’d lost, and prayers that she could finally be happy with her blood relatives.
At one point, a man fluent in the Comanche language came to visit Cynthia, in the hopes of learning more about her time living with the tribe.
Initially, Cynthia stared daggers at him, having long grown tried of being gawped at by curious white men. But spoke to her in Comanche, and invited her to talk, she quite literally threw herself at the man’s feet, and in a voice that trembled with tears held back, she replied “yes, let us talk”.
For Cynthia Ann, her time with the linguist was perhaps the happiest in recent memory.
She shared a great deal with the man, not just because she enjoyed his company, but because she could finally communicate herself properly. When they tried to have dinner, Cynthia playfully chastised the man, stealing away his cutlery as she told him “we can eat later, but now, we talk”
Perhaps there was a slim chance for Cynthia , but it died along with her daughter, Prairie Flower, who succumbed to influenza in 1864.
The grief of losing her final child drover her over the edge, and she began to engage in a series of grizzly Comanche grief rituals. She would slash at her breast with a razor-sharp knife, dribble the blood onto some tobacco, then inhale the smoke it produced when put to flame; and she did this for hours on end, on a daily basis, until she finally made the decision to stop eating.
After wasting away for the better part of a month, forty-three-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker passed away in March of 1871, and was buried in Foster Cemetery, near the small town of Poynor, Texas.
Cynthia Ann’s story, as well as that of the wider Parker family, is perhaps one of the most horrifying, heartbreaking and underexplored in all American history.
But not all of their lives had such tragic endings, and as an epilogue, I’d like to touch on the life on Cynthia’s younger brother, and fellow Comanche captive, John Richard Parker.
Much like his sister, John was raised as a Comanche, but his upbringing was radically different to that of Cynthia Ann.
Comanche boys between the ages of around nine to fourteen led lives that would inspire envy in their modern-day counterparts.
They had absolutely no responsibilities, no chores, no formal education; they just played around with their bows and blunt arrows, rode around and horseback, and generally did as they pleased. They did this day in, day out, for years; and by the time they were young men, they were phenomenal archers, and master horsemen.
John spent six years with the Comanche, from the ages of six to twelve years old, but was ransomed back to Texan authorities in 1842.
In contrast to his sister, twelve-year-old John made to attempt to reintegrate himself back into Anglo-American society, and soon ran away to rejoin his Comanche warband.
The Comanche were no doubt delighted with his decision, and even the most skeptical of warriors would’ve been impressed.
The boy had deserted his own blood relatives to rejoin the warband, a demonstration of loyalty tantamount to an oath of allegiance.
John would’ve no doubt spent the next few years preparing to become a fully-fledged Comanche raider, and by the time he was eighteen, he was participating in devastating raids deep in the heart of Mexican territory. This means John would’ve participating in all the torture, murder and carnal violation that came with successful raids, and by the time he was a veteran warrior in his mid-twenties, it’s likely he’d killed hundreds of soldiers, civilians, and rival Apache.
Yet it was on one of these raids that John almost met his end, not by the tip of some Apache arrow or Mexican bullet, but by an invisible killer, responsible for more death than any weapon of war.
After one particularly profitable raid, John’s warband were on their way back to Texas, when he began to feel ill.
Before he long, he was too sick to ride, and a rudimentary medical exam, his fellow warriors discovered he was suffering from smallpox.
The Comanche were well aware of how devastating the disease was, and John understood that he had to be abandoned in order to protect his brethren. It’s likely he accepted this fate with a quiet stoicism, as would be expected of him as a warrior, but to alleviate his suffering, his Comanche comrades ordered a captured Mexican slave-girl to stay with him until his death.
Miraculously, not only did John survive his bout of smallpox, but his impromptu caregiver failed to contract it turn. As she nursed him back to health, the pair fell deeply in love, and after returning the girl to her family, John proposed, and they were married.
Incredibly, John would later return to the United States at the outbreak of the civil. His motivations for doing so are unclear, as he most likely felt no loyalties to his former home, but he soon signed up with a group of Texan Confederates, and rode north to battle the Union.
He most probably served with groups of so-called bushwhackers, mounted guerrilla united which conducted lightning-fast raids against Union positions, before disappearing again in a cloud of dust and gun-smoke. Their tactics would’ve suited his unique Comanche skillset, and his commanders no doubt used him to devastating effect.
Shockingly, John survived the Civil War, and returned to his home in Mexico following the collapse of the Confederacy.
The loot he came home with him made him a very wealthy man, and he was able to purchase his own ranch on which to raise a family. He lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five, and died peacefully of natural causes, sometime in 1915.
John’s life and death provide a remarkable silver lining to the violence and grief of the raid on Fort Parker. He is once-living proof that the Comanche were not monsters, merely a nomadic, primordial civilization shaped by centuries of deprivation, forced migration, and inter-tribal warfare.
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