Restored Captive

A life so hard:

On a May morning in 1836, at a stockade called Parker’s Fort near the Navasota River in Texas, some ninety miles south of present-day Dallas, a nine-year-old girl was taken captive by a Comanche raiding party. At the beginning of March 1955, a famous director at a crisis point in his career began shooting a movie distantly derived from that earlier event.

...Cynthia Ann Parker too became a restored captive, having surrendered, after twenty-four years with the Comanches, to a force of US troops and Texas Rangers in 1860, at what has been variously called the Battle of Pease River and the Pease River Massacre. She was then thirty-three years old.

...At Pease River, as soldiers shot down old men, women, and children, a woman in a buffalo robe, holding her infant daughter, called out “Americano!” It took a while for her to be identified as Cynthia Ann Parker. She now spoke only Comanche and at first said (through an interpreter) that she had forgotten her original name. An observer wrote: “She was sullen…a hard looker…as dirty as she could be and looked to me more like an Indian than a white woman.” Her rescue was hardly an occasion for public celebration. Apparently it resembled more a second captivity. Withdrawn, terrified, grief-stricken at the loss of her husband and of her two sons, she was passed from relative to relative, no one knowing what to do with her.

... She tore off the clothes she had been dressed in and tried to run away. At her uncle’s house in Fort Worth, she crawled under the bed to avoid the stares of strangers. She was bound with a rope and put on public display for curiosity-seekers: “Tears were streaming down her face, and she was muttering in the Indian language.” She made a fire in the backyard and practiced a Comanche mourning ritual. In a rare encounter with a Comanche speaker, a retired Indian scout, she pleaded with him all night to take her back to Comanchería: “My heart is crying all the time for my two sons.” Around 1865 she died unmemorialized, devastated by the recent death of the daughter she had with her when she was rescued. Her uncle Isaac Parker called her “the most unhappy person I ever saw…. She was as much an Indian as if she had been born one. She knew no other people except as enemies.”

And from that suffering, came this: