The Searchers (5 page)

The Indians commenced to plunder the stockade. They slashed open mattresses and scattered the feathers. They tore open James's books and smashed his medicine bottles. Lucy Parker, Silas's wife, tried to flee with her four small children. She ran into Lorenzo Nixon, but before he could lead her and the children to safety, Indians surrounded all of them and marched them back to the fort. The Indians forced Lucy to help load her two oldest children behind mounted warriors, and they were in the process of taking the younger two, Silas junior and Orlena, when David Faulkenberry, a lone farmer armed with a single-shot rifle, emerged from the woods and trained his weapon on the attackers. Faulkenberry gathered Lucy, her two young ones, and Nixon behind him and forced the Indians to retreat. But no one could help the other captives.

Rachel Plummer, covered in blood and bruises, was dragged by her long red hair to the back of an Indian pony and forced to climb on. She saw the Indians shove her young aunt, Elizabeth Kellogg, onto another pony and watched as a warrior triumphantly waved a handful of bloody scalps; the only one she recognized was the long gray hair of her beloved grandfather, Elder John.

The raiders mounted up and rode away with a flourish, lancing any cattle they came across in a final gesture of vandalism and contempt. They had killed five people and taken five more captive without a single casualty of their own, and now they rode deep into the night, weaving their way through the heavy forested bottomlands with their prisoners: two young women—Rachel Plummer and Elizabeth Kellogg—Rachel's toddler son, James Pratt, and her eight-year-old nephew, John. And on another mount, alone and terrified after watching her father, her uncle, and her grandfather all killed before her eyes, and held tight by her Indian captor, the late Silas Parker's oldest child and the late Elder John Parker's forty-ninth grandchild: nine-year-old Cynthia Ann.

Almost from the moment of her abduction, Cynthia Ann Parker's family began telling and retelling the story, and shaping the facts to fit their own needs and understanding. The first narrators were her uncle James and the other men at Parker's Fort who had failed to rescue her and the other captives. Their excuse was simple: they had been caught by surprise, and the vast numbers and brutality of the assailants had left them no time nor means to respond. Were there, in reality, eight Indians or, as some of the witnesses claimed, eight hundred? We will never know.

James Parker claimed he had grabbed his long gun and started immediately for the stockade, only to be intercepted by his fleeing wife, Martha, and their children. Fellow farmer George Dwight, who had also fled the fort, told him that everyone there had either been killed or taken prisoner. At that point, James said, he abandoned his rescue plans and gathered the terrified survivors; he led them up the Navasota River, retracing their steps by walking backwards so that the Indians couldn't track them along the sandy riverbank. Six adults—including Martha, who was eight months pregnant—and twelve children set off under cover of darkness for the safety of Tinnin's settlement some forty miles to the east. They had no horses, food, blankets, or spare clothing. Most had no shoes. The grown-ups carried the smaller children on their backs. “
We were in the howling wilderness
, barefooted and bare-headed,” James would write, “a savage and relentless foe on the one hand; on the other, a traceless and uninhabited country literally covered with venomous reptiles and ravenous beasts.”

Terrified that the Indians would return, the little band traveled only
at night, concealing themselves during daylight like moles hiding from the sun. On the second night, with the children crying out for food, James caught a skunk and held it under water until it drowned. “We soon had it cooked,” he wrote. It was all they had to eat for three days.

On the fourth night they caught another skunk and two small turtles, a veritable feast. It took two more days to reach the settlement. The next day, Rachel's husband, Luther Plummer, arrived on foot. The other survivors also straggled in, with their own harrowing tale to tell. Abram Anglin, Silas Bates, and David and Evans Faulkenberry said that as soon as they heard the alarm they had grabbed their rifles but got to the fort too late to save the victims or rescue the captives. Seeing that they were badly outnumbered, they hid in the forest until sunset, long after the invaders had ridden off. Anglin was exploring the ruined grounds when he saw what looked like an apparition wandering dazed and senseless, “
dressed in white with long, white hair
streaming down its back.” It was Sally Duty Parker, Elder John's wife. Stabbed, perhaps raped, and left for dead by the warriors, she had somehow managed to yank the Comanche lance out of her shoulder.

Anglin threw a blanket around her bare shoulders and gave her water. She led him to a hole where she had buried $125 in cash. They dug up the money, grabbed the five remaining horses, saddles, bacon, and honey from the stockade, and fled. Terrified by the prospect that at any moment the Indians might return, the four men and Mrs. Parker left behind the livestock and dogs howling for food and five corpses lying exposed. They found Lucy Parker and her two remaining children hidden nearby and began the trek to safety. Traveling only at night, they reached Fort Houston in three days.

James was desperate to get back to Parker's Fort as quickly as possible to pick up the trail of the captives. Officials authorized several hundred volunteers to accompany him but withdrew them almost immediately after a false report that Santa Anna's troops were regrouping on the western frontier of the new Texas republic. “To go alone was useless, and to raise a company was impossible, as every person capable of service was already in the Texas army,” James would recall.

With everyone focused on the Mexican threat, it took James more than a month to organize a group of fourteen men to return to the fort—far too late to pursue the raiding party. “
We found the houses still standing
, but the crops were entirely destroyed, the horses stolen, nearly all the cattle killed,” James would write. He gathered the bare bones of his father and two brothers and Samuel and Robert Frost: all of the flesh had already been devoured by animals. There was, of course, no sign of the captives.

Monument to the victims of the massacre at Fort Parker Memorial Cemetery, Groesbeck, Texas.

The dead were gone; the living, too, seemed to have vanished.

THE INDIANS HAD RIDDEN until midnight, keen to put distance between themselves and any possible pursuers. They finally stopped in a clearing, hog-tied Rachel Plummer and Elizabeth Kellogg facedown on the ground with plaited leather straps, punching and kicking them for amusement and increasing the intensity of the blows whenever the two young women cried out. Rachel's head wound opened up again and she struggled to keep from smothering in her own blood. When Elizabeth called out to her and she sought to respond, their captors stomped on both of them. The three children—Cynthia Ann, her brother John, and Rachel's young son James Pratt—were tied down nearby. If they called out or cried, they, too, were punched and kicked.

The warriors danced throughout the night, young men high on adrenaline, reenacting scenes from their glorious victory, working themselves into a frenzy and tormenting and humiliating their captives. Rape was often part of these rituals. Although Rachel was not explicit, she later wrote that her captors treated her with such barbarity she could not bear to describe the details: “It is with
feelings of the deepest mortification
that I think of it.”

The next morning they were off again, passing out of the rich, forested bottomlands and threading their way through the dense wooded fabric of the Cross Timbers, then pouring out onto the flat, open countryside. They trampled swift, yielding buffalo grass and skirted the rocky outcroppings and ravines that punctuated the vast, blunt landscape.

The raiding party rode for five days, until they finally reached the High Plains, where they stopped to divide their captives. A group of Kichais took Elizabeth, while separate bands of Comanches claimed Cynthia Ann and John. Rachel had one last tender moment with her son James Pratt. The raiders untied her and brought her the child for breast-feeding. James Pratt's swollen body was covered in bruises and she hugged him tightly. But when the Indians saw that he had already been weaned, they pulled him out of her arms and sent him off with another small band.

Rachel never saw him again.

JAMES PARKER'S NEXT OBJECTIVE was to put together a company of men to journey directly to Indian Territory, north of the Red River in what is now Oklahoma, in pursuit of Rachel, Elizabeth Kellogg, and the three children. To accomplish that, he needed the blessing of the commander who was widely celebrated for defeating Santa Anna, a man whom from the beginning James mistrusted and antagonized.

Sam Houston's mythic life was ax-cut from the same rough block of pioneer timber as the Parkers. Born in Virginia in 1793, he had migrated at age thirteen with his widowed mother and eight siblings to the mountains of Tennessee after the death of his father. Farm life in Tennessee did not agree with young Houston; he soon ran away from home and spent three years on and off living with Cherokee Indians, who adopted him and gave him the name Colonneh—“the Raven.” Houston called Cherokee chief Oolooteka his “Indian Father,” treated the Cherokees as a surrogate family, and later helped them resettle west of the Mississippi in Indian Territory after the federal government expelled them from their tribal homeland. Along with two of Elder John Parker's sons, he fought under Andrew Jackson's command against the Creek Indians during the War of 1812. Jackson treated him like a protégé, and under Old Hickory's guidance Houston completed law school, served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was elected governor of Tennessee.

Tall, dashing, moody, and intensely ambitious, Houston carved his
own flamboyant legend as a two-fisted backwoodsman, soldier, and Indian fighter. He was a hard drinker and a brawler: he caned a fellow congressman on the streets of Georgetown after the man publicly questioned his honesty. Still, Houston looked like Old Hickory's political heir and a surefire presidential candidate until his marriage to nineteen-year-old Eliza Allen mysteriously collapsed after only eleven weeks, and he resigned the governorship and fled Tennessee for Indian Territory. He lived there with the Cherokees in self-imposed exile for nearly three years—choosing, he wrote, to “
abandon once more the habitations of civilized men
, with their coldness, their treachery, and their vices, and pass years among the children of the Great Spirit.” Houston added to his own myth when he visited Washington to lobby on the behalf of the Cherokees
clad in native garb
: turban, leggings, breechclout, and blanket. He became that classic American frontier figure: the Man Who Knows Indians.

Like the Parkers, Houston eventually made his way to Texas, the land of fresh beginnings, where as an experienced military man he quickly became commander of the newly declared republic's makeshift army. After his troops vanquished Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto, Houston's popularity skyrocketed and he easily defeated Stephen F. Austin to become the first president of the new nation. Not all were enamored of their charismatic new leader. “He's eloquent, patriotic, and talented,” wrote Texas newspaper editor John Henry Brown, a contemporary, but also “
jealous, envious, dissipated
, wicked, artful, and overbearing.”

Houston's backwoods upbringing and experiences as an Indian fighter were similar to that of James Parker, but he and James had little else in common. While James was a teetotaling, sanctimonious Baptist, Houston was a proud and profane man whose bouts with alcohol were legendary. While James learned to hate Indians indiscriminately, Houston sympathized with many of them and celebrated his adoptive Cherokee heritage. He concluded early on that Indians, like whites, came in many varieties, some trustworthy and some not, and that it was important to be able to discern between them. In effect, the two men represented the American empire's conflicting approaches to native peoples: the carrot versus the stick.

During the independence war, Houston worked hard to tamp down hostilities between Texans and Indians and prevent native peoples from allying with Santa Anna and launching a second front. He showered friendly Indians with gifts and promises that Texans would not impinge on their territory. “
Your enemies and ours are the same
,” he wrote to a
group of Comanche chiefs in December 1836. If so, it was at best a temporary state of affairs.

Houston expressed his condolences to the Parker family for the attack on Parker's Fort and the abduction of the five captives, but he was reluctant to help James pursue a scorched-earth campaign to get them back. He saw James as an irrational Indian hater and a one-man wrecking crew who could single-handedly demolish the good-neighbor policy Houston was working so hard to establish with native peoples.