The Searchers (9 page)

James instructed the men he was with to ride ahead. “
As soon as the opportunity presented itself
,” he writes, “I mounted my horse, and taking a ‘last fond look' at my vest—with one eye through the sight of my trusty rifle—I turned and left the spot, with the assurance that my vest
had got a new button hole
.” After the shooting, other Indians attempted to grab his horse's bridle, but James fought his way through the mob, swinging his sword, and rode off after his companions.

This trip, James's fifth in eighteen months, ended like all of its predecessors. Sick, tired, and broke, he returned home empty-handed in late October. Then a few weeks later came a breakthrough. James saw a report in a Houston City newspaper: Rachel, it said, had turned up alive in Independence, Missouri.

MEXICAN TRADERS DOING BUSINESS with a band of Comanches somewhere in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains spotted a white woman with long red hair and offered to buy her, knowing they could redeem her for a good price from her relatives. After months of despair eating
away at her spirit and her health like a relentless predator, Rachel suddenly came to life. One of the traders proposed a sum that her Comanche owner rejected as too low. The trader offered more, but the master again said no. The trader indicated he had reached his limit. Rachel's heart sank. “
Had I the treasures of the universe
, how freely I would have given it,” she would recall. Then the man made a third offer and her owner consented. “My whole feeble frame was convulsed in an ecstasy of joy.”

Her rescuers took her to Santa Fe—a rugged seventeen-day journey—and brought her to the home of William and Mary Donoho, American settlers in the territory, which was still ruled by Mexico. The Donohos paid off the traders and took in Rachel, who was suffering from exposure and malnutrition. They treated her with great kindness—in Mary Donoho, Rachel writes, she found “a mother to direct me in that strange land [and] a sister to condole with me in my misfortune.” Santa Fe was a wild frontier town—four men had been gunned down in the streets in recent weeks—and William Donoho decided it was no longer safe for him and his family to remain. He and Mary packed up their three children, along with Rachel and Caroline Harris, another recently liberated captive whose baby, like Rachel's, had been killed before her eyes by Comanches. They organized a small caravan for the eight-hundred-mile trek east along the Santa Fe Trail to Missouri. Weakened and scarred from sixteen months in captivity, Rachel had to endure yet another grueling overland journey. She had no idea whether her husband or father or any of her relatives had survived the massacre at Fort Parker, nor whether her son James Pratt had been recovered. Once she got to Independence, she was so starved for information that she immediately tried to start out on foot for Texas, and had to be restrained. She ached for a way to get home.

Comanche brave, photographed by Will Soule.

It was early January 1838 when Lorenzo Nixon, Rachel's brother-in-law, arrived in Independence. Overcome with emotion, Rachel was too weak to stand and embrace him. Still, she insisted they leave for Texas at once. “Every moment was an hour, and it was now very cold weather, but I thought I could stand anything if I could only get started towards my own country,” she writes.

A few days later, they set out on the thousand-mile journey. Rachel arrived at her father's home in Huntsville on February 19, 1838, exactly twenty-one months after the massacre at Parker's Fort. In her narrative, she describes “the exquisite pleasure that my soul has long panted for” in embracing her family. But James Parker's spirited and robust daughter had been reduced to a fragile, uncertain creature.
Her appearance was “most pitiable
,” he would write. “Her emaciated body was covered with the scars, the evidence of the savage barbarity to which she had been subject … She was in very bad health.”

RACHEL'S HEALTH WAS ONLY ONE of James's pressing problems that winter. He was facing a whispering campaign of attacks on his character and his shady business dealings. Texas was an untamed and wide-open frontier society where swindles and gunplay were as much a part of the landscape as tumbleweed. But even by those rugged standards, James was a man apart. His anonymous accusers claimed he had secret dealings with Indians to steal horses from whites and had paid off the Indians with counterfeit money, angering the warriors and triggering the reprisal raid on Parker's Fort. Even worse, James was accused of killing a woman and her daughter during a botched robbery in 1837. Counterfeiting, horse theft, and murder were the kinds of accusations that could earn a man a perfunctory trial and the hangman's noose.

The accusers were not all anonymous. Late in 1838 James was accosted on the street in neighboring Montgomery by a local man named William W. Shepperd, who publicly repeated the accusations. James sued Shepperd for $10,000 for slander; Shepperd denied he had made the specific allegations. James applied to the court for a change of venue because “
the prejudice existing
at this time in the … said county … would prevent him from obtaining justice.” The case never went to trial, but vigilantes came looking for James at his ranch house. He was away
at the time, but the men warned his wife that “they would whip him and destroy the property,” James wrote in a letter to Texas officials.
He went into hiding
and ordered his family to flee to his brother Joseph's home in Houston City, seventy miles away.

While many ransomed female captives found themselves the object of abuse and suspicion once they were returned to white society, there is no indication that Rachel's family treated her with anything but love and concern. She became pregnant soon after reuniting with her husband, Luther, and the unexpected journey to Houston City in midwinter was yet another physical ordeal for her. James joined his family there, and in January 1839 he published a five-page pamphlet denying the three main charges against him and proclaiming his innocence. “
My success engendered malice
in the hearts of some,” he writes, “who, if they could not elevate themselves to my level, were determined to drag me down to theirs.”

Although crammed into her uncle Joseph's house in Houston City, Rachel managed to complete a crisp, harrowing twenty-seven page account of her captivity. She outlined several goals in the preface, including the hope that readers would gain sympathy for captives and help campaign for their release. And she concluded with a premonition of her own fate, saying she was offering the following pages to the public “
feeling assured that before they are published
, the hand that penned them will be cold in death.” The small book, which quickly sold out, confirmed Texans' worst fears about Comanche barbarism.

Rachel gave birth that same month to a boy, whom she and Luther named Wilson. But Rachel and her frail newborn were dying. She was still obsessed with the fate of her missing son James Pratt, who by now would have been four years old. “
This life had no charms
for her,” her father writes. “Her only wish was that she might live to see her son restored to his friends.” Crushed physically and emotionally by her long ordeal and haunted by her lost son, Rachel Plummer died on March 19, 1839.
Wilson died two days later
.

Spurred on by his dying daughter's last request, James continued the fruitless search for his grandson, nephew, and niece—James Pratt Plummer and John and Cynthia Ann Parker, now nearly three years in captivity. He formally applied for guardianship of all four of Silas and Lucy's children in 1840, including “
John Parker and Sinthy Ann
Parker supposed to be among the Comanche Indians.” But he had other ambitions as well. That same year he traveled to the new Texas capital in Austin with
a wild scheme to raise an army
of four thousand men to
invade New Mexico, which was still under Mexican control, capture Santa Fe, forge a treaty with local Indians, and take control of the Santa Fe Trail. The legislators, who were focused on more pressing concerns, paid no attention.

WHILE JAMES PARKER WAS WAGING his personal crusade against Indians, the Republic of Texas was locked in an increasingly savage war with Comanches and other tribes. Sam Houston's good-neighbor policy had produced at best a fragile peace that was constantly shattered by raiding parties and retaliation. West Texas was a lawless battleground where Comanches and Rangers regularly ambushed each other and settlers lived in constant fear of Indian attack. Houston left office in December 1838, replaced by Mirabeau Lamar, a popular hard-liner who advocated expulsion of the Cherokees and other purportedly peaceful tribes in eastern Texas and a war of extermination against the Comanches and Kiowas in the west. “
If the wild cannibals of the woods
will not desist from their massacres, if they continue to war upon us with the ferocity of tigers and hyenas, it is time that we should retaliate their warfare,” Lamar proclaimed in his opening address to the Texas Congress in December 1838. He was not a man for half measures when it came to Indians. The goal, he said, was “their total extinction or total expulsion.”

What had started as a tit-for-tat struggle over horse thievery and hunting rights was quickly evolving into the most protracted conflict ever waged on American soil, a forty-year blood feud between two alien civilizations. Neither side believed the other was fully human. Comanches saw the Texans as invaders without conscience who occupied their lands, destroyed their hunting grounds, and broke every promise. Texans saw Comanches as human vermin, brutal, merciless, and sadistic.

Still, despite the huge gap in their experiences and consciousness, Indians and settlers were
intimate enemies
. When they waged war against each other, they killed with rifles, pistols, tomahawks, and bows and arrows—at close range, often while looking into the faces of their victims. There were no boundaries or rules and no noncombatants. It was truly a war of populations: destroying a man's family was as important as killing the man himself. Part of any victory was to inflict the maximum amount of suffering and humiliation on the other side.

“The savage wars of peace”—Rudyard Kipling's phrase from his jingoistic poem “The White Man's Burden,” the literary battle cry of racial
imperialism—could only end in the extermination of one race or the other. Hence
the centrality of attacks on women and children
: the object was to destroy the enemy through the murder of his family or to corrupt his seed through captivity and rape.

Texans used the term “depredations” to describe Comanche atrocities. In the Texan view, this was not warfare as practiced by civilized men but rather a form of depraved, predatory attack by wild beasts. The only possible solution was to cage or kill the perpetrators.

Comanches were not the only targets. Lamar and the hard-liners saw the more peaceful, domesticated tribes of East Texas as equally culpable. When the Cherokees resisted the government's order that they “voluntarily” remove themselves from their farms and villages, Lamar's troops conducted a two-day campaign of slaughter and pillage in the summer of 1839, driving out the Indians and torching their homes and fields. The Cherokee defenders, outnumbered three to one, put up tough resistance, but the Texans killed eighteen and wounded one hundred.
The elderly Cherokee leader
, Chief Bowles, an old friend of Sam Houston's, greeted the invaders dressed in a brightly colored coat and hat and special cane that Houston had given him. The chief refused to abandon his village, was wounded by the Texans in the attack, and sat down in front of a cooking fire. A Texan put a pistol up against the old man's ear and blew out his brains. The Texans left the body to rot in the open, where twenty years later the bones were still bleaching in the sun.

The troops proceeded to blaze a trail of destruction throughout the region, burning out villages of Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Caddos, Kickapoos, Creeks, and Seminoles. The Indians fled north across the Red River into what is now Oklahoma; white settlers quickly took their place. Revisionist historians have characterized these campaigns as exercises in ethnic cleansing. Despite the emotionally charged context, it's a hard label to refute.

IN THE VICIOUS STRUGGLE between Texans and Comanches, abductions became the abiding fault line. There was no chance for peaceful coexistence so long as Comanches held white captives, and they never grasped the deep cultural, religious, sexual, and racial hatred that kidnapping Texan women and children aroused. Texans quickly came to see Indians as subhuman in large part because of the seemingly casual cruelty with which they treated captives.

Still, the ransoms that the Texans paid out for the return of their
loved ones served to encourage more abductions. And the Comanches couldn't help but notice that the more abused the victims looked, the more willing the Texans seemed to be to buy them back.

By 1840 both sides were exhausted from the conflict and even Governor Lamar entertained the possibility of accommodation. But the return of all white captives was a nonnegotiable precondition for a truce. With this in mind, Texan officials invited Comanche leaders to a peace conference in San Antonio in mid-February and told them they could have a treaty provided they returned all of their white prisoners. As an insurance policy, the Texans quietly arranged to have three companies of infantrymen waiting in the wings.