History Lesson 
The Warrior's Bride
One month after the Battle of San Jacinto, a nine-year-old girl was abducted by Indians and went on to become the wife of the most feared Comanche chief. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker, and though her story was long ago intertwined with fiction, one fact remains: She was the original tough Texas woman.
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"I speak French very lamely, and answered, as best as I could, ŒTexans, Americans, et amis.' She smiled brightly . . . and came bounding down the rocks to join us." Still later: "That night her small, graceful head lay upon my shoulder, while the long and silken hair streamed in a raven cloud to my feet. She was very lightly clothed, since the only garments of civilization her captors had left her was something like a chemise of fine linen, which left her breast exposed and the arms naked; she, however, had thrown over her shoulders, as a cape, the brightly rosetted skin of an ocelot, but this had now fallen off. From an instinct of delicacy which does not desert even rude backwoods men, I swept her long hair as the most appropriate veil over her bosom. It was sacred to me!"
A Texas Ranger who spoke French! In his rush to use Cynthia Ann as rhetoric to stir up the anger of white frontiersmen, Baylor had no idea that his paper was close to breaking a stunning exclusive about the comely captive. This time the tale would actually be true.
IN LATE 1860 NACONA LED a huge raid that set ablaze the settled frontier from Jacksboro to Weatherford. Afterward, a hard rain set in, and it was easy for the Texans to follow the Comanches' horse tracks. A few weeks later, two companies of Rangers and a cavalry troop approached the Comanche camp on the Pease River. It was one of their favorite places; just north were the four sacred Medicine Mounds jutting up from the plains. A scout with the Texans was Charles Goodnight, the future trailblazer and Panhandle cattle baron. One of the young Ranger captains was Sul Ross, who would go on to become governor and the first president of Texas A&M University. Near the Pease, Goodnight found a Bible that had belonged to a young woman named Sherman. In a raid a few weeks before, the woman had been pregnant when the Indians surrounded her farm in the Palo Pinto country; they raped and scalped her and shot several arrows into her body. She lived long enough to have a stillborn baby, then died. For the Comanches, the stolen book was nothing more than tough packing material for their shields.
Enraged, the Texas avengers rode through the camp and just laid bodies in a heap. Ross took part in the killing of a chief who warbled his death song and tried to fend them off. Ross was convinced that the man he killed was Nocona. The Comanches later jeered at this account. They claimed that Nocona, his sons, and most men of fighting ability were engaged in a buffalo hunt; the camp was now just an outfitting station. But if Nocona lived, he vanished as a war chief after that day.
In the meantime, a figure wrapped in a buffalo robe and riding a fast gray horse led the Texans on a chase from the camp through the river bottom and trees. Concealed in the robe was Cynthia Ann's two-year-old daughter, named Prairie Flower. Seeing that Ross was about to shoot her, the woman pulled up the horse, raised the infant, and called out, "Americano! Americano! Americano!"
Goodnight later wrote that he was the one who saw that the hysterical woman was blue-eyed, but Ross swore that he made the discovery, yelling at a lieutenant, "Why, Tom, this is a white woman! Indians don't have blue eyes." The angry and exhausted lieutenant yelled back: "Hell, no! That ain't no white woman! Damn that squaw! If I have to worry with her anymore, I will shoot her!" They captured the woman and her infant and returned with her to a cottonwood grove along the river to camp. "We rode right over her dead companions," Goodnight recalled. "I thought then and still think how exceedingly cruel it was."
Ross always said that he suspected and verified that she was the long-lost captive. Others, however, claimed that a cavalry officer sent for Isaac Parker, Cynthia Ann's uncle, who was a member of the Texas Legislature for its first twenty years. Living at Birdville, near Fort Worth, Parker rode out to see her. According to one witness at the interview, a neighbor of Parker's, the woman "sat for a time immovable, lost in profound meditation, oblivious to every thing by which she was surrounded, ever and anon convulsed as if it were by some powerful emotion which she struggled to suppress." Parker tried to question her in English but got little response. He turned to the neighbor and said, "If this is my niece, her name is Cynthia Ann." The woman stood up, struck herself on the chest, and cried, "Me, Cynthia Ann!"
THE STORY RACED FROM the white man, which broke the exclusive, to a Dallas newspaper and then all over the state. Cynthia Ann's mother was eight years dead by then, and her uncle took her to his farm, but first he practically roped her into sitting for a photographer in Fort Worth. She was no delicate maiden now, if she ever had been one. She was 34, and the years of extreme physical hardship had worn hard. The portrait was a grim, haunting image of an intently staring woman with a breast bared for a nursing infant. Her hair was hacked short—a Comanche demonstration of grief. She'd been separated from her two boys, and she would never see them again.
At Birdville, her kin and neighbors feared that Prairie Flower's soul had been carried off by the "demon of barbarianism"; rigorous Bible study was required. Meanwhile, her mother continually tried to escape. In the end, the most idealized Texas woman of her time couldn't fit in. The Texans couldn't get through to her, couldn't make her realize how much better off she was. In bitter irony, they became her captors.
At wits' end, in 1862 Isaac Parker turned her over to her brother Silas Parker, Jr., who moved her to Van Zandt County, hoping the deep Piney Woods would convince her of the futility of longing for the plains. But Silas was drafted into the Confederate army, and Cynthia Ann's sister-in-law was overwhelmed. Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower were moved once again, this time to a house nearby built by relatives. There, Prairie Flower began to assimilate, just as her mother had among the Comanches. The girl spoke English more than Comanche, and she was doing well in school. But she caught the flu and pneumonia in December 1863, and she died the next year. Once more the wall of incomprehension shot up. Desperate with grief, Cynthia Ann wailed a keening song and, to the horror of the Parkers, slashed her arms and breasts with a knife.
Even then, the mythologizing of Cynthia Ann never relented. In telling the story of her life, most accounts claim that she passed away right after her child's death—gave up and died of a broken heart. But in truth, she lived on at least until 1870. Probably she died of the flu.
IT WOULD BE A STRETCH to now make Cynthia Ann into a protofeminist who lived in a culture of extravagant machismo. In fact, she may have accompanied her husband on some of his ferocious raids. The wives of leading warriors were useful at managing horses and captives, and the buildup to the stealing and fighting was said to have an erotic charge. Still, something about her character did inspire the Comanches. She was torn from her family at a young age, yet she had become a survivor, one who had learned to live among them and had held up with a winsome quality. She named her first son Quanah, which translated as Fragrant (he was said to have been born in a bed of wildflowers), and her second son Peanut, in honor of her favorite treat when she was a child. The Comanches gave Cynthia Ann a name that reflected their respect: Naduah, which most often translated as She Who Carries Herself With Dignity and Grace
Almost in spite of themselves, Texans came around to sharing that same opinion. The Ranger company that caught up with her witnessed a mother who could ride a galloping horse bareback while holding a child secure in one arm. Neighbors who lived near her after her capture recalled a woman who could chop wood as ably as a man, who had a gift for sewing and weaving, and who was good-hearted, always eager to help. And she was stoic, a mother who was forced to endure the death of one child and the unknown fate of two others. Even under the worst of circumstances, Cynthia Ann Parker managed to remain tough, strong-willed, and a devoted wife and mother.
After she died, Cynthia Ann's legacy lived on through her eldest son, Quanah. (Peanut had died years earlier of smallpox.) Like his father, Quanah had a brief reign as the Comanches' principal war chief and fought bravely to keep his people off the reservations. But after losing the decisive battle at Adobe Walls in 1874 and suffering relentless pursuit all winter, Quanah and the last holdouts surrendered in 1875. The strapping Comanche resolved that he had to walk the White Man's Road and became lionized in peace by cattle barons Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett, and eventually even President Theodore Roosevelt. With friends like that, he received an $800 grant from Congress to move Cynthia Ann's remains to the reservation prairie of her chosen people.
In 1910 he spoke emotionally at the reinterment service, praising education, farming, and the white man's God. Certainly there was meanness and more on both sides of that bitter Texas conflict, but the note Quanah struck that day was one of reconciliation and tribute. "Forty years ago," he said, "my mother died. She captured by Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life so well she no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say." All Cynthia Ann had wanted was the freedom to love and be left alone, to the good of her family. It was a sentiment that still goes to the heart of what defines Texas women.
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