April 02, 2020
Volume 50 - No. 14
By lyle e davis
Looking back at frontier times there are several incidents where white women were kidnapped by Indians and kept as members of the tribe . . probably the most well known of them was Cynthia Ann Parker - mother of Quanah Parker, chief of all the Comanche tribes.
J. Marvin Hunter wrote an extensive article about the incident in Frontier Times Magazine, dated March of 1927, some 91 years after Cynthia Ann Parker was lost to the The Paper - 760.747.7119
website:www.thecommunitypaper.com
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white civilization and became part of the Indian culture.
Hunter knew and talked with one of the veterans who was with the rangers that captured Quanah Parker.
In the fall of 1833 the Parker family moved from Cole county, Illinois, to Texas. The elder Parker was a Virginian by birth, lived for a while in Georgia, but raised his family principally in old Ledford county, Tennessee. It was from this country, in 1818, that he moved to Illinois—
then a country in the far west. But the elder Parker and his sons dreamed of the distant land on the frontier. Cynthia Ann’s grandfather, John Parker, was recruited to settle his family in north-central Texas; he was to establish a settlement fortified against Comanche raids, which had been devastating to the Euro-American colonization of Texas and northern Mexico. The Parker family, its extended kin, and surrounding families established fortified blockhouses and a central citadel—later called Fort Parker— on the headwaters of the Navasota
River in what is now Limestone County, then about 60 miles above the settlements. . And what is more strange, they came to be massacred by the Comanches whose savage braves were destined to be ruled by the blood of the very family they sought to wipe out in that terrible raid.
It was a block house, built of rough-hewn logs, for the protection of the people in case of an Indian raid. It was nested about a mile
Kidnapped by the Comanches! See Page 2