Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (35 page)

When Smith asked why she and “Billy” could not go by themselves, she answered that she thought he would be killed and she would be made a slave. She had an idea that Coho was tougher than William Parker, the cripple and coward. She was probably right. And of course Smith spoke the Comanche language. The next day Parker took Smith out to see his illegal still, which he had built following the directions in a book entitled
One Thousand Things Worth Knowing,
then made one last effort to convince him to help, offering Smith the deed to more than half of his eighty acres. “They will never get me in the army again,” he said. “I will suicide first.” Smith again refused. He later heard that Parker had managed to find his way to Illinois anyway, and had thus escaped the war. The last thing Smith remembered Cynthia Ann saying was: “Si le doy o mi gene si le doy, todos las muchachas que si quire, pero bonito y buen mosas. [I will give you, or my people will give you, all the girls you want, but pretty and well made].” He refused that, too. It must have broken her heart.

Coho Smith captured Cynthia Ann as no one else has. Other people saw her as sullen, brooding, unresponsive, detached. Despondent. Even crazy, or at least so far sunk in savagery as to be irredeemable. In Smith’s account she was smart, aggressive, focused, strong-willed, and intensely practical. She was completely aware of what she wanted and, at least for that brief moment, of how to get it. Her tragedy was that such a woman was utterly helpless to change the destiny that her family had, with the best of intentions, arranged for her.

In early 1862, Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower moved yet again, this time to the home of her younger brother, Silas Jr. He had also been at the fort when it was raided, along with his three siblings. For some reason the Indians had taken Cynthia Ann and John and had spared Silas Jr. and Orlena. Silas and his wife, Ann, lived with their three children in Van Zandt County, deep in the piney woods of east Texas, twenty-seven miles northwest of Tyler.
If Cynthia Ann had despaired of getting back home when she was living in Birdville, she was now more than a hundred miles east. She was no longer even near the frontier. She must have understood this as they traveled: She was leaving the prairies, heading for the high timber. She must have known she was never getting out.

Life was no better with Silas, who was twenty-eight at the time and stuttered. She did not get along with his wife, who punished Prairie Flower (who was often called Topsannah or Tecks Ann) every time she called her mother by her Comanche name.
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Cynthia Ann kept trying to escape, walking off down the road with her daughter in her arms whenever she was left alone. (She said she was “going home, just going home.”)
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She often slashed her arms and breasts with a knife, drawing blood. This was probably an act of mourning for the death of her husband. Or it could have been a simple expression of misery. On one occasion she took a butcher knife and cut off her hair.

It was around this time that a photograph was taken of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower that would become famous on the frontier and beyond. They had gone “visiting” in Fort Worth in the company of Silas—probably dragged along so she would not escape—and had somehow, perhaps at Silas’s urging, landed in the photography studio of a man named A. F. Corning.
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The result was an exceptional and luminous portrait of mother and daughter. In it, Cynthia Ann wears a plain cotton blouse with a kerchief tied loosely at the neck. Her board-straight, medium brown hair is cropped short (perhaps this was the result of the butcher knife incident). Her eyes are light and transparent, her gaze disarmingly direct. Again we see the large, muscular hands and thick wrists. What is most extraordinary about the portrait, however, is Cynthia Ann’s exposed right breast, at which the black-haired, swaddled, and obviously quite pretty Prairie Flower is nursing. There is probably no precedent for this sort of photography on the Texas frontier in 1862. White women were not photographed with their breasts exposed. And even if a photographer had taken such a photo, no newspaper would have published it. This one was different. It became the picture of Cynthia Ann that generations of schoolchildren knew; it is still in wide circulation. The only explanation is that because Cynthia Ann was seen, and treated, as a savage, even though she was as white as any Scots-Irish settler in the south. The double standard is similar to the one
National Geographic Magazine
famously applied in the mid-twentieth century to photographs of naked African women. The magazine would never have considered showing the breasts of a white woman in
its pages. This explains part of the fascination with Cynthia Ann: the sense that, though her skin was white, something darker and more primal lurked beneath. In April 1862, Silas joined the Confederate army, leaving his pregnant wife to care for their three children and also to act as jailer for Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower.
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Ann soon put a stop to it, and Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower were shipped off yet again, this time to her sister Orlena, who also lived in the vicinity of Tyler, with her husband J. R. O’Quinn. Mother and daughter were moved to a separate house.
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Now, perhaps because of her growing realization that she was never going back to the Comanches, Cynthia Ann began to adjust. The Civil War had taken most of the able-bodied men, leaving the women to pick up the slack. Cynthia Ann began to relearn English, and, in one account, could eventually speak it when she wanted to. She learned how to spin, weave, and sew and became quite adept at it. Her Comanche experience had taught her how to tan hides, and she became known as the best tanner in the county. According to a neighbor:

She was stout and weighed about 140 pounds, well made, and liked to work. She had a wild expression and would look down when people looked at her. She could use an axe equal to a man and disliked a lazy person. She was an expert in tanning hides with the hair on them, or plaiting or knitting either ropes or whips. She thought her two boys were lost on the prairie . . . this dissatisfied her very much.
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Part of this adjustment, too, was her reintegration into the Parker family. Many of her relatives lived nearby, and she saw them with some regularity. She had friends, too, in a sense, at least people she could talk to. She even remembered some of the people from the old days. Every Sunday one of them would take Prairie Flower visiting. The child had learned English quickly and soon spoke it more often than Comanche.
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She even went to a nearby school. In the account of Cynthia Ann’s relative Tom Champion, she had a “sunny disposition” and was “an open-hearted, good woman, and always ready to help somebody.”
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Most others had a different view. She was seen weeping on the porch, or hiding herself from gawkers, who never stopped coming to see the infamous “white squaw.” And there was nothing sunny about her refusal to abandon many of her Indian ways, slicing her body with a knife whenever a family member died, and singing her high-pitched, keening songs of Comanche mourning. She had never forgotten, she had only accommodated; she probably stopped believing the Parker family’s promises, which they repeated
to the end, that she would be allowed to see her sons again. They had always been empty promises. According to T. J. Cates, one of Cynthia Ann’s neighbors, she spoke often of the loss of her two sons.

I well remember Cynthia Ann Parker and her little Taocks [sic]. She lived at this time about six miles south of [the town of] Ben Wheeler with her brother-in-law Ruff O’Quinn, near Slater’s Creek. . . . She thought her two boys were lost on the prairie after she was captured. . . . She would take a knife and hack at her breast until it would bleed and then put the blood on some tobacco and cry for her lost boys.
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Champion had the same impression. “I don’t think she ever knew but that her sons were killed,” he wrote. “And to hear her tell of the happy days of the Indian dances and see the excitement and pure joy which shown [sic] on her face, the memory of it, I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from them than the Indians did by taking her at first.”
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Whatever chance she may have had at contentment was destroyed in 1864 when Prairie Flower died of influenza and pneumonia.
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The little girl’s death shattered her. Now there was nothing left of her Comanche life but memories. What her day-to-day life was like in the years after that is largely unknown. The Comanche version is unambiguous: The white men broke her spirit and made her a misfit. She became bitter over her enforced captivity, refused to eat, and eventually starved herself to death.
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She lived six more years, until 1870, when she died of influenza, which may well have been complicated by self-starvation. A coffin was built for her by relatives; a bone pin was put in her hair, and they buried her in the Foster Cemetery, four miles south of the town of Poyner, which lies between the larger towns of Tyler and Palestine. It is perhaps fitting for someone who had endured so many changes against her will that, before she came to her final resting place, she was buried three times, in three different cemeteries.

Who was she, in the end? A white woman by birth, yes, but also a relic of old Comancheria, of the fading empire of high grass and fat summer moons and buffalo herds that blackened the horizon. She had seen all of that death and glory. She had been a chief’s wife. She had lived free on the high infinite plains as her adopted race had in the very last place in the North American continent where anyone would ever live or run free. She had died in deep pine woods where there was no horizon, where you could see nothing at all. The woods were just a prison. As far as we know, she died without the slight
est comprehension of what larger forces had conspired to take her away from her old life.

One thinks of Cynthia Ann on the immensity of the plains, a small figure in buckskin bending to her chores by a diamond-clear stream. It is late autumn, the end of warring and buffalo hunting. Above her looms a single cottonwood tree, gone bright yellow in the season, its leaves and branches framing a deep blue sky. Maybe she lifts her head to see the children and dogs playing in the prairie grass and, beyond them, the coils of smoke rising into the gathering twilight from a hundred lodge fires. And maybe she thinks, just for a moment, that all is right in the world.

THE RISE OF QUANAH

T
HE BATTLE WAS
over and the two boys were alone in the bottoms of the narrow Pease River, among cottonwood and hackberry and walnut and rolling sand hills. They would have shivered in the same bitterly cold north wind that spun tornadoes of blown dust about the white soldiers. The boys were young—twelve and ten years old—but not too young to understand the horror that had just befallen them. When the soldiers had first come into sight a great cry of alarm had gone up and both of them—Quanah and Peanuts—had fled the village. Their mother, Nautdah, had been with them. Then, somehow, they had lost her.
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There was shooting, and screaming, as the soldiers slashed and blasted their way through the village, killing everyone in sight, even the women with their heavily laden pack mules, even the dogs. Then there was silence. Then the boys were alone. Though they may or may not have witnessed the death of their father, Peta Nocona, they almost certainly understood that their mother had not been killed. But they obviously got the general idea that everybody else was dead. So they fled.

A twelve-year-old Comanche boy was not entirely helpless in the wild. He would have been far more competent than a frontier white boy. He would have been, as all Comanche boys were, a superb rider. He would have known how to hunt small game. He would have known how to make fire. He would have known something about gathering edible roots and berries. But by the
timetables of Comanche culture, Quanah would not, at that point in his life, have been allowed to participate in battle, and would probably not even have been allowed on a buffalo or deer hunt. He would never have been permitted to stray very far from camp. He would absolutely never have been left alone in the immensity of the southern plains, without food or weapons, and with no sense of where his people were.