Western icon torn from family twice
In December 1860, a company of Texas Rangers raided an Indian
encampment near the Pease River. During the fight that followed, a
rider held a baby above her head. She was surrounded and
captured.
Her captors noticed her blue eyes and surmised that she was a
white woman. It was determined that she was Cynthia Ann Parker,
captured by the Indians nearly 25 years earlier.
Western icon torn from family twice
In December 1860, a company of Texas Rangers raided an Indian encampment near the Pease River. During the fight that followed, a rider held a baby above her head. She was surrounded and captured.
Her captors noticed her blue eyes and surmised that she was a white woman. It was determined that she was Cynthia Ann Parker, captured by the Indians nearly 25 years earlier.
Her uncle confirmed the identification when she was taken to Fort Parker from where an Indian raiding party had captured her and five other people in 1836. Cynthia was 9 then and was raised by a Comanche couple. Within a few years the other captives, including her brother, John, were returned.
Cynthia, re-named Naduah, was offered her freedom but requested that she be allowed to remain with her new family.
She eventually married Chief Ocono, and she was his only wife. They had two sons, Quanah and Pecos, and a daughter, Topsanna. After her capture, the Rangers took her through Fort Worth. Her original family welcomed her and her child but she grieved for the loss of her husband, and for her two sons that she believed had been killed. She tried to return to the Comanches several times but was always prevented.
In 1863 she learned that her younger son, Pecos, had survived the fight but had died of smallpox. A few months later her daughter contracted influenza, then pneumonia and died. Cynthia’s health declined rapidly after that. She finally refused to eat and died of starvation at 43 in 1871.
She did not know that her older son had taken his father’s place as chief of the tribe and won many battles against the white man. But Quanah Parker was far-seeing and realized the old days were nearly over. He led his tribe onto the reservation and took up the ways of his former foes.
Quanah Parker shared his mother’s sense of family. He located her grave and had her exhumed and moved to “friendly ground” in Oklahoma in 1910. He was buried beside her the following year. In 1957. Their remains were later moved to the military cemetery at Fort Sill.
For the last 50 years, Cynthia Parker has slept in peace with her son beside her. She is among the most tragic figures in the history of the American West, a woman who lost her family twice and who believed that she had outlived all her children.
