Of the captives we will briefly trace their subsequent checkered career.

After leaving the fort the two tribes, the Comanches and Kiowas, remained and traveled together until midnight. They then halted on an open prairie, staked out their horses, placed their pickets, and pitched their camp. Bringing all their prisoners together for the first time, they tied their hands behind them with raw-hide thongs so tightly as to cut the flesh, tied their feet close together, and threw them upon their faces. Then the braves, gathering around with their yet bloody, dripping scalps, commenced their usual war dance. They danced, screamed, yelled, stamping upon their prisoners, beating them with bows until their own blood came near strangling them. The remainder of the night these frail women suffered and had to listen to the cries and groans of their tender little children.

Mrs. Elizabeth Kellogg soon fell into the hands of the Keechis, from whom, six months after her capture, she was purchased by a party of Delawares, who carried her into Nacogdoches and delivered her to Gen. Houston, who paid them $150.00, the amount they had paid and all they asked.

On the way thence to Fort Houston, escorted by James W. Parker and others, a hostile Indian was slightly wounded and temporarily disabled by a Mr. Smith. Mrs. Kellogg instantly recognized him as the savage who had scalped the patriarch, Elder John Parker, whereupon, without judge, jury or court-martial, or even dallying with “Judge Lynch,” he was involentarily hastened to the “happy hunting grounds” of his fathers.

Mrs. Rachel Plummer remained a captive about eighteen months. Soon after her capture she was delivered of a child. The crying of her infant annoyed her captors, and the mother was forced to yield up her offspring to the merciless fiends,—in whose veins the milk of human sympathy had never flowed,—to be murdered before her eyes with all the demoniacal demonstrations of brutality intact in those savages. The innocent little babe but six weeks old was torn madly from the mother’s bosom by six giant Indians, one of them clutched the little prattling innocent by the throat, and like a hungry beast with defenseless prey, he held it out in his iron grasp until all evidence of life seemed extinct. Mrs. Plummer’s feeble efforts to save her child were utterly fruitless. They tossed it high in the air and repeatedly let it fall on rocks and frozen earth. Supposing the child dead they returned it to its mother, but discovering traces of lingering life, they again, by force, tore it angrily from her, tied plaited ropes around its neck and threw its unprotected body into hedges of prickley pear. They would repeatedly pull it through these lacerating rushes with demonic yells. Finally, they tied the rope attached to its neck to the pommel of a saddle and rode triumphantly around a circuit until it was not only dead but litterly torn to shreds. All that remained of that once beautiful babe was then tossed into the lap of its poor, distracted mother. With an old knife the weeping mother was allowed to dig a grave and bury her babe.

After this she was given as a servant to a very cruel old squaw, who treated her in a most bruatl manner. Her son had been carried off by another party to the far West and she supposed her husband and father had been killed at the massacre. Her infant was dead, and death to her would have been a sweet relief. Life was a burden, and driven almost to desperation, she resolved no longer to submit to the intolerant old squaw. One day when the two were some distance from, although still in sight of the camp, her mistress attempted to beat her with a club. Determined not to submit to this, she wrenched the club from the hands of the squaw and knocked her down. The Indians, who had witnessed the whole proceedings from their camp, now came running up, shouting at the top of their voices. She fully expected to be killed, but they patted her on the shoulder, crying, “Bueno! bueno!!” (Good! good!!) or well done! She now fared much better and soon became a great favorite and was known as the “Fighting Squaw.” She was eventually ransomed through the agency of some Mexican Santa Fe traders, by a noble-hearted, American merchant of that place, Mr. William Donahue. She was purchased in the Rocky Mountains so far north of Santa Fe that seventeen days were consumed in reaching that place. She was at once made a member of her benefactor’s family, where she received the kindest of care and attention. For long she accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Donahue on a visit to Independence, Missouri, where she had the pleasure of meeting and embracing her brother-in-law, L. D. Nixon, and by him was escorted back to her people in Texas.6

On the 19th of February, 1838, she reached her father’s house, exactly twenty-one months from her capture. She had never seen her little son, James Pratt, since soon after their capture, and knew nothing of his fate. She wrote, or dictated a thrilling and graphic history of her capture and the horrors of her captivity, the tortures and hardships she endured, and all the incidents of her life with her captors, with observations among the savages.7 In this book she tells the last she saw of Cynthia Ann and John Parker. She died on the 19th of February, 1839, just one year after reaching home. As a remarkable coincidence it may be stated that she was born on the 19th, married on the 19th, captured on the 19th, released on the 19th, reached Independence on the 19th, arrived at home on the 19th, and died on the 19th of the month.

Her son, James Pratt Plummer, after six long and weary years of captivity and suffering, during which time he had lived among many different tribes and traveled several thousand miles, was ransomed and taken to Fort Gibson late in 1842, and reached home in February, 1843, in charge of his grand-father. He became a respected citizen of Anderson county. Both he and his father are now dead. This still left in captivity Cynthia and John Parker, who, as subsequently learned, were held by separate bands. The brother and sister thus separated, gradually forgot the language, manners and customs of their own people, and became thorough Comanches as the long years stole slowly away. How long the camera of their young brains retained impressions of the old home within the fort, and the loved faces of their pale-faced kindred, no one knows; though it would appear that the fearful massacre should have stamped an impress indellible while life continued. But the young mind, as the twig, is inclined by present circumstances, and often forced in a way wholly foreign to its native and original bent.

John grew up with the little semi-nude Comanche boys of his own age, and played at “hunter” and “warrior” with pop-guns made of the elder stem, or bows and arrows, and often flushed the chaparral for hare and grouse, or entrapped the finny denizens of the mountain brooks with the many peculiar and ingenious devices of the wild man for securing for his repast the toothsome trout which abounds so plentifully in that elevated and delightful region, so long inhabited by the lordly Comanches. When just arrived at manhood, John accompanied a raiding party down the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Among the captives taken was a young Mexican girl of great beauty, to whom the young warrior felt his heart go out. The affection was reciprocated on the part of the fair Dona Juanita, and the two were soon engaged to be married, so soon as they should arrive at the Comanche village. Each day as the cavalcade moved leisurely, but steadily along, the lovers could be seen riding together, and discussing the anticipated pleasures of connubial life, when suddenly John was prostrated by a violent attack of small-pox. The cavalcade could not tarry, and so it was decided that the poor fellow should be left all alone in the vast Llano Esticado to die or recover as fate decreed. But the little Aztec beauty refused to leave her lover, insisting on her captors allowing her to remain and take care of him. To this the Indians reluctantly consented. With Juanita to nurse and cheer him up, John lingered, lived, and ultimately recovered, when, with as little ceremony, perhaps, as consummated the nuptials of the first pair in Eden, they assumed the matrimonial relation; and Dona Juanita’s predilections for the customs and comforts of civilization were sufficiently strong to induce her lord to abandon the wild and nomadic life of a savage for the comforts to be found in a straw-thatched Jackal. “They settled,” says Mr. Thrall, the historian of Texas, “on a stock ranch in the far West.” When the civil war broke out John Parker joined a Mexican company in the Confederate service, and was noted for his gallantry and daring. He, however, refused to leave the soil of Texas, and would, under no circumstances, cross the Sabine into Louisiana. He was still living on his ranch across the Rio Grande a few years ago, but up to that time had never visited any of his relatives in Texas.

Of Cynthia Ann Parker (we will anticipate the thread of the narrative). Four long years have elapsed since she was cruelly torn from a mother’s embrace and carried into captivity. During this time no tidings have been recieved of her. Many efforts have been made to ascertain her whereabouts, or fate, but without success; when in 1840, Col. Len. Williams, an old and honored Texian, Mr. —— Stoat, a trader, and a Delaware Indian guide, named “Jack Harry,” packed mules with goods and engaged in an expedition of private traffic with the Indians.

On the Canadian river they fell in with Pa-ha-u-ka’s band of Comanches, with whom they were peaceably conversant. And with this tribe was Cynthia Ann Parker, who from the day of her capture had never seen a white person. She was then about fourteen years of age and had been with the Indians nearly five years. Col. Williams found the Indian into whose family she had been adopted, and proposed to redeem her, but the Comanche told him all the goods he had would not ransom her, and at the same time “the fierceness of his countenance,” says Col. Williams, “warned me of the danger of further mention of the subject.” But old Pa-ha-u-ka prevailed upon him to let them see her. She came and sat down by the root of a tree, and while their presence was doubtless a happy event to the poor stricken captive, who in her doleful captivity had endured everything but death, she refused to speak a word. As she sat there, musing, perhaps, of distant relatives and friends, and the bereavements at the beginning and progress of her distress, they employed every persuasive art to evoke some expression. They told her of her playmates and relatives, and asked what message she would send them, but she had doubtless been commanded to silence, and with no hope or prospect of return was afraid to appear sad or dejected, and by a stocial effort in order to prevent future bad treatment, put the best face possible on the matter. But the anxiety of her mind was betrayed by the perceptible quiver of her lips, showing that she was not insensible to the common feelings of humanity.

As the years rolled by Cynthia Ann speedily developed the charms of womanhood, as with the dusky maidens of her companionship she performed the menial offices of drudgery to which savage custom consigns women,—or practiced those little arts of coquetry maternal to the female heart, whether she be a belle of Madison Square, attired in the most elaborate toilet from the elite bazars of Paris, or the half naked savage with matted locks and claw-like nails.

Doubtless the heart of more than one warrior was pierced by the Ulyssean darts from her laughing eyes, or charmed by the silvery ripple of her joyous laughter, and laid at her feet the game taken after a long and arduous chase among the Antelope Hills.

Among the number whom her budding charms brought to her shrine was Peta Nocona, a Comanche war chief, in prowess and renown the peer of the famous and redoubtable “Big Foot,” who fell in a desperately contested hand-to-hand encounter with the veteran ranger and Indian fighter, Captain S. P. Ross, now living at Waco, and whose wonderful exploits and deeds of daring furnished themes for song and story at the war dance, the council, and the camp-fire.

Cynthia Ann,—stranger now to every word of her mother tongue save her own name—became the bride of Pata Nocona, performing for her imperious lord all the slavish offices which savageism and Indian custom assigns as the duty of a wife. She bore him children, and we are assured loved him with a species of fierce passion, and wifely devotion; “for some fifteen years after her capture,” says Victor M. Rose, “a party of white hunters, including some friends of her family, visited the Comanche encampment on the upper Canadian, and recognizing Cynthia Ann probably through the medium of her name alone, sounded her in a secret manner as to the disagreeableness of a return to her people and the haunts of civilization. She shook her head in a sorrowful negative, and pointed to her little, naked barbarians sporting at her feet, and to the great greasy, lazy buck sleeping in the shade near at hand, the locks of a score of scalps dangling at his belt, and whose first utterance upon arousing would be a stern command to his meek, pale-faced wife. Though in truth, exposure to sun and air had browned the complexion of Cynthia Ann almost as intensely as were those of the native daughters of the plains and forest.

She retained but the vaguest remembrance of her people—as dim and flitting as the phantoms of a dream; she was accustomed now to the wild life she led, and found in its repulsive features charms which “upper tendom” would have proven totally deficient in:—“I am happily wedded,” she said to these visitors. “I love my husband, who is good and kind, and my little ones, who, too, are his, and I cannot forsake them!”

* * * * * * * * What were the incidents in the savage life of these children which in after times became the land marks in the train of memory, and which with civilized creatures serves as incentives to reminiscence?

“Doubtless,” says Mr. Rose, “Cynthia Ann arrayed herself in the calico borne from the sacking of Linville, and fled with the discomfited Comanches up the Gaudaloupe and Colorado, at the ruthless march of John H. Moore, Ben McCulloch and their hardy rangers. They must have been present at the battle of Antelope Hills, on the Canadian, when Col. John S. Ford, “Old Rip” and Captain S. P. Ross encountered the whole force of the Comanches, in 1858; perhaps John Parker was an actor in that celebrated battle; and again at the Wichita.”

“Their’s must have been a hard and unsatisfactory life—the Comanches are veritable Ishmaelites, their hands being raised against all men, and every man’s hand against them. Literally, “eternal vigilance was the price of liberty” with them, and of life itself. Every night the dreaded surprise was sought to be guarded against; and every copse was scanned for the anticipated ambuscade while upon the march. Did they flount the blood-drabbled scalps of helpless whites in fiendish glee, and assist at the cruel torture of the unfortunate prisoners that fell into their hands? Alas! forgetful of their race and tongue, they were thorough savages, and acted in all particulars just as their Indian comrades did. Memory was stored but with the hardships and the cruelties of the life about them; and the stolid indifference of mere animal existence furnishes no finely wrought springs for the rebound of reminiscence.”

* * * * * * * *

The year 1846, one decade from the fall of Parker’s Fort, witnessed the end of the Texian Republic, in whose councils Isaac Parker served as a senator, and the blending of the Lone Star with the gallaxy of the great constellation of the American Union;—during which time many efforts were made to ascertain definitely the whereabouts of the captives, as an indispensable requisite to their reclamation; sometimes by solitary scouts and spies, sometimes through the medium of negotiation; and sometimes by waging direct war against their captors,—but all to no avail.

* * * * * * * *

Another decade passes away, and the year 1856 arrives. The hardy pioneers have pushed the frontier of civilization far to the north and west, driving the Indian and the buffalo before them. The scene of Parker’s Fort is now in the heart of a dense population; farms, towns, churches, and school houses lie along the path by which the Indians marched from their camp at the “water-hole” in that bloody May of 1836. Isaac Parker is now a Representative in the Legislature of the State of Texas. It is now twenty years since the battle of San Jacinto; twenty years since John and Cynthia Ann were borne into a captivity worse than death; the last gun of the Mexican war rung out its last report over the conquered capital of Mexico ten long years ago; but John and Cynthia Ann Parker have sent no tokens to their so long anxious friends that they even live: Alas! time even blunts the edge of anxiety, and sets bounds alike to the anguish of man, as well as to his hopes.

The punishment of Prometheas is not of this world!