Fort Parker, "The Searchers" and the Downfall of the Comanche

 

My father’s direct ancestors stayed East of the Mississippi and were mostly done participating in the violence against Native Americans after the Red Stick War in the early 19th century. But relatives moved farther west, and it is through them that we connect to the more recent leg of the story. My dad’s mother’s family, the Parkers, arrived in Virginia in 1645, making this the longest unbroken American line in my ancestry on my father's side, nearly 350 years.

One of this family, Elder John Parker , born in 1759, made what was usually a multigenerational migration during the course of one lifetime. He was born in Baltimore, then moved with his family to western Virginia when he was a child.  As a young man, along with his friend Daniel Boone he became a frontier scout in what was to become Tennessee and Kentucky. Native Americans allied with the British in many frontier areas during the American Revolution, and Parker participated in much bloody fighting against them, and he continued in actions against the Cherokee and other eastern bands into the early 19th century. Later he participated in the Northwest Indian War and was rewarded for his efforts with a land grant in Southern Illinois where he settled with his 11 children and their families. Basically, this amounts to a lifetime of Indian fighting.

In 1833, at age seventy-five, Parker was recruited by Texas Founding father Stephen Austin and Mexican authorities to create a settlement on the Texas Frontier in what is now Limestone County, about 100 miles south of Dallas-Fort Worth. This was early days in Texas, not just prior to statehood but also previous to the rebellion that resulted in the Texas Republic. The Comanche, the most powerful tribe of the Great Plains, were still extremely strong and numerous at this time and Anglo settlers were few. It is thought that Comanche is a Ute word meaning “enemy” or “anyone who wants to fight me all the time”. It’s important to note that another tribe gave them that name. Still, Parker moved there with all his extended family and some friends, amounting to a few dozen people and they built a four acre compound with 12 foot high log walls, which they called Fort Parker. And they started to build a community and farm the land. The venture lasted 3 years.  In 1836, shortly after Texas independence, the Comanche, along with Kiowa and Wichita allies, made a surprise attack on the fort in overwhelming numbers, several hundred warriors, killing Parker and most of the people, in and around the fort. 

But they didn’t kill them all. Some escaped, and five, most of them children, were taken prisoner by the Comanche. And through them we can trace the eventual, lamentable fate of the Comanche people. One of the captured was nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, John’s granddaughter. The search for Cynthia by her uncle James, became the basis for the novel on which John Ford’s movie The Searchers is based, with NatalieWood playing the kidnapped girl and John Wayne playing the fanatical, raged-filled uncle.

Cynthia Ann lived with the Comanches for 25 years. As you can imagine she developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome, the size of, well, Stockholm. As in the film, she became completely culturally Comanche. She was the bride of a tribal chief and had several children by him and had very little interest in rejoining white America anymore. But in 1860 she was discovered by white soldiers during a battle and brought back to live with her Parker relatives in Texas, where she wasted away and died a decade later.

Quanah Parker 

It’s easy to understand her despondency when you recall that she’d left behind several children among the Comanche. One of them was very important, in fact today he is far better known than his mother, or his great grandfather John, or our immigrant ancestor Richard. That is Quanah Parker, the Last Chief of the Comanche. Quanah was the son of Peta Nocona, a chief of the Nokoni band, and grandson of Iron Jacket, a medicine man known for wearing a Spanish coat of mail into battle. Quanah was born in the 1840s, at a time when the Comanche population was beginning to be decimated by disease. During that decade they lost almost half their population, from 20,000 to 12,000. They signed a major peace treaty with Texas in 1845 but the following year Texas joined the United States, necessitating a new treaty which wasn’t ratified for several years. Then Texas seceded from the US, making that treaty null. And then the Confederacy lost the Civil War and had to be reincorporated into the United States, necessitating a new treaty. And even in those rare times when there was a valid treaty in place not every faction or band of the Comanche had signed off on it. Meanwhile disease continued to decimate the population and there was an active campaign by the US army to exterminate the buffalo. So basically a sporadic state of warfare existed between the Comanche and the whites until the mid 1870s, with Quanah Parker as one of their principal warchiefs. By 1875, there were only 1500 starving Comanche left, and they finally settled down on their designated reservation in the Indian Territory which later became known as Oklahoma, where the Cherokee and others had been resettled decades earlier. Quanah was named tribal chief, and was a complicated figure. While he had fought to the bitter end and had been one of the last to come onto the reservation, he later adopted the white man’s style of dress and amassed a great fortune in cattle and land use fees and wise investments and became a friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s. Quanah Parker died in 1911, just around the time that the western was becoming firmly established as a cinematic genre.