Legends of the Old West - TEXAS RANGERS Ep. 5 | "Naduah"

Episode Date: May 26, 2019

Texas Ranger Sul Ross makes a fateful discovery during an expedition against the Comanches, but the revelation has tragic consequences and it proves to be one of the most controversial and hotly debated topics in Texas history. This is the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, whose saga inspired “The Searchers” with John Wayne. In the end, hear an interview with Justice Ken Wise, the host of “Wise About Texas,” a podcast dedicated to Texas history. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Other conditions apply. 24 year old charlie goodnight huddled inside his coat as he and his horse trudged through the biting cold of a december day in 1860 he had been over this same ground two weeks earlier while chasing a comanche raiding party but the warriors had been too fast to catch. Now he was back on the trail as the lead scout for a group made up of rangers, federal troops, and local militiamen. They were in pursuit of another raiding party, but the frigid temperatures were taking a toll on the men and their horses. Thousands of buffalo roamed the area, but Charlie still found signs of the raiding party in the confusion of tracks.

The company trailed the party until sundown and then camped along the banks of the Peace River. They built meager fires and pulled their coats tight around their shoulders to protect against the bitterly cold wind that shouted down from the north. The next day, rain added more misery to their lives, to protect against the bitterly cold wind that shouted down from the north. The next day, rain added more misery to their lives.

But they discovered a fresh trail that reinvigorated some of the men. A party of rangers and federal troopers split off from the company and followed the trail along the banks of Mule Creek, a stream that fed into Peace River. They discovered a small Comanche camp and devised a quick plan of attack. The Rangers would strike from one side and the cavalry would strike from the other. The fight that followed would be one of the most hotly debated and controversial events in Texas history. Over the next 70 years, accounts of the fight would be enlarged and revised and embellished by numerous people, some of whom were never there. And almost exactly 100 years later, it became immortalized in The Searchers, the film directed by John Ford that starred John Wayne and Natalie Wood. This is the story of Cynthia Ann Parker Her capture by the Comanches

And her recapture by Texas Ranger Sol Ross From Black Barrel Media This is Season 5 of the Legends of the Old West Podcast Presented by the Cowboy Lifestyle Network I'm your host Chris Wimmer And this is the final episode of a five part series of the Legends of the Old West podcast presented by the Cowboy Lifestyle Network. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is the final episode of a five-part series on the Texas Rangers. After the story, stick around for an interview

with Justice Ken Wise, the host and creator of Wise About Texas, a Texas history podcast. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage.

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no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash realm. This episode is brought to you by Lego Fortnite. Lego Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of Lego play and Fortnite. Created to give players of all ages, including kids and families, a safe digital space to play in. And now, here's Episode perfect to the Parkers. The soil of the rolling plains that spread out before them was rich for planting crops. The open landscape was studded with live oak trees, and there were deer and wild turkeys everywhere.

The Parkers and a few other families arrived in Texas in 1833 by way of Virginia, Tennessee, and then Illinois. Elder John Parker and his son Daniel led the party to this spot along the Navasota, a tributary of the mighty Brazos River, in about 1834 and they immediately started building. They constructed a square fort made of logs with lookout towers on two corners. The families in the group built small cabins in a neat row inside the fort. They began to farm a 12-mile stretch of the bottomlands near the Navasota River and things were good for a little while.

Their small settlement was about 40 miles straight east of the modern city of Waco, and the closest Native Americans to the fort were the Wacos who lived along the Brazos, though this area actually belonged to the Wichitas. In 1835 and 1836, the Parkers were worried about the troubles with Mexico, like all the families in Texas, even though they were well north of the fighting. But their primary concern up here was the growing animosity between white settlers and the native tribes in the area. And the Parkers were out here on their own.

They were farther west than any other white settlers. They had built their fort, but if it didn't protect them, there was no chance of help from anyone else. In the spring of 1836, just one month after Sam Houston and the Texian army beat Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Parkers' luck ran out. San Jacinto, the Parkers' luck ran out. May 19th, 1836 was a pleasant day and most of the men of Parker's Fort were out in the fields. The women and children busied themselves with tasks inside the fort and a few men had stayed behind to help.

So they were about as vulnerable as they could be when a large party of Native Americans rode up to the fort. The party was mostly Comanches, but also had Kiowas, Wichitas, and Catowins. They waved a white flag that signaled they wanted to talk. Elder John Parker was uneasy about the situation. From his family, only his sons Silas and Ben were in the fort. Samuel Frost and his son were also there, but they were the only five men in the

stockade. The native party probably numbered about 100, and Ben Parker felt he had no choice but to go out and talk. He walked out of the walls of the fort and communicated with the party through broken English and sign language. Ben returned to the fort and told the others that the warriors wanted directions to a nearby waterhole, and they wanted beef to eat. Ben was nervous. He thought the warriors could become hostile at any moment. Silas begged him not to go back out, but Ben insisted on returning to the party to avoid a fight through conversation. As soon as Ben arrived, the warriors shrieked and surrounded him. They drove their lances into him and killed him on the spot.

Other warriors charged toward the fort. Silas rushed to the gate, but he couldn't close it in time. Warriors streamed into the fort and attacked the settlers. They killed Silas at the gate and then rode down old John Parker, the patriarch of the clan. They murdered him in a brutal, gory fashion and mutilated his body. They attacked his wife, known as Granny Parker, and left her for dead. They killed Samuel Frost and his son Robert. They attacked the other women in the fort and left them severely wounded.

Out in the fields, the men of the families began to run back to the fort. Lucy Parker, the wife of Silas, grabbed her four children and hurried out of the gate as the melee of screaming violence swirled all around them. They ran toward the Navasota River, but the warriors galloped up behind them and grabbed them all. The warriors threw Lucy and her kids onto their horses and began to flee. David Falkenberry was the first to arrive from the fields and he fought the warriors with his rifle. He forced them to drop Lucy and two of her children, but the warriors rushed away with the other two. The two kids were nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker and her six-year-old brother John. As the men of the fort rushed in from the fields, the warriors turned

their ponies and galloped away. They had killed five people, injured and mauled several others, and taken five prisoners. In addition to Cynthia Ann and John, the warriors captured Elizabeth Kellogg, Rachel Plummer, and Rachel's young son James, who was just 15 months old. At dawn the next day, the raiding party split up. Elizabeth Kellogg went with the Catowins or the Wichitas and stayed with them for roughly six months in eastern Texas. She was then sold to a band of Delawares who turned her over to Indian agents in Texas. At that point, she vanishes from history. The Comanches kept Rachel

Plummer and the three children. Rachel became the slave of a warrior and was treated to relentless beatings and degrading torments, especially at the hands of the Comanche women. After the raid, the Parkers and the plumbers began the exhaustive search for their lost family members, and little by little, it started to pay off. About a year and a half later, Rachel was spotted in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. An American trader named Donahue arranged for her release, and he and his wife took Rachel to Independence, Missouri, and then back to

Texas. They had been able to buy her from the Comanches, but they could not make a deal for the three white children who were still captives. And, as with many women who were captured and then returned to white society, Rachel could not readjust. She died within a year of her return. Cynthia's brother John and Rachel's son James were located in 1842 and successfully ransomed. By that point, James was six years old and spoke no English, but he was young enough to readjust to white civilization. John Parker was not. He was 12, and he had just been taken away from his sister, Cynthia Ann.

He was closer to her than anyone else in the world, and when he grew old enough, he ran away to try to find her. But by that point, the Comanches who held her were out of reach and John never found her. He eventually married a young woman from Mexico and settled near the Rio Grande. Cynthia Ann Parker was the last remaining captive of the raid on Parker's Fort. By the time her brother John was ransomed in 1842, she was 15 years old and the wife of a warrior. The Comanches refused to let her go.

For the next 19 years, she was mostly lost to the wreckers of white society. She assimilated into Comanche culture and began having children with her new husband, Peta Nakona. Seven years after John Parker and little James Plummer returned to their families,

Shapley Ross moved his family to the tiny village of Waco on the banks of the Brazos River, 40 miles west of Fort Parker. Ross had been a ranger in Texas during the Mexican-American War, and after his discharge in 1849, he bought four lots in Waco. He owned a ferry that ran across the river and more than 200 acres of farmland. And at that point, he had seven children to help him with his labor. His daughters Mary and Margaret came first, and then two boys followed, Peter and Lawrence.

These first four children were born in Van Buren County in Iowa Territory before Shapley moved his family to Texas in 1839. And by the time they arrived in Waco, Lawrence Ross was 11 years old. Shapley Ross wanted good educations for his children, and it turned out that his wife Catherine was a better teacher than any of the kids found at their formal schools. At 17 years old, Lawrence Ross enrolled at Baylor University in Independence, Texas. He completed the two-year program and decided he wanted to continue his education. He packed up and headed to Wesleyan University in Florence, Alabama. But in the summer of 1858, while he was home in Waco on summer break,

his life of study took an adventurous turn, one that almost got him killed. That spring, Texas Ranger Captain John Rip Ford had tracked the Comanches across the Red River and attacked a camp in Oklahoma. His expedition received high praise in Texas. Now it was the Army's turn to organize a mission against the Comanches, and it put Major Earl Van Dorn in charge of the expedition. Shapley Ross and a group of warriors from the Brazos Reservation had fought with Rip Ford on his expedition, and now Van Dorn wanted their help on his new expedition. But Ross was very sick at the time, so his son Lawrence Sullivan Ross took over as the leader of the warrior contingent.

And by this point, nobody called Lawrence by his first name. He was known simply as Saul Ross. In mid-September 1858, the expedition left Fort Belknap in search of Comanches. left Fort Belknap in search of Comanches. The column consisted of four companies of cavalry, two companies of mounted infantry, and more than 100 warriors with Saul Ross. The expedition traveled north and crossed the Red River into Oklahoma, and their scouts found a trail near Otter Creek in present-day Tillman County, Oklahoma. The scouts followed the trail and discovered a combined camp of Comanches, Wichita's, Chickasaws and Choctaws.

The Comanches had set up this meeting of tribes to essentially apologize to the Wichita's. They thought the Wichita's had helped Texas Ranger Rip Ford on his expedition four months earlier, and they had retaliated by stealing Wichita horses. Then they found out that Wichita's were not involved and now they were making amends. Ross's scouts rushed to the main column to tell him of the camp. They reported that there were 400 to 600 people in the camp and it was about 40 miles away. So Major Earl Van Dorn quickly told the expedition to pack up and get moving. But now there was a communication breakdown. The two scouts who had found the camp didn't fully understand the American system of measuring distance.

The camp wasn't 40 miles away. It was 90 miles away. The column marched all morning, and then all afternoon, and then all evening without finding the Comanche camp. Finally, Van Dorn called a halt near a creek to rest the horses and let the men brew some coffee. But after the break, they climbed back into their saddles and began trekking through the night. At daybreak, they closed in on the camp. The men and the horses were exhausted. They had been on the move for 36 hours straight, but in the early morning fog, they arrayed themselves for battle.

At 7 a.m., the bugler sounded the call to charge, and the column descended on the sleeping camp. The soldiers attacked from one side, while Ross and the warriors stampeded the horses on the other side. Sleepy warriors poured out of their lodges to fight the troopers. They shielded the women and children so they could escape. The Braves ran for their horses but Ross's group had driven them out of reach. Ross and his warriors turned and charged into the fight, but he noticed a group of natives fleeing in a different direction and he spurred his horse toward them. He shouted for the others to follow, but in the confusion, only three men stayed with him.

The four men raced toward the escapees and then discovered they were women and children, not fighters. But Ross had also noticed one little girl was white. He instructed his scout to grab her, and as the four men turned back toward the general engagement, they realized they were cut off from their companions. 25 warriors blocked the path to the main body of American troops. They opened fire on Ross and his three men. A lieutenant went down immediately, shot through the heart with an arrow. Then an Army private was hit. Ross raised his sharps rifle to return fire, but it malfunctioned. A Comanche arrow pierced his shoulder.

Then a warrior fired an old Springfield carbine at point-blank range and blew Ross off his horse. Ross crashed to the ground. As the warrior stood over him with a scalping knife in his hand, Ross was sure he would die. But then the cavalry rushed to his aid and a lieutenant blasted the warrior with a shotgun. A caddo scout dressed Ross's wounds for the long trip back home. In two hours of fighting, 56 warriors lay dead. The village was destroyed. The camp supplies were gone, and the horses had been scattered. Saul Ross survived the trip home and recovered from his wounds at his family's house in Waco.

General Winfield Scott was so impressed by the young man that he offered him a commission, but Ross turned it down so that he could finish college, which he did in June of 1859. But before he went to Alabama to complete his degree, he tried to find the family of the little white girl who had been rescued in the expedition. He couldn't find them, so he and his fiancée, Elizabeth, adopted her and named her Lizzie, and raised her as their own child. Sam Houston began his final service to the state of Texas in December 1859 as its seventh governor. Three months later, he called for another expedition against the Comanches, who still terrorized the Northwest frontier. Saul Ross joined up with a company of Texas Rangers for the expedition,

but this one would not have the results of his previous experience. for the expedition, but this one would not have the results of his previous experience. In June of 1860, more than 300 rangers struck out for the Comancheria, the homeland of the Comanches. But a month later, after crisscrossing the northwest part of the state, they hadn't laid eyes on a Comanche warrior. And after the Comanches lit a wall of fire to burn the prairie, many rangers decided it was time to go home. Men started to disperse in mid-July, and Governor Houston officially canceled the expedition in early August. The regiment trudged home without accomplishing anything while costing the state $1,500 per day, and Houston was not happy. Even though Saul Ross had not been in charge of the operation, many people blamed him for its failure.

In October of 1860, settlers were calling for his resignation. There were even whispers of a lynching that might be in the works. But despite the criticism, there were those who supported Ross, and Houston was one of them. He put the young ranger in command of another company, and that company began to conduct regular patrols. And then, in November, two things happened that would have a lasting impact on the history of Texas and the history of the nation. The Comanches went on a killing spree. They butchered six people in rapid succession, five of whom were women. And Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States. The butchery in Parker County that November of 1860 put Saul Ross on the path toward one of the most controversial events in Texas history.

Ross heard that a group of hostile Comanches was camped along the Peace River, just a few miles southwest of the Texas-Oklahoma border. He took 40 Rangers and rode to Camp Cooper. The commander of Camp Cooper gave him 20 cavalrymen under the leadership of Sergeant John Spangler. The team of 60 men then added about 70 local volunteers. By early December, the entire force had assembled and they rode north into the teeth of a bitter cold front. Charlie Goodnight, a 24-year-old rancher from the area,

took the lead and guided the party. He was the only one with knowledge of the territory, and not long ago he had been over this same ground in pursuit of a raiding party. Now he was the lead scout for the expedition, and he guided the men over a series of creeks as they worked their way north. They crossed the Big Wichita River and then finally reached the Peace River on the evening of December 17th. By that point, the expedition was struggling. The terrible weather and the lack of food had taken its toll on the men and the horses. The column was now strung out over a couple miles. Half the rangers had fallen behind the leaders. out over a couple miles. Half the rangers had fallen behind the leaders. All of the local volunteers had fallen behind. Only about 40 men were healthy enough to keep up a decent pace,

and they were a combination of rangers and cavalry troopers. A little more than a day later, on the morning of December 19, 1860, Saul Ross and the men who now led the expedition discovered a fresh trail and began to follow it. They soon spotted a small village of between five and ten lodges nestled on the banks of Mule Creek near its junction with the Peace River. There were around 15 people in the hunting camp who packed their belongings as if they were preparing to leave. They were mostly women and children who were traditionally responsible for transporting the goods of the camp. Saul Ross divided his force. He led the rangers, who numbered as many as 20, around the

left side of the camp. Sergeant Spangler led maybe 20 cavalrymen around the right side. As the villagers packed up their gear and got ready to leave, the troops attacked. The Comanche saw the charge at the last second. They had no time to mount a real defense. The rangers and the soldiers began firing. Women and children ran through the camp, terrified and screaming. The few Comanche men who were there grabbed weapons and tried to fight back. A Ranger was about to fire on a warrior but then the Rangers horse stopped abruptly. The Ranger nearly fell off his mount but his slide caused him to escape the arrow fired by the warrior. Saul Ross hurried

into the fray and killed the warrior in hand-to-hand combat. As the main attack happened in the heart of the camp, several Comanches were able to run to their horses and gallop away. American horsemen took off after the fleeing Comanches. In the chaos and confusion, one of the Comanche riders was nearly shot, but then she revealed herself to be a woman, and she was carrying an infant child. Not only that, but she appeared to be white. Her skin was heavily tanned and very dirty, but her blue eyes were unmistakable. The horsemen collected her and brought her back to camp, where the brief fight was now done. It lasted about 20 minutes, and the rangers and troopers didn't have so much

as a scratch on them. But somewhere between 7 and 15 Comanches lay dead on the ground. The majority of the dead were women. Saul Ross took care of a young boy who was thought to be the son of the man he had killed in the hand-to-hand fight. He took the boy home with him and named him Peace Ross. But it was the white woman and her infant daughter who would ignite a firestorm of excitement about the event. The Rangers and the soldiers took the woman and her child to Camp Cooper. The woman's uncle, Isaac Parker, eventually identified her as his long-lost niece, Cynthia Ann Parker. But the identification process was difficult.

She had been gone for more than 20 years. She spoke little to no English. She had trouble remembering and even saying her original name. By this point, she considered herself Nadoa, the wife of a warrior named Peta Nakona. They had three children together, two boys and the infant daughter she held in her arms. But she would never see her boys or her husband again. She would never witness the death of her younger son from disease, or see her eldest boy grow up tall and strong. She would never be able to mourn the loss of her husband,

who likely died less than two years after her capture at Peace River. Cynthia Ann returned to white society, but it was now a foreign culture. She was being held against her will. She desperately wanted to return to her Comanche family, and she tried to escape numerous times. But each time, she was caught and brought back. Within a couple years, her young daughter died, and she sank deeper into depression. She starved herself to death and passed away sometime in the second half of the 1860s. But that was certainly not the end of her story or her legacy.

Her eldest son was Quanah Parker, and he became the last great chief of the Comanches. And the story of this relatively small engagement along the banks of Mule Creek near Peace River took on a life of its own. For the next 70 years, the story was revised, altered, embellished, exaggerated, and expanded by numerous people who were there, and at least one who wasn't. Texas Ranger Captain Saul Ross gave at least six different accounts in the decades that followed. Each time, the action grew a little larger and his role became a little more heroic. He wrote the story of the rescue of Cynthia Ann Parker right into the governor's office in 1886 by claiming, among other things, that the man he had killed in the fight was Cynthia Ann's husband, Pettinacona,

a great chief of the Comanches. The prevailing wisdom today is that it's almost certain Pettinacona and his two sons were not at the hunting camp that day in 1860. But at the time, in 1860, Ross was praised by Governor Houston for his good work and offered command of a new company of Rangers. But the calendar had flipped from 1860 to 1861 and now there were only two topics on the minds of Americans, secession and Civil War. In March 1861, Texas voted to secede from the Union. Governor Houston thought it was a terrible idea and refused to go along with it, and he was removed from power. The country, which was now two countries, was just one month away from the first shots

of the Civil War. Texas Rangers Ben McCullough, Rip Ford, and Sol Ross joined the Confederate Army, but Bigfoot Wallace had the same opinion as Sam Houston. Wallace said after it was all over, I wanted nothing to do with that war. I did not want to see the Union dissolved, and I could not fight against Old Virginia, and I would have fought a regiment before I would have shouldered a musket on either side. Many people felt the same way, but the course had been charted and

there was no turning back. The next time we hear from the Texas Rangers, they're going back to war. Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it? It's the best deal, the highest cash back, the most savings on your shopping. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at Rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Thanks for listening to Season 5 of the Legends of the Old West podcast.

West podcast. This season was edited and mixed by Michael Martin at Sneaky Big Studios in Phoenix, Arizona. The theme song, Yellow Rose of Texas, was arranged and recorded by the Mighty Orc in Houston, Texas. Much of the music for this show was produced by Rob Valliere in Phoenix. Sketches of General Scott's grand entrance into Mexico City and a Texas Ranger were provided by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum and Dickinson Research Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. And the great color images of Texas Rangers you saw throughout the season were produced by Matt Lowry in Ireland. Matt is a world-renowned photographer

whose project My Colorful Past breathes new life into old photos. Check out his Facebook page for more of his work. Again, thank you for listening, and thanks to everyone who's given the show a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening. Please check out our website blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details, and follow us on social media for news of the show. Our Facebook page is Legends of the Old West Podcast, and our handles on Twitter and Instagram are at Old West Podcast. And now, here's my conversation with Justice Ken Wise on location at the new San Felipe de Austin Museum outside Sealy, Texas. All right, Judge Wise, thank you very much for coming back to the show. I appreciate it.

Well, thanks for having me. It's a treat. Yeah, we're back here. As we were just talking about, I think it's a little over a year since our last interview. We're kind of making this a yearly crossover event between Wise About Texas and Legends of the Old West. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah, it's specifically about the Texas Rangers, of course. Maybe someday we'll find another topic to talk about, but for now it's still Texas Rangers. Yeah, that's been a great series. You've done wonderful work on that. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And certainly this is, man, it's come a long way since that first, the first interview we did at the headquarters

of Wise About Texas. Now, as listeners have already heard in the setup, we're here at the San Felipe de Austin Museum, a really cool new museum down here outside Sealy, Texas. So this is a much more fitting place for a discussion about the Texas Rangers. This is kind of where it all started. It's literally where it all started. It's where Austin was. It was his headquarters when that famous letter that we consider the genesis of the Texas Ranger force from today in 1823 was written from here. So it's a special place. Absolutely. So again, as we were preparing for this interview, we were kind of joking around that I only have two questions for you. I have exactly two questions, but each one is going to

kind of go in different avenues. So there are going to be several branches on the tree, but let's just jump right into the very first one. And I'm going to have a little preface for this in that it's somewhat designed to put in the story of Cynthia Ann Parker into a little bit of historical context with the early years of Texas history. Let's say eight to be round numbers, 1820 to about 1900, those early famous years. So I think when people think about those years of Texas history, the old West version of Texas history, obviously they probably think of the Alamo as number one. The first Texas history event that comes into mind is probably the Alamo, probably followed shortly thereafter by the Goliad Massacre, the Battle of San Jacinto,

those early pivotal Texas Revolution years. But as I started thinking about it, I started wondering how far up the ladder, how far or down the rankings maybe with the story of Cynthia Ann Parker fall. It feels like it could be very close to the top and it's the story of a single person. One single person story when compared with the siege of the Alamo, the massacre of Goliad, the battle of San Jacinto. I feel like it might have some of that credence. It might be up there in the ranking. So the question then becomes, how or why has the story of Cynthia Ann Parker endured over all these years? Right. Well, I think your analysis is exactly right. I think one of the things, you know, there are phases of Texas history that are, as Texas is, you know, bigger and grander and they're romanticized and etc. So you have the

Revolution, which is its own story with Alamo and Goliad and San Jacinto, as you mentioned. And then you have that Old West period where we have the Cowboys. And one of the big features of that time, unfortunately, were the Indian Wars, which played a huge role in Texas history. And part of that is some of the tactics that the Indians used to intimidate the settlers. They would capture children and make them part of the tribe. And I think it was really done to repopulate the tribe, is what my research reveals. Interesting, yeah. But that was a very common practice. And so you have in Cynthia Ann Parker,

you have a story of someone that was captured in 1836 and becomes an Indian, essentially, and lives with them for a couple of decades and then is repatriated, so to speak. Yeah. And that didn't happen all that much. And by that time, she had had children with one of the Indians and et cetera. And then, of course, the coda to all of that is one of her

children becomes essentially the last Comanche chief and a very well-known celebrity around the country. So there's just a lot of aspects to this story that set it apart. Yeah, I think it probably is unprecedented. And I always want to qualify everything I say. Certainly that I'm not a historian. I don't spend years and years and years researching this stuff. But from what I understand, and maybe you can check me on this, this story seems to be unique. It seems to be one of a kind.

From what I had read, there are some sources I saw that will claim that Cynthia Ann Parker was the first recorded capture by the Comanches. I don't know if we could ever verify that. I don't know if you've seen the same thing, but it feels like there are several parts of this story that lead it to this kind of unprecedented stage that she was one of, if not the first person captured, certainly for a long period of time. She spent more than 20 years with the Comanches. She assimilated into their culture, learned the language, and then was repatriated, as you say.

I was trying to figure out the right word. Rescued, recaptured. I've seen so many different ways. I don't know if there is a right term for her being brought back into white society. And then, yes, having the son, Quanah Parker, who goes on to become

the last great chief of the Comanches. So all of those things mixed together, you put all of those elements together and you do have this one of a kind story. And so I guess let me throw out a kind of a sub question is how much of that stuff have you read, too, that her her being one of the earliest captive captured people in white society and all of those different elements. How have you found any of those? Well, I don't know that we can ever know if she was literally the first person, but the Parkers settled in very early on in Texas. And just the Parker family coming here and what they did, they came and they built a fort. And so, and, you know, not many families these days have family forts, but the Parker family had a fort and there were people that were not part of the Parker family with them. So there was this little mini colony of folks that came down and were either brave or stupid enough to build outside the frontier

and built a fort, which of course was a good idea. And, you know, so that in and of itself is pretty unique, but it was also very early. And so it's when the Indians attacked the Parkers, it was a very early example of what settlers would later in fact face. And so you could almost characterize it as a warning, you know, that maybe this wasn't going to be as easy as we all thought it might be to colonize this land called Texas. So I think because it was so early in our history, it is kind of one of the early moments of the trouble that the settlers would later have with the Comanches. with the Comanches. I started really thinking about this and looking at it from like a bird's eye view, from the macro view, there's really only about 50 years of overlap between white settlements and the Comanche era before the Comanches are removed to Fort Sill in the 1870s. So there's actually a very brief time period. So it's almost physically not possible for it or the odds of another person having been captured and spending that much time with the Comanches and then re-assimilating into white society. The odds of that happening are very low because there's only about a 50-year period where it could have happened. And she was gone for 20 to 25 years. So I think that enhances the uniqueness of it.

Yeah, it does. And the other thing, and it's sort of a sad romance, really, is poor Cynthia Ann, she was captured against her will at age nine and then returned much later also against her will. Yeah. So she was basically captured twice. You know, from a perspective of an Anglo, you would say, well, we liberated her from her captors. Well, from her perspective, she was captured twice, and her life totally upended, fatally so, as it turns out. She just couldn't, she could never, she was depressed. We would call her today depressed, probably some PTSD involved. some PTSD involved. And, you know, she saw members of her family killed twice. And so that's, you know, you can't imagine how traumatic that must be. And I think, you know, to get her back with her being a significant citizen of the Comanches and all that, I mean, that was just very interesting to everyone, I think, and still is. As we said, a lot of these things have combined to help this story live throughout the years. Like you just said, she was ripped away from her family twice.

The odds of us finding someone who had all of these experiences in one short lifetime, she was in her early 30s, I believe, when she was repatriated or rescued or liberated or recaptured, whichever term we want to use. So only about 25 year span of time did all of this stuff happen to her. So it was obviously a hell of a lot for one person to go through. It really was. And of course, the history of the Indian Wars in Texas, we had the early time period. Now you covered Jack Hayes in the series, who was one of the greatest Indian fighters ever. But one of the things that made him so great was he figured out how these fights were going to have to go with the Comanches.

We didn't know anything about the Comanches until we started moving west. They weren't in East Texas where Texian settlers were settling. There weren't Comanches. But as we came west to the Brazos and the Colorado regions, we learned real fast what the Comanches were capable of, but we didn't learn how to fight them. And Hayes really led that charge, pun intended, to learn how to fight the Comanches. And the way he did it was to learn to ride like one and to use his weapons like one and to use their tactics and to understand their tactics. Well, that was all coming to a head when Cynthia Ann was found. And that was the time period where the Indian Wars were, we knew something was going to have to be done. And it was a big deal. And the railroads were starting to expand and all of those sorts of things. The ranching industry was starting to expand. It became imperative to solve, as the Anglos would put it, solve this Indian problem. And so there was a lot of attention on that situation. When we found Cynthia Ann, that would

have been called a great victory and a wonderful job by whoever did it. And then you have the person that did it, Lawrence Sullivan Ross, who went on to be governor and was an officer in the Confederate Army and was his own romantic figure of sorts. He has his own history that the show will get to down the road, probably next year sometime when we come back for the trilogy, for the third installment of Texas Rangers history. His story in this series that's just wrapping up is really just getting started. His story,

as far as the Texas Rangers are concerned, begins in 1858. And then obviously, like you said, he will go on to be an officer in the Civil War and then have his own trajectory. And that I obviously touch on a little bit when he runs for governor in 1886, which will lead us to question number two, which is the story of the rescue, if we want to use that term, of Cynthia Ann Parker and how it evolved over the years. And so we're trying to, I don't want to get into every different version that was told by every different person. There's a lot of them out there, but there are a lot of different versions and they, like many stories, evolved and changed and got embellished over the years.

lot of different versions and they, like many stories, evolved and changed and got embellished over the years. So to your knowledge, what are some of the evolutions? How did some of this stuff evolve between 1860 when Cynthia Ann was found? And then let's say, I guess the ultimate end game of it was Saul Ross becoming governor in 1886. So a lot of the evolution happened in that 26 year period of time. Right. And I think, you know, when kind of what I was alluding to before, when the event happened and Cynthia Ann was found after so many, many years, that was a huge cause celeb in the country, not just Texas. And so that was a story that everybody was interested in. Because again, from the perspective of an Anglo settler, citizen of Texas, you would say, wow, what a glorious thing to save that poor girl from what was considered a fate worse than

death, which was to be made part of these savages, which is what they called them back, or how they were regarded, and the Indians, I mean. So there was a lot of romance surrounding that story. So it's a story that would get told and retold. And when that happens, of course, things tend to get embellished. Details, strict historical details are sometimes ignored in favor of what sounds better. And so the story changes, you know. And the story that I always was told as a child and read about was that the gallant Lawrence Sullivan Ross leads a group of soldiers and rangers against a huge force of Indians. They fight.

They win the battle. And not only do they defeat these Indians, but they also recapture this poor girl who's been held hostage for 25 years. And Lawrence Sullivan Ross kills the chief, Petta Nakona. Well, you know, great story, very romantic. And that's what I always thought had happened because that was what was written in a book in the late 1800s. Well, that's not at all what happened. When you dig down into historical detail, you discover that, you know, it was a small group, mostly women and children, we think. Petta Nakona was probably not even there.

And, you know, so most of it happened, but it sure didn't happen the way that story was initially written. And I think nowadays, as with a lot of historical stories, the further away you go from the first telling, the more accurate the history tends to become. And, you know, as historical resources are gathered, you know, Texas is a very young state. We're not even 200 years old. So we're still sort of gathering documents, so to speak, about our history. We're discovering things that we didn't know existed. In this case, it would be battle reports or it would be, you know, somebody's diary that turns up or, you know, some turns out.

I just found out recently working on this interview that Lawrence Sullivan Ross was actually interviewed by a Parker cousin. And that interview transcript survives. Well, I didn't even know that that was discovered, so to speak, in like 2009 by some scholars. So, you know, the story evolves toward more toward the truth and we'll never know for sure no but we know a lot more than we used to yeah and like you said you know there have been there were we know Saul Ross gave at least six different accounts of the story over the years but as we were talking about just before we turned on the microphones what has been lost to history unfortunately unfortunately, is his immediate after action report. Right. Missing from the archives.

That's right. It went missing from the archives. So we don't know what he said immediately afterwards. And as you just referenced, some of the rangers who were there, at least one ranger who was there, kept a diary. And he wrote about the event right afterwards. So we can use that as almost a pseudo after action report. And it gives us a little bit of insight, but then over, like you said, over time, we see different versions of the stories. We have to keep tracing back to what we can find as the earliest documents. And unfortunately, one of the earliest ones from Saul Ross has disappeared. Yeah. And I'm real curious about that because I'm not necessarily trying to gin up a conspiracy

theory, but in whose interest would it be for that report to disappear? I mean, was it taken? Historical documents are stolen all the time. Was it taken for its value? Perhaps it'll have Lawrence Sullivan Ross's autograph on it. So that makes it valuable to some degree. Was it stolen in the 20th century?

Did someone who never wanted that to come out? Maybe it reveals that the story is not exactly as it was told in that first writing. Is that why that document's not there anymore? To many people, to us, historical documents are treasures. But to a lot of people, they're just like, I'll just get rid of this document. I'll shred this document. No one will ever know. The presentation you're about to give here at the San Felipe de Austin Museum is about historical documents. And as you were just telling me before we turned on the microphones, they can be stored in some pretty horrifying places. They're not

always taken care of in, you know, glass cases and air conditioned rooms and climate controlled and all that kind of stuff. They can be sitting in a crate in the middle of nowhere forever and just simply destroyed by the weather and the elements and all that kind of stuff. So unfortunately, we have not always had the greatest preservation tactics when it comes to these documents. So it could have just simply been lost. But at the same time, it is very convenient that that one document that had seemed to happen to go missing. It sure would be nice to find it. That's for sure.

But, you know, archivists and archivists around the state, I work in a lot of archives around the state. They do a wonderful job, but they can only deal with what they get. And so that's you don't always know what's going to turn out to be really important, you know, to to people at any given battle with the Comanche Indians. Those reports might not be all that important at the time. with the Comanche Indians, those reports might not be all that important at the time. But now, of course, I mean, who knew that Cynthia Ann Parker's son would go on to be the last chief? Stuff like that. I mean, you know, the document's way more important now than it probably was back then.

So, you know, who knows what happened. And at the time, the Texas Rangers and the cavalrymen who found Cynthia Ann Parker did not know she was Cynthia Ann Parker. That came later. So certainly when they would have written these reports, she would have just been a random white woman with no identity in white civilization at the time. So all of that happened later. So yeah, even at the time, the after action report would not have any significance that it would have had weeks or months later than certainly in the years afterward. Right, and you remind me of an element of this story that we hadn't talked about, and that's the prominence of the Parker family.

Her uncle Isaac, who was the one who sort of interviewed her to figure out that she was Cynthia Ann, was a state legislator, I believe at the time, that she was recaptured. So, you know, very prominent family, very early family in Texas. You know, that's yet another element to this story that, and it's proof to me, really, when dealing with Texas history. I mean, it's, the truth is much more interesting than any fiction that you

could write about this. Well, that's basically going to wrap it up, Judge Wise. Thank you very much. And I think you're, we're going to let you get to your presentation here. But at the same time, you teased us with an interview that you're going to be searching for about this very topic very soon. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Well, there's some recent historical research done by, coincidentally, a former district judge and a professor emeritus at Texas Tech about the Cynthia Ann Parker story. And I noticed in an article they wrote that there was that interview I mentioned earlier that Lawrence Sullivan Ross gave to a lady named Susan Parker St. John, who was a cousin of Cynthia Ann's, in 1894 that exists in someone else's papers at the

Briscoe Center, which is a place I do a lot of archival research at. And so I can't wait to get over there and figure out what Ross told her. It says in the article that he admitted to her that the federal troops were the ones that caught captured Cincy Ann. I don't think in the grand scheme that really matters because they were all fighting the same battle. But those are the kinds of places where you're going to find things that are going to shed light on the story that, you know, an example of documents that you might not have thought of as important to the story now become important. Sure. We can't wait for you to check back in with us. Once you've discovered the document, we'll hope to hear the update. Definitely let you know. All right. Thank you, sir. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I love Legends of the Old West and looking forward to more great work from you. Thank you

very much.