In the late autumn of 1836, on the high plains hundreds of miles from any settlement, a seventeen-year-old woman gave birth in a Comanche camp. Her name was Rachel Plummer, and she was a slave. She had been captured six months earlier in a raid on her family’s fort in Texas. The father of her child was her husband, Luther Plummer, a man she had not seen since the day she was taken.
She named the infant Luther, after him, and for six weeks she kept the baby alive while she worked, starving herself to feed him. Then the men who owned her decided the child was slowing her down. They took him from her arms, and what they did next would become the most harrowing passage in the first captivity narrative ever published in the Republic of Texas. Rachel Parker was born in March 1819 in Illinois, the daughter of James W.
Parker, a hard frontier preacher and militia officer. Her family had moved to Texas and helped build Fort Parker on the Navasota River. Rachel married young, as frontier girls did, and by the spring of 1836 she was seventeen, the mother of a two-year-old boy named James Pratt, and pregnant with her second child. Her father had disbanded the small company of rangers stationed at the fort just days before the attack, writing later that there seemed to be no danger and the government could not afford to pay men to guard against nothing.
On the morning of May 19, 1836, her father, her husband, and several other men walked out to the cornfields about a mile from the fort. Rachel stayed inside with her son, worried that her pregnancy would slow her down if trouble came. About an hour later, trouble came in force. In her own words, one minute the prairie in front of the fort was empty, and the next it was covered with hundreds of riders, Comanche, Kiowa, and their allies.
One warrior approached with a white flag, and her uncle Benjamin walked out to talk. He knew what he was doing, buying time so the women and children could run. Rachel tried to run with James Pratt in her arms, but she was pregnant and slow. She looked back and saw the riders drive their lances into Benjamin.
She heard her uncle Silas shout at them as if he had a thousand men behind him, though he had none. She never reached the river. A warrior cut in front of her, hit her with a garden hoe, and knocked her to the ground. When she came to, they were dragging her by the hair.
Her face was soaked in blood, and her little boy was gone from her arms. She found him on another man’s horse, crying for her, barely old enough to say the word mammal. She started to cry, and two Comanche women beat her with whips and clubs until she stopped. That morning, five men of the fort were killed, including her grandfather and both uncles.
Five people were carried off: Rachel, her son, her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg, and her two young cousins, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker and her brother John. Her father got his wife and younger children across the river to hide, and that evening he climbed a tall tree and looked back at the fort. It was silent as death. The war party rode north until around midnight, then built fires.
The captives learned what the fires were for when the warriors held a scalp dance with the scalps taken that morning. Rachel was bound with rawhide cords so tight they cut into her. She could hear her son crying somewhere in the dark, and every time she tried to answer him, she was beaten. Then she and her aunt Elizabeth were taken, one at a time, away from the fire.
In her book, Rachel wrote only that to describe their barbarous treatment would only add to her distress and that she felt the deepest mortification even to think of it. She left out only this one thing, and its omission in a woman who would later describe in plain detail the murder of her own infant spoke for itself. Within days, the war party split up. Elizabeth Kellogg went to the Keechi, Cynthia and John went with one Comanche band, and Rachel and her son went with another.
Soon, the Comanches decided James Pratt was old enough to be weaned. They took him from her, and she never saw him again. What followed was slavery. Rachel was not adopted into the band as her cousin Cynthia had been.
She was a grown woman, an enemy taken in a raid, and to the band that held her she was property. She scraped and tanned buffalo hides, hauled water and wood, tended horses, and dressed meat, often working all day and most of the night. When she failed at a task, she was beaten and burned. She was given so little clothing that when the northern storms came down across the plains that winter, her feet froze.
The band traveled constantly, across the high plains, toward the headwaters of the Arkansas, into the mountains, over more country than almost any American woman of her time had ever seen. Every mile took her farther from anyone who was looking for her. Around October 1836, in a camp far out on the plains, she gave birth to her second son, alone, among people who did not want the child. She named him Luther, after his father.
For six weeks she kept him alive. Then the men who owned her decided the baby was interfering with her work. A warrior choked him, threw him into the air, and let him fall to the ground again and again until he stopped moving. Then they handed him back to her and walked away.
Rachel washed the blood off his face, held him, breathed with him, and after a while, he started breathing again. She later wrote that she had hoped, if she could revive him, they would let her keep him. It was the worst thing that could have happened. When the men saw the child was alive, they came back, tore him from her arms, and knocked her down.
What they did next involved a rope, a horse, and a hedge of prickly pear taller than a man, and Rachel wrote down every part of it. By the end, her little one was not only dead but torn to pieces. They let her bury what was left. Rachel’s father had been searching for her almost from the moment she was taken.
James Parker went to Sam Houston, the new president of Texas, and begged for a company of men to pursue the captives. Houston refused, saying a treaty would bring the prisoners back faster than a war. Parker disagreed, writing later that no treaty with hostile Indians had ever been made until they were whipped, and well whipped. He went alone.
In October 1836, around the time Rachel was giving birth, he crossed the Red River on a raft he built himself, chasing a rumor of a white woman brought into a settlement. A storm hit him in the night, water rose two feet deep around him, the wind swung to the north, and within an hour his clothes froze onto his body. He walked in circles until dawn, because he knew that stopping meant death. When he stumbled into the settlement, the woman was not Rachel, but traders there told him his daughter was alive.
They also told him the Indians had killed her child. He kept going, nearly died on the Red River, went home, rested, and went out again and again. Over the next year and a half, he estimated that three-quarters of his time was spent in the wilderness, often going five or six days without food. He never found her.
By the spring of 1837, Rachel had been a slave for nearly a year. She had lost both children and had nothing left to lose, and she later wrote that she had made a decision: if she was going to die, she would die on her own terms. The person who made her life most miserable was a young Comanche woman in the household that owned her, the young mistress, as she called her. One day the young woman came at her screaming, and Rachel wrote that an enraged tiger could not have screamed more terribly.
Her captor hit her with a club, and Rachel took the club away and knocked her down with it. They fought in the middle of the camp, so violently they broke down one side of the lodge and rolled out into the open. Rachel beat the young woman until blood ran from her face. The whole camp gathered and screamed, but nobody touched her.
Not one warrior, not one of the women. They watched and let the two of them settle it. When it was over, Rachel was taken before a council of elders. She was certain they would kill her.
Instead, she was ordered to repair the lodge broken in the fight, and when the young woman refused to help, the council made her fix her share as well. Rachel understood something in that moment: among the Comanches, fear bought nothing, but courage was respected, even in a slave. From that day on, she was treated differently. She was not free, but for the first time in a year she was not simply property.
A few weeks later, strangers arrived. The band that held her was camped far to the west, north of Santa Fe, in Mexican territory. That winter she had seen a great gathering of tribes on the upper Arkansas, a council to plan a combined war against Texas. Now a party of Mexican traders, Comancheros who made their living trading with the Comanches, rode into camp.
They wanted to buy the white woman. Her owner did not want to sell, but the traders kept bargaining, and on June 19, 1837, thirteen months after the raid on Fort Parker, Rachel was sold. The rescue had been arranged by strangers, an American couple in Santa Fe, Colonel William Donaho and his wife, who had heard a white woman was held by the Comanches and asked the traders to buy her at any price. It took seventeen days to reach Santa Fe.
When Rachel stood before Mrs. Donaho, she was starved, scarred, burned, and barely able to believe she was alive. But New Mexico in the summer of 1837 was not safe, either. A revolt was brewing against the government, and the Donahos decided to leave, taking Rachel with them across roughly eight hundred miles of plains along the Santa Fe Trail to Independence, Missouri.
Late on the night of November 30, 1837, a rider knocked on James Parker’s door with the news that Rachel was alive and in Missouri. His wife fainted in his arms, and his younger children crowded around asking over and over if their sister was really alive. On February 19, 1838, Rachel came home. Her father described the woman who walked through his door as emaciated, covered with scars, and in very poor health.
The girl taken at seventeen now looked like someone who had lived a whole hard life. Her husband Luther was waiting for her, and within months she was pregnant again. She also did something almost no frontier woman had ever done: she told her story and had it printed. Her book was issued in Houston in 1838, the first narrative of captivity among the Texas Indians published in the Republic.
It reached readers across Texas, the United States, and overseas. Rachel wrote carefully about the Comanches themselves, how they lived, traveled, governed themselves, and what they believed, and historians still use it today as one of the best early descriptions of Comanche life ever written by someone who lived inside it. But the woman her father saw at home was not the author of a successful book. She was dying.
He wrote that she hardly ever complained about her own suffering. What consumed her every day was her son James Pratt, the little boy who had been crying for her from another man’s horse. She prayed for him constantly and told her family again and again that this life had no charms for her, that her only wish was to live long enough to see her son come home. On January 4, 1839, she gave birth to another child.
On March 19, 1839, Rachel Plummer died in Houston, three days short of her twentieth birthday. Two days later, her baby died as well. James Parker did not stop. For nearly four more years he kept riding into Indian country, following rumors and offering rewards.
In January 1843, at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory, he found two boys who had been bought from the Comanches. One was his nephew John Parker. The other was his grandson, James Pratt Plummer, now about nine years old. The boy spoke almost no English.
When he heard a white man had come to take him away, he ran off and hid in the soldiers’ camp a mile from the fort. Officers had to send a sergeant to bring him back, and it took more than two hours of talking before the boy understood who the old man was. Then, James Parker wrote, the boy asked if he had a mother. Parker told him no, his mother had died.
The boy’s back and shoulders were covered with scars from the lash, hardly a place, Parker wrote, where you could lay a finger without touching one. Rachel had prayed for exactly this moment and missed it by less than four years. James Pratt Plummer grew up, married twice, and had four children. He joined the Confederate Army and died of typhoid and pneumonia at Little Rock, Arkansas, in November 1862, at about twenty-eight.
Rachel’s book was not written to entertain anyone. She came home weak and scarred, with her first son still somewhere on the plains, and her father had spent every penny searching, hoping the money from his own book would help find the children still missing. Her narrative was a mother’s notice, printed and sold by a woman who knew she was running out of time: somewhere out there is my son, this is what they did to me, help me find him. But her book, and her father’s, became some of the most widely read accounts of the Comanches in Texas, and the settlers, rangers, and politicians who read them took from them exactly one lesson, the one her father had written: no peace until they were whipped, and well whipped.
The war between Texas and the Comanches would go on for almost forty more years, raid answering raid and massacre answering massacre. Twenty-two years after Rachel died, that war reached a Comanche meat camp on the Pease River, where a Texas Ranger captain rode down a blue-eyed woman holding a baby over her head, her cousin Cynthia Ann, taken from the same fort on the same morning. One cousin wanted to come home more than anything; the other would have given anything not to. Both were brought back, and both were dead within a few years of their rescue.
Rachel Plummer never saw her son again, but she did get the last word. Her book is still in print almost two hundred years later, and under all the horror remains the request she wrote it to make: find my boy.