Rachel Plummer was seventeen years old, alone among the Comanches, and holding her six-week-old son when the men who owned her decided the baby was slowing her down. She had given birth to him in a camp far out on the high plains, with no mother, no midwife, and no one who spoke her language. She named him Luther, after his father. For six weeks she had kept him alive while starving herself.
Now they took him from her arms. What followed was the worst thing any mother could do under the circumstances. The warriors choked the baby, threw him into the air, and let him fall to the ground again and again until he stopped moving. Then they gave him back to her.
Rachel sat in the dirt, washed the blood from his face, held him, breathed with him, and after a while he began to breathe again. She later wrote that she had hoped, if she could revive him, they might let her keep him. That hope 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. By the end, she wrote, her little one was not only dead but torn to pieces. They let her bury what was left. Rachel Parker had been taken on May 19, 1836, from Fort Parker on the Navasota River in Texas.
She was the daughter of James W. Parker, a preacher, militia officer, and frontier fighter who had helped build the fort. A few days before the raid, he had disbanded the small company of rangers stationed there, reasoning that there seemed to be no danger and the government could not pay men to stand guard against nothing. Rachel had married young, to a man named Luther Plummer, and by the spring of 1836 she was seventeen, had a little boy named James Pratt, not yet two years old, and was three months pregnant with her second child.
On the morning of the raid, her father, her husband, and several other men had walked out to the cornfields about a mile away. Rachel stayed inside the fort with her little boy, worried that being pregnant, she could not keep up if anything happened. About an hour later, the prairie in front of the fort was suddenly covered with riders, hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and their allies. One came forward with a white flag.
Her uncle Benjamin walked out to talk, knowing that every minute he stood there gave the women and children time to run. Rachel tried to run, carrying James Pratt, but she was slow. She looked back and saw the riders drive their lances into Benjamin. A party of riders cut in front of her, and a big warrior knocked her to the ground with a garden hoe.
When she came to, they were pulling her by the hair. Her little boy was gone from her arms. She found him a moment later on another man’s horse, crying for her, barely old enough to say the word “Mama. ” When she started to cry, two Comanche women came over with whips and clubs and beat her until she stopped.
Five men of the fort were killed that morning, including her grandfather, her uncle Silas, and her uncle Benjamin. Five people were carried off: Rachel, her son, her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg, and her two young cousins, Cynthia Ann and John Parker. Rachel’s father got his wife and younger children across the river to hide. He crawled up a tall tree that evening and looked back at the fort, which was silent as death.
The war party rode north until around midnight. Then they built fires, and the captives learned what the fires were for. The warriors held a scalp dance with the scalps taken that morning. Rachel’s hands were tied behind her with a plaited rawhide cord, her feet bound so tightly the cords cut into her, and she was laid face down.
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. Rachel never described what was done to them. In her book she wrote only that to tell of their barbarous treatment would only add to her distress, and that she felt the deepest mortification even to think of it, much less to speak or write of it.
This was a woman who would later describe in plain detail the murder of her own infant. There was one thing she would not put on paper. Within a few days, the war party broke apart and the captives were split up. Elizabeth went to the Keechi.
Cynthia and John went with one Comanche band. Rachel and her son went with another. Not long after, the Comanches decided that James Pratt was old enough to be weaned. They took him away from her.
She never saw him again. Unlike young Cynthia Ann, who was adopted, Rachel was a slave. A grown woman, pregnant, an enemy taken in a raid. In 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 northerns came down across the plains that winter, her feet froze. The band traveled enormous distances, across the high plains, up toward the headwaters of the Arkansas, into the mountains.
She was seventeen, pregnant, and every mile took her farther from anyone who was looking for her. Around October 1836, she gave birth to her second son. A few weeks later, the baby was dead. While this was happening, Rachel’s father was trying to find her.
James Parker went to see Sam Houston, the new president of Texas, and begged for a company of men to go after the captives. Houston refused, saying a treaty would bring the prisoners back faster than a war. Parker thought that was nonsense, writing that no treaty with hostile Indians had ever been made until they were whipped, and well whipped. He went alone.
In October 1836, he crossed the Red River on a raft he built himself. He walked for days across open prairie with a pocket compass. A storm hit him in the night, and within an hour his clothes had frozen onto his body. He kept going.
At a settlement, he met traders who had seen his daughter’s band. They told him she was alive, and that the Indians had killed her child. 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.
Someone else did. By the spring of 1837, Rachel had been a slave for nearly a year, had lost both of her children, and had nothing left to lose. She decided that 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, whom Rachel called the young mistress.
One day the young woman came at her screaming. She grabbed a club and hit Rachel with it. Rachel took the club away from her and knocked her down. They fought in the middle of the camp, fought so hard they broke down one side of the lodge and rolled out into the open.
Rachel beat her until the blood ran from her face. The whole camp gathered around them screaming, but nobody touched Rachel. 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 the elders, certain she would be killed. They were not. The ruling was that she had to repair the lodge broken in the fight, and when the young woman did not help, the council made her fix her share too. Rachel understood something in that moment.
Among the Comanches, fear bought you nothing, but courage was respected, even in a slave. From that day on, she was treated differently. A few weeks later, in the late spring of 1837, the band was camped far to the west, north of Santa Fe, in Mexican territory. A party of Mexican traders, Comancheros, rode into camp.
They wanted to buy the white woman. Her owner did not want to sell, but they kept bargaining, and on June 19, 1837, thirteen months after the raid on Fort Parker, Rachel Plummer was sold. The rescue had not been arranged by her father. An American couple in Santa Fe, Colonel William Donaho and his wife, had heard that a white woman was being held by the Comanches, and they had asked the traders to buy her at any price.
It took seventeen days to reach Santa Fe. Rachel was starved, scarred, burned, and barely able to believe she was alive. New Mexico was not safe either, with a revolt brewing there, so the Donahos took 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.
He told him Rachel was alive and in Missouri. On February 19, 1838, Rachel came home. Her father described what walked through his door: her body was emaciated, covered with scars, and she was in very poor health. But she was home.
Her husband Luther was waiting for her, and within months she was pregnant again. In the meantime, she did something almost no frontier woman had done. She told her story and had it printed. Her book was issued in Houston in 1838, the first captivity narrative ever published in the Republic of Texas.
People read it across Texas, the United States, and overseas. Rachel wrote carefully about the Comanches themselves, how they lived, traveled, governed themselves, and what they believed. Historians still use it as one of the best early descriptions of Comanche life ever written by someone who lived inside it. But the Rachel her father saw at home was dying slowly.
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 on another man’s horse. She prayed for him constantly. She told her family again and again that this life had no charms for her, and 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 too. James Parker did not stop.
For nearly four more years he kept riding into Indian country. 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, Cynthia Ann’s little brother. The other was his grandson, James Pratt Plummer, Rachel’s boy, now about nine years old.
He spoke almost no English. When he heard that 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. It took more than two hours of talking before the boy understood who this old man was.
Then the boy asked if he had a mother. Parker told him no, his mother had died. The boy’s back was covered in scars from the lash. There was hardly a place you could lay a finger that did not touch one.
Rachel had prayed for exactly this moment. She had missed it by less than four years. James Pratt Plummer grew up, married twice, had four children, joined the Confederate Army, and died of typhoid and pneumonia at Little Rock, Arkansas, in November 1862. He was about twenty-eight.
Rachel’s book was not written to entertain anyone. She came home weak and scarred, with her first son still somewhere out on the plains and her father having spent every penny he had searching. It was a mother’s notice, printed and sold, from 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. Her book, and her father’s, became some of the most widely read accounts of the Comanches in Texas. Every horror in them was real.
And every horror was read by settlers, rangers, and politicians who took from it exactly one lesson, the one her father had written in his own book: no peace until they were whipped, and well whipped. The war between Texas and the Comanches went on for almost forty more years. 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.
Two girls from the same fort, taken on the same morning. One wanted to come home more than anything in the world. The other would have given anything not to. They were both brought back, and they were both dead within a few years of their rescue.
Rachel Plummer never got to see her son again. But her book is still in print almost two hundred years later. And every person who reads it still finds, underneath the horror, the same simple request she wrote it to make.
Find my boy.