Loyalty to the Comanche
Final thoughts on "Empire of the Summer Moon"
This is my final post in this review of “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S. C. Gwynne. My focus today is the strong sense of loyalty of both Comanche Indians and captives who joined the tribe.
The book is a powerful account of the lives of the Comanche tribe and how they were brought down by disease and war. My previous posts detail the brutality of life on the Great Plains and the campaign waged against the Indians by European settlers.1
A primary character of the book is Cynthia Ann Parker, the "white squaw.” That word “squaw” is a relic of how 19th century settlers described Native American women. While the book replete with such references, it is considered offensive by Indians.2
The Comanche took Cynthia Ann prisoner during a brutal raid on the Parker settlement in west Texas. Gwynne details how settlers speculated on her life among the Comanche. No one knows the details of what happened in over two decades among them or what she thought.
People were thus free to indulge their prejudices. Though she became, in lore, legend, and history, the most famous captive of her era, the fact was that, at the age of nine, she had disappeared without a trace into the incomprehensible vastness of the Great Plains. Most captives were either killed or ransomed within a few months or years. The White Squaw stayed out twenty-four years, enough time to forget almost everything she had once known, including her native language, to marry and have three children and live the full, complex, and highly specialized life of a Plains Indian….
Perhaps most important, we know the general behavior of the tribe towards what might be called a “loved captive.” To victims of Comanche brutality, it was almost impossible to believe that such a phenomenon existed. Yet it did, and it was not uncommon. The infertile Comanche women and statistically death-prone Comanche men were undiscriminating in whom they invited into the tribe… Their bloodline, as twentieth-century studies would show, was extremely impure compared to other tribes.
A parallel account comes from Bianca “Banc” Babb. She was taken captive at the age of ten in September 1866 near Dallas, then ransomed seven months later. She was similarly taken in a horrific manner. The little girl watched her mother be murdered and scalped. Another woman was captured and became “the helpless victim of unspeakable violation, humiliation, and involuntary debasement.”
But Banc was taken in by a childless widow, Tekwashana.
The woman was always good to me, that is she never scolded me, and seldom corrected me…. On cold winter nights my Squaw Mother would have me stand before the fire, turning [me] around occasionally, so I could get good and warm…. She … seemed to care as much for me as if I were her very own child.
There was also hardship. For nomadic hunter-gatherers life was uncertain. There was not always enough food to eat. The band moved camp every three weeks which was hard work for everyone. She carried water, gathered wood, and packed the horses, mules, and dogs on moving day.
In April 1867 Banc was ransomed to the Texans. Yet her adopted mother convinced Banc to try to escape with her. They were tracked down and Banc was returned to her family. In those seven months away from modernity she had forgotten English.
Another captive, Malinda Ann “Minnie” Caudle was taken at the age of eight. Her adopted Indian mother tried to shelter her from the rape, torture, and murder of her aunts. Minnie was similarly ransomed and returned after a half-year. Both Banc and Minnie defended the Comanche tribe.
Minnie Caudle “would not hear a word against the Indians,” according to her great-granddaughter. Her great-grandson said, “She always took up for the Indians. She said they were good people in their way. When they got kicked around, they fought back.”…
Banc Babb, against all reason and memory, felt the same way. In 1897 she applied for official adoption into the Comanche tribe. Both girls had seen something in the primitive, low-barbarian Comanches that almost no one else had…
Banc’s brother Dot Babb described it as “bonds of affection almost as sacred as family ties. The kindness to me [Banc] had been lavish and unvarying, and my friendship and attachment in return were deep and sincere.”
One wonders as to the reality of “Stockholm Syndrome.” This is an alleged condition of hostages developing a psychological bond with their captors. There are significant doubts about the legitimacy of the condition. But Banc and Minnie certainly bonded to the Indians despite seeing their own families slaughtered.3
The Search for Cynthia Ann Parker
Gwynne tells the account of Texas Indian agent Leonard H. Williams to find the Comanche peace-chief Pah-hah-yuco. Pah-hah-yuco was a large, portly man who had multiple wives and “a pleasing expression of countenance, full of good humor and joviality.” Colonel Williams’s goal was to find and purchase any captives among the Comanche.
Williams discovered the Indian village contained the blue-eyed, light-haired Cynthia Ann Parker. She was nineteen in 1846. Williams sent a runner back to the governors' office in Austin and attempted to purchase her from the Indians. The Indians simply would not negotiate. A newspaper story reports they “say they will die rather than give her up.” The commissioners Pierce Butler and M. G. Lewis wrote to the Indian affairs in Washington D. C. “The young woman is claimed by one of the Comanches as his wife.” She wasn’t going anywhere for any amount of money.
Cynthia went on to have three children with her husband Peta Nocona: the future chief Quanah, Peanuts, and Prairie Flower. The names are unusual, suggesting her and her husband had defied Comanche custom by naming the children themselves. In 1851 she was seen by a group of traders who later wrote histories of the era. They claimed to ask her if she wanted to leave.
She shook her head and pointed to her children, saying, “I am happily married. I love my husband, who is good and kind, and my little ones, who, too, are his, and I cannot forsake them.”
The grammar to those sentences is unlikely given she had not been among English speakers in many years. But it confirms that Quanah was born between 1848 and 1850.
In 1860 Charles Goodnight led the raid that killed Peta Nonoca and captured Cynthia Ann. Texas Ranger Sul Ross recruited Indian scouts to track down the Comanche near the Big Wichita and Pease Rivers. Ross killed the chief, then took a woman prisoner.
The woman was filthy, covered with dirt and grease from handling so much bloody buffalo meat. But to Ross’s astonishment he noticed that she had blue eyes. And he saw that under the grime her short-copped hair was lighter in color than Indian black. She was white.
Cynthia Ann was taken back to Texas by Sul Ross. It was painfully apparent that the real tragedy in her life was this second captivity. This destroyed her life, killing her husband and separated her from her sons.
The newspaper media was obsessed with her. The stories assumed everything was forced upon her. People did not believe that a Christian white woman had gone native.
Her family treated her as though she was crazy. She refused to speak English and continued her pagan devotions. A relative described her ritual:
She went out to a smooth place on the ground, cleaned it off very nicely and made a circle and a cross. On the cross she built a fire, burned some tobacco, and then cut a place on her breast and let the blood drop onto the fire. She then lit her pipe and blowed smoke towards the sun and assumed an attitude of the most sincere devotion. She afterwards said through an interpreter that this was her prayer to her great spirit to understand and appreciate that these were her relatives and kindred she was among.
Cynthia and her daughter Prairie flower moved around the estates of various relatives in the Parker clan. She continually tried to escape back to the Comanche. But she was helpless to change the destiny had arranged for her. She often slashed her arms and beasts with a knife, drawing blood. This was likely an act of mourning for her dead husband or simple expression of misery. This was around the time that the famous photograph of her was taken.
The portrait is extraordinary because of the exposed right breast with the nursing infant. Note her beefy wrists. There was no precedent for this sort of photography on the Texas frontier. No newspaper would have published such a photo before this. Yet it became famous. She was seen and treated a savage.
Cynthia continued her Indian ways despite reintegrating into the Parker family. She was seen weeping on the porch or hiding from gawkers. She never forgot and had only accommodated her family’s empty promises to see her sons again.
Gwynne paints a touching picture of her final days. Cynthia Ann’s relative Tom Champion wrote:
I don’t think she ever knew but that her sons were killed. And to hear her tell of the happy days of the Indian dances and see the excitement and pure joy which shown [sic] on her face, the memory of it, I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from them than the Indians by taking her at first.
The chance of her ever being happy in Texas was shattered by the death of her daughter in 1864. The Comanche say “The white men broke her spirit and made her a misfit.” She eventually starved herself to death. Gwynne poetically poses the question:
Who was she, in the end? A white woman by birth, yes, but also a relic of old Comancheria, of the fading empire of high grass and fat summer moons and buffalo herds that blackened the horizon…
One thinks of Cynthia Ann on the immensity of the plains, a small figure in buckskin bending to her chores by a diamond-clear stream. It is late autumn, the end of warring and buffalo hunting. Above her looms a single cottonwood tree, gone bright yellow in the season, its leaves and branches framing a deep blue sky. Maybe she lifts her head to see the children and dogs playing in the prairie grass and, beyond them, the coils of smoke rising into the gathering twilight from a hundred lodge fires. And maybe she thinks, just for a moment, that all is right in the world.
Cynthia Ann experienced two very different worlds in 19th century America. “Empire of the Summer Moon” gives a beautiful contemporary account of the Texas frontier. One marvels at the richness and brutality of Comanche culture.
Something beautiful was lost in the end of the Comanche empire on the Great Plains. It’s a past worthy of remembering.
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Thanks for reading. Live free,
Taras
