The Searchers (10 page)

This was the moment when two alien civilizations collided. It was if the laws of physics had overcome whatever good intentions might have existed and pushed both sides into disaster.

Decked out in an exotic array of buckskin breechclouts, red jackets, blue trousers, and great eagle-feather bonnets—the Comanche equivalent of formal wear—a dozen chiefs paraded to the main plaza in San Antonio with fifty of their warriors, women, and children on March 19, 1840. The chiefs sat themselves on the floor of the small Council House in the heart of the plaza, not far from the ruins of the Alamo. They brought with them only one white captive, fifteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart. She had been taken in a raid two years earlier, along with her younger sister. Matilda, in keeping with the Comanche sense of what kind of captive made the most effective impression on white people, was thoroughly disfigured.

“
Her head, arms, and face were full of bruises
and sores, and her nose actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone, and a great scab formed on the end of the bone,” recalled Mary A. Maverick, one of San Antonio's first ladies. “She told a piteous tale of how dreadfully the Indians had beaten her, and how they would wake her from sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose, and how they would shout and laugh like fiends when she cried. Her body had many scars from before, many of which she showed us. Ah, it was sickening to behold, and made one's blood boil.”

Matilda told the Texans that the Indians were holding some fifteen other captives outside of town, hoping to bargain for each one individually. When the angry Texans demanded the return of the other captives, Chief Muguara, leader of the Penataka band, responded that they were safe but that he himself only had custody of Matilda. He said the other captors were expecting blankets, firearms, and booty in exchange for
their human prizes. This made perfect sense to him, and he concluded his oration with a simple, innocent question: “How do you like that answer?”

All of which further enraged the Texans. In a pre-rehearsed maneuver, they summoned the waiting soldiers. One company of troops surrounded the building while another marched inside the room. The Texans decided to hold Muguara and his fellow chiefs until the Comanches produced the other captives. The Texans' interpreter, himself a former captive, was too terrified at first to convey the threat. When the officials insisted, he delivered their message in Comanche and immediately fled the room. The chiefs, stunned at such a flagrant violation of the sanctity of the peace council, rose to their feet. When a sentinel blocked his path, Muguara pulled a knife and stabbed the guard, after which the eleven other warriors surged forward and tried to fight their way out of the chamber. Soldiers stationed along the walls and at the windows cut loose with a thundering volley of rifle fire, transforming the tight little room into an acrid slaughterhouse reeking of flesh, blood, smoke, and gunpowder. All of the chiefs were killed. Soldiers in the courtyard opened fire on the Comanches outside, killing at least a dozen more, mostly women and children. Seven whites died as well, including a visiting judge who was shot in the heart by an arrow fired by one of the Comanche children.

The surviving warriors careened down the streets of San Antonio in terror past equally terrified residents. Soldiers followed in hot pursuit. “
Here are Indians! Here are Indians!
” Mary Maverick screamed to her brother-in-law, who pulled out a gun and shot two of the Comanches. Another Indian tried to grab the reins of Army captain Lysander Wells's horse. The two men grappled for a grim moment, swaying from side to side, until Wells managed to draw his pistol and shoot the Indian dead at point-blank range.

All of the sixty-five or so Indians who had ridden into San Antonio, including women and children, were either killed or captured. The Texans released the wife of one of the slain chiefs and sent her to the Comanche encampment with the message that the Texans would free the other prisoners when the Indians returned their remaining white captives. But when the woman reached the camp and described what had happened, the Comanches went into frenzied mourning, weeping and cutting themselves with knives. Then they turned their attention to their captives. With remorseless precision, they staked out and slowly butchered thirteen people, sparing only two young children who had been adopted into the tribe.

Stunned by the killing of their most cherished elders, the Comanches fled north. But after a period of mourning, they plotted their revenge. Under the leadership of Buffalo Hump, the last surviving Penateka chief, an invading army of some four hundred warriors and their families managed to slip undetected into the region in August. They struck first at Victoria, a small farming town at the bottom of the Guadalupe valley, killing a half dozen farmers and field hands and laying siege to the village. The settlers held them off overnight and the next day the raiders swerved east. In each town along the way they surprised inhabitants who had never anticipated such a brazen attack. In one, they seized a woman named Nancy Crosby, said to be the granddaughter of the great frontiersman Daniel Boone, killed her baby, and hauled her off on horseback. Eventually they reached the port town of Linnville. Most of the residents managed to reach the village dock and fled on boats into the Gulf of Mexico. They watched from offshore as the raiders sacked the town, pillaged shops and warehouses, and set them ablaze. The Indians rounded up cattle and slaughtered them, tied feather beds and bolts of fabric to horses, and dragged them around the streets. John J. Linn, a merchant and town father, recorded in a memoir how the warriors pulled from his warehouse several cases of hats and umbrellas belonging to James Robinson, a San Antonio merchant. “
These the Indians made free with
, and went dashing about the blazing village, amid their screeching squaws and ‘little Injuns,' like demons in a drunken saturnalia, with Robinson's hats on their heads and Robinson's umbrellas bobbing about on every side like tipsy young balloons,” he wrote.

Finally, the Comanches pulled out of the town, hauling their plunder on pack mules. Swathed in stolen clothing, men's and women's, the raiders herded some three thousand horses and perhaps a dozen captives. Twenty-three settlers had been killed, including eight black slaves and servants. Among the dead was Mrs. Crosby, speared through the heart. But the vast array of booty slowed down the retreating raiding party, as did the women and children who trailed behind. A combined force of citizen volunteers and Texas Rangers caught up to the Indians at Plum Creek, in the vicinity of the present-day Lockhart, and dealt them a major defeat. At least fifty warriors were killed and the surviving Indians abandoned most of their plunder and ran.

After Plum Creek, Lamar dispatched Colonel John Moore and a column of men to Comancheria to wreak their own special vengeance. They rode up the Colorado River toward the edge of the Staked Plains
until they came across a Comanche camp of some sixty lodges. Moore had his men stampede the Indians' horses so that they had no escape. Then he positioned a group of riflemen overlooking the river's edge. When he finally attacked the camp, the warriors fled into the water and the riflemen opened fire. They shot at everything that moved and kept shooting until nothing did—resulting in a death toll of perhaps 130 Comanches. “
The bodies of men, women, and children
were to be seen on every hand, wounded, dying and dead,” Moore reported back to Austin, betraying no hint of shame.

The Council House Massacre, the subsequent Comanche invasion of white settlements, and the aftermath marked the last time Comanches and Texans fought as armies on somewhat even terms. What's important to note is that the flashpoint here, as in so many of the spasms of violence that followed, was captives.

FOLLOWING THE LINNVILLE RAID, most Comanches retreated into the forbidding upper reaches of Comancheria. But other non-Comanche tribes saw advantages in cutting deals with the Texans. In May 1842, General Zachary Taylor, the new commander of Fort Gibson in the eastern sector of Indian Territory, held a peace conference with various tribes and urged them to bring in their captives. Three months later a party of Kickapoo Indians returned with James Pratt Plummer, now seven years old, whom they said they had purchased from the Comanches for $400. About a month later a Delaware Indian brought in thirteen-year-old John Parker.
The two cousins
, both of whom spoke only Comanche, exulted in each other's company.

James Parker first heard rumors of the boys' release, and then saw a newspaper report. He started out for Fort Gibson three days before Christmas, arriving three weeks later. After seven years with the Comanches, both boys had been thoroughly Indianized, although James claimed that the backs of both of them were covered with scars, “evidence … of the free exercise of savage barbarity.” James was stunned by his red-haired grandson's resemblance to his late daughter Rachel. James Pratt, “learning that I had come after him, ran off, and went to the Dragoon encampment, about one mile from the garrison,” James wrote. “Poor child, how my heart bled, when he thus avoided me … [H]e was incapable of appreciating my kind intentions toward him.”

It took two hours of painful conversation through an interpreter for
James to explain to his grandson how they were related. James Pratt asked if he had a mother. “I told him he had not, as she had died,” James recalled. “
He then asked if he had a father
. I told him he had …”

James Pratt Plummer agreed to accompany his grandfather back to Texas.

But James Parker, showing again his trademark egotism, turned what should have been a joyous reunion into a vituperative family feud. He refused to turn over James Pratt to the boy's father, Luther Plummer, claiming Plummer owed him repayment of ransom money and a share of his expenses for his many journeys to Indian Territory. When Plummer wrote to Sam Houston to complain, the Texas president replied with a stinging condemnation. For all his own problems with James, Houston wrote, he never suspected James would behave in such an ugly fashion. “
It evinces a degree of heartlessness
totally incompatible with the common feelings of humanity,” Houston told Plummer in an April 1843 letter. Houston committed the government of Texas to cover the entire cost of the ransom. “You will, therefore, take your child home,” Houston wrote. “Mr. Parker has not the shadow of right to detain him, and by so doing is not only laying himself under the imputation of extreme brutality, but is subjecting himself to the penalties of law.”

James's career as a Baptist clergyman was no less turbulent. In 1841 he was excommunicated from his local church after congregants accused him of dishonesty, and three followers split off with him to form a new church. Two years later, one of his supporters, Susan Tinsley, accused him of lying about the amounts of ransom he had paid out for his relatives and other captives, of slander, fraud and of “
holding correspondence with suspicious characters
.” James was excluded from the new church.

While James played the role of searcher, avenger, and angry paterfamilias, his older brother Daniel stuck to preaching. Under the Texas constitution, ministers were not allowed to serve in the legislature; still, Daniel wielded political influence throughout the early days of the republic. He founded at least nine Baptist churches in Texas under the “Union Association of the Regular Baptists,” and prided himself on his stamina, regularly preaching four-hour marathon sermons into his sixties. In August 1844, at the relatively advanced age of sixty-three, he undertook a grueling trip to visit some of the churches, but had to cut it short when he fell ill. “
My time is at hand
and I must be offered up,” he said. “I do not the least dread it. My Master calls. I long to obey.”

Even on his deathbed, his son John wrote, Daniel was still focused
on the weaknesses of mankind. He “
lamented that thear was many
of the deer Lambs of Jesus who was blinded by the cunning craftiness of wicked men that lie in wait to deceive.” Daniel died on December 3 and was buried the next day “amid … cryes and tears from his numerous friends.”

JAMES PARKER CONTINUED TO SEARCH for Cynthia Ann. When he heard of a young white woman who had been freed from Indian captivity in Missouri, he journeyed north again in vain. Afterward, he wrote a letter to the
Texas National Register
, describing the girl so that her relatives might recover her. “
I wish to make this public
, because I know from experience the anxiety of the bereaved, and wish as far as lies in my power, to alleviate distress,” he declared. For all his braggadocio, James had a heart.

Still hungry for vindication, he published his ninety-page narrative that same year. He appended at the end of it a new edition of Rachel's tale as well, with the clear aim of garnering more admiration and readers for his own dubious story by connecting it with that of his more sympathetic daughter. It's clear that James edited Rachel's text to suit his own needs. The second edition makes no mention of Rachel's husband Luther, who by 1844 held a prominent place on James's long list of enemies.

After Daniel's death, James became involved in the workings of his older brother's Pilgrim Regular Predestinarian Baptist Church, formally joining the congregation in May 1845 and seeking ordination to preach at an affiliated congregation. It is clear from church records that he hoped to take Daniel's place as leader, but equally clear that the congregation was wary of this obsessed and ambitious man. A January 1846 note records a private letter from a congregant urging the church to delay James's ordination and stating, “Brother JW Parker informd the church that he had got angry and had even come very near shooting a man.”

By October, the elders appeared even more concerned, although reluctant to totally part ways with the brother of their late revered leader. While the church's ruling body proclaimed James's virtues, it added “that
we believe the church has bin and continues to be unjustly implecated
on his account as well we believe that Bro Parker['s] reputation has as unjustly bin assailed by those calling themselves Baptists and we believe Bro Parkers usefulness has greatly bin destroid by this unlawful course.”