Rachel Plummer

American writer (1819–1839)
Rachel Parker Plummer (March 22, 1819 – March 19, 1839) was the daughter of James W. Parker and the cousin of Quanah Parker, last free roaming chief of the Comanches. An Anglo Texan woman, she was kidnapped at the age of seventeen, along with her son, James Pratt Plummer, age two, and her cousins, by a Comanche raiding party. Rachel Plummer's 21 months among the Comanche as a prisoner became a sensation when she wrote a book about her captivity, Rachael Plummer's Narrative of Twenty One Months' Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Commanchee Indians, which was issued in Houston in 1838. This was the first narrative about a captive of Texas Indians published in the Republic of Texas, and it was a sensation not just there, but in the United States and beyond. In 1844, after Rachel's death, her father published a revised edition of her book as an appendix to his Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker. Her book is considered an invaluable look at Comanche culture before environmental destruction, disease, starvation, and war forced them onto reservations.

Rachel Plummer was born in 1819 in Crawford County, Illinois1, the second youngest living child of James William Parker (1797–1864) and Martha Duty. She had two living siblings, and three siblings who had died at an early age. In 1834 her family and allied families, led by her father James and uncle Silas, moved from Illinois to Texas along with other sons of Elder John Parker (1758–1836) and Sarah White, as part of the large Parker family. except to say dryly that anyone who said that a good woman died before being violated had not been forced to run naked tied by a rope to a horse for a day or two in the sun, The night before she died, Plummer reportedly told her father "if only I knew what had become of my dear little James Pratt Plummer I could die in peace."