Рейд на форт Паркер: Похищение и судьбы пленников.

1836 American Indian attack

The Fort Parker massacre, also known as the Fort Parker raid, was an event in which a group of Texian colonists were killed in an attack by a contingent of Comanche, Kiowa, Caddo, and Wichita raiders at Fort Parker on May 19, 1836. During the attack, Cynthia Ann Parker, then approximately nine years old, was captured and spent most of the rest of her life within the Comanche Nation, later marrying Chief Peta Nocona and giving birth to a son, Quanah Parker, who became a prominent leader of the Comanches and a war leader during the Red River War of 1874–75. Cynthia’s brother John Richard Parker was also captured and remained with the Comanches for six years before his release was negotiated. He was unable to readapt to Western society and chose to return to the Comanche Nation.

Fort Parker was established about 2 mile (3 km) north of present day Groesbeck, Limestone County, Texas, United States, by John Parker, his sons, Benjamin, Silas and James, with other members of the Pilgrim Predestinarian Baptist Church of Crawford County, Illinois. Led by John and Daniel Parker, they came to Texas in 1833. attacked the inhabitants of Fort Parker. In her memoir, Rachel Plummer wrote that "one minute the fields (in front of the fort) were clear, and the next moment, more Indians than I dreamed possible were in front of the fort." One of the Indians approached the fort with a white flag. No one believed the flag was genuine. Silas Parker wanted the five men present to man the walls and fight as best they could. Benjamin Parker felt that by going out he could buy time for the majority of the women and children to flee out the back (small) gate. He felt that there was simply no way that five men would be able to hold the Indians out more than a second or two, as they could use ropes to scale the walls. He felt that the war party would then kill everyone in the fort, and the unsuspecting men in the fields. He argued with Silas that they had to barter their lives for time for everyone else.

Cynthia Ann's brother John Richard Parker was ransomed back in 1842 along with his cousin, James Pratt Plummer. He was unable to adapt to white society and ran back to the Comanche. He later was left to die after he contracted smallpox during a Comanche raid into Mexico. The war party left a captive Mexican girl to care for him, and he restored her to her family after recovering, and spent the remainder of his life in Old Mexico after marrying her. During the American Civil War, he served in a Mexican Company within the Confederate Army. He later lived as stockman and rancher in Mexico, where he died in 1915.

Rachel Plummer, the 17 year old wife of Luther Plummer, daughter of James Parker, and cousin to Cynthia Parker and her brother John, was held captive by the Comanche for two years before being ransomed by her father. Her book on her captivity, Rachael Plummer's Narrative of Twenty One Months' Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Comanchee Indians, 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 throughout the United States and even abroad. Rachel died in 1840, in childbirth, a year after being ransomed.

James Pratt, son of Luther Martin Thomas Plummer and Rachel Parker Plummer, was separated from his mother (who never knew about his further fate) and was soon given away to another Comanche band. Late in 1842 he was ransomed and in 1843 reunited with his grandfather James W. Parker. Parker refused to return his grandson to his father, claiming that Luther Plummer had not even paid any money for his family's ransom. Even when the latter appealed successfully to the Governor of Texas, Parker refused to return his grandson. Luther Plummer later remarried and fathered another child, and then didn't pursue the matter any further. James Pratt Plummer married twice and had four children. He enlisted in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and died from pneumonia in 1862 after suffering from typhoid.

In late May 1836, Elizabeth Kellogg was taken by a band of Kichai Indians, which she took for "Kitchawas". In summer, Delaware Indians purchased Mrs. Kellogg and sold her to her brother in law James W. Parker in August 1836 for 150 dollars (the money was sent by Sam Houston). She was reunited with her sister Martha Duty on September 6, 1836.

James W. Parker, who was working in the fields when the raid began, spent much of the rest of his life, and most of his fortune, searching for his daughter Rachel, his grandson James, his niece Cynthia, and his nephew John Richard. After many near death escapes, he finally settled with his family. John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards, in the John Ford Western The Searchers, was modeled by author Alan Le May after Parker and others affected by child abductions. Former Dallas Morning News columnist Frank X. Tolbert in his book An Informal History of Texas entitled one of his book's chapters "Was Uncle James (Parker) The Villain" which expressed an entirely different take on the reverend. James W. Parker was Cynthia Ann Parker's uncle, Rachel Plummer's father, and Rachel's son James Pratt Plummer's grandfather. Sam Houston responded to "Luther" Thomas Martin Plummer in a letter that: "Reverend Parker had quite a bad reputation with most all he ever had business dealings." Houston did not trust the judgement of Parker and as that chapter of Tolbert's book relates Houston just could not believe that Reverend Parker would not return James Pratt Plummer to his natural father.

Quanah Parker, son of Cynthia Ann Parker, became a leader among the Quahadi Comanches. After most of the Comanches and other tribes on the Staked Plains were defeated, Parker and his group surrendered to authorities and were forced to an Indian reservation in Oklahoma Territory. The Quahadis were the very last tribe left on the Staked Plains. Quanah Parker was made chief of all the Comanche tribes on the reservation. Shortly before his own death in 1911, he arranged for the disinterment of his mother and sister and had them reburied in a plot next to his own at the Post Oak Cemetery near Cache, Oklahoma. Congress passed a special allotment to fund the reburial. The three were moved in 1957 to the Old Post military cemetery in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.