The Searchers (6 page)

After tending to his sick wife and children, James went in early July to see Houston, who was himself recovering from a severe leg wound he had received at the battle of San Jacinto. Houston rejected James's demand for a large company of soldiers to hunt down the Indians and rescue the captives, telling James a peace treaty would be a more effective means of securing their release. James argued that the Indians would never agree “until they were whipped, and well whipped,” but Houston was unmoved. “
All argument failed
,” wrote James, who felt that “Gen. Houston betrayed too great an indifference to the matter.”

James was still lobbying Houston in mid-August when Elizabeth Kellogg suddenly appeared in Nacogdoches. She had been purchased for $150 by a band of friendly Delaware Indians, who proceeded to ransom her to the Texans for a similar amount—paid by Houston, according to James, who says he himself was penniless. James returned her to her family. But first there was an ugly scene when he and Elizabeth came across a wounded Indian who had been shot while allegedly trying to steal a horse. By James's account, Elizabeth recognized the man as one of the raiders who had killed Elder John: she claimed to remember the distinctive scars on each of the man's arms. James reacted “
with mingled feelings of joy
, sorrow and revenge.” He gave no details of what he did to the Indian, but afterward, “suffice it to say … it was the unanimous opinion of the company that he would never kill and scalp another white man.”

Uncle James had killed his first Indian.

ALL THREE OF THE PARKER CHILDREN— Cynthia Ann, John, and James Pratt—disappeared into the heart of the Comanche world and left no written account of their experiences. Rachel Plummer, by contrast, would leave a compact, detailed, and brutally frank written narrative that depicts the stunning violence of her abduction and captivity.

After they separated her from her young son and the other captives,
Rachel's abductors headed north. Each day the vegetation receded further and the landscape grew more stark and naked, until they entered what seemed like a vast, arid sea of brown rock, dry dirt, and scrub. The imperious sun beat down, and even in May a hot breeze clawed at the ground. Washington Irving, who had passed through the same area four years earlier accompanying a government surveying mission, found “
something inexpressibly lonely
… [H]ere we have an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation; we feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world.”

This was the heart of Comancheria, homeland and sanctuary of the Comanche nation, an empire without borders, signposts, fences, or walls. It was a roughly egg-shaped territory stretching some six hundred miles north to south from Kansas and the headwaters of the Arkansas River to the Rio Grande, and four hundred miles east to west from modern-day Oklahoma to New Mexico. The Comanches were supreme nomads: they built nothing they could not tear down overnight, load onto a travois strapped to the backs of horses or dogs, and drag to a new location. They left no monuments, temples, or enduring architecture. Even the term “Comanche” was created by others. It was derived from the Ute Indians, who described their foes as
Koh-mahts,
“Those Who Are Always Against Us.” The
Comanches called themselves
Nemernuh
—“the People”—a name that suggested that non-Comanches were less than human.

There was in fact not one overarching Comanche nation but rather a collection of bands that spoke the same language and recognized each other as distantly related even while living in separate geographic areas. There may have been a dozen or more of these bands: among the larger and more noteworthy were the Penateka (“Honey-Eaters”), who dominated southern and central Texas; the Nokoni (“Those Who Turn Back”) in the northeast region; the Quahadi (“Antelope Eaters”) in the northwest and New Mexico, and the Yamparika (“Root Eaters”) in western Kansas and southeastern Colorado. There was no central authority, no chief whose word was law or could be considered binding on the others, no rulers and no subjects.

Still, by the mid-eighteenth century the Comanches had become the most relentless and feared war machine in the Southwest. They butchered their prisoners—torturing, amputating, eviscerating, mutilating, decapitating, and scalping—for entertainment, for prestige as warriors, and for the belief that to destroy the body of an enemy was to doom his
soul to eternal limbo. Comanche warriors practiced a ritualized form of warfare: counting coup by striking an enemy and escaping untouched was as prestigious as killing him. The battlefield was a place to make a fashion statement. A Spanish priest who watched hundreds of Comanches form outside the Franciscan mission of San Saba in central Texas in 1758 noted the Indians' “
most horrible attire
.” They painted their faces red and black and dressed in animal skins, horns, tails, and feather head-dresses. But the fashion show was a prelude to a brutal slaughter: eight men at the mission were butchered, scalped, and decapitated.

The intense brutality reflected the harsh conditions Comanches faced. Food and other resources were scarce. These were meant to be shared with kinsmen, not with others, and violence reinforced this code. The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film
Dances With Wolves
—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody's victims and no one's friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless.

“The Comanche constitute
the largest and most terrible nomadic nation
anywhere in the territory of the Mexican republic,” wrote Jean-Louis Berlandier, a French-born naturalist who traveled throughout the region in the late 1820s and was captivated by the native peoples he observed. “These constantly wandering savages are incredible in their agility. The extremes of the weather and the privations of a life of constant turmoil combine to give them a physical hardiness peculiarly their own.”

Raiding and trading were their way of life—for goods, horses, food, and captives. Imported to the new world by the Spanish conquistadores, horses proved to be a technological breakthrough that transformed Comanche life. Once they mastered the horse, the newly mobile Comanches expanded their field of operations. They quickly turned New Mexico into what the historian Pekka Hämäläinen calls “
a vast hinterland of extractive raiding
,” rampaged through Texas and crossed the Rio Grande into the vast, unprotected underbelly of northern Mexico. Under the decaying colonial rule of Spain, the Mexican authorities responded with wildly shifting policies, mixing retribution with appeasement, gift giving, and rewards that amounted to paying extortion. “The peace lasted only as long as the gift distributions did,” writes Hämäläinen. With the outbreak of a revolt against Spain in 1810, the gift giving dried up—and the raiding resumed.

Rachel Plummer never said
which band of Comanches she was held by—perhaps she never knew—but she and her captors were constantly on the move, never stopping for more than three or four days at a time except when the weather grew too raw for travel. They roamed from the stark alkaline flats of the Llano Estacado—the “Staked Plains”—in West Texas and New Mexico, north to the southeastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, covered in snow even in July. Rachel, barefoot and lightly clothed, suffered terribly from the cold. She was enslaved to a small family consisting of a man, woman, and daughter, and her duties were to mind the horses, dress the buffalo skins, and perform other menial tasks. The two women beat her frequently.

She became an involuntary traveler through a world of primitive wonder. In her narrative she describes endless miles of salt plains, mirages of vast lakes, stunning mountains, and a wide range of animals, from elk, antelope, bears, wild mustangs, and wolves, to rumors of a man-tiger who looked like a human being, only taller, with huge paws and long claws instead of hands. The riverbanks were populated with turtles, deer, coyote, cattle ducks, geese, and slender gray cranes. The stars were as intense as candles, the moon so large it stretched across the night sky. “
Its light turned the evening mist
to a color like pearl,” Texas native son Larry McMurtry would later write.

Rachel was four months pregnant when she was captured, and in October she gave birth to a baby boy. She pleaded with her older mistress to help her care for and protect the infant, but to no avail. At first the warriors left mother and baby alone. But as the child demanded more and more of her time, Rachel's work suffered. One cold morning when he was around six weeks old, a half dozen men surrounded her as she was breast-feeding him. While several of the men held her down, one took the baby by the throat and held tight until the infant turned blue and lost consciousness. Then the others took turns throwing him in the air and letting him fall on the hard ground. They handed the lifeless body back to Rachel, but when the baby began to breathe again they grabbed him one more time, tied a rope around his neck, and dragged the corpse for several hundred yards. “My little innocent was not only dead, but literally torn in pieces,” Rachel would write in her narrative.

She took comfort in believing the child had gone to heaven. And she noticed a curious thing: even as she watched her son being murdered before her eyes, her tears ceased to flow; all she could manage were deep, dry sighs.

Rachel Plummer decided she was ready to die; indeed, so far as she was concerned, she was dead already.

ALTHOUGH SHE COULD NOT KNOW it at the time, Rachel's written account of her ordeal would become part of a long-standing American tradition. The captivity narrative was
the country's first indigenous literary genre
.

The first published account, Mary Rowlandson's 1682 narrative of the abduction of herself and her three children by Narragansett Indians from the Massachusetts village of Lancaster, became America's first homegrown bestseller. Rowlandson set the pattern. The early stories were both harrowing and redemptive. White women and their children were seized as spoils of war by dark-skinned savages who slaughtered their menfolk and pillaged their homes. The captives were spirited off to the untamed wilderness, where they faced a series of ordeals that tested their Christian faith. Usually they resisted barbaric depravity and eventually won their freedom and safe return to their families and communities. The Indians in these sagas served, in the words of cultural historian Richard Slotkin, as “
the special demonic personification
of the American wilderness.”

The narratives reflected the intimate nature of the struggle between settlers and native peoples on the shores of the new world. Women and children were not merely collateral damage but primary targets, not prisoners of war but the spoils. Hundreds of white settlers were taken during captive by Indians during the colonial wars. Their stories of life among the natives fascinated, frightened, and repelled their fellow settlers.

There was an undercurrent of anxiety and ambiguity in the captivity narratives that was all about sex. Indian men were portrayed as the most hideous of creatures—dark, unclean, untamed, and rapacious—and to be raped by an Indian was a Fate Worse than Death. Faced with this horrific possibility, Mary Rowlandson writes that she had promised to kill herself rather than be abducted. When the time came, however, she could not go through with it. “
Their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit
that I chose rather to go along with those ravenous bears than that moment to end my days,” she writes.

Rowlandson claims she was lucky: no one tried to rape her during her months of captivity. But few captives returned from their time with Indians unscathed either physically or emotionally. Fewer still were reabsorbed
into white society without trauma—many died within the first year or two of their return to white civilization—and some of the children resisted returning at all. Mary Rowlandson's daughter married one of her captors and chose to remain with the Indians.

From Mary Rowlandson through the next century, true tales of Indian captivity dominated American bookshelves. But it was the novels of James Fenimore Cooper in the early nineteenth century that most openly focused upon the sexual obsession underlying the captivity narrative. In
The Last of the Mohicans
(1826), two beauteous sisters, Cora and Alice, are abducted by Huron Indians led by the treacherous chief Magua. He offers to release Alice, provided that Cora, the older sister, agrees to become his wife. Cora is a ravishing beauty—“
the tresses of this lady were shining
and black, like the plumage of the raven. Her complexion … appeared charged with the color of the rich blood that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” She is deeply revolted by the horrifying prospect of having sex with Magua, no more so than when he stares at her with a lust so fierce “that her eyes sank with shame, under an impression that for the first time they had encountered an expression that no chaste female might endure.” But Cora does not surrender. She tells Magua that she would rather die than become his wife.

At the time of the massacre at Parker's Fort, three of the nation's four biggest sellers were novels by Cooper—
The Last of the Mohicans
,
The Pathfinder
, and
The Deerslayer
, all of which featured captivity as an important plot element. The fourth was Everett Seaver's
A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
, the story of a young woman who was captured and absorbed into the Seneca Indian tribe in western New York. When her first Indian husband died, Jemison married another, had seven children and stayed with her adoptive tribe rather than return to white civilization. These books offered a more nuanced version than their literary forerunners of life with native peoples, who were no longer depicted as purely evil. But anxiety about the spiritual and physical pollution of sex with Indians remained a constant, if unspoken, theme in the conquest of the West.