Robson, Lucia St. Clair

  Ride the Wind: The Story of Cynthia Ann Parker and the Last Days of the Comanche by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  The astonishing, beautifully written epic story of a white woman who became a Comanche, of Indians free in spirit, at one with the land, driven by fate to RIDE THE WIND

  In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians from her family’s settlement.

  She grew up with them, mastered their ways, and married one of their leaders. Except for her brilliant blue eyes and golden mane, Cynthia Ann Parker was in every way a Comanche woman. They called her Naduah―Keeps Warm With (Is. She rode a horse named Wind).

  This is her story, the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever.

  It will thrill you, absorb you, touch your soul, and make you cry as you celebrate the beauty and mourn the end of the great Comanche nation.

  1982 SPUR Award — Historical Novel

  Copyright © 1982 by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Map copyright © 1982 by Random House, Inc.

  ISBN 0-345-32522-2

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Trade Edition: August 1982

  First Mass Market Edition: December 1985

  Cover painting by Tom Hall

  Frontispiece photograph of Chief Quanah Parker, courtesy of the Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma.

  To Sallie Ratliff Taylor, teacher and friend, who said she’d wait on the other side.

  Quanah Parker, circa 1880.

  Shown as a child on our cover painting by the artist Tom Hall, Quanah was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker and Wanderer and was the last free war chief of the Comanche.

  Photo courtesy of Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library.

  Prologue

  Eighteen thirty-six was an uneventful year. In the remote wilds of Texas a slender, mild-eyed twenty-one-year-old named John Coffee Hays joined the newly formed Rangers. In February, the U.S. Patent Office burned to the ground. Among the waterlogged papers rescued from the debris were the sketches and specifications on patent number 138, the clever innovation of another twenty-one-year-old, Samuel Colt.

  The first women crossed the plains in a wagon train that year. A self-taught painter and ethnologist named George Catlin rode thousands of miles desperately recording the faces and folkways of a doomed race, the American Indian. God still owned the real estate between the ninety-eighth meridian and the Rocky Mountains. It was a useless piece of property dismissed on maps as “The Great American Desert.”

  On April 21, 1836, Sam Houston’s ragged army cornered Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto, drove them into a quagmire, and, ever frugal with their ammunition, clubbed them to death. Texas became a nation bordering the United States at the Sabine River. Refugees from the Mexican War began trudging back from Louisiana to their homes and fields, many of which had been burned by Houston’s retreating troops the month before.

  Among the refugees were members of the Parker clan, their friends and in-laws. Perched on the rim of the frontier, the last settlement before the wasteland west of the Brazos, Parker’s Fort had escaped devastation. Its people returned and picked up the threads of their lives.

  Not much happened in 1836.

  SPRING

  I will say of the Lord, He ismy refuge and my fortress:

  My God, in Him will I trust….

  Thou shalt not be afraid for theterror by night;

  Nor for the arrow that flieth byday;

  Nor for the pestilence that walkethin darkness;

  Nor for the destruction that wastethat noonday.

  Ninety-first Psalm

  “If it is ordained that we should die here, then, the Lord have mercy on our souls.”

  Elder John Parker

  CHAPTER 1

  A rolling sea of deep grass flecked with a foam of primroses washed up on islands of towering oaks and pecans and walnuts. The pale blue sky was fading at the edges as the sun heated up the day. Soon it would be hot enough for the children to sneak down to the nearby Navasota River to splash in the cool, shaded waters. The warm East Texas wind blew through the stockade door, bringing company with it. It was a morning in May; a time of sunshine and peace, an open gate and Indians.

  Inside the high wooden box of Parker’s Fort, twenty-six people stood frozen as though in a child’s game of statues. Outside the gate scores of painted warriors sat sullenly on their ponies. One of them dropped the dirty white flag he had been holding. It fluttered slowly to the ground where his nervous little pinto danced it into the dust.

  Give them a cow, Uncle Ben. Please. If that’s what they want, give it to them. The cracked corn felt cool around nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker’s fingers as she held the small gourd of chicken feed. Cold chills prickled her skin under her father’s scratchy, tow linen shirt. Patched and frayed and altered down to only three or four sizes too large, the shirt looked as though it had been dyed with the same pale, gray-brown dust that covered her bare toes. She watched the men at the gate like a baby rabbit staring into a snake’s eyes.

  They were begging, Uncle Ben had said. A cow? What would a hundred Indians do with one cow? Roast it outside the fort? Would all of them leave driving one cow ahead of them? It didn’t matter. Uncle Ben wouldn’t give it to them. The Parkers didn’t hold with begging. He’d tell them to move on, and everyone would go back to their chores. Maybe her grandfather, Elder John, would preach a sermon on sloth at the service Sunday. Foreboding swelled in her stomach and spread to her chest. She heard her heart pounding in her ears.

  Her cousin, fifteen-year-old Rachel Plummer, hovered nearby. Her hands were dusted with flour and tangled and rigid in her coarse linen apron. The other women stood in the doors of their cabins, built in two rows against the stockade’s north and south walls. The houses were tiny and crowded, but all seven of them fit inside the fort for safety. From the corral opposite the gate Ben Parker’s big roan neighed in answer to a sly-eyed war pony’s whinny.

  In the center of the bare yard Rebecca Frost was poised over the huge, noisome vat of lye and fat boiling into slimy soap. She clenched the long wooden paddle like a club in her right hand. The smell of morning coffee mingled with the smoke of her fire and the warm, heavy odor of the corral. Outside Elder John’s cabin, Granny Parker sat on a worn log bench, her knitting lying in her lap. Her Bible story had trailed off into silence as she and the young children stared at the bronzed mass of bodies outside.

  Feathers swayed and bobbed on the Indians’ slender, upraised lances. The brass cones on their leggings jingled merrily. Sunlight streamed around them and through the gate that faced east to collect it each morning. The tranquil, muted coo of mourning doves mocked the carelessness that had left the heavy wooden door open. The few men who had stayed in from the fields that morning were far from their guns.

  “If you’re not a good boy, John, we’ll trade you to the Indians.” The memory of her mother’s soft, slow voice, speaking to her little brother, echoed in Cynthia’s head. “We’ll trade you to the Indians.”

  From the corner of one wide blue eye Cynthia could see Samuel Frost sliding along the front wall of his cabin, the rough wood plucking at his heavy cotton shirt. The big log chimney hid him from the Indians’ sight, but in the stillness of the yard his movement seemed to set the very air in motion. Surely the eddies would reach the warriors and warn them. She held her breath until he was safely inside with his new breechloader. It could fire over three times a minute. One hundred Indians, and a gun that could kill three of them a minute.

  Please close the gate, Pa. Close it now. Paralyzed by fear
, she stood mired in the dust and watched the scene play out. Cynthia’s uncle, Ben Parker, shrugged off his brother Silas’s hand and moved toward the Indians. Big, beloved Uncle Ben with laughing blue eyes, silky black hair, and hands that dwarfed the toys he was always whittling for the children. Now he looked small and alone framed in the door’s wooden jaws. Her father, Silas Parker, stood by to close the heavy gate.

  “Oh, Lord,” whispered Rachel.

  There was a surge of ponies that engulfed Ben. When the wave receded he lay, Comanche, Kiowa, and Caddo lances quivering in his body. Howling like all of hell’s condemned souls, the raiders split around him and pounded through the opening. Women and children scattered with the squawking chickens before the battering hoofs. Their screams ricocheted against the wooden walls and fell back into the din.

  Huddled in the angle of a chimney and wall, Cynthia stared out at the nightmare. Across the yard, young Henry White leaped from a bench and threw his arms over the lip of the low cabin roof. He kicked and heaved, his bare toes seeking purchase on the logs of the wall, his hands scrabbling for a grip on the warped roof boards. He hung there for a century, suspended in time, before he managed to pull his long legs over the rim and start to crawl up the slope. A hundred miles ahead of him lay the abutting stockade wall and safety. Under his baggy, torn corduroy trousers his knees were bloody, the skin scoured by the eaves’ ragged edges.

  A Comanche galloped the length of the cabins toward him. His horse plowed through the pile of rock-hard hominy corn, toppled Mr. Frost’s work bench, and strewed the crude wooden tools behind him. Standing up in full career, the raider grabbed Henry’s thin ankles and tugged. The boy clawed at the saplings holding down the shingles. Long splinters drove up under his nails before he was pulled loose like a piece of green fruit. He screamed as he was whirled and thrown into the madness below.

  Robert Frost thrashed at the riders with his father’s long-handled adz, trying desperately to cover the retreat of his mother and sister. At the top of a swing the weapon was wrenched from his hands, throwing him off balance. He fell under the horses’ hooves and curled into a ball in the dust, vainly shielding his head and stomach. The raiders wheeled and spurred their rearing, protesting ponies back and forth over him until there was little left to recognize as human.

  Naomi White ran for the gate, her long skirt flapping about her legs. As her stride widened, the hem snapped taut. She pitched forward, her arms flailing for balance. Gathering the faded cloth in her hands, she pulled it up over her knees and fled like a startled deer through the clamor. A squat iron bake oven, dribbling a trail of beans, rolled through a doorway and into her path. She leaped it and one bare foot landed hard in the soft, bloody pulp of her favorite hen. Screaming and sobbing in horror, she stopped to scrape and twist her foot in the dust, mindless of everything but the warm, wet flesh and feathers between her toes.

  There was a sharp, stabbing pain in her side and another in her chest. Sighting up the lance shaft, she stared into a painted face flanked by half a dozen others. They herded her, still sobbing, to the center of the yard, where Mrs. Duty and Rebecca Frost stood at bay near the soap vat.

  Big, raw-boned Sarah Nixon defended her doorway like a mother bear her lair. Hot grease from the morning’s salt pork splattered as her huge iron spider rang against a Kiowa’s hard thigh. Men crowded around for the fun. Laughing and clucking, they poked at her, jousting with her frying pan from horseback. Two of them finally dropped nooses over her head, catching the long graying hair that tumbled from the bun at the nape of her neck. She choked and stumbled, running to keep from falling and being dragged, to where the other women were.

  Over the screaming and the war whoops there was a steady thunk, ka-chunk. Some of the Indians were pounding on the bulbous iron kettle with the butts of their lances. Others wedged their shafts under its rim and heaved. Slowly it tilted, the viscous gray mass inside flowing toward the far edge. The kettle wavered, then toppled, spewing the boiling lye and fat like lava onto the women’s feet. The sight of them slipping in the steaming slime, their legs already turning red and raw, was a grand joke. One by one they were lassoed and dragged off through the mud to serve those who circled them, jostling for a turn. Little Susan Parker’s screams sliced through the din as she was roped and towed through the fire, sending sparks and live coals flying.

  With the primal reflexes of predators, the Indians chased anything that moved fast. Cynthia didn’t move at all. Cowering against the cabin wall, she still clutched the gourd of corn. Through the chaos in the yard she saw only one thing; like an object at the wrong end of a telescope, the image seemed far away yet sharply defined. Her father hung suspended, a dozen arrows driven into his back, pinning him to the heavy gate he had been trying to close. One arm dangled limply in the big wooden bolt slot. His head drooped, and the top of it was flat and bloody.

  Cynthia’s terrified whimper rose to a shriek as she tried to block the sounds of death. Dust rose in billows, blinding her to the sight of Silas Parker hanging lifeless as a rag doll. She was still screaming when her mother spun her around and shook her, sending the gourd flying. Lucy Parker’s nails dug into the child’s small round arm, the pain wrenching her back to sanity.

  “Find John,” Lucy Parker said. Her voice could scarcely be heard, but her lips formed the words clearly. Carrying two-year-old Orlena and holding little Silas by the hand, she nodded toward the rear of the stockade.

  Cynthia slid along the line of cabins, stunned by the horror in the yard. She squinted through the dust and smoke and horses’ legs, searching for her younger brother. If he was out in the open, he was dead. Some of the Indians had driven the hysterical animals out of the corral, stampeding them with flapping buffalo hides. Now they careened blindly through the compound, neighing shrilly and trampling everything in their path.

  She spotted John peering wide-eyed from behind the hogshead used to store water. She sprinted across the open space and pulled him around the corner of the last cabin to the rear of the fort. There in the palisade wall was a small opening cut for those fetching water from the spring down the hill. Lucy Parker had already crawled through it.

  Cynthia pushed John after her and crouched to follow him. She heard a familiar voice and swung her head around. A mob of Indians cawed and hooted and shoved Granny Parker as they tore her clothes off. She shouted at them and pushed at their lances as their points caught her skirt and ripped it. The child stared as her grandmother was pushed onto her back. Two men held her arms while two others spread her legs. A fifth stood straddling her. He raised his lance, then drove it with both hands through her shoulder and into the ground. Cynthia could almost hear the scrape of the metal blade on bone, like fingernails across slate. The Indians began loosening their breechclouts. She knew instinctively what they were going to do and that Granny’s age wouldn’t save her from it.

  The image of her grandmother’s thin, white body, pinned squirming and screaming, followed her through the opening. The inhuman cries rang out across the silent hills, tearing the air. The jagged edges of the roughly cut hole snagged Cynthia’s braids and ripped her smock. Sobbing, she jerked her head, leaving wisps of wheaten hair dancing on the light breeze that sucked in through the door. She raced after her mother, who was headed for the dense thickets along the river bottom to the west. The hillside was covered with burs and sharp stones hidden in the tall grass, but she felt them no more than the dust and dung that coated her feet.

  Behind her Rachel Plummer ran ponderously, fifteen-month-old Jamie bouncing on her hip. Rachel was with child again, and she supported her slightly swollen belly with her other hand. Mounted Indians swooped in and out at her, yapping and whooping as she swerved and stumbled to dodge them. Stirrup to stirrup, two riders bore down on her. Just as they were about to run her over they split apart. With graceful precision they lifted her onto one horse and Jamie onto the other. Then they wheeled and raced back to the fort.

  For the Parkers, sanctuary was close.
Once they reached the thickets Cynthia could hide them. Their tangled mazes were her refuge from the fort, where she was as much communal property as the hominy mill or the water barrel. Solitude was never officially listed as a sin, but the search for it was. The stolen hours spent listening to the sun go down or watching a line of ants were her biggest iniquity. Now she could see that they were part of God’s plan. He wouldn’t let anything more happen to them.

  The ground under her feet vibrated as a dozen ponies overran and surrounded the family. While the riders circled, herding them like cattle, four men broke from the ring and cantered to the center of it. They halted in front of Lucy, who tried to hide her children behind her long, faded skirt. She kept her small face passive, but her skin was pale under the light scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her ice-blue eyes stared up into the painted masks around her. John darted out and stood in front of her, arms akimbo, small mouth set fiercely, a pudgy field mouse standing off a pack of wolves.

  The outer ring of riders halted, and a few peeled off in search of other game. The rest sat on their restless ponies. The brightly colored feathers on their shields and horses riffled in the wind, giving them a carnival air.

  “Don’t you touch my mother, you filthy heathens.” John’s high voice rang out in the moment of silence.

  One of the four warriors walked his round-bellied pony the few steps to where John stood. He was so close and the moment seemed so long that Cynthia felt she would never forget him. His lean legs were encased to the tops of his naked thighs in soft, tan leggings with long fringes and tinkling brass beads. His buttocks and upper body were bare and tightly muscled. His dark blue breechclout fluttered behind him like a flag. Strung across his narrow chest were his bow and quiver. Four long cylinders dangled from his right ear lobe and swayed as he turned to stare at John. Straight black hair framed a face that was young and aristocratic under the gaudy red paint slashing his cheeks and chin.