Finding Cynthia Ann Parker

 

Cynthia Ann Parker nursing her daughter Prairie Flower

The Scalp Collector

The evening rain fell in torrents, making it difficult to see in the distance. A young cattleman and scout named Charles Goodnight rode from house to house along the western edge of Parker County, trying to raise a company of volunteers to chase down a Comanche war party. A few days earlier, his neighbor, Martha Sherman, was gang-raped, scalped and shot with arrows before giving birth to a dead child. She died too - four agonizing days later.

His last stop, the dogtrot cabin of Isaac Lynn came into view. The curling smoke from its chimney inferred warmth and comfort, which belied the gruesome discovery inside. Under the glow of a burning fireplace, Goodnight found Lynn roasting an Indian scalp on a forked dogwood stick. Along with the pungent order, grease oozed from its skin, eventually becoming dry and tough, thus preserving it against any damaging moisture. After his daughter, son-in-law and their baby were killed by Indians, Lynn began amassing a collection of scalps. Goodnight’s attention was diverted by the arrival of eight volunteers to help him chase down the Comanches. Time was of the essence, or else they would disappear into the vastness of West Texas.

 Governor Houston’s Dilemma

In 1860, Comanche raids had increased sharply in Jack, Palo Pinto, Parker, and Young counties. Newly elected Texas governor, Sam Houston, told legislators, “Depredations by the Indians are so frequent that to hear of them has almost ceased to excite sympathy and attention in the interior of the state.” The U.S. Army, underpaid and overstretched, garrisoned a line of forts across Texas, but could accomplish little against the nimble Comanches. In a letter to U.S. Secretary of War John B. Floyd, Houston wrote, “Unless the Indians are fools enough to go up to a Garrison and be shot down, Garrisons will be of no use only to shelter the inmates.” He also pointed out that Federal horses were grain fed, not grass fed, and of little use in riding the vast distances in search of Indians.  Then there was the problem of money. There just wasn’t enough to pay and supply all the Rangers and volunteers needed. In desperation, Houston turned to an old political crony, Milton Tate Johnson.

 

Middleton Tate Johnson

Milton Tate Johnson Takes Command

A native of North Carolina, Johnson served two terms in the Texas Legislature and ran for governor four times, losing in each attempt. He commanded a regiment of Texas Rangers along the Trinity River. On June 6, 1849, he and Brever Major Ripley A. Arnold established a fort they named after U.S. Army General William J. Worth – Fort Worth.  Johnson also helped organize Tarrant County. He later established a cotton plantation, becoming the largest slaveholder in Tarrant County.

On March 17, 1860, Houston authorized Johnson to raise a force of Rangers. Eventually, seven companies were raised and assembled at Fort Belknap in Young County. Among them was a promising young captain named Lawrence Sullivan Ross. Fort Belknap was a U. S. Army fort abandoned after the nearby Indian reservation was closed and the Indians moved north into the Indian Territory. After a rousing parade, the problems began to emerge, the main one being a lovesick Johnson.     

Love and Rangers

Her name was Mary Louisa Givens, the English widow of a U.S. Army officer, who was suspended after his men tried to burn down their own fort near Abilene, Texas.  Johnson, himself a widower with five children, was head-over-heels to the point he abruptly left Fort Belknap to marry his sweetheart in Galveston. In a private letter to Houston, Johnson wrote, “I am bound to see her, but will be back before I am missed.”   

He was missed all right. Without a firm guiding hand, the Rangers began to drink and fight amongst themselves. A lack of food and water added to the deteriorating morale.  The Rangers, less Johnson, finally set out on June 10, 1860, to take on the Comanches. Under the command of Captain J. M. Smith, they found no Indians. The offensive failed miserably.  Under mounting criticism, Houston was forced to disband Johnson’s command.

Lawrence Sullivan Ross

The Tracking

Meanwhile the raids grew worse. The Comanches made off with a huge herd of horses. This time, the response was quicker.  Under the more competent command of Captain Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross, fifty-nine rangers, ninety-three volunteers, including Goodnight and the eight he brought from Parker County, and a detachment of twenty-one U.S. cavalrymen rode out on December 14, 1860. They rode through the Western Cross Timbers until they reached the Pease River near present day Vernon. Goodnight scouted the way, made difficult by thousands of Buffalo tracks. Through experience, he managed to discern the horse tracks from those of the buffalo.  A break came when he discovered Martha Sherman’s family bible. Comanches often took books during raids, using the paper to pad their shields against bullets. Another sign was the nearby chittam trees, which bore a berry Comanches craved. Looking over the ground around the trees, Goodnight saw signs they were not more than ten minutes away. A freshwater creek, Mule Creek, was close by. It was likely the Comanches were camping there.

Ross found them first. Only two hundred miles away were eight or nine grass huts. Not exactly a whole Comanche village filled with menacing warriors, but more of a camp used to process buffalo meat. The Indians were casually packing-up to leave, never noticing what was about to happen. The cavalry
detachment broke away to block of the Indians escape route. The Rangers charged head on, hitting the Comanche camp like a cue ball hitting racked billiard balls. The Indians scattered in all directions. The Rangers shot down squaws and men alike. Ross shot down one Comanche later identified as a chief, Peta Nocona, though Comanche witnesses later testified that it wasn’t him. During the battle of what was latter called The Battle of Pease River, seven Comanches were killed during the charge. Four of them were women. Ranger Hiram Rogers later recalled, “but I am not very proud of it. That was not a battle at all, but just a killing of squaws.”

 

Cynthia Ann

Among the female captives, Ross made a startling discovery. One of the squaws was a blue-eyed Caucasian, holding a baby. Her hair was cropped short in Comanche fashion. Covered with blood and grease from handling buffalo carcasses, she called herself Naudah and was taken captive as a child, but having little recollection of how it happened. Mother and child were taken to Camp Cooper in Throckmorton County. While there, it was revealed she was Cynthia Ann Parker, captured by the Comanches at the age of nine, brought up Comanche, and married to the slain Peta Nocona. Cynthia Ann had two sons and a daughter named Prairie Flower, who was the only child she had with her. Now thirty-three years old, she knew little English and felt more captured than rescued. Cynthia Ann agreed to live with her Uncle Isaac at his farm near Fort Worth, but she was more the grieving Comanche widow than the grateful, long-lost niece finally returning home. She slept on the floor and spent hours by a campfire staring up at the stars, depressed by the loss of her husband and not being able to see her sons. When Prairie Flower died of a fever, she mourned in the Plains Indian way by cutting herself along the arms and breast. Cynthia Ann Parker died in 1870 of an unknown illness, no doubt exacerbated by a broken heart. One of her surviving sons would grow up to become the last great chief of the Comanches - Quannah Parker.

 

Check It Out

Check out the movie, “The Searchers,” based on the novel by Alan Le May about the kidnapping of a Caucasian girl by Comanches. The girl’s half crazed uncle, played by John Wayne, conducts a search for her.

Goodnight Stakes His Claim

Charles Goodnight

In 1876, a bullish, weather-beaten man gazed off into the horizon while scratching his beard. The featureless, boundless expanse of the Texas Panhandle made it difficult to navigate. For days, he and his Mexican guide searched on horseback for a canyon, an anomalous, jagged gash in the Panhandle plains. One that could contain a massive Longhorn cattle herd and their dedicated cowhands. Finally, they found their destination - Palo Duro Canyon. After looking over the deep canyon with its towering cliffs, well-watered pasture, and cedar trees, the old trail herder liked what he saw. One of the greatest cattle barons in U. S. history, Charles Goodnight, had found the location for his new ranch.  

 

Bio

Goodnight liked to brag he was born at the same time as the Republic of Texas, March 5, 1836, in Macoupin County, Illinois. In 1845, his family journeyed 800 miles to Milam County, Texas. It was there he learned to hunt and track while hiring himself out to work at neighboring farms and plantations. Ten years later, he and his stepbrother were herding cattle in the Brazos Valley to Palo Pinto County where he eventually moved his mother and siblings. It was there he would meet the man who would dramatically change his life - Oliver Loving. Together they ran cattle through the Indian Territory, Kansas and Colorado. During the Civil War, Goodnight fought Comanches as a Texas Ranger, assisting in the recapture of Cynthia Ann Parker, the famed Anglo mother of Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. After the war, Goodnight and Loving established the Goodnight-Loving trail stretching from South Central Texas to Wyoming. Loving was killed fighting Indians. Goodnight had his body sent back to his home in Weatherford, Texas for burial. In 1869, he established his Rock Canyon Ranch near Pueblo, Colorado. While there, he married Molly Dyer, a schoolteacher from Weatherford. Settling into ranch life proved short-lived, Goodnight lost most of his holdings during the Panic of 1873. To recoup his losses, he decided to make a fresh start, ranching in the remote grasslands of the Texas Panhandle.   

The Panhandle

After sending Molly to California to live with relatives, Goodnight gathered a herd of sixteen hundred longhorn cattle near Trinidad, Colorado before herding them across the Llano Estacado, a region few traveled much less settled. The Comanches and Kiowas, who once inhabited the region, were now corralled in their Southwest Oklahoma reservations after the 1874-1875 Red River War. Goodnight had some knowledge of the Panhandle from his service with the Texas Rangers, but no full understanding of what lie ahead. What did lie ahead was a region of buffalo hunters, Indian traders, and bandits on the lookout for horses and cattle to steal. The most dangerous being a demented, half-French, half-Mexican gunfighter named Sostenes Archiveque; who claimed to have killed 23 Americans before being run out of New Mexico.  Adding to this seedy array were the sheepherders who weren’t exactly thrilled to share their land with cattle ranchers. What little law and order there was came  from distant army forts. The nearest Texas civilian court of law was over two hundred miles away in Henrietta. Law, for the most part, was law of the six-gun or rope.

Home Ranch

After herding his cattle into the canyon, Goodnight’s cowhands chased off any nearby grazing buffalo herds by firing their six-shooters at their feet, setting off a massive buffalo stampede out of the canyon. Next, they built corrals, a house and a smokehouse. Goodnight christened his collection of buildings and cattle the “Home Ranch.” Provisions were shipped by wagon from Colorado or Kansas. During shortages, food, namely buffalo, antelope and wild turkeys, were hunted on the plains.  Highly sought tobacco, that was either smoked or chewed, was replaced with coffee grinds.   

The Negotiations

Dutch Henry Born

While on the way back from buying provisions, Goodnight encountered one of Old West’s most notorious horse thieves, Dutch Henry Born, a German immigrant and former scout for General George Armstrong Custer. Not one to settle for a menial job, Dutch Henry turned to theft, specializing in Indian ponies and mules. After introducing himself, Goodnight  and Dutch Henry reached an agreement.  Dutch Henry’s band of horse thieves would not cross into Goodnight’s ranch and face his well-armed cowhands.  In return, the land above the Salt Fork of the Red River was Dutch’s to plunder. The deal was sealed over a bottle of French brandy. Surprisingly, Dutch honored the agreement. 

The sheepherders, on the other hand, were a touchy issue. For years, prior to Goodnight’s arrival, vast herds of sheep or pastores were herded out of Las Vegas, New Mexico into the Panhandle for winter grazing. In the spring, the sheep were returned to Las Vegas for shearing. At that time, there were no fences. Until the arrival of barbed wire, custom dictated boundaries. Respecting those customs was another matter. When a pastores drifted into Goodnight’s ranch, his cowhands herded them into the Canadian River, drowning four to five hundred sheep. A deputy arrived from Las Vegas and arrested the guilty party. Goodnight was forced to pay damages for their release. In an agreement with the sheepherder leaders or mayordomos, Goodnight would keep his cattle out of the Canadian River Valley. The sheepherders would stay out of the Palo Duro Canyon.  

John George Adair

The Money

Like any growing business, you need money.  Money to buy provisions, buy cattle, buy land, lobby government officials, and pay the ranch hands. The problem was where to get it.  For Goodnight, the solution was investment. The investment, however, came from an unlikely source, an Irishman and heir to a large estate in Rathdair, Ireland - John George Adair. Trained for diplomatic service, he decided finance was more to his liking. In 1866, Adair established a brokerage firm in New York, getting rich by lending to the English at low interest rates and lending to Americans at higher rates. His wife, Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie, was an attractive, widowed New York socialite. Both of them had a taste for the sporting life and wanted to go out west to hunt buffalo. No buffalo were killed, but Adair did accidentally shoot and killed his horse, and almost himself, when his horse stepped into a prairie dog hole. Nevertheless, the West fascinated him, and he moved his brokerage firm to Denver in 1875. It was there he met Charles Goodnight, who invited him and his wife to his new ranch in Texas. Goodnight’s wife, Molly, would accompany the Adairs and her husband. In 1877, the Goodnights, the Adairs, four wagons, a light ambulance, and a hundred head of short-horned Durham bulls set out from Trinidad for the Texas Panhandle. 

Anxious to get into the cattle industry, Adair agreed to invest nearly $500,000 at 10% interest for a five year period. The name of the ranch was changed to the JA (Adair’s initials) Ranch. Goodnight would manage the ranch for an annual salary of $2,500. With the investment money, Goodnight purchased 24,000 acres in a scattered, elongated crazy-quilt fashion that included crucial hayfields and watering holes. By doing so, he was able to gain control of the entire canyon.

Paving the way for such acquisitions was the firm of Gunter, Munson and Summerfield, surveyors and lawyers  out of Sherman, Texas. Jot Gunter traded in land certificates like baseball cards. Millions of Texas acres were granted to railroads, corporations and cash-laden individuals. Goodnight’s cattle expertise held him in good stead with the firm, who was more than eager to entice him with additional acres. He later recalled, “I bought land anywhere and everywhere I could get it, provided I could get it right. I paid different prices for it. Some land cost me twenty cents per acre, some twenty-five, som thirty, and some thirty-five cents per acre.” 

In five years, Adair made a profit of $512,000. After 1878, the JA Ranch went through a period of expansion. The buffalo were killed off by hunters, leaving the grass to the cattle.  Improved breeds, artificial watering holes and barbed wire followed.  Goodnight's herd grew to 100,000 head. More land adjacent to the canyon was purchased from Gunter, including the Tule and Quitaque Ranches. Through Goodnight's careful guidance, the JA Ranch became the best managed ranch on the plains.

Check It Out

Check out J. Evetts Haley's fine book, "Charles Goodnight Cowman and Plainsman." Goodnight's life is like a Hollywood western, but better.