Table Of ContentRide 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 is my refuge and my fortress:
My God, in Him will I trust....
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;
Nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness;
Nor for the destruction that wasteth at 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
