Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne

Author:S. C. Gwynne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: First Nations, Military History, 19th Century, U.S.A., Biography, History
ISBN: 9781416591054
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Part of this adjustment, too, was her reintegration into the Parker family. Many of her relatives lived nearby, and she saw them with some regularity. She had friends, too, in a sense, at least people she could talk to. She even remembered some of the people from the old days. Every Sunday one of them would take Prairie Flower visiting. The child had learned English quickly and soon spoke it more often than Comanche.46 She even went to a nearby school. In the account of Cynthia Ann’s relative Tom Champion, she had a “sunny disposition” and was “an open-hearted, good woman, and always ready to help somebody.”47 Most others had a different view. She was seen weeping on the porch, or hiding herself from gawkers, who never stopped coming to see the infamous “white squaw.” And there was nothing sunny about her refusal to abandon many of her Indian ways, slicing her body with a knife whenever a family member died, and singing her high-pitched, keening songs of Comanche mourning. She had never forgotten, she had only accommodated; she probably stopped believing the Parker family’s promises, which they repeated to the end, that she would be allowed to see her sons again. They had always been empty promises. According to T. J. Cates, one of Cynthia Ann’s neighbors, she spoke often of the loss of her two sons.

I well remember Cynthia Ann Parker and her little Taocks [sic]. She lived at this time about six miles south of [the town of] Ben Wheeler with her brother-in-law Ruff O’Quinn, near Slater’s Creek. . . . She thought her two boys were lost on the prairie after she was captured. . . . She would take a knife and hack at her breast until it would bleed and then put the blood on some tobacco and cry for her lost boys.48

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.