Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne

Author:S. C. Gwynne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781416591061
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Coho Smith captured Cynthia Ann as no one else has. Other people saw her as sullen, brooding, unresponsive, detached. Despondent. Even crazy, or at least so far sunk in savagery as to be irredeemable. In Smith’s account she was smart, aggressive, focused, strong-willed, and intensely practical. She was completely aware of what she wanted and, at least for that brief moment, of how to get it. Her tragedy was that such a woman was utterly helpless to change the destiny that her family had, with the best of intentions, arranged for her.

In early 1862, Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower moved yet again, this time to the home of her younger brother, Silas Jr. He had also been at the fort when it was raided, along with his three siblings. For some reason the Indians had taken Cynthia Ann and John and had spared Silas Jr. and Orlena. Silas and his wife, Ann, lived with their three children in Van Zandt County, deep in the piney woods of east Texas, twenty-seven miles northwest of Tyler. If Cynthia Ann had despaired of getting back home when she was living in Birdville, she was now more than a hundred miles east. She was no longer even near the frontier. She must have understood this as they traveled: She was leaving the prairies, heading for the high timber. She must have known she was never getting out.

Life was no better with Silas, who was twenty-eight at the time and stuttered. She did not get along with his wife, who punished Prairie Flower (who was often called Topsannah or Tecks Ann) every time she called her mother by her Comanche name.40 Cynthia Ann kept trying to escape, walking off down the road with her daughter in her arms whenever she was left alone. (She said she was “going home, just going home.”)41 She often slashed her arms and breasts with a knife, drawing blood. This was probably an act of mourning for the death of her husband. Or it could have been a simple expression of misery. On one occasion she took a butcher knife and cut off her hair.

It was around this time that a photograph was taken of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower that would become famous on the frontier and beyond. They had gone “visiting” in Fort Worth in the company of Silas—probably dragged along so she would not escape—and had somehow, perhaps at Silas’s urging, landed in the photography studio of a man named A. F. Corning.42 The result was an exceptional and luminous portrait of mother and daughter. In it, Cynthia Ann wears a plain cotton blouse with a kerchief tied loosely at the neck. Her board-straight, medium brown hair is cropped short (perhaps this was the result of the butcher knife incident). Her eyes are light and transparent, her gaze disarmingly direct. Again we see the large, muscular hands and thick wrists. What is most extraordinary about the portrait, however, is Cynthia Ann’s exposed right breast, at which the black-haired, swaddled, and obviously quite pretty Prairie Flower is nursing.

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