The Searchers by Glenn Frankel

listen to the proposition,” Marcy reported, “saying that her husband, children, and all that she held most dear, were with the Indians and there she should remain.”
    After his encounter with Marcy, John Parker’s own trail grows cold. Like many former captives, John had trouble readjusting to white civilization, and according to legend he eventually rejoined a Comanche band. The story goes that he was wounded in a raid and left behind, but another Comanche captive, a young Mexican woman, nursed him back to health and fell in love with him. The couple crossed the Rio Grande and settled on a ranch in Mexico, where they lived a long and happy life. It is a romantic and optimistic fable. Cynthia Ann, by contrast, latertold relatives she had heard that John had died of smallpox just a few years after their abduction.
    In truth, the white world, despite tantalizing glimpses of Cynthia Ann, did not know where she was and could not reach her. “ She seemed to be separated from her own people as effectively as if she had been transported to another continent,” wrote the Texas historian Rupert N. Richardson.
    Still, in all the witness accounts, reliable or fanciful, one thing was clear: Cynthia Ann Parker had become a Comanche.
    BY THE END OF 1852 the army had established seven new outposts in strategic locations around North and West Texas. The forts—most of them so makeshift they barely deserved the name—were designed to form a protective ring around white settlements, but each attracted even more settlers, who felt safer under its flimsy shadow. The pioneers inevitably homesteaded well beyond the zone of protection, making tempting targets for Comanche raiders. The cavalry, stretched thin , poorly supplied, underpaid, and caught between hostile entities, proved incapable of preventing each side from slaughtering or abducting the women and children of the other. Into the security vacuum, the state legislature reconstituted and injected the Texas Rangers and volunteer companies who functioned as vigilantes and saw it as their mission to either drive the Indians from the frontier or wipe them out.
    The savage war of peace between Texans and Comanches was now in full destructive bloom, a violent adolescent tearing at its own flesh.
    In January 1858 the legislature authorized Governor H. G. Runnels to expand the Texas Rangers by an additional one hundred men. The man he chose to lead the new unit was John Salmon “Rip” Ford, a veteran politician, newspaper editor, and Indian fighter. Ford joined forces with Shapley Prince Ross , an Indian agent from Waco. They mounted a force of 102 Rangers and 113 Indian allies and set out north in April. A few weeks later they caught up to a large camp of Comanches on the Canadian River at the edge of Indian Territory. Iron Jacket, a medicine man of renown, came forward to greet them waving a white flag and wearing his trademark breastplate of Spanish armor. A Texan rifleman took aim and shot him in the head. Then the Rangers charged the camp. Many women and children were killed, as Ford himself laconically conceded. “It was not an easy matter to distinguish Indian warriors from squaws,” he offered by way of justification.
    The next targets were the two Indian reservations established in northern Texas under federal protection. Settlers and their leaders claimed that hostile Indians were using both as launching pads for raids and depredations. Led by John S. Baylor, a former Indian agent who championed the extermination of any Indian who dared step foot in Texas, settlers organized guerrilla bands that attacked Indian villages at night with the same vicious brutality of Comanche raiders. Six white men were arrested for killing seven Indians while they slept, but were released after the authorities concluded that no court in Texas would convict them. Baylor threatened to attack any soldiers who stood in his way. His former boss and nemesis, Robert