Cynthia Ann Parker

Cynthia Ann Parker was captured as a child during the 1836 attack on Fort Parker and was raised among the Comanche. She married the war leader Peta Nocona and became the mother of Quanah Parker. Texas Rangers recaptured her in 1860 and returned her to relatives, but she was separated from her Comanche family and never readapted happily to settler society.

Texas Rangers forcibly returned Parker to Anglo-American society in 1860 after a raid on a Comanche camp, separating her from the people among whom she had spent most of her life. She struggled to readjust and repeatedly expressed a desire to return to her Comanche family. Her son Quanah Parker later became a major Comanche leader, making Cynthia’s life a powerful symbol of the violence and cultural dislocation of the Texas frontier.

In Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Ride the Wind, in 1836, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker is taken during the attack on Fort Parker in Texas and adopted into a Comanche family.