Indian captives

[jrdudas]

I watched part of a Gunsmoke made-for-TV movie yesterday, and the story line centered around Matt Dillon trying to get back a young woman (they claimed it was his daughter) from the Apaches who kidnapped her.  I have seen similiar themes in many western movies and I wonder if there is much historical accuracy in these plot lines.  For instance, why would an Indian want a white woman for a wife.  Opens the door to all kinds of issues about different cultures and values, and the possibility that the captive will not be accepted by the tribe.  Any children may be discriminated against by the others in the tribe, and the possibility that captives may escape and take their children with them.  With the exception of potential use as slave labor, I just see a lot of reasons why Indians would not want to try to integrate outsiders into their tribe.  I'm not sure they understood the concept of diversifying the bloodline in order to assure the longevitity of their race.

What do you think, did the Indians really look for women they could capture with the idea of making them wives.  Or, is does this just make for an interesting Hollywood plot.

JR
 

[Four-Eyed Buck]

Hostages= bargaining chips. Or trade fodder for other wants. wouldn't exactly look at them as a slave type situation. some were brought up in the ways of the tribe as a rule.........Buck

[St. George]

Not only did this happen - this is one of the better-known accounts of white women, captivity, and tribal assimilation.

Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive of the Comanches, was born to Lucy (Duty) and Silas M. Parker in Crawford County, Illinois.
According to the 1870 census of Anderson County she would have been born between June 2, 1824, and May 31, 1825.
When she was nine or ten her family moved to Central Texas and built Fort Parker on the headwaters of the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County.
On May 19, 1836, a large force of Comanche warriors accompanied by Kiowa and Kichai allies attacked the fort and killed several of its inhabitants.
During the raid the Comanches seized five captives, including Cynthia Ann.
The other four were eventually released, but Cynthia remained with the Indians for almost twenty-five years, forgot white ways, and became thoroughly Comanche.
It is said that in the mid-1840s her brother, John Parker, who had been captured with her, asked her to return to their white family, but she refused, explaining that she loved her husband and children too much to leave them.
She is also said to have rejected Indian trader Victor Rose's invitation to accompany him back to white settlements a few years later - though the story of the invitation may be apocryphal.

A newspaper account of April 29, 1846, describes an encounter of Col. Leonard G. Williams'  trading party with Cynthia, who was camped with Comanches on the Canadian River.
Despite Williams' ransom offers, tribal elders refused to release her.
Later, federal officials P. M. Butler and M. G. Lewis encountered Cynthia Ann with the Yamparika Comanches on the Washita River; by then she was a full-fledged member of the tribe and married to a Comanche warrior.
She never voluntarily returned to white society.
Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors learned - probably in 1848, that she was among the Tenawa Comanches.
He was told by other Comanches that only force would induce her captors to release her.
She had married Peta Nocona and eventually had two sons, Quanah Parker and Pecos, and a daughter, Topsannah.

On December 18, 1860, Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross attacked a Comanche hunting camp at Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease River.
During this raid the rangers captured three of the supposed Indians.
They were surprised to find that one of them had blue eyes; it was a non-English-speaking white woman with her infant daughter.
Col. Isaac Parker later identified her as his niece, Cynthia Ann.
Cynthia accompanied her uncle to Birdville on the condition that military interpreter Horace P. Jones would send along her sons if they were found.
While traveling through Fort Worth she was photographed with her daughter at her breast and her hair cut short - a Comanche sign of mourning.
She thought that Peta Nocona was dead and feared that she would never see her sons again.
On April 8, 1861, a sympathetic Texas legislature voted her a grant of $100 annually for five years along with a league of land and appointed Isaac D. and Benjamin F. Parker her guardians, but she was never reconciled to living in white society and made several unsuccessful attempts to flee to her Comanche family.
After three months at Birdville, her brother Silas took her to his Van Zandt County home.
She afterward moved to her sister's place near the boundary of Anderson and Henderson counties. Though she is said in some sources to have died in 1864, the 1870 census enrolled her and gave her age as forty-five.
At her death she was buried in Fosterville Cemetery in Anderson County.
In 1910 her son Quanah moved her body to the Post Oak Cemetery near Cache, Oklahoma.
She was later moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and reinterred beside Quanah.
In the last years of Cynthia Ann's life she never saw her Indian family, the only family she really knew. .

Her Comanche name was 'Naudah' - meaning 'Someone Found' - and she was a true pioneer of the American West, whose legacy was carried on by her son Quanah.

In 1867 -  Quanah was made war chief of the Kwahadi Comanche of the Staked Plains.
For the next eight years he led an alliance of various tribes in raids against frontier settlements in Texas.
After finally surrendering in 1875, he quickly accommodated himself to the white culture by learning Spanish and English, adopting new agricultural methods, and promoting education for his fellow Indians.
He himself prospered as both a farmer and the managing agent for business deals between whites and Indian tribes - he was reputed in later years to be the wealthiest Native American in North America - but he also created wealth for fellow Indians by getting them to lease surplus tribal lands to white cattlemen.
In 1886 he became a judge of the Court of Indian Affairs; by 1890 he was principal chief of all Comanche bands; he was also a major figure in the peyote religion.
He rode beside Geronimo in the inaugural parade of President Theodore Roosevelt (1905).

Serving as a link between whites and Comanches, Quanah Parker became the most influential Comanche leader of the Reservation Era.

The history of the West - perhaps especially the South-West - is replete with instances of captives being taken.
It was a viable and accepted part of Plains warfare and they were regarded as trophies, slaves, and were saleable, besides.
Many - like Naudah - stayed with their captives and adopted their ways, while some escaped, or tried to, and others committed suicide - driven by despair.
Generally - those would've been the older captives - with a greater sense of group/familial identity, whereas children were far more valued because they could easily assimilate into the tribe.
Of course - captive women could provide more children - who would then also become part of the tribe.

In the case of white captives - rewards were offered and searches made with varying degrees of success.
Little is known about the fates and attempts to retake Mexican captives - except to mention that the Indians and the Mexicans had been at odds for a far longer time than the whites were.

Attempting to ascribe today's mores on yesterday's commonalities serves no purpose.
Times were different - captives had value - slaves were slaves and there was a use for them, too.
Little thought was given to the Human Genome Project insofar as diversifying  tribal bloodlines.

It was 'how it was' on the Llano Estacado and the Frontier and not an Old West version of 'Mandingo'...

Scouts Out!

[Calamity Jane]

Among the eastern woodlands tribes (with whom I have ties), it was very common to keep a "captive" to replace someone who had been killed or died. It was also the practice to keep "foundlings" and those who came in search of refuge.

Many of those who were taken into a tribe or household were afforded all the benefits and respect of tribal members born into the tribe.

There is inherent logic to expanding the tribe by any reasonable means when a hard life and warfare claimed a large number of people regularly.

There were a great many accounts of "adpotees" being "liberated" later in life and refusing to leave their native community.

[Capt. Hamp Cox]

What St. George said Re: Central Texas.

A very early incident (1840) was the Council House Fight in San Antonio.  This was an example of a diplomatic effort to recover white captives that went very very bad as a result of a major lack of understanding on the part of all parties concerned.  The primary trigger of the episode was the deplorable physical condition of the one young white girl, Matilda Lockhart, brought to the gathering by the Comanche chiefs, coupled with the fact that the Comanche Chiefs wanted to negotiate release of a considerable number of other captives on an individual basis, rather than as a group.  A brief account of this event is at http://nativenewsonline.org/history/hist0319.html. 

More detailed accounts of this and other related events  may be found online (some particularly good ones are at http://dl.tamu.edu/Projects/sodct/plumcreek.htm) and in the following "old fashioned" research sources, which give extensive coverage to the problems encountered by early arrivals to Texas:

Indian Depredations In Texas (Wilbarger)
Texas Indian Fighters (A.J. Sowell)
The Evolution of a State or Recollections of Old Texas Days (Noah Smithwick)

[US Scout]

Indians, in general, were far less prujudiced than whites.  Most tribes had a belief that "foreign" blood could be washed away through a purification ceremony of some type, allowing the captive to be adopted into the tribe as a full-fledged member. 

Naturally, young children were preferred as they adapted to their change in culture more readily than older children or adults, however even some of these might be adopted if they showed character traits that were admired. 

Whites who were returned to their families after a period of captivity often were not as warmly welcomed by their Christian neighbors, relatives and friends as might be expected.  Many believed the captive had been tainted by their captivity. Women who had married and borne children were usually kept isolated and hidden from "respectable" people.  Little wonder many whites wanted to return to their Indian families where they were accepted for their value to the tribe, not their ethnic background.

[jrdudas]

Thanks for the responses so far, and keep them coming if you like.  I am quite interested in the American Indian culture and the values and beliefs of the different tribes.  There seems to be far more history written about the tribes of the West than what is written about the Eastern tribes.  Perhaps this is just coincidence since the history of the Western tribes is so crucial to the telling of the opening (theft of) the West by the white man.  Certainly Eastern tribes (Cherokee for sure) were treated poorly by our government, but it seems that their recorded history is less developed.

My wife is part Cherokee and it is well known in her family that one of her male ancestors was married to a full blood Cherokee woman in Michigan in about 1870.  We have been unable to document this however.  It seems that many of the Cherokee who remained in the East and Midwest assimilated into the white society and much of their culture was lost along with records that would identify them as Indian.

Our youngest son wrote his PHD disertation on the treaty rights (specifically whaling) granted to tribes of the Northwest.  While I am not an expert, I believe that the whaling rights granted by treaty to the tribes involved were later revoked by our government.  At some more recent time I understand that they are once again permitted to harvest a small number (maybe only one) whale per year for use in their religious ceremonies.

JR
   

[St. George]

Potentially inflammatory comments like 'theft of' and 'treated poorly by our government' will soon see this thread deleted.

History is history - not 'his story'...

Revisionist History is merely a modern-day, feel-good panacea to assuage liberal feelings of guilt regardless of the documented truth of the matter.

Political discussion belongs elsewhere.

Any good Search Engine will yield solid information on the various Tribes and how they fared throughout time and I'd start with the Library of Congress' archival stuff.

You'll find that there is a wealth of documentation on the Cherokee and the Eastern Tribes - fully as extensive as that on those of the Plains and the South-West.

You may notice those tribes more because they were the most prominent players in the Indian Wars and consequently - the associated books and movies.
About the only films to feature the tribes of the East was "Hiawatha" and "Last of the Mohicans" - while films with Western tribes abound.

Scouts Out!

[jrdudas]

Since you find my comments "potentially inflamatory" and "revisionist" with regard to history, and since I am the originator of this thread, I request that you delete it.

JR

[Calamity Jane]

If yer interested in the history of the Iroquois (Five Nations) in the early days, e-mail me. I can refer you to one out-of-print book that's still available and pass on some of the oral history that was shared with me when I was young.

[Capt. Hamp Cox]

I think that the Cynthia Ann Parker story is fairly unique in that the captive didn't want to be repatriated. 
In reading about Cynthia and her sons, you may find her Peta referred to as Peta Nocona, Peta Noconi, or Peta Nawkohnee, but they're all the same guy.  For those who may be interested in other accounts of Cynthia's rescue, you might want to check http://www.forttours.com/pages/pease.asp, and http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v012/v012p163.html .  The latter has a photo of Cynthia's gravestone.  That entire Oklahoma State Digital Library site is definitely worth checking out.  Lots of interesting stuff there.

[Danny Bear Claw]

JR.  For information on white captives held by Indian tribes I suggest the book titled "Captured By The Indians" - 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750 - 1870.  Editied by Frederick Drimmer.  Dover Publications Inc.  Dover has published numerous books about the American Indians.  I found "Captured By The Indians" to be a facinating read.

For general information on all the tribes of North America I suggest the book "Encyclopedia Of Native American Tribes" by Carl Waldman.  Checkmark Books.  It covers all tribes of North America including the eastern tribes and the "5 Civilized Tribes". 

[Four-Eyed Buck]

Thanks, Danny. I miss your posts from that set of books........Buck

[Danny Bear Claw]

Thanks Buck.  Glad you enjoyed them.  I've been considering posting some of them here but I'm a little worried about copyright infringement.  I was told by a lawyer friend of mine that portions of books could be printed on line or in magazines provided the material represented less than 5% of the book and you cited the original author and publisher.  I don't know how true this is.  The friend in question has since been disbarred so I wonder if he knew what he was talking about.

Any lawyers out there care to comment on this?  I really would like to post more of the stuff from my Indian books.   

[Capt. Hamp Cox]

Thanks Buck.  Glad you enjoyed them.  I've been considering posting some of them here but I'm a little worried about copyright infringement.  I was told by a lawyer friend of mine that portions of books could be printed on line or in magazines provided the material represented less than 5% of the book and you cited the original author and publisher.  I don't know how true this is.  The friend in question has since been disbarred so I wonder if he knew what he was talking about.

Any lawyers out there care to comment on this?  I really would like to post more of the stuff from my Indian books.   

Danny,

I've had real reservations about the same thing.  Sure hope someone with the right smarts will clarify this issue.

Hamp