[TEXAS]

The Rachel Plummer Narrative, A Stirring Narrative of Adventure, Hardship and Privation in the Early Days of Texas, Depicting Struggles with the Indians and Other Adventures

Privately printed by Rachel Lofton, Susie Hendrix and Jane Kennedy, 1926.

Softcover. Near fine. 8.75" x 5.75", 118 pp, in original printed wrappers, with 118 pp, illustrated with portraits of Quanah Parker and Cynthia Ann Parker. Near fine, with just a touch of creasing to the wrappers. Scarce reprint (from an imperfect copy, lacking the final chapter) of the very rare Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker during a Frontier Residence in Texas...to which is appended a Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer (1844 edition). On May 19, 1836, a large group of Indians, mostly Comanche, attacked Fort Parker (near present-day Groesbeck, Limestone County, Texas), killing five of the inhabitants and taking five captives -- siblings John Richard and Cynthia Ann Parker (aged 5 and 9, respectively), 17-year old Rachel Plummer and her infant son, James, and Elizabeth Kellogg. Rachel Plummer lived as a Comanche slave for twenty-one months before being ransomed. Streeter (Texas Bibliography 1525) comments that "the capture of Fort Parker on the Navasota River in the then quite unsettled part of Texas and the subsequent captivities are among the famous events in Texas history. Parker gives a dramatic though overdrawn account of the massacre and his three trips into the Indian country in search of his daughter." Referring specifically to this reprint, Streeter notes that "the importance of the Parker family in Texas history is shown by the inclusion of articles on James W. Parker and of his brothers Daniel, Isaac, and Silas Parker, his niece, Cynthia Ann Parker, his nephew, John Parker, and his great-nephew, Quanah Parker, in the Handbook of Texas. There is also a brief account of Fort Parker."