Rachel Plummer - Fort Parker Massacre

Fort Parker Massacre

On May 19, 1836, at sunrise, everything appeared normal as the men went to the work in the fields. Plummer, three months pregnant with her second child, was in the fort caring for her firstborn, James Pratt, two years old, the first child born to the Parker family in Texas. It would be the last normal morning of Rachel Plummer's life, and the last time she would ever see her child. Her husband and father were working in the fields.

In her memoir, Plummer wrote that "one minute the fields (in front of the fort) were clear, and the next moment, more Indians than I dreamed possible were in front of the fort." As the Parkers debated what to do, one of the Indians approached the fort with a white flag. No one believed the flag was genuine, but Benjamin Parker believed it gave the family a chance for most of them to escape. He got his father's support to try a bold gamble, and went out to try to buy time for the family to escape - which most of them did. Only five women and children were captured.

As the other women and children were leaving, Plummer chose to stay in the fort out of fear that she and her son would not be able to keep up. After Benjamin Parker returned from his first talks with the Indians and warned them that they would likely all die, Plummer wanted to flee, but Silas told her to watch the front gate while he ran for his musket and powder pouch. “They will kill Benjamin,” she reported her Uncle Silas saying, “and then me, but I will do for at least one of them, by God.” At that moment, she said she heard whooping outside the fort, and then Indians were inside. She then ran, holding her little boy's hand, while behind her she said she saw Indians stabbing Benjamin with their lances.

Plummer was then seized by mounted warriors who threw her up behind them, and watched helplessly while another seized her son. She witnessed her grandfather's torture and murder and her grandmother's rape. Her cousins Cynthia Ann Parker and John Richard Parker were also captured. All five of the men present in the fort that morning were killed. That night the war party stopped and did a ritual scalp dance, and then raped the two women. Plummer never directly addressed the subject of rape in her book except to say dryly that anyone who said that a good woman died before being violated had not been forced to run naked tied by a rope to a horse for a day or two in the sun, and further:

Rachel did, however, write candidly about the culture and psyche of the Comanche.