Cynthia Ann Parker

So after the Red River War, Quanah and the remaining Kwahadi Comanche surrendered in 1875.

Now, who is this war leader, Quanah Parker? Born around 1848, his father was a Comanche war chief named Peta Nocona, and his mother was Nahda, which means someone found.

Oh.

So her original name is Cynthia Ann Parker.

... it's all he ever knew.

Yeah.

So at age 11, the Texas Rangers took his mother and younger sister during an attack.

They were taken to be reunited with the Parker family.

Right.

Now, while Stands With a Fist is a fictional creation designed to facilitate the plot and the eventual romance with Dunbar, her backstory is deeply rooted in the harrowing, very real historical account of a woman named Cynthia Ann Parker.

The raw reality of Cynthia Ann Parker's life is staggering, especially when you contrast it with the sanitized Hollywood version we get in the film.

Parker was kidnapped as a child in the 1830s after her family's settlement was attacked, and she was taken by the Comanche tribe, actually, not the Lakota, and she lived with them for decades.

Almost her entire life.

Oh, that makes total sense.

Right.

It, it's the concept of borrowing historical weight by embedding the echoes of a genuine brutal reality, like Cynthia Ann Parker's captivity, into a fictional character, the creators lend an incredibly heavy, unearned authenticity to their made-up plot.

Well, that's also something that continued for hundreds of years.

I mean, Cynthia Parker was...

Kidnapped by natives and then she became part of their tribe and had to be kidnapped back by white people and she never re-assimilated into American culture.

She was mad about it and we should do an episode on Cynthia.

And we get confused for Old Fort Parker.

which is where the restoration fort is where the Cynthia Ann Parker story started.

And because we're so close and we're right down the road, how we're kind of tied together is through that CCC element.

And so between 1937 to 1942, there was a CCC group that was doing the restoration and the rebuilding of old Fort Parker at the same time that we as Fort Parker State Park were were being built.

then we repeat the cycle over and over and over again.

And you had mentioned Cynthia Parker, who this book is somewhat based on.

Well, this is what happened to her.

She'd been raised by a Native American tribe, married one of the prominent chiefs, had three sons, And then along came the cavalry, wiped out everyone in the village, men, women, and children, her husband and one of her sons, and she and her other two sons, or maybe it was the son and the daughter, are the only survivors.

And

then the question becomes, what do we, the audience, take from what we see? And I think a lot of people could take exactly that.

You know, I also think what you said, which is that they might have just witnessed, you know, something like what Cynthia Parker experienced of their entire life.

Everybody that they love slaughtered in front of them.