Rachel Plummer

Rachel Parker Plummer (March 22, 1819 – March 19, 1839) was the daughter of James W. Parker and the cousin of Quanah Parker, the last free-roaming chief of the Comanches. An Anglo-Texan woman, she was kidnapped at the age of seventeen, along with her son, James Pratt Plummer, age two, and her cousins, by a Comanche raiding party.

Plummer's 21 months among the Comanche as a prisoner became widely known when she wrote a book about her captivity, Rachael Plummer's Narrative of Twenty One Months' Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Commanchee Indians, which was issued in Houston in 1838. This was the first narrative about a captive of Texas Indians published in the Republic of Texas, and it became an international sensation. After Plummer's death, her father published a revised edition of her book in 1844 as an appendix to his Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker. Her book is considered an invaluable look at Comanche culture before environmental destruction, disease, starvation, and war forced them onto reservations.

Birth and early years

Rachel Parker was born in 1819 in Crawford County, Illinois1, the second youngest living child of James William Parker (1797–1864) and Martha Duty, and spent most of her youth in Illinois. She had two living siblings, and three siblings who had died at an early age. In 1834, her family and allied families, led by her father James and uncle Silas, moved from Illinois to Texas, along with other sons of Elder John Parker (1758–1836) and Sarah White, as part of the large Parker family. only commenting that:

To undertake to narrate their barbarous treatment would only add to my present distress, for it is with feelings of the deepest mortification that I think of it, much less to speak or write of it. The night before she died, Plummer reportedly told her father "if only I knew what had become of my dear little James Pratt Plummer I could die in peace."