Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Winter 2012

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 32:1 (Winter 2012).

Comments

Copyright © 2012 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

The so-called "Battle of Pease River," in which the Comanche Indians purportedly suffered a crucial defeat, has become a recurrent topic in the literature on the Indian wars of the Southern Plains, as well as in the collective memory of Anglo-Texans. In this extraordinary book, Carlson and Crum scrutinize numerous accounts of the event to unveil one of the most blatant fabrications in the history of Texas. The authors' painstaking meticulousness has permitted them to discriminate numerous falsehoods and forgeries from the following few discernable facts: a massacre occurred on the banks of Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease River, in today's Foard County, Texas, on December 19, 1860, when a force of twenty Texas Rangers led by Lawrence Sullivan (Sul) Ross and twenty federal troops attacked a small Comanche camp of some nine tents, killing about twelve Comanches, mostly women and children, and taking three prisoners, including white captive Cynthia Ann Parker. Seized by Comanches during the famous 1835 raid on Fort Parker, by 1860 Cynthia Ann had become a full-fledged Comanche, the mother of three children, including the renowned Quanah, who would years later become an influential reservation leader.

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