The Great Comanche Raid in August of 1840 is understood to have been in response to the deaths and capture of Comanches at the Council House Fight in March of that year. Base treachery in the eyes of the Comanches.
But it wasn’t the first time a huge number of Indians had gathered together to attack the Texians. The first one was four years earlier in May of ‘36, Parker’s Fort, five hundred to seven hundred Caddos and Comanches.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/fort-parkerThe Caddo Confederacy is generally forgotten today, if the exponential tide of settlement had reached them in the 1720’s instead of the 1820’s perhaps they would have loomed larger in our history, like the Eastern tribes, but by the 1820’s the Frontier was advancing like a tsunami, sweeping all before it. Interesting trivia; Charles Goodnight said he learned his woodcraft skills as a boy from an elderly Caddo living along the Trinity River.
Whoever those Indians were it must have taken some time and effort to get them all to congregate at that one place. They hit the fort, killed or captured all they could of the eighteen inhabitants then living there, including nine year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, and then left.
A bit of a puzzle, apparently this army of warriors then doesn’t go on to wreak any more havoc than usual along the Texas Frontier, from our perspective they seem to disband.
Parker’s Fort of course is part of Texas legend because little Cynthia Ann goes on to become Quanah Parker’s mom. But the question isn’t usually asked why that place was singled out for such attention.
Fort Parker was completed the year before, 1835, and almost immediately was used as the staging point for the first major offensive by the Texians against the Indians.
August of ‘35, John H Moore led 98 men on a tremendous swing and a miss. Guys started leaving early as horses and patience wore out but Moore and about 30 men stayed out for nearly two months.
All they had to show for it was two dead Indians, four if you count a woman who stabbed her young child and herself some time after being captured, three other Indians captured who did not commit suicide, sixty acres of burned Indian corn, and one dead Ranger accidentally shot by another.
This was Moore’s first big expedition, a failure, winter of 1839 he would attack a Comanche camp on the San Saba and end up walking home, but the third time was the charm, winter of 1840, as many as 180 Comanches killed on the Colorado.
So Parker’s Fort certainly was an imminent threat, but author Steven Moore (Savage Frontier) throws in another detail associated with this expedition...
Adjutant James Neil took up his own little experiment for returning destruction to the enemy tribes. He had procured some type of smallpox virus and had this injected into one of the Indians his men had captured. This Indian was then released and allowed to carry the infection back to his tribe. Neil was never able to ascertain the success or failure of his little experiment.Neither was anybody else, but I guess the thought might count, James Neill must have really hated Indians. We have no information whether the Indians assembled to attack the fort in 1836 were aware of this attempted epidemic. It is possible that they did, word has a way of getting around. For example years later Buffalo Hump in Oklahoma, the same guy who led the Great Raid, would hear of the birth of Jack Hays’ first child, in California, and send him an engraved silver cup, so word did get around.
Today’s MSM might present the massacre as an attack on a bioweapons facility.
Anyways, Cynthia Ann’s story is well known but that of her equally remarkable brother John, six years old at the time of capture, is generally overlooked.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/parker-john
