Talk:Cynthia Ann Parker

Untitled
I'd like to add a tidbit about the Parker log cabin still in existence at the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth. It belonged to her brother and guardian, Isaac Parker (namesake of Parker County, in Texas) and was her home until her death. I'm not entirely sure where it should go, however. http://www.logcabinvillage.org/tour-parker.html 99.30.79.193 (talk) 23:07, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

"It is undisputed that Cynthia Ann was never happy among her birth family after her forced return to them. It was extremely difficult for whites of that time period to understand that she regarded herself as Commanche, and wanted to go 'home.' As the decades passed, gradually society began to be able to grasp the sadness of her life, and death, in exile." I'm not sure the above paragraph adds anything not already in the article, except a little of what appears to be POV on what someone did or did not understand. Opinions?? - Rlvaughn 02:47, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

About the picture
The picture must be a fake. It's almost impossible to imagine that any contemporary photographer in Texas would have taken a picture of a white woman with her breast uncovered. // Napikwan 08:11, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Photographers at the time may have been less prudish than you think. This is a famous image, and has been reproduced many times in many different books over the years.  A copy is held by the University of Texas at Austin, and can be seen on their "Texas Beyond History" website: http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/forts/dieiscast.html.  This article (also on the UT Austin site) mentions Cynthia Ann being photographed with her baby at her breast: http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/PP/fpa18.html.  This Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram also mentions Cynthia Ann having her photograph taken with her baby: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/local/16130380.htm?source=rss&channel=dfw_local.  I don't see any reason to doubt the age of the photograph. CKarnstein 17:54, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I have no great doubts about the age of the photograph. For several reasons I just don't believe the woman in the picture is Cynthia Ann Parker. It may be a famous image now, but as far as I know it's never mentioned in any contemporary source. Are there any other known pictures taken by a Fort Worth photographer by the name of A.F Corning? //Napikwan 11:08, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I suppose it's possible that the picture is really of some other woman, but this image is commonly accepted as a photograph of Cynthia Ann Parker and her baby. As far as I can tell, there's no scholarly debate on the matter.  But I'm no expert on the subject.  If you know of some reputable source that claims the photo is not of Cynthia Ann, it would be appropriate to mention in the article that there is some doubt as to the true identity of the woman pictured.  But if you can't cite such a claim, your suspicions (even if correct) would fall under "original research". CKarnstein 19:05, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Remember, in that era it was acceptable to portray non-Caucasoid European-Americans as uncivilized, "savage', etc. The Europeans, British Victorians, and their American counterparts a short while later similarly had fewer scruples about depicting via photography other "races" in revealing poses, including photos of bare-breasted women "natives".  The National Geographic Magazine fell in with that tradition soon after its inception and continues even today with subtle remnants of it. Wayne Roberson, Austin, Texas (talk) 03:47, 17 September 2011 (UTC)  9-16-11 10:48pm CST Texas USA.
 * People in Victorian times were less prudish than modern America - despite modern promiscuity and Hollywood doing their best to destroy morals.203.184.41.226 (talk) 22:18, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

clarification needed on (contradiction in) translated Comanche name?
Help needed from those knowledgable on the subject. I'm just an ignorant, but interested, reader - noticing this discrepancy:

In this article, "Cynthia Ann Parker", it states: Cynthia Ann was named "Naduah" by the Comanches, which means "she carries herself with dignity and grace".

and

In the closely related article: "Quanah Parker", it states, Cynthia Ann Parker... was given the Indian name Nadua ("Someone Found")... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Maralrapp (talk • contribs) 00:29, 10 May 2007 (UTC).

Who is Toh-Tsee-Ah ?
There is a major problem... the article (and related sources) states that when Cynthia Ann was recaptured by the Texas rangers, she had with her her baby daughter Topsannah.

In the part about her death, it is stated that her daughter Toh-Tsee-Ah died of the flu in 1863. Who is that character? is that another name for Topsannah? Was Cynthia pregnant with another daughter when captured? did she have congress (rape?) after capture and give birth to another child?

Another related problem is that it is stated that she sank into depression after the child's death, and that this caused her to pine to death... seven years later.

So what's really up? --Svartalf (talk) 12:38, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

It's stupider than that. It says she stopped eating in 1863 but survived for seven years! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.74.13.100 (talk) 14:22, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

POV?
Is there an established standard for defining history as "revisionist"? I ask because the final sentence of the article defines the book by Carlson as revisionist [NOTE that on Wiki's front page today, the same info appears, but the word is misspelled "re-visionist"]. Ed8r (talk) 17:06, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to add that this article uses different forms of the word "savage", five times. None of the times is it a quotation from the period. I don't think contemporary historians bandy about the term "savage" to describe Native-Americans in this way. I suggest the lines be put in quotes if that's what they are, or a rewording. NeilCoughlin (talk) 02:30, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree and will add the pov-tag now.  Azx2  19:30, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Photograph of Cynthia Ann Parker is real
In the book by Dallas Morning News journalist C.S.Gwynne titled: "Empire of the Summer Moon", there is a photograph of Quanah Parker sitting beside the framed photographic portrait of his mother and baby sister. This portrait was from the studio of A.E.Corning of Fort Worth in (or around) the year 1862. Looking at the photograph, one can assume it was not "posed", therefore, the child at her breast was the way it was taken and not altered. The photograph was given to Cynthia Ann's oldest son, Quanah, and was his most treasured possession. Maggie One (talk) 20:54, 16 August 2011 (UTC)--Maggie One (talk) 20:54, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Ethnocentric melodrama
This article has been plagued by vandalism and melodrama since its inception. Has the ethno-centricism of the earlier entries spurred the vandalism? As discussed earlier in this TALK the use of catchy (i.e., un-PC) words might be a cause. Surely many contributors refrain from trying to 'clean up' articles like this one to avoid being accused of subjectivity and hypocrisy. It is indeed difficult to begin changing unfortunate grammar and punctuation in an article while ignoring the mealy vocabulary.

This article is a good example of why Wikipedia et al are having to curtail unbridled entry in articles. Such articles make me think, 'Thank you editors!' Wayne Roberson, Austin, Texas (talk) 19:35, 16 September 2011 (UTC) (2011-9-16 2:45pm CST Texas USA)


 * Ethnocentric? Perhaps. However consider what if this was an article about a 21st century girl kidnapped, raped and brainwashed into wanting to stay with her captors. Would the word "rescued" be in quotes. Don't be too kind towards the villains of this piece.203.184.41.226 (talk) 22:21, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Despite your desire to make this story fit your own moral narrative, there are no clear-cut "villains" or "heroes" in this piece. Kidnapping and adopting your enemies' children was common during that time in that region. I don't deny the trauma that Cynthia Ann must have faced when she was kidnapped nor do I deny the trauma her family must have gone through, but the woman that was "rescued" 25 years later was simply not the same person. I think it was equally traumatic for her to be "rescued" as it was for her to be kidnapped in the first place. 76.112.202.166 (talk) 16:25, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

I have reservations about a large chunk of the description of the massacre being sourced from a book entitled: The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement: A Century and a Half of Savage Resistance to the Advancing White Frontier, that was published in 1934. I believe there may be an issue of period bias in the writing of the book. Perhaps a more modern source would be more appropriate? Duhon (talk) 12:12, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

This did not take place in the 21st century, it took place when captive raiding, Indian Removal, slave auctions, and conquest was part of the daily experience of many North Americans of all backgrounds.24.167.53.205 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 10:52, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

In addition, the term "adopted" is inappropriate, "enslaved" fits the narrative of the actual situation. Furthermore, why is Jose a Commanche slave (because he is presumably Hispanic) and CAP is not (because she is Anglo)? Among the Plains Indians, Commanche culture was exceptionlly brutal to all captives and given that reality, to assume CAP was benignly adopted is stretching the facts beyond the pale. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:387:F:4C32:0:0:0:3 (talk) 20:42, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

″Only wife″ and other claims
In a largely speculative online column of 1 May 2007, one C. F. Eckardt writes:
 * In a 1910 letter to Charlie Goodnight, written shortly before the chief died, Quanah said ″... when the Peas river fight took place my father with the main body of Indians was about seventy or eighty miles away with his Indian wife my brother and myself. He knew nothing of the fight until the two survivors, of the last named fight returned to the camp and informed him of the great disastor which had befallen his people.″ (Spelling & punctuation from the original.) (C. F. Eckardt: ″Who Killed the Chief?″ Online column, May 1, 2007. In: Texas Escapes Online Magazine, page last modified May 1, 2008; accessed Feb 13, 2013.)

If this a correct quote, it would imply that Cynthia Ann was not Peta Nocona only wife – and so far this is the only sourced statement I found on this topic (relatively sourced, one should say; Eckardt unfortunately does not state where he found his quote). The question of sources is the major problem of this article. Hardly any of the statements concerning Cynthia Ann′s private live are sourced; many seem to be taken from Lycia St. Clair Robson′s novel Ride the Wind, which is a not a serious biography, but a novel, written by a non-Indian for a non-Indian audience and only loosely adhering to facts, cf. for example Iron Shirt′s death, the feud between Wanderer and Chief Placido and Placido′s death, and the portrayal of Rachel Plummer, who must have been a very strong woman, as weak and in the end three-quarter′s crazy. While I like the novel and am happy not to live in a one-husband-many-wifes culture, I uphold Wikipedia′s principle of ′facts only′ and I especially think it demeaning towards Cynthia Ann to once again force a Western moral and cultural corset onto her, who already once was subjected to a forced ′re-westernization′. In short, this article needs a serious overhaul and a cleansing of fiction from facts. --92.206.1.212 (talk) 11:45, 13 February 2013 (UTC) hello im doris and i want to know hows justin bieber doing? please answer IF you're in love with me! im dorias nomia parkia and she was my anceste... my nickname is doris.

In addition to the above details about Cynthia Ann Parker's personal life, how do we know the details of the "massacre," or that CAP "watched as the other women were raped and the men tortured and killed"? This is just generally poorly done, however I don't know the facts well enough to correct it myself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pinthke (talk • contribs) 10:04, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Is it really credible that "tens of thousand of Texan families had suffered loss of family members, especially children" in Indian raids by the time of Cynthia's rescue in 1860? After all, the estimated Comanche population in 1851 was only 12,000. 107.133.158.129 (talk) 07:00, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Use in Popular Culture
A public elementary school in Houston, Texas built in 1959(?) bares the name Cynthia Ann Parker Elementary School. Ventifact104 (talk) 16:39, 22 August 2013 (UTC)Patricia Hunter (attended Parker Elementary from 1969 to 1974)

Link to 1870 census
There are scans of the 1870 Anderson County census at http://www.usgwarchives.net/tx/anderson/census/1870/1870images.htm. Someone with a keen eye and patience may be able to find the Parker family on one of the pages and provide a source for the c. 1825 birth date in the article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:03, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Requested Guild of Copy Editors copy edit complete
As requested by, I have copy-edited this article, including doing my best to remove POV language. I have removed all instances of the words "savage" and "rescue" objected to above, along with other terms that seemed non-neutral to me. I have removed the NPOV and Weasel Word tags from the article.

I also did quite a bit of work to straighten out the reference formatting.

Feel free to correct any remaining errors that I have left behind. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:24, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

A bit of hyperbole?
"Tens of thousands of Texan families, and many more throughout ...". Really? 66.81.245.173 (talk) 11:16, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Cynthia Ann Parker School of Liberal Arts was not named for THIS Cynthia Ann Parker
This was named after the mother of the donor, who was born in 1930:   --Taivo (talk) 17:02, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Just remove it.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 17:25, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I did, but this is just a placeholder for the evidence in case s/he comes back to reinsert it. --Taivo (talk) 17:50, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Prairie Flower
"Topʉsana: Flower (name); daughter of Cynthia Ann Parker" Taa Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ?ha Tʉboopʉ (Our Comanche Dictionary), Revised 2010, Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee, Elgin, Oklahoma, pg. 66. --Taivo (talk) 23:22, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

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IP Vandalism
An IP is promoting a racist narrative here that Cynthia Ann Parker (CAP) was "rescued" after living her entire life as a Comanche. That's just a 19th century racist narrative that said that all whites who were at any time captured in a Comanche raid were still captives no matter how integrated they had become in the band and how free they actually were as Comanche tribal members. CAP was the wife of a band leader, had Comanche children, and spoke only Comanche. She was captured by Rangers and in no sense whatsoever was she "rescued". Modern histories of the Comanche are clear in that fact--that "rescue" is a complete misnomer. The leading Comanche expert, Thomas W. Kavanagh, uses the term "recapture" to refer to CAP's removal from her family and placement with white relatives (The Comanches: A History 1706-1875, 1996, page 373, "In December another party of Rangers attacked a Comanche village...recapturing Cynthia Ann Parker"). Even the sensationalist non-scholar and Pulitzer Prize winning writer S.C. Gwynne uses the term "capture" to refer to CAP's seizure by white Rangers in 1860 (Empire of the Summer Moon, 2010, page 181, "We will never know how Cynthia Ann Parker felt in the weeks and months after her capture by Sul Ross...But it was painfully apparent from the earliest days that the real tragedy in her life was not her first captivity but her second. White men never quite grasped this.  The event that destroyed her life was not the raid at Parker's Fort in 1836, but her miraculous and much-celebrated 'rescue' at Mule Creek in 1860.  The latter killed her husband, separated her forever from her beloved sons, and deposited her in a culture where she was more a true captive than she had ever been with the Comanches"). Gwynne goes into great detail about the 19th century racist attitude that the IP is trying to perpetuate (page 181): "What is interesting was the virtually universal belief among Texans at the time that Sul Ross...had saved the poor, unfortunate Cynthia Ann Parker from an ugly fate.  That belief would color the histories for a long, long time." Paul H. Carlson's history of CAP is entitled: Myth, Memory, and Massacre: The Pease River Capture of Cynthia Ann Parker. The term "rescue" has absolutely no place in the history of CAP other than to support a white racist narrative. --Taivo (talk) 02:32, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons you might want to). Montanabw (talk) 02:45, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Cause of death?
The body of the article states: "Heartbroken over the loss of her daughter, she stopped eating and died in 1871." and "She began refusing food and water and resisted encouragement to save herself." The info box states the cause of death as "Influenza". Her daughter apparently died of influenza, but that doesn't appear to be the cause of Cynthia Ann Parker's death. Is there some more definitive information about her cause of death? 98.186.127.140 (talk) 13:53, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I have questions about this, too, and about classifying it as suicide. She died years after her daughter died. It may have been depression and a broken heart for all her losses, but it doesn't seem right to call it suicide. I deleted categories of suicide and infectious disease, as the latter doesn't refer to her, either.Parkwells (talk) 03:16, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Stockholm Syndrome
Isn't Parker's experience a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome? Shouldn't it at least be mentioned, or a link to the Stockholm Syndrome page be provided? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.209.39.111 (talk) 04:48, 5 October 2020 (UTC)


 * If she had been freed after, say, some months and had spoken favorably of her abductors, that could be called Stockholm syndrome. But when you've been raised from childhood in a different culture, had adoptive parents, then married and had children, lived for decades in that culture, and probably only have only blurred memories of a time when you were living with different people, it's perfectly natural that you'd identify with this culture. It's normal acculturation, not Stockholm syndrome. Similar to, say, a couple adopting a child born in a different country. You don't expect that the child will keep longing forever for his original culture. 37.167.159.125 (talk) 00:41, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

To add to article
To add to this article: the 2020 film News of the World is loosely based on Cynthia Ann Parker's story. 173.88.246.138 (talk) 04:28, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
 * No, it's not. --TaivoLinguist (Taivo) (talk) 07:34, 7 December 2020 (UTC)