Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S.C. Gwynne

Thus two experiences that were very likely similar, except for the ransoming and return, to Cynthia Ann Parker’s. One can only speculate. As long as both of them lived, Banc and Minnie defended the Comanche tribe. Minnie Caudle ‘would not hear a word against the Indians’, according to her great-granddaughter. Her great-grandson said, ‘She always took up for the Indians. She said they were good people in their way. When they got kicked around, they fought back.’15 This is asserted against the brute facts of her own experience, which involved watching her captors rape and kill five members of her family. Banc Babb, against all reason and memory, felt the same way. In 1897 she applied for official adoption into the Comanche tribe. Both girls had seen something in the primitive, low-barbarian Comanches that almost no one else had, not even people like Rachel Plummer with long experience of tribal life. Banc’s brother Dot Babb described it as ‘bonds of affection almost as sacred as family ties. Their kindnesses to me had been lavish and unvarying, and my friendship and attachment in return were deep and sincere’.16 The children all had the sense that, at the core of these most notorious and brutal killers, there existed a deep and abiding tenderness. Perhaps that should be obvious, since they were, after all, human beings. But it was absolutely not obvious to white settlers on the western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century.