When Fort Parker fell on May 19, 1836, a large Comanche (Numunuu) force with Kiowa and Kichai allies took five captives, according to the Handbook of Texas: Rachel Plummer and her son James Pratt, John and Cynthia Ann Parker, and Elizabeth Kellogg. They were separated within days. Getting them back took years, a chain of go-betweens and a family quarrel.
Delawares and a hundred and fifty dollars
A Kichai band took Mrs. Kellogg, Rachel's aunt. That summer Delaware people bought her, and in August they sold her to her brother-in-law James W. Parker for $150, according to Wikipedia's account, which says Sam Houston sent the money. Parker met her in Nacogdoches and took her home to Walker County. She was back with her sister, Parker's wife Martha, by September 6.
Houston's help stopped at ransom. Parker asked him in July at San Augustine and again in August at Nacogdoches to send an expedition against the Comanche. Houston preferred a treaty. In June 1837 he commissioned Parker to raise 120 men, then disbanded the force in late July before it left.
Santa Fe
Rachel Plummer was seventeen. When her captors learned her son was weaned, the Handbook says, he was taken from her, and she never saw him again. She was made to work all day and much of the night, and the band killed the baby she bore that fall when he was about six weeks old. North of Santa Fe, Mexican traders approached the band, and on June 19, 1837, she was sold to them. Col. and Mrs. William Donaho had arranged it. She reached them in Santa Fe after seventeen days. Fearing trouble with the Mexicans, the Donahos took her some 800 miles to Independence, Missouri, and her brother-in-law Lorenzo Nixon brought her home. She reached her husband on February 19, 1838.
She wrote an account, published in Houston in 1838, the first narrative of a captive of Texas Indians published in Texas. She bore a third child on January 4, 1839, and died on March 19. The baby lived two more days.
The boys
James Pratt Plummer was ransomed in late 1842. The Handbook's entry on his grandfather says Parker recovered two boys from Fort Gibson on January 16, 1843, thought to be James and John, and doubts that the second was John. According to a summary of Jo Ella Powell Exley's family history, Parker then refused to give James to his father, Luther, saying Luther had paid nothing toward the ransom. The authorities Luther appealed to ruled for him. Parker still refused. James died in Confederate service at Little Rock on November 17, 1862.
John Parker's story is told differently. The Handbook says Texas set aside $300 for his rescue in 1845, never spent, because he was not found until he was grown and would not return. He lived in Mexico and died in 1915. In 1846, according to a newspaper of April 29, tribal elders refused Col. Leonard Williams's offers to ransom Cynthia Ann.
James Parker searched for nine years and spent much of his fortune. The Fort Parker Cemetery nearby holds the graves of the victims of the attack, and the stockade is rebuilt at Old Fort Parker.