Pease River Battlefield
Margaret, Foard County, Texas
Marker Inscription
After being captured by Comanche Indians on May 19, 1836, in what is now Limestone County Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured here by Texas Rangers under Captain L.S. Ross on December 18, 1860. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On this ground in December 1860, Texas Rangers under Captain L. S. Ross overtook a Comanche encampment and recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been taken as a child during a raid in 1836 and raised among the Comanche for twenty-four years. Torn from the family she had made—including her son, the future chief Quanah Parker—her recapture became one of the most famous and tragic episodes of the Texas frontier. The state marked the battlefield in 1936.
Why it matters
The Parker story sits at the heart of the long, painful struggle between settlers and the Comanche over the southern plains, a conflict that shaped the closing of the Texas frontier.
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Related people
- · Cynthia Ann Parker
- · L. S. Ross
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Medicine Mound Community
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The area's earliest inhabitants were Comanche and Kiowa people who camped around four dolomite hills—the Medicine Mounds—prized for their healing properties. After the land was deeded to a railway in 1854 and Anglo settlers arrived in the 1870s, a small village grew, then relocated 2.5 miles north in 1908 when the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway came through. At its peak Medicine Mound held 22 businesses and 500 people, but the Depression and a 1933 fire that burned the whole town drove its decline, and the last business closed in 1966.
Pease River Battlefield
Crowell, TX
At the Battle of Pease River in 1860, Texas Rangers under Captain L. S. Ross attacked a Comanche encampment and took a woman they recognized as Cynthia Ann Parker, seized as a nine-year-old in the 1836 raid on Fort Parker. By then she had lived a quarter-century among the Comanche as Naduah, wife of Chief Peta Nocona and mother of the future leader Quanah Parker. Returned to her Anglo relatives with her infant daughter, she never adjusted, tried repeatedly to escape, and died in 1864.
Red River Valley Museum
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