It was a useless piece of property dismissed on maps as 'The Great American Desert.' God still owned the real estate between the ninety-eighth meridian and the Rocky Mountains. A self-taught painter and ethnologist named George Catlin rode thousands of miles desperately recording the faces and folkways of a doomed race, the American Indian. The first women crossed the plains in a wagon train that year. Among the waterlogged papers rescued from the debris were the sketches and specifications on patent number 138, the clever innovation of another twenty-one-year-old, Samuel Colt. In the remote wilds of Texas a slender, mild-eyed twenty-one-year-old named John Coffee Hays joined the newly formed Rangers. Photo courtesy of Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library.Įighteen thirty-six was an uneventful year.

Shown as a child on our cover painting by the artist Tom Hall, Quanah was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker and Wanderer and was the last free war chief of the Comanche. To Sallie Ratliff Taylor, teacher and friend, who said she'd wait on the other side. Manufactured in the United States of Americaįrontispiece photograph of Chief Quanah Parker, courtesy of the Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma. Map copyright © 1982 by Random House, Inc. It will thrill you, absorb you, touch your soul, and make you cry as you celebrate the beauty and mourn the end of the great Comanche nation.Ĭopyright © 1982 by Lucia St. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever. This is her story, the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. They called her Naduah―Keeps Warm With (Is. Except for her brilliant blue eyes and golden mane, Cynthia Ann Parker was in every way a Comanche woman. She grew up with them, mastered their ways, and married one of their leaders.

In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians from her family's settlement. The astonishing, beautifully written epic story of a white woman who became a Comanche, of Indians free in spirit, at one with the land, driven by fate to RIDE THE WIND

Ride the Wind: The Story of Cynthia Ann Parker and the Last Days of the Comanche by Lucia St.

Ride the Wind by Lucia St. Clair Robson