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Killing Cynthia Ann A Novel by Charles Brashear Basing his fictional speculation on a careful reading of the historical record, Brashear chronicles the heartbreaking descent into despair of a proud woman who could not forget her warrior husband and two sons.—Library Journal. Brashear's research is impressive, and the members of the extended Parker family are fairly and carefully drawn . . . . he succeeds in conveying [Cynthia Ann's] anguish as an external exile.—Publisher Weekly. |
The saga of Cynthia Ann Parker is well known to historians of the Texas frontier. Kidnapped from Parker’s Fort near Mexia by raiding Comanches in 1836, she was completely assimilated into the Noconi band. She married tribal leader Peta Nocona and bore him two sons, Quanah and Pecos, and a daughter, Toh-Tsee-Ah. Late in 1860, she and toddler Topsannah (as the whites called her) were recaptured by Texas Rangers and returned to “civilization” and the extended Parker clan.
Little is known or documented, however, about her life afterward. Charles Brashear’s novel recreates the decade that Cynthia Ann spent among her kin in the villages and countryside of North Texas.
Cynthia Ann never adapted to white culture. She was shunted from one Parker family to another, living in constant grief and doubt—about herself and her daughter and about the fate of her Comanche family still on the prairies. Convinced she was a captive of the Texans, Cynthia Ann was determined to escape to the high plains and the Comanche way. The Parkers neither cared for nor understood Cynthia Ann’s obsession with returning to her homeland and her people.
CHARLES BRASHEAR, a retired professor of creative writing, lives in Santa Rosa, California. Killing Cynthia Ann is his second novel.
Killing Cynthia Ann
ISBN 0-87565-209-3
$21.50
6x9. 192 pp.
Fiction
Publication Date: October 1999.
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