"Was Quanah Parker's Mother Abducted in Ohio Instead of Texas?" 

Quanah Parker

Quanah Parker was the son of Peta Nacono, a Comanche chief, and Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been abducted by Comanches when she was nine years old. Cynthia was adopted into the tribe, and as a teenager, she married Peta Nacono. From an early age, Quanah distinguished himself as a horseman and warrior. He also learned to hate the white man after Texas Rangers took his mother from him, forcibly returning her to her relatives (she died four years later), and after the death of his father in combat. When Quanah's brother succumbed to a white man's disease, the young warrior joined the most aggressive of Commanche bands, the Kwahadi and, by 1867, was a war chief among them.

Quanah Parker

With the successful conclusion of the Texas War for Independence, the settlers became overconfident and relaxed their security measures. On May 19, 1836, when a war party composed principally of Comanches and Kiowas suddenly appeared in the clearing before the fort, most of the men were working in the fields some distance away. The gate of the fort was open, and the blockhouses unmanned. The warriors first feigned friendship and then quickly overran the defenses. Some of the whites escaped in the confusion, but the Indians scalped & killed three men and left three women wounded, one of them mortally. The dead included Quanah's maternal great-grandparents and grandfather. The war party carried off five women and children, including nine year-old Cynthia Ann Parker and her six-year-old brother John. Although there are other versions of John's fate, it is most likely that he died in captivity, as Cynthia Ann purportedly told one white man. It was common practice for these Indians to seize women and children. Some might be killed if the warriors were hotly persued; often they were traded to other bands or tribes or exchanged for ransom. Cynthia Ann was one of those who remained with her captors, and with the passage of a few years became a Comanche herself. In an interview with Francis E. Leupp the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Quanah told him; "My mother was a white girl taken captive by the tribe in one of its forays. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker and she lived in Chillicothe, Ohio, or rather, in the then wild region which later furnished a site for the present city. She was about seven years old when a band of Indians found her at play some distance from her father's house and kidnapped her. This was in the latter end of the eighteenth century." 

Cynthia Ann Parker

The disappearance of Cynthia and an elder sister, who was taken at the same time, aroused great excitement among the settlers in that part of the frontier, but the searching parties sent out at once were unable to find a trace of the children or their captors. What was the high point of Quanah's career as a parade Indian was his part in the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. 

Hollow Horn Bear

Together with Geronimo, Hollow Horn Bear and American Horse of the Sioux, and Little Plume, a Blackfoot, Quanah in warbonnet and buckskin rode in the inagural parade. Before leaving Washington the chiefs had an audience with the president. It consisted of their shaking hands with Roosevelt and then "gazing silently at the Great Father, who gave then some wholesome advice." Agents, inspectors, Indian commissioners, and secretaries of the interior had been unable to still Quanah, but in the exuberantly voluble Roosevelt he finally had met his match. 

Theodore Roosevelt

A few weeks later Roosevelt remembered Quanah and sought him out when he traveled to Oklahoma to hunt coyotes. It was here that Roosevelt supposedly gave Quanah a pocket watch inscribed: "Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief." Later he had a beaded pouch made for the watch.

Pocket Watch That President TheodoreRoosevelt  Gave Quanah  Parker

Inscribed: "Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief."