A Love Story

This little painting of a cottontail rabbit hiding among some evening primrose wildflowers isn’t what this story is all about. It just happens to be what I was painting when I was thinking about how two teenage kids found each other and fell in love.

Out of the fog of Texas history, bits and pieces of this story appear now and then. Some may be fact and some may be legend. Most of the story of these two teenagers that fell in love in the most unusual circumstances is unknown, but what I do know about the story fascinates my imagination. Their story starts on the morning of May 19, 1836, the day the Comanche Indians attacked Parker’s Fort on the head waters of the Navasota River. This is the day that Cynthia Ann Parker, then nine years old, was captured and her story is now perhaps the most famous of all the children that were captured by the Comanche Indians.

This love story is about her younger brother, John Richard Parker, then six years old, that was also captured at the same time that Cynthia Ann was captured. Both Cynthia Ann and John saw their father, Silas Parker, being killed and scalped by the Indians during the battle at Fort Parker.

Six years later, in 1842, John was somehow found living with the Comanche Indians and his family paid a ransom for him. He returned to live with his mother, Lucy, now remarried, but unhappy in her marriage. Sometime later, John, unable to adjust to living in the white man’s civilization, ran away to return to live with the Comanche Indians.

He became a warrior and participated in raids into Mexico. On one of those raids down into the deep interior of Old Mexico, their band captured many horses and some Mexican children. One of these captured children was a beautiful teenage girl named Dona Juanita. Somehow on the trail coming back up out of Mexico, these two teenagers, John (I don’t know his Comanche name), now a Comanche warrior, and Dona Juanita, the captured Mexican girl, fell in love.

Soon after the Indian band, with their captured horses and Mexican children, crossed the Rio Grande River (probably at the ford near the village of Castolon in present day Big Bend National Park) John became very sick with smallpox. The Indians knew what this sickness was and were terrified of it since so many of their tribe had died a few years before from a smallpox epidemic. They decided to leave John behind, to live or to die, somewhere along the trail in the vastness of the West Texas desert. He asked Dona Juanita to stay with him. Although she knew that he would probably die and she might also get the dreaded disease, she wanted to stay with him. The other warriors in the band reluctantly agreed to also leave her behind with John.

After the Indian band left them to their fate and moved on northward up the trail, she could have abandoned him to try to find her way back to her own family, but she didn’t. Almost nothing is known about their stay in the desert, but somehow, with her help, he survived. When he was well enough to travel, they went back to Mexico to her family’s ranch. There, they married and had many children. According to legend, he lived a long and happy life with Dona Juanita until his death, at the age of 85, in 1915.

P. S.

This little painting of the cottontail rabbit is something new that I am doing. I needed something that is inexpensive to sell at the art festivals this year for people that are shopping for gifts and cannot afford a large painting. Recently, it occurred to me that I could do nine small paintings, all of the same subject, on one large sheet of watercolor paper. I start from scratch on each painting so that each is an original. The idea being that when I have the paint brush loaded with a certain color, I put it on all nine paintings at the same time. It has worked out that the best size for each painting is 5” x 7”. With a mat, they will fit in a standard size 8” x 10” or 11” x 14” frame. They will be priced at about $40 to $60 including the mat. The subject matter for these little paintings will be flowers, butterflies, birds and small animals.