Say what?
Yes, living in Texas and being a history nut, I have read a lot of the State’s history. White, or as we say here, Anglo women were often stolen by the Comanche Indians and taken as hostages, prisoners and sometimes kept and made their wives.
Many Anglo children were captured by the local natives who became furious at the intrusion of the white man into his hunting and burial grounds. Then when cholera afflicted so many Indians and when measles and mumps felled thousands more, the natives stole children to replace the ones who had died. Many times, young women were abducted. Some were raped and scalped. Others, sadly, skinned. Yes. Had to be honest about it. and taken to replace the wives the Indians had lost to death and disease.
In 1836, Cynthia Anne Parker, a 9 year old Anglo girl who grew up to marry a chief and bear him four sons and a daughter, was the first of these Anglos stolen. Texas Rangers, sheriffs and many local posses searched for the child for years. Not until she was an adult did her uncle take her back to her family. But once among them, she disliked the life and ran away. Yes, she returned to her Comanche husband.
Why did she return?
I venture to say she returned because she had been nurtured in that native environment and she felt out of place among her Anglo family and neighbors. Stories abound of white women and men who had been taken by Indians and returned, but were then shunned by their families and friends for their association.
Could she have loved her Comanche husband? Yes, she could have. We love what we know and what we revere. We also come to love the characteristics of a person, seeing beyond a person’s race or color or ethnicity.
But I will say that life among the Comanche was far from romantic. In my newest EC release, coming soon, STEAL ME AWAY, (no cover, no release date yet) I tell the story of an Anglo woman, Fancy Turner, stolen by a Comanche chieftain in the Hill Country of Texas in 1866. Fancy knows Bull Elk because she has seen him at powwows among the Comanche and the settlers. She likes him for his willingness to come to a powwow. He speaks English and a bit of Spanish, as many did because they had to do so to get along with the Anglo and Tejano settlers.
He understands many of the Anglo customs and so he does not insist that Fancy have her blonde hair coated with bear grease on their wedding night. He is distressed for her when she cannot easily digest their meat-based diet. When she asks him to get peaches for her from the German farmers near Fredericksburg, he tells her he will have to steal them. Conflicted that he must take from her friends to help her, nonetheless she doesn’t stop him. She needs to eat fruit.
Yes, I have written a romance—an erotic one at that. I did make Bull Elk an Alpha male worthy of a woman who adores him. But he is also of his own culture.
And he is very heavily researched!
I hope you like him when he appears on the digital bookshelves. He is a good man, albeit not one of our time or our culture. He stole his wife, made her love him and kept her with the power of that.
STEAL ME AWAY is the first of two historicals or prequels to my contemporary series, KNIGHTS IN BLACK LEATHER. The first two were ROPE ME IN and TIE ME DOWN, both western, multiple partner, light BDSM. Come and enjoy all the people in Bravado Texas where the men are good and plenty and all the women wear only a smile!
BUY LINKS:
ROPE ME IN: Ebook: http://amzn.to/13aBAob Print: http://amzn.to/UrcFHn
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