John Richard Parker John Richard Parker ( 1830 – 1915 ? ) was the brother of Cynthia Ann Parker and the uncle of Comanches chief Quanah Parker . An Anglo - Texas man of Scots - Irish descent who suffered being kidnapped from his natural family at the age of five by a Native American raiding party , he returned to the Native American people of his own free will after being ransomed back from the Comanche . He was a member of the large Parker frontier family that settled in east Texas in the 1830s . He was captured in 1836 by Comanches during the raid of Fort Parker near present - day Groesbeck , Texas . Birth and early years . John Parker was born in 1830 in Crawford County , Illinois the second oldest child of Silas Mercer Parker ( 1802 – 1836 ) and Lucy ( Duty ) Parker . His younger siblings were Silas Mercer Jr . , and Orlena . His older sister was Cynthia Ann Parker . This family and allied families , led by Silas ' father John and brother Daniel , moved from Illinois to Texas in 1833 . A large group under the family patriarch , Elder John Parker , settled near the headwaters of the Navasota River in present - day Limestone County . In 1834 they completed Fort Parker for their protection on the frontier . On May 19 , 1836 , a large force of Comanche and allied warriors attacked the fort , and in what became known as the Fort Parker Massacre killed five men and captured two women and three children : Parker , his sister Cynthia Ann , Rachel Plummer and her son James Pratt Plummer as well as Elizabeth Duty Kellogg . Captivity . The Comanche ' s population had increased in large part by adopting captured women and children into the tribe , the former as child - bearing slaves and the latter as tribal members . The Comanche made little distinction from tribal members born into the tribe , and those adopted in . Children under puberty were tested for intelligence , strength and courage , and if they seemed acceptable in all , they were adopted into the tribe and taught to be warriors . Grown men captured alive were generally killed , while women over puberty could expect gang rape and slavery . Elizabeth Duty Kellogg was ransomed from the relatively benign Delaware Indians relatively quickly by Sam Houston . Rachel Plummer endured nearly two years of captivity among the Comanche , and never saw her oldest child , James Pratt Plummer , again . Her second child , born six months after her kidnapping , was murdered by the Comanche , who claimed that the child interfered with her work . Parker was raised by the Comanche , as were his sister and younger cousin , John Pratt Plummer . The two boys were ransomed back in 1842 . Plummer was returned to his grandfather and was able to readapt to white society , but Parker was unable to readapt and ran away from his family to return to the Comanches . In Old Mexico . As did most young Comanche , Parker participated in many raids into Mexico during the September full moon , the " Comanche Moon , " when the dreaded Comanche raids literally devastated Mexico all the way to Central America . On one of these raids , he contracted smallpox . The Comanche were returning from the raid with captives , horses , and other plunder , but they stopped briefly when Parker became too ill to ride , somewhere just north of the Rio Grande in West Texas . The Comanche were terrified that they , too , would catch this dreaded killer , which had killed over half the tribe during the epidemic years , and they left Parker to ride out the illness , leaving a girl they had captured on the raid to take care of him . Rather than leave to try to return to her family , the girl nursed Parker back to health . He then returned to Mexico with the girl and restored her to her home and family , and he later married her . Later life . Parker returned to the United States during the Civil War and served with Confederate troops in Texas . After the war , he returned to Mexico , where he died in 1915 on his ranch . He appeared to have been the only one of the Parker children who lived a happy life .