people before disease and war forced them onto reservations. She not only recounted her feelings about her captivity, but detailed the life, lifestyle, and much as she could, the mindset of the Comanche. She detailed the roles men, women, children, and temporary captives or "slaves," played in that society, and why. In her account of her life among the Comanche, Rachel wrote that six weeks after giving birth to a healthy son, the warriors decided she was slowed too much by childcare, and threw her son down on the ground. When he stopped moving, they left her to bury him. When she revived him, they returned and tied the infant to a rope, and dragged him through cactuses until the frail, tiny body was literally torn to pieces. In the meantime, her father, James Parker, was searching frantically for her. Rachel wrote that she had never seen open space the size of the Great Plains, and her travels with the Comanche took her to what her father later thought was Colorado in the northernmost part of the Comancheria. She attended a giant meeting of all divisions and bands of the Comanche, their allies the Kiowa and the Kiowa Apache, while the tribes considered whether to drive the Texans completely from the Comancheria, and conquer Mexico. There were thousands of Indians present, and Rachel Plummer wrote she had never seen so many people, nor imagined there to be so many Indians. Her accounts of her travels, and the untamed land she saw, remains one of the best descriptions of the early west in existence. Ironically, Rachel's lot among the Comanche improved dramatically in the month before her ransom. The women charged with her supervision routinely beat and tormented her. One day, Rachel simply snapped, and began fiercely beating the younger of the two women who she was a slave to. She expected to be killed at any moment, writing "at any second I expected a spear in the back, but instead, the warriors seemed amused, and gathered and watched us fight." Rachel's long captivity might have sapped her physical strength, but it had left her with a surfeit of rage and hate which enabled her to easily defeat the younger woman, and nearly beat her to death. After the fight was over, Rachel was astonished that no one helped the young Comanche woman, and she herself finally helped her to the