Rachel Parker Plummer (March 22, 1819 – March 19, 1839) was the daughter of James W. Parker and the cousin of Quanah Parker, last free-roaming chief of the Comanches. An Anglo-Texan woman, she was kidnapped at the age of seventeen, along with her son, James Pratt Plummer, age two, and her cousins, by a Native American raiding party. Rachel Plummer's 21 months among the Comanche as a prisoner became a sensation when she wrote a book about her captivity, Rachael Plummer's Narrative of Twenty One Months' Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Commanchee Indians, which was issued in Houston in 1838. This was the first narrative about a captive of Texas Indians published in the Republic of Texas, and it was a sensation not just there, but in the United States and even abroad. In 1844, after Rachel's death, her father published a revised edition of her book as an appendix to his Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker. Her book is considered an invaluable look at Comanche culture before environmental destruction, disease, starvation, and war forced them onto reservations. Birth and early years Rachel Plummer was born in 1819 in Crawford County, Illinois1, the second youngest living child of James William Parker (1797–1864) and Martha Duty. She had two living siblings, and three siblings who had died at an early age. In 1834 her family and allied families, led by her father James and uncle Silas, moved from Illinois to Texas along with other sons of Elder John Parker (1758–1836) and Sarah White, as part of the large Parker family. Rachel Parker spent most of her youth in Illinois. At age 14, considered a grown woman in that era, described by her father in his later book as a "red haired beauty of rare courage and intelligence," Rachel married Luther M. Plummer, and moved with the Parker family in 1830 to Conway County, Arkansas, which her father used as a staging ground for exploratory trips to Texas. In 1832 her father proposed to Stephen F. Austin that the Parkers be permitted to settle 50 families north of the Little Brazos River, in what was considered part of the Comancheria. One of the 50 families was that of Luther Plummer and his wife Rachel. Austin did not reply to this proposal. James Parker was the first of the Parkers to come to