Some Went West

Dorothy Johnson, author of The Hanging Tree and Indian Country, describes the great western experience of a number of nineteenth-century women of widely different situations and fates. Some were captured by Indians. Cynthia Ann Parker, assimilated to the Comanche tribe after being captured as a child, was later recaptured by U.S. soldiers who killed her Comanche husband and separated her forever from her sons. Pioneer Fanny Kelly spent five months as a captive of the Sioux; she went on to w...