The Battle of Pease River, also known as the Pease River Massacre or the Pease River fight, occurred on December 19, 1860, near present-day Margaret, Texas in Foard County, Texas, United States. The town is located between Crowell and Vernon within sight of the Medicine Mounds just outside present-day Quanah, Texas.
A monument marks the site where a group of Comanche Indians were massacred by a detachment of Texas Rangers and militia under Ranger Captain "Sul" Ross. The Indian camp was attacked as retaliation against recent Comanche attacks on settlers.
This raid is primarily remembered as the place where Cynthia Ann Parker was recovered after she had been captured in the Fort Parker massacre, 24 years earlier.
Cynthia Ann Parker was a woman of European descent who had been kidnapped as a child by the Comanche in the Fort Parker massacre in 1836. The nine-year-old Parker had grown up among the Comanche, who called her "Na'ura". She married and had three children with war chief Peta Nocona. Nonetheless, the Rangers and her family had never given up hope of regaining her. Her uncle, James Parker, had spent most of his adult life, and his fortune, in a fruitless search for her.
Her presence and “rescue”/re-capture at Pease River was a matter of national importance, probably because, as Ross was quoted as saying in the book Indian Depredations, by J.W. Wilbarger, "Most families on the frontier had lost someone to the Indians. Cynthia Ann's recovery would be looked at as almost a miracle by those folks". The famous picture of her with her daughter Topʉsana at her breast was carried in almost every paper in the country.
The greatly feared Comanche war chief Peta Nocona was a son of a chief of the Quahadi band of the Comanche. He was known as the Wanderer, or possibly wanderer as in "outcast", or "he who wanders far and returns". Peta Nocona was one of the war chiefs present at the attack on Fort Parker, and had formed his own band of the Comanche called the Nokoni. They occupied territory along the Red River. Nocona married and had three children with Cynthia Ann Parker. Their first child, Quanah Parker, was born some time around 1850.
In early 1860 Peta Nocona led the Comanches in a raid through Parker County, Texas, which ironically was named in honor of his wife's family. After the raid he returned with his band to what he believed was a safe retreat under the sandstone bluffs of Pease River near where Mule Creek flowed into the stream. The site was long a favorite of the Comanche, providing both cover from the fierce blue northers that hit the plains, and ample forage for their ponies, with easy buffalo hunting from the nearby herds. But the raids of the Comanche had brought pressure in Austin to protect the settlers, and Texas Governor Sam Houston had commissioned Ranger Captain Sul Ross to organize a company of 40 Rangers and 20 militia to put a stop to the Indian raids. The company of 60 was based at Fort Belknap, in Young County.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
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