In the Autumn of 1860 the indomitable and fearless Peta Nocona led a raiding party of Comanches through Parker county, so named in honor of the family of his wife, Cynthia Ann, committing great depredations as they passed through. The venerable Isaac Parker was at the time a resident of the town of Weatherford, the county seat; and little did he imagine that the chief of the ruthless savages who spread desolation and death on every side as far as their arms could reach, was the husband of his long lost niece; and that the comingled blood of the murdered Parkers and the atrocious Comanche now coursed in the veins of a second generation--bound equally by the ties of consanguinity to murderer and murdered; that the son of Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker would become the chief of the proud Comanches, whose boast it is that their constitutional settlement of government is the purest democracy ever originated and administered among men. It certainly conserved the object of its institution--the protection and happiness of the people--for a longer period, and much more satisfactorily than has that of any other Indian tribe. The Comanches claimed a superiority over the other Texian tribes; and they unquestionably were more intelligent and courageous. The “Reservation Policy,”--necesessary though it be--brings them all to an object level,--the plane of lazy beggars and thieves. The Comanche is the most qualified by nature for receiving education and for adapting himself to the requirements of civilization, of all the southern tribes, not excepting even the Cherokees, with their churches, school-houses and farms. The Comanches after waging an unceasing war for nearly fifty years against the United States, Texas and Mexico, still number 16,000 souls; a far better showing than any other tribe can make, though not one but has enjoyed privileges to which the Comanche was a stranger. It is a shame to the civilization of the age that a people so susceptible of a high degree of development should be allowed to grovel in the depths of heathenism and savagery. But we are digressing. The loud and clamorous cries of the settlers along the frontier for protection, induced the Government to organize and send out a regiment under Col. M. T. Johnson to take the field for public defense. But these efforts proved of small service. The expedition, though at great expense to the state, failed to find an Indian until returning, the command was followed by the wily Comanches, their horses “stampeded” at night and most of the men compelled to reach the settlements on foot, under great suffering and exposure.