Old Fort Parker was originally built in 1834 by eight or nine Illinois families who had come to the Mexican state of Texas in 1832 and 1833. Typical of Anglo-American pioneer forts of the eastern United States in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the stockade-blockhouse fort stood in what was then a wilderness and sheltered families whose fields lay just outside its walls. On May 19, 1836, soon after three men left to work in the fields, about five hundred Comanche and Kiowa Indians attacked. Benjamin Parker was killed first when he approached them in friendship, and four more men died trying to defend women and children. One woman escaped to warn the men in the fields, who alerted four neighbors, and the attackers withdrew as armed men approached. Fearing another attack, the survivors hid in a creek bottom, and a group led by James Parker, equipped with horses and provisions from the fort, reached Fort Houston six days after setting out on foot the day of the attack. Two women and three children were captured, and all but two were ransomed within a relatively short time. John Parker, age 6, and Cynthia Ann Parker, age 9, both children of Silas Parker, lived with separate Comanche bands; John was said to have become a Comanche warrior, married a Mexican captive, and later settled on a ranch in Mexico, while Cynthia Ann resisted ransom offers several times, married the Comanche chief Peta Nacona, was recaptured with her daughter at the Battle of Pease River in 1860, could not readjust to her white kin, and died in 1864. Her son Quanah later became one of the great Comanche chiefs of Texas.