Extraordinary story of abducted Texan girl

Cynthia Ann Parker, aged just nine, was abducted as her family were brutally slaughtered around her. After her isolated Texan outpost was attacked by Comanche Indians, she was stripped from her mother and spirited away on horseback - brought up to live as one of the tribe.

For 24 years the blue-eyed captive remained with her abductors, marrying and bearing children - even forgetting her native English tongue. But in an incredible quirk of fate, one of her sons - Quanah Parker - rose to become one the most feared Native American generals of the 1800s and the last of Comanche leaders to finally surrender the tribe to a life on the reservations under U.S. authorities.

The brutal tale of abduction, bloodshed and surrender - a story that was echoed in the John Wayne classic film The Searchers - is the subject of a new book, Empire Of The Summer Moon.

Author S.C. Gwynne takes up the tale of Cynthia Parker - Nautdah to her adopted Comanche family - weaving her unlikely narrative into the violent sweep of scalpings, raiding parties and bloody revenge that punctuated frontier life in the mid 1800s.

Cynthia's grandfather was scalped and had his genitals removed as his wife was made to watch, while in an attack on another settlement Gwynne tells of a pregnant woman was gang raped before being shot with arrows. She was then scalped alive.

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