It wasn’t uncommon for Native Americans to raid Anglo American settlements. In these raids they killed settlers, raped settler women, and kidnapped settlers.
One of the most famous cases was when the Comanche raided an Anglo settlement in Texas in 1836. They kidnapped a nine year old girl named Cynthia Ann Parker and gave her to a Comanche couple for them to raise. Cynthia learned the Comanche way of life and completely forgot about her Anglo birth family. She married a Comanche chief and had three children with him.
Meanwhile, her birth town had been looking for her for years. In 1860, a group of Texas Rangers discovered a group of Comanches rumored to hold Anglo captives. The rangers raided them in a surprise attack and found a woman with an infant daughter. They identified the woman as an Anglo named Cynthia Ann Parker.
Parker and her daughter were brought back to Parker’s family, who were happy that she was found. But Cynthia was not happy. She had developed a bond with the Comanche, and wanted to be back with her husband and sons. She relearned Anglo culture, but never stopped looking for her family. When her young daughter died of pneumonia, she became even more unhappy. She refused to eat, and eventually died of starvation.
Her husband, sad about his wife’s recapture, died of a battle wound a year later. Their middle child, a son, also died young of an illness. Their oldest child became a Comanche chief named Quanah Parker. Quanah fought against the U.S. Army to keep the Comanche’s land and culture for many years, but eventually failed and his people were moved on to a reservation in Oklahoma. Quanah helped the Comanche assimilate into white culture, and became a rancher and investor. He is seen as “the last great Comanche chief”.
This reminds me, what was done to Cynthia Parker (who incidentally was a cousin of Rachel Parker/Plummer, the one whose baby was butchered by their Comanche kidnappers) seems to have happened quite a bit and was a habit of more unrelated native cultures than just the Comanche. Abducting a young settler girl after wiping out the rest of her family, inducting her into the tribe, raising her as a tribeswoman (in the process indoctrinating her into your tribe's ways) and having her marry & bear the children of a ranking tribesman, that is. Such was also done to, for example,
Mary Jemison by the Seneca - an Iroquois tribe living far to the east of the Comanche - almost 100 years prior and to
the Oatman sisters by the Yavapai living in Arizona, far west of the Comanche (they were later sold to the Mohave, in whose custody the younger sister died) almost 20 years after the Fort Parker Massacre. And you can bet that this wasn't just done to white girls, but to other native girls from rival tribes too (in fact the practice must logically have started with them before it could be applied to whites), well before the first colonies were established.
It's a Stone Age tribal survival strategy and one that seems to have been SOP for most natives in general, no matter how far apart they might have been (either physically or temporally) across the North American continent - when you go to war and win you kill the men of the rival tribe, rape & enslave the adult women, and absorb the children (especially girls) into your ranks so as to add them to your tribe's strength. Definitely another huge hole in the 'Native Americans were saintly noble savages who never did any wrong and were crushed by the mean European imperialists for no reason' narrative deconstructionists like to push. I consider it an amusing irony that the residential schools, which said deconstructionist apologists for the natives like to tout as one of the greatest evils in human history (not even indoctrination centers but straight up genocide factories in Canada even, like Auschwitzes in the snow), were basically a less overtly destructive & more industrialized version of that process.
On that note though, there's another interesting case I can think of that's actually a rare exception to the above:
the Crow Creek Massacre. In that case, the winning native tribe brutally murdered the losers in their entirety, not even sparing the children. We don't know who said winners or their victims were, or why they were fighting in the first place (although the standard competition over resources is one easy guess), both tribes' identities having long since been lost to history - because this massacre happened in the mid-14th century (the 1300s), a full century before Columbus and all those pesky white settlers blighted paradisaical and totally peaceful Turtle Island.
