But while many books leave Parker with that short biography, other historians dispute it. The real story, they say, is that Parker lived as a prisoner in her sister's house. That her daughter, Prairie Flower, also was captured and taken back to civilization, where she died from some unnamed disease brought to the region by white settlers. That in customary Comanche fashion, the grieving Cynthia Ann Parker stripped the flesh from her own arms and died from those wounds only four years after her "rescue." That fifty years later, another one of her children, the Comanche chief Quanah Parker, convinced the U.S. government to have his mother's remains moved from Texas to Oklahoma for reburial.
It's a story that captivates Toni Dewey, a Chicago executive who retired in 1987 to the hills above Boulder. "Now this woman is filled out for us," says Dewey. "We see she was a mother, and what she meant to her son, and what her daughter meant to her. That's what history is--layers and layers of what makes us individuals, what are our customs, ways and problems."
Stories like Parker's have led Dewey, a former Motorola vice president, to begin the ambitious project of establishing a $25 million Women of the West history museum in the Denver-Boulder area.
"The West is such a critical region regarding our opinion of ourselves as a nation, and there's this great void in the history where women are not a part of it," Dewey says. "So if you put those things together, there's a national need for a museum like this."
And she has some help. Her husband, Victor Danilov, is former director of the world-renowned Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. "There's an obvious need for such a facility," says Danilov, who has written sixteen books on museums, "and it's a great challenge to make it succeed."
That's because the two are starting from scratch. Dewey says the museum is three to five years from realization, but little more than 1 percent of the estimated $25 million price tag has been raised, and they have yet to find a spot for the project. Although Dewey and Danilov say agreements have been reached with some private individuals to show their collections, the proposed museum's exhibits are still in the brainstorming phase.
But the couple claim to have convinced such women as Cherokee Nation chief Wilma Mankiller, Western history scholar Patricia Limerick and Texas governor Ann Richards to lend their names to the project, and their goal is to finish a master plan by the end of this year.
When Dewey speaks of the museum's future, she envisions hundreds of thousands of tourists filing past exhibits, an archival library to rival any Western history collection and an educational center with classes and public lectures.
There are only eight museums in the United States devoted entirely to women's history, according to the National Women's Historical Resource Center in Washington, D.C., and none of those deal with the West.
Dewey's fascination with women's place in Western lore is evidenced by the bookshelves in her study, filled with volume after volume of stories about Chinese girls sold into San Francisco brothels, black slaves who escaped from plantations to become cowpunchers and Native American women for whom the West is simply "the land."
But some of the women who have made the history books remain shrouded in mystery. Sacagawea is well known as Lewis and Clark's Shoshone guide on their trailblazing exploration of the Northwest, but the story of her ultimate fate is murky. Both Wyoming and South Dakota claim her grave, but no one knows where she's really buried. And then there's Mount Silverheels, a Rocky Mountain peak near Fairplay named for a dance hall girl noted for wearing fancy silver shoes. She nursed her townspeople through a smallpox epidemic, but her real name is forgotten.
"What little has been done with women in the West is only a small part of a much bigger story," Danilov says. "There isn't anything else like this around dealing with the topic.
