The Captured

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  FOR ZACH AND BEN:

  This is your heritage.

  Let us now sing the praises of our

  ancestors in their generations.

  There were those who made a name for

  themselves by their valor;

  Those who gave counsel because they

  were intelligent;

  Those who led the people by their knowledge

  of the people’s lore—

  All these were honored in their generations,

  and were the pride of their times.

  Of others there is no memory;

  They have perished as though they had

  never existed;

  They have become as though they had

  never been born.

  But their name lives on generation

  after generation.

  –EXCERPTED FROM

  ECCLESIASTICUS 44

  Prologue

  The Trail

  If I’d been looking for it, I never would have found it. I came across it by accident on a hot, still afternoon in June. I was wandering alone through a neglected corner of the Gooch Cemetery in Mason, Texas, mulling over the names of forgotten pioneers who dreamed big and died young. With a sideways glance, I saw it, barely sticking out above the dry weeds in the miserly shade of a mesquite tree—just a tiny concrete stub with a funeral home plaque, a temporary marker that had served its purpose too long. It read:

  ADOLPH KORN

  –1895

  Even though the letters were weatherworn, the name leaped out at me. He was my own kin, and this cemetery was located on the outskirts of my hometown, my family’s settling place for six generations. But I never knew he was buried there. And Mason is one of those small towns on the fabled Texas frontier where people take pride in knowing these things about their ancestors.

  I stopped and stared at the plaque. The date of birth was missing; the year of death was earlier than I would have expected. Then I thought: It’s shameful. My family has let this pathetic chunk of concrete stand as his only monument. As if we’re embarrassed to claim him.

  I vaguely remembered my grandparents’ stories about Adolph Korn. He was a stepbrother to Granny Hey, my grandmother’s grandmother. I’d heard the family yarn about how he was kidnapped by Indians when he was a child. After he returned to his people, he refused to sleep indoors. For a while, he even lived in a cave like a wild man. He ate raw meat. Now and then he took his rifle and disappeared into the hills for several days, never explaining his absences when he returned.

  Other than those bits and pieces, no one seemed to know much about him, not even the most basic facts. For instance: How old was he when he was captured?

  “About ten,” my grandfather thought.

  “Twelve,” said Granny Hey.

  Eight, according to a fellow captive’s narrative.

  How long did he stay with the Indians?

  “Three or four years,” recalled my grandfather.

  Twelve, in Granny Hey’s memory.

  The Korn family history book said six.

  Which tribe was he with?

  No one knew.

  His story had so many gaps and inconsistencies that I doubted whether much of it was true. Still, it wasn’t implausible. Indians and their captives were facts of bygone life in the Hill Country of central Texas, the rural region north of San Antonio and west of Austin. I’d spent my first eighteen years in Mason County, an area with a rich Native American past. Until my ancestors edged them out, the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas had hunted deer in those brushy hills and buffalo on the grassy flats below. On that same ground, Native Americans and immigrant Americans had fought some of their last, desperate battles over who would control this country. It was clear who’d won. I didn’t even know where the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas had gone after they were driven away.

  I’d grown up on the cattle ranch my family had claimed as our home since Indian times. It consisted of two square miles of steep, rocky hills lying between the Llano and James Rivers, eight miles south of Mason. As a child, I rode my horse past the blackened mounds of long-ago Indian camps, climbed into caves decorated with faded Indian pictographs, and occasionally found discarded arrowheads and flint knives the rain had washed up.

  I was surrounded by reminders of the Indian wars as well. My sixth-grade Sunday school teacher was a daughter of an Indian captive. During my high school days, my friends and I sat by the road and drank Lone Star in front of the historical marker at a rounded hill known as Todd Mountain, where a group of Indians had attacked a family and captured a white girl in 1865. On the hill where Granny Hey had lived were the foundations of Fort Mason. From that post, Robert E. Lee and the soldiers of the Second Cavalry had protected my ancestors from Indians until the Civil War called the army away.

  I was also aware, even as an adolescent, that Mason and its closest neighbors—Llano, Fredericksburg, Junction, Menard, Brady, and San Saba—had once been much more lively and significant places than the complacent “last picture show” towns they’d become by the 1970s. A century earlier, this had been the heart of the Texas frontier mythologized by countless western movies and novels, the domain of independent cowboys and their archenemies, the Indians. Still, I never gave much thought to the people who came before me, not even to my family’s own Indian warrior.

  By the time I was grown, the story of my uncle Adolph’s life with the Indians seemed beyond reach. He’d died at the turn of the twentieth century, and the only relatives I’d ever known who could actually remember him were Granny Hey’s last surviving children. Aunt Kate, Aunt Fay, Aunt Net, and Aunt Mag had spent their childhoods in the 1880s and 1890s with Adolph Korn. As girls, they shied away from their odd uncle who walked with a limp and had a habit of picking them up by their pigtails. They didn’t understand why he still acted like an Indian many years after he came home.

  I wish I’d asked them about him, or at least listened to their tales more carefully. However, by 1970 they’d all died and taken their stories with them. Virtually no eyewitnesses were left. Eighteen years later, I no longer had my grandmother to tell me what she’d heard. As each generation passed, our elusive uncle Adolph receded further into the realm of legend, soon to be lost to history.

  I call him Uncle Adolph by way of reclamation. In our family, we always referred to him as Adolph Korn, for he was never really one of us. But seeing his grave got me stirred up. For the first time, this obscure ancestor seemed real. I wondered if there was a trail leading to his story.

  As soon as I got home that day, I called Julius DeVos, a local historian who catalogued Mason’s cemeteries, to make sure this was our Adolph Korn. “Yes, that’s your relative,” he assured me.

  Then I asked him a question that I should have been able to answer myself: “Why wasn’t he buried with the rest of the family?”

  “Well, Adolph was always a little strange,” explained Julius.

  That
did it. I decided it was time to find out who this shadowy figure really was—or at least get enough information to give him a decent headstone.

  His story was unusual but not unique. Dozens of children on the Texas frontier were captured by Southern Plains Indians in the 1800s and adopted into the tribes. Many came to prefer the Native American way of life, resisting attempts to rescue them. Long after they were forced to return to their former families, they held fast to what they’d learned while they were away. Some anthropologists call these assimilated children white Indians.

  Not all of the captives were white, though. The Plains Indian raiders abducted European-Americans, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and Native Americans from other tribes. They didn’t discriminate as to whom they killed or kidnapped—or whom they eventually adopted as their own.

  The white Indians who rode with the native warriors willingly took part in their horse-stealing raids, which sometimes led to the gruesome deaths of my fellow Texans. Having a captive in the family brought this history uncomfortably close to home. My relative was a German-Texan boy, much like myself, who grew up in a gentle, religious household, instilled with a set of values that most Americans consider absolute and universally desirable. Don’t eat with your hands. Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t kill other people. After spending only three years among the Indians, my uncle Adolph had thrown aside all his old ways of thinking. Did he come to see his own people’s morals as hypocritical and untrustworthy? Or were his dormant personality traits finally coming out, once he was liberated from the people who pressured him to act like a “good boy”? One other question troubled me: under the same circumstances, would I have become like him?

  The documented facts of my uncle Adolph’s life were fragmentary and inconclusive. Like many white Indians, he kept his secrets, leaving few tracks. However, I learned from my research that practically all of the captured children went through similar experiences. To better understand my ancestor’s captivity, I expanded my search to include other children who lived with the Comanches or Apaches at about the same time, especially those who chose to talk about their experiences.

  One of them, Herman Lehmann, eventually got away from his Apache captors, only to join a group of Comanches rather than return to his own kin. Another, Rudolph Fischer, chose to spend his entire adult life with the Comanches. Uncle Adolph’s campmate, Temple Friend, was brought back to his white family in robust health but soon withered away. Dot and Banc Babb, Clinton and Jeff Smith, and Minnie Caudle defended the native people throughout their lives. While these captives’ stories were alike in many respects, each contributed something unique to my understanding.

  Most of Uncle Adolph’s fellow captives lived until the 1930s or 1940s, which meant I would be able to find people who knew them personally. I placed ads in Texas newspapers, posted messages on genealogy Web sites, crashed family reunions, and even left a note in a bottle at one captive’s grave. Soon the responses came pouring in. Like me, the descendants of other captives grew up hearing stories, and they were eager to pass them on. They also wanted to know how many of the family legends were true. One woman sent me successive emails with funny, poignant anecdotes about her grandfather’s rough readjustment to the white world. She concluded: “I don’t see how all these little things can be of any interest to someone writing a book.” However, I was spellbound. The details were fascinating; significant patterns of behavior started to emerge.

  I also needed to get to know the native people Uncle Adolph lived among. Why did their culture and their hard way of living have such a strong hold on him? When I began my search, I was sorely uninformed about the Native American tribes who inhabited this continent before my ancestors arrived, and popular culture had only reinforced familiar stereotypes. I’d seen movies such as The Searchers, with its ruthless Comanches who attacked Texas settlers without provocation. I’d also seen later films such as Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves, in which vindictive U.S. soldiers splattered even more blood in the Indian camps. I suspected that the truth fell someplace outside these extremes, but I didn’t know where.

  Through the Internet, I contacted some Comanches in Oklahoma. I didn’t know how I’d be received, for the Comanches hated the Texans in the old days and blamed them for all of their troubles. However, they encouraged me to come visit them. When I got to Law-ton, I was invited to their meetings, their church services, and their homes. Over tables spread with platters of roasted meat and homemade bread, they shared with me their stories, songs, and aspirations. We had more in common than I’d realized. Their ancestors adopted many non-Indian children, and a number of those children grew up and married into the tribe. Like me, most contemporary Comanches have captives in their family trees.

  The captives’ trail took me from central Texas to the vast prairies of Oklahoma and Kansas and the open plains of the Texas Panhandle. I refused to let Uncle Adolph and the other white Indians rest in peace. Their story still speaks to us, and they have much explaining to do. These children witnessed a brutal chapter in the history of America from a unique perspective. For a short time, they became “the other.”

  Their trail begins in the Texas Hill Country, where European immigrants lived miserably and in terror of Indians.

  Part one

  A Fate Worse

  Than Death

  Chapter One

  New Year’s Day

  They had no reason to feel afraid when they first saw the three figures on horseback, riding steadily across a distant ridge. Even when the horsemen started heading their way, there was no cause to panic. It was noon, broad daylight. The riders were probably just some neighbors returning home from church. Maybe they were travelers on their way to Fredericksburg. They might be U.S. soldiers or Texas Rangers on patrol. There were many good reasons to believe they weren’t Indians. Still, as the riders drew closer, the two miles of riverbank that separated the shepherds from the village seemed like a great expanse.

  It hadn’t seemed nearly as far that morning, when they’d let the sheep drift upstream. Along the south edge of the Llano River, the herd was greedily ripping up the dry grass. The sheepdog trotted back and forth, keeping the flock from straying. The herders were ten-year-old twin brothers, Adolph and Charlie Korn, with identical broad faces, light flaxen hair, and high foreheads. Adolph had a scar in the middle of his chin. The boys spoke only German.

  The hillsides in that region were thick with live oaks, agaritas, and persimmons. The twins kept losing sight of the three horsemen, weaving in and out of the brush. As always, the boys were defenseless. Still, they didn’t try to hide; it wasn’t their habit to be cautious. Everyone knew that Indians raided on summer evenings when the air was warm and the moon was full, not on a crisp New Year’s Day just before a new moon.

  The sheep scattered and bleated as the horses galloped into their midst. Adolph was sitting on a log, calmly eating his lunch, when he got his first good look at the three Apache men rushing toward him. Charlie, a short distance away, dove into the bushes and kept quiet. He watched, petrified, as his twin tried to dash for safety. One of the Apaches grabbed Adolph, hit him over the head with a pistol, and hoisted him onto his horse.

  Then the Apaches disappeared into the brush like phantoms, as silently as they had come. It was over and done with so quickly that it didn’t seem real. The sheep went back to grazing, as if nothing had happened. As if Charlie Korn still had a twin brother.

  Those three Apaches dealt my ancestors the hardest blow of their lives on that first day of 1870. My uncle Adolph’s capture was the worst and last in a series of disasters his family withstood during their ten-year bout with the Texas frontier. They’d come to this hard, wild country by choice, and their decision turned out to be a poor one.1

  Grandpa Korn should have stayed in San Antonio, where his family was safe and modestly prosperous. My great-great-great-grandfather was a gentle soul, an immigrant candy maker who loved to host dances and German songfests and pl
ay Santa Claus at Christmas. A small, wiry man with large eyes and heavy eyebrows, he walked around the plazas of San Antonio with sweets in his pocket, ready to offer them to his pupils from the Methodist Sunday school. Never very strong, Grandpa Korn had weighed just over three pounds at birth and grew to a height of only five feet three inches. He wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier.

  Still, he felt the lure of the unspoiled wilderness a hundred miles northwest of San Antonio. His friends told him about the bountiful rivers and springs, the ample grazing land for cattle, the gently sloping hills covered with sturdy oaks and flowering yuccas. Hardly anyone lived there: just a handful of fellow German immigrants and a few soldiers and some drifters from the southeastern states. Grandpa decided to give the ranching business a try.

  For all its delicate beauty, the Texas Hill Country is an unexpectedly harsh land. Rainfall is erratic, and the area is prone to drought. Cattle that are round-bellied and healthy during the spring, when the countryside is flowering with bluebonnets, wine-cups, and red Indian blankets, may be wasting away by the end of summer. Mesquites, junipers, and prickly pear spread uncontrollably, draining the shallow aquifer and choking out the native grasses. Bold outcroppings of limestone and granite give the landscape its rugged appeal; but that same rock also underlies the fragile topsoil, waiting to crack the blade of a plow. Grandpa Korn didn’t know about that. He was thinking of the money he would make from raising and selling beef cattle. The U.S. Army needed to supply its frontier forts, and the urban markets in Texas and beyond were expanding.

  Most of his experience had been in trade, not agriculture. Grandpa Korn—his full name was Louis Jacob Korn—had lived in America twenty-four years before he came to the Hill Country. He’d left his home in Meissenheim, Germany, at the age of nineteen and arrived in New York in 1836. Like many immigrants, he moved around a lot, looking for better opportunities. In 1839 he relocated to New Orleans, then left Louisiana for Texas in 1845. For a few years, he tried farming near New Braunfels, a German-American enclave northeast of San Antonio. He also went into business as a confectioner, and that seemed to suit him. By 1848, at age thirty-one, he was doing well enough to marry Friedrika Grote, a neighbor. Over the next nine years, they had five children.