The Captured Read online

  That was the only time the children were afraid of the Indians in camp. Later, Minnie and Temple came to realize that the man was just fooling with them. Considering what they’d witnessed during their flight from Legion Valley, no one could blame them for taking him seriously.

  At some point, Minnie Caudle and Temple Friend were separated and went with different Comanche groups. The story of Temple’s time with the tribe has been lost. All that’s known is that he eventually ended up with the same group of Quahada Comanches that was holding my ancestor, Adolph Korn.

  Minnie’s experience has survived only through one published interview and a few anecdotes she passed along to her descendants. According to family lore, Minnie was treated well by the Comanches, especially the women. They dressed her in buckskin and greased her body with tallow to keep her dry during the rain and snow. At night her new mother told her stories around the fire. Minnie said that this woman “was very kind to me” and “always treated me as her own child.” The girl slept on a pallet near the wall of the woman’s tepee. The Comanche women “wouldn’t let the Indian men bother her in any way,” says a grandson, Frank Modgling. “They were good to her. The Indian ladies knew that Grandmother liked her meat cooked, so they cooked it for her. When they passed by salt licks, they would get some salt so they could season her food for her.”

  “She always spoke well of them,” agrees great-grandson Damon Benson. “The woman that took care of her would cook her meat better than she would for the Indians. Grandma said she was not mistreated in any way.”

  One night Minnie was nearly trampled by accident. Her great-granddaughter, Neoma Benson Cain, remembers her telling the story: “She said that the Indians were real jokesters. They’d stampede their own horses right through the camp, and just laugh! One of the horses stepped on the edge of the tepee, and it grazed her head. From then on, she always put her bed away from the wall.”7

  Like Banc Babb, Minnie spent only half a year with the Comanches. During the summer of 1868, several kidnapped children were recovered in Kansas. The process of redeeming captives was touch-and-go. The Comanches and Kiowas were angry with their agent, Col. Jesse Leavenworth, because he was no longer offering them ransom for captives. Once that summer, the Kiowas reportedly delivered two children to him, then changed their minds and took them back. (Leavenworth denied this story, asserting: “I have never failed to get a captive when they came near me.”8) Although the Indians peevishly refused to turn over any more captives to Colonel Leavenworth, they were on good terms with J. E. Tappan, the post storekeeper at Fort Larned, Kansas, and were willing to negotiate with him. In July 1868, the Kiowas delivered Eliza and Isaac Briscoe, two siblings captured in Parker County, Texas, to Tappan.

  Around the same time, the Comanches announced they would give up their captives, but they made it clear that they expected payment—two ponies at a minimum. The willingness of the Kiowas and Comanches to trade their captives that summer was partly the result of food shortages. Newspaper accounts described members of these tribes as “sullen and impudent because of the scarcity of provisions among them.” Buffalo were few in the region, and they had not received the guns and ammunition that the government had promised them for hunting other game.

  In late July, Col. Edward W. Wynkoop, the dapper Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian agent of the Upper Arkansas Agency at Fort Larned, was visiting a Comanche camp near the post when he noticed a white girl among them. He was able to talk with her. Fortunately, the girl remembered her name—Malinda Ann Caudle, or Minnie, as she was called. She could still speak English. Wynkoop told the Comanches that they must bring her to Fort Larned and surrender her.

  No one knows whether Minnie’s Comanche mother fought to keep her (or even who actually owned the girl), but the general feeling was that the white children must be traded for badly needed supplies. The Comanches brought Minnie to Fort Larned on July 25, 1868, and presented her to the post’s commanding officer, Capt. Henry As-bury. Apparently, she wasn’t afraid of either her captors or the white people, for she answered questions freely. Although Captain Asbury claimed that Minnie spoke English “very well,” he appears to have had some problems communicating with her. He understood Minnie to say that her parents had been killed, and that she had two or three brothers who were captives.

  Captain Asbury wasn’t especially worried that the Comanches would harm the girl or leave the region with her, for he decided not to try to take her by force. Before the Comanches left with Minnie that day, they promised to bring her and the other captives back to Fort Larned. They asked Asbury how much he would pay for them. He replied vaguely, “Bring them in, and I will talk about trading them.” Meanwhile, he wrote to his superior officer for instructions on whether or not to pay ransom.

  He hadn’t received a response by the time the Comanches returned with Minnie Caudle two days later.9 However, the federal Indian agent at Fort Larned, Colonel Wynkoop, demanded that they give up the girl without ransom. They were resentful; but they also knew that the Indian agents had the power to withhold their annuities. They agreed to hand her over.

  Wynkoop brought Minnie to his house so that his wife, Louise, could take care of her. The Wynkoops were a dashing couple. He was a social, polished gentleman, an amateur actor, and, according to the British journalist Henry Morton Stanley, a “skillful concoctor of drinkable beverages.” She was a former actress who had gained many admirers while touring the mining camp circuit in Colorado. The Wynkoops gave Minnie a doll, and the girl, thrust into yet another unfamiliar situation, became obsessively attached to it.10

  Shortly after Minnie was released, a newspaper reporter arrived when Louise Wynkoop was giving her a bath in a big wooden tub, trying to scrub the tallow off her. The journalist couldn’t wait to interview her; he burst into the room. “She ducked under the water and would not talk to him, wouldn’t even look at him,” says great-grandson Damon Benson. “She was embarrassed.”

  Colonel Wynkoop interviewed Minnie, whom he described as a “bright intelligent girl.” He learned the names of her parents and brothers, as well as the circumstances of her capture. There was only one problem: she was unable to state exactly where in Texas her family lived. Wynkoop had a hard time figuring out to whom she belonged. Apparently, he had never received a copy of the circulars that the Texas governor sent to authorities in Indian Territory and New Mexico concerning Minnie and Temple.11

  Minnie’s case was brought to the attention of the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, who in turn contacted the Texas governor for help in locating her parents. Governor E. M. Pease notified the commissioner that Minnie’s family resided in Llano County. Since the Caudles were poor, he requested that the Indian agency have her sent to the nearest military post, where the officers might arrange a ride for her. After a journey of three or four months that took her to Fort Harker, the town of Leavenworth, and Cherokee Town (near Fort Cobb), Minnie finally made it home to Llano. The celebration over her return was muted, for Temple Friend’s fate was still unknown.

  Still, the Friend family hadn’t given up hope; Temple’s recovery seemed imminent. On July 31, 1868, four days after Minnie’s release, representatives of the Kiowas and Comanches came to Fort Larned to meet with Thomas Murphy, a superintendent of Indian Affairs. Murphy demanded that the Indians give up all their white captives. They promised they would deliver Temple to their new agent at Fort Cobb when they received their annuities. By October that still hadn’t happened.12 Eventually, the Comanches returned to the plains with Temple.

  Meanwhile, the Friend family relocated. Matilda had given birth to a healthy baby girl, Belle Jane, less than a month after the massacre. According to local lore, Matilda’s face was still so badly swollen from the scalping and beating that she wasn’t able to see her baby for more than seven weeks. A few months after the baby was born, the Friends packed up and left Texas for good. They traveled by covered wagon, driving nine hundred head of steers up the Chisholm Trail, until they reached thei
r new home of El Dorado, Kansas, in September 1868. John and Matilda purchased a one-hundred-sixty-acre farm a mile east of town, and John opened a meat market on Main Street. For four more years, the Friends continued searching for Temple.

  The fledgling settlement of Legion Valley foundered after the raid of 1868, its soil stained by blood and the site forever poisoned by the memory of what had happened there. Betsy Johnson and several of her children moved to Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin. The two widowers, Babe and Boy Johnson, left Legion Valley and eventually remarried. The Friends and Johnsons weren’t the only ones whose lives were shattered by the events of February 5, 1868. Jack and Samantha Bradford had to leave the area, their reputations destroyed by a single lapse of courage when they abandoned Matilda Friend that night. The families’ log cabins became empty, crumbling shells, and the community finally vanished altogether. Even the graves of the five victims have been lost.

  When the Apaches kidnapped my uncle Adolph Korn, the only physical injury they inflicted on anyone was a smack on his head with a pistol. Similarly, the Comanches simply nabbed Rudolph Fischer as he walked along a deserted road. A number of other rural youngsters were scooped up and whisked away without bloodshed while they were tending livestock or working in fields. Captivity began in a horribly different way for some children, including Dot Babb and Minnie Caudle. Dot watched the Comanches stab, shoot, and scalp his mother. Minnie was present when her captors brutally terrorized, raped, and butchered her half sister, niece, and three cousins. Even though her Comanche mother shielded her from some of the worst sights, she said: “I remember how they suffered. They cried and prayed all the time and they knew they were going to be murdered.”

  Historian J. Norman Heard, who studied more than fifty captivity cases from across America, observed: “Frequently, the surviving members of the family were compelled to carry the scalps of their parents and little brothers and sisters, an experience which would seem likely to have instilled in them such a hatred of Indians as to make assimilation impossible.”13 Yet that wasn’t the case. Minnie Caudle’s great-granddaughter, Neoma Benson Cain, recalls, “She would not hear a word against the Indians.” Neoma’s brother, Damon Benson, agrees: “She always took up for the Indians. She said they were good people in their way. When they got kicked around, they fought back, because it was their land to start with, their hunting ground, their living.”

  Dot Babb was even more defensive of the Comanches. He was known to say on many occasions, “Bad Indians were made bad by bad white men.” When asked if he hated Indians because they’d murdered his mother, he replied: “You wouldn’t want to kill every white person you saw because some white person had killed your mother.” While Dot never absolved the “very desperate Indian” who shot his mother, he was nonetheless able to rationalize what had happened: “I don’t believe they would have killed Mother, but she held on to my sister’s hand.”

  Dot once told an illuminating story about a conversation he had with another customer in a bank in Clarendon, Texas, in the early 1900s. While they were reminiscing about old times, the other man admitted to Dot that he used to go to the Comanche reservation and steal the Indians’ horses. Dot listened to his tale in stony silence. When the man finished, Dot told him: “You were the cause of my mother being killed.” Recalling this incident in 1926, he added, “I had my mind made up to kill him if he said anything back. I would rather kill that kind of a man than let him live.” Dot, having convinced himself that the Comanches raided his parents’ farm in retaliation for horse stealing by Texans, went so far as to blame his mother’s death on white thieves rather than the raiders who actually killed her.14

  The ghastly circumstances under which Dot Babb and Minnie Caudle were abducted did not impede their Indianization and had no bearing on their lifelong attitudes toward Native Americans. The sociological literature on Indian captivities offers no explanation for the apparent lack of correlation between violence during capture and a child’s ability to assimilate; nor do the captives’ own narratives provide much insight on this point. It is worth noting that the Comanche individuals who adopted Dot and Minnie were not the same persons who had killed their loved ones; in fact, Dot never saw his mother’s murderer afterward. All the same, these children, who had had little if any previous close contact with Native Americans, were placed in Comanche households shortly after they saw Comanches take the lives of their family members by the most gruesome means. Nonetheless, Dot and Minnie didn’t transfer their abhorrence of their relatives’ killers to the tribe as a whole. The strong affection they developed for their Native American families and friends somehow enabled them to look past the horror they’d witnessed in those first days—and even find a way to justify it.

  Chapter Five

  Warriors

  in Training

  As late as 1870, the year of Adolph Korn’s disappearance, the abduction of children by Indians in the American West still made the front pages of newspapers across the nation. For people living on the eastern seaboard, these news items read like correspondents’ reports from foreign lands. Several generations had passed since their own immigrant families had lost sons and daughters to the native people, and to easterners it seemed inconceivable that Indians still captured children in the United States.

  Citizens on the East Coast sympathized with the western families only up to a point. Many Americans in the long-settled parts of the country thought the people out West were overstating their Indian troubles, even falsifying tales of atrocities. They also felt that the western settlers, who insisted on advancing the frontier at the expense of the native people, were largely to blame for the bloodshed.

  Regional differences of opinion on Indian relations gave rise to overheated editorials in America’s newspapers. Texas journalists lambasted easterners, whom they claimed formed their idealized notions of Native Americans from reading James Fenimore Cooper: “New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, &c., have millions who have never felt hunger, never known what it was to be for days, weeks and months in a constant state of watchfulness, necessary to preserve life and property.”1 However, the eastern press wasn’t impressed by the Texans’ clamor for more protection in the hinterlands. The New York Tribune lashed out against “that peculiar and unnatural and unjust warfare, which in disguise of frontier defense the settlers have for years past waged against the Indians.”2 The editors of the New York Herald suggested that the accounts coming from the Southern Plains were “grossly exaggerated,” proclaiming: “Not half the stories of attacks by Indians on white men, on trains, or the killing and scalping of soldiers are true.”3

  A few observers were able to step back and take a long-range, more dispassionate look at the realities of the longstanding conflict between Native Americans and newer Americans. In May 1870, The New York Times ran an editorial titled “Red and White,” in which the writer summed up “the essential difficulty in the Indian question” by positing: “The coexistence of the two races in close contact is impracticable.” The column went on to describe “an incompatibility of temper” between Indians and whites. It pointed out that the Native American, having utterly rejected the European-American’s brand of civilization, “has the enterprise and courage to insist that he will live his own life in his own way; and that is a way which is in fatal conflict with the age and its movements.”4

  The culture of the Southern Plains Indians, who lived by hunting and by raiding their enemies, was inimical to the values of virtually all other Americans of the 1870s, whether they descended from Mexicans, Europeans, Africans, or Asians. For that matter, the free-roaming life of the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches was alien to some of the more pastoral native people in other regions of the American continent. In hindsight the plains of America afforded ample land to sustain all the people living there in 1870, but the irreconcilable goals of native hunters and immigrant farmers goaded both sides into a hardheaded struggle for dominance. There would be no real peace until one group or the oth
er was annihilated, or at least broken in spirit. When the Lakota chief Red Cloud finally quit fighting the intruders, he reportedly told a white delegation, “We didn’t need all this land, and neither did you.”5

  A week after The New York Times ran its editorial, two more German-American boys from the Texas Hill Country, youngsters like Adolph Korn and Rudolph Fischer, got an unwelcome opportunity to learn firsthand about Native American life. One of them, Herman Lehmann, would eventually be the last white Indian to roam the Southern Plains.6

  After lunch the four children went to the field to scare the birds away from the wheat. It was a radiant spring day, a Monday, May 16, 1870. The countryside had rallied back to life after a bleak winter. It was still too early in the season for the children to think about the hard labor of summer, hoeing weeds and clearing brush in the heat. That day they were going to spend a lazy afternoon playing and sitting in the sun. Shooing birds was easy work.

  They weren’t expecting the visitors who silently appeared on horseback shortly after one o’clock. A few were dressed in blue army jackets, pants, and overcoats. Others wore nothing but breechcloths and leggings. Some had painted their faces red, black, and white. Their dark hair was plaited. Around their heads, they’d tied rags and handkerchiefs; one wore a small cap decorated with feathers. These men, eight or ten altogether, were armed with bows and arrows, six-shooters, and lances.

  The children looked up. They thought they heard the strangers speaking English, but they couldn’t be sure, for these children had never been to school and spoke only German. By the time they realized they were in danger, it was too late to run and hide. Their parents’ house was three hundred yards away. The Indians grabbed Willie Lehmann where he was sitting. He was eight years old, with sandy hair and light blue eyes. His stepsister, Auguste, a toddler of seventeen months, tumbled from his lap; the men ignored her. An Indian named Chiwat caught nine-year-old Caroline Lehmann as she fled.