The Captured Read online

  Herman, almost eleven, sprinted across the field. He was a slender boy, small for his age. Like his brother, Willie, he had sandy hair and gray eyes. Another Indian named Carnoviste caught him, slapped and choked him, then tore off his blue pants and hickory shirt. Though Herman was normally bashful, he fought back violently. He yelled, pulled Carnoviste’s long black hair, kicked him in the stomach, and bit him. But the Indians were too strong for them. They dragged the three older children to the edge of the wheat field, where their companions were waiting on horseback. Willie’s captor tossed him over the rock fence, and other Indians tied him to a horse. Herman nearly got loose from Carnoviste, so Chiwat, who was only about seventeen, came to his aid.

  While Carnoviste and Chiwat were struggling to shove Herman over the fence, Caroline managed to break away. She dashed toward the house, screaming for help. The children’s mother, Auguste Buchmeier, heard the screams and rushed to the door of the family’s log cabin. At first she thought the men chasing her children were cowboys. However, her oldest daughter, Mina, ran to the house and shouted, “Mama, I think it is Indians.” Auguste’s husband, Phillip Buchmeier, jumped up from his meal, grabbed his gun, and bolted out of the cabin.7

  Meanwhile, one of the Indians raised his six-shooter and fired at Caroline as she ran across the field. She dropped down in the wheat, unhurt. The Indians didn’t have time to go after her. They took off with Herman and Willie before the boys’ stepfather could fire any shots. Phillip Buchmeier then tried to round up a posse to follow the raiders’ trail. As bad luck would have it, all the men in his sparsely settled neighborhood were out looking for their cattle that afternoon.

  When news of the Lehmann brothers’ capture reached the community later that day, only one neighbor could truly understand what they were going through. Ten-year-old Minnie Caudle, who had spent six months in a Comanche village, was living with her family in Loyal Valley, about four miles east of Phillip and Auguste Buchmeier’s farm on Squaw Creek. Perhaps only she believed that the Indians were not going to harm the boys. She knew they had other plans.

  Herman Lehmann was fair-complexioned and freckled. He was also naked. Before long his tender skin was blistered from riding in the midday sun and bloody from brushing against mesquite needles and cat’s-claw bushes. Tied to a horse like a slain deer, he couldn’t dodge the thorny branches.

  They were heading northwest. The Indians stopped to rest for a while on the banks of the Llano River across from the mouth of Willow Creek, only seven miles from the site of the capture. They weren’t too worried about a posse overtaking them. During the raid, they’d had a chance to size up the German farmers in the area, and they’d been easy prey.8 Before they lay down, they tied Herman and hobbled Willie.

  Eventually, they pushed on. All Herman and Willie got to eat that afternoon were some berries. They kept riding after the sun went down. The full moon was on the wane, still bright enough to make the raiders’ flight easy. In the middle of the night, they came upon a young calf lying down. Carnoviste slew it, cut open its stomach, and ate the milk it had nursed. He motioned for Herman to do the same.

  The boy refused.

  Carnoviste grabbed Herman and thrust the boy’s head into the calf’s paunch. He rubbed the contents all over his face and forced some of the mush into his throat. Then he held the boy’s nose.

  Herman swallowed. Immediately, he vomited.

  Carnoviste then cut out the calf’s kidneys and liver. He made Herman eat some of the warm, raw organs.

  Herman vomited again.

  Carnoviste scooped up Herman’s vomit, forced it into his mouth, and made him swallow again. Once more it came up.

  Then Carnoviste soaked the matter in warm blood and tried again. The blood seemed to settle Herman’s stomach, for he was able to keep it down. Carnoviste washed the boy’s face, and they took off into the darkness, both riding on the same horse.

  When daylight came, Carnoviste was curious to see if Herman knew how to shoot. He took the cartridges out of his pistol and handed it to Herman. They played with the gun for a while, and Herman began to think Carnoviste was easygoing. That opinion soon changed. When Herman couldn’t understand what his captor was saying or wanted him to do, Carnoviste smacked the boy until he comprehended.

  Finally, the Indians decided to see how well Herman could ride. During their raid in the Texas Hill Country, they’d stolen between twenty and twenty-five horses. They roped a wild pony and tried to put Herman on it. The boy yelled, terrified. He and the pony fought several rounds with each other, with no clear winner. Eventually, the Indians were satisfied and let him off.

  Eight-year-old Willie fared better; he wasn’t tested as severely, probably because of his youth. Unlike Herman, he got to keep his clothes. His captor also gave him a furry cap made from the scalp of a calf’s head and a small pair of deerskin moccasins. The man offered him some raw meat but didn’t force him to eat it. As Willie recalled, “He never did beat me or abuse me, but he often frightened me.”

  That evening the Indians washed and dressed the sores the boys had developed from hard riding and brushing against thorns. Then they painted Herman and Willie like Indians, using black rocks and saliva to obtain a yellowish red hue. Herman was tied securely with ropes at night to keep him from escaping, but Willie was turned loose. He almost got away that night. He remembered, “I rolled down a hill some distance from camp and could have slipped away, but I was too scared. I was too little to know what to do; so I climbed the hill and went back to sleep. Early the next morning I heard roosters crowing, and I knew then that we were not far from a farm house.”

  While they were riding the next day, one of Willie’s new moccasins fell off. He poked his captor in the side, but couldn’t get his attention. When the man finally looked back, Willie pointed solemnly to his naked white foot. He was scared that the Indians would beat him for losing the moccasin. Instead, they just laughed.

  Like all parents who lost their children to Indian kidnappers, Au-guste Buchmeier must have blamed herself. She should have taken the threats more seriously. Reports of horse thefts and brushes with Indians had been circulating through Mason and Llano Counties that month. Only a week before her boys were taken, some Indians had attacked John Brite of Mason while he was driving his wagon to his father-in-law’s ranch with his family. As Auguste would soon learn, the Indians who abducted Herman and Willie had tried to take the son and daughter of her neighbors, Johann and Margretha Anderegg, only three hours before they raided her place. One of the raiders had managed to lift the girl onto his horse, but her father jumped on the Indian and finally wrested her away from him. Auguste and her neighbors probably realized the same thing: if the Indians had succeeded in capturing the Anderegg children, they might not have taken the Lehmann boys.

  Auguste had let her children roam the woods freely and hadn’t taught them to be afraid of Indians, even though tales of killings and captivities circulated through the area. Rudolph Fischer of Fredericksburg had vanished five years earlier and was presumed dead. Temple Friend, one of the children captured in Legion Valley two winters ago, was still missing. His parents had given up on Texas and resettled in Kansas. Just five months before Auguste’s own sons were taken, some Indians had stolen Louis and Johanna Korn’s boy near Castell, ten miles to the northeast. The Korns had become so distraught that they’d abandoned the Hill Country and moved back to San Antonio.

  Unlike the Friends and the Korns, Auguste Buchmeier wasn’t going to pack up and leave. From an early age, life had taught her to endure whatever adversity came her way, including the untimely death of her first husband while she was expecting their sixth child. The day her boys were carried off, she and Phillip, her second husband, wrote a letter to the commanders of Fort Concho and Fort McKavett, imploring them to search for Herman and Willie. Unfortunately, no one knew which Indians had taken them. Auguste and Phillip, along with their neighbors in nearby Loyal Valley, believed that the boys’ captors were Comanches. Later
, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington would suggest that the Indians who raided the Buchmeier home were either Kickapoos who lived in Mexico or the wild Kiowas or Comanches who ranged around the headwaters of the Rio Grande. In either case, the commissioner cautioned, the prospects of finding a captive among them were grim, for “[w]ith these Indians the Government has but little intercourse, there being no agent in charge of them.”

  The Buchmeiers, their neighbors, and the commissioner in Washington were all mistaken. Somehow, no one suspected that Herman and Willie Lehmann were in the hands of Apaches.9

  On their fourth full day of captivity—May 20, 1870—Herman and Willie Lehmann were riding with the Apaches along a wagon road about fourteen miles north of Fort McKavett, near the tiny outpost of Kickapoo Springs, when their captors halted abruptly and pulled off the road. The two boys were forced to dismount. One Apache stayed behind to watch the prisoners, while the others rode off.

  About fifteen minutes later, the Lehmann boys heard a rapid exchange of gunfire. As it turned out, the letter their parents sent to the northern forts had produced results. The Apaches had encountered a patrol of ten African-American troops of the Ninth Cavalry, led by a short, scrappy sergeant named Emanuel Stance. The soldiers had left Fort McKavett that day with orders to scout along Kickapoo Creek and “endeavor to the utmost to intercept the Indians that stole the two children of Phillip Buckmeier [sic] of Loyal Valley.” When they saw the Apaches riding across the hills, the cavalrymen charged them. After a short fight, the Apaches abandoned the horses they had stolen and fled to the hills. The soldiers killed the leader of the raiding party and recovered nine horses.10 (In recognition of his leadership on this mission, Sergeant Stance became the first black regular to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor.11)

  Soon the Apaches came rushing back to where Herman and Willie were waiting. They grabbed the Lehmann boys and took off. Herman rode on the same horse as the Apache in the lead. Willie shared a horse with the last man in the group. He thought the man was trying to crowd him off, perhaps to lighten the load and move faster. The boy clung desperately to his captor. While they were traveling at full speed, Willie fell off the horse and hit the rocky ground with a thud. He was still clutching a shred of the Apache’s black shirt in each hand. His captor either didn’t notice that he was gone or thought it was too risky to go back for him.

  When Herman glanced over his shoulder and saw that Willie was missing, he thought the Apaches had killed his brother. The two boys wouldn’t see each other again for eight years.

  Willie’s experience after he fell off the horse explains why Indian captives, especially the very young ones, didn’t try harder to escape. Lost in the wilds, with no settlements for miles around and no food or water, the captives were faced with the daunting question: escape to where?

  Willie wandered helplessly across the deserted grasslands, unable to find the soldiers who had just fought against his captors. He was terrified that he would be attacked by wild animals. The child had good reason to be afraid, for buffalo and wolves still roamed the Staked Plains of Texas in 1870, and occasionally a person heard the chilling scream of a mountain lion. As darkness fell, he crawled into some bushes, where he crouched in fear all night.

  Water was hard to come by on the prairies of west Texas. During a nighttime shower, Willie was able to catch a few raindrops by holding his head up with his mouth open. At one point, he drank muddy rainwater that had collected in some animal tracks. The only food he found was a piece of cornbread that a traveler had discarded.

  By his third day alone, Willie was so weak, hungry, and thirsty that he could walk only a few steps without resting. Around noon he spotted a white man on horseback and called to him in German as he approached. The man didn’t understand him and rode on by without trying to help the bedraggled waif. Later that day, Willie saw a freight wagon approaching. As it drew near, the driver spoke to him in German, and Willie climbed aboard. The wagon belonged to a teamster from Fredericksburg. He brought Willie to Kickapoo Springs and left him in the care of some settlers named John and Martha Flanigan. The freighter eventually returned and delivered Willie to his home in Mason County on the evening of Saturday, May 28, 1870.

  It was a bittersweet reunion for the Buchmeier family, for Herman was still missing. When Auguste asked her son where he’d left his brother, Willie replied: “Herman has gone on, Mama. They took him on.” Willie Lehmann’s testimony gave the civil and military authorities their best leads about the Indians who had raided Loyal Valley and kidnapped Herman. The boys’ stepfather, Phillip Buchmeier, assured everyone that his stepson’s information was reliable, as Willie was a “very clever little chap” who was “not in the habit of telling an untruth.” Willie would later summarize his four-day captivity as follows: “During my stay with the Indians I was never whipped or beaten, and besides scares, hard rides and starvation, I was treated well.”

  Herman and the Apaches traveled northwest across the Staked Plains without sleep, food, or water. They passed some waterholes along the way, but the Apaches wouldn’t let Herman drink—possibly to test his endurance. Eventually, Chiwat loosened his bonds. One evening at dusk, they crossed a small stream. Herman slipped away unnoticed and crawled to the creek. The boy was so dehydrated he wanted to feel the water, not just swallow it. He drank and bathed in the stream as evening fell. Before long the Apaches realized he was missing. He heard Chiwat and another Apache named Pinero searching for him. Herman kept still. Eventually, the Apaches gave up and went on without him.

  At last Herman had his chance to escape, but he was lost in the wilderness. He’d never been outside the Hill Country before, and his party had passed no settlements along the way. He knew that he couldn’t find his way home alone. He might have to wander in the open country for weeks, and he didn’t know what he’d eat or where he’d find water. Like his younger brother, the boy was afraid of wolves and mountain lions. As he weighed the merits of freedom and captivity, freedom seemed less appealing. “If I follow the Indians,” he reasoned, “they will see that I don’t want to leave them. So I will be treated better.”

  Herman bounded off in the direction the Apaches had gone. Soon Chiwat and Pinero saw him and stopped. They waited for Herman to catch up to them. As he got close, Pinero grabbed him by the hair and hoisted him onto his horse. Then they took off.

  That night in camp, Chiwat and Pinero decided to punish Herman for trying to escape. They tied a rope around his neck, fastening the other end to a bush. They strapped his arms behind his back and tied his feet together. Then they suspended him facedown by tying his arms and feet to a pole, so that his chest just barely touched the ground. Finally, they placed a heavy rock on his back, pressing his face into the dirt. The Apaches left him hanging in that agonizing position all night.

  The raiders and their captive had almost reached New Mexico before they got to the Apache camp. To Herman, the village looked as if it were swarming with about 2,500 Indians. The women and children rushed up to Herman. One fat woman grabbed him, pinched him, slapped him, boxed him, and threw him down. A man took a hot iron rod from the fire and used it to burn holes in Herman’s ears, so that he, like the Apache boys, could wear earrings on dress occasions. Then the Apache seared marks on the boy’s arms, probably as signs of ownership or identification. Herman kicked and struggled and hollered; finally, he fainted from the pain. When he came to, the Apaches were washing him.

  The next day, Carnoviste led Herman to a blanket spread with food. The Apaches had bartered with some Mexicans, and the blanket was covered with cakes, breads, sugar, coffee, cooked meats, and raw meat. Herman, for reasons he never could explain, reached for the raw meat. That greatly pleased the Apaches. They patted him to show their approval.

  Herman’s captor, Carnoviste, adopted the boy. Carnoviste called his new son Enda (White Boy). His wife, Laughing Eyes, was very good to Herman. At the time he came to live with them, she had no children of her own and lavished affectio
n on him. Even after her first baby, Straight Bow, was born, she continued to treat Herman as her natural son.

  Herman did small jobs for his adoptive father, Carnoviste. He would fetch the man’s horse, bring his food, light his pipe, wash his feet, paint his body, tighten the points on his arrows, and catch lice for him. When Herman wasn’t helping Carnoviste, the Apache women made the white boy work for them. He pounded corn, skinned game, built fires, looked after the babies, carried water, and hauled off the dung from camp.

  Eventually, Herman was invited to spend more time with Carnoviste. His new father taught him how to ride wild ponies and jump on a horse as it ran by. He learned to crouch close to his horse’s neck so that an enemy’s arrow wouldn’t hit him in battle. The warriors also trained him to use a shield to ward off arrows. The men stood about fifty yards away and shot headless shafts at him, while he moved the shield “as a snake when it tries to charm its prey.” As he remembered, “I had to learn to use the shield, and I was knocked down several times before I became an adept.” Then he added: “All Indians were thus trained.” Already the Apache men were starting to treat Herman like one of their own rather than as their slave.

  On July 18, 1870, only two months after Herman’s abduction, eight Apache raiders, including a woman and a boy, made a quick sweep through southern Mason County. They rode down the Onion Creek branch of Threadgill Creek and shot a farmer named Fritz Brandenberger through the arm. At about three o’clock that afternoon, they reached the Buchmeier place. Phillip Buchmeier and his oldest stepson, Adolph, were working about a mile and a half from their house, preparing to irrigate some land. Auguste was home with seven of her children. Willie and his twelve-year-old sister, Mina, had just returned from watering the horses at the creek. When Mina heard the dogs barking, she stepped outside the cabin and saw the raiding party drawing near. She cried out to the family.