The Captured Read online

  Auguste herded the children into the house. She bolted and barricaded the door behind her. Then she and Mina waited and watched while the smaller children hid. Their only weapon was a double-barreled shotgun. It was loaded, but neither of them knew how to shoot it or reload it. They decided not to fire the gun unless the Indians actually broke inside the house.

  The Apaches rode silently around the cabin at a full gallop, waiting to see if anyone would come out or shoot at them. Finally, some of them dismounted. They caught the horses that were grazing in the pasture and saddled them. Then they drew nearer to the house and rode around it, firing their six-shooters at the roof. No one shot back. They jumped off their horses.

  The windows of the cabin were covered with curtains. The raiders hurled rocks through them and stuck a lance in the room to see whether anyone was inside. There was still no movement or sound. The Apaches rummaged through the lean-to attached to the cabin and saw a large box in which the family kept its personal goods. They opened it and found a small, unloaded pistol that the children used as a toy. The men had great fun playing pranks with the pistol, pointing it first at one and then another of their unsuspecting comrades, and roaring with laughter when it snapped and the victim flinched. Then they proceeded to rob the storeroom of anything they could carry off: blankets, linens, clothes, harnesses, and saddles.

  Meanwhile, one Apache approached a window of the cabin. When he tried to climb inside, Auguste shot at him. She thought she missed, but at least she scared him away. Another Apache tried to climb through the opposite window. Auguste fired at him with the other barrel of the shotgun, wounding him. After the second shot, all the Apaches ran to their horses. They took off immediately, firing several shots at the cabin as they left.

  As soon as the family stepped outside, they saw their dog, Max. He’d been wounded by lances and was weak from loss of blood, but was still standing and had never stopped guarding their house. The family also found that the raiding party had left behind a horse that had been stolen at the time of the first raid. The same Indians were responsible for both attacks; the Buchmeier farm had become a target. Two months later, the family packed up and moved to nearby Loyal Valley.

  Auguste Buchmeier had no way of knowing that by defending her other children, she’d unwittingly endangered Herman’s life. As it turned out, her shotgun blasts during the second attack had wounded two men. One was an Apache named Genava. The other was Herman’s adoptive father, Carnoviste.

  Back at the Apache camp, the two injured men grunted and howled as their friends picked turkey shot from their flesh. Genava received the more serious wound. He took a full blast to the lower part of his back, and the Apaches were afraid he would die. (He didn’t, to Herman’s great relief.) Carnoviste’s chest was peppered with shot.

  The Apaches beat Herman severely to avenge his mother’s well-aimed shots. They also showed him the clothing and the toy pistol they’d taken from the box in the storeroom. In the course of the raid, they told him, they’d killed all of his family. After that Herman gave up any remaining hope of returning home. He thought he had nothing left to go back to. Instead, he made up his mind to become the very thing that had terrified him only a few weeks earlier: an Apache warrior.

  In 1963 Frontier Times magazine reprinted a condensed version of Herman Lehmann’s story. During my childhood, my dad saved a well-worn copy of the magazine. I remember curling up on the couch in the dark, high-ceilinged parlor of the old sandstone house where we lived, looking at the magazine many times. The torture was what impressed me the most. The cover illustration showed Herman stripped of his clothing and buried in the ground up to his chest. His head was lifted, and he was screaming in anguish. His Apache captors hovered menacingly above him with lances and rifles, ready to inflict savage torments on the boy.

  The picture left a lasting impression on me. I assumed that was how the Indians treated all their captives. When I reread Herman’s memoirs as an adult, I was surprised to find that the magazine illustration I remembered so vividly from my childhood bore no resemblance to any of the incidents Herman actually described.12

  Were the Southern Plains Indians intentionally cruel to their child captives? There’s no simple answer, for the children’s experiences varied considerably. To a large extent, it depended on the dispositions of their individual captors. The sex and age of the child were also significant. The two girl captives I followed, Banc Babb and Minnie Caudle, were never physically abused during their captivity. Neither was Willie Lehmann.

  Dot Babb addressed the issue of the captives’ treatment in his memoir:

  Generally the Indians were very considerate of their captives, and I have known not a few to return to the Indians and others that would have returned if they had been given the opportunity. Such captives had found the Indians hospitable and generous, dividing liberally and freely any and everything they had or could get that would minister to the pleasure and comfort of the captured.13

  When the Indians did inflict physical pain on their child captives, it was the boys, especially those age ten or older, who bore the brunt of the misery. Still, in the cases I’ve studied, the situations in which Native Americans purposely hurt their boy captives were limited and typically fell into one of three categories. The first was initiation by hazing; sometimes the native women would beat and torment the boys when they first arrived in camp. The second was punishment, usually when they tried to run away or misunderstood an order. The third—and this was rarely carried out—was vengeance for injuries and killings committed by whites. I found no instances when the Indians tortured the children simply for torture’s sake.

  The Southern Plains Indians lived under mean circumstances in a merciless environment. They were passionate and affectionate, but they weren’t gentle people. They had to be tough to survive, and they raised their children to endure great hardships. For the most part, they didn’t treat their boy captives any more harshly than they treated their own sons. When Herman Lehmann described how the Apaches taught him to swim by simply tying a rope around his body and tossing him into a pool of deep water, nearly letting him drown while he floundered, he concluded: “The Indian boys were taught by the same process.” Roughhousing and deprivation were just part of their training. And the fighting men, hoping to build up their own ranks, were determined to make Indians out of those white boys who could take it.

  There were plenty of boys to choose from in Texas. The abductions happened time and again, with only minor variations. During the last week of February 1871, Indians were sighted in a neighborhood less than twenty miles northwest of San Antonio, Texas’s second largest city (after Galveston). The local press exclaimed that “with bands of Indians roving about and around San Antonio, we may presume that again our city has become the frontier.” Another San Antonio journalist, understandably edgy, reported that “within a short twelve or fifteen miles from the very office where we are now writing, distracted parents are bowed to the very earth with the weighty sorrow of loss of their young children, carried off by these very devils upon whom so much mistaken charity is being expended.”14

  At around nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, February 26, 1871, a raiding party visited the farm of Henry Marion Smith on Cibolo Creek, about twenty-three miles northwest of San Antonio. Henry, a former Texas Ranger and San Antonio city marshal, was a short distance from the house looking for his horses. Two of his sons, Clinton and Jeff, were across the creek herding sheep. Clinton, ten years old, was a good-looking, slender boy with a spare build, dark eyes, and black lashes. His complexion was fair, and his hair was almost white. His eight-year-old brother, Jeff, was also fair-complexioned, with dark eyes, a rather large head, and hair even lighter than Clinton’s. Jeff was so shy that he never talked to strangers unless spoken to, and then only to answer their questions.15

  The Smith boys’ stepmother, Harriet, had just given Clinton some matches to burn off the grass on a hillside east of the house. She was watching him to make sure h
e did it right. All at once, six or seven men appeared behind him, well-dressed and riding good horses. Their hair was short, and they wore black hats. They looked like cowboys out for a Sunday ride. As Harriet would later admit, “I viewed the whole tragedy without fear or excitement.”

  She watched the men chase Clinton and try to pull him up onto one of their horses. They were just having fun with him, she thought, but she could tell that Clinton didn’t like it. She watched him run down into the creekbed, where he disappeared. Harriet expected to see him jump the fence and come home. He never did.

  Up close the men looked like Indians. The Smith brothers’ first inclination was to run for the house. However, the raiders cut them off, riding between them and home. The two brothers then headed for each other. Clinton took Jeff’s hand and they sprinted. When Jeff got tired and fell behind, Clinton carried him on his back and kept running as best he could.

  The Indians, a mixed group of Lipan Apaches and Comanches, soon overtook the Smith boys. A Comanche jerked Jeff off Clinton’s back, grabbing the younger boy by the hair. He held on to Jeff’s white hair while the boy kept running alongside the horse. Then the man pulled him up.

  Clinton realized that it was not only useless but also risky to resist anymore. An Apache patted him on the back, indicating that he should get on the horse behind him. Clinton walked up to the man, who took the boy’s hand and stuck out his foot to use as a step. Clinton climbed on, and they galloped off.

  By the time Henry Smith returned to the house, Harriet was worried. She told her husband that the boys had gone off with some cowboys and never had come back. Henry ran to the place where Clinton had disappeared. He didn’t see any sign of him. He couldn’t find Jeff, either. He started running in every direction, shouting frantically. As Harriet later wrote: “Then the awful truth burst upon our minds.”

  Henry got on his horse and tried to follow the kidnappers. Along the way, he asked a man he met to go to Leon Springs, about seven miles west, to let the neighbors know what had happened. The messenger reached there an hour later. In less than ten minutes, store-owner Max Aue and another man named Cardenas rode off to help Henry in his search. Aue, like Henry Smith, was a former Texas Ranger and was ready for action. The small posse followed the Indians’ trail as far as they could. All they found along the way was one of Clinton’s shoes.

  Indian depredations had become so common in Texas that the San Antonio press was almost blasé in reporting the Smith brothers’ capture: “We presume, as usual, these children will be offered for ransom by the savages, who have learned by experience, that a hundred dollars is the accredited value of stolen children.”

  The Indians in the raiding party were used to taking captives from Texas and Mexico and getting away with it. This time, however, they’d picked the wrong boys. The kidnappers were in for a much tougher getaway than they’d expected. The Smith brothers’ first cousin on their late mother’s side was John W. Sansom, one of the most fearless, energetic, and respected captains of the Texas Rangers. Absolutely determined to bring his young cousins home, Captain Sansom was prepared to show the raiding party that Texas Rangers, like Southern Plains Indians, could ride all day and night without rest or food.

  Sansom was stationed near Kerrville at Camp Verde. He learned about his cousins’ abduction Sunday night around eleven o’clock and didn’t wait for daylight. Within an hour after he got the news, San-som was on the Indians’ trail with all but two of his men—seventeen rangers, “eager for an affray” and ready to “have a fight if possible.” They took ten days’ rations, expecting to be on the trail at least that long. The rangers headed toward Austin, thinking they might intercept the raiding party. They rode the rest of that night and all day Monday until seven o’clock in the evening. Finally, they stopped to buy corn for their horses.

  Meanwhile, the Indians were riding just as relentlessly, trying to lose the rangers. By Tuesday Clinton and Jeff Smith still hadn’t had anything to eat. The day before, the Indians had killed a cow. The boys had refused the bloody milk and raw meat their captors tried to give them. By the third day, they weren’t so fussy. When the Indians killed another cow, Clinton and Jeff “were watching like dogs” for their portion. The men tossed the boys some raw liver. Clinton was so hungry that he grabbed the first piece away from his younger brother. The Indians laughed at them.

  Later that day, the Smith boys witnessed their first murder. When the raiders came upon a man splitting rails, one of the Indians crept up and shot him with arrows. They made Clinton roll the body over so they could have a look at their victim.16 Afterward, they rode through a stretch of thorny brush. As Jeff recalled, “It ripped our flesh like keen knife blades and we bled like stuck hogs.”

  Around daylight on Wednesday, March 1, the Indians heard some dogs barking. The Smith boys rallied, thinking they were about to be rescued. As the Indians pressed on, they kept looking back anxiously. The party split up into two groups. Clinton went with one, Jeff with the other. The Indians also set fire to the dry grass, trying to destroy their tracks.

  By then the rangers had followed the Indians’ trail about thirty-five or forty miles over very rough terrain. When they found the tracks indicating that the raiders had taken off in different directions, Captain Sansom figured they were trying to join other groups of Indians. From signs along the way, he estimated that his cousins’ captors were only twelve hours ahead of him.

  Meanwhile, the Indians kept watching for the search party, stopping on a high peak to survey the countryside and have a smoke. They offered Clinton some tobacco, but he was too hungry to accept. He said, “I began to think they had quit eating altogether.” From there they headed down into a long, brushy draw. Some of the men dismounted and crept off with their bows. Half an hour later, they returned. One of the Indians gave Clinton two pieces of skin and made signs for him to tie them to a shield. They were human scalps. That evening the scattered Indian groups used smoke signals to locate each other. Clinton’s bunch rode to join the men who were holding Jeff. They ate some colt meat for supper.

  On Thursday morning, the Indians came upon two cowboys riding up a river. Clinton recalled, “As I saw those young men coming, and knowing what was going to happen, I got nervous and wanted to cry out and warn them, but I knew it would not be safe for myself and my little brother.” The Indians opened fire on the cowboys, killing both of their horses. However, the cowboys got the upper hand in the short battle that followed. They killed one Indian and wounded another in the shoulder.17

  By Friday, March 3, Captain Sansom and the rangers had reached the Llano River. They’d followed the Indians’ trail westward in a zigzag pattern for another forty miles. The Indians seemed to have gained a little on them. They stopped to get some corn for their horses. The next day, they found signs that the Indians had headed due north after crossing the river. The rangers traveled about forty miles that day, almost to the head of the Llano River. They set up camp once they found good grass for their horses.

  That night the rangers met the enemy. Rain, normally a welcome visitor to the parched hills of central Texas, arrived at the worst possible time. By the next morning, the Indians’ tracks had been obliterated. The rangers had no choice but to turn back on Sunday, March 5, a week after the chase started. In his report, Captain Sansom wrote: “I must in justice to my men with me on scout say that I never have seen men more determined. Some were truly sick when they saw that it was impossible to catch the Indians and recover the boys which we were satisfied they had.”

  Meanwhile, the Smith boys, traversing the open plains of northern Texas, saw their first buffalo. The Indians roped one. When Clinton ran up to it, the buffalo turned and knocked the breath out of him. The Indians had a good laugh. As for Clinton, he “was learning the wild savage life pretty fast, but it was in a rather tough way.”

  They reached a large camp of Mowway’s group of Comanches. Mowway (Shaking Hand) was the principal chief of the Kotsotekas, who ranged primarily in easter
n New Mexico. He’d made a name for himself some years earlier when he single-handedly wrestled a grizzly bear and stabbed it to death, and he wore one of the bear’s claws in his hair as a reminder. That evening the women celebrated the men’s return by preparing a big feast of raw buffalo, horse, and mule meat. They tossed some chunks to the Smith boys, who ate them greedily. Later, the Comanches held a dance over the scalps the raiding party had brought back. Some of them dressed as animals—deer, bear, buffalo, owls, eagles, and turkeys. Clinton and Jeff, as spoils of war, were displayed in the parade along with the scalps.

  The day after the boys’ arrival, the Comanches painted Clinton and placed a string of beads around his neck. One of the men led him to an arena, where a number of people were waiting. The man’s name was Tosacowadi (Leopard Cat).18 He was a powerful figure who stood six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds.

  Clinton was terrified, thinking the Comanches were going to kill him there. Instead, some women arrived with a Comanche boy about Clinton’s age. The boy entered the arena. Clinton was relieved, but he still wasn’t sure what was going on. He didn’t have much time to think. The Comanche boy charged Clinton and knocked him down. Clinton didn’t resist. He simply picked himself up. Once he was on his feet, the boy knocked him down again. Then he jumped on Clinton and started beating him. Clinton still didn’t know what to do, so he did nothing.

  Tosacowadi entered the arena and pulled the Comanche boy off Clinton. That was the end of the fighting for that day. Tosacowadi took Clinton by the hand and led him off. He attempted to explain what he should do, but his words and gestures only baffled Clinton more. Then Tosacowadi tried speaking Spanish, and Clinton understood him. As it turned out, the Indians had placed bets on the fight. Tosacowadi wanted Clinton to whip the Comanche boy so that he could win some horses from the women who were promoting him. Tosacowadi took good care of Clinton, grooming him for the next match.