The Captured Read online

  Herman Lehmann thought the Apaches were “morose” compared with the Comanches, whom he described as “a fun-loving people.” Nonetheless, even the somber Apaches occasionally held drinking festivals when someone prepared a batch of home brew.7 Herman Lehmann described these parties:

  All would get drunk, and even I’d get “tipsy.” Gambling and fighting would be the next thing on programme…. [I]t was no unusual sight to see braves, squaws and squatters all in a bloody pile, gnashing their teeth and swearing vengeance on each other…. After a week’s debauchery we would lie around and sleep and grieve over the death—maybe brought about by our own hands—of some loved one…. It was not unusual for an intoxicated warrior to murder his wife and children, or outrage his own daughter….8

  The communities in which the captives grew up rewarded cleverness as well as bravery. One day an old woman spied Clinton Smith at a spring eating a hard biscuit he’d swiped the night before. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that. The woman reported the theft to Clinton’s father, Tosacowadi. He summoned his adopted son to his tepee and demanded: “Backecacho, I want you to tell me how you managed to steal those cakes, with all of us near, and you have no clothes on which to hide them, after we have been trying for so long to catch you.”

  Unshaken, Clinton replied, “I stuck them under my arms.” He then demonstrated how he hid the stolen biscuits.

  Tosacowadi was greatly pleased. “You will never starve,” he said. “Give him two more for being so wise.”

  The Southern Plains Indians and their captives lived in societies that imposed few rules and punishments. Young men learned how to behave by observing their elders, not by being taught a moral code. As long as the tribe had enough to eat and wasn’t being threatened by enemies, camp life was relaxed and unfettered. The Indians gave their young free rein when it came to pleasures such as eating, drinking, sleeping, and gambling.

  And sex.

  As if adapting to a strikingly different culture weren’t hard enough, the boy captives watched helplessly as their adolescent bodies underwent confusing changes. The youngsters may have been fearsome-looking warriors, but when they let out a bloodcurdling yell, their voices occasionally squeaked and broke. They started sprouting facial hair, which the Comanches found repulsive. Clinton Smith remembered, “They would get me down, and, with a pair of tweezers, pull out every hair they found growing on my face. It was very painful to me, but I had to bear it.”

  The boys were also encountering unfamiliar new feelings and desires. The Comanches didn’t encourage premarital sex, but if it happened, they didn’t take it very seriously, either. Teenage boys normally weren’t the aggressors. Quite bashful, they stayed in their own tepees at night and weren’t disposed to go carousing. It was slightly older girls who took the initiative, slipping into the boys’ tents after dark. If the lovers were discovered, they would be the subjects of amused gossip and razzing around camp the next day.

  Those of us with captives in our families wonder whether we might have blood relatives among the Indians today. It’s possible, although I suspect that Adolph Korn, Clinton Smith, and Temple Friend were too young to have experienced this part of Comanche life. Clinton said that a Navajo once promised him a friendly, pretty girl if he ever got to be a Comanche chief, but Clinton wasn’t interested at the time: “I did not want any Indian girl.” Dot Babb, captured at age fourteen, was old enough to have been an object of the Comanche girls’ affections. If he was, however, he was too discreet to mention it.

  Only Herman Lehmann wrote frankly and unapologetically about his amorous adventures, first among the Apaches and later with the Comanches. As he explained, “With the Indian, all nature took its course, and we had none of those abnormal hugs on the sofa in a dimly-lighted parlor.” At the same time, he was careful to point out, “There was virtue among the Indians and it was rigidly maintained.” Ordinarily, the Apaches were shyer and more prudish about sex than the Comanches. In their system of beliefs, premarital sex was an offense against the girl’s family. Most couples were too bashful to attempt it, anyway. Even after marriage, some mortified newlyweds asked their cousins to stay with them and sleep between the couple for a while to ease the awkwardness.

  Herman chose a mate when he was about seventeen. She was a Comanche girl named Topay; they met while they were skinning a buffalo together. Herman confessed that when her hand touched his, “I had passions that I didn’t know I possessed.” He started watching Topay and following her around camp. Topay’s father didn’t like Herman and tried to keep them apart.

  One night Herman arranged to come see Topay at about eleven o’clock. He crawled inside her tepee and “found her awake ready to receive” him. He was “whispering sweet words of love and encouragement to her” when he felt a rough kick in his behind. Topay’s father was standing in the doorway. Herman promptly bounded out through the tepee wall, “leaving a pretty considerable hole in the tent.” As Herman circled the tepee, he came face-to-face with the girl’s father, who shot an arrow that struck Herman’s knee. Topay sprang from the tepee and took him in her arms. She rebuked her father for treating him that way. “He was behaving nicely,” she scolded, “and you should not have disturbed us.” Her father calmed down, apologized, and removed the arrow from Herman’s knee.

  Herman once referred to Topay as “my spouse.”9 He probably wasn’t using the term literally, although it’s not entirely clear whether he and Topay were considered married in the eyes of the Comanches. For many years after he returned home, an unconfirmed rumor persisted that Herman Lehmann had taken an Indian bride. One day the gossip would cause trouble between Herman and his white wife.

  The captives didn’t just come to love their Native American families; after a while, they also started to despise their own people. At first their hatred seems to have been born of fear—not so much fear of their captors but fear that the white settlers or soldiers they came across would mistake them for Indians, shooting first and discovering the error later. For the first time, the boys were on the receiving end of the white people’s gunfire. Clinton Smith said, “We were all painted up, and no one could have told me from an Indian boy…. [M]y hair had grown long, and I was sunburned so I looked like an Indian, and naturally I was afraid the white people would kill me.”

  In some instances, their fear of being killed by whites almost materialized. Adolph Korn received a flesh wound in the arm during a battle with some soldiers. In another hard fight between the Comanches and a wagon train of settlers, Clinton Smith was struck in the face by a shotgun blast that knocked him off his horse. After the battle, the Comanches held him down and picked out most of the pellets. He wrote in 1927, “Some of these shot are in my face yet.”

  As time went by, the captives were subjected to the same fiery sermons as the Native American boys their age. The elders’ rhetoric left a deep impression on them. According to Clinton Smith, “Our chief was preaching to us that every Comanche from ten years old must fight or lose our hunting grounds, saying the palefaces would brand us and make us work like they had the buffalo soldiers (negroes), and whip us. That inflamed us and we were determined to fight for our rights.”10 Our hunting grounds. Our rights. Those first-person pronouns, casually sprinkled throughout the captivity narratives, suggest how strongly the captives had come to identify with their new people after only a year or two among them.

  Herman Lehmann remembered attending an Apache council when Victorio, the famous Eastern Chiricahua leader, said: “The white man is the Indian’s enemy, and the Indians must quit fighting among themselves and all go together to fight the palefaces.” At the same meeting, Herman listened while another Apache leader named Red Wasp railed against the whites:

  They have robbed us of our hunting grounds; they have destroyed our game; they have brought us disease; they have stirred up discord among our own race; they have bought out and intimidated our braves; they have made profligates of our children, reprobates of our wives and destroyed our tradit
ions. They have wrought despair and desolation to our tribe, and for my part I am ready to fight until I fall.11

  These tirades had their intended effect; they gave the captives a sense of purpose and justification for attacking their fellow whites. By then the boys stayed with the tribes by choice. Clinton Smith recalled that there were times when he could have escaped. However, he had become so attached to his “chief”12 and other members of the tribe that he “could not muster courage enough” to make a getaway. Clinton had come to idolize his Comanche father, Tosacowadi, whom he described as “my best friend.”

  Herman Lehmann had even more opportunities to leave the Apaches. Several times they took him raiding near his old home in Mason County. Herman eagerly took part in these raids against the Texans, for they had become to him “the hated tribe of palefaces.” One night the raiders wandered into Fredericksburg unnoticed and watched the German-American boys drinking beer in a saloon. They quietly made off with their horses. Then the Apaches headed north to Loyal Valley, where Herman’s family lived. There, the raiding party stole his former neighbors’ livestock. As Herman related, “We passed right by my old home, and the Indians tried to get me to go see my mother. They called me paleface and urged me to quit them.” Herman refused.

  Similarly, the Comanches took Rudolph Fischer on raids near his old home in Gillespie County. Crouched behind a split-rail fence on a moonlit night, he watched his former neighbors pass by within easy killing distance. Legend has it that Rudolph even sneaked up to the window of the Fischer family’s house to catch a glimpse of his mother. Still, he had no desire to stay there.

  The captives’ hatred of the whites wasn’t just a matter of indoctrination. They were also deeply affected by the things they saw. Herman Lehmann recalled one particularly horrible mistake on the part of the U.S. Army. His band of Apaches was raiding in Texas, and some soldiers from Fort Griffin were following them. The soldiers came across a camp of friendly Lipans and other Apaches and mistook them for the raiders. The Indians in the camp had no reason to be afraid and put up no resistance. According to Herman, the soldiers charged into the camp and “murdered men, women and children, and only a few escaped to tell the tale.”

  Another time, when Herman was raiding with some Comanches on the Texas plains in the spring of 1877, his party returned to their camp at Quemado Lake and found that soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry had attacked it. He wrote:

  I remember finding the body of Batsena, a very brave warrior, lying mutilated and scalped, and alongside of him was the horribly mangled remains of his daughter, Nooki, a beautiful Indian maiden, who had been disemboweled and scalped…. In our council we swore to take ten captive white women and twice as many white children, and to avenge the death of our squaws, especially Nooki; we vowed to kill a white woman for each year of her age (she was about 18 years old), and that we would disembowel every one we killed.13

  The army had its reasons for these attacks on Indian villages: the guilty sought refuge among the innocent, and in the heat of battle, it was impossible to tell them apart, especially when the Comanche women and children joined in the fight. To the soldiers, any Indians who harbored raiders in their camps were accomplices and deserved to be punished. The Native Americans, on the other hand, thought the soldiers were waging a war of extermination and were looking for any excuse to kill off a few more civilians.

  The captives were practically the only people who got to see the conflict from both sides. Eight-year-old Minnie Caudle watched Indians butcher her relatives; nonetheless, after spending merely six months with the Comanches, she developed a bitter taste for the U.S. soldiers who pursued Native American raiders, and it stayed with her for the rest of her life. “When the army raided the villages, the Indians didn’t have a chance,” her great-grandson, Damon Benson, remembers her saying. “They slaughtered them like you would a bunch of chickens. They poisoned some water holes. She said the cowboys were real hard fighters, but they didn’t bother the Indian women and children like the army did.” (Benson doesn’t know whether Minnie actually witnessed an army attack on a Comanche camp or whether she just heard her captors’ tales.)

  Herman Lehmann reminded his audience that the Indian-white conflict was two-sided when he told an interviewer in 1906: “I have always found the Comanches to be my most devoted friends. Don’t you believe that the Comanche is a bad man. You hate him and believe him to be a rascal, but the Comanches don’t keep books and their side of history has never been written.”14

  Similarly, Jeff Smith, Clinton’s younger brother and fellow captive, thought it was important to present the Apache viewpoint even though he came from a family of Indian fighters and was himself a victim of a raid:

  In their opinion, they were justified in taking vengeance on the settlers for what they termed theft of their hunting grounds. They were forced back and back, and we must admit that, even before they became hostile, the pioneers did not hold their lives of much value. So they may not have been wholly to blame for playing a fair game of tit for tat.15

  Eventually, the captives’ hatred of their fellow whites led them to commit murder. Like Clinton Smith, Herman Lehmann, and Dot Babb, my uncle Adolph Korn almost certainly killed people. The boy captives didn’t just shoot and scalp other fighting men; many of their victims were civilians. Herman Lehmann, who murdered a white ox driver, came to think of killing as “sport.” Clinton Smith said, “I saw so many people killed that I became used to it, and looked upon it as a common thing of no more concern than the killing of a cow.”

  The former captives who told their stories in later years didn’t like to dwell on this aspect of their Indian life. Chances are they didn’t record all the murders in which they participated. As Clinton Smith explained:

  I have been asked many times, “Did you ever kill anybody while you were with the Indians?” When asked this question I always hang my head and do not reply. It pains me greatly when this question is asked for it brings up memories of deeds which I was forced to do, taught to do by savages, whose chief delight was to kill and steal. It must be remembered that I was just a mere boy, and that I had, without choice, absorbed the customs and manners of a savage tribe. I was an Indian.16

  In this candid but ambivalent passage, Clinton goes through an interesting progression as he grapples with his past, as if he were thinking out loud. First, he claims that he was “forced” to kill. Then he corrects himself: he was “taught” to kill, but it seems that he did it voluntarily. Clinton was “just a mere boy” at the time; but was his youth supposed to account for his thorough Indianization, his irresponsible acts of violence, or both? He admits that he had “absorbed” the Comanches’ habits—apparently not under duress, although it did happen “without choice,” i.e., unconsciously. As “an Indian,” it never occurred to him to question the values of his new people, including the practice of killing anyone whom the tribe saw as its enemy.

  Herman Lehmann wrote in a similar passage: “While I still love my old Indian comrades, the refining influences of civilization have wrought a great change in me. When I was a savage I thirsted to kill and to steal, because I had been taught that that was the way to live; but I know now that that is wrong.”

  Were the former captives genuinely remorseful over the murders they’d committed, or were they just trying to appease their largely white audiences in the early twentieth century? They explained their actions by blaming the Indians for having “taught” them to kill. However, the native people were not really the first ones to teach them that. Uncle Adolph was old enough to remember Grandpa Korn trying to shoot the Indian raiders who surrounded their cabin. Clinton Smith had heard his father’s stories about battling Indians while he was with the Texas Rangers. Rudolph Fischer had been raised among settlers who lynched a Comanche teenager on the mere suspicion that he might have been a spy and therefore a threat to their community. These children of the Texas frontier had learned through observing their elders that killing hostile Indians was sometimes ne
cessary to defend their own people. After they became Comanches and Apaches, what changed was not so much their moral views on taking an enemy’s life as their perception of who was an enemy.

  By the fall of 1872, Adolph Korn, Clinton Smith, Herman Lehmann, Rudolph Fischer, and Temple Friend were living with the Indians as Indians, fighting their battles and taking part in their raids, prepared to die in defense of the tribe if necessary. “I had by this time become to all intents and purposes a wild Indian,” Clinton Smith wrote. Herman Lehmann insisted that he “did not want to go” back to the white world, explaining, “I had learned to hate my own people.” The captives made it clear that they wouldn’t return to their former families unless they were forced to do so. That, in fact, is what happened to all of them. They didn’t know it, but their time with the natives was running out.

  Chapter Seven

  Searchers

  and Quakers

  On a warm spring evening, May 4, 1871, Auguste Buchmeier hurried along a wagon road, trying to find the army camp in the woods. Earlier that afternoon, she’d learned that the general was spending the night nearby, and he was one of the most powerful men in America. In Georgia, where he’d cut his path of destruction seven years before, people still spoke the name Sherman with a mixture of enmity and terror. Auguste wasn’t afraid of him, however; this man could help her more than anyone, and she was desperate. It had been almost a year since her boy, Herman Lehmann, disappeared.