The Captured Page 2
In the mid-1850s, Grandpa moved his family to San Antonio, where the market for his candies and pastries was larger. It was a good time to be living there. During that decade, San Antonio temporarily eclipsed Galveston to become the largest, most vibrant city in Texas. Businesses flourished, soldiers and traders came and went, and smart new buildings sprang up every month. Grandpa Korn opened his confectionery shop on Market Street, just east of Plaza de las Islas (Main Plaza). His specialty was elaborately decorated wedding cakes, which he displayed in the front window. Louis and Friedrika Korn’s children played hide-and-seek in the ruins of the Alamo.
In 1858 Friedrika died unexpectedly of a fever, leaving Grandpa with five children under the age of ten. He needed help, and he found a new partner who was just as needy. Less than a year after my great-great-great-grandmother’s death, Grandpa Korn married Johanna Bartruff, a recently widowed immigrant from Germany. She was twenty-one, exactly half his age. Grandpa also adopted her three-month-old twins, Charlie and Adolph.
Louis and Johanna Korn’s amalgamated family numbered nine by the time they set out for the Hill Country in the latter part of 1860, and their spirits were high. They awoke each morning to see a light frost on the tall, brown grass and a misty blue haze over the hills ahead. They had every reason to believe that after a few years of hard work and sacrifice, they’d be cattle barons. The nation had just elected a controversial new president, Abraham Lincoln, and South Carolina was threatening to break away from the United States, but that wasn’t likely to have much impact on people out in the hinterland.
The Korns established their new home on the eastern edge of Mason County, near the German-American settlement of Castell. They weren’t one of the first families there; Castell and its founders had already survived thirteen winters by 1860. The Korns arrived to find a close-knit, orderly community of 137 people whose homes were nestled among the sprawling oaks and native pecan trees. The Llano River was wide and shallow, its clear water pouring over low ledges and swirling around gray and pink rock islands. Ten-acre farm plots with log cabins—what passed for civilization in that remote out-post—already lined the grassy lowland along the north bank of the river. The Korns became members of Castell’s Methodist church, the only other token of civilized life in the area.
Although the children of Castell grew up in an idyllic natural setting, everyday life was far from utopian. The older Korn children, accustomed to the relative comfort and urbanity of San Antonio, must have been appalled by their new living conditions. “People living now as we had to live then would be looked on as mighty sorry white trash,” declared my granny Hey. She was ten years old when the Korn family arrived in Castell.
Popular culture, especially western movies, has tended to elevate the living standards of settlers on the Texas frontier during the 1860s. In John Ford’s The Searchers, for instance, the pioneer family lives in a rustic but comfortable house of several rooms. Its wood-plank floors are covered by woven rugs. The glass windows are curtained. The family eats substantial meals off elegant Blue Willow china neatly laid out on a long, polished table, with plenty of spare dishes on the shelves. Their clothes are tidy and look barely worn. A rocker and a padded armchair wait invitingly beside the fire. On the mantel of the broad fireplace sits a kerosene lamp and a handsome clock.
A typical house in Castell during the 1860s would have looked nothing like that. The immigrants’ dwellings were crude log cabins of one or two rooms. The walls never quite fended off the strong gales of a winter norther; however, they did manage to trap the one-hundred-plus-degree heat of August. The floors were hard-packed dirt. No matter how many times a housewife swept them, they still wouldn’t seem clean. The thatched roofs leaked. The windows had no screens or glass, only shutters. During the daytime, a person could either leave them open and risk an invasion of grasshoppers, wasps, and mosquitoes, or close them and sweat in a dark room. Cooking was done over an open fire, either in the fireplace, if the family was fortunate enough to have one and the weather wasn’t sweltering, or else outside the cabin. At night the only source of light was a twisted rag dipped in tallow and set on a tin plate. It was barely enough to read by; but that didn’t matter, because there was hardly anything to read, except the family Bible and maybe an almanac. Most of the children were illiterate, anyway.
The settlers around Castell supplemented their simple diets with whatever they could take off the land: deer, turkey, rabbits, wild plums and grapes, persimmons, even prickly pear apples and weeds. Occasionally, the native plants they ate turned out to be poisonous, making them seriously ill. They didn’t do much canning or preserving to store food for the winter, because they didn’t have jars. They rarely got wheat flour for bread, and they were desperate for corn. Any time U.S. soldiers camped nearby, the locals scoured the ground afterward for corn their horses might have left uneaten. They also tried to keep a little whiskey on hand to trade the soldiers for grain. “It was a ‘lucky’ that could afford corn bread, black molasses, bacon and beans six days in the week and biscuits for dinner on Sunday,” said Granny Hey. The children dreaded the arrival of visitors during the Sunday meal, because they had to wait and eat at the second table.
Money was scarce. Sometimes the men of Castell left home to take odd jobs such as splitting rails, leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves. As Granny Hey recalled, “Many of the Germans who later became wealthy would work twelve hours a day for fifty cents, and save thirty-five cents of it.” Even when the settlers had money, there wasn’t much food for sale.
The Korn children didn’t attend school—there wasn’t any. Sometimes a teacher would attempt to hold classes for a few days or weeks at one of the settlers’ houses. Usually, however, the children were needed at home. Like the adults, the youngsters spent almost every day carrying out tedious and repetitive chores. Johanna Korn often told her stepdaughters, “I hope you poor children won’t have to work and live as hard as we women have to work and live.” She seemed to overlook the fact that they already did. Granny Hey and her sisters hauled water, gathered firewood, milked cows, ground corn (or acorns when there was no corn), herded livestock, made soap, sewed, and washed clothes. The laundry list wasn’t extensive; each family member had only about two suits of clothing, made of coarse cotton fabric or deerskin. The kids had no shoes. Their feet and arms itched from frequent brushes with stinging nettle, cat’s-claw, and thistles. As they went about their work, they had to watch out for diamondback rattlesnakes along the sandstone ledges and cottonmouth moccasins in the river bottom.
It soon became obvious to Grandpa Korn that Castell wasn’t quite the paradise he had envisioned. Yet perhaps, at the end of the day, in the tranquil moments just before dark, Grandpa paused from his hard labor to watch a fiery sunset over the Llano River, observe a skittish whitetail deer at its evening watering, or listen to a bobwhite quail signaling its mate, and thought to himself: Maybe this wasn’t a mistake. Stop thinking about San Antonio, New Orleans, New York. This is home now. Somehow, he was going to make it tolerable.
Then everything fell apart. Grandpa Korn had invested $1,200 in cattle—his life savings, plus all of the proceeds from the sale of his confectionery in San Antonio. According to Granny Hey, he “never got one dollar back.” It’s hard to account for the Korns’ complete failure in the cattle business, though the outbreak of the Civil War only a few months after they arrived in Castell must have been a factor. Cattlemen in Confederate Texas had lost their single biggest consumer, the federal army. None of the ranchers in the Hill Country could get reliable information about where and when to sell their livestock; mail arrived once a week at most. Another factor may have accelerated the family’s downward slide: the Korns were city folk with little experience raising livestock. The grazing land was unfenced; some of their wild cows strayed and never returned, or were stolen by rustlers or Indians.
Living conditions plummeted during the Civil War, even though Mason County was far from the battlefronts. E
ven basic foodstuffs were hard to come by. “We had to eat careless weeds and lambsquarter,” Granny Hey remembered. “Supper for us children was usually a bowl of mush without milk or cream.” The Korns were desperate. They had to try another line of work, and quickly, even at the cost of their self-respect. In a land where a man’s status was measured by the head of cattle he owned, Grandpa Korn was soon reduced to raising sheep. What’s worse, the smelly, thickheaded animals didn’t even belong to him. Louis Korn merely tended the sheep for their owner in exchange for part of the profits.
In search of new grazing land for the sheep, the Korn family left their home in Castell late in 1862 for the hardscrabble country of the Saline Valley, west of Mason. They brought with them the few milk cows they’d managed to keep for household use. Sometimes the family camped out with the sheep. Whenever they stopped in one place for a few months, they put up a makeshift shanty.
As Granny would say: like mighty sorry white trash.
The countryside in the Saline Valley was much rougher and less hospitable than Castell. The hills dropped off suddenly in craggy precipices rather than gentle slopes. Tough, scraggly junipers and daggerlike sotol plants dotted the ridges. The soil was stony, the cliffs a pale yellow caliche. Whereas the families of Castell lived close together, the settlers of Saline were widely dispersed. Some of their cabins were six or seven miles apart—ideal targets for Indian raiders. Indian attacks had increased in the region, for Fort Mason and the other federal army posts on the frontier were left in disarray once the nation split apart.
Unlike Castell, Saline had only a handful of German-American residents. The Korns settled three miles east of the farm of Grandpa’s friend, Adolph A. Reichenau, a German immigrant who had moved to Saline from Castell a short time earlier to run cattle. Reichenau, with his heavy dark beard and blue eyes, was a rough-hewn, hardy adventurer who’d served as a soldier and Texas Ranger. As soon as the Korns saw the Reichenaus’ compound, they knew what they could expect in the Saline Valley. The two-room log cabin was enclosed by a heavy picket fence made of sharpened cedar poles, with small holes cut so they could shoot at attackers. It wasn’t a home; it was a fortress.
The Reichenaus weren’t overreacting, for the threat of Indian raids was very real. On April 2, 1862, only a few months before the Reichenaus and the Korns arrived, the Saline community had been shocked by a triple murder. When a settler named Felix Hale went to his elderly neighbors’ place to return a wash kettle, he found their cabin on fire and feathers from a mattress strewn about the yard. Near the house, he discovered the charred body of Henry Parks, age seventy-seven. His wife, Nancy, seventy-two, had been killed near the cow pen. Along the creek lay the body of their twelve-year-old grandson, Billy. All three had been scalped.
Hale rode off to spread the news, and a Texas Ranger captain named John Williams quickly raised a scouting party to look for the Indians who had killed the Parks family. Some of the neighbors offered to ride with him. However, when Captain Williams asked one smart aleck in the Saline community to join him on the Indian hunt, the man refused, saying he hadn’t lost any Indians.
That sort of response wasn’t uncommon. If western movies have underplayed the harsh living conditions on the Texas frontier, they’ve also exaggerated the bravery and self-reliance of the farmers who lived there. On the whole, the Texas settlers were ordinary folks, no more or less courageous than their kin in Tennessee or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. Many of these people had moved to Texas because they hadn’t succeeded back home. Often, they remained there in the face of adversity not because they were stouthearted but because they were trapped. Poverty kept them from relocating and starting over, especially during the miserable years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. One Mason County pioneer wrote in 1868: “I would get away from here if I could but I am too poor…. I have been living on the frontier since 1853 and I now curse the day when I commenced it.”2
When Indians came around their homesteads, the settlers were usually outnumbered, and they seldom stood and fought to defend their homes if they had a chance to hide or escape. Clinton Smith, a young white captive who went on raids through Texas with the Comanches, recalled: “[W]e fearlessly went to the ranches and stole horses out of pens in the daytime. The white people would dash into their houses whenever we appeared, and we would go boldly into the pens and get the horses.”3
A few months after the Parks murders, the Reichenaus were startled one afternoon when a sorrel pony belonging to an eight-year-old neighbor boy, Billy Schumann, came galloping into their compound, started circling the house. “Get the gun, Daddy, get the gun!” Granny screamed. Before Grandpa could fire a shot, the raiders left. According to Granny Hey, they were afraid of the dogs. One of the Indians lost his saddle when he took off. The next morning, Uncle Adolph found it and claimed it for his own. “Before my stepmother would allow my brother to use it,” said Granny, “she put it in a pot of boiling water to kill the bugs.” The Indians also dropped some beads, which Granny Hey and her sisters were delighted to claim.
White settler histories are full of tales like Granny’s. It’s too bad that we have so few raiding stories from the natives’ point of view. The Texas pioneers, who were busy defending themselves and scratching out a meager living, didn’t have the luxury of mulling over the more interesting questions. For instance, why did the Indians bother to stake out the Korn house if the family had so little worth taking? Were they hoping to capture the children? Did the Indian who stuck his scowling face through the door envy or scorn the way these impoverished settlers lived in their cramped hovel? And why did the Indians circle the cabin and put on such a show if they weren’t planning to attack? Were they scared off, or did they just lose interest?
One Comanche captive, Clinton Smith, described an almost identical incident from the other side of the cabin door. He reported that the Comanches sometimes chased settlers into their shacks just for fun. When the white family in his story sprinted to their cabin, as Granny Hey and Johanna Korn had done, “[w]e all gave the war-whoop, just to see how fast those people would run…. We had a big laugh. The house was an old log affair, with only one hole in it, and a big old slathery boy was running so fast he missed the hole and went half way around the house before he could stop and turn back and hit the hole.”5
Anything for an occasional laugh. Life was hard and potentially short for both the Native Americans and the immigrants. As a former Comanche raider named Mamsookawat explained in his later years, perhaps only half jokingly: “We shot the white men, because it was better to shoot them than to let them starve.”6
Three years after the murders of 1862, the people of the Saline Valley were still living in a state of anxiety, expecting at any moment to hear that another neighbor had been killed and mutilated. Adolph Reichenau’s family awoke on the morning of January 8, 1865, to discover that they’d been raided during the night. Someone had made off with the laundry they’d hung out to dry the previous evening. A storm had blanketed the area with about fourteen inches of snow, so the Reichenaus were able to follow the thieves’ tracks to a pasture near their cabin. Sure enough, they found signs of an Indian camp. Then they saw something so chilling that they forgot about their stolen laundry. Some small footprints circled a tree over and over again. It appeared as if someone, probably a child, had been tethered to the trunk.
Later that morning, a tired, grim party of men from neighboring Mason County arrived in Saline. They were tracking some Indians who had captured a thirteen-year-old girl, Alice Todd, the day before, about four miles south of Fort Mason. The Indians had killed the Todd family’s servant girl and mortally wounded Alice’s mother. Her father had abandoned his family during the attack, claiming he couldn’t control his horse. The Reichenaus, the Korns, and the other neighbors realized what had happened during the night, while they slept soundly—Alice Todd, bound to a horse and shivering from cold and trauma, passed by their cabins, unable to cry out for help. At the same time, they felt a guilty sen
se of relief that it wasn’t one of their children.
A few of the men of Saline joined in the search for Alice Todd. Nothing caused the Texas settlers to hate Indian raiders more than the abduction of women and, especially, children. To their way of thinking, captivity truly was a fate worse than death. Death at the hands of Comanches or Apaches elevated ordinary dirt farmers to the status of martyrs in the quest for western expansion. Captivity, on the other hand, was unspeakably degrading. Life among the natives turned virtuous women into sexual slaves and civilized children into savages. Alice Todd was at that in-between age where she could be subjected to both types of ruination.
The rescue party pursued the raiders north into Menard County, then northwest beyond Fort Concho, a total distance of over a hundred miles. Snow was still falling, and the searchers lost the Indians’ trail several times and had to circle around for miles to find it again. The men and the horses were exhausted and badly chilled. At the foot of the Staked Plains, the tracks indicated that the Indians had divided into three groups. It was hopeless. Alice Todd was lost, another casualty of the frontier.7
After the Civil War officially ended on April 9, 1865, the frontier settlers hoped that peace and order would soon be restored. However, Indian raids in Texas only got worse. That summer the people of the Saline Valley heard nothing but bad news from the surrounding settlements. On July 26, 1865, Indians attacked and killed a man named Henry Kensing in southern Mason County. They raped and mortally wounded his pregnant wife, Johanna. Only three days later, the Comanches captured a thirteen-year-old boy, Rudolph Fischer, close to his parents’ farm outside Fredericksburg. Ten days after that, Eli McDonald and his sister-in-law, Gill Taylor, were killed by Kiowas in adjacent Gillespie County. McDonald’s wife, Caroline, and their two children, two nieces, and a nephew were all taken captive.