The Captured Read online

  At about the same time as the attack on the McDonalds’ farm, Saline got hit. This time the victim was thirty-four-year-old Fred Conaway. He was last seen at the Reichenau place on his way to get a yoke of oxen. He’d been gone several days when Adolph Reichenau rode by his house and asked Conaway’s wife, Martha, where he was.

  “God, I don’t know,” she blurted out. Martha Conaway, five months pregnant, was frazzled by then. She’d been keeping her four young children close to her in case there were Indians around. When night fell, she hadn’t built a fire or lit a lamp.

  Adolph Reichenau and a few other men rode in search of Fred Conaway. They were about to give up when they noticed some buzzards circling. Along the edge of the Llano River, they found his partially decomposed body. He’d been suffering from two gunshot wounds and apparently was trying to quench his thirst at the time he died. One hand was dangling in the water. It was the hottest month of the summer, and the smell of decay was so strong they didn’t try to haul his body back home. Instead, they buried him beneath a nearby tree. Later, they found signs that he’d furiously battled some Indians from inside a cave and had apparently killed or wounded at least one of them.

  After Conaway’s death, the people of Saline began to question whether it was really worth trying to stay there. One of them, Rance Moore, lost 2,100 head of cattle and fifty-two saddle horses to a large party of Indian raiders in the daytime hours of August 8, 1866.8He decided to move to the town of Mason for safety. He’d helped bury his neighbor, Fred Conaway, and had lived in fear of Indians much too long. Even in town, however, his family didn’t feel secure. On the night of February 5, 1867, Moore awoke in terror when he heard a noise in the horse stable. He spotted a single, shadowy figure prowling about the corral. Like most Indian fighters, Rance Moore shot first and investigated afterward. The boy he’d killed was his own son, Daniel, five days shy of his fifteenth birthday.

  At the time the Saline settlers learned about the Moore family’s tragedy, it had been a year and a half since they’d lost anyone in their community to Indians. They started to lower their guard. On the morning of October 12, 1867, fifty-five-year-old Frank Johnson, a patriarchal figure with a long, white beard, went to look for his horses. He didn’t take his gun—and he didn’t come home. His wife, Betsy, wasn’t too worried. Once before Frank had set out for a neighbor’s house to get some cornmeal for breakfast and was gone for three months. However, the men of the community decided not to wait that long to look for him. They found his body several miles from his home, scalped and shot with arrows.9

  One by one, the families of the Saline Valley gave up and left. Adolph Reichenau lost nine horses to Indian raiders in June 1868, seventeen more in December of that year, and another twenty-five in March 1869.10He moved his family east to a place on the Llano River called Hedwig’s Hill. Betsy Johnson and her family returned to their former home, the Legion Valley community in southern Llano County, shortly after Frank was murdered in the fall of 1867. The Korn family went back to Castell in 1869. The Johnsons and the Korns hoped they could still find some semblance of serenity on the frontier if they stayed in settlements where the houses weren’t so far apart. Both families would be proven wrong.

  For Grandpa Korn, the 1860s should have been the era in which he established his place in life. As the decade drew to a close, however, he had nothing to show for his ten years in the Hill Country. He had stoically withstood Indian raids, but he hadn’t managed to profit from occupying the natives’ home. He had foundered in the cattle business, his American dream scrapped for salvage. Worst of all, he had failed his children. Louis Korn’s mother had been able to speak seven languages, and Louis himself could read and write both German and English. Most of his own offspring spoke only German and were illiterate. Grandpa even had to send them to work for other families for wages. During the last weeks of 1869, as his children halfheartedly observed the German St. Nicholas traditions and scavenged wild plums and berries for an improvised Christmas pudding, Grandpa Korn tried to convince himself that the next decade would be better.

  But New Year’s Day 1870 was just another working day in Castell. The ten-year-old twins, Charlie and Adolph, rose early and left the cabin to go to their usual job: herding sheep for their neighbor, August Leifeste. They wouldn’t be home till dusk, so their mother sent lunch with them—perhaps some dried meat, if they had any, and a hunk of the previous night’s cornbread. Johanna Korn watched her boys leave the cabin. When she casually told Adolph good-bye, she couldn’t have imagined it would be for three years. Or that when he returned, her son would be a stranger who despised everything she stood for.

  * * *

  August Leifeste was afraid something bad had happened when his sheepdog came home alone. He started to go check on his shepherds, the Korn boys. Before he got far, he could hear Charlie’s frenzied shouts upriver, followed by Louis and Johanna Korn’s cries of panic. Within minutes Leifeste, Grandpa Korn, and some other men from Castell were searching frantically for Adolph, calling his name and whistling. In that boundless brushland, it was useless. The European settlers were no match for the Apaches when it came to navigating the wilderness.

  Adolph Korn heard the men calling, not far behind. However, he was afraid his captor would hit him again or even slit his throat if he cried out. His head was still throbbing where the Apache had smacked it with a pistol. Gradually, the voices of his father and his neighbors faded in the distance. All he could hear was the pounding of horses’ hooves.

  The three Apaches who captured him probably came from the Fort Sill region of Indian Territory, although they may have been from New Mexico or even Arizona.11Regardless, they were a long way from home, and they weren’t out for pleasure. Adolph traveled north with them for about twelve days. Each day his hope of rescue grew fainter.

  After a raid, the Southern Plains Indians rode hard, stopping only a few moments for rest or water, sometimes not eating for several days. If they killed a calf or a deer along the trail, they often didn’t bother to cook the meat before they ate it. It took too long to build a fire, and the smoke would give away their location. Typically, they tied the captives to a horse to prevent their escape. Sometimes, the Apaches stripped off a captive’s “white” clothes and made him ride naked until they could get to an Indian camp, where the women would dress him in buckskin and moccasins.

  Finally, they reached a Quahada village in Indian Territory. The Quahadas were the most bellicose division of the Comanches, the ones who refused to report to their Indian agent and made no treaties with the federal government. Their camps had the appearance and atmosphere of a traveling circus: the tepees, constructed of tanned buffalo hides and long poles, were easily assembled and disassembled, and the mood was festive when a successful raiding party showed up.

  As a captive, Adolph was the property of the man who abducted him and was subject to his whims. His Apache owner decided to trade him to some Quahadas at the camp for a sorrel horse, a pistol and ammunition, a blanket, and some other trinkets. During the early weeks of his captivity, Adolph served as their menial. One of his chores was taking care of a Comanche child, who was sick at the time. When the child died, some of the tribesmen wanted to kill Adolph, but an old woman intervened and saved his life. He was severely whipped in-stead.12

  That wasn’t his worst trial. As the Comanches were preparing to move on to new hunting territory, Adolph was thrown from a horse, badly injuring his leg. The Comanche men debated what to do with him. Adolph didn’t understand their language, but no translation was necessary. Crippled, he had little value as chattel and no future as a warrior. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with them, and they often had to stay on the move in case U.S. soldiers or Texas Rangers were after them. They could abandon him to fend for himself. However, they were a long way from any settlement, and with his lame leg he would almost certainly starve to death before he found help. The simplest and most humane solution would be to drive a lance through his chest.13

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bsp; Then a Comanche woman, most likely the same one who had saved him before, came forward to beg for his life. Maybe she took pity on him. Perhaps she’d lost a son of her own. Or maybe she just felt that he still had potential as a warrior if his leg healed properly, and she knew the tribe needed more fighting men to resist the Texas invaders. There’s no record of what she said, but she must have put up a spirited argument, for the boy was spared.

  This Comanche woman helped Adolph travel two miles to the next camp by holding up his injured leg while he crawled. No doubt his hands were cut and bloody and swollen from thorns by the time they reached camp, but at least he was alive. The child prisoner had survived his closest call. While his leg was healing, the old woman nursed him and protected him, sometimes even hiding him in a snowbank from those tribesmen who still thought he should be killed. Adolph would always feel indebted to her. Alone in a world of unfamiliar sights and sounds, he had a new mother to guide him.

  Grandpa Korn refused to believe that the Indians would have killed Adolph after going to so much trouble to get away with him. He traveled to San Antonio to report the kidnapping at the military headquarters. As a result, officers in charge of scouting parties were ordered to search for the boy. Grandpa Korn also wrote to the Texas governor, and his cry for help went up and down the chain of command. The Texas secretary of state notified the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, who contacted the Indian Office’s superintendent in Lawrence, Kansas, who directed the Indian agent at Fort Sill to ask the tribal chiefs if they knew what had become of Adolph Korn.

  Despite this show of authority, the army, the governor, and the commissioner of Indian Affairs were powerless to do anything more than publicize the boy’s disappearance. The Indian Office’s superintendent in Lawrence issued a circular, making a plea on the Korns’ behalf: “His parents are poor, but hope to hear something of their child from some out-post of civilization where Indians trade; therefore all Texas and frontier papers will confer a favor on the afflicted, by giving this notice publication.”14“All Texas and frontier papers”: Adolph could be anywhere. The Korns didn’t even know which tribe was holding him. The commissioner in Washington directed the agents under his authority to inquire among the Kiowas and Comanches, the tribes that most frequently raided in Texas. He was essentially saying, “The boy is in Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas, or New Mexico, unless he’s elsewhere.” No news came back.

  For ten years, Grandpa Korn had felt the shame of not being able to provide for his children. Now he’d failed in an even more important duty of a man on the frontier: to protect his family. He’d let his twin boys wander perilously far from the village, just so they could earn the money he didn’t have, and now one of them hadn’t come home, and the other was traumatized. For all he knew, the Indians had bashed out Adolph’s brains with a rock, just as they’d done a couple of years before to two infant granddaughters of Betsy Johnson, the Korns’ former neighbor from Saline. Or maybe they were torturing Adolph, putting him through a slow and agonizing death. Grandpa knew he had let it happen.

  It was his wife who decided they’d stayed on the frontier long enough. The move to the Hill Country had been Grandpa’s idea to start with. Johanna Korn had trusted her husband and kept watch over his dreams, waiting patiently for things to get better. But after her boy disappeared, she declared that she would no longer live in that wild country and put her other children at risk. The Korns packed up their meager belongings and returned to San Antonio. A decade after Grandpa Korn had set out to make good in Castell, he was back where he started.

  But Louis and Johanna Korn’s Hill Country ordeal was not yet over, for the boy they’d left behind there, if he had survived, was still wandering somewhere on the prairie, a prisoner in the hands of savages. The Korns had become part of a small circle of heartsick parents across Texas who faced each day by reassuring themselves that some captured children eventually came home. However, each night they tossed fitfully, racked by the knowledge that others, like Alice Todd, did not. There was nothing the Korns could do to improve the odds of Adolph’s recovery. Only one decision remained within their hands: how long to wait before giving up hope.

  Chapter Two

  Germans in

  Comanche Land

  At the time my uncle Adolph roamed the plains with the Comanches, they had no central government. The scattered tribal groups made their collective decisions in local village councils. Nowadays the Comanche Nation is headquartered in a sprawling, modern complex on a low hill nine miles north of Lawton, Oklahoma. It’s the center of tribal government, business, and social services, but I went there to contemplate a treasured part of my own heritage. Hanging behind the receptionist’s desk is a handsome mural on a tanned buffalo hide. It reaffirms a treaty the Comanches made with my German-Texan forefathers in 1847:

  We are the Promise of our Ancestors

  We agree to uphold

  the Treaty of Peace

  made between

  the People of Fredericksburg

  and

  the Comanche Nation

  We are not afraid of war; we choose peace

  We shall walk the path of

  peace and protect each other

  We shall give support to those

  among us in need

  germans in comanche land

  We shall not recognize any line

  of distinction between us because

  we are one people and choose

  to live together as such

  We reaffirm these ideals so

  our children will be our promise

  1997

  The signers of the mural are descendants of people from two strikingly different cultures who attempted to tolerate one another and coexist peacefully in Texas during the mid-1800s. I decided to take a closer look at the unusual relationship between the Comanches and the German immigrants, because it might have some bearing on why my German ancestor became such a thorough Comanche convert. Anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell pointed out that Indianization depended on a number of variables, one of which was the captive’s “previous attitude toward the people of the second culture.”1 Three of the captives I tracked—Adolph Korn, Rudolph Fischer, and Herman Lehmann—spent their childhood within thirty-five miles of one another, growing up among German-Texans whose first contacts with Native Americans had been mostly positive.

  The bond of friendship between the Comanches and the German settlers of central Texas has been enshrined in both people’s mythologies, and over the decades the story has been glorified and distorted by selective memory. Still, the Comanche-German treaty is remarkable, possibly even unique in American history. In the bloody annals of Indian-white relations in the nineteenth century, it’s hard to find other instances when white settlers and Plains Indians successfully negotiated a private agreement. Although their utopia didn’t last, the Comanches and the Germans seemed to have had an understanding for a short time. The story of those few golden years provides a heartbreaking glimpse into an America that might have been.

  * * *

  Could the final, bloodiest years of the Indian wars on the Texas frontier have been avoided? What if someone had just drawn a boundary line through Texas—Indian hunters on one side, non-Indian farmers on the other? It sounds simplistic, but that’s what both the Comanches and Sam Houston wanted. Shortly after Texas became an independent republic in 1836, Mopechucope (Old Owl) and several other Penateka Comanche chiefs starting talking with Houston, the Texas president, about dividing the territory: Indians in the north and west, settlers in the south and east. Since the Penatekas were the southernmost division of the Comanches, they were the ones most directly threatened by white expansion.

  Mopechucope, a small, wrinkled man who wore a dirty cotton jacket that belied his stature, was the Penatekas’ principal advocate for a line of demarcation across Texas. In March 1844, he dictated a letter to Sam Houston, describing a line that he wanted to “run between our countries,” from the Brazos Ri
ver to the Colorado River below the mouth of the San Saba, then straight to the Rio Grande.2 Houston, who was popular among the Comanches, agreed that a boundary line would be a good idea, but he felt it would never work, for two reasons. The Comanche elders who made the treaties were notoriously ineffective when it came to restraining the high-spirited young men of their tribe, who raided where they pleased. And Houston was just as powerless to control the white settlers. He admitted, “If I could build a wall from the Red River to the Rio Grande, so high that no Indian could scale it, the white people would go crazy trying to devise means to get beyond it.”

  Nonetheless, the line through Texas remained the focal point of the Comanches’ talks with the whites for several years. In the summer of 1846, a multitribal delegation of Native American chiefs traveled to Washington to meet with President James K. Polk and discuss the boundary question. After passing through one town after another and realizing that the white people were “more numerous than the stars,” the chiefs were prepared to accept a compromise. However, they were stymied by an odd problem created by an agreement they hadn’t made. On December 29, 1845, the U.S. government had approved the annexation of Texas as a state; the independent Republic of Texas was formally dissolved on February 19, 1846. Prior to joining the union, Texas had opened all of its so-called “vacant” land—that is, Indian hunting grounds—to non-Indian settlers. One of the stipulations of the annexation agreement was that the state would retain title to that territory. That meant the federal government didn’t own the land that the Indians occupied in Texas and therefore had no legal authority to establish a line of separation. Meanwhile, the Texas state government was selling the Native Americans’ homeland to immigrants and developers.