The Captured Read online

  Nor did the Comanches feel completely at ease in town. If the German men in Meusebach’s expedition had felt nervous camping among hundreds of armed warriors, a night in Fredericksburg was just as unsettling for some Comanches. When Mopechucope came to visit, he was invited to stay in a settler’s log cabin, but he vacated his room before daybreak, inexplicably shaken, and never returned to Fredericksburg.

  Other cross-cultural exchanges were more enjoyable for both sides, especially in the smaller German settlements on the Llano River outside of Fredericksburg. In November 1847, Santa Anna, with about one hundred of his men and their families, paid a visit to the German settlers at Bettina, an experimental communistic colony started by enthusiastic students from Darmstadt. Louis Reinhardt, one of the founders, recalled: “For everything we gave them we were paid back three-fold.… Whenever we came into their camp, they would spread out their deer skins, bring out morrals full of the biggest pecans I ever saw, and tell us to help ourselves.” In nearby Castell, where the Korn family would eventually settle, friendly native women cared for the German-American children while their parents worked in the fields. William Schmidt, who spent his childhood near Castell, said that the Comanches “never stole a horse or anything else from us.” One day a Native American man picked up William’s older sister, Sophie, rode off with her on his horse, then brought her back a little later, laughing.

  Those early days saw the fulfillment of the vision of cooperation and mutual support spelled out by Meusebach, Santa Anna, and Mopechucope. No one realized they would end soon, especially not the immigrants. One of them even boasted, “The Americans know well that the Indians have an ineradicable hatred against them—a natural result of the many injustices they have suffered; whereas the Indians treat the Germans very kindly.” Another wrote, rather smugly, that the Indians “see in the conduct and actions of the Germans a distinct difference from that of the old-time Texans.… Because of the kindness shown them, the Indians do not transfer to the German newcomers their old hostility against the Texans.”

  Sadly, it didn’t take long for the peaceful relations between the Comanches and the Germans to deteriorate. There’s no single reason why. A series of unrelated events, beginning only a year after the peace treaty, all played a role.

  In 1848 the U.S. Army established Fort Martin Scott on the outskirts of Fredericksburg to keep the peace on the frontier. The Comanches knew that the soldiers weren’t there for their benefit, and they felt less welcome in town. Texas Rangers were also stationed near Castell to protect the German settlers from Indian raids.

  Early in 1849, the body of a German laborer was found about twenty miles from Fredericksburg. He’d been lanced, stripped, and scalped—a warning that not all was well between the Germans and the native people.11 No one knows why he was killed. However, Marie Leifeste Donop, the daughter of one of Castell’s original settlers, related, “Some of the white people became angry with the Indians and began beating them in trades and mistreating them. That’s what my father said started the trouble with the Indians.” Later in 1849, both Santa Anna and Mopechucope died during a cholera epidemic. The Germans lost their two best Comanche friends.

  In 1850 the Comanches made one of their last recorded visits to Fredericksburg, and it wasn’t peaceful. Two Comanches got in an argument with an Indian of the Tonkawa tribe and stabbed him to death. Later that year, the federal government negotiated a new treaty that prohibited the Comanches from traveling south of the Llano River without express, written permission from an Indian agent or military officer.12 It placed no similar restriction on whites venturing north.

  By 1851 renegade Indians had started moving into the region, including Comanches from northern divisions that had not signed the treaty with the Germans. A chief of the Lipan Apaches who visited Fredericksburg reported that the Comanches were still disposed to be peaceable and friendly toward the whites, except for some “bad men among them who cannot be restrained.”

  Meanwhile, the pattern of white settlement was changing. The Germans had originally established compact, European-style villages surrounded by small farm plots. They eventually discovered that the stony, arid land of the Texas Hill Country wouldn’t allow them to farm as they had in Germany. They started occupying larger and more widely dispersed tracts. More significant, they began competing with the native people for wild game, which the Comanches had thought they would never do.

  Indian raiders began stealing the Germans’ horses and household goods. In 1852 some citizens of Fredericksburg put together a petition complaining about the conduct of certain Comanches and Lipan Apaches encamped in the area, “praying that measures may be taken to stop their outrages” and that these Indians “be removed from the Llano.” On investigation it was found that the Germans’ account of the depredations was “greatly exaggerated.” The thefts were committed by a few drunken Indians, “who were made so by unprincipled white men who reside in Fredericksburg and vicinity and sell liquor to the Indians.”13

  Around 1854 the townspeople took matters into their own hands. Early one morning, an ailing Comanche boy, about thirteen years old, approached the home of a German settler near Fredericksburg, begging for food and medicine. No one knows what made the settler so angry or suspicious, but he immediately tried to grab the Comanche. The boy dodged him, jumping behind the man’s wife for protection. He even dropped his bow and arrow to show that he meant no harm. Still, the German caught him and bound his hands and feet. The boy implored the man’s wife to help him, but she refused. The man put him on a wagon and hauled him into Fredericksburg. A crowd gathered, drawn by the ruckus, and the Germans held a long discussion over what to do with the prisoner. Some thought he was a spy. Eventually, they took him to the outskirts of the village, where they forced him to gather firewood. Then the lynch mob tied the young Comanche to the trunk of a pecan tree, raised their shotguns, and blasted him more than thirty times. Finally, they used the wood he’d gathered to cremate his body.14

  Although there were still some friendly contacts between Native Americans and German settlers well into the 1860s, violent encounters became the norm after 1850. At least nineteen German-Americans were murdered by Indians around Fredericksburg and the surrounding German communities between 1850 and 1870, some reportedly by Comanches. No one kept a record of how many native people, Comanche or otherwise, were killed by German-Americans during that same period. However, by the time the Civil War broke out, the Germans of the Texas Hill Country were battling Native American raiders as fiercely and frequently as any other settlers living in central Texas.

  One significant difference remained, however. What set the German immigrants apart was not how they responded to the Indian threat in practice but how they spoke about the native people in the abstract. The typical feelings of other frontier settlers toward Indians were summed up in the no-nonsense words of one Mason County pioneer from Virginia: “They ought to be all killed off. There is no better way to get rid of them.”15 Many of the Germans, in contrast, continued to defend the Indians and see their side of the conflict even during the years they were fighting them, blaming the troubles on the “Americans” or “old-time Texans.” That way of thinking—tolerant of the natives, arrogant toward non-German whites, and blind to their own culpability—permeated the insular German settlements during Uncle Adolph’s boyhood.

  The German-Texans of the Hill Country, still congratulating themselves over the bond they’d formed with the native people in the 1840s, clung to their idealized notions of a Comanche-German Camelot long after the brief era of peaceful relations had passed. In 1855, while the farms around Fredericksburg were being hit by Indian warriors, a resident named Theodore Specht wrote that he “found among these so-called ‘wild people’ good and bad persons, but never such poor specimens as are to be found among civilized nations.” The German community made excuses for the Indians even when they raided, attributing fault to everyone but their own people and the natives themselves. Specht blamed federal
Indian policy and government agents. In 1877 an unnamed newspaper correspondent from Fredericksburg argued that Indian raids were understandable because the establishment of military posts on the frontier “provoked the red men to anger,” and the soldiers’ persecution of the natives “incurred their hatred for every pale face.”16 A pioneer named Therese Marschall von Biberstein Runge, who grew up during the Indian scares of the 1860s, nonetheless maintained that the Native Americans “were people of great honor defending their homes.” Adolph Korn and the other German captives most likely heard their families and neighbors express these sorts of sentiments in their formative years.

  The reality of their daily lives was another matter. Theodore Specht acknowledged in 1855: “Where in 1846 we dared to go hunting and fishing, in common with the Indians or alone, without any risk, now we must expect to be mercilessly shot down and scalped by the same Indians who were formerly our friends.” As raids intensified and horror stories accumulated during the 1860s, the German immigrants lived in a climate of fear. They stayed close to home and barred their cabin doors at night. Some never walked across an open field without first ducking behind a tree to see if there were Indians around. Occasionally, they got careless. Sometimes they just didn’t see the raiders in time.

  After it happened, Gottlieb Fischer must have tried to convince himself there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. He’d heard that twenty-five or thirty Indians had been seen camped near Fredericksburg that week. They were probably Comanches.17 Some people said they’d even come within a couple of miles of town. And by 1865, Indians in the vicinity almost always meant trouble. Still, the settlers had to go on with their daily lives.

  The Fischers’ farm, six miles southwest of Fredericksburg on the north bank of the Pedernales River, was isolated and vulnerable to attack. Gottlieb and his wife, Sophie, had purchased the land in 1851,18 when the Indians were still friendly. Back then the place had seemed more like the New World paradise that the German noblemen who headed the colony had promised: one hundred ten acres of rolling meadows in a shady dale, the river bottom lined with tall trees. Fourteen years later, at age fifty-one, he was still struggling to make a living from it.

  The abduction occurred on a main road in broad daylight, around noon on a sunny, calm Saturday, July 29, 1865. Fischer had sent his oldest son, Rudolph, to look for some stray cattle. Times were hard; the war had ended only three months earlier, and the family couldn’t afford to lose any livestock.

  Rudolph should have been more careful. He wasn’t a helpless, ignorant child. He was a young man, thirteen and a half years old,19 a fine-looking boy with curly black hair, dark eyes, and a fair complexion. Certainly, he knew to watch out for raiders. The boy had heard stories about Indian abductions. At least he was old enough to know not to struggle too much or the Indians would kill him. He might have even gone with them without putting up a fight.

  A scouting party had tried to follow the Indians that took Rudolph. They’d come near them twice, but finally they’d lost the trail. It might have been better if they’d found him dead. When Mrs. Runge’s son, Herman, had been killed by Indians ten years earlier, she’d been greatly comforted by one witness’s report that he’d probably died before he was scalped. Then again, what if the search party had found Rudolph’s body in the same position as Billy Schumann’s, Gus Schumann’s son in the Saline Valley: drawn up in a cramped heap, probably in the last throes of a death struggle as he was being scalped?

  The Fischers knew there was some hope Rudolph might make it back to them alive. Gottlieb tried to get information from Indian traders, but they weren’t any help. At Christmastime, desperately missing his son, the broken man wrote to Pres. Andrew Johnson, giving him a full account of Rudolph’s disappearance: “When he was carried off he was barefooted, wore a straw hat, hickory striped shirt and buckskin pants. On the lower part of his belly he has got a mark, the exact likeness of a Catfish.” As months went by with no news, hope started to fail him. By the spring of 1866, Gottlieb Fischer was willing to believe that his son had been killed. It was easier to mourn Rudolph than to wait for him.

  He didn’t know that Rudolph now answered to the name Aseway-nah (Gray Blanket),20 or that when he saw his boy again, the boy would be a man. Not a man as he pictured him, but a painted, solemn Comanche warrior. Asewaynah had spent his first thirteen years among settlers who taught him that the Indians were noble people fighting for their homeland, and he had taken those lessons to heart. One day he would help the native people make their final stand against the white invaders on the plains of Texas.

  Chapter Three

  The Bosom

  of the Comanches

  Rudolph Fischer and Adolph Korn, like many white Indians, left no explanation of how they made the transition from docile farm boys to Comanche warriors. “He didn’t care to discuss his life,” says Rudolph’s granddaughter, Josephine Wapp. “We thought we shouldn’t ask him questions if that was how he felt.” Nor did Adolph Korn reveal much about his time away. Perhaps he didn’t talk about it because he thought the family wasn’t interested. Maybe he felt it was none of our business. For whatever reasons, he kept his secrets, and no one knows exactly what happened to him during his first months with the Comanches. The only way for me to understand his captivity was to study other child captives of post–Civil War Texas who went through similar experiences and chose to tell their stories— Dot and Banc Babb, Herman Lehmann, and Clinton and Jeff Smith. The first of these to be captured were the Babbs. The two siblings from north Texas lived with the Comanches in 1866–1867, only three years before Uncle Adolph was kidnapped. They left a wealth of information about their early months as captives. Dot Babb published a memoir, In the Bosom of the Comanches, in 1912. Banc also wrote a short account of her time with the tribe.

  One of Dot’s granddaughters, Miri Hargus, traveled to Oklahoma in 1989 and tried to find out more about him from the Comanches. When she returned home to Seattle, she visited her grandchildren’s elementary schools and shared his story with their classes. Sadly, Mrs. Hargus died just as I was starting my own search, so we never got to compare notes. Her daughter Leslie told me, “She was always proud of her grandfather and his efforts to present the Comanches as something besides savages.” That’s what drew me to the Babbs’ story as well. In both of their narratives, Dot and Banc Babb spoke glowingly, sometimes idealistically, of their captors.1 Their admiration for their adoptive people might not be so surprising if their captivity hadn’t begun in a frenzy of bloodshed and terror.

  The raiders were in a foul mood long before they reached the Babb place. It should have been a quick, easy trip. They’d started out as thirty-two young men from the Nokoni division of the Comanches, looking for adventure and a chance to test their mettle. Their leader, Persummy, was a brother to the Nokonis’ principal chief, Ter-heryaquahip (Horseback). They’d dipped down into north Texas from Indian Territory, raided four farms in Jack and Wise Counties, and taken several horses. However, something had gone terribly wrong; six of their men had lost their lives along the way. The white enemies had even scalped one warrior, so that his life was forever annihilated, his spirit unable to enter the next world.

  Persummy’s group rode hard across rolling prairies and low hills thick with oaks and native grasses—what used to be good buffalo-hunting country, before the white settlers moved in. Around mid-afternoon on September 14, 1866, they came upon a log cabin on the scrubby flatlands near Dry Creek, about twelve miles west of Decatur. Two white children, a boy and a girl, were resting and playing in the yard near a brush arbor. The Comanches didn’t see any men around. A white woman yelled from the doorway, and the two children looked up. Then they ran to the cabin and slammed the door. Persummy’s group headed in their direction. The Nokoni raiders were about to have their satisfaction.

  The people trapped inside the cabin waited anxiously for the Comanches to make their next move. Isabel Babb, the mother, tried to stay calm. She spoke as little as possibl
e, because she didn’t want the children to hear the fear in her voice. There wasn’t much she could do to get ready for an onslaught. The door didn’t even have a lock or a bar. Isabel had always known there were Indians around; but, like everyone else, she never really believed they would bother her family. Nor had she learned to be afraid of the native people. Before moving to Texas, she’d lived peacefully beside the Winnebago Indians in Wisconsin Territory.

  Her husband, John, and their oldest boy, Court, had gone to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to trade some cattle for horses. They weren’t expected back for another three weeks. Her son Dot was fourteen and could fire a rifle. But her daughter Banc was only ten, too little to defend herself, and Isabel couldn’t protect her and the infant, Margie, too. A young Civil War widow named Sarah Jane Luster was also in the cabin. She’d been staying with Isabel and keeping her company while John and Court were away.

  They all heard the war whoops. A moment later, a Comanche man threw open the door and stepped in. Isabel, knowing she couldn’t fend off the intruders, tried to shake the man’s hand and even offered him a chair. Ignoring her, he walked back to the bed and started stripping off the linens. Other raiders poured into the house and began taking clothes and bedding. They jerked off the mattresses, tore up the fabric cases, and shook feathers into the air. They also broke up the furniture. Some helped themselves to the milk.