The Captured Read online

  Dot ran back to the corner to get a rifle off the rack, but the Comanches easily overpowered him. They took the gun away and whipped him over the head with their quirts. Isabel cried out, “Don’t fight back, Dot! They’ll kill you.” She was clutching the baby in one arm, and her other arm was wrapped around Banc, sheltering the girl in her skirt. Two of the Indians grabbed Banc by the arms and started to lead her away. Isabel put the baby on the bed. She followed Banc and clung to her hand, trying to stop the Comanches from taking her. Suddenly, one of the men reached for a large knife and plunged it into Isabel’s body four times. She fell onto the bed beside the baby.

  The raiders forced Sarah Luster down from the loft where she’d been hiding and took her and Banc outside. Two men came back in the house; they were surprised to find Isabel still alive. A Comanche named Omercawbey (Walking Face) drew a bow and shot her in the left side with an arrow. Then the raiders scalped her alive. Dot managed to pull the barbed arrow out of his mother’s flesh and tried to comfort her. Omercawbey then pointed an arrow at him. The last thing Isabel said to her son was: “Go with him and be a good boy.” A warrior grabbed Dot by the arm and led him to the door.

  Outside the cabin, Sarah and Banc were already placed on horses, each behind a Comanche man. Banc called out, “Dot, don’t let them hurt me.” The ten-year-old girl had already given her captor a hard time, clinging to one of the posts of the brush arbor so tightly that the skin was ripped from her hands when he pried her loose. She also slipped off the horse before the man got her secured. However, Banc had made up her mind not to cry. Later, her captor, whose name was Kerno, told her that if she’d cried, he would have killed her.

  Dot couldn’t do anything to help his sister. He was also put on a horse behind a warrior. “The Comanche pulled my arms around in front of him and held me by pressing his own arms tight against his side,” he recalled. “I thought I could get away, but I soon found out I was being held. I tried to bite the Indian then, but there was no place I could get my teeth into.”

  As they left the Babb place, the Comanches took six of the family’s mares, adding them to the herd. They also killed Dot’s colt. Then they moved fast up Dry Creek in the direction of Indian Territory, disappearing into the woods.

  A few hours later, Sheriff Bob Cates and a volunteer posse of about twenty-three men from Decatur arrived at the Babb farm. They’d been following the Comanches’ trail of destruction all afternoon. On a hill about two hundred yards from the Babb house, they’d found some of John Babb’s carpentry tools. The cabin was eerily quiet when they rode up. They called out, but no one answered. They got off their horses. Feathers from the bed were scattered about the yard. One man pulled an arrow out of a dead sheep.

  When they entered the cabin, all talking stopped, except for a few muffled exclamations. Isabel Babb, bleeding profusely but by then mercifully unconscious, was breathing her last. And the infant, Margie, unharmed but grotesquely smeared with Isabel’s blood, was trying to nurse at her dying mother’s breast.

  By then it was dusk. The new moon hadn’t reached its first quarter, and the men knew there wouldn’t be enough light to pursue the Indians after dark. Early the next morning, Sheriff Cates and the posse started following the raiders’ tracks northwest. Along the way, they found pieces of calico and strips of clothing hanging from the brush. They speculated that Sarah Luster was ripping her clothes, trying to leave a trail for them. After about forty miles, the Indians’ tracks split off in several directions, and the searchers had no idea which path to follow. They’d also run out of food. Exhausted and defeated, they turned back.

  The Comanches and their captives were heading northwest at a rapid pace, barreling across open prairies where there were no settlements. They rode full speed through the night, stopping only two or three times for their sweaty horses to rest. Unlike their white pursuers, the Comanche fighting men had trained themselves to go long distances without food or water. Sometimes they purposely chose escape routes with no water so the whites wouldn’t try to follow them.

  They wouldn’t let the three prisoners off their horses during the flight. The girl captive, Banc Babb, lost control of her bodily functions. The Comanches must have been amused, for they gave her a nickname that meant “Smell Bad When You Walk.” Unfortunately for Banc, the name stuck.

  By the next morning, they’d reached the northern plains of Texas, country not yet inhabited by white settlers. About six miles northwest of present-day Henrietta, Texas, they arrived at the Little Wichita River, which was on a rise. The Comanches, not knowing whether they were still being pursued, decided to risk crossing it. They got off their horses and led the captives over the roaring floodwaters atop a large accumulation of driftwood. The Comanches forced the horses to swim the swift stream. Then they took off west.

  If the three captives had been too terrified at first to notice how uncomfortable they were, they could think of nothing else after a night on horseback. Their legs were sore, their backs ached, they hadn’t slept, and Banc was sitting in her own excrement. The mid-September sun was blistering and burned their faces. They hadn’t had anything to eat since they’d left home.

  At around eleven o’clock, when the raiders reached Holliday Creek, they found the remains of a big steer that the wolves had attacked, crippled, and partially devoured. They stopped there. When Dot’s captor jumped down from the horse they were sharing, the boy tumbled awkwardly to the ground. “I tried to get up and go over to Banc,” he recalled, “but I was too numb. I couldn’t walk. When I fell back, the Indians laughed at me. Then I made a face at them. They slapped their bare legs and laughed louder than ever.” Banc didn’t notice these pratfalls. She was fixated on the dead steer. The men built a fire and started cooking the meat. As Banc later related, “I was so hungry that I begged for some of the raw meat, and they gave me a small piece, which I ate greedily and begged for more…. I reached for a piece myself, when an Indian hacked my finger with his knife. I reached with my other hand and he hacked it, so I decided to quit reaching.”

  They got back on their horses and kept pushing on at a steady clip, leaving plumes of dust behind them in the clear autumn air. Banc was able to sleep a little as she rode behind Kerno. At sunset they reached the Red River just below the mouth of the Pease River. By then the raiders felt safe enough to stop and rest. They camped on the south bank of the stream for several days, waiting for the floodwaters to subside. Meanwhile, most of the Comanches went off to hunt buffalo. The three prisoners had to stay behind in camp with their guard. In the daylight, they were allowed to move freely and talk with one another. At night the two Babb children and Sarah Luster slept together, with their captors surrounding them.

  On the morning of the fifth day, they crossed the Red River just below the mouth of the North Fork, which put them on the grassy prairies of Indian Territory. Banc thought the men looked very relieved: “I presume it was because they considered that they were out of Texas and at home again.” They kept moving northwest, passing through large sand dunes and crossing the North Fork of the Red River between Stinking and Otter Creeks. The buffalo were ample, so they had plenty of meat. They crossed the North Fork again the following morning and stayed overnight on the Washita River. The next day, they reached the Canadian River northwest of present-day Elk City, Oklahoma, and set up camp.

  Sarah Luster had given up hope that a search party would find them. She was twenty-six and beautiful and, as Dot explained delicately, “the helpless victim of an unspeakable violation, humiliation, and involuntary debasement.” All this time, Sarah had been making plans to escape. On the seventh night, while their captors slept, she and Dot talked quietly. Sarah told Dot that he should tie a certain good stallion near the camp the next day. She felt sure a particular mare would stay with the stallion. They’d take off the following night while their guards were asleep. They planned to ride through the water of the Canadian River, which was only two or three feet deep, so the Comanches couldn’t track them
. Dot didn’t want to leave without his sister, however. “Banc is a little girl, Dot,” Sarah told him. “She is in no danger now with the Indians, and I know we cannot get her away without noise. We will escape and send the soldiers for Banc.” Dot was still troubled, but Sarah convinced him that her plan was their best hope.

  The following day, Dot did as Sarah had instructed him. Around one o’clock in the morning, Sarah woke Dot. They crawled slowly away from their captors, moving for a short interval and then lying still, until they reached the place where the stallion was waiting. Sarah found a bridle for the horse. They led him to a log where she could climb on. The mare came up to them in high spirits. Sarah whispered for Dot to get another bridle and get on the mare. Before he could bridle the mare, several Comanches awoke. The men started shouting and running toward them. Dot told Sarah to go on without him. She took off into the night, unnoticed by their captors.

  Dot dropped the bridle he was holding and started walking toward camp, as if nothing had happened. An hour later, the warriors discovered that Sarah was missing. About eight or ten men went after her. They returned at daybreak, empty-handed and furious. They held Dot responsible. Early that morning, the men scratched a mark in the ground and made Dot stand there. They unbuttoned his shirt and ordered him to hold it open. Then they punched him in the chest with an old pistol, ripping his skin and causing him to fall back each time. Dot knew better than to cry or beg for mercy. Next, the Comanches made Dot stand against a big cottonwood tree. The men formed a line about twenty or thirty yards in front of him. Some drew their bows; others aimed pistols at him. Banc started sobbing, then fell on the ground and threw a blanket over her head.

  Dot just wanted to get it over with. He made signs for the Comanches to shoot. Instead, they lowered their weapons and walked up to him. A few men tied Dot to the tree with a rawhide rope. They piled dry grass, leaves, and brush at his feet. They placed flint and steel nearby, ready to start a fire. Banc was so completely seized with terror that she did a strange thing: she began laughing hysterically. Even Dot smiled uncontrollably from fright. Then, in the maddeningly democratic fashion of the Comanches, the men held a council. Dot, “more than ever tired of these preliminaries,” again made signs for them to hurry up and be done with it. He recalled, “I couldn’t stand to hear Banc screaming, so I motioned for them to go on and set the fire.” Instead, the men came forward and said to Dot, in broken English: “Heap wano you.” They untied him. Dot had passed the test. As he explained in later years, “I never was scared. I never get scared until after everything is over.”

  At that point, the Comanches divided into several parties and left in various directions. Dot and Banc went with different groups. The Babb children wouldn’t see each other again while they were with the Comanches. And they’d seen Sarah Luster for the last time. After a grueling ride and a second captivity by Kiowas, she escaped once more and found her way to freedom near Fort Zarah, Kansas.

  The Southern Plains Indians had two reasons for capturing women and children during raids rather than killing them or leaving them behind. The first was commercial. Captives could be held for ransom or traded to other tribes. The second was adoption. Captives could be used to replace family members who had died, or just to build up the tribe generally. The Indians were hampered by low birth rates and had lost many of their own people to warfare, smallpox, and cholera. If the captives proved their worth and were adopted, they were granted full tribal rights and treated as natural-born Native Americans.

  The practice of taking captives long predated the arrival of Europeans in America and continued right up until the reservation period. Captives taken during a successful raid were considered spoils of war, like horses or guns or clothing. Indians couldn’t understand why non-Indians got so upset about it. Most of the captives were children between the ages of seven and fourteen. Younger children were too much trouble to care for during the getaway and were likely to cry; older ones were hard to retrain and usually tried to escape. Occasionally, the Indians took adult women, such as Sarah Luster, to hold for ransom or use as concubines. Hardly any grown men, or even boys over the age of fourteen, were captured. They were usually killed if they put up a fight or got in the way.

  Whatever the reasons for taking captives, the practice was common. “We are all descendants of captives,” said Ronald Red Elk at a Comanche gathering I attended in Lawton. I heard this refrain several times in Oklahoma. “Whenever they went on a raid, they were interested in capturing young boys,” Comanche elder Vernon Cable told me. “Someone to ride the horse, to be a warrior, to help them in their battles. It didn’t matter if they were black or Mexican or white. When the captives got to be about twelve or thirteen years of age, they were Comanches.”

  And so Dot and Banc Babb, and later my uncle Adolph Korn, became members of the tribe. They had two choices: adapt and enjoy their new life, or resist and live in miserable bondage.

  By her second week of captivity, Banc Babb was completely alone in a world she couldn’t comprehend. She no longer had Dot and Sarah for company. After Banc and her brother went their separate ways, her captor, Kerno, and his Comanche group continued up the Canadian River, riding hard for several more days.

  During the trip, Banc spent one night in the camp of a Comanche group whose chief had a white captive living in his home. She said the captive was a teenage boy; most likely, he was Rudolph Fischer, who was fourteen years old by that time and had been with the Comanches a little more than a year. Although Rudolph had grown up in the German-American enclave of Fredericksburg, he could speak a little English. Banc and the boy talked about where they were from and how they were captured. According to Banc, “The Indians seemed to have a good time listening to us talk our funny language.” The next morning, she left with her captors, and she wouldn’t see another white face for seven months.

  Three days later, as the sun was setting, Banc reached the village of the Comanche group with whom she would live. The first glimpse of a large Comanche camp was an unforgettable sight. The clusters of buffalo-hide tepees were strung along a stream for several miles, making the village look more populous than it really was. Family members set up tents near one another. Hundreds of horses grazed nearby. Her captors rode up to one tepee after another, greeting their friends. Eventually, they started to dismount and relax.

  After a triumphant raid, the returning warriors were met with shouts of joy and songs of victory. Children rushed to find out what their fathers, brothers, and uncles had brought home from the trip. The people in the village also wanted to see the new captive. Soon Banc was surrounded by men, women, children, and dogs, all curious to get a look at her. They pulled the white girl one way and then the other. Before she was even off her horse, she had managed to kick several people in the face. The Comanches were going to learn to keep their hands off Banc Babb.

  Once she was on the ground, the Comanche children flocked around her. The small boys were naked; the older ones were clad in breechcloths, leggings, and moccasins. The girls wore buckskin dresses. The children were especially interested in stroking Banc’s long, blond hair, for she was the first white child most of them had ever seen.

  Kerno, the man with whom Banc had shared a horse for more than a week, led the girl to the lodge of his sister, Tekwashana, a young widow with no children of her own. He presented the girl to her to raise as her daughter. As it turned out, this woman’s husband had been killed by white men a short time earlier. Banc didn’t describe Tekwashana’s appearance, but she probably wore moccasins and a buckskin dress decorated with multicolored beads, fringes, and small pieces of iron and tin. Comanche women paid little attention to their hair, usually hacking it off crudely. However, they carefully painted their faces with red and yellow lines. That night the Comanches held a big feast to celebrate the return of the warriors. They enjoyed flat bread, coffee, and sugar—luxuries Banc would seldom have during her time with the tribe.

  Over the next few weeks, Banc adjusted q
uickly to the Comanche way of life. Her family consisted of about thirty-five people, who occupied seven or eight lodges. She slept in Tekwashana’s tepee on a bed of dry grass, blankets, and thick buffalo robes. The Comanches kept a fire burning inside their tepees for warmth; a flap at the peak let the smoke out. On cold nights, Tekwashana would stand Banc in front of the fire, turning her around until she was warm. Then she’d wrap her in a buffalo robe, furry side in, and tuck her into the bed next to the tepee wall.

  From the moment she got up each morning, Banc was ready to eat, and she seemed to have no trouble getting used to the Comanches’ diet of mostly meat. She also liked the informality of their meals. Her family had no fixed hours for dining, but ate whenever they were hungry. She remembered, “We never sat down to eat, just stood around the kettle of meat, and with the stick we would spear a piece of meat from the kettle, hold it to our mouth and bite off as much as we could conveniently chew.”

  Banc came to treasure her Comanche ornaments. Tekwashana outfitted her with brass bracelets, silver earrings with long chains, and an elaborate headdress made of shiny pieces of metal attached to long strips of cloth. Before long Banc learned to ride horseback, and she enjoyed racing her horse as fast as it would run so she could glance back at her blond hair and headdress trailing in the breeze. Her hair didn’t stay blond, though. Eventually, the Comanche women mixed buffalo tallow and charcoal together and rubbed it in her hair to make it dark. Banc thought they did this so she would fit in with the other children. It’s also possible that they didn’t want her to stand out if any traders, Indian agents, or army officers visited their camp.