The Captured Read online

  Although Banc had to gather wood, fetch water, and help move camp, she was young enough to escape the hardest work that befell Comanche women. Most days she did whatever she pleased. As she recalled, “Every day seemed to be a holiday; children came to play with me and tried to make me welcome into their kind of life.” She also chose to take part “in many a chase after the buffalo, deer and antelope,” which she thought was more fun than staying in camp.

  It’s not clear when Banc started speaking Comanche. In one account, she said, “I wasn’t with them long until I could talk their lingo.” In another, she recalled that she was “some time learning to speak their language.” She wasn’t shy, however. Whenever anything happened in the village that she didn’t understand, she plied Tek-washana with questions until she was satisfied. Tekwashana seldom scolded or even corrected her. Banc said, “She was always very thoughtful of me and seemed to care as much for me as if I was her very own child.”

  * * *

  After the Babb children were separated, Dot traveled with his captors for ten days until they reached a Comanche village on the Arkansas River. Persummy, who had led the raid through Wise County, claimed Dot as his own but placed him in the home of his sister and her husband, Watchoedadda (Lost Sitting Down). Dot was given an equally unflattering name: Nadernumipe (Tired and Give Out).

  Dot’s experience in his Comanche village was markedly different from Banc’s. The role of every young Comanche man, including potential adoptees, was to become a good horseman, hunter, and warrior. While Banc was enjoying an unstructured life, Dot went into training. His teacher was his Comanche father, Persummy.

  One day Persummy, painted and bedecked in horns and feathers, told Dot to follow him into the sand hills for a demonstration. He then handed Dot his six-shooter, instructing the boy to fire at his torso each time he charged and at his back each time he retreated. If Persummy was testing Dot, he did so at great personal risk. He made four charges and retreats. Dot fired six shots, and each time Persummy deflected the bullets with his buffalo-hide shield. Afterward, rather than gloating over his own skill and bravery, Persummy complimented Dot on his accuracy and said he would make a trustworthy warrior.

  Even while he was in training, Dot wasn’t punished by the Comanches for his mistakes, and only once was he in danger among them. One day when he went for water with some Comanche girls, the mother of a slain fighting man, crazed with grief, came running at him with a large butcher knife, shrieking and moaning. Most likely her son had been killed by whites and she was out to take revenge. Dot managed to outrun her. Eventually, she stopped and slashed herself to death.

  Like his sister, Dot didn’t have much trouble adapting to Comanche living conditions, including the food. He described his favorite Indian meal: “Whenever a buck killed a buffalo calf, the squaw rushed up and split the calf open. She scooped every bit of the milk out of its stomach just as quickly as she could and gave it to the children. It was the sweetest stuff I ever tasted, and was thick like our gelatin.” He also claimed that Comanche beds, consisting of dried buffalo hides suspended between four poles and covered with buffalo robes, were comfortable enough. “I’ve slept in lots worse beds in white folk’s houses many times,” he once remarked.

  Persummy drilled his new son in the specifics of battle; but other than that, Dot learned his new people’s customs through observation and experience rather than actual instruction. Even though he was training to become a warrior, he didn’t know how assertive he should be, or what station a boy his age was supposed to assume in village life. Early on, the Comanche women appropriated him as their servant. They made him help move the tepees, carry wood and water, and cook the meat. Dot, accustomed to obeying his mother, did what they told him. Eventually, the other young men his age hinted that the women were taking advantage of him; as a warrior, he didn’t have to do those household chores. Dot explained how he liberated himself: “One day an old squaw told me to put some wood on the fire. I didn’t do it. She hit me a devil of a lick across the back.”

  That was the only blow he received while he was with the Comanches. It was worth the pain, however, for he had won his independence. From that day on, he enjoyed the life of a Comanche man: breaking wild horses, hunting deer and buffalo, practicing with his bow and arrow, lounging around camp—and leaving the manual labor to the women.

  The final stage of a Comanche warrior’s training was experience in an actual battle. Persummy took Dot on his first raid with a group of fifteen men. They’d been gone from camp six days when they surprised seven Caddoes chasing buffalo along the Washita River. At that time, the Comanches and Caddoes were at war. In the short fight that followed, the Comanches killed six of the Caddoes, but had to chase the seventh several miles. Finally, Persummy shot him twice, knocking him off his horse. When the Comanches approached him, the Caddo was sitting up, badly wounded but still conscious. Persummy handed Dot his pistol. Then he commanded the boy to shoot the Caddo in the head. Dot described his response in three simple words: “This I did.”

  As far as anyone knows, this was the first time Dot had killed a person. The incident raises a host of questions. Did he do it because he thought he had no choice, or did he shoot the man willingly? Was he certain the Caddo was going to die anyway and wanted to put an end to his suffering? Did he feel guilty afterward? Or did he think the murder was justified, since his fellow Texans never thought twice about killing Indians? Was he trying to win his adoptive father’s approval? Did he already consider himself a Comanche and think of the Caddo as an enemy of his people? No one knows the answers, for Dot refused to satisfy his readers’ curiosity about the killing. His autobiography is noticeably terse and vague when it comes to recounting his experiences as a warrior. Like most returned captives, Dot didn’t reveal too many details about what he did on the warpath.

  Dot’s next adventures as a raiding warrior pulled him even further away from the values of his upbringing. It was one thing to kill an enemy in battle; it was quite another to attack non-Indian civilians in their homes. Yet Dot accompanied the Comanches on two raids into Mexico, where they killed seven adults and captured three Mexican children. Moreover, Dot’s repeated use of the word “we” in describing these raids suggests that he was a full participant: “we captured,” “we killed.”

  Dot wanted to go with the Comanches on their raids into Texas, but they wouldn’t let him. They were afraid he would try to escape. At first he would have; he was elated “at the thought of getting back and finding an opportunity to detach myself from my savage captors.” Later, however, he made up his mind that if they would let him go to Texas, he wouldn’t try to run away. Still, the Comanches never put him to the test of possibly killing one of his own people.

  After only a few months among the Comanches, fourteen-year-old Nadernumipe Dot Babb, Tired and Give Out, had become a budding Comanche warrior. When asked in 1926 why he thought the Comanches wanted to keep him, he replied simply: “Wanted to make an Indian out of me. Wanted to build up their tribe.”

  In October 1866, John Babb and his oldest son, Court, returned from Arkansas to a home that no longer was. The previous month, his neighbors had buried Isabel, his wife of twenty-one years, in a quiet, shady spot about a quarter of a mile from the ruins of their cabin. At least his infant, Margie, was unharmed. However, he had no way of knowing where Dot and Banc were, or if they’d even survived.

  He began his search for his children as soon as he learned what had happened. For families of Indian captives, the most important contact in the government was the federal Indian agent for the tribe thought to be holding the children. In the Babbs’ case, that was the Kiowa-Comanche agent, Col. Jesse H. Leavenworth, a native of Vermont who had spent much of his life on the western frontier. Like a number of ex-army Indian agents, Leavenworth had fought Indians during his military days but preferred making peace with them.

  The years 1865 and 1866 had been a period of both triumphs and failures for Colonel Leavenworth. He’
d witnessed the recovery of a number of captives from the Kiowas and Comanches, including Sarah Luster.2 However, the work of locating captives and arm-twisting the Indians into turning them over was slow, unpredictable, and frustrating. To make matters worse, Leavenworth wasn’t popular among the Indians, partly because he demanded that they give up their captives without payment. They were becoming less inclined to surrender their captives to him.

  Although Dot Babb was reported dead at various times, Leaven-worth had reason to be hopeful. He knew that the Nokoni chief Quenahewi (Drinking Eagle) disapproved of the September raid into Wise County by the young men of his division. He was also able to confirm that the Babb children were still alive at the time their captors reached Quenahewi’s camp. Leavenworth was confident that Quenahewi would promptly surrender the two children to him, but by December 1866, three months after their capture, he hadn’t been able to learn any more about them.3

  Quenahewi wasn’t the only person who was trying to obtain the Babbs’ release. Dot was sighted in a Comanche camp by Brit Johnson, an African-American sharpshooter “of splendid physique” who was moving among the Indians, trying to recover captives. His wife, two of his children, and four other people had been captured in Young County, Texas, during a raid in 1864, and afterward he made several trips to the Indian villages. Johnson was generally well received by the Comanches, for he had known some of them in his younger days and had learned a little of their language. A frontier hero in his day, Brit Johnson was credited with recovering several captives, and “[f]or these acts of chivalry he never asked any remuneration.”4 (His legendary journeys served as inspiration for The Searchers.5) While Johnson was camped across the Cimarron River from the Comanches, he and Dot spoke with each other. Johnson assured Dot he would try to ransom him. However, he didn’t have any money at the time, and he’d traded all his horses except four, which he needed to bring other captives back to Texas.

  Meanwhile, in February and March 1867, Capt. E.L. Smith, the commanding officer of Fort Arbuckle, Indian Territory, got actively involved in the search. He asked Horace P. Jones, the government interpreter, to try to recover the Babbs. Jones said he lived too far from the Comanche villages to deal with the captors effectively. He recommended that Smith engage Jesse Chisholm, “a person of intelligence and tact” who had extensive prior experience with the Comanches and was thought “worthy to be trusted with the business.” Chisholm, who was half-Scottish and half-Cherokee, was a veteran Indian trader, guide, and interpreter, by then in his early sixties. (He is remembered today as the namesake of the Chisholm Trail, the main cattle-driving route between Texas and Kansas.)

  Chisholm had been able to secure the release of several Indian captives in the past. He was also believed to know the whereabouts of Dot Babb. In April 1867, Captain Smith authorized Chisholm to negotiate for the captives’ ransoming. At the same time, Smith laid before him the government’s dilemma, a matter of increasing concern among policy makers in Washington:

  Although my sympathies have been warmly enlisted in behalf of these captives and their friends, it has not been thought sound policy by the Government, to encourage this inhuman business, by holding out inducements to continue it by the eager offer of large ransoms, or indeed by any act that might appear to commit it to the practice of ransoming at all. Neither on the other hand is the Government insensible to the cruelty of remaining idle or indifferent in a matter of so much interest to the relatives of these captives and to the captives themselves, but it is anxious to exert its full power in their behalf, in such a manner however as may tend to restrain this barbarous speculation.6

  Captain Smith further instructed Chisholm that any ransoms paid (which were “really the rewards of treachery and lawlessness”) should be made as small as possible. In the end, however, Chisholm was no more successful than Quenahewi or Brit Johnson in getting the Babbs away from their captors.

  By early 1867, John Babb couldn’t wait on the government any longer. Placing his son Court and the infant, Margie, in the care of their neighbors, he left Wise County on January 25, 1867, and traveled to Fort Arbuckle to see if he could do anything to expedite the search.7 There, he got to know Horace P. Jones, the interpreter. Jones, whose own great-grandfather had been an Indian captive, was a congenial, outdoorsy man who had lived most of his thirty-eight years in close contact with Indians. He’d even been adopted by the Penateka Comanches, the division that had made the peace treaty with the German immigrants two decades earlier. They placed great trust in him and thought he was a man of his word.

  Jones promised John Babb that he’d make further inquiries about his children. He engaged a man named Jacob J. Sturm to search for them. Sturm, a self-styled doctor from Tennessee, had worked and lived among the Caddo and Waco Indians and married a Caddo woman. Meanwhile, John Babb sent word to his father in Wisconsin to try to raise as much as $800 to use if necessary in recovering Dot and Banc. He decided to wait in Indian Territory until he found out whether they were still alive.

  One day in April 1867, Banc Babb returned from gathering firewood to find Tekwashana crying in their tepee. She explained that a man had come to their village to take Banc back to her father. The rescuer was Dr. Sturm, who had located Banc while her people were camped near the site of Verden, Oklahoma. Banc told her Comanche mother that she wanted to leave with him. Tekwashana hung her head and refused to talk. Banc hurried to find the tepee where Sturm was meeting with her captors. The Comanches demanded ransom for Banc’s release, and Sturm paid $333 for her.

  When Banc got back to her tepee that night, Tekwashana had fastened the flap and wouldn’t let her inside. Her Comanche mother told her, “If you want to leave me, it is because you do not love me.” By that time, Tekwashana’s brother, Kerno, had been killed during another raid into Texas. Banc was all she had. Tekwashana also thought of herself as Banc’s only protector against their white and Indian enemies.

  Banc couldn’t get her Comanche mother to let her come in. As much as she longed to see her white father, she also wanted to be near Tekwashana that night. She walked around to the side of the tepee where the bed was located. After a while, she fell asleep on the ground there.

  During the night, Banc woke when she felt Tekwashana shaking her shoulder. She carried the girl inside the tent, where she had prepared some dried meat and two bottles of water. When Banc asked what was happening, Tekwashana explained they would run away and hide until Dr. Sturm left. Then they’d come back home. Banc didn’t protest this plot to escape. They left the village under the cover of darkness. Banc was still sleepy, so her mother carried her on her back. When Tekwashana got tired, they stopped to rest. The two of them traveled this way until noon the next day, when they hid in a large depression in the ground and took a nap.

  They woke suddenly when they heard someone calling. Dr. Sturm had tracked them. Angry with Tekwashana, he took Banc away from her and put the girl on his horse. He told Tekwashana she would have to walk. Then they headed back to camp, Tekwashana trailing behind, brokenhearted. That was the last time Banc saw her Comanche mother.

  The next morning, Dr. Sturm started for Fort Arbuckle with Banc. When they got there, he delivered the girl to the commanding officer, Capt. E. L. Smith, who made out a voucher for the amount Sturm had paid in ransom. John Babb was overjoyed to see one of his lost children. Banc was also “tickled to death” to be back with him. However, as she remembered, “I had been with the Indians so long, I had forgotten how to speak English. Although I could understand what was said to me, when I tried to talk to my father, it would be in Comanche.”

  John Babb told his daughter that her brother had been located near the New Mexico border. Dot had been discovered in a Nokoni Comanche camp by a trader named Mike McCleskey,8 a hardy fellow who “could drink whiskey like throwing slop down a slophole.” The trader had spoken to the young white Indian, asking where he was from. Dot gave McCleskey his father’s name and address.

  John and Banc Babb stayed in Indian
Territory with the family of Joseph Chandler near Pauls Valley, waiting for further word about Dot. Chandler’s wife, a Mexican woman named Tomassa, understood the culture shock Banc was experiencing. She had also been a Comanche captive; after her recovery, she had voluntarily returned to the tribe.

  Around the middle of May 1867, the Nokoni chief Horseback visited Fort Arbuckle and told the new commanding officer, First Lt. Mark Walker, that he had Dot Babb “in his possession” and was willing to surrender him. However, he was “anxious to be remunerated for this trouble,” as he claimed it had “cost him considerable to get the child from its captors.” (Dot’s captor, Persummy, was Horseback’s brother. While it’s possible that the chief had purchased the boy from Persummy, Horseback’s claim that he’d already paid for Dot’s release was probably bogus, as Dot made no mention of being sold.)

  Lieutenant Walker wasn’t sure how to handle this situation. He knew that the higher-ups in both the army and the civilian Office of Indian Affairs had started to grumble about the practice of paying ransom for captives. Walker didn’t promise Horseback any money or presents, but instead reminded him vaguely of his treaty obligations to return captured children. Meanwhile, Walker wrote to his superiors for further instructions.

  Now that Dot was finally located, his father was terribly eager to have him brought in at any cost. He was worried that if ransom were refused, Horseback, who seemed determined to make a profit off the boy one way or another, might sell him to a different band or tribe, and Dot would be lost once more. Horace Jones, the interpreter, arranged for a friendly Penateka Comanche chief known as Esihabit (Milky Way) to go to Horseback’s camp and try to negotiate Dot’s release.

  Esihabit arrived in Horseback’s village with two of his wives and spoke at length with the Nokonis. They weren’t willing to give up Dot, no matter what Horseback had told Lieutenant Walker, and they made “a display of much obstinacy.” According to Dot, they finally agreed to let him decide for himself whether to remain with the Comanches or go back home. (In reality, they were probably just soliciting Dot’s opinion; his owner would have made the final decision.) Horseback and several of the Nokonis felt certain that Dot had become Indianized and would want to stay with them. Dot surprised them. He made an “instant and unalterable” decision to accompany Esihabit to Fort Arbuckle and go back to Texas with his father. Dot reported that Esihabit had to pay ransom to Horseback, consisting of horses, saddles, bridles, blankets, and other gifts.