The Captured Read online

  Although Dot had stated his preference without hesitation, his parting with his Comanche companions turned out to be much more difficult than he’d expected, for “many mutual attachments had been formed.” As he described his departure: “Not a few cried and wept bitterly, and notably one squaw and her son who had claimed me as son and brother and as such were my guardians and protectors, and to whose immediate family and household I had been attached…. Their kindnesses to me had been lavish and unvarying, and my friendship and attachment in return were deep and sincere, and I could scarcely restrain my emotions when time came for the final good-bye.”

  Meanwhile, John Babb had become impatient. In June 1867, he left Banc in the care of Joseph and Tomassa Chandler, while he and Horace Jones went to search for Dot themselves. They met Esihabit’s party on the Washita River, near the site of present-day Anadarko, Oklahoma. Dot described this meeting with his father as a scene of “convulsive joy or hysteria.” John Babb broke down, overcome with emotion. Esihabit later told Indian agent Jesse Leavenworth that he could not bear to see the white man weep for his child. When the party reached Fort Arbuckle, Lieutenant Walker gave Esihabit $210 in cash, plus articles of clothing worth $23.75, to cover his costs in procuring Dot.

  In the summer of 1867, Dot and Banc finally made it home to Texas, where they went through a rough period of acculturation. A neighbor, H. H. Halsell, remembered that they “had adopted Indian ways and habits.”9 Banc said, “It was rather a hard job for me to get my tongue twisted back so I could talk English again to my folks and friends.” Dot agreed: “When I got back from the Indians, I talked like an Indian. I quit talking for a long time because I couldn’t talk like white people.”

  Not long after Dot’s recovery, Lieutenant Walker received a belated communication on how to handle Horseback’s ransom demand. His instructions came from no less an authority than Lt. Gen. William T. Sherman, the scourge of both the Southern rebels and the Native Americans, and the man who was soon to become the commanding general of the U.S. Army. Sherman railed against the practice of paying for stolen children, proclaiming that it was “better the Indian race be obliterated…. There must be no ransom paid.” He directed Walker to tell the Comanches that Dot Babb “must be surrendered or else war to the death will be ordered.” Apparently, Walker had already settled with Esihabit before he received this scathing order. The controversy over paying ransom for captives would flare up repeatedly for several more years.

  Banc and Dot Babb became only partially Indianized after spending seven and nine months, respectively, with their captors. Despite the strong bonds they formed with individual Comanches, they never lost their desire to go back to their own people and resume their former way of life. Of all the captives I followed, they were the only ones who said they willingly left their captors. After they were ransomed, the Babb siblings were able to reenter the white world successfully. As Dot’s obituary accurately summed up, “He brought back from his life with the Indians the natives’ love of nature, their skill and daring, but at the same time he didn’t lose his background as a white man.”

  Still, it is remarkable that the Babbs became as assimilated as they did. More than anything else, their story provides a benchmark for how rapidly the child captives could acquire the ways of their captors. “People may think that is strange,” Banc said in one interview, “but really a nine-year-old [sic] child reacts very quickly to surroundings.” After less than a year among the Comanches, Dot and Banc had practically lost their ability to speak English. Even though the Babbs had been victims of a Comanche raid, Banc soon came to enjoy the raiders’ festivities in her village, and wrote, “It was always fun to go to a war dance.” Dot’s quick transformation was even more unexpected, because he was already a teenager when it happened, less impressionable and more independent than his sister. No doubt he passed up opportunities to escape when the Comanches took him into Mexico. After an apprenticeship of merely nine months, the fourteen-year-old white boy had developed a taste for raids and battles.

  Most of what my family knows about our own Comanche warrior comes from the narrative of one of his fellow captives, Clinton Smith. By the time Clinton met Uncle Adolph in captivity, my ancestor had been with the Comanches about fourteen months and was already one of them.10 His experience provides another benchmark. Although the child captives assimilated at different rates and to varying degrees, nearly all of them came to prefer the native people’s society once they’d stayed with them more than a year. Historian James Axtell found that the children abducted by Indians in colonial America “took little time,” in some cases no more than six to nine months, to “fall in with” the natives and forget their past lives.11 If Dot and Banc Babb had spent just a few more months with their Comanche families, chances are they would have made a different choice.

  Chapter Four

  Legion Valley

  A few months after the Comanches surrendered the Babb children, several influential leaders of the tribe signed a watershed treaty that would mark the beginning of the end of their nomadic way of life. In October 1867, representatives of the Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Kiowa-Apaches gathered on Medicine Lodge River in southern Kansas to meet with a government peace commission. It was the last great Indian council of this type, and the peace treaty that was signed on October 21 would be the last ever made with the Southern Plains Indians. Not every division of these tribes deigned to participate in the treaty talks. Among the absentees were the warlike Quahada Comanches, who eventually counted among their numbers my uncle Adolph Korn, Rudolph Fischer, and several other captives.

  The gathering at Medicine Lodge was huge and spectacular. The treaty meetings, which began on October 19, were held in a grove along the river. Although the event was billed as a council, there was no real negotiating. The peace commission had already decided the terms of the agreement. The Indians were to go live on their reservations and stop roaming. They had to give up their extensive hunting territory. They could still hunt south of the Arkansas River as long as the buffalo held out—which wasn’t expected to be long. However, they couldn’t settle permanently off the reservation. They had to stop raiding white settlements and taking captives. In short, the commission was asking the Indians to stop being Indians. They were to become like white people and settle in one place, so that the real white people who wanted to move onto their hunting grounds could do so without fear of being attacked.

  In exchange for the concessions forced on these tribes, the government promised to provide them with houses, farms, agricultural implements, schools, churches, teachers, carpenters, doctors, and all sorts of things they didn’t want. The peace commissioners tried to convince the Indians that this radical change was necessary for their well-being. Senator John B. Henderson bluntly put the native people’s dilemma before them: “The whites are settling up all the good lands…. When they come, they drive out the buffalo. If you oppose them, war must come. They are many, and you are few. You may kill some of them; but others will come and take their places.” The Treaty of Medicine Lodge allowed the Indians little time for transition; the wandering hunters were required to become sedentary farmers at once. As a safety net, the government agreed to provide them annuities for thirty years. The commissioners made it clear that if the Indians refused to comply with these terms, they would face the wrath of the U.S. Army.

  The treaty didn’t stop Indian raids into Texas. The Quahada Comanches, in particular, were contemptuous of treaties and derided their fellow Native Americans who made peace agreements with the whites. Besides, no matter what the Indians had agreed to in Kansas, they’d always thought of Texas as a free-for-all. Although some Texans thought Native Americans had “a revenge to satisfy on every man, woman and child of the white race,”1 most raids weren’t really about vengeance or necessity or driving settlers off the land. The Southern Plains Indians raided because raiding was what they did. Raids were as much a part of their culture as hunting buffalo, constructin
g tepees, or wearing moccasins and buckskin.

  The main purpose of a typical raid was horse gathering. The Comanches depended heavily on horses, not only for transport but also for currency. Raids were also rites of passage, the primary means by which young men proved their prowess. The only way a boy could gain status was to demonstrate that he was braver, stronger, or cleverer than his peers. Until he had returned from a raid with some horses, a captive, or a scalp that he’d taken himself, no one would respect him or ask for his advice.

  Non-Indians had their own terms for what these raiders did. Stealing. Kidnapping. Murder. To the Plains Indians, however, taking an enemy’s property, children, or hide was not only daring but also honorable. They wouldn’t think of chastising a young warrior who took part in a raid any more than non-Indians would condemn a war hero for conduct that, in everyday society, would be criminal.

  Murder wasn’t the objective of most raids. Still, Mexican-Americans, European-Americans, and African-Americans who were unlucky enough to encounter a raiding party along the road or in a field might be killed for sport or practice, or perhaps as a precaution. Occasionally at the end of a raid, when the excitement was at its height, the young Indian men would launch a full-scale assault on some unfortunate settler’s cabin.

  According to Texas folklore, Indians raided during the season between the arrival of the spring grass and the fall buffalo hunts, and during a full moon, when they had ample light for a quick night getaway. (Hence, the expression “Comanche moon.”) That seems logical, but it’s not true.2 In reality the settlers were vulnerable to Indian attacks any month of the year and any time of the month. They had no way of predicting when or where the next strike would take place. Although the number of non-Indian civilians murdered by Native Americans was small compared with deaths from diseases and accidents, the grisly reports of Indian depredations generated enough hysteria to cause a significant number of Texas settlers to abandon the frontier.

  So many, in fact, that Gen. William T. Sherman eventually made a fact-finding tour of the remote settlements in Texas. Although Sherman had little sympathy for Plains Indian raiders, he reserved his harshest invective for the citizens he was duty-bound to protect. He blamed white settlers such as my ancestors for creating conditions that encouraged Native Americans to raid. While visiting Fredericksburg, Fort Mason, Menardville, and Fort McKavett, he observed that the people “expose women and children singly on the road and in cabins far off from others, as though they were safe in Illinois…. If the Comanches don’t steal horses in Texas, it is because they cannot be tempted.”3

  But tempted they were. My grandpa Korn and his neighbors in the Saline Valley suffered their heaviest losses from Indian raids in the years after the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. On October 12, 1867, at the exact time the Indians were gathering at the council in Kansas, Frank Johnson was killed by raiders near his home. In 1868 and 1869, Grandpa’s friend Adolph Reichenau lost a total of fifty-one horses in three separate raids on his farm.

  The frontier families deserted the hardest-hit areas such as the Saline Valley for places they thought would be safer. The Korns returned to their former home on the Llano River in Castell. The Reichenauses moved to Hedwig’s Hill in Mason County. Betsy Johnson, Frank’s widow, went back to Legion Valley in nearby Llano County, where several of her relatives lived.

  These settlers didn’t necessarily find security in more populated communities. By the summer of 1868, Indians were stealing horses in plain daylight near Castell.4 Over the next few years, Grandpa Korn and his friends would watch helplessly from a distance as painted men on horseback made off with their most valuable property. In Legion Valley, twenty miles to the southeast, Grandpa’s former neighbor, Betsy Johnson, would see much more horrible sights.5

  Legion Valley wasn’t a town or even a village. Smaller than Castell, it was just a rural settlement of about one hundred people, most of them related by blood or marriage. Their log cabins were scattered throughout a scenic vale that was bounded on the east and south by rugged hills thick with junipers, oaks, and blackjack trees. Just below Cedar Mountain to the east, Legion Creek flowed into Sandy Creek, a tributary of the Colorado River. The nearest town, Llano, was fifteen miles to the north.

  By 1868 the community still didn’t have a school or church or store. Its only real center was Betsy Johnson, Frank’s widow. The matriarch of the large Johnson clan was only in her midforties. Seven of her twelve children were under age twenty; her youngest was just three. Betsy was the community’s nurse and adviser, the one to whom everyone turned for help when a baby was coming or a wife was ill. After Betsy’s husband was killed by Indians in October 1867, she and her younger children went to stay with the family of one of her married daughters, Samantha Bradford, in the Bradfords’ cabin on Legion Creek.

  During the first week of February 1868, a heavy rain fell in Legion Valley, followed by a cold front that turned the moisture to snow. The sky was cloudy and bleak. It was a miserable time to be outdoors, but most of the men of the community had picked that week to take to the road. Betsy’s son Asa Johnson (they called him “Boy”) had started to Austin with a drove of hogs. Boy’s older brother Thomas (known as “Babe”) was also away from home on business. Their young wives, Samantha and Rebecca, were staying with their mother-in-law at the Bradfords’ house.

  On Tuesday, February 4, while the frozen ground was still spotted with patches of snow and ice, a neighbor named John Friend came over to the Bradford place. John was married to Betsy Johnson’s great-niece, Matilda; they lived a mile and a half to the west, across Legion Creek. He was planning to go to the mill at Fredericksburg the next day to get some lumber for the floor of his new cabin. The trip was twenty-five miles each way, so he’d have to stay there overnight. His nineteen-year-old wife was eight months pregnant with her first child, and he was worried about leaving her alone. John asked Betsy’s daughters-in-law, Samantha and Rebecca, if they’d go stay at his house with Matilda the following evening. They said they would. By the next day—Wednesday, February 5—the air was still cold, but the snow and sleet had stopped. At nine o’clock that morning, John Friend left for Fredericksburg in a wagon drawn by a team of two horses.

  Meanwhile, at the Bradfords’ cabin, the community’s tireless matriarch, Betsy Johnson, was called into service once more. Betsy’s eighteen-year-old niece, Amanda Townsend, appeared at the door with a message. Her mother, Nancy, was expecting a baby and was having a rough time with the pregnancy. Amanda asked if Aunt Betsy could go stay with her. Betsy Johnson was being pulled in many directions at once. She was also looking after another niece, eight-year-old Malinda Ann Caudle, whom everyone called “Minnie.” The girl had been experiencing fever and chills. Betsy decided Minnie would be all right without her for one evening; Amanda could look after the girl. Betsy dressed for the cold and left the Bradford place to go sit through the night with her sister-in-law, Nancy Townsend.

  Later that afternoon, Samantha and Rebecca Johnson got ready to go over to the Friends’ cabin to stay the night with Matilda, just as they’d promised John the day before. They wrapped their shawls tightly around their heads and necks. Rebecca decided to take her three-year-old daughter, Nancy Elizabeth, with them. Her two older children, Will and James, would stay with the Bradfords that night. Rebecca’s sister-in-law, Samantha Johnson, also took her baby girl, Fielty, eighteen months old. She was expecting her second child.

  The young Johnson wives didn’t think of their mission to Matilda Friend as a chore. Instead, it would be a break from the monotony of their hard, solitary lives. Social events were rare in Legion Valley, and an evening at Matilda’s would be something akin to a slumber party or girls’ night out. That’s probably why their unmarried cousin, Amanda Townsend, decided to go with them. Eight-year-old Minnie Caudle wheedled an invitation as well. A half sister to Samantha Johnson, she was a bright girl with blue eyes and light-colored hair. She convinced the adults that despite her fever, she wasn’t too sick to wa
lk the mile and a half to the Friends’ cabin. The six of them— three young women, two infants, and one girl—set out for the Friend place anticipating a quiet evening together, away from their husbands and the responsibilities of home.

  The frosty, overcast weather somehow made for a comforting sunset. A thick bank of gray clouds diffused the sun’s last, piercing rays in breathtaking shades of orange and purple. The heaviness of the damp air gave the women a feeling of tranquility. Their work was done. The horses were hobbled, the evening meal under way. By the time darkness set in, they’d be huddled around the fire with the children, warming their hands and resting, gazing at the big, black kettle as their supper simmered to a finish.

  Outside the cabin, Minnie Caudle was playing with Temple Friend, John’s seven-year-old son from his first marriage. He was a rather frail, fair-complexioned child with dark eyes, light auburn hair, and “quite an intellectual countenance.” The women heard Temple and Minnie running and laughing, throwing snowballs at each other. Their noises were reassuring; as long as the women could hear them, the children must be all right. They’d been cooped up indoors during the snowfall that week, so they were allowed to play as long as they wanted.