The Captured Page 9

  Suddenly the children’s yells sounded different, more like screams. They were shouting “Someone’s stealing Button!” as they sprinted toward the house. Matilda rushed outside. Samantha, Rebecca, and Amanda were close behind her. They saw a man near one of the ponies that was hobbled about two hundred yards from the cabin. Matilda climbed up on the log fence to get a better view. The lone figure she saw was unmistakably an Indian. The women watched as he removed the hobbles. Then he leaped on the pony, bareback, and took off to the southwest.

  The four women waited anxiously to see whether the Indian was gone for good. A few moments later, about fifteen figures on horseback approached at a gallop, charging the house. The women ran back inside the cabin and barred the door. Then they watched from a window as the raiders drew near and stopped.6 Among them were a couple of women. Some of the Indians dismounted and walked confidently toward the house.

  Matilda Friend handed her husband’s double-barreled shotgun to one of the other women. When the Indians broke open the door, she screamed, “Shoot!” Her friend was too petrified to react. Matilda grabbed the shotgun out of her arms. She used it to try to frighten the Indians away from the door, but the man at the front of the group lunged into the house and wrested the gun away from her.

  Matilda was the only one in the cabin who put up any fight. She picked up a chair and knocked the gun out of the man’s hands. He drew his bow and shot her in the arm. With her good arm, she grabbed a smoothing iron and hurled it at him. It struck him on the side of the head. He collapsed. She reached for the iron again. The man quickly recovered, and he shot her with another arrow, this time in her left side. The arrow went all the way through her body, coming out below her right breast. She fell onto the bed, pretending she was dead. Meanwhile, other Indians poured into the cabin and led the women and children outside. After seeing what had happened to Matilda, they decided not to struggle.

  Once the prisoners were all outside, the Indians came back inside the cabin. They started stripping the house of everything they could carry away: bedding, clothes, a Spencer rifle, the shotgun, a six-shooter, a sidesaddle, and some money from a box on a shelf. They dragged Matilda off the bed and dumped her facedown on the dirt floor. Then they carried the featherbeds and straw ticks out into the yard, tore them open, emptied the feathers, and took the cloth.

  Matilda’s attacker reentered the house. He drew a knife, slashed the back of her left hand to the bone three times, and stabbed her left breast twice. Then he started scalping her. First, he cut a strip almost two inches wide and three inches long from the back of her head, just below the crown. Not satisfied, he took a larger section from the front part and right side of her head. Finally, he cut off the rest of her hair and inflicted several severe blows to what was left of her scalp. Matilda Friend, still fully conscious, somehow managed to keep from crying out.

  When her attacker left the cabin, she tried to get up from the floor so she could see what was happening to the others. She wasn’t able to stand. Instead, she crawled to a small opening in the side of the house. Wiping the blood out of her eyes, Matilda watched as the Indians placed the three women and four children on horses. It was almost dark by the time they headed out. Then she saw her attacker coming back toward the house. Matilda hurried to the spot where he’d left her on the floor and tried to place herself in the same position as when she was scalped. The man approached her, still not satisfied she was dead. He grabbed the arrow sticking out from her side and jerked it back and forth, then up and down. She didn’t flinch. The man went back out to join his companions.

  Once Matilda was sure the Indians were really gone, she pulled herself up off the floor. She found a piece of cloth and wrapped it around her head to stop the bleeding. Then she stepped outside to make her way toward the home of her cousin, Samantha Bradford. Before she left, she took time to pick up the things the Indians had scattered around the yard and put them inside the cabin, bending over carefully so she didn’t agitate the arrow shot through her chest.

  The sky was cloudy, but Matilda knew her way in the dark. After everything she’d been through that evening, the freezing temperature wasn’t likely to bother her. However, she was weak from trauma and loss of blood. The searing pain of the multiple knife wounds and the arrows lodged in her arm and breast, as well as the baby protruding from her belly, caused her to walk slowly. Along the way, she stopped to scoop up some snow. She used part of it to quench her thirst and put the rest on her head to bathe her face and stem the flow of blood.

  It was eight o’clock by the time Matilda saw the faint light coming from the Bradford cabin in the grove of live oaks. She tried to call out, but she didn’t have the voice. The dogs growled and barked as she approached. Her cousin’s husband, Jack Bradford, opened the door and emerged hesitantly. He saw a strange apparition staggering in the shadows, its head wrapped in a bloody cloth and arrows protruding from both sides. Jack ran back inside and slammed the door. Matilda summoned enough strength to holler and tell him who she was. Jack came back out. This time he rushed to her side and supported her.

  It wasn’t until she got inside that the Bradfords saw how horribly she was wounded. The sight of Matilda Friend—two arrows sticking out of her, blood oozing from her scalp and down her face—caused them to panic. They were sure the Indians were still in the area and would come for them next. The Bradfords decided that they weren’t going to ride for a doctor, sit with Matilda and comfort her, or even take time to remove her blood-soaked clothes or dress her wounds. What they did was place her in front of the fireplace and quickly retie her bleeding head. They put a bucket of water by her side and threw a quilt on the floor. At Matilda’s insistence, Jack finally agreed to extract the arrows, cutting them below the feathers and pulling them through. Before they abandoned her, the Bradfords told Matilda not to lie on their bed; they didn’t want their linens bloodied. Then Jack and Samantha woke the children and fled with them, leaving their cousin alone to die. For the rest of that freezing night, the Bradford family hid in a cedar thicket.

  The temperature had dropped sharply after sundown, but eight-year-old Minnie Caudle was too much in shock to notice the numbness in her hands and face. The Indians who had taken her moved fast and spoke little. Minnie was tied behind one of the women in the raiding party, a fat Comanche who was to become her adoptive mother. The woman drew a blanket around her so that she didn’t suffer terribly from exposure.

  The Indians and their seven captives hadn’t gone far when Samantha Johnson’s infant daughter, Fielty, started to cry. Everyone tensed. The noise would give away their location if a search party was following them. The man who was carrying Fielty choked her, trying to make her stop. Samantha was riding behind him on the same horse. In a panic, she tried to take her baby away from him. He got so angry at both of them that he grabbed the infant by the ankles and dashed out her brains against a tree. Minnie Caudle saw it happen. The murdered infant was her niece, her half sister’s child.

  That first night, they camped on a small mountain not far from the Friend house. The Indians took shelter from the icy blasts of wind in a cedar brake and kept a fire blazing. That was risky, for the light could lead a rescue party straight to their camp; but the night was too miserable not to have any heat. Minnie’s new mother slept with her to keep her warm. She also sheltered the girl from some of the terrifying sights and sounds that followed. It would be an endless night of suffering for the two Johnson women and Amanda Townsend, who were raped and tormented as they sobbed and prayed aloud.

  The two older children, Minnie and Temple, realized that they mustn’t cry, not even when they saw worse sights the second day. Shortly after they left camp the next morning, the Indians decided that they didn’t want to risk traveling with a wailing infant. One of them grabbed Rebecca Johnson’s three-year-old daughter, Nancy Elizabeth, and slit her throat. They held up her body by the feet as blood flowed out, letting her head dangle right in front of Rebecca. The child’s mother screamed and
fainted. The Indians laughed at the spectacle. Then they took off again.

  Around noon they stopped. The raiders held a conference. The five remaining captives couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they knew the Indians were debating something. Finally, the men grabbed the two Johnson women. Before Minnie could see any more, her Comanche mother threw a blanket over her head.

  The day after the raid, the small town of Llano was in an uproar over the shocking news. About a dozen men, outraged by the atrocity, had already formed a posse to pursue the Indians. When they reached the cabin of Jack Bradford in Legion Valley around ten o’clock that night, the tiny, close-knit community was already in mourning. Earlier that evening, Spence Townsend, the father of one of the captives and a brother of Betsy Johnson, had found the frozen, battered body of Samantha Johnson’s baby girl on the side of Cedar Mountain, close to the Bradford house. Eighteen-month-old Fielty Johnson, the first infant to die, was lying in a heap at the foot of a blackjack tree. Bits of fabric, hair, and clothes clung to the bark. It was too late and too cold for the search party to start following the Indians’ trail. They spent the night outdoors at the Bradford house warming themselves by a fire.

  Around midnight John Friend drew near to Legion Valley in his wagon loaded with lumber. A messenger had gone to meet him along the road. The man lent John his horse and offered to drive the slow wagon for him. John took off, spurring the horse to a gallop. First he stopped briefly to inspect the damage at his house. Then he rushed to the Bradfords’ cabin to see his wounded wife. Matilda was conscious and remarkably calm, nursed by Betsy Johnson and Hardin Oatman, the physician from Llano. Miraculously, she hadn’t lost her baby. John tried to convince her everything would be all right. But his boy, Temple, was still unaccounted for, and he wasn’t sure if Matilda was going to make it through another night. John was also racked by guilt. If he hadn’t asked Rebecca and Samantha Johnson to spend the night with his wife, they and their children would be safe at home. His only consolation was that his ten-year-old daughter, Florence, had been away at boarding school when the raid happened.

  Before sunrise the next morning—Friday, February 7—the searchers started following the steep, rocky trail through the brush along the hillside. The journey began horribly. The men heard John Oatman, the physician’s son, cry out for them to stop. About fifty yards from where the murdered infant had been found the previous evening, he discovered the body of three-year-old Nancy Elizabeth Johnson, lying facedown on a flat limestone rock. He recalled: “As I approached it, I thought that it had been stripped to go to bed when it was taken and that it had on a white night cap with a lock of yellow hair sticking out on the back of its head. But when I got to it, I found that it had been scalped, taking all the hair off its head except a small space next to its neck on back of its head, and that what I thought was a night cap was the flesh of its naked scalped head.”

  Near that place, the men found beds of cedar boughs and grass. They doubted whether anyone had slept there. Instead, they speculated that the beds were where “the Indians had mistreated the women in a nameless way.” One of the men became so distraught that he started experiencing heart problems. The others convinced him to turn back.

  John Oatman and another man carried the frozen body of the second infant back to the Bradford cabin. John Friend and the doctor, Hardin Oatman, were waiting there for news. Meanwhile, John had found a way to occupy his time. He was using the lumber he’d brought from Fredericksburg to build coffins. He and Dr. Oatman buried the two children.

  About three or four miles up Cedar Mountain, the posse found the prints of bare feet. Since the Indians usually wore moccasins, the men guessed that these were the tracks of the white women. For the first time, their spirits rallied. If the three adult prisoners had survived that far, maybe they were still alive.

  Around ten o’clock that morning, they reached a place called Gamble’s Gap, after trailing the raiding party another four miles. The Indians had stopped near there and left two of their captives behind. Samantha Johnson, perhaps because she was pregnant, hadn’t even tried to flee. It looked as if she had just sat down on the limestone rock, naked and humiliated, and given up. The spear had entered her body just under her right shoulder blade and had come out on her left side above her hip. Her throat was also slashed, and she’d been scalped. Apparently, she was going into premature labor at the time she died. Samantha’s sister-in-law, Rebecca Johnson, also stripped of her clothing, had managed to run about fifty yards before she fell. A spear went through the center of her body. She’d been both scalped and disemboweled. The men had to identify her mainly by process of elimination, because some wild hogs had eaten out her intestines and torn most of the flesh from her face and thighs. The search party stopped long enough to borrow a wagon from a nearby settler and haul the bodies down the hillside to his house.

  The trail then took the men up four more rough miles through thick persimmon and cat’s-claw to a craggy spot aptly called Hell’s Half Acre. There they were startled to see a red flag flying. They couldn’t believe that they’d actually managed to sneak up on the Indians, whom they thought were long gone. That meant they’d have to fight them to rescue the remaining three captives. These men were farmers, not soldiers, and they were about to go to battle with some of the best-trained warriors in the land. It took all the courage they could muster to charge up the hill into the thicket, their pistols drawn and their rifles ready for action.

  But no one was there. They dismounted and looked around. They found the remnants of an Indian camp: a dying fire, more tracks, and some scraps of cooked meat. Spence Townsend picked up one of the small pieces of flesh the Indians had discarded. It had a long lock of yellow hair attached. The men heard him scream, “This is my poor child’s hair!”

  Then they noticed a foot trail leading away from the camp into the brush. There they found the last of the adult prisoners, Amanda Townsend. According to the news accounts, her remains were “an indescribable mass of flesh.” Her head was crushed to pieces. Around her body, the men found rocks covered with blood, hair, and brains. She’d been scalped, and her throat was cut. Amanda’s father was there to see it all. One final outrage perhaps caused him more grief than all the others: his daughter had been “tied in a position that the fiends could satisfy their brutal lusts.”

  By then the posse had given up all hope. The only task that remained for them was to find the mutilated bodies of the two older children, Temple and Minnie, and they were in no hurry to do that. They continued the search for five days, but the Indians eluded them. Near Devil’s River, their horses finally gave out from exhaustion. Some of the men had to lead their mounts by the reins. They stopped to let them drink at one of the waterholes where the raiding party had been.

  One of the men took a close look at the ground. He shouted in excitement. The others crowded around. They saw some footprints too small for the adult Indians to have made. Either Temple Friend or Minnie Caudle might still be alive. Perhaps both of them had survived.

  After that first night when they camped on the hillside, the Indian raiders rode three days and three nights without stopping to rest or eat a proper meal. Minnie Caudle, whose legs were sore and raw from riding bareback behind her Comanche mother, was still suffering from chills and fever. At one point, the Indians stopped by a cornfield and collected some husks. They boiled them and made signs that she should drink the water. After that her fever broke, and she felt much better.

  Minnie’s great-grandson, Damon Benson, remembers her talking about the flight northwest from central Texas. “She said they’d ride a horse till it fell from exhaustion. Then they’d jump off of it, split it open and grab a gut, about three or four feet long, and just pop it over their heads like you would a rope and eat it raw. They’d grab another horse and take off, riding full tilt all the way.”

  This was the first time the two white children had been outside the Hill Country. After long days of hard riding across the plains, t
he raiding party reached Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle, a favorite gathering place for the Comanches and Kiowas. This vast, deep canyon, sixty miles long and six miles wide, took Minnie and Temple by surprise, opening up suddenly before them after they’d crossed a seemingly endless expanse of level land. The raiding party descended eight hundred feet over rocky trails to the bottom of the canyon, which was watered by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. They set up camp in the peaceful valley and rested there awhile, safe from soldiers and Texas Rangers. Other Indians were probably staying there as well.

  By then the moon was full. The landscape, dotted with small hardwood shrubs and defined by buttes and pinnacles, looked like a wonderland in the moonlight. The colors of the steep canyon walls were stunning, especially at dawn, when the sun’s first rays gradually illuminated the stratified layers of burnt red, gold, and dusty green.

  One day the Indians sent Minnie and Temple to the river to fill a wooden bucket with water. The stream was shallow, and they took turns using a tin cup to dip the water into the bucket. Temple was playing along the edge of the stream. Minnie got tired of doing all the work and handed Temple the cup. They got into an argument. Temple swung the empty tin cup and hit Minnie in the stomach.

  When they got back to the camp with the bucket of water, the Indians ushered them to the teepee of the group’s headman. He was sitting inside, slowly drawing the blade of his knife back and forth across a sharpening stone. Suddenly, he grabbed Temple by the hair on the back of his head and laid the boy across his knees. He pressed the blade of the knife against his neck. Through signs and gestures, he made them understand that he was going to cut off Temple’s head for hitting Minnie. The terrified children started wailing and pleading for mercy. Eventually, the man made Temple understand that if he’d never strike Minnie again, he would let him live.