The Captured

By Scott Zesch

The Trail

If I’d been looking for it, I never would have found it. I came across it by accident on a hot, still afternoon in June. I was wandering alone through a neglected corner of the Gooch Cemetery in Mason, Texas, mulling over the names of forgotten pioneers who dreamed big and died young. With a sideways glance, I saw it, barely sticking out above the dry weeds in the miserly shade of a mesquite tree—just a tiny concrete stub with a funeral home plaque, a temporary marker that had served its purpose too long. It read:

ADOLPH KORN — 1 8 9 5

Even though the letters were weatherworn, the name leaped out at me. He was my own kin, and this cemetery was located on the out-skirts of my hometown, my family’s settling place for six generations. But I never knew he was buried there. And Mason is one of those small towns on the fabled Texas frontier where people take pride in knowing these things about their ancestors.

I stopped and stared at the plaque. The date of birth was missing; the year of death was earlier than I would have expected. Then I thought: It’s shameful, My family has let this pathetic chunk of concrete stand as his only monument. As if we’re embarrassed to claim him.

I vaguely remembered my grandparents’ stories about Adolph Korn. He was a stepbrother to Granny Hey, my grandmother’s grandmother. I’d heard the family yarn about how he was kidnapped by Indians when he was a child. After he returned to his people, he refused to sleep indoors. For a while, he even lived in a cave like a wild man. He ate raw meat. Now and then he took his rifle and disappeared into the hills for several days, never explaining his absences when he returned.

Other than those bits and pieces, no one seemed to know much about him, not even the most basic facts. For instance: How old was he when he was captured?

“About ten,” my grandfather thought.

“Twelve,” said Granny Hey.

Eight, according to a fellow captive’s narrative.

How long did he stay with the Indians?

“Three or four years,” recalled my grandfather.

Twelve, in Granny Hey’s memory.

The Korn family history book said six.

Which tribe was he with?

No one knew.

His story had so many gaps and inconsistencies that I doubted whether much of it was true. Still, it wasn’t implausible. Indians and their captives were facts of bygone life in the Hill Country of central Texas, the rural region north of San Antonio and west of Austin. I’d spent my first eighteen years in Mason County, an area with a rich Native American past. Until my ancestors edged them out, the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas had hunted deer in those brushy hills and buffalo on the grassy flats below. On that same ground, Native Americans and immigrant Americans had fought some of their last, desperate battles over who would control this country. It was clear who’d won. I didn’t even know where the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas had gone after they were driven away.

I’d grown up on the cattle ranch my family had claimed as our home since Indian times. It consisted of two square miles of steep, rocky hills lying between the Llano and James Rivers, eight miles south of Mason. As a child, I rode my horse past the blackened mounds of long-ago Indian camps, climbed into caves decorated with faded Indian pictographs, and occasionally found discarded arrowheads and flint knives the rain had washed up.

I was surrounded by reminders of the Indian wars as well. My sixth-grade Sunday school teacher was a daughter of an Indian captive. During my high school days, my friends and I sat by the road and drank Lone Star in front of the historical marker at a rounded hill known as Todd Mountain, where a group of Indians had attacked a family and captured a white girl in 1865. On the hill where Granny Hey had lived were the foundations of Fort Mason. From that post, Robert E. Lee and the soldiers of the Second Cavalry had protected my ancestors from Indians until the Civil War called the army away.

I was also aware, even as an adolescent, that Mason and its closest neighbors—Llano, Fredericksburg, Junction, Menard, Brady, and San Saba—had once been much more lively and significant places than the complacent “last picture show” towns they’d become by the 1970s. A century earlier, this had been the heart of the Texas frontier mythologized by countless western movies and novels, the domain of independent cowboys and their archenemies, the Indians. Still, I never gave much thought to the people who came before me, not even to my family’s own Indian warrior.

By the time I was grown, the story of my uncle Adolph’s life with the Indians seemed beyond reach. He’d died at the turn of the twentieth century, and the only relatives I’d ever known who could actually remember him were Granny Hey’s last surviving children. Aunt Kate, Aunt Fay, Aunt Net, and Aunt Mag had spent their childhoods in the 1880s and 1890s with Adolph Korn. As girls, they shied away from their odd uncle who walked with a limp and had a habit of picking them up by their pigtails. They didn’t understand why he still acted like an Indian many years after he came home.

I wish I’d asked them about him, or at least listened to their tales more carefully. However, by 1970 they’d all died and taken their stories with them. Virtually no eyewitnesses were left. Eighteen years later, I no longer had my grandmother to tell me what she’d heard. As each generation passed, our elusive uncle Adolph receded further into the realm of legend, soon to be lost to history.

I call him Uncle Adolph by way of reclamation. In our family, we always referred to him as Adolph Korn, for he was never really one of us. But seeing his grave got me stirred up. For the first time, this obscure ancestor seemed real. I wondered if there was a trail leading to his story.

As soon as I got home that day, I called Julius DeVos, a local historian who catalogued Mason’s cemeteries, to make sure this was our Adolph Korn. “Yes, that’s your relative,” he assured me.

Then I asked him a question that I should have been able to answer myself: “Why wasn’t he buried with the rest of the family?”

“Well, Adolph was always a little strange,” explained Julius.

That did it. I decided it was time to find out who this shadowy figure really was—or at least get enough information to give him a decent headstone.

His story was unusual but not unique. Dozens of children on the Texas frontier were captured by Southern Plains Indians in the 1800s and adopted into the tribes. Many came to prefer the Native American way of life, resisting attempts to rescue them. Long after they were forced to return to their former families, they held fast to what they’d learned while they were away. Some anthropologists call these assimilated children white Indians.

Not all of the captives were white, though. The Plains Indian raiders abducted European-Americans, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and Native Americans from other tribes. They didn’t discriminate as to whom they killed or kidnapped—or whom they eventually adopted as their own.

The white Indians who rode with the native warriors willingly took part in their horse-stealing raids, which sometimes led to the gruesome deaths of my fellow Texans. Having a captive in the family brought this history uncomfortably close to home. My relative was a German-Texan boy, much like myself, who grew up in a gentle, religious household, instilled with a set of values that most Americans consider absolute and universally desirable. Don’t eat with your hands. Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t kill other people. After spending only three years among the Indians, my uncle Adolph had thrown aside all his old ways of thinking. Did he come to see his own people’s morals as hypocritical and untrustworthy? Or were his dormant personality traits finally coming out, once he was liberated from the people who pressured him to act like a “good boy”? One other question troubled me: under the same circumstances, would I have become like him?

The documented facts of my uncle Adolph’s life were fragmentary and inconclusive. Like many white Indians, he kept his secrets, leaving few tracks. However, I learned from my research that practically all of the captured children went through similar experiences. To better understand my ancestor’s captivity, I expanded my search to include other children who lived with the Comanches or Apaches at about the same time, especially those who chose to talk about their experiences.

One of them, Herman Lehmann, eventually got away from his Apache captors, only to join a group of Comanches rather than return to his own kin. Another, Rudolph Fischer, chose to spend his entire adult life with the Comanches. Uncle Adolph’s campmate, Temple Friend, was brought back to his white family in robust health but soon withered away. Dot and Banc Babb, Clinton and Jeff Smith, and Minnie Caudle defended the native people throughout their lives. While these captives’ stories were alike in many respects, each contributed something unique to my understanding.

Most of Uncle Adolph’s fellow captives lived until the 1930s or 1940s, which meant I would be able to find people who knew them personally. I placed ads in Texas newspapers, posted messages on genealogy Web sites, crashed family reunions, and even left a note in a bottle at one captive’s grave. Soon the responses came pouring in. Like me, the descendants of other captives grew up hearing stories, and they were eager to pass them on. They also wanted to know how many of the family legends were true. One woman sent me successive emails with funny, poignant anecdotes about her grandfather’s rough readjustment to the white world. She concluded: “I don’t see how all these little things can be of any interest to someone writing a book.” However, I was spellbound. The details were fascinating; significant patterns of behavior started to emerge.

I also needed to get to know the native people Uncle Adolph lived among. Why did their culture and their hard way of living have such a strong hold on him? When I began my search, I was sorely uninformed about the Native American tribes who inhabited this continent before my ancestors arrived, and popular culture had only reinforced familiar stereotypes. I’d seen movies such as The Searchers, with its ruthless Comanches who attacked Texas settlers without provocation. I’d also seen later films such as Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves, in which vindictive U.S. soldiers splattered even more blood in the Indian camps. I suspected that the truth fell someplace outside these extremes, but I didn’t know where.

Through the Internet, I contacted some Comanches in Oklahoma. I didn’t know how I’d be received, for the Comanches hated the Texans in the old days and blamed them for all of their troubles. However, they encouraged me to come visit them. When I got to Lawton, I was invited to their meetings, their church services, and their homes. Over tables spread with platters of roasted meat and homemade bread, they shared with me their stories, songs, and aspirations. We had more in common than I’d realized. Their ancestors adopted many non-Indian children, and a number of those children grew up and married into the tribe. Like me, most contemporary Comanches have captives in their family trees.

The captives’ trail took me from central Texas to the vast prairies of Oklahoma and Kansas and the open plains of the Texas Panhandle. I refused to let Uncle Adolph and the other white Indians rest in peace. Their story still speaks to us, and they have much explaining to do. These children witnessed a brutal chapter in the history of America from a unique perspective. For a short time, they became “the other.”

Their trail begins in the Texas Hill Country, where European immigrants lived miserably and in terror of Indians.

Chapter 1

New Year’s Day

They had no reason to feel afraid when they first saw the three figures on horseback, riding steadily across a distant ridge. Even when the horsemen started heading their way, there was no cause to panic. It was noon, broad daylight. The riders were probably just some neighbors returning home from church. Maybe they were travelers on their way to Fredericksburg. They might be U.S. soldiers or Texas Rangers on patrol. There were many good reasons to believe they weren’t Indians. Still, as the riders drew closer, the two miles of riverbank that separated the shepherds from the village seemed like a great expanse.

It hadn’t seemed nearly as far that morning, when they’d let the sheep drift upstream. Along the south edge of the Llano River, the herd was greedily ripping up the dry grass. The sheepdog trotted back and forth, keeping the flock from straying. The herders were ten-year-old twin brothers, Adolph and Charlie Korn, with identical broad faces, light flaxen hair, and high foreheads. Adolph had a scar in the middle of his chin. The boys spoke only German.

The hillsides in that region were thick with live oaks, agaritas, and persimmons. The twins kept losing sight of the three horsemen, weaving in and out of the brush. As always, the boys were defenseless. Still, they didn’t try to hide; it wasn’t their habit to be cautious. Everyone knew that Indians raided on summer evenings when the air was warm and the moon was full, not on a crisp New Year’s Day just before a new moon.

The sheep scattered and bleated as the horses galloped into their midst. Adolph was sitting on a log, calmly eating his lunch, when he got his first good look at the three Apache men rushing toward him. Charlie, a short distance away, dove into the bushes and kept quiet. He watched, petrified, as his twin tried to dash for safety. One of the Apaches grabbed Adolph, hit him over the head with a pistol, and hoisted him onto his horse.

Then the Apaches disappeared into the brush like phantoms, as silently as they had come. It was over and done with so quickly that it didn’t seem real. The sheep went back to grazing, as if nothing had happened. As if Charlie Korn still had a twin brother.

Those three Apaches dealt my ancestors the hardest blow of their lives on that first day of 1870. My uncle Adolph’s capture was the worst and last in a series of disasters his family withstood during their ten-year bout with the Texas frontier. They’d come to this hard, wild country by choice, and their decision turned out to be a poor one.1

Grandpa Korn should have stayed in San Antonio, where his family was safe and modestly prosperous. My great-great-great-grandfather was a gentle soul, an immigrant candy maker who loved to host dances and German songfests and play Santa Claus at Christmas. A small, wiry man with large eyes and heavy eyebrows, he walked around the plazas of San Antonio with sweets in his pocket, ready to offer them to his pupils from the Methodist Sunday school. Never very strong, Grandpa Korn had weighed just over three pounds at birth and grew to a height of only five feet three inches. He wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier.

Still, he felt the lure of the unspoiled wilderness a hundred miles northwest of San Antonio. His friends told him about the bountiful rivers and springs, the ample grazing land for cattle, the gently sloping hills covered with sturdy oaks and flowering yuccas. Hardly anyone lived there: just a handful of fellow German immigrants and a few soldiers and some drifters from the southeastern states. Grandpa decided to give the ranching business a try.

For all its delicate beauty, the Texas Hill Country is an unexpectedly harsh land. Rainfall is erratic, and the area is prone to drought. Cattle that are round-bellied and healthy during the spring, when the countryside is flowering with bluebonnets, winecups and red Indian blankets, may be wasting away by the end of summer. Mesquites, junipers, and prickly pear spread uncontrollably, draining the shallow aquifer and choking out the native grasses. Bold outcroppings of limestone and granite give the landscape its rugged appeal; but that same rock also underlies the fragile topsoil, waiting to crack the blade of a plow. Grandpa Korn didn’t know about that. He was thinking of the money he would make from raising and selling beef cattle. The U.S. Army needed to supply its frontier forts, and the urban markets in Texas and beyond were expanding.

Most of his experience had been in trade, not agriculture. Grandpa Korn—his full name was Louis Jacob Korn—had lived in America twenty-four years before he came to the Hill Country. He’d left his home in Meissenheim, Germany, at the age of nineteen and arrived in New York in 1836. Like many immigrants, he moved around a lot, looking for better opportunities. In 1839 he relocated to New Orleans, then left Louisiana for Texas in 1845. For a few years, he tried farming near New Braunfels, a German-American enclave northeast of San Antonio. He also went into business as a confectioner, and that seemed to suit him. By 1848, at age thirty-one, he was doing well enough to marry Friedrika Grote, a neighbor. Over the next nine years, they had five children.

In the mid-1850s, Grandpa moved his family to San Antonio, where the market for his candies and pastries was larger. It was a good time to be living there. During that decade, San Antonio temporarily eclipsed Galveston to become the largest, most vibrant city in Texas. Businesses flourished, soldiers and traders came and went, and smart new buildings sprang up every month. Grandpa Korn opened his confectionery shop on Market Street, just east of Plaza de las Islas (Main Plaza). His specialty was elaborately decorated wedding cakes, which he displayed in the front window. Louis and Friedrika Korn’s children played hide-and-seek in the ruins of the Alamo.

In 1858 Friedrika died unexpectedly of a fever, leaving Grandpa with five children under the age of ten. He needed help, and he found a new partner who was just as needy. Less than a year after my great-great-great-grandmother’s death, Grandpa Korn married Johanna Bartruff, a recently widowed immigrant from Germany. She was twenty-one, exactly half his age. Grandpa also adopted her three-month-old twins, Charlie and Adolph.

Louis and Johanna Korn’s amalgamated family numbered nine by the time they set out for the Hill Country in the latter part of 1860, and their spirits were high. They awoke each morning to see a light frost on the tall, brown grass and a misty blue haze over the hills ahead. They had every reason to believe that after a few years of hard work and sacrifice, they’d be cattle barons. The nation had just elected a controversial new president, Abraham Lincoln, and South Carolina was threatening to break away from the United States, but that wasn’t likely to have much impact on people out in the hinterland.

The Korns established their new home on the eastern edge of Mason County, near the German-American settlement of Castell. They weren’t one of the first families there; Castell and its founders had already survived thirteen winters by 1860. The Korns arrived to find a close-knit, orderly community of 137 people whose homes were nestled among the sprawling oaks and native pecan trees. The Llano River was wide and shallow, its clear water pouring over low ledges and swirling around gray and pink rock islands. Ten-acre farm plots with log cabins—what passed for civilization in that remote outpost—already lined the grassy lowland along the north bank of the river. The Korns became members of Castell’s Methodist church, the only other token of civilized life in the area.

Although the children of Castell grew up in an idyllic natural setting, everyday life was far from utopian. The older Korn children, accustomed to the relative comfort and urbanity of San Antonio, must have been appalled by their new living conditions. “People living now as we had to live then would be looked on as mighty sorry white trash,” declared my granny Hey. She was ten years old when the Korn family arrived in Castell.

Popular culture, especially western movies, has tended to elevate the living standards of settlers on the Texas frontier during the 1860s. In John Ford’s The Searchers, for instance, the pioneer family lives in a rustic but comfortable house of several rooms. Its wood-plank floors are covered by woven rugs. The glass windows are curtained. The family eats substantial meals off elegant Blue Willow china neatly laid out on a long, polished table, with plenty of spare dishes on the shelves. Their clothes are tidy and look barely worn. A rocker and a padded armchair wait invitingly beside the fire. On the mantel of the broad fireplace sits a kerosene lamp and a handsome dock.

A typical house in Castell during the 1860s would have looked nothing like that. The immigrants’ dwellings were crude log cabins of one or two rooms. The walls never quite fended off the strong gales of a winter norther; however, they did manage to trap the one-hundred-plus-degree heat of August. The floors were hard-packed dirt. No matter how many times a housewife swept them, they still wouldn’t seem clean. The thatched roofs leaked. The windows had no screens or glass, only shutters. During the daytime, a person could either leave them open and risk an invasion of grasshoppers, wasps, and mosquitoes, or close them and sweat in a dark room. Cooking was done over an open fire, either in the fireplace, if the family was fortunate enough to have one and the weather wasn’t sweltering, or else outside the cabin. At night the only source of light was a twisted rag dipped in tallow and set on a tin plate. It was barely enough to read by; but that didn’t matter, because there was hardly anything to read, except the family Bible and maybe an almanac. Most of the children were illiterate, anyway.

The settlers around Castell supplemented their simple diets with whatever they could take off the land: deer, turkey, rabbits, wild Plums and grapes, persimmons, even prickly pear apples and weeds. Occasionally, the native plants they ate turned out to be poisonous, making them seriously ill. They didn’t do much canning or preserving to store food for the winter, because they didn’t have jars. They rarely got wheat flour for bread, and they were desperate for corn. Any time U.S. soldiers camped nearby, the locals scoured the ground afterward for corn their horses might have left uneaten. They also tried to keep a little whiskey on hand to trade the soldiers for grain. “It was a ‘lucky’ that could afford corn bread, black molasses, bacon and beans six days in the week and biscuits for dinner on Sunday,” said Granny Hey. The children dreaded the arrival of visitors during the Sunday meal, because they had to wait and eat at the second table.

Money was scarce. Sometimes the men of Castell left home to take odd jobs such as splitting rails, leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves. As Granny Hey recalled, “Many of the Germans who later became wealthy would work twelve hours a day for fifty cents, and save thirty-five cents of it.” Even when the settlers had money, there wasn’t much food for sale.

The Korn children didn’t attend school—there wasn’t any. Sometimes a teacher would attempt to hold classes for a few days or weeks at one of the settlers’ houses. Usually, however, the children were needed at home. Like the adults, the youngsters spent almost every day carrying out tedious and repetitive chores. Johanna Korn often told her stepdaughters, “I hope you poor children won’t have to work and live as hard as we women have to work and live.” She seemed to overlook the fact that they already did. Granny Hey and her sisters hauled water, gathered firewood, milked cows, ground corn (or acorns when there was no corn), herded livestock, made soap, sewed, and washed clothes. The laundry list wasn’t extensive; each family member had only about two suits of clothing, made of coarse cotton fabric or deerskin. The kids had no shoes. Their feet and arms itched from frequent brushes with stinging nettle, cat’s-claw, and thistles. As they went about their work, they had to watch out for diamondback rattlesnakes along the sandstone ledges and cottonmouth moccasins in the river bottom.

It soon became obvious to Grandpa Korn that Castell wasn’t quite the paradise he had envisioned. Yet perhaps, at the end of the day, in the tranquil moments just before dark, Grandpa paused from his hard labor to watch a fiery sunset over the Llano River, observe a skittish whitetail deer at its evening watering, or listen to a bobwhite quail signaling its mate, and thought to himself: Maybe this wasn’t a mistake. Stop thinking about San Antonio, New Orleans, New York. This is home now. Somehow, he was going to make it tolerable.

Then everything fell apart. Grandpa Korn had invested $1,200 in cattle—his life savings, plus all of the proceeds from the sale of his confectionery in San Antonio. According to Granny Hey, he “never got one dollar back.” It’s hard to account for the Korns’ complete failure in the cattle business, though the outbreak of the Civil War only a few months after they arrived in Castell must have been a factor. Cattlemen in Confederate Texas had lost their single biggest consumer, the federal army. None of the ranchers in the Hill Country could get reliable information about where and when to sell their livestock; mail arrived once a week at most. Another factor may have accelerated the family’s downward slide: the Korns were city folk with little experience raising livestock. The grazing land was unfenced; some of their wild cows strayed and never returned, or were stolen by rustlers or Indians.

Living conditions plummeted during the Civil War, even though Mason County was far from the battlefronts. Even basic foodstuffs were hard to come by. “We had to eat careless weeds and lambs quarter,” Granny Hey remembered. “Supper for us children was usually a bowl of mush without milk or cream.” The Korns were desperate. They had to try another line of work, and quickly, even at the cost of their self-respect. In a land where a man’s status was measured by the head of cattle he owned, Grandpa Korn was soon reduced to raising sheep. What’s worse, the smelly, thickheaded animals didn’t even belong to him. Louis Korn merely tended the sheep for their owner in exchange for part of the profits.

In search of new grazing land for the sheep, the Korn family left their home in Castell late in 1862 for the hardscrabble country of the Saline Valley, west of Mason. They brought with them the few milk cows they’d managed to keep for household use. Sometimes the family camped out with the sheep. Whenever they stopped in one place for a few months, they put up a makeshift shanty.

As Granny would say: like mighty sorry white trash.

The countryside in the Saline Valley was much rougher and less hospitable than Castell. The hills dropped off suddenly in craggy precipices rather than gentle slopes. Tough, scraggly junipers and dagger-like sotol plants dotted the ridges. The soil was stony, the cliffs a pale yellow caliche. Whereas the families of Castell lived close together, the settlers of Saline were widely dispersed. Some of their cabins were six or seven miles apart—ideal targets for Indian raiders. Indian attacks had increased in the region, for Fort Mason and the other federal army posts on the frontier were left in disarray once the nation split apart.

Unlike Castell, Saline had only a handful of German-American residents. The Korns settled three miles east of the farm of Grandpa’s friend, Adolph A. Reichenau, a German immigrant who had moved to Saline from Castell a short time earlier to run cattle. Reichenau, with his heavy dark beard and blue eyes, was a rough-hewn, hardy adventurer who’d served as a soldier and Texas Ranger. As soon as the Korns saw the Reichenaus’ compound, they knew what they could expect in the Saline Valley. The two-room log cabin was enclosed by a heavy picket fence made of sharpened cedar poles, with small holes cut so they could shoot at attackers. It wasn’t a home; it was a fortress.

The Reichenaus weren’t overreacting, for the threat of Indian raids was very real. On April 2, 1862, only a few months before the Reichenaus and the Korns arrived, the Saline community had been shocked by a triple murder. When a settler named Felix Hale went to his elderly neighbors’ place to return a wash kettle, he found their cabin on fire and feathers from a mattress strewn about the yard. Near the house, he discovered the charred body of Henry Parks, age seventy-seven. His wife, Nancy, seventy-two, had been killed near the cow pen. Along the creek lay the body of their twelve-year-old grandson, Billy. All three had been scalped.

Hale rode off to spread the news, and a Texas Ranger captain named John Williams quickly raised a scouting party to look for the Indians who had killed the Parks family. Some of the neighbors offered to ride with him. However, when Captain Williams asked one smart aleck in the Saline community to join him on the Indian hunt, the man refused, saying he hadn’t lost any Indians.

That sort of response wasn’t uncommon. If western movies have underplayed the harsh living conditions on the Texas frontier, they’ve also exaggerated the bravery and self-reliance of the farmers who lived there. On the whole, the Texas settlers were ordinary folks, no more or less courageous than their kin in Tennessee or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. Many of these people had moved to Texas because they hadn’t succeeded back home. Often, they remained there in the face of adversity not because they were stouthearted but because they were trapped. Poverty kept them from relocating and starting over, especially during the miserable years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. One Mason County pioneer wrote in 1868: “I would get away from here if I could but I am too poor.... I have been living on the frontier since 1853 and I now curse the day when I commenced it.”2

When Indians came around their homesteads, the settlers were usually outnumbered, and they seldom stood and fought to defend their homes if they had a chance to hide or escape. Clinton Smith, a young white captive who went on raids through Texas with the Comanches, recalled: “Me fearlessly went to the ranches and stole horses out of pens in the daytime. The white people would dash into their houses whenever we appeared, and we would go boldly into the pens and get the horses.”3

A few months after the Parks murders, the Reichenaus were startled one afternoon when a sorrel pony belonging to an eight-year-old neighbor boy, Billy Schumann, came galloping into their compound, riderless. The Schumanns, who had sold their farm near Fredericksburg the year before to move to Saline, were building a cabin nearby. Two of Adolph Reichenau’s sons took off with some other men to see what was wrong. Ten-year-old Gus Reichenau rode Billy’s pony toward the Schumann farm. As they drew near, the pony became agitated and wouldn’t go any closer. Before long they found the naked body of Billy’s father, Gus Schumann, near Little Saline Creek, with fourteen arrows in his back. About three hundred yards away lay Billy, also naked, shot with twelve arrows.

The tiny community had witnessed five murders in a single year: 1862, the year the Korns and the Reichenaus migrated to the area. Although neither family lost any of its own members to Native American raiders in the Saline Valley, they had their share of close calls over the next few years. That’s how my ancestors, who had no personal reason to hate the native people, became Indian fighters. To the Korns and their neighbors, Indian raiders were just hazards of frontier life, like rattlesnakes or rabies or rustlers. Settlers such as Grandpa Korn didn’t see themselves as intruders on Native American hunting grounds. They weren’t aware that their mere presence there helped precipitate the last and bloodiest phase of warfare between Native Americans and all other Americans.

Each time the Korns drove the sheep herd into virgin grazing territory, they moved farther from their neighbors and deeper into Indian country. One bright midnight, my granny Hey and her stepmother, Johanna Korn, got out of bed to let some calves out of the pens. As Granny was lowering the bar, she noticed a crouching figure. “I thought at first it was a cow and said, ‘Huah.’ The Indian jumped up and nearly scared me to death. I shouted to my stepmother to run. We caught up our dresses and ran to the house as fast as we could.” Granny slammed the door so quickly that she caught part of her skirt in the doorjamb. “The Indian was right behind me,” she claimed, “and stuck his head through an open panel in the door and took a wild glance about the room.”

Meanwhile, other Indians came riding out of the brush and started circling the house. “Get the gun, Daddy, get the gun!” Granny screamed. Before Grandpa could fire a shot, the raiders left. According to Granny Hey, they were afraid of the dogs. One of the Indians lost his saddle when he took off. The next morning, Uncle Adolph found it and claimed it for his own. “Before my stepmother would allow my brother to use it,” said Granny, “she put it in a pot of boiling water to kill the bugs.” The Indians also dropped some beads, which Granny Hey and her sisters were delighted to claim.

White settler histories are full of tales like Granny’s. It’s too bad that we have so few raiding stories from the natives’ point of view. The Texas pioneers, who were busy defending themselves and scratching out a meager living, didn’t have the luxury of mulling over the more interesting questions. For instance, why did the Indians bother to stake out the Korn house if the family had so little worth taking? Were they hoping to capture the children? Did the Indian who stuck his scowling face through the door envy or scorn the way these impoverished settlers lived in their cramped hovel? And why did the Indians circle the cabin and put on such a show if they weren’t planning to attack? Were they scared off, or did they just lose interest?

One Comanche captive, Clinton Smith, described an almost identical incident from the other side of the cabin door. He reported that the Comanches sometimes chased settlers into their shacks just for fun. When the white family in his story sprinted to their cabin, as Granny Hey and Johanna Korn had done, “[w]e all gave the warwhoop, just to see how fast those people would run.... We had a big laugh. The house was an old log affair, with only one hole in it, and a big old slathery boy was running so fast he missed the hole and went half way around the house before he could stop and turn back and hit the hole.”

Anything for an occasional laugh. Life was hard and potentially short for both the Native Americans and the immigrants. As a former Comanche raider named Marnsookawat explained in his later years, perhaps only half jokingly: “We shot the white men, because it was better to shoot them than to let them starve.”

Three years after the murders of 1862, the people of the Saline Valley were still living in a state of anxiety, expecting at any moment to hear that another neighbor had been killed and mutilated. Adolph Reichenau’s family awoke on the morning of January 8, 1865, to discover that they’d been raided during the night. Someone had made off with the laundry they’d hung out to dry the previous evening. A storm had blanketed the area with about fourteen inches of snow, so the Reichenaus were able to follow the thieves’ tracks to a pasture near their cabin. Sure enough, they found signs of an Indian camp. Then they saw something so chilling that they forgot about their stolen laundry. Some small footprints circled a tree over and over again. It appeared as if someone, probably a child, had been tethered to the trunk.

Later that morning, a tired, grim party of men from neighboring Mason County arrived in Saline. They were tracking some Indians who had captured a thirteen-year-old girl, Alice Todd, the day before, about four miles south of Fort Mason. The Indians had killed the Todd family’s servant girl and mortally wounded Alice’s mother. Her father had abandoned his family during the attack, claiming he couldn’t control his horse. The Reichenaus, the Korns, and the other neighbors realized what had happened during the night, while they slept soundly—Alice Todd, bound to a horse and shivering from cold and trauma, passed by their cabins, unable to cry out for help. At the same time, they felt a guilty sense of relief that it wasn’t one of their children.

A few of the men of Saline joined in the search for Alice Todd. Nothing caused the Texas settlers to hate Indian raiders more than the abduction of women and, especially, children. To their way of thinking, captivity truly was a fate worse than death. Death at the hands of Comanches or Apaches elevated ordinary dirt farmers to the status of martyrs in the quest for western expansion. Captivity, on the other hand, was unspeakably degrading. Life among the natives turned virtuous women into sexual slaves and civilized children into savages.

Alice Todd was at that in-between age where she could be subjected to both types of ruination.

The rescue party pursued the raiders north into Menard County, then northwest beyond Fort Concho, a total distance of over a hundred miles. Snow was still falling, and the searchers lost the Indians’ trail several times and had to circle around for miles to find it again. The men and the horses were exhausted and badly chilled. At the foot of the Staked Plains, the tracks indicated that the Indians had divided into three groups. It was hopeless. Alice Todd was lost, another casualty of the frontier.

After the Civil War officially ended on April 9, 1865, the frontier settlers hoped that peace and order would soon be restored. However, Indian raids in Texas only got worse. That summer the people of the Saline Valley heard nothing but bad news from the surrounding settlements. On July 26, 1865, Indians attacked and killed a man named Henry Kensing in southern Mason County. They raped and mortally wounded his pregnant wife, Johanna. Only three days later, the Comanches captured a thirteen-year-old boy, Rudolph Fischer, close to his parents’ farm outside Fredericksburg. Ten days after that, Eli McDonald and his sister-in-law, Gill Taylor, were killed by Kiowas in adjacent Gillespie County. McDonald’s wife, Caroline, and their two children, two nieces, and a nephew were all taken captive.

At about the same time as the attack on the McDonalds’ farm, Saline got hit. This time the victim was thirty-four-year-old Fred Conaway. He was last seen at the Reichenau place on his way to get a yoke of oxen. He’d been gone several days when Adolph Reichenau rode by his house and asked Conaway’s wife, Martha, where he was.

“God, I don’t know,” she blurted out. Martha Conaway, five months pregnant, was frazzled by then. She’d been keeping her four young children close to her in case there were Indians around. When night fell, she hadn’t built a fire or lit a lamp.

Adolph Reichenau and a few other men rode in search of Fred Conaway. They were about to give up when they noticed some buzzards circling. Along the edge of the Llano River, they found his partially decomposed body. He’d been suffering from two gunshot wounds and apparently was trying to quench his thirst at the time he died. One hand was dangling in the water. It was the hottest month of the summer, and the smell of decay was so strong they didn’t try to haul his body back home. Instead, they buried him beneath a nearby tree. Later, they found signs that he’d furiously battled some Indians from inside a cave and had apparently killed or wounded at least one of them.

After Conaway’s death, the people of Saline began to question whether it was really worth trying to stay there. One of them, Rance Moore, lost 2,100 head of cattle and fifty-two saddle horses to a large party of Indian raiders in the daytime hours of August 8, 1866.8 He decided to move to the town of Mason for safety. He’d helped bury his neighbor, Fred Conaway, and had lived in fear of Indians much too long. Even in town, however, his family didn’t feel secure. On the night of February 5, 1867, Moore awoke in terror when he heard a noise in the horse stable. He spotted a single, shadowy figure prowling about the corral. Like most Indian fighters, Rance Moore shot first and investigated afterward. The boy he’d killed was his own son, Daniel, five days shy of his fifteenth birthday.

At the time the Saline settlers learned about the Moore family’s tragedy, it had been a year and a half since they’d lost anyone in their community to Indians. They started to lower their guard. On the morning of October 12, 1867, fifty-five-year-old Frank Johnson, a patriarchal figure with a long, white beard, went to look for his horses. He didn’t take his gun—and he didn’t come home. His wife, Betsy, wasn’t too worried. Once before Frank had set out for a neighbor’s house to get some cornmeal for breakfast and was gone for three months. However, the men of the community decided not to wait that long to look for him. They found his body several miles from his home, scalped and shot with arrows.

One by one, the families of the Saline Valley gave up and left. Adolph Reichenau lost nine horses to Indian raiders in June 1868, seventeen more in December of that year, and another twenty-five in March 1869.10 He moved his family east to a place on the Llano River called Hedwig’s Hill. Betsy Johnson and her family returned to their former home, the Legion Valley community in southern Llano County, shortly after Frank was murdered in the fall of 1867. The Korn family went back to Castell in 1869. The Johnsons and the Korns hoped they could still find some semblance of serenity on the frontier if they stayed in settlements where the houses weren’t so far apart. Both families would be proven wrong.

For Grandpa Korn, the 1860s should have been the era in which he established his place in life. As the decade drew to a close, however, he had nothing to show for his ten years in the Hill Country. He had stoically withstood Indian raids, but he hadn’t managed to profit from occupying the natives’ home. He had foundered in the cattle business, his American dream scrapped for salvage. Worst of all, he had failed his children. Louis Korn’s mother had been able to speak seven languages, and Louis himself could read and write both German and English. Most of his own offspring spoke only German and were illiterate. Grandpa even had to send them to work for other families for wages. During the last weeks of 1869, as his children halfheartedly observed the German St. Nicholas traditions and scavenged wild plums and berries for an improvised Christmas pudding, Grandpa Korn tried to convince himself that the next decade would be better. But New Year’s Day 1870 was just another working day in Castell. The ten-year-old twins, Charlie and Adolph, rose early and left the cabin to go to their usual job: herding sheep for their neighbor, August Leifeste. They wouldn’t be home till dusk, so their mother sent lunch with them—perhaps some dried meat, if they had any, and a hunk of the previous night’s cornbread. Johanna Korn watched her boys leave the cabin. When she casually told Adolph good-bye, she couldn’t have imagined it would be for three years. Or that when he returned, her son would be a stranger who despised everything she stood for.

August Leifeste was afraid something bad had happened when his sheepdog came home alone. He started to go check on his shepherds, the Korn boys. Before he got far, he could hear Charlie’s frenzied shouts upriver, followed by Louis and Johanna Korn’s cries of panic. Within minutes Leifeste, Grandpa Korn, and some other men from Castell were searching frantically for Adolph, calling his name and whistling. In that boundless brushland, it was useless. The European settlers were no match for the Apaches when it came to navigating the wilderness.

Adolph Korn heard the men calling, not far behind. However, he was afraid his captor would hit him again or even slit his throat if he cried out. His head was still throbbing where the Apache had smacked it with a pistol. Gradually, the voices of his father and his neighbors faded in the distance. All he could hear was the pounding of horses’ hooves.

The three Apaches who captured him probably came from the Fort Sill region of Indian Territory, although they may have been from New Mexico or even Arizona.11 Regardless, they were a long way from home, and they weren’t out for pleasure. Adolph traveled north with them for about twelve days. Each day his hope of rescue grew fainter.

After a raid, the Southern Plains Indians rode hard, stopping only a few moments for rest or water, sometimes not eating for several days. If they killed a calf or a deer along the trail, they often didn’t bother to cook the meat before they ate it. It took too long to build a fire, and the smoke would give away their location. Typically, they tied the captives to a horse to prevent their escape. Sometimes, the Apaches stripped off a captive’s “white” clothes and made him ride naked until they could get to an Indian camp, where the women would dress him in buckskin and moccasins.

Finally, they reached a Quahada village in Indian Territory. The Quahadas were the most bellicose division of the Comanches, the ones who refused to report to their Indian agent and made no treaties with the federal government. Their camps had the appearance and atmosphere of a traveling circus: the tepees, constructed of tanned buffalo hides and long poles, were easily assembled and disassembled, and the mood was festive when a successful raiding party showed up.

As a captive, Adolph was the property of the man who abducted him and was subject to his whims. His Apache owner decided to trade him to some Quahadas at the camp for a sorrel horse, a pistol and ammunition, a blanket, and some other trinkets. During the early weeks of his captivity, Adolph served as their menial. One of his chores was taking care of a Comanche child, who was sick at the time. When the child died, some of the tribesmen wanted to kill Adolph, but an old woman intervened and saved his life. He was severely whipped instead.12

That wasn’t his worst trial. As the Comanches were preparing to move on to new hunting territory, Adolph was thrown from a horse, badly injuring his leg. The Comanche men debated what to do with him. Adolph didn’t understand their language, but no translation was necessary. Crippled, he had little value as chattel and no future as a warrior. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with them, and they often had to stay on the move in case U.S. soldiers or Texas Rangers were after them. They could abandon him to fend for himself. However, they were a long way from any settlement, and with his lame leg he would almost certainly starve to death before he found help. The simplest and most humane solution would be to drive a lance through his chest.

Then a Comanche woman, most likely the same one who had saved him before, came forward to beg for his life. Maybe she took pity on him. Perhaps she’d lost a son of her own. Or maybe she just felt that he still had potential as a warrior if his leg healed properly, and she knew the tribe needed more fighting men to resist the Texas invaders. There’s no record of what she said, but she must have put up a spirited argument, for the boy was spared.

This Comanche woman helped Adolph travel two miles to the next camp by holding up his injured leg while he crawled. No doubt his hands were cut and bloody and swollen from thorns by the time they reached camp, but at least he was alive. The child prisoner had survived his closest call. While his leg was healing, the old woman nursed him and protected him, sometimes even hiding him in a snowbank from those tribesmen who still thought he should be killed. Adolph would always feel indebted to her. Alone in a world of unfamiliar sights and sounds, he had a new mother to guide him.

Grandpa Korn refused to believe that the Indians would have killed Adolph after going to so much trouble to get away with him. He traveled to San Antonio to report the kidnapping at the military headquarters. As a result, officers in charge of scouting parties were ordered to search for the boy. Grandpa Korn also wrote to the Texas governor, and his cry for help went up and down the chain of command. The Texas secretary of state notified the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, who contacted the Indian Office’s superintendent in Lawrence, Kansas, who directed the Indian agent at Fort Sill to ask the tribal chiefs if they knew what had become of Adolph Korn.

Despite this show of authority, the army, the governor, and the commissioner of Indian Affairs were powerless to do anything more than publicize the boy’s disappearance. The Indian Office’s superintendent in Lawrence issued a circular, making a plea on the Korns’ behalf. “His parents are poor, but hope to hear something of their child from some out-post of civilization where Indians trade; therefore all Texas and frontier papers will confer a favor on the afflicted, by giving this notice publication.”14 “All Texas and frontier papers”: Adolph could be anywhere. The Korns didn’t even know which tribe was holding him. The commissioner in Washington directed the agents under his authority to inquire among the Kiowas and Comanches, the tribes that most frequently raided in Texas. He was essentially saying, “The boy is in Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas, or New Mexico, unless he’s elsewhere.” No news came back.

For ten years, Grandpa Korn had felt the shame of not being able to provide for his children. Now he’d failed in an even more important duty of a man on the frontier: to protect his family. He’d let his twin boys wander perilously far from the village, just so they could earn the money he didn’t have, and now one of them hadn’t come home, and the other was traumatized. For all he knew, the Indians had bashed out Adolph’s brains with a rock, just as they’d done a couple of years before to two infant granddaughters of Betsy Johnson, the Korns’ former neighbor from Saline. Or maybe they were torturing Adolph, putting him through a slow and agonizing death. Grandpa knew he had let it happen.

It was his wife who decided they’d stayed on the frontier long enough. The move to the Hill Country had been Grandpa’s idea to start with. Johanna Korn had trusted her husband and kept watch over his dreams, waiting patiently for things to get better. But after her boy disappeared, she declared that she would no longer live in that wild country and put her other children at risk. The Korns packed up their meager belongings and returned to San Antonio. A decade after Grandpa Korn had set out to make good in Castell, he was back where he started.

But Louis and Johanna Korn’s Hill Country ordeal was not yet over, for the boy they’d left behind there, if he had survived, was still wandering somewhere on the prairie, a prisoner in the hands of savages. The Korns had become part of a small circle of heartsick parents across Texas who faced each day by reassuring themselves that some captured children eventually came home. However, each night they tossed fitfully, racked by the knowledge that others, like Alice Todd, did not. There was nothing the Korns could do to improve the odds of Adolph’s recovery. Only one decision remained within their hands: how long to wait before giving up hope.

Excerpt from The Captured by Scott Zesch. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press. Copyright 2004 by Scott Zesch.