It was relatively easy for SCOTT ZESCH to find his great-great-great uncle Adolph Korn’s gravestone in their family’s hometown of Mason. It was considerably more difficult to uncover the facts of his ancestor’s abduction as a child by an Apache raiding party in 1870 and understand why, by most accounts, Korn would not shake his acquired Indian ways even after he’d been returned to his birth family. Zesch’s research forms the basis of THE CAPTURED (A TRUE STORY OF ABDUCTION BY INDIANS ON THE TEXAS FRONTIER) (St. Martin’s), in which he reconstructs the stories of nine children and teens taken in raids. The collection is a fascinating reassessment of the not-uncommon phenomenon of white Indians in nineteenth-century Texas. Be forewarned that the brutal truths of frontier life recounted here are not for the faint of heart.
