The Captured

by Scott Zesch

  Lawrie Tatum had thought of himself as a pioneer in Iowa, where he was one of the early settlers of Cedar County. Still, he’d never seen anything quite as primitive as the conditions he found at Fort Sill and his new agency in the hinterland of Indian Territory. When he arrived in May 1869, the crude adobe building that would initially house his office was still under construction. The men he met at the military post were as unrefined as the facilities. Progress toward civilization was slow, and Tatum celebrated small victories. He was pleased when the soldiers finally “learned to eat with knives and forks, which were very much in their way at first.” He also wrote to his wife, Mary Ann, that Fort Sill had “a very good surgeon,” who had “taken off a good many toes the past winter, on account of being frozen.”

  The dedicated public servant who would later title his memoir Our Red Brothers was genuinely interested in getting to know the Plains Indians. Tatum was especially impressed by their hospitality, and he wrote a warm description of his visit to a Native American village with his interpreter, Matthew Leeper:

  We went to the lodge of the chief, who sent one of his wives to take care of our horses; another wife prepared some fuel for the fire in the tent, and a third wife prepared our supper.… She did not get nervous by having us sitting on the bed about four inches high on the opposite side of the fire watching her. When she had it cooked, she placed a board on the laps of her husband and visitors, spread her cleanest blanket on it, and placed the provision before us, and we had a sumptuous meal. Just as we got through eating an invitation came from another chief to eat with him.… So we accepted the kind invitation, supped a little more coffee, and partook of enough food to show that we were not above eating with him also.9

  Not all of Tatum’s encounters with Native Americans were that pleasant. Furthermore, his Quaker superiors in the Indian Office didn’t fully appreciate what he was up against. They told him to make sure that “every member of each tribe under his care” who had “arrived at years of understanding” was “told the saving truths of the gospel.” Tatum’s Comanche and Kiowa charges were tough, independent men and women who had their own religious beliefs and were hardly amenable to friendly persuasion. He referred to them as “poor, ignorant creatures.” They called him “Bald Head.”

  Of all the challenges that Tatum faced, none weighed more heavily on his mind than recovering the Indians’ captives. He later recalled, with Victorian primness, “It was distressing to think of those savages having white captives, and especially women.” Some parents told Tatum that “they would rather see their children killed than carried off in that way, and endure so much suspense and uncertainty of ever seeing them again.” At first Tatum offered to pay the Indians $100 for each captive they brought to him. He later changed his mind, believing that this policy encouraged them to take more children. He started demanding that the Indians deliver their captives without ransom.

  Tatum’s only real bargaining chip was the government’s rations. Every two weeks, the Indians came to his agency to receive beef, bacon, flour, cornmeal, coffee, sugar, salt, soap, and tobacco. Each chief would divide the goods among the women of his band, who sat on the ground in a circle around him. The Comanches and Kiowas were becoming increasingly dependent on these luxuries, which had been alien to their way of life only a few years earlier. Applying his legal training, Lawrie Tatum concluded that the Native Americans of his agency had forfeited their rights to annuities under the Treaty of Medicine Lodge by their frequent raids into Texas. He announced that he would cut off rations to those groups that refused to bring in all their captives.

  Tatum also asked a friendly Apache chief named Pacer to go to the Indian camps and see if he could learn anything about the captives. Pacer inquired among some of the Comanches and Kiowas, but he didn’t bother trying to locate the Quahadas. He knew it wouldn’t do any good, for they were angry with practically everyone—the Tex-ans, the army, Tatum, even their fellow Comanches who chose to cooperate with the whites. They were also the ones holding the most captives. Scornful of those Indians who lived on the reservation and the Quaker agent who treated them like wayward children, the Quahadas stayed mostly on the plains of the Texas Panhandle, far from the Fort Sill region. They were beyond the Indian agent’s reach, and that rankled him. He knew he couldn’t negotiate with them unless he had them at a disadvantage. Month after month, Lawrie Tatum waited for that opportunity.

  In the fall of 1870, Marcus Goldbaum finally located Rudolph Fischer in a Comanche camp. The German-American captive was a strapping young man of eighteen, hard to distinguish from the other warriors. Goldbaum spoke with Rudolph and assured him that he would help him get away from the Comanches and return to his family. To the trader’s astonishment, the young man refused to go with him. It was uncertain whether Rudolph’s stubbornness resulted “from fear of being recaptured, or whether roaming life had gained such a charm for him that he preferred it to rejoining his parents and friends.” Another factor may have influenced Rudolph’s decision to stay: by then he was believed to have taken a Comanche wife.

  Although Goldbaum was unsuccessful, his discovery led to a renewed effort to bring Rudolph Fischer back home. Lawrie Tatum’s superiors in the Indian Office instructed him to ask about the young man when the Comanches came to his agency for rations. In March 1871, Tatum reported that a white youth matching Rudolph’s description was living with one of the Comanche bands. However, Tatum added, “They say that he is married among them and not willing to leave.” Tatum then put a thorny question to his bosses: “Will the department order that he be taken without his consent if it can be done without being likely to cause difficulty with the Indians? I think it would be best to remove him from the Indians if practicable, whether he is willing or not.”

  Rudolph Fischer presented a quandary for Tatum and the Quakers. Was it their duty, either moral or diplomatic, to rescue a captive who clearly didn’t want to be redeemed? They referred the question all the way up to H. R. Clum, the acting commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington. He waffled on the issue, replying:

  It is not perhaps advisable to take any step for compelling the young man against his will to leave his present associations, but if it be possible, he should be seen and persuaded to return to his relatives and friends in Texas. Should the only obstacle in the way of his return be the objection or unwillingness of the Indians to part with him, a demand positive and firm, should be made upon them, to deliver him up, as also any other captive in their possession.10

  Clum also advised Lawrie Tatum to visit the Comanche band that was holding Rudolph “and by his utmost endeavors cause the captives to be released.” Tatum’s heart must have sunk when he read those words. What did his superiors in Washington think he’d spent the previous two years trying to do?

  Clum’s next instructions were even more impracticable, revealing the vast gulf that separated those who worked in Washington from those who actually dealt with Native Americans on the frontier. He forbade Tatum to offer the Indians any ransom for captives, not even “presents,” the traditional token of goodwill in Indian-white diplomacy. Instead, he ordered the agent to demand the captives’ release immediately and unconditionally. Nor would he allow Tatum to exchange Indian prisoners being held by the army for white captives. Essentially, he left the agent with no tools for negotiation except the withholding of rations—goods that the more hostile bands didn’t especially want, anyway.

  Tatum’s report had failed to specify which Comanches were holding the captives. Clum made one concession: “If they are distant and not likely soon to come in, and it be impossible for the Agent to go, it would be well to dispatch some trusty and influential Chief of the friendly Comanches living upon the reservation to effect the object desired.”

  Tatum didn’t think that plan would work. He pointed out, “I tried several months ago to get chiefs to look for captives but have found none to be depended upon.” However, he managed to engage a reliable envoy who was willing to venture int
o hostile territory and look for captives. This searcher was a Mexican whose birth name was Vincente de Demencio; but for most of his life, he had gone by the alias George Caboon, or sometimes by his adoptive name, George Chisholm. Caboon had been kidnapped by Comanches as a child and raised with the tribe. The trader Jesse Chisholm eventually bought him from his captors, adopting him as a son. Caboon still spoke the Comanches’ language. He’d served as an interpreter for his brother, William E. Chisholm, a trader like their father.11

  Lawrie Tatum didn’t expect Caboon to be able to rescue the abducted children single-handedly. Instead, Caboon’s assignment was to visit the Comanche villages and surreptitiously find out which captives the different groups were holding. He planned to travel across the plains for about three months, spending enough time in each camp to quietly take inventory of the captives without putting the Comanches on guard.

  George Caboon’s journey during the summer of 1871 was successful in achieving its limited purpose. In August he returned to Tatum’s agency and reported that the Quahada Comanches were holding three white captives. He was unable to learn their English names, but they were almost certainly Adolph Korn, Temple Friend, and a boy named John Valentine Maxey, who had been captured in Montague County, Texas, on September 5, 1870. In addition, Ca-boon learned that Mowway’s group of Kotsotekas still had “the little captive taken last winter by the New Mexico Apaches,” Clinton Smith. In summarizing Caboon’s report, Tatum noted: “There is another young man who is with the Quahadas a part of the time and occasionally with some of the other bands of Comanches. He is not willing to come to the Agency.” This captive was apparently Rudolph Fischer, by then nineteen years old.

  Tatum knew that the odds of recovering captives from the Qua-hadas were slim. He wrote, “This band of Comanches have never been into the Agency and I can have no control over them while this remains to be the case.” The Indian agent also understood the urgency of rescuing the four young, impressionable white boys. He observed, “All the other captives have been with the Indians several years, are nearly or quite grown and from what I can learn are unwilling to leave the Indians.” Tatum realized it was critical to recover Adolph Korn, Temple Friend, John Valentine Maxey, and Clinton Smith before those boys became as Indianized as Rudolph Fischer. Time was not on his side.

  On May 12, 1871, Lawrie Tatum experienced one of the most galling incidents of his career, a confrontation that would prey on his mind for many months to come. The Kotsoteka Comanche chief Mowway (Shaking Hand) appeared unexpectedly at Tatum’s office with several of his tribesmen. They had come to collect their annuity goods. Mowway was a striking figure with an angular face, wide mouth, and narrow eyes. Lawrie Tatum was pleasantly surprised to see the chief. He generally liked Mowway, whom he later described as “one of my best and most reliable of the Comanches.” Mowway was the leader of “one of the most roving bands of the Comanches,” and this was the first time he had reported to the agency in more than a year.

  Tatum took the opportunity to ask whether Mowway had seen any captives among the Indians on the plains. Without hesitation the chief admitted that two months earlier, one of his own men had purchased a white boy captured in Texas by some New Mexico Apaches. From the description of the boy and the estimated time of the abduction, the agent knew that the captive was most likely one of the Smith brothers.

  Tatum’s welcoming expression vanished. In a fit of uncharacteristic anger, he told Mowway, “You cannot have the annuity goods for your people until that boy is delivered to me.”

  Mowway, taken by surprise, became just as indignant. He said, “The Comanches did not steal this boy. We only traded with the Apaches for him. We should not be required to give him up.” For some time, Mowway had been trying to cooperate with the white people, but their way of thinking perturbed him. They spoke of ownership rights, so they should recognize that the Comanches had purchased this captive, fair and square. Bald Head had no right to take a man’s property without paying for it.

  Tatum stood firm, refusing to give them any goods that day. Mowway and his men were seething when they left the agency. As they rode off to their camp, one of the Comanches turned around and taunted the Indian agent, saying, “We will not bring in the boy.”

  Afterward, Lawrie Tatum couldn’t stop brooding over his failure to recover a captive who’d been practically within his grasp. The next day, he discussed the matter with the friendly Comanche chief Tosawa (Silver Brooch). Tatum asked him to go visit Mowway and try to rescue the boy. Tosawa didn’t think that was possible. He accurately predicted that Mowway would immediately return to the plains. Whoever this white boy was, he was already out of reach.

  Later, Tatum wrote to Henry Smith to let him know that he thought he’d located one of his sons among the Comanches. When Henry learned that Mowway had been allowed to leave the agency without surrendering the boy, he exploded. He complained bitterly to Texas governor Edmund J. Davis: “Mr. Tatum allowed this chief to depart simply refusing him annuity goods, why did he not retain him as Hostage, until the captive was delivered up.” When the Kiowas came to the agency that summer, they reported that Mowway had been traveling with them, and that he had reconsidered and decided to bring the white boy to Tatum after all. As the weeks passed, however, that never happened.

  In desperation, the pacifist Indian agent eventually advocated the use of military force if necessary to recover the elusive boy in Mowway’s group. He was also convinced that coercion was necessary to make the renegade Indians give up raiding and come live on the reservation under his care. General Sherman noted that the Quaker agent was “more fully convinced… that his humane efforts have been fruitless, and he now not only consents to, but advises extreme mea-sures.”12On August 4, 1871, Tatum wrote to Cols. Benjamin Grierson and Ranald Mackenzie, “I wish to have the captive recovered if at all practicable, and returned to its father whom I suppose to be Henry M. Smith.” Throughout the remainder of 1871, Tatum would make “repeated but ineffectual efforts to procure the captive boy.”13

  Lawrie Tatum eventually obtained the release of twenty-six captive women and children, something that the private searchers hadn’t managed to do. While the epic journeys of determined relatives such as Leonard Friend and adventurous traders such as Marcus Goldbaum and George Caboon lend a touch of romance to the story of the search for captives, the fact remains that they almost never recovered any stolen children. (Two exceptions were Brit Johnson and Jesse Chisholm, who reportedly ransomed several captives.) Even Tatum wasn’t able to recover the captives through diplomacy alone. Most of them were finally released as a direct result of the army’s campaign against the Comanches during the fall of 1872. In the end, the type of military action that Tatum reluctantly supported would prove to be as effective as it was ruthless. The federal government had bullied most of the Southern Plains Indians into complying with the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867; between 1872 and 1875, Sherman’s army would force the stragglers to obey.

  Chapter Eight

  Death on

  the Red River

  By the early fall of 1872, those Comanches who still refused to walk the white man’s road saw no reason why they couldn’t continue their way of life forever. They hadn’t seen any soldiers or Texas Rangers pursuing them as they made their way across the Texas Panhandle. They were far from Fort Sill, with its despised pauper’s reservation and the annoying agent, Bald Head. The summer buffalo hunts had been successful. So had the horse-stealing raids the previous spring. These last Comanche holdouts had everything they needed to sustain their way of life, and that didn’t include white people’s houses or churches or schools for their children.

  By September they had established their camp in a restful valley along the North Fork of the Red River. In the shade of large cotton-woods and oaks, they set up their tepees, which spread out several miles along the winding stream. The largest village was Mowway’s camp on the south bank of the river, consisting of 262 lodges. Smaller camps were scattered
nearby. Knee-high grass covered the prairie, providing ample grazing for the large herds of horses.

  People from every Comanche division were staying in Mowway’s village that fall. Among the young men lounging, eating, telling stories, and playing practical jokes were Adolph Korn and Clinton Smith. The Comanches’ youngest white captive, eight-year-old John Valentine Maxey, was also staying with Mowway’s people. Temple Friend was in one of the camps, and Rudolph Fischer was probably in the vicinity, too.

  Farther upstream was the village of Paruacoom (Bull Bear), a Qua-hada chief. Mowway and Paruacoom often traveled and hunted together, even though they didn’t always see eye to eye. Mowway was tired of fighting; he simply wanted to enjoy his roving life and stay out of the cavalry’s way. In fact, he had left for Washington that month to talk peace with the Great Father in his big white house. Paruacoom, on the other hand, was a war leader from the traditional mold. Described as “a great bear of a man” with curly hair, he had never attended a peace council or signed a treaty. He believed that the Comanches should fight until either they or the white invaders were finally conquered.

  In this season of plenty, the Comanches were busy preparing for winter. Around the tepees, the women strung buffalo meat from scaffolds. They sliced the flesh into very thin strips so that it would dry quickly in the autumn sun. The women scraped and tanned the hides to make thick robes for their families. Some of the men were still out hunting.