by Scott Zesch
The trouble had started the night after the pair left Fort Sill, long before they got to Kansas. While the old man was setting up camp, Temple Friend tore off his school clothes and put on his buckskin and moccasins. Then he got out his war paint and began decorating his face. His grandfather, Leonard Friend, was horrified. The Methodist preacher tried to make his grandson understand that these practices were heathenish. Unable to make any headway, Reverend Friend finally threw away the paint. Temple, who had always been quicktempered, was furious.
Traveling by buggy, Leonard and Temple passed through several towns on their way to El Dorado. Their story made good newspaper copy, and journalists were eager to talk with them. The Wellington Banner reported:
The boy is rather small of his age and seems to have forgotten almost all the reminiscences of his early childhood. He remembered his name, and when recovered could talk a few words of English. His grandfather says that he picks up words in English very rapidly. Notwithstanding his long captivity, he is a bright, intelligent looking boy in the face, his walk and actions being those of an Indian, and he talks Comanche like a native brave. He being young it will require but a short time to bring back to his memory the recollections of the past, and to divest him of the actions and habits he has acquired by his long residence with the savages.11
During the trip, Reverend Friend tried to teach Temple the English names for the things they saw. However, by the time the boy finally got to El Dorado in late December 1872, a local correspondent reported, “He cannot speak a word of English.” Temple, like Adolph Korn, seems to have become more taciturn and uncooperative as he reached his journey’s end.
Leonard took his grandson to the Friend family’s farm. Temple refused to believe that the woman who welcomed him was his stepmother. She finally had to show him the scars on her head to prove she’d survived the Indians’ attack. Matilda Friend still dressed and bandaged her head every day to soothe the scalp wounds she’d endured the night Temple was taken and her women friends were murdered.
The morning after he got home, Temple put on his buckskin clothes again. Before long he became a familiar, if peculiar, sight in the streets of El Dorado. A local newspaper described him as “quite a lively young man.” So lively, in fact, that he shot arrows through all the ducks around his parents’ farm. Temple played rough sports with the other children in town and taught them how to make bows and arrows. One playmate recalled, “He could hit a penny on a stick at ten yards with his bow and arrow and wing a bird in the top of the tallest tree.” He also brought children to the Friend farm, where he enjoyed showing them his stepmother’s scalp wounds. (Rumor has it he charged a fee for this privilege.) However, he never liked to speak English. When he talked, he used few words.
His parents enrolled him in the local school. Temple hated it. Learning the alphabet and playing childish games such as Red Rover were beneath his dignity. At recess he usually stood apart from the other children, solemn and silent. After a while, his schoolmates started making fun of Temple’s odd behavior. He was miserable. John Friend finally allowed his son to quit school. That still didn’t cure his melancholy. He became more withdrawn and started disappearing in the woods for several days at a time.
Despite a good diet and plenty of exercise, Temple’s physical health began to fail, and his physique declined. He seemed to lose interest in life. His parents and the local doctors didn’t know what to do for him. They watched helplessly as he withered away, giving up without a struggle. Two and a half years after he was restored to his family, Temple Friend died at age fifteen on June 2, 1875— coincidentally, the same day that the last of his fellow Quahada Comanches finally surrendered to the army at Fort Sill.
“No one seemed to know exactly what his ailment was,” his younger half sister, Carrie Friend Dwire, recalled in a 1961 interview. “There was a theory that he ate so much salt that it killed him. The Indians often were deprived of salt, and when they found a source of the mineral they gorged themselves on it.” Some doctors speculated that he died from the ill effects of his sudden transition from Comanche life. Perhaps. Even if it were possible to pinpoint the exact cause of Temple Friend’s death, the medical explanation wouldn’t be satisfactory. It seems that he had all the symptoms of a more elusive malady, a broken heart.
While Temple Friend’s readjustment to white society was unusually traumatic, all of the former captives had a difficult time during their first couple of years back home. The four other white boys who were recovered in 1872–1873—Maxey, Korn, and the two Smith brothers—kept their Indian habits for several months, even years, after they were reunited with their families. Old-timers in Montague County, Texas, remembered that John Valentine Maxey was “very rude” when he came back. Like his close pal, Temple Friend, he tried to kill all the chickens and pigs on his family’s farm.12
Adolph Korn was even more antisocial. Even though he dressed like any other white boy in San Antonio, his demeanor was strange enough to make him stand out. In February 1873, a month after Adolph returned home, the poet Sidney Lanier wrote about him as one of the “odd personages and ‘characters’ ” he saw on the streets. Adolph was described as “absolutely uncontrollable” during his teenage years. He reportedly committed so many offenses in San Antonio that the local law enforcement officers told Grandpa Korn he’d have to do something with the boy. There is no record of the nature of Adolph’s crimes,13 but it’s likely that he got on the wrong side of the law by helping himself to whatever he fancied, especially horses. In addition, like the other white Indians, he probably got his target practice by shooting animals he thought were useless, such as fowl and swine. When Adolph saw Clinton Smith in San Antonio one day, he tried to talk his old raiding partner into running away with him and going back to the Comanches. Clinton refused; by that point, he was content with his white family. Besides, after Tosacowadi’s death, Clinton may have felt he had no home within the tribe.
No doubt the Korns were embarrassed by Adolph’s misdeeds in San Antonio. They must have also worried that he would get into more serious trouble as he grew older, perhaps ending up in prison or on a hangman’s scaffold. In the spring of 1876, when Adolph was seventeen, the family finally addressed the problem by moving back to Mason County and putting Adolph to work on an isolated ranch. The move helped, but it didn’t completely solve the problems. Adolph is rumored to have resumed his old habit of stealing horses once he got to Mason. Three years after his recovery, he still hadn’t been reconciled to European-Americans’ ideas of property ownership and acceptable behavior.
The Smith brothers didn’t cause quite as much trouble as Adolph, although they both had a hard time readapting. At first neither was happy on the Smith farm. Jeff sized up the situation best when he remarked, “Everything seemed mighty tame by comparison after I got back home.” It wasn’t long before the former captives missed their adventurous years on the plains. Jeff said, “We two boys were pretty wild at first, and had no manners of any kind except those which we had learned from the Indians, and that did not fit very well in polite society.” Their stepmother had to teach them how to use a knife and fork; the boys preferred to eat with their hands. They also struggled to re-learn English. Jeff recalled, “We kept hammering away until we could make ourselves understood, without embarrassment, in friendly conversation.”
It took Clinton and Jeff about a year to get used to being around white people and to lose their fear of them—much longer than it had taken them to feel comfortable with the Indians. The two brothers were curiosities among the children of their neighborhood. One of those neighbors reminisced in 1934:
Sometimes these boys showed us Indian dances, and how they catch horses, and some of their tricks and stunts they had to learn by the Indians, but when it came to riding wild horses, well, these boys were not to be beaten, the more they bucqed, [sic] the better they liked it. They told us the signs of birds and animals, such as that of an owl, hoo-hoo, or that of a chicken or turkey, or that of a hor
se, or other animals, what they meant, they said at nights they used these signs of animals, or fowl, that of an owl, hoo-hoo-hoo, meant look out, so every sign had its meaning.14
Within a year or two, the former captives more or less settled down and learned to curb the extremes of their unconventional behavior. Nonetheless, a part of them would always belong on the other side. They had spent their formative years in two very different cultures, Native American and European-American. The tension between those competing ways of looking at the world—both of which were deeply engrained in their characters—would cause more problems for the former captives attempting to reconnect with their own people than for their Indian friends who tried to walk the white man’s road for the first time.
Chapter Ten
Resisting
the Reservation
After the Comanches got their women and children back from Fort Concho, many of them promptly forgot the promises their chiefs had made to President Grant, the army officers, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, their federal agent, and even the Episcopal bishop in New York—namely, to settle down on their reservation and act like white people. The wounds they’d suffered in the battle on the North Fork of the Red River had healed. Now they needed to cleanse from their memories the humiliation of subsisting on government rations at Fort Sill while waiting for their captive families to return, of supplicating themselves like docile children in front of the agents of the Great Father. Before long the defiant Quahadas and other Comanches who had chosen to affiliate with them returned to the plains. There they tried, for the last time, to resume the only life they’d ever known, following the buffalo and raiding settlers’ farms to get more horses.
But as they rode silently in long lines across the Texas Panhandle, the Comanches were deeply troubled by what they saw. The large herds of grazing animals eluded them. Instead, they found the skinned carcasses of thousands of buffalo rotting on the prairie. A new breed of white enemy had arrived, one that was far more dangerous and aggressive than the hapless sodbusters of earlier years who had encroached timidly on their hunting grounds. The brief and profligate era of commercial buffalo hunting was under way.
Across the Southern Plains, the buffalo herds had been declining for several decades. Still, neither Indians nor non-Indians seriously believed that these shaggy beasts would disappear altogether from the American landscape. That assumption was shattered during the 1870s. After America’s transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, it became profitable to ship buffalo hides east. Two years later, the American leather industry developed new tanning processes that made the hides more valuable.
The number of animals killed on the plains in the course of a single decade was staggering. A professional hunter could shoot as many as seventy-five buffalo per day. He hardly even had to move; buffalo usually wouldn’t run from the sound of gunfire. They recognized danger only when they could smell it. Standing downwind, a hunter began shooting the beasts on the outside of the group, leisurely working his way through the herd. Skinners traveled with the hunters, stripping off the hides and leaving the meat behind. In 1872 and 1873, traders shipped about 1.5 million hides east each year. The slaughter escalated after that. During the winter of 1877–1878, the stack of buffalo hides at Fort Griffin, Texas, was said to be as long as a city block. By 1881 commercial buffalo hunting on the Southern Plains was over. The herds were wiped out.
The army saw the hunters as allies in their campaign against Native Americans living outside the reservations, since the hunters were destroying the Indians’ food supply. Texas ranchers also approved of the hunting, because the buffalo competed with their cattle for grass. Not all Texans quietly assented to the butchery, however. Even in Mason County, where settlers still lived in fear of Comanche and Apache raiders, one citizen wrote: “Would it not be in the interest of the frontier people to petition Congress… to prevent the wholesale slaughter of this noble animal for the hides alone? … At the present rate of destruction the species will soon become extinct.”1 Nonetheless, a few individual conservationists were no match for the combined power of the eastern leather industry, the Texas ranchers, and the U.S. Army. In 1874 Pres. Ulysses Grant refused to sign a federal act to protect the buffalo. The following year, a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature to stop the hunting. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan personally appeared to testify before the lawmakers in Austin, arguing that the extermination of the buffalo was necessary to drive the Indians out of Texas and stop their depredations. The bill quickly died.
The buffalo hunters set off a new round of hostilities in the Indian wars. For the Comanches, the mass killing of these animals has been described as “death—physical and spiritual.”2 Between 1874 and 1877, the Comanches and their Indian allies at that time— Apaches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes—attacked several isolated hunting camps on the Texas plains. Two of the buffalo hunters’ most dedicated enemies were German-Americans from the Texas Hill Country, Rudolph Fischer and Herman Lehmann.
While Ishatai the prophet spoke of better days ahead, Asewaynah (Gray Blanket) stood in the crowd brooding over every sentence. Just like the other young men who pressed close around him, he was fired up by the shaman’s promises. Unlike them, he was white. The twenty-two-year-old Quahada had been raised a Christian, but for the past nine years he’d followed a different spiritual path, one that he hoped would lead him to success in battle. Asewaynah no longer answered to his baptismal name, Rudolph Fischer.
It was May 1874. The charismatic Quahada medicine man, Ishatai (Coyote Vagina), had gathered a large group of Comanches and Cheyennes for a religious revival in Indian Territory at the junction of Elk Creek and the North Fork of the Red River, about forty-five miles west of Fort Sill. His followers were receptive to what he said, for Ishatai told them what they wanted to believe. Even middle-aged men with sons old enough to fight were swayed by his message.
Look at the peaceful Indians, the Caddoes and Wichitas, Ishatai pointed out. Their numbers are declining. They live like paupers ever since they took up the white man’s road. For the Comanches and the Cheyennes, however, it was not too late. Ishatai offered a way out. If you want to be powerful again, as in the days of yours fathers and grandfathers, you must go to battle and kill as many white people as you can. After you do that, the buffalo will return to the plains in great numbers. Things will be like they once were.
The reactionary preacher, only in his late twenties, couldn’t have attracted a serious following a few years earlier, when the world of the Southern Plains Indians was still in balance. However, by the spring of 1874, they were desperate for a messiah. The Comanches living on the reservation were discontented and unruly. Heavy rains had kept the freight wagons from reaching the agency, so the government’s promised rations fell short. The Indians had to kill their horses and mules for food.
Word spread among the Comanches that Ishatai had performed miraculous feats. Some claimed he had belched forth a wagonload of cartridges, then swallowed them again. In battle, according to his fellow fighting men, the bullets of his enemies fell harmlessly from their guns. Ishatai even told the Comanches that he had ascended above the clouds and communed with the Great Spirit. When he accurately prophesied a drought and the disappearance of a comet, many believed him. Ishatai also promised the congregation that he could create war paint that would deflect bullets.
Like all the men at the gathering, Rudolph Fischer was primed for battle. The commander of a squad of Comanche warriors, he had selected the heart of a bird known as a blue darter as his “medicine,” the material object associated with his source of supernatural power and protection. In Comanche religion, certain animals represented guardian spirits who could bring success in war and hunting.
Another war leader who put his faith in Ishatai was Quanah, then in his midtwenties. He was a son of the Comanches’ most famous white captive, Cynthia Ann Parker, and Fischer was his right-hand man. At Ishatai’s revival, Quanah came forward and suggested that the first white peop
le they killed should be a group of buffalo hunters camped along the South Fork of the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle. The hunters had set up their headquarters near the ruins of William Bent’s old trading post, known as Adobe Walls.
Ishatai gave his blessings to the plan. He and Quanah left the medicine dance with Rudolph Fischer and a group of Comanches and Cheyennes estimated to have numbered between 200 and 250. Day after day, they rode hard with little rest. Along the way, Ishatai kept the religious fervor high by encouraging the men to dance every night. He announced, “God tells me we are going to kill lots of white men. We will kill them all, just like old women.”
They found the buffalo hunters where Quanah had said they’d be. During the predawn hours of June 27, 1874, the Comanches and Cheyennes gathered on a butte near the camp and gazed down on the makeshift settlement of Adobe Walls. Twenty-eight men and one woman were sleeping there in three separate buildings. No one was moving about. Nor had the hunters posted a guard.
The Comanches and Cheyennes prepared themselves for the attack. They formed battle units around their leaders—respected fighters such as Quanah and Rudolph Fischer. Ishatai painted his naked body yellow. Just before daylight, the Indians launched the assault. Whooping and firing their rifles, the first wave of fighters swept down from the plateau and dashed across the meadow, their horses’ hooves as loud as thunder. They raced their mounts at full speed and started circling the buildings.