by Scott Zesch
Still, the rumors seemed plausible, for many people suspected that Rudolph wouldn’t stay in Fredericksburg very long. On the one hand, the locals admired his decorum and his efforts to get along with them. In March 1878, the gunsmith Engelbert Krauskopf sent a photograph of Rudolph to Gustav Schleicher, the congressman who had helped arrange his return, noting that “the boy” was “very well disposed” and would “make a good citizen.” At the same time, people knew that Rudolph was making other plans; he didn’t keep his intentions secret. According to a news report from Fredericksburg dated April 14, 1878: “Rudolf Fisher, the Indian captive, is talking of paying a visit to his Indian friends at Fort Sill this spring, but the general opinion is that he will never return to his family again if he gets with the Indians.”
Meanwhile, Rudolph condescended to take a job for wages. A local man named Crocket Riley hired him to help drive a herd of horses to Nebraska Territory. They left Fredericksburg near the end of May 1878, just a couple of weeks after Herman Lehmann was reunited with his family in nearby Loyal Valley. The trip across the plains that spring proved to be too great a temptation for Rudolph, who was starting to think he’d done his duty by his German-American family. According to Fredericksburg lore, he called his employer’s attention to some piles of rock they passed along the way, saying they were signs left by the Comanches. That evening he and Riley set up camp north of Fort Concho. Rudolph was very restless and pensive all night. Around four o’clock in the morning, he got up, discarded his white-man’s clothes, painted his face, and selected one of Riley’s best horses. With a Comanche war whoop and a quick wave good-bye, he disappeared into the darkness, heading for the reservation.
A year later, Engelbert Krauskopf once again wrote to the Indian agent at Fort Sill, asking what had become of Rudolph Fischer. The young man had promised to return to Fredericksburg in the spring of 1879, once he had completed his “visit” to Comanche country. By that summer, his father was anxious to find out what had happened. The new agent, P.L. Hunt, wrote back:
I have to say that he is here and last Fall I told him he must go home, but he asked me to let him remain and go Buffalo hunting with the Indians and then he would go after he came back. I consented to it, but he did not comply with his promises, and I said no more to him, thinking every week that I would. Black Crow with whom he lives is now in the office, and I sent word for him to come in. Black Crow says he is now married and wants to re-main.24
Rudolph Fischer was finally home. He wouldn’t return to Freder-icksburg for twenty-one years, and then only for a short visit.
When Herman Lehmann left Fort Sill in April 1878, he was the last white Indian of the Kiowa-Comanche reservation, and possibly the last Indian captive in North America, to be sent back to his former family. In June of the following year, the Quahada warrior Black Horse led the final Comanche raid into Texas. Although Indians and non-Indians continued to fight each other for a few more years in other parts of the country, the lords of the South Plains were conquered. By 1880 the people of Texas, Indian Territory, and Kansas, like their fellow Americans on the eastern seaboard, spoke of the Indian wars in the past tense.
The last major confrontation between Indians and non-Indians in the United States occurred on December 29, 1890, when the cavalry slaughtered a large group of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee. After that the Indian wars were officially over. In 1894 the U.S. Department of the Interior issued a report stating:
It has been estimated that since 1775 more than 5,000 white men, women, and children have been killed in individual affairs with Indians, and more than 8,500 Indians. History, in general, notes but few of these combats…. The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women, and children, including those killed in individual combats, and of the lives of about 30,000 Indians…. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much greater than the number given, as they conceal, where possible, their actual loss in battle, and carry their killed and wounded off and secrete them. The number given above is of those found by the whites. Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate to add to the numbers given.25
The federal government had finally established a boundary between Comanches and non-Indian settlers, but it wasn’t the line across Texas envisioned in the 1840s by the Penateka chiefs who met with Sam Houston and made a peace treaty with the German immigrants. Instead, it was the boundary defining the Kiowa-Comanche reservation in Indian Territory. The Comanches’ life in Texas was over.
Part Three
Redemption
Chapter Eleven
Once and
Always Indians
They couldn’t stay cooped up indoors.
Their love of nature kept most of the former captives from getting even a basic education. They simply couldn’t tolerate the confinement of the classroom. As a result, Herman Lehmann and Jeff Smith remained illiterate throughout their lives. Herman even signed his name with an X for most of his life. Clinton Smith’s daughters eventually taught him to read and write—“not very well, but it was legible,” says his granddaughter, Edda Raye Moody.
Most of the male white Indians became cowboys. Adolph Korn broke horses for a neighbor near Castell, his boyhood home. Jeff Smith’s two years with the Apaches had also increased his love for horses. “We couldn’t content ourselves to stay indoors and naturally went to working cattle,” he said. The captives’ teenage years and early adulthood coincided with the great cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s. Trail bosses hired youngsters such as Dot Babb and the Smith brothers to help take their herds to markets north of Texas.
When Clinton Smith was about seventeen, he tried to join a group of trail drivers. After he succeeded in riding their wildest horse, the boss hired the gangling teenager. Clinton was careful not the let his fellow cowboys know about his past life with the Comanches, for the Indian wars had not quite ended in Texas. Whenever they passed places he recognized from raiding with the tribe, he kept his mouth shut.
One day a large party of Comanches rode up to the trail boss and asked if he could spare a few beeves. The boss granted their request, and they took the animals to one side and butchered them. Suddenly, one of the Comanches recognized Clinton. He walked up to the teenager and called him by his old name, Backecacho. Clinton was horrified. He shook his head, pretending not to understand.
Cattle herding got the boys back out on the plains, but it couldn’t give them the same thrills they’d known as Indians. Jeff Smith told an interviewer in 1930, “Trail driving and cattle work is all so much of a sameness.” Captivity had clearly been the high point of their lives.
They couldn’t settle in one place.
The former captives weren’t content just to spend their days outdoors; they also needed to roam and see new country. Even after he married and had children, Clinton Smith traveled across Texas to rodeos, parades, and old settlers’ reunions. He was especially proud of the Angora goats he raised, which won him several trophies at livestock shows. “The Indians moved around a lot, and I suppose Clinton never got over it,” says his granddaughter, Edda Raye Moody. “My grandpa never could settle down when he came home. He was gone a lot.”
For Banc Babb, the most annoying aspect of captivity had been moving camp every few weeks. Nonetheless, the habit stayed with her. She and her husband, Jefferson Davis Bell, an abstractor of land titles, moved from town to town across north Texas, California, and New Mexico. Her grandson, Daniel Crooks, says, “Grandmother had the Indian travel fever in her, because she was always buying a new house and moving. She said a person gets tired looking at the same old things all the time.” Minnie Caudle’s great-granddaughter, Neoma Benson Cain, sums up her ancestor’s nomadic half year with the Comanches by saying, “I guess that was kind of a wild, carefree life. The house got dirty, you just packed up and moved on.”
They couldn’t hold a regular job.
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��I would not work at first,” Herman Lehmann said when he recalled his reintroduction to white society. Eventually, however, he “began to want to possess property like other people.” Initially, he hired out to do hard manual labor. He also tried raising cattle, but no steady career seemed to suit him. In 1890 he went into business, opening a beer saloon and dance hall at Cherry Spring, near Loyal Valley. The tavern made good money, and his customers had a fine time. So did Herman. “I got too fat and drank too much,” he said. He sold the business around 1895. Before long he’d squandered all the proceeds.
“That was the story of Uncle Herman’s life,” says his niece, Esther Lehmann. She and her sister, Gerda Lehmann Kothmann, grew up with Herman in the 1920s.
“Uncle Herman wasn’t very good at cowboying or raising livestock or any other business,” Gerda confirms.
“I don’t remember him doing any kind of work,” says Esther. “He wasn’t successful at anything.” She adds, “They should have brought him back and let Grandma know he was all right and left him with the Indians. He would have been happier.”
Clinton Smith spent many years as a cowpoke before he bought a ranch near Rocksprings, Texas, in 1910, where he raised his family. “My grandmother told me that Grandpa never would work,” says his granddaughter, Edda Raye Moody. “Both of them would be plowing in the field, and if a neighbor rode up on a horse, Grandpa would throw down the plow-horse reins, go over to the fence, and talk a while. In a few minutes, they would go to the house and play checkers and drink coffee the rest of the day. My grandmother had to do the plowing by herself. He had no value of money, so why would he work to support anybody?”
Rudolph Fischer chose to continue his relaxed way of life among the Comanches in Oklahoma. When his granddaughter, Josephine Wapp, visited her Fischer relatives in Fredericksburg in 1996, the family talked about how hard the German-Texan children worked on the farms. She recalls, “Someone made the remark, ‘I guess that’s the reason Rudolph didn’t stay.’ Everybody laughed. We always say he went back to the Comanches for an easier life.”
They couldn’t stay married.
The extreme cultural differences that separated Native Americans from other Americans sometimes led to severe problems when the white Indians married and tried to raise families. My ancestor, Adolph Korn, never experienced marital problems, because he never married. No one would have him, even if he were interested. People say he was just too strange.
When Herman Lehmann was twenty-six, he fell in love with a young woman in Loyal Valley, identified in the marriage records as N. E. Burks. They were married by a Baptist preacher at her parents’ home on July 16, 1885. Herman had been back in white society for seven years, and it seemed that he was finally getting his life in order. However, the union was unhappy and short-lived.
Herman claimed that he left his first wife because she spent all his money, flirted with other men, and was eventually unfaithful. However, Willis Skelton Glenn, a buffalo hunter who knew Herman in Oklahoma, told a different story. He reported that Herman’s wife sought a divorce after someone told her that he had once been married to an Indian. (As far as anyone knows, that rumor was false, although it followed Herman all his life.) In all likelihood, neither version of the story fully explains the quick collapse of Herman’s marriage, and it’s safe to assume that his wife wasn’t entirely to blame. Herman was still an Indian in many ways. He undoubtedly wanted his bride to conform to his expectations of a Native American wife.
Once he was single again, Herman “drank some and fought a great deal.” He “gambled and ran horse races and was turned out of” the Methodist church. Herman was a brawler in those days, although he never carried a grudge after he’d fought. “I loved beer and other strong drinks,” he said, “and when a man did anything I didn’t like, I never quarreled with him, but I would knock it out with him. We would be the very best of friends afterwards until some other trouble arose.”
Herman wed again on March 4, 1896. He and his second wife, Fannie Light, stayed married until Herman’s death in 1932. However, they didn’t get along very well. In 1926 Herman left his family in Oklahoma, where they had resided since 1900, and returned to Texas to spend the rest of his life with his brother Willie in Loyal Valley.
Clinton Smith also weathered a turbulent marriage for forty years. On August 29, 1889, he wed an industrious woman named Dixie Alamo Dyche, named for the Mason-Dixon Line and an ancestor who died at the Alamo. Their granddaughter, Edda Raye Moody, recalls, “My grandmother worked night and day. She raised her children almost by herself. She took in washing and ironing and sewed for her kids at night. When I was growing up, I could tell that she resented it that Grandpa never was home to help her much. She hardly ever mentioned him at all, and if she did, it wasn’t very good.”
Although the Smiths spent much of their adult lives together, they separated when Clinton was sixty-three. After threatening to leave for many months, he finally walked out in the early part of 1924. Dixie eventually filed for a divorce, which was granted on February 16, 1929. In her petition, she complained that ever since their separation, Clinton had “not contributed to the support of herself or her children” and had not “intimated any desire to do either of these things.” Despite the strife they’d known during their four decades together, Dixie’s demand for a divorce hit Clinton hard. When the court papers were served on him, he sat down and bawled.
“He never supported any children after that,” says Edda Raye. “Not that he ever did before.”
Although several of the white Indians had difficult relationships with their spouses, they managed to hold the affection and admiration of their children. The same traits that caused problems in their marriages—their generosity, indulgence, and easygoing manner— may have also endeared them to their young. Herman Lehmann’s daughter May recalled, “He was wonderful to us … the best father there ever was.”1 Similarly, Edda Raye Moody says, “All the Smith kids seemed to have great regard for both parents.” She adds, “About seven out of ten Smiths are named Clinton.”
The marital problems that Herman Lehmann and Clinton Smith suffered didn’t come close to the domestic turmoil that followed Minnie Caudle. One of the three survivors of the Legion Valley raid, she married a man named James M. Benson around 1874, when she was no more than fifteen. They had three children. By the time of the 1880 census, Minnie was enumerated as a “widow,” a common euphemism for a divorced woman. On May 17, 1883, she married her second husband, William F. Modgling. They had one son. The Mod-glings divorced on October 6, 1890, and the judge, without explanation, ordered Minnie to “pay all costs.”2 Her descendants don’t know the reason for her second divorce, and no court papers have survived. She then married James Benson—again. Afterward, she placed her son by her second husband in a home for orphaned or indigent children, reportedly because of friction between the boy and her first family. Minnie’s fourth and final marriage was to Will “Doc” Dane, a salesman of patent medicines. They traveled through Texas and New Mexico in a wagon. Wherever he sold his miracle cures, she played music on a wind-up phonograph to lure the crowds.
Minnie Caudle Benson Modgling Benson Dane spent only six months with the Comanches. It would be presumptuous to link her difficulties on the home front to her brief immersion in a foreign culture if it weren’t for two things. First, divorce seems to have been much more pervasive among former captives than within the general population of their time. Second, Minnie’s behavior in many other ways suggests that she retained a surprisingly large amount of what she’d learned during her short stay with the Comanches.
Consciously or not, they held fast to their Native American teaching.
“She never would sleep with her head to the east,” Neoma Benson Cain says. Her great-grandmother, Minnie Caudle, lived part-time with Neoma’s family on a farm north of Rising Star, Texas, during the 1920s and early 1930s. “When she was going to come stay with us, Mother and Daddy moved the bed to suit Grandma,” says Neoma. In the Com
anche camps, all the tepees opened to the east. The beds were placed against the opposite wall, so that the occupants, their heads to the west, faced the rising sun when they woke.
“Mother had this little quirt, and when we kids would disobey, we got spanked with it,” Neoma continues. “Grandma got Mother’s quirt and threw it in the fireplace. She didn’t want us to get whipped.” The Comanches were indulgent toward their children and seldom punished them.
“She could stop blood. We had a colt that ran into a barbed fence and cut itself. Mother came into the house and told Grandma about it. Grandma wanted to know what color and how old the colt was. And she stopped the bleeding.” Comanches were skilled at stemming the flow of blood from an arrow or bullet wound, often using a soft buckskin thong as a tourniquet.
Like the Comanches, Minnie understood the behavior of horses. Neoma remembers, “In the spring of the year, there came a dark cloud. Mother said, ‘Grandma, that old silly mare has taken the baby colt and gone right out in the middle of the field.’ Grandma told her, ‘You get the kids in the house and shut all the windows and doors. That’s going to be a bad cloud.’ She knew there was going to be a big wind. If the mare had gone to the brush, the wind would have broken down the trees and hurt the colt. She knew a lot of Indian things like that.”
The boy captives were even more like Native Americans in their behavior. In 1910 one of Rudolph Fischer’s neighbors in Oklahoma wrote about him: “He is certainly Indianized. He not only acts like an Indian, but he looks like one, and at a short distance you would judge him to be one.” That’s not surprising, considering that Fischer had been living with the Comanches since 1878. However, even the returned captives who lived far from their former tribesmen in Oklahoma kept their Native American traits.