by Scott Zesch
According to one news article, Dot Babb “retained many of the Indian characteristics through his life. He had the reticence of the red man among strangers, but once his friendship was gained, he talked freely.” Similarly, a journalist who interviewed Jeff Smith noted, “It took a three-year acquaintance with him to induce him to say anything…. [A] habit contracted from association with the Indians has stuck tight. He keeps his eyes busy and sees much, says little and tells the truth.”
Even among their immediate families, they were reserved. Minnie Caudle’s grandson, Frank Modgling, recalls, “She didn’t talk a whole lot.” Similarly, Banc Babb’s granddaughter, Claudia Crooks, says, “Grandmother did not talk much. I cannot remember a single time when she spoke directly to me.” One of Rudolph Fischer’s granddaughters, Teresa Parker, also remembers, “He didn’t talk very much.” When he did speak, it was usually in Comanche.
Adolph Korn’s stepsister, my granny Hey, recalled: “Throughout his life he retained many of the habits and customs of the Indians. Always restless, he would sometimes take up his gun, leave home and be gone for days in the woods. When he came back he said little about where he had been.”
The habit of wandering off into the woods was common among white Indians. Herman Lehmann’s niece, Esther Lehmann, tells me, “He would take off and go out in the pasture. He’d be gone a couple of days. When he got back, he’d sit out beside the house with his legs crossed, and you could tell his mind was way off somewhere.”
“We never worried about him,” her sister Gerda says of his absences. “That was part of his routine.”
Esther adds, “One morning I heard some strange noises when I was out in the woods. I got pretty scared. I kept asking my brother Gus what it was. He’d just laugh. It was Uncle Herman. The Indians could imitate wild animals.”
Like Native Americans, the returned captives were more closely attuned to the natural world than most non-Indians. Jeff Smith’s son, Bert, recalled in a 1979 interview, “When we’d be out in the woods, he was so good at doing things that it was obvious he knew the ways of the Indians.”
Sidney M. Whitworth, whose grandfather knew Jeff Smith, reported, “After Jeff ‘came home,’ he still lived as an Indian in many respects…. I recall hearing Grandpa Tom tell stories of Jeff always sleeping outside under a big tree—winter, summer, spring or fall, he slept under that tree when he came to visit. Sometimes, if it was raining or real cold, he would come indoors, but even then, he would only sleep on the hard floor with only his blanket. Jeff followed the Indian customs in many ways, sometimes making folks uncomfortable, but my grandmother didn’t pay any attention to it and just went along with it. He didn’t like to sit at their table to eat, choosing instead to sit ‘Indian style,’ eating in the corner or outdoors.”
Throughout their lives, the former boy captives continued to make their own bows and arrows and sometimes used them to hunt. When they brought home wild game, they expected the women to do the rest of the work. M. J. Lehmann, Herman’s great-nephew, recalled in 1983: “If he shot a deer, it was left for someone else to clean and prepare.”
Both Adolph Korn and Herman Lehmann still liked to eat raw meat after they returned home. Even toward the end of his life, Herman enjoyed raw venison ground with onion, salt, and pepper. (That habit may be attributed to conversion zeal. The natural-born Plains Indians ate raw meat mostly out of convenience or necessity, not preference.)
They were tougher than the average person, and they had no taste for luxuries. Herman Lehmann’s hands were so hardened that he could grab a coal out of a fire and use it to light a cigarette. One journalist noticed that Banc Babb Bell, at age eighty-two, preferred to sit on a hassock, scorning soft cushions and easy chairs.
When Jeff Smith recalled his trail-driving days, he remarked: “As far as I was concerned, the usual occurrences that sometimes upset the other boys in the outfit had no weight with me. I had gone through so many worse things that they were scarcely noticeable…. If we ran short of chuck on a stampede hunt or anything, I had the advantage of the others, for I had gone hungry so much in my Indian life that I just pulled my belt a little tighter and forgot it.”
They also didn’t fret over anything. Herman Lehmann’s nephew, Maurice J. Lehmann, reminisced shortly after his uncle’s death: “He was always carefree and happy and refused to let any inconvenience of any kind worry him. I remember on one occasion while fishing on Beaver Creek, he ran out of tobacco and without a word of complaint, reached over, picked up some dry live oak leaves, crushed them in his hand, tore off a piece of paper from a bag and rolling a cigarette, smoked it with as much content and satisfaction as if it had been a Turkish blend cigarette or an expensive Havana cigar.”
Their Indian habits stayed with them until the end of their lives. Edda Raye Moody was born a year before the death of her grandfather, Clinton Smith. “The family told me that he used to rock me and sing an Indian lullaby,” she says. “Whatever that is.”
Eventually, some of them drifted back to the Indians.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Herman Lehmann made several trips to see his old friends in Indian Territory. When Herman was having marital problems in the mid-1880s, he “rode back to the Comanches at Ft. Sill, and spent several weeks with Quanah Parker.” He went to see Quanah at least two other times, including a visit during the summer of 1900. In the spring of 1898, he renewed his friendship with one of his Apache captors, Chiwat (Chebahtah), who was then living among the Comanches.
Even though the various white Indians had been through similar experiences that set them apart, they didn’t seek each other’s company. Between 1878 and 1900, Herman Lehmann and Adolph Korn lived only a few miles from each other in Mason County. Minnie Caudle also resided there during part of that time. Yet none of the family stories or published articles suggests that these former captives had much contact with each other.
Sometimes the Comanches made trips to Texas, although not specifically to visit their former captives. Around 1884, when Dot Babb was living in Wichita Falls, he ran into Quanah Parker and a large group of Comanches on their way to a cowboy reunion in Seymour, Texas. Quanah was traveling with Tonarcy, his trophy wife who accompanied him on his diplomatic junkets to Washington. (The white folks thought her name was “Too Nicey.”) The Comanches started chasing a large group of antelope, and Dot joined them. Tonarcy asked for his pistol, and another Comanche woman borrowed his rope. The rope proved useless, but Tonarcy, who was riding a good horse, succeeded in running down and shooting five bucks.
This chance meeting with the Comanches, along with several subsequent encounters with his former tribesmen, whetted Dot’s appetite for his old life with them. In 1887 he moved his family to the Kiowa-Comanche reservation at the invitation of his Comanche friends, whom he claimed “contended that I was by captivity and adoption a Comanche Indian, and had as much right in the Territory as the rest of the tribe.” The Babbs built a house on a creek near Fort Sill and raised livestock. The Indian agent at that time, Lee Hall, permitted Dot to stay on the reservation once he learned that the Comanches had asked him to come there.
Agent Hall was replaced by Eugene E. White in October 1887. The new agent was suspicious of any white people living on the Indians’ land, and for good reason. Since 1878 the Kiowa-Comanche reservation had become a haven for white rustlers, murderers, gamblers, and thieves, mostly from Texas. In addition, Texas cattlemen drove their herds across the border to take advantage of the free grazing. Agent White decided to get tough on these unsavory characters. On May 19, 1888, he directed the chief of police to make a tour of the reservation with twelve martial policemen and “notify Mr. Babb, Graham Bro and Acum who are reported to me as holding cattle horses and sheep without authority to remove from the Reservation on or before the 15th of June with all their horses cattle sheep and other effects under pain of forcable [sic] removal, toll and penalties.”3 Although the Comanches had encouraged Dot Babb to move to Indian Territo
ry, he was swept off the reservation as part of the new agent’s attempt to purge the Indians’ land of nearly all non-Indians. Dot suffered several more personal setbacks shortly after he left Indian Territory in 1888. He was defeated in his election bid for sheriff of Wichita County, Texas, in 1890. He also lost his parents’ farm in Wise County to foreclosure in 1891.4
Despite having been forced off the reservation, Dot continued to visit Comanche country periodically. In the early 1920s, he was talking in English with some Native Americans in Cache, Oklahoma, when he noticed his adoptive mother crossing the street. He called to her in Comanche. One of the Indians looked at him in amazement and asked, “Where in the hell did you learn that?”
While Dot eventually became more successful in the ranching business than most of the other former captives, the only white Indian who truly prospered throughout his life was Rudolph Fischer. It’s probably no coincidence that he was also the only one who went back to the Comanches to stay. Rudolph spent most of his life on a farm about four miles south of Apache, Oklahoma, where he raised cattle and cultivated a fruit orchard. A judge who lived in Apache noted in 1910, “Fischer is quite well to do and considered a good citizen, despite his Indian ways.”
Like many prosperous Comanche men, Rudolph took more than one wife. He married two sisters named Tissychauer and Kahchacha. The women’s father, Hoascho, was a Mexican; their mother, Tooene, was Comanche. Consequently, Rudolph’s children were only one-fourth Comanche by blood, although they were accepted as full members of the tribe. It was reported that Rudolph sat between his two wives at the dining table and that their household was peaceful and content.
When the Fischer family converted to Christianity, the missionaries pressured Rudolph to give up one of his wives. At some point between 1897 and 1901,5 Rudolph and Kahchacha divorced, apparently amicably, and she remarried. The census records indicate that the minor children of Rudolph and Kahchacha spent time in the homes of both parents during the early 1900s.
Rudolph became a devout Catholic. His farm was a favorite gathering place for the local priests and nuns. He was adamant that his children and grandchildren receive a good education, and he sent them to a Catholic boarding school in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Unlike many of the white Indians, Rudolph learned to read.
Rudolph’s father, Gottlieb Fischer, died in 1894, leaving his oldest son an interest in the family farm near Fredericksburg. It took several years for the Fischer family to settle the estate, because Rudolph wanted nothing to do with the property in Texas and was uncooperative. Finally, in the summer of 1900, Rudolph’s brother Arthur took a train to Indian Territory to visit with him. Rudolph, finally persuaded that he could relinquish his part of the property to the estate so that it could be divided among his white siblings, reluctantly returned to Fredericksburg with Arthur. It is said that he climbed into the buggy wearing his old work clothes, bringing nothing for the trip. On September 1, 1900, he sold his interest in his father’s farm to Arthur and a brother-in-law, Otto Rabke, for $150.6 Rudolph remained in Fredericksburg for a few days, visiting his mother and siblings. Then he returned home to Indian Territory.
People in the Texas Hill Country remained fascinated by Rudolph Fischer’s story and were curious about his life among the Comanches. In 1892 a man from Kerrville named Charles Morris was riding a train from Fort Worth to Pecos. Across the aisle from him sat Quanah Parker and one of his wives. Morris introduced himself to Quanah and asked, “Do you know a German in Indian Territory by the name of Fischer?”
“Fischer?” Quanah responded. “A German named Fischer.” He repeated the name several times. Finally, he said, “You mean a Dutchman, don’t you? A Dutchman by the name of Fischer? Oh, yes, I know him. He is well fixed, has fine farm, much cattle. Oh, he is all right.”
Quanah was being cagey. He didn’t let on that he actually knew Rudolph quite well. In fact, two of Quanah’s sons, Len and Thomas, eventually married two of Rudolph’s daughters by Kahchacha, Bertie and Helen. Some people in Indian Territory even described Rudolph as Quanah’s right-hand man. Quanah didn’t mention that Rudolph had also helped him battle buffalo hunters and soldiers in the early 1870s. Memories of the Indian wars in Texas were still too fresh.
Many of the former captives struggled financially throughout their adult lives. Some felt they deserved compensation from the federal government for having been held in captivity. The idea wasn’t all that far-fetched. Frontier settlers who lost livestock or other property to Indian raiders could file federal Indian depredation claims and, if they succeeded in proving their cases, receive payment. However, the former captives and their families were frustrated to discover that they had no similar recourse. The law authorized payment only for losses to property, not personal injuries.
In 1894 the U.S. Court of Claims finally awarded John Friend $897 for property taken or destroyed by Indians during the raid on his home in Legion Valley in 1868. By the time the Friend family had its day in court, John’s son, Temple, had been dead for nearly two decades. Although John recovered damages for the goods he’d lost, the court denied his claim for injuries to his wife, Matilda, and for Temple’s five-year captivity. John’s lawyer argued that the Friend family should be compensated under a federal treaty provision entitling a U.S. citizen to be “reimbursed for his loss” caused by Indian depredations. Amazingly, the judge wrote in his decision: “The words ‘reimbursed for his loss’ are not apt words to describe damages for personal injuries to one’s self, or for scalping his wife, or carrying off his son and detaining him in captivity for some years.”7
Having failed on the personal injury counts in the Court of Claims, John Friend sought direct relief from Congress. In 1896 the House Committee on Indian Affairs recommended approval of a bill to pay him $6,500. However, the bill never passed.8 Similarly, Dot Babb persuaded Congressman John H. Stephens to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives to recover the value of his family’s property that was destroyed. However, Stephens warned Dot that the Babbs could not recover “for their personal injuries or imprisonment or for the death of other members of the family, as there is no precedent for such action of Congress, and at this late date [1911] it would be utterly useless to ask for such damages.”9
Some former captives tried unsuccessfully to collect payment until the end of their lives. In 1929 Clinton Smith wrote to the General and Special Claims Commission in Washington to find out if he could either recover damages for his captivity or receive a pension as an adopted Comanche. The commission dismissed his request, replying that these matters were not within its jurisdiction.10 As late as 1935, Clinton’s brother, Jeff, submitted an application to receive federal money. The commissioner of Indian Affairs said he knew of no way a person could recover damages from the government by reason of having been captured by Indians. Nor could Jeff’s adoption by the Apaches entitle him, that many years later, to any benefits that tribal members received.11
A few former captives sought satisfaction in another way: they applied for allotments of farmland in Indian Territory as adopted Comanches. In 1887 Congress bowed to the popular opinion that Native Americans controlled too much land and weren’t doing enough with it. Under the Dawes Act, the legislature authorized the president to unilaterally modify the Treaty of Medicine Lodge by breaking up the Indians’ reservations if he thought their land was “advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes.”12 The Dawes Act forced Native Americans to accept individual allotments of one hundred sixty acres of farmland. Once the allotments were granted, the federal government proposed to buy the rest of the reservation land from the tribes and open it to non-Indian settlers.
The Jerome Commission, appointed by Pres. Benjamin Harrison, dealt with the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches in Indian Territory. The commissioners arrived on the reservation in September 1892. They found the Indians unwilling to sell any of their land. The native people thought that allotments of one hundred sixty acres were too small to support a family in most areas of the rese
rvation, and they voted to reject the Jerome Commission’s offer. However, the commissioners made it clear that the terms they proposed were not really negotiable. They used a combination of threats, pressure, and promises to force the Indians to sign the contract. During the decade that followed, Quanah Parker and other Comanche leaders still refused to accept this arrangement, lobbying to delay Congress’s ratification of the agreement.
Banc Babb Bell wandered into this political hotbed in the spring of 1897, when she arrived in Indian Territory seeking to be adopted by the Comanches. She called on the family of Jesse G. Forester, a Methodist missionary, to see if they could help her locate her Comanche people. Banc and the Foresters went to visit some Comanches who were camped around Fort Sill, waiting for a payment from their grazing leases. From them Banc learned that her foster mother, Tek-washana, had died. However, she found her Comanche uncle and a Mexican captive who had lived with Tekwashana’s family thirty years earlier. They remembered Banc and promised to help. She submitted a formal application for adoption in the fall of 1899.
Banc’s determined campaign to be accepted as a Comanche does not appear to have been motivated solely by the promise of free land. The allotments were located at least seventy miles from Banc’s home in the north Texas town of Henrietta, and she expressed no intent to move her family there. A one-hundred-sixty-acre tract would have provided little rental income to an absentee owner.13 Nor could she have sold it; the federal government planned to hold title to the allotted land in trust for twenty-five years. “She wouldn’t have wanted land in Oklahoma,” says her grandson, Daniel Crooks. “When she was there, land was free. She said only the white man used land for money.” Even if Banc had desired land in that area, it would have been much less trouble and expense for her to have waited and applied for it when the reservation was opened to non-Indian settlers in 1901. Instead, she made several trips to the Fort Sill area and wrote numerous letters over a three-year period in an effort to earn the land as a genuine Comanche rather than claim it as a white homesteader.