by Scott Zesch
Banc, it seems, felt a need for some sort of official acknowledgment of the extraordinary experience she had endured as a child. She also thought that she was being unjustly denied something that was rightfully hers. In another letter to Indian agent James F. Randlett, she stated, “I honestly believe that my self and children are entitled to a right in that Country. The Indians did me a great wrong, murdered my mother, took me captive and destroyed or stole every thing that my Father possessed. They can partially recompense me for loss of property by adopting me, and I believe if they now had an opportunity that they would do so.” Banc’s letter indicates that she held a lingering grievance over her family’s misfortune; but at the same time, she was on cordial terms with the Comanches she knew in Indian Territory. Her brother, Dot, also believed that the Babbs were “entitled to something on account of our having been captured by the Comanche Indians.”
Both Banc and Dot returned to Indian Territory and attended the general council meeting of the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches in October 1899. On the second day, October 10, they “asked to be adopted into the Comanche tribe in consideration of what they had suffered at the hands of those Indians.” A Comanche named Mihe-coby, himself an adopted Mexican captive who had been granted full tribal rights, spoke in favor of the Babbs’ request, relating the story of their capture. The council decided to delay action until the following day. Meanwhile, the Indians discussed the matter privately. On October 11, the council reconvened. All of its members, including Quanah Parker, voted to reject the proposal to adopt the Babb siblings. The council entered no explanation in the minutes.
Before the Babbs left Indian Territory, Quanah privately encouraged Banc not to give up. He said, rather cryptically, that certain things stood in the way of their adoption, but that those obstacles might be overcome in the future. He assured her that the Indians were in favor of adopting her, but were afraid that her adoption would adversely affect their ongoing efforts to repudiate the Jerome Agreement. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Quanah was thinking. He was trying to keep more land for Native Americans and may have been worried that adopting some white people would risk opening the door to many others. It’s also possible that Quanah and his fellow council members thought Banc wasn’t Comanche enough to be adopted, but were too polite to tell her. Unlike her brother Dot or Herman Lehmann, she’d had virtually no contact with the tribe since her ransoming in 1867.
After Congress ratified the Jerome Agreement on June 6, 1900, Banc contacted agent Randlett to find out “what seemed to be the general feeling of all concerned” regarding her petition. He replied, “I sympathize with you most heartily and would be glad if the Indians could be induced to adopt you.” However, in December 1900, Randlett informed her that the council had never reversed its decision the previous year declining to adopt her. Then he dealt the final blow to her case: “Since the Act of June 6, 1900 ratifying the Jerome Treaty of 1892, the Honorable, the Secretary of the Interior has decided that as the Indians have relinquished their rights to all lands not required for allotments to Indians, such surplus lands revert to the United States and that no further adoptions can be approved that convey any rights to lands that have become landed property of the United States.” In short, the Kiowa-Comanche reservation no longer existed, and the Comanches had no unclaimed land that they could give Banc.14
When he closed Banc Babb Bell’s case at the end of 1900, Indian agent James Randlett thought he’d seen the last of the white Indians trying to obtain land. Less than a month later, however, the case of Herman Lehmann landed on his desk. In the summer of 1900, Herman had returned to Indian Territory to visit Quanah Parker and ask if he could be formally adopted into the tribe. Two other events that happened near Herman’s home in the Hill Country that summer may have rekindled his desire to go back to the Comanches. In July his fellow white Indian, Adolph Korn, who was only a month older than Herman, died in Mason. Herman must have realized that time was passing him by; he knew he shouldn’t wait too long to give Indian Territory a try. Then, in early September, Rudolph Fischer visited Fredericksburg to settle his father’s estate. Although it is unknown whether the two white Indians saw each other at that time, Herman, who lived only twenty-five miles away in Loyal Valley, certainly would have heard the fantastic tales about his fellow German-American who had grown wealthy among the Comanches.
Later that year, Herman moved his family to Duncan, Indian Territory, east of Fort Sill. On December 15, 1900, he began the long process of applying for an allotment as an adopted Comanche. When his petition reached Washington, the commissioner of Indian Affairs asked agent Randlett to investigate Herman’s case. In the early part of 1901, Herman and Quanah Parker called on Randlett in person. During their meeting, Quanah did something he had never done for Banc Babb Bell: he recommended that Herman be enrolled as a Comanche. Quanah may have acted differently in Herman’s case because the Jerome Agreement had already been ratified and he had given up trying to save the reservation from being broken up. Or maybe he simply believed that Herman, a proven warrior and Qua-nah’s foster son, was more deserving.
The legal obstacle, however, was that none of the Comanches could say exactly when Herman had been adopted. Herman gave an affidavit in which he swore that he had considered Quanah Parker to be his adoptive father since 1878. Although Randlett thought Herman’s claim was credible, he wanted more testimony from Native Americans, especially Quanah Parker, confirming that they truly accepted Herman as one of them. During an Indian council held on April 10, 1901, the chiefs and twenty headmen of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribes, on Quanah’s recommendation, voted unanimously that Herman “be enrolled with the Comanche tribe of Indians and given full rights with them to all benefits pertaining to their lands and annuities.”
Shortly afterward, Herman’s case went back up the chain of command all the way to the secretary of the Interior, where his application hit its first real barrier. On May 1, 1901, the secretary determined that Herman’s petition for enrollment and tribal rights by adoption could not be approved: “He claims to have been adopted by the Indians in 1878, but there is no record of such adoption; it was never reported to the Agent, nor approved by [the Kiowa-Comanche agency] and the Department.” Herman, of course, had panicked and fled shortly before he got to Fort Sill in August 1877, so his name wasn’t entered on the Comanche rolls at that time.
As Herman feared, his lengthy absence from Indian Territory also weighed against his claim. The secretary further pointed out, “He is now about 42 years of age; he returned to his mother in Texas when about 18 years old, and has therefore for over 20 years resided off the reservation.” Then the secretary, in a cranky fit of parsimony, voiced his concern that claims such as Herman’s—for a mere one-quarter of a square mile of prairie land—would reduce the amount of territory that the federal government had wrested from the Indians under the Jerome Agreement to be redistributed to non-Indian homesteaders. He wrote: “[I]f any increase of tribal membership is allowed, it would practically be modifying the agreement made and entail a loss to the United States, as each individual, not a party to the agreement, but now to be enrolled or adopted, reduces the amount of land to be received by the United States from the Indians for the price fixed in the agreement.”
Herman got a lawyer, who asked that his case be heard again. The controversy over his land rights turned on a single legal issue: whether Herman had actually been adopted when he lived with Quanah’s family in 1877–1878. If so, then he was entitled to an allotment as a bona fide Comanche. Herman’s lawyer couldn’t find much proof in the records. However, he astutely observed that the Comanche census of 187815 showed that Quanah had three wives, one daughter, and one son. He contended that Quanah had no son of his own at that time; therefore, the unnamed boy listed with Quanah’s family must have been Herman.
The secretary of the Interior still wasn’t convinced. He countered that the Indian council had voted to adopt Herman when it met on April 10, 1901. If Her
man was already a Comanche, why would they have felt a need to readopt him at that time? The secretary offered one small concession, however: Herman could be enrolled as a member of the Comanche tribe, even though his adoption in 1901 had occurred too late for him to receive land.
Herman and his friends in Indian Territory weren’t pacified. On August 26, 1901, Quanah Parker gave an affidavit in support of Herman’s claim. Recalling the events of 1877–1878, he stated, “The boy wanted to live with me and I took him to my camp and he was called my boy…. While he lived with me he drew rations with my family. After he was sent home he returned three times to visit my people.” Quanah was doing all he could to help Herman, but the additional information he volunteered in his affidavit muddled the issues. While Herman had said that he always thought of Quanah as his “foster father,” Quanah stated under oath that he never considered Herman “as adopted by deponent as one of deponent’s children, but while Lehman lived with deponent the Indians called him deponent’s captive boy.” Furthermore, Quanah was “unable to state positively if Lehman was ever taken up on the rolls or census of deponent’s family or not.” More damagingly, Quanah identified the unnamed boy enumerated with his family on the 1878 census as his own son, Harold Parker. Finally, Quanah said that when Herman came to see him in the summer of 1900, he “wanted to be adopted into the tribe, and I told him I was willing for him to be adopted if it was not too late for him to do so.” This statement cast even greater doubt on Herman’s claim that he was a full-fledged Comanche as far back as 1878.
The officials in Washington weren’t persuaded by Quanah’s affidavit. The secretary of the Interior allowed Herman to be enrolled as a Comanche, which entitled him to any monetary benefits bestowed on tribal members. However, in the government’s view, Herman had not been adopted until 1901, too late to receive an allotment of land. Since the Comanches had already surrendered their surplus lands to the government under the Jerome Agreement, they no longer had the power to grant allotments to newly adopted members. Herman, still disgruntled, was enrolled as a Comanche on September 16, 1901.16
While the former captives were unable to seek reparations from the federal government, some of their most hated enemies—the buffalo hunters—were allowed to do just that. One of them was Willis Skelton Glenn, who filed an Indian depredation claim for damages that Herman Lehmann and the Comanche renegades had done to his hunting camps in 1877. In the spring of 1903, Glenn traveled to Lawton to collect the testimony of witnesses in his case, including Herman. Shortly beforehand, he had seen a photograph of Herman and recognized him as the “Comanche” who shot him at close range in early May 1877. At first Herman was suspicious that Glenn had come to take revenge for Herman’s attacks on his camps twenty-six years earlier; before long, however, they became friends. When the depositions were taken on April 28, 1903, Glenn introduced Herman to John Stansbury, the defense attorney representing the federal government, by saying, “This is the Indian that shot me and broke my leg and helped fire my wagons.”
Stansbury looked at Herman disapprovingly, and said, “So you are the man, are you? The state of Texas will take you up for attempted murder and break your neck.”
Herman wasn’t intimidated by the threats. He replied, “I am going to tell the truth.” Then, sadly, he acknowledged his inability to provide for his family: “I expect they will send me to jail, but I expect that squaw and papoose will be better off.”
When he testified that day, Herman kept his promise to Glenn and Stansbury. He gave a full, candid, and unapologetic account of raiding Glenn’s camps: “We destroyed everything that was there, corn, flour, sugar, and buffalo hides; we burned the wagons and buffalo hides, put fire to them. We done that because we thought the men was killing our game…. We destroyed everything at every camp as near as we could.”
On cross-examination, John Stansbury attempted to discredit Herman’s status as an adopted Comanche by asking: “The Comanche Indians each secured an allotment here some time ago, didn’t they?”
Herman said, “Yes, sir.”
“You being a white man couldn’t get any, could you?”
“No, sir, I didn’t get any.”
“You made an application … then you made a second application, did you not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Both of those applications have been thrown out by the secretary of the Interior, have they not?”
“Yes, sir.”
Stansbury needled Herman by dwelling on a sore subject, but Herman kept his cool that day. Glenn, the claimant, had promised Herman that in exchange for his testimony, he would do all he could to help him get an allotment. Some white citizens of Lawton also circulated a petition in support of Herman’s application. After eight years of legal wrangling, Herman finally got his land. On May 29, 1908, Congress authorized the secretary of the Interior “to make an allotment to Herman Lehman (Montechema), an enrolled member of the Comanche tribe of Indians, who did not get an allotment, of one hundred and sixty acres of unappropriated and unallotted land.”17 Herman selected a tract nine miles west of Grandfield, close to some of his Native American friends, and moved his family there sometime after 1910. Ever generous in the Comanche manner, he gave some of his property for the construction of a school.
Although he won his battle at long last, Herman Lehmann never found the contentment he was seeking in Oklahoma. His relatives have suggested several reasons—he didn’t like farming, he didn’t care for the flatlands, he missed his brother Willie and the Texas Hill Country. More significant, Herman waited too long to go back to the Indians. By the time he moved to Indian Territory in 1900, the manner in which his Comanche and Apache friends were living bore little resemblance to the adventures he had shared with them on the plains in the 1870s. They toiled in their fields and sent their children to schools and fretted about money. The carefree days were only a memory.
Both Herman Lehmann and Rudolph Fischer had been seduced by the unadulterated culture of the Southern Plains Indians before their way of life was forever changed by their confinement on the reservation. Unlike Fischer, however, Lehmann decided not to accompany his Comanche brothers as they learned to walk the white man’s road—that rocky path to assimilation into mainstream American society. He tried to forge his own way, acquiring livestock and going into business in Texas. It never worked for him. Had he moved to Indian Territory earlier, Herman, like Rudolph Fischer, probably could have adjusted to modern life alongside his Comanche friends. Most important, he would have had a guide. Like Fischer, Lehmann could have followed the example of his friend and mentor, Quanah Parker.
Instead, the changes Herman found when he arrived in Indian Territory in 1900 bewildered him, and the twentieth century soon left him behind. After spending twenty-six years in Oklahoma during its boom days, watching the children of his Comanche brothers marry outside the tribe and move away from their relatives while more white people poured in, Herman grew disillusioned. He returned to Texas in 1926 to live out his remaining years on Willie’s ranch. An anachronistic figure, he had spent his whole adult life moving irresolutely between two peoples, both of whom had embraced him but had also moved on without him. His incomparable experience had come at a heavy cost. Herman’s niece, Esther Lehmann, says, “He died a broken man.”
Chapter Twelve
In the Limelight
Hollywood called on Dot Babb in 1920. The movie people caused a stir in his hometown. The front page of the Amarillo Daily Tribune announced the impending production of “a great drama of the early days,” depicting the life of the former Comanche captive. By then his story was well known in Texas. Dot’s 1912 memoir, In the Bosom of the Comanches, would serve as the source for the film’s scenario. The production outfit was the Oklahoma Motion Picture Company, which had a studio in Los Angeles and an office in Oklahoma City.
Dot, who had moved to Amarillo from Clarendon in 1906, had just retired and leased his ranch at the time the motion picture project was announced. In the summe
r of 1920, he spent several months helping with preproduction in Oklahoma. He was also signed to appear in the film, which would be shot in the Wichita Mountains near Lawton, using five to six thousand Indian extras. By that time, the Comanches and Kiowas were no strangers to film work. In 1908 the Oklahoma Natural Mutoscene Company had recruited Quanah Parker for a cameo role in The Bank Robbery, the earliest two-reel western. That picture, one of the first to cast real-life participants in the recreation of historical events, starred a former bank robber, Al Jennings, and was directed by a popular lawman, William Tilghman. Cattleman Charles Goodnight invited Native Americans from Oklahoma to his Texas ranch to reenact a buffalo hunt for the 1916 film Old Texas. In 1920 two of Quanah’s children, White and Wanada, were cast as principals in The Daughter of Dawn, a six-reel melodrama filmed around Lawton with an all–Native American cast.1
The shooting of the Dot Babb story was expected to begin in October 1920 and last sixty days. However, the project appears to have died before the film ever went into production. No trace of it remains. It’s possible that the producers couldn’t raise enough money or that their company folded. Or they may have decided that the market for this type of picture was saturated. By 1920 Hollywood studios had already made more than sixty films about Indian captivities.2
Even though In the Bosom of the Comanches never made it to the screen, the announcement of the project marked the beginning of a decade in which the former Indian captives of Texas, whose lives had been characterized mostly by failure and discontent, enjoyed a brief reemergence as regional celebrities. Their stories were featured in popular history magazines such as Frontier Times, which began publication in 1923 to preserve the recollections of elderly pioneers. The same year, a Dallas publisher issued a second edition of Dot Babb’s book, which became even more widely circulated than the first.