by Scott Zesch
The 1920s would also be the last decade in which the myth and the reality of the American West substantially overlapped. Although the early western pictures gave audiences a biased view of the time and place, they were peopled with authentic cowboys, Indians, and lawmen. To audiences in the silent era, these old-timers on screen were quaint curiosities, as far removed from the Jazz Age as Huckleberry Finn or Natty Bumpo.
The first westerns told the stories the way the white pioneers wanted them to be remembered, glorifying the courage and fortitude of the settlers along the frontier. Their tales needed cruel, terrifying antagonists, and Native America’s public image didn’t benefit from many of the photoplays. Nonetheless, the film shoots gave the Plains Indians a chance to put on their feathers and war paint, race their best horses, and launch arrows at their former enemies once more, if only in make-believe.
Something else happened during the 1920s that would have seemed unthinkable half a century earlier. Aging white settlers and aging Native Americans, who had once tried to kill one another on the plains of Texas, now eagerly looked forward to meeting one another at reunions and parades. They enjoyed comparing their experiences from the old days and solving some lingering mysteries. These long-ago combatants had more in common with one another than they did with their own grandchildren, who played “Oh, Lady, Be Good!” on phonographs, drove automobiles to dance halls and speakeasies, and decorated their faces with cosmetics rather than ceremonial paint. Old cowboys and old Indians became strange bedfellows in a world that had long since left them behind.
By the age of radio and silent screen stars, the white men and women who had lived with the Indians already belonged to the realm of legend. Every year the living legends of the Texas frontier gathered at their own convention. In 1915 a former trail driver and livestock commission agent named George W. Saunders helped found an organization called the Old Trail Drivers Association. Its purpose was to perpetuate the memory of the early cowboys who had taken the herds to market in the 1870s and 1880s. Each fall the association hosted a weekend reunion at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, a gathering place for cattlemen.
The three-day event in 1924 began on November 6.3The press promoted it as “a great gathering, old frontiersmen and cowboys, Indian fighters, freighters and rangers coming from different sections of the country to once more greet their old comrades.” President Saunders also promised a special treat: “At the reunion this year will be quite a number of men who spent years in captivity among the Indians.”
Jeff Smith was living in San Antonio at the time. He showed up.
Clinton Smith arrived in town from his ranch at Hackberry. His son, Allen, drove him to the reunion. The San Antonio Light interviewed the Smith brothers, and they posed for a publicity photo with their pistols drawn.
Frank Buckelew came from Bandera to relive the old days, even though he’d hated his time with the Lipan Apaches.
Herman Lehmann traveled all the way from Grandfield, Oklahoma. His picture appeared in the San Antonio Express as one of the “Veteran Trail Drivers.” That must have amused him. He’d never gone up the trail, although he’d stolen horses from a number of those who had.
The white Indians were the center of attention at the gathering in 1924. Herman Lehmann, dressed in a buckskin suit and a buffalo-horn headdress, performed Native American dances for the crowd. At age sixty-five, he was still strong and agile. Later, in the lobby of the Gunter Hotel, he spoke to the old-timers, many of them former Indian fighters, about his experiences as a warrior in Texas. He told the well-worn story of his close call with the Texas Rangers on the Staked Plains in August 1875.
In the audience sat a well-dressed gentleman three years older than Herman. He stood and announced, “I was with the Rangers who attacked those Apaches.” The man was James B. Gillett, who had joined the Texas Rangers at age eighteen and fought against Herman shortly afterward. In front of the audience, the two men discussed all the particulars of the battle.
“You shot me in the temple after my horse had fallen on my leg, but I wasn’t hurt very much,” said Herman.
Gillett replied, “I remember shooting your horse out from under you, but I don’t think I fired at you after you were down.”
“Yes, you did. And you and another Ranger left me lying there while you chased an Indian who had been riding behind me on the horse.” Then Herman tossed off a seemingly casual remark that must have chilled Gillett: “I later found where you caught my pal.” The reference went right past the audience, for Herman spared them a description of the headless, mutilated corpse of his Apache friend, Nusticeno. However, the former Texas Ranger must have remembered the sight very well. Later, when Lehmann and Gillett shook hands for a photographer, neither looked entirely at ease.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, the former captives were often asked to put on shooting and riding exhibitions at all sorts of community gatherings—county fairs, rodeos, reunions, parades, grand openings, and so forth. “When he wasn’t at a goat show, he was at a rodeo as a participant, even when he was up in years,” says Edda Raye Moody, Clinton Smith’s granddaughter. “Or some place would be celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of its establishment, and they would ask Clinton and Jeff to dress in Indian clothes and ride in the parades.”
Jovial and outgoing, Clinton Smith became a very popular figure in Texas, and he relished the attention. None of the former captives matched the public’s image of a cowboy more perfectly. With his lanky frame, droopy white moustache, wide-brimmed hat, and easygoing manner, Clinton would have been an ideal find for a Hollywood casting agent.
His brother, Jeff, was slightly smaller and darker, with an intense, serious expression. Jeff also participated in many public events as a featured guest, but he seemed less comfortable in the spotlight. Sidney M. Whitworth recalled seeing the Smith brothers at the fairgrounds in Bandera, Texas, in the late 1920s. Jeff was dressed in a black suit and a large felt hat, with a shiny gold watch chain hanging across the front of his vest. Whitworth said, “He just sat on a bench under a tree and looked at his pocket watch, turning it over and over in his hand, never saying a word…. Even then, you could see him reliving his years with the Indians. Every now and then, he would stare out in the crowd as though he were trying to put all the pieces of his life back together.”
None of the white Indians enjoyed performing more than Herman Lehmann. No longer content to limit his exhibitions to Oklahoma, he started making more frequent trips to the Texas Hill Country in the early 1920s. For many years, he was the headline attraction at county fairs in Fredericksburg, Comfort, Llano, Mason, and Burnet.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” says Carlos Parker, ninety-one, who saw Herman perform in Fredericksburg during those years. “He’d make that gray mare run as fast as she could go, riding bareback, with no bridle. Then he’d lean over on one side, pull the bow, and shoot a calf. He’d never miss a shot.”
This was Herman Lehmann’s trademark act. He appeared suddenly on his horse, wearing a headdress of eagle feathers, a buckskin suit, a breastplate of white bone, and a beaded belt and moccasins. While the crowd cheered wildly, Herman started chasing a calf, grabbing arrows from the quiver on his back and shooting them at the calf’s hooves to get it running full speed. Occasionally, he let out a war whoop. Before long he would kill the calf, jump off his horse, cut out the liver, and eat it raw. People who saw these performances say that the audience didn’t recoil at the bloody spectacle; instead, the crowd treated Herman with immense respect. They were in awe of his considerable prowess.
One night at the Gillespie County Fair in August 1925, Herman told his life story to a spellbound crowd of hundreds. Afterward, he joked, “I had a letter from my son in Oklahoma who says they are about to strike oil on our land and maybe I’ll have some money yet.”
Some money yet. That would never happen for Herman. The public’s adoration may have shored up his self-esteem, but he was still a financial failure.
/> Cowboys weren’t the only old-timers gathering at events in Texas to celebrate the frontier days. In the spring of 1926, some special guests from Oklahoma arrived in San Angelo, Texas, to appear at the fairgrounds. The visitors were Comanches who had traveled by automobile to take part in the Wild West show of Hackberry Slim Johnson, a promoter described as a “squinty-eyed, one-legged, would-be Buffalo Bill.”4Two of the Comanches, Mamsookawat and Hayko-bitty Millet, paid a visit to Fort Concho and were interviewed by a re-porter.5
Mamsookawat, a prominent Indian council member who had fought under Paruacoom in the Battle of the North Fork of the Red River, was rumored to own oil-producing land in Oklahoma worth approximately $100,000. One cheeky local asked him, “Did you ever do a day’s work in your life?” He grunted and looked disgusted. His interpreter explained that Mamsookawat had better ways to spend his time; he “smoked, talked, and ate lots of beef.”
The two Comanches made the trip to the Staked Plains of Texas because they wanted to see the country their people had once roamed. Mamsookawat said it “made him sad to look about and see this country which once was the Comanche’s, now in the hands of others.” He promised that someday the young Comanches “would know the white man’s ways—and would appeal to the President to give them back their property.” The elderly Comanche visitors were also anxious to meet and “smoke the pipe of peace” with old pioneers in the area. Half a century after Ranald Mackenzie drove them to their reservation, the Comanches were gradually drifting back to Texas, where they were now treated as celebrities.
One significant event that happened at the Old Trail Drivers reunion in November 1924 went unnoticed at the time. Herman Lehmann renewed his acquaintance with J. Marvin Hunter, a journalist and publisher of Frontier Times. Hunter, born in Loyal Valley in 1880, had known Herman since early childhood. In fact, Hunter’s father, John Warren Hunter, had briefly been Herman’s teacher at the Loyal Valley schoolhouse in 1879 and had interviewed him for a newspaper article in 1906. As a child, J. Marvin Hunter had been afraid of Herman. His mother used to threaten that if he didn’t behave, “that Indian” would get him.
Hunter knew that Herman Lehmann had published a memoir in 1899, written by a Mason County schoolteacher and future county judge named Jonathan H. Jones. Herman and Jones called their collaborative work A Condensed History of the Apache and Comanche Indian Tribes for Amusement and General Knowledge, but it was more commonly known by a different title printed on the cover, Indianology. Jones took great liberties with both style and content, confusing the chronology of Herman’s tales, littering the narrative with ludicrously inappropriate word choices, and supplementing it with sentimental verses and superfluous extracts from other works. Herman’s first venture in publishing was a commercial failure. When he traveled to New Braunfels, Texas, to peddle Indianology, his buggy flooded in a creek crossing, and many of the copies floated downstream. In the Mason County census of 1900, Herman listed his occupation as “book dealer,” although that brief career was as unsuccessful as all his others.
The prospects for a Lehmann autobiography seemed brighter in the 1920s. As a publisher, J. Marvin Hunter was aware of the resurgence in popular histories about Indian captivities. The second edition of Dot Babb’s memoir, In the Bosom of the Comanches, was selling briskly despite its purple prose and florid style—the handiwork of Dot’s ghostwriter, Amarillo entrepreneur Albert Sidney Stinnett. Twenty-five years had passed since Indianology appeared, and Herman had never really liked it, anyway. He and Hunter were thinking along the same lines. It was time to bring Herman’s story to a new and larger audience.
A month after the reunion in 1924, Frontier Times announced the impending publication of a new book, to be called Herman Lehmann, The Indian. It would be edited by the magazine’s publisher, J. Marvin Hunter. He planned to work quickly, scheduling publication for March 1925. In the early part of 1925, Herman Lehmann returned to Texas from Oklahoma and spent more than a week at Hunter’s home in Bandera, relating the story of his life while the publisher took notes. Hunter later recalled that Herman “in many ways expressed himself as an Indian.”
Herman had been displeased with the liberties Jonathan Jones took in Indianology, and told Hunter, “I want you to write my book the way I tell you, so the young people of this country will know what we went through.” Hunter didn’t exactly follow Herman’s instructions. Much of the manuscript he compiled was taken word for word from Indianology. (In his introduction, Hunter stated that he had “obtained valuable material” from Jones’s book, although he indicated that Herman had related most of the facts during their meetings.) Even though most of Hunter’s work wasn’t original, he performed a great deal of much-needed editing. He deleted large chunks of extraneous material, corrected the personal names of the Apaches and Comanches, and weeded out most of Jones’s odd phrases, clichés, and digressions. (He also toned down the racier passages, perhaps at Herman’s urging.) Herman was satisfied with the results.6
By the time of the Gillespie County fair in August 1925, Herman Lehmann, The Indian still wasn’t in print. When J. G. Burr, a writer for the Austin American-Statesman, tried to interview Herman during the festivities, he protested, “I’ve been having too much publicity already. My life has been written and the people will not buy the book if the papers publish everything in advance.”
“Why not?” said Burr. “You have been telling these stories for years and the same people are as anxious as ever to hear them again. If we write about you, it will only serve to create more interest in your book.”
As it turned out, there would be plenty of time to generate publicity. Herman’s autobiography wasn’t published until 1927, two years after it was written. The reason for the delay is unknown, but the problems may have been financial. J. Marvin Hunter’s magazine press, Frontier Times, was originally going to publish the book, but those plans fell through. Herman’s nephew, Maurice J. Lehmann, eventually financed publication and paid Hunter for his work as editor. Maurice sent the manuscript to another firm, Von Boeckmann-Jones Company in Austin.
The new publisher gave Herman’s memoir a more descriptive title, Nine Years Among the Indians 1870–1879.7Due to some editorial carelessness, the title on the cover appeared as Nine Years with the Indians, and the book has been known by both titles ever since. Either is a slight overstatement, for Herman actually spent eight years among the Apaches and Comanches. The publisher also added an inaccurate paragraph describing how the Apaches made flint arrowheads, apparently without Herman’s knowledge.8Despite these minor glitches, Herman’s book was a publishing triumph. The clothbound volume, which sold for three dollars, was accurately advertised as the “thrilling life story of a white man who was an Indian…. He tells his story simply and without frills or flourishes, or exaggeration.”
Herman Lehmann wasn’t the only white Indian whose memoir appeared in 1927. Clinton Smith had decided to write an account of “the only two brothers ever known to endure the same hardships of captivity and get back alive,” as the book was billed. That description also appears to have been accurate. Clinton and his brother, Jeff, collaborated on the narrative over a long period of time, working at the kitchen table by the light of a coal-oil lamp. Using a lead pencil, Clinton scribbled the manuscript, appropriately, on pages of Big Chief writing tablets. When he finished each page, he tore it off and placed it in a cardboard box. The brothers took the box full of handwritten pages to J. Marvin Hunter in Bandera. Hunter published the narrative, with a fair amount of judicious but unobtrusive editing,9under the title The Boy Captives.
As memoirists, Clinton and Jeff Smith had one major advantage over Herman Lehmann: Clinton was able to transcribe their story himself. Consequently, their personalities came through unfiltered on every page. For the Smith brothers’ audience, reading The Boy Captives was like listening to a good campfire tale, well told by two masterful storytellers. The narrative was also permeated with their quick sense of humor, and they didn’t hesitate to crack jo
kes at their own expense.
In the fall of 1927, Hunter announced that the Smith brothers’ book would be off the press and available for purchase at the Old Trail Drivers reunion in October. He promoted the book in Frontier Times, stating: “The story is told in pleasing style, and is a true recitation of the hardships endured and the cruelties visited upon helpless white captives…. When they were restored to their people they were almost as wild as the Indians with whom they had been associated.” The first edition was paperbound and sold for two dollars. In one advertisement, Hunter pitched the book, rather pitifully, as somewhat of a charity case, noting that the Smith brothers were “old men now” and “have lived a hard life, have had to toil, and still have to toil, for the necessities of life.”
Actually, Clinton’s wife, Dixie, was the one who’d had to toil. She had resented the time her husband spent on the book while she did all the “real” work for the family. Nonetheless, by the time The Boy Captives appeared in print, even Dixie Smith was excited. She said, “Oh, he is going to make so much money out of it!” However, Clinton ended up giving away most of the copies to his many friends. He was a popular fellow, and he refused payment from anyone he knew, even mere acquaintances. “Just like an Indian,” his granddaughter jokes. “He had no idea of the value of money.” The former captives could barely make a living for their families, and to compound their financial troubles, they had acquired the Comanches’ generosity to a