by Scott Zesch
fault.10
The thirteenth annual reunion of the Old Trail Drivers Association got under way on October 6, 1927, and it would prove to be the humdinger of them all.11 More than one thousand members registered at the ballroom of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, while the Cockle Burr Band played lively fiddle tunes. Three of the association’s members—Hermann Lehmann and Clinton and Jeff Smith—were hawking their new books.
Everything on the program that year was larger than life. The association was trying to raise $100,000 for a huge bronze sculpture to be erected in honor of the trail drivers in San Antonio.12The reunion featured a spectacular event to raise money for the monument—a Wild West pageant at Garrett Field on North Flores Street depicting a battle between cowboys and Indians. The casting couldn’t have been more realistic. A local journalist noted that almost all the roles would be played by “persons who participated in such actual events a quarter of a century or more ago.” About twenty-five aging trail drivers came from southwest Texas to play the cowboys, wearing the rough, homespun clothes that some of them probably still had hanging on nails in their doors at home, along with their spurs, chaps, six-shooters, and high-heeled boots.
That wasn’t all. As one San Antonio newspaper announced, “Real Comanche Indians were brought here for the show.” Thirty-seven Comanches traveled all the way from Oklahoma to portray the antagonists. After the long, dusty road trip, they “prowled the city trying to find a place to have the car washed and polished.” Many were more than seventy years old. They were described as “giants of men, six feet and over and weighing 200 pounds.” The former warriors wore their hair in two tightly wound braids, and they were decked out in deerskin suits and headdresses made of eagle feathers. Among them were “a dozen or so old men who opposed with rifle and bow the advance of the wagon trains across the Southern Empire.”
Every day local reporters attended the rehearsals for the pageant. They noted that the Comanche men talked with one another in their own tongue unless a white man joined the group: “Then, in politeness to him, they speak in halting, jerky English, in phrases incomplete.” The former trail drivers were “frequently found engaged in earnest conversation with ex-warriors—each man gesturing valiantly, using the one language known to both.” During one rehearsal, a young Comanche horseman rode around the field “wearing a war bonnet, which looked absurdly out of place with his white shirt and blue trousers.” He finally tore off the headdress, exclaiming, “That darn thing’s too hot!” One of the tribe’s elders, dressed in full regalia and leaning against a touring car, glared at him with contempt.
The show featured an attack on a wagon train by the Comanches. They captured a white girl, played by Edith Kelley, the daughter of a trail driver. She told the local press, “I know one thing—that it’s not any fun to be an Indian captive. I feel like I’ve been scalped a dozen times.” The newspaper identified the Comanche who played her captor as, preposterously, “Idaho, Heap Big Brave.” In the show, he hoisted Edith off the ground and onto a galloping horse.
The production was a big hit, even though one newspaper critic groused that the attack “would have been better if more space had been available and better light provided.” Nonetheless, “[t]he Indians in their circling of the camp mounted bareback displayed some marvelous horsemanship.” The cowboys, unlike the real-life pursuers of Native American raiders half a century earlier, managed to track down and kill all the Indians, rescuing the captives.
Clinton and Jeff Smith attended the pageant. While they were waiting for the show to start that night, they noticed three Comanches around their age gearing up to attack the wagon train and then get killed by cowboys. They wore feathers and elaborate buckskin outfits. Clinton stared at them, with his hand cupped over his mouth. He nudged Jeff and murmured, “Look! Look at those old bucks over there! Ain’t them …”
The Comanches glanced their way. They studied the Smiths.
A moment later, the Comanches let out loud whoops of joy. They called Clinton by his old name, Backecacho. He answered them in Comanche. The three Comanches hadn’t seen Backecacho since he was taken from their camp and delivered to Fort Sill in 1872. In full view of the crowd, he and the Comanches rushed toward one another, hugging and pounding one another on the backs.
It’s doubtful whether Clinton, the three Comanches, or the audience in San Antonio fully appreciated the bizarre irony of the moment: Comanches traveled to Texas to reenact the kidnapping of a white child, only to be reunited with a real captive their fathers had abducted and brought to their village. A few years later, a meeting like that could no longer take place. As one newspaper noted sadly, each year a few more folks such as these went “up the trail from which there is no return.”
Even though Jeff had lived with the Apaches, he was almost as excited as Clinton to be back in the company of Comanches his own age. That night he asked his son, Bert, to drive him to the Comanches’ camp. “We were there all night,” Bert recalled. “He was like a young man again, smoking their pipes, chanting and dancing with them. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so happy.”
* * *
Herman Lehmann, Dot Babb, and the Smith brothers actively sought publicity. Some former captives did just the opposite: they stubbornly resisted talking about their time with the Indians. My granny Hey said that Uncle Adolph never told the family much about his experiences. Only a few boyhood friends around Castell got to hear his tales. Rudolph Fischer refused repeated requests to tell his story. “We respected his privacy,” says Josephine Wapp, his granddaughter. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask him more questions. We just left it alone.” Consequently, very little is known about Fischer’s pre-reservation life with the Comanches.
Minnie Caudle liked to tell her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren stories about her time in the Comanche camps. However, she never seemed to want her tales to go beyond the family. Nor did Minnie want to leave any traces of her Comanche life after she was gone. When her daughter-in-law started writing down her stories, Minnie found the notebook and burned it. She also told her family that when she died, she wanted them to destroy her Comanche paraphernalia—her beaded pantaloons, belts, vest, moccasins, and quiver that she’d kept through the years.
By their silence, the captives who refused to tell their stories unwittingly gave birth to some fantastic local legends. The public filled in the gaps, and wildly inaccurate tales were passed from one generation to the next. It is said, for instance, that a contingent of ten soldiers took Rudolph Fischer from Fort Sill to Fredericksburg with his hands bound. That’s not true; Rudolph returned to his former home grudgingly but voluntarily, accompanied only by his father. Also, some accounts state that Rudolph was abducted with another boy named Johnson, who later went with a band of Comanches on a raid into Mexico and never returned. Yet there is no documented evidence that “Johnson” ever existed. In fact, Rudolph told one of his neighbors that no one else was captured with him.
According to another legend, Temple Friend refused to leave Fort Sill without his fellow captive and close companion, Toppish (John Valentine Maxey). Leonard Friend took both boys back to Kansas, where they were inseparable. After Temple died, Toppish disappeared into the woods and was never seen again. This romantic story is entirely unfounded. Toppish’s father came to get him at Fort Sill a few weeks after Leonard Friend left with Temple.
In 1935 my granny Hey told one interviewer a completely fallacious version of how Adolph Korn was recovered from the Comanches. She said that the Indians “finally traded him to a white man for a barrel of crackers. In some way, this man heard that my father was in San Antonio and offered to sell my stepbrother to him for $100. This was the way father got his son back.” How Granny came up with that tale, I’ll never know. What’s even stranger is that the same story was told about another Mason County captive named William Hoerster. It wasn’t true in his case, either.
In 1926 Herman Lehmann left his wife and grown children in Oklahoma to spend the last six yea
rs of his life in the home of his brother, Willie, at his ranch in Loyal Valley, Texas. Herman was as popular in Texas as he had been in Oklahoma. His nephew, Maurice J. Lehmann, said, “I recall when I was a boy at home, Uncle Herman visited us often, and as soon as neighbors for miles around heard of him being there, they would come to see him and would have him talking continuously about the experiences he had with the Indians.”
“He’d really get kids interested,” says Esther Lehmann, Willie’s daughter. “Then he’d let out his Indian war whoop and scare the daylights out of them.”
Herman never held a job while he lived with Willie. (His death certificate listed his occupation as “retired stockman.”13) He hunted and fished a great deal. He also made lots of bows and arrows out of dogwood and mulberry, giving away many of them. Sometimes, he peddled his books. He learned to operate a Model T, but he was never a very good driver. Instead, he walked most places. Herman wore white-man’s clothes, saving his Comanche regalia for special occasions. Unlike Adolph Korn and Jeff Smith, he didn’t mind sleeping indoors.
In the wintertime, Herman sat in front of the fireplace in a rocking chair, smoking his cigarettes. “You could tell his mind was way off somewhere,” says Esther. “I think he really missed the Indian life.” He never left his old life completely behind him. Herman continued to visit his Comanche friends in Oklahoma every year, traveling by bus, never taking anyone with him.
Eventually, Herman developed a heart condition. Toward the end of his life, he was bedridden. He died at Willie’s home on February 2, 1932, at the age of seventy-two. According to the Fredericksburg newspaper, “A large concourse of mourning relatives and friends attended the funeral and covered his last resting place with beautiful flowers, as a token of the high esteem in which he was held by his fellow citizens.” In the end, Herman left nothing to his name except his many friends. He died trusting that Willie would pay for his burial.
Unlike Herman Lehmann, Clinton Smith didn’t make repeated trips to Oklahoma. Nonetheless, he kept in touch with some of his Comanche friends there. His granddaughter, Edda Raye Moody, reports, “While I was digging through his papers, I came upon a letter written to Grandpa from an Indian in Oklahoma, stating that he would like to come to Texas to visit and talk about old times. He also asked if there was any peyote around here. I do not know if Grandpa Smith replied to this letter, but I feel sure that the Indian did not make the visit or my dad would have told me.”
After Clinton and Dixie Smith divorced, Clinton became a nomad, living with one of his children for a while and then another. He was staying in Rocksprings with his daughter, Zona Mae, when he died suddenly on September 10, 1932, probably of a heart attack. In a span of only seven months, Texas had lost two of its most famous white Indians, Herman Lehmann and Clinton Smith. Like Herman, Clinton was seventy-two when he died.
His funeral at the Rocksprings Baptist Church was huge, for Clinton had been an enormously popular figure. According to his obituary, he “was known and loved by the ranching fraternity over the broad scopes of Texas as well as New Mexico…. Beautiful floral offerings were laid beside his casket at the church by a large gathering who knew Mr. Smith to love him, and his remains were followed to the cemetery by a large gathering, who were brought to tears as his remains were laid beneath the sod.”
As well known and well liked as Clinton was, he suffered from low self-esteem, perhaps because he hadn’t been more successful in business. Many years after his death, his granddaughter, Edda Raye Moody, displayed in her house the photograph of Clinton and his three Comanche friends at the 1927 Old Trail Drivers reunion. Her mother looked at it, and said, “You cannot realize how proud your grandpa Smith would have been if he only knew you had his picture in your living room.”
Edda Raye said, “Really?”
Her mother replied, “Oh, yes, he would have been so flattered that somebody thought that much of him.”
Minnie Caudle’s fourth and final marriage ended with the death of Will “Doc” Dane, the purveyor of miraculous medicinal cures. Afterward, she went from the home of one of her children to another, staying several months at each place.
“Grandma was pretty easy to get along with,” says her great-grandson, Damon Benson, who grew up on his parents’ farm near Rising Star, Texas. “She did have her little contrary spells, though. When she got peeved at us, she’d threaten to run off and go back to the Indians. She said if she just knew a good Indian tribe somewhere, she’d go to them.”
Minnie started losing her eyesight before she was thirty, possibly from hereditary macular degeneration. She was completely blind by age fifty-seven. “Her eyes were just as white as snow,” says Damon Benson. “No color to them whatsoever.”
Minnie sometimes stayed with the family of another son, Henry Modgling, in Artesia Wells, Texas. Henry’s widow, Bertie, recalled in 1984, “When she stayed with us, she’d talk on and on and tell us stories about the Indians and what happened when she was captured. She would talk about her life and how she lived, and about how brave her mother was. After a while, we’d just listen at her, not to her.”
Minnie was staying with her son Mose Benson in Marble Falls, Texas, when she died on March 11, 1933. She was seventy-three. Her obituary stated, “She was converted in early life and united with the Baptist Church…. Loved the Lords House and his work and was formerly a beautiful singer.” For many years, “Grandma Dane” had been the last survivor of the Legion Valley raid of 1868. Her playmate and fellow captive, Temple Friend, had been gone since 1875. Temple’s stepmother, Matilda Friend, who had given birth to a healthy daughter after being shot with two arrows and scalped, had finally succumbed to a stroke in 1909.
As Dot Babb grew older, he became even more devoted to his adoptive people. At age sixty-six, he embarked on a strange, quixotic campaign to prove that the Comanches had been wrongly accused of stealing cattle from Texas ranchers, arguing that white thieves were really responsible for the thefts. (He was almost certainly wrong about that.14) Between 1918 and 1925, he sent out questionnaires and collected testimony from several veteran cattlemen, including Charles Goodnight.15Dot’s motive in sending the questionnaires remains a mystery, although he wrote in 1922, “It is never too late to do right.” He apparently held a grudge against some of the well-known ranchers of the Texas Panhandle, whom he thought had filed bogus Indian depredation claims to recover losses from alleged cattle thefts by Native Americans. Dot went to great lengths in his unsuccessful attempt to clear the Comanches’ name, hoping the tribe could recover the federal money awarded to the white ranchers.
Around five o’clock on a Saturday evening, February 21, 1931, Dot collapsed in the yard of his home in Amarillo. The local newspaper announced that he had suffered a stroke and was not expected to live through the night. However, the white Indians were tough. Dot was released from the hospital the next morning, and his condition had improved rapidly by Sunday night. Nonetheless, he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. By 1934 he left home only occasionally.
Dot Babb remained one of the Texas Panhandle’s best-loved characters. He took great interest in the development of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society. In 1935 Dot made a special trip to the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, to present a gift. It was a sinew necklace strung with copper ornaments, bright beads, dried berries, pierced buffalo teeth, and a charm. One of his Comanche brothers had given it to him when he left the tribe in 1867. Dot said, “I knew exactly what it meant when that necklace was placed around my neck. It was a bond of eternal friendship between us. It was his dearest possession. I’ve kept it all these years. I want you to take care of it.”
Dot died on August 10, 1936, at age eighty-four. The Amarillo Globe’s eulogy for him applied just as readily to all the other white Indians of his generation: “It cannot be said that the death of Dot Babb closes a chapter in the history of Texas and the Panhandle. The chapter which his life epitomizes was closed long ago, and Dot Babb became
, as it were, a carryover into a new and strange order of things…. Dot Babb is gone, and with him almost the last link of a modern, fenced West, with a West preserved only by the legends and writings that have been spared by the erasure of the years.”
Dot had been a cowboy and a rancher nearly all his life. Inexplicably, his death certificate listed his occupation as “Indian Scout.”16
Jeff Smith spent his latter years in San Antonio, where he tilled gardens and small plots of land for families who kept milk cows in the area. After his wife, Julia, died in 1933, he stayed with different relatives for a few months at a time. In the 1930s, “he would still hunt with a bow and arrows that he made himself,” says grandson Tom Smith.
On March 8, 1940, Jeff made his last public appearance as a special guest at the San Antonio engagement of the film Geronimo at the Texas Theater. In an interview with the San Antonio Light, he referred to Geronimo as a “nice” Indian—perhaps the first time that adjective had ever been applied to the Apache leader by either his defenders or detractors. The article was mostly about Jeff, however. It stated, “He attributes his longevity and present hardy condition to the rigors of Indian ways…. All in all, he was not treated much worse than were the Indians’ own children, and presently he forgot that he was not actually one of them…. He still carries the brand of ownership placed there by the tribes on each cheek.”
Grandson Charles Smith recalled, “He was a fun-loving man who loved to go to dances.” One Saturday evening, April 20, 1940, Jeff’s son and daughter-in-law dropped him off at a family-style tavern while they went to the movies. Jeff played the fiddle for hours while people danced. When his son returned for him later that night, Jeff was having the time of his life and wasn’t ready to leave. Instead, he rode home with some friends and spent the night at their place about seven miles outside of San Antonio on the Pleasanton Road. Around noon the next day, he was sitting in a rocker, clutching his cane, when he died of an apparent heart attack. He was seventy-seven.