by Scott Zesch
The San Antonio Light reacted to the passing of the city’s last white Indian with this understatement: “Smith was born in Texas when it was still part of the frontier and he endured more than the usual share of hardships that went with life at the time.”
At age eighty-three, Rudolph Fischer finally developed an interest in his family in Texas. In 1935 his grandson took him to Fredericksburg to visit his brother, Arthur. The two brothers’ families hunted deer and spent several happy days together. The Fredericksburg newspaper noted that Rudolph was “still hale and hearty and enjoying life very much. He still attends to his ranch chores personally, being in the saddle every day.”
He made his last trip to Fredericksburg in 1939 to attend Arthur’s funeral. Rudolph himself died at age eighty-nine on Easter Sunday, April 14, 1941. His first wife, Tissychauer, had passed away in 1933. Her sister, Kahchacha, the wife whom Rudolph had divorced at the missionaries’ insistence, stayed by his bedside and attended him during his last illness. He was buried from the Catholic church in Apache, Oklahoma.
J. Marvin Hunter, writing in Frontier Times magazine, reflected that Rudolph was probably the last of the Indian captives from the Texas Hill Country, a group that had once included Adolph Korn, Herman Lehmann, Minnie Caudle, and Clinton and Jeff Smith. “Now Rudolph Fischer has passed on to join his companions in the Great Hereafter,” he concluded.
That left only Banc Babb Bell. Like Jeff Smith, Banc had lived most of her life in the shadow of a more famous older brother, Dot. She didn’t seem to mind. Banc didn’t avoid publicity, but she didn’t seek attention, either. When one journalist asked her in 1939 why she’d never published an account of her life, she seemed genuinely surprised by the idea. “Write a book?” she replied. “Well, maybe I should, but I’ve never thought much about it. No, I don’t mind talking about my experiences as a captive, but I suppose I’ve just taken those early experiences as a matter of course and haven’t thought that others were much interested.”
At age eighty-two, Banc was a guest of honor at the opening of a new opera, Cynthia Parker, at North Texas State Teachers College in Denton on February 16, 1939.17It was the first opera premiere ever held in Texas. The composer, Julia Smith, was a Juilliard graduate who later became Aaron Copland’s first biographer. The libretto was written by Jan Isbell Fortune. Leonora Corona, formerly a soprano with the Metropolitan Opera, flew from New York to sing the title role. Banc sat in the same row with one of Quanah Parker’s sons, Rev. White Parker, and Quanah’s last surviving wife, Topay,18who was wearing shells and beads. During an intermission following the prologue, the college president, W. J. McConnell, introduced Banc, noting: “She knew Quanah when he was a boy. Her capture was six years after Cynthia Ann’s recapture by the whites.”19
Widowed since 1934, Banc spent her last years living in comfortable obscurity in a neat brick house in Denton, Texas. A family friend, Bette S. Anderson, recalls, “I was aware that Mrs. Bell had been captured by Indians as a child. But I did not hear her say anything about the Indians.” Few people who met the nice, quiet old lady were aware that she had once hunted buffalo, attended war dances, and shared a tepee with a woman named Tekwashana, who bundled her in buffalo robes on cold winter nights.
Banc died at her home on April 13, 1950, at age ninety-three. An abbreviated account of her remarkable childhood experience appeared in the Denton and Fort Worth papers, but her death didn’t even make the news in nearby Dallas. No one seemed to realize that her passing marked the end of an extraordinary era, for Texas had lost its last Comanche captive. In fact, by 1950, Banc Babb Bell may have been the last white Indian in America.
Chapter Thirteen
The Trail Fades
Uncle Adolph finally got a proper headstone in 2000, a century after he died. My grandmother’s cousin, Lora Hey, paid for the monument. It’s an inconspicuous block of gray granite resting flat on the ground. The tablet states his name and life span, then adds, matter-of-factly: Lived with the Comanches Jan. 1870–Nov. 1872. Each year at Christmas, another relative, Susie Hey Ellison, and her daughter, Debbie, place a small poinsettia by his stone. He’s part of our family again.
When April arrives, the old section of the Gooch Cemetery in Mason reverts to nature. If there’s been enough rain, a few bluebonnets and fire red Indian paintbrushes sprout between the crevices in fallen tombstones and the rods in wrought-iron fences. Unruly native grass grows out of control like wool over a sheep’s eyes, almost hiding the headstone. Even in death, Uncle Adolph resists discovery.
He was staying with his stepsister, my granny Hey, when he died at three o’clock on the afternoon of July 3, 1900, at her rambling frame house on the Fredericksburg Road in Mason. Uncle Adolph was only forty-one. No one remembers the cause of his premature demise. His obituary mentioned “an illness of several months,” adding that until then he had been “the very picture of vigorous, rugged manhood.” As a former Comanche warrior, Uncle Adolph wouldn’t have feared death or even fought it. Instead, having missed his chance to die gloriously in battle, he would have welcomed the opportunity to avoid the indignities of old age.
His obituary was barely noticeable at the bottom of the third page of the Mason newspaper. It explained briefly that Adolph Korn had been captured by Indians and eventually recovered, noting that he had “imbibed many of their customs and mannerisms that remained with him till his death.” Uncle Adolph was a private man who made others uncomfortable, and not many people were interested in the details of his strange life at the time it ended. His contemporaries must have shaken their heads, thinking how sad it was that he’d ended up a failure, a misfit, and a loner.
He didn’t have enough personal property to pay the debts he left, which included $209.20 he owed to Granny Hey. The administrator of his estate had to sell the land that Uncle Adolph had bought a few years earlier, before he stopped trying to fit in and decided to live in a cave.1
Granny saw to it that he was buried with proper rites. The mourners—a small group, no doubt—gathered at his graveside in the Gooch Cemetery to pay their respects the evening after he died. The date of the funeral happened to be the Fourth of July, but that didn’t matter; the events of the American Revolution meant little to people on the Texas frontier who had fought their own war against Indians. Afterward, Granny had a death announcement, “To the Memory of Adolph Korn,” printed in gold letters on black cardboard. For the few friends and kinfolk who cared about him, the card would be their only memento of his short and seemingly insignificant life. Granny couldn’t read, and she may not have realized how inappropriately the sentimental, stock verse on the announcement marked his passing:
One precious to our hearts has gone,
The voice we loved is stilled,
The place made vacant in our home
Can never more be filled.
Our Father in His wisdom called
The boon His love had given;
And though on earth the body lies.
The soul is safe in Heaven.
Other circumstances of his burial are more fitting. Uncle Adolph is facing the rising sun, as is proper for a Comanche. Above his remains grows a lone mesquite, a tree highly valued by the Southern Plains Indians as a source of food during hard times. Across the fence from his grave, a neighboring landowner keeps horses, the Comanches’ dearest possessions. Even though Uncle Adolph is not with his tribesmen, I think he would have liked this site.
My chance discovery of his grave sent me in search of him, but I’ve come to realize that it’s impossible to find the answers to all my questions. His trail has become too dim and broken to follow all the way to the end. The reality of his life has been supplanted by the legend, and even that has faded from most people’s memories. That’s probably the way he wanted it.
The family doesn’t have even a single photograph of him. I wonder if no one thought it was important to preserve his image. Maybe he refused to go to a photographer’s studio. Even the photograph of Adolph Korn tha
t was taken when the Comanches brought him to Fort Sill in 1872 has never surfaced in any museum or private collection.2
He didn’t leave many traces at the Korn homestead. In the spring of 1876, Grandpa Korn moved his family for the last time, leaving San Antonio and returning to Mason County. Only six years had passed since Adolph’s capture, but the Hill Country was a different place by then. The U.S. Cavalry and the Texas Rangers had done their job well. The Indians were gone for good.
Louis and Johanna Korn bought a 640-acre ranch on the Llano River, where Uncle Adolph spent his late teen and early adult years. The Korns built a small, two-story sandstone house near a spring. They also put up rock fences to enclose the garden and the corral. Uncle Adolph probably helped haul the rock, chisel the corners square, and set the stones in straight lines to build the thick walls. Like Herman Lehmann, he must have despised that type of manual labor. He would have preferred the simplicity and portability of a tepee, anyway.
His toil was ultimately for nothing. The Korn house has been reduced to a pile of rocks and a few rotting timbers completely overgrown with persimmon, broomweed, and prickly pear. From the pasture road, it’s hard to even see where it stood. Only the foundation is intact. The well, dug by hand and lined in sandstone, dried up long ago. Wild, native vegetation has reclaimed the fruit orchard. A hundred yards south of the remains of the house, the tiny, rectangular enclosure where Adolph’s mother, Johanna, was buried beneath an oak tree in 1883 is hardly recognizable as a family cemetery.
Several crumbling rock fences, in various stages of decay, mark the boundaries of the Korns’ ranch and subdivide the pastures. Eventually, those barriers will disappear. My ancestors tried to impose their European sense of order and permanence on these former Native American hunting grounds, but today the Korn place looks much the way it did when the Indians held it.
The families of Adolph Korn and Herman Lehmann tried similar ploys to help their white-Indian sons readjust. Herman’s family gave him livestock to care for after he returned. Likewise, Adolph registered a cattle brand in 1877 and owned his own herd by 1879. He opened a charge account at a Mason dry-goods store in 1889. The same year, Adolph became even more deeply immersed in the American way of doing business: he was sued in a property dispute.3 He lost the case, and his opponent recovered possession of the premises. Uncle Adolph couldn’t find the words to explain to the white judge what he’d learned while he was away: the land didn’t really belong to any single individual.
Just as Willie Lehmann looked after his brother, Herman, I suspect that Adolph’s twin, Charlie Korn, tried to help him get back on his feet. The two boys had worked side by side before Adolph’s capture, and they remained close after they both returned to Mason County in 1876. They were given county roadwork assignments together in 1879 and 1885. After that, Charlie Korn disappeared from Mason County records and from Korn family history; he drifted away and fell out of touch with the family. Adolph was alone once more.
During the 1890s, Adolph found work in Castell, near the site of his capture. He broke wild horses for a man named Jacob Bauer. One day Adolph and Bauer’s young son, Frank, were following an old Native American trail when they came upon a pile of rocks. Adolph told Frank that the Indians had covered a spring with buffalo hides, then piled stones and soil on top to stop the water from flowing. He didn’t explain why they did that. Perhaps it was a last-ditch effort to hold the white invaders at bay by cutting off their water supply.
Adolph also taught Frank how to make a bow. He cut a dogwood branch and covered it with cow manure for about ten days to soften it. The branch was then very pliable, and he could easily shape it.
That’s the sum of the stories about Adolph Korn that have been handed down through the generations. If it weren’t for Clinton Smith’s narrative, Uncle Adolph’s experiences among the Comanches would be entirely lost. Like Minnie Caudle and many other former captives, he seemed determined not to leave an Indian legacy.
On October 12, 1892, Uncle Adolph testified in the Indian depredation case of Adolph Reichenau, the Korns’ former neighbor in the Saline Valley. Reichenau was trying to recover the value of more than fifty horses stolen by Indian raiders in 1868 and 1869. At the time Adolph gave his testimony, he was working as a well digger. The shy, reticent man must have been terrified of speaking before lawyers and a court reporter. The transcript of his deposition, taken in Mason, is the only surviving record of Adolph’s hesitant, stilted way of expressing himself.
Reichenau’s attorney was a boisterous and outspoken Englishman named Henry M. Holmes, a friend of Granny Hey and her family. When Holmes asked Adolph to state his age, he replied, “Thirty-three past.”
After establishing that Adolph had lived in the Saline Valley at the time of the thefts, Holmes asked, “Did [Reichenau] lose any property or have any property destroyed on or about that time, and if so, what was it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was it?”
“Horses and oxen.” Then Uncle Adolph reconsidered. “I don’t remember about the oxen, but he lost horses. He was running a big stock of cattle and used plenty of horses, which horses I often saw Mr. Reichenau ride.”
“Who took that property?”
“As much as I know, the Indians at that time.”
“How do you know the Indians took them?”
“I heard the Indians running the horses that night and found an Indian saddle there the next morning.”
“Did you ever see any of these horses again?”
“I have seen those horses afterwards, that I had seen him ride before.”
“Where did you see them?”
“With the Comanche Indians.”
“State how you came to be with the Comanche Indians.”
“I was herding sheep in Mason County for August Leifeste on the first of January, 1870, and the Indians come and got me and took me prisoner. These were the Apaches.”
“State how you came to be with the Comanches.”
“They took me up there after traveling with me ten days or over, and I stayed one day and a half with them at their camp. Then traveled me another half a day afoot, and then another half a day and then reached the Comanche camp. And then I was traded to the Comanches. I stayed with the Comanches nearly three years.”
Under the federal plan for compensating victims of Indian depredations, a tribe could not be held liable if it was at war with the government at the time of the claimant’s property loss. On cross-examination, the government’s attorney, Thomas Ball, asked Adolph a standard question: “From 1865 on to 1876, did a condition of war exist between the Apache and Comanche Indians and the governments of Texas and the United States?”
Adolph’s answer explodes off the page: “Yes, of course there was war! They killed one another whenever they got a chance.”
Ball then asked, “Did you ever go with these Indians on their war party?”
Adolph replied, “I was too little.”
“Where did they leave you?”
“They left me at their places of rendezvous of their woman and children, which was always being moved. I never stayed over fifteen days at one place.”
Why did Adolph Korn deny his involvement in all the raids and battles that Clinton Smith documented in detail? Did he think he might still be prosecuted for horse thefts? Or hanged for treason, because he’d shot arrows at U.S. cavalrymen? Did he want to conceal the misdeeds of his Comanche youth from his family and neighbors in Mason? For whatever reason, Uncle Adolph kept his secrets. It’s likely that Grandpa Korn and Granny Hey never knew that during Adolph’s years away from home, he had not been a cowering, horsewhipped slave but an unholy terror.
In 1893 Adolph Korn was thirty-four years old and finally seemed to be finding his place in life. Once again he made some effort to become a regular property owner. He purchased several residential lots in the town of Mason, apparently as investments. Granny Hey, who was always interested in real estate, probably encouraged him to bu
y land, perhaps even lending him the money. Adolph also bought sixty acres a mile and a half north of Mason, suggesting that he planned to settle down, maybe build a house, and perhaps even marry and raise a family4.
No one knows what caused Adolph to revert to his Comanche ways and eventually become a hermit. He never built on his sixty acres north of town. Early in 1896, he sold one of his residential tracts in Mason for $500, the same price he had paid for it. In November of that year, he sold another lot for $130, a loss of seventy dollars.5
Some time after that, Adolph Korn dropped out of society altogether. He went to live in a row of small caves known as Diamond Holes on Rocky Creek, near the Mason County community of Hilda. His home in a bluff was located on Gustav and Emma Loeffler’s ranch. It’s not clear why he chose that spot, but the caves were believed to have been a Comanche lookout. A quarter of a century earlier, he may have even spent time there when he was raiding with the tribe.
Adolph hunted and lived off the land. Granny Hey worried about him. She sent the Loefflers cornmeal, sugar, coffee, and other provisions to deliver to her younger stepbrother. The Loefflers’ son Otto, who was only nine or ten at the time, rode horseback to the crest of the bluff above the caves. Using a rope, he lowered the food in a basket. Adolph appeared and acknowledged the goods with a wave, but he said nothing. He didn’t seem to want to visit with Otto. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.6
If Uncle Adolph was so deeply alienated from his German-Texan kin, why didn’t he go back to the Comanches in Oklahoma, like Rudolph Fischer and Herman Lehmann?
At first I wondered if it was because he thought the tribe had betrayed him by bringing him to Fort Sill and handing him over to the Indian agent. But that seems unlikely. Clinton Smith and Herman Lehmann held no grudges against the Comanches for coercing them to return to their white families. What’s more, the captives’ fellow warriors assured them that they were welcome to come back and live with the tribe any time they wanted.