The Captured

by Scott Zesch

  When I was doing research at Fort Sill, I found a more plausible explanation. It came from the report of a federal Indian agent, Julian Scott, who visited the Comanche reservation in the summer of 1890. Scott stated, “There still remains one feature of Indian life on reservations which distinctly links the present with the most savage past. The beef issue is looked upon as a gala day.” He described how the government agents provided the Comanches with five or six cows, which they chased and killed in a sort of mock buffalo hunt. The pathetic spectacle was a pale imitation of their rousing adventures on the plains. Scott sniffed, “This exhibition of savage cruelty, permitted as it is by a kind and indulgent government, is no credit to our civilization.”7

  I don’t think Uncle Adolph wanted to live in a world where his fellow Comanches chased government-issued cows around an enclosed arena. He couldn’t go back to the way of life he’d loved, for it no longer existed. Adolph found greater freedom in a cave in the Texas Hill Country than he would have known within the confines of the Kiowa-Comanche reservation. He preferred to live in the past, even if that meant living alone.

  I’ve waited three years to see this,” I told the others as we got closer. All of us were looking for the Jeep tracks that led to Diamond Holes caves. My dad, Gene Zesch, was driving his four-wheel-drive pickup across rough, brushy ranchland. Jamie Smith Jackson, a family friend and photographer, was with us to take pictures of the cave.

  As we crept down the last hill, the pickup lurching over each rock ledge, we discovered that we’d chosen the correct forks in the pasture road. In the valley below, the caves on Rocky Creek were easy to recognize by the series of diamond-shaped openings near the top of a steep limestone bluff. The dirt road led us through a shady grove along the creek to a rustic cabin. We stopped the pickup, walked to the water’s edge, and stood in a thicket of post oaks, looking up at the bluff across the creek.

  None of us was expecting Uncle Adolph’s cave to be so high or inaccessible. From this vantage point, it seemed less like a home than a fortress, guarded by sotol plants with daggerlike spines and impenetrable stands of prickly pear cactus. It was obvious that he didn’t want company. We all marveled at the multiple, near-perfect diamond shapes of the apertures in the cliff. “I believe it was man-made,” my dad said. “I’ll bet there were existing holes and the Indians shaped them like that.”

  “There’s got to be some sort of spiritual implication,” added Jamie. “There’s a reason for that shape.”

  We stared in silence. Just downstream from where we were, the creek was dammed, forming a smooth, clear pool that reflected a perfect mirror image of the craggy face of the cliff. The intense sunlight of mid-June brought out the gray, white, and yellow strata of the limestone. At the top of the bluff, the holes looked mysterious. We couldn’t see beyond the dark openings.

  Jamie asked, “What do you think he did all day?”

  I couldn’t imagine. I was curious how he carried his water.

  We climbed back into the pickup and found a way to coerce it partway up the rocky slope behind the cliff, driving over prickly pear and pushing through thorny shrubs when we had to. About halfway up the high hill, we parked the vehicle in the meager shade of a scrub oak. Then we got out and slowly picked our way around the cat’s-claw and agarita bushes that grew in the shallow soil on the sharp incline. My long-sleeved chambray shirt was clinging to my back. Uncle Adolph probably climbed this same steep hill on hotter days, barely aware of the discomfort. I wondered if he wore any clothes.

  When we reached the top of the bluff, directly above the caves, we found a cleft leading down into the main chamber. The path was probably the same one that Uncle Adolph used when he went out to hunt deer or to get water or firewood. As soon as we crawled across the threshold into the cave, the midday heat vanished. A steady breeze swept through the diamond-shaped holes, and the rock surfaces felt almost chilly against our hands.

  “It’s a wonderful place,” my dad said. “I could live up here.”

  On the inside, the cave was much more hospitable than I’d pictured it. The room was just tall enough to stand up in. The floor was level, and the long, narrow gallery had several full-length windows that cooled and lighted the space. Thick, twisted limestone columns supported the arches above the wide openings.

  I was hoping to see some pictographs, possibly even a few traces of Uncle Adolph’s time in the cave. We found some graffiti on the wall, but it wasn’t put there by Native Americans. Otto Loeffler. Emilie Arhelger. Albert Reichenau. 1887. A. C. Eckert. HH. Some of those names had already been carved or painted in the cave by the time Uncle Adolph came to live there in the latter 1890s.

  I sat in one of the windows where he once must have rested. From this lofty perch, the view of the unspoiled countryside was breathtaking. For miles into the distance, successive ranges of stony, oak-dotted hills rose and then dropped off, until one seamless, bluish ridge finally met the sky. Hardly any signs of human civilization intruded on that landscape. If Uncle Adolph had wanted to meditate on his past life or just escape his present circumstances, he found the right place to do it.

  At one end of the gallery, the gnarled trunk of a dead mesquite tree stretched across the floor. Jamie sat on it to take some photos. A moment later, we heard her shout. Dad and I got up and hurried to see what Jamie was looking at. On the rock above her was an ancient, stylized painting of the sun in dark red, with rays streaming out. “It’s gorgeous! It’s perfect!” She saw a linear figure beside it. “There’s an arrow pointing outward!”

  I looked behind her and found a painting that was even better preserved in a crevice that got no direct light. It was an abstract geometric shape outlined in red ocher, its interior filled in white. Uncle Adolph must have studied these same pictures. Maybe he understood what they meant.

  Jamie noticed the blackened ceiling right over our heads. “Look, that’s where the smoke went up when he was building his fire.”

  I ran my hand over the traces of smoke on the rough stone surface, trying to picture him with his long, wild, blond hair and callused hands, crouching by the fire on a frosty winter evening, stoking the coals with a stick. In the old days, aging Comanche warriors would gather around the campfire at night and entertain one another with tales of derring-do from their glory days—the raid when they risked their lives to get a particularly good horse, the death-defying prank they played on a friend, the dirt-poor immigrant family they terrorized for fun, the Indian enemies they whipped in battle, the hated buffalo hunters they ambushed and scalped. But Uncle Adolph, after he was back among the German-Americans of Mason County, had to relive his raids alone. There was no one he could tell his stories to. His neighbors would have called him a thief, a murderer, and a savage.

  My ancestor’s tracks were nearly impossible to follow, but this cave was one place where I could be certain I was occupying the same space he once inhabited. My reaction was unexpected. Even though he was long gone, I somehow felt like an intruder. I’d invaded a sanctuary, his private retreat from what he probably saw as a dull, sterile society filled with spiritless people who couldn’t understand him and didn’t try, people whose customs, values, and pretensions must have seemed both laughable and offensive.

  I decided it was time for us to leave. That site belonged to his memory. As we took our last look around the cave, Jamie remarked, “It takes a really lonely, angry person to live in a place like this.”

  I agreed. Lonely, angry—or maybe just terribly sad. Every day he spent in that cave, with its commanding outlook of the distant hills where his people used to ride, my uncle Adolph kept a solitary vigil for Comanche brothers whom he knew would never return.

  I think the Germans were cruel to their children,” a friend of mine remarks. I’ve asked for her opinion because her husband grew up in Castell, and she’s observed German-Texan life as an outsider.

  “They couldn’t show affection,” her daughter agrees. “They thought that as long as they provided for the fami
ly, that was love.”

  The German children of the Texas Hill Country did seem to work harder than those of other ethnic groups, well into the twentieth century. Nor did their parents indulge them much. The children weren’t paid allowances for doing farm chores, because that was simply what they owed the family. Even as they grew to adulthood, the parents found ways to block their independence. Sons worked for their fathers for promises of inheritance rather than wages; the fathers kept title to the land.

  Our family history describes Grandpa Korn as a gentle fellow who loved sweets, music, and dancing. However, he could also be demanding and rigidly moralistic. He seems to have worn out two wives, both of whom died relatively young. It is said that later in life, he would have fired any cowboy working for his family who didn’t attend Sunday school. The Comanches, on the other hand, placed few restrictions on their children, giving them a full measure of autonomy at adolescence. They rewarded cleverness and success, not hard labor or adherence to dogma.

  I’ve often questioned whether the privation the Korn children suffered was due solely to the family’s poverty or whether Grandpa was also parsimonious. The German-Texans were famously unwilling to part with their money. Grandpa Korn’s wife and infant son died two decades before he did, and he never purchased headstones for the family cemetery at the Korn place. I wonder, too, if Grandpa was really too poor to go get Uncle Adolph when he was recovered at Fort Sill or if he was willing to let him come home with the army just to save the stage fare. The Comanches, in contrast, were renowned for their generosity. They would share everything they had with those they liked.

  Uncle Adolph grew up herding sheep every day. He was never able to attend school or venture beyond his isolated community. The Comanches let him hunt and ride and see new country.

  In the winter of 1870, Adolph suddenly went from living in a log cabin to a tepee. He was probably surprised to find that the tepee was more comfortable in Texas weather. Then his leg was injured when he was thrown from a horse, crippling him for life. Among the Comanches, he could still win respect, because he carried out his most daring feats on horseback. He rode one of their best mounts; he was sent on reconnaissance missions; he even commanded a band of Comanches in battle. When he got back to Mason County, he was just a peculiar recluse who walked with a limp. After he died, no one bothered to give him a real headstone for a hundred years.

  Highway 29 runs through the spacious cattle ranches that lie between Mason and Llano, and from it a winding, unpaved lane called Bauerville Road heads south and leads to Castell the roundabout way. Its surface is corrugated like a washboard, swept by wind and rainwater. The road cuts through gently sloping pastures dense with undergrowth. Whitetail deer, turkey, and rabbits thrive in this unpopulated country. Otherwise, it’s a lonely route; chances are a motorist won’t meet any other vehicles. Several of the roadside farmhouses that were once home to generations of German-American families are now empty. The porches sag. Old tractors and livestock trailers sit idle in the weeds.

  The road eventually turns east, and the last stretch runs beside the north bank of the Llano River, shaded by tall pecan trees. Down in the riverbed, a wooden waterwheel encased in a shell of stone and mortar stands strong against the current, even though it is no longer turning. Not far beyond the waterwheel is the land of August Leifeste, the man who hired the Korn boys to tend his flock.

  I decided to commemorate the 133d anniversary of Uncle Adolph’s capture by visiting the place where it happened. I’d seen the site from a distance but never had set foot on the land. That day I wanted to stand where Adolph and his twin brother, Charlie, were herding sheep and see what they saw. It was a cloudless morning in Mason County, unusually warm for January. I’d always assumed the weather was cold and overcast the day he was taken, but now I realized it might have been a gorgeous New Year’s Day like this one.

  Around noon, the time of day Adolph was abducted, I parked my car in front of a sturdy white farmhouse with a long veranda, its decorative tin roof now a shroud of solid rust. Many years ago, this was the home of August Leifeste’s daughter, Wilhelmina. Now it’s shuttered and locked. I made my way down the slope to the Llano River, passing through tall weeds and over the tops of pink granite outcrop-pings, their surfaces sparkling in the sunlight. The river bottom is wide at this point, and half of it is covered by a sand bar sprinkled with polished gravel. As I crossed it, I followed scattered tracks in the mud left by deer that drank there earlier.

  I reached the water’s edge and stopped directly across from the place. The older Castell natives say that Adolph Korn was captured beside an unusually large oak tree that stood on the south bank of the Llano. In the summer of 1935, that tree was uprooted and swept away during a violent flood; later, a windmill was erected just east of where it stood. As I stared at the site from across the river, the only sounds I heard were a few birdcalls and the steady grind of the rusty windmill, its blades turning lazily in the breeze.

  The river looked wadeable. I removed my sneakers and socks, rolled up my jeans, and stepped in. Even though the air was warm, the water felt like ice as I started across. When I got to a limestone ledge in the middle, I stopped for a moment and warmed my feet in the sunshine. I debated whether to continue or do the sensible thing: go back to my car and drive around a few miles to the site. But it was so close; I couldn’t wait.

  I plunged ahead, only to discover that the clear water wasn’t as shallow as it looked. I felt the coldness creeping up my thighs. Then I slipped on a mossy rock and was drenched to my chest. I’d been carrying my shoes to keep them dry, but they got submerged as I foundered in the water, trying to gain a foothold. Finally, I steadied myself. By the time I reached the other side, I was soaked. I made the steep climb up the south bank below the windmill, relieved to be out of the frigid water.

  At the top of the riverbank, I stopped to catch my breath and look around. I’d finally reached my destination, and I wanted this place to be memorable, distinctive. However, I found myself fighting back disappointment. His capture site looked like any other bank on this stretch of the Llano River. Then I realized: that’s the point. The abduction could have happened anyplace, anytime, to any child. The Korn boys had no reason to suspect they were in danger there. If the three Apaches had taken a slightly different route, they could just as easily have made off with an adolescent Leifeste or Bauer instead, and another family would be telling stories about its white Indian.

  I walked upstream along the water’s edge, tracing the path Adolph and Charlie must have used as they let the sheep drift upriver. In my mind, I could hear Adolph telling the story during his deposition: 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. Most of the bushes around me were either leafless or thinly clad. I wondered how Uncle Charlie managed to hide from the Apaches. Maybe the grass was tall enough to cover him.

  I paused to take in the landscape in every direction. According to family lore, the Korn boys first saw the Apaches riding across a distant hill. However, the land is level on both sides of the river; I could see no hill. Legend also has it that Adolph was going down into a ravine to eat his lunch when the Apaches appeared. I found no ravine as I ambled along the riverbank, only a slight depression in the ground near some granite boulders.

  Maybe the ravine has filled in over the years.

  Maybe the “hill” was just a low ridge.

  Or maybe the stories have changed over time. Perhaps I wasn’t even standing at the exact spot. At this late date, no one knows for sure.

  Whether it was precisely the right place or not, I realized I’d followed Uncle Adolph’s trail as far as I could. His story started for me at his grave; I’d finally reached the end of my search on the riverbank where his own journey began. I knew as much about him then as I was likely to ever know. The time had come to let him rest in peace.

  The breeze kept reminding me that my s
hirt and jeans were dripping. I climbed back down the steep riverbank and plunged into the stream again, getting even wetter when I crossed this time. My sneakers were caked with sand by the time I scrambled up the grassy slope toward the road. As soon as I started my car, I put the heater on high, turned the vehicle around, and headed up the dirt lane, spraying gravel along the way.

  The Apaches 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.

  One hundred thirty-three years: only a few generations ago, this part of America was inconceivably wild and brutal. I was crisscrossing the path the three Apaches took when they left with Uncle Adolph. They moved nearly as fast on horseback as I could travel by car. Old-timers say the Indians tied a cloth across Adolph’s eyes so that he wouldn’t know where he was going and couldn’t find his way back home if he escaped. It doesn’t matter whether that story is true. Blindfolded or not, there is no way he could have seen what was ahead.

  TABLE

  DATES AND PLACES OF

  BIRTH, CAPTURE, RECOVERY, AND DEATH

  NAME

  BIRTH

  CAPTURE

  RECOVERY

  DEATH

  RUDOLPH

  FISCHER

  Jan. 12, 1852

  Gillespie