Daria Doering

The Captured: a True Story of Abductions by Indians on the Texas Frontier

By Scott Zesch

The Captured is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read.  It’s a biography of about ten children who were captured by mostly Comanche Indians between the ages of about eight and fourteen, and held for between six months and eight years.

Indian abductions in the 1860’s and 1870’s were not uncommon.  It was a way for Indians to try to build up their tribes, in their wars against the white men.  The abductions often started in a very violent way, with the Indians attacking and sometimes brutally killing the children’s families, stealing their horses, or burning down their farms.  One abductee’s mother was shot twice with arrows, scalped alive, but still survived to bear a healthy child a month later.

Then the escapes were harrowing.  Comanches trained themselves to ride for up to three days without sleeping or eating.  When a horse gave out they would abandon it and steal another horse.  When they finally did eat they would butcher an animal they found and eat the meat raw.  The children were tied to horses this whole time.  In all cases, posses of whites followed the Indians in an attempt to recover the children, but they were never successful.

Once the children arrived at the Indian camp, they were often given to childless women, or adopted by other families they developed an attachment to, and treated in a loving manner.  They came to see the Indians as their people.

In fact the amazing thing is that of all the children held for over a year, they all came to much prefer the Indian way of life, and none of them willingly chose to return to their white families.  They were forcibly reunited with their families, after varying periods of time, as they were finally located, and as a result of various negotiations with the Indians.

Those who were returned had been “Indianized.”  Traumatic as it had been to be abducted, it was even more traumatic to be returned to their white families.  They all had difficult adjustments, and retained many Indian characteristics for the rest of their lives.  Many of them slept outdoors for years, and made their own bows and arrows and hunted a great deal thereafter.

Most of them had been part of German American immigrant families, and many spoke only German, originally.  They all became fluent in Comanche during their captivity, and most completely lost their ability to speak English and/or German, and had to relearn their native language.  However many of them refused to go to school.  They absorbed a love of nature from the Indians, and couldn’t stand to be indoors for much time.  Some moved constantly as adults, having enjoyed the Indians’ migratory lifestyle.

Eventually most of them readjusted to white life to some degree – many became cowboys, and eventually bought ranches.  Though they were mostly unsuccessful in business, and many had trouble with any kind of manual labor.  The boys were actually somewhat spoiled as Indians.  When the males shot animals, for example, the squaws did all the work of skinning the animals, cooking them, and tanning the hides.

The most amazing thing is that even those who were held for less than a year, and were glad to be recaptured by whites, still were so affected by their experience that almost all of them asked to be adopted by the Native Americans toward the end of their lives.  As seniors, many of them performed riding and shooting tricks in Western shows, or wrote memoirs of their time with the Indians.  Their captures were clearly the high points of their lives.

Why did these white children become so attached to the Indians?  I think for one thing, their lives as white children were very difficult.  They were members of immigrant families on the Texas frontier, and had to work unceasingly in herding animals and other farm chores, while living on the brink of starvation with little material comfort.

Secondly, the children’s actual fathers seemed to have been too busy staving off starvation to spend virtually any time with their sons or teach them anything.  The Indian fathers, in contrast, spent a lot of time with the boys, and taught them everything from riding to war tactics to the Indians’ spiritual beliefs.  This bonded them very closely to their Indian “fathers.”

Lastly, with the Indians they had freedom and excitement.  There was no school, and the Indians were indulgent with their children and rarely punished them.  In their first year, as captives and slaves, they had to perform various menial chores, though not an excessive amount.  But as they became Indianized, and moved toward becoming warriors, that ended.  They then spend their days making bows and arrows, horseracing, hunting, learning to imitate animal sounds, and practicing shooting and roping on horseback.  They were allowed to become warriors at a very young age – maybe twelve – as soon as the Indians trusted that they would join in their war against whites, and not try to return to the whites.

The book is very fair in their portrayal of both the brutal side of the Indians, and the positive side.  And despite the Indians’ massive stealing of horses and farm items, and attacks on the settlers, the former captives always defended them after their captivity, explaining how the Indians were driven to do these deeds, as the buffalo were killed and their nomadic lifestyles were made impossible by whites.

Perhaps most amazingly, as the “roaring twenties” arrived, and the great cattle drives of the 1870’s and 1880’s were long over, various former enemies found they had much more in common with each other than with their own young.  Former cowboys, Texas Rangers and Indians on reservations got together at the yearly convention of an organization called the Old Trail Drivers Association.  They reminisced fondly about their former battles, and even reenacted the old Texas Rangers versus Indians wars for the new moving pictures.

All in all, it was a fascinating book that taught me more than anything else I’ve ever read about Native Americans, and left me with a lot of food for thought.

Fascinating book … I think any time you’re fighting for survival, or to fit in with an alien culture, it’s by definition a “peak experience,” and you tend to get bonded to those you do it with.  Also, there’s a tremendous feeling of pride you get from living through such an experience.