|
him
over the head with a gun bar-
rel,
pulled him
onto his horse, and
rode
away. That was the last his
Mason
County family saw of him
until
three years later, when a band
of
Comanches, who had received
the
boy in a trade with his abduc-
tors,
surrendered
him to govern-
ment
authorities
November 14,
1872,
at Fort Sill, Indian Territory.
Author Scott Zesch had heard
occasional
references to his great-
great-great
Uncle Adolph over family
meals
as he was growing up.They
talked
about how odd he was after
his
period with the Indians and how
he
lived in a cave for part of his life.
But
it wasn’t until Zesch literally
stumbled
over Adolph’s solitary,
untended
grave in a Mason County
cemetery
that he began to speculate
about
his ancestor. His curiosity led
him
to write Captured:
A True Story of
Abduction
by Indians on the Texas Frontier
(St.
Martin’s Press, 2004) about
Adolph
Korn and eight other chil- |
Kenya
and a Harvard Law School
graduate,
explained that child
abduction
was not limited to the
Plains
Indians such as the Comanches
and
Apaches, or even to the 19th
century.
The practice of capturing
enemies
was common throughout
North
America and predated the
arrival
of Europeans in America.
Some
people were taken for ransom
and
some as slaves. When it came to
children,
the tribes were usually try-
ing
to increase
their ranks.
By the 1850s, smallpox, cholera
and
warfare had decimated the
Indian
population on the Texas
frontier.
“The Indians thought that
if
they captured young boys before
their
cultural identities were com-
pletely
set, they
could retrain them
as
Indian warriors and get them to
fight
willingly for the tribe. And
that’s
exactly what happened,”
Zesch
said.
The Texas children were among
thousands
of North American chil- |
