THE CAPTURED

Kidnappings, revenge raids, murders, and burials out on the lone prairie.

Cross the dusty plains 100 miles or so north of San Antonio, and you’ll arrive at the little town of Mason, Texas. “I was aware, even as an adolescent, that Mason and its closest neighbors—Llano, Fredericksburg, Junction, Menard, Brady, and San Saba—had once been much more lively and significant places than the complacent ‘last picture show’ towns they’d become by the 1970s,” writes native son Zesch. Indeed they were: in the mid-19th century, Mason and environs were hotly contested battlegrounds between German immigrants, Mexicans, and roving groups of Indians, the last of whom cast a pall across the plains. “Death at the hands of Comanches or Apaches elevated ordinary dirt farmers to the status of martyrs in the quest for western expansion,” he writes, doubtless small comfort to those settlers. For their part, the Indians seemingly took pleasure in terrorizing the region and occasionally perpetuating minor massacres, such as scalping and disemboweling a young woman: “The men had to identify her mainly by process of elimination, because some wild hogs had eaten out her intestines and torn most of the flesh from her face and thighs.” These atrocities would then be repaid many times over. For complex reasons of trade and honor, the Indians also regularly kidnapped young whites, who grew up among them and became acculturated “timid farm boys”—and girls—“well on the way to becoming juvenile Indian warriors.” Zesch recounts the tale of an ancestor who was just such a kidnapped boy, his great-great-great-uncle, Adolph Korn, who was eventually returned to civilization, so to speak. There, he and another former captive attracted so much attention that their rescuer put them to work: “He handed Adolph an ax, indicating that he should sound the Comanche war whoop and start at the crowd. Adolph did so, and the townspeople scurried.”

A carefully written, well-researched contribution to Western history—and to a promising new genre: the anthropology of the stolen.