The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier

by Scott Zesch

Overview

Winner of the TCU-Texas Book Award for Best Book on Texas

On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by an Apache raiding party. Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family.

That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences.

With a historian's rigor and a novelist's eye, Zesch's The Captured paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier, offering a rare account of captivity.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312317898
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/27/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Scott Zesch grew up in Mason County, Texas and graduated from Texas A&M University and Harvard Law School. He is the author of a novel Alamo Heights and nonfiction book Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, and he is the winner of the Western History Association's Ray Allen Billington Award. He divides his time between New York City and a ranch in Art, Texas (population 3).

Editorial Reviews

Inspired by nearly forgotten family stories of a German-Texan forbear taken by Apache raiders at age ten, traded to the Comanche, and unable to readjust when forcibly returned three years later, historical novelist Zesch (Alamo Heights) changes hats to write a history of forced captivities on the Texas frontier. Zesch's thorough research includes accounts from several different families, both Texan and Comanche, which reveal how particular children adjusted to the severe and abrupt changes in their family, cultural, and personal identities as they were captured by Indians and subsequently seized by the U.S. Army. His writing vilifies neither the pioneer settlers nor the Native Americans. This modern and much-needed addition to Southern Plains Indian captivity literature (e.g., Carl Coke Rister's Border Captives, 1940) expands the compass of the entire North American Indian captivity narrative genre to include the odyssey of "white Indian" readjustment to frontier settlement life. Highly recommended for high school, public, and academic libraries. Nathan E. Bender, Buffalo Bill Historical Ctr., Cody, WY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

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 captiveattracted 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. Agent: Jim Hornfischer/Hornfischer Literary Management

Kirkus Reviews

On New Year’s Day 1870, 10-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by Indians. Nor was his abduction painless. First struck down with a pistol, he later fell off a horse and was crippled. Yet by the time he was restored to his parents--just three years later--Adolph was a Commanche who could never adjust to the society that had “rescued” him from savagery. This and other tales of white Indians, stunningly written by one of Adolph’s distant relatives, reveal how subjective--perhaps even mistaken--is our understanding of family and what constitutes the good life. Golden-voiced Grover Gardner charges his rich baritone with the thrill of discovery. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

APR/MAY 05 - AudioFile