The Captured by Scott Zesch

Author:Scott Zesch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Adolph Korn had never seen a city that he could remember. He’d grown up in the isolated village of Castell and the wilderness of the Saline Valley. The largest settlements he’d ever visited were the small towns along the frontier where he’d stolen horses with the Comanches. As the army wagon train slowly made its way toward San Antonio, the towns got larger. The caravan passed through Gillespie County, whose population had grown to over 3,500. In Fredericksburg, the county seat, Captain Rendlebrock and the soldiers stopped to purchase supplies. News soon spread that two of the white boys recovered from the Comanches were in town. Curiosity seekers flocked to the store and crowded around the boys, who spoke to each other in Comanche and still looked wild even with their clipped hair and schoolboy clothes. Captain Rendlebrock had grown fond of Adolph and Clinton during the trip. When he saw what was happening, he decided to let them have a little fun. 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.

The two captives and their military escort finally entered San Antonio on January 7, 1873. Nothing they’d seen along the way, not even the pesky crowd in Fredericksburg, could have prepared the boys for what they were about to experience. San Antonio was Texas’s second-largest city, only slightly smaller than Galveston, and it was as cosmopolitan a gathering place as the Southwest had to offer. The town appeared abruptly on the mesquite plain. The adobe Mexican huts on the outskirts soon gave way to sturdy limestone houses with latticed balconies. As the wagon train got closer to the city center, the streets and plazas were packed with canvas-covered wagons, buggies, burros laden with firewood, and pedestrians.

To Adolph and Clinton, the people in the streets looked as strange as the buildings. The American poet Sidney Lanier, who was visiting San Antonio that winter, was fascinated by the mix of cultures in the city, “the queerest juxtaposition of civilizations, white, yellow (Mexican), red (Indian), black (negro), and all possible permutations of these significant colors.” A sign at the Commerce Street Bridge warned in English, German, and Spanish: “Walk your horse over this bridge, or you will be fined.” Around the plazas, hard-drinking cowboys, high-rolling cattlemen, and grizzled Indian fighters jostled with perfumed dandies, Mexicans adorned in silver, and recent European immigrants wearing the garb of their homelands. Lanier was charmed by these “characters,” “a perfect gauntlet of people who have odd histories, odd natures, or odd appearances.”6

Since Lanier came from the comparatively quiet town of Macon, Georgia, he was shocked to learn that Indian raids still occurred not far from San Antonio. After reading a local newspaper’s account of the capture and recovery of Adolph Korn and Clinton Smith, Lanier wrote to his father back home: “[T]o think of children being carried into captivity by Indians, in the year 1869, [sic] and within a

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