dren—black,
brown and white—
who were
taken by Indian tribes over
two
centuries. All these children
metaphorically
straddled two fires,
one tended by
their birth parents and
the other
tended by the Indians who
carried them
away. And even though
their time
with Indians was limited,
most
survivors came to love their
riding,
roaming days.
“The phenomenon of preferring
native life
was more common than
not in
captured narratives, although
the women
didn’t fare as well as the
men,” said
Zesch.
Zesch’s nine subjects, three of
them German
speakers, lived with the
last of the
free-ranging Plains Indians.
All were
given full tribal rights.
Despite the
brutality of the raids
in which some
were captured, the
Texas
children quickly changed alle-
giances.
Within less
than a year,
some of them
were enthusiastically
participating
in raids near their for-
mer
family
homesteads. Adolph, for
example, was
a particularly daring
warrior by
the age of 11. He
sneaked into
white campsites and
stole horses,
commanded a group of
Comanches in
a desperate fight with
Texas
Rangers, and even burned
down a
homestead near his family’s
place. Zesch
believes that at least
four of the
seven boys “almost cer-
tainly
killed
people.”
He said there
have been few aca-
demic
studies of
how the children
adapted to
Indian culture so quickly.
“The
Stockholm Syndrome [in which
captives
begin to relate to their cap-
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