I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches

27. The Captives

263 George Schwander, a newcomer at Camp Wood in 1864, herded sheep past the ruins of the Mission of San Lorenzo, which had sheltered Lipans a century earlier. One fall morning he left home with a flock of sheep. His wife and six-year-old son, Albert, stayed behind with the ewes and lambs. That day five Lipans approached, and Mrs. Schwander told Albert to run and hide. They killed her with arrows, ransacked the house, and took the boy. “When the Indians had plundered all they wanted to, we started out afoot and walked all day through brush and over rocky ground,” Albert recalled in the first narrative by a Lipan captive. The Lipans reached their camp that night and were joined by a large band. “[T]hey stretched me out on the ground. My feet were bruised and swollen and I was tired and almost dead with fear.” The Lipans held a big dance, led by their chief, wearing “a crown of bright colored feathers” that stretched down his back. They danced through the night, the men leaping up and down and striking the ground with their lances. “The next day they tore the top of my garments off, and I suffered from cold, but at their command had to keep going. The band we 27 CHAPTER The Captives The [Lipan] when traveling never followed a road or even a path if it were near a settlement, and never crossed either unless forced to do so. If it was necessary for him to do this, he removed every sign of his trail before pressing on. — Frank Buckelew1 264 I FOUGHT A GOOD FIGHT met had horses, and they whipped me with a rawhide rope because I couldn’t catch the horses for them, as I was so small. “I rode behind one of the warriors, and I remember we had only boiled meat (cattle or buffalo) without any salt or seasoning. The bread was made from prickly pear apples, mashed up and put on a rock to dry. I was very sick from eating the Indian diet.” When George Schwander returned that night to find his family missing , he hurried on foot to Uvalde, forty miles away. A posse followed the trail across the Pecos and camped in the rain. Over Schwander’s protests, they built a fire. At midnight, someone threw dry wood on the fire, causing it to blaze up, and “a shower of arrows and bullets fell about the little group.” One arrow lodged in a posse member’s hip. They threw a buffalo robe over the flames. The Lipans cursed them in Spanish, saying they killed the woman and had the boy. They told the Texans to wait and they would give them a fight in the morning. That night Albert slept on the ground between two warriors, who kept him in place with their arms. Instead of fighting, the Lipans slipped away, rode along the Rio Grande to Paso del Norte, and crossed into Mexico. At Cuatro Cienegas in Coahuila , the Lipans traded Albert to a Mexican for liquor and a horse. The man was kind to the boy and would have kept him, but a miller named John Crawford notified Schwander, who then ransomed his son.2 Lipans commonly had Mexican captives but rarely white Americans . They may have felt, as their western cousins did, that white children were more trouble than they were worth, or their long association with white people may have made them reluctant, but war and disease had taken such a toll that they needed new tribal members, particularly boys. Bravado aside, their encounter with the posse probably gave them pause. More whites would come looking for the boy, and they couldn’t afford to lose men. Q R Frank Buckelew became an involuntary guest of the Lipans on March 11, 1866.3 Thanks to his recollections, we have one of the few intimate The Captives 265 accounts of their life in this period. Thirteen-year-old Buckelew was on the head of Sabinal Creek with another boy when he saw cattle dart from a thicket and spotted a warrior, who rose to one knee, placed an arrow in his bow, and spoke. Buckelew knew he would die if he attempted to run, so he turned to face the man, who was having a good laugh at the sight of the other boy running hysterically. He...