Comanches liked to capture children old enough to endure hardship, yet young enough to be pliable, to forget their past quickly and adapt to a vastly different mode of life. Children were separated from their mothers as soon as possible to make the transition easier for their captors. Unless freed fairly soon, they usually forgot their native tongue and became, for all intents and purposes, Indian children.

In most cases families never saw or heard of captive children again. It was as if the earth had swallowed them up. On rare occasions they were ransomed by traders or rescued by the military. In one notable case a black teamster named Brit Johnson spent years doggedly searching for his kidnapped family. Finding them, he successfully bargained them free. He also freed several white captives of the Kiowa.

Children who did not soon adapt were likely to be killed. Boys in particular were often tested by severe treatment. Those not tough enough to endure it were considered expendable. However, a boy who fought his captors might be spared out of admiration for his bravery. He was seen as having the potential to become a good warrior.

One of Texas’s first well-documented accounts of Indian captivity was that of Rachel Parker Plummer, taken in a raid on a civilian fort on May 19, 1836, two months after the fall of the Alamo and less than a month after the battle of San Jacinto. She was one of five whites taken that day, another being her cousin, Cynthia Ann Parker. Mrs. Plummer wrote a lengthy report on the horrors she endured. Pregnant at the time of her capture, she saw the Indians kill her baby at the age of six weeks because they considered him a hindrance to her work. She spent thirteen months as a captive. Ransomed by traders from New Mexico, she returned to her family in broken health and lived but a short time.

Much more famous is the tragic history of her younger cousin, Cynthia Ann, who spent almost twenty-five years with the Comanches, becoming the wife of warrior Peta Nocona and mother to Quanah Parker, who would be the last war chief of the Quahadi Comanches. Though offered a chance at freedom several times, she had become so thoroughly Comanche that she refused. She was forcibly “freed” in 1860 when a band of rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross overran her camp, killing most of its inhabitants. She was spared when it was noticed that she had blue eyes. She remembered little of English, though she recognized her name when it was spoken. Against her will she was returned to relatives. She tried to run away to rejoin the Comanches but was restrained. Brokenhearted, she never reconciled to white ways. In effect she had become a captive for the second time.

For those who returned to the white world after extended life among the Indians, the readjustment was usually difficult. Herman Lehmann was a German boy captured in the hill country when eleven years old. He became a warrior and participated in Comanche raids on the Texas settlements. He narrowly escaped death at the hands of the rangers, some of whom became his good friends in later years. Eventually returned to his people, he made a partial readjustment but maintained ties with his former captors and lived their lifestyle as much as he was able under the constraints of society.