Abuction On The Texas Frontier Sparknotes

In the novel, “The captured: A True Story of Abduction on the Texas Frontier” written by Scott Zesch narrates the story of the Indian captives to address the experiences of Texas Pioneers. The story of Adolf Korn and the others who were captured by tribes brings forward the different cultures. The book explains a series of kidnapping and how the Indians force the children to adjust to their costumes. Zesch describes what the experiences of those abducted reveal about Native American culture and pioneer culture. The author pinpoints the reasoning as to why the Comanches took captives and portrays how the stories from both the captives and the captors fit into the history of the United States West. Overall, the novel acknowledges the difficult

“Many of the Texas settlers were too terrified or too busy with farm chores to help track down Indian kidnappers”(Zesch 142). They lived on the Texas frontier, where they had modern homes and social communities and a simple way of life farming and taking care of the household. The children had schools to learn and play, they were taught about religion for they went to church with their parents. The pioneers' life was completely different from the Native Americans. As the author states in chapter eight, “Death on the red river” how the Comanche’s lifestyle was, “these last Comanche holdouts had everything they needed to sustain their way of life, and that didn't include white people’s houses or churches or schools for their children”(Zesch 158). This explains how the Indians also lived a great life without modern things the pioneers had. They relied on skills and hunting to survive and had the means to live a simple

armed forces drove the Indians into reservations, the change was troublesome and difficult. Zesch sees himself both to be a relative of whites and, through the experience of his predecessor Adolph Korn, to be an assenting relative of the Comanche. He recounts to the two sides' accounts with equalization and compassion. He additionally investigates his very own family's conflicted relationship to its ancestors, and strips back the layers of history, so one feels not just the truth of the 1860s and 1870s, yet the resulting manners by which the encounters of officers, Indians, prisoners, and others were later spoken to in the mid-twentieth century, through books, Wild West shows, reunions between previous White and Indian and previous hostages and their previous individual warriors. The author states, “ By the fall of 1872, Adolph Korn, Clinton Smith, Herman Lehmann, Rudolph Fischer, and Temple Friend were living with the Indians as Indians, fighting their battles and taking part in their raids, prepared to die in defense of the tribe if necessary” (Zesch 139). This shows how after living with them for so long they managed to become part of the Indian culture and