The Captured : A True Story of Indian Abduction on the Texas Frontier

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Summary: A most excellent depiction of life on the Texas Frontier
Review: As a Lehmann descendent, I found this book fascinating and historically accurate. A lot of time and effort went into the research for this book and Mr. Zesch has done an oustanding job. This book gives the reader a look at what life was like on the Texas Frontier in the 1800's. My ggg-grandfather Daniel Lehmann was the uncle of Herman Lehmann, the german boy who was captured by indians in 1870 and is mentioned throughout this book. We have read many accounts about Herman Lehmann and his life from various books and family history, and this is just one more look at his life and what his family went through during those days. One can only imagine the terror these families endured on a daily basis, living in fear of being attacked by the indians, but on the other hand you also get a glimpse of the indian's lives from their perspective as well as you try to understand their purpose and why they did what they felt they had to do in order to survive. I highly recommend this book to anybody that wants to learn more about their Texas heritage and the lives their ancestors lived.

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Summary: Fantastic piece of Western history
Review: Author Scott Zesch started out researching information on an ancestor, Adolph Korn. What he ended up with is a fascinating book on the lives of other families of Texas settlers who had children abducted and also their frontier lifestyles. Also included are the stories of not just his ancestor Adolph Korn, but other children who were Indian abductees as well. Incredibly well researched (especially for an Aggie.) He leaves no stone unturned. The stories these abductees had of their lives with the different tribes are absolutely fascinating. Not having read much before about Indian abductions, especially intriquing was how difficult re-assimilation back to their native white culture was for these former child abductees. Even if they had only spent a few months with the Indians. A great factual look back at what life on frontier was like. Highly recommended.

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Summary: Praise for Scott Zesch
Review: Computers, flash drives, and Internet download capability permit today's authors amazing ease and accuracy in their writing. Still, it requires a writer to do months and sometimes years of research then sit before a keyboard and peck out twenty-six little letters of an alphabet into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and volumes that warrant a reader to occasion his or her valuable past time. Scott Zesch has done a remarkable job here with America's past. Anyone who reads The Captured cannot help but become connected to the captives in this book. Scott not only tells a riveting story, he does it with style in what might be called that ambiguous category known as creative non-fiction---truth which evolves as an expression that explores all possibilities, a release of imagination in a world that argues what realities really were.
This is a must read for every Western Historian, Writer, and serious reader, especially Texans. Highly recommended. Wayne Bethard, pharmacist, medical historian, author of Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs-Frontier Medicine in America.


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Summary: Wonderful account of those who lived in two different worlds
Review: In his effort to understand the life of an ancestor taken captive by the Indians, the author undertakes an extraordinary search into the stories of other captives. The result is a gripping account, weaving all their lives together with extensive documentation and remarkable understanding of the people involved. Perhaps the most important--and certainly the most surprising--ingrediant is the refusal of most of the captives to turn their backs on the ways of their "captors."

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Summary: New Version of an Old Genre
Review: Scott Zesch has overcome my numerous prejudices against Aggies to write a first rate, well researched, and insightful book about Anglo captives on the Texas frontier. By following the fragmentary stories of an ancestor, Scott delves into all the elements of captivity--elements that the genre, which blossomed during the 19th Century, usually ignored.

The physical nature of the capture, the landscape where the captures occurred, how captivity fit into the Comanche scheme of things, the personalized and capricious nature of capture (being killed, tortured, or immediately accepted into the tribe), and numerous other details come to life with Zesch's solid writing and great research.

We see through Zesch's prose how different captives reacted differently, and how the Comanche way of life could quickly and completely supercede Anglo culture. Zesch makes an implicit argument, and a powerful one, for the equality or superiority of other lifestyles over that of the frontier.

As interesting is the way the book follows former captives and notes how their periods in captivity affected them until their death. You'll find it impossible to miss the point that captives (the ones who weren't killed, anyway) fit easily into Indian culture, but were never quite accepted back by whites. The most interesting part of the book receives the shortest treatment, where Zesch speculates about how much his ancestor's father really loved him, and where he tries to bring together some of the conflicts that seem evident to an outsider: why would a grieving parent delay reclaiming his son simply because of the cost of a train or wagon trip to Oklahoma?

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the West, and I commend Zesch for this excellent work. His bibliography is exhaustive and fascinating--he's even referenced the West Texas Frontier by Joseph Carroll McConnell, a rare record of Indian depredations now available only in archives and through antiquaries.

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Summary: Riveting - manages to be fascinating, funny, & sad
Review: The author manages to work some humor into this wonderful account of Indian captives on the Texas Frontier. Indians were noted for their generosity and this sometimes worked against them, even when they could have used the income. Zesch relates the story of one captive who wrote his life story many years later, but ended up giving away copies to almost everyone instead of making some money, which he sorely needed. There's a lot of sadness in this book, too. Many of the captives lived the remainder of their lives never quite living fully in either the white man or the Indian's world.