The Captured

"On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn's life as the son of a poor German-speaking farmer ended, and his life as a Comanche began." "On that day, an Indian raiding party kidnapped the boy from his neighbor's pasture in the Texas Hill Country. With little hope of finding him alive and no resources - material or political - his loved ones eventually gave him up for dead." "However, Adolph survived his capture, and soon thrived in the rough, nomadic life of the Plains Indians. Within a year, he had become one of the Comanche's fiercest warriors." "For nearly three years, Adolph fought alongside his fellow Comanches against the encroaching white settlers, buffalo hunters, and U.S. soldiers who threatened their survival. Forcibly returned to his parents when the army "captured" him a second time, Korn held fast to his Native American ways and never found a place in white society. He spent his last years living alone in a cave, an eccentric oddity forgotten by his family." "That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his relative's barely marked grave in a neglected corner of an old cemetery in Mason, Texas. Determined to know more about his ancestor and understand how a timid farm boy like Adolph could have become so thoroughly Indianized in such a short time, Zesch tracked down surviving relatives, dug for primary sources in archives across the West, talked with Comanche elders, and expanded his search to include other child captives from the region, who also became some of the most Indianized whites in history." "Set against a backdrop of intense political wrangling and bloody confrontations between the U.S. government and Native Americans, The Captured is a true account of what settlers considered a "fate worse than death" - and the dramatic, very personal story of Adolph Korn and eight other children abducted by Comanches and Apaches in the Texas Hill Country."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.