Adolph Korn: “The boldest boy I ever knew”

On New Year’s Day in 1870, a 10-year-old fair-skinned son of German immigrants named Adolph Korn and his twin brother Charlie were tending a neighbor’s sheep in a Mason County pasture when three Apaches on horseback took them by surprise. Charlie had time to hide but Adolph didn’t. One of the Apaches hit him in the head with a pistol and pulled him onto his horse and rode away with him. 

A few days later the Apaches swapped Adolph to the Quahadi Comanches in exchange for a horse, blanket and some trinkets. The Comanches got a bargain.  Almost from the first, the 10-year-old who spoke only German was all in on the Comanche way of life. 

Clinton Smith, another child captive, knew Adolph by his Comanche name, Cachoco, and wrote about him in his and his brother Jeff’s book The Boy Captives. He described Korn as “the boldest boy I ever knew” and “about as mean an Indian as there was in the whole tribe at that time.” 

One night the two young captives were with a band of Comanches that slipped into a small prairie town to steal some horses. They spied a stable but the older and more experienced Comanches urged the two white boys to go no farther. Korn ignored them. “Now go slow and don’t be afraid, and I will get the horses,” he told Clinton and then he slipped into the stables, cut the ropes and took the horses out one by one. 

Scott Zesch, a Mason County native and a direct descendant of Adolph Korn, wrote The Captured: A True Story of Abduction on the Texas Frontier, an account of Adolph, the Smith brothers, and six other child captives. His research revealed that by the time most of the captives returned, against their will, to white society, most of them had come to prefer the Comanche way of life.

“The child captives found themselves in a society that imposed few rules and did not value work for its own sake,” Zesch wrote. “As long as the tribe had enough to eat and was not being threatened by enemies, camp life was relaxed. The Southern Plains Indians gave their young free rein, seldom punishing them. They ate whenever they were hungry. If they wanted anything, they simply asked and usually got it.”  

Clinton Smith recalled: “The Indian boys and I would go in bathing every day, run horse races,  rope buffalo calves and ride them and take wild horses out into deep sand and ride them.” 

It beat all to pieces tending someone else’s sheep all day. 

The beginning of the end for Adolph and Clinton’s Comanche days came on Sept. 29, 1872, when U.S. Army Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie’s troops raided a Quahadi village on the North Fork of the Red River. The soldiers killed several dozen men and took 130 captives, mostly women and children. Adolph and Clinton were there but escaped to fight another day. Or so they thought.  

The two young white Comanches were soon on their way to Fort Sill in the company of a Comanche chief named Horseback. The army had promised to return the 126 surviving Comanche women and children in exchange for the white captives. It was an offer the Comanches could not refuse. 

The boys got haircut, baths and clothes while the Army waited for someone to claim the boys.. Adolph and Clinton tried to escape from Fort Sill but got caught. They tried to escape again as the army took them to San Antonio, where Korn’s parents had moved after the abduction. Adolph’s reunion with his parents was difficult for everyone involved.  

“Mr. and Mrs. Korn both cried and hugged and kissed their boy, but he manifested great indifference to their caresses,” Clinton wrote. “He looked wild and stubborn.”

Adolph’s subsequent behavior was such that San Antonio authorities urged the family to leave town, take Adolph with them and keep going. The Korns returned to Mason County but the change of scenery did little to change Adolph. The concept of private property never really registered with him. He bought some cattle and some land but sold both with little to show for the transactions. 

Eventually, Adolph left the white man’s road and never returned. He took to spending most of his time alone in a series of isolated Mason County caves called Diamond Holes, so named because the entrance is diamond shaped. The caves once functioned as a Comanche lookout. Adolph spent most of his days there, perhaps waiting for a reunion that he had to know would never come.

Adolph Korn’s Comanche name, Cachoco, translates loosely to Not an Old Man and Cachoco never became an old man. He died a hermit at age 41, a frontier relic and a bit of an embarrassment to his family, but always the boldest boy that Clinton Smith ever knew.