The Botched Surrender To The Soldiers

Howdy folks, greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!

We're in a series about the Wild West and the incredible story of an 11 year old German boy, Hermann, who was captured by an Apache war party from his family's farm in 1870 in Central Texas.

He's now 17-18 years old at this point in the story and has become a full blown warrior who hates and fears the White man. And in fact, has taken many a scalp. He's been with the Comanche for a couple of years now.

Yesterday's post

In the last post Hermann's band was making plans to avenge the death of family members massacred by soldiers and their enemy the Tonkawa Indians.

However, the famous Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, came to their camp and urged them to turn themselves in. He was promising safety and a well furnished existence on the reservation if they would follow him and turn themselves in at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Here's Quanah:

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He also promised them that if they didn't go to the reservation they'd all be killed. But even facing certain death many of them wanted to die as free men rather than surrender to the enemy.

Fort Sill is about 50 miles North of the Texas border.

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Well, as you can imagine the debate was extremely passionate and went on for four days. In the end they decided to go with Quanah and surrender to the soldiers at Fort Sill. Messengers were sent to the fort and preparations to make the trip were made.

He couldn't do it

When they'd made it to about 15 miles from the fort they saw a big cloud of dust from the soldiers coming to meet them. Hermann panicked, swung his horse around and rode as fast as he could the other way!

The cavalry was just casually galloping out to escort them to the fort like this:

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But Hermann saw them like this..lol:

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Quanah himself took off after him and caught up with him after 3 or 4 miles. He told Hermann that he wouldn't be harmed and there was no need to be afraid but Hermann told him flat out that he would NOT go to the fort.

So Quanah told him to go to his(Quanah's) village then, and gave him directions. By the time Quanah got back to the band they were surrounded by soldiers and the warriors had given up their weapons. (that had to be painful!)

Hermann joins Quanah's village

Hermann rode on to Quanah's camp and stayed there, herding his horses and hunting for them.

His Comanche comrades were made to do work around the fort, including farm work, which they knew nothing about and didn't care to know nothing about! They weren't farmers and never had been.

After he'd been at Quanah's village for awhile Hermann realized that there were many Apaches there, some from his old tribe who still wanted him dead for killing their medicine man.

He had to stay on high alert because being Indians they were very crafty, sneaky, and ninja like.

The assassination attempt

One night while he was riding back to camp from taking some horses out to the grass several shots rang out, someone was shooting at him. He fell off his horse and laid there real still. More shots rang out and he could see the flashes of the guns so he knew where they were.

Her raised up and emptied his pistol at them and heard a groan when he fired. He ran to Quanah and told him what had happened. Quanah had his men search the camp and found that 5 were missing.

They soon found them and one was wounded. At first they said they were just trying to scare him but after questioning them they admitted that the Apaches had hired them to kill Hermann.

After stern warnings from Quanah they agreed to leave Hermann alone.

Is anyone gonna be able to force that kid to the fort? The pressure on Chief Quanah increases to bring Hermann in when the Chief finds out his parents are looking for him! His story continues on the next post.

Thanks for reading folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas