When it comes to ethnic stuff IMHO you do tend to take a simplistic views of things, real people are somewhat more complex.
If the Comanche had killed Lehmann, it would have been because he was an Apache. By age 17 everything about Lehmann, except perhaps his eye coloring presented him as an Apache.
I dunno that a tall, skinny, starving German kid would resemble an Apache, who as a group tend to be shorter, barrel-chested, bow- legged and decidedly brown. There’s a reason the Ashanti’s call us “Obruni Cocor” (red white men).
It is true that Lehman may have been fortunate that there was an Apache-speaker among even that small band of Comanches, which brings up an interesting point:
Apaches and Comanches were enemies, and yet here you have an Apache-speaking Comanche. Sorta in the same vien, in the 1850’s Texas Ranger Captain RIP Ford’s scout and compadre under fire in many combats was a local called Roque. Roque was half Mexican half Comanche and actively warring against the Comanches. Ford say that, out of politeness I guess, he never asked him why.
Same time period as Lehmann, same area, the tall, ebullient Black Seminole Scout Adam Payne was winning a Medal of Honor while guiding Ranald McKenzie and the 4th US Cavalry against the Comanches, the very same tribe that it is believed had captured Payne in his youth, such that the already tall Payne went into battle wearing a Comanche buffalo horn headdress. (read Thomas Porter’s “The Black Seminoles” next
, it’s excellent).
According to the Pop History Plains Indian Rule Book, these things weren’t supposed to happen.
The fact that he was an outcast from his tribe for killing a respected Apache medicine man is what persuaded the Comanche to let him live.
Possibly, and/or maybe they thought they could receive a reward for reuniting him with his family as was happening among the Comanches at that time. Far from reading strictly from the Pop History Plains Indian Rulebook, MOST Comanches were settled down and getting into ranching about that time, to the tune of selling 30,000 head of cattle in 1873 to the US Army in New Mexico. So many at least knew the value of a dollar at least as much they did the value of a Buffalo.
The plains Indians respected strength and a warrior spirit.
Who doesn’t? (apart from our rampant Progessives, Liberals and Feminists I mean).
Possibly THE most respected White guy among the Comanches was JJ “Doc” Sturm, a gentle German botanist who had first been assigned to the Comanches on the Brazos Reserve twenty years earlier as an agricultural advisor and remained with them in some capacity ever since.
Ranald MacKenzie broke the resistance of the last Comanche holdouts in the Red River War by capturing their women and children. At MacKenzies’ own request it was Doc Sturm who rode out alone onto the high plains, found their camp where the warriors were hiding and brung back the hostiles with him, this on the strength of his word alone.
Ain’t too many people who coulda done that. The following year Sturm and the former Comanche War Chief Mow-ray travelled all over the Texas Plains finding and bringing home fearful Comanche refugees.
Late in life Sturm married a literate Caddo woman and they were highly esteemed in Indian Country for their medical help and many acts of kindness. It is said that no one hungry and homeless was ever turned away from their door.
A different sort of Frontier story I know, ain’t saying the blood-and-guts stuff didn’t happen, just that the whole truth was more complex than that.
Hey, one of the most famous Apaches of all, Naiche, son of Cochise, front and center in the most famous Apache War of them all, later became an Elder in the Methodist Church, and earnestly tried to get Geronimo to convert.
