Taken

The three children were playing in a wheat field, several hundred yards from their home outside Loyal Valley, Texas, when the Apaches attacked. One grabbed Willie Lehmann, age 8, and carried him off. Willie’s brother and sister screamed and sprinted for the family’s log cabin. Caroline Lehmann, 9, got away. An Apache caught Herman, 11, and threw him to the ground. Herman fought back, punching, kicking, and biting, but the man overpowered him, ripped off the boy’s clothes, tied him to a horse, and galloped off.

Hearing screams, Phillip Buchmeier, the children’s stepfather, grabbed his gun and ran toward the noise. He was too late. Apaches had taken Willie and Herman. Buchmeier rushed to recruit a posse, but all the neighboring men were off rounding up cattle. It was May 16, 1870, in Mason County, Texas. Buchmeier and his wife Auguste, who had brought her three children to the marriage, were German immigrants scraping a living out of the soil of the Hill Country, where life’s hazards included raids by Indians bent on stealing horses and sometimes children.

Captives in hand, the Apaches rode northwest, raiding another farm and stealing eight horses before vanishing into the dark. Herman was tied across his captor’s mount like a deer carcass, his bare skin burned by the sun and scratched bloody by thorns. Late that night, Carnoviste, the Apache who’d snatched Herman, spotted a calf. He slit the animal’s