Hollywood sold you the lost girl carried home to a weeping family. The people who actually came back told it differently, when they told it at all. These are fifteen captives of the frontier tribes, from a Kentucky boy taken in 1789 to Cynthia Ann Parker on the Pease River in 1860, in the words of their own books: John Tanner (1830), Rachel Plummer (1838), Olive Oatman (1857), Nelson Lee (1859), Fanny Kelly (1871), Abbie Gardner-Sharp (1885), Dot Babb (1912) and Herman Lehmann (1927), with George Custer (1874), Nelson Miles (1896) and the Quaker agent at Fort Sill on the army's side of the trade.

Did anyone in your family get taken, or run off to live among the tribes, or was there a grandmother who would only say so much about it? Put it down in the comments, and tell me which side of the family it came from.

CHAPTERS

0:00 The blue-eyed Comanche

0:45 Number 15: The alarm watch

3:19 Number 14: Twenty-one months

5:39 Number 13: The boy who asked for it

8:24 Number 12: The empty treasury

10:53 Number 11: Thirty-eight names

13:35 Number 10: The stolen book

16:15 Number 9: Seven ponies

18:57 Number 8: The blue chin

22:28 Number 7: Be a good boy

25:05 Number 6: Sundown

28:01 Number 5: The swap

30:54 Number 4: The photograph

33:51 Number 3: The boy in the picture

36:32 Number 2: Montechena

39:28 Number 1: Was found

SOURCES (period accounts)

- Nelson Lee, Three Years Among the Camanches (1859): https://archive.org/details/threeyearsamong00leegoog

- Rachel Plummer, The Rachel Plummer Narrative (1838; 1926 reprint): https://archive.org/details/rachelplummernar00park

- John Tanner, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830): https://archive.org/details/narrativeofcapti00tann

- Abbie Gardner-Sharp, History of the Spirit Lake Massacre (1885; 1895 edition): https://archive.org/details/spiritlakemassac00gardrich

- Sarah Wakefield, Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees (1863), quoted through later sources, not read directly: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/nhomefront/26

- Fanny Kelly, Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians (1871): https://archive.org/details/captivitysiouxind00kellrich

- Sarah Larimer, The Capture and Escape (1870): https://archive.org/details/captureescapeorl00lari

- R. B. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls (1857; 1859 edition): https://archive.org/details/captivityoatman01stragoog

- T. A. Babb, In the Bosom of the Comanches (1912): https://archive.org/details/inbosomofcomanch01babb

- George A. Custer, My Life on the Plains (1874): https://archive.org/details/GR_961

- Lawrie Tatum, Our Red Brothers (1899): https://archive.org/details/ourredbrothersa00tatugoog

- Nelson A. Miles, Personal Recollections (1896): https://archive.org/details/cu31924028674038

- Herman Lehmann, Nine Years Among the Indians (1927): https://archive.org/details/nine-years-among-the-indians

- James T. DeShields, Cynthia Ann Parker (1886): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55857

- Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas (first published 1952, read online): https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook

IMAGES

Every image is in the public domain (458) or released under CC0 (34): period photographs, engravings, paintings, maps and book pages, plus a few modern photographs of surviving objects. They come from Wikimedia Commons (314), Internet Archive (95), Library of Congress (53), National Archives (29), Wikipedia (en) (1). The 96 text cards, with the words of the script, were made for this video.

Artists and photographers include T. A. Babb, Carol M. Highsmith, Frederic Remington, Nelson A. Miles, William S. Soule, R. B. Stratton.

No film, television or reenactment footage is used.

MUSIC

"Arkansaw Traveler (1922)" by Henry C. Gilliland and Eck Robertson (Public domain): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_C._Gilliland_and_Eck_Robertson_-_Arkansaw_Traveler.flac

"Death Valley Waltz" by Lucas Gonze (CC0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucas_Gonze_-_01_-_Death_Valley_Waltz.ogg

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/): "Bittersweet", "Comfortable Mystery 3", "Crossing the Divide", "Dark Standoff", "Dark Times", "Folk Round", "Gnarled Situation", "Heart of Nowhere", "Laconic Granny", "Lamentation", "Long Road Ahead", "Scheming Weasel (slower version)", "Showdown", "Touching Moments Four - Melody".

Back Trail West: true stories of the American frontier, told from the records of the time.