T. A. Babb In the Bosom of the Comanches

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. IN the unchallenged verity of the chronicle of Theodore Adolphus Babb, better known as Dot Babb, recorded in the pages that follow is vouchsafed a sustained and ab sorbing interest to the reader and the student: a dissolvent of the mystical haziness that has characterized so much of the Indian lore, current hitherto; and a contribu tion to history, an inestimable legacy and gift to posterity as rare and timely as truth is mighty and eternal. Mr. Babb, a descendant of resolute venturesome pioneer stock, entered upon an eventful boyhood in the untamed wilds of the western border of Texas in a locality and period when the mounted Indian marauder with his panoply of war and death was often seen silhouetted against the distant horizon, at a time when the spectre of tragedy and desolation, of atrocious massacre, mutilation, cap tivity, and torture, cast its terrifying shadow athwart the fireside of every pioneer home; when, unheralded, cunning monsters of vindictive savage hate, here and there among the settlers, in unguarded repose or fancied security, sprang from stealthy ambush, from the wood-lands' dark border, the sheltering hillside and gulch, or the shadowy lustre of an unwelcome fateful full moon, and amid and unheeding the shrieks of horror, and frenzied slaughter, mingled with the cries of anguish and prayers of women and children kneeling before their doom, they struck with the fangs of the most vicious, merciless, and unreasoning beast, and in their unrestrained and unresisted madness and ferocity, they left in their crimson wake a sickening chapter of ghastly human wreckage of whole families exterminated, in either a fiendish butchery or revolting captivity without a counterpart in all the annals of every race and age since the hour of the dawn of Christendom, if not since the world began.