At noon on a beautiful New Years Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was sitting on a log eating his lunch just a short distance up the river beyond that little oak tree in my oil painting of the Llano River near the tiny village of Castell, Texas. His identical twin brother, Charlie, was nearby, probably doing what ten-year-old boys do, chunking rocks out into the river. Their parents, German immigrants, had migrated up from San Antonio in 1860 with visions of getting rich by establishing a ranch on the Llano River.

Adolph and Charlie had a job of taking Mr. August Leifeste’s, a neighbor, flock of sheep out to graze every day along the Llano River. Mr. Leifeste’s sheep dog would go along with them each day. The sheep dog was well-trained and was doing his job on this day by keeping the sheep together as they grazed along the banks of the river.

On that day, they had been watching, for an hour or so, three horsemen way up the river coming toward them and they were wondering who they might be. From time to time, the horsemen could not be seen, but then they would reappear somewhere always closer to the boys. Then the boys didn’t see them for awhile, so Adolph decided to eat his lunch.

While he was eating, the quiet stillness of the day was shattered when the three horsemen suddenly appeared running and shouting through the flock of sheep. The sheep were running in every direction, the dog was barking and both boys immediately recognized the horsemen were not some of their neighbors, but were the dreaded Indians.

Terror stricken, Charlie dived under some brush along the river bank and watched what was happening. His brother, Adolph was running for his life. One of the Indians caught up with Adolph and leaning down from his running horse hit him on his head with a pistol knocking him down. The Indian stopped his horse and reached down and pulled the bleeding semiconscious boy up and put him on the back of his horse. The three Indians with the kidnapped bleeding boy then started yelling and thundered off into the brush and disappeared. And all was quiet again except for the barking dog that was gathering the scattered sheep.

Charlie, shaking and terror stricken, was still hiding under the brush by the river. The dog did his duty and soon had all the sheep back together and they were grazing again along the river bank. All that Charlie could then hear were some birds that were singing in the nearby brush and the low muffled sounds of the gently flowing water in the nearby Llano River. It was as if nothing had happened.

The morning I was there a few months ago, I was sitting on the red colored boulders in the river near the low-water county road crossing to Castell, watching an egret up the river and the crystal clear water of the river flowing by. I was thinking about Adolph and his tragic life and that maybe I should do a painting of this scene. Earlier I had found the tracks of a mountain lion in the sand on the river bank. I was wondering if I did the painting, should I put a mountain lion in it. Behind me, I heard a car coming slowly across the low-water county road crossing.

When the car reached me, it stopped and the driver lowered the window and said “Good Morning”. The driver was an old codger about my age and he wanted to talk. I soon learned that he had been over to the little country general store in Castell and was now going home to his little ranch on the north side of the river. His name was Bo and he had been for thirty seven years the football coach at Bellville High School. He had retired and bought a little ranch up here on the river. After our conversation died down, he invited me to come see him sometime and drove on. He said I could find him by going over to the country store and ask them where he lives. He left and all was quiet again.

About one hundred and thirty years after Adolph was kidnapped that morning here on the Llano River, a man named Scott Zesch was wandering around on a hot summer afternoon in an old cemetery near Mason, Texas. It is about twenty miles up the river. In my painting it is where those storm clouds are in the distance. Six generations of his family had lived in this area and he was looking for their graves. In a corner of the cemetery, he happened to see in the weeds an old concrete grave marker with the faded letters “Adolph Korn” and he recognized the name. He remembered his grandmother talking about him. Adolph was the stepbrother of her grandmother and that he had been kidnapped by the Indians. He started researching what he could find out about Adolph. This lead him to writing a wonderful book about not only Adolph and his life, but the stories of a lot of the children that had been kidnapped by Indians on the frontiers in Texas. The name of the book is The Captured, published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

I hope to do some more paintings along this river someday and perhaps I can tell you the rest of the story of what happened to Adolph after he was kidnapped that day.