Captured By the Apaches, Forty Years with this Savage Band of Indians / Bookcrop (ePub)

"According to...'Captured by the Apaches'...Stringfield grew up...rubbing shoulders with the likes of Geronimo and Quanah Parker." - Mavericks: A Gallery of Texas Characters (2008)

"Just before Geronimo died he told 'Two Braids' that he would find his people 100 miles west of Corpus Christi....Last year he obtained a permit through the commanding officer at Fort Sill to go in quest of his people, and being partly successful he was granted complete liberty by President Taft." -Eagle Pass News-Guide, Aug. 19, 1910

On Sept. 28, 1870, rancher Thomas Wesley Stringfield, his wife and their children were traveling in their wagon in McMullen County when a party of 21 Apaches and Mexicans surrounded them. The wife and children fled the wagon and ran to a nearby stand of brush.

The father used his rifle to defend his family until wounded in his arm. The Apache band encircled them, eventually capturing 4-year-old Thomas who was given the name "Two Braids" and assimilated into the tribe of Apaches with whom he lived for 40 years.

In 1911, Thomas Stringfield (born 1867) published "Captured By the Apaches, Forty Years with this Savage Band of Indians," which covers his life as an Apache and his reemergence into civilization after forty years of absence.

Looking, back Stringfield writes:

"My heart and mind longs back among the Indians. I must say I am more than glad to meet all of my living relatives and friends, but on the whole, I am worse off than if I never had met any of them, both mentally and financially. Now I am confronted with a thousand or more questions asked me by disinterested people. I can realize my present condition much better than anyone else. I am 45 years old and unfitted for the ordinary occupations of this life by my long nomadic career among the Indians."