Review of \u3ci\u3eChevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Herman Lehmann.\u3c/i\u3e By William Chebahtah and Nancy McGown Minor

This fascinating book foregrounds the oral history of Chevato (Billy Chiwat), a Lipan Apache who in May 1870 captured eleven-yearold Herman Lehmann near Fredericksburg, Texas. Orphaned when young, Chevato joined the Mescalero Apaches, who were the ones actually responsible for the kidnapping of Herman and his brother Willie. In middle age, through the influence of the powerful Comanche Quanah Parker, Chevato became a Comanche and moved to Oklahoma where he lived until his death in 1931. Non-Native captivity narratives, which have been a familiar part of American culture for centuries, usually focus on the crystallizing events of captivity and do not follow the subject\u27s postcaptivity life. Thus in many captivity narratives the whole experience is decontextualized. Yet the historical record reveals ongoing relationships between Native Americans and European Americans before and after what might be called a captivity event. Continued contact was certainly more likely if a non-Native captive became transculturated to Native culture, as Herman Lehmann did, but then returned (perhaps unwillingly) to his culture of origin. Chevato complements and complicates the two popular books published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries based on Herman Lehmann\u27s experiences: A Condensed History of the Apache and Comanche Indian Tribes for Amusements and General Knowledge (1899), also called Indianology, by Jonathan H. Jones, and Nine Years Among the Indians: 1870- 1879 (1927), by J. Marvin Hunter. Although the subtitle of Chevato seems to define the man by his role as one of Lehmann\u27s captors, in fact the book focuses on Chevato\u27s biography and includes Lehmann only when the two men\u27s lives intersect. Surprisingly, these convergences were more frequent and more friendly than the initial captor/captive relationship might suggest. Indeed, the authors conclude that Chevato\u27s entire life was interwoven, in a strange and unfathomable way with Lehmann\u27s

Review of \u3ci\u3eA Fate Worse Than Death: Indian Captivities in the West, 1830-1885\u3c/i\u3e By Gregory and Susan Michno

The field of captivity narrative studies has been expanding and evolving since the early 1990s. Thirty academic books have appeared since then, including individual editions, anthologies of narratives, studies of individual captives, and critical and historical monographs. Two aspects of Gregory and Susan Michno\u27s volume contribute to captivity narrative studies in a very limited way: first, it considers the still underexamined captivity narratives from the West and Midwest; and second, like a biographical dictionary, it provides basic information about unfamiliar captives and captivities mostly taken from the narratives themselves. The book also includes maps, illustrations, and various appendices and tables. The inflammatory title, A Fate Worse Than Death, is not ironic. In their introduction, the authors state that the majority of captivity narratives were personal accounts of the horrors of captivity for the women and children on which the book focuses. They continue, The stories are replete with details of killing, mutilation, abuse, and rape. There is no particular joy in relating what the captives experienced, but there is a need for it. Lest readers have not fully understood their agenda, the Michnos restate their reactionary thesis at the end of the book: \u27\u27An Indian captive in the American West was almost assured of a horrible ordeal, and for many women it was truly a fate worse than death. Unfortunately, it sounds as if the Michnos have uncritically absorbed the rhetoric of the preselected nineteenth-century texts they have researched