Representations of Captivity
The photo, "German Sisters," is of two rescued Cheyenne captives. Their sufferings are clear from their pose and the expressions on their faces. The women are embracing each other in a similar way that white women captives were drawn in narratives from the 1830s. However, Germans in the mid to late nineteenth-century were suspected of having established a "kinship" type bond with the Comanche people. Even though the German sisters are considered "Anglo," their nature was thought of as more aligned with Comanche lifestyles than Anglo-Americans. This provides some context for why Soule photographed the German sisters. In the Anglo-American imagination, and his as well, German captives represented life on the Southwest frontier.
According to Scott Zesch's popular The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, the "peaceful co-existence" ceased to exist by the 1860s and German captivity were reported consistently. All reports indicate that the captives were ages eleven or twelve, lived among Indigenous societies, and later rescued. The reports are so similar that the historian must question their authenticity, Which Zesch does not do. The Anglos producing these reports were motivated by settler colonial agendas. Soul's photograph represents the depiction held by nineteenth-century Americans about what was happening in Texas as they sought to migrate. Works like The Captured that still treat these narratives as accurate reports, and still circulate in history classrooms, contribute to the myth that defends the colonization of Texas.
Accounts of captivity circulated in the early American Republic and gained popularity in the early nineteenth-century. In 1838, the captivity narratives of Clarissa Plummer and Caroline Harris were published in New York by Perry and Cooke, an elusive publishing company. Little information exists on the publisher, and there does not appear to be any other publications beyond the two narratives under its name. The very purpose for its short life may have been to publish these stories. The allure of a quick profit is something to consider, but why publish captivity narratives, based in Texas, in New York at this time? Popular fiction perhaps? Likely not. Rather, the narratives have a political and national agenda as they play on social fears and justify colonial violence just as Soul’s representations of captives did three decades later.
The stories of Clarissa Plummer and Caroline Harris were dramatic retellings of the captivity accounts of Rachel Plummer and Cynthia Ann Parker. All the women in the narratives are Texas emigrants, captured by Comanche tribesman, and victimized on the brutal Texas frontier. These accounts also echo another tale, an Australian narrative written and published at the same time about a woman named Eliza Fraser. Fraser was captured by Australian Aboriginals in her emigration from Britain. The narratives mask colonial and imperial agendas through their emphasis on the “barbarous” other, Christian values, and white femininity.
“Never, no never could a human being of my sex be reduced to a more wretched condition. The old savage (whose companion I was not by compulsion to become) was, in person as well as disposition, the most ugly and disgusting of the human race; a wretch whose heart was callous to every human feeling; nay, one who could coolly and deliberately dash out the brains of the harmless new-born babe, it could not be expected could be moved to pity, or in any way affected by the tears of its distracted mother.”
Comparing images and narratives of captivity on a global scale helps us understand more about how and why this type of sensationalism was used? Each woman is a white Christian mother who inevitably watches as her children and husband are either murdered or lost to treacherous conditions, and then falls into the sexual servitude of “savage,” Comanche or Aboriginal men. The women are eventually rescued from captivity and share their stories of terror. The stories highlight one of the great fears and threats to white manhood that existed at this time, sexual encounters between white women and non-white men. Much of the Southwest remained settled by non-Anglo men, and as economic and social upheaval created uncertainty for the male patriarchy, the image of the non-white other was continually reinforced.
Although the accounts entertain the reader as a novel would, and are very obviously imagined, they nonetheless became firmly embedded in the American imagination and myth as it highlighted social anxieties during the time. They identified and reinforced categories of otherness in effort to define dominance and power as divinely Anglo. Historian Reginald Horseman argues that by the 1850s, an ideology of white superiority was firmly planted in the American mindset. In the wake of Jacksonian Indian Removal policies, captivity narratives, scientific journals, literary works, art, and photographs all helped reinforce racial and gendered stereotypes. The rhetoric also justified violence, dispossession, and displacement against non-white peoples as Anglo western migration increased.
