Andele, the Mexican-Kiowa Captive: A Story of Real Life Among the Indians

Early in 1867 Kiowa chief Many Bears paid the Mescalero Apache one mule| two buffalo robes| and a red blanket to purchase ten-year-old Jose Andres Martinez. Abducted near his home in Las Vegas| New Mexico| in October 1866| he became Many Bears’s grandson| Andele. He quickly adapted to his new life| grew to manhood among the Kiowa| took part in Kiowa raiding parties when he turned sixteen| and three times married Kiowa women. Confined to a reservation in Oklahoma after 1875| Andele in the 1880s sought to reclaim his former life and returned to his family in Las Vegas. But in 1889| feeling “his interests were all identified with the Kiowa| and that he had learned to love them”| he returned to the reservation and taught industrial arts at the agency school. He also aided the Kiowa in defense of their lands. In 1894 he served as interpreter and spokesman for a Kiowa| Comanche| and Apache delegation to Washington that argued against allotment of the reservation under the Dawes Act of 1887. In the 1890s Andele began serving as a resource to a generation of anthropologists studying Kiowa and Apache society. His captivity narrative| published in 1899 by the Methodist missionary J. J. Methvin| is an invaluable eyewitness description of Plains Indians. It is reissued with an introduction by ethnohistorian James F. Brooks of the University of Maryland.