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San Antonio, Texas, March 10.“No, I am a white man. But I have lived for forty years with the Indians, and I do not even know my own name.” Such was the answer given to W. C. Burris of this city last fall, by a bronz ed frontiersman, while the two were sitting through a performance of Buf falo Bill's show here, and that answer started the last chapter of a romance of the Texas borderland, which not even the story of Cynthia Ann Parker surpasses in interest. For “Two Braids” the frontiersman whom W. C. Burris spoke to that day is the long lost Tommie Stringfield, whose father, mother and brother were murdered on the Frio in LaSalle coun ty in 1870, by Apache Indians, and whose sister, left for dead in a heap of prickly pear, lived to tell the story of the massacre and to become Mrs. Ida Hatfield, of Cedar Point, Kerr county. “They call me Two Braids,” the stranger told Burris the day at the show, shaking out the heavy plaits of hair which he wore across his shoul ders. “That is the only name I ever knew. But somewhere there are some of my own people who know my own name and I'm going to keep on hunt ing till I find them. I only know that the Indians captured me down here, somewhere north of Corpus Christi, many years ago, and that they killed my father and mother.” Although that conversation with the stranger last fall started the solution of the mystery, neither Burris nor Two Braids attached enough importance to it at the time to keep track of each other after the show. Revolving the facts of the story as he has known them all his life, Burris became satis fied that Two Braids was the real Tom mie Stringfield. Then, try as he might, he could not locate the stranger and after several weeks’ work he gave it up. So it took another accident, or was it providence, a few days ago to re store Two Braids to his name, and to his people, and today the story is pub lished for the first time. A week ago Two Braids came back to San Antonio, after spending nearly all the time since last fall driving about over South Texas, searching for clues to his family and his identity. A week ago Friday Mrs. Burris saw him in his buggy on Commerce street, and recognizing him as the man whom her husband had talked with at the show. She approached him at once and told him of the investigations they had conducted and of their belief. Two Braids grasped eagerly at the chance for finding his people and he and his daughter, little Nuckeye Two Braids, went to the Burris home, in South Heights. Burris at once telephoned his neph ew, J. L. Burris, at Stockdale, and Sunday Two Braids saw the first of his blood kinsmen he had seen since the warriors carried him away as a babe from the massacre on the Frio. Family resemblance between the cous ins, as well as bits of the story which the two were able to piece out, made it certain that Two Braids was actual ly Tommie Stringfield. His own mother, it should be ex plained, was the sister of young Bur ris’ mother. Young Burris’ father and mother made every possible effort dur ing their life to find trace of the miss ing Tommie Stringfield, and the story with all its details had been familiar from boyhood to J. L. Burris. None of the story sare such as he had learned after his meeting with W. C. Burris had been known to Two Braids and in this he was learning for the first time of his parents and other kinsmen. But the crowning identification came Sunday night when Mrs. Ida Hatfield, the matron, who has grown from the little girl whom the Indians left for dead, came from her home in response to a message from W. C. Burris. Both Two Braids and Burris went to the Sap station to meet her and in order not to miss any of the arrivals, Burris waited at one end of the platform and Two Braids at the other. From the dozen or more women com ing from the train Two Braids’ gaze centered on one. “This is Ida Hatfield?” stepping to her side, and almost before she could nod her assent, he embraced her. For him, the sight of this woman, his sister and the only surviving mem ber of his family, brushed away in an instant all doubt and he knew her in stinctively for the sister who forty years before had tended him as “baby brother.” Not so the matron, who saw, in stead of the chubby tot she remember ed, a brown man who wore his hair in two strange looking braids and it took her several minutes to recover from the shock of this sudden em brace. But when the party had taken the car for the home on South Olive street and Mrs. Hatfield could look more closely at the face of the man, slowly and then rapidly she began to see that his features were those of the lost lit tle brother whom she last saw in the arms of an Indian warrior on that terrible September morning. Old memories came flooding to them both and at the home that night the two went over parts of the history. “Tell me some of the things you re member,” she urged Two Braids. “I was 9 years old then and I can surely remember anything you tell if you are Tommy Stringfield.” “Once, when we were camped on a river,” recalled the man, “I followed a big black dog off into the bushes and I remember some woman called and screamed for me, and how— “Our mother!” burst out his sister, with her tears starting afresh. I re member just like it was yesterday how baby Tommy got lost while we were camping on the Frio on a fishing trip. He followed a big black dog down the river. And I remember how our moth er was nearly scared to death for fear we would not find him.” ‘And I remember,” went on the man, “a spotted cow with a bell.” “Old Piety, we used to play with her, she was so gentle.” And I can see one big tree with a swing,” said the man. Each picture as he recalled it or as his sister suggested it, seemed to lead to others and he wonderfully told of things which he had never in his years among the Indians thought about.
Newspaper Details
Brownwood Daily Bulletin
Brownwood, Texas, US
Thu, Mar 11, 1909
Page 2
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 01 Oct 2025
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