Johanna Leonberger

Johanna Leonberger’s return from captivity is not a simple homecoming: after four years among the Kiowa, the child who reaches her German relatives thinks of herself as Kiowa, and their home offers neither the belonging nor the safety that the word family promises. Her story turns on the distance between biological kinship, cultural identity, and the care people actually provide. When her relatives fail her, she chooses to run back to Jefferson Kyle Kidd, the man who brought her home and is willing to take her in again.

Identity and Background

Johanna was six when her mother was killed before her eyes and she was taken from her family. The account of her suffering names starvation and beatings, but her captivity was also a life with relationships and memories: she remembers her Kiowa mother, Three Spotted, and the girls with whom she played in the water. By the time she is returned, she has forgotten her first language. The language she has lost is not the whole of what was taken from her; the life she remembers most vividly is the one she lived after her capture.

That divided history is visible in her names. The narrative remembers her as Cicada, Three Spotted’s blue-eyed girl, while, at her relatives’ farm, Kidd formally identifies her as Johanna Leonberger, the daughter of Jan and Greta. Later, when asked who she is, she answers that she is Johanna Kidd. The names do not resolve her competing attachments. Instead, they mark the different communities and relationships through which others claim her, and the name she gives herself.

Memory and the Cost of Return

A confrontation over modesty makes the gulf between Johanna’s experience and her relatives’ expectations painfully clear. As a young woman rebukes her after bathing, Johanna covers her eyes and remembers Three Spotted laughing with the girls at Cache Creek in the Wichita Mountains. They dunked one another, splashed in the water, and heard young men drumming on the mountainside. Johanna recalls their vermilion beads and weeps for the girls and the mountains. The memory arrives as a rush of grief: she is not merely being asked to learn unfamiliar rules; she is being corrected for a life that mattered to her and that she has lost.

Kidd answers the rebuke by defending her and insisting that she be given shoes and clothing for the journey. His response contrasts with the demand that she be forcibly corrected. Johanna’s memories are not presented as an obstacle to becoming herself again; they are evidence that her former life remains part of her, even when the people around her treat it as something to erase.

Reunion and Failed Kinship

Before the reunion, Kidd sends a messenger ahead with the news that Johanna, missing for four years, is coming from captivity among the Kiowa. At the farm, the stone house, porch, fence, animals, and outbuildings form the setting for a reunion that initially produces silence. A German command to drive off the dogs catches Johanna’s attention. She recognizes the language and whispers the words for aunt and uncle. Recognition is real, but it does not make the place feel like home: she looks at the farm with a blankness that makes her return seem more like arrival in an unknown country than recovery of a childhood one.

Kidd presents the papers documenting her return and explains that Indian Agent Samuel Hammond ransomed her at Fort Sill. He also tells Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger that Johanna needs quiet, reassurance, and a gradual adjustment; she thinks of herself as Kiowa and has already changed guardians three times. Yet he knows the news is likely to summon relatives eager to celebrate and test what she remembers, with old photographs and a dress from when she was six. Their anticipated excitement is set against Johanna’s need for patience, a need Kidd understands but cannot make the family honor.

The weakness of her place in the household is not only emotional. A messenger tells Kidd that the Leonbergers have no adoption papers; without adoption, they would not be legally obligated to support her or, according to custom, provide a dowry. When the messenger takes Kidd’s sleeve and tells him he cannot leave her there, the warning gives practical force to the failure of the reunion. The family connection has been named, but the obligations that might secure her care have not been established.

Choosing Safety

The decisive break comes the next morning. Kidd calls to Johanna from his wagon and sees dark red stripes across her forearms and hands, marks left by a dog whip. She approaches with a handful of corn for Pasha, asking whether she may feed the horse. Her offer is a small attempt to make herself welcome and wanted. Kidd’s anger nearly stops him, but he answers calmly, tells her to drop the bucket, and prepares to leave. Johanna drops it, runs to the fence, vaults over the top rail, and lands in the road beside him. The movement turns her return into a choice: when the household has made her unsafe, she goes back to the person who has already carried her across the long journey.

The later encounter with John Calley shows her under the name Johanna Kidd, with a small, doubtful smile. Calley remembers meeting her as a grimy ten-year-old with ragged braids, staring like a wild animal from the spring wagon and slapping away his taffy. The contrast links the young woman he now meets to the guarded child of the earlier journey without suggesting that her difficult return has simply vanished.

Narrative Significance

The closing account keeps Johanna’s two histories in view. It recalls the bones of the Kiowa warriors through stories told and retold, and names her as Three Spotted’s little blue-eyed girl, taken from the Kiowa by the Indian Agent. That remembrance sits beside Kidd’s report that he returned Johanna to her relatives and beside her own return to his wagon. The ending refuses to treat biological reunion as proof that she has been restored to her former place. Her identity remains shaped by captivity, remembered affection, and the failures of those expected to receive her; belonging is measured instead by whether someone protects her when she needs it.