The return of Johanna Leonberger to her German relatives does not restore her to family life; it exposes the distance between biological kinship and actual care. After delivering her to Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger, Jefferson Kyle Kidd discovers that the household will not accept the obligations of adoption and that Johanna is being treated harshly. He returns for her, and she chooses to leave with him. The episode turns a homecoming into another separation, and makes protection a matter of action rather than ancestry.

The journey toward a family

Before Johanna reached the Leonberger farm, Britt Johnson had considered taking her only as far as a place where he could hand her off to someone else. He had rescued at least four captives from the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Cheyenne, and six years earlier, in 1864, had recovered his own wife and two children. Yet he would not take Johanna to her parents, even for fifty dollars in gold. The journey south would take three weeks each way, and he had no haulage to carry on it. His experience as a rescuer did not remove the practical limits he placed on this particular mission.

Doris Dillon offered to keep Johanna, responding to the knowledge that the girl was German and would have to know three languages. Doris said Johanna reminded her of a little sister who had died. Her offer gives the episode an alternative model of kinship: care prompted by resemblance, grief, and willingness, rather than by blood or legal status. But Jefferson Kyle Kidd continued the journey to Johanna’s relatives.

He sent a messenger ahead with the news that Johanna, daughter of Jan and Greta and missing for four years, had returned from captivity among the Kiowa. At the farm, he got down from the wagon first and offered Johanna his hand. The stone house, long porch, fence, chickens, tools, barn, mesquite trees, and dogs made the place a specific, working household, but Johanna initially stared at it without moving. When a man drove the barking dogs away and German reached her ears, she recognized her aunt and uncle. Kidd introduced himself and explained that Indian Agent Samuel Hammond had ransomed her at Fort Sill in Indian Territory.

Homecoming without adjustment

Kidd understood that arrival could not by itself reverse four years of captivity. He urged Wilhelm Leonberger to give Johanna quiet, peace, and time to adjust. She thought of herself as Kiowa, he explained, and would have to relearn European behavior gradually; she had already changed guardians three times and needed reassurance. His warning runs against the family’s eager expectation of a sudden recovery. The news, he knew, would bring visitors, songs, praise, food, German questions, photographs of her parents, and a dress from when she was six, all urging her to remember.

Inside the house, Johanna sat on her haunches with her hands around her ankles, taking in objects the white household treated as ordinary. Daguerreotypes looked to her like strange metal plates; doilies, vivid carpet flowers, glass windows, ironstone dishes, small tables, and curtains belonged to an unfamiliar order of life. Even the curtains perplexed her: she could not understand making windows in a stone wall only to cover them with cloth. Her stillness and scrutiny show the divide between being physically returned and feeling at home. The household’s possessions did not simply surround her; they revealed how little the place yet meant to her.

The refusal of responsibility

The promised adjustment did not take place under the conditions Kidd had asked for. A messenger later explained that the Leonbergers had no adoption papers. Without adoption, he said, they would not be legally bound to support Johanna or, according to custom, to provide a dowry. They had not adopted a nephew either. The explanation makes the return more than a clash of temperaments: formal family responsibility carries material and legal consequences, and the relatives had not accepted those obligations for Johanna.

Kidd felt his throat thicken as he heard the news. When the messenger took hold of his sleeve and told him he could not leave her there, Kidd still said he had to go. He left quickly, before tears began to run down his face. His departure was therefore not confidence that the homecoming had succeeded. He had heard the warning, but had not yet seen the conditions Johanna was living in. The gap between what he feared and what he knew would close on his return.

The second departure

The next morning, Kidd drove down the Castroville Road with Pasha tied behind the wagon, trying to imagine that Wilhelm and Anna needed better information about what captivity and return had done to a child. He considered persuasion and bribery, but intended to continue north afterward. By night he had reached D’Hanis and turned down the Leonberger farm road again. He waited near a grove of mesquite, watching the farmhouse light, uncertain whether the relatives might now be glad to be rid of Johanna and doubting that they could make her work without severe beatings.

Then he saw her alone in the field after dark, sent to fetch the horses. She carried several heavy leather halters over one shoulder and a wooden bucket of shelled corn in both hands. At ten years old, she was staggering under roughly twenty pounds of equipment across unfamiliar ground, calling softly to the horses in Kiowa. When Kidd called her, she approached with corn for Pasha, asking if she could feed him. The offered handful was also her way of making herself welcome to the man she called Kontah, or grandfather. Dark red stripes across her forearms and hands showed that a dog whip had been used on her.

Kidd’s anger nearly stopped him, but he spoke calmly and told her to drop the bucket and come with him. Johanna let it fall, ran to the fence, vaulted over it, and crossed into the road. Crying, she said she would go with him. Kidd put an arm around her and threw the halters into the dirt. He turned the Curative Waters wagon north again, warning that anyone who objected would be shot full of ten-cent pieces. The return to the relatives thus ends not in a negotiated reconciliation but in a decisive removal. Johanna’s movement over the fence, followed by Kidd’s turn back toward the north, makes visible the choice the first arrival could not settle: the person who will care for her is the one who returns and takes responsibility.