A white feather: A Cibolo story
Ferdinand Ludwig von Herff was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1820. After becoming a doctor in 1843 and treating the many victims of the revolution and famine, Dr. Herff left for America.
He sailed from Hamberg to New Orleans on a steamer filled with other German immigrants. He traveled with a group overland in wagons and oxcarts and settled in the wild Texas Hill Country.
There he helped found the German commune of Bettina, and later Tusculum, which would become Boerne. He established his medical practice and gained a reputation for caring for all, regardless of their ability to pay.
He normally provided treatments and performed surgeries on the indigenous peoples in the area, including the removal of cataracts to restore eyesight using boiled rainwater. He visited nearby villages, where tribal healers taught him about their healing techniques.
One technique he noted was the use of “greenish scum” ladled from a nearby creek to heal infected battle wounds -- a technique he was surprised to find had actually worked.
Eventually he was asked to perform a cataract operation on a Lipan Apache Chief who was going blind.
“I knew I was taking a risk,” Herff wrote later, understanding what would happen if his procedure failed. “But I was also sure that without surgery (he) would be doomed to blindness.”
Herff performed the operation in the open air, with primitive instruments and assistants using palm leaf fans to keep the flies away. After a successful recovery, the chief thanked Herff and even offered him a woman from their tribe as a wife. The woman ended up marrying a close friend of the doctor who lived in settlement.
Herff started a family and built a two-story family home from field-stone, near the Cibolo Creek, which had been named after the native buffalo that used to roam freely over these hills. He watched the area go through many changes while he continued his practice.
He also watched many of the Apache and Comanche driven out or banished to Oklahoma by waves of incoming settlers. When the unrest of the Civil War came to Texas, Herff decided to return to Germany.
After the Civil War ended, he returned to Texas, though this time in nearby San Antonio and resumed his medical practice. He also rebuilt his family’s home and farm in Boerne in 1884, which had been destroyed during the Civil War, and it served as a retreat from city life.
In 1888, the 68-year-old doctor and his family made the two-day journey by horse and wagon from San Antonio to the farm. Once there, some of the family and children hiked down to the waterfall. When they arrived, they were shocked to see a band of Lipan Apache warriors camping. Though it had been several years since anyone had seen warriors in the Hill Country, the disdain they had for European settlers who had driven them from their lands was well-known.
The family members rushed back to the house, boarded up the doors and windows, and stood a night vigil. In the early morning hours, they heard screams from the nearby Menger Creek. When the sun rose, the Herff family went out to the road to find angry posse members looking for the Indians who had killed several shepherds and run off livestock the night before.
On the gate of the farm there was a single arrow shot into the post, and attached was a white feather, the Lipan Apache sign for peace.
Evidently, this group of warriors remembered what Dr. Herff had done so many years ago for their chief and, in honor of his service, his home and family were spared that night.
This story would be told by the family and friends for generations.
This Indigenous People’s Day, we take time to recognize that the Hill Country we have come to love and thrive in was cared for by many different tribes of native people long before we arrived.
We encourage all to reflect on the role native people have played in our history, and how our history has impacted them.
AT THE TRAIL
BRI CORPUS
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