DUANE
Duane's take
The marker tells it plain, but let me give it the weight it deserves. Out here in Wise County, there's a cemetery that carries a date nobody who lived through it would ever forget. September 5, 1866.
That's the day this ground was consecrated in the hardest way imaginable — when Mrs. John S. Babb was killed by Comanche Indians.
That same day, the same party also took captive a widow traveling with them, a Mrs. Luster. And then they took something else that must have nearly broken John S.
Babb entirely — his own children. Two of them. Dot and Bianca, carried off into the frontier.
Now, Mrs. Luster — she managed to escape, and soon. That part of the story, at least, didn't linger long in the dark.
But Dot and Bianca? Two years. Two years those children were held captive out beyond the edge of everything their father knew.
And John S. Babb — you have to wonder what a man does with himself for two years when the worst has already happened and the worst is still happening. What he does is he keeps looking.
And eventually, he found them. He rescued his children himself. The cemetery bears the family name.
It was established in grief, on a specific September day, in a specific year. The marker doesn't dress it up, and neither should I. Some stories don't need embellishment.
They just need to be remembered.
What the marker says
Established September 5, 1866, when Mrs. John S. Babb was killed by Comanche Indians. The party also captured a widow, Mrs. Luster (who soon escaped); as well as two of Babb's children, Dot and Bianca, who were held captive for two years before being rescued by their father. (1968)