Apaches at War and Peace and The Apache Diaries
Apaches at War and Peace, The Janos Presidio, 1750-1858 by William B. Griffen, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 and The Apache Diaries by Genville and Neil Goodwin, University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
These books are nice follow-ons to the recently reviewed the Apaches, by James Haley. Griffen gives a much more detailed account of Apache/Spanish and Apache/Mexican interactions, especially in and around Janos, one of the northernmost outposts of New Spain (outside of the New Mexico “salient”) and of its successor state, the Mexican nation. By hook or crook, the original presidial archives for the period in question survived the vicissitudes of time (and especially of the Mexican Revolution), partly at Janos itself and partly at the University of Texas-Austin, and they’re a treasure trove of detailed historical information that formed the basis for Griffen’s study.
What originally got me interested in this work was that Janos was the presidio most closely linked to Santa Rita del Cobre, which, although it is now in the state of New Mexico, in those days was in the jurisdiction of Nueva Vizcaya. The latter province was ultimately split into the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Durango. Both supplies into and product coming out of Santa Rita passed through Janos’ district and its military contingent reported to the Janos presidio’s commander.
Because they were practically in the heart of Gileño (Bedonkohe) and Mimbreño (Chihenne) Apache territory, the copper mines at Santa Rita played a fundamental role in relations between the Apache, the Spanish, and later the Mexicans and Anglos in the region. Evidence from the Janos archives once again suggests that the copper deposits were discovered long before they were developed in 1803 or 1804. The mountain range they sit in was known as the Sierra del Cobre or the Sierra del Cobre Virgen at least as early as 1758, when the name appeared on a map by Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco.
Santa Rita was abandoned in 1838 due to falling productivity and to Apache reprisals for Mexican and Anglo atrocities. On October 3, 1836 four Apaches who had come to trade peacefully in Santa Rita were murdered, and at about the same time Anglo-American scalp hunter John Johnson, hoping to collect a Mexican bounty, ambushed several chiefs (see below) south of Santa Rita in the Animas Mountains.
Griffen gives a good review of the overall context of European colonial and Apache relations in this epoch. Due to the parlous state of New Spain’s northern frontier in the mid-18th C., with constant Apache depredations and the first tentative incursions by European rivals, Charles III, the recently crowned Bourbon King of Spain, decided he had to do something. He sent out two major tours of inspection of the frontier in the 1760s: one by José Galvez, Minister of the Indies and the second by the Marques de Rubí, Inspector of Presidios. These resulted in a through-going reform of policy, strategy and tactics. The Apaches were to be defeated militarily, but prisoners were to be treated kindly (even if deported) and peace was to be granted whenever they requested it. Minister Galvez, for example, said “a bad peace with all the tribes that ask for it would be more fruitful than the gains of a successful war.”
Over the next 70 years under Spain, the on again/off again peace policy of different commanders at Janos actually seemed to work pretty well, but was almost always ultimately scuttled by lack of funds. In detail, it involved getting the Apache to settle near military posts and give up raiding (at least locally) in exchange for rations, agricultural land and tools. In addition to the expense to the Crown, the biggest problems were 1) the atomized nature of Apache society, with its flat and ephemeral leadership structure and 2) the differing interpretations of “peace”’ by the Spanish and the Apaches. The authority of the “Chiefs” who the Spanish made peace with did not extend very far in space or time. So while the Spanish considered peace to be universal between the parties to a treaty, for the Apaches, it only meant that the particular group(s) that made a treaty would not raid, steal, murder and kidnap in the immediate jurisdiction where peace was made. This led to conflict erupting not only with other Apache groups, but with Spanish presidios in other areas, where “peaceful” Apaches receiving rations at Janos would continue to plunder unabated and vice versa. On many occasions troops and militia from Sonora, for example, “invaded” Nueva Vizcaya chasing Apache parties that had attacked Sonora from Janos’ jurisdiction, almost leading to conflict with the Spanish troops at Janos. This sounds a lot like the 21st C US experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, without the religious/ideological overlay! That said, there were fairly long periods of relative peace at Janos, post-Bourbon reforms.
One of the most interesting commanders at Janos was Manuel Antonio Cordero y Bustamante, in charge from 1786-1791. In 1796, he wrote a commentary on the Apache based on his years of fighting and negotiating with them, that is still a valuable ethnographic source today. Jose Cortes, a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Engineers, was also stationed at Janos and wrote a similar report in 1799 that also contains valuable historical and ethnographic information.
Things deteriorated gradually on the northern frontier with Mexican independence in 1821, in terms of military finances, manpower and policy towards the Apache. They reached a nadir with the passage on May 25th, 1849 of the notorious “Fifth Law” by the Chihuahua state legislature, which authorized the payment of bounties for Apache scalps and captives. This attracted the lowest sort of scoundrels and fortune seekers to Chihuahua, including the notorious Anglo-Americans John Johnson and James (Santiago) Kirker (a protagonist of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy?) and served only to exacerbate hostilities between Mexicans and Apaches.
As was the case north of the border, there was a strangely dichotomous relationship between the Apaches and the civilian population in Mexico that alternated between peaceful trading (mostly in stolen and/or contraband livestock and goods), and drinking and gambling bouts which often led to violence, kidnapping and murder.
One of the most interesting characters in the Mexican period was Apache “Chief” Juan José Compá, who was educated in Spanish schools, literate and carried on written correspondence with a number of prominent residents of Janos and vicinity. For years, he acted as intermediary between the Spanish at Janos and various Apaches leaders and bands. His surviving letters are really the only primary source for the Apache point of view during these years. He was killed by the despicable North American scalp hunter, John Johnson in April, 1837 in an ambush in the Animas (?) mountains of New Mexico.
Mangas Coloradas (who may have been called Chief Fuerte earlier in his career), who was based in the upper Gila River-Santa Rita-Mimbres River area, was also a formidable presence in the Mexican records: a powerful and often not very friendly leader whose influence was felt south of the border.
While well outside the scope of Apaches at War and Peace, fast-forward to Geronimo’s surrender in 1886 and ask: what happened to the Apaches still living in northern Mexico at that time? Surely, they didn’t all just pull up stakes and move north to the reservations in the US? The Apache Diaries, a curious book by Grenville Goodwin and Neil Goodwin (University of Nebraska Press 2000) holds some of the answers. Grenville, amateur anthropologist, linguist, and author of a now-classic study on Western Apache culture, died in 1940, when son Neil was an infant. Neil wrote the book using his father’s diaries of two trips he made to the Sierra Madre in 1927-1930 seeking the answer to the fate of the Sierra Madre Apaches, and his own nine trips following in Dad’s footsteps looking for the same and for further connections with his elusive progenitor. The book documents the survival of remnant populations of “wild” Apaches in the Sierra Madre at least through the 1930s. They raided, stole, kidnapped and murdered on a small scale, and were eventually hunted down by Mexican ranchers and townspeople and killed, or captured and enslaved.
The most tragic case, for all involved, was that of Francisco Fimbres, a Sonoran rancher whose wife was killed and his three year old son kidnapped by Apaches in front of his eyes, while on a trip on horseback across the Sierra in 1927. Rescue of his son and extermination of Apaches became his obsession thereafter. In 1930, supporters organized an international vigilante posse based out of Douglas, Arizona to help him, which was quashed by gov’ts on both sides of the border. One of his vengeance raids was successful and led to the deaths of three Apaches, including the infamous “Apache Juan”. Days later, the battered corpse of his son Geraldo was found at the site of his “victory”.
Local Mexicans led Grenville to two recently abandoned Apache camps in the Sierra in the late 20s and 30s and he described them in minute detail. Neil and his companions re-discovered them on his trips in Dad’s footsteps.
A very interesting theme in this and other books I’ve read on the Apaches is the taking of captives in battle who were sold as slaves and used as domestics, especially by the Mexicans or, in the case of children, raised as part of their households by both Mexicans and Apaches, and to a lesser extent, Gringos. Carmela Harris was an Apache girl originally named Bui (Owl, which seems odd, since Apaches loathe owls), captured with two other children by Sonorense cowboys (after they’d gunned down the older women in a rancheria in cold blood) in the 30s then given to, and raised by, an American woman. Carmela graduated from high school in LA, remained a member of the household and eventually died in Italy in the 1970s. Another captive Apache was Lupe who, ironically, lived with the Fimbres family for a while and was interviewed by Danish anthropologist Helge Ingstad. The latter took up the elder Goodwin’s quest independently and went looking for lost wild Apaches in Mexico in 1938. Lupe suggested to him that there were interchanges between remnant Apache populations in the Sierra Madre and the San Carlos reservation at least that late, with stories of Chiricahua men from Mexico coming up to look for women. There are also tales from the Mescalero reservation of small groups of Apache from Mexico encountered in and around their reservation in the late 40s-50s. And Neil tells of a village of Apaches on the Chihuahua side of the Sierra Madre that survived at least through the 1950s. I came across the story of an interview with Apache Jason Betzinez (who was with Geronimo when he surrendered) in 1958, where he claimed that there were still “Bronco” Apaches living in the Sierra Madre at that time.
Also of personal interest to me are interactions between the Mormon colonists in Mexico and the Apaches, with many references to members of the Fenn family, whom I assume are the same clan I know members of (Richmond and John).
Tragically, the wild Apache’s circumstances in those years sound very similar to those of Ishi, the last “wild” Indian in California (see my review): a life of meagre subsistence augmented by theft and rustling; hiding in the mountains, always vigilant, always on the run…an ever-diminishing band headed for extinction. Toward the end of his short life, Grenville Goodwin and Morris Opler, another anthropologist communicated about a plan to save the remnants of the Sierra Madre Apache but nothing ever came of it.
In sum, Apaches at War and Peace is definitely a specialized academic work for those interested in the dynamics of geographical and cultural frontiers in general and the shifting Spanish/Mexican-Apache-Anglo American frontier of the 18th-early 19th C in particular. The Apache Diaries is probably of more interest to the general reader, with the personal angle of the quest by the son for a closer relationship with his long-dead father by following in his footsteps across the southwest and into the Sierra Madre. Its chronicle of the (near?) extinction of the last of the “wild” Apaches is as compelling as it is tragic.
One minor annoyance in the Goodwin book that the editors should of caught is the consistent misspelling of Pinos Altos (New Mexico) as Piños Altos.
