Apaches: A History and Cultural Portrait and At The Desert's Green Edge
I’ll briefly review two books on historical American Indians herein: Apaches: a History and Culture Portrait, James L. Haley, 1981 and At the Deserts Green Edge, 1997, by Amadeo Rea.
Apaches may be the best book I’ve ever read on the eponymous people (who call themselves Indeh, which means "the dead") and I’ve read a few, including those by Dan Thrapp, Eve Ball, etc. Haley builds a very compelling picture of the Apache lifeway first, mostly using their curious legends, myths and tales featuring Yusin, the creator, White Painted Woman and her children Killer of Enemies (ancestor of the whites) and Child of the Water (ancestor of the Indeh), the mischievous Coyote, Vulva Woman, etc. They lived in a world soaked in spiritual power; said power could be acquired either through apprenticeship to a di-yin (shaman) or through the will of the power itself. If accepted, the person became a di-yin. The Mountain Spirits, or Gaan, were sent by Yusin to be the mediators between the spirit world and the people, to show them the proper way to live, to cure and protect them. Gaan (or crown) dancers are the most important ceremonial figures amongst the Apache of today and are an integral part of their key rituals, such as the puberty ceremony for young women.
Haley goes on to recount the Apache’s encounters with Europeans, starting with the Spanish. Coronado met and got along with them pretty well (the chroniclers of the expedition call them Querechos) when they were still plains Indians hunting bison in what is today eastern New Mexico…archeological and documentary evidence suggests that they and their Athabaskan cousins, the Navajo, only arrived in their current homeland at roughly the same time, or a little before, the Spanish. While there were later plenty of atrocities, deceit and betrayals to go around on both sides of European/Apache conflicts, in the end the Anglos and the Mexicans outdid their Apache adversaries in all three, as well as in sheer numbers and force of arms, to defeat them. That said, the Apache were arguably the boldest, toughest, most difficult Native foe faced by armies on either side of the border. They were, in general, inveterate raiders that supplemented their booty with whatever they could hunt and gather in the mountains and limited seasonal agriculture, when and where possible. The vast majority of white, Hispanic and non-Apache Indians loathed them and passed up no opportunity to get a lick in. All other things being equal, they were no match for the Apache, given their phenomenal mastery of the terrain, ability to live off the land, move stealthily from one mountain range to the next and back and forth across the border.
Generals Crook and Miles get a bit different treatment in Haley’s book than in others I’ve read. Miles has always come across as an ambitious cocksure political climber who would stop at nothing to get the advancement he thought he was owed, who took advantage of Crook’s previous successful years of campaigning to achieve the coup de grace and bring in Geronimo…no real change there in Apaches. But Crook comes across, initially anyway, as a much less sympathetic character than in other accounts. The brutality of some of his early battles (Massacre Cave on the Salt), his pettiness and vindictiveness with regards to some of his subordinates were news to me. Nevertheless he had a large measure of respect for his adversaries and was the guy who came up with the strategy that ultimately led to the “pacification” of the Apaches: using their own against them in the form of his corps of Apache scouts. Miles treatment of Geronimo’s band and the other Chiricahuas (sending them off to exile in Florida, where many died in miserable conditions there), post-surrender, remains reprehensible.
Haley paints Geronimo as rather a drunk and a bully, though not as much so as his ally Juh, who pretty much looks like a monster. Mangas Coloradas, Victorio and Cochise remain the most sympathetic of the Apache leaders. The notable “Good Guys” on the Anglo side were Agent Clum (though this is odds with many other accounts of him) at San Carlos, Lt Roy Emmerson Whitman and, to some extent, Crook. They were standouts in an otherwise dismal litany of Anglo corruption and brutality that led right back to Washington D.C. The US Gov’ts Indian agents had their shadow masters in the “Indian Ring”, an unholy alliance of traders, evil officials (right up to the head of Grant’s War Dept) and greedy civilians who wanted to keep the Indian wars going in order to justify grabbing more native lands for themselves.
Apache society was far from unified (many groups hated other Apache bands as much or more than they did the Anglos) and anything but hierarchical; this was their weakness and their strength. It allowed them to fight a multi-generational guerilla war against Europeans, but never really defeat them. Leadership was usually temporary and passed to whoever was the most skilled at the task at hand (hunting, warfare, etc). Geronimo, for example, was never a “chief” as such, but a di-yin, or shaman, who had an a seemingly supernatural ability to see faraway places and events and was, at most, a very skilled leader of raids.
Rea, in At the Deserts Green Edge, recounts the history and ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima (Akimel O’odam in their own tongue), traditional enemies of the Apache. They are members of a Uto-Aztecan linguistic and cultural complex that extends deep into Mexico along both sides of the the Sierra Madre Occidental, part of the “corn-belt”, that Spanish observers as early as Alvaro Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, noted on his trip across the continent (1538-1540).
In contrast to the Apaches, the Gila River Pima relied heavily on irrigation agriculture of the “big three” (corn, beans, squash) crops, supplementing this with hunting and gathering, depending on the season and the need. After the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in their land (1687) as part of the Spanish thrust north, and the introduction by the latter of European crops, especially wheat, they became very prosperous farmers who produced bountiful surpluses that were traded and sold to outsiders passing through their territory, including trappers, forty-niners, military expeditions and garrisons. This came to a screeching halt in the 1880s when Anglo farmers settled upstream from them in the Florence area and diverted the Gila into their own ditches, unceremoniously stealing the Pima’s water. All of this happened at a time when climactic and watershed degradation factors conspired to reduce flows anyway. The net result was that the Gila dried up downstream from Florence and the Pima were left destitute. The gov’t build the Coolidge dam upstream from Florence (ironically on the San Carlos Apache reservation) on the Gila, in part to remedy this, in 1924-1928, but largely due to ongoing drought conditions, it never delivered them the water they were promised. I drove along this stretch of the river, from Florence to Sacaton, a few years ago on a prospecting trip and was depressed as hell by the time I got through miles of sand, weeds, abandoned shacks and the occasional skeletal remains of riparian woodlands that were all that remained of a once thriving linear oasis. Given what I saw it was hard to believe that one of the Pima’s most important sources of protein 150 years ago was fish!
As the water disappeared, many resorted to woodcutting to try and make ends meet. This resulted in the destruction of the extensive mesquite bosques (unlike the cottonwoods, they had survived because their roots tapped deep groundwater) that grew along the river, which led to further erosion and desertification of their land. Meanwhile they became addicted to the only food they could get: gov’t rations based on white flour, canned meats, lard and sugar. And cheap alcohol was never too difficult to find in the surrounding Anglo communities. They subsequently developed the some of the highest rates of obesity and adult-onset diabetes in the world, accompanied by the scourge of alcoholism. They finally got their water back (mostly Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project) after a multi-generational lawsuit was settled in their favor in 2004 and took effect in 2008. Slowly some of the tribe is returning to agriculture and growing their own food, which may, in time, revert the dismal health situation on their reservation. Meanwhile, in a strange twist of fate, they have leapt up to a new position of power as water brokers in the thirsty rapidly urbanizing Phoenix metro area. Unfortunately, their once beautiful home along the lush banks of a free-flowing middle Gila probably won’t be resurrected until after the apocalypse.
Rea’s style of presenting ethnobotany in the second section of the book, organized by the Pima’s own indigenous taxonomy and mostly through the medium his (and older documentary) interviews with the Pima, is fascinating and manages to transmit not only a wealth of plant information, but other cultural aspects of these people and, most importantly, their personalities. While at first glance, you might balk at reading straight through this material, I pressed on and found it well worthwhile for the reasons stated.
Though this might seem to be very much a specialist's book, it is quite accessible to the general reader and a required read for those interested in both survival strategies of the indigenous peoples of the Sonoran desert and their fate under European domination.
