The wars against the Apaches lasted twenty-five years and marked the history of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Cinema and popular literature have described this period as a blatant struggle between good and evil, although reversing the roles of heroes and villains, according to most current historians. This is the case of Paul Andrew Hutton, professor of History at the University of New Mexico and author of The Apache Wars (Desperta Ferro).
In the mid-19th century, about 10,000 Apaches and a handful of “white eyes,” as the early American settlers were called by the “red men,” began to maintain friendly relations. After all, they shared enemies: Spaniards, Mexicans, and Navajo Indians.
However, as the historian Peter Cozzens explains in La tierra cria (Desperta Ferro), as the US expanded its borders (either by buying tens of thousands of kilometers of land from Mexico, or through the new Sharp rifles and Colt revolvers ), the trickle of heavy caravans covered in white tarpaulins became a torrent.
Despite this, the native Indian tribes, who had come from time immemorial across the Rocky Mountains following the great herds of buffalo, were never able to unite against the vigorous white expansion. The result was a low-intensity guerrilla war, albeit extremely cruel.
Hutton explains that the Apaches, despite sharing names and languages, lived isolated existences that prevented them from developing any sense of tribal unity. “The Apaches were pure democrats, each warrior his own master,” writes John C. Cremony in Life Among the Apaches, an 1868 book. For that reason, they had no supply lines, villages, or fortifications, nor did they have a centralized leadership. His loyalty was to the family before his tribe or town.
Like the Vikings, the Apaches lived by looting. Mangas Coloradas (as the Mexicans knew Kan-da-zis-tlishishen, due to the blood that stained his sleeves, bathed in the wounds of the Mexicans he massacred), Gerónimo (so called because his terrified enemies begged Saint Jerome to free them of him), Cochise (whose father-in-law was Mangas Coloradas) and the other Apache chiefs made a clear distinction between pillaging, an economic necessity, and warfare, which was almost always an act of revenge.
The raids to seize those things that interested them (cattle, food, tobacco, weapons or liquor) were carried out by small parties that usually numbered less than a dozen men. Their purpose was not to kill, but to obtain booty or prisoners (women and children) to exchange them for clothing, food or tobacco. Aware that they were few, the Apaches were not reckless. After all, it was possible to return for more cattle or prisoners as long as they were alive…
One such kidnapping was the match (a gift, by the way, highly prized by the Apaches and carefully wrapped in deerskin) that ignited the simmering tension between the Apaches and the US military. It happened on a crisp January morning. when a twelve-year-old Mexican boy with fair skin and red hair spied a cloud of dust.
Before long, a dozen Apaches, painted and well armed, galloped into the ranch and carried off their colts and cattle. The boy climbed a peach tree to hide, but was discovered by the chief of the Aravaipas tribe, who, curiously, was one-eyed like him. The point is that the Apaches took him with them to educate him according to their customs.
In the months that followed, Johnny Ward, the stepfather of Mickey Free (as the white men called Felix, the kidnapped Mexican boy and central character in Hutton’s book), complained about what had happened, though more about the cattle than his stepson. .
Their pleas reached the ears of US Army Lieutenant George Bascom, who made a very clumsy response, sending a party to fool an Apache chief named Cochise, who led a different band and had always been friendly to the Americans. He even promised the lieutenant to find Free and return him.
But Bascom set Cochise up in what looked like a peaceful gathering. He kidnapped his wife, his six-year-old son, his brother, three young warriors and another child. In addition, he shot Cochise, wounding him in the leg, although he managed to escape. The episode would end up leaving a trail of blood from the Pecos River, in Texas, to New Mexico and Arizona, between 1861 and 1886.
The Apaches worshiped the warrior and were obliged to continue fighting to avenge their dead. The word “mercy” was not in his dictionary. The Indian sense of justice was that “the innocent must suffer for the guilty.” On some occasions, the Apaches tied their prisoners to an anthill and opened their mouths so that the insects could enter more easily. They also gave relatives of the fallen warriors some of their captives to be tortured, and thus appease their pain.
However, the Apaches had an almost pathological fear of the wandering spirits of the dead, so they dared not touch the fallen, even their own people. “The Apaches were never in the habit of scalping, but once the Europeans introduced this horrendous act, they sometimes did it,” Hutton says.
Apache mutilations redoubled after the Spanish decorated the battlements of Tucson’s walls with Indian heads and after the Americans sliced ??off the scalps (ears included) of the Apaches and displayed their heads in public (as happened to Mangas Coloradas after being assassinated). For an Apache, the affliction of the body was far worse than death. As Gerónimo recognized at the end of his life, the mutilations suffered by his people were “the worst of grievances.”
The incessant arrival of settlers dragged to the Apachería, the name given by the Spanish to the territory occupied by Arizona and New Mexico, thousands of men armed to the eyebrows, “for whom shooting an Indian was the same as shooting a deer.” Cozzens writes.
The Apaches were very superstitious with animals such as the coyote (their tricky god) or the owl (the reincarnation of the spirits of the wicked). Adults, for their part, considered bears an ancestor, so they rarely hunted them. If an Apache ran into a bear he would tell him: “Go away, grandfather.”
Also, they never ate fish. Game meat made up a large part of their diet, especially venison, but also the prolific mountain rat. If hunger pressed, they ate the horses. Another food that they liked was acorns. And, of course, the mescal, although their favorite brandy was made with corn. Regarding tobacco, they rolled oak leaves.
Likewise, they were very fond of competitions, almost always accompanied by bets. The boys, for example, played running to the top of a mountain with their mouths full of water to spit it out when they returned.
The westward expansion of the settlers placed the ancestral Indian way of life between the sword and modernity. The Apaches, a semi-nomadic people, fought to defend their way of life knowing that the fight was already lost, which explains why many tribes agreed to collaborate with the winner.
However, the US failed to get them to integrate into a “higher civilization” or to become “Christian farmers”. A Mescalero Apache named Cadete summarized to Captain John C. Cremony his vision of the world, directly opposed to the Calvinist vision that already prevailed among the Americans:
“You start to work hard from when you are little and you strive until you become a man and then undertake new tasks. You build houses and boats and cities and everything else. And then, when you have achieved everything, you die and leave everything. We call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you have the use of speech until death; we, on the other hand, are free as the air. We never work, because the Mexicans and the rest work for us. Our needs are few and easy to meet. The river, the forest and the meadow give us everything we require. We will not be slaves.”