Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache
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KILLER OF WITCHES
KILLER OF WITCHES
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF YELLOW BOY,
MESCALERO APACHE
* * *
W. MICHAEL FARMER
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, Cengage Learning
* * *
Copyright © 2015 by W. Michael Farmer
Map of the Apacheria about 1875 © 2014 by W. Michael Farmer
Interior sketches were created by Jim Trolinger at jtrolingerart.com
Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Farmer, W. Michael, 1944–
Killer of witches : the life and times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache / W. Michael Farmer. — First edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-4328-3122-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-3122-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4328-3125-7 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-3125-9 (ebook)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3125-7 eISBN-10: 1-4328-3125-9
1. Apache Indians—History—Fiction. 2. Mescalero Indians—History—Fiction. 3. Mescalero Indian Reservation (N.M.)—Fiction. 4. Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation (N.M.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3606.A725K55 2015
813'.6—dc23 2015012413
* * *
First Edition. First Printing: September 2015
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3125-7 ISBN-10: 1-4328-3125-9
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Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15
For Corky, my best friend and wife.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* * *
A project of this magnitude is not done alone. I owe a debt of gratitude to many friends and associates who have supported and encouraged me in this work. There are several who deserve special mention.
Melissa Starr provided editorial reviews and many helpful questions, suggestions, and comments to enhance manuscript quality and to help bring to life Yellow Boy in a way I had not seen him before. Her work is much appreciated.
Bruce Kennedy’s knowledge of the southwest and invaluable commentary made many helpful contributions to this story. I thank him for his support.
Lynda Sánchez’s first-hand knowledge of Apache culture and history provided guiding light and clarity on many details. Her insights and comments on this story were invaluable. I owe her a debt of gratitude.
Jim Trolinger provided the illustrations for the text and helped bring the major characters to visual life. His help and encouragement will be long remembered and appreciated.
Pat and Mike Alexander have graciously opened their home to me during return visits to New Mexico for research and book tours, and they provided company on long roads across endless deserts and prairies and tall mountains. Friends such as these are rare and much appreciated.
Excellent descriptions of Apache culture, beliefs, and methods of raiding and war in the mid- to late-nineteenth century are provided by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Some of the ones I found most helpful are provided in Additional Reading at the end of the story. The work by Eve Ball and her associates Lynda A. Sánchez and Nora Henn provided especially valuable insights into Apache life because they faithfully recorded the stories Eve’s Apache friends remembered of the old days, and they remembered those days very well.
Map of the Apacheria About 1875
(Towns appearing after 1875 have been added to aid reader orientation.)
CHARACTERS
* * *
Fictional Characters
Beela-chezzi (Crooked Fingers)—Yellow Boy’s friend, a warrior
Caballo Negro (Black Horse)—Yellow Boy’s father
Carmen Rosario—Sangre del Diablo’s slave
Deer Woman (aka Gah)—Yellow Boy’s childhood friend
Delgadito—Yellow Boy’s competitor
Gourd Girl (aka Lucky Star)—a Mexican slave child adopted by Sons-ee-ah-ray
He Watches—Yellow Boy’s adoptive grandfather
Juanita—Yellow Boy’s wife
Kah (Arrow)—Yellow Boy’s friend, a warrior
Klo-sen (Hair Rope)—a warrior
Ko-do (Firefly)—Yellow Boy’s friend, a warrior
Maria—Juanita’s mother
Moon on the Water—Juanita’s little sister
Porico (White Horse)—Juanita’s father
Rufus Pike (aka Roofoos Peek)—Yellow Boy’s mentor
Sangre del Diablo (Blood of the Devil)—Mexican-Comanche Witch
Segundo—Comanche Witch
Socorro (Corn)—Yellow Boy’s adoptive grandmother
Soldado Fiero (Fierce Soldier)—Chiricahua Blue Coat Scout
Sons-ee-ah-ray (aka Ish-tia-nay)—Yellow Boy’s mother
Sons-nah (Corn Tassel)—Deer Woman’s father
Yellow Boy (aka Ish-kay-neh, aka Nah-kah-yen)—The Killer of Witches story teller
Historical Characters
Al Sieber—Chief of Scouts under General Crook
Cadete—Mescalero Chief
Cha—Mescalero Chief
Colonel Edward Hatch—Commander of the Disarming
Dr. Joseph Blazer—Owner of the mercantile store and sawmill on the Mescalero Reservation
Fred C. Godfroy—Agent, Mescalero Reservation
General James Henry Carleton—Commanding General, New Mexico Territory 1862–1866
Juh—Nednhi Apache Chief
Kah Tensakes (Crooked Arrow)—Ancient Mescalero hunter who hunts elk on ice-covered snow
Kit Carson (aka Keet Kah-sohn)—Scout, Indian Fighter, and Colonel, New Mexico Volunteers
Lorenzo Labadie—Agent, Bosque Redondo Mescalero Reservation
Nana—Mimbreño Apache leader
Roman—Mescalero Chief
S. A. Russell—Agent, Mescalero Reservation
Santana—Mescalero Chief
Victorio—Mimbreño Apache Chief
APACHE WORDS AND PHRASES
* * *
Aashco—friend
Búh—owl
Dánt’e—greetings
Enjuh—good
Gaagé—raven
Googé—whip-poor-will
Haheh—a young girl’s puberty ceremony
Idiits’ag—I hear you
Indah—white men (literally the liv
ing)
Indah Lickoyee—white intruder
Indeh—Apache name for themselves (literally the dead)
Ka dish day—goodbye
Klitso—gold
Ndolkah—cougar
Nakai-yi—Mexican
Nakai-yes—Mexicans
Nish’ii’—I see you
Pesh—iron
Pesh-klitso—yellow iron or gold
Socorro—corn
Tiswin—a weak, beer-like drink, brewed from corn
Season of Little Eagles—early spring
Season of Many Leaves—late spring, early summer
Season of Large Leaves—midsummer
Season of Large Fruit—late summer, early fall
Season of Earth is Reddish Brown—late fall
Season of Ghost Face—lifeless winter
CONTENTS
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DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MAP OF APACHERIA
CHARACTERS
APACHE WORDS AND PHRASES
PREFACE
Prologue
Chapter 1—Ish-kay-neh
Chapter 2—The Fifth Day
Chapter 3—On the Llano
Chapter 4—Cha’s Camp
Chapter 5—The Warrior’s Journey Begins
Chapter 6—Shináá Cho
Chapter 7—Nah-kah-yen
Chapter 8—First Blood
Chapter 9—Ride to Cha’s Camp
Chapter 10—First Raid
Chapter 11—Juanita
Chapter 12—First Shots
Chapter 13—Rufus Pike
Chapter 14—First Lesson
Chapter 15—Rufus’ Story
Chapter 16—The Apache Way
Chapter 17—The Indah Way
Chapter 18—Nah-kah-yen’s Dream
Chapter 19—Power Comes
Chapter 20—Power
Chapter 21—The Massacre
Chapter 22—Finding He Watches
Chapter 23—Finding Survivors
Chapter 24—Angry Women
Chapter 25—Horse Raid
Chapter 26—Reservation
Chapter 27—The Warriors Return
Chapter 28—Courtship
Chapter 29—The Time of New Beginning
Chapter 30—Al Sieber
Chapter 31—Nana
Chapter 32—Victorio
Chapter 33—The Disarming
Chapter 34—The Stone Corral
Chapter 35—Rescue
Chapter 36—Chiricahua Wolves
Chapter 37—Juh
Chapter 38—Juh’s Trial
Chapter 39—Sangre del Diablo
Chapter 40—Deception
Chapter 41—Disaster
Chapter 42—Escape
Chapter 43—Battle of the Hacienda
Chapter 44—Carmen Rosario
Chapter 45—Endings
Chapter 46—New Beginnings
ADDITIONAL READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
* * *
Eighty years of information on Apache life gathered by anthropologists, linguists, and historians is often ignored in novels and movies featuring Apaches. These stories fail to capture an understanding of Apache ways and beliefs as they were in the years when their raiding and roaming were disappearing, washed away in conflict by the unending flood of “White Eye” invaders filling the Apachería. Those were brutal, hard-fought years on both sides, and it is easy to overlook the humanity of the Apaches who fought without quarter, and expected none against the ruthless, steely determination of the White Eyes to claim the land, despite the horrors of Indian warfare.
In 1955, Paul Blazer, whose father and grandfather had run a store and a sawmill on the Mescalero Apache Reservation from about 1868, told Dr. C. L. Sonnichsen, the great chronicler of the southwest, “I hate to hear people talk about those Apaches as savages . . . if an Indian is a savage, a lot of white men are savages, too . . . Teddy Roosevelt was a savage. Some of the Mescaleros were savages . . . but they were no worse than the white men who ‘hit them in the rear with a saddle.’ They used to come into the store where I worked. I would give them a smoke, and they would sit around and tell me stories—folk tales. There was poetry and beauty in them. That was when I began to see that they were folks just like us.”
This novel is an attempt to understand what Paul Blazer meant when he spoke with Doc Sonnichsen in the middle of the twentieth century from a perspective that stretched into the last years of the free Apaches. The story is an imaginative autobiography of the warrior and cavalry scout, Yellow Boy, a major character that appears in “The Vanishing Trilogy,” a mythical story of the survival, revenge, and odyssey of Henry Fountain after the true-life murder of his father, Albert, near White Sands, New Mexico Territory, in 1896. I have used Yellow Boy to paint a picture of Mescalero Apache life and times from about 1860–1951, a period when the Mescaleros went from nomadic, horse-mounted raiders and hunters, to White Eye prisoners of war, to reservation residents dependent on White Eye largess, to proud, independent people, making their own way in the white man’s world.
Language is a window into the culture of a people. Apache, its root language, Athabaskan, is a beautiful and complex tonal language with many variants between Navajo, Chipewyan, and Apache groups. It is difficult to learn to speak correctly, and its spelling using tonal marks difficult to write. I have attempted to give the reader a sense of Apache culture by using a few Apache words in the manuscript. Their spelling without tonal marks, except simple accents, depends on the source from which I referenced them, mainly from Life Among the Apaches, by John C. Cremony, and the Western Apache-English Dictionary, edited by Dorothy Bray.
Killer of Witches is the first volume in three that forms the story of Yellow Boy and a history of a people with the same hopes and fears shared by “folks just like us” in a time when their freedom was disappearing and the terrors on the dark side of this life, Witches and other evil spirits in the flesh, had to be neutralized or destroyed to enter the next life unscathed.
W. Michael Farmer
Smithfield, Virginia
May 2014
PROLOGUE
* * *
“You are stronger than we. We have fought you so long as we had rifles and powder, but your arms are better than ours. Give us like weapons and turn us loose, we will fight you again; but we are worn-out; we have no more heart; we have no provisions, no means to live; your troops are everywhere; our springs and waterholes are either occupied or overlooked by your young men. You have driven us from our last and best stronghold, and we have no more heart. Do with us as may seem good to you, but do not forget we are men and braves.”
—Mescalero Chief Cadete to General Carlton, 1863
At the time Cadete spoke his words to General Carlton, the Mescalero Apache, Yellow Boy, my mentor and close friend for over fifty-five years, was three years old. He saved me from certain death in the winter desert after the murder of my father, Albert, in 1896; helped me avenge Albert; and taught me to survive in the hard country of the southwest. In 1950 I persuaded him to tell me his life story. Over the course of many afternoons and pots of coffee, I wrote it down as he told it in a mixture of Mescalero Apache, Spanish, and English in the whispery rasping voice of a vigorous old man. At the beginning of each session I read back to him what I had written from the previous session, and after explaining the meaning of some of my fancy words, he usually agreed I had captured the essence of what he had said. When I missed what he meant, I rewrote until he said I had captured his meaning. This is his story as he told it and meant it to be heard.
–Dr. Henry Grace, 1953
CHAPTER 1
ISH-KAY-NEH
* * *
Bosque Redondo, New Mexico Territory, October 30, 1865
My people were Mescalero Apaches, the Shish-Indeh, the People of the Woods. In the time when Indah Lickoyee, the White Eye outsiders, kept my people prisoners of war in Bosque Redondo, a
chief called Cadete came to speak with my father. My life had not been long then, only five years, and my father still called me Ish-kay-neh (Boy), my true name not yet given.
The night Cadete spoke with Caballo Negro (Black Horse) by the little fire in our ragged tipi, my mother and I sat nearby eating a nasty-tasting stew, made from the worthless meat and worm-filled cornmeal the White Eyes gave us, which she had boiled in bitter water from the river the White Eyes called Pecos. We listened to Cadete and my father speaking in low, secret-filled voices.
My mother’s eyes were bright with the heat of sickness, and her slender body trembled under the thin blanket draped over her shoulders. There was little stew in her bowl. She gave most of her food to me and to Caballo Negro. I wanted to spit it out, but she said I must eat to live, no matter how bad it tasted.
My mother’s eyes followed every move Caballo Negro and Cadete made as she listened and waited to serve them. My father called her Ish-tia-nay, which meant “Woman.” It was a sign of affection and respect among my people for a man to call his first wife by this name. Her true name was Sons-ee-ah-ray (Morning Star), for she was always out of the blankets before the morning star left with the dawn.
Listening to the words between Cadete and Caballo Negro, my mother looked at me and smiled. I understood their words gave truth to the stories the other women had told her while they dug mesquite roots for firewood far out on the llano (dry prairie). She had told me those stories. They said our people were leaving Bosque Redondo.
The words between Caballo Negro and Cadete filled my head with questions: Why are we leaving Bosque Redondo? Haven’t the Shis-Indeh stayed with the Blue Coats here since before my memories? Why will we take many different paths? Will my friends go to the same place I go?