The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932

by Jim Fergus

  “Tell me, darling,” Tolley asked her the other night, “are you a Sapphist?”

  Margaret laughed. “God, no, Tolley, I’m not,” she said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Because you seem so inured to the advances of all the men who are panting after you,” Tolley said.

  “That’s because I’m working,” Margaret explained. “And it’s always a mistake to mix business with pleasure. The only thing more distracting than a love affair in the field is a love affair gone bad in the field.”

  “You say that as if you speak from experience, Mag,” I said.

  Margaret smiled wryly. “Let’s just say that I’ve learned to choose my friends carefully,” she said. “In this case, I think it’s safe to say that Tolbert and I are not going to become romantically involved.”

  “Safe?” Tolley said. “Bookmakers are offering ten-million-to-one odds on that one, darling.”

  “And as for you, little brother,” Margaret said, patting my hand, “I’m too old for you. Besides, you’re already in love. Don’t think we haven’t noticed how love-struck you are when you gaze at that little señorita.”

  “God, I know, isn’t he a bore?” Tolley said. “Mooning over the first whore he meets in a Mexican cantina. It’s so pathetic!”

  “I think it’s sweet,” Margaret said.

  “Oh, please,” Tolley said, “the boy’s a walking cliché of adolescent romantic yearnings. And what’s worse, he’s not even getting laid.”

  “That’s even sweeter,” Margaret said.

  “I just don’t want to be one of her customers,” I said. “If I did that, I’d be just like all the others. She’s a nice girl and I want to get to know her first.”

  “He wants to get to know her first!” Tolley said. “While half a dozen other men hump her every night. What a romantic! What a hopeless chump!”

  “Shut up, Tolley,” I warned. “You know if you weren’t such a big sissy, I’d punch you right in the nose.”

  “That’s what I like about you, old sport,” Tolley said. “Most of the men here want to punch me in the nose because I am such a big sissy.”

  “Well, I think you’re perfectly darling, Neddy,” Margaret said. “The world could use a little more romance and chivalry.”

  “Shall we dance, Mag?” I asked.

  “I thought you’d never ask, sweetie.”

  I’ve learned the steps to the Mexican dances, and if I do say so myself, I’ve become a favorite partner of the cantina girls. Everyone knows I’m sweet on Magdalena, but because the patrón frowns on the girls entering into personal relationships with customers, I can’t dance with her very often. So I dance with all of them.

  “I think your girlfriend’s jealous,” Margaret said after we took to the floor. It was a slow evening and Magdalena was sitting at a table with two other girls. “She’s watching me with daggers in her eyes.”

  “You think so?” I asked.

  Just then Chief Gatlin walked out on the floor and tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m cutting in on you, son,” he said.

  “You’ll have to ask the lady about that, Chief,” I said. Gatlin hasn’t liked me from the start, I guess because I hang around with Tolley. Guilt by association.

  “I’ve noticed that you only dance with queers, Miss Hawkins,” Gatlin said now. “I thought you might want to try a real man on for size.”

  Margaret laughed. “Thanks anyway, Chief,” she said, “but I like queers.”

  “Hey,” I protested. “I’m not a queer.”

  “All right, ma’am,” he said, ignoring me, tipping his hat to Margaret. “Whatever you say. But if you change your mind, all you have to do is ask.” Gatlin went over to the table where the girls were sitting and held his hand out to Magdalena. She looked at him nervously, finally stood reluctantly and walked out on the dance floor with him.

  “Thanks a lot, Mag,” I said. I noticed that Margaret was watching the chief with a strange, pensive look on her face.

  “What for, sweetie?” she asked. “For failing to defend you against the charges of being queer, or for driving the chief into your girlfriend’s arms?”

  I considered this for a moment. “Both, I guess,” I said.

  “You know, he’s not entirely unattractive,” Margaret said.

  “Jesus, you don’t like him, do you, Mag?”

  Margaret shrugged. “I think he reminds me of my father,” she said.

  “Your father must have been a real dick.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, he was.”

  “Magdalena’s afraid of him,” I said.

  Margaret was silent for a long time. “Yes,” she said finally. “She probably should be.”

  24 APRIL, 1932

  This morning I went out to photograph the Apache scouts for the newspaper. It was supposed to be Big Wade’s assignment, but he was hungover as usual and sent me instead. The Apaches are camped off by themselves in a grove of sycamore trees up a little canyon outside town. Evidently they walked all the way down here from the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico, at least three hundred miles, and one of them is a very old man.

  I drove out to their camp and was just getting my camera gear out of the automobile when the younger of them approached me, his eyes flashing angrily.

  “What do you want?” the man asked. He looked to be in his midtwenties, with a strong, broad face and dark skin. I don’t know what I expected … war paint and tomahawk, I suppose … but I have to admit that from a photographic point of view I was a bit disappointed to see that he was dressed in regular clothing—a work shirt, dungarees, and cowboy boots—and his dark hair was cut short like a white man’s.

  “I’m with the Douglas Daily Dispatch,” I answered. “They sent me out here to take your photograph.”

  “That’s the trouble with you White Eyes,” he said. “You have no manners. You come uninvited and you take without asking.”

  “You don’t have to be unfriendly about it,” I said. “You haven’t even given me a chance to ask permission, yet.” But at the same time I was thinking about Big Wade’s instructions to me on the subject. “Never, ever, ask someone if you can take their picture, kid,” he told me. “That’s the first rule of photojournalism. If you’re going to be a pro, you have to take the position that it’s your God-given right to photograph anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

  “All right, go ahead and ask, then,” the man said.

  I stuck my hand out. “My name is Ned Giles,” I said. “I’m with the Douglas Daily Dispatch. I’d like to take your photograph.”

  The man got up very close to me. “No,” he said. “And if you don’t leave here now, I will smash that camera.”

  “If you were to try to do that,” I said, “I’d have to punch you in the nose.”

  The Indian stared at me for a moment, then he laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “In the old days, we made a point of killing White Eyes if they showed fear,” he said. “We enjoyed torturing them and killing them very slowly in order to prolong their suffering. But you are lucky. You are too stupid to be afraid of me.”

  “Why should I be afraid of you?”

  “You don’t know much, do you, White Eyes?” he said.

  “I guess I don’t,” I admitted. “I’m from Chicago.”

  “Please forgive my grandson,” the old man said, approaching us. He was a small, spry, broad-chested old fellow, more photogenic than the younger man, his face the color and texture of old cracked leather, his white hair long and braided into a ponytail that hung halfway down his back, beneath a large, round, wide-brimmed straw hat that tied under his chin and looked somewhat like a Japanese farmer’s hat. He was dressed in patched blue jeans rolled up at the ankles, and a faded blue work shirt buttoned up to the neck. From his belt hung a rawhide pouch, and around his neck a large silver medallion on a chain. On his feet he wore rawhide moccasins with upturned toes, which gave him a kind of elfin look, and he walked with a funny, r
olling, bowlegged, pigeon-toed gait. “He is an angry young man,” explained the old Apache. “It comes from being sent away to the Indian school when he was a boy. And now that he is back on the reservation, he doesn’t have enough to do there besides hate white people. But no matter what he says, he’s never actually killed one before.” He held his hand out to me. “I am Joseph Valor. This is my grandson, Albert.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” I said. “The newspaper sent me out here to take your photograph and to interview you. They say you scouted for General George Crook.”

  “I have had my photograph taken many times before,” the old man said with pride in his voice. He opened the pouch at his waist and extracted a piece of folded paper, which he opened carefully. It appeared to be a page torn out of a book, yellowed and cracked, and on it was the much-faded image of an old daguerreotype photograph. In the photograph General Crook and several other soldiers were seated on the ground with some Indians. “This photograph was taken in Mexico in the White Eyes year 1883,” Joseph Valor said, “the first time Geronimo surrendered to the nantan lupan. That is what we called your General Crook.” He pointed at one of the figures. “This is me, here. Goso was my name in the old days. This is the nantan lupan. And this is Geronimo.”

  “You mind if I borrow this?” I asked. “We could run it in the newspaper. I promise I’ll bring it back to you.”

  But the old man was already carefully folding the page back up. “No, that is not possible,” he said, putting it back in the pouch.

  Albert laughed derisively. “My grandfather is very proud of that picture,” he said. “Even though it is only torn out of a book. Show the White Eyes your medal now, Grandfather. That is the other thing of which he is so proud.”

  “I have been to Washington, D.C., to meet with your president,” said the old man.

  “Herbert Hoover?” I asked.

  “Grover Cleveland.”

  “What year was that, sir?”

  “Eighteen eighty-six,” said Joseph Valor. “The Great White Father gave me this peace medal.” He held out the medal for me to admire. It had faint engraving on it, worn away by fifty years of handling, and it was stamped with the president’s image. But unless I had my American presidents all mixed up, it wasn’t Grover Cleveland on the medal.

  “Isn’t this Chester A. Arthur?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Joseph Valor said. “He was the Great White Father before President Cleveland.”

  Albert laughed again. “It must have just been lying around in the White House,” he said. “They were too cheap to make new ones. You know, they slaughter the savages, steal their homeland, imprison the survivors. And give them a nice leftover presidential medal for their troubles.”

  “My grandson is full of hate,” the old man said.

  I set my camera up and made a portrait of Joseph Valor. Afterward we sat around their campfire drinking coffee while I interviewed the old man.

  “I am ch’uk’aende,” he began in the curiously oratorical way he has of speaking, “the band of the great Chief Cochise, who was my uncle. We considered ourselves to be the only true Chiricahua. The White Eyes try to put us all together as one people, Apache, but this is not at all how it is with us. We are many different bands, even among those the White Eyes call Chiricahua, we are several different bands. We lived apart in those days, in a different country, although we sometimes came together for celebrations or just to visit. Or to raid and wage war. And we often married among each other. Later I married a N’dendaa girl, which was Chief Juh’s band, and also the band to which Geronimo belonged, although despite what the White Eyes believe, Geronimo was never a chief, but a di-yin, a shaman. I lived for some years among the N’dendaa in Mexico. I have had four wives altogether and many children, and grandchildren. Those who are still living are scattered across the earth like grass seed on the wind.”

  “The readers of the Douglas Daily Dispatch would be interested in knowing how you became a scout for the whites,” I said.

  “After we surrendered to the nantan lupan,” said the old man, “we were taken to live at the agency in San Carlos. It was a terrible place. We all hated that country. It was hot and dry and there was no game, and the rations that were promised us by your government never came. Many of us became scouts. The nantan lupan took good care of us. And it was the only way we had to be men, to be warriors. It was all we knew how to do. We were allowed to have weapons and we were allowed to leave the agency with the soldiers, to go back up into the mountains, to the country we loved.”

  “To hunt down their own people,” Albert said bitterly. I had not wanted to say it, and I felt sorry for the old man for the disrespect his grandson showed him, but I was wondering about that myself.

  Joseph Valor looked hard at the younger man. “You do not know what it was like in the old days,” he said in a low voice.

  “I know that Geronimo never scouted for the White Eyes,” Albert said.

  “My grandson believes that I am a traitor,” Joseph Valor said. “As do many others on the reservation. He believes that Geronimo was a great man, a great hero of the People. But others believe that Geronimo caused nothing but trouble for us. He was an untruthful man and many believe that his lying and drinking, and his breakouts from the agency, only made things worse for everyone. It was for this reason that many of us became scouts. The nantan lupan told us that if we helped him to bring in Geronimo and the others who were still out, things would go easier for all Apaches, and the Chiricahuas would be given our own agency.”

  “Yes, and tell the White Eyes how you were repaid for your loyal services as a scout to the United States Army, Grandfather,” Albert said. He gestured with his hand toward my notebook. “Maybe he will write it in his article for the newspaper.”

  Joseph looked steadily at Albert and shook his head sadly. “My grandson is so poisoned by hate,” he said finally, “that he even hates his own grandfather.”

  And it was true that I could feel the anger and hatred coming off Albert Valor like heat vapors.

  “When they sent my grandfather and some of the other scouts to Washington in 1886,” Albert said, “the Great White Father”—he spoke this last in a voice heavy with sarcasm—“promised them a big reservation of their own. But instead of sending them home, the president put them on a train to Florida. They were imprisoned in an army fort near St. Augustine. Later that fall, after Geronimo surrendered for the final time to General Miles, he and his followers were also sent there. Of course, they all despised my grandfather and the others who had served as scouts, and they treated them as traitors. My grandfather was held with Geronimo and the other Chiricahuas as a prisoner of war for twenty-seven years, first in Florida, then at another fort in Alabama, and then finally in Oklahoma. He lived as an outcast among his own people. It wasn’t until 1913 that some of the Chiricahuas were allowed to go back to their home country. And even then we were not given our own reservation, as we had been promised, but were sent to live with the Mescalero Apaches. That is how the White Eyes repaid my grandfather for his loyal service as a scout. And yet he still wears the medal that the Great White Father gave him. And still he is an outcast among his people.”

  My last question was an obvious one. “What made you come down here to scout again, Mr. Valor?” I asked. “And you, Albert? If you hate the whites so much, why have you agreed to help them now?”

  “I did not come to help the White Eyes,” Albert said. “I came because my mother asked me to look after my grandfather.”

  Joseph smiled. “I do not need to be looked after,” he said, “by a boy who grew up on the reservation.”

  “This winter some White Eyes from Douglas came up to Mescalero,” Albert said. “They posted a notice on the bulletin board in the community center asking for Apache scouts to guide an expedition into old Mexico. They made inquiries around the reservation to see if any of the old-timers were still alive. There are a few old women left who once lived in the Sierra
Madre—the Blue Mountains, we call them. And there remain a few people who had been children and infants there when we surrendered. But my grandfather is the last of the old scouts. He insisted on coming. We could not talk him out of it. And he won’t even tell us why.”

  I looked at the old man. He gazed off to the south. He had clearly finished speaking.

  30 APRIL, 1932

  On the plain outside Agua Prieta, Sonora

  I write this from my cot on our first night’s bivouac in the plains just beyond Agua Prieta. The Great Apache Expedition officially departed Douglas, Arizona, this morning with a downtown parade of no small fanfare. A bandstand had been set up in front of the JCPenney store, from which the mayor, surrounded by his committee members, and with his typical bombast, gave a rousing speech. I had my camera set up on a tripod in the corner of the bandstand to record the scene for posterity.

  A marching band from the local high school led the parade down Main Street, which was lined with cheering well-wishers, waving flags and throwing confetti. The band was followed by the company of mounted Mexican cavalrymen, in full dress uniform, headed by the dashing Colonel Carrillo, who rode a prancing white horse and waved eloquently to the crowd. Overhead, Spider King performed daring aerial stunts in his plane, towering dives and loop-de-loops, buzzing low, waggling his wings and generally thrilling the spectators. Next came the company of paying volunteers, nearly fifty strong, led by a wealthy young man from the East named Winston Hughes, whose family is in the steel business, and who proudly bore the American flag. Some of the men were dressed in quasi-military attire—their old uniforms from the Great War, or Teddy Roosevelt–inspired Rough Rider outfits. Yet others sported brand-new Western wear purchased from the Douglas Dry Goods store—snap-button shirts and chaps, cowboy boots and spurs, and spanking-new cowboy hats. Always the clotheshorse, and never one to try to blend in with the crowd, Tolbert Phillips Jr. wore his crisply pressed Abercrombie & Fitch khaki safari outfit, complete with pith helmet, as if he were off to the African bush. He blew magnanimous kisses to the crowd as he passed.