The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932

by Jim Fergus

  I said good-bye to Tolley at the train station in Douglas. Like all of us, he had been subdued by the terrible attrition of those past weeks and months. “Christ, Giles,” he said before boarding the train, “you and me and the kid are all that’s left, aren’t we?”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it, Tolley?”

  “You think we’ll ever see Margaret and Albert again?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, what do you think?”

  He looked south toward the Sierra Madre and shook his head. He held his hand out to me. “I wish I had something amusing to say in parting.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Adios, old sport.”

  “So long, Tolley.”

  As to Jesus, I left him back in Agua Prieta, where presumably he has resumed his career as a street hustler, guide, and “facilitator.”

  “I will come to America with you, Señor Ned,” he offered. “I will carry your camera.”

  “I don’t think so, kid,” I said. “I think I’d better carry my own camera for a while. I’ll come back and look you up sometime, though.”

  And he nodded sadly, because we both knew that I probably wouldn’t.

  I went to see the Mexican girl, Magdalena, the last time I was in Agua Prieta. They had taken her back at Las Primorosas, after all, and in those few months she seemed to have settled into her profession. She seemed coarser and more predatory, flirting with the men, one eye always out for her next trick. We danced together, but it held none of the innocent romance that it had before. We had both changed; neither one of us was any longer a kid, and it seemed like those days were another lifetime ago.

  “Come to my room now,” she said at the end of the dance. “I will make you very happy.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I answered. “I just wanted to see that you were doing okay, Magdalena.”

  But she was already looking around for another mark.

  The next day, I recovered the Roadster from the parking lot at the Gadsden, where I had left it those many weeks ago, and headed out of Douglas. It has been a strange adjustment returning to the world of automobiles and trains, and to the cities and the economies that the White Eyes have built. The Depression, which we more or less forgot all about during our time in Mexico, has deepened even further. But Roosevelt just won the election, and everyone has high hopes that he can turn things around.

  I’ve rented a little adobe casita in the barrio neighborhood of downtown Albuquerque, and I’ve set up a darkroom in the shed behind it to process my own work whenever I have time off from the newspaper. On weekends I sometimes drive down to the Mescalero Apache reservation to shoot film. As Albert used to say, on the reservation there’s always a depression going on, and I can see why he didn’t want to come back here. I’ve been to see his mother, to tell her what became of her son and her father, and to give her some photographs of them. I like to visit with the Apaches at Mescalero, to make images of them, and to practice the language with some of the old-timers who still speak it, though sadly, not many do anymore. Even though I’m a White Eyes, the people there have more or less come to accept me. I tell them stories of my time in the Sierra Madre. I don’t know if they really believe me or not, but they listen quietly and politely as is the Apache way. I tell them that I have an In’deh wife, and a son or a daughter, up there somewhere in the Blue Mountains, still living in the old way, and that someday I plan to join them.

  LA NIÑA BRONCA

  When the end of the earth is coming, all the water will begin to dry up. For a long time there will be no rain. There will only be three springs left. At those three springs the water will be dammed up and all the people will come there and start fighting over the water. In this way most of the people will kill each other off.

  When the new world comes after that, the white people will be Indians and the Indians will be white people.

  MORRIS OPLER, “THE END OF THE WORLD,”

  Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians

  THE GIRL KNELT WITH HER LEGS APART, HOLDING ON TO AN OAK post set in the ground, as the midwife, the old woman Dahteste, massaged her abdomen downward. The girl was silent, did not utter a sound as the head of her baby emerged, then its shoulders, and as it slipped from her body and out into this world, the old woman caught the falling infant in her sure hands. It was a boy and he took a deep, lusty breath, hungry for life. But he did not cry.

  “That is good,” said the old woman. “A baby who does not cry at birth grows to be strong.”

  Old Dahteste cut the umbilical cord with a piece of black flint and knotted it, bathed the baby in warm water, and laid him on a soft robe. She rubbed his body with a mixture of grease and red ocher, strewed a pinch of pollen to each of the four directions, clockwise beginning with the east, and then she held the baby up and in the same order presented him to the four directions so that he would always know his way. She wrapped the afterbirth and the umbilical cord in a piece of the blanket upon which the girl had knelt during the birth. Later the old woman would place this bundle in the branches of a lemon tree and bless it by saying: “May this child live and grow up to see you bear fruit many times.”

  The years passed. Her son grew to be a strong, healthy boy. He was brown-skinned like his mother but he had fair hair for an Apache, and the sclera of his eyes was pale, so that when he was a child the People called him White Eyes Boy. Eventually the girl remarried a young man named Bishi and had two more children by him. Together with the others in the small band, they lived quietly back in the secret hidden recesses of the Blue Mountains, country so rugged and so remote that no Mexicans and no White Eyes dared venture there. She never forgot the boy who had been so kind to her, the White Eyes boy who had bathed her and covered her with a blanket in the Mexican jail cell, who had taken her away to release her back into the wilds as one releases a caged bird; this boy who had saved her and loved her once. She told her son the stories of his father and of the other unknown world in which his father lived, and from which his father would surely one day return.

  Now the Mexicans claim that la niña bronca, the wild girl whom the American lion hunter Billy Flowers trailed into Bavispe, Sonora, hobbled and tethered to a dog chain on that spring day in 1932, was the last of the bronco Apaches in the Sierra Madre. They say she was so wild that she bit anyone who tried to touch her, and because they didn’t know what else to do with her, they put her in the town jail. They say she curled up in a fetal position on the cold stone floor of the jail cell and refused food and water, and starved herself to death in five days. They say they buried her in an unmarked grave on the edge of the town cemetery, just outside the fence, because, of course, she was not a Christian. But that’s just what they say, and none of it is true. She curled up on the cold stone floor and lay perfectly still, closing up into herself, and she dreamed this life of the People from beginning to end. Daalk’ida ’aguudzaa. It happened long ago. Five thousand years and two hundred generations ago, she had already been among them as both man and woman, child and elder, hunter and suckler of babies, dressed in the heavy skins of mastodons as they made their way in a blizzard across the frozen Siberian plains. White-Painted-Woman, mother of all Apaches.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN THE WINTER OF 1998, while traveling in the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, I met an elderly gentleman in the village of Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. We sat on a bench in the town plaza, and he told me the story of the young Apache girl they called la niña bronca, who had been treed in the mountains by the hound dogs of an American mountain-lion hunter, in the spring of the year 1932. The lion hunter did not know what to do with the girl and so he brought her into town. And because she was so wild and tried to bite anyone who touched her, they put her in the local jail. The Apaches still occupied a kind of mythic role in the folk (and actual) history of northern Mexico, and everyone in town and in the surrounding villages wanted to see this wild girl for themselves. And so the sheriff charged a small admission fee and allo
wed people to come into the jail to view her. The old man who told me this story had been only a boy himself at the time, and like so many other curious townspeople, he paid his fee and saw the Apache girl in her jail cell. Looking back on it, all those years later, he was still ashamed about this, and he did not wish to discuss it further. “I was just a boy,” he said in a low voice, “I didn’t know any better.” And when I asked the old man what had happened to this girl, he shook his head and refused to say.

  I couldn’t get the story of la niña bronca out of my mind, and I knew I had to find out for myself what had happened to her. In this way was this novel born.

  Although certain actual historical events are recounted in this book, it is entirely a work of fiction. Similarly, although some actual historical characters appear in this book, they are entirely fictional creations. The Great Apache Expedition, for example, was organized out of Douglas, Arizona, under the name the “Fimbres Apache Expedition.” This was to be a joint Mexican-American operation, ostensibly to rescue the six-year-old son of a Mexican rancher by the name Francisco Fimbres. The boy had been kidnapped three years earlier by the Apaches and was reported to be still alive with the renegade band in the Sierra Madre Mountains. However, because the Mexican government was understandably nervous about a vigilante force of armed Americans entering their country, the expedition was canceled before it ever crossed the border. The boy’s father, Francisco Fimbres, then launched his own posse of ranchers and vaqueros, who finally cornered the Apaches in the Sierra Madre. But when they closed in, Fimbres found his son hanged by a rope from a tree limb.

  The boy Charley McComas, who was kidnapped on the Lordsburg to Silver City road in 1883 by an Apache band led by the warrior Chato (who later became a prominent scout for the U.S. Army), was never recovered. Differing accounts of little Charley’s fate were told by the Apaches of the era. Some said that he had died as a boy when General George Crook’s soldiers attacked his captors’ camp in the Sierra Madre later that same year, though the boy’s body was never found. Still others said that Charley McComas had lived and grown to manhood among the bronco Apaches, and that he eventually became an important leader of his own band. This account was lent some credence over the years when generally reliable witnesses on both sides of the border reported sightings or encounters with a band of Apache raiders led by a tall, fair-haired white man with a nearly waist-length beard.

  In all other respects this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, dates, and geographical descriptions are all either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. At the same time, while a genuine effort was made to accurately interpret and portray the history and culture of the Apache people here represented, these, too, are rendered entirely as fiction and are not intended as either anthropological or historical fact. It is, finally, impossible for a “White Eyes” to fully comprehend, let alone represent, the Native American experience and life-way. For the presumptuousness of that effort, and all its inherent shortcomings and failures, the author offers his sincerest apologies to the Apache people.

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  IN RESEARCHING AND WRITING THIS novel, the author gratefully acknowledges valuable insights and information gained from the following works:

  Eve Ball. In the Days of Victoria (1970).

  ———. An Apache Odyssey: Indeh (1980).

  Keith H. Basso. Western Apache Language and Culture: Essays in Linguistic Anthropology (1990).

  ———. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (1996).

  John G. Bourke. An Apache Campaign (1886).

  ———. On the Border with Crook (1891).

  ———. Apache Medicine Men (1892).

  Ruth McDonald Boyer and Narcissus Duffy Gayton. Apache Mothers and Daughters (1992).

  Evelyn Breuninger, Elbys Hugar, and Ellen Ann Lathan. Mescalero Apache Dictionary (1982).

  Terry A. Cooney. Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (1995).

  Angie Debo. Geronimo (1976).

  J. Frank Dobie. The Ben Lilly Legend (1950).

  Grenville Goodwin. Western Apache Raiding and Warfare (1971).

  ———. Among the Western Apaches: Letters from the Field (1973).

  Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (1997).

  James L. Haley. Apaches: A History and Cultural Portrait (1981).

  Nelle Spilsbury Hatch. Colonia Juarez (1954).

  Shelley Bowen Hatfield. Chasing Shadows: Apaches and Yaquis Along the United States-Mexico Border, 1876–1911 (1998).

  George Hilliard. A Hundred Years of Horse Tracks: The Story of the Gray Ranch (1996).

  Herman Lehmann. Nine Years Among the Indians 1870–1879 (1927).

  Carl Lumholtz. Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years’ Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre; in the Tierra Caliente of Tepic and Jalisco; and Among the Tarascos of Michoacan, vol. I–II (1902).

  Douglas V. Meed. They Never Surrendered: Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madres, 1890–1935 (1993).

  Morris Edward Opler. An Apache Life-Way: The Economic, Social, & Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians (1941).

  ———. Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians (1942).

  Henry Bamford Parkes. A History of Mexico (1960).

  Marc Simmons. Massacre on the Lordsburg Road: A Tragedy of the Apache Wars (1997).

  Bernard Sternsher. Hitting Home: The Great Depression in Town and Country (1970).

  H. Henrietta Stockel. Women of the Apache Nation: Voices of Truth (1991).

  Edward Weston. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. I. Mexico (1961).

  Donald E. Worchester. The Apaches: Eagles of the Southwest (1979).

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  The title of the novel is The Wild Girl, and yet much of the novel is narrated from the perspective of Ned Giles. Which character did you respond to more? Why?

  Do you consider Billy Flowers a moral person? What were his varying attitudes toward whites, Mexicans, Native Americans, and animals?

  What do you think of the portrayals of women in the novel? Did you find the wild girl and Margaret to be believable? Did you think the author accurately imagined the way women in these situations might think and feel?

  The novel takes place during the Depression, and Ned is very conscious of class. What are his attitudes toward the privileged, and how justified do you think his attitudes are?

  Wealthy and homosexual, Tolley is at once privileged and an outcast in society. Which do you think affects his life in a greater way—his wealth or his sexuality? Did you find his character’s flamboyance believable from a historical perspective?

  Did anything surprise you about the history of the time period depicted by Jim Fergus?

  Did anything surprise you about the depiction of the Apaches or their relationship with the Mexicans? Did you feel that the author was making any judgments in his depiction of the Apaches, Mexicans, and whites?

  How did you feel in reading the story about the murder of Charlie McComas’s parents and Charlie’s kidnapping? Did it surprise you that a boy would embrace the people who murdered his parents?

  Consider the choices made by Goso over the course of his life. Do you understand those choices? Did you find him sympathetic?

  In much of twentieth-century filmmaking and writing, continuing to the present, Native American cultures have been represented in black-and-white terms. Do you think Jim Fergus’s depictions of the wild Apaches, Mexicans, whites, and their interactions differ from other depictions?

  Do you think that the Apaches and the whites and the Mexicans could have coexisted peacefully, or was a violent outcome inevitable?

  What did you think of the love story between Ned and the wild girl? Did his choice to go back to the white world surprise you? Do you think he should have made a different choice?

  Consider the course of Ned’s life
after his experiences with the Apaches. Why do you think his life took the turn it did? Is it due to what happened to him and his relationship with the wild girl, or does it stem more from the losses he experienced prior to meeting the wild girl?

  How does Ned use photography to express himself? What do you think this says about how artists deal with emotion and human suffering?

  In what ways is The Wild Girl similar to the author’s first novel, One Thousand White Women? In what ways is it different? Which did you like best, and why?

  A CONVERSATION WITH JIM FERGUS, AUTHOR OF THE WILD GIRL

  Q: You were a nonfiction writer for most of your career—primarily about hunting and fishing. What inspired you to write fiction?

  A: To clarify the first part of that question: I got sort of typecast as a “hook & bullet” writer later in my journalism career, but I actually started out doing general-interest journalism—essays, literary and celebrity profiles, interviews, environmental writing, etc. From the very beginning, from the time I was about twelve years old, I had always intended to become a novelist. All my role models were fiction writers, and after I got out of college I wrote a bunch of short stories and shipped them off to the magazines, certain that I was going to get discovered. And I wrote an unpublished (and unpublishable) novel. It did not take long for me to figure out that I wasn’t going to be able to make a living doing this, and so I became a teaching tennis pro, which was the only other thing I knew how to do. I worked in that profession for a full decade, during which time I wrote yet another unpublishable novel. Finally at age thirty, I had put together a little stake, about $8,000 dollars, which in those days still seemed like a lot of money. I retired from tennis and started freelance writing full-time. Of course, the Catch-22 of that business is that in order to make even a modest living at it you have to work all the time; when you’re not working on an assignment you’re trying to drum up new assignments. It’s a very hand-to-mouth existence, not unlike being an itinerant farm laborer, and simply did not allow me any free time for fiction writing. So that old childhood dream was relegated very much to the back burner. Suddenly I found myself in my mid-forties, and it occurred to me that I wasn’t any closer to being a novelist than I had been in my twenties. I came upon the idea for 1000WW while researching what I thought was going to be a nonfiction book about the Northern Cheyenne Indians. An old friend of mine who had some money loaned me enough to take a year away from journalism and write the novel.