Apache Ransom

by Clay Fisher

  There was the matter of returning, of all things, the twin hinny mules. These little brutes had wandered in off the roughlands after the Apache departure, and Allison, having borrowed them from Bustamante, suggested they be returned with the rest of the missing items to our alcalde.

  Bustamante was beside himself to see his mulitas, which he naturally assumed to have been taken by the Apaches. He insisted that the same criminals had relieved him of the Walker Colt and the two butcher knives of the good Señora Bustamante. What the damnable indios had spirited away, the mayor proclaimed, the tall Tejano had retrieved, a miracle surely.

  Indeed, nothing would do but that the Texas pistolero be given as good as he had brought back.

  For the return of Tin Can and Mean Trick, would the señor so kindly accept a very nice entero which the alcalde had found running loose after the ranger ambush by Juh? The animal came with a good Texas saddle, bridle, rifle, scabbard, todo.

  Well, what might an honest Texas horse thief do in such a case? Insult the mayor of Casas Grandes? Never. Graciously, Allison accepted back his own stolen horse and, after some toasting in the aromatic cantina of Elfugio Ruiz, the tall man and the short humpbacked priest went again up the rise to the sunset silences of my ruined mission.

  Here we shook hands for the final time.

  Allison told me that he believed he would not go home to San Saba immediately but would look around a bit for some people here in Chihuahua to whom he felt an accounting might still be owed.

  “There’s always somebody left over,” he said. “This time it’s Santiago Kifer.”

  I shivered at the memory of the name but nodded my understanding of his need to make the grim search.

  “Ride a long life, Tejano,” I said, and I stepped back.

  Allison swung up on the restless stallion.

  “Luck, Padre,” was all he said.

  But when he and the horse topped South Ridge below Mission of the Virgin, I saw him pause and take something from inside his flat-crowned Stetson. There was enough sun remaining to catch and glitter on the torn pieces of paper fluttering from his hand.

  Was it the ransom note?

  I never knew.

  He rode on, and I could hear his clear, sweet whistling of The Yellow Rose of Texas long after the ridge hid him and the stolen El Paso stallion.

  Epilogue

  The preceding history is not a verbatim transcript of the original Narrative of Father Nunez. Rather, it is a selection from that controversial document of material pertinent to the carrying off, from outside El Paso, Texas, circa 1868–73, of young Henry Garnet Buckles III, by certain Chiricahua Apache Indians under Chief Juh. Some detail is thus omitted which ought to have been included. The epilogue attempts to rectify these oversights in that portion of the narrative relating to Nunez’s adventures among the savage Nednhi.

  The confusion of Apache fortresses in the Mexican Sierra Madre: Pa-gotzin-kay and Juh’s Stronghold. Pa-gotzin-kay, said by some accounts to be the site of the rescue of young Buckles, is five days south of Casas Grandes and was not located by white men until the later years of Crook’s campaign against Geronimo. Juh’s retreat was much nearer Casas Grandes, although it lay in Sonora State, and was generally known throughout the monte, due to Juh’s habitual travels to the Chihuahuan settlement to trade for whiskey. It is agreed in Chihuahua that the Buckles boy was taken to Juh’s Stronghold, “in the Blue Mountains, just west of Casas Grandes two days by a good mule.”

  Matter of Mexican casualties at Casas Grandes. The Nunez account says the bodies of the federal dead were given mass burial in Arroyo Arido, “to the south of the old wellhead a distance of four hundred varas.” Father Nunez administered the rites upon his return from Juh’s Stronghold.

  The Texas Rangers scalped at Mission Guadalupe: American witnesses. Nunez claims that “a coroner’s committee” of noncommissioned officers of the United States scout force from El Paso, and citizens from the invading Texas posse of Governor Henry Buckles, did in fact inspect and certify the ranger dead. There is no confirmatory record, either in ranger or United States Army files.

  The cruz of Father Nunez. The Franciscan Order is said to have the cross that Father Nunez placed above the Texas casualties in his mission garden. However, the order has no comment on any of the Nunez claims, including the very existence of a mission of Saint Francis at Casas Grandes. Like the rangers and the army, the Church does not dignify such fabulas del monte.

  The related matter of how Mision de la Virgen de Guadalupe, at Casas Grandes, disappeared. It is the severest critique of the Narrative of Father Nunez that his church is not remembered in Chihuahua, and that the so-called vestry stones beneath which his document lay buried until 1933 were in fact the masonry floor of an 1885 milking establo for the large goat herd of the Rancho Guadalupe, outside the town. Angry defenders of the folklore say there never was a Rancho Guadalupe and no “large goat herd or lecheria” out there on the lonely rise where Fr. Alvar Nunez “waited for fierce Juh.” Their best story is that the shelling of Robert Flicker’s field artillery piece leveled the church, the pastorate, bell tower, the very walls of the garden and cemetery, everything. Through the century that followed, the people of Casas Grandes “used up the rubble” and then, late in the century, the great flood of 1889 undercut the knoll, caved in the site, carried all remaining traces of the ruin away down Arroyo Arido, “excepting the vestry stones themselves, which God sheltered from the storm, knowing the treasure they covered.”

  Why the 1866 Winchester “Yellow Boy” rifles were “new” to the Nednhi Chiricahua. Little understood among aficionados of western history and folklore, is the fact that it was always some years, often a lot of years, before a new design of weapon reached the frontier in numbers. Hence, although the Nunez narrative is dated considerably later than 1866, it is no western wonder at all that such witnesses as Father Nunez and the wild Nednhi were “astounded at the gleaming brass-framed beauty” of the first true Winchester.

  The Ruiz Museum of Mexican History. In his cantina, proud owner Elfugio Ruiz for many years maintained a display of memorabilia of the Nunez legend. Among his wares of value were the antiquated Walker Colt, his wife’s two butcher knives, the braided horsehair riata, the “one and only” genuine “cruz de Padre Nunez” and even “Juh’s jug,” the very one he carried on the day when, drunk, he fell in the Casas Grandes River and was drowned. Oue tall! It must be confessed that both Mayor Bustamante and tavern keeper Ruiz were known to get at the mescal a bit early in the afternoon. Yet who really knows? Juh did fall in the river and drown. And an emptied jug was found bobbing in the current downstream. Enjuh.

  The contradictions of Kaytennae. Like Juh, Kaytennae became a very well-known person in later years. His best biographers insist he was never in the United States until his capture with Geronimo in 1883. This view would rule out his presence with the war party that took young Buckles on the El Paso stage road. But then those same authorities on the Apache—all white men naturally—spell Kaytennae’s name six different ways and disagree on his age ten years in two directions and, well, that is only the beginning of the discussion.

  Clarification: the four bands of the Chiricahua Apache. There has always been and yet remains a controversy in this matter. White historians tend to consider the four hostile bands, Nednhi, Bedonkohe, Warm Springs, and True Chiricahua as, in fact, all Chiricahuan peoples. Some Indians differ. James Kaywaykla, Warm Springs Apache narrator of Eve Ball’s fascinating In the Day of Victorio, writes: “I say peoples, although the White Eyes designated the members of all four different Apache bands as Chiricahua. This was an error, for only the tribes of Cochise and Chihuahua were true Chiricahua … Juh was chief of the Nednhi Apaches, whose stronghold was in the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Geronimo was leader, but not chief of the Bedonkohes whose territory was around the headwaters of the Gila. Though closely associated, we were distinct groups.”<
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  Addendum Kaytennae: his origins. Good and careful white writers on the Chiricahua agree that Kaytennae was a Warm Springs Apache, with no stated record of having lived with Juh and the Nednhi. Given the contentions on the subject, however, as plainly demonstrated above, Father Nunez’s claim for Kaytennae’s youth being spent among the people of Juh would not appear indefensible. The Apache were a nomad, intermarried people. Blurrings of tribal origins are inevitable.

  Later days of Little Buck: what happened to Henry Garnet Buckles III. There is no useful line on the Texas boy. Some say he was wild to the end of his days, which were brief. Some contend he became the gunfighter he thought Ben Allison was. In no event did “Little Buck” contribute to a better society, except that he changed his name to follow the owlhoot trail.

  The Spencer seven-shooters: unknown guns that could have won the West. Perhaps this ought to read “that should have won the West.” For it is one of the great mysteries of frontier firearms history that Christopher Spencer’s great 50-caliber carbine did not go the famous way of the celebrated Winchester. Suffice to say that if Robert Flicker could have seized the weapon in numbers for the Apache, hell would have been spelled Spencer, in Apacheria.

  The strange escape of R. E. L. Flicker. No body was ever found for the Negro deserter in Father Nunez’s church. The main roof caved the day following the shelling and it was many weeks before the wreckage was cleared in the search for the by-then notorious black soldier. Father Nunez himself is subtle, writing in the Narrativa that, “Brave Flicker, one would pray to imagine, yet rides out there in that freedom he did not find with his own people. And who is to say, also, that he did not return to find sweet Huera, his Apache love, and that the twain even now ride the deep Sierra at peace and in happiness, man and woman together?” Knowing Padre Nunez, one may be forgiven that, “sweet Huera” aside, the suspicion lingers that “brave Flicker” was “confessed” right on out the Arroyo Arido tunnel, come nightfall and the necessary darkness.

  Santiago Kifer and the scalp hunters. There are two elements with regard to Kifer. First, in defending the fact that no corpses were recovered at Old Campground to match the two scalpers he reported slain by Kifer, Nunez says, “It is to be noted that I did not see them killed, but only heard their murders. Perhaps I was wrong.” Quita! As for the five Apache bodies said to have been given Nednhi burial at Old Campground, no grave was discovered to explain the absence of those corpses either. But Nunez points out here that nearby the campsite the earth is “riven by the Chiricahua crevice, a splitting of the rock without known bottom,” implying of course that Juh simply dropped his dead into this “holy vault.”

  Addition, S. Kifer and his men. In his Narrativa, Nunez appends a grim footnote to the Kifer gang, saying that, “Some days after Allison rode away, a Warm Springs or possibly a Bedonkohe Apache traveling South Way down to Pa-gotzin-kay was stopped by a white man coming up from the south. He had a greasy sack which he gave the Indian, asking only that the traveler see that the sack reached Juh and the Nednhi. The sack was delivered and, according to Jee-le Ruiz, the wife of Elfugio, it contained five heads, all of White Eyes. But the sixth head, that of Santiago Kifer, was not among them and was never found.” The implication here is inescapable. But of that element Father Nunez writes, “I do not say and will never believe that the Tejano filled the terrible container.” Pues, quien sabe? Perhaps so. Others of the keepers of the Ben Allison historia will not be so certain or so charitable.

  Identification and fate of the “rîfled cannon” of Robert Flicker. From Nunez’s sketchy description in the narrative, this was either the M1857 Napoleon 12-pounder, or the M1861 Rodman 9½-pounder, called the “Rodman rifle.” Since it was but two-thirds the weight of the bigger Napoleon, the Rodman would seem to have been the likelier candidate for Flicker’s wild dash up into the Casas Grandes roughlands. If so, the weapon was a 3-incher with a 69-inch tube and weighing but 820 pounds. Its normal rate of fire was two aimed shots per minute, four with canister. This would match the account of the brevity of Flicker’s shelling of the mission—no over ten minutes. The gun was accurate to 1830 yards. Flicker’s range was just over 1000 yards, hence the devastating results. Until the turn of the century, a wheeled carriage was displayed in the plaza in front of La Cantina Ruiz, which would have fitted the M1861 Rodman. But the cannon proper had long since been melted down for its barrel’s iron, and in later years the carriage was requisitioned by General Francisco Villa to haul ammunition and aguardiente for the revolution. When Ruiz died and the cantina burned down the following year, it was not even remembered where the wheels of “Flicker’s cannon” had rested.

  The Yellow Rose of Texas: its fair words. The lyrics Father Nunez indicates for this old Texas ballad are imprecise. Perhaps it would be more accurate to guess that the Little Buck Buckles variation on the original theme was at fault. The record, at least, is clear.

  She’s the sweetest rose of color

  this fellow ever knew,

  Her eyes are bright as diamonds,

  they sparkle like the dew;

  You may talk about your Dearest May

  and sing of Rosa Lee,

  But the Yellow Rose of Texas

  beats the belles of Tennessee.

  Casas Grandans old enough to have heard it from fathers who were there insist that Chief Juh frequently performed the number in the plaza on his whiskey trips down from the Sierra, and that he always employed Father Nunez’s bowdlerized lyrics; a poetry of some Apachean justice, after all. Enjuh, Jefe!

  Of the true end of Father Alvar Nunez. It is plain in the inscription of the narrative that Nunez expected Juh and the Nednhi to return for an accounting with him. The priest seems certain of this fate. Yet, as the full manuscript ends, the Apache have not appeared. Did they ever do so? One is permitted to hope, with the same certainty that Blackrobe Jorobado held for Robert Flicker’s escape, that, somewhere in all of wide Chihuahua, the lively flesh of Fr. P. Alvar Nunez, O. F. M., wandered the monte for many a year in the unquenchable spirit that was his.

  About the Author

  Will Henry was born Henry Wilson Allen in Kansas City, Missouri. His early work was in short subject departments with various Hollywood studios and he was working at MGM when his first Western novel, No Survivors, was published in 1950. Red Blizzard (1951) was Allen’s first Western novel under the Clay Fisher byline and remains one of his best. As Fisher, he tends to focus on a story filled with action that moves rapidly. His many novels published as Will Henry tend to be based deeply in actual historical events. Under either name, as a five-time winner of the Gold Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, Allen has indisputably been recognized as a master in writing gripping historical novels of the West.