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An unidentified Apache woman, late 19th century |
In the mid-1860's, Sonoran merceneries raided a small Apache
town near the US-Mexican border, near what are now the cities of Esqueda,
Mexico and neighboring Douglas, Arizona.
After slaughtering the captured males, they force-marched many of the
surviving women southwest to the Gulf of California. Many of the women died en
route, and the rest were sold into slavery and put to work in the fields of a
local hacienda.
Several of the Apache women, including a middle-aged
grandmother from the Eastern Chiracahua nation named Dilchthe, hatched a plan
to escape and return to their tribe.
They surreptitiously gathered some supplies, and successfully broke away
from the patron and, remembering the route they took in, fled east to the Gulf. Once their disappearance was discovered, the
hacienda owners dispatched vaqueros to track them down, but the group of women
evaded them. When they reached the gulf,
they travelled north along its shore. After the food they brought with them ran out,
they subsisted by eating leaves and bugs.
The group of women travelled for nearly 300 miles up the
coast, until they reached the mouth of the Colorado River. None of the women could swim, so they had no
direct way of crossing the great river until Dilchthe made friends with an old
Mexican woman who lived nearby. The
woman told the party of a shallow spot in the river far to the north, where the
confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers, near present-day Yuma, at the
southern tip of the California-Arizona border.
Dilchthe led the group up there and herself waded out into the Colorado
River. Discovering it was safe to walk
across, she motioned the others to join her, and they continued east. They were halfway home.
They followed the Gila River toward Apache land. Despite the scorching heat in the Yuma Valley,
Dilchthe prevented them from moving to the cooler, higher land because of enemy
tribes. After three days of following
the Gila, the women were ambushed by a party of Yuma warriors, who were no
friends of the Apache; Dilchthe and one other Apache woman escaped by hiding in
some brush, but the Yuma captured one other woman, and killed the rest. Dilchthe and her companion were the last two
remaining, and they continued their walk, past what is now Phoenix and Tucson.
Finally, they could not go any further. Suffering from exhaustion, hunger, and
thirst, they were reaching the limits of their endurance; for their last
hundred miles they had only been able to move at a slow walk. Finally, one misty morning, they collapsed on
the side of a mountain near what is now the city of Safford. When the sky cleared, Dilchthe could see a
heart-shaped mountain in the distance.
Being an Apache, she knew the mountains of the desert southwest very
well, and she recognized that one at once.
She built a smoky fire as a signal beacon, and she and her companion
laid down on the earth, too tired to move.
In a moment of sheer coincidence, the Apache that
investigated, and found the two women lying on the rocky soil, was Dilchthe's
own son-in-law. In those days, it was
customary for a man and his mother-in-law to avoid physical contact, but they
both ignored that custom and embraced heartily.
After walking for more than a thousand miles through harsh desert
terrain, with no map or weapons and almost no food, these two women made it
back from a life of slavery to their home tribe. Dilchthe was received back into her tribe as
a returning hero.
Links and Sources:
Aldama, Arturo J., Elisa Facio, Daryl Maeda, and Reiland
Rabaka, Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado, O'Reilly
Media Inc., 2011.
Kan, Sergei, Pauline Turner Strong, and Raymond Fogelson,
New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and
Representations, University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Wright, Mike, What They Didn't Teach You About the Wild
West, Presidio Books, 2000.
Who are/were the Sonorans? And who hired the mercs? Or, were they just bored, with guns, and looking to make some money by selling slaves?
ReplyDeleteHey there! They're from the Sonoran desert, in southern California and Arizona, and northern Mexico. You guessed pretty much right - the hacienda owners were looking for cheap labor and would send these goons around to go on slaving runs. It was a big income source for them. Thanks for reading!
ReplyDeleteI love this story, especially how emotional her return was with the embrace that broke customs. Nice write up.
ReplyDelete