The Wild Girl (14 page)

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, rolling, 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.

Behind the volunteers came the staff, about thirty people altogether, which included muleteers, cowboys, guides, cooks and sundry attendants, riding horses, mules, and donkeys. Harold Browning, the British desk clerk from the Gadsden Hotel, has been pressed into service as Tolley’s valet. Clearly not much of an equestrian, Mr. Browning bounced uncomfortably down the street on a little white burro, his feet nearly grazing the ground.

The Apache scouts, Joseph and Albert Valor, brought up the rear, mounted on mules. They sported red bandannas around their heads, the traditional accessory of the scout, worn in the old days to identify them from the hostile Indians they were chasing. The crowd had a curious reaction to the appearance of the scouts; there were scattered catcalls and boos as they passed, expressions of the deep antipathy that many in the Southwest still feel toward the Apaches. Joseph ignored them, staring straight ahead, expressionless, but Albert glared menacingly back at the spectators. He looked up at me on the bandstand, pulled a rifle from his scabbard, and raised it overhead, shaking it and uttering a fierce Indian war cry, which actually brought a collective expression of alarm from the crowd. Then he laughed.

The grand send-off from Douglas was largely ceremonial. After the parade, everyone dismounted and we were loaded into buses and driven into Mexico, while the stock, equipment, and provisions were trucked across the border. It took the better part of the day for the expedition to clear Mexican customs. To overcome the obvious political problem of an armed force of Americans entering their country, the president of Mexico, Ortiz Rubio, issued special hunting permits to each member of the expedition, allowing volunteers to carry sporting arms only into the country—shotguns and deer rifles.

A comfortable camp was set up in advance in the plains just outside Agua Prieta, and after our arrival here, the Mexicans put on an enormous dinner feast under a huge tent. Tables were laden with all manner of foodstuffs, and white-jacketed waiters served cocktails, while a mariachi band played and the volunteers danced by the light of kerosene torches with the girls who had been bused out from town along with other dignitaries.