This volume continues to mine the rich vein of oral history of certain Chiricahua Apache families that were forcibly relocated to Florida, Alabama, and Indian Territory before being allowed to settle on the Mescalero Indian Reservation in New Mexico. Coauthor Narcissus Duffy Gayton is the title’s fourth-generation daughter. Her autobiography therefore might inspire more confidence than those of the three mother-daughters who preceded her. Born in 1924, before her great-grandmother died, Narcissus attended boarding school in Mescalero, studied nursing at Muskogee, met a Ponca Indian whom she married, and began working in the Mescalero hospital in 1950. In 1957 she became the first woman elected to the reservation’s governing council. She collaborated on this book after retiring.
In terms of Hispanic American history, the woman of greatest interest is first-generation Dilth-cleyhen, a daughter of the famed leader Victorio. She was born about 1848 just west of the Río Grande, in the Apachería near what the same year became the international boundary between Mexico and the United States. Unfortunately, her biography is the weakest in the book. It is novelized with imagined conversations of doubtful details and marred by frequent temporal anomalies. For example, U.S. Army Lieutenant G. Bascom’s 1861 command at Apache Pass is racially integrated too soon. They were black men, buffalo soldiers. Such passages betray imperfect supplementation of Chiricahua oral history by the newcomers’ documentary history.
Second-generation Beshád-e was born in 1870. As a teenager, she preferred living at Ojo Caliente to the many other places she visited. From 1886 to 1913, she and her mother experienced internment in Florida, Alabama, and Ft. Sill, where she lived with Kiowa and Comanche, speaking English. After moving to Mescalero, she and her husband participated in self-styled prophet Silas John’s Four Cross cult. Her vision failed, and she and her husband died in a 1941 automobile accident. Third-generation Christine Louise Kozine was born at Ft. Sill in 1904 and also moved to Mescalero in 1913. She attended Indian boarding schools, returning home in 1922. Marrying a widower, she worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs agency. Christine died young in 1931, apparently of tuberculosis.
These biographies throw light on many aspects of post-1848 Apache life: women’s roles, high mortality rates, unstable nuclear families, child rearing as a lineage activity, intertribal contacts and intermarriages, integration into the cash economy, and the frustrations of reservation governance. Yet this is hardly an indispensable book.
