D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
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Luis Pérez continues a lonely quest to erect a monument to the Apache warriors who once fiercely resisted the invasion of their homeland.
Story and photos by Richard Mahler
If Luis Pérez had his way, Silver City would proudly erect a bronze monument to the four Apache warriors — Geronimo, Mangas, Victorio and Cochise — who once terrorized southwestern New Mexico's early residents and visitors.
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Amateur historian Luis Pérez holds
a photo of Ramona, a 19th-century Apache leader. |
"I first proposed the idea back in 1982," recalls Pérez, a retired Silver City businessman, photojournalist and public-relations executive. "I got about as much cooperation as if I'd said I wanted to import the bubonic plague."
Pérez is an amateur historian who believes local Mimbreo, Bedonkohe and Chiricahua Apaches, most of whom were forcibly relocated to Arizona in the 1870s, deserve some form of public recognition. Mostly remembered locally for their ferocity, these peoples had a rich culture and ancient traditions of their own. Other than published materials, a few museum artifacts and a Catron County plaque acknowledging Geronimo's supposed birthplace, there is little to indicate that the immediate predecessors of Anglo miners and Mexican settlers ever lived here.
"When I moved here in 1980," Pérez tells me, "I found that there was almost no local written or spoken history about the Apaches. I couldn't understand it. There even seemed to be some resentment around the subject."
Pérez, then the newly hired publicity officer for Western New Mexico University, "tried and tried" to get support for a bronze monument bearing the likenesses of the Apache's most prominent chiefs and warriors. (Two died in battle, the others in captivity.) "I had a meeting at the Red Barn restaurant ," the historian remembers, "to which I invited professors and people like that." Instead of enthusiasm, his proposal was met with indifference or worse. Bad feelings lingered, it seemed, from the "Apache wars" that lingered between white newcomers and local tribes well into the 1880s.
"But that was over a century ago," I interject, as Pérez and I sip coffee in the comfortable, tree-shaded home he shares with his wife on a Silver City cul-de-sac. My host shrugs his shoulders and raises his palms in the international gesture of frustration.
"So what?" he says. "How about the Civil War? That ended more than 150 years ago and there's still resentment about [its outcome] today."
For the youthful-looking Pérez, who was born in Chihuahua City, Mexico, but spent most of his life in El Paso, the unsuccessful campaign to celebrate an important yet unsung piece of New Mexican heritage sent him on a quest that has spanned nearly three decades and taken him hundreds of miles throughout the area's backcountry. By dint of library work, personal interviews and field research, Pérez has become a self-taught authority on the several centuries of Apache dominance hereabouts. (Scholars place their arrival from the north in New Mexico between 1200 and 1500 AD.) In schooling himself about our indigenous people, he has come to better appreciate their culture — and the negative feelings toward them still harbored in our community.
"[Anglo and Hispanic settlers] were always being raided and having fights with the Apache," Pérez allows. "There was an awful lot of fighting and killing."
Several prominent Silver City residents, including town co-founder John Bullard and respected judge Hamilton McComas and his family, met untimely deaths in attacks not far from town. Prospectors were frequent victims and it was considered unsafe to travel alone more than a mile outside the city limits.
But Pérez voices sympathy toward the Apaches, who showed great courage and ingenuity in taking on interlopers. They were here first, after all, and angry about being deported from their homeland. Hatred of Apaches appeared universal in those days among Americans, Mexicans and even some other area tribes. Despite promises to establish Apache reservations in the Mimbres Valley and at Mangas Springs (see "Hiking Apacheria," August and October 2008), the US government's main goal was to eliminate or remove the Apache entirely.
"In our area there is still, in 2008, resentment and resistance against Indians," concedes one knowledgeable and long-time Silver City resident, who asks to remain anonymous. "It dates back to the 19th century. People won't talk about these feelings openly but they are definitely there. People were killed and terrible things happened on both sides. Nobody wants to discuss it."
The most famous of homegrown warriors was Geronimo. "There is still a lot of controversy about where he was born," says Pérez, who has searched for a physical location. "Some believe he came from north of Clifton, Ariz. Others claim the area around the Gila Cliff Dwellings. Geronimo himself said he was born [in 1829] along the middle fork of the Gila. I don't think we'll ever know, but it's not that important, anyway."
The legendary Geronimo led the last band of native fighters to formally surrender to US authorities, in Arizona during May 1886. That ended organized warfare by Native Americans against European-descended people for the first time in nearly 400 years. But why were the Apaches able to hold out for so long?
One reason is our region's often rugged and largely empty terrain. Indigenous people knew the essential trails and reliable water sources. They could live off wild game and plants. They had scouted ideal ambush points along travel routes and stolen or purchased fine horses and firearms. As a result, they were some of the best guerrilla fighters North America has ever known.
"For the last few months," says Pérez, "I've been researching and writing about Emmet Mills" — killed by the Apache during a famous 1861 attack in Cooke's Canyon, about 30 miles southeast of Silver City (see "Tugging on Red Sleeve," August 2008). Mills was among seven Americans leading a stagecoach along the San Antonio-to-San Diego line. The men were set upon by an estimated 100 to 300 attackers yet managed to hold out for three days before all seven whites were killed. Two years later the US Army established a "buffalo soldier" garrison near the canyon in an effort to protect travelers, mail and freight.
Pérez has visited the relevant sites and recently did a flyover in a small airplane. He shows me pictures of a place so desolate it might be on the moon.
"But y'know," says Pérez, "it was like a highway through [the Cooke Range] before the railroad" provided a safer route via Deming beginning in 1881. Mining persisted in these mountains, however, as was the case throughout southwestern New Mexico. "Eventually the [newcomers] just ran the Apaches out of their own country." But not without decades of hostility.
Situated near the foot of 8,408-foot Cooke's Peak, a Luna County landmark that can be seen for a hundred miles, Fort Cummings is a place that — both literally and figuratively — is fading away. Its 12-foot-high adobe walls have largely melted into the earth. The fort was established in 1863 near a small spring used by the Butterfield Overland stage line. African-American soldiers stationed here and at Fort Bayard protected mail carriers, freight wagons and emigrant trains along a stretch of ground between Mesilla and Tucson that was long considered a "gauntlet of death." Many travelers remarked on the primitive graves and grisly skeletons they saw along the trail. Troops from Cummings were escorts through a narrow four-mile defile into open country where ambushes were less likely. Yet even the fort sometimes came under attack, though more common nuisances were rattlesnakes, scorpions, flash floods and scorching sun.
Nearby are the ruins of an old settlement called Cooke's, where lead and silver were mined, as well as the steep-sided peak, known to the Apache as "the proud mountain that sits alone" and to the Spanish as Picacho de Mimbres.
The scourge of every soldier at Fort Cummings was Victorio, whose wily hit-and-run strategy frustrated the Americans through the 1870s. According to one writer, Victorio melted into the landscape, "relying on stealth and surprise and the brave heart of those fighting for their homes and families." By contrast, most of the troops fighting the Apache were ex-slaves recruited out of the South following the Civil War. For them, New Mexico was a harsh and unfamiliar foreign land. At one point every soldier in the territory was assigned to search for Victorio, but it was the Mexican army that finally killed him south of the border.
Pérez's interest in Emmet Mills is, in part, linked to the 51 years the historian spent living and working in El Paso. The Mills family is prominent there, as evidenced by a statue, building and street commemorating the clan's contributions to the city. Pérez learned of them while a reporter for El Paso newspapers. Later, he and a partner launched a tourism publication that served the Southwest for 15 years, prompting the bi-national publisher to explore the area thoroughly.
"I got to know the Apaches pretty well," Pérez recalls. "I visited all of their reservations and I knew about them from my travels in Mexico, too. That's when I first started writing about the Apache wars."
Pérez allows that he has "always been interested [in the border states] and in high school I was a history ace who knew all the answers. . . . I had a knack for the subject and read a lot, in Spanish as well as English."
One influence was certainly Pérez's own family, which played a significant role in turn-of-the-20th-century Chihuahua, the sprawling Mexican state that was the initial destination for New Mexico's silver and copper. Pérez's father was a politically involved businessman from an important mining district near the Sierra Madre. He served as a senator in Mexico's congress and once was grandmaster of the country's Masonic Lodge. Because of their friendships with presidents, generals and other key players who came out on the losing side in the Mexican Revolution, family members were forced to escape to El Paso in 1929. Luis Pérez's father eventually opened a business college in Jurez and commuted to work across the Ro Grande bridge.
"My dad could not work for a salary in the States," Pérez explains. "We were political exiles — thrown out of Mexico."
Toward the end of our visit, Pérez shows me some treasures handed down over the generations. There is an ancient clay pot from the Tarahumara region, a .44-caliber 1856 revolver and a collection of dusty Spanish-language books. Downstairs, Pérez shows off a model airplane — he is an aficionado of military aircraft — and faded photos of Apache leaders. He has a roomful of research materials, enough for scores of articles on historical topics.
By now I am convinced that this man's own life story would make an interesting book. But this is not in the works.
"Why would I want to write about the Mexican Revolution?" he laments. "It has been done to death. I wish people would quit writing about it." This from someone fit and vibrant at 81, who remains a living link to one of the most important epochs in regional history. Pérez allows as much at one point in our conversation.
"My grandmother was 15," he says, "when she remembered seeing the remnants of Victorio's band being brought through the streets of Chihuahua City. My grandfather used to run mule trains hauling silver; he talked about the Apache all the time. . . . My grandparents had three old stagecoaches on their ranch we used to play on as kids."
Pérez points out that many people from his family's homeland in Chihuahua, a major mining district, relocated north to Silver City during the town's early years. A number settled in the barrio of Chihuahua Hill, while others established ranches in the Mimbres Valley. Still more moved north during the Mexican Revolution, from 1910 through 1928, when violence was rampant in the state of Chihuahua. Reaching back farther still, Pérez reminds me that the first formal copper mine at Santa Rita was established in the early 1800s by an army colonel who hailed from northern Mexico.
"When the Mexican government agreed to the Gadsden Purchase," a 1854 treaty whereby Mexico sold part of southern Arizona and New Mexico to the US, "some families stayed and became US citizens while others went to (old) Mexico and settled in many places down there," he says. Then, as now, it appears the border was not considered an obstacle.
Neither was it a barrier for the Apaches, who moved with ease across political boundaries and managed to live in a traditional manner in the Sierra Madre as recently as the 1930s. Some of their patrimony is preserved in books and articles, as well as on the existing reservations of the Southwest. But the long-standing Apache presence is largely invisible in southwestern New Mexico, something Pérez would still like to see changed. He is not alone.
"Luis has done a great job in his research," says Dale Giese, a retired WNMU history professor who has studied the Apache. "I am for the monument he proposes."
But such sentiments are few and far between. Luis Pérez has not abandoned the idea, but shakes his head when asked about the likelihood that any sort of public memorial to the land's past inhabitants will be erected. "A lot of people suffered here from the Apache raids," he muses. "But you could live here for years and never hear about them. I'll never understand why this is so."
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is the author of 11 books, including The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat, to be published by Yale University Press in 2009. His byline has appeared in publications including New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fean, Los Angeles Times and Arizona Highways, and on columns for the Albuquerque Journal and Crosswinds. He lives in Silver City.