D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
Aug 2011
Hiking Apacheria
From Water to Water
Filming Apacheria and discovering truths about the Apache — and yourself.
Story and Photos by Jerry Eagan
Four and a half years ago I received a call from a "limey" from Texas named Brian Huberman. "Are you the Jerry Eagan who writes Hiking Apacheria?" said the English accent over the phone. He explained that he was from Rice University in Houston and that he'd been working for a year or two on a documentary film about Geronimo. Brian had "found" me while Googling "Apaches" and the Burt Lancaster film Ulzana's Raid. I'd written an article ("Searching for Ulzana," June 2006) that, among other things, showed just how historically inaccurate that film was.
 |
Cynthia Wolf unlocks the gate at Skeleton Canyon, site of Geronimo’s final surrender. (Photo by Jerry Eagan) |
In that first conversation Brian and I had, he wondered whether he and his wife, Cynthia Wolfe, could come out to New Mexico for a week and hike Apacheria with me?
As a wary Irishman myself, thinking I'd never had an Englishman in my house, I warned him that I didn't hike many trails, and that the hikes I engaged in were often all-day affairs. Coming in May, they would likely be hot, sweaty and into all kinds of rocky, rugged, steep terrain infested with rattlers, other snakes, spiders, tarantulas, millipedes, centipedes, hantavirus rat and mouse dung, red ants and black ants, as well as every kind of cacti imaginable. Were he and his wife ready for that?
He said they were. Even so, I was surprised when they actually showed up for their first visit to Apacheria; I'd figured they'd back out.
I expected some tender feet and I realized they were inexperienced hikers from my perspective.Brian, who stands about six feet tall, wears a straw cowboy hat with the strap always under his chin to keep it from flying away (my approach: crunch it down damn tight on your head), a beard and a bit of facial pallor. Despite the accent, he's an American citizen by birth who's lived in Texas for 30-plus years. I learned that he was born in Queens, NY, but grew up outside of London, and was inspired early on by the Western films and television series of the 1950s. He graduated from Britain's National Film and Television School, and his documentaries include one on John Wayne's The Alamo as well as on The Return of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (See www.brianhuberman.com.)
While Brian appeared eager and ready to do the hiking, I wasn't so sure about his half-Hispanic, half-Apache wife, Cynthia, who's an artist. She had roots in the Chiricahua Apache, with an ancestor coming most recently from the Mescalero Reservation near Ruidoso. Cynthia's about five-feet tall and has lovely black hair, black as a raven's wings. She has brown eyes and a dusky voice from too many cigarettes.
 |
The Apache weren’t the only area residents drawn to water. Here, Sandhill Cranes gather in the Lower Gila Box. (Photo by Jerry Eagan) |
I had to instruct them not to wear shorts; not to hike in tennis shoes or anything but sturdy boots; to buy some gloves; and to buy some "Recharge" sugar-free electrolyte fluids from the Silver City Food Co-op.
They took it well, and our first outing, as I recall, was across the road from Spirit Canyon Lodge, where they were staying. The destination was Spirit Canyon, with some of the finest local pictographs. I also took them up on top of that canyon area to a place I knew where agave grew. I told them that according to anthropological data assembled by Morris Opler and his grad students, Mountain Spirit Dancers (or Gahe or Gan, as the Apache call them) often liked to come down from the mountains to do that particular dance. In this area, there are several possible locations where Apaches who performed as Gan dancers would prepare for the dances that they held.
At the time, I didn't realize that Spirit Canyon, in the middle of our rainy season, was a superb place to demonstrate how summer rains turn the country lush and beautiful — and how the semi-nomadic Apaches moved from water to water, in order to survive.
Over the next four years, Brian, Cynthia and I have shot hundreds of feet of video in many places throughout Apacheria. Brian and I wanted to visit Canyon de los Embudos, in Chihuahua, Mexico, which was the first place Geronimo sought to talk surrender with General George Crook in March 1886. I went there with Peter Crum in 2007. The "funnels," or "embudos" as they're called, contain a constantly flowing stream, then and now — hence the importance of the place as a site suggested by Geronimo.
In recent years, the obstacle to returning there has been our cowardice at venturing into the Borderlands where violence is paramount. Sent some photos of dismembered Mexican victims of drug violence, Brian and I elected to keep our heads and refrain, reluctantly, from going to that place in the last two years.
We'd decided before Brian and Cynthia came this May that we'd read the surrender talks conducted between General George Crook and the Chiricahua Apaches who'd left the San Carlos Reservation in May 1885. In lieu of the "embudos," we picked a canyon in the Burros that has some powerful intermittent water cascades and floods from time to time, but was without a drop this dry year. I read the surrender dialogue between the Apaches and General George Crook, while Brian videotaped.
As I did so, I found several phrases that I believe help explain the Apaches' lifestyle in those prickly, arid, rocky, nasty places they lived, but that they nonetheless loved beyond description.
In the opening segment of the talks on March, 26, 1886, Geronimo rambled on about how many Americans were "saying bad things about me. [in newspapers]." He was obsessed with his "press image" and tried, unsuccessfully to justify and rationalize his "jumping the Reservation in May 1885." General Crook didn't buy it, and called Geronimo a "liar" and someone whose mouth "talks too many ways."
After that long diatribe, Crook brought Geronimo up as short as a dying candle wick. Crook made it clear that he didn't care about Geronimo's concern that "bad people said bad things against him." Crook asked, several times, "What about all those innocent men, women and children that you killed?" The general added, "If you stay out I'll come after and kill the last one, if it takes me 50 years."
Geronimo never fully apologized for those many deaths, nor did any other Apaches at Canyon de los Embudos apologize. This was due, I think, to the way Apaches saw any killings in war as justifiable and not subject to "amends," and that their women and children had been killed in prodigious numbers by Mexicans and Americans. Much later, after many Apaches had been on reservations for decades, there was some remorse. Some alluded to deep pangs of remorse after they had converted to Christianity.
Also present at the talks was Chihuahua, aka Kla esch, an Apache who alternated at times between extreme violence and a commitment to nonviolence ("Chihuahua's Journey," April). A Bedonkohe or Chokonen Apache, he was likely born west of where Geronimo said he'd been born. That would be west of the Middle Fork of the Gila, somewhere, I suspect, between there and the Blue River of Arizona, south of the Fort Apache Reservation line of today, around or south of Alma, NM.
 |
Los Embudos, Mexico. (Photo by Jerry Eagan) |
In the surrender talks, Chihuahua said the following words to General Crook and his retinue of officers, translators and White Mountain Apache scouts:
"I am glad to see you and have this talk with you. It is as you say, how we are always in danger out here. I hope from this on we may live better with our families and not do any harm to anybody. I am anxious to behave. I think the sun is looking down upon us and the Earth is listening. I am thinking better. It seems to me that I have seen the one who makes the Rain and sends the Winds; or he must have sent you to this place.
"I surrender myself to you because I believe in you and you do not deceive us. You must be our God. I am satisfied with all that you do. You must be the one who makes the green pastures, who sends the rain; who commands the winds. You must be the one who sends the fresh fruits that appear on the trees every year. There are many men in this world who are big chiefs and command many people. But you, I think, are the greatest of them all, or you wouldn't come out here to see us. I want you to be a father to me and treat me as your son. I want you to have pity on me. There is no doubt that all you do is right, because all you do is just the same as if God did it."