Page 252 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPT E R S E VEN

others. White military records indicate that in July 1880, Nana "whirled
through the territory , plundering and killing a number of people." On
August 27, Nana and his soldiers set a successful ambush in Gavilan
Canyon in Ruidoso, which disrupted an entire company of the black
Ninth Cavalry, who lost three men, about thirty horses, and one hun­
dred rounds of ammunition.
Victorio's warrior sister, Lozen, also tried to avenge him. She f o ught
with Nana and later with Geronimo. In 1 8 86, she was captured with
another woman fighter, Tah-des-te. Both were sent on a prisoner-of­
1
war train to an internment camp in Florida. In 8 87, Lozen was moved
to Mount V e rnon Barracks in Alabama, where she died of tuberculosis
on an unknown date. According to custom,Apaches buried her secretly
in an unmarked grave. The Apaches she left behind were dispossessed,
disenfranchised, and prisoners of war.
In the meantime, whites living in New Mexico's Mimbres V a lley
committed psychological violence against Apaches by appropriating
Victorio as a white cultural symbol and commodifying his image. 8
Rather than taking Victorio and Apache culture as a medium to under­
stand Indians, and on a larger level, the human condition, whites used
Indians to sell things. During the mid-I880s, a new hotel in Hillsboro,
the Victorio Hotel, opened its doors. In Silver City, the Victorio Mining
Company operated. During the mid-I890s, the owners of the Mountain
Pride Stage Line based in Kingston had a portrait of Vic to rio painted
on the doors of the company's premier coach. Why did whites do these
things? A line fr om a mid-I880s military report suggests that whites were
proud of vanquishing Vic to rio and his people: "the vast section over
which the wild and irresponsible tribes once wandered, has been
redeemed f r om idle waste to become a home f o r millions of progres­
sive people."
The f e w Mimbres Apaches who currently reside at the Fort Sill
agency in Oklahoma, as well as Mescaleros at Fort Sill and at Mescalero,
New Mexico, see things differently. After all, creating historical accounts
is just another f o rm of discourse, in which the narrators choose domi­
Y
nant tropes. As the Nez Pew� e llow W o lf said sometime around 1 8 7 7,
T
"The whites told only one side. o ld it to please themselves. o ld much
T
that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the

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