Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache Read online

  KILLER OF WITCHES

  KILLER OF WITCHES

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF YELLOW BOY,

  MESCALERO APACHE

  * * *

  W. MICHAEL FARMER

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  * * *

  Copyright © 2015 by W. Michael Farmer

  Map of the Apacheria about 1875 © 2014 by W. Michael Farmer

  Interior sketches were created by Jim Trolinger at jtrolingerart.com

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  * * *

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Farmer, W. Michael, 1944–

  Killer of witches : the life and times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache / W. Michael Farmer. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4328-3122-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-3122-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4328-3125-7 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-3125-9 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3125-7 eISBN-10: 1-4328-3125-9

  1. Apache Indians—History—Fiction. 2. Mescalero Indians—History—Fiction. 3. Mescalero Indian Reservation (N.M.)—Fiction. 4. Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation (N.M.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.A725K55 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2015012413

  * * *

  First Edition. First Printing: September 2015

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3125-7 ISBN-10: 1-4328-3125-9

  Find us on Facebook– https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website– http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15

  For Corky, my best friend and wife.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  A project of this magnitude is not done alone. I owe a debt of gratitude to many friends and associates who have supported and encouraged me in this work. There are several who deserve special mention.

  Melissa Starr provided editorial reviews and many helpful questions, suggestions, and comments to enhance manuscript quality and to help bring to life Yellow Boy in a way I had not seen him before. Her work is much appreciated.

  Bruce Kennedy’s knowledge of the southwest and invaluable commentary made many helpful contributions to this story. I thank him for his support.

  Lynda Sánchez’s first-hand knowledge of Apache culture and history provided guiding light and clarity on many details. Her insights and comments on this story were invaluable. I owe her a debt of gratitude.

  Jim Trolinger provided the illustrations for the text and helped bring the major characters to visual life. His help and encouragement will be long remembered and appreciated.

  Pat and Mike Alexander have graciously opened their home to me during return visits to New Mexico for research and book tours, and they provided company on long roads across endless deserts and prairies and tall mountains. Friends such as these are rare and much appreciated.

  Excellent descriptions of Apache culture, beliefs, and methods of raiding and war in the mid- to late-nineteenth century are provided by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Some of the ones I found most helpful are provided in Additional Reading at the end of the story. The work by Eve Ball and her associates Lynda A. Sánchez and Nora Henn provided especially valuable insights into Apache life because they faithfully recorded the stories Eve’s Apache friends remembered of the old days, and they remembered those days very well.

  Map of the Apacheria About 1875

  (Towns appearing after 1875 have been added to aid reader orientation.)

  CHARACTERS

  * * *

  Fictional Characters

  Beela-chezzi (Crooked Fingers)—Yellow Boy’s friend, a warrior

  Caballo Negro (Black Horse)—Yellow Boy’s father

  Carmen Rosario—Sangre del Diablo’s slave

  Deer Woman (aka Gah)—Yellow Boy’s childhood friend

  Delgadito—Yellow Boy’s competitor

  Gourd Girl (aka Lucky Star)—a Mexican slave child adopted by Sons-ee-ah-ray

  He Watches—Yellow Boy’s adoptive grandfather

  Juanita—Yellow Boy’s wife

  Kah (Arrow)—Yellow Boy’s friend, a warrior

  Klo-sen (Hair Rope)—a warrior

  Ko-do (Firefly)—Yellow Boy’s friend, a warrior

  Maria—Juanita’s mother

  Moon on the Water—Juanita’s little sister

  Porico (White Horse)—Juanita’s father

  Rufus Pike (aka Roofoos Peek)—Yellow Boy’s mentor

  Sangre del Diablo (Blood of the Devil)—Mexican-Comanche Witch

  Segundo—Comanche Witch

  Socorro (Corn)—Yellow Boy’s adoptive grandmother

  Soldado Fiero (Fierce Soldier)—Chiricahua Blue Coat Scout

  Sons-ee-ah-ray (aka Ish-tia-nay)—Yellow Boy’s mother

  Sons-nah (Corn Tassel)—Deer Woman’s father

  Yellow Boy (aka Ish-kay-neh, aka Nah-kah-yen)—The Killer of Witches story teller

  Historical Characters

  Al Sieber—Chief of Scouts under General Crook

  Cadete—Mescalero Chief

  Cha—Mescalero Chief

  Colonel Edward Hatch—Commander of the Disarming

  Dr. Joseph Blazer—Owner of the mercantile store and sawmill on the Mescalero Reservation

  Fred C. Godfroy—Agent, Mescalero Reservation

  General James Henry Carleton—Commanding General, New Mexico Territory 1862–1866

  Juh—Nednhi Apache Chief

  Kah Tensakes (Crooked Arrow)—Ancient Mescalero hunter who hunts elk on ice-covered snow

  Kit Carson (aka Keet Kah-sohn)—Scout, Indian Fighter, and Colonel, New Mexico Volunteers

  Lorenzo Labadie—Agent, Bosque Redondo Mescalero Reservation

  Nana—Mimbreño Apache leader

  Roman—Mescalero Chief

  S. A. Russell—Agent, Mescalero Reservation

  Santana—Mescalero Chief

  Victorio—Mimbreño Apache Chief

  APACHE WORDS AND PHRASES

  * * *

  Aashco—friend

  Búh—owl

  Dánt’e—greetings

  Enjuh—good

  Gaagé—raven

  Googé—whip-poor-will

  Haheh—a young girl’s puberty ceremony

  Idiits’ag—I hear you

  Indah—white men (literally the liv
ing)

  Indah Lickoyee—white intruder

  Indeh—Apache name for themselves (literally the dead)

  Ka dish day—goodbye

  Klitso—gold

  Ndolkah—cougar

  Nakai-yi—Mexican

  Nakai-yes—Mexicans

  Nish’ii’—I see you

  Pesh—iron

  Pesh-klitso—yellow iron or gold

  Socorro—corn

  Tiswin—a weak, beer-like drink, brewed from corn

  Season of Little Eagles—early spring

  Season of Many Leaves—late spring, early summer

  Season of Large Leaves—midsummer

  Season of Large Fruit—late summer, early fall

  Season of Earth is Reddish Brown—late fall

  Season of Ghost Face—lifeless winter

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAP OF APACHERIA

  CHARACTERS

  APACHE WORDS AND PHRASES

  PREFACE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1—Ish-kay-neh

  Chapter 2—The Fifth Day

  Chapter 3—On the Llano

  Chapter 4—Cha’s Camp

  Chapter 5—The Warrior’s Journey Begins

  Chapter 6—Shináá Cho

  Chapter 7—Nah-kah-yen

  Chapter 8—First Blood

  Chapter 9—Ride to Cha’s Camp

  Chapter 10—First Raid

  Chapter 11—Juanita

  Chapter 12—First Shots

  Chapter 13—Rufus Pike

  Chapter 14—First Lesson

  Chapter 15—Rufus’ Story

  Chapter 16—The Apache Way

  Chapter 17—The Indah Way

  Chapter 18—Nah-kah-yen’s Dream

  Chapter 19—Power Comes

  Chapter 20—Power

  Chapter 21—The Massacre

  Chapter 22—Finding He Watches

  Chapter 23—Finding Survivors

  Chapter 24—Angry Women

  Chapter 25—Horse Raid

  Chapter 26—Reservation

  Chapter 27—The Warriors Return

  Chapter 28—Courtship

  Chapter 29—The Time of New Beginning

  Chapter 30—Al Sieber

  Chapter 31—Nana

  Chapter 32—Victorio

  Chapter 33—The Disarming

  Chapter 34—The Stone Corral

  Chapter 35—Rescue

  Chapter 36—Chiricahua Wolves

  Chapter 37—Juh

  Chapter 38—Juh’s Trial

  Chapter 39—Sangre del Diablo

  Chapter 40—Deception

  Chapter 41—Disaster

  Chapter 42—Escape

  Chapter 43—Battle of the Hacienda

  Chapter 44—Carmen Rosario

  Chapter 45—Endings

  Chapter 46—New Beginnings

  ADDITIONAL READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREFACE

  * * *

  Eighty years of information on Apache life gathered by anthropologists, linguists, and historians is often ignored in novels and movies featuring Apaches. These stories fail to capture an understanding of Apache ways and beliefs as they were in the years when their raiding and roaming were disappearing, washed away in conflict by the unending flood of “White Eye” invaders filling the Apachería. Those were brutal, hard-fought years on both sides, and it is easy to overlook the humanity of the Apaches who fought without quarter, and expected none against the ruthless, steely determination of the White Eyes to claim the land, despite the horrors of Indian warfare.

  In 1955, Paul Blazer, whose father and grandfather had run a store and a sawmill on the Mescalero Apache Reservation from about 1868, told Dr. C. L. Sonnichsen, the great chronicler of the southwest, “I hate to hear people talk about those Apaches as savages . . . if an Indian is a savage, a lot of white men are savages, too . . . Teddy Roosevelt was a savage. Some of the Mescaleros were savages . . . but they were no worse than the white men who ‘hit them in the rear with a saddle.’ They used to come into the store where I worked. I would give them a smoke, and they would sit around and tell me stories—folk tales. There was poetry and beauty in them. That was when I began to see that they were folks just like us.”

  This novel is an attempt to understand what Paul Blazer meant when he spoke with Doc Sonnichsen in the middle of the twentieth century from a perspective that stretched into the last years of the free Apaches. The story is an imaginative autobiography of the warrior and cavalry scout, Yellow Boy, a major character that appears in “The Vanishing Trilogy,” a mythical story of the survival, revenge, and odyssey of Henry Fountain after the true-life murder of his father, Albert, near White Sands, New Mexico Territory, in 1896. I have used Yellow Boy to paint a picture of Mescalero Apache life and times from about 1860–1951, a period when the Mescaleros went from nomadic, horse-mounted raiders and hunters, to White Eye prisoners of war, to reservation residents dependent on White Eye largess, to proud, independent people, making their own way in the white man’s world.

  Language is a window into the culture of a people. Apache, its root language, Athabaskan, is a beautiful and complex tonal language with many variants between Navajo, Chipewyan, and Apache groups. It is difficult to learn to speak correctly, and its spelling using tonal marks difficult to write. I have attempted to give the reader a sense of Apache culture by using a few Apache words in the manuscript. Their spelling without tonal marks, except simple accents, depends on the source from which I referenced them, mainly from Life Among the Apaches, by John C. Cremony, and the Western Apache-English Dictionary, edited by Dorothy Bray.

  Killer of Witches is the first volume in three that forms the story of Yellow Boy and a history of a people with the same hopes and fears shared by “folks just like us” in a time when their freedom was disappearing and the terrors on the dark side of this life, Witches and other evil spirits in the flesh, had to be neutralized or destroyed to enter the next life unscathed.

  W. Michael Farmer

  Smithfield, Virginia

  May 2014

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  “You are stronger than we. We have fought you so long as we had rifles and powder, but your arms are better than ours. Give us like weapons and turn us loose, we will fight you again; but we are worn-out; we have no more heart; we have no provisions, no means to live; your troops are everywhere; our springs and waterholes are either occupied or overlooked by your young men. You have driven us from our last and best stronghold, and we have no more heart. Do with us as may seem good to you, but do not forget we are men and braves.”

  —Mescalero Chief Cadete to General Carlton, 1863

  At the time Cadete spoke his words to General Carlton, the Mescalero Apache, Yellow Boy, my mentor and close friend for over fifty-five years, was three years old. He saved me from certain death in the winter desert after the murder of my father, Albert, in 1896; helped me avenge Albert; and taught me to survive in the hard country of the southwest. In 1950 I persuaded him to tell me his life story. Over the course of many afternoons and pots of coffee, I wrote it down as he told it in a mixture of Mescalero Apache, Spanish, and English in the whispery rasping voice of a vigorous old man. At the beginning of each session I read back to him what I had written from the previous session, and after explaining the meaning of some of my fancy words, he usually agreed I had captured the essence of what he had said. When I missed what he meant, I rewrote until he said I had captured his meaning. This is his story as he told it and meant it to be heard.

  –Dr. Henry Grace, 1953

  CHAPTER 1

  ISH-KAY-NEH

  * * *

  Bosque Redondo, New Mexico Territory, October 30, 1865

  My people were Mescalero Apaches, the Shish-Indeh, the People of the Woods. In the time when Indah Lickoyee, the White Eye outsiders, kept my people prisoners of war in Bosque Redondo, a
chief called Cadete came to speak with my father. My life had not been long then, only five years, and my father still called me Ish-kay-neh (Boy), my true name not yet given.

  The night Cadete spoke with Caballo Negro (Black Horse) by the little fire in our ragged tipi, my mother and I sat nearby eating a nasty-tasting stew, made from the worthless meat and worm-filled cornmeal the White Eyes gave us, which she had boiled in bitter water from the river the White Eyes called Pecos. We listened to Cadete and my father speaking in low, secret-filled voices.

  My mother’s eyes were bright with the heat of sickness, and her slender body trembled under the thin blanket draped over her shoulders. There was little stew in her bowl. She gave most of her food to me and to Caballo Negro. I wanted to spit it out, but she said I must eat to live, no matter how bad it tasted.

  My mother’s eyes followed every move Caballo Negro and Cadete made as she listened and waited to serve them. My father called her Ish-tia-nay, which meant “Woman.” It was a sign of affection and respect among my people for a man to call his first wife by this name. Her true name was Sons-ee-ah-ray (Morning Star), for she was always out of the blankets before the morning star left with the dawn.

  Listening to the words between Cadete and Caballo Negro, my mother looked at me and smiled. I understood their words gave truth to the stories the other women had told her while they dug mesquite roots for firewood far out on the llano (dry prairie). She had told me those stories. They said our people were leaving Bosque Redondo.

  The words between Caballo Negro and Cadete filled my head with questions: Why are we leaving Bosque Redondo? Haven’t the Shis-Indeh stayed with the Blue Coats here since before my memories? Why will we take many different paths? Will my friends go to the same place I go?