In September 1886 the chiefs Geronimo and Naiche gave themselves with the few followers of him to General Nelson Miles of the Army of the United States and with it the so-called Apache Wars were officially ended. But in the wildest part of the Sierra Madre, in the so-called Jaguar mountains and in the other equally broken and inaccessible mountain ranges that rise on the border between Sonora and Chihuahua, there remained small groups of Apaches who, taking refuge in the coniferous forests, continued to carry a free and independent life. They were called rough Apaches, that is, “untamed”, and even their brothers from the North American reserves –chiricauas, idiots, mescaleros, jicarillas, aravaipas, lipanes, etc.– feared them. Well, the Bronco Apaches had not acculturated like them and continued to use the bow and dress in deer skins. They hunted deer and cultivated small gardens of corn and pumpkins. Some of them may have been Lipan Apaches and others may have had relatives among the Mescaleros and Chiricauas, but by the end of the 19th century the Broncos themselves constituted an Apache subgroup whose main hallmark was their fierce determination to continue living free, thus as his refractory stubbornness to acculturation. Indeed, at the end of the 19th century and during the first third of the 20th, the broncos continued to be fearsome warriors and, when the winters were harsh and the snow forced them to come down from the heights where they had had to take refuge, they raided ranches, farms and small towns. The world had changed, but they hadn't.
For those little bands of Apache Broncos Mexicans or Americans were not citizens of powerful countries, but annoying neighbors who had usurped their best hunting and farming lands. The Apaches, divided into tiny bands, could not understand that the Mexicans of such a ranch or such a town were part of the same "band" as those who lived a hundred kilometers from the place. Therefore, they could get to live with some of their neighbors, but at the same time wage war against others, without being aware that attacking some was unleashing a conflict against all of them.
Besides, the rough Apaches didn't forget. They did not forget years, decades of harassment and extermination. The Mexican government had been paying a premium for the hair of a brave Indian, man, woman or child, since it became an independent country in 1821. Lured by these rewards, many ranchers, gunmen and even mercenaries, Mexicans and Americans alike, had devoted the entire 19th century to a brutal and ruthless manhunt The result of which was that by 1887 just over three hundred Apaches continued to live in the Mexican Sierra Madre.
Admittedly, its integration was difficult. The Apache, ever since the days of Comanche pressure pushing them off the Great Plains, had been a tough, warlike people who often saw their neighbors as a source of resources. Still in the 1920s, “Indio Juan”, one of the last chiefs of the Apache Broncos, shouted at the unfortunate Mexican cowboys and peasants whom he left alive after robbing them:“I am not killing you so that you can continue raising cattle. for me." Evidently, this predatory feature of the Apache culture It attracted the hatred and bitterness of the Mexican and American population that suffered the incursions of the broncos and justified before the public opinion of the time that they tried to exterminate them at all costs.
Like beasts
Like beasts. This is how the Bronco Apaches were treated and, it is fair to say, this is how they treated their Mexican and American enemies. Through the news that the newspapers of the United States and Mexico collected, we can outline its history from 1887 until its complete extermination around 1940. It is a bloody and bitter history.
The Bronco Apaches, secluded in their wooded and almost unknown mountains, avoided contact with the Mexicans as much as possible. From time to time, however, a war party, spurred on by hunger or the desire for revenge, would come down from their mountain refuges and undertake lengthy expeditions that sometimes took them as far as Texas, New Mexico and Arizona , although in general they used to be limited to the territories of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. Often, the only clue, the only evidence that this or that miner, trapper, traveler, rancher or peasant had been killed by them or that the cattle of this or that ranch had been stolen by the Apache Broncos, were the singular and strange footprints left by their horses wearing deerskin boots.
Most of these Apaches used rifles, but they also carried bows and arrows. For example, in 1892, a group of North American cowboys who had suffered cattle theft by a party of rough Apaches, chased and killed one of them and found that he was armed with an "excellent bow" and a quiver. containing forty arrows.
Since 1889 the Apache Broncos became part of a sort of “collective and nostalgic psychosis.” His attacks were punctual and spaced:a tiny trickle of violence in a gigantic area that between the United States and Mexico totaled more than a million square kilometers and that it could have been "dissolved" among the innumerable acts of violence that the Mexican and American citizens of the time committed, if it were not for the exoticism, the fascination and the bitterness that the Apaches had drawn to themselves for generations. Indeed, between 1889 and 1935, the Apaches killed some three hundred people in the area indicated above, but during those same years and in the same region, Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, Sonora and Chihuahua, the violent deaths caused by US and Mexican citizens can number in the thousands. But, nevertheless, each Apache attack, and most of them did not go beyond occasional cattle raids or caused one or two fatalities, attracted the hysterical attention of the newspapers and of local and regional governments, while the murders and even massacres perpetrated by Mexican or American citizens did not deserve such coverage.
Thus, on May 2, 1889, it was reported that the Broncos had attacked a mining operation near Dee Creek, Arizona, capturing a man whom they had wounded and whom they had put to death by savage torture by the horrible method of roasting him alive over a stove. While on May 30 and 31, 1890, the newspaper Ephita of Tombstone, Arizona, published the news that ten Apaches had attacked a group of surveyors and that the same war party, two days later, robbed a caravan in which they killed one man and wounded another, completing their attack. incursion into Arizona with the attack launched on May 24, in the Chiricaua mountains, on a renowned local lawyer and his brother-in-law, killing the first and unsuccessfully pursuing the second. The Ephite of Tombstone took the opportunity to cry out against the Apaches and denounce the supposed passivity of the US Army.
But what could be done? That same year, 1890, the Bronco Apaches made further raids into Arizona and throughout the 1890s raided settlements throughout northern Mexico. This Apache bellicosity is explained because their territory was being more and more limited by European-American ranchers and farmers . For example, many Mormon settlers were moving to northern Mexico and settling in the vicinity of the last free Apache settlements. These were pushed more and more towards the most inaccessible mountain tops and their resources in hunting and fertile lands diminished, forcing them to depend more and more on the periodic and now more and more frequent raids of looters.
On the other hand, the Apaches were ruthless warriors:in September 1892, a war party of eight Broncos fell on a Mormon ranch, Cliff Ranch, about 50 km to the west of Colonia Juárez, killing a man and his elderly mother and stealing the cattle and all the household goods they managed to carry.
A factor to also take into account is that the Bronco Apaches were often reinforced by the arrival of escaped Apaches from the North American reservations , some of them as famous as Massai or the well-known "Apache Kid". These "refugees" used to hold a strong grudge against the whites and a considerable contempt against the Apaches who preferred to continue living poorly on the reservations. Indeed, in a way they were living proof to the Broncos of what fate they could expect if they ceased their war against the Euro-Americans. Perhaps for all this, the hostility of the American Broncos and Apaches who joined them in the 1890s was also directed against the Apaches of the reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, whom they frequently harassed and who learned to fear them. .
By 1896 Apache Bronco attacks in Mexico They had caused so much fear and commotion that on June 6 of that year the governments of Mexico and the United States signed an agreement that allowed the armies of both states to cross the border to pursue Apache war parties.
At that time and very particularly, the attacks led by “Apache Kid” stood out , a former US Army scout who had eventually fled to Mexico and now led a mixed band of Apache Broncos from the Mexican mountains and Aravaipa, Chiricaua and Mescalero refugees from Arizona and New Mexico. Fed up with their attacks, the United States and Mexico detached forces against the "Apache Kid" gang and other bronco gangs. Specifically, a platoon of Mexican Rurales was sent against them, and on the part of the United States, two companies of the famous 7th Cavalry, their last mission against the Indians, supported by a detachment of Apache explorers. In total about three hundred men who, however, failed to catch or kill "Apache Kid" or his gang of robbers.
But in the end, always at war, always persecuted, “Apache Kid” was shot down in New Mexico, in the San Juan canyon, in 1907, by a group of angry ranchers Americans who had organized a "hunting party" against the Apaches. His death was proof that, no matter how tough and rebellious the Apaches were, sooner or later, they would be annihilated.
But meanwhile, as if the 20th century couldn't handle them, the Broncos clung to their mountain shelters and fiercely fought anyone who came near them. His story, a forgotten story, seems out of time and impossible to be happening in the Mexico and the United States of the roaring twenties and the Great Depression of the thirties. If in those years there were some true "grapes of wrath", without a doubt the broncos harvested them.
Apache Hunters
Slowly, but inexorably, the hitherto inaccessible mountains of the last free Apaches were violated by explorers, trappers, miners, ranchers and farmers in search of riches, a better life or, simply, adventures and strong emotions. The rough Apaches would become the object of what today we would call "risk tourism" and that, if possible, makes their end even more pathetic and terrible.
Thus, for example, in 1929, H. White, an American explorer and gold prospector, led a party of cowboys to the heart of the Jaguar Mountains, the last sanctuary of the Apache Broncos and raided their main camp. The surprised Apaches retreated into the surrounding woods and watched for their attackers. White counted about forty-five huts next to an adobe fort and after collecting some objects from the abandoned town, he withdrew fearing that the Apaches would surround them. According to his report, widely replicated, the Apache Broncos still numbered about sixty-five warriors. If so, the group numbered between 180 and 200 members.
White's expedition had as its main objective to provide its participants with the excitement and celebrity of “real Indian fighters” . It was not cheap to be part of a party that went into the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental in search of the last free Apaches. But White's expedition was also to some extent a response to the Apache raids on Mexican and American territory carried out incessantly by the Broncos during the 1920s. Indeed, after a decade, the 1910s, in which few Apache raids, in the 1920s they multiplied.
During their final years, the Apache Broncos remained divided in several gangs, although two of them, led by the so-called “White Apache” , a mysterious Anglo-American renegade, and that of "Indio Juan" became especially famous for their violent raids in Sonora, Arizona and New Mexico. Thus, for example, in 1924 the "White Apache" party, made up of only six warriors, crossed the border and stole cattle from a ranch in New Mexico, killing a cowboy on another ranch. The Bronco Apaches were chased into the Mexican mountains by a group of American cowboys who failed to catch them.
Their last refuges, those in the Jaguar Mountains, were increasingly narrowed by the growth of colonization in the area. The regions of Bavispe and Nácori Chico, on the border between Sonora and Chihuahua, were often the scene of his last raids in which the “Indio Juan” stood out for his cruelty. .
These Apache raids caused several dozen casualties over the decade and culminated in 1930 when a group of Apaches, said to be led by a grandson of Geronimo, attacked near Nácori Boy to a group of cowboys and killed three of them.
Attacks like the one mentioned above provoked the corresponding Mexican retaliatory expeditions . Sometimes these expeditions were official and others led by individuals. One of the latter was the one led by a rancher from the outskirts of Douglas, Arizona, Francisco Fimbres, who around 1925 entered the mountains with two of his cowboys with which he surprised an Apache village killing some broncos, recovering part of the of stolen cattle and capturing a girl who turned out to be Geronimo's great-granddaughter and who was adopted by the Fimbres family, who baptized her Lupe.
But the frontier had always been a land of revenge and remained so until the last of his days. In October 1927, an Apache war party came down from the mountains, crossed the border and fell on Francisco Fimbres's ranch, slitting his wife's throat, killing one of the eldest sons of the couple and taking the youngest as a captive. An eye for an eye.
The attack on the Fimbres ranch was the beginning of the end for the Apache Broncos. Francisco Fimbres turned out to be a man consumed by the desire for revenge and to her he dedicated his life and her money. He hired American gunmen and enlisted his cowboys and with this "private army" he tirelessly beat the mountains in search of the Apache gang that had kidnapped his little one and killed his wife and the eldest of the sons of him.
Not only Apaches, Fimbres also harassed the few Yaquis who had not yet been exterminated or deported by the Mexican government. Thus, on February 12, 1931, the following news item published in the Arizona Daily Star was reported from Mexico City:of Tucson, with the following headline in large letters:“FIMBRES SUCCESSFUL IN YAQUI CAMPAIGN.” and which read as follows:
Guaymas, Sonora, is about 600 km south of Douglas and more than 400 km from the refuges of the Apache Broncos. Fimbres knew the territory well and must have known without a doubt that he would not find rough Apaches in Guaymas, but Yaquis, and he knew enough about Indians to be fully aware that the Yaquis had had nothing to do with the murder of his father. wife and eldest son, nor with the kidnapping of their little one. Even so, no one asked Francisco Fimbres for an explanation for the murder of the innocent and unfortunate Yaquis . Fimbres's revenge was indiscriminate:he simply hated all Indians and hunted and killed them wherever he could find them, and the people, both Americans in Arizona and Mexicans in Sonora, applauded and admired his "hunts" and his determination to take revenge. .
Francisco Fimbres draws our pity for his unhappy history and at the same time, his implacable revenge astonishes us for his cruelty. The Yaquis, for example, did not have a predatory culture like the Apaches. They did not launch looting raids against their neighbors if they were not attacked and their only crime was that of having constituted, together with other groups such as the Mayos or the Opatas, peaceful and prosperous communities that did not consent to simply submit to the provisions of the Government that deprived them of part of their lands or shamelessly favored the interests of large Mexican landowners who plundered indigenous lands.
Why then attack those already by yes cornered yaquis? The answer is discouraging:because it could. You could kill Indians who had been designated as "barbarians" or "braves" and for a man driven mad by grief and the desire for revenge, as Fimbres was, that was enough. What should be denounced is above all that a supposedly modern government, such as that of the Mexico that emerged from the revolution, allowed it.
By 1930 Fimbres not only had a score of armed men at his service, but he had enlisted the support of influential American businessmen from Douglas, Arizona, and with their help gave rise to a crazy advertising campaign that toured the entire United States openly promoting what was called “the last Apache hunt” and as "the last chance to penetrate the last virgin and unexplored regions of Mexico." With such a campaign in the media of the time, it is not surprising that more than a thousand American "hunters" gathered, equipped with the most modern weapons and even assisted by a plane that had to locate the Apache camps from the air. to signal them and lead the "hunters" to them.
The Mexican government, alarmed by the number of armed Americans entering its territory, ended up aborting that "hunt" but at the same time, supported Francisco Fimbres in his expeditions against the apaches broncos providing it with official coverage and providing means.
The extermination of the last broncos of Sierra Madre
That was how, in March 1931, Francisco Fimbres went back into the mountains in search of the last harassed free Apaches. In March he ambushed a party and killed three warriors who were scalped. With his hair they posed, days later, for a photographer from the Daily Star of Arizona , who published the image with much fanfare, accompanying it with a melodramatic chronicle summarizing Fimbres' particular war against the Apaches:
The photograph, published on page 6 of the Daily Star of March 13, 1931, is impressive and occupies the top of the page. In it we can see standing, with their modern repeating rifles resting on the ground, ten of the gunmen in the service of Francisco Fimbres. They all pose proud and handsome, as if instead of stalking and killing humans, they had been in the western Sierra Madre hunting deer or antelope. Fimbres, in the center of the photograph, is kneeling, and shows off his recently harvested Apache scalps, while squatting and to the left, another of his men poses next to a captured Apache boy by Fimbres on his expedition and was forcibly separated from his family, perhaps murdered, to be handed over to a Mexican family.
The newspaper confused some data, for example, it placed the Apache attack on the Fimbres ranch in 1926 when it really took place in October 1927, but the success of its news, replicated in other media, shows to what extent Francisco Fimbres was popular and, above all and more sinisterly, to what extent, in the middle of the 1930s, the attitudes of rejection, extermination, racism and demonization wielded by Americans and Mexicans survived. against the Indians and, very particularly against the non-subdued and acculturated, as well as to what extent these aptitudes were not only publicly and shamelessly admitted and recognized, but also applauded, both in the democratic and capitalist United States, and in the revolutionary and socialist Mexico.
And the hunt continued. That same year of 1931, Fimbres penetrated the mountains again and this time he managed to find the party of "Indio Juan" surprising it and killing the latter and two dozen Apache warriors and women. The survivors, in revenge and during their flight, killed the captive son of Francisco Fimbres. The rancher swore to continue his revenge until he killed the last Apache in the Sierra Madre.
While, the Mexican government carried out its own policy of extermination . In a covert way, he hired several “hunters” and thus, slowly but inexorably, the last broncos fell. In the end, Francisco Fimbres himself was part of those "government hunters", thus achieving the annihilation of the main band of rough Apaches.
By 1934, the American anthropologist Greenville Goodwin calculated that there could not have been more than thirty Apache Broncos left. In a letter he wrote that same year to his colleague, Dr. Opler, he reflected on the inexorable fate of the Free Apaches:“They are fighting a losing battle in Mexico and it is only a matter of time before they are exterminated.” He was right.
Goodwin tried to contact the last free Apaches but these, in the words of the anthropologist, were "so primitive" and so distrustful and warlike that no white man could approach them alive and as for the Apaches from Arizona and New Mexico who collaborated with Goodwin, "No one dares to approach them, because they are very afraid of them."
Could an approximation to the Apache Broncos have been tried? Could they have been contacted and given a chance to survive as a people? During the same years, in Brazil, Colonel Rondón did it with tribes no less bellicose and hostile than the rough Apaches. He is still today with some "uncontacted" groups in Brazil, Peru, Paraguay or Ecuador. But in the Mexico of the 1930s, the political will to do so was lacking and there was plenty of hypocrisy and violence.
So Goodwin was right:Free Apaches were doomed . The year before, 1933, a party of Mexican ranchers had ambushed a band of Apache Broncos and killed two dozen of them. The assassins then realized that the majority of their victims were women and children, since few warriors remained among the Apache people. The ranchers took with them three babies who were adopted by Mexican families. Another survivor of the massacre, an adolescent girl of twelve or thirteen years old, was captured days later and locked up in the jail of the town of Nuevo Casas Grandes where the girl, whom the peasants watched through the bars of the cell as if she were a wild beast, fell into a deep depression and allowed himself to die of hunger and thirst.
The thirty Apaches who continued to roam free through the most remote forests of the mountains and the most remote cliffs found, however, neither mercy nor rest. Every time Mexican cowboys spotted one they were shot, and Apache hunts were an event permitted and encouraged by the government.
In November 1935, forced by the heavy snowfalls of that year, a small band of Apache Broncos came down from the Sierra Madre and were ambushed by Francisco Fimbres and his hunters, who killed to all:two warriors and eight women.
There were still, isolated, harassed, lonely, here and there, some rough. They were falling during the following years. By 1940 the forests of the Jaguar Mountains were silent. The only testimony that remained of the freedom of the Bronco Apaches was that of their abandoned bones. The last free indigenous people in Mexico had been totally and systematically exterminated in the middle of the 20th century.
Bibliography
- Arizona Daily Star :Thursday February 13, 1931 and Friday March 13, 1931. Tucson, Arizona. The newspaper is still published today under the banner of Tucson.com.
- Chicago Tribune :July 27, 1997:"Ghosts of a Vanished Frontier." With testimonies from a nephew of Francisco Fimbres, Pedro Fimbres, and an 82-year-old man who lived through the last expeditions against the Broncos.
- Flagler, Edward K. (2006):“After Geronimo:The Apache Broncos of Mexico.” Spanish Journal of American Anthropology . Vol. 36, pgs. 119-128.
- Meet, Douglas V. (1993):They Never Surrendered:Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madre, 1890-1935 . Tucson.
- Opler, Morris E. (ed.) (1973):Grenville Goodwin among the Western Apache . Tucson.
- Worcester, Donald E. (2013). The Apaches . Barcelona.
- Roberts, David (2008):The Apache Wars . Barcelona.
Acknowledgments
I must thank Professor Francisco Plata for his help in searching for images and information, Doctors Jorge Juan Soto and Francisco Jiménez for providing excellent advice, help and his unconditional support, to Federico Caracuel Armada for having colored the original photo of the Arizona Daily Star , to my Ph.D. student Miguel Navarro for describing Diego Rivera's fascinating frescoes in detail, and to my editors, Javier Gómez and Carlos De La Rocha, for finding the rest of the photographs, drawing the map, and providing all sorts of insightful suggestions. /P>