ONCE THEY MOVED LIKE THE WIND: COCHISE, GERONIMO, by Roberts David

Author:Roberts, David [Roberts, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

In that place we lived a few weeks as those who have gone to the Happy Place must. Again we hunted, feasted, and danced about fires. Again fathers spent time with their families—those who had fathers left to them—For the first time within my memory we lived as Apaches had before the coming of White Eyes.

From this sanctuary Nana’s band made long forays. One of the boldest was all the way north to Ojo Caliente, which had been deserted by the army now that it no longer had Apaches to guard there. Posting a sentry, the Chihenne bathed for two days in their sacred spring. “How good it was to lie in that water!” Kaywaykla remembered. “On the desert where even drinking water was difficult to obtain we had rubbed our skin with fine sand. We lay in the cleansing pool and enjoyed its beneficent water for hours.”

At the end of June 1881, the chief launched what has ever since been known as Nana’s Raid. Of all the extraordinary deeds of war ever performed by the Chiricahuas, this was arguably the most brilliant. The summary statistics only hint at the intensity and perfection of Nana’s wild campaign. In two months, the chief and some fifteen warriors rode three thousand miles—an average of fifty miles a day. They fought seven serious battles with cavalry, winning every one, and attacked more than a dozen towns and ranches. With one thousand soldiers and another three hundred to four hundred civilians chasing them, the warriors escaped every trap. During those two months they killed at least thirty-five of their enemy, wounded many more, and captured more than two hundred horses and mules. Their own casualties are uncertain, but not a single dead or wounded Apache was found by any of the pursuing horde. All this, with a relative handful of warriors under the leadership of a lame-footed chief some seventy-five years old!

The full story of Nana’s Raid will never be told: only the Apaches knew it from the inside, and Kaywaykla was too young to ride with the warriors. From the point of view of white settlers and soldiers in New Mexico, it was a two-month ordeal of frustration and fear. The confident colonel in charge of the chase believed he could use the new railroad and telegraph lines to box Nana in; instead the warriors blithely outmaneuvered the troops at every step. The Chihenne rode their horses until they were nearly dead; then they shot them (sometimes for food) and stole others. With their matchless knowledge of the New Mexico mountains, they could hide whenever they chose to. Victorio’s larger band had always been hindered by the numbers of women and children among them; Nana’s party was all warriors.

The lightning mobility of the raiders dumbfounded New Mexicans, who could not believe that the same Apaches who burned a ranch in one part of the territory could ambush a wagon train seventy miles away less than two days later. At one point, Nana rode

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