Woman Warrior of the Apaches

LOZEN Apache Warrior, Holy Woman, and a Shield to Her People

In May, 1877, Indian Agent John Clum and a unit of Apache police, acting on orders from the Indian Commissioner in Washington, D.C., marched 453 Warm Springs Apache men, women, and children 250 miles from their home at Ojo Caliente in southwestern New Mexico to old Camp Goodwin on the San Carlos Reservation, along the Gila River of eastern Arizona. There they suffered from smallpox and other diseases and sometimes went hungry. They quarreled with their neighbors. They longed for freedom, and they vowed that if they ever escaped, they would never return to Camp Goodwin.

Finally, early in September, about 300 of the Apaches splashed through the Gila River and fled north into the mountains, stealing horses as they went. One of the fiercest and most determined of the escapees was Lozen, sister of the Warm Springs leader Victorio. First she helped the women and children cross the water, then she rode off to join the warriors.

From that time until Geronimo's surrender in August, 1886, Lozen and her people were often on the run, traveling thousands of miles on foot and by horse across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora.

To the male-oriented soldiers who pursued them, Lozen was just a woman, someone they noticed so little they didn't even learn her name. But to her people, she was a warrior and a powerful medicine woman. "Lozen is my right hand," Victorio said. "Strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy, Lozen is a shield to her people."

Most of the fragmentary stories and anecdotes about Lozen come to us from the eyewitness accounts of Apaches, recorded earlier in this century.

There was the time, for instance, when the Warm Springs Apaches were once again fleeing soldiers who wanted to deliver them back to the San Carlos area. This time about 40 Apache families bolted eastward. When they reached the Rio Grande, the muddy water was running hard and rising fast, and their horses refused to cross. Finally Lozen rode up on a magnificent black stallion. Holding her rifle high, she kicked the horse's right shoulder hard. He plunged in and swam across, and other horses followed.

Another time, Mexican troops attacked some Apaches Lozen was traveling with. The warriors scattered, leaving behind a pouch containing 500 cartridges. Soon the Indians were trapped and running out of ammunition. Lozen crawled back through the crossfire and rescued the cartridges, saving her companions.

At the battle of Cibecue, when Apache scouts turned their guns on the cavalrymen, Lozen rode into the Army's camp while the shooting raged and drove off most of the soldiers' horses.

Other stories say that Lozen knew how to heal wounds and determine the direction from which enemies might come. But the most detailed story, and the one that shows Lozen's character best, recounts an episode from the summer of 1880, when Lozen was probably near 40.

For months the Warm Springs Apaches had been hiding in the mountains of Chihuahua, south of Texas. But finally Lozen, Victorio, and other warriors met in council and decided it was time to sneak home to Ojo Caliente. Parents tied small children onto their backs or atop horses, and the worn-out band of youngsters, women, and men crossed the Rio Grande and headed toward a spring hidden in a canyon.

They didn't know the cavalry was hiding at the spring. But before the soldiers could ambush the Indians, a wagon train approached, and the cavalry rushed out to protect the travelers. The Apaches galloped back toward Mexico with the soldiers chasing them.

One of the women, a Mescalero Apache, was having strong labor pains and couldn't go on. Lozen pulled out of the line of riders with her and dismounted. Gathering up blanket, knife, rifle, cartridge belt, and a little food, Lozen sent their horses off with the others so the soldiers wouldn't discover anyone had stayed behind.

Lozen and the suffering woman had just enough time to hide in the brush before the sol-diers rode past. Then Lozen found a safe hideout and helped deliver the baby.

The next day, the two women walked to the Rio Grande, carrying the newborn in their arms, and hid near the banks. They needed food, but Lozen didn't dare fire her rifle at game for fear their enemies would come. She waited until a herd of longhorn cattle came to the river to drink. Using nothing but her knife, she killed a longhorn, and the two women cut the meat into strips and dried it.

They knew they had to leave the river, but they had no water carriers, and it was too far between water holes to walk without water. They needed horses.

Lozen cut a bridle from the longhorn's hide and waited until dark. Leaving everything behind except knife and bridle, she crept to the riverbank. Just then some Mexican soldiers arrived on the opposite bank and set up camp. They had what Lozen needed: horses. But they also had guns, She waited until the men fell asleep by the fire, then she swam across the river and moved silently toward their camp, hoping not to alert the horses or the guard, who walked back and forth between the soldiers and the hobbled animals.

When the guard turned back toward the fire, Lozen cut the hobbles of the strongest-looking horse, leapt onto its back, and charged toward the river. The soldiers woke up and fired at her, even shooting across the river, but Lozen got away. Within minutes, she and her two charges

When her hands tingled and her palms turned purple, she knew she was facing the direction from which soldiers were approaching.

were galloping westward in the night on the north side of the border.

When they reached the first water hole, soldiers were guarding it. Unseen, the two women slipped past, sucking thirstily on prickly pear fruits until they found water.

For weeks the women traveled slowly, stealthily, sometimes on this side of the border, sometimes on the other. Lozen made a water carrier from the stomach of a calf, but it was too small. And they needed another horse.

Finally one day, the women followed three vaqueros to their camp. Leaving the young mother and her infant a little distance away, Lozen sneaked into the corral and stole a horse before the men knew what was happening. Then the women galloped away.

After that, Lozen killed a cavalryman and took his rifle, ammunition, and canteen. Well equipped now, the two women traveled to the Mescalero reservation in southern New Mexico, and Lozen delivered mother and child to their people.

There Lozen learned that Victorio and 175 other Apache men, women, and children had been attacked in Mexico, with 78 killed - including Victorio - 68 captured, and 30 escaping with their lives.

Again Lozen set out, this time alone, hunting for survivors. First she rode westward toward Ojo Caliente, then south into Mexico. Always alone, she dodged cavalry on both sides of the border.

Meanwhile Lozen's people were hiding in the wild country along the western slopes of the Sierra Madre, south of the Arizona border. Nana, a crippled but inexhaustible warrior in his 70s, led the survivors of the attack.

One day a young Mexican captive came running in to tell Nana that someone was riding toward camp, trailing a pack horse. The rider, who was heavily armed and appeared to be a woman, was analyzing the brush for signs of the well-concealed encampment.

Nana realized it must be Lozen, and he rode out to meet her. When Nana found Juh, Geronimo, and other Apache leaders at their camp, the people gathered around the fire, and Nana said of Lozen, "There is no warrior more worthy than the sister of Victorio."

Lozen was an expert roper, which made her an invaluable asset to the band when they were stealing horses, and she was a good rifle shot who often served as rear guard when her people were fleeing enemies.

But what made her most valuable to the tribe was their belief that she had a power to locate the enemy. To do this she held out her arms while walking in a circle and praying to Ussen, the Life Giver or Creator. When her hands tingled and her palms turned purple, she knew she was facing the direction from which soldiers were approaching. Some said she could even divine how far away they were.

LOZEN

Many of her people believed Victorio would not have been killed had Lozen been there to warn him of the enemy.

Afterward when Nana and others called war councils, Lozen sat with them. When Nana and others slaughtered settlers to avenge their relatives' deaths, Lozen rode with them. And always she supported, guarded, protected, and healed the Apaches she lived and traveled with, no matter what band they belonged to.

It is said that when Geronimo decided the Apache men, women, and children who still remained free would be better off if they surrendered, Lozen carried messages for him and helped arrange meetings and the terms of defeat.

With Geronimo, Lozen surrendered. With him, on September 8, 1886, almost nine years to the day since she had fled from Camp Goodwin, she boarded a train as a prisoner at Bowie Station in southeastern Arizona and traveled toward Florida and exile.

White guards did not record Lozen's death, but Apaches recalled that she succumbed to tuberculosis in a prisoner of war camp at Mt. Vernon Barracks near Mobile, Alabama.

During her wanderings throughout the Southwest, Lozen probably came to know the southeastern corner of Arizona and the land north of it well. So after reading every scrap I could find about her, I crisscrossed Cochise, Graham, Greenlee, and Apache counties and surrounding areas where Lozen may have traveled, imagining her life.

One day I drove north along U.S. Route 191, climbing its twisting switchbacks, and pictured Lozen and her people fleeing on horseback and on foot across these rugged canyons, hills, and mountains in 1877.

One night I hiked by myself, without a flashlight, in the Chiricahua Mountains, imagining what it must have been like for Lozen when she traveled alone in the dark. True, she could read clues to animals and humans that I wouldn't notice even in the daytime, and she undoubtedly stumbled less often than I. But the melting snow that dripped from the branches overhead would have dripped onto her, just as it did onto me. And the wind that blew among the oaks, junipers, and rocky pillars, pushing at my back like a gianticy hand, would have chilled and hurried her, just as it did me. I had a car to return to. Lozen would have had to search for a cave or a dry spot among the patches of melting snow where she could lie down and sleep.

I also visited the Apache village of Bylas, which straddles U.S. Route 70 near the Gila River, about where Camp Good-win once sat. San Carlos Apaches live there now, and none of those I talked to had heard of Lozen. But one of them, Wheeler Grimes Jr., agreed to ride with me out into the countryside. He saddled two horses, and we forded the Gila and rode up into the hills where Lozen and her people fled.

As we trotted among the greasewood and cacti, Wheeler talked about old weapons caches and old graves that Apaches from Bylas have found in the hills. He said that when he was a boy playing cavalry and Indians with other Apache boys, everyone wanted to be in the cavalry because the cavalry won.

Meanwhile, the hooves of our horses clanked across rocks, and powdery dust rose around us. I smelled the horse and my own sweat and thought about Lozen.

Coming from another culture, and another time, I don't understand Lozen com-pletely. But I've seen enough, and hurt enough, to imagine the pain she must have felt in the bloody, violent decade before her surrender. It was such a turbulent time that another Apache, James Kaywaykla, who was a little boy then, said, "Until I was about 10 years old, I did not know that people died except by violence."

It's not too hard to feel, vicariously, some of the contradictory emotions Lozen may have felt when people told her Victorio and the others would not have died if she had been there.

Or to imagine her uncertainty or despair as the train pulled out of Bowie Station and she looked at the Chiricahua Mountains for the last time.

Or to picture how she suffered in exile, in a humid climate where even the air that went in and out of her lungs was so different from what she had breathed all her life and where Apache babies died, not in battle, but of mosquito bites.

Scholars wrangle about many details of Lozen's life, but I believe it is true, as the son of a Chiricahua scout once told historian Eve Ball, "To us she was as a Holy Woman."