Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (review)

On October 15, 1880, Mexican soldiers and militiamen commanded by Colonel Joaquin Terrazas attacked a camp of Chihenne (Warm Springs) and Mescalero Apaches at the remote Tres Castillos range, roughly ninety miles north of Chihuahua City. At the cost of three casualties, the Mexicans killed sixty-two warriors and sixteen women and children, and captured sixty-eight persons. Among those slain was the dynamic leader Victorio, guiding force behind his people’s lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful quest to be allowed to live in their traditional homelands in the Warm Springs country of southwestern New Mexico. In the present work, Kathleen P. Chamberlain provides an empathetic and often revealing examination of the man who offered such hope to his followers, and who sowed so much fear among the non-Indian peoples of Chihuahua, Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas.

Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief admirably meets the goals of the Oklahoma Western Biographies series, of which it is the twenty-second volume. Chamberlain’s informal, often breezy prose style is well-suited to the intended general readership, and the emphasis on Victorio’s persistent quest to secure for the Chihennes a suitable living space in the face of the United States government’s unsympathetic bureaucracy (in this case the Indian Office) and cruelly one-sided Indian policy provides a useful thematic structure. Nonspecialists in American Indian history will find Chamberlain’s having framed her narrative through the context of Apache culture and world-view especially enlightening. In hypothesizing about the incredulous attempts by Victorio and Nana (his brother-in-law) to understand the government’s disastrous effort to force their people to live at ghastly San Carlos, for example, Chamberlain posits: “After all, the whites in Washington were blind, but were they stupid, too?” (p. 155). Alas, they perhaps were.

In accord with series guidelines, Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief has no notes, but it does boast a valuable bibliographic essay. Readers of all backgrounds should glean many insights from the work, but military historians will find Chamberlain’s decision not to attempt a more systematic analysis of issues relating to war and combat somewhat disappointing. After all, it was her subject’s ability to out-think, out-fight, and out-ride the enemies of his people on both sides of the U. S.-Mexican border that caught the attention of contemporary observers, and that distinguished him from his less talented peers. As the author acknowledges, those seeking such an investigation are still probably best served by Dan Thrapp’s earlier biography, Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches (1974).