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Chapter 2: In the Southwest
- University of Nebraska Press
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2 In the Southwest i. into apache lands In prereservation days the various tribal groupings and bands of Apaches lived mainly in the mountainous border region between Mexico and Arizona and New Mexico, but they ranged and raided over vast distances—deep into Sonora, Mexico, into the far north of Arizona, to the Rio Grande pueblos of northern New Mexico, and even well into Texas. By the time of the final defeat of Geronimo and his mainly Chiricahua band of followers—the survivors of whom were eventually returned from their humiliating imprisonment in Florida to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico—the majority of Western Apaches were settled on the part of their former domain comprised of the adjacent White Mountain and San Carlos Reservations in east-central Arizona. The Western Apaches belong to the heterogeneous Southwest culture area and, like the two other peoples treated in volume 1 of The North American Indian—the Navajos and Jicarilla Apaches—they speak an Athapascan language. They were visited several times by various Curtis parties in the years leading up to the publication of volume 1 in 1907, while the bulk of the fieldwork for the volume was conducted in 1906 (see fig. 9). The North American Indian includes data on the Apaches as a whole, but the following documents, composed at various points in the succeeding years, concern only the Western Apaches. These reports represent the views of Curtis’s son, Harold Phillips Curtis, who was a schoolboy at the time the events described took place; William Wellington Phillips, Curtis’s cousin by marriage and the project’s first principal ethnological assistant; and Curtis himself. “Entering Apache Lands” by Harold P. Curtis, c. 1948 (c. 1905) Harold, the oldest of the Curtis children, was born in 1893. With the Curtis Studio in Seattle a financial success and coincidental with Edward’s more frequent visits to the 30 In the Southwest 31 East—mainly to try to raise interest in and funds for The North American Indian— Harold was sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania. As his father spent more and more time traveling and his parents’ marriage deteriorated, Harold was spared some of the pain of the family tensions, at least in one sense, by being away from home. In fact, because of his father’s friendship with the lawyer Robert Clark Morris and Morris’s wife, Alice Parmalee Morris, Harold often did not return to Seattle during school vacations but spent them either with the childless Morrises at their home in Morris, Connecticut, or in the field with his father. Later Harold was informally adopted by Alice Parmalee Morris and stayed with her—viewing her virtually as his mother—after her marriage with Robert collapsed. As an adult Harold was close to his father—“the Chief,” as Harold and others referred to him—and, after the conclusion of the Indian project, even worked with him on various business ventures. He enjoyed a long and physically active life. For example, he regularly drove the length of the American west coast between his two homes in Southern California and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, even into his eighties—and died on July 26, 1988.1 Harold Curtis jotted down several reminiscences of his adventures in the field, and shared them with others interested in writing about the Indian work, especially his sister, Florence Curtis Graybill. One memoir in particular—mainly about his experiences on the northern plains, when he caused much worry by contracting typhoid fever—was extensively quoted in a Westerners’ publication and has since been widely circulated in other books. The present essay was probably composed in the late forties— or perhaps only typed then—at a point when various members of Edward’s family were encouraging him to write his autobiography and may have donated materials to that end. It is difficult to say precisely when the journey described took place. For example, A. B. Upshaw, the Crow fieldworker mentioned at the outset, did not join Curtis until too late for the 1905 work in Apache lands, yet the 1906 field season did not reach Apache country until June, after the early spring described here. Possibly two seasons were conflated in the telling.2 I had had many delightful but tantalizingly short weeks with Father in his camps with the Indians, and now I was to be really one of the party and live in camp month after month...