“Soy Gente, Soy Gente” : The Apache Captivity Narrative of José María Mendívil

When José María Mendívil passed away in February 1916, having spent the previous forty-five years or so of his life in mining communities along the Colorado River above Yuma, the Arizona Sentinel reported his death on the front page with the bold headline, “Joe Mendevil, Pioneer Character, Passes Over the Great Divide.” José Mendívil (usually called “Joseph” or simply “Joe” in his later years) gained a justifiably earned reputation as a mineral prospector and developer of silver and gold claims, mines, and processing mills on both sides of the river in Arizona Territory and California. Additionally, he was the primary founder of the 1890s mining community of Picacho, California, located on the west bank of the river some thirty miles north of Yuma. It was generally recognized by those living in the Lower Colorado River region that he had been a captive of the Apaches in his childhood, although the particulars of that part of his lifetime were apparently little known at the time of his death. The newspaper account of his death incorporated the following summary for the events surrounding that episode:

Just what his age was no one knows, for he never knew who his mother and father were, never having any recollection of having seen either . . . . The first that he learned of civilization was when he was captured by Gen. Cook’s troops when they captured a band of savages from Mexico. Joe could speak no other than the Indian tongue, intermixed with Mexican. Interpreters ascertained that he was really not one of the tribe, but that he had been captured by them when he was an infant, his father and mother having been killed at the time. Just how many years he was with the tribe he had no way of telling, except that he was in captivity many, many years. In due course of time he became a valuable adjunct to Gen. Cook’s troops, but finally drifted into civilian life.

Unfortunately, there is little factual substance found in this version of events except for the final phrase of the last sentence.¹

In the years following Mendívil’s passing, some newspaper articles departed even more from reality. For example, the November 13, 1930, edition of the Calexico (Calif.) Chronicle declared that: “It was not until 1857 that quartz seams with gold were discovered in the Picacho district by Joe Mendeville, Indian ward of Captain Mendeville of Fort Yuma who had found him in an Apache camp of the renegade Geronimo’s followers which soldiers attacked in Arizona in reprisal for forays made on white settlements. The boy took the name of his captor who reared him.”² Such distortions were undoubtedly the result of journalistic laziness because the story of Mendívil’s captivity was in fact well documented by newspapers and U.S. Army officers immediately after his rescue.

In fact, an accounting of the activities surrounding his seizure and the ensuing events forms one of the best descriptions of such happenings in mid-nineteenth-century Sonora and Arizona Territory. This is largely due to the availability of both official and other records and the diligence of some military officers who provided him shelter following his liberation. Two of these men further expended substantial effort to document and report José Mendívil’s firsthand accounts of his capture and time in captivity, along with his important observations of various cultural aspects and activities of his abductors, in which he was not only a keen witness but an active participant as well.³

The headline announcing the death of José María Mendívil. Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), February 24, 1916, p. 1.

Family Background

Two years prior to his passing, José Mendívil prepared an affidavit as part of an application requesting that each of his family members be granted ten-acre allotments at the Colorado River Indian Reservation, located some 150 river miles above Yuma. In that document, prepared to establish the family’s Indigenous ancestry...