Chief Loco: Apache Peacemaker (review)

Bud Shapard’s account is both convincing and exasperating. With a rich and solid array of primary documentation, he succeeds in convincing his reader that despite a long record of depredations, there was at least one major Apache chief, Loco, from the Ojo Caliente (self-identified as “Chihennes” or Red Paint people) band who realized early on that to continue the life of a marauder was doomed to ultimate failure. In behalf of the women and children in particular, he opted for reservation life with all of its shortcomings rather than risk genocide. This is a sympathetic biography, yet the writer is at his best when he shows the foibles and necessary evils faced by a successful Apache leader. Plagued by occasional bouts of heavy indulgence in alcohol consumption and credited with at least three killings of troublemakers in the tribe, Chief Loco persisted in his goal with dogged determination. He was able to survive the counterproductive efforts of militants such as Victorio and, especially Geronimo, who forced Loco and his band to join him in a flight from the San Carlos Reservation back to their old haunts in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Together with Edwin Sweeney’s Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief and Dan Thrapp’s Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches, Shapard’s book completes a trilogy of works covering significant Apache leaders.

A particularly strong and previously neglected portion covered by Shapard’s account involved the Apaches’ evacuation and subsequent imprisonment in Florida and Alabama. Despite Loco’s efforts in behalf of peace and acculturation via education of his children, Loco and his followers found themselves transported along with known militants across the country to incarceration, first at Ft. Marion, Florida, and later at Mt. Vernon Post in Alabama. The Apaches began to wear white men’s clothing, make white friends, become local entrepreneurs, and they gained celebrity status thanks to the tourist appeal they engendered among those wishing to see their first “wild Indians.” Despite good treatment for the most part at these installations both by their army caretakers and the local populations who benefited from this new tourist attraction, these Apaches, isolated from their native environment, suffered high rates of tuberculosis, malaria, and mortality in the humid South. Most were eventually allowed to return westward to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, by 1894. As for the aged patriarch and peacemaker, Loco, he was near his end. But before he died, he left some remarkable recorded statements about his affection for his white neighbors and their way of life.

Shapard shows less sympathy toward the Mexican American neighbors of the Ojo Calientes at Cañada Alamosa (today Monticello, New Mexico), who shared similar levels of abject poverty with their Apache neighbors on the same Rio Grande tributary. It is unfathomable that these new American citizens might openly refuse to trade goods, including liquor, with these heavily armed warriors. The author does acknowledge that the Apaches occasionally pillaged the maize of these settlers, but it was the Ojo Calientes’ lack of “groceries” that he contends most commonly sparked their sporadic raids on both sides of the border. In keeping with the modern paradigm of western history, historians must be mindful to give just coverage to all of the “conquered peoples” of the West.