Tag: Apache

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On Mule Teams and Dutch Oven Biscuits

Mule teams and Dutch oven biscuits, doubletrees and a renegade Apache called the Apache Kid. These are some of the images that fire family history, family myth.

Betty and I spent some time in Arizona and New Mexico this year and as we wandered around between the deserts and the mountains, my mind journeyed to some of my family’s history in that part of the USA: My great-grandfather Riggs herding cattle into the Mogollon country in the 1870s, the Plumbs settling in the eastern part of the state, the decades down around Tombstone and then homesteading in the Sonoran Desert south of the Salt River.

I heard a lot of stories about these folks when I was young, these pioneers who pushed south out of Utah into a wild and desolate land.

One of the tales I heard was about an encounter my grandfather, William Lafayette Plumb, had with the Apache Kid. It came to mind as Betty and I were headed south from San Simon, Arizona, on Interstate 10, driving towards Portal Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains. I’d forgotten the story, but as we looked at the desert flats trapped between the Chiricahuas on our right and the Peloncillo Mountains on our left, the story came back to me.

The Apache Kid, or Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl as he was named in Apache, was a semi-mythical figure who lived in the border country of Arizona and New Mexico in the US, and Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico. The Kid was pretty much an orphaned child and was raised around Army posts in Arizona, and when he became old enough, the chief of Army scouts, Al Sieber, chose him for a scout.

In 1887 The Kid was involved in a murder of another Apache scout, was tried and convicted–more than once for the same murder–before finally being sent to the Arizona State Prison in Yuma in 1889. On the way, The Kid escaped and from that point on, became a phantom of sorts, accused of rape and rustling and theft and murder all the way into the 1930s.

My grandfather was a freighter around the turn of the 20th Century. He hauled freight in southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico as well as northern Mexico.

Lafe Plumb freighting logs

The encounter with The Kid as told to me was that Lafe, as they called my grandfather, and two other freighters were camped out in the high desert south of San Simon. Let me set the scene.

The horses were hobbled in a meadow. Even though it’s a desert now, that country back then–in the 1890s–was lush. The freight wagons, or trucks as they were also known, were drawn up in a laager just in case; even though the Apaches had been on the reservation for ten-plus years, old fears refused to die gracefully. The sun was just cutting in over the Peloncillos and the meadowlarks were singing their liquid-gold tunes. A slight breeze bent the heads of the gramma grass and a mantle of snow shrouded the Chiricahuas.

Dutch ovens smoked on blue-red mesquite coals, a speckled coffee pot, too. Tin plates and cups and other gear spread in the bed of one of the wagons. Side meat sizzled in a Dutch oven and potatoes fried in a cast iron skillet. The scent of pinto beans and fresh tortillas lingered over the fire.

The freighters wore high-topped boots and colorful Mexican serapes, floppy felt hats. Big knives hung off their belts and long-barreled 44s in holsters. Winchester rifles leaned up against the spokes of wagon wheels.

No one heard The Kid arrive…just suddenly there, sitting horseback, sombrero brim pulled down over his forehead, right hand on the grip of one of his pistols.

I imagine alarm and awkwardness. Hemming and hawing. He was an Indian and they were white men.

But I also imagine these freighters having a notion of hospitality, and they would have known that if he was going to kill them, he probably would have already done so, and so they invited him to sit a spell and share their victuals.

They ate their beans and tortillas and side meat and spuds, the freighters talking about the route south, their families. The Kid sat on his haunches and packed all his grub inside tortillas and never said a word. That’s what my grandmother kept saying to me when she first told me this story. “He never said a word.”

When he finished eating, he set his utensils down on the end of one of the wagons, walked over to his horse, jumped into the saddle, turned to ride off, but then stopped. He looked at the freighters and tipped his hat and said, “You men are lucky. You just ate breakfast with the Apache Kid and will live to tell your children.” That’s what she kept saying, my grandmother, “You men are lucky. You just ate breakfast with the Apache Kid and will live to tell your children.”

One of the important aspects of family history is how it creates a rich tapestry that ties us to the past. Some folks reckon that what happened in the past doesn’t matter since it can’t be changed. Yet I can’t help but wonder if where we come from isn’t part of who we are.

Ken Rodgers

I once heard a radio interview with the African American poet Rita Dove. She talked about family and the strengths that family history provides to the living. The past provides context, it presents a panoply of characters to admire, or not admire.

Rita Dove’s not-too-distant ancestors were slaves. Yet family was so important to her that since she couldn’t know who her ancestors were, she made them up. It was important for her to create a lineage, to visualize, to name them, to give herself a framework to understand who and what she had become.

Even though I can name a lot of my ancestors, family history is important to me for the same reasons it is important to Rita Dove. It’s important to me to know about Lafe Plumb’s encounter with the Apache Kid.

I don’t necessarily have to make up a family history. I have stories related to me over the years by my elders. I also have family rumors and myth–some true, some false–that I can draw upon so that the images I see in my mind are the kind I can hear and see and smell, the kind I can rub my hand over and when I look at my fingers, find a festered splinter that came out of one of Lafe’s freight wagons.

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The Wind

The wind blows in Idaho this time of year. Totes the angry vestiges of another aging winter. Grass leans, limbs break, birds balance in the tops of aspen branches that tilt away from the gales that holler off the east Oregon desert. Time moves east to west around here, the wind sweeps west to east and yells back at us about what we time-mailed West Coast way yesterday.

And yesterday the wind blew, and last week, most of the week except for one or two golden days where the rays made us think of planting spinach and snap peas; but then, here it rolled in again, the blustery breath of early spring, stirred up by differences in barometric pressure. Wind is air movement pushed out of high pressure areas into low pressure areas. Winds create havoc in hurricanes and typhoons, can lift the land off the top of Wyoming and haul it all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic. It carves, cuts and makes you crazy.

Once Betty and I stood above the Palais de Papes in Avignon, Provence, admiring a late spring view of the Rhone, the hills, the old town, when a blast of hot air known locally as the Mistral almost knocked us over. I recall reading somewhere about that wind, and Gauguin and Van Gogh and how the Mistral helped drive Van Gogh crazy.

When I lived in southern Arizona, the wind got up in the spring and blew a layer of dust for days, stinging eyes, skin, the leaves of newly planted pansies, testing your ability to stay focused on the business of getting by. In the summer, great hullabaloos formed up over Tucson and harangued our way, as if to furiously eradicate the city of Phoenix and everything in between.

I lived in that desert in early the seventies, not too long back from the war and metaphorically speaking, walking backwards into a stiff gale. In 1972 I recall standing outside my house and watching one of those brief and violent late afternoon holocausts rear up and try to exterminate everything in its way. Spiny Sonoran Desert mountain ranges over four thousand feet up were dwarfed by the chocolate brown fury. It roiled and rolled, like a flood rush of muddy water. When it attacked us, the sky turned black, trailer houses moved twenty feet to the northwest, telephone poles snapped like match sticks, privet bushes lost half their leaves. Everything and everywhere owned a coat of fine brown clay.

When Betty and I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico, the wind blew from late February through May. Steady. Brisk. The moan and whine of old spruce trees as they rubbed up against each other and the wood in your back porch deck. The gales, gusts, and breezes that hauled Arizona’s surface over the Gila massif, the Black Range, the San Andres, finally picking up the white gypsum sand outside of Alamogordo. Plastering it on the sides of mountain top Ponderosa pine and red fir so that it looked like snow. The season of creaks and cracks and listening to the trees complain in the middle of the night. Worrying about the hood of your car. The roof over your bed.

In Cloudcroft, NM, the bars bustled that time of the year. Men stormed in and threatened each other with big Bowie-type knives, .357 magnums, fists, snow shovels. The schnapps and cheap whiskey spilled all over the bar tops. Boot heels up in the air. Old woodstoves smoking where the melting snow leaked in and dripped dripped dripped.

Everyone seemed on edge. That was the time of boredom, before planting, before moving the cattle, often too muddy to go into the woods to work. Just time to drink and dream and stew. That’s when the Apaches would come to town and irritate half the white folk. I don’t know if it was all on purpose, the back and forth between the white folk and the natives. But it bubbled up everywhere: in the mercantile, the gas station, the Western Bar. Barkeep Frieda used to get after the young Apache men as they taunted her over their glasses of draft Budweiser. She’d call the law. They’d laugh. The law would show up. Sometimes a fight ensued.

Once a young Apache man came to town and ran out of gas in his pickup. The wind blew that day, too. I recall the fluttering skirts and scarves of women bustling on the boardwalk, the American and New Mexican flags slapped straight out from the flag pole.

That young Apache man went around and begged for change to buy a couple of gallons of gas. I sat in the Western Cafe and drank hot coffee and watched. He tried at the gas station. They threw him out of the bank. He walked up to the door of the bar, but thought better. I don’t know, maybe he’d been kicked out of there before when he wasn’t so needy.

He went from store to business to store down the length of Burro Street. Out of sight I wondered about all the animosity between whites and browns, whites and yellows, black and brown, yellow and red, hell, anything that makes one different is enough to start the process, like a little breeze that gets up in the afternoon, then steadies into a wind that gusts with particular fury. Sometimes it’s a typhoon and blows the world down onto its knees.

After finishing my coffee, I walked down to the post office to get the mail. The wind forced me to tilt my back into it. People in the street leaned this way and that, any way they could to fight the power of what they could not stop.

After I checked my mail box, I saw that young Apache standing at the door, hitting everyone up for change. He wasn’t having any luck and I wondered how I could slip by him and out into the wind. I didn’t want to get caught and have to say, “No.”

For a moment, a gaggle of women dammed up against the entrance…purple pant suits and the quilted outers of down jackets. L. L. Bean boots. I saw my chance to escape but by the time I arrived at the door he was standing forlorn and single. I figured if I didn’t look him in the eye, he’d leave me be, but for some reason I looked him in the eye. What I saw was nothing to fear.

He said, “Hey, man, I ran out of gas and I…”

I already knew his story. It’s as old as mankind. For some reason, against my will, I stuffed my right hand in my Levi pocket and pulled out a lump of dollar bills, quarters, pennies, dimes.

I shoved it at him, “That’s all I got.”

I swear some tears rose in his eyes and I doubt it was from the wind. He started to pull off a silver and turquoise ring the size of my thumb, and said, “Here, man,” but I threw out my clenched fist and said, “Naw, ain’t necessary.”

He began to say something else, but I didn’t stick around, just had to get out into that wind.