A Chiricahua Band Hidden in the Clans: The Tsiltaden

By Ruben Leyva

The story of the Apache is not always told in straight lines. Some bands went east. Others went underground. And a few, like the Tsiltaden (pronounced roughly: SEEL-tah-den), disappeared into the folds of other names, only to reappear generations later, not as relics, but as remembered kin.

The Tsiltaden were not forgotten because they were never entirely lost. They were a Chiricahua band known as the "mountain side people" who survived by adapting to shifting political landscapes. Federal authorities once listed them as a Chiricahua group—"Chillon or Chilion, Tsiltaden (a band of Chiricahua)"—but over time, they were absorbed into the administrative categories of the Western Apache. Today, their name lives on in the clan rolls of the San Carlos Apache, cross-listed with the Pinaleño and even the White Mountain Coyotero. This is not a story of assimilation, but of strategic endurance.

In Indians of Arizona, published in 1918, historian Thomas Edwin Farish notes that the Tsiltaden, a Chiricahua band, were later identified as the Tziltaden of the Pinal Coyoteros, the Tziseketzillan of the White Mountain Apache, and the Tsayiskithni of the Navajo. According to Farish, the Tsiltaden were under the San Carlos Agency at that time. This echoes what the San Carlos Apache Tribe affirmed in 2023: the Tsiltaden name still exists on the tribe's official list of clans.

That list was compiled by Willem de Reuse, one of the most respected linguists of the Apachean languages, working alongside San Carlos tribal enrollment officers like Bernadette Goode and Joyce Johnson. Their work ties the historical Tsiltaden band—once associated with Mangas Coloradas, Loco, Victorio, and Geronimo—to contemporary clan structures, where they are counted among the descendants of the San Carlos, Pinaleño, Nedhni-Chiricahua, and White Mountain Apache.

In Western Apache Raiding and Warfare, an elder named Joseph Hoffman recalls meeting a chief of the Tseyiden (pronounced TSAY-yee-den)—"in the rocks people"—and calling him his brother. That chief may have been Haské-níí, also known as Esquine, the Bedonkohe-Chiricahua leader who, alongside Lino "Juh" Leyva, Geronimo, and Elías, agreed in 1879 to relocate to San Carlos. There, he was joined by his son-in-law, Frank Leyva. Haské-níí, remembered by White Mountain Apache scout John Rope as the man who sang during Chiricahua dances, became a cultural bridge. His songs and presence helped Chiricahua families integrate with the Western Apache, including the Tseyiden (rendered as Tseyidn by Basso)—a condensed form of Tseyi' Ndee, meaning "Canyon People."

In my editorial, "Between the Canyon Walls: Reclaiming the Gila Apache Name," this identity is discussed. An early record of the use of the name Tseyi' Ndee for the Chiricahua is from July 22, 1788, in a report by Spanish military leader Hugo de O'Conor to Spanish Commandant General Teodoro de Croix. O'Conor mentioned that the Chiguicagui (Chiricahua) self-identified as "Sigilande." For Frank, this was not merely a relocation—it was an immersion into his wife's people, a living testament to the kinship bonds that carried memory forward even as locations shifted while some names remained.

This matters. Because the Tsiltaden, like some of the Tseyiden, were never deported. They were not sent to Florida. They were not counted among the prisoners of war held at Fort Marion, nor at Mount Vernon Barracks, nor later at Fort Sill. Instead, they survived within the folds of other tribal communities—westernized, renamed, recategorized, but not erased.

That survival tells us something about the life of Frank Leyva, a Chihene–Chiricahua Apache who lived at various times among the Western Apache at the San Carlos Agency. He appears not once but intermittently in reservation records — first entering in 1877 as a prisoner in chains with Geronimo, then again in 1879 with his family, and still later, alone in 1890, listed as "Lava" among the Mojave on the San Carlos census. During these years, Frank was not static. He crossed the border often. His children were baptized in Mexico in 1884, 1886, and again in 1889 — a rhythm of return that complicates any neat archival classification. In 1885, Frank appears on the Mescalero census with a wife and four children, though baptismal records suggest there should have been five. That quiet discrepancy speaks volumes. Whether the missing child was lost, hidden, or taken, we cannot know — only that this silence, too, is a part of the record.

Frank—known to Anglos as Apache Frank or possibly Felaytay—was not Tsiltaden, but like them, he made himself at home among those at San Carlos. He was born to Norberta Ishnoh'n Leyva, a Warm Springs-Chihene Apache matriarch. But in 1879, following a meeting with Apache scouts at Fort Bowie, he and his family began a new trajectory. Unlike his brother Jim Miller, who was deported east as a Chiricahua prisoner of war, Frank found refuge by aligning with those who had already been relocated to the San Carlos Reservation: Yavapai, Tonto, and Pinaleño families. Among them were the Tsiltaden.

These people with a similar cultural background to Frank served as a familial network for him after relocating in 1879 through 1883 and again in 1890. Frank, while at San Carlos, is classified in the 1890 Census records not as Chiricahua but as "Mojave." However, the Fort Sill Historian Gillett Griswold reported Frank as "Yuma"—a label that obscured his origin while protecting his life. The Yavapai bands, who relocated to San Carlos in 1875, were often grouped under such names as Yuma and Mojave. According to Old San Carlos by Paul and Kathleen Nickens, those groups remained at the reservation until around 1900, when they were allowed to return to Fort McDowell, Camp Verde, and Prescott.

Frank did not disappear, but he stepped out of view, reappearing in the memory of Fort Sill to see his mother in 1909. He was not a progenitor of the Bá̱ch'i, but for some time, he was allowed to live among them. That Tucson-region community was already established. Its families carried forward the old ways in hidden arroyos and whispered songs. They spoke Apache softly, behind closed doors, and told their children not to mention who they were.

Frank's children would later marry into Nednhi-Chiricahua families, including the Pinaleño-Nednhi line. This lineage, descended from those who remained and those who returned, now stands as proof that not all Chiricahuas were removed. Some stayed, and some returned quietly, and some, like Frank, found ways to do both.

The implications are clear. Frank Leyva's descendants are not only tied to the Warm Springs families at Fort Sill and Mescalero. They are also tied to the Tseyiden (Tseyidn) and Tsiltaden—to families who remained at San Carlos, to those listed today on the tribal rolls and clan registries. This link challenges the binary narrative of Chiricahua exile versus disappearance. It opens the door to a more complicated, but more accurate, map of Apache persistence.

There is a danger in forgetting the Tsiltaden story. When the band was renamed as a clan, when its Chiricahua origins were folded into Pinaleño or Coyotero identities, it became easier to assume they had always been Western Apache. But the record does not support that. The BIA, the Smithsonian, tribal historians, and local knowledge all agree: the Tsiltaden were Chiricahua. And some of them stayed.

We must also be careful not to impose new myths. Frank was not the founder of this community. He did not shape its identity. He survived within it. He learned to move through its natural flows, speak its dialects, and protect his kin. The family believes that, for a period, he may have lived under the name Felaytay. For a moment, he was associated with the Mojave, according to records. He let the record keepers believe what they wanted to believe. That, too, was strategy.

In the end, it was not the government that preserved these stories. It was the people. It was the great-aunt who warned her family never to speak the word "Chiricahua" aloud, lest they be sent to "the Black"—the East. It was the elder who rolled in the soil of the Dragoon Mountains as a child. It was the children who remembered the old songs sung in secret. It was the clan systems, so important in Apache relationships, that brought the past into the present.

It was kinship, not paperwork, that carried the Tsiltaden through. It is kinship that still ties Frank's descendants to that legacy. Today, we may find the name on an enrollment form or a tribal database, but it is the mountain itself—the land that held them—that remembers best.

Not every survivor stood on a battlefield. Some survived by standing still, by standing close, by standing in the place their ancestors had always called home.

The Tsiltaden were not lost. They were hidden. And now, we remember.