By Ruben Leyva
The descendants of the Gila Apache were not loaded into boxcars and sent east. Some from all four principal bands stayed in the West, particularly the young and elderly, and found refuge on the San Carlos and White Mountain Apache Reservations. These communities took in children whose parents were lost to death or exile. Like the ocotillo, they remained rooted, blooming when the time was right. They concealed their Chiricahua ties to avoid deportation. One such story begins with a ten-year-old boy who stayed behind, John Talgo.
John stayed and adapted after the upheaval of the Chiricahua in 1886, when many Apaches were exiled to Florida. He married Nona Zaye Yundehe and raised their children in Bylas, Arizona, within the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Like other San Carlos and White Mountain families with ties to those deported, they embodied a quiet resistance: young people hidden among relatives, shielded from government removal, nurtured by close-knit clan networks that understood survival meant remembering.
Places like Black Rock, Turkey Creek, and Bonito Creek were more than remote outposts—they were sanctuaries where prayers for deported family members took form in the footsteps of the next generation. I share this story not as a distant historian, but as the fifth great-grandson of El Pīs A Hó and Ołáyáʼ, "She Who Sings." Through this lineage, my family carries the memory and moral weight of these choices. As explained, the names Idalgo and Talgo are not abstract to me; they are ancestral and blood-woven through marriage to my Leyva family.
In most accounts of Apache history, the 1886 removal of the Chiricahua Apaches is prominent. The trains headed for Florida, the forced exile, and the Fort Sill internments -these events are etched into public memory. Yet, silence surrounds another truth: some never left. The Gila Apache, blood relatives of Pīs A Hó Cabezon, Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and others, remained in their homeland. While some of my family members were sent east, some of my great-grandparents and extended family members endured in the shadows of the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico. Other family members hid in plain sight in the Mogollon Rim of New Mexico and Arizona, particularly within the folds of Bylas (San Carlos Apache Reservation) and Turkey Creek (White Mountain Apache Reservation).
Their survival was not erasure. It was endurance, hidden in the histories of family names. Like the Geronimo surname, Chiricahua prisoners of war who descend from Cochise often use the surnames *Cochise* or *Naiche*. However, Western and Gila Apache ancestry, which is connected to Cochise and his siblings, is rooted in different surnames—*Talgo* and *Idalgo* (pronounced Ee-TAHL-go). These family names in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico carry traditions and responsibilities. Their presence in San Carlos and White Mountain Apache Reservations was not incidental but strategic, ceremonial, and sacred.
My Apache ancestor, Ołáyáʼ, was the daughter of the Sisneros family, captured by the Spanish military in 1695 at El Salinero's Gila Mountain ranchería. She married Santiago, the son of Juana Rosa de la Cruz, who belonged to the Clay Riverbank Clan of the White Mountain Apache. Santiago held the title El Pīs A Hó, "The Clay Riverbank One." His nickname, El Pīs A Hó, identified him as a White Mountain Apache man honored as a leader, diplomat, and relative by Gila Apache families. The couple's son was baptized *Joseph Miguel Idalgo Sisneros* in 1764.
Joseph "Miguel" inherited the Pīs A Hó name, which the Spanish clergy corrupted to Idalgo. In the shade of the tribes' family trees, he grew and became known as Pīs A Hó Cabezon—a prominent Gila Apache headman in the San Francisco River area. The river begins in Arizona's White Mountains, flows eastward into New Mexico, and then curves back into Arizona before joining the Gila River near Clifton. Among his sons was Cochise. One of Cochise's two wives was from the Chokonen band, and he became their leader. His second wife, Dos-teh-seh, was the daughter of Mangas Coloradas and the mother of Taza and Naiche.
His Apache name, Cochise or Gócí (meaning "His Nose"), emerged from cross-band roots. These intertwined lineages illuminate a truth often missed in simplistic retellings of tribal identity. Matrilocal systems meant that cultural identity followed the mother's line. Cochise's father relocated to the Sisneros, Bedonkohe band, descendants of the ancestral western Salineros, a Gila Apache group. Descendants from this line, including the Talgo family of Bylas, are blood kin to Cochise, not metaphorically, but genealogically.
The Cibecue community at White Mountain also shares ties, and the alliance between Cochise and other White Mountain Apache leaders, such as Hashkeedasilla, was solid. Cochise was close friends with Gochaahá, a White Mountain Apache named "Big One." He was a tall, muscular war captain who joined Cochise on raids into Mexico. While Cochise's Stronghold was located in the Dragoon Mountains, his descendants were relocated to San Carlos after he died in 1874.
Cochise's Pīs A Hó family name didn't just survive; it anchored their identities in fundamental places. In 1876, Taza and Naiche led their father's people north to the San Carlos Apache Reservation. John Talgo was an infant at that time. Cochise's people established a cultural foothold, although some, like Geronimo, chose to break away from the reservation and escape to more familiar mountains and canyons. Those who remained stayed connected to the wisdom found in places documented by the late Keith H. Basso.
These were not remote zones; they were sanctuaries. Bonito Creek, near Fort Apache, was not a hiding place but a memory held in water. Clan names Nádotz Ózn ("Slender Peak Standing Up People") and Pīs A Hó reveal that sacred geography has endured through language. They were identity markers embedded in place, a silent declaration that the people had not disappeared.
Even in times of confrontation, these communities stood firm according to Tl'oldiłhił (Black Rope). In April 1882, Geronimo returned to San Carlos to retrieve Loco's band but faced resistance at Ash Flat. Richard Bylas, the Eastern White Mountain Apache leader, initially refused Geronimo and his group access to his sheep camp, warning the Mexican Victoriano Mestas, who had been a captive of Geronimo's people in his youth: "Don't let them come, for they will kill you." To his detriment, Mestas granted Geronimo access.
Sensing whiskey on Bylas's breath, Geronimo requested alcohol, and he persistently repeated his request. Pīs A Hó Cabezon's daughter, Inádzidlé —"She Who Rose Up"—was the wife of Nahilzay and mother of Adelnietze. These two men were with Bylas. Adelnietze reinforced the refusal: "This man (Bylas) is not a boy for you to talk to this way." These were words and declarations of spiritual and moral responsibility and sovereignty.
The lines between families, clans, and leadership were not always visible to outsiders. However, within these circles, alliances like those between the Idalgo and Bylas families represented bonds of survival. They formed what might best be called alliances of protection—ritual and familial structures designed to uphold kinship. As an adult, Adelnietze was front and center when photographed with my family at Cañon de los Embudos, Sonora, in 1886. He did not surrender at Fort Bowie in Arizona like Geronimo and many others; instead, he and a group of prayer runners escaped captivity by fleeing to the Sierra Madre.
Such endurance is also preserved in linguistic and ethnographic records. Richard Perry, in Western Apache Heritage, emphasized the Gila Apache's place within the broader Western Apache world. They were not outliers but mountain-adapted kin. They retained similar language and ceremonial structures while developing a distinct dialect, singing style, and crown dance. The Gila Apache overlapped more with Western Apache geographies along the present-day Arizona-New Mexico border. Indeed, today, the Chiricahua prisoners of war descendants align more closely with the distant Plains Apache. Their rituals, kinship practices, and ecological ties are rooted in an eastern corridor but retain western influences.
The names out west passed down through these families—Idalgo and Talgo—are not relics. The name Pīs A Hó, shaped by Spanish clerics into Idalgo and later adapted as Talgo on reservation rolls, carries its sacred weight across borders and generations. These three spellings of the same name preserve the memory of ancestors who adapted their speech across boundaries while maintaining their identity. These versions of Pīs A Hó (pronounced Biszaha) are signposts of belonging, bearing the weight of memory and obligation. Their legacy is one of survival and stewardship, serving as guardians of place, ceremony, and kinship.
Among the earliest women to carry the Talgo spelling was *Tsese,* [TS-eh-seh], born in 1836. She is remembered as "Jennie Talgo," a widow in census documents. Forty years older than John Talgo, she remained behind like stone warmed by the morning sun. Her Apache name meant "Stone Woman." In times of upheaval, the old and young were often overlooked. They posed little threat, yet held the most remarkable memory. Tsese was no mere bystander. She was Baa nołtł'izhíí, the one who endures with grace. A prayer in motion, rooted in place. Her presence was not forgotten. Like Bylas, her name continues to speak softly yet without pause.
Tsese's enduring presence confirms that not all matriarchs were deported east. The U.S. aimed to eliminate the cultural identity in the Southwest by exiling every mother's line, but Tsese proves otherwise. She is a living memory that the Gila Apache lineage continued at home, passed down through women who remained rooted. Her survival as a named elder is not an anomaly but evidence of an unbroken Gila Apache land-based identity. Although she passed away on August 9, 1923, at the age of 87, she and all matriarchs are still honored, just as the memory of "Taa Taa Gócí," our great ancestor (Cochise), is revered.
This continuity persists today. In the fall of 2025, Gila Apache relatives from New Mexico will participate in a Na'í'ees Sunrise puberty rites ceremony in San Carlos. This is more than a rite of passage; it is a return. Anthropologist Eleanor Nevins refers to such rites as bá'hadziih, a ceremonial reaffirmation of moral and familial ties. It is an act of remembering that is not passive but active, a memory relived.
What binds these communities is not just blood, but intention—a shared ethic of remembrance and responsibility. When an Apache girl kneels in the shade of a ramada in Bylas, surrounded by her relatives who offer songs taught by elders, and when her Gila Apache cousins from New Mexico arrive with tobacco and gifts, we see not divergence but convergence. These surnames in Apache communities of New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma, as well as these places —Fort Sill, Mescalero, along the Gila River, and in Mexico —are not boundaries but braided strands of the same basket.
We were never erased; we were only overlooked. The Gila Apache did not vanish; they endured, living under many names on reservations. Not all resistance moved east with the Chiricahuas. Some stayed and kept winter stories alive in the whisper of pines, Southwest canyons, and the languages of Western Apache kin. Exile defined some, but it did not define us all. The Gila Apache are not merely a genetic thread; we are a community shaped by kinship, memory, and relationships that outlasted removal.
