The Forgotten Third Woman: In the Final Days of Freedom

By Ruben Q. Leyva

They said there were two.

That's how the record tells it—two Apache women who entered the town of Fronteras to buy mescal, cooking pots, and a little sugar for the camp. Two women who spoke softly in Spanish and handed over gold to the Sonoran merchants while Geronimo and Naiche, son of the deceased Chokonen band leader Cochise, waited in the hills. Two women who Lieutenant Leonard Wood reports were temporarily seized by Mexican soldiers, on August 22, 1886, whose names history preserved as Tah-das-te and Dejonah. But what if there were three?

What if the one who carried the basket of mescal wasn't just a shadow between them, but Felicitas, a woman of the Leyva kin, who spoke both the language of the sierra and the marketplace, who knew the cost of survival? The National Archives don't say her name, not directly. They hint around her, "several squaws," wrote Lt. Charles Gatewood in his field journal (Gatewood 1898, 131). "Women," said Lieutenant Wood, who never stopped to count. Only the Mexican prefect of Arispe bothered to write them down: Felicitas and Cruz (Alonso 2025, 118). And so, from those fragments, an old story begins to breathe again.

Within the Apache custom of diplomacy, it was often women who were entrusted to begin peace overtures, a practice some scholars call the 'gender of diplomacy.' Lieutenant Wood's account records that, on August 19, 1886, the Apache women called out for Dejonah, who could connect them to her husband, El Apache Elías, then scouting for the U.S. Army. These women were not mere traders seeking supplies; they were emissaries carrying Geronimo's message to his trusted friend Elías, demonstrating how obligation and diplomacy intertwined through the courage of women.

Yet Wood's August 19 entry and his later note of August 22 may not describe the same encounter. The first, the calling out for Dejonah at her Fronteras home, appears to record the diplomatic overture, when women acted as envoys seeking contact with El Apache Elías. The second, when two women were captured at Fronteras, likely marks the outcome of that effort. These dual references, only three days apart, reveal how the same women could be remembered twice: first as messengers of peace, then political diplomats negotiating surrender.

Sweeney (2010, 573) tells us of the two men who vanished from Lawton's camp after the surrender and before arriving at Fort Bowie on September 8, 1886. These men Atelnietze and Nat-cul-baye (Elías), were men who escaped south into Sonora and lived another decade in the hills. Alonso argues that the women who slipped away with them were the same: Felicitas and Dejonah. 

One woman, the Spanish-speaking wife of El Apache Elías. The other, her companion and the wife of Francisco de Jesús Leyva, AKA Apache Frank.

And if that's true, then the line between witness and ancestor thins, because the woman left uncounted, the "third," has been publicly identified. Lieutenant Wood's own spelling of "Alias" as "Elias" in his field notes links directly to this family line, offering linguistic continuity and corroborating evidence for the Elías–Leyva connection, one of Apache Frank Leyva's two wives, Maximiliana and Felicitas, the latter who reappears fourteen years later in the 1900 Tucson census beside him. The census said the family had re-entered the U.S. from Mexico in 1888, only about 15 months after Geronimo and the POWs had been exiled. 

The August 1886 record of the encounter with the women in Fronteras, Sonora, said one was "very old and horribly ugly." That's how *La Constitución* described one of the women from that day in Fronteras, its own way of deciding who mattered enough to remember. But if you read across the records, the story starts to shift. Wood wrote simply of "women," as if they were part of the landscape, incidental and plural.

Gatewood, who was possibly more attentive but still not politically correct by today's standards, saw the difference in his writing. Here, Wood's own mention of 'women' in the plural from his August 19, 1886, field notes entry provides crucial corroboration for Gatewood's 'several squaws.' This grounds the evidentiary chart in both primary perspectives, as he reported "several" and noted they were willing to speak if their terms were met. What historians later mistook as a single event was, in fact, one day of approach and one of capture. 

The duplication in reports: "women," "several squaws," and "two captured" suggests overlapping sightings of the same small kin group moving between Fronteras and the Teras Mountain camps around the 19th and 22nd. The record collapses these moments, leaving later readers to untangle the living from the remembered. This evidence of several women allows those who have heard the memory of the woman warrior Lozen's presence in Fronteras to live on. The confusion between these two incidents does not weaken the record; it strengthens it. It shows how Apache women's actions moved faster than colonial record keeping could keep up with, appearing twice in the span of three days, first as negotiators and then as fugitives. What survives is not a contradiction but a rhythm of resistance.

Sweeney, writing generations later, reduced them to two women, Tah-das-te and Dejonah, and closed the ledger. Then came Alonso, who reopened it with care, retrieving the names that had been hiding in plain sight: Felicitas and Cruz (as Dejonah). His revision didn't add new ghosts; it let the living step forward. In the gaps between their versions, the omission, the lieutenant's uncertainty, the historian's compression, one begins to see a pattern of forgetting so practiced it feels like form.

Each record describes the order. Each record releases what memory cannot remember. Felicitas Leyva and Dejonah Elías keep returning. Their stories align with that of their leader, Naiche, who told U.S. General George Crook, "Near Fort Bowie, two men, one boy, and some women left the party and have never been heard from since."  

The narrative also aligns with my great-grandfathers, Apache Frank (Francisco de Jesús) and El Apache Elías, who were independently taken captive by Mexicans in the Arizona Territory, possibly by the same Mexican family. The men shared parallel histories of displacement and endurance that predated the 1886 Chiricahua Apache association with Geronimo and deepened their kinship. Through these ancestors shared captivity and survival, of having not been sent east with the POWs, breathes new life into the narrative and a distinct survivor identity as Gila Apache.

This link connects the Elías–Leyva kin to specific regional and familial geographies across the borderlands, not only in the paperwork, but in the kinship that kept these families connected until the present. The woman, like her husband, survived the rounding up and the silence and surfaced in a census. She appeared as a name on a line beside (Francisco de) Jesús, in a city built over Native land.

That one line reopens everything we thought was finished. Because if Felicitas was there in Fronteras, standing beside Dejonah, then they were two who survived while Tah-das-te and Lozen were sent east on trains. It was the beginning of new survival stories hundreds of miles apart. It was kinship rearranging itself to survive. The women, called "wives," were strategists; the men, called "surrenderers" or "runaways," were negotiators of continuance.

This is where "Challenging Bias in Apache History: A Journey Toward Cross-Border Truths" begins to matter again.

There, I wrote that "our history has been told from the outside looking in, as if those who fled south simply disappeared." But the Elías–Leyva–Silva families never disappeared. They recalibrated, carrying memory across borders the way others carried religious sacraments. 

The 1890 Tombstone Epitaph notice of the "Elías band active in Sonora," and the 1897 San Francisco Call article referencing the same Apache survivors near Casas Grandes, prove that the kin who walked out of Skeleton Canyon were the same who reemerged a decade later in Chihuahua's valleys. These are the people the Chiricahua Wikipedia page calls the "Nameless Ones," as if anonymity were their destiny. But we know their names.

El Apache Elías (José de la Cruz Elías).
Dejonah (Juana "Cruz" Elías).
Atelnietze.
Felicitas Leyva.
Apache Frank (Francisco de Jesús Leyva).

They were not nameless. They were deliberately misunderstood, their kinship systems mistranslated into categories the bureaucracy could digest. Some stories refuse to end where history says they should. 

What we call disappearance was sometimes strategy; what we call exile was a way to keep ceremony breathing. The Gila Apache kinship logics I've written about are those quiet systems of memory that link families such as the Elías of Fronteras, Sonora, the Silva of Camargo, Chihuahua, and the Leyva of Tucson, Arizona. They show how relationality connects all three families to all three borderland regions.

Their Mexican and Tohono O'odham neighbors called them Bą Chí (a Spanish corruption of Apache). Anthropologist Morris E. Opler categorized them as a Central Chiricahua band, or Chokonen—the Mountainside Ridge People. This was the same band affiliation of many of those deported to Florida, related to Naiche. 

In his January 31, 1868, letter to his superiors, the U.S. Indian Agent Levi Ruggle numbered this Apache community at 100. His letter refers to them as "Tame Apache at Tucson." Ruggle offers the group as a proof of concept that Apache can assimilate under the right conditions, and that this group might model good behavior if given a reservation and "hostile" Apache are integrated. 

By 1900, (Francisco de) Jesús Leyva and Felicitas had settled in Tucson's Second Ward, the eastern section of the city, at the foothills of the Rincon Mountains near Old Fort Lowell. Araivaipa Apache Walter Hooke's recollection places the Bą Chí within this same landscape: Aravaipa Creek to the Rincons, Teeł Nanebsá [Cattails Across], and Tú Bílgoš'įt [A Lot of Water Like Hills]. These were the living geographies of the Apache families who returned to the Tucson basin after the Chiricahua deportations—building corrals, raising children, and maintaining ties to the Mexicans who had once sheltered them.

When Felicitas surfaced in the Tucson census, she proved Ruggle's hypothesis. She was reuniting with other survivors who could model how she should adapt. Felicitas evinces that the families who walked south from Fort Bowie did not vanish. There was no reservation established for the Tame Apache at Tucson as Ruggle recommended. However, those refugees in their own homeland quietly adapted, folding their histories into borderland stories that could pass through checkpoints. 

Remembering the third woman changes everything because it reminds us that our Gila Apache histories are built on the women who did not surrender and survived. To research for evidence of the ancestors is kinship practice. It is important to acknowledge that learning about survival stories during this Native American Heritage Month should be considered a form of ceremony.