If the herders knew their names, a more difficult and important question follows: *Do we know who some of their descendants are today? *
Pages 111–121 and 139 of Robert Watt's book processing notes on *Horses Worn to Mere Shadows* discreetly records something the sweeping Chief Victorio epic often fails to notice. With its explicit documentation of raids, the military responses to them, and Indian Depredation Claims filed as a result, it also documents specific Apache people who did not disperse from the Gila–Mogollon–San Francisco country even after the U.S. experiment with reservation life ended in that region. These were not mere fugitives fading up into the mountains. They were families that went on living and ranching and reporting losses and being identified by local authorities because they were already known.
Two brothers stand out. They carried the surname Leyva, sometimes pronounced Leyba.
The first is Francisco de Jesús Leyva, leader of the Bedonkohe band named **Pancho Laceris** in local Spanish-language sources: misspelled as **Lasheires** and pronounced "Lasharris" in newspapers, but easily traceable from Indian Depredation Claims and later military correspondence. As Edwin Sweeney details in *From Cochise to Geronimo*, this Francisco was the chief who led the sheep-scattering raid of April 28, 1880 (some sources say April 25), which launched Victorio's well-planned offensive. Watt's notes directly corroborate that identification. Francisco was not some faceless raider along for the ride with Victorio, and his family did not just appear in the region. Sweeney paints him a Bedonkohe chief, a participant in Apache-style war in Bedonkohe country with attention to kinship; tailoring an approach that depended on recognition: for proximity and long acquaintance of the land and its people.
The raid also sits at a moment when older trading relations in the corridor were fracturing. As government control increased and Anglo settlement widened, the terms that once stabilized Hispano–Apache exchange weakened. Under those conditions, senior Chihene leaders could still pursue a strategic plan, but younger warriors, and possibly allied fighters with separate grievances, had fewer reasons to protect local ties. That is how familiarity and violence can coexist in the same record: the corridor did not vanish; the governance that moderated it was being dismantled.
The second name is softer, but no less significant: José Albino "Guero" Mariscal Leyva and in Watt's materials as *José Lieba* (spelled Leyba/Leyva across different documents), reporting one lost animal. That detail matters. A man, a biological brother of the person responsible for the incident, where herders and "Indians?" are conflated, is said to have lost one head of stock among the thousands of sheep that had been scattered throughout the area.
The asymmetry of loss raises questions about proximity and foreknowledge rather than chance alone, questions the surviving records do not fully resolve.
Who was the ranchero nicknamed Guero, sometimes spelled Huero? He was the husband of Soledad Alderete, who in this editorial series was warned by the Apache Victorio to hide herself and four children in the reeds near Old Fort Tularosa to avoid being victims of his mocetones (young male warriors). Guero was listed as "JM Leyba" on the U.S. Forest Service documentation. An Apache still lingering from when the short-lived roster of the Old Tularosa Apache Agency whose doors shuttered six years before. His rancheria at Apache Creek was surveyed the year following this incident. Indian Agent John M. Shaw lists him in his 1876 census at Ojo Caliente, along with Francisco (probably his brother), Victorio, Nana, and others.
The point here isn't just that Guero stayed in the region as a herder, but also that his position enabled him to provide for others, like his brother, passing through the corridor. That continuity is supported by later federal land records compiled in 2011 by retired U.S. Forest Service employee Ronald Henderson. JM Leyba (José Mariscal Leyba) is recorded in the regular land use reports based on Datil, New Mexico, a location he settled after Apache Creek. These records do not describe conflict. They describe presence.
The Leyva Rancheria was at Apache Creek on the Old Fort Tularosa reservation. Victorio preferred to camp at the old Horse Springs nearby. Not every family member permanently accompanied Victorio back to the Warm Springs that the agency shut down. Many remained or returned to the area of the Old Fort Tularosa rather than being relocated to the San Carlos Apache Agency in Arizona, in 1877 and again the following year. They appeared in local records as herders and laborers in the area of modern-day Aragon, New Mexico. Those families were instrumental in settling what was to become the nearby Mangas, New Mexico, named after the late chief Mangas Coloradas.
Guero was not a fugitive or a ward but was known to local and federal officials through ordinary records, even though he was not identified as a hostile Apache. This shows that some Indian families continued to live and work locally after reservation Apaches disappeared from official accounts.
Bob Roland's book, the Ballad of Plàcida Romero, describes Nana's raid, after Victorio's death in October 1880. Guero, who has access to livestock and local intelligence provided Nana support during his revenge raid. Roland's research places Guero among Navajos providing Nana aid in his violent campaign.
This mirrors an earlier pattern seen under Victorio, where figures like Francisco occupied positions of access and familiarity, while others carried out overt military action, demonstrating that Apache family survival often depended on differentiated roles rather than unified visibility. This distinction is important. While some family members were taken captive (his mother *Ishnoh'n* and younger brother Jim Miller, for instance) Guero and his brother Francisco made a different choice: to live outside the reservation boundary as land-based actors in continuing an Apache way of life. Despite their divergent paths, the family did not shatter. They stitched together several lines of survival running at the same time.
That agency, in what is now Catron County, was not some abstract bureaucratic failing. It was a lived place. As David Kayser reported in *El Palacio*, this was the terrain where 450 Apaches of the Mogollon, Warm Springs, and White Mountain bands settled. Robert Watt detailed that Nana and Loco fought alongside Victorio against other Apache leaders, including Victorio's son-in-law, at the Old Fort Tularosa Reservation. It was during this encounter, that the 90 plus-year-old, Chihene Chief Rafael Elías, was shot in the leg. The violence that helped bring the agency to its end did not erase Apache presence there. It reconfigured it.
This is the part of Apache history that very rarely fits into the familiar story arc of "surrender, exile, return." It is not a hero's escape to freedom, nor tragic imprisonment. It is continuity.
Today, when we ask what "Gila Apache" means, our answer is not only ceremonial or political. It is geographical and genealogical. It encompasses the names of families who would survive the collapse of formal recognition and continue to live under local knowledge if not federal visibility. It names individuals who appear in the record not because they are "captured" or "transported," but simply because they are there, known well enough to be identified by name, by kin and by livestock.
That's why "Gila Apache" is not just an alternative way to say any of the four principal bands, Chíhéne, Bedonkohe, Nednhi, or Chiricahua, though it contains all those histories. It is a corridor identity; one that for the Leyvas reaches all the way from Apache Creek to Mangas, from Old Fort Tularosa to the Warm Springs and all the way to Janos and the Sierra Madres; from grand figures with names like Victorio and Nana aided by Francisco, who fled the area ,and Guero, who remained.
The files do not explain disappearance. They describe survival without removal.
To be Gila Apache today is not just to remember who was taken east and who crossed into the Sierra Madre. It is also to recall who remained, who persisted after the reservations at Old Fort Tularosa, the Warm Springs, and Gila; who established communities while never relinquishing their identity, and transmitted Apache life to places that, in the archive's telling of it, were afterward empty of Apaches.
This series has traced only one set of families and one corridor; others remain to be named, remembered, and read with the same care.
The herders knew their names.
The land still does.
And that, more than any designation imposed from outside, is what "Gila Apache" means today.
