What Does "Gila Apache" Mean When Presented as Farmers? III

By Ruben Q. Leyva

This essay is part of the ongoing "What Does 'Gila Apache' Mean?" series. This essay builds on the earlier pieces by showing how Apache continuity becomes intelligible not through fixed names or places, but through repeated actions, relationships, and returns across a shared corridor.

In the previous essay, I covered why records so often bear south, and how that can be reconciled with family tradition about being Gila or Mogollon or Mimbres. The point was that church and presidio records were located where colonial systems safely could reach Apache people, not the place of origin of Apache life.

There's another pattern that makes this clearer, and it's easier to notice than names.

It is farming.

When Spanish and then Mexican officials documented Apache leaders in the late 18th century, they were not just recording names; they were documenting behavior. Who negotiated, who moved families, who planted crops, who took tools and used them and who came back year after year to the same spots. When we track those behaviors across time, that continuity becomes visible even as the spelling changes. Sabinal, New Mexico, is where that visibility sharpens.

As the names and places multiply below, I ask the reader to watch the actions rather than the spellings.

Matthew Babcock's book, *Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule*, remarks that Spanish negotiations with Apaches started in late June 1789. The following July, four Gila Apaches, known as, "Los Capitán Apaches," signed peace terms with Governor Fernando de la Concha in Santa Fe. Those four same leaders signed a treaty to settle and farm at Sabinal, New Mexico (not the Sabinal in Ascensión, Chihuahua). In the treaty, one such leader is called Jansquiedetcho. That spelling occurs just once, but the phenomenon it describes never goes away.

There was further implementation on the ground by 1791. Babcock explains how the Apache leader Jasquenelté, known as "General" to Governor Concha, moved eighteen rancherías from the San Mateo, Gila, and Mimbres ranges half a league from Sabinal, a farming center south of Belen on the Rio Grande. These were not symbolic moves. (No small feat when you consider that Apache families were tending fields, planting crops using Spanish farming tools, and utilizing existing acequias for crop irrigation.)

Three Apache headmen again assembled with Governor Concha at Santa Fe in the summer of 1792. Concha told them to return to Sabinal. By December, Spanish officials described three hundred Apache residents in the settlement. This was not a drop-by, or an eviction. It was a negotiated farm settlement, in which the Apache leaders went into with expectations and left when those circumstances no longer held.

One leader, besides General Jasquenelté, remains prominent through this farming diplomacy—under different names, but with the same pattern of action: Joséf Antonio Leyva [Leiba] christened in 1742, in Chihuahua.

Josef is moving around, and the Spanish record him farming in modern-day New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora, Mexico. As far back as 1778, 'Josef' was mentioned in correspondence by Lieutenant Governor Juan Antonio Arrieta of the El Paso district. That same leader is mentioned in the Sabinal treaty of 1790 under the treaty spelling Jansquiedetcho. Governor Concha was directing the Apache farm at Sabinal in 1792, and in his letters, the name is given as 'Josef,' alongside two others, Jasquenelté and Campanita. Later, after the diplomatic center moved southward, that leader is documented in Janos and Bavispe. In the Janos censuses of 1800, he was recorded as "Chief José from Bavispe."

In 1810, the Spanish Commandante General Salcedo gave farming tools to Apache leaders at Janos, Chihuahua. Jasquenelté, José and Cayetano were among those listed. It was the familiar farming diplomacy, moved southward along the corridor. The pattern continues after population figures for Janos end: Feroz, perhaps Niseforo, Josef's son in the genealogy steps in to run the Janos ranchería of 'José and Cayetano'. In 1812, Josef is back in Bavispe, documented under the name 'Asquiedenchul,' an Apache corrective of the Jansquiedetcho spelling written in the 1790 treaty yet still associated with a recognizable role in a recognizable place.

Janos's ration list dated March 18, 1822, provides unusually clear confirmation of this continuity. In the ledger titled "Ración dada a los Indios de Paz," the right-hand column begins with Feroz, head of a Mogollonero group of thirty-nine people, and within the same provisioning entry appears Asquiendenchol, listed without a beef ration but clearly situated within the same band economy. This is not a recycled name or a scribal echo. It is the archive itself recording generational and relational continuity: the son provisioning his group at Janos while the father remains present as a recognized figure within the same peace settlement. What earlier records blurred through shifting orthography, the ration list renders explicit—Apache leadership and family structure persisted together within the same corridor well into the 1820s.

Transposed like this, the question is no longer whether these spellings "match."

Who, exactly, is out there farming?

One leader, for more than three decades: negotiates peace, relocates rancherías, plants crops, accepts tools, and journeys with his people along the very same corridor, from the Gila and Mimbres, through Sabinal, into Janos and Bavispe.

The archive records this imperfectly. It was named by the writer or the year, but it sounds different depending on who says it. But the action and associations are vividly recorded.

William B. Griffen's book, *Apaches at War and at Peace*, cites an unconfirmed male, "José (also Tanchintijue)," who was inciting peaceful Apache at San Elizario in October of 1803 as possibly our Joséf Leyva. Griffen cautiously writes, "...perhaps the same man who visited Janos during these years..." This single reference does not fully align with the otherwise consistent farming, diplomacy pattern described above, which is why it must be treated cautiously.

This is why passages that name Jansquiedetcho, Asquiedenchul, and Josef (and even Tanchintijue) should not immediately be taken for different people. In this case, it is plausible that these names refer to the same leader. When read based on location and activity, these names show continuity; Apaches leading in colonial systems but holding onto power by farming.

If you read simply for the spellings, the story falls apart. If you do the math, who farmed, where, and how often, the continuity stands. Sabinal was not meant to recede into the record. It was about planting, harvesting, and knowing when to move on. Historian John P. Wilson's article "Southern Apaches as Farmers, 1630 - 1870" retraces the broken Spanish administrative documentation to tell this farming story like no other.

In the next essay, I'll present a simple method for reading these shapeshifting nomenclatures alongside one another; not to fuse them into one assertion about identity, but to demonstrate how Apache leadership remains intelligible when what people did is laid across where they did it, and who else came back how many times.

Seen this way, Sabinal does not disappear into the archive as a failed experiment or a temporary peace. It remains discernible as a place where Apache leaders exercised judgment about when to settle, how to farm, and when conditions required movement again.

The descendants of the Gila Apache leaders at Sabinal will not allow this story to fade into obscurity. Why? Because it's not only about planting and harvesting, it's about homelands.