By Ruben Q. Leyva
One of the quiet truths buried in the Apache Victorio-era record is this: the people who lived on the land often knew exactly whom they were dealing with, even when later archives attempted to portray otherwise. On page 139 of the notes for the book *Horses Worn to Mere Shadows*, utilizing original U.S. military and civilian correspondence collected by Robert Watt, Hispano sheep herders in the Mogollon and San Francisco ranges of New Mexico's Catron County are described as naming individual Apaches involved in raids, not anonymous "hostiles," but actual human beings, known through familiarity, frequent encounters, and long presence among these people. This detail matters. It informs us that Apache movement through the Mimbres–Mogollon–San Francisco corridor was not random or undifferentiated. It was discernable to those who shared the landscape.
As such, recognition was not confined to herders and rural communities. American military officers, in fact, knew Nana personally as both an enemy and a collaborator and translator from earlier periods. Before being known in the archives mainly as an enemy leader, Nana had direct relations with Army officers, mediating communication and traveling between worlds —Apache and U.S. That familiarity matters. It shows that Nana was not a mysterious being rising abruptly in the heat of battle but was rather a known person already familiar with soldiers and Hispano communities long before he took to the warpath. When later memory levels him as the enemy, as part of U.S. narrative closure at Tres Castillos, where Victorio died, it's a deliberate re-narrowing of Nana's significance to history. His obligation as Victorio's sister's husband, according to Stephen Lekson, gave him purpose to lead after the leader's death. Nana had more than one wife, in fact, he had married Geronimo's sister as well, which aligned with the custom.
Family testimony from the Mogollon corridor remembers Victorio encountering Soledad Leyva (Alderete) and her children on the road and warning them to hide in the tules (reeds or cattails) because his "mocetones (meaning 'strapping young men' in Spanish) were coming right behind." Read alongside the archival pattern of inconsistent naming, the point is not sentimentality; it is structure. It shows differentiated roles within the Apache force, senior leaders managing harm and younger warriors acting with fewer restraints, inside a landscape where neighbor-relations still existed even as they were beginning to break under U.S. pressure.
That recognition helps to solve one of the puzzles that has plagued Apache historiography: who was who and why the archive so frequently bundled different leaders, families, and obligations into a single name. Take Apache Francisco, who was born a Chihene, but married into the Bedonkohe band. According to Mexican records, he was born Francisco de Jesús Leyva; and whose regional press name was Pancho Laceris, printed as "Pancho Lasheires," in the January 21, 1880 edition of the La Voz de Mexico. He was a Leyva and kin to the Nednhi-Ndendahe Apache Chief Lino "Juh" Leyva (as identified by Ana María Alonso), son of Laceris. The surname mismash that Francisco carries across documents of the time—Laceris, Lasheires, Leyva—is not proof there is more than one person. It speaks to phonetic transcriptions running into Spanish, English and Apache name systems.
His participation with Victorio is not a loose inference; Edwin Sweeney's account specifically listed the Indian Depredation Claim in *From Cochise to Geronimo*, describing who is believed to be our Francisco (de Jesús) Leyva as Apache from another band who operated alongside Victorio's Chihenes. It is evidence of phonetic transcription colliding with Spanish, English, and Apache naming systems. The Leyva family is thus clearly located within the Chihene and Bedonkohe-Ndendahe kin network: Leonardo (Laceris/Placeres) "Prudencio Leyba" appears in Ana Maria Alonso's book as the father of Lino Juh Leyva (Juh). Within Spanish-language communities, Francisco is naturally shortened to Pancho. Nothing about Pancho Lasheires as Apache Francisco is anomalous, but the anomaly is thinking that the archive to spell that name consistently. It is the same misrecognition that characterizes the coverage of Esquine or Has-ke-na-dil-tla (Andrés Silva).
La Voz de Mexico probably described Esquine as Pancho Laceris's "brother." In fact, the relationship was one of affinity, not blood: Esquine was Francisco's father-in-law. For the Apache system of relational law, this is an essential distinction. A son-in-law serves his wife's family while bridging local groups, leaders, and bands. When journalists collapsed that relationship into "brother," they were translating Apache kinship into settler shorthand and leaving behind the structure in which it exists.
That duty to kin did not always mean freely chosen action. In some cases, prior relationships created access that could later be leveraged under coercive conditions. Sweeney describes Francisco approaching a Mexican sheep camp under the pretense of peace, a familiarity that allowed him entry before violence erupted. Read only through the archive, this appears as tactical deception. What Francisco did was systematic, relational and intentional; the expression of a duty to kin rather than coming under centralized command. Read alongside family memory, it looks different.
Oral histories within the Leyva–Baca family recall Victorio warning women and children to hide in the tules near Tularosa before the "young bucks" passed through. This warning was an instruction that suggests foreknowledge, constrained agency, and the use of trusted intermediaries rather than indiscriminate violence. In this light, Francisco's presence is less about authorship than position: a man known well enough to gain access, bound tightly enough by kinship obligation that refusal may not have been possible. Such moments help explain why certain individuals later disappear from one corridor and resurface in another. After such events, remaining in the Mogollon, for Francisco, would not have been neutral. Movement, again, followed responsibility and consequence rather than choice.
What often appears in the archive as contradiction, Mogollon one year, Mimbreño or Warm Springs the next, is better understood through Apache kinship law. Men did not move randomly across corridors; they moved through marriage, obligation, and alliance. As documented earlier in this editorial series, the Leyvas were Mogollon by birth-corridor, but repeatedly present in the Mimbreño and Warm Springs worlds because that is where responsibility required them to be as they had married into the other groups.
A similar issue arises in relation to Nana and the Elías family. Ramón Elías, son of the Chihene leader Rafael, had obligations to Geronimo through marriage to Geronimo's sister. José de la Cruz Elías (Nat-cul-baye) did not. When Geronimo later refused to speak for Nat-cul-baye, and when Nat-cul-baye declined removal to Florida, this was not fragmentation or defiance. It was Apache law at work: leadership power does not simply travel along lines of blood, it can be identified through leadership potential and consensus.
This is what makes Tres Castillos (the battle in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Victorio died) so deeply misunderstood. The massacre is frequently portrayed as the end of Chihene Apache resistance, a closure in history. At Tres Castillos, the story that shuttered was an administrative story rather than Chihene life. Those ones who would not surrender—those belonging to families of Victorio, Francisco, Esquine, and Nana, and the Leyva–Elías line—held the corridor south into the Sierra Madre where U.S. authority no longer had the power either to name them, to count, or cull them out. The archive interprets absence as a closure. The land records continuity. The herders knew whom they were seeing: Apache people weren't ghosts. They lived as neighbors, kinsmen by marriage, higher-order traders, and long-known figures in a shared landscape. The closure was never a matter of local knowledge; it was a historical interpretation that favored paperwork from far away over lived recognition on the land. Tres Castillos was as far as state tracking of some families would go. That marked the point at which the Army was no longer able to follow lesser-known leaders' families, unless those leaders returned to a reservation like Mescalero or San Carlos. It did not, however, mark the end of Gila Apache history.
What emerges from these stories is not fragmentation, but jurisdiction. Apache families did not remain visible by staying still or by being consistently named; they remained present by honoring obligations: to kin, to marriage ties, to corridors of movement that had long predated colonial borders. When Spanish, Mexican, and later U.S. records could no longer follow those obligations, the archive interpreted that loss of sight as disappearance. It was not. It was the limit of state vision. Families who moved south, married across bands, or declined removal did not cease to be Gila Apache; they continued to live under Apache law, carrying memory, identity, and responsibility forward without needing recognition to authorize their existence. That distinction, between being unrecorded and being gone, is where the final question of this series begins.
Footnote: Contemporary military familiarity with Nana is explicit in post-campaign accounts written by Edward Hatch, who referred to Nana as both a leader of the Warm Springs and an Indigenous diplomat, known face-to-face by Army officers long before hostilities developed into war.
