Who Was Apache Frank? Part II — The Kinship We Carry

By Ruben Q. Leyva

They called him Mexican. Then they called him Navajo. But we call him kin.

This is Part II of a continuing exploration. If you haven’t read Part I, "Who Was Apache Frank?"—the story of a man misnamed, misread, and misremembered in the military and missionary archives—you’ll find that it lays the groundwork for this piece. Part II carries the story further, deeper into the protocol of relation, kinship, and endurance. We pick up the thread not to tie it off, but to follow where it leads.

Let’s begin with two boys: Francisco and Merejildo Grijalva. In 1849, during a raid near Banamichi, Sonora, both were taken—alongside three Grijalva women and two Opata Indian boys. That moment, violent and unresolved, didn’t just fracture a family. It opened a split in how history would remember them.

One brother, Merejildo, was taken in by the Chiricahua, where he lived under the leadership of Miguel Narbona and Cochise of the Chokonen band. He later became known as El Chivero and served the U.S. military as a scout—a man asked to track his own kin. His life was split between worlds, always shadowed by what was taken and what was made of that taking.

According to the author Edwin R. Sweeney, the other brother, Francisco, was reared by the Western Apache (Eastern White Mountain). His name appears less frequently in the written record, but his path was no less significant. Some historians have speculated that he may be the same man later known as Gochaahá—the Big One—an Eastern White Mountain leader who, like many, moved between identities: Opata, captive, Apache, Mexican. But, he was not our Apache Frank.

This is where the threads start to tangle—and where our idea of *Apache Kinship Protocol* becomes essential. It’s a term I use to describe how Gila Apache people remember, transmit, and adapt relational identity across war, removal, reclassification, and survival. This protocol doesn’t follow bloodlines or bureaucracies. It follows bonds.

What Is Apache Kinship Protocol?

Apache Kinship Protocol is not simply a historical pattern—it is an ongoing framework for how identity is felt, maintained, and activated in everyday life. It describes how names are carried, adapted, and sometimes strategically obscured in response to external pressures. It helps explain how families persisted through captivity, forced relocation, and cultural erasure. Kinship Protocol insists that Apache identity is not static—it’s relational, embodied, and place-based. It survives not because it conforms to policy, but because it refuses to.

Where governments sought to define Indians by blood quantum, census rolls, or reservation status, Apache Kinship Protocol emphasized obligation, responsibility, and ceremony. Who buried you? Who raised your child when you were gone? Who offered water when you arrived from exile? These questions hold more weight than enrollment cards. It is the connective tissue between people, land, and memory.

Kinship Isn’t Fixed—It Moves

What happened to those two brothers isn’t an anomaly. It’s a map. They were raised by different Apache tribes—Chiricahua and Eastern White Mountain—yet they were never fully cut off from one another. Apache kinship networks weren’t rigid clans or formalized governments. They were living systems of relation. People moved between camps, bands, and even languages—not because they lacked identity, but because they carried it.

To survive meant to adapt, and to adapt meant to relate. That’s how a boy taken in a raid could grow into a leader, how an Opata mislabeled "Mexican" could become an Apache war chief, or an interpreter, or both. But what about our Apache Frank?

Apache Frank, Between Names and Nations

In 1871, during a critical moment of negotiation and tension, Agent Vincent Colyer traveled to the Tularosa Valley with the goal of relocating Apaches from Cañada Alamosa. He was accompanied by Chief Loco, one of the most respected leaders of the Warm Springs Apache. But Loco did not go alone. The only other Apache who accompanied him was a young man, Colyer described as a "Navajo interpreter”—Frank.

It is possible that Frank’s service to Loco began even earlier. According to the author Bud Shapard, in the fall of 1867, an Apache man recorded only as “Francisco, a Mexican and former captive” acted as interpreter during the so-called “cornfield treaty” at Cañada Alamosa, not far from Ojo Caliente. The Francisco in that account stood beside Loco, translated between Apache and town leaders, and helped negotiate a temporary peace. The details match more than just the name: the timing, geography, and multilingual skill align closely with what is known of Apache Frank’s life. The “Mexican” label would have fit how outsiders often identified him, and his proximity to Loco in both events hints at a longer history of trusted service. While definitive proof is elusive, the circumstantial overlap invites us to consider that Francisco of Cañada Alamosa and our Apache Frank may have been one and the same (Shapard 2010, 20).

This moment is telling. In a time of profound mistrust, when most Apache leaders were cautious or outright resistant to federal overtures, Loco chose Frank to walk beside him. Not just as a translator, but as a bridge. Frank’s ability to navigate multiple languages and lifeways—Apache, Navajo, Spanish, and possibly English —made him indispensable. But even more importantly, his presence beside Loco affirmed his belonging. Though labeled "Navajo" by Colyer, Frank was recognized by Loco as kin and trusted enough to help negotiate the future of their people.

That trust wasn’t given lightly. In Apache society, kinship is earned through loyalty, presence, and accountability. That Frank—raised in a blended household after the death of his father, moving between Apache and Navajo spaces—stood as the sole companion to Loco reveals how deeply his value was known within his mother’s people.

This relational identity didn’t end with the 1871 meeting. It followed him into later roles. As Part I of this editorial explores in greater detail, Frank later served as a scout—likely alongside his Navajo stepfather, Hastíín—in a period when Apache and Navajo communities were both navigating fragile alliances with U.S. authorities. He operated not only as a translator of language, but as a translator of worldviews, straddling cultural and political borders at every turn.

When Frank was eventually detained and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1882, he was once again recorded not as Warm Springs-Chihene, but as Navajo, like Hastíín. Carlisle administrators listed him as the son of Hastíín Bitsii’ Łigai (recorded phonetically as Hostee del-a Bisha Legay), a member of the Dibé Tłizhíní (Black Sheep Clan) from the Zuni Salt Lake region, in Catron County, near Quemado. It was easier, perhaps, for institutions to categorize him under a single tribal affiliation—but Frank’s life defied such simplifications. To know him only as a Navajo is to miss how he was chosen by Chief Loco, how he survived the Pyramid Mountain campaigns, how he married into the Tseyiden, and how he held space for multiple kinship systems within himself.

These overlapping identities weren’t contradictions. They were strategic. They were survival.

Frank was born Francisco de Jesús Leyva. Some called him Mexican. Others, Navajo. But here’s what matters: his mother, Norberta Ishnoh’n Leyva, was Chihene (Red Paint People), under the leadership of the Warm Springs Apache leader, Loco. His father, Prudencio Manuel "Manuelito" Mariscal, was a Chokonen Apache. After Manuelito’s death, Norberta remarried a Navajo man named Hastíín, from near Zuni Salt Lake.

Frank was raised across those traditions—Apache and Navajo—absorbing the rhythms and responsibilities of both. When Bud Shapard lists him in 1871 as a "Navajo interpreter" aiding Agent Colyer and Chief Loco at Cañada Alamosa, he wasn’t wrong. But, he wasn’t completely correct either. Frank’s Navajo identity came through relation, not census. And his Chihene roots were affirmed by Chief Loco himself, who saw him as kin and leader. Bud Shapard’s *Chief Loco* references Frank as a Chihene leader and a Navajo interpreter (Shapard 2010, 48 & 355).

This isn’t contradiction. It’s kinship.

Tseyiden: Those Within the Rocks

Later, we believe Frank married into the Tseyiden, a Bedonkohe local group connected to his father-in-law Esquine, the local group leader, a Bedonkohe-Chiricahua. In ethnographies, Tseyiden is listed as a Western Apache clan. In Navajo traditions, it's a clan name too. Frank lived both. Norberta, like many Chiricahua women, passed on kinship through marriage, movement, and care. These weren’t outliers—they were continuity.

Apache Kinship Protocol helps us see that continuity. It reveals how identity flowed not from fixed labels but from relations: who took you in, who you protected, who you buried.

The Shadows Between Records

There are no clear answers in the archives. That’s part of the problem—and the point. The story of Apache Frank and the Grijalva brothers is also the story of record keeping gone sideways: Spanish names that blur into each other, war department documents written by outsiders, and census categories too narrow to hold the truth.

Yet even in those records, we hear echoes: a child taken but never forgotten, a scout who spoke many tongues, a name listed in a baptismal record or a military roll call. These fragments, when held together, do not confuse. They clarify.

They remind us that survival left traces—just not always the ones the state thought mattered.

Why Apache Kinship Protocol Matters

It matters because it explains what history has failed to record: how our people endured through rupture and renaming. It matters because it centers the voices of women like Norberta, who raised children across boundaries others considered absolute. It matters because it allows us to trace continuity in the face of policy designed to break it.

When tribes are recognized only through federal acknowledgment or blood quotas, the story becomes one of fragmentation. But Apache Kinship Protocol reveals a different kind of story—a story of movement, of careful remembering, of ancestors whose decisions still shape our lives. It shows us that kinship can’t be legislated. It’s made, carried, and sustained.

To recognize Apache Frank is not just to name a person—it’s to affirm a framework of belonging that exceeds the tools of the archive. It’s to say: we remember differently, and that difference means survival.

From the Huachucas to the Bá̱ch’i: Central Chiricahua Connections

Frank’s life also threads through landscapes that map Chiricahua history—the Huachuca Mountains, the Mangas Mountains of Catron County, and Ojo Caliente in Cañada Alamosa. These were not disconnected waypoints but parts of a single cultural corridor that Goodwin and Opler would recognize as the territory of the Central Chiricahua (Chokonen), or “Ridge of the Mountainside People.” 

Within this classification, the late elder Jewett Chinoze, at the Mescalero Apache Reservation, told the ethnographer E. W. Gifford about the Huachuca Apaches. The Huachuca local groups—the Caiahene or Shaiahene (“Western” or “Sunset People”)—were bound to the Chokonen core through alliances, marriages, and shared defense of their highland ranges. Considering Western Apache phonology and Bray’s entries for ch’ihenda and ch’ihenna’ (“the end of his life”), the name “Chihe,” given by Jewett Chinoze for his home in the Huachucas, could also carry a spatial sense— “the end” as in the farthest or most westerly camp of Chokonen territory.

In 1935, E. W. Gifford documented the testimony of the elder Jewett Chinoze, originally of the Caiahene-Chokonen local group. Chinoze’s Chihene father, from Ojo Caliente at Cañada Alamosa, relocated to his wife’s home at Chihe, according to protocol. Jewett Chinoze’s own wife was from the Chokonen band but was said to be from the Mangas Mountains in Catron County and the Ojo Caliente like Chinoze’s father. This map of landscapes shows all the same regions tied to Frank’s mother, his in-laws, and his stepfather, as well as the U.S. military forts—Fort Craig, Fort Huachuca, and the Old Fort Tularosa.

The Mangas Mountains lay near the short-lived Tularosa Valley Indian Reservation and the Old Fort Tularosa in Catron County, which was a focal point in 1871 when Frank, described by Agent Colyer as a “Navajo interpreter,” stood alongside Chief Loco of the Warm Springs-Chihene. Ojo Caliente was Loco’s home ground and the center of Chihene leadership. Frank’s trusted role in those negotiations reflected more than multilingual ability—it affirmed his place within the Gila Apache Kinship Protocol. In this relational framework, belonging is measured by obligation, service, and shared survival rather than by the single-tribe labels imposed by outsiders.

By the early 20th century, Frank’s path led him south of Tucson, into the Bá̱ch’i community—a Chiricahua-speaking, Huachuca-adjacent group described by Goodwin and Opler as a remnant Chokonen local group. These families, rooted in Huachuca territory yet linked to the Sierra Madre and Pinaleño-Nednhi alliance through marriage, avoided the 1886 deportations by adapting to settled valleys while preserving language, song, and ceremonial memory.

Seen through the Gila Apache Kinship Protocol, the Huachuca Mountains were more than a refuge—it was a nexus where maternal ties, marital alliances, and survival strategies converged. This network of relations, stretching from the Mogollon Rim to the Sierra Madre, exemplifies how Apache identity endured as a living system of reciprocity and movement, rather than a fixed point on a federal map.

Why This Still Matters

To ask, "Who was Apache Frank?" or "Which Francisco became the Big One?" is to ask how we remember those who crossed lines not to betray, but to endure.

This is Part II, not because it entirely answers the question, but because it opens new doors to the identity of Apache Frank. 

The kinship we carry didn’t disappear when the reservations were drawn. It didn’t end when the last census rolled through. It’s in the silence before a name is spoken. In the way a story pauses before it is received. In the way someone still calls him grandfather.

 We remember them not as captives. We remember them as kin.

 Frank still walks that path. So do we.

To the Chiricahua, Warm Springs, and White Mountain Apache, the Opata, and the Navajo peoples [Diné]—thank you. This story belongs to you, too.