Fimbres Apache Expedition

[Astarho]

This is a little known incident came to mind with all the Minutemen stuff going on.

The Fimbres expedition was probably the last campaign against Native Americans. It started with an ongoing dispute between a few holdout apaches and ranchers. There had been a few Apaches still holding out in the Sierra Madre, who would occasionally raid ranchers' livestock for food. After years of skirmishing, it exploded when Apaches kidnapped the son of rancher Fransisco Fimbres. He recruited adventure seekers from all over the country to hunt Apaches, billing it as a safari. The Mexican government put a stop to it, to the relief of American diplomats.

They Never Surrenered by Douglas Meed tells about the Apache holdouts and the Fimbres expedition.

http://www.swanet.org/zarchives/gotcaliche/alldailyeditions/97aug/310.html

NUEVO CASAS GRANDES, Mexico - Guillermo Damiani Bassi's eyes are as clouded as antique glass. But his memory is still sharp enough to jab his
conscience, make him wince when he recalls the day they dragged la nina
bronco - the wild girl - into town.

She was only 12 or 13, Damiani said and the cowboy who found her wandering almost naked in the nearby Tasahuinora Mountains had dressed, her in baggy men clothing. She wouldn't eat. She wouldn't talk. She never looked into her captor's eyes. Instead she lay balled up in comer of the local jail, her back turned to a growing of curiosity seekers.

"It was a sad thing," said Damiani, 82 a retired theater owner in this raw
cowtown in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. "People were selling food
outside. It was terrible, like a circus."

If what Damian and his amazed neighbors saw on hot summer day seemed like a cheap sideshow, it was actually something far sadder and more inexplicable - a ghost from a vanished frontier. The girl was a hostile Apache. And the year - 1933 - was nearly a half-century after Geronimo, the tribe's's
last war chief, had surrendered to U.S. forces in the desert of neighboring
Arizona.

[BrotherBuzz]

1. This reminds me of still another interesting story...Ishi

It's another story of the past meeting the present. I read a biography of Ishi written by Kroeber's wife years ago and have never forgotten it. As much as I enjoyed the book, I still have mixed reactions about how he was treated or perceived as less then a human person, more like a science project - which he was, I guess.

<snip>
On the morning of August 29, 1911, in a slaughter house corral, two miles from the town of Oroville, a nearly dead "wild man" is discovered. He is emaciated, exhausted, frightened, and starved. The sheriff takes the Indian into custody, but is baffled as to what to do next. Locked in a cell, unable to communicate with any number of Indians brought before him, the traumatized man awaited his yet unknown fate.

In a carnival atmosphere, Ishi, the "wild man" caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. News of his discovery reached two professors of anthropology at the University of California, Alfred L. Kroeber and T. T. Waterman. Both men had an interest in the human saga being played out in Oroville for several reasons. Beyond the obvious general anthropological interest, they had been searching for the lost "wild man" that had been sited three years earlier by the surveyor crew a few miles north of Oroville ... in the Deer Creek region. They wondered if this could be him.

Two days after Ishi's discovery, Waterman was on a train to Oroville to assume responsibility for the "wild man." Kroeber and Waterman became guardians of Ishi, the last Yahi. For nearly five years Ishi lived at the university's museum while teaching the professors whatever he was able to communicate about the Yahi people. There was no other speakers of his tongue so communication was difficult and tedious. Kroeber persevered and managed to learn and communicate in 'conversational' Yahi, while Ishi learned about life in 20th century America.

The bond that developed between Kroeber and Ishi was, by all accounts, a close one. They both came to depend upon one another, not only for the pursuits of study they were engaged in, but on a personal level. For Ishi, this relationship must have been especially precious, for he had been alone for so long. (It was Kroeber who named him "Ishi", which is Yahi for 'man'. Yahi tradition prevented Ishi from speaking his own name or the names of the dead.)

As Ishi told the Yahi story, Kroeber became anxious to see the country of which he spoke. The village sites, the spots they frequented for food, ... the place where Ishi and his mother parted for the last time. At first, Ishi resisted, afraid to revisit the places at which he had experienced both joy and sorrow. Eventually, he did agree. Ishi was going home. The results of the 1914 excursion to Yahi country are invaluable. Kroeber drew maps, marking crucial sites of Ishi's life, and recorded the place names as the Yahi knew them. There were also photographs taken of both locations and of Ishi demonstrating the Yahi methods of crafting arrow heads, arrows, bows, spears, etc. In a strange way, Kroeber was actually recording the past through living history in the present for the future. It was as if he had reached
back in time, pulled forth a man of another age, and asked him; "Please show me what life was like long ago." Ishi was physically contemporary, though culturally and socially antiquated. That alone bears reflection.
<more>

http://www.mohicanpress.com/mo08019.html