“For every Apache killed, he took many lives.”

I’ve been re-reading Lance Blyth’s Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880. It offers fresh insights into the Apache Wars from the perspective of the people of northern Mexico.

I hope to have more to say about the book’s overall theme in a future post, but first I want to focus on the short passage (p. 196) devoted to Nana’s Raid. Blyth adds a couple of interesting details, noting that Mata Ortiz was in pursuit of the raiders when they crossed the border. Presumably the Mexicans had taken the field in response to the attacks on the surveying party and other travelers along the Chihuahua Road as the raiders set out from the Sierra Madre at the end of June.

Beyond that, Blyth offers precise statistics on the raid: seven fights, 12 ranches and towns attacked, five soldiers and 30 civilians killed and “at least” 25 wounded.

He doesn’t specify these events so I don’t know if he counts the cluster of ranches around Garcia and the tent camp of Gold Dust and (possibly) an attack on Seboyeta as towns, but certainly the raiders struck at least a dozen ranches. I would list eight encounters as fights involving U.S. military personnel or civilian possemen: Alamo Canyon, the San Andres Mountains, Red Canyon, Monica Spring, Carrizo Canyon, the Cuchillo Negros, Wild Horse Canyon and Gavilan Canyon.

I count 8 soldiers and 64 civilians killed in New Mexico Territory by Nana and his raiders, another 25 wounded (some so badly they never fully recovered) and 14 taken captive – only about half of those ever reported recovered.

Whatever the exact count, we can all agree with Kaywaykla that, “Usen had not commanded that we love our enemies. Nana did not love his; and he was not content with an eye for an eye, nor a life for a life. For every Apache killed, he took many lives.”