July 25 marks the anniversary of Lt. Guilfoyle’s clash with Nana’s raiders in the San Andres Mountains. It’s a good moment to revisit one of the many intriguing puzzles surrounding the Raid: was Victorio’s sister Lozen with the raiding party, or did she stay behind to guard the women and children in the Sierra Madre?
I have never seen a complete roster of Nana’s original followers. There were said to be 13 when the war party crossed the Rio Grande below Fort Quitman, but Sweeney lists just five: Mangas, Bacutla, Jatu, Sάnchez and Suldeen. Kaytennae was certainly another, but it’s uncertain who the others were (and if there were only 13).
When the raiders departed their camp in the Sierra Madre Lozen was probably back from her heroic trip escorting a young woman and her newborn baby to the Mescalero Reservation. It’s hard to believe she would not have been remembered and noted if she were among the raiders, and equally hard to believe she would not have been in the forefront of a war party setting out to avenge her brother’s death.
But she had accepted the responsibility of guarding the women and children on earlier occasions, and Nana may well have believed she was indispensable in that role while he led most of the men off to the north. Her mysterious ability to “sense” the enemy threat at a distance would have greatly increased the security of the camp.
As far as I know there’s only one mention of a woman (other than captives) in contemporary accounts of the Raid. Reporting his attack on the hostiles’ camp in the San Andres on July 25, Lt. Guilfoyle claimed to have hit two hostiles and captured two horses and 12 mules as well as “cooking utensils” and other equipment. In the last line of his dispatch he mentions that the band included “eleven bucks, one squaw and one child.”
“Squaw,” like “buck” was not necessarily a derogatory term in those days, but simply a short-hand descriptive to distinguish native males and females. No one who saw her in action would describe Lozen as a “squaw,” however, and Guilfoyle strongly implies the woman he saw came from the Mescalero Agency. It was not unusual for Apache raiding parties to bring along one or two women to cook and keep the camp, chores that otherwise fell to any apprentice warriors in the group.
There’s no authenticated photo of Lozen that I know of, although she’s said to be one of the women pictured in the group behind Geronimo in the picture above.
Tracking Nana 