Field Notes

Dan Herrera does a thoughtful column in today’s Journal on the importance of local history and closes with a quote he attributes to Napoleon: “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.”  In its own small way the Nana Project is an attempt to achieve that consensus on just one relatively obscure corner of New Mexico history. As an ex-reporter and editor, the discrepancies I found between the various accounts of Nana’s raid stirred my old compulsion to “get it right” and separate fact from fiction. Not easy after more than a century,

Today being the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Pres. Lincoln,  try an alternate history scenario: would the ultimate fate of the Apaches have been any different if Lincoln had lived to finish out his second term?

Certainly his energies and attention would have been focused on reconciliation and reunification with the South, and most of his  political capital would have been spent in reining in  the radicals in his own party. But Lincoln had compassion and wisdom to spare; it’s not likely he would have entirely ignored the rapid deterioration of relations with the Native American peoples to the west. He pardoned many of the warriors sentenced to be hanged after the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota, and that may provide a clue as to how he would have dealt with the Indians during the turbulent years after the Civil War.

The economic and demographic forces driving events would have been almost impossible to control, but Lincoln was above all a master politician. Given the popular surge of Eastern sentiment following first  Sand Creek and then Fetterman’s disastrous encounter with Red Cloud,  it’s possible he could have crafted some kind of accommodation with the tribes. That would almost certainly have cost them their land in the end, but it might have avoided the bloodshed.

April 9 marked the 73d anniversary of the day Gen. King lowered the flag on Bataan (Dougout, safely in Austrailia, FDR in DC and Wainright on Corregidor would have preferred the battling bastards fight to the last cartridge) and a good day to stop for a moment and remember the 1,800 men of the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery, the NM Nat’l Guard.

Their story, like Nana’s. is an epic of courage, defiance and endurance, survival against all odds. (Well told by Eric Morris in Corregidor: The End of the Line and in Hampton Sides’ Ghost Soldiers .) I’ve seen different pieces on the guard units specifically, and the effect on the home front in New Mexico, but I don’t know there’s a comprehensive history available. If you know of a good source, let me know.

The difference is the guardsmen’s sacrifice was ultimately rewarded. About half of them died on the March or in Japanese camps, but the rest lived to see victory. Nana died in Oklahoma.

Albuquerque ceremony is today at Bataan Park, 1 p.m.

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According to today’s Journal   the state supremes have rejected Fort Sill Apache request to force the governor to sign a gambling compact with the tribe.

Chapter 11 Nana Slips Away
mining camps & mountain roads
Geronimo Trail

The Albuquerque Journal reports on the ongoing war between the Fort Sill Apaches and the Governor, now back in the state Supreme Court for the second time in two years.  The new gaming compact negotiated by the state and approved by the Legislature specifically excludes the tribe’s little plot of land on I-10 near Deming, and the governor is adamantly opposed to a separate deal with Nana’s people,

But as far as I know, she’s never explained just why she’s determined to block the tribe’s ambitions. It can’t be because she opposes additional casinos in NM, since her new compact with the other tribes specifically allows at least four new gambling meccas.

 

 

 

Chapter 10 War to the Knife

Found it hard to make progress on Nana’s raid with news of death of one of my favorite authors.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31858156

Not many writers can successfully combine profound insights and laugh-out-loud humor. For years now I’ve looked forward to his annual book (although I have to say his last two or three weren’t up to the standard of his previous work — not surprising considering his deteriorating mental condition).

Couple of interesting stories out of the Bootheel this past week – and there aren’t many weeks you can say that about NM’s southernmost tip. According to the March 1 Deming Headlight, Forest Service workers found the body of a 72-year-old Deming man near his pickup south of Lordsburg, five miles from the border. No indication of foul play, and apparently no clue what he was doing so far from home and so close to the line; in reporting him missing his wife said he was “disoriented” from his cancer meds.
That same day according to El Paso TV the Border Patrol captured another pickup, this one a heavy-duty Ford F350 that  “breached” the border carrying 1,600 lbs of pot. (Good news for Colorado merchants who sold a reported 2.5 tons of legal marijuana last year; I’m sure they appreciate the feds protecting their market from cut-rate foreign imports.) The truck was boosted in Tucson, driven south and loaded up and then sent on a kamikaze run north through the Bootheel. The truck was apparently chased down by helicopter and the driver and passenger fled on foot before capture.  A bold move that must have made the two mulas instant heroes of a new corrido in the Lordsburg lockup, but it’s hard to guess how they could have thought it would work out otherwise, given the concentration of local, state and fed’l LEOs around Deming and Lordsburg. It was a scheme Cheech and Chong would have rejected as impractical.
It’s been years since I’ve been down as far as Antelope Wells, which must certainly be the most isolated (legal) crossing anywhere along the 2,000 mile border, but the Bootheel has always been a dangerous place. The route through the Burro Mountains and down along the Peloncillos was a favorite Apache trail from the Mogollons to the Sierra Madre.

Updated Chapter 3 with a pic of scout Frank Bennett (courtesy The Huntington Library, San Marino, California). A  tough, courageous and principled guy who came to a sordid end when he was pushing 50 — a dangerous age for any man, but particularly one who had led a vigorous and physically challenging life but found himself in middle age with little or nothing to show for it but his fading celebrity as a “famous Indian scout.”  I found his suicide note (Chapter 7 ), like most, poignant but self-pitying; tactless at best to blame the woman you’ve just killed for your troubles. “Don’t you hate it when loves turns around and bites you like a damn rattlesnake?” one of Carl Hiaasen’s characters asks in Strip Tease,  “It happens, by God. Happens every day.”