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Lozen, another Warm Springs
Apache woman and the sister of the renowned chief Victorio, became legendary both as a warrior and as a shaman. She had what
the Apaches called "Power," supernatural abilities on the battlefield and in spiritual communication. According to Peter Aleshire
(Woman Warrior: The Story of Lozen, Apache Warrior and Shaman), Lozen fought in more campaigns against the Mexicans and the
Americans than any of the great Apache leaders such as Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, Juh, Chihuahua, Geronimo or her own brother,
Victorio. "Lozen began fighting Mexican soldiers and scalp hunters, eternal enemies of her band, when she came of age in the
1840’s," said Aleshire. "After the Americans arrived in 1848 to lay claim to her homeland, she battled them as well."
Lozen
fought beside Victorio when he and his followers rampaged against Americans, who had appropriated their homeland in west central
New Mexico’s Black Mountains and had tried to confine her people, first, to Arizona’s San Carlos Reservation then
to New Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Reservation.
As the band fled U. S. forces, Lozen inspired women and children, frozen in fear, to cross
a surging Rio Grande. "I saw a magnificent woman on a beautiful
horse—Lozen, sister of Victorio. Lozen the woman warrior!" said James Kaywaykla, a child at the time, riding behind
his grandmother. "High above her head she held her rifle. There was a glitter as her right foot lifted and struck the shoulder
of her horse. He reared, then plunged into the torrent. She turned his head upstream, and he began swimming." Immediately,
the other women and the children followed her into the torrent. When they reached the far bank of the river, cold and wet,
but alive, Lozen came to Kaywaykla’s grandmother. "You take charge, now," she said. "I must return to the warriors,"
who stood between their women and children and the onrushing cavalry. Lozen drove her horse back across the wild river and
returned to her comrades.
"I depend upon Lozen as I do Nana (the aging patriarch of the band)," said Victorio, according
to Kaywaykla. "She could ride, shoot, and fight like a man," said Kaywaykla, "and I think she had more ability in planning
military strategy than did Victorio."
Late in Victorio’s campaign, Lozen left the band to escort a new mother
and her newborn infant across the Chihuahuan Desert
from Mexico to the Mescalero Apache Reservation,
away from the hardships of the trail. Equipped with only a rifle, a cartridge belt, a knife and a three-day supply of food,
she set out with the mother on a perilous journey through Mexican and U.
S. cavalry forces. En route, afraid that a gunshot would betray their presence, she used
her knife to kill a longhorn, butchering it for the meat. She stole a Mexican cavalry horse for the new mother, escaping through
a volley of gunfire. She stole a vaquero’s horse for herself, disappearing before he could give chase. She stole a soldier’s
saddle, rifle, ammunition, blanket and canteen, even his shirt. Finally, she delivered her charges to the reservation.
There,
she learned that Mexican and Tarahumara Indian forces under Mexican commander Joaquin Terrazas had ambushed his brother Victorio
and his band at Tres Castillos, three stony hills in northeastern Chihuahua.
It happened on October 15, 1880. Terrazas, said Stephen H. Lekson in his monogram Nana’s Raid: Apache Warfare in Southern New Mexico, 1881, "surprised the Apaches, and in the boulders of Tres Castillos Victorio’s
warriors fought their last fight. Apache tradition holds that Victorio fell on his own knife rather than die at the hands
of the Mexicans. Almost all the warriors at Tres Castillos were killed, and many women died fighting; the older people were
shot, while almost one hundred young women and children were taken for slaves. Only a few escaped."
Knowing that the
survivors would need her, Lozen immediately left the Mescalero Reservation and rode alone southwest across the desert, threading
her way undetected through U. S. and Mexican military patrols, and rejoined the decimated band, now led by the 74-year-old
patriarch Nana, in the Sierra Madre, in northwestern Chihuahua.
According to Kimberly Moore Buchanan in Apache Women
Warriors, Lozen fought beside Nana and his handful of warriors in his two-month long bloody campaign of vengeance across southwestern
New Mexico in 1881. Just before he began, Nana had said,
"Though she is a woman there is no warrior more worthy than the sister of Victorio."
Lozen also fought beside Geronimo
after his breakout from the San Carlos reservation in 1885,
in the last campaign of the Apache wars. With the band pursued relentlessly, she used her Power to locate the enemies, the
U. S. and Mexican cavalries. According
to Alexander B. Adams in his book Geronimo, "She would stand with her arms outstretched, chant a prayer [to Ussen, the Apaches’
supreme deity], and slowly turn around."
Upon this earth
On which we live
Ussen has Power
This Power is mine
For
locating the enemy.
I search for that Enemy
Which only Ussen the Great
Can show to me.
From Eve Ball’s In
the Days of Victorio
"By the sensation she felt in her arms, she could tell where the enemy was and how many they numbered,"
according to Adams.
Taken into U. S.
military custody after Geronimo’s final surrender, Lozen traveled as a prisoner of war to confinement at the Mount Vernon
Barracks in Alabama. Like many other Apache warriors, she
died there of tuberculosis sometime after 1887, her life a validation of the respected place women held among the Apaches.
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