Cultural Survival and a Native American Community: the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches in Oklahoma, 1913- 1996
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
CULTURAL SURVIVAL AND A NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITY: THE CHIRICAHUA AND WARM SPRINGS APACHES IN OKLAHOMA, 1913- 1996 By CLIFFORD PATRICK COPPERSMITH Bachelor of Arts Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 1988 Master of Arts st. Bonaventure University st. Bonaventure, New York 1992 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December, 1996 COPYRIGHT BY Clifford Patrick Coppersmith December 1996 CULTURAL SURVIVAL AND A NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITY: THE CHIRICAHUA AND WARM SPRINGS APACHES IN OKLAHOMA, 1913- 1996 Thesis Approved: Thesis Advisor Dean of the Graduate College iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a true story about a Native American community using, as much as possible, sources which reveal that community's perspective on the past. While I have had to rely to a great extent on traditional sources to tell the story, I have also enjoyed the collaboration and cooperation of many members of the .Fort Sill (Chiricahua and Warm Springs) Apache Tribe without whose help this project would not have been possible. If this is a worthy addition to Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache historiography it is due to their contributions. Until the day when a Chiricahua or Warm Springs Apache historian writes a definitive account of his or her people's experience in Oklahoma I offer this as an attempt to tell a new and truer version of their history. I wish to thank Michael Darrow, a Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache and an American national treasure, for his assistance and guidance during the entire process of researching, interviewing for, and writing this dissertation. I also wish to express appreciation to Mrs. Ruey Darrow, Tribal Chairperson, Mrs. Mildred Cleghorn, Former-Tribal Chairperson, Mrs. Pat Haozous Regan, Vice Chairperson and members of their staff, especially Lupe Gooday, Jr. for their assistance in allowing me the use of iv tribal facilities and resources for research. I thank members of the Chiricahua Language Class, especially Sam Eagleshield and Pam Eagleshield, for welcoming my presence and being patient with my questions. I also wish to thank Mr. Harry Mithlo for sharing his perspective with me and for inviting me to the Watson Mithlo Annual Memorial. I travelled far and wide conducting research for this project in archives located in Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina. I thank archivists at the Federal Records Depository at Fort Worth for their assistance, especially Kent Carter. Special thanks go to Tawana Spivey of the Fort Sill Museum and Archives for his personal knowledge of events and places and for the assistance of his staff in finding materials pertaining to my work. Archivists at the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Phillips Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma, and at Oklahoma State University were also indispensable in the task of finding materials relating to the Chiricahua and warm Springs Apache experience in Oklahoma. Special praise goes to Carl Bornfriend of the Native American Museum in Frisco, North Carolina for his hospitality and generosity in allowing me to work in his collection of Chiricahua papers and photographs. I owe a profound debt to my intellectual mentors, Dr. Laurence Hauptman and Dr. George Moses for their advice and gifts of inspiration in the methodological and historical V aspects of my work. Dr. Hauptman has exercised an incredible influence in my perception of Native American history and the way it should be researched and written. I also thank members of my committee for their guidance and advice, especially Dr. Ronald Petrin, Dr. Michael Smith, and Dr. Donald Brown. I also express appreciation for grants and scholarships given to me by the Oklahoma State University History Department that funded portions of my research. Thanks go, as well, to my parents, JoEllen and Jay Don Coppersmith, who contributed in many ways to my work. A final debt of gratitude is owed to my wife, Kathleen, who has, in greatest measure, provided me with the opportunity to complete this project. I am eternally grateful for her contribution and for her patience through all the times I was away from home. To her and my children, Cory and Katie, I dedicate this work. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS I . Introduction . ....................................... 1 II. Origins ............................................ 32 III. Exile and Captivity ••.•............••...•.•.•..•... 77 IV. Life at Fort Sill . ............................... 100 V. Diaspora: Removal Again ..•••..•.....•.....•..•.••. 136 VI. The Post Allotment Period: Accommodation and Leadership . ...................................... 170 VII. Case Study in Identity: The Fort Sill Apache and the Indian Claims Commission ............•..•••.•.. 196 VIII. Case Study in Cultural Continuance: The Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache Mountain Spirit Dance ....• 220 IX. Organization, Government, and Revival ....•........ 242 X. Epilogue .......................................... 263. Bibliography . ..................................... 267 vii I. Introduction On a cold autumn morning before the sun appeared in the eastern sky the people began to stir and the noise of camp life could be heard. Fires that burned throughout the night now heated coffee and the food that would be served for breakfast. Haphazardly parked cars, trailers, and tepees designated the area around which a sacred ceremony would soon begin. This ceremony, which marked the passage of a Chiricahua Apache girl to womanhood, had not been celebrated here for many years. Even among the local Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache community there was no small amount of controversy over whether the rite should take place at all. However, the celebration of this ritual, both ancient and sacred to the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache people, testifies to the resilience and survival of a people who have faced many challenges throughout the past century. 1 Paradoxically, just several weeks before this event unfolded a local newspaper, The Lawton Constitution, ran a feature article on the one-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches in Oklahoma. The article, entitled, "Apaches Remember Arrival at Fort Sill" comprised nearly a full-page story and included several photographs about the Apache experience in those early days. 2 Oddly, the journalist responsible for the story failed to interview any Apaches in the local 1 community who presumably remembered their own captivity or that of their parents or grandparents. There are three surviving members of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache Tribe in Oklahoma who were born before the tribe was released from captivity in 1913.3 Apparently, the reporter did not know that Chiricahuas still live in Oklahoma. That newspaper story--which left so much out of the story--is a parable of the way outside observer~ including journalists, anthropologists, and historians have treated the continued lives and existence of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches in Oklahoma. This work addresses two themes. on the one hand investigators and observers of Native American culture and history have largely ignored this Indian group in Oklahoma, while on the other Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches have maintained their tribal identity and elements of their culture. In one aspect this treatment of modern Chiricahuas in Oklahoma reflects a trend in the general field of Native American history in which historians have largely avoided the twentieth century. Fortunately, in the past few years, historians have reversed that trend and more attention has been paid to the writing of modern Native American history. This "New Indian history" centers on the Indian experience, the definition of community, and the maintenance of culture. Not so long ago historians wrote history of Indians largely without Indians. At first historians simply 2 ignored America's aboriginal inhabitants or addressed them largely as yet another obstacle to settlement in the inexorable flow of Euroamerican civilization to the West. The trend of writing Native American history which placed Indians at the center of study began in the 1950s mostly with anthropologists, although late nineteenth-century ethnographers began the process. 4 Methods associated with this kind of history made use of traditional historical sources, such as government documents, and those previously overlooked or ignored, such as ethnographic studies, ethnographic sources within journals, memoirs, and explorers' reports, archeological studies, artifacts, and oral histories. Statistical records, agency reports, Indian school records, allotment documents, and census data provided other pertinent information. Early ethnohistorical work attempted to reconstruct the cultural past through narrative and often focused on the prehistoric, discovery and conquest, and early colonial periods. In essence, anthropologists and historians concentrated on the "ethnographic present," limiting their perspective on Indian history to their preconceived concepts of what it meant-to be an Indian. Many historians wrote Indian history that continued to focus on traditional lines of inquiry such as Indian-White relations, Indian policy, and military history. In the larger context of the civil rights era that 3 accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, some historians began to redefine subjects worthy of investigation. An upsurge in scholarly and popular interest in Native American history spawned not only a quantitative