By Ruben Leyva

They called him El Indio del Gallo (The Indian of the Gallo Mountains). The term echoed off porch rails and adobe walls—part warning, part forgetting. He lived in Mangas, or just outside it, one of those places in western New Mexico where memory lingers like smoke. While we cannot be entirely sure, some family researchers suggest that the man known as El Indio del Gallo was Procopio 'Pomposo' Leyva, drawing on patterns of residence, kinship, and oral tradition in the Mangas area. Procopio was the son of José Albino Mariscal Leyva and Soledad Alderete, and the grandson of Norberta Ishnoh'n Leyva, a Warm Springs Apache matriarch who once marched from the springs of Cañada Alamosa to the San Carlos Apache Reservation.

To understand the cost of being both—to carry the weight of multiple worlds—we must look at the survival paths forged by Ishnoh'n's sons: José Albino and Francisco "Apache Frank" Leyva. These two men chose different routes before and after the 1886 exile of the Chiricahua. Neither boarded the trains east to St. Augustine, Alabama, or Fort Sill. They stayed—José Albino as a Warm Springs Apache (Chihene) headman and Frank as a Bedonkohe Apache headman.

José Albino rooted himself in Quemado, a mesa-brushed edge of the Mogollon Uplands. There, he married, farmed, and raised children in a borderland defined not by fences but by caution. His pale complexion—perhaps inherited from his translator grandmother, Soledad Idalgo—meant that he passed more easily in the Mexican world. But that came at a cost. Some claimed he wasn't "really" Apache. Others considered him too Indian to trust. These were not misunderstandings—they were forms of erasure.

Yet Albino, who preferred to be called José, did what our people have always done: he endured. One of his sons—possibly Procopio—may have carried the family forward under the whispered name El Indio del Gallo. This name wasn't necessarily just a slur; it likely served as shorthand for "other than us." In towns like Mangas, it carried a legacy of silence. However, beneath that silence, a survival network formed, shaped by kinship and adaptation.

In the north, kinship ties extended to the Bear Springs Band of Navajo (Dineh). This was no accident. In September 1877, several Apache leaders, including Chiefs Victorio and Loco of the Warm Springs Apache, broke out of the San Carlos Reservation due to intertribal tension and federal targeting. Edwin Sweeney writes, "... (the Apaches) moved north into Navajo country, where Loco, Victorio, and Mangus (son of Mangas Coloradas) had friends and relatives by marriage." They located some  Navajo farmers southwest of Acoma, including a former captive they knew, whom they had traded to the Navajo as a child in exchange for a horse.

This captive, who remained among the Navajo, agreed to take the Apache's message of surrender to Captain Horace Jewett, who informed Colonel Hatch. Hatch sent a team of men, including Southern Navajo leaders Mariano and Juan Navajo, who served as emissaries of goodwill on behalf of the U.S. and the Bear Springs band, negotiating the surrender of the Warm Springs under Victorio and Loco, as well as the Bedonkohe Apache band under Esquine and Apache Frank.

After Mariano and the Apache leaders reached an agreement, the Apaches agreed to accept Fort Wingate as a reservation instead of San Carlos. The group marched from the Gallo Mountains, in present-day Catron County, 90 miles north to Fort Wingate seeking refuge. Historian Bud Shapard's research reveals 242 or 243 Apaches relocated to Fort Wingate. We settled within the Bear Springs Navajo—a moment of alliance that went beyond mere shelter. That month was the start of a lasting kinship that would help preserve a people; however, not all surrendered at Fort Wingate.

After their initial arrival, the Apache set up camp at West Spring, determining that 68 remained in the Gallo Mountains. Another team was sent to retrieve the remaining Apaches and returned with only 56 of the 68, as the second envoy left 12 Apaches behind. The Leyva family's story aligns with this. The stronghold housing the remaining 12 was located at Turkey Spring on the north side of Escondido Mountain. This was where El Indio del Gallo took his wife to live after their marriage, according to the handwritten notes of the late Eliseo Baca, a resident of Mangas who married an Apache descendant. The relationships between the Apache family in the Gallo Mountains and their relatives among the Navajo remained.

Among these Bear Springs families, Apache and Navajo women created cultural bonds. One such connection was through Tsidil, the women's stick game, said to have been made by Changing Woman herself.
Played in winter, Tsidil uses three sticks—black on one side, natural on the other—symbolizing lightning and the dual worlds of night and day. Players toss the sticks onto a rock at the center of a circle of forty stones. Each gap represents a river, and each stick crash is a bolt of spiritual energy. If a stick lands in the river, the player must begin again.

The Chishi Dineh (Chiricahua-Navajo) women, many of them descendants of the relocated Warm Springs Apache, played Tsidil with their Dineh sisters. The circle became more than a game—it was a classroom, a prayer, a treaty of laughter.

It's here, in this space of shared resilience, that we can also imagine Ishnoh'n's second husband—a man known only in records as Hastiin—possibly among these Bear Springs Hosteens (older men). He fathered her two youngest children, including Jim Miller, a U.S. Army scout who later relocated to Mescalero upon discharge. "Chiricahua Jim," as he was known, knew the terrain of contradiction: loyalty to the army, love for his people, and a final refuge at a federally designated reservation. Hastiin was a good stepfather to Ishnoh'n's older sons, José Albino and Frank, whose father passed away when they were young boys.

Apache Frank, recorded in Spanish as Francisco de Jesús, led a distinctly different life. He wandered between names and nations. The circumstances are unclear, but he was captured and sent by the Anglos to Carlisle Industrial School under the name "Francisco," labeled as Navajo in 1882. He was known as Biszahe Gunde—a name rooted in Apache that means something like 'Hollow Loud' or 'One whose voice comes from a deep place.' This name was not given lightly. It spoke of echo, memory, and how sound lingers even after the source is gone. Records indicate that he died, yet he reappears later, visiting Louisiana and returning to the Southwest, according to Fort Sill Historian Gillett Griswold. We now know that adult men were sometimes sent to Carlisle under false pretenses or to hide their identities during times of federal scrutiny.

Frank returned to the Southwest, first to Mescalero, then farther south. His sons, Roman and Tomás Leyva, reported his death in 1941 in San Francisco de Conchos, Chihuahua. His son, Leandro, had married the granddaughter of Sierra Madre Apache leader Elías, reinforcing his ties to Geronimo, with whom Frank was arrested at Ojo Caliente in April 1877 when the Warm Springs Apache were first taken to San Carlos.

In November 1877, First Lieutenant Martin Hughes delivered 226 of the 243 Apaches from Fort Wingate to their home at Ojo Caliente, located at Cañada Alamosa. At least 17 Apaches stayed behind at Bear Springs among relatives. Hughes' report states the leaders Loco, Victorio, Nana, Esquine, Mangus (son of Mangas Coloradas), and Thomaso were deposited at Warm Springs. Hughes' dispatch offers insight into Apache Frank's movement, as Esquine, his father-in-law, is mentioned among those delivered to Cañada Alamosa.

A year later, in 1878, the Apaches living at Ojo Caliente were again relocated to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. Not all went back to San Carlos. Victorio took his group into the Black Range. Some smaller groups chose to flee to the mountains, settling in places like Quemado, located between Bear Springs and the Mogollon. Some of those who returned to San Carlos would escape again. Today, the Leyva family is grateful that the Chishi Dineh are a part of our story.

José Albino's branch near Quemado thrived quietly. His children married into nearby families, blending Apache, Mexican, and Navajo memories. Their world was one of careful camouflage—of saying enough to survive but never too much to be targeted. And that is what "being both" costs. Recognition became risk. Naming oneself openly as Apache after 1886 could mean arrest or worse. However, through informal alliances—such as Bear Springs kinship, local agricultural networks, and cross-border Sierra Madre connections—families like the Leyvas managed to survive.

This editorial is not a romantic story of return. It is a reality of what it took to stay. The records do not tell the whole story, but the land does. So do the games, the names, and the women who played them.

The 1915 Navajo census indicates that Chishi Dineh women were still living near Fort Wingate. Their names and lineages prove that the Warm Springs presence wasn't temporary—it was enduring. These women weren't captives. They were connectors, keeping sacred knowledge alive through ceremonies, family, and the winter stick game.

We must now recognize that the history of the Gila Apache was never erased—only relocated, renamed, and whispered. "El Indio del Gallo" was a name of reduction, but now, we reclaim it as a title of resistance. Procopio's legacy was not silence—it was survival. Through his family, through the Bear Springs circle, and through the laughter of sticks crashing on stone, he still speaks.

Examples abound of ongoing intertribal relations between the Gila Apache and our Dineh relatives. Following rumors that Mangus' Chihene band was near the Navajo Reservation, General Crook met with Chief Mariano in October 1885, stating Mariano was "the only (Dineh) who might have anything to do with hostiles (Gila Apaches)," according to author Edwin Sweeney. The solidarity of the Bear Springs band provided much-needed support for Gila Apache survival before and after the 1886 exile, including during the blizzard.

This mutual care extended beyond games and ceremony. The northern network, Bear Springs, survived. In 1931, when a deadly blizzard struck western New Mexico, some kinfolks of the Warm Springs Apache were living near Atarque, just north of Quemado. Snowed in and desperate for food after their sheep escaped, it was local ranch hands who dug them out, wrapped them in blankets, and loaded them into pickup trucks for rescue. Some were taken to relatives in Ramah and nearby communities for shelter. Vintage film footage captures this act of compassion. This compassion was the echo of alliances forged generations earlier and newly formed relations with ranchers, proving that community wasn't just a matter of name or blood.