Who Was Apache Frank? Part III - The Cornfield Treaty

By Ruben Q. Leyva

In the Cornfield
In October of 1867, outside Cañada Alamosa (Monticello), New Mexico, Apache Frank Leyva stood among the rows of corn and men, dust on his moccasins, reading faces the way his Navajo stepfather taught him to read tracks. To the town, he was Mexican; to some officials, he had been referred to as Navajo; to his mother's family, he was of the Red Paint People [Chihene band]. He was not a captive, but the interpreter for Chief Loco. Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier Grover, commander at Fort Craig, had confirmed Loco's leadership of the group upon the passing of his relative, the great leader Mangas Coloradas, four years before. However, on this day, Frank carried all of his ancestors with him. Names could wait. The work in front of him was simple: end the shouting before someone's son died for a sack of grain.

This scene shows how Apache-led, locally negotiated peace—which was helped by interpreters like Frank's grandaunt Refugia and family friend Monica—had kept the Gila Apache alive through past agreements. Little did anyone know that distant government policies would later break the peace Frank was about to broker. Pressure from settlers, mostly from outside Monticello, wanted the Apaches on reservations, if not exterminated. This gave Indian Commissioner Colyer the motivation to place 4,000 Natives on reservations within a year. Despite their efforts to establish an understanding between the neighboring Mexican and European settlers of Monticello, Frank and his people would face this fate.

On that quiet autumn day in 1867, shots rang out. A boy had run to fetch his father. Now the alcalde, José Trujillo, rode out with a few men and raised a cloth on a lance. Across the rows, riders shifted and reined up, watching. Loco kept near Frank's shoulder, saying nothing. They stepped forward until they could hear each other without yelling.

Cañada Alamosa was not a typical frontier town. Isolated in a canyon west of the Rio Grande, its nearest military presence lay miles away at Fort Craig. Beyond that, there was little connection to any outside settlement. This isolation made local agreements more than gestures of goodwill; they were the only practical means by which both Apache and settler families could survive in a country where no help would come quickly if peace broke down.

Echoes of Earlier Treaties
Frank remembered what the old men had said about earlier peace agreements—Acoma in 1852, Fort Webster in 1853, and Fort Thorn in 1855, where leaders like Cuchillo Negro and Loco signed their names to papers that promised "friendship" but still hinged on food and a trade market. The sheets of paper upon which those promises lived were referred to as agreements of friendship. Although the 1855 treaty was not ratified, it aimed to cede Gila Apache land—specifically, Ndeh Bikeyah, also known as Ndeh Bikah. Indian Agent Steck, who negotiated with Governor Meriwether on behalf of the United States, remarked that year, "I desired very much to treat with the Gila Apache at the same time and place...The Mimbres Indians are generally classed with and considered as a part of the Gila Apaches, but they live separate, claim different tracts of country, and have separate and distinct interests and organizations."

While men took credit for the treaty signing at Fort Thorn, the two women, Refugia and Monica, who were among them, also signed and served as interpreters. If not for the women, food, and the possibility of a reservation, no real work would have been done. When trade stopped, and Congress refused to ratify the treaty, things went silent. However, today, in the cornfield, a consensus could be reached to work the way those days had, if both sides set the terms that everyone could live with.

According to R.C. Patterson and Sam Creevey, who later recounted the meeting, the terms were set out with practical brevity: no more shooting, the town would return its prisoners, the Apaches would return a horse and the captured boy, and trade would take place within sight of the settlement. The arrangement was remembered in nearly the same words by both men, "the boy for the horse, cotton cloth, and wheat for meat and stock." Frank translated the terms into Spanish and Apache, making sure each side understood them.

They listened because it was practical. The alcalde nodded, answering plainly, and Frank carried the words back across the rows without embellishment. Riders planted their lances in the earth as the talk shortened into pieces that could be kept: a path to a trading place, a day to begin, the kinds of goods allowed, and the promise to pull back if tempers rose. He made sure the boy crossed first, and the horse followed. No one cheered. Peace that worked sounded like ordinary voices speaking lists and prices.
The alcalde wanted an armistice and mutual restraint, not a federal treaty. This would serve as the latest stop-and-start fix in a long line of such accords. Like the prior peace talks, the terms were practical because in a lean country, peace only lasted as long as trade or rations did. Frank made it simple for his people: a safe place to trade, returns made on both sides, no raids out of the trading camp, and no ambushes from town. Frank translated the terms into both Spanish and Apache, ensuring all sides understood.

Loco may have brushed his sleeve on the walk back. The Gila Apache themselves were unlikely to discuss the band names settlers used to refer to them – Mimbres, Mogollon, Coppermine, or Warm Springs. Instead, they almost certainly discussed the first loads of wheat and cloth, and how far from the acequia the camp should be situated so that children would not wander into the fields. Frank carried the memory of Acoma, Fort Webster, and Fort Thorn without saying the names out loud. He did not need to. The pattern was the same: trade enough to live and test each other's word tomorrow.

History builds statues for warriors; my family tells winter stories about warriors and diplomats. While Frank served as an Apache scout, he is also remembered for his diplomacy.

A Fragile Peace and Its Breaking
For a time, it held. Wickiups rose in the hills above town. People did business because hunger and caution made it a worthwhile endeavor. Soldiers nearby called the trade a problem; families called it breathing room. Frank kept translating, sometimes more than he was given, sometimes less, always toward the small space where men could back away without losing face.

Years later, orders would come from far away to dismantle the camps and relocate families to a new location in the Tularosa Valley. The cornfield accord, like the Fort Thorn treaty before it, had never been meant to withstand that kind of top-down change—it was a local fix, proof that when people set terms in their own tongue, they could coexist. That decision would break the local accord the way a hard wind snaps a drying gourd from its vine. But on this day in the corn, before the wagons and the papers and the counting of names, a man with several names kept people alive with the only weapon left to him—language.

Why it matters now
If a town and a camp can maintain local peace through trade and trust, then a community can also hold a local truth about who belongs. The Cornfield armistice was born not in a capitol city but in an isolated canyon settlement, where cavalry reinforcements were too distant to matter. In such a place, survival itself depended on neighbors setting their own terms for peace. Frank's life—many names, one obligation—argues for a way of seeing Gila Apache identity that honors ties of care and place alongside whatever the paperwork once said. Some neighbors would later fold this into the catch-all of "calico treaties"—the small, local peace agreements secured by promises of calico cloth and other goods. We keep the truer name here: the Cornfield armistice at Cañada Alamosa, a community-made agreement, not a federal treaty. The word "calico" reminds us that, in this country, cloth often carried more weight than paper.

The cornfield armistice held because it was local neighbors setting terms with their own words, trading grain for cloth, and measuring peace in ordinary voices. Yet even as those rows of corn stood in Cañada Alamosa, larger forces were already in motion. Within months, not years, some of Apache Frank's family, who had been forcefully removed by the U.S. and taken to the horrific conditions of the Bosque Redondo Reservation years before, needed his help. The cornfield negotiations had been a training ground, sharpening Frank's role as interpreter just in time for the Navajo Treaty of June 1868, where his name surfaced beside that of his brother Guero. From the furrows of corn to the treaty lines at Bosque Redondo, Frank's path links local accord to federal negotiation and it is there that the next part of his story unfolds.