Who Was Apache Frank? Part IV

The Kinship Corridor

By Ruben Q. Leyva

The cornfield armistice at Cañada Alamosa was a fragile peace, measured in rows of maize and bolts of cloth. It was there, in 1867, that Apache Frank first appeared clearly in the historical record as an interpreter—a young man trusted to carry words between his people and the United States. Standing beside Loco, he was not a captive but a negotiator, working in the narrow space between subsistence and survival. The cornfield showed Frank as a figure who could move between worlds, his presence marking a moment when dialogue, however fleeting, was possible.

His older brother, José Albino Leyva, known as Guero, emerged in a different register. Where Frank's role was inscribed in the maize fields of the Gila, Guero's presence is found in the rosters of Bosque Redondo, counted among the Navajo and Apache captives at Fort Sumner. There, in the barracks by the Pecos, the federal project of confinement pressed Indigenous lives into ledgers and returns. If Frank's story in 1867 was one of cautious mediation, Guero's was one of endurance under guard. Yet by 1868, the two brothers stood again in proximity, Francisco and Guero both listed as signatories to the treaty that allowed the Navajo to leave Bosque Redondo. Taken together, their divided paths, Frank at the edge of the armistice, Guero within the records of captivity, show how one family straddled the overlapping worlds of negotiation, imprisonment, and kinship corridor.

Too Many Franciscos

The challenge in telling Apache Frank's story is that he is not alone in the archives. There was Captive Francisco Manzanares, a Navajo child enslaved in the Manzanares-Madrid household of Abiquiú in the 1860s, who died by 1877. There was Scout Juan Cisco (Denet Tso), sometimes called Francisco, who enlisted at Fort Wingate in 1885 and lived until 1942. There was even Francisco "the Big One" of the White Mountain Apache, a leader in his own right. Each of these men bore the name Francisco, and over time, their stories bled into one another.

To tell Apache Frank's story requires not only distinguishing him from these other Franciscos but also recognizing the kinship corridors that linked his family to the larger struggles of the Gila Apache and their Navajo allies. At the center of those corridors stands his older brother, José Albino Leyva—better known by the nickname Guero.

Interpreter By the River

Apache Frank first appears in U.S. military records in 1864, when he was noted as interpreting near the Gila River. He was only twenty years old, but already positioned in a role of mediation between the military and his people. This was not a position given lightly. It reflected his kinship bond to Chief Loco, whose Red Paint band relied on trusted family to carry their words into Spanish and English.

That bond would define Frank's life. At the Cornfield armistice of 1867 at Cañada Alamosa, he again appeared as interpreter, standing beside Loco, as local peace was negotiated with nearby settlers. He was not a captive like Francisco Manzanares, nor a boy like Cisco. He was a man trusted by his people at the height of a fragile peace.

The Treaty of 1868

But Apache Frank and Guero were also pulled into another story, one often told only as a Navajo tragedy: the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. Between 1863 and 1866, the U.S. Army forced more than 8,000 Navajos and about 500 Mescalero Apaches to Fort Sumner. Until recently, historians insisted that only those two groups were interned. Yet records from 1865 prove otherwise.

National Archives and Records Administration collection of monthly returns from Fort Sumner (1865) lists a small band of Gileños—Gila Apaches—counted separately: 20 in January, 31 by April, 43 by June. In that June return, the absence of a "Miguel, Gila chief" was noted. By July, the Gileños were merged statistically with the Mescaleros, and soon after, all were listed simply as "Apaches." What began as a distinct presence was absorbed into bureaucratic erasure.

Frank's connection to Fort Sumner may have been limited to moments of translation rather than internment. His brother Guero, by contrast, emerges more firmly in the record under a Navajo identity, not only beside Francisco in the 1868 treaty but later in Nuevomexicano newspapers that cast him as a "renegade Navajo" riding with Nana's Red Paint band. Their divided presences, Frank in the Gila and Guero at the Pecos, show how one family straddled the overlapping worlds of treaty, captivity, and kinship corridor.

In August 1864, the Navajo leader Barboncito and his remaining kin surrendered and were marched to Bosque Redondo. But within a year, by 1865, he and a small band had slipped away, finding refuge among Apache allies in their mountains. Although he was forced to surrender again in 1866, historian and Diné scholar Jennifer Nez Denetdale reminds us that even the most renowned Diné leaders depended on Apache kinship corridors for survival. This moment, coinciding with the archival traces of Gileño Apaches at Fort Sumner, confirms that Apache–Navajo alliances were not marginal but central to the story of endurance.

It was at Fort Sumner that the Treaty of 1868 was signed, ending Bosque Redondo and allowing the Navajos to return to Navajo Land [Diné Bikeyah], also known as Dinetah. Among the signatories were two familiar names. According to Digitreaties.org, the brothers were not listed among the "Chiefs" but among the "Council": Francisco and Guero.

Here, the puzzle deepens. If this Francisco were Scout Cisco, he would have been only twelve years old—far too young to sign as a headman. Captive Francisco was already dead or still in bondage. The most plausible candidate is Apache Frank, then twenty-four and already a practiced interpreter. And beside him, as both memory and record suggest, was his older brother José Albino, remembered as Guero for his fair skin color. His given name, Albino, and his nickname, Guero, carried similar meanings. Both names highlight his light complexion; one formal, the other familiar, which made the nickname an easy fit in Nuevomexicano memory.

More than a treaty signatory, Guero carried a layered identity. His mother, Ishnoh'n, belonged to the Red Paint band, yet he was reared under the Navajo elder Hastiin Bitsii Ligai, which marked him in Nuevomexicano memory as a "renegade Navajo." He married Soledad Alderete, herself a Red Paint woman, and together they had a son known as El Indio del Gallo, Procopio Leyba. Guero's Diné upbringing and masculine role did not sever his Apache ties; rather, they deepened his loyalty to Nana, who was kin to both his mother and his wife. His place beside Francisco in the treaty record thus reflects not confusion of names, but the intersection of Navajo and Gila Apache kinship that shaped his life.

Victorio's Defeat

The brothers' lives cannot be disentangled from the broader fate of the Chihene Red Paint People. Chief Loco and Chief Victorio, co-leaders of the band, struggled against the relentless pressure of U.S. and Mexican forces. Frank's role as interpreter at Cañada Alamosa was one expression of this struggle: survival through diplomacy. Victorio's campaigns of the late 1870s were another: survival through resistance.

In 1880, according to Eve Ball's *In the Days of Victorio,* Victorio's band was cornered and massacred at Tres Castillos in Chihuahua. Over a hundred women and children were taken prisoner, many sold into slavery in Chihuahua City, while others escaped to the Sierra Madre. Survivors recalled that Nana (Nané), Victorio's lieutenant, took up leadership of the remnants—an aging warrior suffering from rheumatism but determined to avenge his people.

In my own family research, connections to the Elías line of Chihene leaders tie us to Nana himself. These kinship ties remind us that the Gila Apache experience was never limited to one band or one name. Survivors of Tres Castillos scattered, but kinship stitched them back together across borders and generations.

Guero Among the Renegades

It is here that José Albino "Guero" Leyva resurfaces. In the aftermath of Tres Castillos, when Nana gathered the survivors for his retaliatory raid of 1881, his band was no longer only Apache. A.E. "Bob" Roland's research reproduces Romero's affidavit sworn before Justice Gregorio Otero (April 1882). The sworn statement describes the raiders as a mixed group: Red Paint survivors and renegade Navajos.

Romero's sworn affidavit named them: **Cibulse, Margarito, Chino, and Guero.** Her husband was killed in the Cebolla raid; she and her child were carried away. Newspapers like the Red River Chronicle seized on these names, painting Guero as a renegade Navajo who betrayed the peace. (Red River Chronicle, June 24 and July 1, 1882, in Roland, The Story of Plácida Romero, 106–07)

But to reduce him to that label is to miss the deeper truth. Guero's presence among Nana's riders was not simply rebellion. It was kinship. Bosque Redondo had forced Navajos and Apaches into proximity; out of that crucible came new alliances. Guero embodied that corridor, moving as a headman among Navajos, kin to Apache Frank, and ally to the Red Paint People under Nana. To call him simply "renegade" obscures this fuller story. Guero was at once a son of the Red Paint, a husband to Soledad Alderete, a father to Procopio, and a man raised within Diné masculinity. These overlapping ties made him a figure whom colonial categories could not contain. His loyalty to Nana, anchored in both maternal and marital kinship, shows that fidelity to the corridors of relation that bound Navajo and Apache survival together.

Corridors of Survival

Together, the stories of Frank and Guero illuminate the wider protocol of Gila Apache survival. Frank's path was through interpretation: appearing beside Loco, translating at the Cornfield, and walking into military councils as the voice of his people. Guero's path was through alliance: first beside his brother at Bosque Redondo, then later as one of Nana's renegade riders, remembered in captivity narratives and Nuevomexicano memory.

Neither fits neatly into the categories imposed by the archive. Frank was listed as Mexican, Navajo, and even Yuma in different records. Guero was remembered as a renegade Navajo, though his kinship placed him firmly within the Gila Apache story. Their identities, like those of so many Apache families, were fluid because they had to be. Survival meant moving between names, between nations, between borders.

Conclusion: Shadows and Survival

Who was Apache Frank? He was not the captive boy of Abiquiú, not the scout from Thoreau, not the White Mountain chief. He was a Gila Apache interpreter, a relative of Loco, and the brother of Guero. His life stretched nearly a century, bridging the eras of the Cornfield, Bosque Redondo, and the Sierra Madre.

Who was Guero? He was simply a renegade Navajo in the eyes of Nuevomexicanos and a signatory at Bosque Redondo. To his family, he was José Albino Leyva, elder brother to Frank, remembered as one who carried both Apache and Navajo ties into the hardest years of survival. From Fort Sumner to Nana's Raid, Guero stood in the corridors that made Gila Apache endurance possible.

Their stories, read together, remind us that what looks like confusion in the record is often coherence in kinship. These are the Gila Apache kinship protocol—the ways our people survived erasure not by clinging to static categories, but by carrying relation across them. In the end, Frank and Guero did not just live through history. They made survival itself the measure of belonging.