With the death of Victorio (whose only son, Washington, was shot in the fall of 1879, leaving no one to succeed him) the cause was lost.
His wife, we are told, after Victorio's death, cut off her hair, in the old Greek fashion, and buried it,—an offering to the spirit of this fallen chief, to whom (devil though he was) she was devoted.
It is told of Rafael, one of Victorio's band, that when maddened by tiswin (an intoxicant made by the Indian from corn), he fatally stabbed his wife, and, after her death, overcome with penitence, sacrificed all his beads and most of his clothes to the "dear departed," cut his and his children's hair short, and sheared the manes and tails of his horses. These manifestations of anguish over, he went up into a high hill, and howled with uplifted hands.
Women are regarded by the Apaches as an incumbrance. They are of so little account that they are not even given a name. Mothers mourn at their birth.
The Indians occupying a reservation of seven hundred square miles in southern New Mexico, and numbering, at the present writing, about four hundred and fifty souls, are typical Apaches, and closely related by blood to the other Apaches of Arizona and New Mexico. They exhibit the usual race characteristics,—of ignorance, stubbornness, superstition, cruelty, laziness, and treachery.
In December, 1894, Lieutenant Stottler first assumed the charge of these Indians. In spite of the fact that for many years a generous government had supplied them annually with rations, clothing, working implements, etc., they were then living in tepees, or brush shelters, on the side hills; clad in breech-clout and blanket, wearing paint, and long hair, and thanklessly receiving their rations of beef, flour, coffee, sugar, salt, soap, and baking-powder. A few of them condescended to raise corn and oats; but acres of tillable land on the reservation were still unused.
"They were," says Lieutenant Stottler, in an able and interesting report, "not only contented with this order of things, but desirous and determined to prolong it indefinitely."
Fifty per cent of their children were in school, but the parents were wholly opposed to their education. Among them were twenty strong, broad-shouldered Indian adults, educated at the expense of thousands of dollars, yet still running about the reservation in breech-clout and blanket, wilder than any uneducated Indian on it.
The girls were held from school, and at ten and twelve years of age were traded for ponies, into a bondage worse than any known slavery.
Fourteen Indian policemen are allowed the agent. Their especial duty is to see that the herd of beef cattle for their own eating is properly cared for. The police, each had a cabin to live in; but each, in scorn of this civilized innovation, had carefully planted alongside of his cabin a tepee to sleep in. To get these policemen into civilized clothing, under threat of duress, and to order all tepees away from their cabins, was the agent's first move. Next, it was decided that all children five years old and upwards must be placed in school at the beginning of the school year, whether the parents were willing or not. Every Indian man was ordered to select a piece of land, and put in his posts. To break up the influence of chiefs or bands, who, claiming the whole country, deterred the people from work, by threats, appears to have been up-hill work; "but now," says the agent (in 1897), "there are no chiefs, and 'work or starve' is the policy." Formerly, government supplies of clothing, wagons, harness, and utensils, as soon as issued, had been packed on burros and sold for a mere song to settlers about the reservation. This abuse was promptly stopped, as also was the making of tiswin.