Columbus Day-of-Mourning

The four hundred Mescalero Apaches sharing the reservation with the Navajos had come to the end of their patience. Outnumbered by the Navajos twenty to one, they were especially miserable at the bosque. They had refused to send their children to Carleton's school and had completely given up trying to plant corn. Unlike the Diné, the Mescaleros had no tradition of agriculture and had come to view the work required to grow crops--while an interesting novelty at first--as beneath their dignity. At the most basic level, they did not understand the life Carleton wanted them to live; and to the extent that they did, they abhorred it.

One day at Bosque Redondo, Cadete, the great Mescalero chief, fell into conversation with Capt. John Cremony about the Mescalero's view of work. With frank eloquence, Cadete explained his people's disdain for the white man's mode of existence:

"You desire our children to learn from books, and say, that because you have done so, you are able to build all those big houses and sail over the sea, and talk with each other at any distance, and do many wonderful things...

"Let me tell you what we think. You begin when you are little to work hard. After you get to be men, you build big houses, big towns, and everything else in proportion. Then, after you have got them all, you die and leave them behind. Now, we call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you begin to talk until you die; but we are free as air. The Mexicans and others work for us. Our wants are few and easily supplied. The river, the wood and the plain yield all we require. We will not be slaves; nor will we send our children to your schools, where they only learn to become like yourselves."

When Cremony tried to debate some of Cadete's points, he found it "utterly impossible to make him comprehend the other side of his specious argument." The Mescaleros hatred of the bosque was so palpable, and their rejection of its day-to-day life so complete, that he thought they were unteachable.

One morning in early November 1965, the soldiers at Fort Sumner awoke to find that the entire tribe of Mescaleros had bolted from the reservation. The Indians had carefully planned their nighttime breakout, scattering in all directions of the compass, then reconvening in the mountains of their homeland. To effect their escape--and also pay a parting insult to their hated fellow tenants--the Mescaleros absconded with some two hundred horses owned by the Navajos. The army picket guards scarcely bothered to pursue them, and though embarrassed by the episide, General Carleton didn't press the matter. The Mescalero Apaches never returned to the Round Forest.