PIONEER MOTHER MURDERED BY INDIANS

Back in the years 1937-1939, as part of the New Mexico Federal Writers' Project, Edith Crawford, the representative in Lincoln County, collected a number of interviews of Lincoln County pioneers.  These were never published and were lost until the collection was brought to the attention of the Lincoln County Historical Society.  This vignette is based on that work and taken from the actual words spoken by Jose Apodaca on April 28, 1959.

Jose Apodaca’s parents, Severanio and Juanita, moved to Agua Azul, on the south side of New Mexico’s Capitan Mountains, in 1872.  They built a two roomed hut and had a few horses and cattle.  The following story was told to Jose when he was just a boy.

Early in January, 1873, Marcial Rodriguez and Severanio went on a hunting trip and were attacked by Indians.   Severanio escaped the Indian attack and made it to the Casey Ranch.  The Casey’s formed a posse and sent word up and down the Rio Bonito for every man who could go to meet at Agua Azul to fight the Indians.  The posse found the mutilated body of Marcial Rodriguez and buried him.  The posse set out again and found the Indians at the west end of the Capitan Mountains.  Several Indians were killed and some escaped.  Someone in the posse noticed two Indian women on the side of the mountain and a white woman with them.  Jose Apodaca related, “The two squaws had my mother and when they saw the white men coming and knew that they could not get away with my mother, they split her head open with an axe, and the squaws made their getaway.  When the men got to my mother,” Apodaca explained, “she was dead and they found that she had given birth to her baby, which was alive and a boy.  The posse dug a grave and buried my mother right there on the mountain side.”

Severanio Apodaca took his newborn son to the town of Lincoln and gave the boy to Tulia Gurule Stanley to care for.  She raised the child and gave him the name Jose.  The Indians who killed his mother were Mescalero Apaches.  This all occurred while the Infantry and Cavalry were being assigned to Fort Stanton following the Civil War.  In our next installment, Jose Apodaca will relate the fate of his father, Severanio.