Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Between 1989 and 1992, I crisscrossed the Southwest (including the states of Chihuahua and Sonora) as I researched a book about the last twenty-five years of the relentless war between the U.S. and Mexican governments and the Chiricahua Apache, the last tribe of American Indians to hold out against the nations that usurped their homelands. The principal leaders in that resistance—the heroes, if there were any, of my Once They Moved Like the Wind—were Cochise and Geronimo. The story of that epic contest was already an oft-told tale by the time I started writing, but to my mind, no previous book about the Apache wars paid more than token lip service to the Chiricahua side of the narrative.

  Trying to get inside that point of view, however, proved formidably difficult. By 1990 the living memory of the conquest was still bathed in an apocalyptic bitterness. After Geronimo’s final surrender in 1886, the Chiricahua were shipped en masse to concentration camps in Florida and Alabama, where they were held for eight years. In 1894, they were relocated to Fort Sill in the Indian Territory. There, still prisoners of war, they languished for another nineteen years. In 1913, when the Chiricahua were finally freed, the tribe had dwindled to 261 men, women, and children.

  Thanks to that legacy, today’s Chiricahua Apache have never bought into the commercial sideshow that obtains on other Indian reservations. There are precious few Apache gift shops or trading stands in Arizona, and even the reservations of other Apachean peoples, such as San Carlos and White Mountain in Arizona, or Mescalero and ­Jicarilla in New Mexico, do almost nothing to attract visitors. The sites of massacres by U.S. troops and vigilantes, such as Aravaipa Creek and Cibecue, bear few historical markers memorializing the tragedies.

  As I learned again and again, I could not simply show up on today’s reservations and hope to interview the descendants of Cochise and Geronimo and Juh and Victorio. For the Chiricahua point of view, I relied on the work of an extraordinary schoolteacher named Eve Ball, who after 1942 labored for decades on the Mescalero reservation near Ruidoso, New Mexico, to win the trust and record the stories of the descendants of the Chiricahua principals. Her books, Indeh and In the Days of Victorio, remain priceless primary documents, though Ball never tried to weave those testimonies into a historical chronicle.

  Launching my own research forty years after Ball, I succeeded in interviewing the granddaughters of Geronimo and of his right-hand man, Naiche (Cochise’s son), as well as of other elderly Chiricahua on the Mescalero reservation and at Fort Sill. From the start, I was struck by the intensity of the Apache feeling for their homeland, so I set myself the challenge of visiting every location where the pivotal events in the last twenty-five years of the resistance had transpired. In that quest, the deed I was proudest of was finding the mesa top deep in the Sierra Madre, near the border of Chihuahua and Sonora, where General George Crook had surprised Geronimo’s band in 1883, turning the tide of the war for good. In more than a century since Crook’s daring thrust, no Anglo, as far as I could learn, had ever rediscovered the site of the battle. To the Chiricahua, who had believed that the Stronghold in the Sierra Madre would forever serve as an impenetrable hideout in which they could live free, Crook’s invasion dealt a profoundly demoralizing blow. My own journey to the site, guided only by an X on the sole surviving map from the campaign, bore confirmatory fruit when I found the very piles of stones—“breastworks”—the warriors had thrown up on the mesa to crouch behind as they fired on the bluecoats swarming up from the valley below.

  The temptation for a revisionist historian of the Indian wars is to recast the struggle as a simplistic clash between wrong and right, as the triumph of manifest destiny over the sovereign integrity of native tribes. In 1970 Dee Brown produced a runaway bestseller predicated on that formula in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I tried to resist the urge to romanticize the Apache way of life. For the men who fought with Cochise and Geronimo, the worst punishment they could suffer was to be locked up in a cell. After Kaytennae, one of Geronimo’s fiercest warriors, endured a year and a half at Alcatraz, he was returned to his people shortly before the final surrender. To his jailors, Kaytennae had “become a white man and . . . an apostle of peace.” To Geronimo and the other warriors still at large, Kaytennae had lost his mind, had been brainwashed into a mute, meek shadow of his former self.

  A Chiricahua man would unfailingly choose death in battle over surrender and incarceration. He would even prefer to be tortured than to be locked up. In my empathic effort to comprehend another people’s worldview, the most disturbing cultural trait with which I had to grapple was the Apache enthusiasm for torture.

  The chronicles of the Anglo-American invasion of the Indian West are rife with lurid and sensational accounts of “atrocities” and “outrages” committed by “savages” against innocent homesteaders. But there is no point denying that torture of the cruelest kind played a central role in Apache culture. Well-documented testimony records that Cochise sometimes executed victims by hanging them head down over slow fires that inflicted agonizing deaths. Another chief, Eskiminzin, buried an American alive up to his neck and let the ants feast on his head. One of the most brutal treatments was to drag a victim behind a horse back and forth through prickly pear thickets until he expired.

  Other historians seemed to have ducked the question of Apache torture altogether. Trying to fathom the practice, I ransacked the anthropological literature, but I found only a huge lacuna in the theoretical discussion of how torture served the moral and spiritual needs of indigenous peoples worldwide. Simple revenge failed to explain the phenomenon, as did the idea that extreme punishments were required to undo the evil of witches. In a chapter titled simply “Torture,” I made a stab at my own explication, but I knew I had fallen short. Cultural relativism could take me only so far, and I was not willing to see such leaders as Cochise and Geronimo as congenital sadists. (My mother, who read everything I wrote, was so sickened by my short chapter on torture that she closed Once They Moved Like the Wind around page 45 and never finished the book.)

  During the last twenty-five years of the relentless campaign against the Chiricahua, virtually no Anglo-Americans, whether army men like General Crook or territorial officials such as Governor Anson Safford, made the effort to suspend their own notions of civilization and see the world from the Chiricahua point of view. The great exception was a prospector turned stagecoach supervisor named Tom Jeffords. Baffled and distressed by having lost fourteen drivers to Cochise’s raiders on the run between Santa Fe and Tucson, Jeffords “made up [my] mind that I wanted to see him.” Sometime between 1867 and 1870, Jeffords walked alone into the Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains. So impressed was the chief by the white man’s bravery that instead of killing the interloper he sat down to talk. Somehow Jeffords had already acquired a smattering of the Apache tongue, and during a series of visits lasting to the day before Cochise’s death in 1874, the tall, red-bearded American became the only white man to befriend the Apache leader. Among all the citizens of Arizona in his time, Jeffords was the only one who ever gained a deep understanding of the Chiricahua world.

  Tom Jeffords lived on near Tucson for another forty years. In all that time, no historian bothered to pick his brain for the matchless comprehension of the Apache lifeway that he had absorbed. Only in the last year of his life, in 1914, did a pair of journalists sit down with the old man to produce cursory résumés of his career. Outside of the oral traditions of today’s Chiricahua, who are loath to share their knowledge with outsiders, Cochise remains a shining enigma, the greatest of all Apache chiefs, but a man whom white Americans never understood.

  The most powerful insight I gained from my research on the Apache was how inextricable a lifeway is from the landscape across which it flourishes. As it did with virtually every other Indian tribe in the West, the U.S. government imposed reservations on arbitrarily defined tracts of land (usually regions deemed worthless for mining or Anglo settlement), then reacted with dismay and outrage when the indigenes refused to relocate.
For the Chiricahua, their homeland was inviolable, the only space in which the people could be free and happy. But what struck me again and again was how a specific place—the Ojo Caliente hot spring at the head of Cañada Alamosa, the granite domes of the Dragoon Mountains, the Stronghold above the Bavispe River deep in the Sierra Madre—brimmed for the Apache with an otherworldly numen that I could only dimly perceive.

  In 2003, for National Geographic, I traveled to Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize to investigate an aspect of the culture of the Maya, both ancient and living, that scholars had woefully ignored. On previous trips, I had toured many of the great city-states that had anchored the civilization during its Classic period, from 250 to 900 AD. Some of them, such as Tikal, Uxmal, and Palenque, had been restored and turned into tourist destinations. Others, such as Calakmul and Dos Pilas, lay mostly buried under the trees and vines of the rain forest, their structures adumbrated by sprawling mounds of vegetation that only hinted at their erstwhile glory. Much of the Maya heartland, however, is made of limestone, and all across its domain caves and underground passages abound, many of them drowned in water.

  The underworld was a supernatural realm that the ancient Maya called Xibalba—the Place of Fright. For the seven or eight million Maya living today, speakers of some thirty different languages, Xibalba remains a complex domain, the dwelling place of monstrous beings, but also the source of life-giving rain and corn and the home of the beloved dead.

  A century and a half of archaeology, beginning with John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s, rediscovered the pyramids and causeways and stelae of the city-states, which had consolidated as many as ninety thousand inhabitants apiece. But those rediscoverers remained all but ignorant of the Maya underworld. That neglect is epitomized in the story of Balankanche, a cave not far from lordly (and tourist-thronged) Chichén Itzá in Mexico’s Yucatán. The cave had long been known and, it was thought, thoroughly explored; only a few potsherds scattered along the main passageway testified to an ancient Maya presence. One day in 1959, however, a Mexican tour guide noticed that a patch of wall looked unnatural. Scraping away the mud, he discovered a small portal sealed with clay. The guide chipped away the clay and crawled through a hole, emerging in a tunnel. A hundred yards on he came to a large chamber dominated by a column of limestone reaching from floor to ceiling. Scattered across the cave floor lay a dazzling assemblage of brightly painted clay vessels. Many were incense burners shaped as effigies of the rain god Tlaloc, whose grotesque, sneering face was molded in bas-relief on the clay itself.

  Fifty-eight years later, Balankanche has been preserved as a shrine open to visitors on guided tours. The original Tlaloc effigy pots rest in situ on all sides of the limestone column. We know now that about a thousand years ago the local Maya performed elaborate rites in this secret lair so near the underworld—probably in a desperate petition for rain. But Tlaloc had failed the Maya, so they sealed shut the shrine—no doubt forever, they hoped, for they took pains to camouflage the portal. Yet a faint memory of the lost shrine has perhaps come down through the centuries in the name of the cave. Balankanche translates as “throne of the jaguar,” but it can also mean “hidden throne.”

  In highland Belize I entered a more complex cave called Actun Tunichil Muknal, or the Cave of the Stone Sepulchre. The grotto had remained unknown for more than 1,100 years, before a small group of hard-core cavers had pushed its passageways. With photographer Stephen Alvarez and archaeologist Jaime Awe, I swam across the entrance pool, waded chest-deep against the current of a rushing stream, then climbed a steep and slippery rubble pile. Two hours in, we reached the spacious chamber at the heart of the cave. Two hundred ceramic pots lay scattered about, some arranged in natural niches as if placed in museum display cases. Only moments later, we gazed upon a human skeleton. “This is a human sacrifice,” said Awe, who had discovered the remains of fourteen humans inside the cave. During the next several hours we hovered over one victim after another, including a pile of tiny bones, all that was left of an infant. The most startling skeleton was that of a twenty-year-old woman, sprawled in the position of her death, legs and arms akimbo. According to Awe, some priest had either slit her throat, cut her heart out, or disemboweled her. The skull, staring upward at eternity, seemed frozen in a silent scream.

  Awe believed the skeletons were sacrifices to Chac, the principal Maya rain god (Tlalac being a deity borrowed from central Mexico). “Earlier the Maya had implored Chac near the entrances to the caves,” said Awe. “But by the middle of the ninth century AD, something wasn’t working. The rain never came. So the Maya went deeper and deeper into the caves, making more and more desperate petitions to Chac. This is what they left.”

  Even those prayers failed. Within fifty years the Classic civilization had collapsed. The center of Maya culture moved north to the Yucatán Peninsula, leaving the heartland, stretching from Copán to Palenque, empty and abandoned.

  The Maya are far from the only people for whom caves embodied a world of transcendental mystery. In 1879, a man named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was digging up animal bones and prehistoric stone tools inside Altamira cave, near the town of Santander on the north coast of Spain. He had brought along his eight-year-old daughter Maria, who while he dug in the soil noticed paintings of bison on the ceiling of a side chamber. The next year, Sanz de Sautuola published a description of the cave art. Experts were quick to dismiss the paintings as a modern forgery, for the images looked far too well-drawn and sophisticated to be the work of Stone Age nomads.

  By now, caves adorned with Paleolithic paintings have been discovered from the Urals to the Iberian Peninsula—some 340 of them in France and Spain alone. All of them date from before 11,000 BP (Before Present). The most famous is Lascaux in southern France, discovered in 1940 by four teenagers chasing a stray dog. The excellence of the paintings, often massively superimposed and rich in images of animals now extinct, such as the aurochs, the cave bear, and the mammoth, continues to astound and bewitch the public and archaeologists alike.

  For more than a century, experts have debated the meaning of the Paleolithic cave art in grottos like Lascaux. For many years, a theory advanced by the Abbé Breuil held sway. The Abbé argued that the paintings were “hunting magic”—the depiction of prey in an effort to ensure the continued plenitude of the game the nomads hunted with spears and clubs. That theory was neatly demolished by studies that documented, for example, the scarcity of images of reindeer among the cave paintings, during a time when that animal supplied the great majority of the locals’ diet. By 2017, the intentions of the artists working all across the regions where the caves are found remain an intractable mystery. Collectively those painters, in the words of journalist Judith Thurman, “invented a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone.”

  Having visited six or eight of the Paleolithic grottos in southern France, I was stunned to imagine the courage and skill the painters must have mustered simply to get to their ateliers to begin work. Often the chambers in which the art ranges across convoluted walls and ceilings lie far from the entrances. Sometimes the routes to these sanctums require difficult maneuvers, verging on technical caving. We know that to light their way, the intrepid artists carried nothing more reliable than pine torches, which quickly burn and sputter out. As they painted, they used primitive grease lamps made from animal fat. If your light goes out very far inside a subterranean cave, even today, you are in deep trouble. The risk involved in making the art, I concluded, was an intrinsic part of its power.

  In 1994, in the Ardèche region of southern France, three amateurs whose weekends were devoted to searching for new underground passages made one of the great discoveries of the twentieth century. On a nondescript hillside close to a modern highway, near a natural arch called the Pont d’Arc, the three spéléologues stumbled upon a small opening in the ground. The hole “breathed,” emitting a steady stream of cool air—a reliable sign that a sizeable cave lurked beneath the gro
und. The trio moved some rocks blocking the hole, then squeezed into a vertical shaft 30 feet deep, which they used a chain ladder to descend.

  In the generous chambers that branched away from the foot of the entrance shaft, as they played their headlamps across the limestone walls, the cavers were astonished to discover a vast gallery of images. The Grotte Chauvet (named after the leader of the team) turned out to enclose a museum of Paleolithic art, the equal in variety and mastery of Lascaux. The 30-foot entrance shaft, the cavers concluded, was not the original entrance, which must have been blocked by a landslide, but rather a fortuitous shortcut to the inner sanctum carved by some other movement of the earth long after the painters had left their mark.

  Within a week or two of the discovery, I was on a plane to France, determined to cover the story for Men’s Journal. I knew beforehand that I would never be allowed inside the Grotte Chauvet. Lascaux had been nearly ruined by a black mold that encrusted the paintings, the fruit of the cumulative exhalations of thousands of visitors over the decades. The cave had been closed to the public in 1963. Since then, on ground not far from the real thing in the Dordogne, an artificial replica, called Lascaux II, had attempted to slake the tourist appetite for prehistoric Picassos. So brilliantly executed was the “fake Lascaux” that, far from feeling like an amusement park, the replica made the hairs on my neck stand up when I visited it.

  In the Ardèche, I strolled up the hillside through a vineyard to find the small hole in the ground, now covered with a locked steel grate, that Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two companions had slithered through in December 1994. Later, near the Pont d’Arc, I met the three spéléologues, who were still breathless as they recounted the find of a lifetime.