Captured By The Apache: Tales Of Tribe Culture

Apache country in the winter time:
source

Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!

We're in a series about the Wild West and the story of an 11 year old German boy, Hermann, who was captured by an Apache war party from his family's farm in 1870 in Central Texas. He is now about 14 years old at this point in the story and has become a full blown warrior.

In yesterday's post I was talking about the big "high" that the entire tribe got for some big celebration and the wild demonstrations that the medicine men put on by stabbing and cutting themselves with no damage or blood being spilled.

Today's story

They also claimed to control the weather and Hermann said he would watch them go up on a hill or mountain and do incantations and chants and wave a cows tail for rain. If it didn't rain they blamed someone in the tribe for angering the Great Spirit.

Well, one time they were in a drought so the medicine men were doing their incantations and so forth but no rain came so they came into camp and blamed a Mexican man who was staying with them.

He was ordered to be bound head and feet and then he was carried up the mountain and tied to a flat rock.

Then they tied a huge rattlesnake beside him just near enough to strike him whenever he moved. They went back down to the camp and started doing their incantations again and here come the rains, in abundance.

I reckon it worked

It poured so much that the area they were in flooded, it was a flash flood zone and took out their wigwams. They lost several horses and they had a white child captive who was being held there and the child drowned too.

Hermann didn't say but I'm sure the unlucky Mexican died. Either he got bit by the rattler or died of thirst or something else. It sounded more like a human sacrifice than just getting rid of the problem.

But I'm sure the medicine men were highly revered, or feared, for ending the drought.

It was an entirely foreign realm of knowledge

They had tremendous knowledge and power and knew more about nature and herbal medicines than we'll ever know, but this particular incident sounds a little bizarre to me.

But then, it was told by a white boy who never had a clue of what they were doing or why!

Talk about dangerous snakes

This is a wild story that Hermann was told and apparently it was accepted as fact by his tribe. It seems there was a very dangerous snake in the region where they were, not a rattlesnake but some other type of venomous snake.

Legend has it that they always traveled in pairs and if you killed one of them, the other would follow you and bite you, even if you were miles from where you killed it's mate.

Hermann was told that a young Indian who had just gotten married killed one of these snakes and then traveled on and camped that night with his new wife.

The snake gets it's revenge

Well, the dead snake's companion trailed them all the way to their campsite and bit the young wife in the throat and she died straight away. The young brave quit the tribe and spent the rest of his life hunting and killing those snakes.

That one sounds a little hard to believe, what do you guys think? A good campfire story?

In the next post Hermann's war party has a deadly encounter with the dreaded Texas Rangers.

Thanks for reading folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas