The Old White Lady with Many Stories

     After I finished high school, having taken all the secretarial courses, and having some college courses under my belt - literature, creative writing, and history, my father suggested to me, since I was rather aimless, that I might want to go up to Ruidoso and meet Eve Ball and ask her if I could help out and learn about writing from her. She was an author who wrote Western stories and did oral history interviews with the Apaches who had been prisoners of war in Alabama, Florida and Oklahoma.  

My father, Clif McDonald, had lived for a while as a young boy at Bent, near the Mescalero Reservation. He herded goats and got to know some of the young Apache boys he roamed the mountains with. When he became a politician, he always enjoyed going to Mescalero to reconnect with the families he knew and ask for their votes. He thought Mrs. Ball was doing the Lord’s work writing down the old warriors' stories before they were gone forever. 

At the time, I thought to my young, ignorant self, “I would rather poke a stick in my eye than hang out with an old woman in her 70s every day, writing down what even older people are saying,” and I hightailed it off to San Francisco to work as a secretary for an import company - rods and reels and creels.

I began to date a bicycle messenger who delivered and took documents around the city; he frequented our import warehouse waiting for signatures, we began to meet for lunch and ate our sandwiches in the park across from City Hall and eventually I met his parents.  His mother was a member of a tribe from near Yellowknife, Canada.  She liked my turquoise and silver jewelry and I told her my mother and grandmother often bought jewelry from the parents of Navajo students who visited their children at the New Mexico School for the Visually Handicapped.  

We talked about the recent occupation of Alcatraz by Native Americans and the American Indian Movement and I told her about Eve Ball interviewing Apaches in Ruidoso and how my dad suggested I go meet her and offer to help her.  “What are you doing now?” she asked.  “Secretary, taking shorthand and typing letters,” I said.  “I think you should have listened to your father,” she replied. 

Now I am an old white woman in my 70s who missed out on meeting Eve Ball and the warriors who fought the longest war in American history: 36 years, from 1849 to 1886 (with some minor conflicts until 1924).

 Eve Ball

The Old White Lady With Many Stories, as Eve Ball was renamed by the Apaches, did not start writing stories until she was sixty years old.  She had been a school teacher in Ruidoso, though she was not from there. She had an adobe house built along a trail that women walked along from Mescalero to Ruidoso to buy supplies.  They would stop at Eve’s house to ask if they could use her garden hose for a drink of water.

Eve did one better - she put a table and chairs outside with glasses and a pitcher of water and a pitcher of lemonade. She would go outside and sit with the women on their trek to or from town.  Eve learned that some of their husbands and fathers had spent nearly three decades as prisoners of war of the United States government - they were Chiricahua and Lipan Apache, not Mescalero. She also learned from Mescalero descendants of the escape from Bosque Redondo of nearly 350 Mescaleros who made their way “illegally” back from the concentration camp to return to their sacred Sacramento Mountains.

It took many years for Eve to gain access to interview descendants and relatives of Geronimo, Victorio, Nana, and Juh.  She made friends with their wives and daughters who she spent years convincing that they should convince their husbands and fathers to let her interview them. 

Ramona Chihuahua Daklugie finally got her husband, Asa Daklugie, after four years to agree to come to Eve’s home.  Ramona and her daughter chaperoned Daklugie on his Thursday morning visits because it was not proper to talk to a white woman or any woman alone. Ramona was the daughter of Chief Chihuahua and met Asa at Carlisle Indian School; they married in 1896 and had several children.

Daklugie had been a young teenager when he fought alongside his uncle, Geronimo. He was so young that when the Apache warriors surrendered in 1886, he was eventually allowed to go to Carlisle Indian School rather than suffer in the hell hole prisoner of war camps in Florida and Alabama.  

At first Daklugie pretended not to speak English to Eve but his English was excellent after spending twelve years in school. His comments often displayed stinging hatred of the White Eyes (Anglos) and Mexicans; 5000 U.S. Cavalry and Mexican military had tried to capture Geronimo’s small band of warriors. He described how his Chiricahua family were POWs for 27 degrading, miserable years. In 1913, they were given the choice to remain in Oklahoma with land allotments or relocate to the Mescalero Reservation but were not allowed to return to their homelands.

Eve was intrigued with how consistent her interviewees’ stories were.  There was no Apache written language; storytellers told stories around the fire at night.  A storyteller needed to have their story straight as it would be passed down to the next generation in oral tradition - verbatim.  Eve used shorthand during the interviews. She would read her notes back to her interviewees to make sure she had the correct information.  She did not ask leading questions; she let the person talk to ensure she got the Apache point of view.

When Eve Ball began documenting the “oral history” from the last living Apache warriors, many academics dismissed her. They saw her as a teacher pretending to be a historian, not using primary written sources, writing on a “side of the story” that wasn’t yet valued because history is written by the victors. 

Eve had to pay for her first publication herself; publishers weren’t interested, but once it was released, people saw its value to history. In 1982, Eve Ball won the “Oscar of Western Writing,” the Golden Saddleman and was also inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.  A year later, she was nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom and received a special joint U.S. Congressional Resolution honoring her work on the history of the west. 

To be continued…