Brutal Truths About Apache Women Hollywood Erased [FULL DOCUMENTARY]

PART 2:

Burke described these markings in his journals and called them war paint. He was wrong. They were protection. A woman crossing the Cherikawa mountains in July with bare skin [music] and no barrier would blister before she reached the next camp. The women knew this the way they knew the trail. The officers, sunburned and peeling inside their wool uniforms, never thought to ask what they were actually looking at.

 They saw color on skin and assumed ceremony. They missed the science underneath [music] it. Number seven, parasite control. Lice were a fact of life on the frontier. Every army camp was crawling with them. A trooper in the field could go weeks in the same shirt and the lice settled in by the hundreds. The difference was not the problem.

 It was the response. Apache women practiced regular deliberate delousing [music] as a daily habit, not a reaction to an outbreak, a discipline as automatic as eating. Bedding was aired and shaken. Aromatic plants were rubbed into hides and clothing. Opler described personal cleanliness among the Cherikawa not as a virtue but as a baseline.

 It [music] was expected the way silence on a night march was expected. Betsinez remembering his childhood among the Warm Springs people [music] recalled the order of camp life as something no one remarked on because it never stopped. The old image of native people as unwashed and crawling with vermin is [music] not just wrong.

 It is the exact reverse of what the sources say. The people who carried lice by the thousand were the soldiers in their damp wool. Keep that in your mind. We are getting closer to the question I asked at the start. Number six, wound care. Apache women were the primary healers in camp.

 They gathered creassot bush from the desert floor and made washes for open wounds. They collected yerba mansa near springs and pressed it into picuses. These plants contain compounds with real ability to fight infection. Modern laboratories can name those compounds and measure exactly how they work. The women who used them did not need the chemistry.

 They had something better. They had centuries of watching what healed and what did not. During the same years, Army field surgeons were cutting off limbs with saws they had not cleaned since the last patient. They probed wounds with bare fingers. They watched men die of blood poisoning at rates that would end a career today.

 Germ theory was still fighting for acceptance in American hospitals while Apache women in a desert camp were already practicing its conclusions. The women Hollywood turned into silent extras were healing wounds better than the best the United States Army could manage. That fact sat in the record for over a hundred years before anyone cared to say it out loud.

Number five, daily bathing. Here it is. Apache women bathed in cold running water. Streams, rivers, desert springs, not once a week, not when convenient, as a habit every morning as constant as building the cook fire, even in cold weather, even when the camps were moving. Burke observed it again and again across his years in Arizona territory and wrote about it plainly.

The women were clean. The camps were ordered. The people the United States government classified as savages in official documents washed every single morning. The troopers riding out to hunt them had not touched water in weeks. You can still smell a cavalry camp in the written record.

 Sweat, horse, tobacco, unwashed wool. Then you read Burke describing the Apache women at the creek at first light washing their hair with yucka before the sun cleared the trees. Remember number five, I asked you a question at the beginning of this video and number five is where the answer lives. We will come back to it. Number four, the 2s.

Water in the Cherikawa homeland was not a convenience. It was the difference between living and dying in 2 days. And the vessel that carried it was [music] made entirely by women. The tus was a basket jug woven tight from sumac or willowshoots, then sealed inside and out with heated pitch from the pin and pine.

 A woman gathered the pitch, melted it over coals, [music] and worked it into the weave by hand. A well-made tous held water without losing a drop across 20 m of hard trail. It could last for years. She made it. She repaired it when the [music] pitch cracked in the heat. She carried it on her back through some of the worst terrain on the continent.

 And she decided when water was drawn, how much was used, and when the band had to move toward the next source. Today, the average American uses about 80 gall of water a day and never [music] thinks about where it comes from. An Apache woman carried every drop her family needed on her own back in a jug she built with her own hands.

Hollywood never showed you the 2s. A woven jug does not look [music] dramatic on a movie poster, but without it there was no camp, no survival, and no [music] story worth telling. Number three, childbirth. When a cherry kawa woman gave birth, she did not deliver [music] in the family wiki up.

 She moved to a separate structure built for that single [music] purpose. The ground was prepared. Herbal tees were made in advance, some [music] for pain, some for cleansing. Experienced women from the band attended her. The birth position was upright or [music] kneeling, supported by the women at her sides.

 Modern obstetrics has only recently admitted that these positions [music] are more effective than lying flat on a table. After delivery, both mother and [music] child pass through a defined period of rest and purification before they return to the main camp. Opler documented these [music] customs among the Cherikawa in careful detail.

 Now, think about what a white settler woman experienced [music] in the same years. She gave birth in the only bed the family owned, in a cabin where [music] meals were cooked and dirt was tracked in from outside. A neighbor whose hands had been in the [music] garden an hour before held her through the delivery. Child bed fever killed frontier [music] women at staggering rates.

 The people Hollywood called primitive had a birth system that was cleaner and safer than anything available [music] to most white women west of the Mississippi. That is not sentiment. That [music] is the record. And the question I planted at the start is still not answered. Not yet. Number two, [music] menration.

 During her monthly cycle, a woman moved to a small separate shelter set apart from the main camp. This was not punishment. It was not exile. It was structure. She used absorbent materials prepared from soft inner bark, from cattail down, and from dried grasses. There were dietary guidelines and expectations for [music] rest.

The whole system was built around cleanliness and practical management of a biological reality that every human society has had to address. Hollywood never touched this subject. Not for Apache women. Not for anyone else on the frontier. It could not be turned into spectacle [music] or fitted to a poster.

 But it tells you more about the sophistication [music] of daily Apache life than any battle scene ever filmed. The silence surrounded [music] in popular culture is not accidental. It is a choice. And the choice reveals exactly what the storytellers valued and what they threw away. Number one, the sunrise ceremony. When a Cherry Kawa girl had her first cycle, the band stopped everything.

 They gave her four days. A woman of proven character was chosen as her godmother to guide her through what came next. The girl was bathed from head to foot. Her hair was washed with yuckaroot [music] until it shone. Cattail pollen was pressed to her face and body. She wore clothing sewn and prepared for the single [music] occasion.

 At dawn on the first morning, she ran east toward the rising sun. Through the nights, she danced. The singers sang. [music] The whole community gathered. She was tested in body, in endurance, in spirit in front of every person she had ever known. The ceremony demanded [music] weeks of preparation and real resources from the entire band. It required a level of ritual cleanliness that had no equal anywhere in white America.

 Not in the [clears throat] churches, not in the parlors, not in [music] the frontier towns. It was the most elaborate right of passage [music] on the continent. And it was not a relic buried in a museum case. Apache families [music] still hold the sunrise ceremony today. It survived the forced marches. It survived imprisonment at Fort Marion in Florida.

 It survived a century of Hollywood pretending it never existed. So number one is the most elaborate truth on this list. The sunrise ceremony is the single most powerful answer to anyone who ever used the word primitive to describe these people. But it is not the answer to the question I asked you at the beginning.

 The sunrise ceremony belonged to the band. It was [music] sacred. It was internal. The army almost never witnessed it. The officers [music] did not write about it because they were never invited to see it. The deeper [music] question is why none of this ever reached the screen. And the answer is not complicated.

 Three forces built the image that replaced [music] the truth. First, the cavalry dispatches. Every report sent from Arizona territory to Washington needed the word savage or hostile to justify what the government had ordered. Clean women and ordered camps did not fit that [music] paperwork. Second, the dime novelists who sold Apache women as silent painted figures in stories written for readers who would never leave the east.

Third, the studios. By the 1950s, every western on-screen reduced Apache women to a background blur behind [music] the cavalry charge. John Wayne never shared a frame with a woman washing her hair in yucka at dawn. She scrubbed and she managed and she kept her body as close to clean as the water and the hours and the terrain would allow.

 But the body she tended still belonged to a life she did not fully control. What comes next is the hardest truth in [music] this film. It is the one that sits beneath every other truth you are about to hear. And once you understand it, you will see why everything else in her story circles back to it. Number 20.

 There was no wedding ceremony the way you imagine one. No priest standing at the front of a room. No vows repeated after someone. No single sacred moment where two [music] people stood before a crowd and swore forever. The marriage was a process. [music] It unfolded in stages. Negotiation between the families came first, then a formal exchange of gifts, then a feast prepared by the women of both camps.

And then quietly, the groom simply moved to the bride’s camp and began his new life there. Opler documents that the transition could stretch out over weeks, almost business-like in its patience. There was no single moment a filmmaker could point a camera at and call the wedding. Hollywood needs a scene, a dramatic beat, an audience [music] gasping.

 The Apache had something quieter and something harder to fake. They had a season. Number 19. [music] Courtship did not begin with a glance across a campfire. A young man who wanted a woman did not approach her directly. He would not have dared. Instead, he sent an intermediary. Often a female relative, an aunt or an older sister walked to the bride’s family camp and made the case on his behalf.

 The family deliberated among themselves. They weighed the young man’s reputation, his family standing, [music] and his ability to provide. And the woman herself could refuse. And the whole thing ended right there. No argument, no appeal. Goodwin and Opler both record cases where the woman said no and the courtship was finished that same day.

 That scene in the movie where the warrior rides up and claims the girl. Pure invention. The real courtship started with a conversation the man was not even part of. Number 18. The courting flute was real and it was nothing like what the movie suggests. Young men played a wooden flute outside the family’s wiki up after dark. The music was not random.

 Specific melodies carried specific meanings understood by the young woman inside. If she came outside, she was interested in hearing more. If she stayed in, the answer was no, and no words needed to be spoken. The rejection was silent and it was final. Betsy Nez mentions this practice among the Warm Springs people.

 Hollywood gave us war drums and battlecries when it showed Apache romance. The actual sound of Apache courtship was a single handmade flute played softly in the dark while a young man sat alone outside a wiki up and waited and hoped. Number 17. Relations before marriage were more openly tolerated than white America ever wanted to admit.

Opler documents that among the Cherikawa, young people were given a degree of physical freedom that horrified every Victorian observer who encountered it. John Kremany writing in 1868 after years of living near Apache bands acknowledged it plainly [music] but framed it as evidence of what he called savagery.

Meanwhile, the exact same behavior in white frontier communities is thoroughly documented in bastardy records, shotgun marriage entries, and church [music] disciplinary minutes across every American territory from Kansas to Oregon. [music] The behavior was identical. The difference was never the act itself. It was the honesty about it.

The Apache did not pretend. Number 16. Marriage was not a union between two people. [music] It was a contract between two extended families. The bond tied kinship networks [music] into mutual obligation that touched every part of daily life. Economic, [music] military, social. When a hunt was organized, married alliances determined who rode together.

 When a camp moved, the family [music] networks moved as a unit. A marriage that failed was not a private heartbreak between a man and a woman. It was a diplomatic rupture between entire clans. That is why the negotiation was handled so carefully. That is why the go-between was essential. Hollywood turns Apache marriage into a love story between two individuals.

 The real institution was closer to a treaty between nations. Number 15. The bride price was not a purchase. The groom’s family presented horses, blankets, weapons, and goods to the bride’s family before the union could proceed. Opler is direct about this. It was a demonstration of capability, not a commercial transaction.

 The groom’s family was proving they could provide, and the bride’s family gave back gifts of equal or greater value in return. It was a mutual exchange, a pledge of investment from both sides. The phrase bought and sold belongs to the colonial writers who looked at this custom and [music] imposed their own assumptions onto something they refused to understand.

 The Apache word for it had nothing to do with commerce. It had everything to [music] do with respect. We are not halfway yet. The entries ahead are the ones Hollywood had to actively bury. Hold your guess. Number 14. A man could have more than one wife, but the preferred form followed a strict logic that no western film has ever shown.

 It was called sorural polygion. Sisters married to the same [music] husband. Opler explains the reasoning plainly. Sisters already knew how to share labor and living space. They had grown up in the same wiki [music] up and learned the same rhythms of work. The household ran more smoothly when the women inside it already trusted each other.

 A man who wanted a second wife from an unrelated family faced real scrutiny and open resistance from both camps. It was not automatic. It was [music] not casual. The movies show Poly Genie as unchecked appetite, a powerful man taking what he [music] wants. The Apache practiced it as deliberate household engineering and the women’s families had veto [music] power over every step of it.

Number 13. If a wife died, her family was expected to offer a sister or close female relative as a replacement [music] wife. This was the sororat. It was not a suggestion. It was a binding social obligation designed to preserve the alliance between the two families and to keep the dead woman’s children inside the same kinship network they were born into.

 A man might still be grieving his wife when her younger sister was presented to him as the next partner in the arrangement. The grief was real and it was [music] respected. The structural obligation was also real and it could not be refused without consequence. They existed side by side [music] and neither one erased the other. Number 12.

 If a husband died, his brother [music] was expected to step forward and marry the widow. This was the leverate, the mirror of the sorarate. The purpose was the same. The alliance between the two families had to hold. The children had to be fed and protected. Opler and Goodwin both document this practice across multiple Apache bands.

 The brother did not [music] choose this. The obligation fell on him whether he wanted the responsibility or not. He might already have a wife and children of his own. It did not matter. The duty came first. [music] It was a weight no one in Hollywood’s version of the frontier was ever shown carrying. Number 11.

 Morning before remarage was enforced [music] and you could see it on the body. A widow cut her hair short. She gave away or destroyed every possession her dead husband had owned. In some bands, she smeared her face and body with ash or white clay so that everyone [music] in the camp could see she was in mourning and know not to approach her with talk of a new match.

 remarrying before the morning period ended, often a full year or longer, [music] brought severe public censure from the entire community. It was not a private [music] grief. It was a visible physical transformation that the whole camp witnessed [music] and enforced. The movie skipped straight from the death scene to the next romance.

 The Apache made you wear your grief where no one could miss it. [music] Number 10. Sometimes the family said no and sometimes the young couple ran anyway. Betsinez describes elopment among the Warm Springs band as something that happened but never without cost. Running was not a love story. [music] It was a crisis. Elopement shamed both families publicly.

 It ruptured kinship ties that had taken years to build. And in most cases, the groom’s family had to pay a sharply increased bride price after the fact just to begin repairing the damage that the running had caused. The debt could hang over a young couple for years. Running away together was not freedom.

 It was a bill that followed you home and grew larger the longer you waited to pay it. Number nine, a man who hit his wife answered to her brothers, her uncles, her father, every male relative she had. Opler documents clearly that the wife’s family held both the right and the expectation of physical intervention against an abusive husband.

 They did not wait for a complaint to be filed. They acted. In extreme cases, the man was beaten and expelled from the camp entirely. And where would he go? He was, after all, living in her world. The wiki up was hers. The camp was her family’s. He was the guest. Now, hold that against American common law in [music] the exact same century.

In most states, a husband’s legal right to what the courts called moderate correction of his wife was formally recognized. A man could strike his wife and the law would look away. The Apache enforced protection with fists [music] and exile. The law of the settlers offered nothing. Number eight, adultery carried consequences.

 [music] But they were not the same for both sides, and they were nothing like what the movies show. A husband who discovered [music] his wife’s infidelity could, in the older custom, cut the tip of her nose. Cremony records this in detail. Opler confirms the practice existed, but notes it was already declining even before the reservation era.

 The punishment was visible and permanent. But a wife who caught her husband in the same act had her own tools. She could divorce him immediately. She could shame him in front of the entire camp. And she had the full backing of her armed male relatives if [music] he protested. The system was codified and specific. It treated each side differently, not equally, but not silently either.

 Both sides faced [music] consequences. That alone sets it apart from most legal systems of the same era. The top seven are ahead, and this is where the comparison stops being comfortable. Number seven, the sunrise ceremony was the most sacred event in all of Apache life. The na ease. Four days of ritual, running, singing, prayer, and physical endurance that tested a young girl to her limits.

Over those four days, she was transformed into changing woman, the central spiritual figure of Apache belief, the source of life and renewal. No girl was considered ready for marriage until she had completed this ceremony. It was not a wedding. It was the gate that made marriage possible. It was more important to the Apache than any war dance Hollywood ever staged, more central than any raid or battle.

 The United States government banned it. Christian missionaries suppressed it on every reservation they reached, calling it pagan and dangerous, and it survived anyway. Underground, whispered from grandmother to granddaughter when no one with authority was listening. It is still performed today at Mescalero in the open with the whole community watching.

 Hollywood never once depicted it with any accuracy, not once in 70 years of Apache films. Number six, a man could not look at his wife’s mother, could not speak to her, could not sit in the same space or share the same fire. If she walked toward him on a path, he turned his face away or left the trail entirely. If he entered a wiki up and she was already inside, one of them had to go.

This was the mother-in-law avoidance taboo, and it [music] was absolute. Violation brought genuine spiritual dread and lasting social ruin. Opler devotes page after page to it. Goodwin confirms it across every western Apache band he studied. This was not a joke. It was one of the most strictly enforced rules in all of Apache social life.

 It shaped the physical layout of entire camps. It dictated who could eat together, [music] who could enter which dwelling, who had to leave the fire when another person arrived. Every daily movement in the camp was organized around this single rule. You cannot dramatize a custom built entirely on avoidance and silence.

 So [music] Hollywood pretended it did not exist. Number five, the groom did not ride home with the bride sitting behind him on the horse. [music] He did the opposite. He left his own family and moved to her camp. Matrallo residence. the most basic [music] structural fact of Apache marriage and the single fact most completely absent from the popular imagination.

He built a new wiki up near her mother’s dwelling. [music] He hunted for her parents. He performed bride service months or sometimes years of labor for her family before the community fully recognized the marriage as settled. Goodwin lays this out in plain terms across his western Apache fieldwork. The man was in every practical sense on probation in his wife’s world.

 He had to earn his place there. That image you carry in your mind of the warrior sweeping the woman onto his horse and riding back to his camp is not a simplification of the truth. It is the exact opposite of what actually happened. Number four, the wiki up belonged to the wife. She built it with her own hands or directed its construction.

 She owned every object stored inside it. The food she gathered through the seasons, acorns, messcal hearts, berries, wild seeds, all of it was hers. The household economy [music] ran through the woman. The man contributed game from the hunt, but the home itself and everything kept within its walls was her property alone.

 Goodwin documents this [music] clearly for the western Apache. Opler confirms it for the Cherikawa. This was not in formal custom or unspoken tradition. This was the recognized enforced operating law of the household. A man lived in his wife’s house at her pleasure and at her discretion. If she decided he no longer belonged there, he did not.

Number three, a Chirikawa woman could end her marriage by placing her husband’s belongings [music] outside the wiki up door. No filing with an authority, no hearing before a council, no waiting period. She gathered his things, [music] set them on the ground outside, and the marriage was dissolved. He went back to his mother’s camp.

 She kept the home. She kept the children. She kept the household property and everything she had gathered. Opler records multiple accounts of this from Churikawa informants who saw it happen or experienced it themselves. now set that beside American law in the same decade. In most states [music] during the 1850s and60s, a white woman could not divorce her husband without first proving extreme cruelty or total abandonment before a judge.

 The legal process could drag on for years. It could cost more money than she would earn in a lifetime. And even if she won, she might still lose her children at the end of it. An Apache woman could accomplish the same thing before breakfast. Number two, when a marriage ended, the children stayed with the mother.

 There was no argument about it. Clan membership among the Apache was matral. A child belonged to the mother’s clan from the moment of birth, [music] not the fathers. In the event of divorce, there was no custody hearing, no petition. The children remained with the woman as a simple matter of course. The father kept [music] a relationship with them but held no claim over where they lived or who raised them.

 In the same century, English and American common law treated children as the legal property of the father. A divorced or separated white woman in the [music] 1860s could lose access to her own children entirely, and many did. The tender years [music] doctrine, the idea that young children belonged with their mother, did not gain broad legal ground until decades later.

 And even then, it was bitterly fought by men who saw it as an erosion of their rights. The Apache system protected the [music] mother’s bond as the unquestioned default. The system the settlers brought with them [music] severed it. Number one, add it up. the right [music] to own the home. The right to keep everything she gathered and built with her own hands.

 The [music] right to divorce without a petition, without a court, without anyone’s permission, the right to keep her children. When the marriage ended, the backing of armed male relatives against [music] any husband who raised his hand to her. She carried what wifehood demanded of her, and she carried it in the body she had just fought to keep clean.

 The same hands that crushed yuckaroot at the creek were the hands that cooked and hauled and bore weight and tended children through fever and drought and seasons that offered no rest. She did not record what it felt like because no one ever asked her and no format existed that would have held the answer.

 She bore it in silence because silence was the only thing the arrangement left room for. Number nine, the food she served and the flies she could not stop. Lydia Allen Rudd crossed the plains in 1852 and kept a diary every day. She describes wevils in the flower as ordinary. Meat turning green within hours, [music] cooking over buffalo chip fires that flavored everything with the taste of dung smoke. There was no refrigeration.

A slaughtered hog drew flies within minutes in summer [music] heat. A frontier wife skimmed maggots from the salt pork barrel and served what was underneath [music] because the other option was nothing at all. Amelia Stewart Knight, crossing the plains pregnant with [music] her eighth child in 1853, records feeding seven children from a wagon bed in the rain.

 The fuel was too wet to burn. The food was half raw. She served it anyway. Today, the average American throws away over $400 of groceries a year. On the trail, a woman fed her family food she knew could kill them because starvation was the only certainty [music] and contamination was just a chance. Number eight, her teeth were falling out of her head.

 Every pregnancy [music] leeched calcium from a woman’s bones and teeth. A woman who bore six or eight children [music] could lose a tooth with each one. By 40, many frontier wives had few teeth left at all. The old saying was not folklore. A tooth for every child. Dr. Bethnia Owens Adair, one of the first licensed female physicians in Oregon, describes pulling teeth from her own patients with blacksmith pliers and no anesthesia.

 No frontier dentist was coming. A husband or a neighbor held her down and pulled. The pain was simply endured. In the Sears Robuck catalog of the 1890s, a set of porcelain dentures cost about $10. A homestead wife who needed them was earning nothing. [music] Under the law, every scent she touched belonged to her husband.

 Remember that we are coming back to it. [music] Number seven, menstruation with nothing that exist to help her. Katherine Han crossed the plains in 1849 and is one of the only diarists who references the subject at all. She describes the difficulty of managing what she calls the monthly trouble on the trail. No privacy, no clean water, no product of any kind.

 [music] Commercial menstrual products did not reach the American market until the 1890s. For 50 years of frontier settlement, women used rags, scraps of worn out clothing, or nothing. They did this while hauling water, walking 15 miles beside a wagon, plowing sod, and nursing infants. Schlissell noted the near total silence on this subject across all 103 diaries she collected.

 The taboo was so deep that women recording their most private thoughts still could not write the words. The silence itself is the evidence. The body did not pause because the culture refused to speak about it. Number six, the vermin that owned the house. Molly Dorsey Sanford kept a diary through the late 1850s in Nebraska territory.

 She describes bed bugs falling from the sod ceiling onto sleeping faces in the dark. Snakes nesting inside the dirt walls. Centipedes dropping into the cookpot. A sod house was not built. [music] It was cut from the earth and roofed with grass. It was also a living habitat. Lice, fleas, bed bugs, and rattlesnakes lived in the walls and the ceiling.

 When it rained, the roof turned to mud and dripped insects and filth into the food, the bedding, and the children’s hair. A wife could sweep and scrub and boil the linens from dawn to dark. And by nightfall, the vermin were back. She fought that war every single day. She never once won. Is the worst truth on this list a physical one or is it something else entirely? Keep that question close.

 We are not done. Number five, the chamber pot at 3:00 in the morning in a blizzard. No indoor plumbing reached most rural homes until well into the 20th century. A chamber pot sat beside the bed. An outhouse stood 40 or 50 yards from the house. In winter in the northern plains, the walk to the privy was through kneedeep snow and below zero wind.

A wife emptied and scrubbed that pot for every member of the family. Every morning with cold water and bare hands at frontier army posts like Fort Laram officers wives wrote letters home describing the stench of the post privies as inescapable in the summer heat. And those were the privileged women, the ones with orderlys and servants.

 [music] The homestead wife had no one but herself. Number four, wash day was the hardest labor she did all week. Monday, [music] every week without exception. The process went like this. Haul water from the well or the creek. At 8 lb per gallon, a single wash for a family of six required roughly 50 gall. That is 400 lb of water carried by hand before the first [music] garment touched the washboard. Heat it over an open fire.

Shave soap from a block of lie made from wood ash and rendered animal fat. Scrub every piece on a riged board until the dirt broke loose. Ring it by hand. Hang it. Start again. 10 to 12 hours. The lie soap cleaned the cloth. It also ate skin. A washerwoman’s hands were cracked raw and bleeding by evening. Week after week, year after year, Hollywood shows a frontier wife in a clean [music] dress.

 It never shows the 12-hour day that made the dress clean or the hands that [music] paid for it. Number three, childbirth in filth alone with no one coming. Amelia Stewart Knight gave birth to her eighth child on September 17th, 1853. The day after her wagon reached the Columbia River in Oregon, she had walked and ridden across the entire continent for 5 months, pregnant, caring for seven children.

 Her diary entry for the birth is two sentences long. Before germ theory reached common practice in the 1880s, corporal fever, what they called child bed fever, killed roughly one woman in every eight births in some frontier county. The 1850 through 1870 census mortality schedules recorded as a leading cause of death for women of childbearing age in western territories.

There was no hospital. Often no midwife, no trained doctor within a 100 miles. The delivery happened on the same bed in the same room where the family ate and slept. If the birth went wrong, a breach, a hemorrhage, there was no intervention. She lived or she did not. Dr. Bethania Owens Adair was married at 14 and bore a child at 15 in a remote Oregon cabin. She nearly died.

 Years later, she became a physician specifically because of what she survived and what she watched other women go through. Today about 700 women die in childbirth each year in the United States and that number is considered a crisis on the frontier. It was Tuesday. Number two, she was not a person under the law.

 Sir William Blackstone wrote it into English common law and every American territory carried it forward. By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. That is the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage. That is not a paraphrase. That is the doctrine of couerture word for word. [music] A married woman in the territories could not own property in her own name.

[music] Could not sign a contract, could not keep her own wages, could not sue or be sued, could not retain custody of her own children if [music] the marriage ended. Her husband owned her labor, her earnings, [music] her inheritance. In legal terms, her body. New York [music] passed the first married women’s property act in 1848.

Wyoming territory gave women the vote in 1869. [music] But for the great majority of frontier wives between 1840 [music] and 1880, coverture was the operating law. A woman who fled a violent husband had no legal claim to her own children. Every physical horror on this list, the teeth, the vermin, the childbirth happened [music] inside a legal cage that said the woman enduring it was not a legal person.

 [music] She could not leave. She could not own what she built. And she could not protect her children from the man the law said [music] owned them all. Number one, she buried her own children and then she did it again. The 1850 [music] through 1880 census mortality schedules tell the story in numbers. Child mortality under the age of 5 [music] ran between 1 in 4 and 1 across many frontier counties.

Chalera, dysentery, [music] measles, diptheria, scarlet fever. A scratch that became an infection with no medicine to fight it. Schistle’s collected diaries contain entries that are among the most devastating primary documents in American history. A woman on the trail writes a single line. The baby died [music] this morning.

 The next day’s entry records the miles traveled. A mother sewed the burial clothes from her own scraps of fabric. A father dug the grave if he was there. If he was not, she dug it herself. On the trail, the grave was beside the road, unmarked or marked with a board that would not last a single [music] season.

 She walked away from it and kept moving west because the wagon train did not stop for grief. And here is the truth that [music] sits beneath every other truth on this list. She was almost always pregnant with the next child [music] while burying the last. No birth control existed. No legal right to refuse her husband under coverure.

The cycle was pregnancy, birth, survival or death of [music] the child and then pregnancy again. But before any of that began, before the labor and the duty and the quiet [music] way she disappeared into another household, there was the moment her life was handed from one structure to [music] another. What happened when that exchange was settled tells you everything about what her body was worth before she ever had a say in it. She did not choose the terms.

 The terms were set by people who believed they already knew what she was for. And by the time she understood what had been agreed to, the life was already underway. She was given and she endured. And she built a life inside the structure that held her. And then even that was taken. The body that had been scrubbed at dawn and traded between families and worked through seasons of birth and grief and duty was now carried by force into a world that did not recognize any of it.

What she endured once she was no longer free tells you more about the cost of the frontier than any battle ever recorded. She lost the wiki up. She lost the rancheriah. She lost the grinding stone and the creek and the hide she had been scraping that morning. She lost the structure that had confined her and discovered that what replaced it was worse.

 What happened to her in captivity is the truth. The record buried deepest of all. Number 20. Apache women were not bystanders. [music] They were the operating system of every band in the southwest. Morris Opler [music] recorded it from Churikawa elders in the 1930s. The women built and owned the wikiups. They processed every pound of dried meat, every [music] pouch of msquet flour.

 They made the tools, the baskets, the cradle boards, the clothing. They decided when a camp moved and how the march was organized. John C. [music] Kremany, who lived among Apache people in the 1860s, put it plainly. A band without its women was finished. [music] When the army captured Apache women, it was not taking hostages.

 It was pulling the engine out of an [music] entire people. Number 19. Captured Apache women were not quietly led away. [music] They were displayed. Mexican military dispatches from Sonora and Chihuahua described captives marched through town plazas. The governor watching from a balcony, the [music] town’s people lining the street.

 Territorial newspapers in Tucson and Santa Fe printed the arrivals the way a stock report lists cattle. [music] The display was the point. A general back from the field needed visible [music] proof. A living Apache woman in chains through the plaza of Arispe was worth more to his career than any written dispatch. [music] Number 18. Mexico ran an open market in Apache captives for the better part of a century.

 The evidence sits in parish churches along the northern frontier. Baptismal ledgers in Janos, Bavispe, and Chihuahua City record Apache children appearing under Spanish names assigned to Mexican households on the same page where their Apache identities vanish. A child seized from a rancheria in the Sierra Madre could be kneeling at a font with a new name before the month was through.

 The practice was legal under Mexican law. One entry in a leatherbound book, a few words of Latin, and a family line stretching back generations was snapped in two. [music] Number 17. The scalp bounty system put a cash price on the hair of Apache women and children. Governor Angel Trius of Chihuahua published the schedule in 1849. A warrior’s scalp [music] brought 200 pesos. A woman’s brought 150.

 A child’s brought 100. The American hunter James Kirker built a career on these contracts, [music] working them the way a trapper worked a beaver line. A woman’s hair dried and [music] stretched on a willow hoop was legal tender at the Treasury window in Chihuahua City. The receipts were signed, the payments logged, it was government policy, [music] and the paper trail is intact.

We are only at 16 [music] and the record is already louder than any film. Stay with me. The worst is [music] ahead. Number 16. The war that defined a generation began over the bodies of a mother, a wife, and three small children outside a Mexican town. In 1851, near Janos in Chihuahua, Mexican soldiers under Colonel Joseé Maria Carrasco attacked an Apache trading camp while the men were in town.

A young warrior returned to find his mother, his wife Alopee, and his three children dead on the ground. [music] His name was Goyakla. He said later that in that moment, he had no purpose left. The world would know him as Geronimo. He dictated the memory to SM Barrett in 1906.

 An old man by then and the words still carry the weight of 50 [music] years. 40 years of war followed. It did not start on a battlefield. It started in the dirt outside Janos. Number 15. [music] The Camp Grant Massacre was designed to kill Apache families in their sleep. There is no other way to read the record. April 30th, 1871, a vigilante force out of Tucson, Americans, Mexicans, and Toono ODM fighters attacked a sleeping camp on Aravipa Creek at dawn.

The men were away. Between 100 and 150 people were killed, nearly all of them mothers, grandmothers, and young ones. Lieutenant Royal Wittmann, the army officer who had accepted these Apache as peaceful, [music] arrived too late. 29 children were pulled alive from the wreckage and carried south into Sonora.

 They were handed over to Mexican households. President Grant called it purely murder. 104 men stood trial in Tucson. The jury took less than 19 minutes. Every defendant walked free. [music] Number 14. Apache children were sent to the Carile Indian School in Pennsylvania and some were buried [music] there.

 Richard Henry Pratt founded Carlilele in 1879 on a public philosophy. Kill the [music] Indian, save the man. Chiraa. Children pulled from the prison camps were [music] among the first students. Their clothing was taken, their hair was cut, their names were replaced [music] on enrollment cards that survive today. Tuberculosis moved through the dormitories.

 There is a cemetery at Carlilele where [music] Apache students lie under white stones a thousand miles from the desert they [music] were born in. Eve Ball spent years recording Churikawa oral histories [music] from surviving elders. The separations were what they remembered most clearly and spoke about last. Number [music] 13.

 This entry changes the shape of the whole list. When Geronimo surrendered in September of 1886, [music] the army imprisoned every Churikawa Apache it could reach. General Nelson Miles ordered [music] 498 people loaded onto trains at Hullbrook, Arizona, and shipped to Fort Marian, Florida. Among them were families of scouts who had served the army against Geronimo.

 A scout named Chattau, who had ridden with American soldiers through the Sierra Madre, [music] watched his wife and children loaded onto the same rail cars as the people he helped capture. He had received a silver medal in Washington. He had been promised protection. He received a prison sentence with no charge and no end date.

 Hold on to that name. Number 12. Fort Marian was a Spanish coastal fortress built to repel warships. It was never meant for families. Constructed beginning in 1672 [music] as the Castillo de San Marcos, it was coina stone, low casemates, and damp corridors open to Atlantic salt air. Post surgeons documented overcrowding in rooms built for cannon powder, standing water on the floors, tropical humidity pressing into lungs that had spent a lifetime in thin desert air above [music] 6,000 ft.

 Apache women cooked over open fires in chambers with no ventilation. Their children slept on damp stone. The sickness started within weeks. Number 11. The army split families by 300 miles of open water and called [music] it security. The men, Geronimo and Niche among them went to Fort Pickins [music] on Santa Rosa Island near Pensacola.

The women stayed at Fort Marion in St. Augustine [music] with every child in the band. No letters, no visits, no reunion date. Army correspondence confirms it was deliberate. For a mother alone in a stone fortress with a feverish child and no word from her husband, the [music] word security meant something no clerk in Washington ever had to feel.

 The family stayed apart for over a year. The voices in the record are all army clerks and posts surgeons. Not one word was written by an Apache woman. What the women thought and felt survives only in oral histories their descendants shared long after the camps were closed. Remember that as we near the top number 10.

 In 1888, the prisoners were moved to Mount Vernon barracks in Alabama. It was supposed to be better. The dying got worse. The barracks sat on low, swampy ground with poor drainage. Mosquitoes bred in every ditch. Malaria joined tuberculosis and dysentery and the posts surgeons reports grew longer each quarter. Desert people locked in swampland buried in earth they did not choose.

Approximately one in four Chirakahua prisoners died during the Florida and Alabama years. The army’s own medical records set the floor. Number nine. At Mount Vernon barracks, Apache mothers buried their children in Alabama red clay they had never chosen and could not leave. The post cemetery holds the names.

 Small graves marked with Apache names spelled by clerks who could not speak the language. Eve Ball recorded what the survivors carried for the rest of their lives. The sound of mourning through the barracks at night. The weight of a small body wrapped in cloth. The walk to burial ground that smelled of wet pine, nothing like the sand and juniper of home.

Number eight, missionary women arrived in the camps with Bibles and sewing kits, and attendance was compulsory. Apache women at Mount Vernon barracks and later Fort Sill were required to sit through classes in English, sewing, and Christianity. [music] Their own spiritual practices were discouraged or forbidden.

 A woman who had managed the movement of an entire band across a [music] thousand miles of desert was expected to sit in a chair and learn to hem an apron on schedule. The lesson plans were documented. [music] The women’s responses were not. Number seven, Apache women were put to [music] work making goods for sale and the government called it training.

 They sewed military garments and crafted items sold to tourists [music] who came to gawk at the famous prisoners. They did not volunteer. They were not paid a wage they controlled. They could not refuse and could not walk out the gate. [music] A woman stitching government cloth under armed guard is not learning a trade.

 [music] She is serving a sentence no court ever handed down. [music] The top of the list is close now. And the truth the record points to is not the one the movies prepared you for. Number six, her name was Lozen. She may have been the most remarkable Apache figure of the 19th century and almost no one has heard [music] of her.

 She was the sister of Victoriao, chief of the Warm Springs band. Warriors described her as a gifted fighter, a strategist, [music] and a healer who could sense the direction of an enemy by the feeling in her hands. She rode with Victoriao and later with Geronimo. [music] After the 1886 surrender, she was shipped to Mount Vernon barracks.

 She died there of tuberculosis around 1889. [music] No confirmed photograph of her exists. No army clerk marked her death with more than a line in a ledger. One of the most extraordinary women the frontier ever produced died in an Alabama prison camp and was granted no notice at all. We know her name only because James K. Wakea told her story to Eve Ball when he was an old man and she was willing to listen.

 [music] Number five, children born inside the camps had never seen the land their mothers [music] described to them. Born at Mount Vernon barracks, born at Fort Sill. Army records list them by name. Prisoners of war from their first breath. [music] They had taken no side. They had committed no act. They were held because of who their mothers were.

They grew up inside boundaries [music] set by soldiers, knowing Arizona only through stories told in a language the government was working to >> [music] >> erase. Today, roughly 10,000 people are enrolled in the Fort Sil Apache tribe. Many trace their ancestry directly to the women who survived [music] those camps.

 The line between an 1886 prison train and a living nation in 2026 is unbroken and almost never mentioned in the frontier story. Most Americans learned. Number four, the Kiri Kahua were held as prisoners of war for 27 years, [music] 1886 to 1913. No trial, no conviction, no individual charge against any woman, child, or elder.

 When they were finally released, they were not allowed home. They could take land near Fort Sil or move to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. Arizona was not an option. 27 years without [music] DU process. It is the longest imprisonment of any group in United States history. Most Americans have never heard a word of it. [music] Number three, the women who helped the army were punished the same as the women who fought it.

Go back to number 13. Chatau’s wife. The wives of every scout who tracked Geronimo at the army’s request. They chose the American side. Their reward was identical to the punishment. [music] The same trains, the same stone fortress, the same Alabama barracks, the same tuberculosis, [music] the same graves. Army paperwork shows no distinction was ever drawn between the families of allies and enemies.

 A woman who bet everything on the word of an American officer watched that word dissolve in a Florida casemate and not one man in Washington corrected it. Number two, more Apache women and children died of disease in government custody than were killed in battle during the entire Apache Wars. The Camp Grant dead, the Fort Marian and Mount Vernon dead, the students who never walked out of Carlile set them against every battlefield casualty across four decades of conflict.

 The comparison is not close. The slow death in custody dwarfs the combat toll. Army surgeon reports documented it in quarterly tables. Post burial records survive in government archives and have been there for more than a century. No screenwriter ever opened them and decided [music] this was the story to tell. Number one, the 29 Apache children taken from Camp Grant were sold into Mexican households.

The United States government never brought them home. Go back to that April morning in 1871. Aravipa [music] Creek. The smoke lifting the dead scattered across the camp. Nearly all of them mothers and young [music] ones lying close to where they had been sleeping. The vigilantes pulled 29 children from the wreckage. Most were under 10.

 They were taken across the border into Sonora and given to Mexican [music] families within weeks. They were baptized under Spanish names in parish churches. Their Apache names [music] went unrecorded. They were entered into the civil register as though born to the families that [music] received them. Wittmann filed his report. Grant demanded action.

Diplomatic letters went south. [music] Mexico did not comply. The children had been baptized. Under [music] Mexican law, they were now citizens of another country. Mondoi. With new names and new families, [music] the United States could have pressed harder. It did not. The file was closed. The children [music] were never recovered.

 This is number one, not because it was the bloodiest morning on the list. It is number one [music] because it was the one they could have undone and chose not to. Those children were known. Their ages were in army files. Their location was not a mystery. They were findable. and nobody went to find them. Every one of these truths lived in the same body on the same day.

The woman who split Yakaroot into a lather before dawn was the same woman who bore children inside a marriage she did not negotiate and was marched barefoot across ground she had once known as home into a life no one had a name for. What we just separated into four chapters was for her a single life lived whole and without rest in a [music] body the myth could not afford to show.

 The popular record of the American frontier left her out entirely and no one standing over that record ever stopped to ask what it felt like. The wiki up is gone now. The willow poles have bent back into the hillside and the brush and hide coverings rotted into the soil decades ago. The grinding stone is half buried where she left it.

No film crew ever came to this clearing. No studio ever sent a camera to record what she carried in her hands and in her body. And in the quiet hours, no one wanted to look at. The land still holds what the record would not. She was real. The myth was