Victorio

Victorio was a Chihenne Apache leader who resisted removal from the Warm Springs homeland in New Mexico. From 1879 to 1880 he led a highly mobile campaign across the United States-Mexico border, repeatedly evading larger military forces. Mexican troops surrounded his band at Tres Castillos in 1880, where Victorio and many of his followers were killed.

Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Ghost Warrior presents Victorio through his sister Lozen and the community that followed him. The novel can therefore show leadership as a family and collective responsibility rather than a sequence of raids attributed to one man. His campaign also exposes the artificiality of the international border for Apache groups whose traditional movements crossed it.