THE PARTING
A regal, silver-haired Mildred Cleghorn warmly greeted a newspaper reporter at her Apache, Oklahoma, home in September 1996 to discuss her storied life. Cleghorn, then 85, spoke with grace and candor as she reminisced about her 18-year reign as chairwoman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, as well as her family’s unique history. Cleghorn specifically recalled one of her earliest memories, at age 3 in 1914, riding in the family’s horse-drawn wagon from the Fort Sill Military Reservation to their 40-acre government allotment near Apache. Only later would she learn those were among her first moments of freedom. She’d been born a prisoner of war at Fort Sill on Dec. 11, 1910.
For the Chiricahua Apaches of Cleghorn’s generation—a people branded “Geronimo’s band,” for better or worse—her story was hardly uncommon. Their collective journey through captivity began in September 1886 with Geronimo’s surrender to U.S. troops (see related story, P. 36) and ended in 1913 after an Act of Congress. By then the absurdity of their continued imprisonment had already been revealed in Washington, D.C., and beyond.
“Their few survivors and their much more numerous descendants—their children and their children’s children—are still ‘prisoners of war,’” argued one humanitarian activist in a 1912 article for The North American Review literary magazine. “There are among the band men and women of full age who were born into that condition and have grown to maturity without knowing any other lot.”
The full gravity of those 27 years of captivity hit home for the Chiricahuas on April 2, 1913, a bittersweet day in their history known as “the Parting.”
that spring afternoon with the
