Bourke wrote that campaigning Apaches could maintain 125 kilometres a day for three of four days until any pursuer was completely thrown off the scent and in temperatures that would kill white men.
John Clum, when he was heading towards the Warm Springs agency to arrest Geronimo, recounted how his Apache militia indulged in a two-hour war dance after completing a fifty-kilometre march through ‘dust, cactus and a broiling sun’. As their chief ‘smilingly explained, “they thought they were not getting sufficient exercise.”’
Although fighting warriors unencumbered by family and possessions were undoubtedly the most formidable opposition, Apache women were hardly less capable than their men. “There is no tiger more dangerous than an infuriated squaw,’ exclaimed John Bourke. ‘She’s a fiend incarnate.’ Davis described an occasion when a patrol was fired on after a skirmish, only to discover a young woman with a bullet wound just above the knee. She and her six-month-old infant were carried for almost two hours across a rugged, near-perpendicular canyon. As she waited to be operated upon by US surgeons a storm of freezing hail soaked her and the child to the skin. The next day they cut the leg off without anaesthetic or even a little whiskey to numb the pain. The woman withstood the ordeal without a murmur, then was made to ride mule-back for another week to an army depot. Months later at San Carlos, Davis saw her again, running with the aid of crutches.
A tale of even greater physical and spiritual resource was the odyssey performed by five Apache women who had been transported to Mexico City. After three years of slavery these Amazons escaped from their owners. Sleeping by day and walking by night, they covered more than 1,600 kilometres through country they had never seen before. They were able to cook food only once, but eventually arrived in Apacheria barefoot, armed with one knife and a single blanket.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “America’s Greatest Guerrilla Fighter.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 228-29. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Clum, Apache Agent, p. 207.
Bourke, An Apache Campaign, p. 107.
Davis, The Truth About Geronimo, p. 25.
Further Reading:
Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua: Goyaałé [kòjàːɬɛ́] "the one who yawns"
Apache Dance (Not ah-PA-che, but ah-pah-shay). I thought it had to do with absinthe, but I could be wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXncZqKmxAw
E: Here's a 1938 one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CwWXG7BeDo