photo #9384909

On foot and without money. Diary of a soldier. September 1 at 7:57 AM · On the morning of February 6, 1777, Captain Luis del Castillo rode with his family, neighbors and a herd of horses and mules towards San Bernardino. Eight soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Corella escorted him, believing that the road would be smooth. But in La Tinaja, the hills were silent in ambush. Suddenly, an Apache cry broke the air, and from above the tide of spears came down. The crash was brutal. A spear wounded Castillo himself, but the captain, with blood soaking his jacket, did not give in. He gathered the train with pushes and, with claws of courage, built an improvised trench where he hid his wife and two little ones. There, sheltered, the soldiers and neighbors fired until the barrels of their muskets breathed the last breath of gunpowder. There was no surrender. When the ammunition ran out, they tore bows from the dead hands of fallen Apaches, stretched improvised ropes, and even made slingshots out of leather shreds. Every stone thrown was an oath of resistance. As evening fell, four Apache chiefs approached with sure steps, speaking in perfect Spanish. The offer was clear as a knife's edge: “Give us the horses and mules... and they will come out alive”. Castillo, wounded and surrounded, negotiated with a firm voice. Hours of tension ran under the moon until, exhausted, the Apaches agreed to retreat with the loot and what they had collected from the field. When they finally moved north, heading to their land of Chiricahua, the captain sent notice to the nearby prison. At dawn reinforcements arrived, finding the Spaniards battered, the horses scattered and the land strewn with arrows. But they also found something else: the trace of a resistance that had turned a handful of men, a woman and two children into an iron wall in the face of the Apache storm. Wild Chihuahua Apache Fountain