05/01/2025
GERONIMO’S ‘BRAVEST’ WIFE FLED MEXICAN CAPTIVITY AND FOUGHT A MOUNTAIN LION
Huera, also known as Tze-gu-juni, served as an interpreter, a mother figure to Apache women, and as a shaman.
Apache oral tradition records several brave women, such as Lozen, sister of Chihenne Chief Victorio, who reportedly participated in Chiricahua raids in the 1870s and ’80s.
Not as well known but certainly courageous in her own right was Huera, or Tze-gu-juni (her Chihenne name, meaning “Pretty Mouth”). She was not a combatant, but her second husband, the Bedonkohe Apache warrior Geronimo, called her “the bravest of Apache women.”
Little is known of Huera’s youth. She was born circa 1847. During a fierce thunderstorm lightning struck her, her mother and her sister, and only Tze-gu-juni survived. She was in her early 30s on Oct. 14, 1880, when a Mexican ambush claimed the lives of Victorio, other Chihennes and their Mescalero Apache allies at Tres Castillos, Chihuahua, Mexico.
ENSLAVED IN MEXICO
The Mexicans captured Tze-gu-juni and nearly 70 other Apache women and children, sending them to Mexico City as slaves. Her Mexican owners called Tze-gu-juni Francesca (Frances), or Huera, a corruption of guera, Spanish slang for a fair-skinned or fair-haired female. Though neither, Huera must have seemed fairer than other captured Apache women. While in captivity she learned Spanish fluently, allowing her to later serve as a translator at the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona Territory.
After four or five years in forced servitude she and several others escaped their hacienda prison near Mexico City with only one knife and one blanket among them. Ahead of them lay a daunting trek of some 1,300 miles. They survived the Chihuahuan Desert by eating the tuna, or fruit, of prickly pear cacti and other wild foods.
En route a mountain lion attacked Huera, seeking a quick kill by going for her throat. She managed to tighten a blanket around her neck for protection, but the cougar tore at her scalp, parting it from her skull. Still she fought on, eventually plunging a knife into the animal’s heart.
The mountain lion was dead, but Huera was in bad shape. The other women reattached her scalp with thorns and used the cougar’s own sputum to help heal her wounds. Resting only briefly, Huera soon resumed the slog north with the others. After several months the weary travelers finally reached San Carlos, shocking family and friends with their fortitude.
The scars on Huera’s chest, hands and face from the cougar mauling remained with her the rest of her life. She seemed both brave and charmed to have survived such an ordeal.
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