Outside the Yuma Valley, the women confronted barren terrain and soon were suffering from the heat. A few of them wanted to leave the lowlands and climb into the cooler mountains to the north, but Dilchthe knew those mountains were home to their enemies, and she urged them to stay on the Gila because it would eventually lead them home.

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On the third night after crossing the Colorado, they were attacked by Yuma (or Mojave) raiders. One woman was captured, and all but two of the others were killed in the ambush–Dilchthe and another woman fled into the brush. Once again they were hunted, but Dilchthe was too wily for the pursuers.

The two Apache women walked four more days over the dreary, hot, mostly dry riverbottom, past the Gila Bend, past Maricopa Wells (near present-day Phoenix), and around the Pima and Papago camps and villages (virtually all the tribes in this area were enemies of the Apache). Dilchthe and her companion made it another 100 miles before collapsing northeast of present-day Safford, Ariz. Almost crazed from grief and hunger and too weak to walk another mile, Dilchthe made a signal fire.

Incredibly, her own son-in-law came into view. After what she had been through, she must have thought it was an apparition, but it was not. Dilchthe and her friend had been saved. Normally, it is strictly taboo for an Apache woman to look her son-in-law in the face, but this time the tradition was overlooked as he hugged her and welcomed his brave mother-in-law back from the dead. Dilchthe was reunited with her family and welcomed back into her tribe as a hero. She had walked more than 1,000 miles and outwitted and outmaneuvered all her pursuers. Through it all, she had carried no map, no weapons and almost no provisions. Her undying determination to reach her Warm Springs clan demonstrates a rare kind of courage. She was the Apache grandmother with the iron will–truly a wild woman of the Wild West.

A Stitch in Time…

More than any other virtue, women brought a hearty pragmatism to the West. ‘When I saw something that needed doing, I did it,’ was a common remembrance of the wild women of the Wild West.

A good practitioner of that brand of pragmatism was Barbara Jones, who, along with her husband and 10 children, settled on the Pecos River in New Mexico Territory in the 1870s. They opened a store near Seven Rivers, and while her husband freighted in supplies, Ma’am Jones, as she was called by her friends and family, managed the store and her brood. The nearest doctor was 150 miles away, so it was probably inevitable that disaster would strike. Sure enough, one of her older boys (she had 10 sons!) came running in one day and said, ‘Mommy come quick, Sammy’s been hurt!’ Ma’am Jones ran outside and found her youngest lying face down. As she picked him up and wiped the dirt and blood from his face, she realized he had been pushed down into some broken glass. Upon closer inspection she discovered that one of his eyelids had been almost severed by the glass and was hanging by a thread. She carried her hysterical son into the house, laid him on the kitchen table and had one of her other sons fetch her sewing kit. While little Sammy howled and squirmed, Ma’am Jones sewed his eyelid back on.

Sammy Jones lived to be a happy old man. One eyelid was a bit crooked, but he still retained the use of that eye–thanks to the courage and quick thinking of his mother. Ma’am Jones owned a brand of bravery that often goes unnoticed when Hollywood looks at the Wild West.

Invasion of the Women of Easy Virtue

Like their male counterparts on the frontier, the early female arrivals were rugged individualists who angled west to gain the cherished privilege of being left alone to do what they pleased. And often as not, ‘doing what they pleased’ was a nice way of saying they were women of easy virtue. A Forty-Niner’s poem sums up the early arrivals to California:

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