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escape.
    Of course the ballad written afterward made no mention of the compassion and considerable bravery of the Apache women who helped Placida escape. That angered me because at the time they helped her escape, Apache women and children were being murdered by Mexicans and Americans alike for the bounty on their scalps. Yet the Apache women who helped Placida escape did not let the genocide destroy their human decency.
    I wanted to put the incident into historical perspective: Placida Romero was a captive for forty-nine days and then she got to go home. Juana was a captive for almost a hundred years, and she never got to go home.
    To prepare to write about the captives, I reread L. R. Bailey’s scholarly work Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest, first published in 1964. Though I’d read it before, I’d conveniently forgotten some of the more horrendous details. The Spanish governors of New Mexico encouraged and participated in the Indian slave trade; it was their way of keeping the Pueblos, Navajos and Apaches at war with one another so they would not unite against the Spaniards as they had in 1680.
    After the fur trade collapsed, the rendezvous held at river crossings from Taos to Tucson became slave markets where Indian captives were traded for whiskey and gunpowder. The captives were mostly young children, primarily young girls because they were less likely to try to escape. At the slave markets, in drunken exhibitions, the slave traders raped the young Indian girls.
    The Catholic Church participated in the slave trade by possessing young Indian “servants” for labor, and by baptizing the captives. Baptismal records show that from 1700 to 1780, eight hundred Apache children were baptized as “servants” to the households of Spaniards in New Mexico. At the Catholic Church at Laguna Pueblo baptismal records revealed that the Spanish rewarded the Pueblos who accompanied them on military actions against the Navajos with young captives.
    More money could be made from one slave hunting expedition of two or three weeks than could be made in one year of subsistence farming or ranching in New Mexico. When the U.S. authorities took the New Mexico Territory from Mexico in 1846, the U.S. officials made attempts to stop the Indian slave trade, but the wealthy Mexican families resisted, and even the U.S. authorities kept Indian “servants.”
    When I reread Bailey’s book I came across the account of a young Navajo woman released by U.S. soldiers from her captivity with a Mexican family in 1852. The young Navajo woman complained to the U.S. military officer that the Mexican family stripped her naked and whipped her every day. Whipping slaves, it seems, was a common perversion with the founding families of New Mexico.
    I happened to mention to my father that I wanted to write about Juana but I wasn’t really sure when or how she came to work for Grandma Lillie’s family. That was when my father told me what Grandma Lillie never told me. My father told me so offhandedly it angered me; I could tell he was ashamed and the off-handed manner was his way to cover up his shame.
    Four young Navajo sisters were captured by the Spanish slave hunters during the Spanish governor’s 1823 military campaign against the Navajos in New Mexico. Juana, who was four or five, was the youngest. The four captives came into the possession of Grandma Whip’s brother.
    Did he buy the young sisters from a slave trader or were they loot he got for volunteering to accompany the Spanish troops on the assault? Did someone owe him a gambling debt and give him the little girls in payment or were they a bribe to curry his favor?
    If Grandma Whip was quick to take off the leather belt to whip her small grandchildren, imagine what Grandma Whip’s brother was like: he must have been the Devil himself with the whip on the little Navajo girls. After he whipped the young Navajo girls, what other perversions? Was he