I also remember thinking at the time that dressing like a white man and taking a white man’s name wasn’t ever going to hide the Apache in him. I don’t mean Apache blood. I just mean after the way he had lived, how was he even going to convince anybody he was a white man? He didn’t even prefer to speak English. It was things like that gave you the feeling he had no use for white men or our ways.

According to Mr. Mendez he was most likely three-parts white, as I have said, and the rest Mexican on his mother’s side. John Russell himself had no memory of his father and only some memory of living in a Mexican village. Probably in Sonora. At that time they say the Apaches were forever raiding the little pueblos and carrying off whatever they needed, clothes, weapons, some women, and sometimes boys young enough to be brought up Apache-style. Which is what must have happened to John Russell. Piecing things together, he must have lived with them about from the time he was six to about age twelve.

Here is where a James Russell, late of Contention, comes in. At that time he owned supply wagons contracted to the Army, and he was at Fort Thomas when this boy who was called Ish-kay-nay was brought in with some prisoners. The boy was assigned to a work detail under James Russell and that was how the two became friends. Just a month later, when James Russell sold his business and went to settle in Contention, he took the boy with him and gave him his American name, John Russell. Five years or so passed and the boy even went to school there. Then all of a sudden he left and went up to San Carlos and joined the reservation police as if to become Apache again. (Here they called him Tres Hombres, which I will try to tell you about later.)