Biography
Dahteste was a Chokonen Chiricahua Apache warrior, scout, and interpreter — a comrade of Lozen and Geronimo who, fluent in English, served as a messenger and mediator and was instrumental in negotiating Geronimo's final surrender to the U.S. Cavalry in 1886. Despite her role in the negotiations, she was taken with the rest of the band as a U.S. Army prisoner of war: she spent about eight years at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida — where she survived pneumonia and tuberculosis — and roughly nineteen more at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, some twenty-seven years of confinement in all. She was finally freed around 1913 and lived out the rest of her life at Whitetail on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico.
Note: Birth and death years approximate; no dependable exact month/day found.
