Son of Vengeance: Searching for the Legendary Apache Rafael by Bradley Folsom (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Son of Vengeance: Searching for the Legendary Apache Rafaelby Bradley Folsom
• James Bailey Blackshear

Son of Vengeance: Searching for the Legendary Apache Rafael. By Bradley Folsom. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, Pp. 301. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes bibliography, index.)

Many scholars have offered explanations as to why Mexico lost Texas in 1836, but few have provided the story with the level of detail Bradley Folsom provides in Son of Vengeance. What it so interesting about this accomplishment is that it is a by-product, not the focus, of the book. Instead, this work is about a serial killer who rampages across northern New Spain in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the manhunt that ensues, and what impact this killer’s depredations had on the isolated communities he preyed upon. And more than that, it is also a scholar’s hunt through long forgotten archives for the perpetrator, a mysterious figure known as El Indio Rafael. The subject was a master of disguises, prolific plunderer, and slippery fugitive, but Folsom chases him down, and at the same time exposes what it meant to live in the midst of the Spanish colonial frontier.

In ten detailed chapters, the author populates northern New Spain with the Spanish, mestizo, criollo, and Apache residents who called it home. He also details the reign of terror a Hispanicized Apache perpetrated upon all of them: shepherds, ranchers, mail carriers, soldiers, priests, muleteers, and various groups of indigenous peoples who crossed his path from 1804 to 1810. Folsom ensures Rafael’s victims are not stick figures. Reconstructing hundreds of crime scenes across Nueva Vizcaya and other provinces, he provides names, as well as the descriptions of the innumerable villages, rivers, mountains, and canyons where they lived. Engagements with militia and regular army are also covered. Six excellent maps allow the reader to follow the chase through parts of Mexico with which they may not be familiar.

Using primary and secondary source documents, the most important being a report on Rafael generated for Commandant General Nemesio Salcedo of the Internal Provinces, Folsom provides a granular level of detail seldom found in early nineteenth-century histories of this region. In the telling, he explores the tenuous relationships that existed between everyone who lived within this cultural shatter-zone, as well as what a dangerous place the frontier could be for people scratching out an existence in isolated communities far from the centers of power. El Indio Rafael was an equal opportunity predator, waylaying Spanish soldiers, indigenous militias, peasants, Tarahumara and Tepehuan Indians, and anyone else who could provide him with the goods needed to avoid capture.

Folsom makes some good arguments about how this “Spanish-speaking, European-clothes wearing, Catholic-baptized Apache who raided like an Apache but was also the enemy of the Apache” (p. 169) exposed Spain’s inability to maintain adequate control over and protection for its citizenry, which led to devastating consequences in the decades to come. This is also a work for those interested in how the juxtaposition between mythmaking and reality often make up what scholars and others call history. While Folsom remains focused on [End Page 471]Rafael, he provides a wealth of information on the challenges everyone who lived in nineteenth-century northern New Spain faced. Two excellent appendices, essentially a six-year list of victims, are included at the end of the book, adding another layer of impact to Folsom’s relentless narrative.

James Bailey Blackshear University of North Texas Dallas Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association