What the account preserves is the community’s belief in the decisive importance of her contribution.

The Apache people who remembered and told this story understood that they had lost not only Victorio and the others at Tres Castillos, but had lost them at a moment when one of their most important defensive capabilities was absent.

The survivor guilt that this understanding might produce — for Lozen herself, who had been separated from the band on a mission of mercy — is the kind of human dimension of the story that the oral accounts do not dwell on but that the events themselves make imaginable.

The Geronimo Campaigns: Final Phase