This extended resistance — maintained by a tiny group of fighters in the Sierra Madre long after the political and military context that had originally animated the resistance had been settled — reflects something essential about the Apache refusal to accept defeat.

The specific men who maintained this last resistance were not political leaders or military strategists; they were people who had been raised in the tradition of the resistance and who had never known any other life, who continued the only way of life they understood even when it had become completely isolated from any broader Apache community.

Lozen’s story is part of the tradition that produced this extended resistance.

The values she embodied — the complete commitment to freedom, the refusal to accept terms that violated the fundamental dignity of the people she served — were the same values that kept the last Broncos fighting in the Sierra Madre for decades after the world had moved on.