Not entirely — the Apache people never forgot her, and neither did the historians who eventually went looking for the specific individuals whose stories the military records and the settler newspapers had not thought worth preserving.

But for most of the century that followed her death, her name was unknown outside Apache communities, while the names of Geronimo, Cochise, and Victorio were in textbooks and in popular culture.

The question of how someone as remarkable as Lozen could be overlooked is not really a mystery.

It is a predictable outcome.

The written records of the Apache Wars were created almost entirely by the people who were fighting against the Apache — by military officers filing reports, by newspaper correspondents sending dispatches to editors who wanted dramatic stories of conquest, by government administrators documenting the movement and management of defeated populations.

These records were not designed to preserve the achievements of the people the Army was pursuing.

They were designed to document the Army’s own operations.

A woman who rode against the Army and helped keep a band of fighters free in the mountains for years would not appear in these records as a hero.

She would appear as an obstacle, if she appeared at all.

And she mostly didn’t appear at all.

The Army’s reports identified Apache raiders by the names the Army gave them or knew them by — typically the names of their leaders.

The specific individuals who rode, fought, scouted, and guided the bands through the mountains were anonymous in the official record.

The Apache oral tradition preserved what the written record did not.

And it is from that tradition, combined with the careful historical work of researchers who made the effort to collect and cross-reference it, that Lozen’s story can be reconstructed.