Lozen died as a prisoner of war in 1889, before any sustained effort to document the oral history of the Apache people had begun.

The historians and ethnographers who would eventually collect and publish Apache oral history were working decades later, by which point the specific details of individual lives had been filtered through time and through the traumatic disruption of the prisoner years.

Eve Ball’s work in the mid-twentieth century, and the subsequent scholarship that built on it, came too late to collect accounts from people who had known Lozen as an adult.

What survives is the testimony of people who had known her as children, who had been told about her by their parents and grandparents, who were preserving community memory filtered through the passage of decades.