Carlos Montezuma (Wassaja) was a Mohave-Apache Indian, Chicago physician, and radical leader of the Society of American Indians and the Pan-Indian movement of the first quarter of the twentieth-century. His personal history is not entirely clear. At various times, beginning as early as 1888, the “Fiery Apache” wrote autobiographical sketches; and copies remain of reports collected when the Office of Indian Affairs investigated his early life at the time he asked to be enrolled with the Apache tribe at the San Carlos Agency, Arizona in May 1920. All accounts differ substantially. There are no records to confirm or deny what took place, and memories are contradictory. Eventually, it was established by the Office of Indian Affairs that Montezuma was a “full-blood” Mohave-Apache, Yavapai or Pinal-Apache of the Yuman family, not full Apache as he believed. It is considered possible that the Yavapai did affiliate in some way with the Apache bands occupying lands contiguous to their own in the 1860's and early 1870's. By 1874 all the bands in that part of Arizona were gathered together by the Army and taken as prisoners of war to the San Carlos Reservation. As late as the 1890's, even confined together on the reserve, the Apache and Mohave-Apache spoke entirely different languages. Since Montezuma claimed to have been able in his youth to converse with the Hualpai Indians of the Yuman family, this seemed to further corroborate the Indian Office theory that Montezuma was a Mohave-Apache. The Indian Bureau could be persuaded that Montezuma was a full-blood Indian born in Arizona, the son of Co-lu-ye-va, a Pinal-Apache warrior, and his first wife, Thil-ge-ya, but, apparently, found it traumatic to accept with equanimity, as a ward of the government, this man who had spent his entire adult life in a dedicated crusade to abolish the Indian Bureau. Therefore, Indian Service reports can be assumed to be as prejudiced in this regard as Montezuma's were idealized.
Montezuma surely was the Mohave-Apache boy, Wassaja, whom the Pima Indians captured in 1871 in a massacre of a small band of Mohave-Apaches on Mineral or Iron Top mountain, northeast of old Fort Adams, near what is now Florence, Arizona. And he was sold for thirty dollars by the Pimas to a photographer and artist, Carlos Gentile, who was prospecting for gold, photographing Indians, and collecting Indian artifacts in the West. Montezuma contended he was four or perhaps six at the time of capture, but Charles W. Davis, superintendent of the Apache Indian Agency gave compelling reasons, in a letter, April 15, 1922, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to establish Wassaja's age at closer to ten or twelve; thus his birth would have been earlier than the 1866 date Montezuma himself accepted. Gentile was one of the founders of the Chicago Press Club and the Chicago Art Institute. He renamed the Indian boy for himself and for the Aztec emperor, took him East and arranged for his early education in the public schools of Chicago, Galesburg, and Urbana, Illinois, and Brooklyn, New York. Gentile continued to sponsor Montezuma until a fire in 1877 destroyed his new and uninsured Gallery in New York City.
Montezuma returned to Urbana, was tutored for the Preparatory Course connected with the University of Illinois, and in 1884 graduated from that university with the degree of Bachelor of Science in chemistry. By 1889 Montezuma had also earned a degree in medicine from the Chicago Medical College. Montezuma was later to practice medicine and teach at the Chicago Medical College in association with his former classmate, Fenton B. Turck, a surgeon and director of research at the Turck Foundation. Throughout his student years at the university and medical school, Montezuma worked as a farm laborer and assisted in a Chicago pharmacy.
In 1889, Dr. Montezuma accepted a position with the Indian Service offered him by General T. J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. With the Indian Service for seven years, Montezuma was to serve first as Indian school clerk and physician at Fort Stevenson, North Dakota, then as physician at Western Shoshone Agency, Nevada, and Colville Agency, Washington, and finally as resident physician at the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. For a part of this time, Montezuma was physician to Chief Moses' Columbia River band and to the Nez Perces of Chief Joseph. His impressions of the effect of the reservation system on the Indian formed during these years, and his association with Brigadier General Richard H. Pratt, commandant at Carlisle, apparently influenced his thinking and made a decisive and permanent imprint on his mind and judgement. Pratt and Montezuma became of one mind in what they regarded as best for the Indian. They were temperamentally indistinguishable; both intense, intractable, and aggressively single-minded; both firmly convinced that the Indian should be assimilated into white society and culture, and the Indian Bureau abolished. In 1896, Montezuma left the Indian Service and returned to Chicago to practice medicine.
In Montezuma's personal correspondence for 1901-1902 are many letters from Zit-kala-sa, revealing a turbulent courtship and tenuous engagement between her and Wassaja. It is possible she had met Montezuma at Carlisle where she taught for two years. Zit-kala-sa, later Gertrude L. (Mrs. Raymond T.) Bonnin, a Sioux (Dakota) Indian with French ancestry, had studied at Earlham College in Indiana, a Quaker school, and at the New England Conservatory of Music. She wrote poetry and Indian stories and legends. Her articles appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harpers magazines and she had several books published. Their breakup was unpleasant. Zit-kala-sa insisted that Montezuma exercise his commitment to the Indian in a more practical way, give up his Chicago medical practice and return to the Indian Service and the reservation; he apparently refused. (There are no letters from Wassaja to Zit-kala-sa preserved here.) Zit-kala-sa's letters offer a fascinating insight into the consciousness of a talented and useful woman very early in her awareness of a dedication to the Indian people and a decade before organization of the Society of American Indians, through which she was to be so influential and effective.
Montezuma married Mary Keller in 1913. They had no children. In 1922, he got permission from the Indian Office to enroll as a Mohave-Apache at Fort McDowell, Arizona, so he returned there to await death from diabetes and advanced tuberculosis, which he must have known to be imminent.
Montezuma was a single red man submerged from earliest childhood in white culture -- assimilated. He could not speak for all Indians, although he thought he did, or at least that his was the right and only answer for all Indians. He would be an anachronism in the Indian Rights' Movement of the 1970s, but, as in every proposed solution to the Indian question since “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” went out of vogue, Montezuma meant his design to be a “positive good” for all Indians. Throughout all the years of his adult life, Montezuma set aside an inordinate portion of his time and strength for the advancement of the Indian and toward the abolition of the Indian Bureau.
Dr. Montezuma died on January 31, 1923 at Fort McDowell, Arizona.
