Maestro Gabriel

This is my small homage to Maestro Gabriel, my link with the history of the land I grew up on. We lost him only a few years ago. As best we could tell, he was about a hundred ten years old. He claimed to remember Cochise and Geronimo.

My family ranched for many years on land where the Apache and other Indians had wintered in the old times, before Spanish and British ranchers moved into northern Mexico. My great-grandfather, Rafael Gabilondo, took in a seven-year-old Yaqui Indian orphan to work on his ranch of “Oaxaca” in Sonora state.