Tel Che'e: Apache warrior turned legend Somewhere along a remote creek bed, somewhere in Central Arizona, sometime in the early 1860s, an unknown prospector lay dead. Over his body stood an exceptionally large, broad-shouldered and slightly stooped, 20-some-year-old Apache. From the dead man's clothing, the Apache plucked a single pearl button. Then, along with his companions, he headed off to one of his remote mountain sanctuaries. The scene was not unusual. There were a lot of bodies littering the landscape at that place and time. But the Apache warrior, who would soon fashion the pearl button into an earring, was. His name was Tel Che'e. The whites who later came to his ancestral land, unaccustomed to his indigenous people's foreign dialect, called him Delshay, Deluche, Delche or Del-che-ae. Other Apache chiefs would achieve greater notoriety, but none would bear the enmity of the U.S. military to the degree eventually reserved for Tel Che'e....