by 1864-1898 Indian War Veterans: Memories of Army Life;Campaigns in the West
Then the White Mountain Apaches took the warpath [in 1881]. They put up a good fight, and if the fight had commenced early in the day it might have been what the papers, when they got the news, said it was. The papers in the East came out in great headlines saying: “Another Custer Massacre. Gen. Carr and His Whole Command Wiped Out.” But Carr pulled out in the night and got back to Fort Apache where the Indians surrounded the fort the next morning. [At Cibicu, ] the Indian scouts with the command deserted and fought with their tribe. The whole Indian outfit was taken in time. Some of the Indian scouts were shot to death and more of them sent to prison. The War Department had all the say about the scouts. But the main body of Indians always were turned over to the Interior Department, where they got new blankets, and when they arrived back on the reservation found that their women and children had been well taken care of.
Here, in order to give the public an idea of Indian cruelty, I’ll state a nerve-stirring scene. At the top of what was called Seven Mile Hill we came onto a Mormon outfit that was on its way from Utah to settle in Arizona. They were all butchered by the noble red men. All except one old man who put up a gallant fight for his life. But at last he was overpowered by the redskins, who bound him to a wagon wheel and burnt him to death. That was their way of honoring a brave enemy, so we were told by Mr. Indian after their capture. Anyhow, all that was left of the old man were his iron pant buttons. I bear witness to that, as I was the one who picked the buttons out of the ashes.
In the spring of’ 82 I was stationed at Camp Thomas on the Gila River, near the San Carlos Indian Reservation. [It was] a two-company post, one troop of cavalry and one company of infantry. Everybody has heard of Geronimo, the old Apache chief, and his war party of Chiricahua Indians that left San Carlos Reservation and took the war trail. Something the Indians never did before was to cut the telegraph wire, as they considered them bad medicine. Well, old Jerry Mo, as we called him, cut the wire running between Camp Thomas and Fort Apache. This wire was cut right in the center of the reservation. Two troops of cavalry had passed by where the wire was cut, but being on what was called a hot trail, gave it the go-by. To make a long story short, I was sent out to connect that wire. The chances were against a man getting back alive. I was to strike the outskirts of the reservation at nightfall, connect the wire and get off the reservation before daybreak, as it was considered sure death to be seen by any of the Indians. I did it all right, but what the poor regular army enlisted man does is never told in song or story. My friend, Charles Willey, now of Belmont, this state [New Hampshire], who stood in the bunch and saw me go out, well remembers what I said to him as I started: “Well, Willey, if the Indians get me, when you get back to Concord just tell them that you saw me.”
The Fight at Black Mesa, 1882 (By Earl S. Hall, formerly of Troop D, Third U. S. Cavalry. From Winners of the West, March, 1924)
Speaking of hardships experienced by “regulars” in Indian war times in the covered wagon days, I wish to relate just one campaign in Arizona by Major Andrew W. Evans, commanding our troops. I was with Troop D, Third Cav., Albert D. King (now deceased), captain; George A. Dodd, First Lieut.; Franklin O. Johnson, Second Lieut. Dodd had command of thirty Indian scouts. Keog, an old westerner, who could talk Apache and was able to handle the Indians, was chief of scouts.
The campaign lasted but two weeks, but was a forced march from first to last owing to the serious necessity of overtaking a band of renegades who had deserted the U. S. service, taking the guns and ammunition and other supplies with them, and had gone on the warpath, stealing stock, murdering ranchmen and their families. Many a burned ranch was evidence of their depredations. [I have] no language to fitly describe the torture of this short campaign. The Indians chose the most impassable trail known to them in order to impede, if possible, or delay our pursuit, to enable them to make a “getaway.” They failed to fully realize the relentless determination and courage of their pursuers and the added incentive caused by their atrocities.
On our march, we were undergoing intense heat, often 130 above, following dangerous and narrow trails up and down mountains, sometimes on the march sixteen hours a day, our tongues swollen in our mouths for lack of water, with every stitch of our clothing saturated with perspiration, as if drenched by a “cloudburst.” Hardtack for diet. Well, on 17th July 1882 (Sunday) our advance scouts struck them. A volley first apprised us of this fact, although we already were prepared to meet them any moment because of the live coals in the last burned ranch, and other signs. Command was quickly given to dismount and link horses. Each set of fours allowed No. 4 horse to hold horses 1, 2, 3 of each set, [and] went into action at the front. The Sixth or Gray Horse Cavalry, deployed to the right. The third or Bay Horse Cavalry, of which I was a member, deployed to the left in skirmish line. The Indians at sight of us retreated to top of mountains about 400 yards distant as the “bullet flies.” Command was given to charge down through the intervening valley and up against them where they had hastily entrenched themselves. The mountain range [sic] was called Black Mesa…one of the Mogollon range.
Not a man faltered, although all were staggering with exhaustion and intense heat. Not a shot was fired by us as we ascended the mountain, although [we remained] a target for the Indians. When we reached the top the Indians retreated after a short time to the heavy timber and rocky ravines which furnished a good hiding place and natural fortress. We closed in on them slowly but steadily, keeping up a well-directed fire on them or where we reckoned they were. After about five hours fighting against an almost invisible enemy, [with] darkness approaching, we rested on our arms—that is five of us—Lieutenant Johnson, Paddy Maher, Mike Devlin, Frank Lenke and myself. We held a strategic point of the battlefield all night while the balance of the troops retired further away (we were accidentally forgotten) and pretty near froze to death that night, although the temperature was over 100 above in the daytime.
Left alone on the battlefield, we did not feel very optimistic when we heard a great hubbub among the Indians, the noise increasing indicating that they were coming head-on toward our position. We opened fire on them in the darkness—this changed their course slightly, and perhaps saved our lives, as if they had run into us pellmell and discovered our number we would have been five more dead heroes—Winners of the West. At daybreak, Major Evans trumpeted over to us from the retired position of the main command, expressing surprise that any of the troops were on the battlefield and still alive. Lieutenant Johnson explained the cause of our position. Orders were given to explore the surroundings and the Indian scouts and we five “Casibiancas” moved forward, reinforced soon by the main command.
We were pretty sure that the Indians had vamoosed during the night (what was left of them). It is only fair and just to state here that owing to the natural features of the ground that it was most impossible to intercept the Indians’ getaway, especially at night. The battlefield did not present much a different spectacle from the usual ones of this kind, excepting the wounded Indians died fighting. Not that we wantonly killed them, but they knew no other mode of warfare and expected no quarter, especially as they were “renegades.” Therefore, as they spied us coming they opened fire, which we returned. One squaw and a little papoose is all we captured alive. The squaw had been wounded and our surgeon amputated her limb. The band was completely broken up and scattered and 250 head of stolen stock returned to their owners by our command.
After we returned to Fort Apache we weighed ourselves and approximately the average weight of the men had been decimated fifteen pounds or an average of one pound per day per man. Excepting the casualties of killed and wounded, no serious results followed our exposure. But I’ve often thought it was a kill or cure dose physical culture.
Certificate of Merit for Combat in New Mexico, 1885 (By Sylvester Grover, formerly of Troop C, Fourth U. S. Cavalry. From Winners of the West, December 30, 1925)
In October, 1885, I was stationed at Lang’s Ranch, New Mexico [Territory], directly
on the line of the panhandle of New Mexico and the Mexican State of Chihuahua. On the 9th of that month, I was ordered, with Private Hickman, Troop F, Fourth Cavalry, to carry dispatches which had arrived from Captain Emmet Crawford, in Mexico, to Brigadier General George Crook, at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory. We left about 11 o’clock a.m. and put up for the night at a ranch about forty miles from our starting point. Next morning before daybreak we started off and traveled at good speed towards Cowboy Pass. The country through which we passed is perfectly level, except [for] piles of rocks called Mal Pais, with which the plain is covered and through which the road winds. None of these piles are more than the height of a man and horse, and we had a good view of the country around us and had no idea that any hostile Indians were in the vicinity, as the last we heard of them located them below the national boundary.
About 9 o’clock a.m., while passing near one of these rock piles, we were suddenly fired upon by about fourteen Indians, who upon delivering the fire suddenly rose up around us. Hickman fell at once from his horse, dead, as I found out afterwards. My horse dashed away with me and got about five hundred yards when he fell dead. I dragged myself from the saddle, got the dispatches out of the saddlebags, and with my carbine crawled to a pile of rocks about twenty yards off. I could see part of the Indians chasing Hickman’s horse, and the rest followed me up on foot. I opened fire on them at once and held them at bay. They did not know that I was wounded, and to that fact I undoubtedly owe my life.
After the Indians caught Hickman’s horse, they all made a break at me. I fired as fast as my wounds would let me, and at last had the satisfaction of seeing them leave toward the mountains, which gave me a chance to look at my wounds. I found that I was shot through the fleshy part of the thigh below the hip, and through the left wrist and hand. For over two hours and a half I was lying under a burning sun, without water, and I felt that my last moments were coming when I saw a wagon approaching. With it were seven citizens, some of whom were discharged government scouts and packers. I called out as well as I could, and managed to make them hear me at last. They stopped, brought me water, washed my wounds, and made me as comfortable as possible, and brought me to the post hospital at Fort Bowie.
Hickman was shot in seven places. The Indians did not mutilate his body, only took off his belts. I have since recovered entirely from my wounds, and through the recommendation of my captain have been awarded a Certificate of Merit by the President of the United States.
The Campaign against Geronimo (By Henry W. Daly, formerly Chief Packer, U. S. Army. From Winners of the West, December 30, 1933)
In March of 1885 I was ordered from Fort Apache to Whipple Barracks, at Prescott, to take charge of the pack train at the headquarters of the Department of Arizona. I found the mules run down. The clerks at headquarters had been riding them into Prescott to take in the sights of the town. Not that the sights of Prescott were any great shakes in the view of a young fellow looking for a little excitement. There were saloons aplenty and wide open gambling, but Prescott had the name of a quiet place by the standards of the West of that day and date.
By April the pack train was in condition to take into the field. Brigadier General George Crook and a small party went to the Grand Cataract, a tributary to the Grand Canon of the Colorado, to settle a little Indian trouble between the Havasupai and the Moqui [Hopi] tribes. This business was so soon over that the excursion turned into an outing more than anything else, much appreciated by me after a winter of sleeping under a roof for the first time regularly in a good many years. In May we were at Whipple, with nothing but garrison duty to pass the time. For nearly eighteen months now, the Apaches, the terrors of the Southwest, had trod the white path—that is, had been at peace. A long and bloody road indeed had been traveled to this end, and it had been my fortune to have traveled most of it in person, serving through the Tonto Basin War of 1872-74, the Mescalero Outbreak of’ 79 and’ 80, the Warm Spring campaigns against Victorio and Nana in’ 80,’ 81, and’ 82, and the Sierra Madre Campaign that wound up with the surrender of Naiche in the fall of’ 83….
My professional acquaintance with Geronimo was made during the Sierra Madre Campaign against Naiche, head chief of the Chiricahuas, the most blood-thirsty of the Apache clans. This campaign took place in northern Mexico, where by special arrangement we were permitted to pursue the Chiricahuas. This campaign brought Go-yath-lay, or Geronimo as he was known by the whites, to the fore as a war leader. Geronimo was then no longer a young man, being forty, I should say, and about medium tall. His frame was well-muscled and, like those of most of the Apaches, capable of fabulous endurance. The countenance of Geronimo was the most arresting I have ever seen on a human being. There was in it a look of unspeakable savagery, or fierceness, and yet the signs of an acute intelligence were also present. Geronimo was of a nervous type, which is, or was, rather rare among Indians. His countenance was mobile rather than mask-like. When he was mad he simply looked like the devil and an intelligent devil at that. This type of leader was well calculated to advance himself under Naiche, an able Indian but a loafer when he could find a subordinate capable of assuming his responsibilities.
Three weeks after our return to Whipple, the humdrum of past life was interrupted by the startling news that a band of Chiricahuas under Naiche with Geronimo as war chieftain had left the reservation near Fort Apache and were making a trail of blood across Arizona headed for their hangout in the Sierra Madres of Old Mexico. There is, I think, still some mystery as to the cause of this outbreak. My diary, kept during the sixteen months of the campaign that followed, gives a simple and I think the correct explanation of it. The lieutenant in charge of the Chiricahua reservation was an excellent young man, but untrained in dealing with Apaches. He won the friendship of Chatto, a rival of Geronimo, which in itself was a good thing, except that the matters were so tactlessly handled that Geronimo became jealous and took the warpath to avenge himself.
An Indian chief was as proud as Lucifer and that always has to be borne in mind. It is an error to assume that because of their ignorance of the ways of civilization they were of a childlike order of intelligence and that their feats in war were due mainly to superior physical endurance. Most Indian leaders I have known or observed were equals mentally of the white leaders with whom they dealt, and as often as otherwise they were superior. This statement applies to the old-time Indian in his semi-primitive state. One of life’s mysteries to me is the way civilization has blunted the native intelligence of the Indian.
Two expeditions entered Mexico after the hostiles, one on the Chihuahua, or eastern, slope of the Sierra Madre range, and one on the western, or Sonora side. I served with the latter, under command of Captain Emmet Crawford, the best Indian fighter I have ever known. His force consisted of Troop A of the Sixth Cavalry, numbering forty-five men, ninety-two Indian scouts, with the celebrated Al Sieber as chief of scouts, and three pack trains with two months’ supplies. I had charge of one of these trains. Crossing the border at Black Springs, south of Tombstone, on June 12, a nine days’ march (during which the temperature reached 120 degrees in the shade, and no shade, as the saying was) brought us into camp in the foothills of a spur of the Sierra Madres, a hundred miles below the line. To the east toward the Sierra Madres proper, their summits high above the fleecy clouds that hugged the slopes of the foothills—a truly inspiring scene, and I find in my diary a glowing description of it [sic]. But after our throat-parching march, what we appreciated most was a rivulet that cascaded down the timber-clad crags; its water seemed literally as cold and clear as ice.
Little time was left to admire the beauties of nature, however. The scouts spread out to feel for signs of the hostiles and on June 23rd they had a small fight, capturing twelve squaws and children, two full-grown boys, and the aged chief Nana. They were sent back to Arizona under guard, and we broke camp and pulled out in the wake of the scouts on a trail that led straight up into the Sierras. A few days later there was another small fight, an
d we pressed on with all possible speed in the hope of a decisive engagement. With each day’s travel the going became more rugged. The dense growth of pine shut out the daylight. Steep descents and steeper ascents were made more difficult by fallen timbers. It will suffice here to summarize briefly the remainder of the history of this particular expedition, which is only remarkable for its marches, as we did not get Geronimo. The Indians lured us more deeply into the mountains. Our maps were worthless. The cavalry horses and the men were worn out, and the clothing of us all was in tatters. Captain Crawford sent me back to the border for more supplies. By trail this was a journey of four hundred miles. On my return in August, I found that he had also sent the cavalry troop back, deeming it useless in such country. The hostiles were in the Sierra Madres proper, where no military expedition had ever attempted pursuit. Nevertheless, Crawford pursued them with his scout company and two pack trains.
I would not attempt to say how many times I have crossed the mountains by trail from Canada to Mexico, but this was the most notable feat in that line of my experience. We crossed the Sierra Madres from the Sonora to the Chihuahua side, being, I understand, the first white persons to do so in that region. We made it in fifteen days without losing a man or a mule, though there were some narrow squeaks. We got fairly close to Geronimo a few times, but that was all. A party of scouts under Second Lieutenant Charles P. Elliott preceded us down the eastern slope. Arriving at the town of Casa Grande, they told the authorities that they had come over the Sierra Madres. They were told that no one had ever crossed those mountains and were locked up until the arrival of the main body under Captain Crawford confirmed their story. Geronimo’s trail had been lost and the expedition turned north, arriving at Fort Bowie, Arizona, in mid-September.