Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  The furore set off by the Baker affair doomed the army’s prospects of playing a significant role in the execution of the Peace Policy. The first casualty was the transfer measure, which seemed near passage as a provision of the army appropriation bill. The second casualty was the network of army officers serving as Indian agents, destroyed by a section of the appropriation act prohibiting military officers from holding civil posts.8 Although the Baker incident provided the rationale for this ban, truer motives sprang from congressional annoyance at the President for eliminating the vast patronage reservoir of the Indian Bureau’s field service. The President’s response, extending the practice of church nomination to the posts vacated by the army officers and to other denominations in addition to the Quakers, frustrated the intent of the congressional action. But also, combined with the defensive stance in which the Baker issue had placed the army, church domination of Indian management inevitably gave the Peace Policy a strongly antimilitary complexion.9

  The generals labored to restore balance to Indian management. Military force, they argued, was as essential to control and civilization of the Indian as education, self-support, and other techniques. Moral suasion could not alone bend “wild savages” to the will of the government. In three testing grounds of the early 1870s, application of Peace Policy precepts appeared to confirm the army point of view. In Arizona, in northern California, and in Indian Territory, the army saw its opinion prevail and the Peace Policy broadened to include the element of force that its framers had intended.

  War Department orders of April 15, 1870, established Arizona as a full department in the Division of the Pacific. No longer would troops in Arizona receive direction from a general in San Francisco with whom it took three months to communicate. Although New Mexico remained a district in General Pope’s Department of the Missouri, the army had at last acknowledged the magnitude of the Apache problem and taken a step essential to dealing with it effectively.10 The first commanding general, Bvt. Maj. Gen. George Stoneman, colonel of the Twenty-first Infantry, threw away part of the organizational gain by establishing his headquarters at remote Drum Barracks on the southern California coast. He tried to adapt the Peace Policy to Arizona by instituting a network of “feeding stations” for Apaches who renounced raiding and by campaigning against those who did not. Stoneman’s policies, however, accomplished little more than to set himself up as a target for the scurrilous abuse at which Arizona editors and political leaders were so proficient.11

  One of Stoneman’s feeding stations was at Camp Grant, a desolate post on the lower San Pedro River. Here Lt. Royal E. Whitman of the Third Cavalry earned the trust and affection of a growing band of Aravaipa and Pinal Apaches under Eskiminzin. But depredations continued, and nothing could convince Arizona’s long-suffering populace that sanctuaries such as Camp Grant did not harbor the offenders. At dawn on April 30, 1871, a force of 148 Tucson citizens—Papago Indians, Mexicans, and white Americans—fell on the sleeping Apache rancheria at Camp Grant. In a half-hour of savage slaughter, rape, and mutilation, they wiped out its inhabitants and carried off 29 children into slavery. Accounts differ on the number killed—as few as 86, or as many as 150. There is no disagreement that most were women and children.12

  Applauded by frontiersmen, the Camp Grant Massacre appalled Easterners. President Grant threatened to clamp martial law on the Territory if the culprits were not tried. One result was to speed efforts to extend the Peace Policy to the Apaches. In July 1871 Vincent Colyer, secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners and a humanitarian with impeccable credentials, set forth for the Southwest clothed with presidential authority to make peace with the Apaches and establish reservations for their control and civilization. Another result was the relief of General Stoneman. This was engineered by Arizona’s Gov. Anson P. K. Safford, who also persuaded President Grant, over the objections of General Sherman and Secretary of War Belknap, to ignore the claims of forty colonels of the line and award the coveted departmental command to a mere lieutenant colonel. Thus did George Crook, fresh from his triumphs over the Paiutes, transfer from Oregon to Arizona.13

  Reaching Arizona early in June 1871, Crook lost no time in touring his command and taking the measure of his adversary. The Apaches would have to be soundly thrashed, he concluded, before a lasting peace could be arranged. At this juncture, early in September, Vincent Colyer arrived in Arizona. Crook suspended operations as an enraged populace watched “Vincent the Good” try to “mesmerize the Apaches into peace.” As a result of Colyer’s labors, however, Apache and Yavapai bands began to gather on a series of temporary reservations he established at various military posts.14

  Despite this rudimentary reservation system, murder and robbery continued. Crook gave the Indians until February 15, 1872, to report to an agency. But once more a peace emissary materialized. At the President’s request, Brig. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedman’s Bureau since 1866, turned his keen humanitarian instincts from black man to red. During April and May the one-armed, Bible-quoting general traced much the same steps as Colyer, made some revisions in Colyer’s reservations, and induced more Indians to come to the agencies.15 He failed, however, in a major purpose—to make peace with Cochise. This able Chiricahua leader had attained almost legendary stature in the decade since an army lieutenant with more zeal than judgment provoked him to a destructive and unremitting hostility.16 No peace that failed to include Cochise could be successful.

  In the autumn of 1872, therefore, Howard returned to complete his mission. He persuaded a white frontiersman, Thomas J. Jeffords, who had long been a friend of Cochise, to guide him to the elusive chieftain. Cochise had been signaling a desire to make peace for more than a year, and in fact he had spent the winter of 1871–72 on the Canada Alamosa Reservation in New Mexico. Thus, Howard’s daring in going all but unescorted into Cochise’s Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains assumes less importance than the negotiations—and concessions—that eventuated in peace. The journey and confrontation form an adventure of high drama which Howard fully exploited in his memoirs. His agreement with Cochise seems not to have been committed to writing. Apparently it was simply that the Chiricahuas could have a reservation in the familiar haunts of the Chiricahua Mountains, with Tom Jeffords as their agent. Imperfect and transitory as this settlement proved, the fact remains that Howard ended the Cochise wars.17

  For more than a year, none too patiently, Crook had held his troops in check. Twice he had been forced to cancel offensive operations. Privately contemptuous of both Colyer and Howard, he had, nonetheless, treated them courteously and hospitably and had given them ample opportunity to test their methods.18 Between them, Colyer and Howard had established a reservation system for the Apaches—Tularosa, New Mexico, for the Southern Apaches (Warm Springs, Mimbres, Mogollon, Copper Mine); the Chiricahua Reserve near Fort Bowie for Cohise’s people; San Carlos, on the middle Gila River, replacing Camp Grant as a reservation for the Aravaipas, Pinals, and part of the Coyoteros; and reserves at Camps Verde and Date Creek for the Yavapais. More than 5,000 Apaches and Yavapais had professed peace and had begun to draw rations on these reservations.19

  But the peace emissaries had not brought peace. Between September 1871 and September 1872, Apaches and Yavapais perpetrated 54 officially verified raids that took the lives of 44 people, wounded 16, and recorded a loss of more than 500 head of stock. Although some of the newly settled reservation Indians acted in good faith and genuinely wanted peace, others participated in these raids. As usual, there was no effective way to distinguish between the two. Furious citizens excoriated Colyer and Howard, threatened the reservation Indians with another Camp Grant Massacre, and demanded that Crook be unleashed.20 Even the Indian Bureau now admitted the need for force—not war, declared Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis A. Walker, but discipline, as contemplated by the Peace Policy.21 By whatever nomenclature, Crook’s offensive of 1872—73 stands as one of the most brilliant and successful ever mounted against Indians.
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  Three factors, all tested in the Paiute operations in Oregon and Idaho, awarded Crook success. First, he made extensive use of Indian against Indian. Second, he developed his mule trains to peak efficiency, allowing him superlative mobility. And third, he gave the troops morale, confidence, energy, and determination unknown in Arizona under previous regimes. He inculcated in officers and men a precept fundamental to success: “The trail must be stuck to and never lost.” As his aide recalled it, “No excuse was to be accepted for leaving a trail; if horses played out, the enemy must be followed on foot, and no sacrifice should be left untried to make the campaign short, sharp, and decisive.”22

  Crook’s strategy called for a winter campaign. In winter food was harder to come by, and the enemy could choose between comfortless security in the cold, snowy high country or insecurity in the congenial lower elevations. Camps Verde, McDowell, Grant, and Apache defined a rough semicircle within which lay the precipitous Mogollon Rim and, falling away from the rim to the head of Tonto Creek, the rugged Tonto Basin. By fielding from these posts nine troop-strength commands of the First and Fifth Cavalry, each accompanied by a detachment of Indian scouts, Crook hoped to clear the country, along and outside the semicircle, of roving Apache and Yavapai bands, drive them into the Tonto Basin, then concentrate there for the kill.23

  The campaign began on November 15. Led by the Indian scouts, the columns unerringly sought out the quarry and kept them moving. Often in their haste the Indians left food and other possessions to be destroyed. Sometimes they dropped their guard and let themselves be surprised. In some 20 actions during the winter, the troops killed almost 200 Indians. Accounting for 76 of the dead, the Battle of Skull Cave, on December 28, 1872, was the most spectacular and, for the Indians, the most demoralizing. A command under Capts. William H. Brown and James Burns trapped about 100 Yavapais in a shallow cave high on the wall of Salt River Canyon. Bullets ricocheted from the sloping roof and boulders dropped from above filled the cave with deadly missiles and all but annihilated the defenders.

  Throughout the winter the scouting commands combed the Tonto Basin and its bordering mountains, the Mazatzals, the Sierra Ancha, and the Superstitions. It was the most punishing kind of soldiering, subjecting the troops to prolonged fatigue, hardships, and privations, and to extremes of climate and topography unmatched in the West. But it paid off in declining enemy morale. On March 27, 1873, a column led by Capt. George M. Randall, Twenty-third Infantry, surprised a rancheria on the top of Turret Peak, south of Camp Verde. Like the occupants of Skull Cave, those on Turret Peak considered themselves secure. Twenty-three died in Randall’s charge.

  Turret Peak broke Indian resistance. Groups of Apaches and Yavapais began to drift into the agencies to give up. On April 6, 1873, at Camp Verde, Crook met with Chalipun. He had 300 Yavapais with him and was said to represent 2,300. His speech of surrender, as summarized by Lt. John G. Bourke, explains why Crook won the Tonto Basin War:

  … General Crook had too many cartridges of copper (demasiadas cartuchos de cobre). They had never been afraid of the Americans alone, but now that their own people were fighting against them they did not know what to do; they could not go to sleep at night, because they feared to be surrounded before daybreak; they could not hunt—the noise of their guns would attract the troops; they could not cook mescal or anything else, because the flame and smoke would draw down the soldiers; they could not live in the valley—there were too many soldiers; they had retreated to the mountain tops, thinking to hide in the snow until the soldiers went home, but the scouts found them out and the soldiers followed them. They wanted to make peace, and to be at terms of good-will with the whites.24

  By the autumn of 1873 Indian Bureau listed more than 6,000 Apaches and Yavapais enrolled at Camp Verde, Fort Apache, Fort Bowie, and San Carlos in Arizona, and at Tularosa in New Mexico.25

  In the Ton to Basin campaign, the militant aspects of the Peace Policy were decisively invoked, to the satisfaction of military and civil authorities alike. As an exercise in guerrilla operations against an unconventional foe, it had been classic in conception, almost flawless in execution, and decisive in results. For several years, under Crook’s paternal eye and firm hand, the Apaches and Yavapais managed to live on the reservations in a condition of relative quiet that, however uncertain and potentially explosive, gave Arizona a period of unprecedented tranquility.

  In October 1873 the military telegraph reached Prescott and Fort Whipple, Crooks’ headquarters, from Fort Yuma, thus placing the Department of Arizona in close communication with higher headquarters. The first message clicked over the wire brought word of the promotion, in recognition of the Tonto Basin triumph, of Lieutenant Colonel Crook to brigadier general. In an era of rigid seniority, the President could pay no higher tribute or grant no greater reward than to jump an officer over so many seniors. The promotion outraged the officers thus ranked and left a legacy of rancor against Crook that persisted for years. But no officer deserved the honor more. None had studied and come to understand the nature of Indian warfare better. None had practiced it with greater skill.

  The brigadier’s billet awarded to Crook had been vacated the preceding spring by Edward R. S. Canby, commanding general of the Department of the Columbia. Assassinated by Modocs during a peace conference in California’s lava beds, he became the first and only general officer of regular rank to lose his life in Indian warfare. A spare, beardless veteran of thirty-four years, Canby was well known to the public as a distinguished Civil War general and to the army as a kindly, courteous, accommodating gentleman with a wide circle of friends. His brutal murder, treacherously conceived and executed, electrified the nation and dealt a shattering blow to the Peace Policy.

  Crook’s victory over the Paiutes in 1867—68 had ended Indian hostilities in the lake-dotted, lava-scored plateaus of southern Oregon and northeastern California. Relations with the Modocs, however, continued ominous. Numbering between 400 and 800, these tough, warlike people claimed as their traditional homeland the country around Lost River and Lower Klamath, Tule, and Clear Lakes, along the California-Oregon boundary. In the 1850s and early 1860s the Modocs had frequently attacked travelers passing through their domain. But they had also cultivated close commercial relations with the miners at Yreka, some fifty miles to the west, who gave them the colorful names by which they are known in the white man’s history. Thus did Kintpuash become Captain Jack. An able and ambitious young leader, Jack commanded the allegiance of the tribe’s militant faction.

  Captain Jack and his followers resisted the government’s effort to bring the Modocs, Klamaths, and Snakes into treaty relations with the United States. Reluctantly he allowed himself to be pressed into signing the Treaty of 1864, by which these tribes ceded their lands and agreed to settle on a reservation in the Klamath country. Homesick, bullied by the more numerous Klamaths, the Modocs found no contentment on the reservation. Besides, the government delayed ratification of the treaty until 1869. In 1865 Captain Jack took his band back to Lost River. Here they remained while their homeland began to fill with settlers. In December 1869 Superintendent of Indian Affairs Alfred B. Meacham persuaded Jack to return to the reservation. But after a stormy three months, Jack and some sixty to seventy men with their families were back once more on Lost River, and his white neighbors grew more and more vocal in demanding his removal.

  Both Meacham and his successor, Thomas B. Odeneal, favored forcible removal to the Klamath Reservation. The department commander, General Canby, refused to provide troops for such an undertaking while the permanent location of the Indians remained to be officially fixed.26 In July 1872, however, the Indian Bureau accepted Odeneal’s recommendation. Canby then authorized his subordinates at Camp Warner and Fort Klamath to help carry out the decision.27

  These subordinates were Lt. Col. Frank Wheaton, Twenty-first Infantry, commanding the District of the Lakes at Camp Warner, and Maj. John (“Uncle Johnny”) Green, First Cavalry, at Fort Klamath, the post clo
sest to the Modoc camps on Lost River. Canby cautioned them that if troops had to be used “the force employed should be so large as to secure the result at once and beyond peradventure.” Not until November 1872 did Superintendent Odeneal decide to move against Jack. And then he acted suddenly, requesting troops from Major Green “at once.” Green complied by ordering Capt. James Jackson and Troop B, First Cavalry, three officers and forty enlisted men, to carry out the superintendent’s wishes.

  Blame for what followed may be widely apportioned. Superintendent Odeneal promoted the decision to move Jack without understanding the strength of his resolve not to move and without giving serious enough consideration to alternative solutions that might have proved feasible. Both Canby and Green accepted Odeneal’s judgments uncritically and surrendered the initiative to him. A conspicuous characteristic of Canby was his reverence for constituted authority. Always he strove to carry out the spirit as well as the letter of decisions handed down from above. In his mind Odeneal’s July directive from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs represented such a decision. Actually, it was only the Commissioner’s ratification of Odeneal’s decision. An officer more jealous of his prerogatives or more sensitive to the historic rivalry between the Indian Bureau and the army would not have acquiesced so easily. At least he would have taken the precaution of arming himself with instructions from his own superiors. And given the explosive potential of the situation, he would surely also have kept closer control of his subordinates. Both General Schofield, Canby’s immediate superior, and General Sherman later implied as much.28 Similarly, on the tactical level, Major Green let himself be stampeded by Odeneal into acting without careful planning, without consulting with Wheaton, without alerting white settlers who might suffer from a misfire, and above all, without the force that might have “secured the result at once and beyond peradventure.”