Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  For two years, 1877–79, Victorio traced a bewildering course around New Mexico trying to find a home satisfactory both to him and to the government. The break from San Carlos quickly collapsed as troops and Indian police harried the fugitives into surrendering at Fort Wingate, New Mexico. The army held them at Ojo Caliente, their old home, while the Indian Bureau pondered the problem and finally, almost a year later, decided to return them to San Carlos. Victorio refused to go and with about eighty men took to the mountains while the women, children, and old men journeyed back to the hated Arizona reservation. Early in 1879 Victorio again attempted to settle at Ojo Caliente, then in June appeared at the Tularosa Agency of the Mescalero Apaches, east of the Rio Grande, to investigate the possibility of living there. Cordially welcomed by the agent, who promised to try to have the Warm Springs families transferred from San Carlos, the chief at last seemed to have found a home. On September 4, 1879, however, suddenly persuaded that he was to be arrested and sent to Silver City for trial, he decamped once again. His own people, some Chiricahuas, and a few restless Mescaleros accompanied him. Two days later a war party of about sixty Apaches wiped out the eight-man herd guard of Troop E, Ninth Cavalry, at Ojo Caliente, and made off with forty-six horses. Victorio had declared war.34

  During September and October 1879 Victorio’s warriors spread over their mountain homeland in southwestern New Mexico, killing an occasional sheepherder or rancher who came within reach. Colonel Hatch deployed most of the Ninth Cavalry to the scene of action. After several skirmishes with the black troopers, Victorio gathered his men and headed for Mexico. Maj. A. P. Morrow followed across the border with a command so badly diminished and exhausted by hard service that Victorio easily held his own when overtaken near the Corralitos River on October 27. Morrow limped back across the line to Fort Bayard.35

  The hostiles rested in the Candelaria Mountains of northern Chihuahua. More warriors joined them—chiefly Mescaleros from the Tularosa Reservation and from the bands in the Sierra del Carmen against which Shafter and Bullis had campaigned in 1876—78. From 60 men, Victorio’s following grew to between 125 and 150. He showed his strength by ambushing and virtually annihilating two parties of Mexicans from Carrizal. This atrocity, taking the lives of twenty-six men in all, aroused General Trevino, who organized an expedition against the Apaches late in December. Almost at once, in January 1880, they slipped back across the border into the United States. Three times they clashed indecisively with Morrow’s troopers in the San Andres Mountains, then disappeared.36

  Late in February 1880 Colonel Hatch came south to take personal charge. Convinced that the hostiles drew supplies and recruits from the Tularosa Reservation, he won permission to disarm and dismount the agency Indians. To bolster his undermanned and worn-out regiment, two troops of the Sixth Cavalry and two Indian scout companies came from Arizona, and Col. Benjamin H. Grierson was to march from Texas with five troops of the Tenth Cavalry. Hatch intended to converge on the agency from the west and meet Grierson, moving from the east.

  The timing was arranged to allow Hatch’s command to probe the San Andres Mountains. Intelligence reports placed Victorio in Hembrillo Canyon, and Hatch planned to meet a column from Fort Stanton there on April 7. A broken water pump at Aleman Well delayed the colonel, and he pushed forward Capt. Curwen B. McLellan with 125 Sixth Cavalrymen and Indian scouts to keep the appointment. Reaching the canyon on the morning of April 8, McLellan found the Fort Stanton squadron, 100 black troopers under Capt. Henry Carroll, pinned down and closely pressed by Victorio’s warriors. McLellan attacked at once and, joining with Carroll’s men, drove the Apaches out of the canyon. They made good their escape by quietly stealing around Hatch, who was coming up with the balance of the command under Morrow. Captain Carroll and seven enlisted men had been wounded in the fight. Carroll claimed three Apaches killed, but only one body was found on the battlefield. Bad luck had cost Hatch a rare opportunity to destroy Victorio.37

  The disarming of the Mescaleros went badly. Hatch and Grierson met at the Tularosa Agency on April 12. By the sixteenth they had succeeded in assembling about 320 Indians. The disarming had barely begun when firing broke out and the Indians stampeded up a mountainside. Grierson’s cavalry charged in pursuit. A few Mescaleros fell victim to the carbine fire, between thirty and fifty escaped to join Victorio, and the rest returned quietly to their homes that night. Although Hatch and Grierson seized few arms, the sobering effect of this experience on the Mescaleros, reinforced by the presence of a strong guard left behind by Hatch, virtually eliminated the Tularosa Agency as a haven and supply base for Victorio.38

  After Hembrillo Canyon, Victorio and his followers had gone back to their mountain homeland west of the Rio Grande. Throughout May 1880 they killed and pillaged in the Black and Mogollon ranges, around Silver City, and even as far west as San Carlos, in Arizona, where their families still resided. (That the Indian Bureau fed the women and children while the army fought the men enraged Sherman. “Does not this magnanimity verge on the borders of folly?” he asked.39) Trying to bring the raiders to bay, Hatch and Morrow wore out and all but dismounted the Ninth Cavalry. At length, on May 23, an Indian scout company under H. K. Parker struck Victorio in the Black Range near the head of the Palomas River, a tributary of the Rio Grande. In a desperate fight, the scouts killed thirty hostiles and reportedly wounded Victorio in the leg before withdrawing because of depleted water and ammunition. After this setback, Victorio once again headed for Mexico. Major Morrow’s squadron of the Ninth twice intercepted the fugitives, but failed to prevent their escape across the boundary.40

  Certain that Victorio would return as soon as he had rested, Hatch asked to have Colonel Grierson again sent up from Texas to help. Grierson protested. Instead, he wished to distribute his command, eight troops of the Tenth Cavalry and four companies of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, along the Rio Grande west of Fort Davis and thus transfer the battleground from New Mexico to Texas. This would avoid the need to leave Texas unprotected and, if successful, keep the hostiles away from the Mescalero Reservation and nearby settlements. General Ord backed Grierson, and on June 28 General Sheridan consented.41

  Grierson had won a rare opportunity. A mild-mannered, big-hearted man, he had not fared well in the postwar army. He owed his Tenth Cavalry commission to the famed “Grierson’s Raid” through Mississippi in 1863. But lack of West Point credentials, identification with black troops, and the active personal enmity of General Sheridan helped make his frontier career frustrating and undistinguished. He now made the most of his chance. Rather than breaking down his troops in fruitless pursuit, as Hatch had done, he posted them at key water holes at which the enemy was likely to stop. His judgment that Victorio would reenter the United States through Texas rather than New Mexico proved correct. Hounded by nearly 500 Mexican troops under Col. Adolph Valle, the elusive Apache crossed the Rio Grande late in July 1880. He promptly became enmeshed in Grierson’s web of subposts.

  Grierson himself held the position that turned out to be crucial—a water hole named Tinaja de las Palmas in parched Quitman Canyon. With two officers, twenty-one cavalrymen, and his teenage son Robert, the colonel had fortified the position upon learning of Victorio’s approach up the canyon at the head of 150 warriors. On the morning of July 30, the little force of black cavalrymen held off the attacking Indians until relief columns, previously summoned, charged onto the battlefield from both east and west, “& golly,” wrote young Robert in his diary, “you ought to’ve seen ’em turn tail & strike for the hills.”42 Thwarted in several attempts to pass, the Apaches pulled back into Mexico.

  Again on August 2 Victorio crossed into Texas and, after two days of maneuvering, slipped through the screen of soldiers and rode northward on the west side of the forbidding Sierra Diablo Range, aiming for the Mescalero Reservation. With two troops of cavalry, Grierson raced northward, marching sixty-five miles in twenty-one hours. Bolstered by two more troops, he took possession of strategic Rattlesnake Spr
ings and on the afternoon of August 6, in a sharp but bloodless exchange of fire, kept the Apaches away from the water hole. Later in the day, eight miles to the east, the warriors jumped a provision train en route from Fort Davis. The escorting infantrymen held their own while Grierson’s cavalry rode to the rescue and drove off the attackers. Baffled, Victorio once again turned back to Mexico.

  Victorio next became the objective of combined Mexican-American operations. In February 1880 President Hayes had revoked the objectionable order of June 1, 1877, authorizing U.S. troops to cross the border without Mexican permission, and President Diaz, in turn, proved receptive to proposals for cooperative action against Victorio. In September 1880, while Grierson guarded the Rio Grande frontier, Col. George P. Buell crossed into Chihuahua with a large expedition of infantry and cavalry from New Mexico, and Col. Eugene A. Carr marched from Arizona with nearly all of the Sixth Cavalry to join him. They were to unite with Col. Joaquin Terrazas and about 1,000 Mexican troops for a sweep through Victorio’s favorite haunts in the Candelaria Mountains.

  These plans went awry when it became apparent that Victorio had gone farther south. The prospect of so many American soldiers plunging so deep into Chihuahua was disquieting to Mexicans. There is also more than a suggestion that Colonel Terrazas, a prominent political figure, felt confident of destroying Victorio without foreign help and did not intend to share any credit with Americans. Citing Buell’s Apache scouts as objectionable, he therefore ordered the U.S. commanders to leave Mexico at once. Five days later, as the American troops made their way back toward the border, Terrazas trapped Victorio in a canyon of the Tres Castillos Mountains and next morning, October 15, 1880, attacked. Sixty warriors and eighteen women and children died in the slaughter. This time Victorio’s legendary cunning failed him. A bullet from the rifle of a Tarahumari Indian auxiliary ended his extraordinary career.43

  The remnant of Victorio’s following, those who escaped the battle and those who were absent from camp on that fatal day, gave allegiance to wrinkled, battle-scarred old Nana, whose remarkable powers had been diminished only slightly by an age approaching, if not exceeding, seventy years. In July and August 1881 Nana and fifteen warriors swept through southwestern New Mexico in a memorable raid that led Colonel Hatch and his Ninth Cavalry in an exhausting chase featuring no less than a dozen small-unit combat actions.44 Then suddenly the area of Apache hostilities shifted westward, to Arizona and Sonora, and Nana turned up as a lieutenant to a leader fully as able as Victorio and even more difficult and costly to run down—Geronimo.

  The services of Hatch and Grierson and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry in the Victorio War of 1879–80 earned the bitter denunciation of frontier editors in the areas afflicted by Victorio’s incursions and have ever since been overshadowed by the scarcely more dramatic campaigns against Geronimo. One respected authority ascribes this to a tendency, then and later, to underrate or even ridicule the achievements of the black regiments.45 In truth, as both Generals Ord and Pope acknowledged, the black soldiers who pursued Victorio had endured some of the most punishing ordeals in the history of the Indian wars. The deserts and mountains of southern New Mexico and western Texas quickly broke down conventional troops. Of the Black Range and San Mateo Mountains, Hatch wrote: “The well known Modoc lava beds are a lawn compared with them.” Yet despite a condition of almost constant exhaustion, the black soldiers kept at the task, four times prompting Victorio to drop into Mexico to rest and refit. Hatch and Morrow did as well as could be expected considering the hostility of the land and the skills of their adversary. Grierson conducted a masterly campaign that turned the land’s hostile features back on the enemy. Victorio at last met his match in Chihuahua, but in Texas and New Mexico he met some worthy foes.

  NOTES

  1. Excellent analyses of border problems are in J. Fred Rippy, The United States and Mexico (New York, 1926), chaps. 9, 16, 17; and Robert D. Gregg, The Influence of Border Troubles on Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1876–1910 (Baltimore, Md., 1937). See also Clarence C. Clendenen, Blood on the Border: The United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars (New York, 1969), chap. 4.

  2. SW, Annual Report (1873), pp. 62–63, 68–69.

  3. Kenneth W. Porter, “The Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts, 1870–1881,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 55 (1951–52), 358–77. Kenneth W. Porter and Edward S. Wallace, “Thunderbolt of the Frontier,” The Westerners New York Posse Brand Book, 8 (1961), 73–75, 82–86.

  4. The clearest and most detailed description of these Indians and their habits was by William Schurchardt, U.S. consul at Piedras Negras, in annex to House Reports, 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 701, pp. 40–45. See also Lieutenant Bullis’ testimony in House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, pp. 190–91.

  5. The Kickapoo problem is well presented in A. M. Gibson, The Kickapoos, Lords of the Middle Border (Norman, Okla., 1963), chaps. 15–18. See also Wallace, Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier, chap. 6; and Wallace and Adrian S. Anderson, “R. S. Mackenzie and the Kickapoos: The Raid into Mexico in 1873,” Arizona and the West, 7 (1965), 105–26.

  6. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, pp. 422–23.

  7. For the Battle of Remolino, see sources cited in notes 5 and 6 above. Official correspondonce is in Wallace, ed., Ranald S. Mackenzie’s Official Correspondence Relating to Texas, 1871–1873, Part III. See also E. B. Beaumont, “Over the Border with Mackenzie,” United Service, 12 (1885), 281–88.

  8. Sherman to Sheridan, June 3, 1873, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers; Sheridan to Sherman, June 6, 1873, Sherman Papers, Vol. 35. LC.

  9. Gibson, chaps. 18–19.

  10. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, p. 26.

  11. Shafter is well characterized in Parker, The Old Army, pp. 100–1; and in Crane, Experiences of a Colonel of Infantry, pp. 64, 82, 85, 256. I have written of Shafter in “Pecos Bill on the Texas Frontier,” The American West, 6 (1969), 4–13, 61–62, upon which portions of this chapter are based.

  12. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, pp. 158–59, 168, 188. The Shafter Papers at Stanford University contain a few documents bearing on border crossings, which I have used through the courtesy of Erwin N. Thompson. See also Porter, “The Seminole-Negro Scouts,” p. 370.

  13. House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, pp. 9, 11, 56–59. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, pp. 179–80.

  14. This story is well developed in Rippy, chap. 17; Gregg, chap. 2; and, from the Mexican viewpoint, Daniel Cosfo Villegas, The United States Versus Porfirio Díaz, Nettie Lee Benson, trans. (Lincoln, Neb., 1963).

  15. House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, pp. 14–15, 18, 59–61, 71–72, 145–47, 159. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, pp. 7, 33, 94. House Reports, 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 701, pp. 448–50. Gregg, chap. 2.

  16. House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, pp. 53–54, 240–41. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No 64, pp. 169, 191–93, 268–69. House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 3d sess., Vol. 1, “Foreign Relations,” pp. 532–33. Bullis to Dodt, Oct. 12, 1877, Shafter Papers, Stanford, University.

  17. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64. House Reports, 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 701. See also House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13.

  18. Sherman to Ord, Nov. 2, 1876, Sherman Papers, vol. 90, pp. 451–53. Ord to Sherman, April 2, 1877, ibid., vol. 46, LC.

  19. Sheridan to Sherman, Nov. 84, 1877, Sherman Papers, vol. 47. Sherman to Sheridan, Nov. 29, 1877, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC.

  20. Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC.

  21. Wallace, ed., Ranald S. Mackenzie’s Official Correspondence Relating to Texas, 1873–79, p. 201.

  22. For this expedition see ibid., Pt. III; Wallace, Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier, chap. 10; Crane, pp. 73–77; Parker, pp. 104–12; and the following documents in RG 94, National Archives: Mackenzie to Vincent, May 28, 1878; Ord to Mac
kenzie, May 30, 1878; Sheridan to Townsend, June 4, 1878; and Mackenzie’s report, June 23, 1878.

  23. House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 3d sess., “Foreign Affairs,” pp. 557–57) 570–74.

  24. Gregg, chap. 3. Rippy, chaps. 7–8. SW, Annual Report (1879), pp. 6–7, 44–45. 85–86, 89–93.

  25. Sheridan to Sherman (confidential), Dec. 12, 1879, Sherman Papers, vol. 51, LC.

  26. In Sherman’s observation, President Hayes was easily moved by personal appeals, and he had bowed to the continued imprecations of Miles’ many friends and promised to promote him to brigadier general. He could do this before leaving office on March 4, 1881, only by forcibly retiring a general who had reached the age of sixty-two. Major General McDowell and Brigadier General Ord were the two who qualified. Of the two, McDowell was older, more senior, and by far wealthier. But he also enjoyed the friendship of Hayes and President-elect Garfield.

  After returning from a trip to San Francisco, McDowell’s headquarters, with Hayes, Sherman wrote to Terry: “McDowell entertained us in San Francisco in the sumptuous manner for which he is distinguished, and for which he is abundantly able. He also came east with a flourish to vote for Garfield in New York, where votes were wanted. Nevertheless, the moment I heard that the President had called Miles here I saw that Ord’s commission was in danger. I was Ord’s chum at West Point, served with him side by side ten years in Florida, the South, and California, and am familiar with his career since. He is a rough diamond, always at work on the most distant frontier; has a far better war record, and is a hardier, stronger soldier than McDowell [in] every way; he is as poor as a rat, having been all his life taxed with the care of parents and a large family. I was, therefore, bound as a man to go to his rescue, when I feared that neglect would result in an act of palpable, gross injustice. I put it in writing that if the President would retire McDowell and Ord, I and all would say amen, but if Ord alone would be forced out, I believed the Army and the world [would] cry shame!” Sherman to Terry, Dec. 5, 1880, Sherman Papers, vol. 91, pp. 541–44, LC.