Frontier Regulars
Page 48
Later in December Sherman wrote to President-elect Garfield: “I entertain for General McDowell the same friendly feeling, which I know you do, but I then believed, and now believe that [his retirement] would have saved you in time the delicacy of action in McDowell’s case which must arise in your administration, for I have such faith in your sense of manly justice, that you cannot go on sparing McDowell, to retire others equally or more meritorious to give places to the young vigorous Colonels, who are moving heaven and earth to secure promotion, among whom I will name Getty, Mackenzie, Hatch, Grierson, Merritt, Gibbon, Willcox, &c, &c, who commanded corps and Divisions during the war, and who properly claim recognition. My judgment was and is that the passing over McDowell to reach Ord was a terrible discrimination, calculated to shake the faith of the Army in what is construed Justice, without which no officer or soldier will strive for excellence, or be disposed to serve his country in distant stations with fidelity and zeal, preferring to seek promotion by intrigue and favor.” Dec. 20, 1880, vol. 91, pp. 571–73. See also Ord to Sherman, Nov. 11, 1880, vol. 53; Sherman to Ord, Nov. 19, 1880, vol. 91, pp. 524–25; Sherman to Sen. S. B. Maxey, Dec. 17, 1880, vol. 91, 562–63, all in Sehrman Papers, LC. See also Sherman to Sheridan, Nov. 13 and 19, 1880, Sherman Sheridan Letters, vol. 2, Sheridan Papers, LC.
27. For affairs on the Chiricahua Reservation, see Ogle, Federal Control of the Western Apaches, pp. 133 passim.
28. The Sherman quote is in Sherman to Kautz, Feb. 26, 1876, Sherman Papers, vol. 90, pp. 540–41, LC. The Clum story is told in Ogle, chap. 6, and Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria, chap. 14. Clum’s version is in a series of polemics in the New Mexico Historical Review: “Apache Misrule,” 5 (1930), 138–53, 221–39; “Geronimo,” 3 (1928), 1–40, 121–44, 217–64; “The San Carlos Apache Police,” 4 (1929), 203–19, 5 (1930), 67–92; “Victorio,” 4 (1929), 107—27. See also Woodworth Clum, Apache Agent: The Story of John P. Clum (New York, 1936). An excellent history of Kautz’ regime is Andrew Wallace, Gen. August V. Kautz and the Southwestern Frontier (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1967.
29. CIA, Annual Report (1873), pp. 289–90; (1875). pp. 42–43, 215–20.
30. SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 98–99. CIA, Annual Report (1876), pp. 3–4, 10–12. Ogle, pp. 162–70. Thrapp, pp. 169–70.
31. SW, Annual Report (1877), pp. 138–47. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (April 7, 1877), 563. Kautz to Sherman, April 9, 1877, Sherman Papers, vol. 46, LC. Wallace, Gen. August V. Kautz, chap. 10.
32. Kautz’ operations are detailed in SW, Annual Report (1877), pp. 133–37.
33. Ogle, pp. 172–75. Thrapp, pp. 171–76. Clum, “Geronimo.” CIA, Annual Report (1877), pp. 20–21; (1879), pp. xxxviii–xxxix.
34. Thrapp, pp. 179–81. CIA, Annual Report (1879), pp. xxxviii–xl, 114; (1880), pp. xliv, 120.
35. SW, Annual Report (1880), p. 86. Sheridan, Record of Engagements, p. 92. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers, pp. 210–14. Thrapp, pp. 182–88.
36. Leckie, pp. 214–15. Thrapp, pp. 189–93. James B. Gillett, Six Years with the Texas Rangers (New Haven, Conn., 1925), chap. 13.
37. SW, Annual Report (1880), pp. 94–95. Leckie, pp. 215–16. Thrapp, pp. 194–97. Thomas Cruse, Apache Days and After (Caldwell, Ida., 1041), chap. 6.
38. SW, Annual Report (1880), pp. 93–98, 154–57. CIA, Annual Report (1880), pp. 129–30. Cruse, pp. 77–80. Thrapp, pp. 197–98. Leckie, pp. 217–19.
39. Army and Navy Journal, 77 (March 27, 1880), 693.
40. SW, Annual Report (1880), pp. 96–110. Thrapp, pp. 198–203. Leckie, pp. 219–22.
41. For Grierson’s operations, see his unusually complete report in SW, Annual Report (1880), pp. 158–63; Thrapp, 203–7; and Leckie, pp. 223–28. I have written events in Fort Davis National Historic Site, Texas (National Park Service Historical Handbook, Washington, D.C., 1965), pp. 42–45.
42. Robert Grierson Diary, Fort Davis National Historic Site, Texas.
43. Thrapp, pp. 207–10. Leckie, pp. 227–29. Cruse, chap. 7. Gillett, chap. 15. King, War Eagle, pp. 192–94. Martin L. Crimmins, ed., “Colonel Buell’s Expedition into Mexico in 1880,” New Mexico Historical Review, 10 (1935). 133–42.
44. Sheridan, Record of Engagements, pp. 99–100.
45. Leckie, pp. 224–25.
Geronimo, 1881–86
AMONG APACHE LEADERS at the beginning of the 1880s, many boasted larger stature than Geronimo. Aged Nana, Victorio’s successor, combined the roles of elder statesman and vigorous war chief. Corpulent, mischievous Juh led the Nednhi band—Chiricahuas and others who made their home in Mexico’s Sierra Madre and their living by raiding settlements. Able, intelligent Chihuahua headed a Chiricahua band. Nachez, second son of Cochise but a weak leader, had succeeded to the chieftainship of the reservation Chiricahuas following his brother’s death during a trip to Washington, D.C., in 1876. Kaytennae (Nana’s heir apparent), Loco, Benito, Zele, Noglee, Chato, Mangas, and others enjoyed notable reputations.1
But it was Geronimo who finally emerged, in the middle 1880s, as the preeminent war leader of the Apaches. Of all the leaders, recalled a warrior who rode with him, “Geronimo seemed to be the most intelligent and resourceful as well as the most vigorous and farsighted. In times of danger he was a man to be relied upon.”2 Although not a chief, and despised by many of his own people, he compiled a record of intransigence in peace and skill in war that made him the terror of two nations. Mexican peasants regarded him as a devil sent to punish them for their sins.3 To Americans, he personified all the merciless brutality of Apache warfare.
In 1880–81, as Victorio and Nana ravaged New Mexico and Chihuahua, Geronimo resided in comparative quiet at San Carlos. Following his seizure by Agent Clum at Ojo Caliente in April 1877 (see p. 359), he had remained at San Carlos for a year before riding off to the Sierra Madre to join Juh’s Nednhis in plundering Mexican settlements. Mexican military pressures at length, in January 1880, prompted Geronimo, Juh, and 105 followers to return to the San Carlos Reservation.4 Conditions there made it fairly predictable that these stubbornly independent spirits would not remain long.
A variety of factors kept the reservation Indians constantly agitated. Despite a rudimentary irrigation system, farming efforts went largely unrewarded. Ration issues that might have compensated never reached adequate levels, the result of paltry appropriations compounded by contract profiteering and simple theft. Military inspection of issues dramatized but failed to eliminate fraud. After Clum, patronage politics visited a series of incompetent or corrupt agents on the Apaches. The “stench in the nostrils of honest men,” as the head of the Board of Indian Commissioners branded San Carlos’ administration, permeated even the Washington office of the Indian Bureau and moved Interior Secretary Carl Schurz to order Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra Hayt to clear his desk and depart within one hour. A year’s interlude, 1879–80, gave the Apaches an efficient and honest military administration by Capt. Adna R. Chaffee, but his civilian successor returned conditions to normal.5
The reservation festered with factional intrigue. It flourished both within and between the white and Indian communities, the currents overlapping and merging and intersecting in confused ebb and flow. Indian, white, and Indian-white alliances formed and dissolved in bewildering complexity. In addition, the concentration at San Carlos of Chiricahua, Warm Springs, Coyotero (White Mountain), Aravaipa, and Pinal Apaches, Apache-Yumas, Apache-Mojaves (Yavapais), and even a handful of Yumas and Mojaves, revived historic antipathies and heightened tensions. Boredom born of idleness, mixed with liberal doses of the potent native drink, tizwin, enlarged still more the potential for trouble.
White settlers, encircling the reservation in growing numbers, contributed to discontent. Arizona’s population doubled between 1880 and 1882, from 40,000 to 80,000. Mining and agricultural communities sprang up around the reservation. Miners intruded on the west. On the east Mormon farmers diverted waters of the Gila, on which the precarious crops of the Indians depended
. Coal was found in the south. Although the Apaches had no great attachment to the malarial bottoms of the Gila, they viewed with alarm the increasing encroachment of settlers on the reservation.
Conditions at San Carlos would have severely tried the most docile and obedient Indians. The Apaches were neither docile nor obedient. “These tigers of the human race,” General Crook later wrote, “resented anything like an attempt to regulate their conduct, or in any way to interfere with their mode of life”6—which of course was what the reservation was all about. It may well be doubted that even an ideal reservation could have contained a people so warlike and so contemptuous of restraint.
No Apaches were more independent or warlike than the Chiricahuas and Warm Springs. Those who were not in Mexico lived near the Camp Goodwin subagency about fifteen miles up the Gila from San Carlos. Juh and Geronimo were here with the people who had surrendered early in 1880. Other prominent leaders were Nachez and Loco. Principally from these Chiricahua and Warm Springs bands came the Indians who, between 1881 and 1886, fought the last of the Apache wars. White called them “renegades,” connoting, somewhat inaccurately, outlaws from their parent tribes on the reservation.
The trouble that set off the Chiricahua and Warm Springs outbreak of 1881 originated, paradoxically, with the White Mountain Apaches. Occupying forested, game-rich mountains in the northern part of the reservation, they endured few of the hardships and privations of their kinsmen in the burning deserts of the Gila. But during the summer of 1881 many of them fell under the influence of a shaman named Nakaidoklini, who preached a heady doctrine that offered the prospect of raising the dead and ridding the earth of the white interlopers. Featuring a special dance, the religion recalled similar creeds embraced by native groups in the past and anticipated the Ghost Dance movement that swept the Plains tribes eight years later. Nakaidoklini’s preachments greatly excited the White Mountain bands and even affected the White Mountain scouts at Fort Apache.7
The commandant of Fort Apache, Col. Eugene A. Carr, Sixth Cavalry, did not view Nakaidoklini’s activities as particularly ominous. San Carlos Agent J. C. Tiffany, however, saw deadly peril in a doctrine that called for the abrupt departure of all white people. He wanted the medicine man arrested at once and, if necessary, killed. The department commander seemed chiefly concerned with insuring that responsibility for any trouble rested with the Indian Bureau. Bvt. Maj. Gen. Orlando B. Willcox, colonel of the Twelfth Infantry, had succeeded General Kautz in March 1878. Since then, he had demonstrated scant aptitude for the difficult task of managing a department full of Apaches. Also, Willcox and Carr disliked each other and communicated with cold formality. In August 1881, a three-way conversation over the telegraph uncertainly linking Fort Apache, San Carlos Agency, and Whipple Barracks gained Tiffany the backing of Willcox and presented Carr with orders to arrest Nakaidoklini—an assignment the colonel regarded as heavy with the risk of unnecessary violence.
Carr’s apprehension proved justified. On August 30 he marched into Nakaidoklini’s village on Cibicu Creek, about thirty miles northwest of Fort Apache, with two troops of cavalry, eighty-five men, and a detachment of twenty-three White Mountain scouts. In a tense confrontation, the mystic submitted and, placed in the custody of Sgt. John MacDonald, was warned that if he tried to escape he would be killed. His angry followers, about one hundred strong, dogged Carr’s march down the valley. As the command bivouacked for the night, they suddenly attacked. At the same moment the scouts mutinied. Their first volley caught Capt. Edmund C. Hentig in the back and cut down six soldiers. Nakaidoklini tried to crawl to safety, but Sergeant MacDonald, down with a bullet in his leg, and a trumpeter shot and killed him. A hastily formed skirmish line swept the assailants across the creek, and the two sides exchanged fire until nightfall. The encounter had cost Carr Captain Hentig and four men killed and another four wounded, two mortally. He was surrounded by a growing body of warriors and had lost most of his horses. Under cover of darkness, therefore, he led his command in a stealthy withdrawal from the battlefield that undoubtedly averted a disaster on the morrow.
Held by only a handful of infantry, Fort Apache lay under threat of retaliation by outraged Apaches. Several killings in the vicinity warned of an attack on the fort itself—a tactic to which Indians almost never resorted. The arrival of Carr’s battered column on the afternoon of August 31 lessened the danger. Even so, on September 1 warriors opened fire on the fort, wounding an infantry officer and shooting Carr’s horse from beneath him. Assault parties pressed in on two sides and gained some of the outlying buildings. They were driven off, however, and the effort to take the fort collapsed.
Garbled reports reaching San Carlos told of the massacre of Carr and his entire command at Cibicu. Eastern newspapers spread the word with sensational headlines reminiscent of those that proclaimed the Custer disaster. With the telegraph cut and the post surrounded, not until September 4 did Carr get a courier through with a report of the Battle of Cibicu and the attack on Fort Apache.
Relief over Carr’s safety did not temper General Sherman’s determination to see the offenders severely punished. “I want this annual Apache stampede to end right now,” he wired General McDowell, “and to effect that result will send every available man in the whole Army if necessary.”8 General Pope, visiting in Santa Fe when the news of Cibicu burst, hastened a relief force from Fort Wingate and recalled Mackenzie and six troops of the Fourth Cavalry from Ute duty in Colorado. McDowell sent reinforcements from California. Sherman, incensed over Willcox’s delay and indecision, designated Mackenzie as field commander charged with rounding up the Apaches who had attacked Carr.
During the balance of September, Carr raced about the reservation in response to a barrage of confusing and contradictory orders from Willcox. His movements, however, combined with the heavy buildup of troops on the reservation, frightened most of the fugitives into surrendering. By the time Mackenzie assumed command at Fort Apache late in September, few organized groups remained at large. Five of the mutinous scouts who had surrendered were brought before a court-martial, which sentenced three to death by hanging and two to imprisonment at Alcatraz. Despite some sentiment for harsh punishment, no action was ever taken against the other Apache participants in the Cibicu affair.
Given the history of antipathy between Willcox and Carr, a dispute over Cibicu was predictable. Agent Tiffany, of course, bore prime responsibility for insisting on the arrest. But Willcox promptly placed interpretations on the confused exchange of telegrams preceding the arrest that threw on Carr the responsibility for doing the agent’s bidding. The controversy might have remained a local matter but for other quarrels between the two officers that at length provoked Willcox into preferring charges against Carr for exceeding orders in attempting to seize Nakaidoklini and for mismanaging the Battle of Cibicu. A court of inquiry in the summer of 1882, however, gave Carr an almost total vindication, noting only certain errors of judgment in his dispositions at Cibicu.9
Even this gentle stigma infuriated Carr and motivated years of unsuccessful attempts to purge it from his record. Without injustice, however, the court might have been considerably more critical. During the confrontation with Nakaidoklini and the subsequent march to the night’s bivouac, Carr seemed to ignore highly visible evidence of the volatile disposition of the Apaches and to treat the whole affair with deliberate indifference. He took no precautions to meet the violence that was obviously possible, if not probable. Also, even though he knew the scouts to be under Nakaidoklini’s spell, he failed to guard against their disaffection. He should have been ready for battle, yet the eruption of gunfire caught his command dispersed and unprepared. The court displayed remarkable charity in characterizing such negligence as “only” errors of judgment.
But the worst errors are chargeable to Willcox. He succumbed to Agent Tiffany’s alarm and overrode Carr’s judgment. The order to arrest Nakaidoklini was unwise, as General McDowell later stated.10 That the medicine man’s followers escape
d punishment conceded as much. And Willcox’s effort to make it appear as though his orders were merely a response to Carr’s assessment of the danger posed by Nakaidoklini was a petty maneuver to evade responsibility that the record plainly shows to have been his. Willcox’s role in Cibicu and its aftermath marked him, in the eyes of Generals McDowell and Sherman, as unsuited for departmental command.
The most serious and lasting consequence of Cibicu was to rekindle Chiricahua hostilities, for in suppressing one uprising the army accidentally touched off another. Throughout the White Mountain disturbances, the Chiricahuas had remained quietly at the Camp Goodwin subagency, but the swarming of troops on the reservation filled them with apprehension that they were to be punished for depredations in Mexico. On September 25, 1881, General Willcox, who had established himself at Fort Thomas, accepted the surrender of two White Mountain bands and paroled them to the subagency, seven miles down the Gila. On September 30, however, Maj. James Biddle led a squadron of cavalry down from the fort to take them back into custody. The White Mountains fled to the Chiricahua camps. That night, fearing an attack by the soldiers, seventy-four Chiricahuas under Juh, Nachez, Geronimo, and Chato cut out for Mexico. Willcox himself gave chase with a hastily assembled command of cavalry, infantry, and scouts. On October 2, at Cedar Springs on the west flank of the Pinaleno Mountains, the warriors fell back and fought off their pursuers for the better part of the day while the women and children made good their escape. In the Sierra Madre the Chiricahuas united with Nana and what remained of Victorio’s following, resting after their devastating raids in New Mexico (see p. 364). Once more the Apache threat hung over the Southwest.11