In January 1882 word reached San Carlos that the Apaches in Mexico intended to force Loco and his Warm Springs band to join them in the Sierra Madre. General Willcox alerted his border posts, and Colonel Mackenzie, now commanding the District of New Mexico, placed Lt. Col. George A. Forsyth on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad with six troops of the Fourth Cavalry. Nevertheless, on April 19, 1882, a war party under Juh, Nachez, Geronimo, Chihuahua, and Chato burst upon the Camp Goodwin subagency and, killing pdlice chief Albert D. Sterling, made off with Loco and several hundred people. Killing and looting their way up the Gila Valley, the Apaches turned southeast to the Peloncillo (or Stein’s Peak) Range, which hugs the Arizona-New Mexico border. Between thirty and fifty dead white people littered the trail behind them.
The army went into action instantly, though for the most part ineffectually. However, on April 23 one of Forsyth’s patrols uncovered the hostiles in Horseshoe Canyon of the Peloncillos. With five troops of the Fourth Cavalry and a scout company, he rushed into a hard-fought action that cost him five dead and seven wounded but failed to destroy the enemy. Another command, two troops of the Sixth Cavalry and some scouts under Capt. Tullius C. Tupper, took up the pursuit and followed the trail into Chihuahua. On April 28, about twenty miles south of the border, Tupper caught up with the fugitives and attacked, but withdrew after using up most of his ammunition without dislodging them from defensive positions. Forsyth, too, pursued into Mexico and, absorbing Tupper, pushed south on the Apache trail. On April 30, however, the column met up with a large force of Mexican infantry under Col. Lorenzo Garcia, who told of a disaster he and his 250 soldiers had inflicted on the Apaches the day before. Preoccupied with Tupper in their rear, they had walked into an ambush prepared by Garcia. In a furious contest they had killed twenty-two Mexicans and wounded sixteen but had lost seventy-eight of their own people killed, mostly women and children, and another thirty-three women and children captured. The rest of the Indians had fled into the Sierra Madre. Ordered out of Mexico by Garcia, Forsyth called off the chase and returned to the United States.12
The alarm created by the Loco outbreak had scarcely died down when trouble again erupted at San Carlos. A White Mountain warrior named Natiotish had established leadership of a small band of men who, refusing to surrender after Cibicu, had been in hiding ever since. On July 6, 1882, some of them ambushed and killed J. L. “Cibicu Charley” Colvig, Sterling’s successor as San Carlos police chief, and three policemen. Gathering strength until they numbered about sixty, the warriors raided northwest into the Tonto Basin. From Verde, Whipple, McDowell, Thomas, and Apache, fourteen troops of cavalry took the field. Ascending Cherry Creek, the fugitives climbed the escarpment of the Mogollon Rim to General Springs, a favored watering place on the “Crook Trail” between Forts Apache and Verde. Following him below, Natiotish spotted Captain Chaffee’s troop of the Sixth Cavalry and decided to set a trap. A deep, narrow canyon gashed the pine-covered plateau seven miles north of General Springs. On the far edge Natiotish concealed his warriors.
Veteran guide Al Sieber led Chaffee’s column. The next day, July 17, Sieber unmasked the trap. Moreover, undetected by Natiotish, Chaffee had been reinforced during the night by Maj. A. W. Evans’ squadron of two troops of the Third Cavalry and two of the Sixth, out of Fort Apache. Evans generously let Chaffee manage the battle. While occupying the Indians with fire across the canyon from one rim to the other, Chaffee skillfully slipped two parties, each consisting of two cavalry troops and some Indian scouts, across the canyon to strike on both enemy flanks. The attacks were vigorous and conclusive. Between sixteen and twenty-seven warriors died, and virtually none escaped unhit. The remnants scattered back to the reservation.
The Battle of Big Dry Wash—a misnomer, since it occurred on a branch of East Clear Creek—marked the end of hostilities with all Apaches except the Chiricahuas and Warm Springs in Mexico. It was also one of the few instances in which regular troops bested Apaches in conventional battle—principally because it was one of the few instances in which Apaches allowed themselves to be drawn into conventional battle.13
The Natiotish uprising provided further confirmation of the need for a change in the management of Arizona military affairs. Cibicu, the breakout of Juh, Geronimo, and others, and the raid that sucked Loco and his people into the hostile ranks aroused strong sentiment in Arizona for General Willcox’s replacement. Sherman, who had sharply criticized Willcox for his handling of the Nakaidoklini affair, toured Arizona in the spring of 1882 and, in fact, almost got caught up in the Loco outbreak. Probably the decision to replace Willcox was reached shortly after his return. But not until July 14, a week after Natiotish and his warriors began their raid, did War Department orders reassign George Crook to the Arizona command.
The new commanding general, taking command at Whipple Barracks on September 4, 1882, defined his task in terms of three major objectives: to bring the reservation Indians under control, to give protection to the lives and property of citizens, and to subjugate the hostiles operating out of the Sierra Madre.14 In large measure, the second depended on the other two.
First on the agenda were the reservation Indians. Crook went to San Carlos to guage their temper and to take the measure of the new agent, P. P. Wilcox. The Indians proved sullen, suspicious, and frustrated to the brink of revolt. The agent, more encouragingly, proved willing to let the army establish itself on the reservation and take on responsibility for management and discipline of the Indians.15
To establish military authority, Crook selected four officers he thought possessed special aptitude for dealing with Indians. Modest, efficient Capt. Emmet Crawford headed the group. Lt. Britton Davis aided him at San Carlos Agency. Lts. Charles B. Gatewood and Hamilton Roach worked with the White Mountain bands out of Fort Apache. These officers applied methods tested in Crook’s previous Apache experience—scout companies whose men lived with their people when not on assignment, a system of identification tags keyed to census records, a network of “Confidential Indians” reporting attitudes and intentions in the scattered camps, and, above all, the judicious exercise of firmness tempered by honesty, justice, tact, and patience. These techniques broke down the unity of bands, fostered factions sympathetic to Crook’s aims, and gave military authorities warning of impending trouble.16
Crook next turned his attention to the Chiricahuas and Warm Springs in Mexico. President Diaz had finally acquiesced in a reciprocal crossing treaty, signed on July 29, 1882, and Crook prepared to campaign in Mexico if necessary.17 Again he would employ tested methods—Indian scouts as the chief tactical arm and pack trains for logistical support. “The nearer an Indian approaches to the savage state the more likely he will prove valuable as a soldier,” Crook believed. The scouts, therefore, were “the wildest I could get.”18 At San Carlos and Fort Apache Crawford and Gatewood recruited about 250 such warriors and organized them in five companies.
While Chihuahua rocked with depredations throughout the winter of 1882–83, Arizona remained ominously untouched. The hostiles had withdrawn far to the south, amid the great gorges containing the head streams of the Yaqui River, and from here they sniped at the villages along the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre. Crook himself went to the border and sent Apache emissaries southward to try to open communication with them. Three of Crawford’s scout companies patrolled the border and probed quietly into Mexico in an unsuccessful attempt to discover their whereabouts. In March 1883, however, the Apaches organized two major raiding parties. One, under Geronimo and Chihuahua, thrust west and south into Sonora in search of stock. The other, under Chato and Benito, headed north to replenish ammunition supplies in the United States.19
Chato’s foray electrified the Southwest. With twenty-five warriors, he entered Arizona on March 21 near Fort Huachuca. In the next week, riding night and day, the raiders shot and plundered their way eastward into New Mexico, then slipped back into Chihuahua without once having even been glimpsed by the hundreds of soldiers an
d citizen volunteers racing frantically about trying to intercept them. They killed at least eleven people. From Washington General Sherman fired off a telegram ordering Crook to pursue and destroy the hostile Apaches without regard to department or national boundaries.20
Crook reacted promptly and energetically. At Willcox, a station on the newly completed Southern Pacific Railroad, he stockpiled supplies and concentrated both Regulars and scouts. He journeyed by rail to Albuquerque to coordinate his strategy with the New Mexican commander, Ranald Mackenzie. Crook then traveled by train to the capitals of Sonora and Chihuahua to clear his proposed movements with Mexican officials. By the end of April he was ready. While elements of the Third and Sixth Cavalry under Colonel Carr guarded strategic border points, Crook would lead a compact, carefully balanced column into the Apache haunts. It consisted of 193 scouts under Crawford and Gatewood, Adna Chaffee’s troop of the Sixth Cavalry (forty-five strong), and of course the ubiquitous pack train, 350 mules carrying ammunition and rations for sixty days. Of crucial importance, by a stroke of good fortune Crook had the services of an expert guide. One of Chato’s raiders who had put in at San Carlos, he had promptly fallen into the toils of Lieutenant Davis and readily agreed to take Crook to the hostile camps. His name was Tzoe, but the troops dubbed him “Peaches.”21
Crossing the Mexican boundary at San Bernardino Springs on May 1, the expedition followed the San Bernardino River to the Bavispe, then up that stream to the mountains. “The whole Sierra Madre is a natural fortress,” marveled Crook as his column penetrated an incredible tangle of towering, pine-capped ridges and plunging, rocky canyons that Mexican troops had never dared to enter. Pack mules slipped from the trails and fell to their death below. Each summit revealed a still higher one beyond. Apache signs abounded. On May 15 Crawford’s scouts stormed into the camps of Chato and Benito, and in several hours of fighting killed nine warriors and destroyed the thirty lodges composing the rancheria.
Crook knew that, thus alerted, the quarry could not again be engaged. But a captive girl told him that some, if not most, of the hostiles could be persuaded to surrender, especially when they learned of Crook’s presence in the very heart of their stronghold, guided by one of their own people, and hunting them with kinsmen from San Carlos. Crook freed the girl to act as an emissary, and within two days the Chiricahua and Warm Springs people began to filter in. They included, in the final tally, Geronimo, Chihuahua, Chato, Benito, Loco, Nachez, Nana, and Kaytennae. Only Juh remained obdurate, and few of his followers were said to have survived recent encounters with Mexicans.22
For a week Crook sparred with the Apache leaders—chiefly Geronimo, whose example, all sensed, would guide the others. He obviously wanted to return to San Carlos and give reservation life another try. Crook contrived an elaborate show of reluctance, explaining that the white people would condemn him for allowing the Apaches to escape the punishment they so richly merited. Only when Geronimo “begged”—or so Crook and his officers described it—did the general accede. But Geronimo now declared that he must tarry in Mexico long enough to gather in some of his scattered people, and Crook, his rations dwindling alarmingly, could no longer delay his departure. He recrossed the border on June 10 with 52 men and 273 women and children, mainly Warm Springs followers of Loco and old Nana, and the promise of Geronimo and his associates that the Chiricahuas would follow as soon as possible.
The fullness of Crook’s victory thus remained to be demonstrated. As the months passed with no sign of the Chiricahuas, he became increasingly a target of ridicule. Indeed, one story that gained wide currency pictured Crook as Geronimo’s captive in the Sierra Madre. Late in 1883, however, the Chiricahuas began to straggle northward into the United States. Nachez arrived first, with ninety-three people, followed in February 1884 by Chato and Mangas with sixty. At last, early in March, Geronimo and eighty followers, trailing a herd of stolen Mexican cattle, reached the border. Lieutenant Davis and his scouts—now almost wholly Chiricahua and Warm Springs warriors—met their kinsmen at the boundary and escorted them to San Carlos.23 With Juh now dead (he either drowned or fell to his death from a bluff while drunk), the Sierra Madre no longer harbored any significant number of Apaches.
Geronimo’s surrender, although belated, stamped Crook’s campaign into Mexico a complete success. An operation bold in conception and daring in execution had put to the test the unorthodox methods he had long championed. Pack transportation afforded maximum mobility. Indian scouts, supported by a small regular contingent, ferreted out the adversary. No obstacle, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, was allowed to deflect the expedition from its course. Crook won not by rounding up the fugitives or besting them in combat. Had they wished, they could have escaped at any time or even turned on him and inflicted severe damage. Rather, he won by demonstrating that he could mobilize Apache against Apache in a determined offensive and could penetrate the inner recesses of bastions always thought impregnable. Also, he knew Indian thought patterns well enough to exploit the demoralization this knowledge created once negotiations began. The Sierra Madre campaign of 1883 seemed to validate all the theories of Indian fighting Crook had formulated.
The surrender of the hostiles precipitated the question of how to manage them. Agent Wilcox resisted their return to San Carlos and enlisted (or manufactured, Crook charged) strong support for his viewpoint among the reservation Indians. Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln summoned Crook to Washington for conferences with Interior Secretary Henry M. Teller and Indian Commissioner Hiram Price. An agreement signed by the two cabinet officers on July 7, 1883, gave Crook full responsibility for the recent hostiles and “entire police control of all the Indians on the San Carlos Reservation.” To Captain Crawford fell the assignment of carrying out the army’s part of the agreement.24
The Chiricahua program, the exclusive property of the army, unfolded with surprising smoothness. Lieutenants Gatewood and Davis took the late hostiles to the high country around Fort Apache, scattered them along the streams draining south into Black River, and launched them on an agrarian life that they pursued with somewhat less than total devotion. Geronimo, Nachez, Chihuahua, and others remained distant and restless; but with scouts, spies, and the help of leaders such as Chato, Lieutenant Davis kept his charges in a generally satisfactory state of order and contentment. Most of what trouble occurred sprang from Crook’s ban on wife-beating and tizwin-making. Kaytennae, a youthful leader receiving his first taste of reservation life, built on the discontent engendered by these proscriptions to mount a serious challenge to military authority. But in June 1884 Davis reacted decisively. Backed by loyal scouts and four troops of cavalry, he arrested Kaytennae and sent him down to San Carlos, where Crawford had him tried by an Indian jury and packed off to Alcatraz prison—“for safe keeping,” as Crook phrased it.25
The army’s experience with its other function at San Carlos proved less satisfactory. The wording of the agreement of 1883 vesting in Crook “entire police control” of the reservation contained ominous potential for controversy over where the line ran separating his responsibilities from those of the agent. Quarrels between Captain Crawford and Agent Wilcox and his successor, C. D. Ford, confused and distressed reservation management and prompted Crawford, early in 1885, to request a transfer. Crook delivered virtually an “all-or-nothing” ultimatum in which he urged an expansion of military powers or relief from all responsibility for reservation Indians. General Pope, now McDowell’s successor as division commander in San Francisco and the proud bearer of two stars, vigorously seconded Crook. In Washington, however, Crook and his theories found less favor with Sheridan than they had with Sherman. Also, the Arthur administration was about to give way to that of Grover Cleveland. Thus, the issue was allowed to lie unresolved for several months.26 Meanwhile, the Chiricahua peace blew up.
The 1885 outbreak grew out of a challenge to military rule such as Kaytennae had organized a year earlier. This time, however, the conspiracy commanded broader support
and involved nearly all the principal Chiricahua and Warm Springs leaders except Chato. Their discontent centered, as usual, on the regulations governing tizwin and treatment of women. On the morning of May 15, 1885, the chiefs came in a body to Lieutenant Davis’ tent, confessed to a tizwin drunk the night before, and dared him to do something about it. Davis played for time by explaining that so serious a matter would have to be submitted to General Crook for a decision. But the telegram had to pass through San Carlos, where Capt. Francis E. Pierce had replaced Crawford. Lacking his predecessor’s experience, Pierce relied on Al Sieber for advice. Sieber, sleeping off a hangover, minimized the importance of the message and Pierce pigeonholed it. Two days later, acutely agitated over the continuing failure to hear from Crook, forty-two men and ninety-two women and children fled the reservation. Among them were Geronimo, Nachez, Chihuahua, Nana, and Mangas. Geronimo headed directly for Mexico. Chihuahua and his following, skillfully dodging some twenty troops of cavalry and more than 100 Indian scouts, raided in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona for almost three weeks before slipping across the international boundary.27
Even before Chihuahua crossed into Mexico, Crook had organized his response. Essentially it repeated familiar strategy. The reciprocal crossing agreement with Mexico had been renewed for one year on October 31, 1884,28 and Crook dispatched two highly mobile forces into Mexico to scour the Sierra Madre and try to flush out the Apaches. One, under Captain Crawford (recalled from his new Texas assignment) and Lieutenant Davis, consisted of a troop of the Sixth Cavalry and ninety-two scouts and crossed the border on June 11. The other, under Capt. Wirt Davis and Lt. Matthias W. Day, consisted of a troop of the Fourth Cavalry and 100 scouts and crossed the border on July 13. To keep the Indians from returning to the United States, Crook stationed a troop of cavalry and a scout detachment at every watering place on the boundary from the Rio Grande west to the Santa Cruz Valley, and backed them with a second line of reserves posted at key points along the Southern Pacific Railroad. Altogether, some 3,000 soldiers, three-fourths of them cavalry, patrolled the border country. Crook established his headquarters at Fort Bowie, in strategic Apache Pass at the northern end of the Chiricahua Mountains.29
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