by Will Henry
But, by damn! old Orlando Willcox wouldn't buffalo. "Push harder," he ordered all field commands.
We heard him.
Troops out of Fort Bayard ambushed Victorio and the main band as we drove them hot from behind. They killed close to fifty of the Apache. One of the dead was a big one—Victorio's beloved son, Washington. Victorio himself fought clear and made it away.
That coming fall he wasn't so lucky.
In October the Apaches, running for Mexico bad-scairt ahead of us, blundered square into the Mexican troops of General Terrazas all laid up in the rocks and waiting for them. It was a frightful kill. Only a few of the Indians got free. One who did not was Victorio himself.
The Warm Springs chief had been a fearsome fighter; his death ought to have warned his people of what was certain to come. Sieber knew them better than that.
"Wait till winter goes," Al said. "Give them the spring grass to fat their ponies. They got short tempers and memories to match. Summer will see them back."
"I don't know," I frowned, still doubtful from the terrible casualties in Mexico. "My hunch is they're whupt this time."
"Your hunch is just like the way they'll show up here," Sieber scowled, "full of piss and tizwin."
I laughed but Sieber didn't; he knew it wasn't funny.
July 1881 brought the Cibicu Creek Ambush, in Cibicu Canyon, and the Apache war was on again. It began when the army ordered troops into the canyon to arrest a renegade Dreamer calling himself Do-klanny, real name of Noch-ay-del-klinne. This Indian was preaching the old trash that all the dead Indians and killed-off buffalo were coming back to wipe out the white man. The advice me and Sieber gave the cavalry was to let Do-klanny preach. "Don't, for Christ's sake," Sieber pleaded, "send no troops into that hole."
Captain Hentig, who had been given the assignment, said the time had come to teach the red rascals a lesson.
Sieber looked at me and said, "Well, Horn, let us go and visit our friends in Tomcat Alley, over to Prescott. Or maybeso mosey down to Tucson and rest in the cool of some good Mexican saloon. I ain't of a mind to die so young, nor in such infernal heat. Where's my mule?"
But the army, having ordered Hentig into Cibicu Canyon, had shred enough of brains remaining to insist that Horn and Sieber go with him.
History ordered it from there.
The three Indians who were our guides were traitors and led Hentig into a set ambush just inside the black bore of the canyon proper. The Apache rifles blazed like summer lightning from the rocks, rivening the stifling heat of the canyon. The entire command would have died but for the fact I was in front and went full out, at first crack of Apache Winchester, for the high ground to our left—where a knob of the wall rock commanded the throat of the canyon, both ways, in and out. In the same jump I went for the knob, Sieber saw it from column's rear and likewise went for it. We got up there about the same time, me first by about two magazines of my Winchester. I never shot better and hit an Indian every squeeze, the last half dozen shots knocking red climbers off the canyon wall to their deaths below. Sieber was with me then, and half a dozen cursing, white-faced troopers. Our combined fire broke the Apache apart, and they fled on into the canyon, taking their dead with them.
When we came again below we found Captain Hentig dead, with eleven men wounded and the horse stock badly shot up. It was no good place to linger. We buried Hentig in the canyon, not grieving over it. It was officers like him that me and Al Sieber hated. And their men hated, too. Those troopers hardly put Hentig in deep enough to fend off a lame coyote. When we rode off and I looked back,
I swear I saw one of the dead officer's hands protruding from the rocks of his mound. More, it seemed to wave, as though in farewell, or some hopeless plea from past the grave to wait for him.
I don't know. The light in canyons plays quirky tricks with a man's eyes. I kept going. Like the soldiers ahead of me, I didn't care for the grieving sounds of the Indians, moaning and crying out softly for their dead, on in the bowels of the Canyon of the Cibicu.
The year turned and, in April 1882 Albert Sterling, chief of Indian police at San Carlos, was killed by a band of sixty bronks up from Mexico with Geronimo, Juh, Chato, and Nachee.
They used a log-mill buzz saw to cut off Sterling's head, which the squaws and their yammering pups then used to kick around like a football. Whiles this game went on, their menfolk took turns pumping lead into the stump of the corpse. It was later counted 123 recovered bullets from the beet-pulp body of Sterling, a decent man who was a good friend to the Apache.
There followed a thirteen-day chase of the guilty broncos by seven outfits of troops in the field around the clock. Dust and blood and the whine of bullet lead got our own Indians crazy. Hundreds of them deserted the agency or their own peaceful camps to flee with the Mexican hostiles. It made the greatest—me and Al said the grandest—flight of the Apache people in one bunch ever seen in Arizona. We figured, counting them past us from high rocks where we lay scarce breathing, that there was upward of one thousand Indians in that wild cavalcade. A thousand mad and angry Apache Indians running desperately for the Mexican line! And Sieber and me the chief scouts for all of our cavalry that was following them. What a time that was for us!
But what a dark one for the Apache.
Sieber and me scouted up close to the Indians and one night found them camping early. We got back to our commands and jumped the column making camp, scattering the Apache something fierce, putting them on the wild drive deeper into Mexico. Unbelievably, it happened again; we hounded them head-on into a big Mexican force under the Mexican commander, Colonel Lorenzo Garcia. Garcia killed seventy-eight Indians, fifty-four of them squaws and kids. Since, just shortly previous, our own troops had killed some eighteen of them in the skirmish that spooked the band into the Mexican ambush, it was a sober and sad Apache time that sunset in Mexico.
We were later in grief over it ourselves.
Colonel Forsyth our ranking officer near lost his commission for this high-casualty chase across the border. Al and me was only punished by short paychecks and some due-bill hard looks from agency Indians that had lost wild kin.
We survived both, knowing spring would pass. It did, bringing summer, July again, and Apache weather.
A new Dreamer was active in the renegade camps; he billed himself as the ghost of Do-klanny, although we knew him all too well as Na-ta-i-osh, a real bad one. He went out one scalding midnight with sixty tizwinned braves on a raid the Verde Valley still shudders at.
Sieber and I were on leave but was called in special to go after the killer broncos. We did so, angered at the need, and caught them in Chevlon Canyon where they could only get out crawling up the far wall of the cut.
We shot them off the face of the cliff rock. I had made the trap for them by a long, long shot which killed a gray pony that fell down into the trail of the cliff, blocking it. As the poor devils would dismount to pass this blockage afoot, we would drill them. It was target-butt practice.
Liars since have claimed it was a sergeant of Major Chaffee's "I" Troop did the fancy shooting that day in Chevlon Canyon. The sergeant tried for the gray pony, all right. And missed him thirty feet. I didn't miss him by nothing. The credit wouldn't have mattered, excepting that the rider of the gray horse happened to be Na-ta-i-osh. The pony pinned him falling. I think it was Sieber scratched him finally.
Bedonkohe Breakout
The rest of 1882 ran quiet up to September.
Sieber and me made some scouts of our own naturally. We had to catch up on our serious drinking in Mexican Tucson and from there, each time, ride home by way of Prescott to make sure Miss Pet and Madame La Luna was all right and safe from Indian raids.
The last time we got back we were met by big news.
General George Crook had come back to the Department of Arizona. And this time he'd brought with him a real Hot Trail Treaty, one that let the U.S. cavalry cross into Mexico any where, any time. It was the death sentence for the four wild
bands of the Chiricahua, especially the Bedonkohe of Geronimo. Old Red Beard would surely kill the Cherry Cows now. But not with me and Sieber along.
We had had our fill of the killing, we figured; remorse, I reckon, and maybe some outright disgust. When Crook sent for us to report in, we saluted proper and told him, "No thank you, sir; we are gone again on business."
I don't know what Crook said.
But we heard it blistered his pet mule's nose and set a brush fire to smoking in his adjutant's chin whiskers. One way and another, we felt it was time to go. We saddled up and went back into business for ourselves, prospecting over in the Dragoons. Such grand luck could not hold.
In March of '83 came the Chato raid.
This young Chiricahua, whose name meant "Flat Nose," rode a six-day circuit up into Arizona, out of Mexico. He went a hundred miles a day. Killed twenty-five white men and murdered one woman, carried off the son of a New Mexico judge from a stagecoach burn-out, stole seven hundred horses and cattle, burned twenty-three ranches, outrode ten companies of U. S. Cavalry, and got safe back into Mexico.
But Chato gave Red Beard Crook the fuel to fire up the Hot Trail Treaty, and Red Beard laid his fire careful.
First off, he asked every one of his commanders who were the absolute best scouts in the territory. He was told they was still Al Sieber and Tom Horn. Forgiving us, the general sent once more to Tucson for us to "come in."
Al and me had got us a new mine going in Tombstone by then and were making it pay. But Sieber couldn't stop his ears to the blare of the cavalry bugle. Away he went again. I felt Tom Horn owed the old German at least that much as to go with him and watch out over him. I still was sick of shooting bronco Indians for a fact. But the need hadn't changed for somebody to go after them. I figured I could do a better job of not shooting the good Apaches, than the other scouts, and so went with Al.
We had great luck to open with. Riding over to Willcox, where Crook was readying his Mexican column, we caught us a half-pint hostile loner buck name of Pa-nayo-tishn, or The Coyote Saw Him. Sieber nicknamed him Peaches, which is the name that stuck to him. This little fellow told us he knew the secret trail to the Apache hideout in the Mexican Sierra. Sieber so reported to Crook and advised the general to trust Peaches. He did so, and the big column set out down into Mexico following this one little bandy-legged Apache drifter. He never failed us.
It took weeks of frightful trail to locate the Apache retreat but, with Peaches to help us we found it at last for Crook. Going in hard, the red-bearded general caught near all the hostile Chiricahua, and those he did not catch promised by messenger to come in peaceful and pronto. Some of these did and more didn't. But we had us our great victory anyway.
We come back into the United States with the likes of Chato (he spelt it Chatto) and Bonito and Kaytennae (Looking Glass) and Loco, Nana, Chihuahua, and Nachee marshaling their bands along behind us. Only Geronimo did not follow, and he promised to do so as soon as he found his missing squaws and children. The count Al Sieber and I made for Crook of the captives came out at 389. Chato and Chihuahua later disappeared when no more word came from Geronimo, but it was still finish to the main Cherry Cow bands, even if yet again Tom Horn was fouled of the part he played. I will gladly confess that little Peaches was our 'scouts' scout." But without me to watch him and Sieber to watch me, he could have led us anywhere, and to our deaths, among other places.
Wagh, Peaches!
But you were still an Apache.
In February of the following winter of 1884, Chato came in from Mexico surrendering with a small band of nineteen people but a big packtrain and many cattle. In March,
Geronimo at last appeared. The great fighter came in with but eight followers but, lo! with 350 stolen Mexican cattle and a thirty-seven-mule packtrain staggering under plunder raped from the ranchos over the border. Both him and Chato were taken to San Carlos under armed U.S. escort. Many other hostiles continued to drift in that spring and summer. By late August, Crook was able to say for the newspapers, "For the first time in the history of these fierce people, every member of the Apache tribe is at peace."
"Well," Al Sieber said, "maybe."
Come April, his doubts took on heft. The politicians of the Indian Bureau had got through a secret order to have them "administer" the San Carlos Agency, their scheme to rob Crook of running the show. The Apache, somehow hearing of the Bureau's return to power, looked at Red Beard Crook, the respected "Old Clothes Soldier" of a hundred honorable chases after them, and felt sorry for their once-powerful friend-enemy. They began, as was natural, to look past him. Crook knew what was happening but was helpless. His orders had not been altered by a comma, but the darkskinned children of the desert had already demoted him.
The winters, oh Lord how they fled. It seemed but yesterday that Red Beard was pridefully reporting his Apache children at peace. But that was a year ago, and now another spring had burgeoned in the Arizona high country, and it was suddenly May of 1885.
Down at San Carlos, sly new civilian agent Ford (an Indian Bureau man) worked to shackle the cavalry troops and set the civilians free to again plunder the Apaches of all the great father in Washington provided to them for keeping the peace. It was suicide, Crook warned. No one heard him but the Indians. And of their number, Geronimo listened the hardest.
What was this? Red Beard reduced in power again? Confined with his Hot Treaty troopers to the ranges of Fort Apache. Aha! Ussen be praised. All was not yet lost of freedom's call to the Apache.
Geronimo raised the war whoop in the middle of the night of May 18., With him, fleeing San Carlos, went forty-two war-age bucks, ninety-two women and children. All vanished without a trace into the Arizona mountains, southbound for the Sierra of Mexico.
Nor did the implacable Gokliya disappear with only his personal Bedonkohe tribesmen in the ghostly breakout. He took Nachee, Mangas, (own-son of the great old Mangas Coloradas), Nana, and the ever-wild Chihuahua, with all their meanest fighters. It bid to be and proved to be Indian hell set fire again.
By June, five cavalry units from Fort Apache and adjacent posts remained in the field casting for the Geronimo fugitives, reported to be still in Arizona, and desperate. Twice we got our particular troops up to rifle range of the rear guard of the Indians, but no casualties either side. But as we pushed them, the toll mounted of their kills—twenty whites in Arizona alone. Then, crossing into New Mexico, they pillaged and burned a hundred-mile swath. On one ranch they killed the rancher, raped and strangled his wife, killed an older child with a hay scythe rip between the legs, left the other child, a blonde-curled three-year-old girl, hanging alive on a meathook outside the kitchen door. With that for farewell, they swept back into Arizona, attacked the supply dump at Guadalupe Canyon, near Fort Huachuca, killed the five soldiers guarding it, made off with seven muleloads of rifle ammunition. Two days later, we lost their trail for good. They simply disappeared. Birds of the air couldn't have made it into Mexico with less sign. Not me, not Al Sieber, not any white man who ever lived came to understand such Chiricahua medicine.
Apaches could literally vanish.
White men who doubted this had a habit of vanishing with them. Al Sieber accepted such things. He glanced over at me, looked south down into the broody stillness of the empty desert, and nodded his bulls head uneasily.
‘They're gone," he said. "Let us be likewise."
The land lay quiet, then, all of the summer and until late fall. In November, a new raider appeared. He was Josanie, also called Ulzanna, younger brother of the wild one, Chihuahua. He and ten men got into Arizona through the Florida Mountains. They killed thirty-eight people, rode 1,200 miles to do it, lost but one man of their own band and were never once sighted by soldiers. This brought Crook looking for Al Sieber and Tom Horn again.
We could have anything we wanted, the general said, and had only to name it. It happened it was for me to say, as Sieber was down with infection in his bad foot, and could not go. "All right," I agreed.
"Let me have Mickey Free and forty Apaches from Old Pedro's village, and we will go and get them for you."
I found Mickey, and he got ahold of Merijilda and Tissnolthos. With our forty Indian "war dogs" from Pedro's rancheria, we rode out in grim certaintude of coming up with the killers, likely inside forty-eight hours. Ah! the advices of ignorance!
We cast and rode, recast and rerode, the southeast quarter of Arizona Territory for five starving-cold weeks, and never saw a moccasin-print of Josanie or his men. All we ever found were blowing ashes of dead mesquite fires, and pony droppings dry enough to rattle on the icy ground when kicked. And we were the best Indian scouts alive.
Finally, along into December, the cavalry took pity on us and called us back in from the field. But pity proved not the idea, at all. A big excitement was in the winter air.
General of the Army Phil Sheridan was in Arizona talking with Red Beard Crook on how to finally kill the Chiricahua "bad ones." They had selected their troops to go into Mexico and do the job. There would be two columns, under Captain Emmett Crawford and Captain Wirt Davis, the two best Indian-hunting officers in the territory.
And what about us, what had we to do with it?
Easy.
Crawford wanted Tom Horn for his scout, Wirt Davis insisted on Sieber for his.