Geronimo

by Robert M. Utley

  None of the Chiricahua chiefs or their followers, including Mangas Coloradas, knew anything of the changes taking place in Washington and Santa Fe. Nor would they have understood had they known. The governmental structure of the Americans, so different from Apache organization, remained a mystery for decades to come. What motivated the baffling fluctuations in American policy and action remained equally unknown. Somehow, a remote and vague “Great Father” determined relations with the Apaches.

  In March 1853 a new “Great Father” had taken office in Washington. President Franklin Pierce, following the usual practice, replaced the appointees of President Millard Fillmore with his own loyal followers. That meant a new secretary of the interior, a new commissioner of Indian affairs, and a new governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for New Mexico. A veteran fur trapper, David Meriwether, replaced William Carr Lane in Santa Fe. He in turn repudiated most of Lane’s program and named new Indian agents. Fortuitously for harmonious relations in Santa Fe, “Bull” Sumner yielded the New Mexico military command. Meriwether sought to negotiate treaties with all the tribes of New Mexico. He succeeded, although only a few Mimbres represented the Chiricahuas. The Senate ratified none of the Meriwether treaties.

  On July 6, 1854, a new agent arrived at Doña Ana. He was a Pennsylvania physician with proper political credentials, Dr. Michael Steck, and he turned out to be the best Indian agent in New Mexico, certainly the best the Chiricahuas had ever had or would have. Governor Meriwether instructed Steck to move his agency up the Rio Grande from Doña Ana to the vicinity of Fort Thorn, and he issued the September annuities there. By October Steck had toured all the Chihenne and Bedonkohe country under his jurisdiction and met with as many chiefs as he could find– except Mangas Coloradas.10

  Late in October the chiefs and their people began to gather around Fort Thorn for the next ration issue. On October 27 Mangas Coloradas came in with two other chiefs and ninety people, probably including Geronimo. Mangas met with Steck, the first meeting between the two. They quickly established a rapport that, as Mangas came in for the monthly issues, ripened into a genuine friendship and mutual respect. For the balance of the 1850s, each supported the other and established an increasingly close relationship.11

  Michael Steck saw the Mimbres as only a small part of his mission. The Mimbres River could not sustain even the Mimbres, much less other Chihennes. In August 1857 he urged that a new reservation be set aside on the upper Gila River with a military post of at least four companies and an agent to get them started farming and see to their immediate wants.12

  Steck did not yield his vision, even though it had already been severely undermined. A Bedonkohe had murdered a Navajo Indian agent, which led to a major military offensive against both Chiricahuas and White Mountains. Colonel Benjamin L. E. Bonneville thrust far down the Gila River and assaulted a White Mountain village. The campaign sent shock waves through all the Apaches.13

  Bonneville’s invasion predictably alarmed the Chiricahuas, and they began to draw off to the south and contemplate overtures to Janos for rations. Mangas’s hybrid following began to fall apart as he aged and younger chiefs asserted leadership of their respective local groups. His influence weakening and his country swarming with soldiers, Mangas turned to his son-in-law Cochise, now the leading chief of the Chokonens to the west. He remained with him until the Bonneville campaign had run its course.14

  Back at Santa Lucía Springs for the October 1858 issue of government provisions, Mangas and Geronimo took their provisions and again moved to Cochise’s country, from which they intended to launch raids into Sonora. About December 1, 1858, both Mangas and Cochise, with about a hundred Bedonkohe and Chokonen warriors, struck into Sonora. Geronimo accompanied Mangas. Cochise had returned with much stock by the end of December, when he met the energetic Michael Steck and received government issues for the first time. Mangas and Geronimo returned from Sonora in the middle of February 1859, also with many horses, mules, and other booty, leaving behind the usual scenes of devastation. With their Mexican plunder, they went back to the upper Gila and settled into farming near Santa Lucía.15

  By 1860, Geronimo was thirty-seven and a tough, seasoned fighter with a long record of raid and war in Sonora and Chihuahua. He had risen in stature to gain the respect and admiration of Mangas Coloradas. Mangas often took him on forays into Sonora as a trusted lieutenant, and he enjoyed the admiration of the Bedonkohes and Chihennes. He had also cemented relations with Cochise and often mixed with the Chokonens in the Chiricahua Mountains and used them as a springboard for incursions into Mexico. His home, however, remained the Gila country near his birthplace in New Mexico.

  That he lived there drew motivation from two sources: first, the nearby home of his mentor, Mangas Coloradas, at Santa Lucía Springs; second, his evolving role as a family man. Shortly after losing his mother, his wife, Alope, and his three children in the Carrasco massacre of 1851, Geronimo had married Chee-hash-kish, a Bedonkohe, and would later sire a son and a daughter. Soon afterward, he took still another wife, his third, Nana-thathtithl, another Bedonkohe. Together, they had one child. The family probably traveled occasionally with Geronimo but most of the time remained on the upper Gila.16

  As a well-known Bedonkohe fighting man and a close associate of both Mangas Coloradas and Cochise, by 1860 Geronimo had become a prominent figure not only among Bedonkohes but Chihennes, Chokonens, and even Nednhis.

  Three developments interrupted the favorable prospects of Steck’s alliance with Mangas Coloradas. First was the discovery of gold in the Pinos Altos Range twenty-five miles east of Santa Lucía and the gold rush this set off in 1860. Second was a grievous wrong to Cochise inflicted by a young army officer bereft of experience and judgment. Third was the outbreak of the Civil War.

  FIVE

  WAR WITH THE AMERICANS

  GOLD!

  Beginning with the great California discovery in 1848, the cry of “Gold!” invariably brought swarms of unruly American prospectors in search of elusive riches. It occurred repeatedly throughout the mountain West in the decades following the California strike of 1848. Always, gold-seekers encountered resident Indians, shouldered them aside, ignored any government effort to protect them, and treated any who resisted with violence and death. Tribe after tribe lost their lands, some their lives. Apaches enjoyed no immunity from the ruling American conviction that mineral extraction prevailed over all other forms of land use.

  Mexican lessees who mined at the Santa Rita copper mines intruded little on the Chiricahua world, nor did the few prospectors who probed the surrounding mountains for gold in late 1859 and early 1860. But on May 18, 1860, a party out of Mesilla made a big strike in the Pinos Altos Range northwest of the copper mines. By California standards, the influx of rough-hewn Americans set off by this discovery was minor, but by August 1860 seven hundred prospectors spread up the creeks from the new town of Pinos Altos. Mangas told his people to avoid the miners if possible, which was difficult.1

  Because of the activity centered on the mining town of Pinos Altos, Geronimo was often drawn to these forested ridges and peaks. They rose to above eight thousand feet but did not offer the tangled terrain that made the Mogollon Mountains to the north so secure a haven for him. The Pinos Altos (Tall Pine) Range lay west of Geronimo’s birthplace and tapered down to the prairies that bore most of the human traffic west and east. They figured frequently in Geronimo’s life so long as miners continued to antagonize the Chiricahuas.

  In May 1860 Agent Michael Steck, on leave in Washington, reached agreement with the commissioner of Indian affairs to establish a reservation on the upper Gila for the Mimbres and Bedonkohe Apaches. The reservation formed a square, fifteen miles on each side, anchored on the southeast corner by Santa Lucía Springs. The commissioner requested the US General Land Office to instruct the surveyor general of New Mexico to run the new boundaries.2

  By July 1860, the New Mexico superintendent of Indian affairs, James L. Collins, worried that t
he new reservation would conflict with the invading miners. He looked to a new military post to be established at the foot of the Burro Mountains to guard the Indians against the miners. (A rude collection of cabins christened Fort Floyd soon sprang up, later to be renamed Fort McLane; it lasted only three years.) Collins’s worries quickly took form when a party of Americans settled on the Gila within the reservation intent on founding a town and cultivating the soil to sell food to the miners. Committed to the reservation, the government refused to honor the claim and instructed Collins to remove the interlopers.3

  The world of Geronimo and his people verged on great change. Unknown to him, in November 1860 Americans had elected a new Great Father, Abraham Lincoln. Almost at once some of the southern states began to secede from the American union. More would follow, and in April 1861 civil war would break out between North and South. Though far distant from the homeland of the Chiricahuas, they would experience consequences of Americans fighting one another.

  Since 1849, Americans had flowed in increasing numbers across the southern route to California. The overland trail brushed the southern edge of Mangas’s country but did not seriously disturb the Apaches. Westward, it climbed to a pass named for a prominent mountain headland, Stein’s Peak (named in honor of Captain Enoch Steen, pronounced Steen although misspelled). The Stein’s Peak Range of wrinkled brown desert mountains, pierced by Stein’s Pass, was shouldered on the south by the Peloncillo Range, a long series of mountains snaking northwest from Mexico across southwestern New Mexico and into Arizona’s Gila country. These mountain chains would play a continuing role in Chiricahua history.

  After surmounting Stein’s Pass, the immigrant trail descended a long incline into the flat San Simon Valley, with the forested rocky up thrust of the Chiricahua Mountains rising against the western horizon. The trail then climbed into the Chiricahua Mountains. A large open gap lay to their north, but it was waterless, which forced all since Spanish times to cross the mountains through Apache Pass. Apache Springs (and several others nearby) provided the necessary water. On the north of the pass, the Dos Cabezos (Two Heads) reared their rocky knobs. On the south lay the peaks, forests, and rocky spires of the Chiricahua Mountains.

  Much longer and more tortuous than Stein’s Pass, Apache Pass opened on the west to the Sulphur Springs Valley, separating the Chiricahua from the Dragoon Mountains. This broad valley, rich with nutritious grama grasses, proved ideal cattle country—once the Indian threat moderated.

  These mountains and valleys formed the homeland of Cochise’s Chokonens. “Cochise’s Stronghold,” hidden among immense piles of boulders in the Dragoon Mountains, provided a virtually inaccessible base for the chief, but he frequently could be found in Apache Pass.

  In 1858 the Butterfield Overland Mail began running stagecoaches from Saint Louis to San Francisco. The coaches had to labor through Apache Pass on the overland trail. The company established a relay station in the pass, and Cochise quickly made friends with the attendants, even supplying them with firewood. Apache Pass would loom in relations between Americans and Chiricahuas for twenty-six years after 1860.

  The Chiricahua Mountains provided Cochise and his Chokonens with the equivalent of Geronimo’s Mogollon Mountains—a secure refuge against any intruders. Rimmed on east and west by two broad valleys, dry but grassy, the Chiricahuas rose to almost ten thousand feet at their highest peak. Twisting canyons drained the summits, providing ideal campsites, well-watered and rich with grass, the walls forming barriers against the incessant wind and the storms of snow and rain that swept the mountains in winter and summer. Ponderosa pine carpeted the heights with green. A forest of rock spires rose from a depression below a high ridge at the northern end. More than a refuge, the Chiricahuas provided the Chokonens with an abundance of game animals and edible plants. Apache Pass at the northern edge was more important to travelers than to the Chokonen residents.

  “Cut the Tent,” the Apaches called it. The Bascom Affair, white students have called it ever since 1861. “Cut the Tent” turned Cochise into an unforgiving foe of Americans and set off a war against them that lasted more than a decade. It also alienated Mangas Coloradas and Geronimo from the Americans because they participated, although defense of their homeland from Pinos Altos miners remained their highest priority.4

  In January 1861, Cochise returned to the Apache Pass area from a raid into Mexico. In his absence Mangas Coloradas, Geronimo, and some of their men, angry over the miners at Pinos Altos and other disturbances at home, had journeyed to the Chokonen country, then embarked on their own raid into Sonora. They had not returned when “Cut the Tent” began.

  As February 1861 opened, Chokonen scouts brought word to Cochise, his people secure in winter lodges in a mountain canyon, of a column of mule-mounted soldiers approaching from the west. That was routine news. Soldiers often threaded Apache Pass, destined for the two forts to the west or to the supply bases on the Rio Grande.

  On February 3 Cochise received word that the soldiers had camped near the Butterfield station in Apache Pass and that the officer wished to talk with him. Prodded by another messenger the next day, he arrived shortly before noon at the soldier camp, a line of tents near the Butterfield mail station. Sensing no danger, he had some of his family with him—his brother Coyuntura, two nephews, his wife, and two of his children. The officer, flanked by a few soldiers with muskets, exchanged greetings with Cochise, as the troops began their noon-hour lunch, and invited him into his tent at the end of the soldier line. Cochise and Coyuntura entered the tent and ate.

  With a white man interpreting, the officer began to question Cochise. The questions actually amounted to an accusation. Cochise, the officer said, had led a raid that seized the young stepson of the interpreter and some of his oxen. The soldiers had come to retrieve them. Cochise vehemently denied the charge, although he knew about the raid. The raiders had not been Chokonens, he explained, but other Apaches. Given a week, Cochise thought he could regain the boy and restore him to his father.

  Through the interpreter, the officer informed Cochise that he and his companions would be held prisoners until the boy was turned over. Furious that an American soldier would treat an Apache chief so insolently, Cochise instantly drew his knife, slashed the canvas wall of the tent, and bolted up the slope of a steep hill behind the line of soldier tents. The interpreter managed to fire a pistol round before the soldiers could even load their muskets. Swiftly Cochise gained the edge of a broad ravine and disappeared. Before he could follow, soldiers seized Coyuntura, as well as the rest of Cochise’s family. As Geronimo recalled years later, Cochise escaped by “cutting through the tent.”5

  An hour after his escape, Cochise came to a hilltop and shouted, asking to see Coyuntura. The soldiers answered with a blast of musketry. Cochise replied to this affront by raising his hand and, through the interpreter, denouncing the soldiers for wrongly accusing him of theft. He swore revenge, then vanished behind the hills.

  Early the next morning, February 5, Cochise dispatched a group of men to approach the stage station, where the troops now had barricaded themselves in the corrals. The Indians bore a white flag. A single Apache advanced to declare that Cochise wanted to talk between the lines. As the officer, interpreter, and two soldiers ventured out, so did Cochise and three comrades. Cochise tried to convince the officer that he did not have the boy and pleaded for the return of his family. The officer’s only response was a promise to release the family once the captive boy had been delivered.

  With these talks under way, one of the station attendants, a friend of Cochise’s, set forth to try to make his own peace. As he tipped over the crest of a ravine, Apaches seized him. As they struggled, the officer and his group raced back to the station. The Indians opened fire, knocking one down with a bullet in his back. The others made it to the corral, where the barricaded soldiers returned the Apache fire. Now Cochise had his own prisoner to bargain with.

  At this point Mangas Coloradas reached the scene
. He and Geronimo and their Bedonkohe warriors had returned from the raid in Sonora and joined Cochise in grappling with the crisis. Cochise retained leadership, but Geronimo took part as directed by Cochise.

  The following day, February 6, Cochise watched from the hills as soldiers cautiously led mules to water in Apache Springs. Still hoping to end the affair peacefully, he refrained from ambushing them on the trail twisting down a ravine to the springs. Instead, he appeared on a slope above the mail station leading the Butterfield employee seized the day before. He had bound the man’s hands behind his back and looped a rope around his neck. He offered to exchange the prisoner and sixteen mules for his family. Again the officer refused. Only the release of the captive boy would end the stalemate.

  A few hours later Cochise gained more hostages for bargaining. A freight train of five wagons entered Apache Pass from the west. Cochise had followed its approach across the Sulphur Springs Valley. Near the summit he sprang the trap. Geronimo strongly implies that he participated in this atrocity. They surrounded the train, seized the mules, and took the teamsters prisoner. Of the nine men, they spared the three Americans but bound the six Mexicans to the wagon wheels, tortured them, and set the wagons afire. Geronimo’s hatred for Mexicans would have given him particular pleasure in slicing, then incinerating the Mexicans.