A new era appeared to dawn with the arrival on August 21, 1877, of Agent Henry L. Hart. He immediately moved to repair the damage with the military as well as the restless Indians. He sought to clean out the rot long burrowed in the contracting system and, with the departure of Vandever, the fraudulent conduct of agency employees. As it turned out, Hart would prove the most corrupt agent in San Carlos history, his tenure culminating in a scandal that brought down the commissioner of Indian affairs himself.
The new agent had to deal with Apaches made uneasy by the concentration policy, which mixed so many tribes of Apaches that had long been at enmity, and by the summer-long shortage of rations. Worse, only ten days after taking control, he suddenly confronted two crises. On September 1, the always fractious Pionsenay, who had never settled at San Carlos, entered the Chokonen subagency and persuaded several men and their families to flee with him to Mexico.5
Probably coincidentally, on September 3 Victorio launched his long-planned breakout. He and Loco fled the reservation with about three hundred Chihennes and headed east for their home country. Cavalry and Indian police skirmished with them, but they made good their escape. In New Mexico they ran into the Ninth Cavalry, which pushed them northward to ultimate surrender at Fort Wingate. The army could think of no better solution than to place them at Ojo Caliente as prisoners of war until the government decided what to do with them. Victorio and his people greeted this move joyously—they were back in their homeland.6
Geronimo held fast with Naiche and the Chokonens, despite the temptations of Pionsenay and Victorio—and despite the fact that about 150 Chokonens and Bedonkohes who had refused to move to San Carlos raided in New Mexico and Arizona. Taza had agreed with Clum to settle in the Gila bottomlands east of San Carlos, where a subagency took care of them. The army erected Fort Thomas upstream from the subagency. Officials reported the Chokonens well satisfied. They may have said so, but these were mountain Apaches planted in a desert environment seared by the sun and swept by wind, sand, and dust. Worse, a nearby spring created a swamp that bred mosquitoes, and malaria would soon begin to strike down the people. Geronimo cannot have been any more satisfied here than the rest of the Chokonens, but he had been chastened by the weeks spent in irons behind bars.
Meantime, Juh had returned to Mexico late in 1876 and remained for more than a year raiding and fighting Sonorans. By late 1877 he and the other Apaches who had not moved to San Carlos with Taza, about 250 Chokonens, Nednhis, and Bedonkohes, had begun to concentrate near Janos in another bid to make peace. A Sonoran force took the trail of a group leading stolen cattle toward Janos. The camp stampeded before the Mexicans could attack, but they confronted a force of fifty to sixty fighters under Juh, Pion-senay, and Nolgee riding from Janos to help their comrades. In an exchange of fire, Pionsenay met his death.7
Back at San Carlos, Geronimo found himself labeled a “bad Indian” by none other than Victorio. When the Chihennes surrendered after their breakout from San Carlos, Victorio explained the motivation as the influence of “bad Indians.” These were about 145 Chokonens, Bedonkohes, and a few Chihennes who had been moved from Ojo Caliente by Clum in April 1877 and had chosen to remain with Naiche’s Chokonens rather than go with Victorio. Although they bore no direct blame for the breakout, Victorio correctly held them responsible for the removal by using Ojo Caliente as a base for raiding and thus bringing the wrath of the government down on all the agency people. In fact, Loco had opposed the outlaws using Ojo Caliente as a base, while Victorio had refused to condemn them. Geronimo was the most prominent of the “bad Indians” living with Naiche. On September 23, 1877, Agent Hart held a council with Naiche and the other Chokonen chiefs at their subagency. He appointed Geronimo “captain” of the Chiricahuas Clum had moved from Ojo Caliente. Together with Naiche and the Chokonen chiefs, Geronimo promised the agent that he would remain on the reservation.8
Affairs at San Carlos remained uneasy into the summer of 1878. The scarcity and uncertainty of ration issues caused anxiety and threatened hostilities. Appropriations failed to provide for the full amounts. Contractors proved consistently late in delivery. Graft continued to take its toll. Several times, emergencies forced the army to “lend” the Indian Bureau flour and the secretary of the interior to authorize purchases of beef and flour on the open market. At times Apaches took to the mountains to supply their own wants. Some committed depredations outside the reservation. General Kautz kept patrols ranging the country, which helped dampen the impulse to break out.
On March 7, 1878, Colonel Orlando B. Willcox took over from Kautz, serving in his brevet grade of major general. He continued Kautz’s operations. The Chokonen subagent used various words to describe the temper of his charges, including “sulky.” He believed that sooner or later they would flee.9
Two developments in 1878 contributed to the next stage of Geronimo’s life. In the spring, for the first time, malaria struck Naiche’s Chokonens with particular vehemence. Some fifty to sixty people died of the “shaking sickness.” Availing themselves of Agent Hart’s permission to augment their scarce rations by hunting and gathering in the mountains, many also sought to escape the malarial scourge by fleeing to the mountains.
Either by trade or as part of their scant rations, the Chiricahuas had acquired corn. Except for Tom Jeffords, agents as far back as Michael Steck in the 1850s had tried to end the manufacture of tiswin. Clum had used his police to break up tiswin stills wherever found. Now, without any police or other officials watching, Naiche’s Chokonens and Geronimo’s Chokonen and Bedonkohe followers resumed making tiswin.
On the night of August 1, 1878, Geronimo and some of his people staged a tiswin drunk. Well into the evening, with most of the group intoxicated, Geronimo began to berate his nephew (name unknown), “for no reason at all,” as Jason Betzinez recalled. In some manner, however, the youth offended Geronimo, probably a remark or behavior induced by tiswin. Mortified by the great Geronimo’s scolding, the nephew killed himself. While rare, suicide occurred among the Apaches, but for reasons more substantive than the nephew’s offense. Shamed—a common Apache characteristic— and vividly remembering his weeks in the San Carlos jail, Geronimo and his immediate family, three wives and two children, packed their gear and fled to the east. That no men went with him persuaded the agent acting in Hart’s absence that Geronimo would return when the affair blew over. He did not. He and his family kept going, south through the Peloncillo Mountains and into Chihuahua. Near Janos he teamed up once more with his old friend Juh.10
As in the past, when a real or imagined threat took shape in Geronimo’s mind, he reacted in the same way—Mexico. He had broken his promise to Agent Hart to remain with Naiche at San Carlos. He made no more such promises, and his breakout of 1878 would not be his last.
TWELVE
BACK TO SAN CARLOS, 1878–79
GERONIMO AND JUH HAD been close friends since youth and became close allies in the 1860s. Even before Cochise began to lose strength and journey frequently to Ojo Caliente in search of a satisfactory peace, Geronimo and Juh were tightly aligned. Mangas Coloradas had been a mentor more than a comrade. Cochise had been an admired leader of the Chokonens, whom Geronimo followed at times. But even before Cochise’s death in 1874, Juh and Geronimo had become true comrades, in war and peace.
Many thought Geronimo a Nednhi. Although he remained a Bedonkohe by heritage, by the 1870s his Bedonkohe band had largely taken up residence with the Chihennes, the Chokonens, or the Nednhis. At San Carlos, where Geronimo had settled with Naiche’s Chokonens in August 1877, he had been appointed “captain” of the combined group of Bedonkohes and Chokonens who had been moved from Ojo Caliente but had been labeled “bad Indians” by Victorio before he broke from San Carlos in 1877. None had followed the “captain” to Mexico after the tiswin drunk of August 1, 1878; for all its faults, San Carlos remained preferable to the uncertainties of Mexico. Geronimo now integrated with Juh’s Nednhis.
At Janos, Juh, Geronimo, and
the Nednhi subchief Nolgee had been negotiating with Chihuahuan authorities for peace and rations, as Juh had done periodically since the 1850s. Now, however, Chihuahua demanded impossible conditions: relocate all the Nednhis at Ojinaga, a town far down on the Rio Grande, and stay there. Insulted, on September 26, 1878, the Nednhis retaliated by ambushing a wagon train in Chocolate Pass, southeast of Casas Grandes, and killing all the occupants—twenty-five men, women, and children.1
With Sonoran troops in the field, the Nednhis then split into three groups. Nolgee returned to Janos to try to revive the talks. Geronimo took refuge about one hundred miles to the south. Juh hid in mountains even farther south. In October 1878 the two groups began moving north again, raiding as they came. Emissaries sent to scout conditions at San Carlos returned with reports of short rations and the “shaking sickness.” The three leaders preferred to take their chances in Mexico.
On November 12, 1878, disaster struck twice. At Janos Nolgee let his guard down and fell for the old Mexican stratagem of gathering the Indians to trade, getting them drunk, then falling on the helpless victims. Mexican federal troops surrounded them and wiped out two-thirds of the group, twenty-six women and children and nine men, including Nolgee. On the same day a Sonoran force fell on Geronimo’s group of about forty people in the mountains east of Nácori Chico. “I do not know how they were able to find our camp,” Geronimo later related, “but they were shooting at us before we knew they were near. We were in the timber. We kept behind rocks and trees until we came within ten yards of their line, then we stood up and both sides shot until all the Mexicans were killed. We lost twelve warriors in this battle.” (Geronimo did, but they did not kill all the Mexicans.)2
These disasters, especially the death of the prominent Nolgee, prompted Juh and Geronimo to give some thought to escaping the Mexican troops and gaining rations by returning to San Carlos. But for now, the adverse reports on conditions at San Carlos kept them in Mexico, raiding in Chihuahua and Sonora and occasionally in New Mexico and Arizona, in the usual way.
Victorio may well have joined them now and then. He and Juh disliked each other, but they could partner in raiding. After the Chihenne breakout from San Carlos in September 1877 and their surrender at Fort Wingate, the army sensibly held them as prisoners of war at Ojo Caliente until the government made up its mind. But the government could not make up its mind. Ojo Caliente was clearly the best place; leaving them in their homeland would almost certainly keep them peacefully happy. The Indian Bureau, however, was obsessed with removal back to San Carlos. As the argument dragged on month after month, Victorio alternated between pleading with officials at Ojo Caliente and raiding in New Mexico and Sonora.
Although Victorio had vowed to die rather than go back to San Carlos, he left the peace chief Loco to deal with the threat. In July 1878 the government resolved to take the Ojo Caliente Chihennes back to San Carlos. Both chiefs argued vehemently against the move, but by October they knew the government would use force if they resisted further. When the military escort took over, Victorio had vanished, leaving leadership to Loco. The grueling trek took a month, slowed by a mountainous trail and constant cold, rain, sleet, and snow. On November 25, 1878, Loco and 172 Chihennes arrived at San Carlos. The number included only twenty men.3
For the first half of 1879, the sometime negotiations with Victorio had focused on trying to get him to settle on the Mescalero Reservation, in the Sierra Blanca east of the Rio Grande, where Nana had already taken refuge to avoid the coming explosion. The Indian Bureau even started moving the Chihenne families from San Carlos to Mescalero. Confusingly, in July 1879 some high officials had proposed placing the Chihennes where they had belonged all along, at Ojo Caliente.
It was too late. Exasperated, Victorio had already taken his people into the San Mateo Mountains north of the Alamosa Valley. In September 1879, he declared war by seizing the entire horse herd of the troop of cavalry at Ojo Caliente. (Juh participated in this event.) The Victorio War lasted more than a year, pitting the entire Ninth Cavalry against the elusive Chihennes. Ranchers lost lives and stock, and the black troopers contended doggedly against the fugitives. On October 27, 1879, in rugged terrain a few miles south of the border in Chihuahua, Juh and Geronimo joined Victorio in a hard-fought battle with pursuing cavalry. Leaving the exhausted troops behind, the Apaches turned east and, with Juh and Geronimo participating, inflicted two massacres on the citizens of Carrizal, Chihuahua. The two then returned to their refuges to the west.
The Victorio War ended on October 15, 1880, at Tres Castillos, Chihuahua, when Mexican troops surrounded and all but annihilated Victorio’s following. The chief himself died, supposedly by his own hand. Old Nana and a remnant of Victorio’s force escaped the carnage and took refuge back in the Sierra Madre. In revenge, in the summer of 1881 he ravaged New Mexico in a classic operation called “Nana’s Raid.”4
By late November 1879, Juh and Geronimo had parted with Victorio and headed west to their base camp in the Carcay Mountains near Janos, raiding and plundering along a tortuous path to their destination. The Carcay Mountains, south of Janos in the angle formed by the Janos and Casas Grandes Rivers, had long been a favorite refuge of Juh and often of Geronimo. Rising five thousand feet and covered by shrub, they offered hiding places while affording easy access to Janos.
At their base camp in the Carcay Mountains, Juh and Geronimo confronted surprising news. In their absence, Chiricahuas from San Carlos had arrived bearing peace feelers, from their own people as well as from the military authorities. They wanted Juh and Geronimo to bring the Nednhis to San Carlos and settle on the reservation. Juh and Geronimo knew the emissaries well: the Bedonkohe subchief Gordo and Ah-Dis, a survivor of Nolgee’s slaughtered Nednhis who had taken refuge with Naiche’s people. Both had friends and relatives among the Nednhis.
In the absence of their leaders, the men in the camp could make no commitment. Two Nednhis with their wives and three children, however, agreed to accompany Gordo and Ah-Dis to a military post in the Chiricahua Mountains south of Fort Bowie and meet with an army officer there. When Juh and Geronimo came back to camp, they hoped serious talks could be held.
Juh reacted instantly and emphatically to Gordo’s proposal. “I am not going in, for anybody.” He got his gun out. “If they get me they kill me.”
Gordo placated Juh enough to get him to listen. “You got lots of children, girl children, and I don’t see why you run like a wild man—no sleep and food, no water. Why, you stay when you go back to white man’s village. Nobody kill you. They give you food and you not going to starve. Little children—you carry them around and get them killed and like the coyote, crow eat you. Now you got a good finish. Nobody going to hang you.” Gordo made sense, at least enough in Juh’s mind to keep the talks going all night. Despite the adverse reports from San Carlos, Juh gradually weakened. By morning, Gordo had prevailed. “You take me back over there,” said Juh.5
He would go, but not that simply. Both Juh and Geronimo distrusted the whites and remained deeply skeptical, suspicious, and unsettled by Gordo’s assurances. To coax them in would require infinite patience, skilled diplomacy, and weeks of frustration.
The patient diplomat was the officer waiting at Camp Rucker, in the southern Chiricahua Mountains. He was Lieutenant Harry L. Haskell, aide-de-camp to the department commander, Brevet Major General Orlando B. Willcox. In July 1878 Haskell had been assigned the seemingly impossible task of persuading Juh and Geronimo to return to the reservation. After months of burgeoning scandal at San Carlos, the Indian Bureau had assented to the detail of an army officer as acting agent. Captain Adna R. Chaffee proved a highly competent and efficient administrator, and he restored honesty and order to the governance of the reservation. Through the Department of Arizona’s chief scout, Archie McIntosh, Chaffee had sounded out Naiche’s Chokonens about the possibility of inducing Juh and Geronimo to bring the Nednhis in Mexico to live among them at San Carlos. Chaffee’s favorable report led General Wi
llcox to select Lieutenant Haskell for this delicate mission.6
Seeking out Tom Jeffords, Haskell obtained his consent to help by modeling the venture after Jeffords’s role in General Howard’s successful peace effort with Cochise in 1872. In September 1879, among Naiche’s people, Haskell found the chief and his leaders in a cooperative frame of mind. Haskell formed his peace party, consisting of Archie McIntosh, Gordo, Ah-Dis, San Carlos police sergeant Atzebee, possibly Chief Chihuahua, and George, an influential Chokonen who had close friends among the Nednhis. By September 20 Haskell had established his base at Camp Rucker, where he met Tom Jeffords prospecting nearby. Haskell promptly sent Gordo and Ah-Dis on their mission into Mexico. Not until mid-October did they locate Juh’s stronghold in the Carcay Mountains near Janos. Finding Juh and Geronimo absent (fighting with Victorio), they persuaded the seven Nednhis to journey to Camp Rucker. Sergeant Atzebee met them at the border and led them to Rucker.7
The wait at Camp Rucker proved long and frustrating. Discouraged, Haskell himself set out with a small party, including the two Nednhis, to probe south in the Guadalupe Mountains into Mexico. In the Guadalupes he teamed up with an Indian scout company under Lieutenant Augustus P. Blocksom. At San Bernardino Springs on December 12, a runner arrived in the camp and said that the Nednhi leaders wanted to meet with Haskell but that he should come alone, without soldiers. Accompanied by the runner and Blocksom’s interpreter, Haskell journeyed to the Nednhi camp. It lay in the Guadalupe Mountains, about forty miles east of Camp Rucker. The Indians had also sent a runner to Camp Rucker, and Archie McIntosh reached the camp a few hours before Haskell.8
The lieutenant confronted his last test. Unknown to him, a few days earlier the Nednhi leaders had held a council to talk more about the proposal of Gordo and Ah-Dis that Juh had already consented to. All but one of the leaders agreed to surrender. The discussion grew angry, and Geronimo ended it by drawing his pistol and killing the dissident.9
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