The next morning the surprised customs officers discovered that they had been tricked. They wanted to know where the Apaches and the stock had gone. Davis could only answer that he did not know. Moreover, nowhere they scanned with binoculars from the ranch roof could anyone spot a dust cloud. Accompanied by Blake, the Apaches had swung west into the San Pedro Valley and made their way north. Lieutenant Davis caught up with them, and on March 16, 1884, he and Blake turned the Apaches, and their stock and cattle, over to Captain Crawford at San Carlos.12
Nearly eight months after promising General Crook to settle again at San Carlos, Geronimo had kept his promise. “Honored” is too strong a word, for the eight months cost Mexicans dearly in life and property, caused continuing anxiety in the US military chain of command, and stirred Arizonans (and their newspapers) into frenzied abuse of General Crook.
Once more a “reservation Indian,” Geronimo would lead what observers believed a cooperative and contented life. It would last little more than a year before the final breakout.
EIGHTEEN
THE LAST BREAKOUT, 1885
GERONIMO HAD BEEN ON at San Carlos only five days when he gave the customary statement of Chiricahua leaders arriving from Mexico. His opening sentence put Captain Emmet Crawford on notice that Geronimo would be likely to make trouble. After begging General Crook to receive him at San Carlos, he had passed nearly a year tearing up Mexico and apparently thinking little about returning to the reservation. He had shed his humbling experience with Crook and, speaking directly to Captain Crawford, set forth in great detail his expectations. “Geronimo said that he has come here with the understanding that everything he asked for was to be granted him.”1
After a rambling discourse testifying to his pleasure at once more living at peace on the reservation, praising General Crook as God, and promising complete submission to authority, he repeated several times that Crook had promised him he could have anything he wanted and live wherever he wanted. The line around the reservation should be removed and his people allowed to settle on Eagle Creek and its tributaries. Whites who owned land there could be bought out. This country contained plenty of water, animals, and farming land. It would be ideal. He was “astonished”—he used the word repeatedly—that his wishes were not promptly granted (he had been at San Carlos only five days).
Geronimo also revealed a trait that had dogged him for years. He believed that “bad people” constantly conspired against him. He was gullible enough to believe every rumor and “story” that reached his ears. He believed Chief George, he said, when he came among the Chiricahuas and told of soldiers coming to arrest the people, a story that triggered the outbreak of 1881. Twice he admonished Captain Crawford not to believe bad things told by bad people. “If in future some one tells anything bad about him, he wants to know right away who it is that is telling bad things about him.” “If these Indians around San Carlos [that is, other Apache groups] come here after I leave and talk about me, I don’t want you [Crawford] to believe them.” This tendency, an element of the suspicion and distrust that had long ruled his relations with other Apaches and especially with all Mexicans and Americans, characterized his life on the reservation and played a significant part in his last breakout.2
Geronimo at once learned that he could not have all he wished. Captain Crawford confiscated his entire herd of cattle. All bore Mexican brands and became the subject of correspondence between the War and State Departments and the Mexican government. On July 26, 1884, Crawford held a public auction at San Carlos and disposed of the cattle. He turned the proceeds over to the Treasury Department for the State Department to draw on to meet claims of Mexican owners. Geronimo believed that his cattle were legitimate spoils of war, no different from horses and mules.3
The Chiricahuas camped across the San Carlos River from the agency, the same place Loco and his people had occupied before their abduction in 1882—supposedly the healthiest place on the Gila River. Nowhere on the Gila was healthy. Sandy, hot, infested with insects and thorny vegetation, malarial in places, almost unlivable in the summer, anywhere else seemed preferable. Even before Geronimo reached San Carlos, the chiefs favored Turkey Creek, in the White Mountains seventeen miles southwest of Fort Apache. Although Geronimo argued vehemently against this area in his interview with Crawford, the Chiricahuas decided on Turkey Creek. Early in May 1884 the move took place. This was White Mountain country. Lieutenant Britton Davis served as the Chiricahuas’ military agent. At nearby Fort Apache, Lieutenant Charles Gatewood presided as agent over the White Mountain Apaches.
General Crook followed the procession of 520 Chiricahuas to their new home. En route, he held a council with all the leaders and concluded that “they are all satisfied and contented and will give no further trouble if fairly treated.” Geronimo declared that he had stored in his head all Crook had told him in the Sierra Madre and would do so with what he said now. But he wanted Crook to remember what Geronimo said. In essence, this meant that Crook was now their Great Father, and he should guide them in their new life and treat them consistently and fairly. In these words, Geronimo probably spoke more sincerely than in his rant to Crawford in the first interview.
In his annual report in September, Crook remained optimistic, which reflected Crawford’s optimism. The planting had gone well, he wrote with some exaggeration, and remarked that Geronimo and Chatto had made the most progress and maintained the best-tilled fields.4
Closer to the Chiricahuas than Crawford and Crook, Lieutenant Davis did not perceive the Apache leaders as contented. “The more suspicious and intractable” made their camps several miles away from where Davis pitched a large hospital tent to serve as his storehouse and a smaller tent next to it for his living quarters. He named these malcontents as Mangas, Chihuahua, and Geronimo. Kayatena, by contrast, located his people on a ridge just above Davis’s camp, where he could watch everything that happened.5
Kayatena had been expected to cause trouble even before he came in. A fierce, independent war leader, he had never been on a reservation and never experienced any restraint by white officials. Before Geronimo arrived, while the Chiricahuas lived at San Carlos, Kayatena declared that he had lost all his horses and other property in gambling and that he was going on the warpath. Crawford dared not take severe action because it would likely stampede Geronimo and lead to another outbreak. The captain managed to smooth the affair over, although Kayatena continued to talk of war. After Geronimo had arrived, however, during a dance at Turkey Creek on June 21, Kayatena had some trouble with his wife and threatened to leave. Seeking an excuse to rid himself of Kayatena, Davis at once had him arrested by his scouts and sent to San Carlos.6
Official reports glossed over further proceedings by noting simply that he was tried by an Indian jury and banished to Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay. In fact, Crawford acted as prosecutor and judge, and San Carlos Apache chiefs eager to please Crawford composed the jury. Of course the jury found him guilty of fomenting unrest. After some telegraphic exchanges between Crawford and Crook, Kayatena set forth under escort for Alcatraz. Both Crook and his division commander, Major General John Pope, began to have second thoughts about the legality of trying and imprisoning Kayatena. When Crook visited the Chiricahuas in the fall of 1884, he talked of freeing Kayatena to return to his people. The chiefs objected, none more forcefully than Geronimo and Chatto. They had enjoyed the absence of the kind of turmoil Kayatena stirred. Crook left Kayatena at Alcatraz.
That General Crook had promised the Chiricahuas to do all in his power to secure the release of their people held in Mexico gained him their respect and friendship. The Chiricahuas may have looked to Crook, as they claimed, to guide them into the new way of life. But some of his guidance they abhorred. They regarded their traditional way of life as their own business, and any intrusive rules offended them. One was to forbid the custom of beating a wife for any offense and for cutting off her nose as punishment for adultery. Also, however, Crook insisted on banning t
iswin: no more processing of corn by expert Apache women to produce the intoxicant that fueled tiswin drunks. Both had long been traditional in Apache culture, and the Indians strongly resented any interference with them. They emphatically informed Davis of their attitude. Yet he had the duty of enforcing these rules, by persuasion, reprimand, or even jail time. The Chiricahuas continued to do as they pleased. In less than a year, tiswin would produce a crisis.
To police his charges, Davis obtained authority to discharge his entire company of Apache scouts, mostly White Mountain. He then rebuilt a unit of thirty Chiricahuas, the very ones who had come in from Mexico. Most notably, he appointed Chatto as first sergeant.
Like Geronimo a Bedonkohe, but twenty years younger, a nephew of Mangas Coloradas, Chatto had grown up to wield great influence. He had a strong and cunning mind, a splendid physique, and the courage of a successful Apache fighting man. Kicked in the face by a mule, he acquired the name Chatto (Flat Nose). Before returning to the reservation, he ravaged Mexico as fiercely as any Chiricahua and led the most successful raid into Arizona. Now he abruptly concluded that the white man’s way was best and switched sides to serve in the US Army, which he did competently and loyally. Chatto and Geronimo had fallen apart over some issue and remained hostile to each other for the rest of their lives. Into old age Chatto would disparage Geronimo.7
If Chatto and Geronimo had not collided already, Chatto’s new role as first sergeant of scouts widened the gulf between them. Geronimo believed that Chatto and interpreter Mickey Free told “bad stories” about him. They may have. That such stories, whether false, true, or exaggerated, influenced Lieutenant Davis is possible.
Chief Chihuahua enlisted in the scout company, as did relatives of Geronimo, including his son Chappo, now twenty. He insisted on the post of Davis’s “striker,” the enlisted man assigned to every officer as a servant, because it paid an extra five dollars. “The hardest work he did,” recalled Davis, “was saddling my mule, smoking my cigarettes, and loafing around Sam Bowman’s cook tent.”
From among the scouts, Davis selected three “secret agents.” No one knew who they were. At night, if one had something to report, a pebble struck the canvas side of Davis’s tent, and the agent quietly entered to report.8
Chihuahua later learned of the secret agents and also picked up tales that Chatto and Mickey Free tried to poison Davis’s mind enough to get the chiefs sent to Alcatraz to join Kayatena—the “bad stories” Geronimo complained of for the rest of his life. Angry, Chihuahua barged into Davis’s tent and announced, “I am quit.” Davis remonstrated. Chihuahua threw down his scout uniform and equipment and declared, “Now, give them to your spies. I won’t scout any longer.”9
During their absence in Mexico, the predictable result of the memorandum of agreement of July 7, 1883, giving Crook police control of the White Mountain Reservation kept it in a state of turmoil. Captain Crawford and Agent Philip P. Wilcox repeatedly collided, with Wilcox accusing the rigid, dedicated captain of overstepping his authority. The conflict over one incident after another produced reams of official documents involving each level of authority up to the cabinet secretaries. Sometimes Crawford did interpret police control too liberally and irritated Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln enough that he once suggested that Crawford be replaced. Finally, on April 21, 1884, less than a week after Geronimo’s arrival, Crook responded to Crawford’s formal application for a court of inquiry. The panel of three officers reviewed the voluminous records and took the testimony of most of the participants in the feud. Not surprisingly, on July 14, 1884, the court duly concluded that “the Crawford administration of affairs at San Carlos has been wise, just, and for the best interests of the Indians.”10
The military finding resolved nothing. The quarrel continued with growing intensity until November 1884, when Wilcox resigned in despair. Charles D. Ford, an honest and competent agent, replaced the corrupt and incompetent Wilcox, only to face an escalating conflict with Crawford. Although Crook firmly backed Crawford, in February 1885 Secretary Lincoln overruled Crawford in a major dispute. The captain asked to be relieved and returned to his regiment. Captain Francis E. Pierce replaced him early in March.
The long-running battle between Crawford and the two agents had its roots less in a highly competent officer determined to do his duty as he saw it than in the fundamental premise of the memorandum of agreement assigning him police control. Divided authority doomed it. Although Captain Pierce still held police powers, he proved much more flexible and less confrontational than Crawford. Distant in the mountains near Fort Apache, the Chiricahuas rarely felt the direct impact of any of the issues. Even so, the tumult at San Carlos added to the unrest already created by Lieutenant Davis’s effort to stop wife-beating and tiswin-making.
The lieutenant’s interference in Chiricahua customs did not reach crisis proportions at Turkey Creek. The people scattered among the forested creeks and valleys, farmed half-heartedly, and behaved much as they pleased, including regular tiswin drunks. Some of the leaders visited with Davis, First Sergeant Chatto daily. Nana and Loco came often to talk and relate their history and achievements to the young officer. Geronimo, Chihuahua, and Naiche never appeared.
Snow and freezing temperatures struck early in November 1884. Davis gathered the people and moved them to the lower elevation at Fort Apache. Three miles up White River, Davis pitched a comfortable walled tent while the Indians spread into the foothills and canyons along the river. Through a bitterly cold winter, they had nothing to occupy them. As the months passed, according to Davis, they “drew their rations, gambled, loafed, and quarreled.” He might have added that they indulged in more tiswin drunks than they had on Turkey Creek. Davis informed Crawford, “We are having a great deal of trouble this winter with tiswin parties. The Apache calaboose has quite a number of Chiricahua and White Mountain Apaches in it under that charge.” Scoldings were tolerable; jail time stoked increasing resentment.11
With the coming of spring 1885, the planting season began. Davis noted that women did most of the work. He regarded Geronimo’s effort as typical. He invited Davis to see his farm in the White River bottom. Davis could not go that day, but he inspected the blister that Geronimo proudly displayed on his palm. The next morning Davis rode out to the farm. Geronimo “was sitting on a rail in the shade of a tree with one of his wives fanning him. The other two were hoeing a quarter-acre patch of partially cleared ground, in which a few sickly looking sprouts of corn were struggling for life.” Davis pronounced no blame. The land was ill-suited for farming, and Apache women had always done the hard labor.12 (The wives would have been Mañanita, Ziyeh, and another wife, Ith-tedda. She was a Mescalero residing at San Carlos when Geronimo married her, probably in 1884.)
Both at Turkey Creek and Fort Apache, Geronimo continued to evoke contradictory opinions. By the spring of 1885, about the time of visiting his farm, Davis judged him “a thoroughly vicious, intractable, and treacherous man.” General Crook, who had praised his farming in the summer of 1884, regarded him as “vindictive, cruel, and crafty.” On the other hand, Lieutenant James Parker, stationed at Fort Apache, recalled of that period that “Geronimo we saw constantly; he was friendly and good natured.” He remembered an incident when the post surgeon, Dr. W. R. Fisher, tried to light a cigarette by rubbing two sticks together. He asked Geronimo how to do it. When “he came to understand what Fisher was driving at, he fell into paroxysms of laughter at the thought that a white man could hope to produce fire with two damp twigs.”13
Dr. Fisher figured in another incident that suggested an enigmatic Geronimo. He commanded high distinction as a curing shaman and regarded himself as a traditional “medicine man” versed in Apache healing techniques. Nevertheless, in September and again in December 1884 he went into Fort Apache and, “suffering intensely,” consulted Dr. Fisher. The doctor diagnosed him with “a local venereal disease,” not with the type that led to syphilis. Fisher treated him regularly. Early in May 1885 Geronimo
again visited Dr. Fisher, who pronounced him cured. Strangely, much as he believed in Apache ways and in his own powers, Geronimo sought treatment from an American doctor.14
In the early weeks of May 1885, as Geronimo learned from Dr. Fisher that American medicine had freed him of the painful venereal disease, the warming spring sun returned the Chiricahuas to their planting fields along White River east of Fort Apache. On May 11 Captain Pierce (Crawford’s successor) came up from San Carlos to assess the farming efforts as well as the disposition of the Chiricahuas. The next morning, May 12, Pierce and Davis moved the Chiricahuas from the White River back to their old haunts at Turkey Creek, a much more congenial location now that the snows had melted. Apaches with farms near Fort Apache could periodically return to tend them. Pierce’s visit, combined with the delight in returning to Turkey Creek, led to a grand feast in the afternoon.
The captain gathered the celebrants and told them how impressed he was with their behavior and promised to convey this sentiment to General Crook. Not to be outdone, the Indians responded. Naiche, always ready for a good time, “appeared in a long-tailed, senatorial ‘jim-swinger’ coat, and from the height of a new Studebaker wagon he made a speech about the blessings of peace. Even Geronimo talked along this line, if more briefly and with less enthusiasm.” Pierce duly reported his heartening conclusion to Crook. These Indians could hardly be driven to the warpath.15
Only three days later events proved Captain Pierce wrong. On May 13, as Pierce made his way back to San Carlos and Davis returned to his base near Fort Apache, the Apache women at Turkey Creek began preparing tiswin for another party the next day. As often in the past, the wife of Mangas, Huera, concocted the tiswin; she was a renowned expert as well as a rabble-rouser. On May 14, before the party, Geronimo and Mangas began to feed each other’s resentment of Lieutenant Davis and his acolytes, especially since Davis had lodged some of Geronimo’s followers in jail for drinking tiswin. They decided the time had come to stand up to Davis, and they enlisted every chief in their cause. When the party got under way at the camp shared by Geronimo and Mangas, Naiche, Chihuahua, Loco, and Zele joined them in the conspiracy and in indulging in the usual tiswin drunk. They planned to confront Davis the next morning.
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