by Geronimo
Once the whites had these Chiricahuas inside the parley tent, however, they could not resist the temptation to capture them. A ring of soldiers closed up around the tent while, inside, Cochise was informed that he and his men would be held prisoners until the missing boy and the stock were returned. When he heard this, he whipped out his knife, slashed a hole in the tent, and leapt through it. The soldiers waiting outside were so surprised to see this tall Indian in their midst that they parted ranks like the Red Sea, and Cochise escaped. Soon after, he captured three whites as hostages and set about the business of long-distance negotiations to secure the release of his own men.
But the whites weren’t bargaining, and in a rage at their stubbornness, treachery, and ignorance, Cochise dragged one of the hostages to death behind his horse while a detachment of soldiers looked on. Later, still unable to get his men back, the chief had the other two hostages killed. In reprisal the whites hanged the Chiricahua head men in February 1861. The Cochise wars were on, and for ten years the chief made whites in Arizona and New Mexico wish they had questioned that Mr. Ward more closely. (The runaway boy, by the way, was Mickey Free, who later became a scout in the final Chiricahua campaigns.)
Whereas for the Plains tribes the coming of the Civil War had meant a temporary if incomplete relief from the relentless pressure of the troops, for the Chiricahuas things during the war years were even more hazardous. Both Confederate and Union forces were in their area. Both sides offered bounties for Apache scalps, but the contemplated Confederate strategy against the Indians was somewhat more savage than that of their adversaries. In instructions to the commander of the Arizona Guards in 1862, Confederate Governor John R. Baylor wrote:I learn from Lieutenant J. J. Jackson that Indians have been in your post for the purpose of making a treaty. The Congress of the Confederate States has passed a law declaring extermination to all hostile Indians. You will therefore use all means to persuade the Apaches or any tribe to come in for the purpose of making peace, and when you get them together kill all the grown Indians and take the children prisoners and sell them to defray the expense of killing the Indians. Buy whisky and such other goods as may be necessary for the Indians and I will order vouchers given to cover the amount expended. Leave nothing undone to insure success, and have a sufficient number of men around to allow no Indian to escape.
Fortunately for the Apaches, higher Confederate command found this plan too brutal, and it was never put into practice, though it was suggested that at such future time as was practicable the Apaches be “legally enslaved.”
In January 1863, Mangas Coloradas was treacherously taken prisoner and assassinated in what Geronimo calls the “greatest wrong ever done to the Indians.” (Like many Indians, Geronimo assumed that “Indian” and his tribe’s name were synonymous; in the case of many tribes there is but one word for both the tribal name and the word meaning human beings.) Though this blow for progress was struck by the Grand Army of the Republic, surely the Confederates would have approved its style, which is amply described in Geronimo’s narrative. Other similar acts of dishonesty—such as treating Apaches to a gift of piñon nuts seasoned with strychnine —continued during the war years, but at war’s end the final solution to the Apache problem was not in sight.
It might have emerged in a less grim fashion than it finally did had the Chiricahuas and other Apache groups been given the generous reservations and hunting preserves that Thomas Jeffords and a few other farseeing whites had requested for them. It was Jeffords who at last won the respect of the great Cochise and cooled the fires of his hatred so much that the chief was finally willing to bring his bands in near a reservation at Fort Bowie. Other Apache groups had already agreed to settle on reservations, but what happened at Fort Grant, Arizona, in the same year that Cochise and his Chiricahuas laid down their arms cannot have inspired them with much confidence.
At the end of April 1871, a group of 146 assassins marched from Tucson and fell upon the sleeping camp of the Arivaipa Apaches at peace on the Camp Grant Reservation. Papago Indians, Mexicans, and leading white citizens from Tucson stole in among the wickiups and began the silent butchering with heavy clubs and knives. A few minutes later when the camp became aroused, rifles did the work, and within a half hour the job was finished: an estimated 108 Apaches killed, only eight of whom were men, the rest of the males being off hunting. Later a trial was arranged for those implicated in the “fight”; a jury deliberated twenty minutes before returning an acquittal.
Can we better understand, then, that deep distrust of all whites that so clearly characterizes Geronimo, Victorio (also spelled Victoria), Naiche (also spelled Natchez), Juh (also Who and Whoa), and the Chiricahuas during the 1870s and ’80s? And of all the distrustful, the intransigent, the wild, the worst from the white point of view was Geronimo, because he was the best from the standpoint of Chiricahua culture. Among a people whose way of life was the raid and for whom the war of vengeance was the inevitable aftermath, Geronimo rose to prominence as a raider and warrior. Among a people who worshiped the land, Geronimo’s attachment to his territory became legendary.
So successful in raiding and warring did he become that he can best be described within Chiricahua culture as a war shaman. In Chiricahua culture, shamanism abounded and the possession of a ceremony, big or small, made one a shaman, but in times of strife the man who knew ceremonies for effectively dealing with enemies would be particularly important. It is clear that, for the Chiricahuas, strife was a way of life, but with the white Americans pressing them throughout the ‘60s and ’70s, tension and strife rose to new levels, and so did Geronimo. With the Chiricahuas’ way of life threatened as it had never been before, this man came forward to a position of leadership at least equal to that of a hereditary chief, which he was not.
Geronimo’s way was the old Chiricahua way, and nothing he saw in the behavior or actions of whites convinced him that Cochise was right in bringing his bands in to the reservation. Certainly he saw nothing very attractive in the style of life which the whites had marked out for the Chiricahuas once they got them on the reservation. They had never been very extensive or serious farmers, probably because they moved about so much; now they were to be exclusively tillers of the soil. The raid and the war of vengeance were now to be ended. A Chiricahua male could not beat his wife for misdeeds, nor could he cut off the end of her nose if he found her unfaithful. Nor could he even make tizwin, the maize-based beer of which he was so fond. In short, the Chiricahuas were to become pretend whites without being able really to share in the white man’s culture. They were to be prisoners in all but name.
These things went hard with the Chiricahuas, and especially the men, but they went harder with Geronimo than with anyone else, again because he was himself the perfection of the Chiricahua way. Others, less perfect—or with clearer vision, as history tells us now—preferred to make these difficult accommodations, and there is enough evidence to indicate that Geronimo was both hated and feared by some of his people because of his uncompromising behavior. In his autobiography he tells us as much when he recounts his early days as a warrior leading expeditions down into Old Mexico, but in the ’70s and ’80s he used tricks, lies, and sometimes outright kidnapping to get his people to continue to fight against the whites—and this he did not choose to tell his white editor.
In April 1876, Geronimo led a band of Chiricahuas off the San Carlos reservation in the first of his major transgressions against the new white way. For almost exactly a year he remained what the whites would call “at large,” which is to say that he lived the old Chiricahua way, but with a new focus of venom—the whites, who seemed more determined to rub his people out than the Mexicans ever had been. As the Arizona Citizen pungently put it in the immediate aftermath of the breakout, “the kind of war needed for the Chiricahua Apaches is steady[,] unrelenting[,] hopeless, and undiscriminating war, slaying men, women, and children ... until every valley and crest and crag and fastness shall send to high heaven the grateful
incense of festering and rotting Chiricahuas.” This was hardly beating around the bush, but what the paper chose not to say was that frontier opinion had never believed in the reservation system, even for tribes far more docile than Geronimo’s Chiricahuas. In New Mexico and Arizona potentially rich deposits of ore had been discovered, prospectors and then mining companies were rushing into the region, and instant settlements were popping up all over what had very recently been Apache lands. Plainly, these lands were now needed by a civilized people, and even a reservation so comparatively modest in size as San Carlos was a flagrant waste of commercially valuable real estate.
Moreover, the paper’s readers, the new residents of those instant settlements, were anything but Indian lovers. They were instead rough men and women, often violent, and many of them had failed in the settled lands back east. As Crevecoeur had observed more than a century earlier, it was not the prosperous and successful who emigrated from the settled lands to become frontiersmen. It was instead the poor and the desperate, and thus, he said, civilization’s incursions into new territory were routinely made by the “most vicious of our people.” A frontier ditty summed up the motley populace this way:Say, what was your name in the States?
Was it Brown or Jackson or Bates?
Did you murder your wife and fly for your life?
Say, what was your name in the States?
No accurate assessment of the Chiricahuas’ and Geronimo’s problems with the whites can be made without due consideration of the prejudices of the Southwestern frontiersmen who so raucously called for Indian lives—and lands.
During his time off the reservation, Geronimo and his people did their full share of raiding and killing, though even this early it had become convenient for whites to hang almost every crime in the region around his neck. After some months when he was observed hanging around the Warm Springs agency with a new herd of a hundred horses, orders went out to John Clum, the agent at San Carlos, to go east into New Mexico and arrest him there. Clum was an arrogant and a vainglorious young man, but he was also energetic, intelligent, and resourceful, and when he went over to Warm Springs he made sure to bring along with him about a hundred well-armed Apache police, whom he secreted in the buildings surrounding the agency parade ground. When he was ready, he sent word to Geronimo’s camp that he wanted to talk.
The war shaman and his people came into the agency on the morning of April 21, 1877, Geronimo grim-faced, his rifle across his arm, and confident he had the young White Eyes right where he wanted him. Speaking with only a small force showing, Clum told him he was here to arrest him and take him and his people back to San Carlos, where they belonged. As Geronimo listened to this through an interpreter, his scowl deepened and his thumb began to move toward the hammer of his rifle. “We are not going to San Carlos with you,” Clum recalled him saying, “and unless you are very careful, you and your Apache police will not go back to San Carlos, either. Your bodies will stay here at Ojo Caliente to make food for coyotes.” But Geronimo hadn’t reckoned with Clum’s hidden force, and now, at a prearranged signal, the rest of the Apache police burst from the agency buildings, rifles at the ready. Geronimo suddenly found himself surrounded, and in a few minutes Clum had him clapped in irons for the trip to San Carlos, where he languished in the stockade for several months. He was released at last only on the understanding that his roving days were over: this was where he would have to stay. Also, he would have to forsake the horse and the gun and go to work farming, an alien task, and one, it must be pointed out, that a good many whites in the region also found distasteful, preferring the possibility of striking it rich or at the very least the freedoms of cowpunching to picking at the dry soil with a hoe.
Geronimo learned to raise crops, and the agents claimed he became proud of the fruits of his husbandry. But in truth, few were fooled, and the white men who cared to look closely into the eyes of the captive shaman were not reassured by the unbanked fires they saw there: Geronimo was not a “good Indian” in any sense of the term, and certainly not in General Sheridan’s. But since he was a prisoner his captors felt safe enough in taunting him, often drawing a line across their throats with their forefingers to signify what fate awaited him. Meanwhile, intertribal frictions mounted on the reservation as did intratribal ones between those who wanted to walk the white man’s road (or felt there was no other choice) and those who stubbornly held out for the old ways, foreseeing no future for themselves as Indians under these conditions.
In September 1881, alarmed by recent developments on the reservation, including a sudden concentration of troops, Geronimo led another break from it, going south to the Sierra Madres, where so often in the old time the Apaches had been safe from all pursuit. But this was not the old time. Now there were enemies on all sides and many more of them, and now, too, the whites had put General George Crook into the field. Before, when the army had tried tracking the Apaches into the mountains, it had been like “chasing deer with a brass band,” as one officer ruefully put it. But Crook quickly understood that only Apaches could successfully track Apaches, and when he began his pursuit of Geronimo he did so with a predominantly native force. Only Apaches, Crook found, had what it took to persevere in that often unforgiving landscape; and where the army would have had to give up, the Apache scouts knew how to keep on going. At the end of May 1883, Crook and his force ran Geronimo’s people to earth and got them to agree to return to San Carlos, though he did give them a two-month grace period to round up groups scattered through the crags.
It was almost a year later when Geronimo showed up at the border, and he announced his coming by a mile-high cloud of dust rising from under the hooves of cattle and horses he had stolen from the Mexicans during these months. If the whites placed such a premium on riches, he was at least going back to their world well supplied with these. Alas, they were all taken from him at San Carlos.
Now it was even tougher to live on the reservation than it had been before: it was overcrowded; there were even more serious intertribal antagonisms; and as for Geronimo, he was a man with a reputation. Still, as he played at farming, he schemed for a way to get his people together again for a large break that might destroy the reservation system forever. As usual in situations of this sort, the whites were playing right into the warrior’s hands: they were ever ready to give the natives cause to revolt by being utterly ruthless in their attempts to destroy tribal culture. In this instance it was the issues of tizwin drinking and wife beating that brought about the confrontation Geronimo had been seeking.
In the middle of May 1885, with the situation at San Carlos tense over these issues, Geronimo told Naiche and another chief, Chihuahua, that Lieutenant Britton Davis and Chatto, a friendly Chiricahua chief, had been murdered and that the whites were going to arrest the three of them for the crime. In fact, the murders had never taken place, though Geronimo had instructed two warriors to commit them once the break had been made. Geronimo’s plan worked, and the three men and a sizable band left the reservation and traveled toward Old Mexico. But as an indication of how the tide was running, when Naiche and Chihuahua discovered how they had been tricked into this act of defiance they came near to killing Geronimo.
Again General Crook was sent into the field, and again he found the Chiricahuas after an incredible campaign, which ended—or at the time seemed to have ended—with Crook’s famous conference with Geronimo and the chiefs at El Canon de los Embudos, March 25 and 27, 1886. The conference became famous not only because it was thought to have represented the final capitulation of the man who had come to be the Bad Injun in the white American mind, but also because it was attended by a photographer and a reporter. C. S. Fly, one of the West’s most intrepid photographers, made the trip to the canyon and brought back a series of remarkable pictures, the best known of which shows the whites seated in an open-ended circle with their quarry, Geronimo, squatting in the center, looking small against these big bearded men. From the accidental composition of the photograph, howeve
r, you would think he was a meteorite just dropped into their midst. In the background lurk the armed figures of his Chiricahua warriors.
In terms of actual negotiations it was not much of a conference. The Chiricahuas were well supplied with guns, ammunition, and horses, all of which they had stolen since they jumped the reservation; but they were vastly outnumbered, they were hungry, and the people were getting tired of running. All except Geronimo. After Chihuahua and Naiche had come forward on the twenty-seventh to make rather abject surrender speeches to Crook, the old warrior himself, no chief and so not able to really speak for anyone but himself, came forward and in a few simple words gave up.
Two or three words are enough. I have little to say. I surrender to you. We are all comrades, all one family, all one band. What the others say I say also. I give myself up to you. Do with me what you please. I surrender. Once I moved around like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.
That was all. The Chiricahua had been taken, and General Crook left for Fort Bowie with a satisfied heart. The Chiricahua retired to their camp a little way up in the hills, and the soldiers settled down to rest for the trip back to civilization.
None reckoned, however, with one of those inevitable harbingers of civilization, a man named Tribolet (or Tribollet), who had come out to the conference with a wagon full of whiskey and a tent to sell it in. The evidence of the next morning plainly showed that Geronimo and Naiche had bought heavily of the merchant’s rotgut, doctored with tobacco and assorted trash to give it an authentic bite. Not only had Tribolet sold the Indians this stuff, but he had told them that once back on United States soil, they would be shot down by the troops. The combination of bad liquor, fears of ambush, and general distrust of whites proved far stronger than the handshakes with Crook of the day before, and when the caravan started off on March 28—the soldiers in the lead, the Chiricahuas following—Geronimo, Naiche, and a party of thirty-eight (some say thirty-nine) men, women, and children slipped away into the hills. The main party continued on, but Crook had lost his biggest catch.