by Jon E. Lewis
Government agents in the West began to fear that the desperate Indians would go on the warpath. “What then will be the consequences,” wrote Thomas Fitzpatrick, a former trapper, to his superiors in Washington, “should twenty thousand Indians, well armed, well mounted, and the most . . . expert in war . . . turn out in hostile array against all American travellers?” To forestall this dread possibility, in September 1851 the government called a meeting of all the northern tribes at Horse Creek, 35 miles from Fort Laramie, a remote outpost on the Oregon Trail.
It was the greatest gathering of tribes in history, attended by 10,000 American Indians, camped in the valley in a forest of skin-tents known as tipis. The mighty Teton (from Titowa, “plains”) Sioux were there, so were their time-honoured enemies, the Crow. Also in attendance were the Arikara, Shoshonis, Cheyenne, Assinboine, Arapaho, and the Gros Ventre. Colonel Thomas Fitzpatrick addressed the tribesmen, telling them that the Great Father was “aware that your buffalo and game are driven off, and your grass and timber consumed by the opening of roads and the passing of emigrants through your countries. For these losses he desires to compensate you.” The compensation offered the tribes by the Great Father was $50,000 a year, plus guns, if the Indians would keep away from the trail and confine themselves to designated tracts of land. (Thus began the reservation system, though no one yet called it that.)
The Indians “touched the pen”, and many went away in the belief that an age of harmony between the White and Red people was about to begin. Cut Nose of the Arapaho declared: “I will go home satisfied. I will sleep sound, and not have to watch my horses in the night, or be afraid for my women and children. We have to live on these streams and in the hills, and I would be glad if the Whites would pick out a place for themselves and not come into our grounds.”
Two years later a similar council was held with bands of the Comanche and Kiowa in Kansas. They agreed to refrain from molesting emigrants on the Santa Fe Trail in return for the annuity of $18,000 in goods.
The treaties were doomed to failure. Invariably, the political organization of an Indian tribe did not allow a chief to speak for all his people. And some chiefs, anyway, did not fully understand what they had been required to give up: their freedom to roam on the wind, to hunt buffalo, and to wage war with their ancient enemies. Such freedom required immense space; the Blackfoot from Montana are known to have raided as far south as the Mexican province of Durango. More serious were the White man’s failures. Congress almost immediately reduced the number of years the stipend would be paid. Supplies delivered were inadequate. To avoid starvation, the Indians were forced to range far and wide in pursuit of a dwindling supply of game. Tension along the emigrant trails increased. There were frequent instances of petty thieving. To defend the emigrants, the Army sent more troops west.
Nearly 40 years of war between the United States and the Plains Indians was set off by an argument over a cow. On 18 August 1854 a young Miniconjou Sioux warrior called High Forehead butchered a lame cow that an emigrant on the Oregon Trail had either lost or abandoned. Hearing this, the owner demanded that the Sioux pay him $25 for his loss. An amiable Sioux leader, Bear That Scatters, offered two cows as reparation. This was refused. Furthermore, the Army at nearby Fort Laramie intervened to insist on High Forehead’s surrender. The next day, brash young Brevet Second Lieutenant John L. Grattan, a West Pointer who had bragged that he could handle the red hordes single-handedly, marched into the Sioux camp accompanied by 31 men. Negotiations broke down when Bear That Scatters refused to surrender High Forehead, who was a guest in his village. Suddenly, Grattan’s patience snapped, and he ordered his men to fire into the Sioux village at point-blank range. Bear That Scatters fell mortally wounded. After a second or two of silence, hundreds of Lakota warriors leaped into battle and every White man in the force was killed. Grattan’s face was smashed to a pulp with stones.
One year later, Brigadier-General William S. Harney was sent to punish the “hostile” Sioux and fell on a village on Blue Water Creek in Nebraska. Eighty-six Indians were killed, and the village razed to the ground. The Indians were staggered, for never before had a village been destroyed by the Whites’ army. Watching the massacre from the safety of a hill was a young Sioux boy, Curly. Afterwards, he went into the Sand Hills to find a vision, and when it came it was a vision of himself as a warrior aboard a flying horse, both untouched by the bullets and arrows which thickened the air. Later the boy’s father helped him understand the dream: he would be a warrior who never fell in battle, a warrior who would lead his people against the Whites. He would also be given a new name: Crazy Horse.
The peace of the plains was broken. But before the full fury of Whites could be loosed on the Indians, the United States began to bloodily rip itself apart in the debate over slavery. In 1860 seven states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas) had passed ordinances of secession and formed the Confederate States of America, later extended to include Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. A year later, North and South were at war.
The conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was both a disaster and a respite for the Native Americans. Those closest to the Whites’ turmoil, the settled tribes located in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), were those most affected by it. Under threats and entreaties, the tribes were obliged to sign to the respective causes of the North and South. The Cherokees, one of the Five Civilized Tribes forced to move to Indian Territory in the 1830s and to become agriculturalists (hence their “civilized” status in the eyes of the Whites), signed an alliance with the Confederacy. Cherokee chief, Stand Watie, organized a regiment with himself at the head and fought with the South in the victory over the Union at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri in August 1861. More tribes – the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Osage, Senecas, and Shawnees – cast their lot in with the South, hoping that it would offer them a better deal in the long run. (A not altogether foolish hope: delegates from the Choctaw-Chickasaw, Creek-Seminole and Cherokee nations sat in the Confederate Congress throughout the war; the US had extended the prospect of Indian seats in Congress as early as 1778, but had never implemented it.) Several tribes had their own Union versus South civil war. In 1863 they were joined by the Cherokee, when the majority of that nation rejected Stand Watie’s Confederate treaty. Along with the Whites in the Civil War, the Indians bled plenty, too.
Less adversely affected by the Civil War were the Indians of the Far West. When the conflict commenced, the Army’s forces in the West numbered around 10,000 men. The majority were quickly summoned to the East, which would be the main theatre of the war. Eventually, these regulars were replaced by large numbers of volunteers, highly motivated young men, keen on adventure, and keenest of all to “crack it to the Indians.”
But in the meantime, some of the tribes of the West enjoyed the breathing space. And some decided to take advantage of the reduction in numbers of “blue coats” to go on the warpath. Among them were the Apache in the dry lands of the Southwest. The series of bloody confrontations between Native Americans and Whites, which would determine the future of the West, had begun.
War Comes to the Land of Little Rain
The People Against the White Eyes
The Apache arrived in the arid, rugged country of the Southwest in a time before memory. The land was already occupied, by the Comanche and the Zuni, who were ruthlessly driven out. Known to themselves as “N’de” or “Dine” (meaning “people”), the newcomers were known to others by the Zuni word for enemy, apachu. Like the Zuni and Comanche, the Spanish found them an implacable foe, impossible to conquer and resistant to the overtures of the Church’s black-robed friars.
Most feared of the Apache tribes were the Western and Chiricahua Apaches, nomads who lived primarily by raiding and hunting. They were as hardy as the mountain environment from which they sprang. A Chiricahua brave was expected to be able to run-and-walk 70 miles a day. Horses could not keep up. Even when he was in his forties the warrior
Geronimo, a member of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua, still ran on raids, trotting endlessly hour after hour.
If the big-lunged mountain Apaches valued brawn and the ability to endure beyond anything their enemies could conceive, they esteemed another quality more: cunning. This was the greatest virtue to the Apache. It ranked even higher than courage.
At first, relations between the Apache and the Anglo-Americans were cordial. The Apache, with their bows and arrows, hardly merited a mention in the annual reports of the War Department in Washington. For their part, the Apache were more interested in pursuing their hereditary opponents, the Comanche and Mexicans, than the few “White Eyes” prospecting for metals in their New Mexico–Arizona homeland.
The fragile peace, however, was soon broken. Characteristically, it was the Anglo-Americans who began the trouble. One day in the late 1850s Mangas Coloradas (“Red Sleeves”), a chief of the Mimbreno band of the Chiricahua, made a friendly visit to miners at Pinos Altos in south-western New Mexico. The miners tied him to a tree and lashed him unconscious with a bullwhip. Unsurprisingly, he went on the warpath. He also requested the help of his son-in-law, Cochise, the great Chiricahua warrior chief.
The six-foot-tall Cochise soon had his own grudge against the Americans. In early 1861, Cochise was accused of stealing a White boy named Ward from a ranch near Buchanan. The boy (who later became a government scout known as Mickey Free) had in fact been stolen by Pinal Apaches. A Second Lieutenant George Bascom of the 7th Cavalry refused to believe Cochise’s protestations of innocence, and took Cochise and his family hostage. Cochise escaped by pulling his knife, slashing a gash in the tent wall and jumping through. In an effort to free his relatives, Cochise captured a stage driver and two Americans from a wagon train and offered Bascom an exchange of prisoners. Bascom refused. The affair ended with Cochise killing the Whites he had taken, and Bascom hanging three Indian hostages. (Hanging was the worst form of death for an Indian, because it shut him out from the warrior’s afterlife.)
And so Cochise joined Mangas Coloradas on the warpath. “I was at peace with the Whites,” said Cochise, “until they tried to kill me for what other Indians did; now I live and die at war with them.”
It was a good time for war. The Whites were beginning to shoot each other in their civil conflict, and New Mexico was stripped of its troops and its forts evacuated. Ranging from their mountain strongholds, the Chiricahuas brought swift-striking death to wagon trains, mines, ranches and small settlements. Estimates of White dead were as high as 150 within two months. Many were tortured, some burned alive, others having small pieces of their body cut away until they died from shock or loss of blood.
Settlers fled for their lives to safer regions – if they could find them. For the Apache were not the only people laying claim and waste to the Southwest. Confederate and Union forces began to manoeuvre and skirmish in the region. In 1862, in an effort to seize the desert country for the federal cause, the Union sent out 1,800 Californian Volunteers under General James Carleton. Their eastwards route lay through Apache Pass.
Alerted by his scouts, Cochise decided to ambush the White soldiers in the gorge. He was joined by Mangas Coloradas and 700 Apaches, the largest force the People had ever raised. Many were armed with rifles, taken from dead Whites.
On 14 July 1862, an advance party of 123 Californian Volunteers entered the pass. The ambush should have been deadly, but the Volunteers under Captain Thomas L. Roberts had two mountain howitzers in tow. Quickly Roberts trained these on the Apache positions. The Indians had never encountered shellfire before, and withdrew.
Mangas Coloradas, as he retreated, was shot in the chest. The wound was not fatal, but it caused him to tire of fighting. Less than a year after Apache Pass, he decided to take up the American offer of peace. The old chief walked trustingly and alone into Pinos Altos. Brevet General Joseph West ordered him seized, telling his guards: “I want him dead or alive tomorrow morning. Understand? I want him dead.”
A miner walking about the camp related what happened next: “About 9 o’clock I noticed the soldiers were doing something to Mangas. I discovered that they were heating their bayonets in the fire and burning his feet and legs. Mangas rose upon his left elbow, angrily protesting that he was no child to be played with.” Whereon the guards shot him dead. Afterwards, he was scalped and decapitated. The official euphemism for the event was “resisting arrest”. Even other Army soldiers were appalled. General Nelson Miles declared Mangas Coloradas “foully murdered”.
The fate of Mangas Coloradas only encouraged Cochise to stay on the warpath. Apache Pass had taught him a valuable, if harsh, lesson – never to confront well-armed troops in open combat. Henceforth, Cochise’s war would be a guerrilla struggle, in which the Apache would come and go like the wind. He was joined by other Apache notables, among them the Warm Springs chiefs Victorio and Nana, and the warrior leader Geronimo. Soon the Gila River country of south Arizona was swept clean of ranchers. The exception was Pete Kitchen, who turned his hilltop adobe ranch into a fortress, and was left alone. Elsewhere Apache raids continued unabated.
On the Long Walk
Nor were the Apache the only Indians in the turquoise-skyed Southwest on the warpath. The evacuation of Fort Defiance had given the pastoralist Navajo – linguistic and cultural kindred of the Apache – the opportunity to do some profitable plundering. A single raid in 1863 netted them 20,000 sheep.
A crisis was upon the White man in the “land of little rain”. Thus, when it became apparent that the Union’s 1862 victory at Glorieta Pass in New Mexico (the largest Civil War battle in the Far West) had effectively ended the chances of Confederate control in the region, federal forces turned to fighting the Indians. Brigadier-General H. Carleton directed his old friend, ex-mountain man Colonel Kit Carson of the New Mexico volunteers, to invade the lands of the Apache and the Navajo. By the end of March 1863, Carson had rounded up more than 400 Mescalero Apaches and sent them to the new reservation at Bosque Redondo, a 40-mile square tract of semi-arid land next to the military outpost of Fort Sumner.
Next, Carson moved to subdue the Navajo, a nation 10,000 strong. His message to the Navajo was brief: “Go to Bosque Redondo, or we will pursue and destroy you. We will not make peace with you on any other terms.”
Carson was as good as his word. After starving the Navajo into submission by destroying their livestock, crops and orchards, the Americans invaded their Canyon de Chelly citadel. In the spring of 1864 6,000 Navajo surrendered. They were marched 300 miles to the Bosque (“Hweeldi” in Apache), an event that became known to them as the “Long Walk”. The land at Bosque Redondo was too poor to support the Indians incarcerated there. Navajo starved and fell ill. Many times was their healing chant, the “Blessing Way” sung, the concluding lines of which run:
May it be beautiful before me
May it be beautiful behind me
May it be beautiful all around me
In beauty may I walk
In beauty it is finished.
Such words fortified not only the patient but also the whole people. The Navajo would endure to return to their homeland in 1868 and become one of the most populous Native American tribes.
Colonel Kit Carson, meanwhile, having obtained the surrender of the Navajo, had been sent hot-foot in 1864 to the southern plains, where Kiowa and Comanche raiders had stolen five boys from a wagon train on the Santa Fe trail. At Adobe Walls, an abandoned trading post in the Texas Panhandle, Carson and his 350 volunteers and 75 Ute scouts ran into a thousand Comanche and Kiowa warriors. Carson’s force was saved by two howitzers. With two dead and ten wounded Carson claimed victory – and got out of the Canadian River valley as quickly as honour would let him.
If Carson intended to send the Kiowa and Comanche to Bosque Redondo he was disappointed. Proving similarly difficult to capture was Cochise and his Chiricahuas, who were trading atrocity for atrocity with the miners and army. The toll Cochise took was heavy, but not heavy enough. Wh
atever he did, White emigrants still came through the “land of little rain” and miners still dug for metal. “We kill ten; a hundred come in their place,” Cochise lamented to his warriors.
For a long, bloody decade Cochise fought the White man, but when he saw it was to no avail he decided to make peace. Other Apache leaders, like Nana and Victorio, had already surrendered, after a relentless pursuit conducted largely by Black troopers. Yet while the army pursued him, Cochise seemed to have no option but to carry on fighting.
Then something happened which brought a softening in government attitude to the Apache. Early in the morning of 30 April 1871, a mob of Americans, Mexicans and Papago Indians massacred 128 unarmed Arivapa Apache near Tucson, in revenge for raids carried out by other Apaches. Twenty-nine of the Arivapa children were taken as slaves. Although the participants in the massacre were tried and acquitted in Tucson, Eastern humanitarians applied pressure on the government to stop such slaughter. Congress voted $70,000 for the “collecting of the Apaches of Arizona and New Mexico upon reservations, furnishing them with subsistence and other necessary articles, and to promote peace and civilisation among them.” General George Crook was assigned to Arizona with orders to deal firmly but fairly with the Apache. A year later, Crook was succeeded by one-armed General Oliver O. Howard, who arrived with full powers to make peace. For help, Howard sought out Thomas Jeffords, the superintendent of mail between Tucson and Fort Bowie. The flame-haired New Yorker was the one White man Cochise called friend, a friendship begun when Jeffords had courageously ridden alone into Cochise’s camp and asked the chief not to kill his drivers. In respect to Jeffords’ personal courage, he did not.
The intensely moral General Howard won Jefford’s approval, and the two went to meet Cochise in the mountains. After 11 days of negotiation, a deal was struck. Cochise agreed to stop fighting and enter a reservation in the Dragoon mountain if Jeffords was appointed agent for the Chiricahua. The terms were met. Also entering into the agreement was the warrior leader Geronimo, whose small band of Bedonkohe Apache had been virtually assimilated into the Chiricahua. Geronimo served as escort to Howard as he left the mountains, riding double on the general’s horse. A war that had cost the United States 1,000 dead and $40 million was over.