Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: The Struggle for Apacheria

This volume explores the history of the Apache Wars of the late 19th century Southwest through diaries, army reports, and other primary sources.

Stretching from the Colorado River to the mountains east of the Rio Grande, and from northern Arizona into Sonora, Mexico, is the sprawling region once known as Apacheria. By the time the first Americans ventured into the region, the indigenous peoples known as the Apache had already been clashing with Spanish and Mexican interlopers for some time.  

Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: The Struggle for Apacheria presents a selection of outstanding original accounts pertaining to the epic struggle between American and the Apache for those coveted lands. It is the first in a five-volume series telling the saga of the military struggle for the American West in the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780811749527

Book preview

EYEWITNESSES TO THE INDIAN WARS,

1865–1890

ALSO BY PETER COZZENS:

No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga

The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga

The Civil War in the West, A Trilogy

The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka and Corinth

The Military Memoirs of General John Pope

General John Pope: A Life for the Nation

EYEWITNESSES TO THE INDIAN WARS,

1865–1890

The Struggle for Apacheria

EDITED BY PETER COZZENS

STACKPOLE

BOOKS

Copyright © 2001 by Stackpole Books

Published by

STACKPOLE BOOKS

5067 Ritter Road

Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890 / edited by Peter Cozzens.— 1st ed.

     p. cm.

Includes index.

Contents: v. 1. The struggle for Apacheria

ISBN: 0-8117-0572-2

1. Western Apache Indians—Wars. 2. Chiricahua Indians—Wars. 3. Indians of North America—Wars—1866–1895. 4. Crook, George, 1829–1890. 5. Geronimo, 1829–1909. I. Cozzens, Peter, 1957–

E99.A6 E94 2001

      973.8—dc21

00-052270

eISBN: 9780811749527

To the memory of my father

JAMES WHITE COZZENS (1917–83)

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: The Struggle for Apacheria is the first volume in a planned five-volume series that will tell the saga of the military struggle for the American West in the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it. Future volumes will be devoted to conflict in the Northwest and the Rockies, on the Southern Plains and in Texas, and on the Northern Plains. A fifth volume will include accounts of a general nature.

It is the purpose of this volume to present as complete a selection of outstanding original accounts pertaining to the struggle for that part of the Southwest once known as Apacheria as may be gathered under one cover. Most of the accounts presented here are taken from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines—a wealth of primary source material, much of which has remained unknown not only to the general reader, but also to serious students and historians of the Indian Wars.

In reviewing items for possible inclusion, I quickly found there to be no shortage of material from which to draw. Indian actions were front-page news nationwide. The Indian Wars in general, and the Apache wars in particular, were a source of constant fascination for eastern readers of the day. The desert Southwest was a new and strange land, with a native populace and a climate most Americans scarcely comprehended. Magazine editors were eager to run stories of army exploits, hostile depredations, Indian scouts, and the Apache way of life (as the white man understood it) that army officers submitted to supplement their meager pay and their wives penned to alleviate the tedium of life at godforsaken posts. Civilian Indian agents, prominent Arizonans and New Mexicans, and general officers like George Crook and Oliver O. Howard granted interviews and penned articles to explain their actions or to influence public opinion. In later years, a whole literature grew up around the pursuit and capture of Geronimo alone.

Several considerations have guided my choice of material for inclusion in this volume of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars. The events described must have taken place between the end of the Civil War and the tragedy at Wounded Knee. With but few exceptions, the articles were published during the authors’ lifetimes. Articles published within the last fifty years have not been included, as they are for the most part readily available. Also excluded were many fine accounts that later appeared in book form, most notably a series of articles that Lt. John Bige low, Jr., penned from the field during the Geronimo campaign for the March 1886 through April 1887 issues of Outing magazine, and which were reprinted as On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1958).

Besides articles of relatively recent vintage, I also rejected those that were of dubious reliability, regardless of how prominent their authors may have been. Notable in this category are six wildly inaccurate articles that former Indian agent and publisher of the famed Tombstone Epitaph, John P. Clum, penned for the Arizona Historical Review and the New Mexico Historical Review in his declining years. These are entitled Victorio, Eskiminzin, Geronimo, The Apaches, The San Carlos Indian Police, and Apache Misrule.

Manuscript sources account for a small but historically significant portion of the contents of this volume. I could not ignore the 124-volume diary of Capt. John G. Bourke, which arguably constitutes the greatest single primary source for the study of the post-Civil War American West. An able soldier, close observer, and accomplished scholar, Bourke faithfully recorded everything to which he was exposed during fifteen years of service on the frontier. First as an officer in the 3rd U.S. Cavalry, then as aide-de-camp to General Crook, Bourke participated in many of the crucial events of the Apache wars. Portions of his diary dealing with his ethnological work and related travels in the Southwest were reprinted in the New Mexico Historical Review in the 1930s. Annotated selections on his combat service and on General Crook’s conferences with Indians in the field are presented here for the first time.

A third source of material was military reports, both official and unofficial, considered sufficiently important that their authors or the War Department had them published outside of normal channels. Among such documents are General Crook’s Resume of Operations against Apache Indians, 1882–1886, which he had published as a rebuttal to the War Department’s implied criticism of his handling of the Geronimo surrender; Lt. Col. John Green’s report of a scout among the White Mountain Apaches that resulted in the establishment of Camp Apache; and Maj. William R. Price’s report of a scout among the Havasupai and Hualapai Indians, which drew attention to their impoverished state and led to a relocating of the Havasupai reservation.

In the accounts presented in this volume, there is an unfortunate but unavoidable imbalance between white and Native American sources. Most of the few Apache narratives that exist were gathered in book form previously. Outstanding among them are the collected accounts of several Apache warriors and women in Keith H. Basso, ed., Western Apache Raiding and Warfare, from the Notes of Grenville Goodwin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971); engagingly written and reliable is Jason Betzinez’s I Fought with Geron imo (Harrisburg, PA: The Stackpole Company, 1959). Invaluable for the Apache perspective are Eve Ball’s In the Days of Victorio (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970) and Indeh, an Apache Odys sey (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1980). Despite the paucity of Native American sources, I am pleased to offer the compelling words of several prominent Apaches, recorded faithfully by John G. Bourke as they were uttered during conferences with General Crook after the Cibicue affair.

A few words about editorial practice in this first volume of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars are in order. My goal has been to present accurate and annotated texts of the articles, letters, and reports included in this work. I added notes to correct errors of fact, clarify obscure references, provide historical context where needed, and offer translations of Spanish terms. Editing of text has been light. Most nineteenth-century writers had a penchant for commas. I have eliminated them where their overuse clouded the meaning or impeded the rhythm of a sentence. I have regularized capitalization, punctuation, and the spelling of names and places; otherwise, I have left the writings largely as I found them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Being abroad on a diplomatic assignment with the Department of State, I found it particularly challenging to gather the articles and other primary accounts presented in this volume. Without the persons mentioned below, whose help I am pleased to acknowledge, it would have been impossible.

First, I thank my mother for her many trips to the Wheaton, Illinois, Public Library, submitting OCLC requests, and retrieving articles; my sincere thanks go also to the staff of the periodicals department of the Wheaton Public Library for their patience and diligence in filling these requests.

My good friend and collaborator on the Military Memoirs of John Pope, Robert I. Girardi, also obtained for me copies of several of the articles appearing in this volume.

I also thank Kim Frontz of the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, who kindly provided me with manuscript material from the society’s archives, as well as copies of newspaper and magazine articles from their holdings; Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, who provided me with microfilm copies of the John Bourke Diary made from that library’s filmed set; Brian J. Kenny of the Denver Public Library, for copies of articles from the Great Divide; and Bonnie Hardwick of the Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley, for a copy of L. Y. Loring’s Report on Coyo tero Apaches.

Much of the material presented here I obtained during several visits to the Newberry Library in Chicago. The reference staff of that institution was most helpful on every occasion.

I express my gratitude to the Arizona Historical Society, the Bancroft Library of the University of California–Berkeley, and the United States Military Academy Library for permission to reprint material from their manuscript collections.

I am indebted to Edwin Sweeney, the preeminent authority on the Indian Wars of the Southwest and on Apache-Anglo relations, and to Scott Forsythe of the National Archives for their penetrating and well-considered critique of the historical introduction. They saved me from several embarrassing errors of fact and of questionable interpretation. Any remaining errors are of course my own.

I am also grateful to my copyeditor, Joyce Bond, for her careful editing and constructive suggestions.

Finally, I thank my editor at Stackpole, Leigh Ann Berry, for her enthusiastic support of this project.

INTRODUCTION

Stretching from the Colorado River to the rugged mountains east of the Rio Grande, and from the great canyons of northern Arizona deep into the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, is the region once known as Apacheria. Its dominant Native American occupants first called themselves Dine, meaning the people, and later, in the days of their demise, Indeh, or the dead. History has labeled them Apache, perhaps from the Zuni word for enemy. The Apaches were not a cohesive tribe, but rather a loose conglomeration of groups and bands. In addition to being of the same Athapascan language stock, all Apaches engaged in raiding as a means of subsistence and a cultural imperative. They were not, however, intrinsically warlike, as many nineteenth-century whites would have us believe, but were driven to prolonged conflict first by Spanish incursions and, later, by Mexican and Anglo treachery. Products of a harsh and cruel habitat, they were well adapted to resist encroachment on the lands they claimed.

Anthropologists have divided the Apaches into two great divisions, the Eastern and Western. Beyond that, designations have been the subject of exasperating differences of opinion. Among the Western Division were the two principal groups, or classifications, that composed the Apache population of Apacheria—the Western Apaches and the Chiricahuas.

The Western Apaches occupied much of eastern Arizona and are generally agreed to have consisted of the White Mountain, Cibicue, San Carlos, Southern Tonto, and Northern Tonto groups, each with its component bands.

The Chiricahuas are usually divided into three bands: the Central Chiricahuas (Chokonen), who inhabited the Chiricahua and Dragoon mountains of southeastern Arizona and of whom Cochise was the most famous chief; the Southern Chiricahuas (Nednhi), who roamed the northern reaches of Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico, made the Sierra Madre their stronghold, and with whom were associated Geronimo and Juh; and the Eastern Chiricahuas (Chihenne), who occupied the country from the Arizona-New Mexico border to the Rio Grande. A fourth band, which Apache sources identify as the Bedonkohe and which looked to Mangas Coloradas for leadership, apparently was absorbed into the other three bands after his death.

The Eastern Chiricahua sometimes divided into the Mogollones, who dwelt near the mountains of the same name, and the Mimbres, also known as the Warm Springs or Ojo Caliente Apaches, whose dominant leader after the Civil War was Victorio. However Geronimo, Jason Betzinez, and the Chiricahua informants of Eve Ball regarded the Mogollones as Bedonkone peoples. East of the Rio Grande roamed the Mescalero Apaches, with whom the eastern band of Chiricahuas maintained friendly relations. The eminent historian of Apacheria, Dan L. Thrapp, estimated the Western Apaches and Chiricahuas to have numbered approximately six thousand during the two decades following the Civil War.¹

From Prescott, Arizona, westward to the Colorado River, the dominant hostile tribe was the Yavapai; the northwestern corner of Apacheria belonged principally to the Hualapai. Both were Yuman tribes linguistically unrelated to, but generally enjoying good relations with, their Western Apache neighbors. Hereditary enemies of the Apaches, and well disposed toward Europeans, were the Maricopas, the Papagos, and the Pimas, agricultural tribes of the Gila River region.

By the time the first Americans ventured into Apacheria in the 1820s, the Western and Chiricahua Apaches had been warring with interlopers—first Spaniards and later Mexicans—and their Indian allies for nearly two centuries. Confounding troops, laying waste to haciendas, and levying tribute on villages, the Apaches had rendered the European presence in Apacheria tenuous at best. In 1835, desperate Mexican authorities began offering bounties for Apache scalps. Two years later, American bounty hunters slaughtered a group of friendly Southern Chiricahuas under Juan Jose Compas, the first act in a gradual but unmistakable deterioration of what previously had been amicable Anglo–Apache relations.

General conflict became inevitable when the United States obtained much of Apacheria under the Gadsden Treaty, ratified in 1854, the conditions of which obligated Washington to prevent Apache raids into Mexico. This the Apaches could not comprehend: The Mexicans were their enemies and had been the enemies of the Americans; why, then, should they desist from raiding south of the border as long as they behaved themselves north of it? Tensions mounted. The discovery of gold, which the Apaches regarded as a metal sacred to their creator, Ussen, and not to be removed from the earth—first in southwestern New Mexico and later near Prescott, Arizona—brought whites in increasing numbers into Apacheria. Tragedy followed upon tragedy with brutal inevitability. Treaties were made and broken, reservations created and abandoned.

The discovery of gold at Pinos Altos, in the heart of the Eastern Chiricahua homeland, exacerbated tensions. Seeking to avoid hostilities Chief Mangas Coloradas spread stories of richer bonanzas to be found in Sonora. Belligerent and bullying, the miners stayed on. Already wary of the United States ascendancy in the region, and of increasing governmental interference with his bands, Mangas Coloradas went to war in 1861—a bloody rampage that claimed hundreds of American and Mexican lives.

Even more egregious was the treatment accorded the chief of the Central Chiricahuas, Cochise. His people had lived at peace with the whites; Cochise apparently had even secured a contract to supply wood for the Butterfield Stage Line station near Apache Pass. But a blundering second lieutenant named George H. Bascom changed all that when, in February 1861, he enticed Cochise and several warriors to his camp, then arrested them on the mistaken impression the Chiricahua chief had stolen cattle and kidnapped a boy from a Sonoita Valley ranch. Cochise protested that marauding Pinal Apaches had perpetrated the outrages and offered to help Bascom find them. Bascom tried to hold the Apaches hostage for the boy’s return, but Cochise escaped and took four hostages of his own. After several days of fruitless parleying, Cochise killed his hostages and Bascom hanged the Chiricahuas, among whom was Cochise’s brother.

Whereupon Arizona exploded in a decadelong orgy of violence. Historian Thomas Farish calculated that Cochise’s fury eventually cost five thousand American lives and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property. Indian agent John P. Clum asserted that the U.S. government spent $38 million between 1862 and 1871 in an effort to extirpate the Apaches. Fewer than one hundred Apaches were killed, however, at a cost of more than one thousand civilians and soldiers.² The calculations of Farish and Clum are disputable, but it is true that no traveler, settler, miner, small body of troops, or ranch was safe from the Chiricahuas.

The onset of the Civil War and consequent withdrawal of Federal troops from the territory convinced the Apaches and other hostile bands that the Americans had given up the fight, and their raiding escalated. Most settlements were abandoned, and Tucson sank to fewer than two hundred inhabitants. Conditions were equally chaotic in southern New Mexico, where Mangas Coloradas held sway.

To reassert its authority, the government sent a brigade of California volunteers under Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton into Apacheria. Cochise and Mangas Coloradas contested Carleton’s march through Apache Pass in a bold but unsuccessful ambush on July 15, 1862. Erecting Fort Bowie to hold the pass, Carleton pressed on to Santa Fe. There he inaugurated a campaign to exterminate the Apaches, employing fast-moving columns of soldiers, miners, local partisans, and Indian allies to seek out the enemy. Under Carleton’s auspices, Mangas Coloradas was lured in and murdered, a group of Pinal Apaches (a band of the San Carlos group of Western Apaches) were deceived into parleying and then slaughtered at Bloody Tanks, and a large Apache rancheria, or village, was wiped out in the Tonto Basin by Prescott-based frontiersmen under King S. Woolsey. But the mustering out of the California volunteers in late 1864 created a power vacuum, and raiding resumed with greater fury throughout the territory.

As the Californians went home, local companies sprang up among the mostly Mexican residents of Tucson and nearby settlements. The Arizona volunteers made several good kills before they were disbanded in the autumn of 1866. A group of angry locals from the Prescott area called the Yavapai County Rangers also hunted Apaches and Yavapais for a few months before a lack of pay and supplies compelled them to disband.

Not only could civilian fighters not solve the Indian problem, but they also often exacerbated it. Indeed, many army officers not unreasonably accus ed the local populace of provoking war, often for purely monetary gain. Said one frustrated department commander, Almost the only paying business the white inhabitants have is supplying the troops. . . . Hostilities are therefore kept up with a view to protecting inhabitants, most of whom are supported by the hostilities. A case in point were the Hualapais. Before 1866 there had been no Indian trouble of consequence in northwestern Apacheria. But the senseless murder at Beale’s Springs that year of Wauba-Yuba, the most influential Hualapai chief, by a party of prospectors with whom he had expected to trade goods peaceably, touched off a two-year war. Prescott was besieged and the surrounding country overrun with war parties. Matters were little better elsewhere in the territory.

During the remainder of the decade (1866–69), army efforts to pacify Apacheria failed for several reasons. First, there were too few troops for both garrison duty and the endless scouts that seemed the only means of catching the elusive Apache raiders. Dozens of posts were created and abandoned in response to specific threats, the growth or demise of frontier communities, the ease or difficulty of supply, and considerations of health. Not until 1867 were volunteers wholly replaced with regulars, and two more years passed before the latter reached a paltry strength of two thousand men. Morale was low and desertion common.

A second problem was the military beaucracy itself. A general reorganization of the army on July 28, 1866, divided the United States into a confusing tapestry of divisions, departments, and districts. Responsibility for Apacheria fragmented: New Mexico became a district in the Department of the Missouri, and Arizona was carved into four separate districts of the Department of California.

Army doctrine posed a third problem. Nothing in their training or in their Civil War experience had prepared the officers or enlisted men who garrisoned the far-flung posts of Apacheria for guerrilla warfare over terrain as foreign and forbidding as a lunar landscape.

The inability of the army high command to settle on an Apache policy complicated affairs further. For instance, after a year of particularly brutal raids in northern Apacheria, in early 1867 Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, commander of the Department of California, promulgated a policy of vigorous war fare against the Yavapais and Tonto Apaches. No sooner did the commander of the District of Prescott, Brig. Gen. J. I. Gregg, move to comply, issuing orders that all Indians not found on reservations be treated as hostile, than McDowell relented. He concluded that wholesale war against Indians starving because of congressional and Indian Bureau negligence was inhuman. Later that year General Gregg himself became a proponent of pacific methods. In 1869 a new commander of the Department of California, Maj. Gen. E. O. C. Ord, first ordered his troops to hunt down the Apaches as they would wild animals; less than a week later, he reversed himself and suggested the Apaches be induced onto reservations. Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, commander of the Military Division of the Pacific, had little constructive to offer his subordinates, arguing simply that nothing could be done without more troops.

In 1867 Maj. Roger Jones, inspector general of the Military Division of the Pacific, submitted a report sharply critical of the military administration in Arizona. He suggested that troops be concentrated at fewer posts, scouts be better coordinated, and infantry be mounted to help the overtaxed cavalry. Most importantly, he insisted that Arizona be elevated to the status of a separate department to eliminate the three months’ time it took for orders to pass among the four territorial district headquarters and department headquarters in San Francisco. Not until April 15, 1870, however, did the War Department act on Jones’s recommendation, creating the Department of Arizona under the command of Bvt. Maj. Gen. George Stoneman. By setting up headquarters on the coast of southern California, Stoneman promptly negated part of the organizational gain.

Despite a chaotic command structure, uncertain policies, and a shortage of troops, the army recorded some successes between 1866 and 1870, particularly in northern Apacheria. In November 1866 Capt. George B. Sanford and a troop of the 1st U.S. Cavalry smashed a rancheria deep in the Sierra Ancha. In April 1867 Capt. James M. Williams and eighty-five troopers of the 8th U.S. Cavalry destroyed a rancheria on the Verde River, killing fifty warriors in two fights. More impressive yet were the efforts of Maj. William R. Price, who in September 1867 started three columns of troops from Fort Mojave on an expedition to subdue the Hualapais. Eleven months of fighting followed before the Hualapais surrendered in August 1868 and agreed to remove to a reservation.

In Southern Apacheria, an impetuous young first lieutenant, Howard B. Cushing, punished Cochise’s warriors and allied Aravaipa and Pinal bands in several sharp engagements—or slaughtered helpless women and children, as the Apaches told it—before blundering into an ambush in May 1871.³ Across the territorial line in New Mexico, the army recorded only 33 engagements and 92 Apache casualties in the four years following the Civil War, compared with 137 combats and 647 Indians killed in Arizona.

As raids continued with unabated fury, General Stoneman announced his program in July 1870. Army camps were to be concentrated and civilian settlers were to organize for their own defense, thus freeing up troops to conduct aggressive field operations. However, little progress was made against the hostiles during the remainder of the year. In March 1871 Stoneman added a pacific element to his policy that had unintended tragic consequences. Rather than punish a number of hostile Pinals and Yavapais who had come to camps Verde and Grant to make tentative peace overtures, he elected to control them through the medium of their bellies. Requisitioning huge stocks of meat, corn, and blankets, he announced that all who remained at peace would be rationed at feeding stations. Several weeks earlier, the Aravaipa band of Eskiminzin had drifted into Camp Grant after securing a promise of kindly treatment from the commanding officer, Lt. Royal E. Whitman. By early March nearly five hundred Aravaipas had gathered under Whitman’s protection. They cut hay and chopped wood for the army and hired themselves out to local ranches at harvest time.

Finding their chief means of livelihood endangered, army contractors made common cause with settlers, territorial press, the legislature, and the governor to discredit the system of Stoneman and Whitman. When depredations resumed near Camp Grant, subtle intriguers falsely proclaimed Eskimin zin’s band responsible. At dawn on April 30, 1871, a group of Tucsonians and Papago Indians fell on the peaceable chief’s sleeping rancheria, murdering scores of Apaches, mostly women and children.

The Camp Grant massacre had two fundamental consequences for Apacheria. First, at the insistence of Gov. Anson P. K. Safford, General Stoneman was replaced in May by George Crook, who brought with him a reputation as a no-nonsense Indian fighter of the first order. Crook conferred with his subordinates and leading civilians, toured the length of his command, and concluded that the Apaches must first be thrashed before a lasting peace could be secured. To do so, he would employ highly mobile commands consisting of cavalry units to fight the hostiles, mule trains to feed the troops, and friendly Indian scouts to locate the enemy. An expedition organized from Camp Apache under Capt. Guy V. Henry in July 1871 successfully tested Crook’s methods, as the scouts not only proved loyal, but also were instrumental in locating a rancheria that the soldiers then cleaned out.

Crook planned five more such expeditions, to operate continuously until all hostiles were driven in or exterminated. Before he could outfit them, Crook was ordered to suspend military operations until a peace commission from the East first visited the Apaches.

The second great consequence of the Camp Grant massacre had been a decision to allow eastern humanitarians to try to conquer Apacheria through kindness—or mesmerize the Apaches into peace, as frontier detractors put it. Two years earlier, Congress had authorized the president to organize a board of Indian commissioners to assume the duties of the corruption-plagued Office of Indian Affairs. President Ulysses S. Grant warmly supported efforts to correct past abuses, and he went Congress one further by accepting a recommendation of the executive committee of the Orthodox Friends that religious men be appointed as Indian agents and peace commissioners. Before the Camp Grant massacre, conditions in Apacheria had not been judged propitious for testing what had become known as the Quaker Policy, or Grant’s Peace Policy. But in the wake of that outrage, Congress appropriated $70,000 to collect the Apache Indians of Arizona and New Mexico upon reservations and to promote peace and civilization among them. The board of Indian commissioners gave the task to Vincent Colyer, a former Union colonel of impeccable humanitarian credentials.

Colyer worked swiftly. Arriving at Camp Apache on September 2, 1871, he designated a vast surrounding area as a reservation and held a peace conference with the White Mountain Apaches. From Camp Apache, Colyer traveled to Camp Grant, where he confirmed the existing reservation. At Camp Verde on October 2 he acceded to Yavapai demands that they be permitted a reservation along the Verde River. After conferring with Crook, who characterized the commissioner’s peace with the Apaches as so much empty humbug, Colyer departed.

No sooner did Colyer reach Washington than a new wave of Indian depredations swept the territory, in part because Colyer’s efforts had failed to extend to Cochise. When the press reported the November 5, 1871 ambush of a stagecoach near Wickensburg, Arizona, in which six whites were killed, among them Frederick W. Loring of Massachusetts, a promising young writer, eastern public opinion swung against Colyer’s peace plan. The war faction stepped forward. From the commanding general of the army, William T. Sherman, came official assurances that Crook would be warmly supported in rigorous aggressive operations. Pleased to learn of the decapitation of Vincent the Good, and anxious to act before others could pop up in his place, Crook prepared for a winter campaign. While he completed his plans, Crook gave all Indians in the territory until February 15, 1872, to report to a reservation.

But the peace advocates were not finished, and before Crook could begin his campaign, they induced the administration to restrain him. Grant appointed Brig. Gen. Oliver O. Howard to travel to Apacheria as a special agent of the Department of the Interior, with authority to cooperate with the military in preserving peace.

Crook held his command in check while, during April and May 1872, Howard retraced Colyer’s steps. Howard made peace between the Aravaipa Apaches and their Pima and Papago enemies and moved the Camp Grant reservation to the Gila River, contiguous with the White Mountain agency, renaming it San Carlos. But Howard failed, as had Colyer before him, to make peace with Cochise. Consequently, President Grant asked him to make a second trip for that express purpose, which Howard did in the autumn of 1872. Enlisting the help of Thomas J. Jeffords, a longtime friend of Cochise, Howard entered the chief’s Dragoon Mountains stronghold. Howard and Cochise concluded an agreement permitting the Chiricahuas a loosely administered reservation in the Chiricahua Mountains with Jeffords as their agent, thereby ending a decade of warfare.

But elsewhere raiding and reprisals continued. Between September 1871 and September 1872, while the peripatetic Colyer and Howard had journeyed from band to band with their overtures of peace, the Apaches and Yavapais conducted at least fifty raids, killing more than forty civilians and running off over five hundred head of cattle. During the first eleven months of 1872, the army engaged in thirty-three actions against the marauders, in which ten soldiers and another twenty-six civilians lost their lives. That many of the raiding parties came from the new reservations was indisputable. Before he left the territory, Howard conceded to Crook that only force could bring lasting peace. Official Washington concurred, and Crook was at last free to unleash his offensive.

The plan Crook had spent sixteen months of forced inactivity perfecting called for a winter campaign, when food was scarce and the hostiles could more easily be starved or frozen—if not fought—into submission. The objective was to force them into the inner recesses of their preferred sanctuary, the Tonto Basin, by striking first at their outlying haunts. Nine troop-strength columns of the 1st and 5th Cavalry, each with a detachment of Indian scouts, would then penetrate the basin itself. Crook himself would ride from point to point around the narrowing perimeter. His instructions to column commanders were unequivocal and simple: accept the surrender of all Indians who wished to give up; hunt down and exterminate warriors who insisted on fighting, sparing women and children; enlist prisoners as scouts when possible; and under no circumstances abandon the trail—the campaign must be short, sharp, and decisive.

Which it proved to be. In the winter clashes that followed, nearly two hundred Indians perished. The most stunning reverse came on December 28, 1872, when the commands of Maj. William H. Brown and Capt. James Burns and their Indian auxiliaries joined forces to decimate a large band in a stronghold above the Salt River known as Skull, or Salt River, Cave. Seventy-six hostiles died; no soldiers were killed. Skull Cave weakened hostile morale; the destruction on March 27, 1873, of a rancheria atop Turret Peak, a site the Indians considered impregnable, broke their resistance. Hundreds streamed into the agencies and army camps to surrender.

On April 6, 1873, Crook met with Chalipun, a war chief of the Yavapais, to accept his surrender. Crook made Chalipun a pledge he repeated to every Native American leader who ever capitulated to him, and which he did his utmost to keep: that if Chalipun would promise to live at peace and stop killing people, he [Crook] would be the best friend he ever had. By that autumn, more than six thousand Apaches and Yavapais had enrolled at Indian agencies throughout Apacheria.

But war parties under Chunz, Cochinay, Chan-deisi, and Delshay roam ed free, and in the spring of 1874 Crook launched an offensive to eliminate them. The army enjoyed success nearly as complete as it had in the Tonto Basin campaign. The hostile bands were decimated in several sharp actions and their leaders killed.

For two years, Crook and his officers ruled the Camp Verde, Grant, and Apache reservations in fact, if not in form, feeding and protecting their wards and encouraging their efforts at farming and stock raising. Civilian officials complained of army usurpation of their prerogatives, but the prestige Crook enjoyed in Washington and his unique influence over his Native American charges kept the Indian Bureau at bay. Not until 1875, after Crook was transferred to the Department of the Platte and the Apaches and Yavapais were concentrated at the San Carlos Agency, did civilian agents reassert their authority.

In the meantime, civil-military wrangling served only to stir up trouble among the reservation Indians. As Crook put it, As soon as the Indians became harmless the Indian agents, who had sought cover before, now came out as brave as sheep, and took charge of the agencies, and commenced their game of plunder. Not all the agents were dishonest, and at least one, twenty-three-year-old John P. Clum, was as brave and competent as anyone the military could muster.

Convinced military interference on the reservations was the greatest obstacle to peace, Clum appointed an Indian police force and an Apache court to administer discipline. The Indian Bureau complicated his work when, in March 1875, it closed the Camp Verde reservation and transferred fourteen hundred Yavapais to San Carlos, but Clum integrated them into his agency without incident. He fed his Indians well, made them work hard at agriculture, and won the grudging respect of the territorial government.

Less successful were Clum’s efforts at bringing the White Mountain Apaches under his control. He relocated a portion of the band to San Carlos, but the military tightened its grip over those who chose to remain at Camp Apache. Unable to complete the removal of the White Mountain Apaches, and weary of his incessant quarrels with the commander of the Department of Arizona, Brig. Gen. August V. Kautz, Clum resigned as agent in February 1876. Hardly had he done so when he learned of unrest on the Chiricahua reservation. He elected to stay on as agent, if only to bring the Chiricahuas under his jurisdiction.

Trouble had been brewing since the death of Cochise in June 1874. His son proved a weak successor, and the Central Chiricahuas broke into factions. Agent Jeffords’s control over the band slipped accordingly, and discontented warriors decamped in increasing numbers. A crisis was reached in March 1876, when a pair of drunken malcontents murdered two stagecoach station attendants and Skinya and fifty Chiricahuas fled to the mountains of southernmost Arizona. Peaceably inclined Chiricahuas feared indiscriminate military retribution, and the territorial government foresaw a general outbreak. Governor Safford convinced the Indian Bureau that the Chiricahua reserve should be abandoned and the Indians removed to San Carlos by Clum, the only man with the nerve, ability, and confidence to do it.

The Chiricahuas feuded among themselves over whether to submit peacefully. Despite Clum’s benevolent administration, San Carlos was a hellhole—a place of death, said the Apache James Kaywaykla, with neither game nor edible plants, but only cactus, rattlesnakes, heat, and insects.⁴ General Kautz concentrated the 6th Cavalry regiment near the Chiricahua reserve, and after an intraband skirmish that left eight dead, the peace faction prevailed—in a measure. Clum led 325 Chiricahuas off to San Carlos, but the remainder of the band, some four hundred strong, fled to New Mexico or melted into the Sierra Madre. Under the leadership of Juh, Nolgee, and Geronimo, they launched a bloody string of raids on both sides of the border. Kautz dismissed the threat as a hoax that nefarious contractors and crooked politicians—whom he, and later Crook, labeled the Tucson Ring—had concocted to have department headquarters relocated from Prescott to Tucson. An indignant Governor Safford demanded Kautz’s removal. Not until his own officers assured him the threat was real did Kautz respond. Although the army failed to capture the renegades, scouting detachments did learn that much of the trouble in Arizona emanated from the Ojo Caliente reservation on the Rio Grande, to which Geronimo and the Chiricahuas from Mexico regularly repaired to rest, refit, and recruit for future raids.

A year earlier, Insp. E. C. Kemble of the Indian Bureau had uncovered wide spread graft at Ojo Caliente, perpetrated by a timorous agent on behalf of Victorio and his Mimbres warriors. Conditions improved under a new agent, but the marauding continued. In February 1877 General Kautz sent Lt. Austin Henely to confirm reports of a Chiricahua sanctuary at Ojo Caliente. When Henely found Geronimo himself there, the Indian Bureau reacted with commendable swiftness. Clum was ordered to arrest the renegades with his police force and remove them and the Mimbres to San Carlos. Nine troops of cavalry under Col. Edward Hatch were ordered to the reservation to overawe the Indians.

Clum reached Ojo Caliente on April 20. With time at a premium and no sign of the promised cavalry, he and his police effected the arrests themselves. Placing Geronimo in shackles, Clum rounded up 343 Mimbres, including Victorio, and 110 Bedonkone Chiricahuas and marched them off to San Carlos. Clum returned to find that Kautz, with the approval of the secretary of the interior, had placed an army officer at San Carlos to watch Indian movements and inspect their supplies. A disgusted Clum resigned in July 1877.

Two months later, Victorio’s Mimbres and Pionsenay’s Chiricahuas decamped from San Carlos. While bloodlust and plunder motivated Pionsenay, Victorio wanted no more than to find a satisfactory home for his people.

Victorio’s breakout was short-lived. Pursuing Apache police and soldiers inflicted fifty-six casualties on Victorio’s band in less than a month, and the chief surrendered at Fort Wingate, New Mexico. Much to his relief, the army returned the Mimbres to their old home at Ojo Caliente. There they remained under army guardianship for nearly a year while the Indian Bureau considered their fate. Weary of providing for the Mimbres, General Sherman threatened to turn them loose. In response, the Department of the Interior asked the War Department to return the Mimbres to San Carlos, and, recorded an Arizona journalist, in an evil hour the concentration policy was reaffirmed.

But Victorio refused to go. You can take our squaws and children in your wagons, he shouted at Capt. F. T. Bennett, who had come with two companies of cavalry to escort the band, but my men will not go! With that, Victorio and ninety Mimbres fled into the mountains.

A particularly harsh winter in the southwestern New Mexico high country persuaded Victorio to again seek peace. He tried to settle at Ojo Caliente in February 1879 but was frightened off by rumors that his band was to be taken to the Mescalero reservation at Tularosa. Victorio reconsidered and voluntarily settled on the Tularosa Agency in June, only to decamp three months later when word reached him that he was to be indicted for murder in nearby Silver City.

This time Victorio and his 150 Mimbre, Chiricahua, and Mescalero warriors stayed out for good. On September 6, 1879, Victorio declared war, wiping out an eight-man herd guard from the 9th U.S. Cavalry at Ojo Caliente. Twelve days later he ambushed a larger detachment twenty miles north of Hillsboro. Isolated ranches went up in flames, prospectors were shot down by the dozens, and the country fell into a panic. The army responded quickly but ineffectively. Eluding Apache scout companies under Lt. Charles B. Gatewood and Lt. Augustus P. Blocksom and nearly the entire 9th Cavalry regiment, Victorio slipped into the Candelaria Mountains of northern Chihuahua.

In January 1880 Victorio’s band returned to New Mexico. They engaged the army in three sharp but inconclusive fights in the San Andres Mountains, then vanished. Unable to capture Victorio, the army instead went after his supposed base of supplies, arms, and recruits—the Mescalero reservation at Tularosa. Accordingly, plans were made to disarm and dismount the Mescaleros. Two large columns converged on the agency: from the west, Colonel Hatch with his own 9th Cavalry, two troops of the 6th Cavalry, and two companies of Indian scouts; from the east, five troops of the 10th U.S. Cavalry under Col. Benjamin H. Grierson.

Feeling his way through the San Andres Mountains in early April, Hatch missed a chance to destroy Victorio’s warriors at Hembrillo Canyon when Lt. John Conline’s Troop A, 9th U.S. Cavalry, scouting under orders from Capt. Henry Carroll, encountered the hostiles before Hatch could bring his entire command to bear. Hatch rendezvoused with Grierson at the Tularosa Agency on April 12, and after a brief skirmish, the Mescaleros were disarmed.

Deprived of his agency haven, Victorio withdrew into the Black and Mogollon mountain ranges, killing and pillaging as far west as San Carlos. Victorio’s first setback came on May 23, when an Indian scout company under Capt. H. K. Parker ambushed his band in the canyon headwaters of the Palomas River. Wounded in the leg, Victorio retreated to Mexico. Anticipating Victorio’s return, Colonel Grierson distributed his command along the Rio Grande west of Fort Davis, Texas, with strong parties guarding the available water holes.

Grierson’s tactics proved effective. When Victorio crossed the Rio Grande in July, with Mexican troops in close pursuit, he fell prey to Grierson’s chain of outposts. With a twenty-four man detachment that included his young son, Grierson held off Victorio and 150 warriors at the Tinaja de las Palmas water hole in Quitman Canyon on July 30. After a week of roaming the parched Texas landscape, encountering soldiers at every turn, Victorio withdrew to Mexico.

He was to enjoy no rest. In September, while Grierson realigned his Rio Grande defenses, strong columns under Col. George P. Buell and Col. Eugene A. Carr marched from New Mexico and Arizona to join Col. Joaquin Terrazas of the Mexican Army in a sweep of the Candelaria Mountains. Victorio withdrew deeper into Mexico. The American troops recrossed the international border at the behest of the Mexicans, but Terrazas trapped Victorio in a canyon of the Tres Castillos Mountains and slaughtered the Mimbres on October 15, 1880. Victorio was killed, and the handful of survivors gave allegiance to the septagenarian Nana. In a remarkable feat of endurance, the following summer Nana led fifteen warriors on a two-month-long raid through southwestern New Mexico. They rode a thousand miles; killed fifty Americans; captured hundreds of horses and mules; fought ten skirmishes with the army—winning most of them; eluded nearly one thousand pursuing soldiers and hundreds of civilian volunteers; and then vanished into Mexico.

As southern New Mexico at last settled down to comparative quiet, Apache troubles flared up where least expected, on the customarily tranquil White Mountain (Fort Apache) reservation. The very tranquility of the White Mountain Apaches had seemingly endangered their existence. Towns had sprung up around the reservation, and Mormon settlers had spilled into the country west of Fort Apache. Fearful of losing their lands, in the summer of 1881 many White Mountain and Cibicue Apaches fell under the sway of a medicine man and prophet, Noch-ay-del-klinne, who promised to resurrect dead chiefs before the autumn corn ripened—if the white intruders were expelled. Col. E. A. Carr, the commanding officer at Fort Apache, was not unduly alarmed by Noch-ay-del-klinne’s prophecies, which also included pacific elements. However, Joseph C. Tiffany, the hopelessly inept successor to Clum as Indian agent for the San Carlos and White Mountain reservations, demanded that the military arrest or kill the medicine man. Brig. Gen. Or lando B. Willcox, who had demonstrated a singular lack of understanding of Apache nature since replacing General Kautz as department commander three years earlier, ordered Carr to make the arrest as soon as practicable. Tiffany followed with a telegram of his own, telling Carr he wanted the prophet arrested or killed or both.

Carr obeyed reluctantly. Too many of his Apache scouts had fallen under the spell of the prophet to be relied upon, and he feared a violent confrontation with Noch-ay-del-klinne’s followers. Nevertheless, on August 29, 1881, he started from Fort Apache for Noch-ay-del-klinne’s village on the Cibicue Creek at the head of eighty-five troopers of the 6th U.S. Cavalry and twenty-three scouts. He arrested the prophet without incident the next day. But when Carr unwisely made camp near the village that evening, Noch-ay-del-klinne’s warriors and his own scouts opened fire on the troopers, apparently without provocation, killing Capt. E. C. Hentig and four men. Noch-ay-del-klinne was cut down trying to escape. Carr repelled the assault and withdrew toward Fort Apache under the cover of darkness. Emboldened by their success, the warriors and mutinous scouts rushed Fort Apache on September 1 but, lacking strong leadership, were driven off.

The failure of the attack—and of Noch-ay-del-klinne himself to arise from the dead—disheartened most of the hostiles, who gradually drifted back onto the reservation or took refuge at the ranch of Corydon E. Cooley, a staunch friend of the Apaches. Only sixty of the most intractable remained out. Had Tiffany been replaced and agency police permitted to round up the ringleaders, the trouble most likely would have ended in a matter of weeks. But the War Department overreacted. I want this annual Apache stampede to end right now, declared General Sherman, and to effect that result will send every available man in the whole army if necessary. Reinforcements poured in from the departments of California and the Missouri, and the overawed renegades surrendered in droves. Five mutinous scouts were court-martialed. Two were sent to Alcatraz, and the remaining three were hung for killing Captain Hentig. Displaying commendable restraint, neither the army nor civil authorities punished the remaining Apache participants in the Cibicue affair.

In its zeal to suppress the Cibicue uprising, the army inadvertently touched off an outbreak among the Chiricahuas. Despite white encroachment, Indian Bureau graft, and factional intrigue among the San Carlos tribes, the Chiricahuas had remained quietly at their Camp Goodwin subagency for nearly five years. But the presence of so many troops on the reservation—which had been free of soldiers for nearly five years—threw them into a panic. Not understanding the reason for the military buildup, they feared they were to be punished for past transgressions. When Maj. James Biddle foolishly galloped into the subagency on September 30, 1881, with three troops of cavalry to arrest Bonito and George, two White Mountain chiefs who had retired there after having been paroled prematurely for their role in the Cibicue affair, seventy-four nervous Chiricahua warriors under Juh and Naiche bolted with their families. Among the 400 decamped Apaches were Chihuahua, Chatto, and Geronimo. After a skirmish with pursuing troops near Cedar Springs, the hostiles vanished into the Sierra Madre, where they joined the remnants of Victorio’s band. In January 1882 messengers from Juh and Naiche infiltrated the camp of old Chief Loco of the Mimbres, who had refused to join the September breakout. They advised him that a raiding party would come in forty days to drag his band from San Carlos.

True to their word, on April 18, 1882, a war party under Chatto, Chihuahua, Naiche, and perhaps Geronimo cut the telegraph wires into San Carlos and coerced Loco and 300 Mimbres into breaking out. During their flight, agency police chief Albert D. Sterling was killed. Now outlaws anyway, the Mimbres perpetrated a string of brutal depredations. Military action was swift but inconclusive. Col. George A. Forsyth patrolled the Southern Pacific Railroad in southwestern New Mexico with six troops of the 4th U.S. Cavalry but succeeded simply in losing several scouts and six soldiers in a drawn battle at Horseshoe Canyon on April 23, 1882. While Forsyth drew off to the Gila River to regroup, the hostile warriors gathered their women and children and marched swiftly across the San Simon Valley and the Chiricahua Mountains, bound for Mexico.

Out of the mountains in pursuit came a column under Capt. William A. Rafferty and Capt. Tullius C. Tupper, with Al Sieber as chief of scouts. Crossing the border in violation of international law, they engaged the renegades at Sierra Enmedio. Seventeen warriors were killed before a lack of ammunition forced the soldiers to retire. Shortly after the fight, Colonel Forsyth arrived with seven cavalry troops and two scout companies, took command of Rafferty and Tupper’s party, and decided to push deeper into Mexico. Fleeing the Americans, Loco’s band stumbled into a Mexican ambush, losing 111 of their number. Forsyth called off his pursuit after the Mexican commander ordered him out of Mexico.

Although renegades from the Cibicue affair had precipitated the Chiricahua and Mimbre flights from San Carlos, they had not joined them. Instead, the sixty who had refused to surrender the previous autumn lingered about the reservation until early July 1882, when, under the leadership of a White Mountain warrior named Natiotish, they broke out to the west, hoping to spark a general uprising. Natiotish’s warriors killed the new San Carlos police chief, J. L. Cibicue Charlie Colvig, and three of his scouts but found no support among the reservation Indians. Kidnapping some squaws, the disgruntled warriors raided northwest into the Tonto Basin.

Fourteen troops of cavalry took the field. On July 16 Al Sieber, guiding Capt. Adna Chaffee’s troop of the 6th U.S. Cavalry, detected Natiotish’s fugitives in an escarpment of the Mogollon Rim near General Springs, where they were waiting to ambush the cavalrymen. Unknown to the renegades, during the night four troops under Maj. A. W. Evans reinforced Chaffee. Instead of massacring a lone cavalry troop the next day, the hostiles found themselves overwhelmed in one of the few conventional battles of the Apache wars. Natiotish and at least sixteen warriors perished; many more were wounded. The survivors snuck back onto the reservations. As one historian observed of what was known as the Battle of the Big Dry Wash, This fight was more than a victory; it was the end of an era in Apache affairs. Never again were the troops to fight the Apaches in Arizona; never again, with the exception of the Chiricahuas, were the Apaches violently to oppose governmental control.⁵ It would, however, take four years and two changes of department commanders before the last of the Chiricahua recalcitrants were subdued.

The Loco and Natiotish outbreaks convinced Washington that a change of department commanders was imperative. On September 4, 1882, George Crook returned to Arizona to relieve the generally despised Orlando Willcox. He immediately concluded that no military department could well have been in a more desperate plight. Continued instrusion on their land, cruel and corrupt agents, enigmatic army and civilian policies, and rumors that they were to be disarmed and removed had brought nearly all the reservation Indians in Apacheria to the brink of revolt. And across the Mexican border were some six hundred Chiricahuas, a magnet for the disaffected who could be counted on to renew their depredations in Arizona and New Mexico.

Crook acted quickly and tactfully. With the warm consent of the new agent at San Carlos, Philip P. Wilcox, Crook permitted the mountain Apaches whom Clum had forcibly relocated to San Carlos to return to their high-country homes near Fort Apache, removing a major source of disquiet. He met with the chiefs of the reservation bands, promising to correct abuses and preaching the benefits of peace. At the same time, he admonished his officers to deal justly, honestly, and impartially with the Indians. In his work of pacification Crook was greatly aided by Agent Wilcox, who allowed the army to manage and discipline the reservation Indians. Crook appointed four able officers to the task: Capt. Em met Crawford and Lt. Britton Davis to deal with the Indians at San Carlos, and Lt. Charles B. Gatewood and Lt. Hamilton Roach to work with the White Mountain bands near Fort Apache. On September 27 Crook wired division headquarters that he had arrived at a thorough understanding with the disaffected Indians and that there is now not a hostile Apache in Arizona.

But the Chiricahuas and Mimbres in the Sierra Madre loomed dangerously close. Reports came of widespread raiding in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, and some said Juh was preparing to retrace Victorio’s old path of destruction into Texas. Crook sent Apache emissaries into Mexico to treat with the renegades and blanketed the border with Indian scout companies. He also laid plans for an offensive campaign, reorganizing his commands and bringing the neglected pack-train service back up to field readiness.

Before Crook could secure either Mexican permission or Washington approval to operate in Mexico, two dozen warriors under Chatto, Bonito, and Naiche swept north out of the Sierra Madre. Crossing the border on March 21, 1883, in a six-day raid they spread terror from the Huachuca Mountains of Arizona to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Riding seventy-five miles a day, they killed twenty-six people, including Judge H. C. McComas and his wife, taking their young son, Charlie, captive; stole scores of horses; and then