Oh What a Slaughter

by Larry McMurtry

  When the number of these unreservationed Indians swelled to around five hundred, Lieutenant Whitman decided he had better seek counsel from his superiors as to whether he was allowed to grant such a number of Indians de facto asylum. At this juncture a little military surrealism enters the story: Lieutenant Whitman’s request for instruction was returned unread because he had failed to summarize his message on the outside of the envelope, a nicety the military code seemed to require.

  This rejection came in early March 1871. In recent months there had been a number of small-scale attacks well south of Tucson, a good distance from the Aravaipa but close enough to alarm the citizenry of Tucson—white, Mexican, and Papago—to take up arms. The Apache and the Papago were bitter enemies; likewise the Apache and the Mexican.

  On the 28th of April Captain Penn at Fort Lowell sent Lieutenant Whitman a message saying that a large and mixed group of men were said to be heading north out of Tucson, in the direction of Camp Grant. The messenger bringing this news arrived at the camp in the early morning of April 30.

  Lieutenant Whitman immediately sent some men to the Apache camp to urge the Apaches to come closer to the fort, but when the men reached the encampment they discovered that they were too late. The men from Tucson—six whites, forty-eight Mexicans, and ninety-four Papago—had already done the work they came to do. More than one hundred Apaches were dead—all had been killed with knives, hatchets, or clubs. The Papago, particularly, favored clubs.

  A puzzlement to me, at least, is that the raiders could slip in and destroy a camp this size with no one at the nearby fort suspecting anything. Dunn says the fort was only half a mile from the camp—perhaps it was farther away; otherwise it seems strange that no one or no thing at the fort heard anything. Surely the horses would have been alarmed, or the dogs, or the sentries. Even though the raiders didn’t use guns it seems odd that a hundred people could be put to death without breaking the early morning silence. Did no one scream, or no babies cry, or no dogs bark? Lieutenant Whitman had deliberately kept the Indians close so he could monitor their comings and goings.

  Besides this, the camp was set afire—did no one smell the smoke and wonder what was going on with the Apaches?

  Perhaps Dunn was wrong—the bulk of the Apache camp may have been farther away than he thought; otherwise it’s hard to believe that such deadly work produced no outcry at all.

  When, later in the day, a doctor was sent from Camp Grant to bring in the wounded, he found very few wounded to attend. The raiders with their knives and clubs had done a very thorough job—though they missed Eskiminzin, the man they wanted most. In fact, they missed all the men. A few women were able to take advantage of the half-darkness to flee; but those who didn’t were treated with the usual severity.

  Twenty-nine Apache children were taken in this raid; most were sold into slavery in Mexico, a source of great bitterness to the survivors. J. P. Dunn called this massacre “pure assassination,” and the succinct President Grant called it “murder, purely.”

  Grant eventually sent an able investigator, Mr. Vincent Colyer, to Arizona with the legal power to bring the culprits to justice. Once again murder had outed, quickly in this case, but Mr. Colyer soon found the citizens of Tucson to be even more stridently defiant than the Mormons had been after Mountain Meadows or the citizens of Denver in regard to Sand Creek. The Arizona press was flamboyantly pro-massacre. The papers were so violently biased in favor of the killers that J. P. Dunn was moved to speak harshly about them.

  But the uproar in the East was just as passionate, and did not subside. To the great outrage of the citizens of Tucson a trial was finally held and 148 raiders were indicted.

  The legal proceedings, conducted in circumstances of high tension, were as farcical as the first trial of John Doyle Lee. The jury took only nineteen minutes to acquit the defendants, surely one of the shortest jury deliberations in the annals of jurisprudence.

  But, at least, the light of the law had been shone on the massacre. The atrocities were aired in open court.

  Practically speaking, this massacre, like Sand Creek, backfired, intensifying the combat between the Apaches and everyone else. Cochise, the Chiricahua leader who had been living peaceably, went back to his stronghold in the mountains. Fifteen more years of raiding and killing followed.

  The Bureau of Indian Affairs, always several steps behind the action, attempted to stabilize the situation by shifting small groups of Indians from here to there, but these efforts mostly stirred the Indians up, rather than calming them down. The situation soon became so volatile that the army was forced to send one of its very best men, General George Crook, to sort things out.

  By the time Crook arrived in Arizona the situation with the Apaches was beyond the power of any one administrator to fully correct, but Crook took his time, did his best, and effected some real improvements.

  George Crook’s career as an Indian fighter and administrator contradicts perhaps more clearly than any other J. P. Dunn’s assertion that the Indians only respected merciless behavior. Crook was no softie, of course, but he did try to be fair, and the Indians recognized as much and respected him for it. Custer might have flair, but Crook was solid. His assistant John Gregory Bourke’s On the Border with Crook continues to be one of the most readable books about this period. Bourke would be the first to admit that Crook was not easy to work with; but his ability was never in doubt.

  Unlike most military administrators, Crook took the time to try to understand the differences between the nine branches of the Apache people, from the Mescalero, far to the east between the Rio Grande and the Pecos, all the way west, to the Apaches who lived near the Gila. It was Crook who recognized the folly of cramming disparate and incompatible bands onto the same reservation. He made real progress. Even Geronimo, a particularly hard sell, developed some respect for General George Crook.

  Unfortunately for peace in Arizona, Crook’s skills and authority soon came to be in even more urgent demand elsewhere: that is, on the northern plains, where Red Cloud and his allies were still proving to be a little too strong for the U.S. Army to subdue. Crook was called north and given a sizable command, perhaps too sizable, because it slowed his power of maneuver. In the main he was less effective in the north than he had been in Arizona. His all-day battle on the Rosebud, a week before the Little Bighorn, was no army triumph; but for the bravery of his Crow and Shoshoni scouts it might have been a very bloody defeat.

  In Arizona, absent Crook’s calming hand, the situation failed to improve. The army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs muddled and then muddled some more. Eventually, well after his inconclusive pursuit of the victors at the Little Bighorn, Crook was sent a second time to the Apacheria, his main task being to catch Geronimo, though Geronimo was by no means his only problem. By 1882, when George Crook returned to the Southwest, many Apaches were off the reservation, doing as they pleased. Crook had to do some hard campaigning, in very inhospitable places; but he did eventually get many of the Apache bands back on more or less suitable reservations.

  At one point Crook almost reeled in Geronimo, but that slippery fellow developed second thoughts: he went out one last time. Crook had done most of the work, but it was General Nelson Miles who eventually took Geronimo’s surrender.

  It had been Miles, also, who accepted the famous surrender of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, in the Bearpaw Mountains, not far from Canada, to which the Indians were headed in their long and dramatic flight.

  Miles would have dearly loved to take Crazy Horse’s surrender too—that would have given him an enviable triple—but this was not to be.

  It is nearly impossible to calculate, at this distance, how many deaths occurred in the Apacheria between the Camp Grant Massacre and Geronimo’s surrender. Camp Grant turned out to be a particularly pointless massacre, in which the least threatening Indians in the region were killed. Like most massacres, it proved to be counterproductive. The outrage it spawned just led to more fights. Papago-Apach
e strife was not new—it had been going on ever since the two people had begun to inhabit the same country; and, likewise, the strife between Apaches and Mexicans. Old hatreds were involved—to some degree they still are.

  As in Colorado, the influx of white people into arid southern Arizona was partly due to rich mining possibilities. The geologist Raphael Pumpelly, who came to Arizona because of the mines, has some excellent descriptions of white-Apache conflict in his travel book Across America and Asia.

  According to Pumpelly, the Apaches found the Americans laughably bad as fighters. In the north the Sioux and Cheyenne held the same opinion. Some of Major Reno’s men, at the Little Bighorn, were so obviously terrified that the Sioux and Cheyenne youth split their sides laughing as they chased them down. According to Pumpelly the western Apache found the white man’s attempts at warfare so laughable that they let them live, so as to have a good laugh another day. Geronimo, who did not appear to have much of a sense of humor, probably would have killed them.

  The issue of the twenty-nine children taken in the Camp Grant raid rankled for years. Once they were across the border, it was virtually impossible to recover stolen children.

  Though much vilified in the Arizona press, which claimed that he debauched with native women, Lieutenant Whitman was a decent young officer who had done his best to help the local Apaches, whom he had come to like. Some of the ranchers in the area had begun to soften toward the Apaches too, employing them when they could. What was lost as a result of the massacre was the small, fragile measure of trust that the two peoples were beginning to develop for each other. This trust had only been possible because of Whitman, a calm, sensitive administrator.

  In time a good many Apaches came to trust Crook, who fought them hard when he fought but who had never been an exterminationist. Once he had subdued a given group of Indians, he did his best to secure decent treatment for them.

  The Aravaipa leader Eskiminzin lost two wives and five children at Camp Grant. He fled into the mountains and did not come back. He also may have taken revenge when an opportunity presented itself. J. P. Dunn, who liked statistics, reckoned that there were fifty-four attacks by Apaches on whites following Camp Grant, which is more or less what happened after Sand Creek. When Crook returned to fix what could be fixed, Dunn had this to say about the difficulties he faced:

  It must be remembered that he had left to him a legacy of hatred of three centuries between the people he had to pacify; that a large proportion of the white population were as barbarous in their modes of warfare as the Apaches themselves; that Arizona was still a refuge for the criminal and lawless men of other states; that war and pillage had been bred into the Apache, until they were the most savage and intractable Indians in the country; that large bands of their nation infested northern Mexico, and had almost impenetrable strongholds there; that Mexico still pursued war in the old way and still paid bounty for Apache scalps, no matter where procured; that slaving still existed in Mexico, and it was next to impossible to recover Indians once carried over the line.

  All true. The president’s man, Mr. Colyer, did a conscientious job of trying to sort things out, but the local white power structure was wholly hostile to him; for a long time the situation remained unsatisfactory and unsettled. Apaches, like most people, naturally have a strong preference for their own particular kind of country, whether desert, mountain, or plain. Shuffling them around from one poor reservation to another seldom improved anybody’s mood; and yet remnants of that system are evident in Arizona today.

  Red Cloud’s old remark about the white man promising to take their land and then taking it is everywhere evident in Arizona. As soon as a given bunch of Apaches, attempting to make the best of a bad situation, began to adapt to one reservation, likely as not they would be shifted to another.

  If the Apaches succeeded in making a given location cultivatable, then the whites would inevitably want it.

  Neither General Crook nor his successor, Colonel Kautz, liked this way of doing things; but they were soldiers, not bureaucrats; and by this time management of Native American affairs came more and more to be the domain of bureaucrats. In the end the Indians always lost. What applied to Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, or Crazy Horse turned out to apply, as well, to Cochise, Victorio, Geronimo, and the rest.

  In the Southwest this pattern has been established as far back as 1863, when some soldiers captured the Apache leader Mangus Coloradas, killed him, and cut off his head. That the struggle then continued for more than twenty years was mainly because Geronimo—the last of the desert Apache leaders—was far from easy to catch or kill.

  In the end, though, as was to be the case from sea to shining sea, the whites had better equipment, and always prevailed.

  The Broken Hoop: 1871–1890

  The two decades between the Camp Grant Massacre in 1871 and the final carnage at Wounded Knee Creek at the very end of 1890, were years in which the Indians of the West, from southern Arizona and northern Texas all the way north to Canada and west from the Missouri River to the lava beds of northern California, where the Modocs mounted their final, futile resistance, slowly lost their freedom, their land, and their way of life.

  Though there were brilliant victories—Fetterman, the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn—the contest was always unequal and its end inevitable.

  The whites—the people with the better equipment—won. Most of the fighting Indians whose names have survived in popular memory—Captain Jack of the Modocs, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, Quanah Parker of the Comanches, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux, Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa, Spotted Tail of the Brulé, Cochise and Geronimo of the Apaches, fought, died, or surrendered during this period.

  Captain Jack was hanged in 1873.

  Chief Joseph, after declaring that from where the sun stood then he would fight no more, forever spent the rest of his days in places he did not want to be.

  Crazy Horse, the most inspired of all the Sioux warriors, was killed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, a victim in the main of his own people’s jealousy. Without quite realizing it, he had become too big a star.

  Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa took his people to Canada for a few years, but received no help and finally came back and surrendered. He was killed by native policemen on the Standing Rock Reservation while resisting arrest. His death occurred about two weeks before the massacre at Wounded Knee.

  Quanah Parker of the Quahadi (Antelope) Comanche surrendered in 1875 and became an effective leader of his people during the painful years of transition from free life to reservation life.

  Red Cloud, the Sioux’s most able negotiator, lived until 1909 and died in his bed, a wise but not a happy man.

  Spotted Tail, cautious leader of the Brule Sioux (and Crazy Horse’s uncle) was also killed by one of his own people.

  Geronimo, the Apache warrior who held out the longest, surrendered in 1886 and died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, also in 1909.

  Quanah Parker died in 1911, also at Fort Sill.

  A number of distinguished military men had their careers defined by the efforts they made in the West to bring the Indian wars to a close.

  The most famous of these of course was George Armstrong Custer, who died at the Little Bighorn, his great folly, with a smile on his face.

  George Crook did honest service, both against the northern tribes and the desert Apache. He died in 1890, without having to witness the shame of Wounded Knee. His old adversary Red Cloud remarked, almost fondly, of Crook: “He never lied to us. His words gave the people hope.”

  One of the most able Indian fighters of all was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. He fought far out on the Staked Plains, where few officers dared to go. In 1875 he broke the power of the Comanches and was sent north to help out with the northern tribes. On the day when he was supposed to be married, Ranald Slidell Mackenzie went permanently insane.

  A fourth able leader was General Nelson Miles, who fought in Texas in the Red River War and the
n went north with Mackenzie. Miles chased both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse with mixed success, but he survived and, as I said, took the surrender of both Chief Joseph and Geronimo—although, in both cases, he did little of the chasing.

  The three chiefs who more or less mastered the diplomatic skills necessary to deal with the white officials and their bureaus were Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Quanah Parker; the latter was the half-white son of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most famous of the Comanche captives.

  Sitting Bull, who hated the whites from first to last, was surly, impatient, and never a particularly good negotiator. The only white he unstintingly admired was Annie Oakley, his “little sure-shot.” Sitting Bull also came to have some respect for Buffalo Bill Cody, in whose show he appeared for a season. Cody, the great showman, in one of his rare understatements, called Sitting Bull “peevish.”

  In fact the great Hunkpapa was a good deal more than peevish. Even at the very end of his life he still so frightened the whites that, when the Ghost Dancers began to dance and he refused to stop them, the authorities sent the Indian police and some cavalry as well to bring him in.

  Though the time between the Camp Grant Massacre and Wounded Knee was almost twenty years, it only took about a half-dozen of those to essentially defeat the Plains Indians. Geronimo was a special case, protected by a harsh but helpful environment.

  The government made treaties and broke them constantly. Most of the Indians knew how little chance they had; they knew, if from nothing more than the rapid disappearance of the buffalo, that their way of life was gone. The gathering at the Little Bighorn was their greatest conclave, and their last. They wiped out the arrogant Long Hair and then just melted away, into the vast spaces of the West. With the possible exception of the Fort Laramie council in 1854 they had never gathered in such numbers and they never would again.