All the great chiefs possessed a variety of Powers. Geronimo’s followers ascribed these and other Powers to him, and they accounted for much of his influence.
Geronimo also lived a happy family life. Alope bore him three children (their gender was not recorded). The couple reared them in accord with Chiricahua tradition and the commands of Usen.
At the early age of forty, Geronimo appeared to have the potential to become an outstanding leader, if not as great as Mangas Coloradas or Cochise, still at least the accomplished head of a Bedonkohe local group. As Mangas’s biographer concludes, “Geronimo, although he enjoyed a reputation for supernatural power and was a fighter nonpareil, did not demonstrate the other leadership abilities to attract more than an intimately devoted band of followers, most of whom were related by either blood or marriage.”16
THREE
BATTLE AND MASSACRE
AS THE 1850S OPENED, Chihuahua and Sonora continued to divide the Chiricahuas. Many, up to half the Chihennes and some Nednhis, succumbed to the lure of Janos, with its prospect of rations and trade. The largest of a cluster of communities in northwestern Chihuahua, about fifty miles below the US boundary, Janos had been a center of Chiricahua attention for a generation, a place to trade plunder from raids in Sonora and to draw rations when the government wanted peace. By the end of 1850 Chihuahua had treaties in place at Janos and issued rations. The rest of the Chihennes, together with the Bedonkohe and Chokonen followers of Mangas Coloradas and Cochise, including Geronimo, opposed the peace overtures. As throughout the 1840s, chiefs continued to waver between the attractions of Janos and the plunder of Sonora.
Even with treaties concluded at Janos, in January 1851 the war faction of the Chihennes, Bedonkohes, and Chokonens organized a formidable expedition against Sonoran towns and ranches. It advanced in two forces of about 150 fighters. With Mangas about sixty years old, the more vigorous Cochise employed superior war skills. But the stature of Mangas ensured his dominant influence, and as always he fought fiercely in the vanguard of any combat. Geronimo, at twenty-eight a highly regarded fighter, was a prominent presence, and his friend Juh had come over from Janos with some treaty Nednhis.1
Mangas and Cochise thrust far down the Sonora River to the southwest as far as Hermosillo. The other division of the war faction rode closer to the western foothills of the Sierra Madre, along the Bavispe River and south as far as Sahuaripa (Sow-ah-reepa). Ranches, haciendas, villages, and travelers fell prey to the warriors, losing lives, horses, mules, cattle, and other booty. Both groups then turned back north, generally up the Nacozari River midway between their downward sweeps along the Sonora and Bavispe Rivers.
As ordained by Apache war culture and inflamed by their hatred of Sonora, the men ruthlessly cut down any Mexican who strayed into their path and made off with any stock or booty that appealed to them. An expedition of this magnitude provided an opportunity for Geronimo to demonstrate his raiding skills and to cement his bond to Mangas Coloradas and Cochise, his mentors.
The raiders encountered little of the organized resistance that confronted earlier Sonoran raids. Unknown to them, their old nemesis, Colonel Elías González, Sonora’s leading military figure since the 1830s, who would have deployed such troops as his little garrisons allowed, had fallen casualty to Mexican politics. His successor, Colonel José María Carrasco, a fierce, arrogant advocate of war of extermination, had yet to arrive in Sonora. Even so, Governor José de Aguilar organized a force to cut off the raiders as they returned northward. Under his orders, fifty national guardsmen under Captain Ignacio Pesqueira moved from Arizpe eastward to unite with another fifty under Captain Manuel Martínez marching west from Bocoachi. They came together amid some rolling hills twelve miles northeast of the upper Nacozari River. Then, when scouts brought word of a dust cloud approaching from the south, Pesqueira and Martínez set up an ambush in a beautiful, mountain-girt valley containing the well-known “Stinking Springs,” or Pozo Hediondo. The date was January 20, 1851.
The dust rose from the war expedition of Mangas Coloradas and Cochise returning to their home country. Ahead of the main force rode a small party driving 350 head of stock. Behind, Mangas drove a herd of about one thousand horses in his front. The advance party triggered the ambush, which took the Apaches by surprise. Although badly outnumbered, the men abandoned their stock, withdrew into defensive positions in the hills, and fought fiercely. The Mexicans assailed these defenses, overran them, and routed the Apaches.
Although also surprised, Mangas and his men quickly recovered. The Mexican ambush had misfired and led them into an Apache ambush. They now faced half again as many as their own number. The Apaches charged to the rescue of their brethren and collided with the foe. A savage conflict, lasting three hours and featuring hand-to-hand encounters, drove the Mexicans from one hilltop defense to another, with heavy losses. Geronimo recalled that “I fought with fury. Many fell by my hand, and constantly I led the advance. Many braves were killed.” At the end, “over the bloody field, covered with the bodies of Mexicans, rang the fierce Apache war-whoop.”2
Contributing to this outcome, by late afternoon, the second war expedition, mainly Chokonens working their way north, reached the scene and threw about a hundred men into the fight. Skirmishing continued until dark, but the Mexicans had been devastatingly defeated. All the officers had been killed or wounded. Mexican casualties amounted to twenty-six killed and forty-six wounded, nearly three-fourths of the command. Apache casualties are unknown.
Pozo Hediondo stood as the greatest victory Apaches had ever won over Mexican military forces. As the biographer of Mangas Coloradas notes, his importance at Pozo Hediondo “rested on his ability to draw together the coalition of bands and to infuse them with a confidence—perhaps even bordering on arrogance—that they were invincible to Sonoran firepower, which resulted in the rout and annihilation of Pesqueira’s command.” Geronimo fought fiercely, as did Cochise, Juh, and others. But to Mangas Coloradas belonged the laurels.3
That Apache culture mandated wars of revenge is ironic in light of the revenge motive that powered the response of the new Sonoran commander, Colonel José María Carrasco. The catastrophe at Pozo Hediondo demanded savage reprisal.
Mangas Coloradas and others who participated in the war expedition, including Geronimo, withdrew to their homes, Mangas and the Bedonkohes to the Burro Mountains. Fearing Sonoran retaliation for Pozo Hediondo and aware of the peace and rations enjoyed by many Chiricahuas at Janos, Mangas put out peace feelers to see if he and his people could receive similar benefits. He did not want to relocate to Janos but wished to move to more secure havens in the Animas Mountains about seventy-five miles northwest of Janos, in New Mexico. Following up on these overtures, he and many of his people, including Geronimo, journeyed to Janos to discuss the issue with the authorities. Like other Apaches settled near Janos, Mangas and his people camped outside town. Each day the men went into the town to trade, bargaining with loot taken in the recent war expedition into Sonora and freely partaking of the intoxicants available there. They produced a quicker and stronger effect than tiswin.4
Meantime, Colonel Carrasco and about four hundred guardsmen and militia crossed the Sierra Madre from Sonora into Chihuahua and crept up on Janos without discovery by either the Apaches or the Janos authorities. On March 5, 1851, he struck, destroying several of the Apache rancherías. Carrasco reported killing sixteen men and five women and taking sixty-two captives. Fifty-six of these were women and children, herded off with his command to be sold into slavery. Carrasco’s count of women and children likely fell short of the actual number. Most of the victims were Chokonens and Nednhis, although Mangas’s Bedonkohes, including Geronimo, temporarily at Janos on a peace mission, suffered also.
As Geronimo recounted his own experience:
Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children, who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of th
e guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children. Quickly we separated, concealing ourselves as best we could until nightfall, when we assembled at our appointed place of rendezvous—a thicket by the river. Silently we stole in one by one: sentinels were placed, and, when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain. There were no lights in camp, so without being noticed I silently turned away and stood by the river. How long I stood there I do not know, but when I saw the warriors arranging for a council I took my place.5
Geronimo leaves unsaid whether he actually saw or recognized the bodies of his family, although in old age he told artist E. A. Burbank that he found them lying in a pool of blood.6 He may have seen them; more likely, since no lights were lit, he did not. For all he knew, they were among the captives taken into slavery. Uncontested, however, is that Carrasco had wiped out Geronimo’s entire family. “I had lost all,” he lamented. “I was never again contented in our quiet home. True, I could visit my father’s grave, but I had vowed vengeance upon the Mexican troopers who had wronged me, and whenever I came near his grave or saw anything to remind me of former happy days my heart would ache for revenge against Mexico.”
As Geronimo testified, the Carrasco massacre planted in him a bitter hatred of all Mexicans that lasted until the end of his life. At twenty-eight, this landmark event shaped the man and marked out his life’s pathway.
FOUR
“AMERICANS”
WHILE LAUNCHING RAIDS AND conducting war against Mexicans, Chiricahuas knew about other white people approaching from the north and east. The newcomers called themselves “Americans.” As early as the 1820s, these white people had appeared in Mangas Coloradas’s country. They were American fur trappers, and they began to base themselves at Santa Rita del Cobre for westward expeditions into the Gila country. Located about thirty-five miles east of Santa Lucía Springs, at the southern edge of the Pinos Altos Range of southwestern New Mexico, they lay within the homeland of Mangas Coloradas and his Bedonkohe and Chihenne followers. The Santa Rita copper mines were first exploited by the Spanish in 1803 and then the Mexicans. The Spanish had built a presidio and other adobe structures to work the mines. Both Spanish and Mexicans also had used the copper mines as a military base both for making war and peace with the resident Apaches. Mangas extended friendship to the Americans and often conferred with them; Geronimo was almost certainly nearby. They proved no threat and merely wished to pass through his domain.1
The Americans next appeared in 1846, when they had declared war on Mexico. An American general, Stephen Watts Kearny, led an expedition of dragoons by way of the copper mines and Santa Lucía Springs toward California to claim it for the United States. He needed mules. He and Mangas Coloradas established a wary friendship, and Kearny got his mules.
In the years following the friendly meeting between Mangas Coloradas and the American general, the Chihennes and Bedonkohes largely concentrated on their ongoing war-and-peace relations with Chihuahua and Sonora. The revenge raid for the Janos massacre, in which Geronimo lost his family, had to be plotted and carried out. At the same time, the Chiricahuas noted the creeping advance of American soldiers down the Rio Grande and the few undermanned forts they built.
As early as 1848, some of the Chihennes, the Chiricahua band closest to the Americans, had even stirred up the soldiers. The Rio Grande flowed south from New Mexico through the Pass of the North, after passing the Mexican towns of Mesilla and, nearby to the north, Doña Ana. The soldiers had stationed themselves at Doña Ana. On December 12, 1848, a small party of Apaches approached Doña Ana and shouted that they wanted to talk. When a detachment rode out, the Apaches opened fire and drove them back. This may have been the first hostile encounter with American soldiers.2
The Chiricahuas occasionally raided around the Rio Grande settlements of Mesilla, El Paso, and Doña Ana and carried off many mules. In August 1849 about one hundred raiders, probably Bedonkohes led by Mangas and probably Geronimo, killed citizens near El Paso and hurried home with a big herd of mules. Soldiers from Doña Ana pursued and caught up near the copper mines. In a two-hour battle, the soldiers routed the Apaches, captured and destroyed their camp with all its contents, and recovered some of the stolen mules. From the Apache viewpoint, they had done nothing wrong. Although in country now claimed by the Americans, almost all the victims were Mexicans, still fair game. Mangas had made clear to Kearny himself that the Chiricahuas would always war on Mexicans. The American claim to the land, moreover, meant nothing to the Apaches. After this encounter, although Mangas was still inclined to trust the Americans, for many Chiricahuas Americans as well as Mexicans became enemies.3
Both Apaches and Americans wavered between war and peace. American civil authorities, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, consistently sought peace. The army, also headquartered in Santa Fe, seemed to pursue both war and peace at the same time. Officials closest to the scene had a better feel for the disposition of the Apaches at any given time than those in distant Santa Fe.
The senior military officer in southern New Mexico, one of the army’s best, was Captain Enoch Steen, who commanded a squadron of the First Dragoons at Doña Ana. He had led the pursuit in August 1849 that destroyed the Bedonkohe camp near the Santa Rita copper mines. Yet in August 1850 he led sixty dragoons to the copper mines to try to discuss peace. For six days he and Mangas Coloradas talked. Other chiefs participated, including some of the major Chihenne chiefs, still residing in their homeland closer to the Rio Grande. All said they wanted peace, but with Mexicans it was “war to the knife.” Steen concluded that if a civil agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs established himself at the copper mines within the next six weeks, he could conclude a lasting peace.4
That did not happen because Colonel Edwin V. Sumner, a tough old dragoon who commanded the army in New Mexico, did not want peace. In January 1852 he established Fort Webster at the copper mines, but moved it nine months later fourteen miles to the east, on the Mimbres River, Chihenne country. The colonel had hoped that Fort Webster would control the resident Apaches, but in his mind control meant military power rather than peaceful accommodation. And with good reason. The Bedonkohes and Chihennes had never stopped raiding the Rio Grande settlements. Sumner considered them at war and sent weak military columns into their country. And the Apaches did consider themselves at war, since the soldiers clearly invaded their country with hostile intent. Sumner blamed the civil authorities for the failure of peace initiatives. In truth, they had lacked both money and officials to extend their reach into the Chiricahua country.5
Ironically, even before Sumner had fully organized his offensive, in June 1852 word reached Santa Fe that the Chihennes and Bedonkohes wanted to make peace. The leading chiefs had achieved triumph at Pozo Hediondo and suffered defeat at the Janos disaster and now wanted to be friends with the Americans. With Mangas Coloradas, they had even started north to meet with the officials. John Griener, acting as superintendent of Indian affairs, and Colonel Sumner set forth to negotiate a treaty. On July 11, 1852, at Ácoma Pueblo, Mangas Coloradas and the other chiefs placed their marks on a treaty of peace and friendship. It ceded no country and promised issues of rations and other items. Mangas vigorously rejected articles requiring an end to raiding in Mexico and the return of Mexican captives, but signed anyway. Now he could go back to the Santa Lucía country and resume life as normal, warring with Mexico and farming at home. He had signed the only treaty he ever would sign with the United States.6
Griener and a new governor, William Carr Lane, followed up on the Ácoma treaty. A new agent, Edward H. Wingfield, arrived at Fort Webster in December 1852, to find the veteran Captain Enoch Steen commanding the post. Together, they spent the winter trying to round up the Chiricahua chiefs and launch a farming enterprise among the Mimbres local group of the Chihennes on the Mimbres River. At the same time, however, small raiding parties struck the Mexican sett
lements along the Rio Grande, undermining the prospects for peace. In the spring of 1853, Governor Lane himself journeyed to Fort Webster and worked with Wingfield and Steen to gather enough chiefs to negotiate a compact supplementing the Ácoma treaty. Since it still took no land and promised rations, the chiefs signed. Mangas Coloradas, raiding in Sonora with Chokonens, did not show up until May 18 to give his “cordial assent.” Lane even traveled west of the copper mines to inspect Santa Lucía Springs. He concluded that this country would make an ideal reservation and agency for the Chihennes and Bedonkohes.7
As so often would happen in the unhappy relations between the Chiricahuas and US officialdom, Lane’s compact met with disapproval. He had to advise Wingfield of a “chilling frost” in Washington and instruct him to reduce rations to the lowest level possible and tell the Indians to hunt and collect desert food.8
The “chilling frost” lasted nearly two years. For Mangas and his followers, the small handouts at Fort Webster hardly warranted the effort to go there, although in September 1853 he had a brief talk with the agent. Besides, Mangas and his people felt secure in their homes on the upper Gila and in the Mogollons. Also, in part reflecting disappointment over the broken promises of the Lane compact, they turned their attention to Mexico. Both provisions and revenge could be gained there. During 1853–54, Mangas and his son-in-law Cochise repeatedly led savage forays into Sonora. The raids distracted Mangas’s attention from what the Americans and the Chihenne chiefs were up to. Cochise, his Chokonen homeland remote from American officials, did not care. Geronimo, the loss of his family still heavy in his mind, probably welcomed the opportunity to kill more Mexicans.
Not until the summer of 1854 did Mangas begin to think about the Americans, with whom he continued to desire good relations. He found that Fort Webster had been abandoned in December 1853 and the soldiers and the Indian agent relocated on the Rio Grande. The army named the new station Fort Thorn. A new agent had appeared and reestablished the old agency at Doña Ana, and he was doling out rations and other issues to the Chihennes. With the Janos massacre amply revenged by the bloody incursions into Sonora, Mangas turned his attention back to the Americans. Nothing is known of Geronimo’s part in any of these events. He either remained close to Mangas Coloradas or carried out his own raiding in Mexico.9
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