Conspicuously absent from the conspiracy was Chatto. In Mexico he had been one of the most aggressive raiders and had gained fame as a war leader. For thirty years, even though twenty years younger, he had been a close friend and companion of Geronimo’s. Both Bedonkohes, both acolytes of Mangas Coloradas, they shared the common attitude toward Mexicans and whites—until the return to the reservation in 1884. Seemingly on his own, Chatto decided that the old ways would no longer work and that the future lay in casting his lot with the whites, especially General Crook. The general’s promise to try to gain the release of the Chiricahuas held captive by the Mexicans, including Chatto’s family, cemented his loyalty not only to Crook but to Davis. As first sergeant of Davis’s scout company, he had clearly drawn the line. No longer could he be counted one of the leaders Geronimo and Mangas incited to defy Davis.16
As May 15 dawned, Davis awoke to find the Chiricahua leaders drawn up in front of his tent three miles from Fort Apache, most unarmed. About thirty Chiricahuas grouped behind them. Under Chatto, the scouts had gathered in knots of four or five, all armed. The chiefs said they had come for a talk. Davis invited them inside. They squatted in a semicircle. Loco, Nana, Zele, and Bonito were badly hungover, while Mangas, Naiche, Geronimo, and Chihuahua were still intoxicated, Chihuahua especially so. Mickey Free interpreted. Loco, the least belligerent, began to set forth the complaints. Chihuahua, “palpably drunk and in an ugly humor,” sprang to his feet and declared, “What I have to say can be said in a few words, then Loco can take all the rest of the day to talk if he wishes to do so.”
Chihuahua directed his “few words” to a vigorous protest against the prohibition of wife-beating and tiswin drunks. They had never agreed to this in talks with General Crook, they had done it all their lives, and they had no intention of stopping now. In the midst of Davis’s attempt to explain why Crook adopted the rules, old Nana jumped up and interrupted with an angry outburst, then stalked out of the tent. Mickey Free relayed what Nana had said: “Tell the Nantan Enchau [stout chief] that he can’t advise me how to treat my women. He is only a boy. I killed men before he was born.”
Chihuahua resumed, “We all drank tiswin last night, all of us in the tent and outside, except the scouts; and many more. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to put us all in jail. You have no jail big enough even if you could put us all in jail.” Davis reasoned that the new defiance arose from the departure of Crawford and others well known to the Indians and their resulting conclusion that Nantan Lupan [Gray Wolf or Gray Fox, Crook] had also left.
Although he might have countered with several measures to avert a crisis, Davis decided to play for time. The issue was so grave, he explained, that only Crook could resolve it. He would seek the general’s decision by telegraph and let them know, although several days might elapse. Seemingly mollified, the Chiricahuas returned to their camps on Turkey Creek. From Fort Apache, Davis telegraphed Captain Pierce at San Carlos, explaining the situation. He naturally assumed that Pierce, like Crawford, would at once recognize the gravity of Davis’s dilemma and forward the telegram to Crook in Prescott. All Davis and the Indians could do was wait. Davis stood by the telegraph at Fort Apache; the Apaches at Turkey Creek simmered with growing anxiety.
As time passed with no word from Crook, Geronimo’s suspicion of treachery drew support from rumors and false reports from other leaders. As so often in the past, he believed that bad people—Chatto, Davis, even Crook—prepared to do bad things to him. Huera, Mangas’s wife, stoked the suspicions. By May 16 the impulse to flee to Mexico took control of both Geronimo and Mangas, restrained only by their failure to persuade more than fifteen men to join them. They needed the prestige of Chihuahua and Naiche to lend credibility to the plan, and they hung back.
Geronimo conceived a scheme for forcing their hand. During the day he sent a runner to the White River planting grounds east of Fort Apache to summon two cousins, members of Davis’s scout company. They came and quickly returned, bearing orders from Geronimo to kill Davis and Chatto. Chihuahua and Naiche would then have to leave, for military retaliation would be swift. At Fort Apache, however, Davis received a tip that Apaches were preparing to bolt the reservation. He and Gatewood mobilized as many scouts as they could round up and headed for Turkey Creek to arrest Geronimo and Mangas. About six miles from camp, the officers met an Apache who told them Geronimo and Mangas had left and had forced Naiche, Chihuahua, and Nana to go. Loco, Zele, and Bonito refused, even though threatened with death.
In fact, Geronimo and Mangas did not “force” the other chiefs to break with them. As Davis learned only later, they told the others that his cousins had killed Davis and Chatto, or as Chihuahua later put it, Geronimo “tricked” them. Why the scouts failed to carry out Geronimo’s orders was never explained. Meantime, the two cousins and two other scouts deserted and joined the people leaving the reservation.
Geronimo’s stratagem had worked. He told Chihuahua and Naiche that Davis and Chatto had been killed. Alarmed, they mobilized their people and joined in the breakout. At dusk of May 17 thirty-four men, including the four deserters, eight adolescent boys, and ninety-two women and children fled Turkey Creek, headed southeast. Counting ten women and children of Naiche’s following who later left, the total on the run numbered 144. The leaders of the outbreak were Geronimo, Mangas, Naiche, Chihuahua, and Nana. Remaining on the reservation were four hundred Chiricahuas, under Chatto, Zele, Bonito, and Loco.
Geronimo had broken away from the reservation for the third and last time.17
As Lieutenant Davis waited anxiously by the telegraph key at Fort Apache, he had no way of knowing that his telegram rested in an office pigeon hole at San Carlos. Crawford would instantly have forwarded it to Crook, but Pierce was new. He sought the advice of Chief of Scouts Al Sieber. He too might have urged sending it to Crook, but Sieber was sleeping off a hangover. Glancing at the telegram, he waved off Pierce with the comment that it was just another tiswin drunk, not to worry, Davis could handle it. Not for four months did Davis know what had happened, nor did Crook even know of the telegram’s existence.18
General Crook remained convinced, probably correctly, that had he received the telegram he could have headed off an outbreak. Even so, Geronimo’s chronic suspicion and readiness to believe any rumor, combined with the rivalries and politicking that constantly swept the Chiricahuas, made another outbreak inevitable.
NINETEEN
BACK TO THE SIERRA MADRE, 1885
THE MOUNTAINS OF ARIZONA and New Mexico are high, steep, tangled, rocky, slashed by deep canyons and gorges, and for humans on foot or horseback, except the Apaches, virtually impossible to penetrate except at lower elevations and along the rivers and creeks that flow from their heights. South of the international boundary, similar ranges of mountains carpet both Chihuahua and Sonora, dominated by the towering Sierra Madre separating the two Mexican states. The mountains of Mexico resemble some of the most rugged north of the border, but the Sierra Madre dwarf all others in tortuous topography.
No Indian tribe mastered a hostile environment more perfectly than the Apaches. Trained from birth, they could live off the land or by plundering neighboring tribes or European newcomers. Man, woman, and child, they could move swiftly through desert and mountain, enduring long journeys without rest, food, or water, intimately familiar with the terrain and skilled in employing it as a weapon in warfare, hiding in mountain recesses unseen and unapproachable by anyone not welcomed. They could “read” the land in every aspect, from the meaning of the unnatural position of a stone or a twig to virtually invisible sign on boulders or rocky slopes. Ever on the alert, with acute vision, hearing, and smell, rarely could they be surprised.
Of all Apache tribes, the Chiricahuas excelled in these traits. The final two years of liberty from American oversight vividly illustrated Chiricahua command of the environment.
The Chiricahua breakout of May 17, 1885, demonstrated the incredible ability of Apaches to move fast,
night and day, avoid troops except in ambush, wreak havoc on ranchers and their stock, and go where they wanted. All the Chiricahua leaders who led in the outbreak possessed these virtues. All moved in a body at times and divided into several bodies when pressed too closely. As he had shown in the abduction of Loco in 1882, Geronimo proved especially adept at confronting the challenges, exercising influence both when traveling with his own followers or when traveling with all the components.
Well aware that troops and scouts would take their trail quickly, the Chiricahuas journeyed swiftly through the night of May 17. Before reaching Eagle Creek on May 18, they glimpsed pursuers behind them. Descending to and crossing the creek, they scaled steep, canyon-scored mountains on the other side. Pushing through these mountains on May 19, the women and children scattered, to rejoin later. To slow soldiers behind them, the men took the most forbidding course possible through rocks and gorges, leaving a dim trail designed to prevent pursuit on horseback and exhaust pursuers on foot. White men they encountered they killed and robbed. After traveling all night, on May 20 they crossed Blue Creek and, coming on a cattle ranch, burned the house, killed two men, lanced the cattle, and made off with the horses and mules. Traveling up the San Francisco River on May 21, they entered a recently settled area and killed every white traveler they encountered.
Somewhere along this river, they paused to rest, Chihuahua’s and Naiche’s people in one group, those of Mangas and Geronimo in another. A raiding party returned with plunder, and one of the three Chiricahua scouts who had deserted told Chihuahua that Lieutenant Davis and Chatto had not been killed, as Geronimo had assured Chihuahua and Naiche on the evening of the breakout. Enraged over the deception, Chihuahua vowed to kill Geronimo. Rifles in hand, Chihuahua, his brother Ulzana, and the scout deserter headed for Geronimo’s group. But someone had tipped off Geronimo, and by the time Chihuahua reached their resting place Geronimo and Mangas had gathered their following and fled, shortly turning east and south on Devils Creek. Chihuahua continued north up the San Francisco River, intending to hide in the mountains until the excitement quieted and he could slip back to the reservation. Naiche had traveled with Chihuahua but was in Mangas’s group when they fled the wrath of Chihuahua and was forced to stay with it. He sent word to his wife to take their child and return to the reservation.1
Geronimo’s role in the last outbreak reveals an unflattering element of his character. Because other chiefs refused to follow his lead, he deceived them. If Lieutenant Davis and Chatto had been assassinated, Chihuahua, Naiche, and others would be forced to join in Geronimo’s outbreak or bear the consequences. Geronimo may have thought his scheme had been carried out when he told the other chiefs. He may simply have expected it to happen and told the other chiefs prematurely. In any event, such efforts to manipulate the other leaders show that Geronimo was willing to intrigue against his own people as well as white authority.
General Crook received his first intimation of an impending breakout at his Prescott headquarters on the afternoon of May 17, 1885, when Captain Pierce telegraphed from San Carlos that Lieutenant Davis, at Turkey Creek, feared that the Chiricahuas were preparing to bolt the reservation that evening. Of course, if Crook had received Davis’s telegram of May 15, pigeonholed at San Carlos by Captain Pierce, Crook would have been alerted to brewing trouble two days earlier and probably could have headed it off. Because the telegraph line between Fort Apache and San Carlos had been cut, Crook did not learn until the afternoon of the May 18 of the breakout of the previous evening. With the Fort Apache garrison already in pursuit, the general began ordering troops from other Arizona forts into the field and warning citizens to the east. He also established contact with Colonel Luther Bradley, commanding the District of New Mexico.
Shortly after the Chiricahuas entered New Mexico and turned toward the Mogollon Mountains and the Black Range, General Crook moved his headquarters to Fort Bayard, New Mexico, the better to move his troops and cooperate with Colonel Bradley. During these days he learned once again what he would always preach—regular soldiers were no match for Apaches:
The whole country north, east, and west of Fort Bayard was filled with troops. No less than twenty troops of cavalry and more than one hundred Indian scouts were moved in every direction either to intercept or follow the trails of the hostiles. But with the exception of the capture of a few animals by the Indian scouts under Chatto, and a slight skirmish with their rear guard by the troops from Apache under Captain Smith on May 22, in which three of his command were wounded, the Indians were not even caught sight of by the troops, and finally crossed into Mexico about June 10. … In the twenty-three days from the outbreak until the Indians crossed into Mexico, every possible effort was made by the troops, which were pushed to the limits of endurance of men and animals, but without result other than to drive the Indians out of the Black Range and the Mogollons, and also to save the lives, probably, of many ranchmen and prospectors.2
On June 5, 1885, Crook moved his headquarters from Fort Bayard to Deming, New Mexico, on the Southern Pacific Railroad. He knew that another campaign into Mexico such as he commanded in 1883 would be necessary. The railroad and telegraph line afforded the means of organizing and assembling the troops and scouts.
After confounding all the troops and scouts General Crook and Colonel Bradley could mobilize against them in New Mexico, Geronimo and the other leaders slipped across the boundary into Mexico. Geronimo and Mangas crossed at Lake Palomas, Chihuahua. Chihuahua, after surprising and destroying a cavalry supply base in Guadalupe Canyon, continued down the San Bernardino River to the Bavispe River. Naiche followed and joined Chihuahua. By mid-June 1885, all had hidden themselves in favorite refuges in the Sierra Madre. Chihuahua and Naiche made camp on a ridge at the junction of several deep canyons northeast of Oputo, although Naiche soon left to find Geronimo. Farther south, northeast of Nácori Chico, Geronimo and Mangas hid in their old haunt of Bugatseka.
Contrasting with their masterful evasion of troops and scouts in New Mexico’s mountains after the breakout of May 17, 1885, once in Mexico the Apache leaders grew careless. They knew Crook would be after them once again, and soon. They knew he would use Apache scouts, recruited from the White Mountains if not their own Chiricahuas. They could not have forgotten how doggedly he ran them down in 1883. Yet twice in the summer of 1885 they allowed themselves to be surprised in their Sierra Madre bastions.
On June 23, little more than a month after the breakout, Chihuahua and his people went about their morning business at their ranchería laid out on a ridge northeast of Oputo. Heavy rain had fallen all night. About 9:00 a.m., as the sun broke through the overcast skies, volleys of gunfire from two directions swept the camp. The surprised Chiricahuas scattered. A man quickly hid the families in a cave, and then joined the other men in scrambling down the intersecting canyons with Indian scouts following and shooting at them. After several miles, as the men scattered farther, the scouts called off the chase and returned to the ranchería. They easily found the hidden women and children. Among the fifteen were Chihuahua’s entire family and Ulzana’s wife and two children. Chihuahua and his men had left behind not only their families but the camp containing the horses, guns, and ammunition seized from the cavalry supply camp at Guadalupe Canyon.
Before this disaster, Chihuahua’s men had raided for cattle on the Yaqui River. Likewise, Geronimo and Mangas had raided extensively along the Sonora River. But they happened to be in their stronghold at Bugatseka on August 7. Early in the afternoon they heard a mule bray and, too late, took alert. Indian scouts swept to the attack, dropping five to the ground dead (three men, one woman, and one boy about thirteen). Geronimo scooped up his young son and dashed into surrounding brush. Recognizing him, the scouts directed a heavy enough fire to cause him to drop the child, but he escaped. As with Chihuahua, the families were not so fortunate. Fifteen women and children fell captive to the scouts. They included three wives and five children of Geronimo’s—two daughters wounded
, one in an arm, the other in a lung. Among the captives also were Nana’s wife and the wife of Mangas, Huera (the expert maker of tiswin whose provocative rhetoric caused much of the trouble that led to the outbreak of May 17). Horses, mules, and all the camp impedimenta had also been abandoned.3
The stock and other camp equipage forfeited in June by Chihuahua and in August by Geronimo and Mangas accounted for little loss. They could readily be replaced by another raid. But for all the leaders, the capture of their families represented a devastating blow. Apache families were very close, as illustrated time and again by the furor over Apache captives held by Mexico. Depending on where the families had been taken after their seizure, getting them back ranged from impossible to doubtful. At the same time, two such calamitous surprises instilled a new caution that would make the task of the Apache scouts more daunting.
By June 7, 1885, General Crook knew that he confronted another grueling campaign into Mexico and had moved from Fort Bayard, New Mexico, to Deming, where he could communicate quickly by telegraph. He had already summoned Captain Emmet Crawford from his regiment in Texas. He arrived at Deming on June 6, together with a train from the east bearing thirty Indian scouts and a troop of cavalry. Crook assigned Crawford to lead an immediate campaign into Mexico. He would move by rail to the west, then strike south and unite with Lieutenant Britton Davis. With Chatto and sixty scouts, Davis had been busy trying to flush the Chiricahuas out of New Mexico’s mountains. Crawford and Davis merged as directed and with the cavalry troop and two pack trains crossed into Mexico, headed for the Sierra Madre.4
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