As Crook relocated his field headquarters west to Fort Bowie, he recognized that circumstances had changed since his 1883 campaign. The Southwest had been filled with even more stockmen and miners, and their newspapers unrelentingly blasted Crook for not stopping Apache outrages. Moreover, the election of 1884 had placed Democrat Grover Cleveland in the executive mansion. William C. Endicott held the position of secretary of war. General Sherman had retired and been succeeded as head of the army by Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. Neither Cleveland nor Endicott knew anything about Indians. Sheridan knew nothing about Apaches, but he relied heavily on Crook, a West Point classmate. Even so, he was skeptical of Crook’s use of Indian scouts, and he found both Cleveland and Endicott hard taskmasters as reports, most exaggerated, reached the president of Apaches running wild in the Southwest.
Crook’s strategy in 1885 differed from that of 1883. Instead of personally leading an expedition into Mexico, he would send two columns of Indian scouts under experienced officers. Captain Crawford had crossed into Mexico on June 11, but the second column, under Captain Wirt Davis, did not leave Fort Bowie until July 7. Crook had sent Lieutenant Gatewood and his scouts into the mountains of New Mexico to make sure the Chiricahuas had all left. Wirt Davis needed Gatewood’s scouts because they knew the Sierra Madre. When they finally arrived, he headed for Mexico with one hundred scouts, his own troop of cavalry, and a pack train. Gatewood returned to Fort Apache, exhausted and out of favor with Crook. He would remain there during this campaign.5
For the expeditions into Mexico, Crook relied almost exclusively on the Apache scouts. For this mission he had no confidence in regular cavalry. Only Apaches could find Apaches in the Sierra Madre. Crawford and Davis could use the regulars however they wanted, but the few who participated engaged primarily in escorting the mule pack trains on which Crook relied for transporting supplies from the base at Lang’s Ranch, near the border at the southern end of the Animas Valley, New Mexico. If fact, the astute Crawford ultimately dispensed with cavalry altogether, entrusting Chatto to employ the Apache scouts as he saw fit.
Crook hastened to assure his Washington superiors that he intended to make prominent use of the regulars. Indeed, he had to do all he could to bar the Chiricahuas from raiding back into the United States and further infuriating the public. He therefore stationed three lines of troops from the border to the railroad. In New Mexico Colonel Bradley did the same.6
Crook knew that the Apaches could slip through his border blockade whenever they wanted, so he placed his main reliance and attention on the ability of Captains Crawford and Davis to surprise the Chiricahuas in their mountain hideouts. Thus on June 23 Crawford’s scouts, led by Chatto, surprised and attacked Chihuahua northeast of Oputo, and on August 7 Wirt Davis’s seventy-eight scouts under Lieutenant Matthias W. Day surprised Geronimo at Bugatseka. Crook decided to hold the families and other relatives seized at both places in camp at Fort Bowie as a bargaining chip.7
Furious over the loss of his family in the attack led by Chatto on June 23, 1885, Chihuahua cut a bloody path west and northwest across Sonora, sometimes uniting with Naiche, sometimes separating from him. On July 23, Chihuahua even struck into Arizona southwest of Fort Huachuca, seizing cattle and horses but also testing whether he could break through to Fort Apache and look for his family. Almost at once troops struck his mountain camp and seized twenty-four horses. Chihuahua then discovered two scout units on his trail and, dropping all his stolen stock, veered back into Mexico, reuniting with Naiche in the mountains southwest of Cananea.8
Meantime, following their surprise at Bugatseka on August 7, the followers of Geronimo and Mangas spent several days rounding up their people. The two then parted, Mangas to lose himself in the Sierra Madre at Juh’s old refuge of Guaynopa, across the summit in Chihuahua. Geronimo and Nana pushed directly east, into the Sierra Madre. Knowing that scouts would be on their trail, they chose the roughest mountain heights to cross the summit and descend into Chihuahua. Daily downpours soaked the Chiricahuas but made their trail harder to follow.
Geronimo had probably already decided to try to recover his family, whom he wrongly assumed had been taken to Fort Apache. Near San Buenaventura, Chihuahua, he turned southeast, crossed the Santa Clara River, and hid the women and children in the mountains to the east. His horses broken down, he raided around the town of Santa Clara and obtained fresh remounts. He then pushed directly north, toward New Mexico. Near Janos, Nana turned into the mountains to the northwest of the city.9
Once again, Geronimo would cross the border and race for the Mogollons, from which he could pounce quickly on the Chiricahua camp at Fort Apache and retrieve his family. General Crook had been astute in holding them at Fort Bowie.
TWENTY
CHASED BY CROOK’S SCOUTS, 1885–86
TWO DAYS AFTER THE attack on Geronimo’s ranchería at Bugatseka on August 7, 1885, Captains Crawford and Wirt Davis met on the Bavispe River, and Crawford learned of the fight and the scattering of the Chiricahuas. By August 13 Crawford and his command had reached the site of the encounter and picked up Geronimo’s trail to the east. With Lieutenant Britton Davis and fifty scouts ranging in advance, Crawford followed over the Sierra Madre and down into Chihuahua. At the crest, he sent word forward to Davis to take thirty-two picked scouts (including Chatto), three packers, and seven good mules, get on the trail, and not abandon it for any reason. If rations ran short, he could kill Mexican beef and give a receipt.
This is what Davis did. Alerted to the theft, a Mexican force of Tarahumari Indians set forth to find Davis. Unknown to him, Lieutenant Charles P. Elliott with pack mules bearing rations followed a day behind. The Mexicans cut Elliott’s trail instead of Davis’s and on August 23 set up an ambush in a canyon. Fortunately, with another rainfall threatening, Elliott bivouacked before riding into the trap. From the heights, the Mexicans opened fire. The Indian scouts fired back, but Elliott restrained them. With the packers, they took to the rocks on the canyon’s side. Elliott walked out and tried to explain the identity of his command to the Mexican leader. The Mexican held a cocked rifle to Elliott’s chest and demanded that he call the scouts out of the rocks, which he did. They dropped their rifles and cartridge belts as ordered. The Mexicans then tied their hands behind them and marched them to San Buenaventura. En route they met a command of Mexican regulars, whose commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pedro S. Marcías, doubted Elliott’s explanation. In San Buenaventura, after parading through the town to the jeers of the citizens, all the scouts and packers were lodged in a military barracks.
Davis’s Indian scouts had learned what had happened, and that night he moved them to the edge of San Buenaventura. The lieutenant, who spoke fluent Spanish, went into the town and found the presidente. In a conference with him and Colonel Marcías, Davis established his legitimacy. The colonel liberated the prisoners and returned all their arms and property. They went into camp to await the arrival of Captain Crawford. As instructed, Davis and his scouts got back on the Chiricahua trail and rode north.1
Elliott led his scouts on the back trail until meeting Crawford and his command. They joined and marched back to San Buenaventura. In the main street, a mob blocked the way, and two Mexicans came forth to demand that the officers enter a house for a conference. Outside, mounted soldiers surrounded the scouts. Whatever occurred inside, the scouts believed that an angry confrontation took place and that the Mexicans ordered the Americans to leave Mexico, an order repeated twice as Crawford’s command moved north seeking Geronimo’s trail. The scouts were angry and anxious to fight. In fact, Crawford had resolved to let Davis keep to the trail while he paused at a nearby ranch to refit.2
Meantime, after three days of hard work following the trail, in repeated downpours and glutinous mud, Britton Davis and his scouts halted for the night. A Mexican force rode into the camp. Colonel Marcías commanded. He informed Davis that two other Mexican commands had cut the Chiricahua trail in Davis’s advance and were in pursuit. Th
e treaty under which US forces operated in Mexico specified that, if a Mexican force got in advance of an American force, the Americans would have to call off the operation and return to the United States. If the Mexican officer consented, the Americans could continue, but Colonel Marcías refused to consent. Davis, his scouts and packers broken by days of negotiating precipitous mountains and canyons and plodding through mud under steady downpours, always short on rations, filthy and ragged, gladly accepted the colonel’s decision.
One hundred miles of barren desert separated Davis from the nearest border crossing: El Paso, Texas. Davis’s shabby command reached Fort Bliss, at El Paso, on September 5, 1885. In the city, Davis met a friend of his father’s who owned extensive ranching and mining properties in Chihuahua. His manager had just resigned, and he offered Davis the job. The ordeal through which he had just passed, combined with his hazardous service at Fort Apache, had persuaded him that the army wasn’t for him. He accepted.3
As ordered by Crook, Davis and his scouts headed directly to Fort Bowie, arriving on September 12. Crook expressed disappointment with Davis’s decision to leave the army, but his diary suggests that he was more interested in long talks with Chatto and others of Davis’s scouts. He would have done better to have heeded Davis’s report that Geronimo’s trail pointed toward New Mexico.
Remaining with Geronimo after Nana’s departure near Janos were five men and half a dozen women, those with family or relatives taken at Bugatseka and thought to be held at Fort Apache but actually at Fort Bowie. Geronimo crossed into New Mexico by the same route he had entered four months earlier, east of Lake Palomas. On September 11 the army picked up his trail and followed him across the Mimbres Mountains and River. He had already left a trail of murdered men. In Gallinas Canyon, the Chiricahuas fell on still another ranch and killed the inhabitants. Here, though, Geronimo himself took a captive, teenager James “Santiago” McKinn. Like Charley McComas two years earlier, Santiago McKinn would become the focus of an intense effort to liberate him. Swinging north across the Gila River, the little band climbed into the Mogollon Mountains. Among these peaks and canyons, Geronimo could easily evade any pursuers.4
None found him, so high and remote was his base. On September 18 he led his party down into Arizona, making for the east fork of White River, the Chiricahua planting grounds near Fort Apache. Shortly after midnight on September 22, Geronimo threaded his way through the White Mountain scouts patrolling the area. An old White Mountain woman informed him that Lieutenant Gatewood had drawn the Chiricahuas in close to Fort Apache. The woman also told him that only one of his wives and a child lived with the Chiricahuas. Her name was She-gha (Ith-tedda, the Mescalero), and she had not been taken captive in the attack on Bugatseka. Rather, soon after the breakout of May 17, Geronimo had sent her to the Mescalero Reservation to see if these Apaches might join in the outbreak. They refused and turned her, her child, and a companion over to the army, which sent them to Fort Apache. The White Mountain woman guided Geronimo to the Chiricahua camp and pointed out his wife’s wickiup. Without disturbing anyone, he quietly entered the wickiup and emerged with the woman, his child, and her companion.
By daybreak, the White Mountain people had been stirred up, angry that Geronimo had made off with some of their horses. The scouts combed the countryside looking for him. But he had swiftly ridden southeast across Black River and hastened back to the Mogollons. His foray a failure, he received unexpected help in his dash back to Mexico. In the Mogollons he found Nana and his people. And farther west, both Chihuahua and Naiche struck into Arizona, leaving trails north both east and west of the Chiricahua Mountains, uniting to find refuge from pursing Indian scouts in the Dragoon Mountains. Regular troops finally drove them back into Sonora. All this Apache activity confused the army and kept patrols in the field following false leads. By October 10 Geronimo was back in Mexico, and no Chiricahuas remained north of the border.5
Not for long, however, although Geronimo and Naiche remained to raid in Chihuahua. Late in October Ulzana and Chihuahua crossed into New Mexico near Lake Palomas. While Chihuahua remained in New Mexico to provide diversion, Ulzana and twelve men aimed for Fort Apache and San Carlos. Some had left their families with the Chiricahuas on Turkey Creek, and others thought their families captured at Bugatseka might be held at San Carlos. Throughout November 1885, Chihuahua’s destructive raids among the ranches and settlements of southern New Mexico took a large toll in lives and stolen stock and property. A newsman listed the names of five people killed within two weeks and within twenty-five miles of Lake Valley, New Mexico. The newsman also wrote of ranchers who lost their cattle but escaped with their lives. Other newspapers named one after another citizen slain by the Apaches. Chihuahua’s raid also set in motion a score of pursuing cavalry units, and as intended it diverted attention to New Mexico instead of Arizona.
Ulzana and his party killed many whites and angered the White Mountain Apaches around Fort Apache, who killed one of his men. No family members remained on Turkey Creek, but the angry Chiricahuas turned on the White Mountain rancherías and killed twenty-one people. With San Carlos now on guard, Ulzana circled to the east and headed for New Mexico. By December, Chihuahua and his followers had slipped back across the border.6
Throughout December, from hideouts in the Mogollon Mountains, Ulzana ravaged ranches in western New Mexico, north of Silver City and Fort Bayard. On December 9, while they burned a ranch and rounded up stock, a small detachment of cavalry attacked them. They abandoned their horses and scampered up a snow-covered mountainside. On December 19 the Chiricahuas exacted revenge on the same troopers, ambushing them as they left an overnight camp and killing the four horsemen in the lead. By the end of December 1885, Ulzana and his small band had traveled about twelve hundred miles, killed thirty-eight people, captured and wore out 250 horses and mules, and although twice dismounted crossed back into Mexico with the loss of the one man killed near Fort Apache.7
Geronimo, Chihuahua, and Ulzana had easily breached the elaborate lines of defense set up to keep the Chiricahuas south of the border, and Colonel Bradley already had troops in pursuit. With Bradley chasing these Indians in New Mexico, Crook turned to other matters. He burned the telegraph wires with the continuing battle over dual control of the White Mountain Reservation—a battle he won when the secretary of the interior agreed to turn over the reservation temporarily to Captain Pierce as Indian agent. Crook fended off criticisms of his archenemy, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles, Bradley’s superior at Fort Leavenworth. Miles made no secret of his contempt for Crook’s reliance on Indian scouts and convinced New Mexico’s governor that with Miles in command the Chiricahuas would quickly be conquered.8
Crook’s hopes lay not with running the Chiricahuas down in New Mexico or Arizona but with the success of Captains Crawford and Davis in Mexico. In the event they succeeded, Crook needed a firm policy from Washington on how to handle the Apaches. On September 17 he began to force the issue by informing his superiors of his first intent to turn the Apaches over to civil authorities to be tried for their offenses. But lawyers advised him of the impossibility of obtaining evidence against individual Indians that could be used in a court of law (as Crook well knew). He then pointed out that killing all the Chiricahuas in the Sierra Madre would take years and that during this time their depredations could not be prevented. With a little more “hammering,” he thought, they could be persuaded to surrender if assured that they would not be killed or turned over to the civil authorities. He asked for an immediate decision.
In Washington, General Sheridan observed that these Indians deserved no consideration at all. But “as a matter of policy,” he believed Crook should be authorized to seek their surrender on the condition that they be regarded as prisoners of war and transported to a distant point. They should never be allowed to return to Arizona or New Mexico. Secretary Endicott approved Sheridan’s endorsement and directed that as soon as the Apaches surrendered they be sent to Fort Marion, Florida
, as were the chiefs of the Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches who surrendered at the end of the Red River War in 1875.9
By October 11, Crook believed that none of the Chiricahuas remained north of the border, and he resolved on a new strategy to bring the Chiricahuas in Mexico into negotiations. The scouts and mules of both Crawford and Davis had endured such hard campaigning that they no longer possessed the vigor to embark on another expedition into Mexico. The general thought that the time needed to build new commands would lull the Chiricahuas into believing the army had called off the offensive. Crawford went to Fort Apache and Wirt Davis to San Carlos to begin discharging their scouts and enlisting fresh ones.10
New Mexicans had suffered death and destruction almost constantly since the outbreak from Turkey Creek on May 17, 1885, and they protested repeatedly and vociferously in their newspapers and in letters and telegrams to army commanders, members of Congress, and, increasingly, to President Cleveland. The raids of Chihuahua and Ulzana stirred the most intense outrage yet, and Secretary Endicott and General Sheridan repeatedly called on Crook to provide some reassurance that would relieve the pressures on the president. The reticent Crook would only reply that he and Colonel Bradley were doing the best they could.
That was not good enough for Washington, which had to keep New Mexicans from bedeviling the president. On November 20, 1885, Secretary Endicott and General Sheridan met to consider Crook’s latest telegrams, which offered no encouragement. They discussed an idea that had been considered both in the Interior and War Departments for more than a year—a lasting solution to the Apache problem. It contemplated no less than the permanent removal to Florida of the entire Chiricahua tribe—not only the few who were in Mexico but the large majority living quietly on the White Mountain Reservation. The meeting ended with Endicott directing Sheridan to travel at once to Fort Bowie to broach this idea to Crook and resolve other problems.11
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