Miles needed no encouragement, for these coincided with his own views. He assigned the mission of running down and destroying or capturing Geronimo and Naiche to regular units. He did not abolish the Apache scouts altogether but retained some as auxiliaries (none Chiricahua or White Mountain), seeking enemy sign and following trails.3
After bolting back to the Sierra Madre on March 31, 1886, Geronimo and Naiche pushed rapidly westward, intent on launching another devastating raid against old adversaries. The first blow fell on April 2 west of Fronteras, only three days after the nighttime escape from Lieutenant Maus. They crossed the Sonora River and embarked on three weeks of death and destruction both east and west of the Magdalena River. The Sonora Railroad extended north along this river into Arizona to link with the Southern Pacific Railroad at Benson. On April 27 Geronimo and Naiche crossed into Arizona and put General Miles’s new strategy to the test.4
Cavalry units proved active and aggressive enough to force Geronimo and Naiche, after three days of plundering on the Santa Cruz River near Calabasas, to withdraw into Mexico. American troops followed. On May 3, on the west side of the Piñito Mountains about thirty miles southeast of Nogales, Sonora, the Chiricahua leaders decided to throw off their determined pursuers. Securing their women and children, they set up an ambush on the rocky side of a canyon. They watched a troop of black soldiers halt and dismount rather than venture into the canyon. They then carefully advanced in a skirmish line on foot. When within range, the Apaches opened fire, dropping two soldiers and driving the rest back to safety. The troopers took formidable positions and returned the fire. The firing lasted more than an hour, with neither side achieving any advantage. One of the two soldiers who had fallen in the first fire lay wounded. Suddenly a bluecoat ran into the open and, dodging a withering fire, dragged him to safety. As dusk came on, both sides withdrew from their positions.5
Rarely had Geronimo and Naiche encountered such aggressive and persistent American soldiers. Twisting and turning back and forth across the Sonora Railroad, the Apaches also spotted Mexican troops trying to find them. Twice on May 11 the Indians took station among rocks on a hillside and engineered a classic ambush, sending the Mexicans flying in retreat. The Americans proved more formidable, “trailing us and skirmishing with us almost every day,” remembered Geronimo. On May 15, camped on the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains, “They surprised us about nine o’clock in the morning, and captured all our horses (nineteen in number) and secured our store of dried meat. We lost three Indians in this encounter.” That afternoon they struck back. “We attacked them from the rear as they were passing through a prairie—killed one soldier, but lost none ourselves. In this skirmish, we recovered all our horses except three that belonged to me.” That these fights loomed so large in Geronimo’s memory reveals the impact of the newly energized regular soldiers.6
The next day, May 17, moments before a troop of cavalry charged their camp, the Apaches gathered their possessions and fled. After this close call, Geronimo and Naiche decided to divide. Naiche wanted to scout the situation at Fort Apache, check on his family, and perhaps put out peace feelers to General Crook (who was in Omaha by this time). Trailed closely by a cavalry column, the entire band crossed into Arizona and raided a ranch before Geronimo turned back to Sonora with two women and a child and the young girl captured in the first raid. Naiche and the rest of the Chiricahuas, twenty-seven in all, thrust down the Santa Cruz River, killing anyone who got in their way. He hid the women and children in the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson and later sent four men to escort them back to the border. With seven fighting men, he wended his way among the mountain chains northeast toward Fort Apache. Soldiers got on their trail and others tried to block the advance, but Naiche eluded them all.
After crossing the Gila and Black Rivers, on May 25 the little band concealed their horses and equipage in a wooded glen near the head of Bonito Creek, southeast of Fort Apache. At night, on foot, they made their way across seven miles of broken terrain to the Chiricahua camp on the edge of Fort Apache. Naiche snuck into the lodge of his mother, learned that his family was not there, and slipped out. He and his men hid in the vicinity for a day as his mother came out bearing an invitation from the soldier chief to give up. Rejecting such a dangerous proposition, Naiche and his men returned to gather their horses and equipment. Descending the trail at dawn on May 27, Naiche suddenly spotted some warning sign, shouted, and raced with his men back into the hills. A harmless volley of fire signaled a failed ambush set up by soldiers.
Naiche and his men hastened back toward the Rincon Mountains, killing two ranchers en route and avoiding the troops trying to head them off. In the Rincons, they discovered that their women and children had already left for Sonora. The little band followed, killing as they went, until they turned east into the Patagonia Mountains. At dusk on June 6, a troop of cavalry surprised them. Abandoning their horses and everything else, they scattered. By the next morning they had crossed into Sonora, leaving behind thirteen dead whites. On June 9, at the summit of the Sierra Azul, Geronimo and Naiche reunited, bringing together all the Chiricahuas who remained at large.
Two days later, forty strong, the Chiricahuas left the Sierra Azul. To confuse pursuing American soldiers, they split into three groups and headed in three directions. They planned to come together far to the south, near the confluence of the Aros and Yaqui Rivers, where they would decide where to take refuge.7
General Miles knew the Chiricahuas were raiding extensively in Sonora throughout April 1886. He conceived a strategy of organizing a light column to campaign against them south of the border. It would be commanded by Captain Henry W. Lawton, who would organize it at Fort Huachuca. Orders for the formation of this command did not reach the fort until May 4. Before that, on April 27, Geronimo had crossed into Arizona and begun his destructive raids down the Santa Cruz River.
The first blow fell the next day on the family of rancher Artisan L. Peck. He was working cattle two miles up the canyon when the raiders struck his home, killing his wife and baby daughter and taking captive his wife’s ten-year-old niece, Trinidad Verdin. After discovering Peck himself, the Apaches beat and robbed him of his clothing. For an unknown reason, Geronimo told him he was free. Peck walked back to his home and viewed his dead family and ransacked house. Peck later identified the leader of the band as Geronimo.8
Three days of marauding along the Santa Cruz River threw Miles’s strategy into disarray. As he traveled by rail between Benson, Calabasas, and Nogales, his troops in the region took the initiative, and Geronimo turned back to Sonora. The first to take up the pursuit, as soon as Peck told his story, was a troop of the black Tenth Cavalry under Captain Thomas C. Lebo. He followed the trail of the Apaches so persis tently that Geronimo set up an ambush southwest of Nogales, in Sonora. On May 3 Lebo’s troop reached the mouth of the deadly canyon. The captain did not ride into the trap. He dismounted his men, formed a skirmish line, and cautiously advanced into the canyon. From the cliffs the Apaches opened fire, hitting two men. One lay dead, but the other, Corporal Edward Scott, had fallen with a shattered kneecap and lay in the open exposed to the Indians’ fire. Lieutenant Powhatan Clarke dashed out into a heavy fire and dragged Scott to safety. For this deed he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Reinforced by another cavalry troop, Lebo continued the chase over punishing terrain. After five brutal days, they lost the trail and returned to Calabasas. But another unit, a troop of the Fourth Cavalry under Captain Charles A. P. Hatfield, had been alerted by a Mexican vaquero to the location of the Apaches. He hastened to take up Lebo’s mission.9
On the morning of May 15, Hatfield surprised the Chiricahuas high in the Sierra Azul southeast of Nogales, Sonora. Geronimo took alert before the troopers could attack but abandoned the camp and its contents and fell back to high, rocky bluffs. The soldiers assailed these positions and drove the Apaches out, scattering them beyond hope of pursuit. The cavalry descended the mountains toward the Mexican town
of Santa Cruz. Aware of the possibility of ambush, Hatfield disposed his command to avoid a trap. Even so, while halted to water the stock, the rear of the command came under fire from Apaches concealed in bluffs. Hatfield gathered his disorganized troopers and attacked the bluffs, driving the Apaches out. Nevertheless, he lost two soldiers killed and two wounded and had part of his horses stampeded.
The next morning, however, another troop of the Fourth Cavalry, under Lieutenant Robert A. Brown, struck Geronimo’s camp in the western foothills of the Cananea Mountains, seized the camp, and recovered two of Hatfield’s horses. The cavalry, largely acting on their own initiative, had kept the Indians stirred up. At this point, much to the army’s confusion, a large group of Apaches ascended the Santa Cruz River and turned east into the Patagonia Mountains. On June 6 elements of Captain Lawton’s command under Lieutenant Robert D. Walsh struck the camp and, joined by Lawton the next day, chased them into Mexico. This was Naiche returning from Fort Apache seeking to reunite with Geronimo, which he did. For his part, Miles had largely lost control of the conflict.10
Meantime, Captain Lawton had taken to the field pursuant to orders of May 4. A tall, strapping veteran of the Civil and Indian Wars, the senior troop commander of the Fourth Cavalry, he led his own troop of thirty-five, twenty infantrymen, twenty Indian scouts (none Chiricahua), and two pack trains. Three lieutenants served Lawton as well as Assistant Surgeon Leonard Wood. The doctor had more than medical ambitions: he wanted to be a line officer. Under Lawton, he would get that chance.11
Geronimo’s raid into the United States threw Lawton’s assignment into disorder. Parts of his command joined with other units in trying to run down the raiders, both in Arizona and in Sonora. Several times Lawton conferred with Miles, in Calabasas, Nogales, and even on a train. With the quarry now all in Mexico, Lawton could take up his assignment. The composition of his command had changed, but it remained essentially at the same strength.12
Lawton’s command marched 120 miles down the Sonora River, enduring heat, rain, fever, and a tangle of ridges and canyons. At a point on the San Miguel River, they had a nearly violent confrontation with a Mexican command in a rough canyon. The Mexicans had battled a band of Apaches here on June 17, lost some men but recovered Trinidad Verdin, the girl seized by Geronimo in the raid on the Peck Ranch. The Mexicans took Lawton’s advance guard of Indian scouts as the enemy returning for their dead and hastily withdrew. On June 18, with great difficulty, Lawton managed to establish relations with the Mexican troops. They turned over Trinidad Verdin, who was badly bruised. Mexican fire had killed the Apache carrying her, and she fell among the rocks. She related to Lawton all the atrocities Geronimo and his people had inflicted since her capture at the Peck Ranch on April 28. Of more immediate importance, she said the Apaches had become separated in the turmoil of fleeing the American troops, and those she was with were looking for the rest of their people. By June 30 the Americans had crossed the Sonora to the Yaqui River and camped near Cumpas.13
Geronimo led one of the bands seeking the rendezvous with the other two. He led them south and then turned east into a canyon in the mountains bordering the San Miguel River. As they camped, someone spotted a Mexican force approaching from behind with intent to attack. Geronimo ordered the people to flee farther into the canyon. Quickly mounting, he placed Trinidad Verdin on the horse behind him. The Mexicans loosed a heavy fire on the fleeing Apaches. Geronimo saw his wife hit. She climbed off her horse and fired a pistol at the Mexicans, but a hail of bullets cut her down. Geronimo’s horse stumbled on a rock and threw both him and Trinidad among the rocks. Calling on her to follow, he ran on foot. Badly bruised by the fall, she did not follow but instead ran to the Mexicans. Geronimo barricaded himself in a cave and opened fire. The Mexicans advanced on the cave, but his rifle blasted three and the rest quickly backed off. Geronimo’s scattered Chiricahuas came together and, still seeking the other two bands, left their stock and possessions in the hands of the Mexicans and continued their trek to the east and then south, down the Sonora River. This was not a raid, although they killed and robbed any Mexicans they met. Rather, Geronimo sought the other Chiricahuas and a hiding place from the solders they knew were looking for them. After he found the other two groups of Chiricahuas, Geronimo nestled into a secluded camp between two buttes on the Yaqui River six miles below its confluence with the Aros River.14
On July 13, one of the Chiricahuas returning from a hunt discovered the trail of a body of horses descending the slopes toward the Indian camp. He gave the alarm, and Geronimo quickly led all the people up a trail between the river and a steep cliff, leaving everything in the camp except their arms. On their heels, a force of infantry and Indian scouts charged into the camp. Once more, Geronimo had demonstrated his amazing skill at getting his people all out of a camp about to be attacked. Losing the camp and all its contents meant nothing compared with the lives of his people.
Geronimo and his little band continued up the Yaqui River, then turned up the Aros River.15
In May and June 1886, General Miles’s troops had driven Geronimo and Naiche out of Arizona, and Captain Lawton had embarked on his struggle against almost overwhelming conditions of weather and terrain to find them. Miles turned to other concerns, traveling to Fort Apache to check on the reservation Chiricahuas. Under Chatto, they had led a peaceful and productive life, cultivating their crops and tending their stock. They detested their kinsmen in Mexico because they were likely to bring trouble on all the Chiricahuas. Moreover, Chatto and others had recently served General Crook as enlisted scouts. Later, Miles portrayed the reservation Chiricahuas as forming a recruiting and supply depot for Geronimo and Naiche. Now, however, their true condition suited his purpose.
In telegrams of July 3 and 7, Miles declared that the strongest military reasons dictated that all the reservation Chiricahuas be relocated somewhere east of New Mexico, and in view of their loyalty and good behavior, that they be “allowed” to settle in the Indian Territory at the southeast base of the Wichita Mountains, near Fort Sill. He knew that Congress had barred the Apaches from ever moving to the Indian Territory, but he thought his recommendations could persuade Congress to lift the ban. Until Congress acted, the Apaches might be placed near Fort Riley, Kansas. He proposed to send a delegation of ten Chiricahuas to Washington to discuss the matter and then be shown such land as the government might be willing to grant.16
Miles seemed unaware that this idea had been seriously discussed for two years. General Sheridan had gone to Fort Bowie in November 1885 specifically to sound out General Crook on the propriety of such a move. Curiously, Sheridan now opposed Miles’s scheme on the grounds that moving Indians from their established homes had always proved mistaken because it made them “bad Indians.” Inconsistently, Sheridan did approve the dispatch of a delegation of Chiricahuas to Washington to discuss such a move.17
Even before advancing his plan to relocate the reservation Chiricahuas, Miles came to another decision, which he did not share with Washington. For a month Lawton had toiled southward in Mexico but, so far as he knew, had accomplished nothing but break down men and horses. Now Miles mulled the unthinkable: Crook’s formula of Chiricahua scouts. A former sergeant major of scouts, George Noche, lived among the reservation Apaches. He knew all of Geronimo’s hiding places in Mexico and how to find them.
Miles sent for Noche and asked him to organize scouts to run down Geronimo and Naiche. Two days later he again conferred with Noche, asking him the best way to catch the quarry. Noche suggested Tanitoe, who had ridden with Geronimo until his horse was shot from under him in the fight with Captain Hatfield on May 15. He had returned to the reservation and now quietly tended his fields. But Tanitoe refused to go back to Mexico to try to contact Geronimo. Noche therefore turned to Kayitah and Martine, introducing the two to Miles. Kayitah told Miles that Geronimo and his following, constantly hounded by Americans and Mexicans, were growing increasingly exhausted and insecure. Both men had close relatives wit
h Geronimo. They could safely approach him without getting shot. Miles had Kayitah and Martine signed as scouts, issued them uniforms, equipment, and mules, and told them their assignment was to find Geronimo and persuade him to surrender.18
The two had to be supervised. The death of Crawford and resignation of Britton Davis left only one officer who knew the Apaches intimately and enjoyed their confidence: Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood. The tall, lean officer who had served so long at Fort Apache had fallen out of favor with Crook, had endured eighteen months of tortuous litigation stemming from his arrest of an intruder on the reservation, and now commanded a company of Navajo scouts at Fort Wingate. Thoroughly disillusioned with scout duty, contemptuous of Navajos as scouts, weakened by recurring bouts of rheumatism and other ailments, Gatewood wanted out of the Southwest. Instead, while in Albuquerque on an official assignment, he was summoned by Miles, also in Albuquerque, and received orders to accompany the two scouts into Mexico. Both regarded it as futile, and Gatewood believed that his health would not hold through another trek in Mexico. As an inducement, Miles promised him a position on his staff, which appealed to the lieutenant as more agreeable duty than he had performed for years. Before leaving Albuquerque, he accidentally met George Wrattan, now heading a body of Indian scouts. Formerly a trader at San Carlos, Wrattan knew Apaches as well as Gatewood and spoke their language; he agreed to accompany Gatewood.
On July 15, at Fort Bowie, Gatewood, Wrattan, Kayitah, and Martine headed for the border at San Bernardino. They carried orders to join Lieutenant James Parker, whose troop of the Fourth Cavalry had followed a trail of six Apaches into Mexico. Parker received orders to halt and await Gate-wood, then put him on the trail.19
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