Mexicans
In the years leading up to the Civil War, Geronimo continued fighting against forces from Mexico but would encounter another enemy as well, in the form of the United States. In his autobiography, Geronimo recounts a long succession of excursions into Mexico—some successful, some not. Although his recollection of dates is sometimes faulty, he seems thoroughly willing to note both the battles that brought him praise and those that elicited blame.
After the successful revenge expedition under Mangas Coloradas, Geronimo persuaded two other warriors to return to Mexico with him. Unfortunately,
The raid proved disastrous, and Geronimo’s companions were killed. When Geronimo returned to his camp in Arizona, he was much blamed for the failure. A raid that Geronimo assigns to 1860 was much more successful. A party of 25 warriors ambushed Mexican troops and wiped out the entire contingent. Geronimo, however, was hit in the head with a gun and knocked unconscious, bearing a scar for the rest of his life after a convalescence of several months. Other raids were notable for the booty captured, such as a pack train taken in 1861. On the way home, though, Mexican troops caught up with the Apaches. A bullet struck Geronimo near his left eye, and after he recovered consciousness he was shot again, this time receiving a slight wound to his side.
Not long after returning home from that raid, Geronimo, his left eye still swollen shut, was at his camp when Mexican troops attacked. The soldiers killed primarily women and children (many of the men were absent on a hunt), burned tipis, and stole ponies and supplies. With winter approaching, the successful surprise attack proved especially difficult for the Apaches, as it deprived them of many of their provisions.
Usually the Mexicans did not pursue their quarry north of the border, a stratagem that could prove disastrous if they lost the element of surprise. In 1862, according to Geronimo, troops again came north, but this time they were spotted. Geronimo and Mangas Coloradas led two groups of warriors against the Mexicans, killed several of the soldiers, and drove the rest south of the border.
Geronimo’s battles with Mexicans continued into the 1880s. A trading mission led by Geronimo and Juh at Casas Grandes that Geronimo dated to the early 1880s was followed by a serious binge on mescal. While many of the Apaches were intoxicated in their camp near Casas Grandes, troops attacked. Geronimo and Juh escaped, but 20 (according to Geronimo) were killed and 35 captured. Among those taken captive by the Mexicans was Cheehashkish, a wife of Geronimo, whom he never saw again.
What Geronimo called his final battle with Mexicans occurred in 1882, although he dated it later. The battle is discussed later in this chapter. It appears, however, that this conflict actually preceded the Casas Grandes attack, still another sign of problems with chronology in Geronimo’s autobiography.
U. S. Forces in Apache Land
Until the 1850s, Apaches viewed the Mexicans alternately as trading partners and enemies, a split vision made possible by their inability fully to appreciate the reality of a Mexican nation. One village or region, from the Apache perspective, could be approached as friends, another perceived as enemies. Sometimes that worked, sometimes not. Nonetheless, the Apaches’ Euro-American enemies resided primarily to their south. That situation changed, however, after the Mexican-American War.
Initially, the Apaches hoped that the conflict would benefit them, perhaps even establishing the Euro-Americans from the north, with whom they had experienced little interaction, as allies against the Mexicans. Historical forces would soon put that hope to rest.
The U. S. victory in 1848 forced terms on Mexico that included ceding to the victor northern California as far north as Oregon and accepting the Rio Grande as the boundary between Texas and Mexico. Most importantly for the Apaches, Mexico also ceded New Mexico to the U. S. government. Then in 1853, the United States, wanting to ensure access for a railway to the Pacific as well as to clarify its southern border, purchased from Mexico a strip of land across the southern portions of the current states of New Mexico and Arizona. This transaction is known as the Gadsden Purchase after the prominent railroad man and former soldier, James Gadsden, who as U. S. minister to Mexico negotiated the deal. The area that was added through Gadsden’s efforts stretched from the Rio Grande on the east westward to the Colorado River and northward to the Gila River.
Posing additional dangers for the Apache residents of Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico was the spread of mining into the area. Copper mines were established by the early 1850s, and gold was discovered in New Mexico in 1859, with the town of Pinos Altos quickly taking shape nearby.
It may have been an incident at Pinos Altos that set the Apaches and the U. S. military on a path that would make Geronimo one of the most famous, feared, and despised Indians from the perspective of the United States. The central figure in this pivotal incident, however, was not Geronimo but Mangas Coloradas, chief of the Chihenne Chiricahuas, if the incident actually occurred.
Mangas Coloradas was a huge figure, in terms of both his physical stature and the respect that he enjoyed from other Apaches. He stood about six feet four inches at least, possibly taller, and was noted for his generosity and spirituality as well as his bravery. He also possessed no animosity toward the northern Euro-Americans. Many historians have perpetuated a story, typically set in the spring or summer of 1860, in which Mangas Coloradas decided to visit the miners at Pinos Altos to reduce tensions between his people and the new arrivals, who were not only ripping up the earth but also cutting down trees and killing game that the Apaches needed. The miners supposedly tied the chief, by then approximately 70 years old, to a tree and whipped him. Afterward, he turned to his son-in-law, the Chokonen leader Cochise, and together they went to war against the intruders, primarily in the current state of New Mexico. Mangas Coloradas’ biographer, Edwin Sweeney, remains skeptical about the incident ever having taken place. He sees the cause of war not in a personal humiliation of Mangas Coloradas but in broader actions: “the miners’ assault at the Mimbres River and Bascom’s actions at Apache Pass.”4
THE COCHISE WARS Early Conflicts
The first of the events referred to by Sweeney occurred on the morning of December 4, 1860, along the Mimbres River in southeastern New Mexico. Approximately 30 miners attacked a Chihenne camp, killing 4 people and capturing 13 women and children. Among the dead was Chief Elias. The prisoners were eventually turned over to the military, but the miners were never punished for their actions.
The second incident took place at Apache Pass in southeastern Arizona in January 1861. Second Lieutenant George Bascom was sent to recover a boy who had been kidnapped. Cochise, who had been trying to live peacefully with the settlers and miners, arrived delivering wood, accompanied by his wife, a son, a brother, and other relatives. While Cochise and his party were inside a military tent, Lieutenant Bascom demanded return of the boy. Cochise had not been involved in the abduction and knew nothing of the affair but offered to try to locate the missing boy.
Bascom refused to allow the party to leave, declaring that they would be held prisoner until the boy was returned. Cochise pulled out a knife and slashed the tent, escaping. He then captured three men and offered to trade them for his relatives. Bascom refused the deal, demanding that Cochise return the boy—a demand that Cochise was clearly unable to fulfill. Cochise then killed his three prisoners, and the soldiers did the same to theirs, hanging their bodies in Apache Pass. Cochise responded by making war on the Euro-Americans: attacking stagecoaches and forts, and spreading fear throughout the area. During these battles, Geronimo was very much involved.
Battle of Apache Pass
The first major battle of the Cochise Wars occurred at Apache Pass, near the present town of Bowie, in the summer of 1862. Geronimo does not mention the battle in his autobiography, but Peter Aleshire in The Fox and the Whirlwind: General George Crook and Geronimo: A Paired Biography notes that it is most unlikely that he would not have been part of the battle.5 This conflict, after all, involved Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, and some 400 to 700 warriors, perhaps the largest Apache force ever.6
The encounter between the Chiricahuas and the U. S. military took place within the context of the Civil War. With the Union and Confederate military forces largely concerned with each other, the Apaches had been able to oppose the Euro-American intruders with minimal resistance. Confederate Colonel John B. Baylor proclaimed himself governor of the Territory of Arizona in 1861. The following year, angered by Apache war making, he ordered that Apache adults be killed and their children sold into slavery to raise money for the Confederate cause. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, however, repudiated Baylor’s bloodthirsty policy.
Meanwhile, the tide was beginning to turn against the South in the region. A small Confederate detachment pulled out of Tucson and retreated eastward. At Dragoon Springs west of Apache Pass, Apaches attacked them, killing three soldiers and capturing supplies and livestock. At the same time, a Union force of about 1,800 men under General James H. Carleton was moving east from California. As the Union force reached Tucson, Cochise became concerned about the large number of soldiers. With Mangas Coloradas and quite possibly Geronimo, he prepared to contest the troops’ movement eastward.
On June 20, soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel E. E. Eyre arrived at Apache Pass. Some Apaches initially parleyed with Eyre, but another group killed three soldiers who had wandered off by themselves. Eyre, keeping his focus on his principal enemy, the Confederates, tried to avoid a major confrontation with the Apaches. When no attack followed, he led his men east.
A few weeks later, 13 miners from Pinos Altos, New Mexico, arrived from the east and were attacked. Not a single miner survived.
Next to arrive were General Carleton’s troops, with the advance detachment being led by Captain Thomas L. Roberts. The party included 126 soldiers and 26 wagons. Captain John C. Cremony commanded the wagon train. Roberts led part of his command to Dragoon Springs, leaving Cremony and the wagons behind until Roberts discovered whether there was sufficient water at Dragoon Springs for the whole command. Cochise and Mangas Coloradas concentrated their men on the spring at Apache Pass, waiting to ambush the soldiers when they approached to replenish their water supply there. Ultimately, Cremony joined Roberts at Dragoon Springs, from which point Roberts—with 60 infantrymen, 7 cavalrymen, and 2 howitzers—continued toward Apache Pass, leaving Cremony temporarily behind.
Roberts and his men ascended the pass on July 15. As Roberts reached the summit and headed through a narrow canyon leading to a station house, the Apaches opened fire. Roberts ordered his men back to the summit and then, braving the fire, led his men to the station house. What Cochise counted on was the stretch of several hundred yards from the building to the spring, a stretch that promised a high level of fatalities when the soldiers tried to reach the spring, as they must to obtain water. However, Roberts ordered the howitzers into action, and the shelling wreaked such destruction on the Apaches that the soldiers were able to reach the spring, collect the water they needed, and return to the station house.
Roberts, who was concerned that the wagon train might be ambushed as it made its way toward Apache Pass, sent messengers to warn Cremony. Five of the six men whom Roberts sent outraced their Apache pursuers. The sixth, a cavalryman named John Teal, was separated from the other messengers and surrounded by Apaches. However, his repeating rifle surprised his attackers with its firepower, and Mangas Coloradas decided to wait to kill him until he ran out of ammunition. Unfortunately for Mangas Coloradas, his height and his sense of command made him stand out above the other Apaches, and Teal took careful aim at him. The bullet flew true, striking the chief in his
Chest. The wound was serious, although not fatal. Shocked at their leader’s plight, the warriors forgot about Teal, who escaped.
Under cover of darkness, Roberts led his men out of the station and back to Cremony and the wagon train. The entire command then made its way back to the station at Apache Pass. By the morning of July 17, with both men and animals desperate for water, Roberts mounted an attack on the Apaches who were waiting on the slopes surrounding the spring. The combination of howitzer shells and repeating rifles soon routed the Apaches.
When General Carleton arrived with an even larger contingent of troops, Cochise made no attempt to stop him from moving through the pass. Further dismaying the Apaches, Carleton assigned Major T. A. Coult with 100 men to build a fort nearby. Soon Fort Bowie provided a U. S. military presence to control movement through the strategically important pass.
Death of Mangas Coloradas
Geronimo needed no further evidence of the treachery that Euro-Americans were capable of perpetrating. He had lost his beloved first wife and three children to a Mexican massacre. Cochise had been falsely accused by supposedly friendly “white eyes,” who had then killed several members of his family, including his wife. So when Mangas Coloradas informed other Apache leaders that miners and soldiers at Pinos Altos desired peace and had promised food and provisions for the Chihennes and Bedonkohes, Geronimo urged him not to return there. Other leaders, including the Chihennes Victorio and Nana, also expressed their distrust of the offer. Mangas, however, was an idealist who believed that Euro-Americans in general were trustworthy, and he resolved to proceed under this assumption.
On January 17, 1863, Mangas approached Pinos Altos. Jack Swilling, whom the Chihenne leader knew, went to meet him. Other members of Swilling’s party aimed their guns at the Apaches. Mangas told his bodyguards to leave and continued onward with Swilling.
Swilling and others, including soldiers who had been at Pinos Altos, took Mangas the following day to Fort McLane, known to Apaches as Apache Tejo (the name Geronimo uses in his autobiography). There Swilling turned Mangas over to Brigadier General Joseph Rodman West. General Carleton had earlier ordered a campaign against Mangas Coloradas’s Apaches, and both Carleton and West held him responsible for much of the violence perpetrated against settlers and miners in the region, following the common Euro-American practice of assuming a level of generalship in one Indian leader that never existed. In fact, Mangas had long been quite willing to make peace.
West had Mangas confined to an open adobe room, the only building even partly remaining at the abandoned fort. He warned his prisoner against attempting an escape and then told the guards to kill the chief. Private Clark Stocking, who was present, said that he heard West saying, “Men, that old
Murderer has got away from every soldier command and has left a trail of blood for 500 miles on the old stage line. I want him dead or alive tomorrow morning, do you understand? I want him dead.”7
While Mangas Coloradas lay on the ground with a single blanket to ward off the cold, the guards tortured him by heating their bayonets in a fire and sticking his feet with the hot points. When Mangas propped himself up on an elbow to complain that he was no child to be treated this way, the guards, Privates James Colyer and John Mead, as reported by another observer, Daniel Ellis Conner, shot him with their muskets. Apparently Sergeant Henry Foljaine then shot him in the head. The execution occurred about 1:00 a. m. on January 19. Later that morning, another soldier, John T. Wright, scalped Mangas. A group of the chief’s relatives and friends, unaware of his fate, were attacked. Eleven, including a son of Mangas, were killed, and the dead leader’s wife was wounded.
A few days later, the army surgeon David Sturgeon and some soldiers decapitated Mangas Coloradas and boiled the head to remove the flesh. Sturgeon took the skull with him to Toledo, Ohio, after he resigned from the army in 1864. A phrenologist, Orson Squire Fowler, carefully examined the skull and published the results in his book Human Science or Phrenology. There have been reports—apparently untrue—that the skull ultimately made its way to the Smithsonian Institution. No Smithsonian record of the skull exists, although Fowler did put it on display in his New York museum, the Phrenological Cabinet.
Geronimo had been left in charge of the Apaches who remained in Arizona. When he heard of Mangas Coloradas’ death, Geronimo led his people into the mountains near Apache Pass. A few weeks later, they discovered four men herding cattle and killed all four, after which they drove the cattle back to their camp and began to butcher them. Before completing their work, they were surprised by the arrival of U. S. troops. Having given most of their weapons to Mangas Coloradas and the Apaches who went to New Mexico, Geronimo’s warriors had to fight the troops with spears, bows, and arrows. The contest, according to Geronimo, was especially disadvantageous to the Apaches, who lost one warrior, three women, and three children before they could scatter into the mountains.
Troops attacked Geronimo’s new camp about 10 days later, with the fighting lasting all day. Geronimo and his warriors exhausted their supply of arrows and were reduced to fighting with rocks and clubs. During the night, they were able to withdraw. The arrival of Cochise and Chokonen warriors did not prevent yet another army attack, and again the Apaches, at a severe disadvantage, had to withdraw. Geronimo seems to imply in his autobiography that confirmation of Mangas Coloradas’s death did not arrive until after this series of encounters with the U. S. military, although the challenges of memory and translation raise questions about the chronology of events here, as elsewhere in his autobiography.
A Fragile Peace
Over the next few years, Geronimo made repeated raids into Mexico. His autobiography mentions a number of conflicts with Mexicans but passes quickly over this period north of the border. He spent some time in New Mexico with Victorio, the greatest of the Chihenne leaders after the death of Mangas Coloradas. Geronimo points out in his autobiography, “No one ever treated our tribe more kindly than Victorio and his band. We are still proud to say that he and his people were our friends.”8
At other times, Geronimo stayed with Cochise. Despite his reluctance in the autobiography to discuss the continuing engagements with U. S. settlers and soldiers, he undoubtedly played a role in the attacks that disrupted the stage line, endangered miners, captured horses from military posts, and frightened the new inhabitants of the region. In 1863, this area was split between the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, creating the boundaries of what would become the two states in 1912.
By 1870, efforts were under way from both sides to explore the possibility of peace. Cochise, Victorio, and Loco, also a Chihenne leader, made overtures to the U. S. military. In that same year, Arizona was made a department in the Military Division of the Pacific, with Major General George Stoneman established as the department’s commander. Stoneman set up stations at forts to distribute food in an effort to advance peace efforts.
Mob action led by a group of Tucson citizens, however, almost derailed the movement toward peace. On April 30, 1871, some of Tucson’s most prominent citizens, augmented by Mexicans and Papago Indians (who were traditional enemies of the Apaches) attacked an Aravaipa Apache rancheria (a small, semi-permanent community). They killed about 150 people and kidnapped approximately 28 children, whom they sold to farmers in Arizona and Mexico. President Ulysses Grant, deeply concerned by the violence, sent Secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners Vincent Colyer to try to make peace. Grant also directed Colyer to establish temporary reservations.
Grant dispatched General Oliver O. Howard to the region in the spring of 1872 to continue implementation of his “Peace Policy,” which included establishing reservations and soliciting Indian agents from various religious denominations. Howard, a devout Christian who also had (at least by EuroAmerican standards) sympathy for the Indians whom he sometimes had to fight, listened attentively to the Aravaipa chief Eskiminzin plead for the return of the children. Despite opposition from local authorities and General Crook, who had replaced Stoneman, Howard prevailed in returning the children to their families.
Howard was helped in his peace effort by Thomas Jeffords, formerly superintendent of the mail route between Tucson and Fort Bowie. Despite being wounded himself and losing many drivers to Indian attacks, Jeffords had become friendly with Cochise and earned his trust. Cochise, Geronimo, and Cochise’s sons, Naiche and Taza, met with General Howard and Jeffords.
Discussions lasted for 11 days, with Cochise finally agreeing to the peace so long as he could stay in the Dragoon Mountains and have Jeffords designated as the military’s representative.
Howard established a reservation in the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona Territory with Jeffords in charge. At the Chiricahua (also known as the Fort Bowie) Reservation, Jeffords worked hard to maintain the peace and operate the reservation as fairly as possible. Geronimo also made the peace with Howard and lived near Cochise while continuing to make raids into Mexico. Geronimo has high praise for Howard in his autobiography:
He [Howard] always kept his word with us and treated us as brothers. We never had so good a friend among the United States officers as General Howard. We could have lived forever at peace with him. If there is any pure, honest white man in the United States army, that man is General Howard.9
Raids into Mexico continued, of course, and Jeffords was largely powerless to prevent them. Then, in 1874, the great Cochise died. Cochise had prepared Taza to assume leadership, but the Chiricahuas who had followed Cochise’s lead began to form various splinter groups. The brothers Skinya and Poinsenay refused to follow Taza, and Geronimo and his cousin Juh believed that Taza was too trusting of the U. S. representatives. In a dispute that grew out of the refusal by the manager of a stagecoach station to continue selling Skinya and Poinsenay whiskey, the two murdered the man and his cook. This incident, which occurred in April 1876, led to demands from local leaders, including Arizona’s Governor Safford, that the reservation be closed and the Chiricahuas relocated.
Finances also factored into the dispute, with the U. S. government wanting to save money by concentrating the Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation farther north on the Gila River, where John Clum had become the agent in August 1874. San Carlos was also readily accessible to contractors at Tucson, the territorial capital. The concentration of tribes, both Apache and nonApache, had begun in February 1875, and the 1876 killings reinforced the decision to shift reservation policy in this direction.
The effort to relocate all Chiricahuas and other area Indians to San Carlos precipitated considerable tension and even violence. In one clash, Cochise’s sons Taza and Naiche killed Skinya and wounded Poinsenay. When Clum met with a group headed by Geronimo in June 1876, Geronimo said that he would go to San Carlos but stated that he needed time to gather the rest of his people. Geronimo and Juh then returned to their camp, killed their dogs so that they would not give away their movements, and traveling as lightly as possible, fled.
Clum made the bizarre decision to raise money for his marriage to a young woman from Ohio by taking a group of Indians east as a sort of show-business venture. The group visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and toured Washington, D. C. In Washington, Taza became ill with
Pneumonia and died. Clum put on an elaborate funeral with General Howard attending but ran out of money for the return trip. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs paid the group’s way back to Arizona. Naiche, who had not gone on the excursion, believed that Clum had poisoned his brother. Naiche became the new successor to Cochise. Although respected as a warrior, he never developed the leadership skills that his father and even his brother had possessed.
World History
