The Career of Leonard Wood

by Joseph Hamblen Sears

THE INDIAN FIGHTER

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THE INDIAN FIGHTER

The problem was what turned out to be the last of the Indian fighting, involving a long-drawn-out campaign. For over a hundred years, as every one knows, the unequal struggle of two races for this continent had been in progress and the history of it is the ever tragic story of the survival of the fittest. No one can read it without regret at the destruction, the extermination, of a race. No one, however, can for a moment hesitate in his judgment of the inevitableness of it, since it is and always will be the truth that the man or the race or the nation which cannot keep up with the times must go under--and should go under. Education, brains, genius, organization, ability, imagination, vision--whatever it may be called or by how many names--will forever destroy and push out ignorance, incompetence, stupidity.

The Indians were not able--tragic as the truth {26} is--to move onward, and so they had to move out and give place to the more worthy tenant.

The end of this century of struggle was the campaign against the Apaches in the Southwest along the Mexican border, where they made their last stand under their able leader Geronimo.

The young doctor was detailed at once for duty on a broiling fourth of July under Captain--afterwards General--Henry W. Lawton, and the next day he rode a horse over thirty-five miles. That incident to the initiated is noteworthy, but even more so is the fact that shortly afterwards in a hard drive of five succeeding days he averaged eighteen hours a day either in the saddle or on foot, leading the horses. It was a stiff test. To make it worse he was given the one unassigned horse--that is to say, a horse that was known as an "outlaw"--whose jerky gait made each saddle-sore complain at every step. The sun beat down fiercely; but, burned and blistered fore and aft, Leonard Wood could still smile and ask for more action.

The stoicism of the tenderfoot who had come to play their game was not lost on the troopers {27} with whom he was to spend the next two years fighting Indians. He "healed in the saddle" at once and a few weeks later was out-riding and out-marching the best of Captain Lawton's command, all of whom were old and experienced Indian fighters.

This was not to be the last time that Leonard Wood was to find himself faced at the outset by tacit suspicion and lack of confidence on the part of the men he was to command. Years later in the Philippines he was put up against a similar hostility, with responsibilities a thousandfold more grave, and in the same dogged way he won confidence--unquestioning loyalty--by proving that he was better than the best. "Do it and don't talk about it," was his formula for success. It was this quality in him that made it possible for Captain Lawton to write to General Nelson A. Miles, who had then succeeded General Crook, after the successful Geronimo campaign: "... I can only repeat that I have before reported officially and what I have said to you: that his services during the trying campaign were of the highest order. I speak particularly of services {28} other than those devolving upon him as a medical officer; services as a combatant or line officer voluntarily performed. He sought the most difficult work, and by his determination and courage rendered a successful issue of the campaign possible."

General Crook, who commanded the troops along the border, characterized the Apaches as "tigers of the human race." Tigers they were, led by Geronimo, the man whose name became a by-word for savagery and cruelty. For a time these Indians had remained subdued and quiet upon a reservation, and there can be no question but what the subsequent outbreaks that led to the long campaign in which Wood took part were due largely to the lack of judgment displayed by the officials in whose charge they were placed. Both the American settlers and the Mexicans opposed the location of the Indians on the San Carlos reservation and lost no opportunity to show their hostility. When General Crook took command of that district he found he had to deal with a mean, sullen and treacherous band of savages.

The American forces were constantly embroiled with the Chiricahuas. Treaties and agreements {29} were made only to be broken whenever blood lust or "tiswin"--a strong drink made from corn--moved the tribe to the warpath and fresh depredations. Due to General Crook's tireless efforts there were several occasions when the Indians remained quietly on their reservation, but it was only a matter of months at the best before one of the tribes, usually the Chiricahuas, would break forth again. Not until the treaty of 1882 with Mexico was it possible for our troops to pursue them into the Mexican mountains where they took refuge after each uprising. In 1883 General Crook made an expedition into Mexico which resulted in the return of the Chiricahuas and the Warm Springs tribes under Geronimo and Natchez to the Apache reservation.

Two years of comparative quiet followed. The Indians followed agricultural pursuits and the settlers, who had come to establish themselves on ranches along the border, went out to their plowing and fence building unarmed. In May, 1886, the Indians indulged in an extensive and prolonged "tiswin" drunk. The savagery that lurked in their hearts broke loose and they escaped from {30} their reservation in small bands, leaving smoking trails of murder, arson and pillage behind them. Acts of ugly violence followed. General Crook threatened to kill the last one of them, if it took fifty years, and at one moment it seemed as though he had them under control. "Tiswin" once again set them loose and they stampeded.

Their daring and illusiveness kept the American and Mexican troops constantly in action. One band of eleven Indians crossed into the United States, raided an Apache reservation, killed Indians as well as thirty-eight whites, captured two hundred head of stock and returned to Mexico after having traveled four weeks and covered over 1,200 miles.

It was into such warfare that Wood was plunged. No sooner had he arrived and begun his work than he put in a request for line duty in addition to his duties as a medical officer. This was granted immediately, because the need of men who could do something was too great to admit of much punctiliousness in the matter of military custom. Before the arrival of his commission as Assistant Surgeon, January, 1886, he {31} had served as commanding officer of infantry in a desperately hard pursuit in the Sierra Madres, ending in an attack on an Indian camp. He was repeatedly assigned to the most strenuous, fatiguing duty. After having marched on foot one day twenty-five miles with Indian scouts he rode seventy-three miles with a message at night, coming back at dawn the next day, just in time to break camp and march thirty-four miles to a new camp. He was given at his own request command of infantry under Captain Lawton, and this assignment to line duty was sanctioned by General Miles, who had recently taken over the command of the troops along the border.

General Miles was one of the greatest Indian fighters the country has ever known. He was peculiarly fitted to assume this new job of suppressing the Apache. He judged and selected the men who were to be a part of this campaign by his own well-established standards. As its leader he selected Captain Lawton, then serving with the Fourth United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, primarily because Captain Lawton believed that these Indians could be subjugated. {32} He had met their skill and cunning and physical strength through years of such warfare under General Crook, and possessed the necessary qualifications to meet the demands of the trying campaign that faced him. After speaking of Captain Lawton, General Miles says in his published recollections:

"I also found at Fort Huachuca another splendid type of American manhood, Captain Leonard Wood, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army. He was a young officer, age twenty-four, a native of Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great intelligence, sterling, manly qualities and resolute spirit. He was also perhaps as fine a specimen of physical strength and endurance as could easily be found."

"... His services and observations and example were most commendable and valuable, and added much to the physical success of the enterprise."

General Field Orders No. 7, issued April 20, 1886, by General Miles for the guidance of the troops in his command, tell clearly and concisely the character and demands of the time.

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"The chief object of the troops will be to capture or destroy any band of hostile Apache Indians found in this section of the country, and to this end the most vigorous and persistent efforts will be required of all officers and soldiers until this object is accomplished.

"... The cavalry will be used in light scouting parties with a sufficient force held in readiness at all times to make the most persistent and effective pursuit.

"To avoid any advantage the Indians may have by a relay of horses, where a troop or squadron commander is near the hostile Indians, he will be justified in dismounting one half of his command and selecting the lightest and best riders to make pursuit by the most vigorous forced marches until the strength of all the animals of his command shall have been exhausted.

"In this way a command should, under a judicious leader, capture a band of Indians or drive them from 160 to 200 miles in forty-eight hours through a country favorable for cavalry movements; and the horses of the troops will be trained for this purpose."

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To get a picture of young Wood at this time it is necessary to look at the situation through the eyes of that day and through the eyes of youth as well.

A young man of twenty-four had been brought up by the sea in what we will call for the sake of politeness conservative New England. He had all the sound and sane basis of character that comes from what in this country was an old and established civilization. He had been educated in his profession at the most academic and conservative institution in the United States; a profession which while not an exact science is nevertheless a science requiring sane methods and the elimination of risks. He had begun the regular work of this profession. He possessed also what every young man with a healthy body of that day possessed-- and still possesses--a passion for romance, for the road, for the great adventure which at that time in this country still centered around the pistol shooting, broncho riding, Indian fighting cowboy.

We who are old have forgotten the paper covered stories we used to read surreptitiously {35} about the "Broncho Buster's Revenge," or "The Three-Fingered Might of the West." But we did read them and long for the great life of the plains. Even Jesse James was a hero to many of us.

But for a New Englander educated at Harvard to the practice of medicine to pick up his deeply driven stakes and actually go into this realm of romance was unusual in the extreme; and to be so well trained and in such good condition, with such high courage as to make good at once amongst those men who looked down on an Eastern tender-foot was sufficiently rare to promise much for the future.

The young man had the love of romance that all young lives have, but he had the unusual stimulus to it that led him to make it for the moment his actual life. And those who study his whole life will find again and again that when the parting of the ways came he invariably took the road of adventure, provided that it was always in the service of his country. Such then was the makeup and the condition of this young man when in the spring of 1886 Captain Lawton, having {36} received orders to assume command of the expedition into Mexico against the hostile Apache, included Wood as one of his four officers. The force consisted of forty-five troopers, twenty Indian scouts, thirty infantrymen and two pack trains. And thus began the two-thousand-mile chase into the fastnesses of Sonora and Chihuahua which ended with the surrender of Geronimo.

General Miles' campaign methods differed from those of General Crook in many ways. He always assumed the aggressive. His motto was, "Follow the Indian wherever he goes and strike him whenever you can. No matter how bad the country, go on." Under these instructions the troops went over the border and down into the depths of the Sonora, jumping the Indian whenever an opportunity offered, never giving him any rest. Wherever he went the troops followed. If he struck the border, a well arranged system of heliostat stations passed the word along to a body of waiting or passing scouts. General Miles' methods differed from those of General Crook also in the matter of the use of the heliostat, a system of signaling based on flashes of the sun's rays from {37} mirrors. He had used them experimentally while stationed in the Department of the Columbia, and now determined to make them of practical use at his new station. Over the vast tracts of rough, unpopulated land of Arizona and Mexico the signals flashed, keeping different detachments in touch with their immediate commands, and the campaign headquarters in touch with its base.

Even before Captain Lawton's command could be made ready the Indians themselves precipitated the fight. Instead of remaining in the Sierra Madres, where they were reasonably safe from assault, they commenced a campaign of violence south of the boundary. This gave both the American troops and the Mexicans who were operating in conjunction with them exact knowledge of their whereabouts. On the 27th of April they came northward, invading the United States. Innumerable outrages were committed by them which are now part of the history of that heart-breaking campaign. One, for example, typical of the rest was the case of the Peck family. Their ranch was surrounded, the family captured and a number of the ranch hands killed. The husband {38} was tied and compelled to witness the tortures to which his wife was submitted. His daughter, thirteen years old, was abducted by the band and carried nearly three hundred miles. In the meantime Captain Lawton's command with Wood in charge of the Apache scouts was pursuing them hotly. A short engagement between the Mexican troops and the Indians followed. On the heels of this the American troops came up and the little Peck girl was recaptured. Nightfall, however, prevented any decisive engagement, and before daybreak the Indians had, slipped away.

The Indians found it better to divide into two bands, one under Natchez, which turned to the north, and the other under Geronimo, which went to the west. The first band was intercepted by Lieutenant Brett of the Second Cavalry after a heartbreaking pursuit. At one time the pursuing party was on the trail for twenty-six hours without a halt, and eighteen hours without water. The men suffered so intensely from thirst that many of them opened their veins to moisten their lips with their own blood. But the Indians suffered far more. In Geronimo's story of those {39} days, published many years later, he wrote: "We killed cattle to eat whenever we were in need of food, but we frequently suffered greatly for need of water. At one time we had no water for two days and nights, and our horses almost died of thirst." Finally on the evening of June 6th the cavalry came into contact with Geronimo's band and the Indians were scattered.

For four months Captain Lawton and Leonard Wood pursued the savages over mountain ranges and through the canyons. During this time the troops marched 1,396 miles. The conditions under which they worked were cruel. The intense heat, the lack of water, and the desperately rough country covered with mountains and cactus hindered the command, but the men had the consolation of knowing that the Indians were in worse plight. Furthermore, the trustworthiness of the Indian scouts, a tattered, picturesque band of renegades, was coming under suspicion. Perhaps it was because of their unreliability that an attack made upon the 18th of July was not an entire success. The Indians escaped, but their most valued {40} possessions, food and horses, fell into the hands of our troopers.

It was the beginning of the end. A month later they received word that the Indians were working towards Santa Teresa, and Captain Lawton moved forward to head them off. Leonard Wood's personal account of this engagement follows:

"On the 13th of July we effected the surprise of the camp of Geronimo and Natchez which eventually led to their surrender and resulted in the immediate capture of everything in their camps except themselves and the clothes they wore. It was our practice to keep two scouts two or three days in advance of the command, and between them and the main body four or five other scouts. The Indian scouts in advance would locate the camp of the hostiles and send back word to the next party, who in their turn would notify the main command; then a forced march would be made in order to surround and surprise the camp. On the day mentioned, following this method of procedure, we located the Indians on the Yaqui River in a section of the country almost impassable for man or beast and {41} in a position which the Indians evidently felt to be perfectly secure. The small tableland on which the camp was located bordered on the Yaqui River and was surrounded on all sides by high cliffs with practically only two points of entrance, one up the river and the other down. The officers were able to creep up and look down on the Indian camp which was about two thousand feet below their point of observation. All the fires were burning, the horses were grazing and the Indians were in the river swimming with evidently not the slightest apprehension of attack. Our plan was to send scouts to close the upper opening and then to send the infantry, of which I had the command, to attack the camp from below.

"Both the Indians and the infantry were in position and advanced on the hostile camp, which, situated as it was on this tableland covered with canebrake and boulders, formed an ideal position for Indian defense. As the infantry moved forward the firing of the scouts was heard, which led us to believe that the fight was on, and great, accordingly, was our disgust to find, on our arrival, that the firing was accounted for by the fact that {42} the scouts were killing the stock, the Apaches themselves having escaped through the northern exit just a few minutes before their arrival. It was a very narrow escape for the Indians, and was due to mere accident. One of their number, who had been out hunting, discovered the red headband of one of our scouts as he was crawling around into position. He immediately dropped his game and notified the Apaches, and they were able to get away just before the scouts closed up the exit. Some of these Indians were suffering from old wounds. Natchez himself was among this number, and their sufferings through the pursuit which followed led to their discouragement and, finally, to their surrender."

The persistent action of our troops was beginning to have its effect, and when the Indians ceased to commit depredations it was good evidence to those who knew Indians and Indian nature that they were beginning to think of surrender.

One night the troops ran into a Mexican pack-train, which brought the first reports that Indians were near Fronteras, a little village in Sonora. Two of their women had come into town to find the {43} wife of an old Mexican who was with the Americans as a guide, hoping, through her, to open up communications looking to a surrender. As soon as the report was received Captain Lawton sent Lieutenant Gatewood of the Sixth Cavalry, who had joined the command, with two friendly Apaches of the same tribe as those who were out on the warpath, to go ahead and send his men into the hostile camp and demand their surrender. This he eventually succeeded in doing, but the Indians refused to surrender, saying that they would talk only with Lawton, or, as they expressed it, "the officer who had followed them all summer." This eventually led to communication being opened and one morning at daybreak Geronimo, Natchez and twelve other Indians appeared, in camp. Their inclinations seemed at least to be peaceful enough to allow the entire body of Indians to come down and camp within two miles of the Americans. It was agreed that they should meet General Miles and formally surrender to him and that the Indians and the troops should move further north to a more convenient meeting place. To give confidence to the Indians in this new state {44} of affairs, Captain Lawton, Leonard Wood and two other officers agreed to travel with them. Due to a mistake in orders, the American troopers started off in the wrong direction, and Captain Lawton was obliged to leave in search of them. This left the three remaining officers practically as hostages in the Indian camp. Speaking of this incident. General Wood says:

"Instead of taking advantage of our position, they assured us that while we were in their camp it was our camp, and that as we had never lied to them they were going to keep faith with us. They gave us the best they had to eat and treated us as well as we could wish in every way. Just before giving us these assurances, Geronimo came to me and asked to see my rifle. It was a Hotchkiss and he had never seen its mechanism. When he asked me for the gun and some ammunition, I must confess I felt a little nervous, for I thought it might be a device to get hold of one of our weapons. I made no objection, however, but let him have it, showed him how to use it, and he fired at a mark, just missing one of his own men, which he regarded as a great joke, rolling on the {45} ground, laughing heartily and saying 'good gun.'

"Late the next afternoon we came up with our command, and we then proceeded toward the boundary line. The Indians were very watchful, and when we came near any of our troops we found the Indians were always aware of their presence before we knew of it ourselves."

For eleven days Captain Lawton's command moved north, with Geronimo's and Natchez's camps moving in a parallel course. During these last days of Geronimo's leadership his greatest concern was for the welfare of his people. The most urgent request that he had to make of Captain Lawton was to ask repeatedly for the assurance that his people would not be murdered.

Captain Lawton in his official report says of Wood's work in the campaign:

"No officer of infantry having been sent with the detachment ... Assistant Surgeon Wood was, at his own request, given command of the infantry. The work during June having been done by the cavalry, they were too much exhausted to be used again without rest, and they were left in camp at Oposura to recuperate.

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"During this short campaign, the suffering was intense. The country was indescribably rough and the weather swelteringly hot, with heavy rains for day or night. The endurance of the men was tried to the utmost limit. Disabilities resulting from excessive fatigue reduced the infantry to fourteen men, and as they were worn out and without shoes when the new supplies reached me July 29th, they were returned to the supply camp for rest, and the cavalry under Lieutenant A. L. Smith, who had just joined his troop, continued the campaign. Heavy rains having set in, the trail of the hostiles, who were all on foot, was entirely obliterated.

"I desire particularly to invite the attention of the Department Commander to Assistant Surgeon Leonard Wood, the only officer who has been with me through the whole campaign. His courage, energy and loyal support during the whole time; his encouraging example to the command when work was the hardest and prospects darkest; his thorough confidence and belief in the final successes of the expedition, and his untiring efforts to make {47} it so, have placed me under obligations so great that I cannot even express them."

Through the formal language of a military report crops out the respect of a commanding officer who knew whereof he spoke, the acknowledgment that here was a young subordinate who never despaired, never gave up, who always did his part and more than his part, and who placed his commanding officer under obligations which he was unable "even to express." That was a great deal for any young man to secure. To-day, after the Great War, there are many such extracts from official reports and all are unquestionably deserved. But they are the result of a nation awakened to patriotism when all went in together. In 1886, when the nation was at peace, when commercial pursuits were calling all young men to make their fortune, young Leonard Wood answered a much less universal call to do his work in a fight that had none of the flare or glory of the front line trench in Flanders.

Out of it all came to him at a very early age practice in handling men in rough country in rough times--men who were not puppets even {48} though they were regular army privates. They had to be handled at times with an iron hand, at times with the softest of gloves; and an officer to gain their confidence and respect had to show them that he could beat them at their own game and be one of them--and still command.

The Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him years later for this Indian work is a fair return of what he accomplished, for this Medal of Honor, the then only prize for personal bravery and high fighting qualities which his country could give him, has always been the rare and much coveted award of army men.

It was in Wood's case the mark of conspicuous fighting qualities, conspicuous bravery and marked attention to duty--a sign of success of a high order for a New England doctor of twenty-five.

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