Then, as the months of 1884 rolled by, troubles appeared on the surface. The military and the Indian Bureau employes did not agree. The military officers, like Captain Crawford and Lieutenant Gatewood, had charge of the Chiricahua prisoners, but the Indian agent had charge of the other Indians. The military was obliged to keep order at San Carlos and the Fort Apache reservation, both, but the Indian agent had the authority to direct the farming. The Chiricahuas had been encouraged by General Crook to mingle with the peaceful White Mountains, and all the Indians preferred the soldiers to the civilians.
The White Mountains and Chiricahuas complained that they were not getting their rightful amount of meat from the agent. The man sent out to see, reported that they were getting everything.
Captain Crawford did not agree with the report. The Indian Bureau asked that he be removed. He demanded a court-martial. The court-martial found that he was honest and correct; and that the Apaches, instead of getting one thousand cows, had been assigned only six hundred poor ones, with the promise that the rest should be delivered “when required.”
But Captain Crawford was powerless in the matter, and the Apaches could not understand why there should be two fathers over them.
In May young chief Ka-e-ten-na went “bad.” He was the Mexican Apache chief who had surrendered; now he made ready to run away, with a band of other restless Chiricahuas, into Mexico again.
General Crook was at West Point, to address the graduating class there. However, Ka-e-ten-na was arrested by his own people, and was tried the same as a white man, and sentenced to be “shut up till he learned sense.” He was sent to the United States military prison on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, for a year; and this proved a very good plan, the same as the cases of Santos and Pedro and old Miguel; because after he had seen how powerful the Americans were and what a great city they had, he was cured of wishing to live wild.
“He is only one, though,” said Micky Free, this fall, while at Bowie on a scouting trip with Tom Horn who was Al Sieber’s right-hand man. “Sibi thinks that all the Chiricahua would better be sent to prison. So does Tom. They have had a talk with Geronimo, and the only way to do is to send all the Chiricahua out of Arizona, quick.”
XXIV
PACK-MASTER JIMMIE MEETS A SURPRISE
“Will there be trouble again, Micky?”