The Apache medicine-men at Fort Bowie made more medicine, and insisted that if Ka-e-ten-na and other runners were sent after Geronimo, as soon as the whiskey left him he would keep his word and come in peaceably.
This was not done, because Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles, of the Fifth Infantry, commanding at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had been directed to take command of the Department of Arizona. This of course meant new methods, and a shake-up all ’round.
Not knowing exactly what was ahead, Jimmie left the pack service and became a railroad telegraph operator.
At any rate, General Crook had not failed. Eighty of the Chiricahuas, including Chihuahua and Nana, had been brought in. Only Geronimo and Nah-che and their twenty men and boys and thirteen women, were out. And the Mangas squad of six men, who had not been with Geronimo for almost a year.
General Miles arrived at Fort Bowie on April 12. He immediately organized things for a campaign with the regular troops. The War Department did not favor trusting in the scouts as fighters—especially in the scouts from the White Mountain and Chiricahua friendlies.
The General Crook scouts had been discharged, and so were many of the interpreters. Tom Horn left. Yes, there was a decided shake-up.
But the new general seemed to be a good man, all right, and the Arizona newspapers put much faith in him. He extended the heliograph service, until a perfect network of stations had been established; and he injected fresh vim into the officers.
Suspecting that they were to get no terms at all, now, and to show that they despised the soldiers, Geronimo and Nah-che went thoroughly bad. Perhaps General Crook’s methods might have been better; perhaps not; but toward the last of April Geronimo and Nah-che led their few warriors straight up past Tucson itself; the troops had not been able to protect the border, and Nah-che penetrated clear to Fort Apache.
They lost only one man. He was a deserter, and volunteered to follow them, as “Peaches” had. The troops did heroic work. Lieutenant Lloyd Brett, of the Second Cavalry, marched twenty-six hours without a halt; his troopers were forced to drink their own blood, to quench thirst.
Captain Henry W. Lawton, of the Fourth Cavalry, and Captain Leonard Wood, assistant surgeon in the army, were selected to push the pursuit through Mexico, with a picked command of the Eighth Infantry and Fourth and Tenth Cavalry. Surgeon Wood was instructed to see if the men could not outdo even the Apaches.