The general was getting ready. According to the officers of the Fifth Cavalry and the Twenty-third Infantry at Camp Grant, the President had resolved that if the Peace Policy in Arizona did not persuade the Indians to settle down within a year, General Crook should be ordered to take matters over.
The year would be up this September.
Then, in August, things “broke wide open,” as Joe Felmer expressed it.
General Crook just escaped being assassinated by the Yavapais at Date Creek, where he had gone for a talk. He had angered them by arresting several of them for the murder of Engineer Loring and others, in the Wickenburg stage massacre. He had been told that they were planning to kill him, but he went anyway.
They did try to shoot him, in the council. Lieutenant Ross knocked up the arm of the Indian who fired first, there was an all-round tussle, Hank Hewitt the packer seized one Indian by both ears and broke his head against a rock, a part of the Yavapais were killed or imprisoned, and the rest fought their way into the mountains.
The Tonto Basin Apaches—Tontos and Yavapais both—were attacking ranches and mines south of Prescott. Their worst chiefs were Chuntz, and Delt-che (Delt-shay) or Red Ant (the Yavapais were known as Red Ant people), and Cha-li-pun, the Buckskin-colored Hat.
And on the road only thirty miles south of Tucson the Chiricahuas killed gallant young Lieutenant Reid Stewart, the “shave tail” who had been out of West Point two months, and Corporal Black, while the two were riding in a buck-board wagon up from Fort Crittenden, for Tucson.
“An’ I hear now they’ve got Bob Whitney, at last,” one day reported Joe Felmer, on return from Tucson. “Yep; shot out his brains while he an’ Cap’n Gerald Russell o’ the Third were waterin’ their hosses in the place called Cochise’s Stronghold of the Dragoon Mountains, between Tucson an’ Bowie.”
Bob Whitney had been known as the handsomest guide and scout in Arizona.