On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

THE SIERRA MADRE CAMPAIGN AND THE CHIRICAHUAS—“CHATO’S” RAID—CROOK’S EXPEDITION OF FORTY-SIX WHITE MEN AND ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-THREE INDIAN SCOUTS—THE SURPRISE OF THE APACHE STRONGHOLD—THE “TOMBSTONE TOUGHS”—THE MANAGEMENT OF THE CHIRICAHUAS—HOW INDIANS WILL WORK IF ENCOURAGED—GIVING THE FRANCHISE TO INDIANS; CROOK’S VIEWS—THE CRAWFORD COURT OF INQUIRY—“KA-E-TEN-NA’S” ARREST ORDERED BY MAJOR BARBER—TROUBLE ARISES BETWEEN THE WAR AND INTERIOR DEPARTMENTS—CROOK ASKS TO BE RELIEVED FROM THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR INDIAN AFFAIRS—SOME OF THE CHIRICAHUAS RETURN TO THE WAR-PATH.

When the Chiricahuas did break through into Arizona in the early days of March, 1883, they numbered twenty-six, and were under the command of “Chato,” a young chief of great intelligence and especial daring. They committed great outrages and marked their line of travel with fire and blood by stealing horses from every ranch they were enabled to cover not less than seventy-five miles a day, and by their complete familiarity with the country were able to dodge the troops and citizens sent in pursuit. One of their number was killed in a fight at the “Charcoal Camp,” in the Whetstone Mountains, and another—“Panayotishn,” called “Peaches” by the soldiers—surrendered at San Carlos and offered his services to the military to lead them against the Chiricahuas. He was not a Chiricahua himself, but a member of the White Mountain Apaches and married to a Chiricahua squaw, and obliged to accompany the Chiricahuas when they last left the agency.

Crook determined to take up the trail left by the Chiricahuas and follow it back to their stronghold in the Sierra Madre, and surprise them or their families when least expected. “Peaches” assured him that the plan was perfectly feasible, and asked permission to go with the column. By the terms of the convention then existing between Mexico and the United States, the armed forces of either country could, when in pursuit of hostile Indians, cross the frontier and continue pursuit until met by troops of the country into whose territory the trail led, though this convention applied only to desert portions of territory. Crook visited Guaymas, Hermosillo (in Sonora), and Chihuahua, the capital of the Mexican State of the same name, where he conferred with Generals Topete, Bernardo Reyes, and Carbo, of the Mexican Army, Governor Torres, of Sonora, and Mayor Zubiran, of Chihuahua, by all of whom he was received most hospitably and encouraged in his purposes.

He organized a small force of one hundred and ninety-three Apache scouts and one small company of the Sixth Cavalry, commanded by Major Chaffee and Lieutenant Frank West. The scouts were commanded by Captain Emmet Crawford, Third Cavalry; Lieutenant Gatewood, Sixth Cavalry; Lieutenant W. W. Forsyth, Sixth Cavalry; Lieutenant Mackay, Third Cavalry, with Surgeon Andrews as medical officer. Crook took command in person, having with him Captain John G. Bourke, Third Cavalry, and Lieutenant G. J. Febiger, Engineer Corps, as aides-de-camp; Archie Macintosh and Al Seiber as chiefs of scouts; Mickey Free, Severiano, and Sam Bowman as interpreters. The expedition was remarkably successful: under the guidance of “Peaches,” “To-klanni,” “Alchise,” and other natives, it made its way down to the head waters of the Yaqui River, more than two hundred miles south of the international boundary, into the unknown recesses of the Sierra Madre, and there surprised and captured, after a brief but decisive fight, the stronghold of the Chiricahuas, who were almost all absent raiding upon the hapless Mexican hamlets exposed to their fury. As fast as the warriors and squaws came home, they were apprehended and put under charge of the scouts.

This was one of the boldest and most successful strokes ever achieved by an officer of the United States Army: every man, woman, and child of the Chiricahuas was returned to the San Carlos Agency and put to work. They had the usual story to tell of ill-treatment, broken pledges, starvation, and other incidentals, but the reader has perhaps had enough of that kind of narrative. The last straw which drove them out from the agency was the attempt to arrest one of their young men for some trivial offence. The Chiricahuas found no fault with the arrest in itself, but were incensed at the high-handed manner in which the chief of police had attempted to carry it out: the young buck started to run away and did not halt when summoned to do so by the chief of police, but kept on in his retreat among a crowd of children and squaws. The chief of police then fired, and, his aim not being good, killed one of the squaws; for this he apologized, but the Chiricahuas got it into their heads that he ought not to have fired in the first place; they dissembled their resentment for a few days until they had caught the chief of police, killed him, cut off his head, played a game of football with it, and started for the Mexican boundary in high glee.

Crook’s expedition passed down through the hamlets of Huachinera, Basaraca, and Bavispe, Sonora, where occurred the terrible earthquake of the next year. Mexican eye-witnesses asserted that the two or three ranges of mountains which at that point form the Sierra Madre played hide-and-seek with each other, one range rising and the others falling. The description, which had all the stamp of truth, recalled the words of the Old Testament: “What ailed thee, O sea, that thou didst flee? And thou, O Jordan, that thou wast turned back? Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams; and ye hills, like the lambs of the flock?”

General Crook was about this time made the target of every sort of malignant and mendacious assault by the interests which he had antagonized. The telegraph wires were loaded with false reports of outrages, attacks, and massacres which had never occurred; these reports were scattered broadcast with the intention and in the hope that they might do him injury. Crook made no reply to these scurrilous attempts at defamation, knowing that duty well performed will in the end secure the recognition and approval of all fair-minded people, the only ones whose recognition and approval are worth having. But he did order the most complete investigation to be made of each and every report, and in each and every case the utter recklessness of the authors of these lies was made manifest. Only one example need be given—the so-called “Buckhorn Basin Massacre,” in which was presented a most circumstantial and detailed narrative of the surrounding and killing by a raiding party of Apaches of a small band of miners, who were forced to seek safety in a cave from which they fought to the death. This story was investigated by Major William C. Rafferty, Sixth Cavalry, who found no massacre, no Indians, no miners, no cave, nothing but a Buckhorn basin.

There was a small set of persons who took pleasure in disseminating such rumors, the motive of some being sensationalism merely, that of others malice or a desire to induce the bringing in of more troops from whose movements and needs they might make money. Such people did not reflect, or did not care, that the last result of this conduct, if persisted in, would be to deter capital from seeking investment in a region which did not require the gilding of refined gold or the painting of the lily to make it appear the Temple of Horrors; surely, enough blood had been shed in Arizona to make the pages of her history red for years to come, without inventing additional enormities to scare away the immigration which her mines and forests, her cattle pasturage and her fruit-bearing oases, might well attract.

It was reported that the Chiricahua prisoners had been allowed to drive across the boundary herds of cattle captured from the Mexicans; for this there was not the slightest foundation. When the last of the Chiricahuas, the remnant of “Ju’s” band, which had been living nearly two hundred miles south of “Geronimo’s” people in the Sierra Madre, arrived at the international boundary, a swarm of claimants made demand for all the cattle with them. Each cow had, it would seem, not less than ten owners, and as in the Southwest the custom was to put on the brand of the purchaser as well as the vent brand of the seller, each animal down there was covered from brisket to rump with more or less plainly discernible marks of ownership. General Crook knew that there must be a considerable percentage of perjury in all this mass of affidavits, and wisely decided that the cattle should be driven up to the San Carlos Agency, and there herded under guard in the best obtainable pasturage until fat enough to be sold to the best advantage. The brand of each of the cattle, probable age, name of purchaser, amount realized, and other items of value, were preserved, and copies of them are to be seen in my note-books of that date. The moneys realized from the sale were forwarded through the official military channels to Washington, thence to be sent through the ordinary course of diplomatic correspondence to the Government of Mexico, which would naturally be more competent to determine the validity of claims and make the most sensible distribution.

There were other parties in Arizona who disgraced the Territory by proposing to murder the Apaches on the San Carlos, who had sent their sons to the front to aid the whites in the search for the hostiles and their capture or destruction. These men organized themselves into a company of military, remembered in the Territory as the “Tombstone Toughs,” and marched upon the San Carlos with the loudly-heralded determination to “clean out” all in sight. They represented all the rum-poisoned bummers of the San Pedro Valley, and no community was more earnest in its appeals to them to stay in the field until the last armed foe expired than was Tombstone, the town from which they had started; never before had Tombstone enjoyed such an era of peace and quiet, and her citizens appreciated the importance of keeping the “Toughs” in the field as long as possible. The commanding officer, of the “Toughs” was a much better man than the gang who staggered along on the trail behind him: he kept the best saloon in Tombstone, and was a candidate for political honors. When last I heard of him, some six years since, he was keeping a saloon in San Francisco.