General Crook Relieved.
Gen. George Crook came to Arizona in 1870, remaining in command of the department here until 1875, when he was transferred to the department of the Platte, and was reassigned and returned to Arizona in 1882. In 1886, evidently taking exception to an implied criticism from the Department at Washington, and, as he expressed it, “having spent nearly eight years of the hardest work of his life in this department”, he asked to be relieved. Crook was criticized in Arizona at the time for a too abiding faith in the loyalty of his Indian scouts, and many of us believed this criticism to be fully justified. There is hardly a doubt that much of the ammunition used by the renegades was supplied them by these same scouts. It was but a few months prior to Crook’s being relieved that Capt. Crawford, a zealous and gallant officer, while engaged in his thankless task of ridding their own country of these pests, was treacherously killed by Mexican irregular troops in the Sierra Madre mountains. It is true that these irregular troops were Tarahumari Indians, possibly as wild and uncontrollable as the Apaches themselves, and that may extenuate the treachery to some extent, but the fact remains that the officers in command were not Indians, but Mexicans.
Geronimo Surrenders to General Miles.
On April 2, 1886, Gen. Miles, superseding Crook, took command of the Department of Arizona, and in his “Personal Recollections” he speaks of finding here, stationed at Fort Huachuca, a “fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great intellect, manly qualities and resolute spirit, a splendid type of American manhood”. This “fair-haired, blue-eyed young man” of 1886 was at the time Assistant Surgeon in the Army. He is now Major General Leonard Wood, late Chief of Staff, U. S. Army.
On the 4th of September following Miles’s assuming command, Geronimo and his band surrendered to him, and on September 8th they left Fort Bowie for Fort Marion, Florida. The point of surrender to Miles was at Skeleton canyon, in Mexico, about 65 miles south of Fort Bowie. The surrender of Geronimo may be fixed as the date of the termination of the many years of warfare between the whites and the Apaches as a tribe, a warfare marked with a cruelty on the part of the Apaches probably unparalleled in the history of the four hundred years of strife between the whites on the one side and the redman on the other.
Apache Kid Begins Bloody Career.
I have said that the surrender of Geronimo terminated the many years of bloody warfare with the Apaches as a tribe, but the Indian tribes may, and do, have outlaws in their own tribe, outlaws for whom as a tribe they are in no way responsible, and for whose acts the individual and not the tribe should alone be held amenable. Even the white tribe is not altogether immune from this infliction. In this class, among others, was the “Apache Kid”, who, following the surrender of Geronimo, with a few lawless followers made independent warfare on isolated, helpless settlers, leaving the footprints of his bloody work wherever he went. The Kid, sometimes called the Apache Kid, and at others simply Kid, was an Apache scout occupying the position of sergeant under Al Sieber, chief of scouts. On June 1, 1887, the Kid shot Sieber on the San Carlos reservation, wounding but not killing him, and this marks the beginning of Kid’s series of bloody crimes.
Immediately following the shooting of Sieber, Kid, his squaw and sixteen other Indians, left the reservation.
Capt. Burgess, Old-Time Scout
An interesting old-time scout is Captain John D. Burgess, who came to Arizona in 1873 to look after some mining interests for General Kautz and Colonel Biddle of the army, subsequently becoming a guide and scout for the government, and in 1882 was chief of Indian police at San Carlos. At the time the Kid started out on his career, Captain Burgess was working some mines of his own at Table Mountain, in the Galiura mountains. The officer in command of the troops sent out from San Carlos in pursuit of the Kid and his followers, knowing Burgess, immediately secured his services as guide and trailer. Following the Kid and his band, they trailed them through to Pantano, where they had crossed the railroad, and going up Davidson’s canyon, and passing E. L. Vail’s ranch had accommodated themselves to a bunch of his horses. Passing down the east side of the Santa Ritas, they killed Mike Grace, an old miner, near old Camp Crittenden. Here Captain Lawton, with a troop of the 4th Cavalry, heading them off and forcing them to turn back, they passed by Mountain Springs, near the present Vail station, and were run over the Rincon mountains, where they were so closely pursued that while in camp they lost all the horses they had stolen. They now headed for the reservation, which they succeeded in reaching before Lieutenant Carter Johnson, who was immediately behind, could overtake them, and here they surrendered, and in due course were tried and sent first to San Diego barracks, passing through Tucson on September 3rd, and subsequently, in February, 1888, were transferred to Fort Alcatraz, in the bay of San Francisco. Subsequently, the United States Supreme Court, having decided that the trial of an Indian devolved on the county in which the crime was committed, ordered that all Indians sentenced by other than the territorial courts should be returned to the Territory and tried by such courts. Under this order the Kid and several others were returned and tried by Judge Kibbey, at Globe, and on October 30, 1889, sentenced to imprisonment at Yuma, and were being taken there by Sheriff Reynolds and his Deputy, “Hunky-Dory” Holmes. They were being conveyed by stage over the Pinal mountains, via Riverside and Florence. In the stage were Reynolds, Holmes, a Mexican who was also being taken to Yuma, the Kid and seven other Indians, and Eugene Middleton the driver of the stage, making twelve in all.