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Home , Apache Wars, Camp Grant massacre, George Crook, Tom Jeffords

AZ Mil Hist 7

Arizona Indian Wars – Part II

This article continues the story of the Indian Wars in during the period 1849-1886 and will address the and events until the final surrender of leader .

The influx of settlers and miners coming into Arizona continued to crowd onto the lands of the Arizona tribes, creating increasingly uneasy relationships. Then, in April 1871, as recounted by David Roberts in They Once Moved Like the Wind, an event near Camp Grant, a small Army outpost north of Tucson, would touch off years of renewed warfare between the government and the Apache tribes. Camp Grant was located near the junction of the San Pedro River and the Aravaipa Creek northeast of Tucson (see Southern Arizona map below). A small band of Aravaipa under their chief Ezkiminizen approached the Army commander at Camp Grant, Lt. Royal Whitman, to make a truce.

The Aravaipa are known in Apache as the Dark Rocks People (after the black rocks of the Galiuro Mountains and Aravaipa Canyon). The Aravaipa appeared to be worn down by warfare and wanted to live on their land in peace, perhaps in an arrangement similar to the “feeding stations” in the north. Whitman was sympathetic and sought authority from his commander in for the truce. Soon over 500 Indians from several bands were camped near Whitman’s garrison seeking peace.

The people of Tucson, to the south, were increasingly unhappy with Apache incursions and were affronted by Whitman’s “coddling” of these particular Apaches. A local Tucson leader named William S. Oury organized a vigilante group to seek “justice.” During the winter and spring, William S. Oury and Jesús María Elías formed a “Committee of Public Safety,” blaming every raid in southern Arizona on the Camp Grant Apaches. Once again, the local whites seemed to assume that every Apache tribe somehow coordinated with every other tribe and shared blame for these raids. The Tucsonans had appealed to the area commander, General Stoneman for relief, but were not satisfied by his tepid responses.

The committee organized a vigilante group in great secrecy, and on the afternoon of April 28, six Americans (including then-Tucson mayor Sidney R. DeLong), 48 Mexicans, and 92 O’odham, gathered along Rillito Creek and set off on a stealthy march (see route of the

1 raiders below). They avoided the main trail to Camp Grant in order to surprise the Aravaipa and headed to Aravaipa Canyon.

Before dawn on Sunday, April 30, they surrounded the sleeping Aravaipa Apaches. The Apaches were taken completely by surprise. Most of the Apache men were alleged to be off hunting in the mountains. No adult Indian was left alive to tell the tale. All but eight of the corpses were women and children. Twenty-nine children had been captured and were sold into slavery in Mexico by the Tohono O’odham and the Mexicans. A total of 144 Aravaipas had been killed and mutilated.

Overcome by the catastrophe, Whitman offered each of his interpreters $100 to go into the hills to convey to the surviving Aravaipa that his soldiers had nothing to do with the massacre. None of the interpreters was tempted, although $100 was a fortune then. Then, as Roberts continues, Whitman did a brave thing. In broad daylight on the morning of May 1st, and vulnerable to the grief-stricken warriors he knew must be watching from the hills, he set about burying the mutilated corpses.

The devastated Aravaipa seemed to understand. Slowly they straggled in to Camp Grant, expressing their grief to Whitman. They asked Whitman to help retrieve their stolen children. Whitman was eventually able to retrieve a few, but most had disappeared into the trafficking markets in Mexico, never to be seen again by the Aravaipa.

As an afterthought for his efforts, Whitman was court-martialed in December 1871. He was charged with failing to pay for drinks in a Tucson saloon. The local newspapers, unable to implicate him in the massacre and still resentful of his “coddling,” assailed him on more personal grounds. The court, recognizing the absurdity of the charges, threw out the case. But Whitman’s career was ruined. He retired on a pension in Washington, DC and would spend the rest of his life brooding over the events at Camp Grant.

The Camp Grant incident is not without controversy. As Constance Lynn Altshuler points out in her Chains of Command, some articles found in the Aravaipa camp could be traced to people killed by the Apaches. The owner of a horse swore under oath that he found it in the Aravaipa camp. Some “unopened packages could only have come from a devastated ranch or a dead traveler.”

The whereabouts of the Aravaipa men is also controversial. Why was a hunting party needed when 90 male Aravaipa already drew rations from the fort? Lt. Whitman had not reported the men absent, which meant that he had not issued the passes required for their absence under the agreement. Whitman himself had a history of public drunkenness and 2 was later court-martialed three times. Nevertheless, his efforts with the Aravaipas seemed honorable and the massacre did in fact occur.

But the momentum created by Whitman’s good intentions would continue. When President Grant heard of the massacre, he took swift action.

President Grant was enraged when he heard about Camp Grant and vowed decisive action. He informed Governor A.P.K. Safford that if the perpetrators were not brought to trial, he would place Arizona under martial law. He then installed General (see photo below) as Arizona military commander. As David Roberts relates, Crook was a decorated Civil War veteran (Bull Run, Antietam, Chickamauga, Winchester) and had spent 13 years fighting Indians in the plains and the northern territories. Chief lauded Crook as more to be feared than any warrior. General Sherman, then commander of the US Army, called Crook “America’s best Indian fighter.” And for good reason.

Crook was an unusual officer, says Roberts. He hated wearing his uniform, preferring unostentatious plain civilian garb (see photo below left). He rode a mule. He never smoked or swore, or drank alcohol, tea, or coffee. He was thoroughly unpretentious. Because of his manner of dress and his peculiar whiskers, the Apache dubbed him "Gray Fox." And he differed from nearly all his fellow officers in the Indian wars in one vital respect: He had a limitless curiosity about the Indian way of life.

His curiosity led to a measured sympathy, but foremost he knew the best way to fight your enemy is to know him through and through. He interviewed everyone he could find who had any experience against the Apaches. He realized that the set formations of his recent Civil War experience had no use in Arizona. His army would need to accommodate the mobility and speed of the Apache warriors.

He went to Arizona and went to school. He talked with the Coyotero and White Mountain Apaches lingering outside Fort Apache in central Arizona. He recognized that “the average Apache was a far superior horseman, a far better conditioned athlete, and a man far more attuned to the brutal Arizona landscape than the average American soldier.”

Crook observed that “It takes and Apache to catch an Apache.” If the nearby Apaches would join his campaign, he promised them “to forgive the crimes of the past, to enforce the same laws for whites and Indians alike, and always to tell the truth.” His decision to use Indian scouts to hunt the warlike tribes was unheard of and controversial, but it would make a difference. Encouraged by early success, Crook moved to Fort Verde, where he began planning a full campaign against the Apaches. 3

Meanwhile, by 1872, and after protracted and bloody warfare, recognized that the Americans seemed to be an unstoppable and growing tide into Arizona. He decided that he needed to come to terms with this force, continues Roberts. A man named (see sketch below) helped Cochise make this possible. Jeffords had come to Arizona as a prospector and later worked as a supervisor for the stage line. The Apaches were killing his drivers and station people and he needed to stop the losses.

Jeffords could speak some Apache and offered to help arrange a truce. He calmly walked into Cochise’s stronghold unarmed and asked to see Cochise. The Apaches were astounded by his audacity and courage, and were not even sure which one they admired most.

Cochise himself was impressed by Jefford’s courage and they became unlikely friends. Cochise had already bargained with Crook and had offered to protect travelers across if his people could stay in their homeland on a reservation. After some negotiation with a visiting Washington emissary, General Oliver O. Howard (see sketch below), and with the help of his only white friend, Tom Jeffords, the government granted Cochise’s tribe a reservation on their homeland in southeastern Arizona. The reservation became official in December 1872.

Howard’s conclusion of the agreement with Cochise (see photo left) put an end to Crook’s own obsession with Cochise. Crook had believed that the would only agree to the reservation after defeat in battle. But Cochise had seen enough of battle and he now had the preserve he sought.

With this agreement, as Roberts relates, Crook could no longer pursue Cochise. So he turned his attention to the only Apaches in Arizona who had refused reservation life. He would set his sights on the “Tonto Apaches” who lived in the tangled wilderness east of the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations. Crook devised a campaign to comb the Tonto lands in search of the Tonto warriors. He would send out his scouts to search for the Tontos and then follow up with nine patrols of seasoned soldiers from various forts to force the Tontos into submission.

Crook commanded by example and seemed to generate focus and energy among his followers. He was often the first to rise in the morning and the first in the saddle. His unique Indian fighting style included his extensive use of Indian scouts, a relentless pursuit of Indians on their own territory, and willingness to negotiate rather than engage in battle.

The Tonto Basin Sweep, as Roberts recounts, began in November 1872 and worked to perfection. After a winter campaign of relentless hounding by Crook’s forces, and with his expertly tracking Apache warriors, the Tontos had lost all will to fight. As Jim Turner tells us in his Arizona: A Celebration of the Grand Canyon State: “It was not by 4 accident that Crook began in winter and stayed in the filed for almost five months. Like the Russians against Napoleon, climate was this general’s ally.”

In April 1873, the various patrols headed back to Camp Verde with their captives.

When Crook counted the incoming Apaches at Fort Verde, he found he had 2,300 captives. Crook’s study of the Apache had paid off. His innovative use of Apache scouts had systematically destroyed the will of the Tontos. At this point, with the Tontos defeated and Cochise on a reservation, Crook thought he had solved the Indian problem in Arizona.

Sometime later in 1874, Tom Jeffords had begun to notice physical limitations in Cochise. The Apache chief had trouble digesting food and he would sometimes go several days taking only water. But Cochise would not complain and would always be up on his horse and actively leading the Chiricahuas.

After long suffering these symptoms, Cochise finally passed away on June 8, 1874. His body was taken to a secret place and put into a crevice in his sacred mountains. His horse and dog were shot and buried with him. Only a handful of people knew the burial place, including Jeffords, but none ever divulged the location.

Following Cochise's death in 1874, however, a headstrong warrior named Geronimo, who felt no commitment to agreements made by Cochise, led new uprisings. He violated the agreements made by Cochise and soon the Chiricahuas were removed from their southeast Arizona homeland to the newly established San Carlos reservation west of Fort Apache in central Arizona. There they joined the White Mountain Apaches, who had been forced off their lands near Fort Apache following the Tonto campaign.

The trouble began almost immediately after the Chiricahua were re-located to San Carlos in 1876, and thrown in with other Apache groups who regarded them as traditional enemies. Some of these Apaches tribes became unhappy with reservation life and continued escaping the reservation, leading raids in Arizona and Mexico. These escapes initiated the so-called “renegade” period in the where soldiers would go in pursuit of those who left the reservation.

However, the Mexican government wanted the US government to control more tightly the Apaches raiding in Mexico and escaping back across the US border. The 1848 Treaty of Hidalgo had specified that this control would be maintained. To respond to the Mexicans and to comply with this agreement, the Army established near the Mexican border south of Tucson in 1875 to provide a base to help control Apache raids across the border into Mexico.

By 1875, and with the Apache problem “solved,” Crook was transferred to the northern Plains to take command of the , headquartered in Omaha. That winter, Crook defeated the Great chief Dull Knife, and then enlisted the Arapaho, Utes, Bannock, , Crow and Winnebago in his fight against the Sioux. By the time Crazy Horse surrendered with 1,100 people on May 6, 1877, the last great battles on the Plains were over.

But in 1882, Crook was ordered back to the after many Apache had fled the reservations and resumed their guerrilla warfare under Geronimo. During the next four 5 years, Crook repeatedly forced Geronimo's surrender, only to see him escape captivity again and retreat into the mountains, or flee to Mexico.

Thus began the last campaign to end the Apache conflicts. In January 1886, Captain Emmett Crawford defeated Geronimo and his band high in the Sierra Madre. Two months later the Apache leader (right- most figure in photo at left) met with General Crook at Canon de los Embudos, and agreed to surrender. However, that night bootleggers came into the Apache camp and sold them whiskey, at the same time telling them the soldiers planned to kill them once they were in Arizona.

Most likely these whiskey peddlers were operating under the influence of the Tucson Ring, a group bent on continuing the war for economic gain. Geronimo and his warriors bolted once again. This flight caused Crook’s superior in Washington, General Phil Sheridan, also his roommate at West Point, to suggest Crook was placing too much trust in the Apache. In response, Crook asked to be replaced and General Nelson Miles was sent to relieve him.

The campaign was nearly over by the time Miles arrived. He continued Crook’s policy of using Apache scouts, durable pack trains and relentless pursuit. The Army rounded up the Chiricahua on reservations and shipped them to .

But in the summer of 1886 as Roberts’ history relates, 34 Chiricahua men, women and children under the leadership of Geronimo “…became the last band of free Indians to wage war against the US Government. They were mercilessly pursued by five thousand American troops (one quarter of the U.S. Army) and by some 3,000 Mexican soldiers. For more than five months Geronimo’s band ran the soldiers ragged. The combined military might of two great nations succeeded in capturing not a single Chiricahua, not even a child.”

Geronimo biographer Angie Debo recounts Geronimo’s final surrender in her book Geronimo. In August, Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, an officer known and respected by Geronimo, undertook a dangerous mission to Geronimo’s camp. After some haggling, Gatewood dealt the warriors his ace card. Their relatives had been exiled to Florida and if they wanted to see them again they’d have to surrender. On September 3, 1886, the wily war chief surrendered and the Apache Wars were finally over.

Angie Debo continues: “Yet the surrender that day was not the end of the story of the Apaches associated with Geronimo. Besides his small band, 394 of his tribesmen, including his wife and children, were rounded up loaded into railroad cars, and shipped to Florida. For more than twenty years Geronimo’s people were kept in captivity at Fort Pickens, Florida; Mont Vernon Barracks, Alabama; and finally Fort Sill, Oklahoma.”

Following the death of Geronimo in 1909, many Chiricahuas elected to move to the reservation, while the remainder stayed at Fort Sill, where they still live today. But as Marshal Trimble says in Arizona: The Cavalcade of History, bitter memories of the 6 Apache wars persisted in Arizona and no Arizonans, either Indian or white wanted the Chiricahua back. This time the door to their eventual return to this land had been closed, possibly forever.

References:

Altshuler, Constance Wynn, Chains of Command, Arizona Historical Society, 1981

Barrett, S.M., Geronimo: My Life, Dover Publications, 2005 (Republication of Geronimo’s Story of His Life, Duffield and Company, 1906)

Bourke, John, On the Border with Crook, , Press, 1962

Brown, Dee, The American West, Dee Brown, Simon and Schuster, 1995

Debo, Angie, Geronimo, University of Oklahoma Press, 1976

McCoy, Kyle and Turner, Jim, The Arizona Story, Arizona Historical Society, Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2009.

Roberts, David, Once They Moved Like the Wind, Simon and Schuster, 1995

Mort, Terry, The Wrath of Cochise, Pegasus Books, 2013

Sides, Hampton, Blood and Thunder, Anchor Books, 2006

Sweeney, Edwin R., Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Sweeney, Edwin R., Cochise: Firsthand Accounts of the Chiricahua Apache Chief, University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

Turner, Jim, Arizona: A Celebration of the Grand Canyon State, 2011

Utley, Robert M., A Clash of Cultures, National Park Service, 1977

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