Geronimo Read online

  A tough, dogmatic veteran of the prewar regular army, Carleton imposed firm discipline, possessed unbounded self-confidence, and had no tolerance for opposition. An experienced Indian fighter, he intended to sweep aside any Indians who interfered with his mission.

  By early June 1862 Carleton and most of the California Column had arrived in Tucson. Seeking to open communication with Canby, he dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Edward E. Eyre and 140 cavalrymen to scout the overland trail as far as Mesilla. At Apache Pass on June 25, Eyre talked with Cochise and lost three men before proceeding on to Mesilla. By the time Eyre reached the Rio Grande and learned of Sibley’s defeat and retreat, Baylor had left for Texas and the last of his troops were evacuating Mesilla.

  Meanwhile, Carleton planned to move the California Column in stages to the Rio Grande. The first contingent left Tucson on July 10 under Captain Thomas L. Roberts. It consisted of a mixed force of 126 infantry and cavalry, twenty-two teams, and 242 head of cattle. Two howitzers rumbled in the rear, manned by infantry. (Howitzers were cannon designed not for direct fire but for lobbing rounds into the air to descend on the target.) Depositing wagonloads of supplies on the San Pedro River for the next detachment, Roberts left an escort for the train and cattle to follow and, with sixty infantrymen, eight cavalrymen, and the howitzers, continued to Dragoon Springs. Resting here for two days, on the afternoon of July 14 he resumed the march across the Sulphur Springs Valley. The dust cloud raised by his column alerted Cochise and Mangas Coloradas that it would reach Apache Pass the next day, July 15.

  The two-day Battle of Apache Pass ensued. Roberts proved a superior leader, expertly deploying his troops and his artillery. Both on July 15 and again on the next day, his howitzers proved the decisive factor in the victory, even though the shells burst over the reverse slope instead of above the Apaches.6

  Captain Roberts had not only won an important victory. Even more significant, when General Carleton arrived at the pass on July 27, Roberts strongly recommended that a military post be erected on the top of the hill overlooking the springs. Otherwise, he argued, every command that attempted to pass would have to fight for water. Carleton readily agreed.

  Fort Bowie, named for one of the California colonels, rose on this site. Later moved a short distance to the east, Fort Bowie would prove a festering sore in the heart of the Chiricahua domain for the remaining decades of Apache warfare. Not until eight years after the collapse of Apache resistance did the troops march away.7

  Carleton reached Fort Thorn on the Rio Grande early in August 1862 and proceeded at once to Santa Fe. Canby had gained promotion to brigadier and a transfer to the East. Carleton inherited his command of the Department of New Mexico, over which he reigned tyrannically for the rest of the Civil War years. Confronted on his journey across the Southwest with evidence of the ferocity of Apache hostilities, he had left most of the California Column in southern New Mexico under his blustery second-in-command, Colonel Joseph R. West. Elevated to brigadier general in October 1862, West turned to the Apaches with the same venom as his Confederate predecessor, John R. Baylor.8

  By mid-August 1862, Mangas and his followers who had fought at Apache Pass in July had returned to their home country. In Janos, his men had forced a Mexican doctor to dig the ball received in the battle out of their chief’s chest. Despite his age, he healed quickly enough to travel back to the upper Gila and the Mogollons. He wanted nothing more than to make peace with the Americans and resume farming at Santa Lucía.

  Only about thirty families still lived in Pinos Altos, although a contingent of men formerly in Confederate service helped bolster their defenses. Mangas journeyed north to Ácoma to send an appeal for peace to the new general in Santa Fe. Receiving no answer, he went back home to try bargaining with the people at Pinos Altos. He found them receptive. In council in the town itself, he talked with a tall man, who promised to issue beef, blankets, and other provisions if he would bring all his people in. The tall man was Jack Swilling, a former Confederate militia officer. Mangas agreed to come back in two weeks.9

  As so often in the past, Mangas trusted the Americans. After the meeting in Pinos Altos, he gathered the Bedonkohes south of Stein’s Peak in the Peloncillo Mountains for a council to decide the next move. Mangas described his hopes for the future: peace with the Americans and a life of undisturbed farming at Santa Lucía. He wished to lead the Bedonkohes to Pinos Altos and deliver this message. Few of the Bedonkohe leaders, including Geronimo, trusted the Americans or thought this a good idea, and they expressed their disapproval. But Mangas still projected the magnetism of old, and all consented to a compromise. Half the band would return to Pinos Altos under Mangas and learn whether the Americans acted in good faith. The other half would remain in Arizona to await word of how the Americans had reacted. In another indication of Geronimo’s increasing independence, he stayed in Arizona.

  Before again heading for Pinos Altos, Mangas conferred with the Chihenne leaders Victorio and Nana. Both agreed with the Bedonkohes who waited in Arizona. The Americans could not be trusted. Even so, Victorio and some Chihennes joined Bedonkohes to act as a bodyguard for Mangas as he approached Pinos Altos.

  Late in the morning of January 17, 1863, Mangas and his escort arrived within 150 yards of the town, walking slowly. The same tall man who had previously greeted Mangas, Jack Swilling, came forward from the men lined up behind him. When the two met, exchanging words in broken Spanish, Swilling looked back, and suddenly his men leveled their rifles. He informed Mangas that he now would remain as a hostage for the good behavior of his men. As the two started back to the town, the body guard advanced, too. Swilling informed Mangas that they would not be needed. As Mangas dismissed them, he stoically comprehended that he had been betrayed and would probably be killed. At an earlier stage of life, his cunning might have worked an escape. Now past seventy, he understood such an attempt to be futile.

  At the edge of town, soldiers emerged from hiding in shacks and chaparral, although Swilling did not turn Mangas over to them. Geronimo, Victorio, Nana, and others who counseled against taking the Americans at their word had been right. Their chief should not have undertaken so risky a move. They knew the Americans could not be trusted.

  The next day, the soldiers formed and, accompanied by Swilling with his own men and his prisoner, rode toward the old army post of Fort McLane. Although burned by the Apaches when abandoned, its ruins had been re-occupied by troops. Here Swilling turned Mangas over to an American general. He was Joseph H. West, a pompous little officer Carleton had left to war against the Apaches in southern New Mexico. Now aware of his impending fate, Mangas denied the general’s accusations that he had led all the bloody raids of the past few years in southern New Mexico and Arizona.

  Warned that any attempt to escape would cost him his life, Mangas entered the shells of one of the fallen adobe buildings with two guards. The soldiers ordered him to the ground, gave him a single blanket, and built a fire nearby for themselves. As the night of January 18 turned bitterly cold, the chief bore the torment under the single blanket. At midnight four more soldiers replaced his two-man guard. One soldier walked sentry on half the building’s perimeter, a second on the other half. The two remaining with Mangas heated their bayonets in the fire and several times pressed them against his legs and feet. Mangas shifted from one side to another and tried to tighten the blanket around him. About an hour after the new guards took station, now January 19, 1863, Mangas raised on one elbow and loudly protested this treatment. Both soldiers raised their muskets and fired into the chief’s chest. He fell back on the ground. Another soldier advanced to fire a revolver into Mangas’s skull. If he was not already dead, he was now. The old man, now about seventy-three, had paid the price for his trust in the Americans.

  General West himself had arranged for Mangas’s death. He personally instructed the guard detail before they took station beside Mangas at midnight: “Men, that old murderer has got away from every soldier command and has left a
trail of blood for five hundred miles on the old stage line. I want him dead or alive tomorrow morning, do you understand? I want him dead.”

  The next morning, January 19, 1863, West got what he wanted. His official report, contrived less for a sympathetic Carleton than for public consumption, explained that Mangas had been shot on his third attempt to escape. Hung together by one fabrication after another, the report concluded that “the good faith of the U.S. Military authorities was in no way compromised.”10

  General West had not finished with the Apaches, as Geronimo would soon learn. But he had decisively ended a long and significant era in the history of all the Chiricahua bands. His treachery, backed by General Carleton, would forever blacken the record of American relations with the Apaches.

  Although a Bedonkohe, Mangas Coloradas had towered over the history of all the Chiricahua bands for more than thirty years. Other influential chiefs of the bands and local groups had come and gone. Mangas reigned supreme. No other chief rivaled him in influence or stature. Cochise came close but had not attained this distinction by the time of the perfidious slaying of his friend and father-in-law.

  Geronimo, Mangas’s most important protégé, had already begun to drift toward Cochise. He surely mourned his mentor’s death, but it freed him from the magnetism that had bound him to the old chief for twenty years. He would excel Mangas Coloradas in only one way: his name would resonate around the world as the best-known of all Indian leaders. In no other way, however, did Geronimo approach the significance of Mangas Coloradas.

  Mangas Coloradas was simply the greatest of all Apache chiefs.

  SEVEN

  COCHISE: War and Peace, 1863–72

  DEMORALIZED BY THE MURDER of their venerable chief Mangas Coloradas and fearful of aggressive campaigning by the soldiers, the Bedonkohes abandoned the headwaters of the Gila River and moved west. As Geronimo recalled, “We retreated into the mountains near Apache Pass.” This was Cochise country, and as Geronimo noted, Cochise “took command of both divisions.” The Chokonen chief assumed the mantle of Mangas Coloradas, although he lacked the qualities to bind the Bedonkohes as solidly to his leadership.

  Neither the Chokonens nor Bedonkohes remained quietly in the Chiricahua Mountains around Apache Pass. The killing of Mangas Coloradas demanded revenge. On March 22, 1863, a raiding party struck a newly built military post in the Pinos Altos Mountains and ran off with sixty horses. They fled westward into Arizona and paused on the Rio Bonita, a southern tributary of the Gila, at a place favored by Cochise. Pursing soldiers found them. A surprise attack took twenty-five lives in twenty minutes and scattered the rest.1

  Revenge raids continued throughout 1864 and into 1865, both in New Mexico and Arizona. Soldiers proved unrelenting in tracking down raiding parties and exacting many lives in sudden surprise attacks while suffering few casualties themselves. Their victories fueled the need for more vengeance, hence more raiding parties. They ran off much military stock, killed a few soldiers, but only seemed to stir them to further offensives. Rarely had the Chiricahuas engaged an enemy in so many open conflicts or suffered such damaging losses.

  As the conflict escalated, Indian families remained relatively secure, tucked away in mountain recesses in the Chiricahua and neighboring mountain ranges. Among the women and children was Geronimo’s family. It consisted of his second wife, Chee-hash-kish, who in 1864 gave birth to a son, Chappo (not to be confused with Chatto, another Chiricahua). Lulu would follow in 1865. Geronimo’s third wife, Nana-tha-thithl, and her child had been killed by Mexican soldiers in 1861. Geronimo would soon take another wife, a Chiricahua-Nednhi whose name is lost but who was the sister of a close relative of Cochise and his second son, Naiche.2

  Deprived of the strong leadership of Mangas Coloradas, in the three years after his death the Bedonkohes fractured into three groups. Illustrating the hybrid composition of Mangas’s following, some joined with Victorio’s Chihennes in New Mexico, ultimately to seek peace with the Americans; by the early 1870s, they would be fully absorbed by the Chihennes. Others drifted under the influence of Cochise and Juh. Given his friendship and family tie with Juh since youth, Geronimo and his following joined Juh. The bond linking the two grew ever stronger by the year.3

  The treacherous murder of Mangas Coloradas in January 1863 should have alerted the Chiricahuas that they faced a new breed of soldiers. Brigadier General James H. Carleton, the military potentate in Santa Fe, set the tone: ruthless, energetic, persistent, demanding, determined that his men keep in the field until they had accomplished their mission. In southern New Mexico, the task fell to Brigadier General Joseph R. West. He wholeheartedly subscribed to Carleton’s mind-set, as demonstrated by his personal order to kill the captive Mangas Coloradas. He expected no less from the able captains who so aggressively kept to the trail of raiding parties and inflicted heavy casualties; nor from the troops themselves, consisting of hardy California gold miners anxious to sweep aside the Indians and, as Carleton encouraged, exploit the mines of southern New Mexico. From 1863 to 1865, the California Volunteers conducted rigorous campaigns that cost Chiricahua lives but did not conquer them.4

  In his annual report for 1866, Major General Irvin McDowell reported from division headquarters in San Francisco that the regular Fourteenth Infantry and First Cavalry had replaced all the Volunteers in the District of Arizona. They were warring successfully against the Apaches and letting them know they could have peace by settling at Fort Goodwin, a post erected on the Gila River by the Volunteers. But they could not be kept there. The army could not feed them, and they did not want to settle with other Apache groups with which they had long been at enmity. In 1866, therefore, the US Regular Army opened a new era in the Apache wars.5

  What part Geronimo played in Cochise’s battles with the California Volunteers for the three years after the death of Mangas Coloradas in 1863 can only be speculated. Consistent with his growing drift away from Mangas in the years before his death, as the Bedonkohes gradually fragmented Geronimo aligned himself with the local group that adhered only partly to Cochise. Sometimes they followed him into battle. Sometimes they raided and fought on their own. Equally as often, they could be found with Juh’s Nednhis in Sonora. There, Geronimo and Juh grew ever closer in raids and warfare, on both sides of the border. Both against the California Volunteers and in the intense warfare with the regulars after 1866, Geronimo and Juh came and went between Mexico and Arizona. Although more independent than Chokonens, Geronimo and Juh still honored the power of Cochise’s leadership and fought closely for and with him.

  The name Geronimo surfaced in Mexican records in 1843 and occasionally in American records in the 1860s. Not until the 1870s, however, in his fifties, did Geronimo appear to any whites in both name and person. His autobiography links him to numerous fights and raids throughout the period when Mangas and Cochise battled Mexicans and Americans, but placing him definitely in all but a few is impossible. That in the middle and late 1860s his Bedonkohe local group bonded as closely with Juh’s Nednhis as with Cochise’s Chokonens suggests that Geronimo passed much of these years in Sonora and Chihuahua. His family probably remained hidden in the Sierra Madre most of the time. Sometime in the years after 1865, Geronimo added to his family of four wives and three children a fifth and a sixth wife. His fifth was a Bedonkohe named Shit-sha-she, his sixth a Nednhi named Zi-yeh. Since the two children of Geronimo and Zi-yeh, Fenton and Eva, were not born until 1882 and 1889, respectively, the sixth marriage probably occurred in the middle or late 1870s.6

  As the Chiricahuas learned of the end of the white man’s Civil War, they watched anxiously as Arizona and New Mexico began to fill with miners, cattlemen, and farmers. They provided tempting targets, and Apache depredations increased. Many of the newcomers lost life and possessions. Travelers on the overland route, especially the mail coaches, proved especially vulnerable. Cochise had not forgotten the Bascom Affair, and the years 1869 and 1870 featured the fiercest fighting of the Chiricahua wars. Fo
rt Bowie, in the heart of Cochise’s homeland, played a central role in the fighting, its patrols tracking and defeating the chief’s raiding parties time and again.7

  In his ten-year war of revenge for the senseless atrocity inflicted on his family by Lieutenant Bascom, Cochise had killed many white people and fought many battles with the white soldiers. He had made southern Arizona dangerous for travelers and settlers. But the conflicts with soldiers, both California Volunteers and US regulars, had cost many fighters. His women and children never felt secure from a sudden attack. They never had enough food and feared to search widely for it. He grew increasingly alarmed at his shrinking population and personally weary of always being forced to fight, whether offensively or defensively. Sixty or more years old by the early 1870s and in failing health, Cochise began to think seriously of peace.8

  To the east, the Warm Springs Chihennes had the same thoughts. Their homeland centered at Ojo Caliente, the sacred springs that fed the Alamosa River, which flowed southeast into the Rio Grande. Downstream lay the Mexican village of Cañada Alamosa, where the Warm Springs people traded. In 1869 hunger had driven them to seek peace and rations from the officer at Fort McRae assigned as their agent. Within a year they were holding peace talks at Cañada Alamosa, although the government’s sparse rations had done little to abate their hunger. During one of the many talks, in December 1869, Chief Loco disclosed that Cochise had said he would bring his people in as soon as a treaty was made. But he wanted to be satisfied that it involved no treachery.9