USA > Arizona > Arizona, prehistoric, aboriginal, pioneer, modern; the nation's youngest commonwealth within a land of ancient culture, Vol. I > Part 32
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CLUM'S EXPERIENCES AT SAN CARLOS
When General Crook was relieved by Gen. A. V. Kautz in 1875, all the Apaches had been herded upon the Sau Carlos, Chiricahua and Mimbres reser- vations. In June, 1876, the Chiricahua reservation was abandoned and 325 of its Indians taken to San Carlos. Jefford's position ended with the abandon- ment of the reservation. John P. Clum, agent at San Carlos, superintended the removal of the Indians, and was assisted by the entire Sixth Cavalry and three companies of Indian scouts, the military arm commanded in person by
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JOHN P. CLUM, AGENT AT SAN CARLOS, WITH APACHE ESCORT, 1874
CHARLES T. CONNELL
AL SIEBER, GREATEST OF ALL SOUTH- WESTERN SCOUTS
ALCHISAY AND PRINCIPAL WARRIORS, WHITE MOUNTAIN APACHES
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General Kautz. Taza and the original Chiricahua band, including sixty-six warriors, readily assented to removal. The Mexican (Janos) contingent, under Juh and Geronimo, absconded, leaving about 125 Indians still loose along the border.
Clum was a man of determined character and of large ability, later shown also as a newspaper man in the boom days of Tombstone. Made agent at San Carlos in 1874, his first experience was not a reassuring one. A short time before, the sub-chief Chuntz, heretofore referred to by Miles Wood, trans- ferred over from Camp Grant, had been making war medicine and had led a re- volt in which had been killed Lieutenant Jacob Almy, who had been acting as quartermaster, as well as three agency employees and thirteen others. Agency Indians were promptly on the trail, spurred by an offer of reward if they brought Chuntz back with them. The next day after Clum came the scouts returned, to proudly roll from a gunny sack upon the floor at his feet the head of the outlaw leader. Then Clum disarmed all Indians save his scouts.
Clum's job was an unenviable one, one in which he was long continued after he had offered his resignation. He had more trouble with the military than with his charges, though the latter, swelled by accretions from the abandoned reserves, soon numbered 4,500. Yet there were some interesting details of ad- ministration, including the killing by Indian police of a very prominent chief, Disalin, and, in March, 1876, the killing by the same efficient force, led by Clay Beauford, of sixteen renegades. In September, 1877, the Chiricahua band fled into the hills, but surrendered soon after.
VICTORIO'S RAIDS ALONG THE BORDER
The noted Apache chief Victorio first became known as a lieutenant under the celebrated Mangas Coloradas. In the summer of 1877 the Mimbres, includ- ing Victorio, Loco and Nana (pronounced Na-nay), were added to the San Carlos contingent, but made only a brief stay. They were rounded up once more and some of them returned, but Victorio had vowed to remain on the upper Gila.
Victorio and his band in February, 1878, surrendered at Ojo Caliente and were taken to the Mescalero agency, but a short time later escaped into Mexico. The following spring, however, the chief again appeared in southern New Mexico, having recruited his strength to about 400 redskins. Military opera- tions against this band continued no less than four years. In this first raid seventy settlers were murdered.
In February, 1879, Victorio and twenty-two Warm Spring Apaches, who had escaped while being taken to the San Carlos reservation, surrendered to a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry at Ojo, New Mexico. April 15, however, the band escaped, followed by two troops of the Ninth Cavalry and a company of Indian scouts. In the years following he left a bloody trail, though few of his operations were in Arizona. Especially he had to do with the Mexicans, who had failed to kill him while he was in their power, but had confined him in jail in Chihuahua. He announced that some day he would seize the town with the particular purpose of braining the judge who had sentenced him.
In May, 1879, about a score of Victorio's band killed four Mexican herders near Clifton and captured eighty mules. After seizing two squaws at the San
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Carlos sub-agency, they returned to the Mimbres country, with an incidental loss of a couple of bucks in a fight with the settlers on the San Francisco River and of four more in an affair on the Mimbres with the command of Captain Beyer of the Ninth Cavalry. The following day Captain Dawson and Captain Beyer, with four troops of the Ninth Cavalry, fought Victorio and about 140 Apaches at the head of the Animas River in New Mexico and were defeated, with a loss of eight men killed. Most of the band escaped into Mexico, to return in September reinforced by a large number of Mescaleros and Chiricahuas. Near Ojo Caliente eight men were killed and a number of horses were captured. In the same month near Hillsboro, in a fight between a party of citizens and 100 attacking Apaches, the hostiles killed ten of the whites.
Another bold deed was the ambush in Tierra Blancas Cañon, of a column of troops under Captain Dawson, on September 18, 1879. Five soldiers were killed and it is possible that the entire command would have been wiped out had not timely assistance been given by Captain Beyer, who had with him as guide the famous Joe Yankie. The Indians were driven southward by Major Morrow, who refused terms and sent word, "Fight, you red devils." Major Morrow clung to Victorio's heels, but was not overly successful, being compelled to retire from a point fifty miles below the border for lack of provisions, water and am- munition.
HOW VICTORIO WENT TO CHIHUAHUA
Early in 1880 Victorio's band again struck into New Mexico, again to en- counter the untiring Major Morrow, who whipped him soundly in the San Mateo Mountains, January 20 and again on February 3. In May he passed through the Eagle Creek country and near San Carlos attacked George's band of Coyotero Apaches, in order to satisfy a personal grudge and in the course of an unsuccessful attempt to take his own wife and children from the reserva- tion. There is little doubt that this raid was most disastrous to him, as it aligned against him a large part of the Apache nation. On the way back he had a couple of actions with Captain Kramer and Capt. H. A. Parker, the latter a chief of secuts with 100 Indians from San Carlos.
Then there started a determined effort on the part of both the United States and Mexico to end Victorio's career. In the summer of 1880, 2,000 soldiers and 200 Indian scouts were watching the border and to the south General Terrazzas kept the Indians busy with the aid of 300 Mexican troops and 500 volunteers, placing a bounty of $1,000 on the chieftain's head. September 9 Victorio evaded his foes and made a raid northward, nearly to Silver City, and followed with another in October about as far as Fort Cummings. But this was the last known of Victorio on American soil. With 100 warriors and 400 women and children he was penned in by the forces of Terrazzas about twenty miles east of Chihuahua and there was killed October 16, not in battle but hiding among the squaws. He had failed to make good his boast, for it was only his head, carried on a lance, that entered Chihuahua, received with loud acclamation as an evidence of the end of the bloodiest period that had ever been known in northern Mexico.
NANA'S ACTIVITIES AND SURRENDER
In July, 1881, the notorious chief Nana, with fifteen warriors from the old Victorio band, reentered southwestern New Mexico and with a number of Mes-
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caleros killed a large number of white settlers. Nana was followed by Lieu- tenant Guilfoyle of the Ninth Cavalry, a gallant officer, who in 1915 commanded the same regiment, assigned to duty as a border patrol between Douglas and Nogales. Other troops soon joined in the pursuit till about two regiments, under the general command of Col. E. Hatch of the Ninth Cavalry, were in the field and the Indians, then seventy in number, finally had to take refuge in Mexico. This was the last raid of Nana north of the line till the old savage finally surrendered to Crook in 1883, thereafter remaining in peace near his wickiup in the White Mountain reservation. There is a story that the Mexican Colonel Garcia in July, 1882, furnished mescal to Nana's band and, while the braves lay stupefied, lessened the number of bad Indians by thirty.
CHAPTER XVIII RAIDS FROM THE RESERVATIONS
Outbreak of Scouts at Cibicu-Middleton Ranch Attacked-Geronimo Escapes- Murders of Sterling, Colvig and Knox-Fight of the Big Dry Wash-Agency Conditions.
In the latter part of 1880, while the census of the reservation was being taken, there were mutterings of trouble among the Coyoteros on Cibicu Creek and east- ward to San Carlos, most of it caused by a single medicine man, Nock-e-da-klin-ny, who, in ghost dances, was urging the Indians to war, with a promise that he would return to them in the flesh their old chief, Diablo, under whom and favored by the gods they would sweep the region free of the white man and repossess the land as of yore. Connell, the census taker, warned Agent J. C. Tiffany and apprehensive army officers likewise reported to headquarters the dangerous state of affairs in the northern reservation, but for months nothing was done and the false prophet was permitted to pursue his campaign unmolested. In addition, there was internal dissension between the bands of Alchisay and Pedro, opposed to Sanchez, who was the legal successor of Diablo, who had been killed by Alchisay. The trouble had been over gambling and the possession of a squaw. Pedro had been badly wounded in the knee and Alchisay shot through the body. Pedro's band took refuge in a volcanic crater near Cooley's ranch, fifty miles north of Fort Apache. There the chief was pluckily visited by Connell and Ed. Hurley, a soldier-interpreter sent in ambassadorial capacity to secure the return of the band to the protection of the fort. Connell did not have to go. He went only as a favor to Major Cochrane, the commander of Fort Apache. The Indians were found in an almost hysterical condition, with Pedro in serious shape, at- tended ouly by a howling medicine man. Connell to this day is a direct-spoken sort of individual, emphatic in manner and truthful by habit. He succeeded the next day in getting the Indians started toward the post with the wounded chief- tain in an army wagon. At Apache the Indians were extended protection and furnished with food and clothing, returning a typically Indian expression of gratitude a few months later in the attempted murder of their benefactors.
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Connell and friendly Indians made true report of the threatening conditions to Agent J. C. Tiffany at San Carlos, and he referred the matter, as one of grav- ity, to Col. E. A. Carr, Sixth Cavalry (brevet major general), at Fort Apache, and to Col. O. B. Willcox (brevet major general), who was in command of the Department at Whipple. Chief of Scouts Albert Sterling was dispatched to the Cibicu to investigate and returned reporting conditions very serious indeed. But there was official delay for even months thereafter. In August, 1881, Agent Tiffany requested Colonel Carr to arrest or kill, or both, this man Nockide-
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klinny. This message in the same terms was repeated by the Department Com- mander. August 29, Colonel Carr marched to the Cibicu with Troops D and E, Sixth Cavalry, and Company A of Indian scouts, in all numbering six offi- cers, seventy-nine soldiers and twenty-three scouts. Opposed were at least 350 hysterical Indians, who had gathered around the medicine man as a new Mes- siah who would lead in the total extermination of the white men in the South- west.
TREACHEROUS SCOUTS AT CIBICU
Colonel Carr appeared, like many army officers before him, rather to have underrated the spirit of the Indians. With his all-too-meager force he reached the village of the medicine man August 30. He arrested the marplot, who ex- pressed willingness to go to Fort Apache and stated that there would be no attempt at a rescue. Carr then turned to the task of making camp, when the Indian scouts he had brought, absolutely without warning, turned against him and opened fire upon the unsuspecting troops.
At almost the first shot was killed Capt. Edmund C. Hentig, shot in the back as he was reaching for a rifle. Four private soldiers were killed and three mortally wounded. The other wounded included only two enlisted men. At the first rifle crack, the medicine man made a dash to escape, but had hardly started when he was shot through the head by Colonel Carr's trumpeter.
Carr drove the Indians from his front, buried his dead and sped back to his undermanned post. He arrived the next day and that he was right in his returning haste was shown by the fact that an attack was made upon the fort September 1 by the Indians, who already had killed eight men on the road to the southward. Though Carr's official account is of the briefest, it is very evident that the Indian demonstration against the post was of serious sort and that the defense was a gallant one. Four soldiers were killed and several were wounded. Lieut. C. G. Gordon, Sixth Cavalry, was wounded severely. There was a rather sad commentary on official delay in the last paragraph of the report, which told, "I am confident the Indians have been preparing this ontrage for six months. Cooley says so also." After the soldiers had left Cibicu, the Indians there dug up the dead for the pleasure of crushing in their heads with rocks and of mutilating the remains.
News of the successful outbreak was sent by runners to all the Apache sub- divisions. The aggressive leadership seemed to have been seized by the mutinous scouts, who were led by Dandy Jim, Skippy and Dead Shot. The Indians who started to surprise Fort Apache were joined on the way by Alchisay and a part of Pedro's band, which had forgotten the protection and food that had been furnished by the fort only a few weeks before.
The first reports of the trouble told that Carr was killed. He was a soldier of long experience in Indian warfare and of high character and it is not im- probable that later he read with deep interest and gratification numerous complimentary obituaries that had been printed.
ATTACK ON THE MIDDLETON RANCH
From Cibien a band led by Eskinoyouhay, failing to secure the co-operation of Nadaski, on September 2, turned their attention to the white settlers. Seven Vol. I-16
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Indians drifted in friendly guise up to the Middleton ranch near upper Cherry Creek. There had been a rumor of the massacre of Carr's command, but the Indians denied knowledge of the affair. The Indians had been fed when they suddenly opened fire upon the group of Americans, which consisted of the father and mother, a grown son and daughter, four little children, Henry Moody and George L. Turner, Jr. Moody and Turner were killed at once. Henry Middle- ton was shot above the heart and in the shoulder, but not till he had shot one of the Indians. The family then barricaded the exits, but the Indians left after a desultory fire of about three hours.
Within the log cabin the two men left made a gallant defense, firing through improvised portholes, but were in constant danger, for the Indians' bullets went through the logs as if they had been mere boards. When the redskins departed with them went all the horses, save one that had been wounded, which served to bear William Middleton, the father, over to Pleasant Valley, where it was hoped help might be secured. Unwilling to remain, the rest of the family fol- lowed on foot, to hide in the rocks on the trail, there found next morning by the father and a single man, all the help found available in the valley. The two had a brush with the same Indian band, but escaped. At Sombrero Butte the survivors were met by a party from Globe, guided by a son, Eugene Middleton, and led by Captain Burbridge. The Indian shot by Henry Middleton later was identified at San Carlos, but nothing was done with him-making only one more reason why the average American settler became a bit irritable when considering the Indian question and its governmental treatment.
CHIRICAHUAS ESCAPE FROM SAN CARLOS
Naturally there was horror over the Cibicu affair in military circles generally, as well as throughout Arizona and into the Apache region were rushed the addi- tional troops that should have been sent six months before. After the first out- break, their supposedly invincible leader dead, the Indians seemed paralyzed and did little damage and numbers of the bronco bands began to surrender. Nearly all the hostiles or suspected Indians were placed under guard at San Carlos or near the sub-agency. Then suddenly and unexpectedly started one of the bloodiest epochs in the history of Arizona warfare. Five chiefs had sur- rendered to Agent Tiffany for trial, as well as sixty or more braves. Several were left at large, however, including George, Bonito, Chatto, Chihuahua and Geronimo. The Indians had drawn rations on September 30 and there is no doubt that they were more than willing to go on the warpath. However, it is likewise thought that rather peremptory military action taken, looking toward the seizure and imprisonment of several of the chiefs still at large, was the im- mediate moving cause. Geronimo later told that the Chiricahuas, who were led by Jnh, left the reserve on the night of September 30, somewhat in sympathy with the outbreak of the White Mountain Apaches and because they had heard that the soldiers from Camp Thomas were coming to make them prisoners and to send them off somewhere.
The first break was of seventy-four bucks with possibly as many women and children. Loco ("Crazy") refused to go, though in the following April he was forced out by Juh and a preponderance of tribal sentiment. The fugitives
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SAN CARLOS GUARD HOUSE, 1880
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INDIANS GETTING WEEKLY RATIONS AT SAN CARLOS
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behaved just as their ancestors had, murdering freighters and ranchers and spreading a trail of blood toward Mexico. Bartolo Samaniego, a freighter and six employees were killed. One Mexican herder escaped to Cedar Springs, there to help Mrs. Moulds and her young son defend the house, till troops came to the rescue. Then the Indians left their loot, with calico streamers flaunting from their ponies' tails.
At Fort Grant a party of five men was sent out in charge of a signal sergeant to see what was the matter with the telegraph line, which had been cut by the Indians. Apaches lay in ambush along the road and killed them all. Then came a team with supplies for Cedar Springs, driven by Moulds, and he, too, was killed. The troops, pursuing, came up to the Apaches about eight miles west of Fort Grant. Then, according to Wood, "The Apaches got among some bluff's of rock, the soldiers behind some other bluffs, about six hundred yards apart. They shot at the smoke of each other's guns from 10 a. m. till 9 p. m., when the cavalry came into Grant and reported that they were out of ammunition and rested up all the next day. The Apaches in the meantime went across the valley and spent the whole day rounding up horses belonging to H. C. Hooker on the Sierra Bonita ranch. Hooker claimed he lost $20,000 worth of horses."
STERLING KILLED AT THE AGENCY
In the following April, of 1882, Nachis, Geronimo, Chatto and Chihuahua, with a half-hundred bucks, stole back into the San Carlos country for recruits.
Apparently not warned by the experience of the previous fall, the military authorities had provided no troops for the San Carlos agency, whereat were only a few white men to guard government property of large value. The Apache rebels, now about 100 in number, expecting to join with Loco's band, which was a mile from the main agency, prepared to capture the agency. On the night of April 18 they cut the telegraph wire a short distance west of the sub-agency and marched away to be at San Carlos in the early morning. The distance between the two points was eighteen miles.
That a massacre was prevented is wholly to be credited to Ed Pierson, the sub-agency telegraph operator. At midnight an Indian scout roused him from slumber with information of the passage of the hostiles. Pierson, finding the wire cut, started out with the friendly scout and located the break, less than a mile distant from his post. He made repairs and, returning to his key, sat down, for hours to desperately call San Carlos. He knew that "Stumpy" Hunter, the one-legged San Carlos operator, had his bed close to his instrument, but Hunter slept on till daylight, when the continued clicking of the instrument awakened him. At once he notified Captain Sterling, the Chief of Scouts, who recklessly flung himself into the saddle and, accompanied by only one of his principal scouts, Sagotal, started for Loco's camp, which was about a mile dis- tant from the agency, possibly with an idea of preventing that chief's junction with the band from Mexico. But the two forces already had joined and had come to an understanding and Sterling was shot down as he rode into the camp. Sagotal, much more wary, made a detour and fled to the agency, there to gather up fifty Indian scouts.
The agent and other principal officials being absent, Connell assumed com- mand of the defense, there being only five white men to reinforce the scouts.
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An attempt promptly was made to secure the body of Sterling, which still lay where the scout had dropped. In the resulting skirmish Sagotal exposed him- self from the shelter of a rock and was shot through the head, but Connell cou- tinued to fight with the dead body of a friend on either side. Then the hostiles, including Loco's band, hurriedly started away, leaving a rear guard of forty braves to check the advance of the agency force. There were repeated forma- tions for rear-guard defense for a distance of ten miles, when the pursuit had to be given up. There was sincere mourning over Sterling's death, for the men at the agency had lost a faithful and loved friend and the service had lost a most efficient officer, who upheld the high standard that theretofore had been maintained in the office of chief of scouts by such men as Al. Sieber, Dan Ming, Bowen and Buford.
At the time, the military pursuit of this band was alleged to have been dis- gracefully slow, though the Indians, who were rather heavily encumbered with plunder, took every occasion for murder and pillage. At one point, at Gila Bonito, eleven Mexicans were murdered. It was found where one child had been hanged by the feet above a slow fire and where another had been thrown alive into a clump of cactus. Near Morenci, at Gold Gulch, six Americans were killed, by name Pinkard, Ball, Slausen, Trescott, Risque and Fink. One of the incidents of the southward flight was the killing of Felix Knox.
FELIX KNOX, A FRONTIER HERO
In Richard Clavering Gunter's melodramatic novel, "Miss Nobody of No- where," and a good Wild-West sort of novel it is, is the story of an Englishman who sacrificed himself when pursued by Apaches that his wife and babes might live. This is founded upon absolute fact. The hero of it, however, was Felix Knox, a Globe gambler, member of the saloon firm of Knox & McNelly. Knox was not a particularly pleasant sort of an individual, in a social way. He was a "short-card" man, expert in his vocation. He was lame, one leg paralyzed by a neck wound received in a fight with a gambler at old Fort Grant. A soldier for many years, he had served in his youth as a drummer boy, and hence was a valued member of the Globe brass band. Knox had a ranch on the upper Gila, with a few hundred head of cattle. In the spring of 1882 he made a visit to the ranch. Returning, on his way to Globe, he left York's ranch on the Gila in the early morning, in a buckboard, in which also were his wife, of Mexican parentage, their two children and a Mexican employe. They had passed a ridge a few miles distant from the ranch, when Knox caught sight of the war party. He turned at once and lashed the mules on the way back to the river, but the Apaches gained and scattering bullets began to fall around, one of them slightly wounding a mule. The fugitives were in desperate situation, with the ranch still several miles away.
Knox saw his duty and took it up. He thrust the reins into the hands of the other man, kissed his wife and children goodbye and, rifle in hand, dropped to the road from the back of the buckboard. The buckboard arrived at the ranch with its passengers safe. Cowboys, on hearing the shots, already had saddled and soon were tearing away up the road, hoping to find Knox still alive. They found him, but dead. The scene was one that could be read without trouble. Knox's sacrifice had been effective. He had kept the Indians from riding past
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him in pursuit of the buckboard, the redskins losing the race because of the necessary detour beyond the range of the ex-soldier's rifle. So they massed their fire upon the single guardian of the road. His body had been riddled by bullets, for he had little shelter from the rain of lead that had come upon him from three sides, but in turn, he had at least wounded several of his foes. Around were fifty empty cartridge shells from his rifle.
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