THE TIGERS OF THE HUMAN SPECIES
AFTER CALIFORNIA’S GOLD rush, after the rise and decline of Virginia City, Leadville, Deadwood, Abilene, and Dodge City, after Custer and Little Bighorn, after Quannah Parker and the Staked Plains War, the last act on the last frontier in the continental United States took place in Arizona. Isolation and harsh terrain partly explain this historical lag, but the other big reason that Arizona stayed unsettled, in every sense, was the Apaches. They terrified people, including other Indians.
A splintered group of related nomadic tribes, the Apaches were avid raiders and merciless killers, sometimes of rival bands of Apaches. Their geographical sway was out of all proportion to their modest numbers. Their ferocity and speed meant that fifty braves could spread terror over several hundred square miles. By the 1830s the Apaches had so decimated and frightened Sonora, Chihuahua, southern Arizona, and southern New Mexico that more than a hundred settlements had been abandoned. People took refuge in bigger towns, where garrisoned soldiers offered some protection. Sonora and Chihuahua began paying bounties for Apache scalps. It was said that the Apaches let a few ranchers survive solely to supply horses and meat in future raids.
In the 1850s and 1860s, after the Mexican–American War, Anglos began trickling into Arizona in search of grassland or precious metals. The Apaches treated them like everyone else: prey. The Indians’ depredations, combined with the inhospitable landscape, led General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army, to complain, “We had one war with Mexico to take Arizona, and we should have another to make her take it back.”
The brutalities on both sides were extreme. Apaches or Anglos would do something horrific, triggering terrible reprisals. Both sides massacred women and children. Occasionally an Apache or Anglo would attempt to make peace, but some betrayal or misunderstanding or fresh atrocity would set the blood flowing again.
Apaches inspired terror for good reason. They were as harsh and pitiless as the landscape they roamed. For non-Apaches, the worst imaginable fate was to be taken alive by them. Captured children and young women were occasionally integrated into the tribe, but men were doomed to torments. Captives often were turned over to Apache women whose male relatives had recently been killed. Many accounts suggest that these women were even more sadistically inventive than the men. Burnham once watched some Apache women skin a young fawn alive for entertainment, a technique also used on human captives, and he mentions watching Apache children stick thorns into the eyes of captured doves, “much to the amusement” of their nearby mothers.
The Apaches excelled at torture and often prolonged it. In March 1873, for instance, a group of Tonto Apaches were waiting near Wickenburg to pillage the Arizona–California stage when three white men happened by. The Indians killed the first two quickly but reserved the third, a twenty-one-year-old named George Taylor, for their amusement. Taylor was found stripped, bound, and pierced with 150 sharpened wooden slivers, all in non-vital areas to protract his suffering. When his wounds had bled for a while but he was still alive, the Apaches lit the splinters. Another example from 1885: during one of Geronimo’s outbreaks, buzzards led some soldiers to the remains of a prospector. The Apaches had cut off his soles, then staked him over an anthill. They cut into his side just deeply enough to let the ants in. Sometimes captives were hung by the heels so their heads could roast over a slow fire. Even freshly buried corpses weren’t safe. The Apaches sometimes dug them up, cut out the heart, and mutilated the rest.
Such incidents understandably aroused outrage and hysteria. The settlers screamed for better protection from the distant U.S. government. By 1869 the army had established thirteen forts in the territory without curbing the Apaches’ ravages. Arizonans wanted permission to form militias against them.
Instead, influenced by religious leaders and liberal thinkers in the East, President Ulysses S. Grant announced his new “Peace Policy” toward Indians, an about-face from the previous de facto policy of pursuit and extermination. A Board of Indian Commissioners, chiefly philanthropists and humanitarians, was appointed to advise on Indian matters. They favored civilizing Indians by distributing beef, flour, and clothing on reservations. This strategy of patience infuriated the inhabitants of Arizona, who were in immediate fear for their lives. Experience told them that the Apaches would see this policy as softness, an invitation to kill with impunity.
Nevertheless, the policy proved a modest success at Camp Grant, an army post at the confluence of the Gila and San Pedro rivers, seventy miles north of Tucson. In early 1871 a large group of Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches surrendered there and began peacefully farming. But other Apaches—especially the Chiricahuas, Tontos, Western, and White Mountain Apaches, all incorrigibly belligerent—continued their murderous, thieving ways, slaughtering miners, ranchers, and travelers, and running off livestock.
To most people in Arizona, all Apaches were untrustworthy and equally deserving of extermination. The sedentary group at Camp Grant made an easy target. Enraged by Grant’s Peace Policy, two of Tucson’s leading citizens, an Anglo named William S. Oury and a Mexican named Jesús Maria Elias, plotted vengeance. They gathered a mob of 140 men—ninety-two Papago Indians (traditional enemies of the Apaches), forty-two Mexicans, and six Anglos. (Most of Tucson’s Anglos, despite whiskey-fueled vows to kill Apaches, were suddenly otherwise engaged when it came time to saddle up.)
On the morning of April 30, 1871, the vigilantes descended upon the Indians around Camp Grant. In less than thirty minutes the mob slaughtered more than 140 Apaches living under the protection of the United States flag. Of the murdered, all but eight or so were women and children. The victims were clubbed, shot, chopped, and brained. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight children were taken captive, most of them given to the Papagos to be sold into slavery in Mexico (six eventually were recovered). Oury crowed that the raid had eradicated “about 144 of the most bloodthirsty devils that ever disgraced mother earth.” For this act of valor he was lionized in Arizona.
Much of the country, however, was appalled. President Grant called the raid “purely murder.” He warned the governor of the territory that unless the offenders were brought to justice, he would declare martial law in Arizona. So about one hundred men, including Oury and Elias, were indicted for murder. The trial was held in Tucson’s adobe courthouse in December 1871. After hearing evidence for five days, the jury deliberated for nineteen minutes and declared everyone not guilty. The event became known to history as the Camp Grant massacre.
The Apaches responded to it by seeking blood vengeance on anyone they encountered. “I know that a book could be written regarding the black night of despair, unrelieved by the glint of one kindly star, in which all that pertained to that Territory was involved,” wrote John G. Bourke, a young Army officer stationed in Arizona at the time.
I have in my possession copies of the Arizona newspapers of those years which are filled with accounts of Apache raids and murders and of counter-raids and counter-murders. No man’s life was safe for a moment outside the half-dozen large towns, while in the smaller villages and ranchos sentinels were kept posted by day and packs of dogs were turned loose at night. All travel, even on the main roads, had to be done between sunset and sunrise; the terrorized ranchmen who endeavored to till a few acres of barley or corn in the bottoms did so with cocked revolvers on hip and loaded rifles slung to the plow-handles.
Two developments eventually wore down the Apaches. First, the discovery of gold and silver in Arizona drew a quickening stream of whites into the territory throughout the 1870s and 1880s, which led to louder calls for government protection. Second, in June 1871, in the aftermath of the Camp Grant massacre, President Grant’s new military appointee arrived in Arizona: Lieutenant Colonel George R. Crook, the most relentless and perceptive Indian fighter in U.S. history. Crook was given the same mission that had battered the reputations of his predecessors: to conquer the Apaches and force them into peace. He had a plan that would soon anger the settlers.
For his first year and a half in Arizona, Crook was handcuffed by Grant’s Peace Policy. An Indian commissioner named Vincent Colyer, an artist and humanitarian, arrived in September to evaluate conditions and establish reservations in Arizona, where none yet existed. Meanwhile, Crook was ordered to suspend military operations against the Indians.
Colyer was not welcomed. The settlers distrusted his motives, a suspicion he worsened by showing little interest in their opinions. The Arizona newspapers, in the style of the day, called him “a treacherous, black-hearted dog,” among other colorful epithets. He met with Indians throughout the territory, including Apaches, and reported that many of them were sick, starving, and constantly endangered by the ranchers and prospectors overrunning their traditional lands. He set up half a dozen reservations near army posts and promised good treatment, food and clothing, and the protection of the U.S. Army to all Indians who moved to these reserved lands. Some bands of Apaches, tired of fighting and lured by free rations, reported to the reservations. Others scoffed at the offer. Why give up freedom for a few hunks of government beef when they could steal all the cattle and horses they wanted?
Even before Colyer left the territory in late 1871, a number of events undermined his peace mission. In November Apaches attacked a stagecoach near the small mining town of Wickenburg and massacred seven passengers. In December, the swift acquittal of the Camp Grant vigilantes encouraged the population’s desire for violent retaliation.
The Apaches supplied frequent incentives. Within a year of Colyer’s mission, they struck fifty times and murdered at least forty people while running off hundreds of cattle, sheep, and horses. Some Apaches who had moved onto reservations were treating them as refuges where they could be fed and protected between raids.
All this supported Crook’s conviction that the Peace Policy alone would never tame the Apaches, because peace was an alien concept to them. Grant finally let him off the leash. He was ready. He had spent the previous year riding all over the territory and thinking about his enemy, whom he later called “the shrewdest and best fighters in the world,” and the most fierce. They were, he said, “the tigers of the human species.”
At first glance the Apaches hardly looked the part. A typical male stood five feet eight inches tall, thin and wiry, though with a deep chest. He didn’t wear feathers or beaded shirts, opting for simple efficiency: a breechclout and tall moccasins to deflect thorns, perhaps a thin calico shirt. He wrapped a piece of flannel around his long, unkempt black hair. He might paint his face with dots and squiggles in red, black, or white, but never his body like the more theatrical Plains tribes. Aside from his weapons, he owned little. He didn’t raise horses or livestock, preferring to steal them as needed.
Apache males devoted themselves from youth to perfecting the related skills of wilderness survival and warfare. Both required extreme fitness, deep knowledge of the landscape and everything in it, the ability to follow the faintest of trails without leaving one, and the training of all five senses for the dual purposes of self-preservation and annihilation of the enemy. They perfected their skills through hunting and war. They mastered battle tactics both improvised and strategic, and developed an almost unlimited capacity to endure hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain. When on the move, Apache men carried little beyond weapons, relying on their ability to find food and water under any conditions. They could walk forty miles without eating or drinking. If provisioned, they could cover 120 miles by foot in two days. A single verb, “to scout,” covered both raiding and warfare. To Burnham, Apaches were exemplars for scouts.
Crook often contrasted the Apache warrior with the U.S. soldier. Whereas a soldier followed orders mechanically, like a cog in a machine, every Apache warrior “is a general and knows exactly what to do under any circumstances,” wrote Crook. The Apache is “an army in himself, waiting for orders from no superiors.” Rank meant nothing to them. They would not follow a leader who wasn’t in superb physical condition and who didn’t demonstrate undisputed courage and judgment.
Apaches differed from most whites, and from many Indian tribes, in how they defined courage and judgment. Unlike U.S. soldiers or many Plains Indians, Apaches didn’t charge fortified positions or ride circles around armed groups of enemies. They saw such actions as foolish bravado, not bravery. They would have admired Falstaff’s trick of playing dead on the battlefield, agreeing with him that “The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.”
Whites and soldiers often disparaged Apaches as primitive savages, by definition inferior to whites, and expressed disgust at their contemptible, sneaky tactics. Thoughtful opponents, however, including Crook, Bourke, and Burnham, admired them precisely because their tactics were militarily effective. Crook again:
In [Apache] combats it must be remembered that you rarely see an Indian; you see the puff of smoke and hear the whiz of his bullets, but the Indian is thoroughly hidden in the rocks, and even his exact hiding place can only be conjectured. The soldier, on the contrary, must expose himself, and exposure is fatal. A dozen Indians in the rocks can withstand the onset of a battalion of soldiers, and though they can be driven from their position at the cost of many lives in the attacking party, it only results in their attaining another position equally as strong as the first, or in their scattering like quail in the rocks, to appear at some point miles away, in front, on either flank, or in the rear, as may seem to them desirable.
The Apaches only fight with Regulars when they choose and when the advantages are all on their side. If pursued to their rocky strongholds, they send their families to some other point beyond the immediate reach of danger, while the bucks absolutely without impediments swarm your column, avoid or attack as their interests dictate, dispute every foot of your advance, harass your rear, and surround you on all sides. Under such conditions Regular troops are as helpless as a whale attacked by a school of swordfish.
In short, Apaches were superb guerrilla fighters. They aimed for maximum damage with minimal risk. To reach those ends, they were ruthless. To stay undetected by nearby enemies, they thought nothing of killing dogs that might bark or light-colored horses that might be visible in the dark. It was not unusual for Apaches to ride their horses to death and then butcher them for meat, or to kill them before vanishing into terrain where horses were useless. In remote places, to discourage pursuit, they might poison a waterhole with horses’ entrails.
Each morning before moving on, they picked a rendezvous; if attacked, they would scatter and reunite there. To throw off pursuers, they often set decoy fires or burned the grass behind them to obscure their retreat. They sometimes waited for pursuers to get halfway down a long hill, then fired the brush below to trap their enemies in the up-rushing flames; horsemen in pursuit of Apaches learned to ride quickly down mountainsides.
They were masters of theft and ambush. These were meticulously planned, often after days of observation to discern weaknesses in the enemies’ patterns of rest and movement. Most scouts, noted Burnham, would hold vigil for a day or two,
but an Apache scout will lie on a rocky point for many days and make no trail or sign. His whole equipment consists of a gourd of water, a piece of dried meat or jerky, and a little mescal, mesquite beans, or a handful of parched corn meal. Every film of smoke, dust cloud, or glint of light on the desert below will be noted, as well as the flight of every bird and the movements of the few desert animals. Patience, patience, and then more patience! The Indian scout will make a little buried fire of smokeless dry twigs, warm up the ground all the afternoon, bury the embers under the earth, and then lie on the warm spot until toward morning, when it will have cooled again. Then he will make a tiny fire of two crossed sticks, wrap his blanket around him, if he has one, and doze and freeze by turns until the sun once more brings warmth and another day of silence and watching.
They were also masters of camouflage. Numerous accounts describe soldiers or settlers passing across flat featureless terrain where a lizard would feel exposed, and then being shocked when Apaches suddenly leaped up from slight dents in the landscape, shooting from feet away. They aimed first for the horses or mules, to hinder pursuit. If the initial blow didn’t cripple the enemy, the Apaches fled to avoid casualties. To pull this off against travelers and soldiers already nervous about Apaches, the camouflage had to be perfect.
“They were clad in such a way as to disguise themselves as much as possible,” wrote General Nelson A. Miles, who would replace Crook in the final Apache campaign in the late 1880s. “Masses of grass, bunches of weeds, twigs or small boughs were fastened under their hatbands very profusely, and also upon their shoulders and backs. Their clothing was trimmed in such a way that when lying upon the ground in a bunch of grass or at the head of a ravine, if they remained perfectly silent it was as impossible to discover them as if they had been a bird or a serpent. . . . An unsuspecting ranchman or miner going along a road or trail would pass within a few feet of these concealed Apaches, and the first intimation he would have of their presence would be a bullet through his heart or brain.”
During the day they made small, nearly smokeless fires of dry wood. At night they hid fires in sheltered places, and sentries kept lookout from higher up. When traveling with women and children, scouts covered the front, rear, and flanks to avoid ambush. They waited for nightfall to cross open ground, and obscured their tracks by brushing them out, stepping on rocks, or walking on their toes. Everyone who fought Apaches marveled at their ability to fade into the landscape, leaving, wrote Crook, “no more trail than so many birds.” If they did leave a perceptible trail, it was probably a ruse as they doubled back on the flanks to spring an ambush.
These were the formidable warriors Crook was supposed to subdue. All his predecessors had failed. He believed that the only way to defeat Apaches was to exhaust them through relentless pursuit, and to convince them that the alternative to peace was annihilation, a point of view that Crook knew the Apaches understood and respected. For his plan to work, he needed to track them to their hidden lairs and compel surrender or destruction. A handful of Arizona frontiersmen, such as Crook’s chief of scouts Al Sieber, were skillful enough to track Apaches, but Crook also needed a force large enough to strike their rancherias (temporary encampments) as soon as they were found. Only one group combined the skills and ferocity necessary to execute his plan: the Apaches themselves. To track birds, Crook needed birds. To fight tigers, he would recruit tigers.
He sent Al Sieber to the Apache reservations to announce that the U.S. Army was hiring. Crook wanted “the wildest that I could get.” He knew recruitment would be easy. Apache factions had always been happy to kill one another, and any male Apache would gladly abandon his corn hoe for the chance to stalk and destroy enemies in the mountains.
A couple of hundred warriors eagerly signed up to hunt down other Apaches.
Crook’s first campaign using Indian scouts began in November 1872. Settlers in Arizona thought he had lost his mind. Territorial newspapers shouted that some of these new government employees had recently been raiders and murderers, and would surely betray the soldiers. Some of Crook’s officers and military colleagues were insulted by the insinuation that numerous regiments in forts throughout Arizona could not tame a few bands of ragtag savages without help from the savages themselves. Did Crook really believe that West Point graduates and trained U.S. soldiers were the military inferiors of primitives in breechclouts?
Yes, he emphatically did. He planned a brief but arduous campaign. In November 1872 he and his troops, led by Apache scouts under Al Sieber and Archie McIntosh, began chasing renegade Apaches throughout central Arizona. Crook knew this pressure would push them into their usual safe haven, the Tonto Basin, where previous offensives had floundered.
He intended to turn this safe haven into a cage. Guided by his Apache scouts, he followed the renegades into the rugged snowy mountains and hounded them all winter. The fugitives soon realized they could not risk shooting game or building a fire because any unusual sound or sight or smell drew the Apache scouts. The renegades spent the winter months of late 1872 and early 1873 fleeing and fighting, starving and freezing, with no rest. Crook and his troops, Indian and regular army, got little rest as well, but were occasionally provisioned by mule trains.
The strategy was physically brutal for both sides. One military account described “the torture of a journey over the miles on miles of confused and jumbled masses of rocky mountain peaks,” and complained that the relief at each day’s ending was immediately pushed aside “by the prospect of the interminable, heart-breaking, rock-climbing struggle to begin again at daybreak.” The soldiers constantly had to dismount and walk. “Cavalry in those regions were as useless as gunboats,” wrote one officer. A soldier described looking up at another “jagged, peaked, rocky, gravelly, slippery trail, covered with sticking Spanish bayonet and cactus and barred by bushes that seem to take a catlike delight in clutching, with barbed thorns, every bone and joint.”
But the strategy worked. The Apache scouts tracked the renegades wherever they tried to hide, then led most of the attacks. No band was too small to pursue. One command marched 1,200 miles in 142 days and killed an estimated 500 Indians. The remaining Apaches always scattered, but the constant attrition—four, eight, twelve deaths at a time—and the constant physical suffering eroded their resolve as well as their numbers.
By spring 1873 most of the surviving Apaches in the Tonto Basin were worn out. In April, groups began suing for peace. One leader, Delshay, said he and his band were surrendering because every rock had turned into a soldier, and the rocks themselves had seemed to soften and carry footprints that led the soldiers to his people, who could not sleep at night because every small noise alarmed them.
As soon as the Apaches began surrendering, Crook stopped the campaign. He told them that if they reported to the reservations, they would not be harmed and would be treated fairly—but if they left the reservation to raid, he would hunt them down and kill them. These were clear terms that the Apaches understood, from the relentless white warrior they now called “the Grey Fox.”
The settlers were elated by Crook’s success, but wanted him to finish the job through extermination. Crook brushed off the demand. By the end of April about 2,500 Apaches had reported to Camp Verde, and hundreds of others to reservations at Camp Apache and San Carlos. Crook soon had them digging irrigation ditches, planting corn and squash, and cutting hay to sell to the army. He outlawed tiswin, an alcoholic beverage made from the mescal cactus, and also the practice of slicing off the nose of an adulterous wife. His gamble with the Apache scouts had succeeded brilliantly. Ten of them received the Medal of Honor.
Within months, the peace crumbled. Crook’s threat of annihilation wasn’t enough to stifle some Apaches’ deep-rooted predispositions toward complete freedom and belligerence. These were further provoked by putting traditionally antagonistic bands of Apaches together on the same reservation, and by the utter corruption of Indian Bureau agents, especially Dr. R. A. Wilbur at San Carlos. Wilbur cut the Indians’ rations to the point of starvation. On May 27, 1873, disgruntled Apaches at San Carlos killed the commanding army officer and fled. By autumn, several other bands had left their reservations to raid and kill. The newspapers resumed howling.
Crook told his Apache scouts that he wanted the heads of the four main renegades. The scouts and the soldiers resumed their relentless pursuit in the mountains. By mid-1874 the renegade leaders had been hunted down and killed, and most bands had returned to the reservations. In August, when the newly appointed Indian agent entered San Carlos, he rode past a display of the rebels’ heads.
The agent was John Clum, a twenty-two-year-old farm boy from New York with no experience of Indians. His appointment may have been arranged by “the Indian Ring,” a network of corrupt contractors and officials who robbed the government and the Indians by shortchanging the reservations. If the Indian Ring thought this young greenhorn would be easy to manipulate, they were soon disabused.
Clum was energetic, curious, and intelligent, and he saw the same qualities in the Apaches. The key, he believed, was to channel their strengths away from violence. Like Crook, he treated them fairly and was clear about the consequences of misconduct. He began a program of building and farming. He helped the Apaches start a court to settle their own disputes, and appointed four of the most trustworthy as agency police. He introduced hygiene programs to prevent disease, and he blocked the parasitic suppliers who had been fattening on government contracts while cutting the Indians’ rations. He also defended the Apaches against settlers who wanted them dead or expelled, and who considered Clum a mollycoddler. In these ways he earned the Apaches’ trust.
All this was soon undermined by the federal government’s new “removal policy.” Despite objections by Crook, who had been transferred to the Great Plains to fight the Sioux, Apaches were forced to leave the reservations that had been promised to them, and to concentrate in one place. The policy was disastrous. It jammed hostile groups of Apaches together on the bleakest of the Arizona reservations, San Carlos. The population there swelled from 700 to 5,000. By the summer of 1877 Clum felt besieged by angry factions: Apaches, settlers, politicians, the army, the Indian Ring. In July, he resigned in frustration and disgust.
Two months later the tensions exploded into violence. Bands led by Victorio, Loco, and Geronimo bolted from San Carlos and rampaged through the region. These were the first of many agitations and outbreaks over the next decade, all traceable to the blunder of the removal policy, which added thousands of deaths and millions of dollars to the cost of peace in Arizona.
Burnham joined this cycle as a scout after the troubles at Cibecue Creek in the summer of 1881. In early 1882, after Apache warriors under Geronimo, Chatto, and Juh crossed into Arizona from Mexico, Burnham went to San Carlos and offered his skills to Albert D. Sterling, the reservation’s chief of police.