THE PEOPLE OF Arizona knew the renegade Apaches were on their way because the leaders had sent messengers to San Carlos demanding that others join them on the warpath. Many Apaches at San Carlos were sick of war, and informants there told the authorities about the renegades’ plans. The army tried to cut them off at the border but failed, so scouting patrols were increased throughout the region. Though everyone knew the renegades’ destination, they raided and killed en route without being caught. Where would they strike next? The region was panicked. Al Sterling sent Burnham to scout for sign in the Apache Peaks, thirty-five miles northwest of San Carlos.
On April 18 the renegade Apaches cut the telegraph lines into the reservation. They hit quickly, killing Sterling and adding to their war party. In just a few weeks their spree of plunder and murder claimed about fifty people—miners, freighters, and settlers, many of them horribly mutilated. At a ranch near the Gila River they tortured and killed five men, roasted one child alive, threw another into a thicket of needle-tipped cactus, and beat the brains out of the children’s mother with a rock. Despite multiple army patrols led by Apache scouts, the renegades were hardly touched.
On July 7, another chief named Na-tio-tish riled up about sixty warriors among the White Mountain Apaches at San Carlos. They ambushed and killed Sterling’s successor as police chief, J. L. Colvig (nicknamed “Cibicue Charley”), plus three Indian policemen, then broke northwest toward the Tonto Basin. The next day they attacked the small mining town of McMillenville, about ten miles above Globe. Most of the White Mountain band at San Carlos condemned Na-tio-tish and his renegades, and offered to help hunt them down.
This raid close to Globe, when added to reports that nearly 700 Chiricahuas were haunting the region, pushed the area’s residents close to hysteria. Globe filled up with frightened refugees. Women and children crammed into the buildings. The men camped in corrals and open areas. Eleven men, after filling up with whiskey, dubbed themselves the Globe Rangers. They packed a further supply of high-proof courage and rode out of town vowing to kill Indians. A day or two later, as they slept at a ranch on the Salt River, the Apaches took a few shots at them and stole all their horses. The rangers hiked back to Globe, sober.
This was the situation when Burnham rode into Globe early one morning after his long scout in the Apache Peaks. He was filthy, his clothes tattered. He was looking forward to a hot breakfast of beans, bacon, and coffee, but a friend in the street told him to go straight to the man now in charge of Globe’s defense, Captain S. L. Burbridge. Burbridge had come to Globe to supervise the construction of new copper smelters, but he evidently had military experience.
A powerful, bearded man, he took in Burnham’s dirty, ragged appearance and laughed in approval. It matched the stories he had been hearing about the twenty-one-year-old. “I’m looking for a scout who is half jackrabbit and half wolf,” said Burbridge, “and by the eternal blazes I believe you are it.” He gave Burnham a requisition to buy new clothes, supplies for a ten-day scout, and new shoes for his horse. He told him to get some breakfast and report back in a couple of hours.
Burnham made a list of his purchases:
1 greenish brown woolen shirt
1 suit of light underwear
4 pairs of light sox
1 pair of Indian-made buckskin leggings
1 pair of hand-sewed light shoes, very best leather
1 pair of brown overalls, light weight
1 large red silk handkerchief, for signaling
2 small gray silk handkerchiefs
1 spool strong linen thread for night guard
1 small canvas water bag
He waterproofed the canvas bag by dipping it in melted tallow and beeswax. Unlike a metal canteen, this would pack flat when empty, and it could be filled with air to float his rifle and cartridge belt across rivers. He also bought two tanned, smoked doeskins, weighing about a pound each, to use at night against wind and cold; they were much lighter than a blanket. He packed fifty cartridges for his carbine and revolver, both .44–40 caliber. He removed the cleaning rod from the hole bored in the butt of the carbine, enlarged the hole, and filled it with a string pull-through cleaner and a small tin of Vaseline, some silk thread and a surgeon’s needle for sewing a wound, and a small file and screwdriver for repairs. To eliminate glints from his gun barrel, he stretched a green hide from a deer’s front leg over it, making tiny slits for the sights. For messages, he packed a stub of pencil and some paper.
Since he wouldn’t be able to shoot game or light a fire, he bought a sack of dried venison, hammered it into fine powder, and mixed it with an equal amount of flour. He baked this nutritious mixture into dense loaves that went into his saddlebags. He also took some pinole (cornmeal) and pinoche (a confection made from sugar and corn). These minimal provisions left room in his pack for whatever he came across: nuts, dock leaves, mesquite beans, perhaps chunks of pitch to make smoke signals.
At the blacksmith’s, he had his horse, Turk, reshod. He bought extra nails and a small hammer. He also carried some round pieces of bull hide, which could be nailed on if a shoe fell off or wore out. Arizona’s granite and shale mountains were tough on horseshoes. He rolled up some gunny sacks and an old sheepskin, which he would tie over the horse’s hooves and his shoes whenever he needed to cover tracks.
All this, he later wrote, was the drudgery required to prepare for a scout, so different from “the glamour and romance” found in storybooks.
There is an idea abroad that the usual mode of procedure for an Indian scout was, after eating a hearty breakfast, to saddle up his broncho and, equipped with an extra belt of ammunition, a rifle, two six-shooters, and possibly a spy glass and a canteen of water, gallop over the mountains until he ran across some Indian sign; then dismount, hide his horse, and with incredible stealth creep up on a large band of deaf Indians. He would probably pot a few of the fiercest, and might then be chased for a mile or two on foot. On reaching his horse, he would vault to his back without touching stirrup and ride gallantly away, still carrying all his equipment and no lighter than when he started, except for the lead in the bodies of the dead Indians.
Later that morning he reported back to Burbridge. The captain was worried that the Apaches might be massing near Globe for a surprise attack. Nobody knew where they were, and rumors were flying. He hadn’t been able to get any information, he said, because many of the men in town were barroom Indian fighters and the others were too scared to get off their horses and nose around in the brush. He assigned Burnham to scout a wide semicircle, south beyond the Pinal Mountains, then north and west along Pinto Creek to the Salt River. Every inch of it was rugged. He told him not to return until he saw a smoke signal on a peak near Globe. If he found Apaches, said Burbridge, “put up three smokes anywhere within sight of town” and then run for it.
Burnham left Globe after dark and rode over the Pinals to Mineral Creek, arriving just before dawn. He hobbled Turk in a glade with grama grass and a spring, then secluded himself in the rocks to sleep for a few hours. After waking, he circled Turk for a half-mile, checking for tracks in case an Indian had followed him and was waiting in ambush near the horse. All clear. He breakfasted on a piece of jerky loaf and plotted his route. To stay as inconspicuous as possible, he decided to scout on foot. He packed four days’ rations and cached his saddle, hanging it by a thong smeared with pine pitch to repel ants, high enough off the ground so coyotes couldn’t gnaw it.
“It may seem rather terrifying to think of riding or even walking alone at night across an Apache-infested country,” he later wrote, “but that is mostly tenderfoot jitters and was not actually dangerous. The Indians did not travel much at night except when pursued or when getting into position to attack. But daylight scouting against the Apache is quite different. To survive, it was well to feel at all times as though a great mountain lion were sniffing the trail and that you must conduct yourself so as to see him first.”
To disrupt the contours of his face—a shape easily detected even from a distance—he drew a line in charcoal from his temples to his chin. He also put some grama grass in his hat band and on his shoulders. Then he began to climb. When the vegetation changed, he replaced the grama in his hat with oak twigs and also carried a small oak branch in front of him to muddle his body’s outline.
He spent an exhausting day moving between high ridges and deep canyons, looking for sign. At sunset he made a bed of grass and leaves on a gravelly ridge where no one could trespass without sending pebbles clattering. He also set up his usual alarm system, stringing a length of strong linen thread between bushes and small stones around the hideout’s perimeter, high enough off the ground to allow the passage of small creatures. Anything large, such as a human, would shake a bush or send stones clattering. A noise woke him at two o’clock: a bear shambling in the canyon below—reassuring, since it would have been spooked by the scent of Indians.
A bird’s sleepy twitter woke him near dawn. He moved out while the shadows could hide him, carrying a pine branch as he climbed toward the dark firs on Pinal Peak. He came across some old Indian sign and spent cartridges, but nothing fresh. At the top he rested in the deep shade of a boulder and gazed south over the broken landscape of peaks, canyons, and deserts stretching to Mexico. Nothing was moving.
He scrambled down a side canyon toward a stream that led to the Gila River. At the bottom, where the side canyon met a larger one, he quickly filled his water bag in the creek, avoiding the sand and gravel so he didn’t leave tracks, then moved into the cover of the bordering willows and scrub oaks where he could rest without being seen.
Minutes later an Apache appeared, riding down the main canyon. He was barely ten yards away. Burnham froze. Should he shoot? Was the Indian alone or part of a group? He heard the answer on the ridge above, where another Apache was riding a bay horse. When Burnham looked back at the main canyon, he saw a third warrior on a pony. He held his breath. They rode on, the soft thuds fading away. Silence returned. Fifteen minutes passed. No more Apaches appeared. That meant the three warriors were scouts, perhaps heading to a rendezvous on the eastern flank of the Pinals, where forage, water, and cover were plentiful—and just ten miles from Globe.
Burnham needed to see if the Apaches were massing there, but he also felt like running in the opposite direction. Two hours of daylight remained. He forced himself to climb the ridge to observe the horsemen and their bearing, but when he reached the top, they had disappeared. As he crossed to the next ridge for another look, a shot cracked above him, less than 100 yards away. The Apache on the bay rode up onto the ridge he had just left. The rider looked unconcerned, so Burnham assumed that the target was a deer. He was still undetected, but that would change as soon as one of the Indians crossed his trail on the ridge. He decided to get a head start down the gulch. Moments later he heard a cry and looked back. The Apache on the ridge had raised his rifle horizontally and was slowly turning it around and back. Burnham knew the signal: enemy sign.
He took off. A shrill yell told him that he had been seen, confirmed by a shot. But the Apaches soon gave up the chase, probably because the odds weren’t high enough in their favor. Burnham knew this was caution, not cowardice. The Apaches would not risk a casualty to kill one lone but armed white man who would soon be hidden by darkness. But in case this apparent lack of interest was a trick, Burnham ran until nightfall, then slept in the mouth of an abandoned mine.
The next day, alert for ambush, he circled back to Turk, but found no sign nearby. He did the same to retrieve his saddle and provisions, then rode toward the eastern side of the Pinals to resume his scout. He crossed the trail of the three Apaches. He turned loose Turk, knowing he would return to the range near Mineral Creek and be easy to find there. For the next several days he scouted the canyons and bottoms. No sign of Apaches. He walked back to Mineral Springs, trailed down Turk, and headed north into the Pinto Creek drainage, “a wild, rough country, with brush, scrub oak, bear grass, and much loose rock”—terrible for daylight scouting because the sound of rolling pebbles and crunched gravel travels so far.
He had been reconnoitering for ten days and was out of food, but no smoke signal came from Globe. On the eleventh day, famished, he remembered a nearby smelter used by charcoal makers. Maybe in their rush to flee they had left some food in their cabin. He circled it. Every trail leading to it showed undisturbed insect tracks—all clear. Inside, he found flour and some rancid bacon hanging from the ceiling. The makings of a feast, but building a fire for fry bread and bacon would draw any Indians in the area. Ravenous, he did it anyway.
The moment he finished, his rational mind returned and warned him to get out fast. He was shoveling ashes over the fire with the frying pan when something blocked the light from the doorway. He turned to see three Indians pointing guns at him. “Hours on end old scouts had taught me caution,” he later wrote, “and there I was trapped like a tenderfoot—all their teaching wasted. My appetite had conquered me. The penalty should have been death.”
But he was lucky. They were friendly Apache scouts sent to bring him in, and had come to check out the cabin after seeing smoke there. A scout didn’t get many second chances. Burnham was embarrassed. He had failed to live up to his mentors’ standards—Apache standards.
He reported to Burbridge and then joined him and others in a rescue party to bring in the surviving settlers on Cherry Creek, which winds through Tonto Basin. During operations in the Pinal Mountains, Burnham’s ability as a long-distance runner came into play. An officer wanted to send dispatches to a troop on the San Pedro River, twenty-two miles across hard terrain crawling with Indians. A cavalryman left on a horse, Burnham on foot. When the horseman arrived, Burnham had been there for hours. “A man who knows how to run has it all over a horse in rough country,” wrote Burnham.
The 1882 campaign ended with the Battle of Big Dry Wash (sometimes called Battleground Ridge) on July 17, 1882, in the Mogollon Mountains above Tonto Basin. Burnham doesn’t mention this event and must have been scouting elsewhere. Al Sieber and his Apache scouts, reinforced by U.S. troops, tracked down Na-tio-tish and his band and killed many of them. The survivors slipped back onto the reservation.
It was the last major battle between Apaches and U.S. troops in Arizona, though the troubles with Apaches were far from over. The Chiricahuas led by Chatto and Geronimo had retreated into Mexico, but everyone knew they would be back. In September Crook was recalled to Arizona to deal with them, and with the wreckage left by the recent raids.
Crook began by interviewing many Apaches, often at their rancherias. He wanted to hear their complaints and understand what had caused Cibecue and the outbreaks. Most Apaches had not supported the renegades and were relieved to see Crook. He had always been honest and fair, rewarding the peaceful and punishing the violent. What Crook heard, in story after story, enraged him. San Carlos had become, and remained, a powder keg, mostly because of white misbehavior. In early October he issued a general order reminding all officers and soldiers “that one of the fundamental principles of the military character is justice for all—Indians as well as white men.” Anyone who violated this principle would be punished. He also called together all 400 chiefs at San Carlos and told them that he would assist all Indians who worked and kept the peace, but would show no mercy to any who chose the warpath.
Crook’s report placed the blame squarely on the profiteers associated with the Indian Ring. They and their partners, the Indian agents, had been robbing the Apaches of their meager government rations and selling the clothing, blankets, and other goods intended for them to merchants in Globe and elsewhere. When the Indians’ patches of corn, melons, and beans were half-grown, the agent had sent horsemen to trample them, thus forcing the Indians to buy overpriced food from him and his partners, the suppliers. The agent also threatened to kill any Apache chiefs who refused to sign away chunks of the reservation where prospectors, his partners, wanted to mine. Anyone who complained was put into irons. This agent, the reviled J. C. Tiffany, was appointed to San Carlos on the recommendation of the Dutch Reformed Church. Many of the Apaches had left the reservation because they were tired of starvation and mistreatment. Keeping the Indians riled up also assured the continued presence of the profiteers’ other big customer, the army.
A federal grand jury investigated San Carlos. Their findings horrified them: “Fraud, peculation, conspiracy, larceny, plots, and counterplots seem to be the rule of action on this reservation. The grand jury little thought when they began this that they were about to open a Pandora’s box of iniquities seldom surpassed in the annals of crime.” They condemned Tiffany “and that class of reverend peculators who have cursed Arizona as Indian officials, and who have caused more misery and loss of life than all other causes combined.” After reading this scathing report, Carl Schurz, the Secretary of the Interior, dismissed the entire Indian Office. He also fired Tiffany, who was never prosecuted.
In Globe, the Arizona Silver Belt, the newspaper of Burnham’s old mentor Hackney, defended Tiffany. Burnham read the grand jury report and split from his mentor on this issue: “For such misdeeds, the prophets of old demanded of their people repentance in sackcloth and ashes and prayers for forgiveness.” Many others in Arizona also were enraged by the reports from Crook and the grand jury—because they were soft on Apaches. This was reinforced by orders from Washington that the army was not to punish any Apaches, regardless of murderous past actions, as long as they were living peacefully on the reservation.
Bands of Apaches, mostly Chiricahuas, continued to leave the reservation and send flares of terror across the region. They tormented both sides of the border for five more years, in a rhythm that drove Crook and the people of Arizona mad. Crook’s Apache scouts—also mostly Chiricahuas—would track them down. The renegades would swear peace and return briefly to the reservation before fleeing back to Mexico, raiding and killing along the way.
In March 1883, for example, Chatto stormed out of Mexico with twenty-six warriors. In six days they flashed across 400 miles and killed two dozen whites, stealing fresh horses as they went, always pursued but never caught. In May 1885 Geronimo and several other chiefs broke out of San Carlos with their warriors and families, about 135 people. By the first week in June they had murdered twenty whites and captured one girl alive, whom they hung from a meat hook spiked into her skull; when rescuers found her, she had not quite died.
The people of Arizona were disgusted that Easterners and the federal government counseled Christian mercy while Apaches killed their families and stole their property. “Massachusetts Has Tears for the Indian, Anathemas for the Whites,” said a headline in the Arizona Silver Belt. In 1885 Tombstone sent a resolution to Washington, D.C., noting that Geronimo had been in custody four times for murderous renegade acts, most recently for killing twenty-eight citizens and three soldiers, wounding nine, and stealing an unknown number of horses and cattle. Yet the government always allowed Geronimo to return to the reservation unpunished, unlike any white man who committed similar crimes. The resolution asked that all Apaches be removed from Arizona before they killed more citizens (a status the Indians lacked).
Eventually, in September 1887, Geronimo and his small band of Chiricahuas surrendered for the last time at San Carlos. Most Apaches had long since stopped fighting or were fighting for the U.S. government, but the violent minority determined everyone’s fate. Orders came from Washington to put every mountain and desert Apache on trains to the tropical state of Florida, where many would die. Those deported included the loyal scouts who had tracked down the renegades and made victory possible. One-dimensional bigotry had prevailed: all Apaches were alike; none could be trusted; all must go.
“There is no more disgraceful page in history of our relations with the American Indian,” wrote John G. Bourke, who served with Crook throughout the Apache campaigns, “than that which conceals the treachery visited upon the Chiricahuas who had remained faithful to their allegiance to our people.”
Crook too was angry. The Apaches who had kept their promise of peace and the scouts who had won the war all were treated like prisoners. “During the entire campaign,” he wrote, “from first to last, without any exception, every successful encounter with the hostiles was due exclusively to the exertions of Indian scouts, and it is the unanimous testimony of officers commanding scout companies that the Chiricahuas were the most subordinate, energetic, untiring, and by odds the most efficient of their command.” In bringing about the defeat of the hostile Apaches, he added, “the efforts of the troops in the field had little or nothing to do with it.”
Burnham had tried to kill Apaches, as they had tried to kill him. He had been appalled by their cruelties and pleased by their defeat. But he had also studied them as masters of scouting, and he knew that something vital was lost when they no longer roamed the Southwest: “. . . admitting all that is worst in the Indian,” he wrote, “there is still much that I admire: his unconquerable spirit, his love of freedom, his infinite patience and unflinching stoicism. They were, after all, a mere handful, fighting the world and holding themselves accountable only to the Great Spirit.”