WHETHER OR NOT GERONIMO acted as Cochise’s Spanish interpreter at the councils with General Howard in October 1872, he was present and observed what happened. He promptly returned to his ranchería near Janos, Chihuahua, where he had been living with Juh’s Nednhis since military forces drove them out of Sonora the previous summer. They hoped the Janos authorities could be persuaded to issue rations. On Geronimo’s heels, runners arrived bearing Cochise’s invitation to Juh and others near Janos to settle on the new reservation. Cochise’s Chokonens were already there, since it was their home country. If Juh had any doubts, Geronimo could have overcome them with appealing words about what he had seen and heard at the peace council, especially the promise of the rations, which the Janos authorities had not granted them. Moreover, both would have instantly appreciated the advantages of a secure base in the United States for raiding across the border into Mexico. Late in November 1872, Juh, Geronimo, and other leaders led several hundred Nednhis and Bedonkohes to Pinery Canyon, in the Chiricahua Mountains about fifteen miles south of Fort Bowie. There they met and conferred with Cochise and Agent Tom Jeffords, and there they settled their people on the new reservation.1
Red Beard Jeffords pursued a relaxed management style. Every week or two he distributed the rations and supplies Howard had promised and let the Apaches come and go as they pleased. Cochise kept his promise to Howard to restrain his young men from committing any depredations in Arizona. Travelers on the overland trail proceeded in complete safety. Ranchers and farmers worked their lands secure from the threat of an Indian attack.
Not so the Sonorans. The southern boundary of the Cochise Reservation coincided with the boundary between Arizona and Sonora. Now secure from retaliation, bands of raiders crossed repeatedly into Mexico and spread havoc across both Mexican states. Cochise himself never participated, but neither he nor Jeffords did much to interfere with plundering expeditions. Geronimo and Juh both indulged old habits repeatedly. In the months following the establishment of the reservation, Sonora suffered as grievously as in previous years.2
Word of the Chiricahua Reservation quickly spread to other Apache groups. Jeffords’s easygoing oversight contrasted with the strict agents elsewhere. Also, he issued the visitors rations the same as the resident Indians. A few White Mountain Apaches from the north appeared, together with a scattering of others from farther south. But the largest influx came from Tularosa, ever a hotbed of discontent. Some arrived in February 1873 and said more would be coming.
There were. With Tularosa as usual in an uproar, in May 1873 about two hundred Chihennes and Bedonkohes, led by Nana, Chie, and Gordo, a rising Bedonkohe subchief, left Tularosa and traveled to the new reservation. They had learned of a massive impending raid into Mexico, and some wanted to take part. Others simply wanted to visit with old friends.
All the Chiricahua bands—Cochise’s Chokonens, Juh’s Nednhis, Geronimo’s Bedonkohes, and many of the fugitives from Tularosa—joined in the foray into Mexico. For a month they ravaged the settlements of both Chihuahua and Sonora, returning in mid-June.
While scourging Chihuahua, Geronimo seized a young boy and took him as prisoner back to the reservation. Cochise disapproved, and Jeffords tried to get the boy back. For an Apache, however, a captive was valuable property, to be ransomed, traded, or reared as a member of the band. Mexican captives had even higher value, for the Mexicans held so many Apache captives. Now fifty, Geronimo had nurtured the independent streak that began with the death of Mangas Coloradas. He defiantly turned down Jeffords’s request even at the risk of offending Cochise. At a stormy council, other tribesmen backed Geronimo but eventually agreed to turn over the boy if a Chokonen captive seized by Mexicans more than a year earlier were freed. Jeffords promised to investigate, but he also presented a small gift to Geronimo. Even though investigation held almost no promise and the gift amounted to empty appeasement, further resistance could alienate Cochise. Geronimo turned the boy over to the agent. A month later, Jeffords discovered that the boy’s parents were then living in New Mexico. He put the boy on a stage, and the contentious dispute faded.3
Although the raids involving both Chokonens and Tularosa Indians continued throughout the summer of 1873, both Cochise and Jeffords suddenly began to try to stop the forays. The people would not be persuaded; they hated the Mexicans too intensely, and they afforded a source of valuable plunder. In October an important government officer from Washington, Indian inspector William Vandever, arrived to talk with Cochise, who came in from his Dragoon Mountain stronghold. They met at Sulphur Springs, in the Sulphur Springs Valley west of Fort Bowie. The talk centered on the continuing depredations in Mexico. Cochise declared that in making peace with the Americans, he had not made peace with Mexico. He himself wanted peace with everyone and contended that his people crossed into Mexico without his knowledge or approval. He also asked that the Tularosa Indians on his reservation, drawing rations from Jeffords, be sent back home; they might get his own people into trouble. Vandever strongly urged Jeffords to quit feeding these people and send them back home, which Jeffords promised to do.4
By August 1873, Jeffords had convinced Cochise that he must intervene to prevent the raids. Cochise made a few half-hearted gestures to demonstrate that he understood. He did not. In October Jeffords flatly informed him that unless the raids ceased, the reservation itself stood in jeopardy. It could well be abolished and Jeffords relieved. Cochise had a hard time believing that the Americans would break General Howard’s promises, but he finally took decisive action. In November, with the agency in the process of being relocated to Pinery Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains south of Fort Bowie, he summoned all his headmen to a formal council. There he declared that he ruled this country and that all who wanted to remain must quit their incursions into Mexico or leave the reservation altogether.
Geronimo and Juh promptly gathered their people and moved back to Mexico. Raiding was their way of life.5
Cochise must have sensed that outside pressures pushed Jeffords into his increasingly firm leadership, especially his insistence that raiding in Mexico stop. Neither he nor any Apaches, however, could have been remotely aware of the complexity and confusion of the Great Father’s “Peace Policy” in Arizona and New Mexico.
They could not have known, for example, that their own reservation enjoyed a special status compared with the others laid out by Vincent Colyer and later revised by General Howard. Howard had exempted the Chiricahuas from any military action and little civilian oversight except for their agent, Tom Jeffords. By contrast, the Chihenne “reservation” Colyer defined at Tularosa was never officially established, although a new military installation, Fort Tularosa, rose nearby.
Most important for the future of the Chiricahuas, among the changes made by Howard, was the expansion of the White Mountain Reservation south to embrace the Gila River. It was established mainly for the Aravaipa and Pinal Apaches of the Camp Grant Reservation, which Howard had abolished. These and other smaller groups of Apaches gradually merged into what came to be known as the San Carlos Apaches. The reservation remained the White Mountain Reservation, administered by the San Carlos Agency, on the Gila River at the mouth of the San Carlos River (see the map of the White Mountain Reservation).6
Discovering no document that recorded the establishment of the Chiricahua Reservation, General Crook felt that he had no choice but to leave it free of military interference.7 Probably unknown to Crook, a presidential executive order of December 14, 1872, established and precisely defined the reservation—essentially the lands embracing the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains as far east as the New Mexico boundary. Howard had undoubtedly dictated these boundaries for the president’s signature.8
Even so, Crook believed that the Chiricahua Reservation would cause constant trouble so long as Cochise was allowed to occupy it. Other reservations could easily accommodate the Chiricahuas, and they ought to be forced to move there. Crook’s opinion, shared by his chain of command, found agreement with the commissioner of Indian affairs, who received the same advice from Inspector Vandever, who visited the reservation and talked with Cochise in October 1873.9 Worse, the commissioner bore constant complaint from the State Department of the repeated demands of Mexico that the raids from the American sanctuary be halted. The commissioner’s pressure on Agent Jeffords explained his increasingly firm stance with Cochise.
In demanding that Cochise take decisive action or face the abolition of the reservation altogether, Jeffords anticipated the future actions of his superiors. At the council in Pinery Canyon in November 1873, Cochise ordered the raids stopped and decreed that all who would not comply leave the reservation. Geronimo and Juh left. Only a month later the expected order arrived from the commissioner. The army had demanded that the reservation be turned over to Crook. Unless depredations ceased, the request would be honored.10
Even though the raids had tapered off, Jeffords doubted that they would cease altogether. In May 1874 he officially conceded as much. General Howard, he thought, had made concessions to Cochise in the belief that the Chiricahuas would have to be moved elsewhere in the future, after they had learned how well the government treated them. Jeffords had tried and failed to stop the depredations. He did not believe they could be stopped as long as the Indians roamed freely. He thought that if confronted with orders to move elsewhere, about half would go and the rest remain.11
When Jeffords penned these words, he knew that Cochise lay dying in his Dragoon Mountain stronghold, probably of stomach cancer. His oldest son, Taza, had already begun to exert leadership over the reservation. Taza had been prepared for the chieftainship, but Jeffords knew he could never exert the strong governance of his father. He could not enforce the ban on raiding in Mexico and thus lift the peril to the Chiricahua Reservation.
The commissioner of Indian affairs instructed New Mexico’s superintendent of Indian affairs, Levi Dudley, to go to the Chiricahua Reservation and see if Cochise would agree to move his people back to New Mexico. With Jeffords, Dudley met with Cochise twice late in May 1874 but found him exhausted and barely rational. He did convey that for his part he preferred Arizona but would leave the final decision on New Mexico to his son Taza.12
On June 8, 1874, Cochise died in his East Stronghold.13
The venerable chief’s death left the reservation on the brink of turmoil, as several strong leaders resented the chieftainship falling to Taza, his tall, muscular eldest son who had been specially groomed by Cochise for leadership. At first they pledged loyalty, but within a few months they began to splinter into rival groups. Skinya, an older and experienced man with an outstanding war record, emerged as the most prominent, powerful, and demanding. Only about half of Cochise’s old following of Chokonens remained loyal to Taza, who in his mid-thirties was the youngest of the contenders. Juh and Geronimo with the Nednhis had been driven by Sonoran troops back onto the reservation, and Chihennes from Tularosa came and went or lived there. Without Cochise’s restraining influence, they all resumed raiding in Mexico. Geronimo and Juh, based in Mexico since rejecting Cochise’s demand for an end to raiding, had never ceased.14
In 1874 the government finally yielded to the demands of the Chihennes at Tularosa to be returned to Cañada Alamosa. Many had already gone anyway, and in September 1874 the agent at Tularosa moved the agency to Cañada Alamosa. The army gladly abandoned Fort Tularosa; it had proved a logistical nightmare because of its distance from transportation routes. Chihennes on the Chiricahua Reservation returned to their old homes, seven hundred square miles designated the “Hot Springs Reservation” but commonly known as the Ojo Caliente Reservation.15
The government still hoped to concentrate the Chihennes and Chokonens at Ojo Caliente, as General Howard had first proposed, and thus be rid of the Chiricahua Reservation. On April 16, 1875, Levi Dudley, now a special commissioner working out of Washington, conferred with the various leaders of the fractured band at the Chiricahua Agency, now located in Pinery Canyon, and proposed the move. None would have any part of it; they would fight rather than go there.16
By Dudley’s authority, on May 14, 1875, Jeffords moved the agency once more, this time to Apache Pass, near Fort Bowie. He reasoned that Pinery Canyon was too far from the traveled road for him to oversee relations between his charges and the whites and Mexicans who used the road. A lively trade had sprung up, the Apaches exchanging horses and mules for whiskey and guns and ammunition. Jeffords conceded that the trade tempted the Indians to steal but stopped short of admitting that it also disclosed the resumption of raids into Mexico.17
In the aftermath of Cochise’s death, the threat of the commissioner of Indian affairs to turn the Chiricahua Reservation over to General Crook if raids into Mexico did not stop held equal validity, for the raids had now resumed. But General Crook no longer commanded in Arizona; he had been moved north to command the Department of the Platte.
On March 22, 1875, Colonel August V. Kautz assumed command of the Department of Arizona in his brevet grade of major general. A stolid German with a mediocre record and no understanding of Indians, he found himself at once embroiled with an infuriatingly bombastic young man of immense self-importance and limitless certitude. He was John P. Clum, agent at the White Mountain Reservation, enlarged by General Howard in 1872. On August 8, 1874, at the age of twenty-two, Clum took office at the San Carlos Agency of the White Mountain Reservation.
The government’s original plan for the Chiricahuas aimed at concentrating all the Chiricahuas at Cañada Alamosa, thus freeing the Chiricahua Reservation for return to the public domain. All the other Arizona Apaches, who had been living on the Colyer-Howard reservations under the jurisdiction of Crook’s officers pending appointment of civilian agents, would be concentrated on the White Mountain Reservation.
Clum detested the army and feuded with its officers incessantly. He recruited his own Indian police force, captained by former army scout Clay Beauford, to avoid calling for military help in moving the Apaches. By the middle of 1875 Clum had completed the removal, although only part of the White Mountain Apaches succumbed to his bullying and moved south to the Gila.18
Early in 1876, the Chiricahua Reservation boiled with unrest. Taza still stirred resentment from leaders who thought they should be the Chokonen chief. Skinya, backed by his turbulent half-brother Pionsenay, grew bolder in his opposition to Taza, who was backed by his younger brother Naiche, only twenty. Skinya and Pionsenay had settled about sixty Chokonens in the Dragoon Mountains. Tension rose when Taza and Naiche also took up residence in the Dragoons with about 180 Chokonens. Skinya tried to persuade Naiche, his son-in-law, to free himself of Taza and lead their followers in a breakout to Mexico. Naiche refused.
Unlike other Apache agents, Jeffords had never tried to ban tiswin, and both resident and visiting Chiricahuas often participated in tiswin drunks. During one such drunk, the inevitable quarrel broke out. The exchange of fire killed a man of each group as well as Cochise’s grandchild. Taza immediately moved his people back to Apache Pass.19
Geronimo, a Bedonkohe with close ties to the Nednhis, held aloof from the Chokonen conflicts. Since driven back to the reservation by Sonoran troops, he kept a ranchería at the western base of the Chiricahua Mountains but raided widely, both in Mexico and New Mexico.
As Skinya’s people grew ever more confident and successful in raids into Mexico, in March 1876 they learned that Nicholas Rogers, who ranched and maintained the mail station at Sulphur Springs, had bought a keg of whiskey in Tucson and installed it at his ranch. On April 6 Pionesenay and a companion rode to Rogers’s ranch and, with gold dust stolen in Mexico, bought several bottles for ten dollars each. The next day Pionsenay returned with his nephew and bought more whiskey. Back in the Dragoons, drunk, he picked a fight with Skinya. When their two sisters tried to interpose, Pionesenay shot and killed both women. He and his nephew promptly left for Sulphur Springs, where they found Rogers and his partner, Orizoba Spence, sitting in chairs in front of their ranch. Pionsenay demanded more whiskey. Rogers refused. Both he and his partner died in a hail of gunfire. The two Indians ransacked the house and left for the Dragoons leading a horse laden with whiskey, cartridges, and food.20
Alarmed by Pionsenay’s actions, Skinya sent a runner to alert Taza. Jeffords asked for a troop of cavalry from Fort Bowie to take up the trail. Taza accompanied it as guide. Lieutenant Austin Henely commanded. They bivouacked that night, April 8, at Sulphur Springs. The next morning a messenger reported that Pionsenay and his companion had killed a man, Gideon Lewis, and committed other depredations on the San Pedro River west of the Dragoons. Back in the Dragoons, Pionsenay took refuge with Skinya, who immediately led his people south toward Mexico. Henely caught up, but the Apaches barricaded themselves behind rocks high in the mountains. After an exchange of gunfire, Henely wisely concluded the defenses so impregnable that, rejecting Taza’s urgings, he withdrew his troop to Fort Bowie.21
As so often happened, the Tucson newspaper used vague reports of the disturbances on the reservation to stoke Arizonans’ fears by proclaiming a full-scale Chiricahua uprising. Reflecting public opinion, the editor wrote:
We heard a man say today, and he was of the opinion that he was endorsed by 999 out of 1000 people that the kind of war needed against the Chiricahuas was steady, unrelenting, hopeless and undiscriminating war slaying men, women, and children … and no relenting until every valley and crest and crag and fastness shall send to the high heavens the grateful incense of festering and rotting Chiricahua Indians, down to the last one of the guilty and their elders and abettors.22
Stirred by such news but motivated by the murder of Rogers, Spence, and Lewis, Washington reacted differently to the need of the hour. On May 1, 1876, Congress enacted legislation mandating the removal of the Indians on the Chiricahua Reservation to the White Mountain Reservation.
On June 5, 1876, John P. Clum, backed by General Kautz and half a regiment of the cavalry Clum so detested, arrived at Apache Pass to carry out the intent of Congress.
By executive order of October 30, 1876, the Chiricahua Reservation reverted to the public domain.