WITH GENERAL KAUTZ’S TROOPS strategically placed to head off trouble, John P. Clum’s removal of the Chiricahuas from their reservation went relatively smoothly despite the monthlong rift between Taza and Skinya. All the reservation leaders had vowed to die rather than move, but they either fled or accommodated.
Most of Cochise’s people had remained loyal to Taza. But Skinya formed a militant group under his own leadership and late in 1875 took sixty Chokonens to settle in the Dragoon Mountains. They included fourteen men, of whom one was his notorious half-brother Pionsenay.
Early in 1876 word reached the Indians that smallpox had appeared among whites in New Mexico. To escape the scourge, Juh (and probably Geronimo) led a raiding party of Nednhis and Bedonkohes into Chihuahua, while Taza and Naiche moved their 180 Chokonens back to the Dragoons.
Skinya and his men were raiding in Mexico. They returned to the Dragoons with ample spoils and in high spirits, only to find Taza and his people there, too. Skinya approached Naiche, his son-in-law, with a proposal that all unite in a breakout to Mexico and resume hostilities. If Naiche agreed, Skinya knew Taza would follow. On his deathbed, however, Cochise had admonished his sons to remain at peace and obey Jeffords, and they flatly refused Skinya’s idea.
During a tiswin drunk a quarrel broke out. The exchange of fire killed one man on each side and left a grandson of Cochise dead. Taza and Naiche at once took their people back to Apache Pass. To keep them distant from Skinya, Jeffords moved them to the eastern side of Apache Pass.
Skinya’s group still lived in the Dragoon Mountains in April 1876, when Pionsenay and his comrade murdered Rogers and Spence and committed depredations on the San Pedro. Lieutenant Henely’s pursuit and exchange of gunfire with Skinya’s barricaded fighters followed. Wild talk of a general Indian war rolled across Arizona, and rumors of impending abolition of the Chiricahua Reservation further disturbed the Apaches.
Alarmed by the uncertainties, particularly that the army might seek to capture Pionsenay, Skinya decided that his followers would be safer near Taza. Early in May he approached Jeffords to talk over the matter. The talks ended abruptly when Pionsenay and his backers sought to kill Jeffords but were prevented by Skinya. The next day Skinya and his people appeared at the agency, without Pionsenay and his friends, and said he and his people would place themselves under Taza’s leadership. Jeffords located them near Taza’s ranchería in Bonita Canyon on the eastern side of the mountains.1
As Skinya may have feared, the murder of Rogers, Spence, and Lewis set off the chain of events that led to the appearance of John Clum on June 5 with a telegram ordering him to move the Chiricahuas to the Gila. He showed it to Jeffords, who had heard rumors of the impending move but received no official word.
About an hour before midnight on the day before Clum’s arrival, another disaster had further ruptured the Chiricahuas. Upset over the convergence of soldiers on Apache Pass, Skinya had entered Taza’s camp with Pionsenay and about a dozen of his most committed followers. With the rancor that had boiled between Skinya and Taza for months inflaming both groups, Skinya exhorted Taza to join him in a breakout of all the Chiricahuas in a flight to Mexico. Faithful to his father’s dying admonition to keep the peace, Taza refused. The volatile Skinya pushed the issue until a melee broke out. Both sides opened fire. The young Naiche, only twenty, raised his rifle and aimed at Skinya. The bullet hit Skinya in the head and killed him, removing from Chokonen chaos the leading agitator. At the same time, Taza singled out Pionsenay, the second-ranking agitator. A second bullet lodged in Pionsenay’s shoulder joint, inflicting a wound severe enough to convince him that he would die. The encounter ended as Skinya’s people scattered. Jeffords and a troop of cavalry rode out to bring Taza and his remaining people to the Chiricahua Agency in Apache Pass. They arrived just before Clum on June 5.2
In a parley with Clum at the agency on June 6, Taza consented to take those people camped with him to the new reservation. None of the Chiricahuas wanted to go, and Taza could not bind all of them. In fact, most of the leaders had said they would fight rather than move. Taza agreed only because he had promised his father always to obey Jeffords, who counseled him not to resist.
Not content with having the Chokonen chief Taza talk for them, the Nednhis and Bedonkohes had insisted on their own parley with Clum. On June 8 three came in: Juh, Geronimo, and a rising Nednhi chief named Nolgee. Geronimo spoke for the others, probably because he was the only one who had been present at the Howard councils in 1872, and in part because Juh stuttered badly. His people and the Nednhis had joined in the Howard treaty, he said, and now that the rest of the reservation people had agreed to go with Clum, the Nednhis and Bedonkohes would go, too. But they would need twenty days to round up their people and bring them in. Although suspicious, Clum granted four days. The next day an emissary from Skinya’s old camp came in and said that Pionsenay wanted to come in “to die of his wounds.” A detachment of Clum’s police accompanied the man back to camp and brought in the wounded Pionsenay, together with an old man and thirty-eight women and children.
But the police also reported that the Nednhi rancherías, only ten miles from the agency, had been hastily abandoned. Once more, when perceiving a threat, Geronimo had heeded his own instincts—get back to Mexico. He got there before General Kautz’s soldiers could catch him.
On June 12 a caravan of army wagons, loaded with three hundred Chokonens and twenty-two Bedonkohes, left Apache Pass. Only forty-two men rode the wagons, the rest women and children. Among the leaders were Taza, Naiche, and Chihuahua, who had his own band of Chokonens separate from Taza’s. Jeffords accompanied Clum and his fifty-four Apache policemen, all escorted by three troops of cavalry. Twenty men and their families of Taza’s following had remained behind, scattering into Mexico or heading for New Mexico. People who had moved from Ojo Caliente to Jeffords’s reservation, about two hundred Chihennes and Bedonkohes, had already gone back.
The Fort Bowie surgeon had dressed Pionsenay’s wound, and Clum intended to turn him over to Tucson civil officials to be tried for the murder of Rogers and Spence. En route, however, the sheriff and a deputy from Tucson met the caravan and relieved Clum of Pionsenay. Although securely bound in the bed of a wagon, as the lawmen drove toward Tucson he freed himself and vanished without even alerting them. He snuck into Clum’s procession and persuaded two men, four women, and a boy to leave for Mexico with him. Pionsenay had not ceased to make trouble for the Chiricahuas.3
On June 18, 1876, the procession reached the Gila. Taza had agreed to locate on the Gila about two miles below abandoned Fort Goodwin. The Indians crawled from the wagons at their new home on the Gila River extension of the White Mountain Reservation.4
It probably was the only choice offered. This extension of the reservation, however, tortured anyone who lived there. Summer sun scorched the desert valley, spotted with cactus and crawling with spiders, tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes, Gila monsters, and a variety of other unfriendly creatures. Where water gathered in stagnant pools, mosquitoes swarmed to infect humans with malaria. The Gila Valley lay at the southern base of the forested ridges rising to the White Mountains, a friendly land and climate that the White Mountain Apaches called home.
Geronimo and Juh would have nothing to do with this environment— yet. They and their people had escaped safely into Mexico. The canyons and caverns of the Sierra Madre afforded the only place Juh ever felt safe. But unless rationed, they had to rely on raids for subsistence.
Scarcely a month after the Chokonens had been settled near the San Carlos Agency, Juh sent Geronimo to scout the Ojo Caliente Reservation as a possible refuge. He discovered the agent scared of his charges and virtually powerless to do more than issue rations to them or any others on the reservation. Geronimo also had relatives at Ojo Caliente, and the place appealed to him. He could settle his family and his Bedonkohes here, draw rations, and use the reservation as a base for further raiding. Others who had fled the Chiricahua Reservation rather than move to San Carlos did the same. Returning to Mexico, Geronimo made his case to Juh. The Nednhi chief could not be persuaded.5
By November 1876 Geronimo had resolved to part with Juh and return to the United States—not to Ojo Caliente but to a small group of Chihennes and Bedonkohes who had been living in the Florida (Flor-ee-da) and Animas Mountains of southwestern New Mexico. In the summer of 1876 war parties from these people had carried out some minor depredations on ranches to the north as well as in Chihuahua. Both white posses and US cavalry pursued and skirmished with them. But they remained in their mountain hideaways. Geronimo and his family and small following took up residence with them.6
Geronimo lost no time reverting to old patterns. As early as December 1876, he had led a small party of Bedonkohes on a raid across southern Arizona to the Sonoita Valley, southeast of Tucson. Besides depredations earlier inflicted by Pionsenay, still living in Mexico and recovered from his gunshot wound, the Apaches had once more stirred up southern Arizona.
Geronimo and his followers and some Chokonens established a winter camp of sixteen lodges on the northern tip of the Animas Mountains, a range close to the territorial boundary on the New Mexico side. It numbered about thirty-five men with their families. At daybreak of January 9, 1877, the men were making their way back to their wickiups from an all-night dance when a burst of gunfire caught them by surprise. They raced to the nearest rocks and returned a brisk fire at their attackers. After two hours of firing, attacks came from two directions. The people hastily abandoned their stock and possessions and fled, leaving the bodies of ten men dead and fighting a stubborn rearguard action.
What surprised the Apaches almost as much as the attack was the attackers. Apache Indian scouts outnumbered the cavalry troopers. Even though recognized as White Mountain Apaches, for the first time Chiricahuas had been struck by a force composed of Apaches in alliance with soldiers.7
After this setback, angry and burning for revenge, Geronimo led his people to the Ojo Caliente Reservation. As he recalled, Victorio welcomed him and his people warmly and shared food with them. Not all the Warm Springs people thought this a good idea. The always peaceful Loco and old Nana warned Victorio that Geronimo’s presence, with loot from his raids, would inevitably cause trouble. Victorio’s response: “These people are not bothering us.”8
These people would soon bother Victorio. Geronimo remained only a short time before organizing an expedition to avenge his rout by the soldiers and their Apache scouts. He persuaded Gordo to join him with about forty or fifty Bedonkohe, Chihenne, and Chokonen raiders for a sweep through southern Arizona. Detouring through Mexico, where they picked up reinforcements under Juh and Pionsenay, they entered Arizona early in February 1877. Marauding through the Sonoita and Santa Cruz Valleys south of Tucson, in two days they killed nine men and captured about one hundred head of horses before quickly slipping back into Mexico.9
Back at Ojo Caliente with the stolen horses, Geronimo appeared on ration day to draw issues for the period he had been absent raiding in Arizona. The agent refused. Although angry, Geronimo remained near the agency as others left for thieving raids. On subsequent ration days, he received handouts for himself and his followers.
April 21, 1877, was ration day, and as Geronimo made ready to ride into the agency, he received a message inviting him to come for a talk with a government official. At daybreak, he and about fifty of his people arrived at the agency. Other Bedonkohes, including Gordo and his followers, accompanied the influx. Gathering his men in front of the agency porch, Geronimo faced San Carlos Agent John P. Clum, whom he had last met at Apache Pass during the Chiricahua removal. Twenty White Mountain Apache policemen backed him up. As soon as the Apaches had assembled, Clum gave a signal and eighty more Indian police, arms at the ready, filed out of the adjacent commissary building and surrounded them. Clum singled out Geronimo and accused him of breaking his promise, at Apache Pass, to take his people with Taza to San Carlos. Clum ordered him, together with recent raiders Gordo and Ponce, escorted to the blacksmith shop and placed in irons. Clum descended the steps and, after a few tense moments as Geronimo considered his predicament, took his rifle from him and several others. Next a policeman pulled Geronimo’s knife from his belt. He had reluctantly concluded that resistance was futile; the police would gun him down instantly.
The next day, April 22, confined with the other prisoners in the agency jail, he observed cavalry arrive at the agency and later all the Indians called to a council. He may have suspected or been told that these Indians were to be removed to San Carlos. They were. By April 30, most of the Ojo Caliente Reservation Indians had been assembled and begun the journey to San Carlos. Clum’s seventeen prisoners, with Geronimo and three others in irons, climbed aboard army wagons and, escorted by cavalry, set forth on the road to the west. On May 20 they reached the San Carlos Agency, and Geronimo, still shackled, found himself once more behind bars.
The events of 1876–77 leading to Geronimo’s shackled removal to the Gila showed the civil and military establishments of Arizona at both their best and their worst. Their worst highlighted the perennial conflict between San Carlos Agent John P. Clum and General August Kautz. The best landed Geronimo in the San Carlos jail.
Clum’s animosity for all things military, and for Kautz in particular, spilled over into constant public feuding. It intensified as Clum enlisted Governor Anson P. K. Safford in his hostility to Kautz and succeeded in getting him to urge the War Department to relieve Kautz. Clum also fed venomous articles to Tucson newspapers attacking Kautz personally and extolling his own brilliance. In the autumn of 1876 Tucson merchants complained loudly of constant Apache raiding in the San Pedro and Sonoita Valleys, attributable to the Chokonens and Nednhis who had refused to move to San Carlos with Taza. Kautz sent commands under reliable officers to verify the complaints, but they discovered no evidence of trouble anywhere in the valleys southeast of Tucson. Their reports failed to still the charges of Kautz’s incompetence spewing from Tucson. Kautz attributed them to the anger of the “Tucson Ring” over his refusal to move the Department of Arizona headquarters from Prescott to Tucson.10
In December 1876, however, Geronimo’s raid as far west as the Sonoita Valley seemed to confirm the wrath of the Tucson citizens. Kautz took prompt action. He set high value on the White Mountain Apache scout companies General Crook had organized and employed so effectively in the Tonto Basin campaign. An exceptionally able cavalry officer, Lieutenant John A. (Tony) Rucker, commanded a company of scouts stationed at Fort Bowie. He promptly took the field with ten cavalrymen and thirty-four scouts. In the Sonoita Valley he picked up Geronimo’s trail leading east with a herd of stolen horses and followed it 130 miles to the Stein’s Peak Range on the New Mexico border. His animals and supplies exhausted, he returned to Fort Bowie to refit.11
On January 4, 1877, Rucker turned back to Stein’s Peak with his scouts, seventeen troopers, and a mule pack train. Here the trail veered to the southeast. Rucker sent Chief of Scouts Jack Dunn with the scouts to follow the trail, while he proceeded twenty miles farther and bivouacked. A courier from Dunn announced that he had found evidence of the Indians and asked Rucker to come forward. They met about 3:00 a.m. on January 9, 1877. Dunn indicated an Apache ranchería about four miles farther. Leaving the horses under guard, Rucker led the command to the objective. He sent Dunn to hide the scouts on a ridge line about 150 yards west of the camp, while he and the troopers headed for a hill about three hundred yards north of the camp. Both units were to attack at daybreak. The cavalry had not even reached their hill when Dunn’s Apaches opened fire and rushed the ranchería. The cavalry began firing at once, taking the enemy from the reverse direction. Dashing from their wickiups to rocky defenses, the surprised Chiricahuas opened such a brisk fire that they drove the scouts back twice. After exchanging fire with them for about two hours, Rucker and Dunn simultaneously charged into the ranchería and sent the occupants scattering.
Rucker counted sixteen lodges and estimated the foe at about thirty-five fighting men. Ten lay dead in the village, together with a large stock of weapons and ammunition and winter food provisions. The scouts captured forty-six horses. Although Rucker did not know whose camp he had struck, a small boy found in the village was later identified as a nephew of Geronimo.12
Rucker received high praise from General Kautz and could take satisfaction in achieving a rare surprise attack on a Chiricahua ranchería.
During February 1877 depredations once more scourged southern Arizona. Lieutenant Rucker again took the field, heading directly east this time. He failed to overtake the raiders but noted that their trail led toward the Ojo Caliente Reservation. General Kautz had other reports that the culprits were mainly Chiricahuas and Nednhis, refugees from the old Chiricahua Reservation, based at Ojo Caliente and led by Geronimo, Juh, Nolgee, and Gordo. Furthermore, Victorio’s men often joined in these forays.13
Kautz therefore dispatched a command from Fort Bowie to reconnoiter the Rio Grande country and ascertain the validity of the reports. Lieutenant Austin Henely, another able young officer and brother-in-law of Rucker, led the scouting party. Near Ojo Caliente Henely observed a raiding party driving a herd of stolen horses and recognized one of the men as Geronimo. A few days later, at the agency, he again spotted Geronimo, incensed at the agent because he could not draw rations for the period of his absence. The lieutenant concluded that the Ojo Caliente Reservation provided shelter and rations for unruly Apaches from elsewhere who used the cover of Victorio for sporadic raiding.14
Henely’s report of sighting Geronimo led to uncharacteristically swift decision in Washington. Alerted by the War Department, the commissioner of Indian affairs on March 20, 1877, telegraphed Agent Clum: “If practicable take Indian police and arrest renegade Chiricahuas at Southern Apache Agency. Seize stolen horses in their possession. Restore property to rightful owners. Remove renegades to San Carlos and hold them in confinement for murder and robbery. Call on military for aid if needed.”15
Clum lost little time in responding. His police captain, Clay Beauford, was in Tucson with eighty police. Clum took twenty-two of the San Carlos police and arranged for Beauford to meet him at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, near Silver City, with the other eighty. Relying on a trivial pretext, Clum had refused to ask General Kautz for military support but instead arranged for cavalry from New Mexico to arrive on April 21. On April 20 the police approached the reservation. Clum left Beauford and his men about ten miles out and proceeded with his small contingent to the agency. During the night Beauford quietly moved his police into the agency and concealed them in a storehouse next to agency headquarters.
Early on April 21, even though the New Mexico cavalry had been delayed a day, Clum summoned Geronimo and other chiefs with about one hundred people for a talk. The small number of police visible appeared to pose no threat, so they came. As Clum confronted Geronimo, Beauford led his police from concealment and surrounded the Apaches. The showdown between the agent and a defiant Geronimo proceeded tensely but ended quietly because of the overwhelming strength of Beauford’s police. He took Geronimo and two “renegades” into custody and had them escorted to the blacksmith shop, where they were ironed, then jailed. By the end of the day Clum had seventeen prisoners in the guardhouse, four of them shackled.16
Clum dispatched Beauford and his police back to Arizona, and the next day, April 22, Major James F. Wade arrived with three troops of the Ninth Cavalry. Already, on April 15, Clum had wired the commissioner of Indian affairs from Fort Bayard advising that all the Ojo Caliente Indians be moved to the San Carlos Agency so that the Ojo Caliente Reservation, like the Chiricahua Reservation, could be abolished. Two days later he received permission, provided the military agreed. Wiring Major Wade of his intent, on April 24 Clum called together the principal reservation chiefs, and after a “short talk” they all agreed to move to San Carlos. Doubtless Wade’s cavalry and Clum’s San Carlos police had a bearing on their ready consent.
On April 30, under charge of Clum’s chief clerk, a cavalcade of 435 reservation Indians got under way, cavalry escorting. Clum and the seventeen prisoners boarded army wagons and traveled by road to unite with the others at Silver City. The procession numbered about 300 Chihennes and 153 Bedonkohes and Chokonens. Reluctantly, Victorio went, too, although about 150 Chokonens and Nednhis slipped away. Clum’s new charges reached San Carlos on May 20, and Geronimo, still ironed, was locked in the agency guardhouse.17
San Carlos would be Geronimo’s home for two years, until again Mexico beckoned.
