AS THE CHIRICAHUAS LEFT Mount Vernon for a new life at Fort Sill, they did not know what to expect. They had led a miserable life in the Alabama pine barrens for seven years. Except for occasional drunkenness, they had apparently lived an exemplary life. Captain Wotherspoon had sought, like Captain Pratt at Carlisle Indian School, to “civilize” them. But could the transformation they and other officers sought be achieved in seven years or less—or ever? To what degree had the Indians surrendered their old traditions and way of life? What went through their minds as they did what they were told? The sources name only Nana as clinging to the old attitudes. The dances and other ceremonies that figured so crucially in the old way could not be performed without the officers knowing it. Could other Apache ways of thinking and believing have gone underground while the veneer of white ways concealed them? Did Usen, the supreme deity, still speak to the people? And what torment did they suffer when the white officers commanded thought and action that violated Usen’s dictates or assurances?
A clue that confuses rather than clarifies may be discerned in a letter Geronimo wrote to his son Chappo, who had been at Carlisle for six years and was now thirty years old, when he asked his father to allow his brother Fenton to join him in school. George Wrattan would have written Geronimo’s reply, June 6, 1894, here paraphrased. Chappo’s letter found Geronimo well and also Chappo’s brother and sister. Geronimo understands what Chappo said about Fenton going to school and is willing for him to go. Geronimo wants him to learn something and be a smart man. He would not say no because he wants to do what is right, and he thanks Chappo. When is Chappo coming to get him? All are here still and belonging to the government, but we do not all think the same. Geronimo has talked until he is tired and so he does not talk to the Indians anymore. They are not his relations, so they do not mind [obey] what he says. They have a captain here, and what he says Geronimo does. He will not say no to him. He would be ashamed to do wrong after he has been treated so well. He thinks good all the time and always tries to do right. From his loving father.1
Geronimo’s letter seems to reveal that he had come to terms with the reality of his new life. He would do whatever the captain said. Interviewed in September by his old antagonist, Captain Marion P. Maus, Geronimo expressed his resignation. He did not consider himself an Indian anymore. He was now a white man.2 Still, according to Geronimo, the people thought in varying ways. Like Geronimo, almost all the people did whatever the captain said, even Nana, so much of the old thinking may have persisted despite their obedience.
Two months after Geronimo’s letter, on August 7, 1894, Captain Pratt discharged Chappo for illness and returned him to Mount Vernon. During September, as the Apaches packed their belongings for the rail journey to Fort Sill, consumption wasted Chappo in the post hospital. The doctor listed him as “very sick.” By the time the people boarded the cars for the new land, Chappo had died of tuberculosis.3
Escorted by Company I, Twelfth Infantry, 305 Chiricahuas—compared with 389 counted at Mount Vernon in 1888—reached Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory, on October 4, 1894. They had traveled by rail as far as Rush Springs and ridden wagons west the final thirty miles. Second Lieutenant Allyn Capron had commanded the Indian company for a year, and the soldiers liked and respected him. The Indians now came under the supervision of another officer, who had interviewed them at Mount Vernon but otherwise was a stranger: First Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott, Seventh Cavalry. The usual crowds did not turn out to gawk at the Apaches as they had in Florida and Alabama. A throng of Kiowas and Comanches, curious to see their new neighbors, gathered to watch and try to converse, succeeding only when Carlisle students were brought forth. Whites had not settled this country yet, and the Kiowa-Comanche Indian Reservation entirely surrounded the Fort Sill Military Reservation, which itself belonged to these tribes.
With winter approaching, the Chiricahuas moved temporarily into canvas-covered wickiups sheltered by timber about a mile from the fort. They did not yet know what Lieutenant Scott had in mind for their future, but they could foresee the possibility of a better life in a land more to their liking. As the lieutenant reported, the Apaches seemed delighted with the change from Mount Vernon. Their conduct had been excellent, and their health was already improving.4
What Lieutenant Scott had in mind would unfold over the next three years.
The Chiricahuas had been fortunate in their new overseer, in January 1895 to be promoted to captain. Like Captain Wotherspoon, Captain Hugh L. Scott would rise to chief of staff of the army. Like Wotherspoon, he devoted himself to caring for the Apaches and leading them toward self-support—as farmers and cattlemen, however, rather than wage-earners in the white world. Unlike Wotherspoon, Scott did not believe in entirely suppressing old Apache ways. In 1890–91, when the Ghost Dance swept the western plains, he had charge of the Kiowas and gained credit for keeping them quiet as other tribes threatened war. By 1894, he had won the trust and friendship of the Kiowas and Comanches as well as a reputation as an expert on Indians and Indian ways, especially the sign language. Where Wother-spoon had dedicated himself to destroying Apache ways, Scott respected the Apaches as Apaches. Where Wotherspoon had sought to break the power and influence of traditional leaders such as Geronimo and Naiche, Scott saw the value of restoring their stature if not their influence.
Despite a cold, stormy winter, the Apaches worked six days a week plowing land for spring planting, cutting logs for permanent homes, quarrying stone for chimneys, and chopping firewood to ward off the freezing temperatures. Construction of houses—two rooms with a breezeway as in Alabama—began in January and proceeded slowly but steadily. In the summer of 1895, as the agricultural effort progressed, Scott bought a herd of five hundred cattle and began to train Apaches how to herd them. Except for skilled carpenters, George Wrattan taught the Indians most of their new work, especially cattle herding. They had never cared for cattle and knew only how to eat them. They made poor herders.5
Scott’s most innovative plan in building homes was to scatter them in twelve villages around the reservation west of the fort, each to have sufficient acreage that every family had ten acres to cultivate as a vegetable garden. In a move Wotherspoon would not have approved, Scott appointed a headman for each village. Each was enlisted and paid as an army scout and issued an army uniform. They were given no authority, but they exerted their influence. Wrattan chose the men, and their names resonated in Chiricahua history from the old days of war and raiding: Geronimo, Naiche, Chihuahua, Chatto, Mangas, Perico, Noche, Kayatena, Martine, Toclanny, Loco, and Tom Chiricahua.
Such a reminder of the old days suggests that the old ways had not died entirely in Alabama. In truth, they had not. Scott never reported ceremonies and dances, but as Geronimo wrote in his autobiography, the people revived them. In his adult years, Sam Kenoi remembered the revival clearly:
There were many ceremonies at this time, but the boys did not attend. It was too common to bother. They were familiar with the customs of the people and didn’t pay much attention. It was pretty hard for the younger people to attend. There were always restrictions on whoever was there. For some ceremonies you couldn’t scratch, for some you couldn’t leave before it was all over, for some you couldn’t sleep. So they didn’t care much about being there. But they always went to the tepee ceremony, for you always had a good time there.6
As the Chiricahuas made a new and better life for themselves at Fort Sill, one pain continued to rankle: their relatives held captive in Chihuahua. At the end of December 1894, George Wrattan composed a letter to Captain Scott naming forty-two Chiricahuas captured by the Mexicans ten or fifteen years in the past and believed still to be held in Chihuahua City—as they probably were, as servants in family households. On the list were relatives of Geronimo, Chatto, Mangas, and Kayatena. The Apaches, wrote Wrattan, said this: “We are settled now, in a good country, where we would all like to be together, have our farms and stock, together and be happy.” As many times in the past, this request crawled up the chain of command, leaped to the State Department, and came back from Mexico with the reply that Chihuahua held no Apache prisoners.7
Lieutenant Capron’s Apache company had no military duties. They guarded the Chiricahua camp and, like their people, worked at building their homes and tilling their gardens. The policy of Indians as soldiers had come under increasing scrutiny, and the opinions of high army officers spelled its doom. In July 1895, Company I of the Twelfth Infantry was mustered out of the service and its members integrated into Troop L, Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Captain Scott at Fort Sill. This troop, composed of Kiowas and Comanches, had performed well under the sure hand of its captain, and the well-trained Apaches made it even better. The experiment ended on May 31, 1897, as Troop L paraded for the last time and turned in its equipment, the last Indian unit mustered out of the army. Many of the Apache soldiers formed a scout unit to keep order in the Chiricahua villages near the fort. All, though honorably discharged from the army, lived as prisoners of war.8
As the Chiricahuas went about their chores of building, gardening, and herding cattle, they felt secure in the repeated promises that they now occupied the reservation General Miles had promised them in 1886. Unknown to them, however, a combination of events unfolded that once again portended betrayal. On the one hand, reflecting the fervent demand of the politically powerful Indian rights organizations, the Dawes Act of 1887 provided for allotment of land in severalty to the Indians. On the other, the demand of land-hungry whites led to efforts to buy all “surplus” reservation land not needed for allotments—and to buy before allotments began.
The Kiowa-Comanche Reservation fell victim to a fraudulent agreement in 1892: the Jerome Commission had failed to secure the vote of three-fourths of adult males as required by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. The army intended, when it ultimately abandoned Fort Sill, that the Kiowas and Comanches would be paid for the military reservation and it would become the Chiricahua Reservation. The fort embraced only enough land for allotments of eighty acres. So in 1896 Captain Scott, joined by the acting agent of the Kiowas and Comanches, Captain Frank D. Baldwin, negotiated with the two tribes for the needed additional acreage. These Indians trusted Captain Scott and would do anything he advised: they agreed. The Chiricahua Reservation appeared secure.9
Geronimo toiled seemingly content in his garden. He delighted in the crops of melons and sweet corn that he grew and sold to the army, along with sweet potatoes and other vegetables. Sam Kenoi remembered Geronimo’s pride in his garden. “Every now and then,” said Kenoi, “he’d take a watermelon, cut it up under his arbor, and say, ‘Come on boys.’ He liked watermelon pretty well himself. He used to tell the boys, ‘Don’t smoke until you have caught a coyote on foot boys. That’s an old Apache custom.’ “10
Seventy-one when he arrived at Fort Sill, Geronimo was regarded by officers as too old and worn-out to perform the duties of scout, or leader of his village. He loved his uniform and proudly wore it. He was hardly worn-out, as his future years demonstrated. His name still roused curiosity throughout the nation, although at Fort Sill the mobs such as in Florida and Alabama could not reach him. Special visitors, such as artist E. A. Burbank and Indians Rights officer Francis Leupp (a future commissioner of Indian affairs) readily gained military permission.
Burbank’s visit, in 1897, belied the common belief. Geronimo “was short, but well built and muscular. His keen, shrewd face was deeply furrowed with strong lines. His small black eyes were watery, but in them there burned a fierce light. It was a wonderful study—that face, so gnarled and furrowed”—so wonderful, in fact, that Burbank won the permission of Geronimo and Captain Scott to paint it. “As we worked day after day, my idea of Geronimo, the Apache, changed. I became so attracted to the old Indian that eventually I painted seven portraits of him.” He also painted Naiche and other Chiricahuas.11
Leupp toured the Chiricahua villages in 1897 and described them in detail. He had just come from Arizona, where everyone told him that Geronimo was the “Apache arch-fiend.” If he ever set foot in the territory, he would be hanged without the formality of a trial. Such talk, ten years after Geronimo left Arizona, impressed Leupp. “But to pass up into Oklahoma and find this same Geronimo putting in his honest eight hours of work daily as a farmer in the fields, and at intervals donning his uniform as a United States scout and presenting himself with the other scouts for inspection,” was even more impressive.12
Soon, however, Geronimo was to discover that the attitudes of Arizonans had not entirely died out among the melon fields of Fort Sill. In February 1898 newspapers carried the story of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. The Chiricahuas learned of the coming war, and a number of the former soldiers came to Lieutenant Capron (who had succeeded Captain Scott in January 1898) and told him they would like to go with him and whip the Spaniards.13
In mid-April 1898, as the Apaches watched the Fort Sill garrison march away to Rush Springs to board a train for the war zone, Geronimo and other Apaches gathered around a fire and joked about how easy it would be, with the soldiers all gone, to make a break for Arizona. A young girl, graduate of Carlisle who had forgotten some of her native language, took alarm. She worked as a servant for one of the officers at the fort and hastened to alert the women that Geronimo and the others were holding war dances and plotting an uprising. At the Apache villages, the people probably failed to note the frantic scampering of the women around the fort but took note of the arrival of cavalry units.
The captain of one of the cavalry troops summoned Geronimo, Naiche, and other headmen to the fort and questioned them. Expressing sadness at being mistrusted, the Apaches declared their innocence; the tale lacked any truth. Geronimo spoke up: “I am a U.S. soldier. I wear the uniform, and it makes my heart sore to be thus suspected.” And suspected they were for a week or more.14
Geronimo would have been amused had he known what a stir, approaching panic, the rumor of an impending uprising caused in the army—from department commanders to the secretary of war. Even before Lieutenant Colonel Edgar R. Kellogg marched his battalion of the Tenth Infantry out of Fort Sill on April 19, the army’s commanding general, Major General Nelson A. Miles, worried enough to order a troop of the Seventh Cavalry to hasten by rail to the fort. As Kellogg waited for transportation at Rush Springs, a telegram and a galloping courier reached him with word of the threatened outbreak. He sent Captain William C. Brown and his troop of the First Cavalry galloping back to Fort Sill to quell the uprising. After interviewing Geronimo and Naiche, and with the impending arrival of the troop of the Seventh Cavalry, Brown hastened back to Rush Springs to rejoin Kellogg. Even then, generals believed that Fort Sill needed more cavalry to stand guard over the Apaches. Within a week, all was calm at Fort Sill.15
The furor over a Chiricahua outbreak, which alarmed the people of the Southwest as well as the army high command, demonstrated that Geronimo, despite his seventy-five years, still aroused fear as well as public notoriety.