ONCE THEY MOVED LIKE THE WIND: COCHISE, GERONIMO,

David Roberts

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780671702212
• eBook ISBN: 9781451639889
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

During the westward settlement, for more than twenty years Apache tribes eluded both US and Mexican armies, and by 1886 an estimated 9, 000 armed men were in pursuit. Roberts (Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative) presents a moving account of the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest. He portrays the great Apache leaders—Cochise, Nana, Juh, Geronimo, the woman warrior Lozen—and U.S. generals George Crock and Nelson Miles. Drawing on contemporary American and Mexican sources, he weaves a somber story of treachery and misunderstanding. After Geronimo's surrender in 1886, the Apaches were sent to Florida, then to Alabama where many succumbed to malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition and finally in 1894 to Oklahoma, remaining prisoners of war until 1913. The book is history at its most engrossing.
— Publishers Weekly

One

Cut the Tent

It was not a confrontation between equals.

The host, sitting tense and rigid inside the canvas army tent, his dark blue trousers dusty from a five days’ march, was Second Lieutenant George N. Bascom. A full beard tapered to a V beneath his chin, failing to mute the earnest, callow face beneath. Heavy eyebrows overhung the bright stare of a zealot. A Kentuckian by birth, Bascom was about twenty-five years old; two years earlier, he had graduated from West Point. Having served in Indian country for less than four months, he had just been handed his first opportunity to prove his mettle.

His guest, still drinking the coffee Bascom had served, was twice the lieutenant’s age. Tall for an Apache at five feet ten inches, he bore hit taut-muscled 175 pounds with formal dignity. His dark black hair hung to his shoulders. From each ear dangled three large brass rings. A sharply bridged nose, high cheekbones, and a high forehead accented the gravity of his countenance. He never smiled.

He was the greatest Apache of his day. His own people, the Chiricahua, regarded him with awe and fear, “his glance being enough,” noted a white observer, “to squelch the most obstreperous Chiricahua of the tribe.” Seventy-five years afterward, an Apache who had been a boy of four at the time remembered being shown the great leader’s tepees, by a man who said that “it was as much as anyone’s life was worth to even look toward them.”

The Chiricahua called him Cheis, or “oak”—invoking not the tree or the wood itself so much as the strength and quality of oak. Anglos added a prefix to the name, and turned it into Cochise.

It was February 4, 1861. Bascom had pitched his camp on a shrubby bank of Siphon Canyon, just east of the low pass leading from the Sulphur Springs Valley to the San Simon Basin in what is now southeastern Arizona. Dead leaves lay in wind-blown patches along the dry stream bed. It was cold, with snow in the offing: within the week, a blizzard would sweep in from the west.

Arriving at Siphon Canyon the day before, Bascom had dissembled to the station keepers of the Butterfield Stage Line, whose stone headquarters stood about a mile away. The lieutenant had claimed that with his fifty-four soldiers of the Seventh Infantry he was headed for the Rio Grande, far to the east. He desired Cochise’s visit, he said, merely to offer the hospitality of his tent.

The Chiricahua chief was a cautious man. All his life he had fought an on-and-off war against the Mexicans, for whose treacheries and pusillanimities he felt a weary contempt. But these White Eyes—so the Apaches called the Anglo-Americans who had started flooding into their homeland from the east—these White Eyes were different. Despite his anger at their arrogant invasion, Cochise was willing to try coexistence. He had befriended the Butterfield employees at the nearby station; he may even have contracted to supply firewood to the stage line.

Thus he came to Bascom’s tent in an amicable mood, bringing with him his brother, two nephews, his wife, and two young children. And the lieutenant had served him dinner and coffee.

Suddenly this stripling in his blue uniform turned accuser, demanding that Cochise return the cattle he had stolen and the twelve-year-old boy he had abducted. At once Cochise professed his ignorance of the raid Bascom was attributing to him. He offered, however, to find out who the perpetrators were and to negotiate for the return of the boy and the cattle. But Bascom had his eyes on phantom laurels: he announced that Cochise and his relatives would be held hostage until the stolen property was redeemed. By design, his soldiers had surrounded the tent.

Cochise reacted instantly. Seizing a hidden knife, he cut a long slash in the canvas wall of the tent and sprang through the hole. The startled bluecoats fired. Some fifty bullets creased the February air, as Cochise dashed through the bushes up the hill behind camp. As the gunpowder fumes began to settle, the soldiers saw him running still, wounded in the leg but beyond their bravest thoughts of pursuit. So quickly had he made his escape, that at the top of the hill Cochise still clutched his coffee cup.

The chief’s six relatives, however, had been captured. An hour later, Cochise came in sight on another hilltop and asked to see his brother. Bascom’s answer was a burst of rifle fire from his troops. According to one eyewitness, Cochise “raised his hand and swore to be revenged.” He cried out that “Indian blood was as good as white man’s blood,” then vanished.

In the failed maneuverings of the next two weeks—the product of Bascom’s adamantine will—the script was written for twelve years of misunderstanding and terror in the Southwest.

The boy whose kidnapping launched this debacle was known in 1861 as Felix Ward. His life would wind in and out of the Apache wars for the next quarter century. Though never more than a marginal actor, he would play a sinister and crucial role, like some minor figure in a Greek tragedy upon whose ordinary deeds heroes stumble and go wrong. He remains one of the most enigmatic characters in the long Apache chronicle. He would live on in Arizona until his death in 1915, without bothering to share the secrets of his life with anyone who might have recorded them. A pioneer who studied him in his decline in 1906 described him as “a wandering, aged, unkempt dependent on the government.”

Felix Ward was what used to be called a half-breed. Because he had red hair and had been adopted by an Irish-born rancher named John Ward, many people thought the boy was half-Mexican and half-Irish. The truth seems rather that he was the son of an Apache father and a captive Mexican mother. After six years she managed to flee her Apache masters, taking her boy with her. Eventually she became the common-law wife of John Ward, who had started a ranch on Sonoita Creek, about forty miles southeast of Tucson.

The boy had a blind left eye, cocked up and to the left. Some said it was a birth defect; others claimed it was the result of a youthful fight with a bear. One day in January 1861, Felix was captured by Indians, who also took twenty head of cattle. Some say the boy had run away from an alcoholic stepfather who beat him; others, that he wandered off from the ranch while dutifully hunting a stray burro.

In high dudgeon, John Ward reported his loss at Fort Buchanan, eleven miles north of his ranch. Although Cochise was camped at the time fully eighty miles away, Ward was convinced that it was his band of Chiricahuas who had robbed him. Soldiers from the fort claimed to follow the depredators’ trail toward the Chiricahua country. Thus Bascom was sent out on his fateful errand.

His contemporaries’ opinion of John Ward was none too high. Some claimed he had been driven out of California by the Vigilance Committee; an early Arizona historian summed him up as “in all respects, a worthless character.” Apaches later surmised that the abducted stepson “was probably not of as much importance to Ward as were the cattle taken from him.” It did not help matters that Ward rode with Bascom, and may have served as his interpreter.

For thirteen years after the confrontation in Siphon Canyon, the whereabouts of Felix Ward remained unknown to whites. The Apaches knew what had happened to him, though. Cochise had told Bascom the truth. It was members of an entirely separate tribe, a group of Western Apaches, who had seized the boy and the cattle, and for the rest of his childhood, Western Apaches raised the boy as one of their own. In 1874 Felix Ward resurfaced with the name Mickey Free, when he offered his services as scout and interpreter to the army. In these roles, as well as later duty as an official “spy,” he performed his dark mischief.

An oldtimer who worked with Mickey Free in 1880 thought him “an indolent creature… a more repulsive object could not be imagined.” He had grown up to be a short, slender man in shabby clothes, wearing a habitual sneer, who let his long, dirty hair hang over his bad eye. He had, all agreed, a mean disposition. It is easy to feel pity for this outcast, suspended in the tension among three different cultures and three languages, including Spanish from his Mexican mother. The Apaches, who knew him best, distrusted him entirely—he was “incapable of loyalty,” judged one who knew him well. In part their antipathy sprang from his innocent role as a twelve-year-old captive: he was, in their words, “the coyote whose kidnapping had brought war to the Chiricahuas.” But whites had little better to say: the opinion of the chief of scouts under whom he served “could not be printed in polite words.”

The mischief Mickey Free performed was real and far-reaching, and all the more unfathomable for its lack of an evident motive. Perhaps, like Shakespeare’s Iago, he nursed a secret wound, a hatred of the world instilled by the wrongs done him in his youth, which drove him to return the harm, just for the pleasure of watching things fall apart around him.

Before dusk that February 4, Bascom broke camp in Siphon Canyon and moved his soldiers a mile upstream to the stage station. Judging that he had a fight on his hands, the lieutenant longed for the security of stone walls. The next morning, leading a large band of warriors, Cochise appeared on a nearby hill; but instead of attacking, the chief proffered a white flag. Led by Bascom and Cochise, two groups of four negotiators each met at a spot some 125 yards from the station. Cochise pleaded for the release of his relatives. Bascom promised their freedom “just so soon as the boy was restored.” To no avail, Cochise again protested that he had not the slightest knowledge of Felix Ward.

Watching the futile parley from the station was a veteran Butterfield driver, James Wallace. Almost a decade older than Bascom, he had twenty times more experience with Apaches; he spoke some Apache and counted Cochise as a friend. Exasperation with the officer’s intransigence must have driven him to action. With two other Butterfield employees, Wallace hurried out to take over the discussion.

This development alarmed the Apaches, but it also gave them an opportunity. Some warriors hiding in a nearby ravine attempted to seize the Butterfield men. Wallace was captured, but the other two broke free and sprinted back toward the station. At the first disturbance, Cochise and his trio of allies fled for cover. Bascom ordered his soldiers to fire, and Apaches on the hillsides to the south returned their volleys. One of the Butterfield men was shot in the back but was pulled to safety. The other was less fortunate. Bascom’s jittery soldiers knew as little as their leader did about Indians. No one had told them that Apaches virtually never attacked a fort. Now, as the third Butterfield man reached the station wall and desperately clambered over, the soldiers mistook him for the enemy, and shot him dead at point-blank range.

That night the addled troops saw distant fires and heard the wailing cries of what they thought was a war dance. They steeled themselves for a battle on the next day. But at noon on February 6 Cochise appeared once more on a hilltop, leading Wallace, whose arms were tied behind his back, by a rope looped around his neck. Again he pleaded with Bascom to free his relatives, offering now to trade his hostage for them. And again the stubborn young man refused.

For Cochise, as for all Apaches, the ties that bound him to his family were of the strongest sort. A black rage had gathered in his breast toward this impudent youngster with his blue uniform and his silly beard. Cochise would gladly have unleashed his warriors. But he still hoped to rescue his wife, his children, his nephews, and his brother. The closest tie of all was to that younger brother, Coyuntara, a great fighter and raider whose name had long struck terror in Mexican hearts. For the chance of saving Coyuntara and the others, Cochise would bear the American’s arrogance yet a while longer.

His scouts had spotted a wagon train, loaded with flour for the New Mexico markets, approaching the pass from the west. The team of three Americans and nine Mexicans had no inkling that anything was amiss. That evening Cochise’s Apaches laid an ambush just below the summit on the eastern side. The wagon train blundered into the trap, and the dozen men were captured in minutes.

For Mexicans not a whisper of pity sounded in Cochise’s soul. Time and again they had deceived and betrayed his people, had even put a bounty on the head of Apache women and children. His nine Mexican captives were of no use to Cochise now. He turned them over to his men, and perhaps to his women, who knew what to do. They tied the Mexicans by their wrists to the wagon wheels, then set fire to the wagons and burned their prisoners to death.

The three additional white hostages, Cochise believed, ought to even the odds in the bargaining with the American lieutenant. That evening, the chief ordered Wallace to write a note: “Treat my people well,” it said in English, “and I will do the same by yours.” On the same hill where only that noon Cochise had shouted down to Bascom, the note was tied to a stake and left for the Americans to retrieve.

Confusion veils the record at this point. According to one account, the note was not discovered for two days—a crucial delay. Yet Bascom’s own official report states that he read the note the same day it was left. In any event, Bascom did nothing—and by his passivity, doomed the hostages Cochise held.

Why, one wonders, did Bascom refuse to believe that Cochise spoke the truth about his ignorance of the abducted boy? Some witnesses reported that as Bascom turned down the trade for Wallace, an older, savvy sergeant at his elbow pleaded so forcefully for accepting the deal that Bascom arrested him for insubordination. Was it, as one scholar suggests, that the lieutenant construed his written orders (which were imperiously phrased) as demanding the sternest possible treatment of Cochise, guilty or innocent? Or did Bascom have the kind of mind that tolerates no ambiguity, that sees the clutter of fact as a mere distraction from the purity of its own theory? Having decided that Cochise had the boy, did Bascom see all the chief’s protestations, his desperate countermeasures, only as confirmation of his guilt?

Or was it, more pathetically, simply a matter of saving face before his soldiers (had they marched five days for nothing?), of keeping oriented the compass of ambition that had steered him through West Point to his destiny in the desert?

With Bascom’s failure to respond to the note, Cochise gave up all hopes of negotiating: he would try to reclaim his relatives by force. He retreated south into the Chiricahua Mountains to plan his strategy.

For two days, not an Apache was seen near the Butterfield station. On February 8, two men drove the herd of army mules to the spring six hundred yards from the station. Just as the soldiers dared to hope the Indians had left for good, a large party of Apaches, naked to the waist and covered with war paint, charged from the hillt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Cochise’s Will
• Part II: Geronimos Power
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photo Inserts