Geronimo Read online

  Until the end of the 1820s, the process was piecemeal and poorly articulated. But with the election of Andrew Jackson matters moved into a higher gear, for if Columbus had been the mind of the West and Cortés its arm, in North America Andrew Jackson was both mind and muscle united into the essential personality of the Pioneer. He was shrewd, practical, and courageous. He also hated Indians and had no interest in the land except as it could be turned to what were then styled the “arts of civilization,” i.e., agriculture and industry. If this was a somewhat diminished definition of what civilization amounted to, it was at least serviceable. The Indian Removal Act that Jackson signed in 1830 was a truly representative piece of legislation—representative in the sense that it expressed the wishes of all white Americans who wanted to see their country move forward. Now progress, great as it had undoubtedly been, would seem faltering and timid by comparison to what was begun in 1830. All the Indians, those visible reminders of the past and bars to future progress, were to be removed west of the Mississippi River, where their wasteful nomadic habits would trouble only a few. No matter that certain tribes like the Cherokees had ably learned to walk the white man’s road, had established schools, libraries, mills, churches, and shops in the Old Southwest. Within five years after Removal became official policy, the Cherokees were started on the long walk westward, leaving behind them their farms, stock, and mills to be taken over by the white dispossessors. They joined the Ottawas, Potawatomis, Wyandots, Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Delawares, Peorias, and Miamis. In Illinois, an old war chief of the Sac and Fox tribe hoped for an alliance between his people and the Winnebago and Potawatomi tribes that would succeed in breaking the wave of the future. Black Hawk was even deluded enough to imagine that the British would help, but that tribe had already been crushed by the American juggernaut and wanted no part of further schemes to oppose it. The result was a hopeless, pathetic fifteen-week war during which various heroes of white history—Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott (he would later tread Cortés’s road to Mexico City)—collaborated to crush the rebellion. Black Hawk and his confederate chiefs were summoned to Washington, where the Great Father told them to be good and go west.

  There can be few clearer examples of white America’s lack of relationship to the natural world than this policy of removal, for it was done in callous disregard of the consequences of dumping thousands of alien Indians into an area the natural resources of which had provided abundant support for the tribes living there. But these resources were not, as both reds and whites were to discover, inexhaustible, and the forced arrival of these displaced tribes produced immediate strains and upsets in the ecology that resulted in the warfare for which the Plains Indians became famous. Both human-kind’s understanding of its proper relationship to the earth and the loss of that understanding—the Garden of Eden myth—were reenacted in the mopping-up operations carried on from 1850 to 1890. This blood-soaked, disease-ridden tragedy was played out against the backdrop of a region so overpoweringly beautiful in both its harsh and lush extremes as to dwarf into mockery the relentless antics of the dispossessors. Treaties were signed—and broken—for “as long as the grass shall grow,” and Indians swept into battles of foregone conclusions, singing that it was a good day to die, for nothing lives long, “only the earth and the grass.” But even the native grasses were being exterminated as the West was made over into farms and ranches: 142 million acres of the continent’s heart-land that for millennia had been thronged with big bluestem, blazing star, wild indigo, black Sampson, butterfly milkweed, compass plant, prairie smoke, Scribner’s panicum, golden alexander, shooting star, and prairie dock.

  When the Lakotas in Minnesota rose up and killed as many as five hundred whites in 1862, leaving a region fifty miles by two hundred miles barren of inhabitants, the nation was shocked. Then the whites gathered themselves for a final assault. Heroes of the Civil War were elevated to positions of central command of the operations. One of them, William Tecumseh Sherman (the middle name would become grimly ironic in the next few decades), responded in approved military fashion to the depredations of the Lakotas. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,” he said, “even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case.” And to his brother John, United States Senator from Ohio, he wrote a contemplated assessment of the situation: “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper.” Rarely has history afforded us an example of such effective execution of orders. Another hero, Philip Sheridan, is credited by Ralph K. Andrist with the original remark about “good Indians.” At Fort Cobb, Indian Territory, a Comanche named Turtle Dove introduced himself to the general with the humble self-attribution that he was a “good Indian.” “The only good Indians I know,” the general returned, “are dead.” Such remarks make clearer than reams of official documents what the real operating procedure was to be in the Plains campaigns: it was to be extermination, pure and simple. Nothing—not the destruction of men, women, children, ponies, bison, grass, the very land itself—was permitted to arrest the machinelike operation, and if some of the village cleanups (like that at Sand Creek in 1864) were pretty bloody, these were but the inevitable hardships of making the continent. The whites proved better able to bear them than the tribes.

  There were, of course, atrocities on both sides during the Long Death, but as Andrist observes, the supposed gap between the savage and the civilized often narrowed so that one was indistinguishable from the other. If anything, the whites sometimes showed greater ingenuity in their killing and mutilating than the Indians for whom such activities were presumed to be second nature. Few Indians, for example, would have been capable of the antics of certain white residents of Montana who cut off the heads of slain Indians, pickled the ears in whiskey, boiled the skin from the skulls, and then inscribed the bleached bones with such witticisms as “I am on the reservation at last.”

  So it went, onward to its relentless conclusion, through dozens of random massacres like the Fetterman Fight, where the Lakotas rubbed out eighty whites in forty-five minutes; the battle of the Washita, where Custer earned the praise of whites and the undying enmity of reds by surprising Black Kettle’s friendly camp, killing perhaps as many as a hundred Indians and 875 ponies; and the celebrated Battle of the Little Big Horn, where the massed forces of Lakotas and Cheyennes overran Custer and his portion of the Seventh Cavalry. But the next year, 1877, it was really all over on the Plains. Andrist writes that as1877 ended, in all the Great Plains, from Canada south, there was no longer a free tribe or a “wild” Indian. It had not taken long; in 1840 the boundary of the permanent Indian Country had been completed and the Great Plains were to belong forever to the Indians. A mere thirty-seven years later every solemn promise had been broken and no bit of ground large enough to be buried in remained to any Indian that could not—and probably would—be arbitrarily taken from him without warning.

  By 1883 the destruction of the once limitless herds of bison that had roamed the Plains was virtually complete. It had become an article of faith with Sherman and Sheridan that the quickest way to insure the destruction of the Indians was to destroy their sources of livelihood. As part of such a plan, the army attempted the large-scale destruction of the forage for both the bison and the Indian ponies. Then in 1871 a new technological wrinkle, one of the many inventions that transformed the nineteenth century into the preeminent century of progress, made the wholesale slaughter of bison even more attractive than before: the perfection of a process whereby excellent leather could be fashioned from tanned buffalo hide. It was the bison, as the Cheyenne George Bent recalled, and the horse that made his people (and the other Plains tribes) “one of the proudest and most independent men that ever lived.” Now that way of life—its humans, its animals, its grasses—was gone, and it remained only for
the whites to tie up the loose ends in California to complete the process. In 1848, when gold was discovered in that area and it was annexed as a state, there were approximately one hundred thousand Indians there; by 1859, that figure had been reduced to about thirty thousand; and by the turn of the century there were only fifteen thousand of the race once described by a devotee of the American way as a “set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks as the Lord ever permitted to infect the earth, and whose immediate and final extermination all men, except Indian agents and traders, should pray for.” To an appalling extent the prayers were answered.

  III

  A small, almost incidental, step in this march of progress was the subjugation, deportation, and drastic reduction of the Apache tribes of the Southwest. It was late and it was limited to the present states of Arizona and New Mexico with tedious campaigns into Old Mexico, but it was bloody, and it produced its fair share of heroes, villains, and fools.

  It may have been Coronado’s blundering and fruitless expedition that produced the first contact between whites and Apaches, but the reference of Pedro Castañeda de Najera, the expedition’s official chronicler, to some nomadic desert people is both obscure and passing. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, the Apaches had been identified by the Spanish as threats to the settlement of northernmost New Spain and had already assumed the guise they would wear in Spanish and American accounts forever after: savages. “They hurl themselves at danger,” wrote a Spanish missionary, “like a people who know no God nor that there is any hell.”

  Their prehistory is all but unknown, though from linguistic analysis it is believed they migrated from Alaska into the Southwest along with other Athapaskan peoples. Just when they reached their final destination remains an open and probably unanswerable question; the mid-fourteenth century has been proposed. For they were nomads who traveled far and traveled light, and when one visits a museum with Native American exhibits one finds the Apaches almost as invisible now as the Spanish and then the Americans did when they sought to track them: a few cane arrows maybe; a quirt; the tatter of a woven basket. Next to the magnificent Redware pottery of the Anasazis, it isn’t much to go on. Even their name, Apache, and their tribal divisions are subjects of scholarly debate, since by the time ethnologists began systematic work among them the tribal cultures had been severely damaged by military defeat, deportation, and disease, and much consequently had been forgotten. Morris Opler and Grenville Goodwin in the 1930s tried to establish some large, general outlines of prereservation life, and Opler concluded there once had been four main Apache tribes—the Mescaleros, Lipans, Jicarillas, and Chiricahuas—within which there were numerous bands. From what he could deduce about the Chiricahuas, they had been further subdivided into three divisions, the southernmost of which had ranged through the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, until toward the middle of the nineteenth century the pressure of Mexican settlement pushed them northward into southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. Geronimo was born into this division and identified himself as a Bedonkohe, evidently a band.

  When he dictated his life story to S. M. Barrett through his kinsman Daklugie, Geronimo had his reasons for seeking to convey the impression that the Chiricahuas had become the fierce warriors they were because of the slave-hunting expeditions of the Mexicans. There is some truth to this, or at least this much: the Mexicans did make slave raids on the Chiricahuas and eventually found that people so hostile and resourceful an enemy that they began offering a bounty on Apache scalps. But the likelihood is strong that the Chiricahuas were skilled in the arts of warfare by the time they reached Mexico. They hunted, to be sure, with clubs, spears, bows, and arrows (though somewhere along the way down from Alaska they had developed a taboo against fishing), and they may have raised a few melons and squashes on streamside plots in the valleys. But by the time we have any accounts of them they seem far too skilled in war to have been simply embattled hunters and gatherers, and they had the nomad-warrior’s characteristic contempt for settled peoples. Indeed, a careful reading of Geronimo’s account of Chiricahua culture suggests that the periodic raid of the settlements was regarded as a legitimate economic activity, something a band might undertake when supplies of meat or ammunition or guns ran low or the hunting was bad, or possibly out of a mingled boredom and hatred of the Mexicans for their depredations against the people. And the inevitable consequence of the raid was that there would be casualties, especially since the Mexican villagers were always better armed than the Chiricahuas. Chiricahua culture required a death to be avenged, and so a grieving Chiricahua brave was sooner or later obliged to recruit a party to take the warpath down into Mexico, to Janos or Casas Grandes or Nacozari or Carrizal. Exacting their revenge, the party would disappear northward again into mountainous retreats where only other Apaches would dare to go. And then the raid, the casualties, the warpath, and the old cycle kicked over again.

  By the time the white Americans were declaring their independence from their imperialist oppressors, the Spanish had been at war with these red guerrillas for over a century —a century of raids, killings, punitive expeditions, isolated murders, despoiled pack trains, bodies rotting in the sun or frozen like cordwood in the high mountains. Now they began a determined drive destined to push the Apaches northward out of Mexico into areas where they were attacked by their hereditary enemies, the Comanches. Caught in such an accidental pincers movement, the Apaches dwindled in numbers but not in toughness.

  From childhood they raised their males to be tireless, deep-chested runners, skilled rustlers, resourceful hiders, agile hand-to-hand combatants. Their women were expected to be adept at striking a camp quickly, establishing a new one, and equally skilled at raising children and tending to the horses. In the bitter years of the white-Apache wars, some women also achieved honor as warriors who rode with the men.

  As soon as I was old enough to understand, recalled an Apache man, “I was told who were our enemies.” So began his apprenticeship in raiding and warfare. A Chiricahua, he learned, might often be at a disadvantage—outnumbered, unhorsed, outgunned—but he should never be outfought or outmaneuvered. “My son,” his tutor in warfare would instruct him,

  you know no one will help you in this world. You must do something. You run to that mountain and come back. That will make you strong. My son, you know no one is your friend, not even your sister, your father, or your mother. Your legs are your friends; your brain is your friend; your eyesight is your friend; your hair is your friend; your hands are your friends; you must do something with them.

  Someday you will be with people who are starving. You will have to get something for them. If you go somewhere, you must beat the enemy who are attacking you before they get over the hill.... Before they beat you, you must get in front of them ... and bring them back dead. Then all the people will be proud of you. Then you will be the only man. Then all the people will talk about you. That is why I talk to you in this way.

  The boy learned to rise before dawn and run up a nearby mountain. Another morning he would be ordered into an icy stream. He was required to run four miles holding a mouthful of water without spilling or swallowing any. He took part in wrestling tournaments with his peers to acquire toughness and agility in hand-to-hand combat. He took part also in slingshot battles where the penalty for lack of agility might well be a broken bone or a blinded eye. All of this was supervised by a man recognized for his superior talents as a warrior, and he was a stern, relentless instructor, for he knew well this was not play he sponsored but a matter of life and death. One Chiricahua boy left oral testimony to how much he and his peers came to hate Geronimo for the rigors he had put them through when he supervised their training.

  When at last the training was complete and the warrior-tutor was satisfied he had imparted all the knowledge he could, then he would step back and in a sense regard his pupil almost as if he were a work of art
: a young man honed to the fineness of a bone-pointed missile and hungering to be talked of for exploits in battle. The Chiricahuas were not big (Mangas Coloradas and Cochise were notable exceptions), but even the American troopers who became their mortal adversaries acknowledged that no tougher, smarter, or more perfectly formed warriors ever fought. If the tribal culture aimed to produce a narrow and singular talent, and one that must give us a long pause for thought, it superlatively succeeded.

  IV

  Originally the Apaches seemed friendly to the white Americans, but this was probably because neither represented a threat to the other. This was in 1807, when Zeb Pike was stumbling around lost in the desert and probably glad to see some other people out there. Relations were bound to worsen with increased contact, considering the principals involved. In 1837 two white traders killed an Apache chief, but widespread trouble was averted.

  It could not be averted after October 1860, from which time we can date the Apache wars ending only when Geronimo and Naiche surrendered the remnants of their band in the late summer of 1886. In that October, a man named Ward beat his half-breed son so savagely that the boy ran away. When Ward sobered up, he told everybody that the Chiricahua chief Cochise had stolen the boy and some stock as well. A punitive expedition was mounted by the soldiers, but before they could chastise Cochise he came in with his head men to protest his innocence.