Tag: Apache Wars

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“For every Apache killed, he took many lives.”

I’ve been re-reading Lance Blyth’s Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880. It offers fresh insights into the Apache Wars from the perspective of the people of northern Mexico.

I hope to have more to say about the book’s overall theme in a future post, but first I want to focus on the short passage (p. 196) devoted to Nana’s Raid. Blyth adds a couple of interesting details, noting that Mata Ortiz was in pursuit of the raiders when they crossed the border. Presumably the Mexicans had taken the field in response to the attacks on the surveying party and other travelers along the Chihuahua Road as the raiders set out from the Sierra Madre at the end of June.

Beyond that, Blyth offers precise statistics on the raid: seven fights, 12 ranches and towns attacked, five soldiers and 30 civilians killed and “at least” 25 wounded.

He doesn’t specify these events so I don’t know if he counts the cluster of ranches around Garcia and the tent camp of Gold Dust and (possibly) an attack on Seboyeta as towns, but certainly the raiders struck at least a dozen ranches. I would list eight encounters as fights involving U.S. military personnel or civilian possemen: Alamo Canyon, the San Andres Mountains, Red Canyon, Monica Spring, Carrizo Canyon, the Cuchillo Negros, Wild Horse Canyon and Gavilan Canyon.

I count 8 soldiers and 64 civilians killed in New Mexico Territory by Nana and his raiders, another 25 wounded (some so badly they never fully recovered) and 14 taken captive – only about half of those ever reported recovered.

Whatever the exact count, we can all agree with Kaywaykla that, “Usen had not commanded that we love our enemies. Nana did not love his; and he was not content with an eye for an eye, nor a life for a life. For every Apache killed, he took many lives.”

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Hatch’s Report

In re-checking my footnotes I came across one reference that had apparently vaporized, and I reluctantly removed the cited quote from the final draft of Tracking Nana. I say reluctantly because in at least one respect, Colonel Hatch’s report   to Gen. Pope supports my supposition that Lt. Guilfoyle was drawn off the trail of the main body of raiders somewhere along Alamocita Creek and wasted a couple of days tracking the decoys off to the west before they dispersed. I’ve tracked down the two relevant pages from the Secretary’s Annual Report for 1881 and posted them under resources.

 

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Death in the Desert

This story reminded me of the old picture above, which appeared in the June 2014 Wild West.  This was also an Arizona case, and I believe the skeleton’s location might have been the country around where Roosevelt Dam was built sometime before 1910. I don’t know anyone ever identified the dead man, however. The skull in the more recent case has been ID’d but there’s no hint as to where the rest of his remains rest of how they came to be separated from his head, or how he came to be out in the desert in the first place.

Nana and his warriors left quite a few corpses in the mountains and desert, of course. I’ve seen a couple of graves myself and can guess where there are others. But it’s likely some were never found or discovered so much later they were never identified as the old man’s victims.

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The Monsoon and the Raid

I became so engrossed in the maps cited in my last post and in recapping this year’s rainy season that I never quite got around to the point I wanted to make: the key role the 1881 monsoon played in Nana’s Raid.

Having spent more than 70 years living outdoors in the Southwest he needed no calendar to track the seasons. The monsoon traditionally runs from around the Fourth of July to the end of September, and the old fox planned his foray to take advantage of those rains. Filling springs and waterholes otherwise dry during much of the year offered the raiders a much wider selection of watering places for themselves and their stock. The Army had the advantage in manpower but a shortage of horses; by using his infantry to guard water sources, Col. Hatch might hope to thwart the raiders’ progress or even trap them as Col. Grierson had trapped Victorio at Rattlesnake Springs in Texas the previous year. Multiplying the number of water sources scattered across the territory greatly reduced the effectiveness of that tactic.

While the summer storms made the roads and trails more difficult to travel in localized and unpredictable ways, this affected their adversaries far more than the Apaches, who were justly famous for their ability to travel fast over the worst terrain. The Army’s wagons and heavy cavalry horses were more restricted in the routes they could travel, and so more likely to get mired in the muddier low country.

The newly-constructed railroads were particularly vulnerable to the rains as well, although Nana probably did not realize that at the time. The crude trestles bridging the numerous arroyos cutting across the right of way were washed out by local flash floods and as a result Hatch was unable to bring two companies of the 9th down from Colorado to join in the chase.

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‘A good story, well told.’

“I like a good story, well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.” – Mark Twain

For me, Lt. George Burnett’s account of the Cuchillo Negro fight is one such tale. It’s the best first person account by a participant on either side of the raid that I’ve found, although I’m pretty sure others exist somewhere. Placida’s corrida is moving and poetic and I believe you hear her authentic voice through the lyrics, but the events retold are filtered through the composer’s dramatic sense and so are less likely to be factually reliable. (Which is why few if any historical movies are true to the known facts.)

Although written 15 years after the event in support of his old first sergeant’s bid for a Medal of Honor, Burnett’s letter is a trained soldier’s straightforward account of what was almost certainly the worst day of his military career (until his horse fell on him 10 years later). He’s careful not to directly indict his commander, but the bare facts are sufficiently damning.

According to Lt. Burnett, Lt. Valois failed to come up in support as previously agreed, was separately engaged by the hostiles and might well have been overwhelmed had not Burnett come to his rescue. As it was Valois was driven from the field. What’s far worse, in his retreat he abandoned three wounded men as well as a number of his horses.

If that was the case it’s hard to understand why Col. Hatch didn’t bring him up on charges. There may have been mitigating circumstances, so I’d like to see Valois’ report before I made up my mind as to either his tactical skill in the field or his personal courage. But if Burnett’s version of the day’s events is at all accurate – and it’s confirmed by the subsequent MoH citations – it’s unlikely the men of the 9th ever trusted Valois again. Abandoning your wounded to the enemy was the one unforgivable sin on either side of the Apache Wars.

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‘Chasing Shadows’

I’m re-reading Hatfield’s Chasing Shadows, an excellent, in-depth history of a century of border disorder as viewed from the Mexican side. It’s a thoroughly researched (and extensively footnoted) work of scholarship with a unique perspective so far as I know. All our popular histories necessarily address the long and bloody conflict in the Southwest from the American point of view. Hatfield draws heavily on primary Mexican sources to provide new insights into incidents like Captain Crawford’s death, as one example. Plus the book places the Apache Wars in the context of all the Indian depredation, banditry, foreign invasion, filibustering and rebellion occurring along the whole length of the border, beginning before the Mexican-American War and continuing into the 20th Century.   Exploring the significance of the Yaqui and Mayo rebellions  in shaping Mexican efforts to suppress the Apache menace really helps in understanding the whole period.