Apache Campaigns - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

command of the China Relief Expedition during the Boxer uprising. He was made a lieutenant
general in 1904 and became Chief of Staff of the Army, retiring in 1906. He died in Los
Angeles in 1914 after helping to establish the Southwest Museum. He commanded Fort Huachuca
from October 1883 to June 1884.
Second Lieut. Thomas Cruse was at the fight with Capt. Kramer’s 95 E Troop, Sixth
Cavalry, and he would later win a Medal of Honor for his part in the battle. This is his first-hand
account.
Our patrol came back, accompanied by Captain Chaffee. Chaffee reported to Colonel
[his brevet rank] Evans that he was bivouacked beyond us. He had his Troop I, Sixth Cavalry
and McDowell’s company of Indian Scouts, commanded by Lieutenant George Morgan. The
celebrated Al Sieber, great frontiersman and expert of experts on Apaches, was Chaffee’s
Chief of Scouts.
“I’m sure that the hostiles are just a little way ahead,” Chaffee told the Colonel.
“Sieber thinks they expect close pursuit and his idea is that they’ll stop at General Springs to
fight. That’s a steep cliff where the trail climbs out of Tonto Basin onto the Crook Road.
Sieber feels that they’ll expect to cut up even a superior number of troops, because of their
position.”
“Well,” Colonel Evans said, “you go on tommorrow just as if you were acting alone.
Your troop is mounted on white horses and so is Converse’s troop of the Third. I’ll put
Converse at the head of my column. So if the Indians do stop to fight, you’ll have two ‘white
horse troops’ to throw against them. The rest of my force can be placed wherever seems best
for attack. It may confuse the hostiles, to face two troops where they’re expecting one.”
Chaffee returned to his camp, and, after a quiet night, at daylight of July 17 we moved
cautiously forward. Chaffee climbed the Tonto rim in our sight, without rousing a shot. We
followed him to General Springs where the sign was plain of our hostiles’ camp. It looked as
if the Apaches were pushing straight on toward the Navajo country and we cursed the prospect
of a tedious campaign in that rough, waterless region. But within a mile a courier
galloped back to us.
Chaffee had found the hostiles camped on the far side of a deep, narrow branch of
Canon Diablo, or Big Dry Wash—Chevelon’s Fork, as we called it. Evidently, the courier
said, the Indians were ready to give Chaffee the fight of his life.
Converse and his white horse troop advanced at the pounding gallop. Word was
passed along our column and we went forward rapidly. There were about three miles to
cover, and all the way we could hear casual shots, then crashing volleys.
Lieutenant Morgan, with Al Sieber and the Scouts, had discovered the Apaches waiting
among the pines of a high mesa across the canon. Chaffee had dismounted his men, and sent
a few to the rim. With sight of them the hostiles, holding the trail seven hundred yards away
on the far wall of the gigantic gash in the Mogollon Mountains, had opened fire. When
Converse arrived he dismounted his troop in plain view, sent the horses back and advanced in
line of skirmishers along the canon brink—as if intending to descend the trail to the canon
floor, a thousand feet below. Both sides immediately opened a heavy fire.
The Apaches had what seemed a perfect position. For miles on each side of the trail
the canon walls were almost perpendicular and every foot of the trail from rim to rim was
covered by the Indian rifles. In that parklike pine forest there was no underbrush or shubbery
A MAGAZINE OF THE FORT HUACHUCA MUSEUM
125