Apache Campaigns - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

Apache Campaigns: The Mission in 1875
In 1875 in the far reaches of the North American continent, at a place then called Arizona
Territory, the U.S. Army had its hands full. It was a small army, only 18,000 men in the cavalry
and infantry, a mere constabulary by European standards. Made up largely of immigrant Irish,
English and German recruits, it had the advantage of being officered by some ready Civil War
veterans, some from the NCO ranks rewarded with commissions. They found their arms (the
model 1873 single shot, .45 Springfield rifles and carbines, and the .45 single action model 1872
Army Colt revolver) to be a further advantage in skirmishes with Indians who only lately were
coming into possession of some of the American firearms and still often were armed with only the
bow and arrow. Their rifles and carbines were breach-loaders, allowing them to be reloaded
while in the saddle. But their disadvantages were weighty enough to throw the scales in favor of
their adversary—the Apache.
The Apaches, a group that embraced bands ranging from Arizona’s Salt River to the
Texas panhandle and south to the northern Mexican provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua, were a
warrior nation. They were trained from youth in the art of mobile warfare and adeptness at the
raiding lifestyle brought status in their military society. In southeastern Arizona and southwestern
New Mexico there were concentrated Apache bands that established for themselves a particularly
formidable military reputation, owing in large part to a cadre of capable leaders.
The Chiricahuas, named for their homeland in those mountains which dominate the western
side of the Arizona and New Mexico border, laughed at the patrols of the U.S. Army under
the generalship of Cochise until his death in 1874. His centralized leadership gave way to several
lesser captains. They were Juh, Chihuahua, Loco, Ulzanna, Chato and Geronimo, all leading
their ever-shifting factions and ad hoc raiding parties.
The Warm Springs Apaches (variously known as the Ojo Calientes, Mimbres and Copper
Springs Apaches) roamed central and southern New Mexico and south into Chihuahua, Mexico.
They boasted a succession of leaders like Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves) who watched the first
American military formation, Cooke’s Mormon battalion, arrive ominously on this bleak landscape,
and his successor, Victorio, who sought for his people a better solution than the relegation
to a distant reservation, only to die in battle in 1880. He was replaced in the field by the
septuagenarian Nana who led the Warm Springs remnants on their final defiant march.
The Warm Springs and Chiricahua Apaches possessed these advantages: They knew the
terrain and how to scrape sustenance from it. That familiarity with valley, arroyo, cave and crag
had bred in the denizens of the Sonoran desert a physical stamina that allowed them to out
distance, out climb, and out scatter any U.S. Army pursuit. It imprinted upon their minds a map
of every water hole and yielded up an instant inventory of the best ambush positions. This
inhospitable desert, a country so harsh that it could not be traversed, according to one U.S.
officer, without “the aid of profanity,” 1 taught the longtime residents caution, resourcefulness,
and patience, the requirements for survival in a forge-hot environment in which little survived.
General George Crook had just, in 1873, completed a persistent and tireless campaign in
the Tonto Basin against Apaches and Yavapais. He had his patrols relentlessly on the trail of the
Indians, forever tightening the cordon until he closed in on them at the Battle of Skull Cave on 28
December 1872 and at Turret Peak on 27 March 1873. His tactics worked, he was rewarded
with a promotion to brigadier general ahead of many senior officers, and reassigned to another
A MAGAZINE OF THE FORT HUACHUCA MUSEUM
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