Other Chiricahua Apaches Escape San Carlos (1881-1885)

Other Chiricahuas left and returned to San Carlos twice between 1881 and 1884. When they escaped, they traveled to mountains below the U.S. – Mexico border.

“The Chiricahuas … led a Jack-in-the-box sort of existence, now popping into an agency and now popping out, anxious … to live at peace with the whites, but unable to do so from lack of nourishment. When they went upon the reservation, rations in abundance were promised for themselves and their families. A difference of opinion soon arose with the agent as to what constituted a ration, the wicked Indians laboring under the delusion that it was enough food to keep the recipient from starving to death…. To the credit of the agent it must be said that he made a praise-worthy but ineffectual effort to alleviate the pangs of hunger by a liberal distribution of hymn-books among his wards. The perverse Chiricahuas, not being able to digest works of that nature … made up their minds to sally out from San Carlos and take refuge in the more hospitable wilderness of the Sierra Madre.” (Captain John Gregory Bourke, Third. S. Calvary, Staff Member, General George Crook, Commander, Department of Arizona. An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, 1886:3-4. )

On May 17, 1885, Naiche, Chihuahua, Geronimo, and 131 other Chiricahuas departed San Carlos for the final time. About 400 of the Chiricahua remained peacefully on the reservation. Federal troops, led by Apache scouts, pursued and killed or captured many who escaped. Geronimo and Naiche later explained why they left.

“I was living peaceably and well, but I did not leave on my own accord. Had I so left it would have been right to blame me; but as it is, blame those men who started this talk about me…. I learned from the American and Apache soldiers … that the Americans were going to arrest me and hang me, and so I left….” (Geronimo, statement to General Crook on March 25, 1886, about why he left San Carlos in 1885.)

“We were indicted by grand juries for crimes of which we were innocent. With our property stolen, at the hands of merciless agents, and indicted for the crimes of others, we saw that we were in for it and would probably be killed anyway, so we concluded to take our chances and escape with our lives and liberty…. You ask of my past. What of my future?” (Naiche in response to the question, “What led to the last campaign?” asked in March1887 by William Hosea Ballou, the Chicago Tribune. “Apaches at Fort Pickens”.)

Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, Commander of Indian Scouts at Fort Apache, confirmed what Geronimo and Naiche said.

“By an act of Congress … the jurisdiction of certain crimes committed by Indians upon their reservations was transferred to the civil courts…. (T)he Chiricahuas … (were) thoroughly advised of the law, its operation and its consequences, and … carefully instructed (about) what offenses subjected them to arrest and delivery to civil authority for trial…. And on May 17th, Geronimo and his band left the reservation. There is (no) doubt in my mind that this act of Congress was the moving cause of their doing so.” (Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, Sixth U. S. Calvary, Commander of Indian Scouts, Fort Apache, from his Journal, in Kraft 2005:7-8. )

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Apaches Before 1886