Soldiers vs. Apaches: One Last Time at Guadalupe Canyon » HistoryNet - From the World's Largest History Magazine Publisher

The bullet ripped through the Apache warrior’s body. He grimaced with pain and tightly clutched his Springfield rifle, but he did not fall. Blood streamed from the wound as Adelnietze ran from the 7th Cavalry troopers who had attacked his small camp. The shot brought the other four Apaches in camp to full alert. The only other warrior there, the furtive and somewhat infamous Massai, immediately fled down the rock-strewn mountainside and vanished, unscathed by the troopers’ bullets. Three Apache women followed the men and disappeared into the rocks and brush.

This 19th-century confrontation was not so different from other brief, if violent, encounters between the military and the free-roaming Apaches of the Southwest. But what’s more noteworthy is the date — May 17, 1896, nearly 10 years after Chiricahua Apache war leader Geronimo surrendered for the last time. The 7th Cavalry attack took place in or near Guadalupe Canyon, which straddles the Arizona-New Mexico border and continues on into Mexico. Based on records available today, it is unclear whether the fight took place in Arizona Territory, New Mexico Territory or Mexico. In 1896 no border-crossing agreement existed that would have allowed American troops to legally enter Mexico in pursuit of renegade Apaches. Contemporary newspapers inferred that the fight took place in Mexico, and those reports drew the attention of the adjutant general’s office in Washington, D.C., which sent a communication to the 7th Cavalry’s commander, Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner, inquiring as to the location of the fight. Sumner’s seemingly equivocal response neither affirmed nor denied that the fight took place in Mexico. Regardless of where the fight occurred, the soldiers involved were stationed in Arizona Territory. The confrontation was the last fight in the U.S. Army’s final Apache campaign.

The surrender of Geronimo to Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles in September 1886 at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona Territory, has generally been viewed as the end to Apache hostilities. In fact, the government declared as much after his surrender. The conquered Apaches were either settled on reservations or banished by the government to such distant places as Florida to serve out their lives as prisoners of war. Nonetheless, small bands of free Apaches, often called ‘marauders’ or ‘hostiles’ by the military, continued to give the Army trouble up to 1896. Author and historian Lynda Sánchez, of Lincoln, N.M, who is considered an expert on the remnant Apache bands of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, notes that there were many violent confrontations on both sides of the border until way into the 1930s. But these confrontations with so-called bronco Apaches did not involve the military; instead, they were spearheaded by local authorities or vigilante groups such as the Francisco Fimbres expeditions of the 1930s.

Warfare was a way of life for the Apaches, and they started fighting Spaniards in the 1500s, followed by Mexicans and, finally, Americans. Conflicts between Apaches and white explorers began as early as the 1830s. The U.S. Army started actively fighting Apaches in the 1850s, and by the 1880s the decades of white emigration into and through Arizona Territory had all but sealed the Apaches’ fate. The Indians resisted, but superior weapons, a seemingly endless supply of soldiers and a relentless drive to settle the land dashed the Apaches’ hopes of ranging free as they had done for centuries. Brigadier General George Crook’s winter campaign of 1872-73 broke Indian resistance in north-central Arizona Territory. The campaigns against Victorio and Geronimo in the 1870s and 1880s destroyed the final large-scale Apache resistance to the settlers coming into what was once primarily Apache country. The last major clash on Arizona soil between the Army and the Apaches occurred on July 17, 1882, at a place called Big Dry Wash, north of present-day Payson. One cavalryman was killed, while about 16 Apaches fell that day.

In 1896, to cope with the small bands of roving Apaches who were continuing the old lifestyle of raiding and running free, military officials asked the adjutant general in Washington to increase the number of Indian scouts from 40 to 70. One small group of Chiricahuas — three men, three women and one boy — had escaped the night before Geronimo and Naiche’s band was brought to Skeleton Canyon to formally surrender to General Miles in September 1886. Ten years later, one of these Chiricahuas, Adelnietze, would figure prominently in the Guadalupe Canyon fight.

The other warrior involved in that May 1896 fight, Massai, was a member of Loco’s Chihenne band of Chiricahua Apaches. Massai probably caused as much trouble as the scout-turned-outlaw Apache Kid, but much of Massai’s work may have been blamed on the Kid. Born in Arizona Territory around 1860, the Apache Kid became a scout for the Army and participated in the Battle of Big Dry Wash, General Crook’s 1883 Sierra Madre search for Geronimo and the 1885 Geronimo campaign. After getting caught up in a row at the San Carlos Reservation in 1887, he escaped, but surrendered that June. The Kid was shuttled back and forth through the legal system before he escaped again while being taken to Yuma Territorial Prison on November 2, 1889. He remained a fugitive for the rest of his life, though several men took credit for killing him at various times and locations. Contemporary accounts have Massai running with the Apache Kid at times. Massai is frequently mentioned in military reports and newspapers of the 1890s, and he is credited with killing several cowboys and miners.

Massai, according to Jason Betzinez’s I Fought with Geronimo, was being transported on a train in 1882 with other Apache scouts when he learned that his band’s leader, Loco, and others had broken out of the San Carlos Reservation and were headed for Mexico. Massai jumped off the train. Four years later, he repeated the feat in a more celebrated escape. In September 1886, he escaped from the train that was shipping him back east along with about 400 other peaceful Chiricahuas who had been rounded up at Fort Apache. Massai exited the Florida-bound train in Missouri and returned to Arizona Territory, on foot and alone. Certainly, he was one of the last free Apache fighters, but it’s hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Massai. One 1953 story claims that he wiped out an entire Mexican cavalry unit ‘by bringing them into a shallow gorge just in time to be swept away by a mountain cloudburst.’

Although the U.S. Army was in the field throughout the early 1890s until 1896, the only fight with Apaches took place on March 7, 1890, when troopers of the 4th and 10th Cavalry regiments attacked a small band of Apaches on the Salt River, 30 miles north of Globe, Arizona Territory, killing two and capturing three. Soldiers chased Massai, the Apache Kid and the other bronco Apaches throughout the early 1890s, but they never seemed to catch up to them. At mid-decade, Apache activity increased. Bronco Apaches murdered Elizabeth Merrill and her father, Horatio Merrill, on December 3, 1895, near Solomonville, Arizona Territory, and on March 28, 1896, they killed Alfred Hands at his cabin on the eastern side of the Chiricahua Mountains (near present-day Portal, Ariz.). Citizens and newspapers in the territory clamored for action by the military.

The Army undertook an aggressive campaign in April and May 1896 to chase down the hostile Indians. As part of the campaign, Captain James M. Bell of the 7th Cavalry, stationed at Fort Grant, Arizona Territory, sent out 1st Lt. Sedgwick Rice to search for renegades. Minnesota-born Rice had become a second lieutenant in October 1883, and then a first lieutenant in May 1892, which was also the month he was transferred into the 7th Cavalry.

Rice departed San Simon Station, a railroad stop and town on the Southern Pacific Railroad, on May 11, 1896, with a detachment of three Indian scouts and four troopers. Rice and his men moved southward, passing through the Peloncillos, a mountain range that runs parallel to the Arizona-New Mexico border, until they cut a trail of horses and Apache Indians on May 12. The scouts told Rice that there were five horses and three Indians ahead and that four of the five horses were shod with rawhide and the other with iron shoes. The scouts also identified the Indian tracks as those of one man and two women. Darkness was quickly approaching, though, so the troopers and scouts went into camp for the night.

Early the next morning, Rice’s detachment continued to follow the trail south. One day later, on May 14, they reached a point where the trail veered away from the mountains and headed for the Animas Valley in New Mexico Territory — a clear passage to Mexico historically used by Apaches when they fled the United Sates. At that point, the command met some troopers under 2nd Lt. Nathan King Averill, also of the 7th Cavalry, who were scouting the area. An 1890 West Point graduate who had been with the 7th for nearly a year, Averill had engaged some Apaches in a skirmish six days earlier, the Army’s first fight with Apaches since 1890. His command had stayed around in hopes of intercepting the Indians. Rice headed toward Averill’s camp in Guadalupe Canyon to confer with him.

Guadalupe Canyon, a natural, protected pass leading into Mexico from Arizona Territory, had been used by the Apaches for a long time as an escape route. Realizing its strategic importance, General Crook and others had frequently posted soldiers there. During the Geronimo campaign, a small redoubt in Guadalupe Canyon had been attacked by some of Geronimo’s warriors in June 1885. After the Apache leader surrendered in Mexico in 1886, he had returned to Arizona Territory through Guadalupe Canyon under the protection of Lieutenant Charles Gatewood.

Before Rice could reach the camp in Guadalupe Canyon, Averill rode up and informed him that the Apaches had crossed the border about three miles west of Cloverdale, a New Mexican ranch just east of the Arizona Territory border.

The combined forces of Rice and Averill now rode together to see 7th Cavalry Lieutenant Edwin C. Bullock, who was camped nearby. That evening Rice sent a courier to his commanding officer informing him of the day’s events and then made preparations for the next movement by the troopers. Rice believed that the Indians were still in the vicinity, and he planned to scout the mountains in and around Guadalupe Canyon.