Victorio’s War

By Robert M. Utley | MHQ  | 3 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Victorio, chief of the Chihennes Apaches, softspoken in negotiations, fierce in war. National Archives.

The Chihennes knew every rocky height and sinuous crevice of the tangled land, and they knew how to position themselves on craggy elevations ideal for ambushes.

No western American Indian chief received shabbier treatment from the U.S. government than Victorio. No one had greater cause for launching a war against his oppressors. And no one demonstrated a greater mastery of guerrilla warfare. As one veteran officer summed up, Victorio was the “greatest Indian general who had ever appeared on the American continent.”

Born in the early 1820s, Victorio rose to warrior status through the intense training that shaped all Apache fighters. Short and muscular, he impressed white negotiators as sincere and soft-spoken. And while some saw in his face the merciless savage, others thought he had an agreeable countenance.

His home, Warm Springs, is nestled between the craggy, forested Black Range of the Mimbres Mountains to the south and the San Mateo Mountains to the north. The Mimbres range extends north to south about fifty miles west of the Rio Grande (in New Mexico, the river runs north to south before turning southeast at El Paso). The springs give rise to Alamosa Creek. Shadowed by the San Mateo Mountains and spurs of the Black Range, the creek flows southeast into the Rio Grande. The Chihennes relied chiefly on raiding into Mexico for subsistence, stock, and trade goods. A small Mexican village sprang up in the valley about thirty miles upstream from the Rio Grande (near modern Dusty), and there the Indians traded their plunder for arms, ammunition, and whiskey.

In the 1850s and 1860s, agents sympathetic to the Chihennes tried in vain to have the region around the springs declared a reservation. Not only were those efforts rebuffed in Washington, but in 1871 the federal government decided to move the Indians to an altogether different location more than fifty miles to the west, at the foot of the Tularosa Mountains. Even though this reservation proved too high and cold for comfort, and mining prospectors had begun to infiltrate the mountains, the government established the Tularosa Reservation.

In the summer of 1872, the army moved the Chihennes there, removing them from their sacred homeland. Instead of settling, however, Victorio and many members of his band hid in the recesses of the Black Range.

In July 1872 another peace emissary appeared. Brig. Gen. Oliver O. Howard met with Victorio, established a bond, and agreed that the Chihennes should return to Ojo Caliente. Executive action remained in abeyance, however, pending Howard’s effort to make peace with the powerful Chiricahua chief Cochise, who had ravaged Arizona for a decade. Howard succeeded, but in his mind, the creation of the Ojo Caliente reservation was conditioned on Cochise agreeing to move there. Cochise refused, and instead Howard established the Chiricahua Reservation for him in southeastern Arizona. Victorio believed, with good reason, that General Howard had promised that his band could immediately return to Ojo Caliente. Understandably, he felt betrayed.

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Tags: 19th Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Native American History, The Wild West, Westward Expansion

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