Capt. John G. Bourke and the Indian Wars

CAPT. JOHN G. BOURKE A SPECIAL BREED OF FRONTIER OFFICER

JOHN G. BOURKE CROUCHED IN THE BONE-CHILLING DARKNESS BEYOND THE LIGHT CAST BY THE FLICKERING EMBERS OF THE APACHE RAIDERS' CAMPFIRES. THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT HAD SURVIVED SOME OF THE BLOODIEST FIGHTING OF THE CIVIL WAR, EARNED THE CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR AS an enlisted man, and graduated from West Point. Now he found service in a war of a different type, waged in feints and thousand-mile chases and terrible ambushes without mercy.

He didn't know it then, but the confusing, exhausting, demoralizing war of attrition with the last Indian tribes to take up arms against the United States would consume the rest of his life, estrange him from his own culture, and convert him from one of the Apaches' toughest foes into one of their most loyal friends.

But that night crouching in the winter dark in the Mescal Mountains, all he could picture was the bodies of the people in the wagon train this band had attacked a few days before. One man with a wagon load of patent medicines they'd dragged into a fire, lanced, shot with several arrows, scalped, cut out his heart, bashed in his skull, and slashed his throat. An unforgettable sight.

Bourke's detachment picked up the trail at the scene of the slaughter, followed its twists and turns through a rocky wilderness, and finally found and surrounded the Indian camp.

The Army often tried such maneuvers but rarely succeeded. This night, however, they did, largely because the Apache raiders had drunk most of the patent medicine they'd stolen and were sprawled about the camp in various stages of stupor.

One old man rose to tend the fire. "The light played fitfully upon his sharp features and gaunt form, disclosing every muscle," Bourke wrote in his diary, which he later turned into On the Border with Crook, a compelling account of the Sioux and Apache wars. An alert wood gatherer raised the alarm. The soldiers opened fire, with devastating effect.

Bourke might have listed the encounter as an Army triumph. Instead he described in vivid detail a warrior carrying a child on his shoulders, both killed with a single shot. "It was a ghastly spectacle, a field of blood won with but slight loss to ourselves," he wrote.

The description of the ambush marked the early, eager days of Bourke's Indian fight-ing. But it also hints at the candor, decency, and persistent sense of honor that gradually transformed Bourke's view of the Indians, his own government, and the triumphant white civilization. Fearless, righteous, and irre-pressibly curious, Bourke started as a con-ventional young warrior but ended as an internationally acclaimed ethnologist, author, and embittered officer.

Despite a formidable scientific and literary reputation, promotion and peace of mind eluded Bourke, in part because of his stub-born support of the Apaches and his scathing criticism of officialdom - from the President on down. At the beginning of his career, he hung in his tent the scalp and ears of an Apache brought to him by one of his In-dian scouts. At the end of his career, he sacrificed promotion in a lonely advo-cacy for Geronimo, Chato, and other Apaches he helped harry out of their tradition-al homelands.

One of seven chil-dren born to Irish immigrants, Bourke acted always out of his own inflexible and exact-ing code of honor. He openly criticized his French teacher for covering another student's cheat-ing. The teacher slapped Bourke, who soundly cursed the academician and walked resolutely away from school, ac-cording to an account in Paper Medicine Man, Joseph Porter's absorbing biography.

The young man left school, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Union Army at 16. He served in the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry and fought at Stone's River, where his unit suffered 40 percent casualties. Private Bourke earned a Medal of Honor for rallying his men and leading a charge after all the of-ficers were killed. He went on to fight at Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Atlanta before mustering out in 1865. An obses-sive, lifelong diary keeper, Bourke wrote little about the Civil War, which he referred

AFTER HIS UNIT SUFFERED 40 PERCENT CASUALTIES AND ALL OF HIS OFFICERS WERE KILLED, PRIVATE BOURKE EARNED A MEDAL OF HONOR BY RALLYING HIS MEN AND LEADING A CHARGE.

to as those "fearful days of carnage."

He wrangled an appointment to West Point after the war and was graduated at 23. The Army sent him out West for the climactic decades of the Indian wars in both Arizona and the Great Plains. He'd already developed a forceful and unyielding character, softened by his deep loyalty, voracious mind, and Irish charm. Intelligent, quick-tempered, and quick to judge, he also proved amiably willing to change his mind. Industrious and modest, he despised shirkers and cowards. He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed about 165, and regarded the world through "deep-set gray eyes under bushy eyebrows." He also had a prominent nose and the heavy mustache of the period. A charming ladies man, witty, and the "best storyteller in the Army," he became the center of attraction around the campfire.

Initially his journals and books depict a young man caught up in the adrenaline rush of the Apache wars in which small units of soldiers and Indian scouts picked up the trail of a marauding band and followed it with awesome tenacity across some of the roughest wilderness in North America. These sweeping expeditions could consume several months and cover 1,200 torturous miles, as the soldiers tried to flush the small Apache bands out of their sanctuaries.

As Bourke wrote in his memoirs: "The endurance of their warriors while on raids was something which extorted expressions of wonder from all white men who ever had anything to do with their subjugation. Seventy-five miles a day was nothing at all unusual for them to march when pursued. Their vision is so keen they can discern movements of troops or the approach of wagon trains for a distance of 30 miles, and so inured are they to the torrid heats of the burning sands of Arizona that they seem to care nothing for temperatures under which the American soldier droops and dies."

Spanish, Mexican, and American armies pursued these ultimate guerrilla warriors over centuries without much success. Bourke's early campaigning only served to underscore the difficulties. That all changed when command fell to Gen. George Crook, a noted but unconventional Indian fighter willing to undertake wildly controversial measures to deal with the Apache threat. Crook quickly concluded that only Apache scouts working with elite troops could hope to wear down the renegade Apaches. But working effectively with Apache scouts required a special breed of officer, men who could keep up with the tireless Apaches, rise above the prejudices of their age, and display the qualities of justice and courage necessary to lead the fiercely individualistic Apache scouts in the field.

Fortunately Bourke and a handful of other officers possessed these qualities in abundance. In fact, Bourke's long intimate association with the scouts during the months of rugged campaigning drew him into ethnological studies of Southwestern tribes, weaned him from the racial arrogance of his culture, and led him to forge lifelong friendships with many of the Indians. His diaries mingle hairraising battles with his dawning appreciation of the personal qualities and cultural richness of his enemies. He spent hours cajoling myths from his friends, singing Army drinking songs in sweat lodges full of scouts, and coaxing medicine men into letting him examine their medicine bundles. The scouts soon dubbed him Captain Cactus, made him a de facto member of an Apache clan, and became fiercely protective of him in the field. All the while, he scribbled furiously in his journal. These notes he later shaped into several popular histories of the period and internationally acclaimed ethnological studies of the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, Sioux, and Apache.

Throughout it all, he lived a life of adventure and escalating disillusionment. He chronicled the massacre of Apaches cornered in a cave overlooking the Salt River; rode with Crook to defeat Crazy Horse; charged virtually alone into a mass of milling Sioux to rescue a wounded, unhorsed bugler; endured deadly starvation marches through South Dakota winters; chased Geronimo's band into the secret heart of Mexico's Sierra Madres; recorded Geronimo's fateful agreement to surrender; battled Mexican rebels as commander of a fort in Texas; married and raised three daughters; and finally waged a fierce decades-long bureaucratic battle to defend Crook's reputation and methods. He chronicled Crook's last great campaign against the Apaches, as he took a unit composed mostly of Apache scouts and plunged off the edge of the map to hunt down Geronimo, Nana, Naitche, Loco, and several hundred followers in the heart of the Sierra Madres. They were guided by Tzoe, a warrior from among Geronimo's own. Known to the soldiers as "Peaches," for his boyish looks, Tzoe was a White Mountain Apache who'd become disenchanted with Geronimo's violent ways.

After a difficult journey, they fought a brief pitched battle with members of Geronimo's band. They then negotiated the surrender of the renegades, who were demoralized by the sudden appearance of Crook and his scouts in their supposedly secure fortress.

But just as they were about to return, a white man peddling whisky and rumors of executions planned in Arizona prompted Geronimo and some 35 warriors to flee. Although hundreds returned with Crook, his failure to bring in Geronimo spawned rumors he'd been somehow betrayed by the scouts. Ultimately this led to Crook's removal as commander.

Gen. Nelson Miles then took command, discharged the Apache scouts, made preparations to deport even the reservation Chiricahuas to Florida, and mobilized some 10,000 U.S. and Mexican soldiers to chase down Geronimo's little band. The efforts proved futile until Miles finally sent Lt. Charles Gatewood and two Apaches to convince Geronimo to surrender. They promised Geronimo's band would be reunited with their families, sent to a two-year exile in Florida, then returned to their reservation in Arizona.

None of that happened. To top off the betrayal, Miles also deported the Chiricahuas who'd remained peaceably on the reservation. Into the same railroad car, he loaded the Apache scouts as a somber Army band played Auld Lang Syne.

Bourke spent much of the rest of his life trying to right this wrong, which he branded in his memoirs "a most contemptible outrage."

Despite Bourke's best efforts, the Chiricahuas remained imprisoned until some 17 years after Bourke's own death in 1896, at the age of 49. Health broken by his long hard service on the frontier, he suffered for much of the last decade of his life from insomnia, agitation, depression, and bone damage from a mule kick.

Before his death, Bourke battled a persistent sense of failure. He'd risen no higher than captain, and he failed to win justice for the Apaches. He struggled with the bitter conclusion that the proud Chiricahuas had been better off battling extinction in the fastness of the Sierra Madres than languishing in the fetid confinement to which Bourke's efforts had helped bring them.

But history has been more kind in its evaluation of Bourke's life. His firsthand accounts of the Apache wars shaped most subsequent tellings, assuring at least the justice of hindsight. His anthropological field work remains an irreplaceable depiction of rich, dynamic cultures on the cusp of change. And his books offer modern readers an absorbing glimpse of life on the frontier.

Even more precious, Bourke won the admiration of his enemies. The oldest Apaches living at Cibecue and White Mountain still recall the affection expressed by their parents and grandparents for Bourke. The Apache scouts Bourke befriended in the 1870s remained his fast friends 20 years later.

Herein lies the poignant irony of Bourke's life. He came West to help defeat a warring aboriginal culture and bestow upon the Indians the blessings of "civilization." But he ended up documenting their culture and honoring their values.

The irony wasn't lost on Bourke, both cursed and blessed with clear sight and an indestructible sense of honor. And you can't help but think that when the band struck up that final chorus of Auld Lang Syne for the Apache scouts, they played for Bourke as well.