The Poisoned Pinole Treaty at Bloody Tanks

THE BATTLE AT BLODY TANKS

If you parch corn, then crush it, and mix it with sugar and spices, you create one of the dietary staples of the Old Southwest: pinole. Add water, cold or hot, and pinole makes a stomach-filling main dish. Add more water, and it becomes a hearty beverage. Indians ate and drank pinole daily. So did Spanish settlers and Mexicans, French and Anglo trappers and adventurers. When the American Army arrived, in the mid-1800s, one officer wrote wistfully, "It would be a capital addition to our own army ration." Given the widespread appeal of pinole, it's not surprising that this simple fare became a basic feature of social gatherings in early territorial Arizona. And given the intense turmoil of the 1860s and early 1870s in Arizona Territory, it's also not surprising that poisons such as strychnine sometimes found their way into pinole. Poisoned pinole became a stock feature of historical reports and the less formal accounts we know as folk history. Today it's sometimes hard to tell if the strychnine was in the pinole or only in the mind of the raconteur. No finer example of this can be found in Arizona history than the Battle at Bloody Tanks, often called the Pinole Treaty. It was January, 1864, just days after Arizona Territory had officially separated from New Mexico Territory. Lured by tales of gold, settlers and miners were flocking in. Arizona's original inhabitants Indian tribes as diverse as the Apaches, Pimas, and Yavapais were trying to adjust to these invaders of their ancestral homelands. Gold didn't interest most Indians, but a different kind of resource did: the horses, mules, sheep, and cattle the settlers brought with them. Soon enterprising Apaches and Yavapais were doing their own sort of "mining": plucking livestock from ranchers' herds. On January 5, 1864, a band of Yavapais slipped across hillsides and fields. Quietly they removed 32 mules and horses from the corral of Abraham H. Peeples, who lived near Weaverville, which was situated between presentday Prescott and Wickenburg. Then they headed east.

SOME SAY YAVAPAI RAIDERS WERE POISONED WITH STRYCHNINE IN THE FOOD SERVED DURING TREATY NEGOTIATIONS Two days later, 29 settlers and miners set out to track the stolen animals. As leader, they chose prominent central-Arizona ranch-er, miner, and entrepreneur King S. Woolsey. The short handsome Woolsey, 32, had lived in Arizona for about three years, making him an old-timer by standards of that era.

For 17 days, the vengeance-minded men hunted unsuccessfully for the Yavapais. It was easy enough to follow the trail of the missing stock across the Agua Fria River and over the Verde toward the Salt, but the Indians stayed well in the lead. Woolsey's provisions ran out, and he had to send men to the Pima villages to obtain more pinole and flour. They returned with the supplies, 45 Pima and Maricopa Indian allies, and two more settlers. One was a young man named Cyrus Lennan.

When the Pimas realized the trail Woolsey's men were following led into unfamiliar territory, they left. Sixteen Maricopa scouts stayed with the Woolsey group.

Eager to retrieve their stock before supplies ran low again, the men traveled all night on January 23, following the trail over a high mountain south of the Salt River. Finally, about sunrise the next day, they encountered the fresh tracks of women and children, then came upon a recently deserted village. Content to know he was finally approaching his quarry, Woolsey pulled back to rest.

He chose as a campsite a clearing near some small natural "tanks," places where water collected in hollows in the rock. But just as the men finished unpacking their animals, they heard war whoops from the bluffs above them. Smoke signals rose all around.

Observing that the Indians stayed about 600 yards away, Woolsey and his men pretended not to notice them. Calmly the settlers ate a meal of bread and pinole, joked about the welcome the Yavapais were giving them, and took a nap.

Finally, about noon, Woolsey walked out to meet the Indians. A chief climbed out onto an outcropping of rock and shouted defiantly, "We stole your horses and mules! And we'll continue to steal them and to kill Americans whenever we can!"

Then he added, "You'll never leave this valley alive. I have 400 warriors as well armed as you."

"There's been a mistake!" Woolsey bellowed back. "It's true we've been following the track of some animals, but it's only be-cause that is the only road we know into your country. We are great men in our own country. We have come to make a treaty."

Hesitantly, uncertainly, the Yavapai chief and 30 of his men came into the settlers' camp. While warriors watched from the hilltops, and signal fires burned, and Indian messengers came and went, Woolsey's Maricopa allies served the Yavapai guests a feast of wheat, pinole, and tobacco.

Suddenly one of the Yavapais plunged a lance into Cyrus Lennan's chest. Woolsey's men began shooting.

Soon two dozen Yavapais lay dead. Among Woolsey's party, only Lennan died; one Maricopa ally was wounded.

The settlers quickly retreated, abandoning the search for the stolen livestock. The Yava-pais didn't pursue them, and the Woolsey party arrived safely back home on February 3.

At least that's the version of the encounter Woolsey told in his official report, written from Prescott on September 14, 1864. But other accounts differ. Some state that far more stock had been stolen. Or that Woolsey never intended to make a treaty and planned the massacre in advance. Or that many more Yavapais, or far fewer, entered Woolsey's camp. Or that up to 200 Yavapais died.

But the most intriguing discrepancy relates to the pinole served to Woolsey's Yava-pai guests. For more than a century, folk history has asserted that before the Indians entered camp, Woolsey slipped strychnine into their pinole; the name Pinole Treaty was a cynical, macabre joke.

Would Woolsey have poisoned people he had invited into camp for peace talks? Did he?

Like many other Arizona Anglos of his era, Woolsey didn't hate all Indians, just those who got in his way. These he pursued ferociously, leading two other major expeditions in 1864 alone. Among other settlers he was noted for his courage, his tenacity, and his willingness to fight without pay; and he has been called, without irony, "the most successful of all Indian killers." He himself wrote bluntly, a few months after the Bloody Tanks incident, "I fight on the broad plat-form of extermination."

No firsthand account of the Bloody Tanks affair claims that the pinole that day was poisoned, but we do know Woolsey used poisoned pinole against Indian adversaries at least once the following year. In fact some writers argue that the term "Pinole Treaty" may originally have referred to that later event, and that through the convolutions of repeated telling, it has become associated erroneously with the Battle at Bloody Tanks.

Analyzing all the surviving documents closely, it becomes clear that circumstantial evidence can be used to argue persuasively both for and against poisoned pinole at Bloody Tanks. Personally I think that at the very least, Woolsey knew of the rumor of the poisoned pinole by the time he prepared his belated report on the Bloody Tanks incident eight months later.

Yet, strangely, rather than confronting the rumor and denying it, as he logically might have, he simply planted hints that would, alternately, discredit the story, disassociate him from the poisoning, or justify it.

He emphasizes that it was not he, but his Maricopa allies who prepared the pinole for the Yavapais, while he was out negotiating. Then, in a generally fast-moving report, he pauses to observe that although the Yavapais accepted the tobacco offered them, they declined the pinole.

Finally he states that before the battle, his men were low on ammunition; one inference could be that they were forced to consider alternate weapons like poison.

Other firsthand accounts appear to be written with an eye to refuting the rumor without overtly addressing it. One combatant, who wrote a report for the Sacramento Union signed with the initials J.K.S., stated that before the Woolsey party fled, the men stopped to retrieve the pinole their dead victims had left behind. Certainly if the pinole had been poisoned, the settlers wouldn't have saved it.

Still, like conspirators who disagree on the details of a concocted tale, J.K.S. and Woolsey disagreed on some important points.

Woolsey said the Yavapais refused the pinole; J.K.S. said they not only accepted the pinole, but demanded more.

Woolsey said the pinole had been prepared and presented as part of a feast. That means it was no longer dry, but mixed with water. Yet pinole mixed with water would have been gooey and awkward to carry away, as J.K.S. contended the settlers did. Despite their victory, Woolsey's men remained badly outnumbered fighters in a hurry to retreat. It seems implausible that they would take the trouble to package and transport wet pinole as they fled. Then there's the question of Woolsey's safe retreat. If, as Woolsey and others reported, the Yavapais were so numerous, so well armed, and so bent on killing whites, it seems puzzling that they simply allowed the intruders to depart peacefully. But poisoned pinole could explain the Indians' flight: seeing large numbers of their comrades fall dead for no obvious reason, the surviving warriors on the surrounding hilltops might flee. Do these discrepancies reflect badly on Woolsey, or are they merely innocent coincidences, which he and the others could have readily explained if they had chosen to? We probably will never know. But the mystery of the Battle at Bloody Tanks, or the Massacre at Bloody Tanks, as it is often called, doesn't end there. The next question is, where did these alleged peace talks occur? J.K.S. reported definitively, "We named the place where we took the scalps the 'Bloody Tanks.'" Miami Wash near Miami has long been called Bloody Tanks Wash, and for many years historians reported thatWoolsey and the Yavapais battled there. A 1919 newspaper article appears at first to substantiate that. In it pioneer H.S. Ford, then an old man, wrote that he participated in the Battle at Bloody Tanks, and that it took place in Miami Wash. But Ford also dated the battle in May, 1873. At first glance, this conflict in dates would seem to be nothing more than an illustration of the way folk history evolves from history, as an old-timer's memory garbles the details of the past. But a close reading of Ford and related documents suggests he was referring to an entirely different incident from the Woolsey expedition. In short it appears that two unrelated battles acquired the name Bloody Tanks. That shouldn't be surprising. During the 1860s and early 1870s, conflicts between Arizona's Indians and non-Indians numbered in the hundreds. Close to 100 incidents occurred in 1864 alone. Given the propensity of both sides to camp near water supplies rivers, streams, springs, and tanks-it's understandable that two clashes should be named for blood-drenched tanks. Bloody Tanks Wash near Miami appears to commemorate that later battle. So where did the first Battle at Bloody Tanks occur? Like a Rorschach inkblot into which numerous meanings can be read, (LEFT) King S. Woolsey was a tenacious adversary of the Indians, but no one is sure of what he did to the Yavapais at Bloody Tanks. Woolsey's description of the countryside bluffs and mountains, a canyon that widened into an open space, a small tank of good water-could apply to many sites. Years later Charles Poston, who was Arizona's superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1864, reported that the battle took place halfway between Globe and Pinal County's Silver King Mine. In recent years, scholars, citing an unpublished 1869 map, have placed the battle site in Fish Creek Canyon, about a dozen miles from Salt River Canyon. Only an archaeological dig could prove the location conclusively. In any case, the 1864 Massacre at Bloody Tanks remains a lesson in the ways history and folk history merge and diverge. It also reminds us, obliquely, that the way we see history says as much about us as it does about the past. Today historians disagree about how to interpret events like Bloody Tanks. Should we, as some insist, denounce Woolsey and others of his day for wanting to wipe out entire Indian tribes? Or should we, as others demand, avoid using the values of the present to judge the past? This issue triggers explosive arguments which leave both sides feeling as if the other had fed them poisoned pinole. Yet no matter how we stand, none of us knows absolutely that we would have acted differently from Woolsey, or the Indians, had we lived in that time and place. In the end, we may never know exactly what happened on January 24, 1864, or where, or what name it should rightly bear, or how to interpret it. As historian Michael Howard wrote, "The past is a foreign country." Just as in a foreign country, the events, people, customs, nuances, and meanings of the past are seldom quite what they seem to be to the outsider from the present. Pinole may be cut-and-dried, but history isn't.Additional Reading: Joseph Reddeford Walker and the Arizona Adventure; Daniel Ellis Conner; edited by Donald J. Berthrong and Odessa Davenport; University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1956. "The Woolsey Expeditions of 1864," Arizona and the West; Clara T. Woody, Summer, 1962. King S. Woolsey unpublished report to Gen. James H. Carleton, September 14, 1864; U.S. National Archives, Record Group 98, Arizona, LR, W 245.