General Crook vs. the Apaches

TONTO BASIN WAR The Battles Between Gen. George Crook and the Apaches Lasted Two Long Winters

The avalanche toward one of the West's least-known but most tragic wars began in 1871 with the slaughter of stagecoach passengers just outside the mining town of Wickenburg, not far from the Camp Date Creek reservation where nearly 1,000 Yavapai Indians had settled.

The war had been brewing for years as incoming settlers in Prescott and the Verde Valley clashed with thousands of seminomadic hunters and gatherers whose ancestors had wandered the region for hundreds of years. Ironically, some historians believe bandits posing as Indians actually committed the stagecoach massacre, but the incident helped to set in motion a tragic chain of events.

The struggle between the U.S. Army and the Yavapai and Tonto Apaches flared and smoldered through 1872 across a jagged swath of desert wilderness stretching from Prescott southeast to the Superstition Mountains. The struggle pitted the two ancient warrior cultures against roving detachments of soldiers led by Apaches from other bands.

The protagonists in this war each struggled through irony and loss to their fatal confrontation. On one side, Gen. George Crook respected and admired Apaches, but he proved to be their worst enemy. On the other side, Chief Delshay was the Apaches' most tenacious war leader, but finally was betrayed and beheaded by his own people.

The conflict pitted the U.S. Army against Indian groups that had more often been enemies than allies before the Anglos arrived. The Tonto Apaches were closelyrelated to other Apache groups as well as to the Navajos. The Yavapais were linguistically and culturally related to the tribes living along the Colorado River to the west. Both groups were soon racked by starvation and disease as the settlers took the good farmland and drove off the game. Facing inadequate rations on reservations like Camp Date Creek, many Apaches raided ranches to feed their families.

Convinced that only a decisive military defeat would persuade these warriors to settle permanently on the reservation, Crook looked for the right moment to launch a comprehensive solution. He began planning for the campaign as early as June 1871, when he was assigned to command the Military Department of Arizona, but postponed his offensive several times because emissaries were sent from Washington D.C., to negotiate a settlement by offering reservations.

Certain the peace talks would founder, Crook continued his preparations while trying to determine who was responsible for the stagecoach massacre. After several months, Crook's network of reservation Indian informers warned him that dissidents intended to assassinate him the next time he came to the Camp Date Creek reservation. The bearded, unconventional Crook, who preferred canvas clothes and a pith helmet to a uniform, was a fearless, taciturn, tireless commander with a shrewd sense of strategy. Anxious to face the conspirators as well as the culprits of the massacre, Crook hurried to the reservation with a force of well-armed mule packers. The talk fromboth sides continued agreeably until the Indians showed their hand. In the ensuing melee, several warriors were killed and the rest fled. They gathered up their families and left the reservation, fearing retaliation. A short while later, soldiers led by Indian scouts from rival bands located them in a nearby canyon and launched a surprise attack that killed 40 Indians and triggered the Tonto Basin War in the winter of 1872. After nearly a year of delay and preparation, Crook had found justification to advance his campaignCrook divided his command into independent companies of soldiers, each guided by a contingent of mostly White Mountain Apache scouts-implementing his theory that only other Indians could hope to track and corner Apaches. He often used Tontos against Yavapais and vice versa, helping to sow hatred between the groups. Much of the fighting took place in the Tonto Basin, a rugged contortion of cliffs, deep canyons, volcanic landforms and steep, arid mountains. The primary chiefs were the Yavapai Cha-lipun, or "buckskin-colored hat," and the Apache Delshay, "red ant."

The campaign became a war of attrition in which starvation proved Crook's strongest ally. Because he deployed supply pack trains, small, independent units could remain in the field for months at a time, keeping the Apaches on the run until they ran out of food. Two major battles finally broke the Indian resistance. The first came on December 28, 1872, in a remote, inaccessible canyon along the Salt River high above what is now Canyon Lake. An Apache scout named Nantaje led soldiers and a detachment of scouts to a cave, which became known asSkeleton Cave, at the base of the cliff that served as a fortress for a Yavapai band. The soldiers attacked at dawn, killing six warriors in the first volley. The officers called on the trapped warriors to surrender, but they merely jeered and slapped their buttocks in a gesture of contempt. The warriors arched arrows up over the boulders behind which the soldiers had taken cover, but did little damage. The soldiers then began bouncing bullets off the sloping ceiling of the cave. A strange, haunting sound floated out of the cave. "It was a weird chant, half wail and half exultation-the frenzy of despair and the wild cry for revenge," wrote Capt. John Gregory Bourke, Crook's loyal assistant. "Look out," warned the Apache scouts, "there goes their death chant. They're going to charge."

A moment later 20 warriors rushed from the cave, "superb-looking fellows all of them," noted Bourke. They charged the double row of soldiers, providing cover for warriors trying to slip around the end of the lines. However, the soldiers' fire drove them back into the cave, where they resumed their death chant "with vigor and boldness" as the soldiers resumed bouncing bullets off the roof of the cave. Suddenly, a 4-year-old boy ran to the entrance of the cave "and stood, thumb in mouth, looking in speechless wonder and indignation at the belching barrels," wrote Bourke. Almost immediately, a bullet glanced off his skull, knocking him to the ground. Nantaje rushed forward and dragged the boy to safety amid the cheers of the soldiers, who stopped firing momentarily - then resumed with redoubled intensity.

At that point, another company of soldiers arrived at the top of the 400-foot cliff and began firing on the cave, then rolling boulders down to shatter at its entrance. "The noise was frightful; the destruction sickening," and most of the Yavapais were crouched behind boulders at the front of the cave to avoid the bullets bouncing off the roof of the cave. "No human voice could be heard in such a cyclone of wrath," recalled Bourke. Soon, all signs of life in the cave ceased. "There were men and women dead or writhing in the agonies of death, and with them several babies, killed by our glancing bullets, or by the storm of rocks and stones that had descended above," Bourke reported. The soldiers found 76 dead, and 35 survivors, half of whom later died.

The next major battle of the campaign occurred after Yavapai raiders struck scattered settlements around Wickenburg, stealing horses and killing three settlers-one a well-known Indian fighter who once killed and scalped a Yavapai thought to be a chief. The scalp was given to an editor who nailed it to the door of the local newspaper office.

Soldiers had captured an Apache woman they intimidated into revealing the raiders were camped near the top of Turret Mountain. The soldiers and scouts crept toward the peak in darkness, feet wrapped with rags to muffle any sound, and attacked at dawn. "So secure did the hostiles feel in this almost impregnable position that they lost all presence of mind, even running past their holes in the rocks. Some of them jumped off the precipice and were mashed into a shapeless mass. All of the men were killed; most of the women and children were taken prisoner," Crook wrote. The attack killed between 33 and 47 Indians, without the loss of a single soldier.

In the next few months, several thousand Yavapais and Tonto Apaches surrendered, lamenting that they could not fight both the Army and the scouts. Cha-lipun came in with 300 of his followers, saying that General Crook had "too many cartridges of copper." According to Bourke, Cha-lipun told Crook, "We had never been afraid of the Americans alone, but now that our own people are fighting us, we did not know what to do; we could not go to sleep at night because we feared to be surrounded before daybreak; we could not hunt-the noise of our guns would attract the troops; we could not cook mescal or anything else because the flame and smoke would draw down the soldiers; we could not live in the valleys-there were too many soldiers. We had retreated to the mountaintops, thinking to hide in the snow until the soldiers went home, but the scouts found us and the soldiers followed us."

Crook took Cha-lipun by the hand and said if the Apaches would live at peace, he would be the best friend they ever had-but that the good men must help him fight the warriors who would not surrender.

Delshay was among the last to surrender. Maj. George Randall reported to Crook that Delshay "said he would do anything he would be ordered to do. He wanted to save his people, who were starving. He had nothing to ask for but his life. He would accept any terms. He said he had 125 warriors last fall... but now he had only 20 left. He said they used to have no difficulty eluding the troops, but now the very rocks had gotten soft, they couldn't put their foot anywhere without leaving an impression we could follow, that they could get no sleep at night, for should a coyote or a fox start a rock rolling during the night, they would get up, and dig out, thinking it was we who were after them."

But on the reservation established in the Verde Valley, Delshay could not master his fears and his yearning for freedom, so he fled with about 40 followers. General Crook sent out Apaches to hunt down Delshay, warning he would resume the war if they didn't kill the runaway. According to one story, as Crook later sat on the porch of his headquarters, the Apache bounty hunters dumped six or eight heads on the planking at his feet-one wearing Delshay's distinctive earring.

Delshay's suspicions proved well-founded and Crook, to his bitter regret, discovered he could not keep his promise to protect the bands on a reservation in their own land. Initially the Apaches and Yavapais settled near Camp Verde alongside the Verde River, planted crops and sold hay and firewood to the fort. Along with any tools the military could round up, the Indians used sharpened sticks and wicker baskets to dig an irrigation ditch measuring 5 miles long and 4 feet wide. In 1873 they grew 500,000 pounds of corn and 30,000 pounds of beans, becoming largely self-sufficient.

However, in the spring of 1874, Crook was told to move the Indians to the sweltering, disease-prone San Carlos reservation nearly 200 miles east. Crook blamed corrupt civilian contractors who wanted to sell the government the supplies the Tontos and Yavapais were growing themselves on the rich farmland of their reservation.

Crook observed, "Their removal was one of those cruel things that greed has so often inflicted on the Indians. When the Indian appeals to his arms, his only redress, the whole country cries out against the Indian. As soon as the Indians became settled on the different reservations, gave up the warpath, and became harmless, the Indian agents who had sought cover before, now came out as brave as sheep, and took charge of the agencies, and commenced their game of plundering."

Crook reluctantly complied with orders and in February 1875, a small detachment of soldiers escorted 1,426 Tontos and Yavapais from Camp Verde across 180 miles of snow-covered peaks, icy rivers and hard terrain to the San Carlos reservation, a bleak, malaria-ridden lowland. One man carried his disabled wife on his back the entire trip. Most of the cavalrymen gave up their horses so some of the children could ride.

Crook's policy of divide and conquer had produced victory, and reaped its bitter fruit for the Apaches and Yavapais. As Crook himself concluded: "The American Indian commands respect for his rights only so long as he inspires terror with his rifle."

Delshay could not have put it better. AH