The Geronimo Campaign
The pursuit of the Nez Perce involved a concerted military operation focused on a small band of fugitives. Down in the Mexican border region, an entire army task force was devoted to the pursuit of a single Indian. His Apache name was Goyathlay (one who yawns), but he was better known by the name the Mexicans gave him: Geronimo (1829-1909). In 1850, Mexican settlers ambushed and killed Geronimo’s first wife and his children, after which Geronimo devoted much of his life to ruthlessly raiding the borderlands along with his brother-in-law, Juh, a Chiricahua chief.
In 1875, U.S. authorities branded Geronimo a troublemaker, who opposed military plans to “concentrate” all the Apaches at the desolate San Carlos reservation in eastern Arizona. Geronimo fled with a band of followers into Mexico but was soon arrested and returned to the reservation. Not to be contained, Geronimo used the reservation as a base from which he staged raids throughout the remainder of the decade.
In 1881, authorities killed another “troublemaker,” Nakaidoklini, revered by the Apaches as a prophet. His death incited Geronimo to abandon the reservation altogether for a secret stronghold in the Sierra Madre Mountains, from which he terrorized the border region.
In May 1882, Apache scouts working for the army discovered Geronimo’s sanctuary and persuaded him and his followers to return to the reservation. He fled again on May 17, 1885, with 35 warriors and 109 women and children. In January 1886, a small army unit, together with Apache scouts, penetrated deep into Mexico, where they found Geronimo, who surrendered to General George Crook. Geronimo escaped one more time but ultimately surrendered to Nelson Miles on September 4, 1886. Geronimo and some 450 other Apaches were sent to Florida for confinement in Forts Marion and Pickens. In 1894, the Apaches were removed to Fort Sill, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and Geronimo became a rancher.
Wounded Knee
In 1886, when Geronimo surrendered to General Miles, 243,000 Native Americans were confined to 187 reservations. With Geronimo’s last resistance extinguished, the Indian Wars were practically at an end. Yet, if the body of defiance was dead, its spirit lingered. Wovoka was the son of a Paiute shaman, but he had spent part of his youth with a white ranch family, who leavened his Paiute religious heritage with the teachings of their own Christianity. By the 1880s, Wovoka began to preach to the reservation Indians, foretelling a new world in which only Indians dwelled, generations of slain braves would come back to life, and the buffalo (nearly hunted to extinction during the first two-thirds of the 19th-century) would again be plentiful. To hasten this deliverance, Wovoka counseled, all Indians must dance the Ghost Dance and follow the paths of peace.
Among a people who had lost all hope, the Ghost Dance religion spread rapidly. Soon, many western reservations were alive with what white overseers regarded as frenzied dancing. Leaders among the Teton Sioux at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, called for armed rebellion against the whites. Reservation agent Daniel F. Royer frantically telegraphed Washington, D.C., in November 1890: “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. We need protection and we need it now.” But the arrival of troops under Nelson A. Miles seemed only to enflame the Indians. As a precaution, Indian reservation police were sent on December 15, 1890, to arrest Sitting Bull, domiciled at Standing Rock Reservation. A scuffle broke out, and the most revered chief of the Plains tribes was slain.
In the meantime, another chief, Big Foot of the Miniconjou Sioux, was making his way to Pine Ridge. Miles assumed that his purpose was to bring to a boil the simmering rebellion, and he dispatched the 7th Cavalry to intercept Big Foot and his followers. The troops caught up with the Indians on December 28, 1890, at a place called Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Big Foot did not, in fact, have hostile intentions. On the contrary, although he was desperately ill with pneumonia, Big Foot was traveling to Pine Ridge to try to persuade the rebellion leaders to surrender. Neither Miles nor Colonel James W. Forsyth, commander of the 7th, knew Big Foot’s intention, and Forsyth quietly surrounded Big Foot’s camp, deploying four Hotchkiss guns (deadly rapid-fire howitzers) on the surrounding hills. On the 29th, the soldiers entered the camp and began to confiscate the Indians’ weapons. A hand-to-hand fight developed, shots were fired—it is unclear whether these came from the Indians or the soldiers—and then the Hotchkiss guns opened up, firing almost a round a second at men, women, and children.
Nobody knows just how many died at Wounded Knee. The bodies of Big Foot and 153 other Miniconjous were found, but it is likely that the 300 or 350 camped beside the creek ultimately lost their lives, After a brief fight with the 7th Cavalry on December 30, the Indians withdrew. Two weeks later, on January 15, 1891, the Sioux formally surrendered to U.S. Army officials. It was a miserable end to 400 years of racial warfare on the American continent.
The Least You Need to Know
Few Indians participated directly in the Civil War, but some did take advantage of a reduced military presence in the West to raid and plunder.
The Indian Wars in the West, spanning the Civil War years to 1891, consisted mainly of long, exhausting pursuits and relatively few battles. The strategy was to fight a “total war” against women, children, and old men as well as warriors, in order to force the Indians onto reservations.
Real Life
Christopher Houston Carson, better known as Kit Carson, was born near Richmond, Kentucky, on December 24, 1809, and grew up in Missouri. He joined a Santa Fe trading caravan when he was 16 and, from 1827 to 1842, lived in the Rocky Mountains as a fur trapper and mountain man. In 1842, Carson served John C. Fremont as a guide in Oregon and California and, during the Mexican War, carried dispatches for him. After the war, Carson settled in Taos, New Mexico, where he served from 1853 to 1861 as Indian agent to the Utes, earning a reputation as one of very few genuinely competent, honest, and compassionate officials.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Carson became colonel of the First New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry, where he distinguished himself in repelling the Confederate invasion of New Mexico and in combat against the Apache and Navajo. Although he became—in the popular phrase—a legend in his own time, especially for his role as an Indian fighter, Carson was deeply moved by the plight of the Indians, with whom he had a strong fellow feeling. Carson died on May 23, 1868, at Fort Lyon, Colorado.