Victorio
Apache Chief
This is the only known photograph of the great Mimbreno leader Victorio, who advocated peace with the whites - until his removal, along with Geronimo - from Warm Springs to barren San Carlos in 1877, precipitated his bloody, three-year war.
Victorio Brings a New Challenge
In the years since their surrender, the Mescaleros on the reservation near Fort Stanton had been ringed by white settlements. Mutual suspicion between the two races led to occasional bloodshed. The cattlemen's war in neighboring Lincoln County in 1878 produced an anarchy that had its effect on the Indians. And finally, factional quarrels among the Apaches themselves created further unrest. Some of the more restless people left the reservation and joined their kinsmen in the Guadalupe Mountains and the Texas Big Bend. Others simply used the reservation as a base and a refuge for raids into Texas and Mexico. All that was needed to transform the uncoordinated raids into a full-scale outbreak was a leader. In June 1879 Victorio appeared on the Mescalero reservation.
A dynamic and aggressive chief, Victorio ranked most other Apaches in leadership ability and skill in the arts of Apache warfare. He had learned from the great Mangas Coloradas. Victorio and the core of his following were not Mescaleros but Warm Springs Apaches whose homeland lay in New Mexico west of the Rio Grande. For 2 years officials of the Indian Bureau had been trying to colonize the Warm Springs people on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona. Victorio had alternately resisted and yielded to these attempts. In April 1879 he took to the mountains and 2 months later turned up at the Mescalero agency with a plea to settle there. His people, however, fomented discord among the Mescaleros and treated Agent S. A. Russell with contempt. The agent called for troops, but before they arrived Victorio and Nana, joined by the wilder Mescaleros, fled the reservation. Leaving a trail of death and destruction through southern New Mexico, they found safety from pursuit in old Mexico.
These three warriors illustrate the division that plagued the last Apache resistance to the white man's advance. Ka-e-te-nay (left), Victorio's son-in-law, survived the battle in which Victorio's power was shattered and later aided the Army in securing the surrender of Geronimo. Nana (center), the aged Warm Springs Apache chieftain, aided Victorio in the outbreak of 1879-80. After Victorio's death at Tres Castillos, Nana fled west and fought with Geronimo in the last Apache warfare. San Juan (right), the Mescalero chief, remained on the Fort Stanton reservation during the Victorio outbreak and exerted his influence to keep his people at peace.
September 1879 Victorio recrossed the border and again wrought havoc in New Mexico. Military columns laced the country but were powerless to stop him. At Ojo Caliente, N. Mex., he successfully made off with all 46 horses of a troop of the 9th Cavalry. With soldiers closing in from all directions, he again crossed into Mexico. Inspired by these triumphs, Mescaleros flocked to his standard. In November a volunteer party of citizens from Carrizal, Chihuahua, took Victorio's trail. The chief set up an ambush in a mountain pass and annihilated all 15 of his pursuers. A relief party of 14 men reached the scene of the tragedy; while burying the bodies they were shot down to a man by Victorio's concealed warriors.
The favorite Indian crossings of the Rio Grande lay between Fort Davis and El Paso. During the winter of 1879—80, Captains Carpenter and Viele, operating from the subpost at Eagle Springs, systematically patroled the river looking for signs that Victorio had again entered the United States. Capt. George W. Baylor and a detachment of Texas Rangers based at Ysleta assisted. But Victorio stayed in Mexico all winter.
Disarming the Agency Indians
Convinced that Victorio was drawing supplies and recruits from the Fort Stanton reservation, Colonel Hatch, now commanding the District of New Mexico, won permission to disarm the agency Indians. Converging columns arrived at the agency simultaneously on April 12, 1880. One came from Texas; composed of five troops of the 10th Cavalry under Colonel Grierson, it included Captain Lebo's Troop K from Fort Davis. Approaching from the west, Colonel Hatch had fought a bitter engagement with part of Victorio's band and had discovered agency identification tags on the bodies of some of the slain warriors.
About 320 Indians had been assembled, but they were nervous and suspicious. Over Grierson's objections, Hatch bowed to Agent Russell's demand that, to avoid exciting the Mescaleros unduly, only one company of infantry be sent into the Indian camp to receive the arms. The Apaches could not bring themselves to give up their weapons, and they began slipping out of the village and up a nearby mountainside. Seeing that the Indians were breaking for safety, Hatch unleashed Grierson, and the 10th Cavalry charged. Part surrounded the village, and the rest, carbines banging, swarmed up the slope. The Mescaleros scattered in small parties, but each found troops in pursuit. About 250 people gave up and were returned to the agency under guard. Between 30 and 50 made good their escape and probably joined Victorio. Hatch took the field in search of Victorio, while Grierson, after combing the Guadalupe Mountains for a week, returned to Texas. Again, Victorio took refuge in Mexico.
During
the Victorio campaign of 1880, supply trains with cavalry or infantry escorts
shuttled between Fort Davis and the troops campaigning in the deserts to the
west.
The
Fight at Quitman Canyon
The military authorities knew that Victorio would soon enter the United States once more and probably head straight for the Mescalero country of southern New Mexico. Colonel Grierson was determined that West Texas would not serve as the pathway. He concentrated eight troops of the 10th Cavalry at Fort Davis and went there himself. Also at his command were the four companies of the 24th Infantry under Lt. Col. John E. Yard already stationed at Davis, a troop of the 8th Cavalry, and a detachment of Pueblo scouts recruited at the old Indian towns of Socorro and Ysleta, below El Paso. Captain Baylor's Texas Rangers, based at Ysleta, stood ready to help. As it had in 1855, Fort Davis was to serve as a supply center and communications link with San Antonio. The infantrymen organized wagon and pack trains to shuttle supplies from Fort Davis to the cavalry columns lacing the deserts to the west.
Grierson strengthened the sub posts along the Rio Grande at Viejo Pass, Eagle Springs, and old Fort Quitman, which had been abandoned as a permanent post 3 years earlier. On July 27 he was at Quitman, and the next day he learned that Victorio was headed north toward the Rio Grande. Determined to block the way with troops summoned from the sub posts, the colonel and a small escort rode eastward from Quitman on July 29. They crossed the Quitman Mountains and dropped into Quitman Canyon. At a waterhole known as Tinaja de las Palmas, a courier from Capt. John C. Gilmore, commanding at Eagle Springs, rode up with word that Victorio and 150 warriors had crossed the river, fired on two patrols, and were riding up Quitman Canyon. Grierson knew that they would have to stop at Tinaja de las Palmas the next day for water. His escort—an officer, six men, and his teenage son Robert—fortified the waterhole and waited. That night Victorio and his warriors camped in the canyon 10 miles to the south.
Stagecoaches passed in the night, the drivers taking word to the subposts
at Eagle Springs and Quitman to send reinforcements at once. At 4 a.m. Lt. Leighton
Finley and 15 cavalrymen reached Grierson. Captain Gilmore had sent him to escort
the colonel to Eagle Springs. "As I had no thought of being escorted there,
or anywhere else," Grierson later wrote, "I immediately sent two of
these men back with peremptory orders that all available cavalry be at once
sent to my support." Twenty-three men now held the rock fortifications
that had been erected.
At
9 on the morning of July 30 the Apaches approached the waterhole and, seeing
the troopers, attempted to bypass it on the east. At Grierson's order, Lieutenant
Finley with 10 men charged. The Indians stopped to return the fire. After a
skirmish lasting about an hour, Captain Viele with Troops C and G of the 10th
Cavalry charged down the road from Eagle Springs and joined the battle. His
advance, however, mistook Finley's detachment for Indians and opened fire, forcing
it to withdraw to the waterhole. The Apaches followed in a wild charge. "We
then let fly from our fortifications at the Indians about 300 yards off,"
wrote young Robert Grierson in his diary, "& golly you ought to've
seen 'em turn tail & strike for the hills. . . . As it was the sons of guns
nearly jumped out of their skins getting away." In another hour of skirmishing,
Viele fought his way through to Grierson. Again the Apaches tried to break through
to the north; again the cavalry cut them off and forced them back. At this moment
Capt. Nicholas Nolan and Troop A of the 10th, riding from Quitman in response
to the colonel's summons, charged into the fight. The Indians gave up the struggle
and scattered southward toward the Rio Grande.
Grierson had lost one man killed and Lt. R. S. Colladay wounded. The fight had cost Victorio seven killed and a large number wounded. It also turned him back to Mexico. But Grierson knew that his adversary would soon return, and he went to Eagle Springs to wait.
The
Battle of Rattlesnake Springs
ON AUGUST 2 VICTORIO CROSSED the Rio Grande and collided with a cavalry patrol. Grierson took two troops and rode east to Bass Canyon, near present Van Horn, to intercept the Indians. They doubled back, however, and on August 4 slipped through the screen of soldiers and rode northward on the west side of the forbidding Sierra Diablo range. Grierson found out at once. He raced northward on the east side of the mountains, marching 65 miles in 21 hours, and camped at Rattlesnake Springs. Here Captain Carpenter and two more troops joined him. Posting the entire force under Carpenter a short distance south of the springs, Grierson waited. At 2 in the afternoon the Apaches made their way down Rattlesnake Canyon toward the springs, only to find four troops of cavalry barring the advance. The warriors attacked, but a few volleys from the cavalry carbines scattered them back into the canyon.
By
4 o'clock the Indians had gathered in the mountains west of the springs. To
the southeast, about 8 miles distant, they spied a string of wagons rounding
a mountain spur and crawling onto the plain separating the Sierra Diablo from
the Delaware Mountains. It was a provision train from Fort Davis guarded by
Captain Gilmore and a company of infantry. At once the Apaches rode out of the
mountains and attacked. Gilmore met them with a destructive volley. Carpenter,
sent by Grierson to help, took the attackers in the rear. They fled in confusion
to the southwest and lost themselves in the Carrizo Mountains.
On August 7 Captain Lebo with Troop K reached Rattlesnake Springs. He had cut off a band of Mescaleros from the Guadalupe Mountains riding to join Victorio and forced them back to the north. The next afternoon Captain Baylor and 15 Texas Rangers rode in. Grierson now had most of his command assembled. He divided it into three squadrons of two troops each and set them to combing the mountains for sign of the hostiles. Carpenter and Nolan picked up the trail on August 11, but their horses were too tired and thirsty for rapid pursuit. Nolan's men reached the Rio Grande on August 13. Victorio had crossed the night before.
But
not before a parting salute. At Quitman Canyon the Apaches ambushed a stagecoach
and killed the driver and the passenger, J. J. Byrne, a Union general in the
Civil War, later U.S. Marshal in Galveston, and at the time of his death employed
to locate lands in West Texas assigned to the Texas and Pacific Railroad. The
bullet struck him in the thigh, reported Ranger Captain Baylor, "within
an inch of the wound he received at Gettysburg. We buried him (a mixed crowd
of Confederates, citizens, and U.S. soldiers) and fired a couple of volleys
over his grave."
Colonel Grierson had not destroyed Victorio. But he had out generaled the greatest of Apache generals and—an accomplishment few others could boast—had prevented him from going where he had planned to go.
Victorio's
Last Stand
VICTORIO WENT BACK TO HIS STRONGHOLD in the Candelaria Mountains of Mexico. Grierson's command Victorio's Last Stand returned to the monotonous but exacting duty of patroling the Rio Grande frontier. Troops from Arizona and New Mexico formed an expedition under Col. George P. Buell that, with Mexican permission, drove deep into Chihuahua. But it was to be the Mexicans themselves who destroyed Victorio. On October 14, 1880, Col. Joaquin Terrazas with a large force of volunteers and Tarahumari Indian scouts caught the Apaches at Tres Castillos. For a day and a night the adversaries waged a bitter and bloody battle. A Tarahumari sharpshooter dropped Victorio, abruptly ending the career of this remarkable leader who had terrorized New Mexico, Texas, and Chihuahua for 2 years. His following was all but annihilated. Most of the survivors, including the aged Warm Springs Apache chieftain Nana, joined Geronimo in the Sierra Madre, to the west, and carried on the traditions of Victorio for another 5 years.
A few survivors—12 warriors, 4 women, and 4 children— returned to Texas. In January 1881 they stopped a stagecoach in Quitman Canyon and killed the occupants. Baylor's Texas Rangers took the trail. It twisted and turned through mountain and desert, but Baylor hung on. He was reinforced on January 24 by Lt. C. L. Nevill and a detachment of Rangers who had been stationed at Fort Davis operating against outlaws. At dawn on January 29 the Rangers surprised the Apache camp high in the Sierra Diablo. Four warriors, two women, and two children fell in the first fire; the rest, most of them wounded, scattered. With this action, the Indian wars of Texas drew to a close.