Gatewood's Apaches
Lt. Charles Gatewood & His Apache War Memoir by Charles Gatewood, edited and with additional texts by Louis Kraft
This is, among other things (see below), probably the definitive description, from the Anglo-American side, of the 1886 final breakout and surrender of Geronimo. Gatewood was the US Army officer who actually met with Geronimo in the Mexican Sierra Madre and convinced him to come in and surrender to General Nelson Miles. The latter event took place at Skeleton Canyon, in the Peloncillo Mountains, on the Arizona/New Mexico border, just east of Douglas, on Sept 6, 1886 and brought the curtain down on 200 years of Apache-European warfare. During his lifetime, Gatewood was never given credit for his part in the surrender, as the ambitious and somewhat unscrupulous Miles wanted to wrap himself in the glory of the event as part of his continuous campaign of self-promotion.
General George Crook re-organized the Arizona Apache reservation under military control in 1882, and put Gatewood in charge of the northern sector, or what is today the White Mountain reservation, know then as Fort Apache, while Emmett Crawford was charged with running the southern sector, now known as the San Carlos reservation. Gatewood had his hands full recruiting and maintaining Indian scout companies, the backbone of Crook's successful Apache campaign's, settling disputes amongst the various (often mutually hostile) bands domiciled on the reservation and fending off incursions by (mostly Mormon) Anglo settlers around its edges. All the while he was battling deteriorating health, with rheumatism making his field campaigns increasingly painful.
A good example of the complex relationship with local Anglo settlers was his arrest and jailing of one Judge F.M. Zuck over non-payment to the Apaches for hay gathered on the reservation, which led to a protracted court battle that exposed the innate hostility and perfidy of Arizona's Whites toward the Indians, even "good" Indians, like the White Mountains, who were their allies in the fight against the "bad" Indians (the Chiricahua). The civilians, often in cahoots with the Indian Ring in Washington, loved to see things stirred up so that reservations would be reduced in size or eliminated and they could grab the land. Also, if there were active hostilities, the military purchased more supplies from them at inflated prices to support their pursuit of the "hostiles", who were often chimeras invented for just that purpose. The wonderful local press devoted generous space to berating the military's efforts, often arguing for "exterminating the brutes" a la Mr. Kurtz, versus confining to reservations and "civilizing". Gatewood's trial in the Zuck affair also effectively ruined Gatewood's relationship with his superior, Crook, and probably torpedoed his chances for promotion.
The drama of Gatewood tracking down and negotiating with Geronimo in the Sierra Madre is palpable and, if faithfully recreated for cinematic purposes, would make a heck of a movie in and of itself. The 1993 movie "Geronimo: An American Legend", comes closer than most, but still falls short vis-a-vis Gatewood's written account...largely by its transformation of Geronimo into a noble "Freedom Fighter" vs the volatile and crafty raider recovering from a mezcal drunk that he actually was at the time.
Kraft has done an admirable job of editing, integrating and annotating Gatewood's original texts, resulting in a very credible and readable account.
