Today in Manhunting History -- May 15, 1885: Showdown at Turkey Creek

The American Southwest, in the words of an army officer stationed there in the 19^th Century, is “a region in which not only purgatory and hell, but heaven likewise, had combined to produce a bewildering kaleidoscope of all that is wonderful, weird, terrible, and awe-inspiring, with not a little that was beautiful and romantic.”

The sun had barely risen over this Dantesque landscape on May 15, 1886, when Lieutenant Britton Davis realized his day would be closer to the inferno than to paradise.

As he stepped out of his tent at Turkey Creek on the San Carlos Reservation, home to 5,000 Apache Indians, the dawn illuminated the stern faces of all the major Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache chieftains: Naiche – son of the legendary Cochise, Mangus, Chihuahua, Loco, and the aged Nana.  Most ominously, Davis saw Geronimo, whom he knew as “a thoroughly vicious, intractable, and treacherous man” whose “word, no matter how earnestly pledged, was worthless.”  Geronimo stood only five-foot-eight inches, but was still powerfully built at age 61, and his countenance bespoke “a look of unspeakable savagery, or fierceness.”  Thirty warriors, all armed, stood behind the chiefs.  Worse, not a single woman or child was in sight, “a sure sign of something serious in the air.” 

They said they wanted to talk.  Davis sent for his interpreter, then invited the leaders into his tent.  Once inside, the chiefs squatted in a semicircle.  Loco began to speak, but was interrupted by a visibly agitated Chihuahua. 

We are not children, Chihuahua said.  When the Apaches had agreed to return to the reservation after the last outbreak in 1883, he argued, We agreed on a peace with Americans, Mexicans, and other Indian tribes. We said nothing about conduct among ourselves. 

The Apaches had many reasons to be discontented with their life at San Carlos.  No Apaches were more independent or warlike than the Chiricahuas and Warm Springs under Davis’s supervision.  While some Apaches made great strides in their new life as farmers, none of the Chiricahua “were making anything more than a bluff at farming,” letting their women tend the fields while the warriors scoffed at performing such unmanly tasks.  San Carlos itself was a perpetually hot and dry, gravelly flat between the Gila and San Carlos rivers that earned the appellation of “Hell’s Forty Acres” from the officers who served there.  In addition to facing the slow encroachment upon their lands by miners and farmers, the Apaches were subjected to an extraordinary level of corruption at the hands of the civilian Indian Agents assigned to San Carlos through patronage politics.  Davis noted that the weekly ration of flour “would hardly suffice for one day,” and the beef cows issued to the Indians were little more than walking skeletons.

On this day, however, Chihuahua was referring to the regulations regarding the treatment of women and Tizwin.  The Apaches claimed the right of a husband to beat his wife as an ancient and accepted tribal custom, as well as the right of a husband to cut off the nose of an adulterous squaw, often by biting it off.  Among the Indians of the reservation there were “about a score of women so disfigured,” and some of the beatings, typically with a heavy stick, were too brutal for the U.S. Army officers in charge of the reservation to ignore.  Consequently, General Crook had prohibited these practices.

Additionally, the brewing and drinking of tizwin (a fermented corn mash) was banned due to the Apaches’ proclivity for violence when intoxicated.  One such drinking spree the previous year led to a failed ambush of Lieutenant Davis.  The leader of the assassination plot, the warrior-chief Kaytennae, was subsequently arrested, exiled, and imprisoned in Alcatraz.

Davis had served in the Arizona Territory for seven years and understood his wards as well as any American officer.  He tried to placate the chiefs, but they responded with jeers and veiled threats.  Chihuahua taunted Davis through the interpreter: Tell Fat Boy that I and all the other chiefs and their men have been drinking Tizwin the night before and now we want to know what he is going to do about it – whether or not he is going to put us all in jail.  He added that he did not think the soldiers had a jail big enough to hold all the Indians who violated the prohibition.

Davis had no option but to play for time.  He explained that a problem this serious must be submitted to General Crook for a decision, that he would telegram Crook and notify them as soon as he received a reply.  Davis made sure they understood an answer might take several days before riding to Fort Apache to send the message.

Lt. Britton Davis

The telegram from Fort Apache to Crook’s headquarters at Fort Bowie had to pass through civilian hands.  In order to avoid leaks, messages were kept simple and cryptic.  Moreover, before reaching the General, Davis’s telegram also had to pass through Captain Francis E. Pierce.  Pierce had only been in Arizona for two months, and so decided to wake the veteran Chief of Scouts Al Seiber for advice.  Unfortunately, Sieber was sleeping off his own whiskey drunk.  Through bleary eyes and an addled mind, he read the telegram.

“It’s nothing but a tizwin drink,” Sieber muttered.  “Don’t pay any attention to it.  Davis will handle it.” 

As Sieber returned to sleeping off his hangover, Pierce filed away the seemingly inconsequential note.

“I am firmly convinced,” Crook would later write, “that, had I known of the occurrences reported in Lieutenant Davis’s telegram of May 15, 1885, which I did not see until months afterwards, the outbreak of Mangus and Geronimo a few days later would not have occurred.”