The North American Indian | Page 8

Fort Apache; the Pinaleños and
parts of other bands surrendered and were established at San Carlos; in all, approximately
three thousand Apache had been brought under control. About one thousand hostiles yet
remained in the mountains, but by 1874 they had become so nearly subjugated as to make
it seem advisable to transfer the Arizona reservations from the War Department to the
Office of Indian Affairs, which was done. The policy of the Indian Office from the
beginning had been to concentrate the various bands upon one reservation at San Carlos.
Disaffection arose between different bands until this became a despicable place to nearly
all, while continued adherence to the removal policy drove the Chiricahua from their
southern Arizona reservation to seek refuge with the Ojo Caliente Apache in
southwestern New Mexico, in 1876, although they had been living in comparative peace
for four years. In 1877 these Chiricahua and the Ojo Caliente band were forcibly
removed to San Carlos, but while en route Victorio and a party of forty warriors made
their escape. In September of the same year three hundred more fled from San Carlos and
settler after settler was murdered. In February, 1878, Victorio and his notorious band
surrendered at Ojo Caliente, but gave notice that they would die fighting before
submitting to removal to San Carlos. The major portion of the three hundred Chiricahua
who had left San Carlos surrendered at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, shortly before. All
these were taken to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico.
Haunted by the dread of removal to San Carlos, the appearance of a party of Grant

County officials at the Mescalero agency on a hunting tour a few months later caused
Victorio and his band to flee with a number of Chiricahua and Mescaleros to the
mountains of southern New Mexico.
For two years, until he met his death at the hands of Mexican troops in the fall of 1880,
Victorio spread carnage throughout the southern portions of Texas, New Mexico, and
Arizona, and the northern states of Mexico, enlisting the aid of every willing renegade or
refugee of whatever band or tribe in that section. After him Nané, Chato, Juh, Geronimo,
and other doughty hostiles carried the fighting and raiding along until June, 1883, when
Crook, reassigned to the Arizona district, followed the Chiricahua band under Geronimo
into the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, whence he brought them back whipped and ready to
accept offers of peace. The captives were placed upon the San Carlos and White
Mountain reservations, where, with the various other Apache bands under military
surveillance, and with Crook in control, they took up agriculture with alacrity. But in
1885 Crook's authority was curtailed, and through some cause, never quite clear,
Geronimo with many Chiricahua followers again took the warpath. Crook being relieved
at his own request, Gen. Nelson A. Miles was assigned the task of finally subduing the
Apache, which was consummated by the recapture of Geronimo and his band in the
Sierra Madre in September, 1886. These hostiles were taken as prisoners to Florida, later
to Alabama, and thence to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where, numbering 298, they still are,
living as farmers in peace and quiet, but still under the control of the military authorities.
[Illustration: Alchisé - Apache]
Alchisé - Apache
From Copyright Photograph 1906 by E.S. Curtis
One of the last hostile movements of note was the so-called Cibicu fight in 1882. In the
spring of that year an old medicine-man, Nabakélti, Attacking The Enemy, better known
as Doklíni, started a "medicine" craze in the valley of the Cibicu on the White Mountain
reservation. He had already a considerable following, and now claimed divine revelation
and dictated forms of procedure in bringing the dead to life. As medicine paraphernalia
he made sixty large wheels of wood, painted symbolically, and twelve sacred sticks, one
of which, in the form of a cross, he designated "chief of sticks." Then with sixty men he
commenced his dance.
One morning at dawn Nabakélti went to the grave of a man who had been prominent in
the tribe and who had recently died. He and his adherents danced about the grave and
then dug up the bones, around which they danced four times in a circle. The dancing
occupied the entire morning, and early in the afternoon they went to another grave, where
the performance was repeated. In each instance the bones were left exposed; but later
four men, specially delegated, went to the graves and erected a brush hut over the
remains.
Nabakélti told the people that they must pray each morning for four days, at the end of
which time the bleached bones would be found clothed with flesh and alive again. By the

end of the second day the Apache band on the Cibicu became