Five Thousand Men against Thirty-Eight Chiricahua Part 5

October 20 L. Q. C. Lamar, the Secretary of the Interior, gave his approval of the above order. The prisoners for both Fort Pickens and Fort Marion left San Antonio by special train, October 22. October 25 General Schofield telegraphed the Adjutant-General that the fifteen male hostiles had been delivered at Fort Pickens.

At the same time that Miles was pressing the campaign against the renegades in Mexico he was deeply employed in an attempt to remove forever from Arizona the Chiricahua and Warm Spring Indians located on the military reservation near Fort Apache. Men, women, and children, they numbered four hundred and forty. Their status was that of prisoners of war. They were kept under strict surveillance by the military, but had never been disarmed or dismounted. Among them were Chatto, Loco, Ka-ya-ten-na, and many other scouts who had served faithfully and efficiently under Crook in his campaigns against Nachez, Chihuahua, Mangus, and Geronimo in 1885, and in 1886. These four hundred and forty prisoners of war had been more or less industriously cultivating little farms near Fort Apache, accumulating cows, sheep, horses and mules, and cutting and selling hay and wood to the Government. The leaders seemed to be doing their best under the very difficult circumstances to live the life of the white man so earnestly pointed out to them by Crook. They were intensely hated and feared by the citizens of Arizona and heartily disliked by the White Mountain and other Apaches.

In July Miles went to Fort Apache for the purpose of working out some plan by which these Indians could be removed to a remote location in the East. He talked with the leading men, holding before them rosy pictures of what the Government might be persuaded to do for them in money and farms and stock if they would consent peaceably to leave their native mountains and mesas and give up their plots of ground for Larger and more productive holdings in some new land. He was able to induce a delegation of ten or twelve of the principal men to go to Washington for the purpose of inquiring what the Government would be willing to do for them if they moved. It was an ill-advised step on the part of Miles; there was no good ground to believe that the Government would or could relocate them satisfactorily on an Eastern reservation. However, about the middle of July, the delegation journeyed to Washington in charge of Captain J. H. Dorst, with Mickey Free, Concepcion, and Sam Bowman as interpreters. Chatto was the leading man in the delegation.