November 23, 2021 • 50 mins
America’s longest-running war was between the US government and the loosely-confederated groups we know as the Apache. As their lands were encroached upon, the Apache pushed back with disastrous consequences, nearly becoming exterminated.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and this
is Stuff you should know. Uh, celebrating Native American Heritage Month. Fantastic, um,
(00:25):
and we are talking about something we probably would have
talked about whether it was Native American Heritage Month or not,
but we selected it for this month in particular just
as a nod shout out. But we're talking about one
of those um moments in history that probably most people
are walking around and are like, oh, yeah, the Apache Wars,
(00:46):
I've I've heard of that, but no, almost nothing about
even though depending on how you look at it, it's
actually still to this day the longest ward that the
United States ever fought. Really Yeah, and it produced some
really famous, really interesting, really um amazing characters on both sides,
(01:07):
but in particular among the Apache who and we'll meet
a lot of them in this episode. Yeah, and these
are you know, a series of skirmishes over time that um,
it seems like there was there was often peace and
then there were these inciting incidents that would happen. There
were misunderstandings that happened. Uh, there were bungled um negotiations
(01:31):
that happened, and like it feels like it could have
gone a different way at so many points, and it
continually just went south. Yeah, And I mean speaking you know,
histories written by the victors, and so the idea of
the Apache basically being um, you know, bloodthirsty, cruel, merciless, um,
(01:53):
you know, people who mutilated victims and would kill women
and children. Um. You know, that's that's definitely painted. Uh,
it paints the whole the whole group with a much
larger brush than you should. But it also leaves out
the atrocities that were committed on the other side to
their people were slaughtered as well, exactly. So, Um, it's
(02:15):
just one of those things where it was war like.
It was a genuine straight up war. But like you said,
there are plenty of places where it could have been avoided,
and we'll talk about those, but first talk, I think
we should talk about the Apache. And one of the
first things that I've learned when I started researching this
is that the Apache are not a nation or tribe.
Their group of loosely affiliated tribes that all kind of
(02:37):
come from the same area and despite the fact that
we tend to think of the Apache as totally tied
to the southwestern United States, they actually arrived fairly recently
from western Canada, like BC, I take it, that's right, uh,
and they eventually found their way to the American uh southwest.
(02:57):
They did not we call them Apache. They they do
not call themselves that. They called themselves I guess day,
which means that the people, which is pretty great and basic.
And they think the name Apache may have been given
to them from the word Apache by the Zuni tribe
who battled with them many times, and that means Apache
(03:19):
means enemy in Zuni, so they think that's where Apache
came from. And uh, you know, you mentioned that they
were a loose collection. I mean there were never like
hundreds of thousands of Apache. I'm not sure where the
numbers topped out, but they were spread over fifteen million
square miles, so that's called a very very thin uh distribution.
(03:45):
So they were uh, you know, not to skip head
too much, but they were rarely in groups, um more
than like twenty five or thirty at a time, right, right,
And so what you would call the Apache were actually
kind of spread out among the western Apache uh, there's
the Cherikawa Apache UM and then these larger groups were
split into smaller bands even and the Cherkawa are kind
(04:08):
of like the central group that UM fought the Apache wars,
although just about every apache Um tribe was involved, but
the Cherkaoa were kind of like the central figures. And
the Cherkao were broken into four different smaller bands, the
bed bed on kohe let's hear it, but donka hey,
(04:32):
thank you, Chuck, the chikon In Chehenni, and the Nedni
Yeah great, okay, so the so what was the first
one again? But donke hey, that's much better than mine.
But all of these groups, these four bands that formed
the ch Chirkawa apache Um total maybe people at their
(04:57):
at their largest um population size UM. And despite that
really small number, they produced some really famous people like
Geronimo CoA Cheese Victorio. All of them were Churakawa Apache
and again they were the central group that fought the
Apache Wars. They were also the central group that could
have stemmed off the Apache wars if UM some of
(05:19):
the Union soldiers that they had to deal with had
taken them a different way. That's right. Uh. And you
know I mentioned that there were a lot of misunderstandings
and mix ups along the way, and combine that with
the fact that, um, the settlers just thought they were
all Apache and that they all were the same. There
were misunderstandings like, uh, you know, a raid would happen
(05:43):
on a camp, and this was one of the the
ways that the Apache got by, as they would, you know,
not because they didn't like somebody, because they needed supplies
and stuff. They would raid a camp, take some stuff,
and the settlers would think, well, this is just this
is the Apache. It's all of you doing this, whereas
it might be one very small group and the other
groups will be like, I don't even know what you're
talking about, right, And that's why I was saying, you
(06:04):
can't really paint the the people we call the Apache
with this very large brush, because some of them worked
very closely and for the U. S. Military to go
find other Apache. UM. Even within the Cherikawa there were
totally different ideas on how to approach and deal with
the Americans. UM. There was a big division that developed
(06:25):
through the Apache wars in among the Apache of you know,
some of them were like, look, we cannot defeat this enemy.
The best thing we can do and to hope to
live peacefully is to just settle down and start farming
and live on these reservations that they're they're making us
live on. And the other groups said, no where. We
need to fight to the death for our ancestral lands
(06:46):
and our old ways of life. And so there's a
lot of nuance, there's a lot of difference. There's a
lot of disagreement among these people who are living and
fighting during the Apache Wars, and even some of the
ones that wanted to live peacefully were frequently worst into
fighting like that was their only choice. Um. And so
it's it's just really important to keep in mind that
(07:07):
you you can't just just like you can't say Apache
and that's just one nation because it's not. UM. You
also can't just say, well, all the Apache thought this way,
or even all the Cherikawa thought this way. There was
just a lot of a lot of difference, and there
was also a lot of room four different opinions, because,
like you said, the groups that they lived in really
(07:29):
were usually no more than twenty five or thirty and
a family or a couple of families exactly, and they
were often related by blood and marriage, and it was
a matrilineal society too. So if you were a man
and you married a woman, you joined your your wife's
family from that point on. And so these bands, these
four bands of the Cherikawa were um were very much
(07:50):
related to one another because they would often swap you know,
UM members through marriage and alliances. That's right. So uh
I mentioned the raids as a way of life for them. UM.
That is different than like there was no malice involved.
That was different from like an actual skirmish or a
battle when the warriors would would take center stage and
(08:12):
that was serious stuff. They were um. They were people
that very much uh wanted revenge when they were wronged,
and that's when those sort of really bloody skirmishes would
take place, as opposed to the raids, which was uh
them you know, getting food and supplies and ammunition and
stuff like that. Yeah. There was an author of a
(08:34):
book called the Apache Wars, a guy named Paul Andrew
Hutton said that they likened them to the Vikings, that
they just like rating was out of economic necessity. The
thing is that they were also again camp paying them
all with one brush. There are plenty of them that
were raiders UM, and all of them apparently engaged in raiding,
but some much more than others. And then the ones
(08:55):
that didn't raid so much, they might farm a little more,
or they might engage in peaceful trade with their neighbors.
But the the one commonality that basically all groups labeled
as APACHE seemed to have had was a a UM
like an enemy in Mexico, first the Spanish and then
later Mexico, where like if you were caught by Mexican
(09:18):
and you were an Apache, or you were a Mexican
and you were caught by Apache, you were going to
face the very brutal, unhappy and UM almost immediately like
there they were. They weren't gonna like release you as
a hostage or negotiate for your release. You were going
to be killed horribly. Yeah. And they were united, uh
(09:39):
sometimes with the settlers against Mexico, so much so that
I believe one of the chiefs told Kit Carson, who
was an American scout in six like, hey, we'll team
up with you to fight Mexico. That's how much we
hate Mexico. Yeah. That chief was Mangus Colorados, and he
was actually one of the UM, one of the first
(10:00):
rate leaders at this time, at this moment in history
when the Americans first started showing up, and he was
very much interested in peace with the Americans. Um, not
even necessarily out of necessity, but like you said, like
the common enemy was Mexico, and he thought Americans were
great because they hated Mexico as much as as the
Apache did. That's right. The one problem with the Chiricawa
(10:23):
is that they had a nice place where they lived.
I mean, they were seasonal um migrators, and so they
would kind of move around. But um one of the
main places that they hung out was south south of
the Gila River in Arizona, and it was a really
really good place to be. So that means, of course,
as westward expansion happens, or as we'll see later, as
(10:46):
the Civil War happens and then Union troops head west
to try and keep it from falling into the hands
of the Southerners, that's gonna be a place where they're
gonna go. They're gonna be wagon trains going through there.
Eventually there's gonna be railroads going through there. And so
there was bay Slean. No chance that the Chiricawa were
just gonna be left alone to do their thing. No,
but this was their ancestral land, and they weren't exactly
(11:08):
you know, ones to leave other people alone through their
rating um and wars for revenge. So like again, like,
the stage was definitely set for Apache wars, but it's
wrong to say that they were inevitable. And the reason
why I was wrong to say that they were inevitables
because there was some early stuff that happened that didn't
have to happen that really kind of kicked this off.
(11:29):
But I propose we take a break before we start
talking about those things. Let's do it. Okay, We'll be
right back, Okay, Chuck so Um. One of the first
(12:04):
things that was um that that a lot of people
point to is the thing that kicked off the Apache war,
uh or wars I should say, took place in eighteen
sixty one, and it came to be known as the
Bascomb affair. And from what I saw, almost every site
that writes about Lieutenant George Bascombe wrote that he was young, inexperienced,
(12:24):
over enthusiastic, over zealous even, and pretty much incompetent when
it came to something as tense and unsure as negotiating
for the release of hostages. Yeah, and that's exactly what
happened in eighteen sixty one. The uh this is when
I didn't look up the Arab vapor um I'm going
(12:47):
with are of IPA. Okay. They were yet another band
of Apache that rated a farm of a settler named
John Ward. Went off to the Chiricawa Mountains, which is
where Coach Hee was. And you know, they did the
usual stuff. They took livestock, but they also made the
mistake of kidnapping UH John Ward's stepson, Felix Ward, which
(13:10):
is when UH Lieutenant Bascombe was sent in to bring
them to justice to negotiate something. He invites Coach Hee
to a meeting and again they went to Coaches's territory.
He was not behind this. And when he got in
a tent with Coach Yese and said, this is what
you did. This is one of those was those things
Coach he was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Man,
(13:30):
We had nothing to do with this. But here's what
I'll do. I'll try and find out I'll try and
find out who was behind this, and I'll track him
down and I'll bring him to you. And Bascomb said,
and which was a pretty good deal. Considering he didn't
have anything to do with it, and Bascomb said, no,
and you know what, You're gonna stay here as our
hostage along with your family members and coach he said,
(13:53):
I don't think so. I'm gonna cut a hole on
this tent in the middle of the night and leave.
They're like, how did he cut a hole in the tent?
It doesn't make any sense. He disappeared, but he he
had to leave his family behind to make his escape,
and UM Bascombe now had his family as hostages. So
Coachiefs went out UM and got his own hostages. They
(14:15):
raided a wagon train and a stage coach and got
both Mexican and American hostages. And the Mexicans they dispatched
immediately in some really terrible way. They tied them to
a wagon and then lit the wagon on fire. UM.
So the Mexican hostages had zero chance, but the Americans,
UM coach he's kept alive UH to to use as
(14:39):
UM pawns. And in negotiating the release of his own
family UM, and apparently Bascombe was unmoved. He said, no,
we're not releasing your family until we get that livestock
and that UM that kid that was initially kidnapped back
that's that's how your family's gonna get released. And so
after a few days of trying to negotiate U an
(15:00):
exchange of hostages, UM Coachife ordered the American hostages killed,
and then Bascomb ordered Coaches's family killed, which is really
something for a US Army officer to do, but that's
what happened. They were executed. Um. The women were let go,
but Um Coaches's favorite brother was among the ones that
(15:21):
were killed, and that did not sit very well with
Coach Cheese. That a lot of people say the baskemb
affairs what kicked off the the the Apache wars. Not
everyone agrees. Actually, there's there's other stuff that came later,
just real quick. The death of of Um Mangus Colorados,
that really important early chief who wanted to allie with
(15:43):
the Americans. In eighteen sixty three, he was invited for
peace talks and Um was held and executed. Um. The
peace talks were just a ruse, and he was grossly mutilated.
After he was murdered, they cut his head off, boiled
the skin from his goals, and its goal off to
a phrenologist in New York. Um and a lot of
(16:03):
people say that's probably what what started the Apache wars,
because not only was that a brutal way to treat
Mangus Colorados is very respected chief, but it also showed that, like,
you couldn't trust the Union Army to engage in actual
peach peace talks. They might just kill you. They might
just as soon kill you. And also they killed a
really big ally and studying hand among the Cherikawa. Alright,
(16:29):
so I mentioned earlier the Civil War getting cranked up
back east and Union soldiers coming out to kind of
you know, safeguard or at least protect Southerners from coming
into the American Southwest, and all of a sudden that
Cherikawa there, like, hey, if we want to do some rating,
this is pretty great because they've got all kinds of supplies,
all kinds of munitions, and it's a pretty pretty good
(16:53):
group of people to try and raid. And how some
of these raids went down as far as the military
is concerned, Uh, they're a battle in eighteen sixty two
that was pretty typical is that they would raid the military,
but the military it was far more outguns them. And
so the Apache retreat, but a retreat to the Apache
(17:13):
was not some bad thing. It was actually a tactic
because they could just sort of They're like, why just
get slaughtered because of pride when we can retreat and
really disappear into the desert and like they will not
find us. We know this land so well, we can
really hide out here because we're few in number and
we know this territory. And there are historians that basically
(17:35):
agreed that say, you know, if it wasn't for Apache
that ended up working with the military to turn on
their own people, like they could have never been found
if they didn't want to be. Yeah, and it wasn't
even necessarily turning on their own people. Again, that's looking
at it through the idea that all Apache were the same.
But we're talking about like the White Mountain Apache um
or the Dark Rocks people Apache like people that that
(17:59):
were might as well have been enemies to the Cherikawa.
So like the idea of them working with the army
as scouts to find these other Apache wasn't you know,
quite as much as as being like a Benedict Arnold
kind of thing. Yeah, not not turning on their own tribe,
right right, So um I found Chuck, there's actually a
confederate UM like officer that's buried in Arizona, because the
(18:22):
Confederacy actually made its way managed to get to Arizona
and occupied it for a brief time, and they themselves
also got into skirmishes with the Apache there and one
of them got killed. So there's a guy that's buried
who is a Confederate soldier in Arizona. Wow. So, um,
we should probably talk about the Camp Grant massacre because
(18:42):
this is a big turning point. We have lots of
raids and skirmishes and battles and atrocities that have been
going on during the first Um Apache Wars generally how
it's kind of loosely gathered together. But the Camp Grant
massacre in eighteen seventy one, it was a big turning
point because there of Apa chief Eska Mansen's Um people
(19:03):
were camped out near um Tucson at an army encampment,
like peacefully settling there. They were not like scouting or
doing anything like that. But the people of Tucson were
worried that there were raiders among them, and so they
pre emptively massacred the Um the Apache that were there,
and I think all but eight of the hundred and
(19:26):
forty four people that were killed in that massacre of
the Apache um were women and children. UM. And that
I think something like twenty seven kids were kidnapped and
sold into slavery and very soon came to work in
some of the homes of two sons, most affluent families.
It was a huge atrocity that was carried out by
the white settlers of Tucson UM and it had a
(19:50):
huge effect on not just the Um, the arab Apa Apache,
but also the Chirakawa as well. And it also had
a big effect on President Grant Ulysses As Grant who
was furious when he heard about this, and he actually
threatened to put Arizona under martial law unless this whole
thing got sorted out. And he sent a peace delegation
(20:11):
to speak with Coach Cheese to see if they could
keep this war from continuing on or breaking out further.
That's right. Uh. So they offered a truce. Uh. They said,
here's what we'll do. If you agree to move to
this reservation in San Carlos, then we can have a
peace treaty and a truce in line. Uh. San Carlos
(20:31):
was not a good place to be UM. It was terrible.
The settlers knew this, Uh, the Apache knew this. They
all called it Hell's forty Acres and so it was
not a place that they wanted to go. But Coach
Chiefs negotiated and said, you know what, we're not going there,
but if we can create our new reservation that's just
(20:52):
for us and we can come and go as we please, uh,
then we'll we'll get on board with his truce. And
Grant said okay, and they had a piece and it
lasted about four years. Eventually Coach Hes died of stomach cancer, though,
and that was, you know, one thing that kind of
weakened the piece. Accord. There was also an incident where, uh,
(21:12):
there were a couple of Chiricawa Apache who killed two
white men who didn't give them whiskey fair enough. And
both of these incidents is basically just sort of chipped away,
and all of a sudden there was no more truce. No,
because the people who lived in the area were like,
we don't like this idea that the Cherkawa gets to
like come and go off of their reservation as they please.
(21:34):
And in fact, they were staging raids in Mexico, which
was not part of the treaty, but it was an
oversight UM. And so like all those things combined, like
especially with the death of coaches like that, that treaty ended,
UM and so that like this the I think it
was a four year UM four year peace and when
that ended, the second Apache Wars began. That's right, Uh,
(21:57):
and coach he's his son took his place. UM. They said,
you know basically that UM, that reservation was abolished that
they were happy with. And they said, well, great, that
means we can just go back and live on you know,
wherever you want and and migrate around. And they said, no,
not really, UM, we'd like you to go back to
the San Carlos reservation that we know you hate. And
(22:21):
so they started negotiating. Uh Tazza had another uh Chiricawa
chief name who chief who j you h who He
was with Bdonka Hayes And he had a stutter though,
so he said, I don't like to negotiate in person
with my stutter. I'm going to have a proxy. My
brother in law, uh Goyakla is going to speak for me.
(22:45):
He's a medicine man, but you might know him by
his other name Geronimo And everyone went, WHOA, right, we've
heard of him, Uh, Geronimo. By this time, he was
already nicknamed as Geronimo, because it was the Mexicans who
gave Geronimo his nickname, and still to this day, no
(23:07):
one knows what the heck they meant by that. It
turns out that Geronimo is a really rare Italian version
of the name Jerome. And we're talking about Mexican and
Spanish people, not Italian, so it would be weird for
them to give him the name Jerome. And even if
they had given him the name Jerome, it wouldn't make
any sense because that means sacred name. And by the way,
(23:30):
you know Hieronymous, that's a version of Geronimo. Yeah, but
it doesn't make any sense. So regardless, it's lost to
history why they call him Geronimo, but they would shout
Geronimo during um some raids that he staged in New Mexico,
and Geronimo went into Mexico because if there was anybody
(23:51):
who hated among the Apache, who hated Mexican UH people,
it was Geronimo. He had watched them slaughter his UH
fame emily, including his mother and his wife, and some
children um, and he never he never forgot it, He
never forgave him. In every chance he had to kill
a Mexican, he he would take it gladly. That's right.
(24:12):
I mean he was genuinely scarred as a young man.
So it wasn't just like man hell bent on revenge.
It was man who suffered like deep deep draumas uh,
losing his family like this, so you know, that's where
all that came from. But he was a complicated guy.
He was you know, if you talked to Americans, he
(24:33):
was known as quote the worst Indian that ever lived
end quote. He had a bad temper, he was paranoid.
He was a fierce fighter who would not hang back,
you know, and like shoot arrows from long distances. He
would charge the enemy and running his zigzag so he
wouldn't get hit with a bullet, although apparently he did
get hit with a bullet quite a bit, as we'll
(24:54):
find out later. And then he would knife people and
take their guns and he didn't even know how to use.
Once he would take guns back to the other apache
so he got this nickname. Uh. They as like Mexicans
would shout it to warn each other, and then it
became something that the Apache latched onto as like a
chant of enthusiasm. Right. And so Geronimo was never a chief.
(25:18):
He became a leader, but he was never a chief.
And apparently he really didn't like people who um accidentally
confused him as a chief. Um. But he he had
like a lot of say, being a medicine man for
the badonky he right, m um, and but be being
that proxy of the actual chief who. So he was
part of these talks and the the the idea was
(25:41):
or the the decision was between who and Tazza and
Geronimo that um. The the Apache could either move to
the San Carlos Resignation Reservation, which had been designated for Apache,
or they could live life on the run um and
basically be died and exterminated by the U S Army.
(26:02):
That was their choice. And so Tazza, who was the
son of coaches and it was his designated air, said,
I we should we should, Like my father knew, like
there's no way to defeat these people. We need to
just you know, live in peace with them. And I
guess it means we have to move to the San
Carlos Reservation. Something like a third of the Apache followed him,
(26:25):
but two thirds said, now we're going to go the
way of Geronimo and who, and that is to just
basically escape and start staging raids and fighting and living
life on the run. Yeah, and Geronimo, this is really
the point in time where his legend really began to
grow as far as the Americans are concerned. And he was, uh,
(26:46):
like I said, he was a complicated guy. He would um,
he would get criticized by his own people for for
for you know, not giving up when he should, for
being reckless in their eyes with some of these young
soldiers who weren't as prepared as they need to be,
And was basically always just sort of like, at this point,
at least go full bore and try and win these
(27:06):
battles as like brutally as possible. So this was happening.
He was getting a reputation among his own people at
some points. Uh. There was a point in eighteen eighty
three where he staged a raid on that San Carlos reservation,
captured another Chira Cowen leader named Chief Loco and two
hundred of his followers and basically at gunpoint said you're
(27:30):
with me now, and you got to help us fight.
So he was uh, he wasn't always looked upon the
best by his own people, even because of stuff like this. Yeah,
I mean Chief Loco and his followers were like, no,
we're just trying to um, We're just trying to live peacefully.
Leave us alone, and and Gerano was said now, so
(27:50):
they were kind of pressed into service other groups. He
he in his band attracted just because they wanted to
fight too. It was that division of no, we need
to protect our ancestral lands and our old ways of living, um.
And so he attracted like Chief Chihuahua, Chief Nana, who
was also a Chehenney like Chief Loco. And that actually, um,
(28:11):
that that that kind of shows that division of opinions
and thoughts where Chief Loco is like, no, we need
to live, we need to live peacefully, and he was
a Cheheney. Um. Chief Nana was also a Cheheney, and
he was like, no, I'm he was at Geronimo side
throughout this entire fight. There's a lot of people say
that Chief Nana he was very old even during this time. Um,
(28:34):
and he lived to be a very old man. But
he also died fighting. They think that he probably killed
more Americans than any apache in history, just because he
was um, he fought so much and he lived for
so long. He's apparently also a really brilliant strategist as well. Alright,
so should we take a break or should we wait?
(28:55):
We could take a break. Is this our second one?
I've lost track because this is a thrilling story. Al Right,
let's take our second break and we'll pick back up
right after this. Okay. Alright, So at this same time,
(29:32):
kind of concurrently to Geronimo and all all his battle
and going on the Chaheney started to fight uh the
Americans at the same time. And they did this because
of another kind of a weird incident um caused by Geronimo,
almost an accident. Uh. He escaped. He had a knack
for escaping. He was really good at that. We'll see
time and time again. If you had Geronimo, you didn't
(29:53):
have him for very long. So he escaped and snuck
onto a reservation at uh Oho Caliente. And this was
this was kind of a big deal. Like they weren't
supposed to be there. They were supposed to Chihaney were uh,
they were supposed to be at San Carlos. They had
set up this other reservation, and again it was you know,
(30:14):
no one knew they were there because things were so
spread out. They were living peacefully. But this Geronimo escaping
and going to their encampment, they were like, hey man,
thanks a lot, Like now everybody knows we're here. He
brought the head. Yeah, put the serious heat on them
to the point where they said, you know, if you're
off of this reservation, you're gonna be shot on site.
And this kind of launches another one of the Apache
(30:37):
Wars or another part. Yeah. The Warm Springs band of
the chiheny Um were led by Chief Victorio, and they
were forced now that they now that they were found
out that they were living on Oho Caliente, which I
guess was, you know, a nicer reservation as far as
reservations went, that they were supposed to be in San Carlos.
They were faced with the same decision, go live in
(30:58):
this hell of San Carlos or live on the run.
And so Chief Victorio said, all right, we've been living peacefully.
We gave it a shot. The jig is up. Now
we are going to go back to living on the run.
And for two years Chief Victoria and his band was
were staging their own Apache war uh, concurrent with Geronimo
and his band staging a different Apache war, and Chief
(31:21):
Victoria's war in the band that that followed him were
so effective that Mexico and America, which hated each other,
still had been engaged in the Mexican American War less
than a decade before. UM, and we're just not fast
friends by any measure. Um, Mexico allowed the US to
UH have its army into Mexico and chase Chief Victorio
(31:44):
and his band. That's how much they were hated by
both the Mexicans and the Americans. And and um, that's
the links that they went to. And apparently they were
actually eventually found by a Mexican American joint expedition. The
Mexican contingent said to Mary Ricans, you should probably leave,
and that deep, deep, centuries old hatred between the Mexicans
(32:06):
and the Apache was really kind of brought to the foe,
and the Mexican slaughtered Victoria. Right up until this point, though,
Victoria had a lot of success with only about a
hundred and fifty warriors to fight with, and one of
the big reasons was this woman named losen Uh lowsin
(32:27):
was was pretty incredible and someone who I mean not
certainly not lost to history, but someone that you probably
never learned about in in like high school history. So
she was Victoria's sister, known as the apache Joan of arc. Uh.
She was a Chiheney Chiricawa medicine woman. She was a
great fighter, she was a great strategist. She uh, she
(32:50):
was wise beyond her years. She would she would kind
of do anything. I mean, there were great legends of
her like, uh, like helping to give birth on the
battlefield in the desert. Uh, and then like you know,
going right back to fighting and did a little Stevie
Nicks kind of deal where apparently she would hold her
hands out to the side and pray and lift her
(33:12):
palms up and turn in a circle. And uh, she said.
And then of course this is this is lore. But
she said that she could she would know the direction
where the enemy was coming from from these tingles that
she would get and depending on how intense the tingles were,
she could even tell how far they're away they were
from them. Yeah, it's still cheer a cow a legend
(33:33):
today that it was Losen who allowed Victoria in a
small band of a hundred and fifty people to survive
for two years, um, as long as they did from
this this weird special talent she had of knowing where
the enemy was coming from and how far away they were,
and sometimes how how strong their troop numbers were. Um,
and then they would move and dictate like their raids
(33:56):
based on her basically her visions, um and it was.
The idea is kind of supported by the fact that
Lowsen wasn't there when Victorio and the last of his
band met their end at the hand of the Mexicans.
She was um off smuggling a woman, a new mother,
and her newborn infant um back to the reservation so
(34:18):
that the mom and the baby could live safely. And
when she got to the reservation, she got news that
that her brother, Victorio and the rest of the band
that was fighting with him had all been slaughtered. And
there's a there's a discrepancy historically about how Victorio died, right, Yeah,
he either died, you know, fighting until his last breath,
(34:39):
or he took his own life at the last minute. Yeah,
so um. Either way, all of the band fought, fought
to their death, and Lowsen wasn't ready to give up
fighting either she was actually on the reservation and could
have stayed there. Instead, she immediately made her way to
go find Geronimo and his band and she joined up
with them. What if Lowsen had just been stealing uh
(35:01):
maps and plans from the other side, and she was like,
watch this. They love this stuff, right, She like does
the Stevie Nicks, the spin with the palms out kind
of things. She's like, yeah, they eat this up. I'm
gonna be a legend. What's this pretty good stuff? Um?
So now we find ourselves kind of coming towards the
end of the Apache Wars where things get really interesting.
(35:24):
When a man named General George Crook arrived on the scene.
They called him the Tan Wolf because he were Khaki.
A lot had a knack for Khaki. They had a
lot of respect for him, he had respect for them.
He earned his name fighting against the Sioux with Custer
years ago, but now he was back. I guess he
was a really good tracker too, because time and time again,
(35:46):
as we'll see, he tracked down Geronimo. Uh. They were
holding out in Mexico at this point, and he wanted
to negotiate, but things were pretty tense at the time,
So there were still a couple of skirmishes, and I
think Geronimo Uh and some of his guys were up
on a cliff above Crook's company and they were kind
of taunting Uh Crook's Apache scouts. Things were not going well,
(36:10):
but it ended up in a very strange turn of
events working out because Krook was a hunter and was
going off hunting the next day by himself and was
tracking an animal and ended up tracking this animal or
I don't know if he found the animal in the camp,
but eventually made his way right up to Geronimo and
where Geronimo was camped out and was like, oh, hi there,
(36:32):
and Geronimo says, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm
not gonna kill you, which he totally could have. I mean,
Krook was there with a single gun by himself, with
no cover and he just accidentally stumbled upon Geronimo and
some of his his warriors. That's I can imagine how
tense that situation was, even Crook knowing that they respected
him and he respected them. It's still Geronimo like, again,
(36:55):
what what the the Americans considered the worst Indian that
ever lived? That's right, so the writing was kind of
on the wall at this point with American encroachment. Geronimo
was like, there are endless numbers of you guys. You
have way more weapons, way more ammunition, way more supplies
than we could could ever get, and we've been on
(37:18):
the run and I don't think, uh, it's gonna work
out for us in the end. So maybe it's finally
time to not fight and to sit down at the
negotiating table, since you seem like someone who was at
least honorable enough to negotiate something honest. And Geronimo is
the last holdout to come to this conclusion by this time,
like it was just he and his band. The rest
(37:39):
of the APACHE or the rest of the um Chirrakawa
UM had either concluded that it was best to just
settle down and and um adapt to reservation life, or
they had been killed fighting. So for Geronimo to finally
come to this conclusion, he had been worn out because
he was the kind of just keep going and keep
(38:00):
going and keep going and inspire others to keep going.
So he um he decides to surrender to Crook, and
apparently the surrender lasted a very short time, but one
of the reasons why he did surrender was Crooks said
that um, that they would create a new reservation near
Turkey Creek, which is where Geronimo was born. Um, And
(38:21):
so they weren't going to move them to San Carlos.
I don't know if you've noticed a pattern or not everybody,
but when the only option was moved to San Carlos
or die, very frequently the Apache chose die or fight
to the death, um, because that's how bad San Carlos was.
Whenever there was another reservation put on the table, the
(38:41):
APACHE tended to say, okay, we'll we'll go give that
a shot. So it was really kind of points out
like how much of this could have been avoided, not
just from George Bascombe never being involved, or not just
for them torturing and killing mangus uh Colorado, but if
they had just proved the way of living at San
(39:02):
Carlos or gotten rid of San Carlos and just created
these other better reservations, the Apache wars might never have
taken the effect that they had either. You know, It's
like when Clarice Starling offered Hannibal Lecterer stay on Anthrax Island,
Plumb Island, Plumb Island. If it had gone a different way,
(39:23):
if they had offered him a real, like nice place,
maybe no one else would have died. Maybe they would
have caught Buffalo Bill before well wait a minute, they did.
It all worked out just fine thanks to Plumb Island.
You know, someone a fan of the movie bought the
Buffalo Bill House and has h has made it a
basically a silence of the Lamb's Museum. And I think
(39:46):
he's building out the basement to where you can airbnb
it and stay there. Oh boy, that sounds awful. It's
pretty great, and it's and that's just like the story
of Germontimo. Is it in um Ohio for real? I don't,
I don't remember where they're real And because you know,
very frequently they'll just be like this househol work. No
one will ever know it's you know, hig oh, no
one will ever buy this house and turn into Airbnb
(40:08):
and publicized that it's actually in Colorado. You know, hope
he makes money off of it. So um So Geronimo
surrenders a total chuck of four different times surrenders, escape, surrenders, escapes,
um And the reason he keeps escaping is because he
was about as hated as anyone ever was in this
stage of American history, not just out West, but even
(40:30):
back east. He was hated, mistrusted, um And there were
editorials that he would read written in the local paper
of wherever, whatever reservation he was having, he was being
held at um that we're calling for his immediate execution
and murder, sometimes by mobs and vigilante So apparently he
had a very large weakness for alcohol, and when he
(40:52):
got drunk, you could really convince him that they were
going to kill him if he didn't escape. So he
surrendered and escaped four different times games and on the
last time, uh, Krook was sent in with different marching orders,
this time by President Grover Cleveland, who said, there's no
terms of surrender anymore. Geronimo surrenders unconditionally or he dies.
(41:14):
And Krook said, that doesn't really sit well with me. Yeah,
he resigned, and uh, I think ever since then, you know,
or at least back then, of course, he was really
looked down upon for doing that by his fellow American soldiers.
So there's a bounty having integrity. Just want to be
(41:35):
clear about, uh, there's a bounty on Geronimo's head. At
this point for Grand a lot of money and a
new general takes over named General Nelson Miles. He was
sort of the opposite of Krook and that he had
no respect for the Apache. They had no respect for him. Uh.
He would do his leading from Fort's many many miles
(41:57):
away from the real action, and he was he kind
of ruined things in the end. Uh that that we'll
get to here in a second. But this last summer
of freedom here in eighty six for the Chericawa, um
I think it was Natchie was the chief at this point. Yeah,
and he was Tazza's brother, um who was not bred
(42:20):
to be chief. But Tazza died on a trip to Washington,
d C. So now you had a chief that was
easily manipulated through Geronimo, which just f y I. So
there was there were only like thirty seven uh free
Chiricawa at this point that were still down to battle.
Eighteen of them were the warrior types. There were thirteen
(42:42):
women and six kids, including a couple of infants. And
these thirty seven people were on the lamb for five
full months with a total of about you know, eight
to ten thousand either Army U S army or Mexican
soldiers or volunteers trying to find them. It's crazy, like
(43:04):
they could really blend into their territory. Yeah, they did
so well at that Chuck. There was only one death
that entire summer of that band of thirty seven, and
Geronimo was loving it. He was like in retrospect, he
was like, this was these were the salad days. I
did some of my best fighting. He's you know, there
were a few of us. Uh, you know, I I could.
(43:24):
I knew when they were coming. I didn't do the
Stevie Knicks, but I knew. I knew what was going
to happen before it happened. I was so on my game.
So that General Miles guy, he came up with a plan,
like he knew that the UM, the the Apache, the
Cherikawa that we're on San Carlos Reservation were still very
closely tied to this band of thirty seven that were
(43:45):
following Geronimo UM, and so he sent word through two
Apache scouts that the family members for the four and
thirty four Churikawa on the reservation had been shipped to
a prison in Florida, and that if they ever wanted
to see their family again. They needed to give up
and surrender, and this proved to be the last draw
(44:06):
for Geronimo. He said, okay, fine, I'm gonna surrender, and
he negotiated. He managed to negotiate terms. He agreed to
be uh to live in exile for two years as
a prisoner of war. But it turned out that the
the those terms were not honored and he never was
able to to make his way back to his his homeland,
his ancestral land in South Arizona, New Mexico again after
(44:30):
he left. That's right, I believe that they were. He
was reunited with his family eventually in Alabama, UH and
then moved out to Oklahoma. Yes, neither of which were
his original You know, I think to the Americans back then,
they're like, oh, look, we're sending you to Oklahoma, where
you're where your your people are from. So that's probably great, right. Yeah.
(44:53):
So the problem was that the people who finally did
make it to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, and again this
is just a male ling hodgepodgs there, like, if you're
a Native American, this is where you live now Oklahoma.
It was twenty seven years before any Chirrakawa were allowed
to move back to their ancestral lands, and at the
time about a third of them said, no, this is
(45:15):
our home now. Um, you know, most of us were
born here. A lot of us were born here. So
there's a Fort Sill, Oklahoma, um contingent of of Churacawa,
and then there's also the Mescalero Reservation Cherracawa that live.
About two thirds of them moved to that south south
(45:35):
southern Arizona area where they live still today. And Geronimo,
if you've ever seen uh, I mean, there are quite
a few famous portraits and photographs of Geronimo, and that's
because Geronimo went on to be pretty famous. Uh. He
later on toured with Buffalo Bill and his side show.
He would uh, he would sell his little trinkets from
(45:57):
his coat uh to two people who would pay top dollar,
like buttons, and then he just replaced it with another
button way for the next person. That's right. And he
rode and Teddy Roosevelt's election parade, and as legend has it,
a lot of people came to see Geronimo more so
than Teddy Roosevelt. Even he asked personally Teddy Roosevelt permission
(46:20):
to go back to his ancestral lands, and Teddy Roosevelt refused,
even those long past the two years that he had
negotiated in the terms of his surrender. Teddy Roosevelt said, basically,
you don't want to go back there. There's too many
people that want to see you hanged still. And so
Geronimo actually died on the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Um.
He had been drinking pretty heavily that day, fell off
(46:43):
his horse, Um and laid in a ditch all night
and apparently caught pneumonia. And as he was dying, he
regretted not having fought to the death, even though he
managed to live to be an old man. Um. And
in retrospect this the the Apache Wars were Um. Again,
that was, depending on how you look at it, the
(47:04):
longest lasting war in American history. And it was also
extraordinarily bloody, especially for the Americans. Remember the Cherikawa numbered
maybe hundred, and they managed to engage in a twenty
five year war with the American Army and the Mexican
Army simultaneously. And there's a famous quote from William to
(47:26):
Comps to Sherman, who said, we had one war with
Mexico to take Arizona and we should have another war
to make them take it back. That's how devastating the
Apache Wars were for the Americans. So that's the Apache Wars.
Oh one other thing, Chuck, So remember I said there
was a division among the Cherikawa um about ones who
(47:48):
were like, we just want to live in peace and
will adapt a reservation life, and the others they know,
we have to we have to fight to the death
for the old ways. Well, now, if you look back
and you go onto the Cherikawa tribe we site and
you look, they proclaimed themselves to be a peaceful tribe.
So it turns out that that faction ultimately one out
in the end. Very cool. Do you have anything else now? Okay, Well,
(48:12):
if you want to know more about the Cherikawa and
other Apache groups, there's plenty of really interesting history out
there for you on the Internet. And since I said
that it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this
reminder that we have a lot of episodes. Hello Josh
and Chuckers. I'm writing you today from Georgetown, Texas while
(48:34):
currently listening to How Kleptomaniacs Work from two thousand nine,
recently discovered your podcast and love it. So I decided
to start at the beginning. Do y'all know you'll have
eighteen and forty three episodes? I don't think that's right. Uh,
and Sarah says, Holy hell, it's taking a while to
get caught up. I really want to jump to new
But on the other hand, it's kind of fun and
(48:55):
interesting to listen to past episodes. For example, will the
world end in twelve? Dug a bullet on that one. Anyway,
I just want to send a quick hello, love the show,
Love how you smart guys. That's in quotes, by the way,
which means she doesn't really mean that, deliver info in
a funny way. I also love that I get your
random references to off the wall stuff Simpson's episode, old
(49:17):
school band names, et cetera. Keep up the great work.
You can't wait to hear what the future holds I
E episodes. That is from Sarah A yes, well, Chuck,
think about how red Sarah's face is going to be
when she finally gets to the episode where you suggest
sandwiching episodes. I know, well, I'm gonna tell Sarah. We'll
(49:38):
see what happens here. Okay, I'm gonna tell her I'm
reading this listener mail. We'll see if we can't tempt her.
I won't even tell her which episode it said. Okay,
so she'll hear this in like twenty seven years. No, no no, no,
I'm gonna let her know, and she may she may
start listening to your episodes. You know what I'm saying. Okay, Well,
I think we've reached the end of this episode. And
if you want to be like Sarah and get in
touch with us, you can send us an email to
(50:00):
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and this
is Stuff you should know. Uh, celebrating Native American Heritage Month. Fantastic, um,
(00:25):
and we are talking about something we probably would have
talked about whether it was Native American Heritage Month or not,
but we selected it for this month in particular just
as a nod shout out. But we're talking about one
of those um moments in history that probably most people
are walking around and are like, oh, yeah, the Apache Wars,
(00:46):
I've I've heard of that, but no, almost nothing about
even though depending on how you look at it, it's
actually still to this day the longest ward that the
United States ever fought. Really Yeah, and it produced some
really famous, really interesting, really um amazing characters on both sides,
(01:07):
but in particular among the Apache who and we'll meet
a lot of them in this episode. Yeah, and these
are you know, a series of skirmishes over time that um,
it seems like there was there was often peace and
then there were these inciting incidents that would happen. There
were misunderstandings that happened. Uh, there were bungled um negotiations
(01:31):
that happened, and like it feels like it could have
gone a different way at so many points, and it
continually just went south. Yeah, And I mean speaking you know,
histories written by the victors, and so the idea of
the Apache basically being um, you know, bloodthirsty, cruel, merciless, um,
(01:53):
you know, people who mutilated victims and would kill women
and children. Um. You know, that's that's definitely painted. Uh,
it paints the whole the whole group with a much
larger brush than you should. But it also leaves out
the atrocities that were committed on the other side to
their people were slaughtered as well, exactly. So, Um, it's
(02:15):
just one of those things where it was war like.
It was a genuine straight up war. But like you said,
there are plenty of places where it could have been avoided,
and we'll talk about those, but first talk, I think
we should talk about the Apache. And one of the
first things that I've learned when I started researching this
is that the Apache are not a nation or tribe.
Their group of loosely affiliated tribes that all kind of
(02:37):
come from the same area and despite the fact that
we tend to think of the Apache as totally tied
to the southwestern United States, they actually arrived fairly recently
from western Canada, like BC, I take it, that's right, uh,
and they eventually found their way to the American uh southwest.
(02:57):
They did not we call them Apache. They they do
not call themselves that. They called themselves I guess day,
which means that the people, which is pretty great and basic.
And they think the name Apache may have been given
to them from the word Apache by the Zuni tribe
who battled with them many times, and that means Apache
(03:19):
means enemy in Zuni, so they think that's where Apache
came from. And uh, you know, you mentioned that they
were a loose collection. I mean there were never like
hundreds of thousands of Apache. I'm not sure where the
numbers topped out, but they were spread over fifteen million
square miles, so that's called a very very thin uh distribution.
(03:45):
So they were uh, you know, not to skip head
too much, but they were rarely in groups, um more
than like twenty five or thirty at a time, right, right,
And so what you would call the Apache were actually
kind of spread out among the western Apache uh, there's
the Cherikawa Apache UM and then these larger groups were
split into smaller bands even and the Cherkawa are kind
(04:08):
of like the central group that UM fought the Apache wars,
although just about every apache Um tribe was involved, but
the Cherkaoa were kind of like the central figures. And
the Cherkao were broken into four different smaller bands, the
bed bed on kohe let's hear it, but donka hey,
(04:32):
thank you, Chuck, the chikon In Chehenni, and the Nedni
Yeah great, okay, so the so what was the first
one again? But donke hey, that's much better than mine.
But all of these groups, these four bands that formed
the ch Chirkawa apache Um total maybe people at their
(04:57):
at their largest um population size UM. And despite that
really small number, they produced some really famous people like
Geronimo CoA Cheese Victorio. All of them were Churakawa Apache
and again they were the central group that fought the
Apache Wars. They were also the central group that could
have stemmed off the Apache wars if UM some of
(05:19):
the Union soldiers that they had to deal with had
taken them a different way. That's right. Uh. And you
know I mentioned that there were a lot of misunderstandings
and mix ups along the way, and combine that with
the fact that, um, the settlers just thought they were
all Apache and that they all were the same. There
were misunderstandings like, uh, you know, a raid would happen
(05:43):
on a camp, and this was one of the the
ways that the Apache got by, as they would, you know,
not because they didn't like somebody, because they needed supplies
and stuff. They would raid a camp, take some stuff,
and the settlers would think, well, this is just this
is the Apache. It's all of you doing this, whereas
it might be one very small group and the other
groups will be like, I don't even know what you're
talking about, right, And that's why I was saying, you
(06:04):
can't really paint the the people we call the Apache
with this very large brush, because some of them worked
very closely and for the U. S. Military to go
find other Apache. UM. Even within the Cherikawa there were
totally different ideas on how to approach and deal with
the Americans. UM. There was a big division that developed
(06:25):
through the Apache wars in among the Apache of you know,
some of them were like, look, we cannot defeat this enemy.
The best thing we can do and to hope to
live peacefully is to just settle down and start farming
and live on these reservations that they're they're making us
live on. And the other groups said, no where. We
need to fight to the death for our ancestral lands
(06:46):
and our old ways of life. And so there's a
lot of nuance, there's a lot of difference. There's a
lot of disagreement among these people who are living and
fighting during the Apache Wars, and even some of the
ones that wanted to live peacefully were frequently worst into
fighting like that was their only choice. Um. And so
it's it's just really important to keep in mind that
(07:07):
you you can't just just like you can't say Apache
and that's just one nation because it's not. UM. You
also can't just say, well, all the Apache thought this way,
or even all the Cherikawa thought this way. There was
just a lot of a lot of difference, and there
was also a lot of room four different opinions, because,
like you said, the groups that they lived in really
(07:29):
were usually no more than twenty five or thirty and
a family or a couple of families exactly, and they
were often related by blood and marriage, and it was
a matrilineal society too. So if you were a man
and you married a woman, you joined your your wife's
family from that point on. And so these bands, these
four bands of the Cherikawa were um were very much
(07:50):
related to one another because they would often swap you know,
UM members through marriage and alliances. That's right. So uh
I mentioned the raids as a way of life for them. UM.
That is different than like there was no malice involved.
That was different from like an actual skirmish or a
battle when the warriors would would take center stage and
(08:12):
that was serious stuff. They were um. They were people
that very much uh wanted revenge when they were wronged,
and that's when those sort of really bloody skirmishes would
take place, as opposed to the raids, which was uh
them you know, getting food and supplies and ammunition and
stuff like that. Yeah. There was an author of a
(08:34):
book called the Apache Wars, a guy named Paul Andrew
Hutton said that they likened them to the Vikings, that
they just like rating was out of economic necessity. The
thing is that they were also again camp paying them
all with one brush. There are plenty of them that
were raiders UM, and all of them apparently engaged in raiding,
but some much more than others. And then the ones
(08:55):
that didn't raid so much, they might farm a little more,
or they might engage in peaceful trade with their neighbors.
But the the one commonality that basically all groups labeled
as APACHE seemed to have had was a a UM
like an enemy in Mexico, first the Spanish and then
later Mexico, where like if you were caught by Mexican
(09:18):
and you were an Apache, or you were a Mexican
and you were caught by Apache, you were going to
face the very brutal, unhappy and UM almost immediately like
there they were. They weren't gonna like release you as
a hostage or negotiate for your release. You were going
to be killed horribly. Yeah. And they were united, uh
(09:39):
sometimes with the settlers against Mexico, so much so that
I believe one of the chiefs told Kit Carson, who
was an American scout in six like, hey, we'll team
up with you to fight Mexico. That's how much we
hate Mexico. Yeah. That chief was Mangus Colorados, and he
was actually one of the UM, one of the first
(10:00):
rate leaders at this time, at this moment in history
when the Americans first started showing up, and he was
very much interested in peace with the Americans. Um, not
even necessarily out of necessity, but like you said, like
the common enemy was Mexico, and he thought Americans were
great because they hated Mexico as much as as the
Apache did. That's right. The one problem with the Chiricawa
(10:23):
is that they had a nice place where they lived.
I mean, they were seasonal um migrators, and so they
would kind of move around. But um one of the
main places that they hung out was south south of
the Gila River in Arizona, and it was a really
really good place to be. So that means, of course,
as westward expansion happens, or as we'll see later, as
(10:46):
the Civil War happens and then Union troops head west
to try and keep it from falling into the hands
of the Southerners, that's gonna be a place where they're
gonna go. They're gonna be wagon trains going through there.
Eventually there's gonna be railroads going through there. And so
there was bay Slean. No chance that the Chiricawa were
just gonna be left alone to do their thing. No,
but this was their ancestral land, and they weren't exactly
(11:08):
you know, ones to leave other people alone through their
rating um and wars for revenge. So like again, like,
the stage was definitely set for Apache wars, but it's
wrong to say that they were inevitable. And the reason
why I was wrong to say that they were inevitables
because there was some early stuff that happened that didn't
have to happen that really kind of kicked this off.
(11:29):
But I propose we take a break before we start
talking about those things. Let's do it. Okay, We'll be
right back, Okay, Chuck so Um. One of the first
(12:04):
things that was um that that a lot of people
point to is the thing that kicked off the Apache war,
uh or wars I should say, took place in eighteen
sixty one, and it came to be known as the
Bascomb affair. And from what I saw, almost every site
that writes about Lieutenant George Bascombe wrote that he was young, inexperienced,
(12:24):
over enthusiastic, over zealous even, and pretty much incompetent when
it came to something as tense and unsure as negotiating
for the release of hostages. Yeah, and that's exactly what
happened in eighteen sixty one. The uh this is when
I didn't look up the Arab vapor um I'm going
(12:47):
with are of IPA. Okay. They were yet another band
of Apache that rated a farm of a settler named
John Ward. Went off to the Chiricawa Mountains, which is
where Coach Hee was. And you know, they did the
usual stuff. They took livestock, but they also made the
mistake of kidnapping UH John Ward's stepson, Felix Ward, which
(13:10):
is when UH Lieutenant Bascombe was sent in to bring
them to justice to negotiate something. He invites Coach Hee
to a meeting and again they went to Coaches's territory.
He was not behind this. And when he got in
a tent with Coach Yese and said, this is what
you did. This is one of those was those things
Coach he was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Man,
(13:30):
We had nothing to do with this. But here's what
I'll do. I'll try and find out I'll try and
find out who was behind this, and I'll track him
down and I'll bring him to you. And Bascomb said,
and which was a pretty good deal. Considering he didn't
have anything to do with it, and Bascomb said, no,
and you know what, You're gonna stay here as our
hostage along with your family members and coach he said,
(13:53):
I don't think so. I'm gonna cut a hole on
this tent in the middle of the night and leave.
They're like, how did he cut a hole in the tent?
It doesn't make any sense. He disappeared, but he he
had to leave his family behind to make his escape,
and UM Bascombe now had his family as hostages. So
Coachiefs went out UM and got his own hostages. They
(14:15):
raided a wagon train and a stage coach and got
both Mexican and American hostages. And the Mexicans they dispatched
immediately in some really terrible way. They tied them to
a wagon and then lit the wagon on fire. UM.
So the Mexican hostages had zero chance, but the Americans,
UM coach he's kept alive UH to to use as
(14:39):
UM pawns. And in negotiating the release of his own
family UM, and apparently Bascombe was unmoved. He said, no,
we're not releasing your family until we get that livestock
and that UM that kid that was initially kidnapped back
that's that's how your family's gonna get released. And so
after a few days of trying to negotiate U an
(15:00):
exchange of hostages, UM Coachife ordered the American hostages killed,
and then Bascomb ordered Coaches's family killed, which is really
something for a US Army officer to do, but that's
what happened. They were executed. Um. The women were let go,
but Um Coaches's favorite brother was among the ones that
(15:21):
were killed, and that did not sit very well with
Coach Cheese. That a lot of people say the baskemb
affairs what kicked off the the the Apache wars. Not
everyone agrees. Actually, there's there's other stuff that came later,
just real quick. The death of of Um Mangus Colorados,
that really important early chief who wanted to allie with
(15:43):
the Americans. In eighteen sixty three, he was invited for
peace talks and Um was held and executed. Um. The
peace talks were just a ruse, and he was grossly mutilated.
After he was murdered, they cut his head off, boiled
the skin from his goals, and its goal off to
a phrenologist in New York. Um and a lot of
(16:03):
people say that's probably what what started the Apache wars,
because not only was that a brutal way to treat
Mangus Colorados is very respected chief, but it also showed that, like,
you couldn't trust the Union Army to engage in actual
peach peace talks. They might just kill you. They might
just as soon kill you. And also they killed a
really big ally and studying hand among the Cherikawa. Alright,
(16:29):
so I mentioned earlier the Civil War getting cranked up
back east and Union soldiers coming out to kind of
you know, safeguard or at least protect Southerners from coming
into the American Southwest, and all of a sudden that
Cherikawa there, like, hey, if we want to do some rating,
this is pretty great because they've got all kinds of supplies,
all kinds of munitions, and it's a pretty pretty good
(16:53):
group of people to try and raid. And how some
of these raids went down as far as the military
is concerned, Uh, they're a battle in eighteen sixty two
that was pretty typical is that they would raid the military,
but the military it was far more outguns them. And
so the Apache retreat, but a retreat to the Apache
(17:13):
was not some bad thing. It was actually a tactic
because they could just sort of They're like, why just
get slaughtered because of pride when we can retreat and
really disappear into the desert and like they will not
find us. We know this land so well, we can
really hide out here because we're few in number and
we know this territory. And there are historians that basically
(17:35):
agreed that say, you know, if it wasn't for Apache
that ended up working with the military to turn on
their own people, like they could have never been found
if they didn't want to be. Yeah, and it wasn't
even necessarily turning on their own people. Again, that's looking
at it through the idea that all Apache were the same.
But we're talking about like the White Mountain Apache um
or the Dark Rocks people Apache like people that that
(17:59):
were might as well have been enemies to the Cherikawa.
So like the idea of them working with the army
as scouts to find these other Apache wasn't you know,
quite as much as as being like a Benedict Arnold
kind of thing. Yeah, not not turning on their own tribe,
right right, So um I found Chuck, there's actually a
confederate UM like officer that's buried in Arizona, because the
(18:22):
Confederacy actually made its way managed to get to Arizona
and occupied it for a brief time, and they themselves
also got into skirmishes with the Apache there and one
of them got killed. So there's a guy that's buried
who is a Confederate soldier in Arizona. Wow. So, um,
we should probably talk about the Camp Grant massacre because
(18:42):
this is a big turning point. We have lots of
raids and skirmishes and battles and atrocities that have been
going on during the first Um Apache Wars generally how
it's kind of loosely gathered together. But the Camp Grant
massacre in eighteen seventy one, it was a big turning
point because there of Apa chief Eska Mansen's Um people
(19:03):
were camped out near um Tucson at an army encampment,
like peacefully settling there. They were not like scouting or
doing anything like that. But the people of Tucson were
worried that there were raiders among them, and so they
pre emptively massacred the Um the Apache that were there,
and I think all but eight of the hundred and
(19:26):
forty four people that were killed in that massacre of
the Apache um were women and children. UM. And that
I think something like twenty seven kids were kidnapped and
sold into slavery and very soon came to work in
some of the homes of two sons, most affluent families.
It was a huge atrocity that was carried out by
the white settlers of Tucson UM and it had a
(19:50):
huge effect on not just the Um, the arab Apa Apache,
but also the Chirakawa as well. And it also had
a big effect on President Grant Ulysses As Grant who
was furious when he heard about this, and he actually
threatened to put Arizona under martial law unless this whole
thing got sorted out. And he sent a peace delegation
(20:11):
to speak with Coach Cheese to see if they could
keep this war from continuing on or breaking out further.
That's right. Uh. So they offered a truce. Uh. They said,
here's what we'll do. If you agree to move to
this reservation in San Carlos, then we can have a
peace treaty and a truce in line. Uh. San Carlos
(20:31):
was not a good place to be UM. It was terrible.
The settlers knew this, Uh, the Apache knew this. They
all called it Hell's forty Acres and so it was
not a place that they wanted to go. But Coach
Chiefs negotiated and said, you know what, we're not going there,
but if we can create our new reservation that's just
(20:52):
for us and we can come and go as we please, uh,
then we'll we'll get on board with his truce. And
Grant said okay, and they had a piece and it
lasted about four years. Eventually Coach Hes died of stomach cancer, though,
and that was, you know, one thing that kind of
weakened the piece. Accord. There was also an incident where, uh,
(21:12):
there were a couple of Chiricawa Apache who killed two
white men who didn't give them whiskey fair enough. And
both of these incidents is basically just sort of chipped away,
and all of a sudden there was no more truce. No,
because the people who lived in the area were like,
we don't like this idea that the Cherkawa gets to
like come and go off of their reservation as they please.
(21:34):
And in fact, they were staging raids in Mexico, which
was not part of the treaty, but it was an
oversight UM. And so like all those things combined, like
especially with the death of coaches like that, that treaty ended,
UM and so that like this the I think it
was a four year UM four year peace and when
that ended, the second Apache Wars began. That's right, Uh,
(21:57):
and coach he's his son took his place. UM. They said,
you know basically that UM, that reservation was abolished that
they were happy with. And they said, well, great, that
means we can just go back and live on you know,
wherever you want and and migrate around. And they said, no,
not really, UM, we'd like you to go back to
the San Carlos reservation that we know you hate. And
(22:21):
so they started negotiating. Uh Tazza had another uh Chiricawa
chief name who chief who j you h who He
was with Bdonka Hayes And he had a stutter though,
so he said, I don't like to negotiate in person
with my stutter. I'm going to have a proxy. My
brother in law, uh Goyakla is going to speak for me.
(22:45):
He's a medicine man, but you might know him by
his other name Geronimo And everyone went, WHOA, right, we've
heard of him, Uh, Geronimo. By this time, he was
already nicknamed as Geronimo, because it was the Mexicans who
gave Geronimo his nickname, and still to this day, no
(23:07):
one knows what the heck they meant by that. It
turns out that Geronimo is a really rare Italian version
of the name Jerome. And we're talking about Mexican and
Spanish people, not Italian, so it would be weird for
them to give him the name Jerome. And even if
they had given him the name Jerome, it wouldn't make
any sense because that means sacred name. And by the way,
(23:30):
you know Hieronymous, that's a version of Geronimo. Yeah, but
it doesn't make any sense. So regardless, it's lost to
history why they call him Geronimo, but they would shout
Geronimo during um some raids that he staged in New Mexico,
and Geronimo went into Mexico because if there was anybody
(23:51):
who hated among the Apache, who hated Mexican UH people,
it was Geronimo. He had watched them slaughter his UH
fame emily, including his mother and his wife, and some
children um, and he never he never forgot it, He
never forgave him. In every chance he had to kill
a Mexican, he he would take it gladly. That's right.
(24:12):
I mean he was genuinely scarred as a young man.
So it wasn't just like man hell bent on revenge.
It was man who suffered like deep deep draumas uh,
losing his family like this, so you know, that's where
all that came from. But he was a complicated guy.
He was you know, if you talked to Americans, he
(24:33):
was known as quote the worst Indian that ever lived
end quote. He had a bad temper, he was paranoid.
He was a fierce fighter who would not hang back,
you know, and like shoot arrows from long distances. He
would charge the enemy and running his zigzag so he
wouldn't get hit with a bullet, although apparently he did
get hit with a bullet quite a bit, as we'll
(24:54):
find out later. And then he would knife people and
take their guns and he didn't even know how to use.
Once he would take guns back to the other apache
so he got this nickname. Uh. They as like Mexicans
would shout it to warn each other, and then it
became something that the Apache latched onto as like a
chant of enthusiasm. Right. And so Geronimo was never a chief.
(25:18):
He became a leader, but he was never a chief.
And apparently he really didn't like people who um accidentally
confused him as a chief. Um. But he he had
like a lot of say, being a medicine man for
the badonky he right, m um, and but be being
that proxy of the actual chief who. So he was
part of these talks and the the the idea was
(25:41):
or the the decision was between who and Tazza and
Geronimo that um. The the Apache could either move to
the San Carlos Resignation Reservation, which had been designated for Apache,
or they could live life on the run um and
basically be died and exterminated by the U S Army.
(26:02):
That was their choice. And so Tazza, who was the
son of coaches and it was his designated air, said,
I we should we should, Like my father knew, like
there's no way to defeat these people. We need to
just you know, live in peace with them. And I
guess it means we have to move to the San
Carlos Reservation. Something like a third of the Apache followed him,
(26:25):
but two thirds said, now we're going to go the
way of Geronimo and who, and that is to just
basically escape and start staging raids and fighting and living
life on the run. Yeah, and Geronimo, this is really
the point in time where his legend really began to
grow as far as the Americans are concerned. And he was, uh,
(26:46):
like I said, he was a complicated guy. He would um,
he would get criticized by his own people for for
for you know, not giving up when he should, for
being reckless in their eyes with some of these young
soldiers who weren't as prepared as they need to be,
And was basically always just sort of like, at this point,
at least go full bore and try and win these
(27:06):
battles as like brutally as possible. So this was happening.
He was getting a reputation among his own people at
some points. Uh. There was a point in eighteen eighty
three where he staged a raid on that San Carlos reservation,
captured another Chira Cowen leader named Chief Loco and two
hundred of his followers and basically at gunpoint said you're
(27:30):
with me now, and you got to help us fight.
So he was uh, he wasn't always looked upon the
best by his own people, even because of stuff like this. Yeah,
I mean Chief Loco and his followers were like, no,
we're just trying to um, We're just trying to live peacefully.
Leave us alone, and and Gerano was said now, so
(27:50):
they were kind of pressed into service other groups. He
he in his band attracted just because they wanted to
fight too. It was that division of no, we need
to protect our ancestral lands and our old ways of living, um.
And so he attracted like Chief Chihuahua, Chief Nana, who
was also a Chehenney like Chief Loco. And that actually, um,
(28:11):
that that that kind of shows that division of opinions
and thoughts where Chief Loco is like, no, we need
to live, we need to live peacefully, and he was
a Cheheney. Um. Chief Nana was also a Cheheney, and
he was like, no, I'm he was at Geronimo side
throughout this entire fight. There's a lot of people say
that Chief Nana he was very old even during this time. Um,
(28:34):
and he lived to be a very old man. But
he also died fighting. They think that he probably killed
more Americans than any apache in history, just because he
was um, he fought so much and he lived for
so long. He's apparently also a really brilliant strategist as well. Alright,
so should we take a break or should we wait?
(28:55):
We could take a break. Is this our second one?
I've lost track because this is a thrilling story. Al Right,
let's take our second break and we'll pick back up
right after this. Okay. Alright, So at this same time,
(29:32):
kind of concurrently to Geronimo and all all his battle
and going on the Chaheney started to fight uh the
Americans at the same time. And they did this because
of another kind of a weird incident um caused by Geronimo,
almost an accident. Uh. He escaped. He had a knack
for escaping. He was really good at that. We'll see
time and time again. If you had Geronimo, you didn't
(29:53):
have him for very long. So he escaped and snuck
onto a reservation at uh Oho Caliente. And this was
this was kind of a big deal. Like they weren't
supposed to be there. They were supposed to Chihaney were uh,
they were supposed to be at San Carlos. They had
set up this other reservation, and again it was you know,
(30:14):
no one knew they were there because things were so
spread out. They were living peacefully. But this Geronimo escaping
and going to their encampment, they were like, hey man,
thanks a lot, Like now everybody knows we're here. He
brought the head. Yeah, put the serious heat on them
to the point where they said, you know, if you're
off of this reservation, you're gonna be shot on site.
And this kind of launches another one of the Apache
(30:37):
Wars or another part. Yeah. The Warm Springs band of
the chiheny Um were led by Chief Victorio, and they
were forced now that they now that they were found
out that they were living on Oho Caliente, which I
guess was, you know, a nicer reservation as far as
reservations went, that they were supposed to be in San Carlos.
They were faced with the same decision, go live in
(30:58):
this hell of San Carlos or live on the run.
And so Chief Victorio said, all right, we've been living peacefully.
We gave it a shot. The jig is up. Now
we are going to go back to living on the run.
And for two years Chief Victoria and his band was
were staging their own Apache war uh, concurrent with Geronimo
and his band staging a different Apache war, and Chief
(31:21):
Victoria's war in the band that that followed him were
so effective that Mexico and America, which hated each other,
still had been engaged in the Mexican American War less
than a decade before. UM, and we're just not fast
friends by any measure. Um, Mexico allowed the US to
UH have its army into Mexico and chase Chief Victorio
(31:44):
and his band. That's how much they were hated by
both the Mexicans and the Americans. And and um, that's
the links that they went to. And apparently they were
actually eventually found by a Mexican American joint expedition. The
Mexican contingent said to Mary Ricans, you should probably leave,
and that deep, deep, centuries old hatred between the Mexicans
(32:06):
and the Apache was really kind of brought to the foe,
and the Mexican slaughtered Victoria. Right up until this point, though,
Victoria had a lot of success with only about a
hundred and fifty warriors to fight with, and one of
the big reasons was this woman named losen Uh lowsin
(32:27):
was was pretty incredible and someone who I mean not
certainly not lost to history, but someone that you probably
never learned about in in like high school history. So
she was Victoria's sister, known as the apache Joan of arc. Uh.
She was a Chiheney Chiricawa medicine woman. She was a
great fighter, she was a great strategist. She uh, she
(32:50):
was wise beyond her years. She would she would kind
of do anything. I mean, there were great legends of
her like, uh, like helping to give birth on the
battlefield in the desert. Uh, and then like you know,
going right back to fighting and did a little Stevie
Nicks kind of deal where apparently she would hold her
hands out to the side and pray and lift her
(33:12):
palms up and turn in a circle. And uh, she said.
And then of course this is this is lore. But
she said that she could she would know the direction
where the enemy was coming from from these tingles that
she would get and depending on how intense the tingles were,
she could even tell how far they're away they were
from them. Yeah, it's still cheer a cow a legend
(33:33):
today that it was Losen who allowed Victoria in a
small band of a hundred and fifty people to survive
for two years, um, as long as they did from
this this weird special talent she had of knowing where
the enemy was coming from and how far away they were,
and sometimes how how strong their troop numbers were. Um,
and then they would move and dictate like their raids
(33:56):
based on her basically her visions, um and it was.
The idea is kind of supported by the fact that
Lowsen wasn't there when Victorio and the last of his
band met their end at the hand of the Mexicans.
She was um off smuggling a woman, a new mother,
and her newborn infant um back to the reservation so
(34:18):
that the mom and the baby could live safely. And
when she got to the reservation, she got news that
that her brother, Victorio and the rest of the band
that was fighting with him had all been slaughtered. And
there's a there's a discrepancy historically about how Victorio died, right, Yeah,
he either died, you know, fighting until his last breath,
(34:39):
or he took his own life at the last minute. Yeah,
so um. Either way, all of the band fought, fought
to their death, and Lowsen wasn't ready to give up
fighting either she was actually on the reservation and could
have stayed there. Instead, she immediately made her way to
go find Geronimo and his band and she joined up
with them. What if Lowsen had just been stealing uh
(35:01):
maps and plans from the other side, and she was like,
watch this. They love this stuff, right, She like does
the Stevie Nicks, the spin with the palms out kind
of things. She's like, yeah, they eat this up. I'm
gonna be a legend. What's this pretty good stuff? Um?
So now we find ourselves kind of coming towards the
end of the Apache Wars where things get really interesting.
(35:24):
When a man named General George Crook arrived on the scene.
They called him the Tan Wolf because he were Khaki.
A lot had a knack for Khaki. They had a
lot of respect for him, he had respect for them.
He earned his name fighting against the Sioux with Custer
years ago, but now he was back. I guess he
was a really good tracker too, because time and time again,
(35:46):
as we'll see, he tracked down Geronimo. Uh. They were
holding out in Mexico at this point, and he wanted
to negotiate, but things were pretty tense at the time,
So there were still a couple of skirmishes, and I
think Geronimo Uh and some of his guys were up
on a cliff above Crook's company and they were kind
of taunting Uh Crook's Apache scouts. Things were not going well,
(36:10):
but it ended up in a very strange turn of
events working out because Krook was a hunter and was
going off hunting the next day by himself and was
tracking an animal and ended up tracking this animal or
I don't know if he found the animal in the camp,
but eventually made his way right up to Geronimo and
where Geronimo was camped out and was like, oh, hi there,
(36:32):
and Geronimo says, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm
not gonna kill you, which he totally could have. I mean,
Krook was there with a single gun by himself, with
no cover and he just accidentally stumbled upon Geronimo and
some of his his warriors. That's I can imagine how
tense that situation was, even Crook knowing that they respected
him and he respected them. It's still Geronimo like, again,
(36:55):
what what the the Americans considered the worst Indian that
ever lived? That's right, so the writing was kind of
on the wall at this point with American encroachment. Geronimo
was like, there are endless numbers of you guys. You
have way more weapons, way more ammunition, way more supplies
than we could could ever get, and we've been on
(37:18):
the run and I don't think, uh, it's gonna work
out for us in the end. So maybe it's finally
time to not fight and to sit down at the
negotiating table, since you seem like someone who was at
least honorable enough to negotiate something honest. And Geronimo is
the last holdout to come to this conclusion by this time,
like it was just he and his band. The rest
(37:39):
of the APACHE or the rest of the um Chirrakawa
UM had either concluded that it was best to just
settle down and and um adapt to reservation life, or
they had been killed fighting. So for Geronimo to finally
come to this conclusion, he had been worn out because
he was the kind of just keep going and keep
(38:00):
going and keep going and inspire others to keep going.
So he um he decides to surrender to Crook, and
apparently the surrender lasted a very short time, but one
of the reasons why he did surrender was Crooks said
that um, that they would create a new reservation near
Turkey Creek, which is where Geronimo was born. Um, And
(38:21):
so they weren't going to move them to San Carlos.
I don't know if you've noticed a pattern or not everybody,
but when the only option was moved to San Carlos
or die, very frequently the Apache chose die or fight
to the death, um, because that's how bad San Carlos was.
Whenever there was another reservation put on the table, the
(38:41):
APACHE tended to say, okay, we'll we'll go give that
a shot. So it was really kind of points out
like how much of this could have been avoided, not
just from George Bascombe never being involved, or not just
for them torturing and killing mangus uh Colorado, but if
they had just proved the way of living at San
(39:02):
Carlos or gotten rid of San Carlos and just created
these other better reservations, the Apache wars might never have
taken the effect that they had either. You know, It's
like when Clarice Starling offered Hannibal Lecterer stay on Anthrax Island,
Plumb Island, Plumb Island. If it had gone a different way,
(39:23):
if they had offered him a real, like nice place,
maybe no one else would have died. Maybe they would
have caught Buffalo Bill before well wait a minute, they did.
It all worked out just fine thanks to Plumb Island.
You know, someone a fan of the movie bought the
Buffalo Bill House and has h has made it a
basically a silence of the Lamb's Museum. And I think
(39:46):
he's building out the basement to where you can airbnb
it and stay there. Oh boy, that sounds awful. It's
pretty great, and it's and that's just like the story
of Germontimo. Is it in um Ohio for real? I don't,
I don't remember where they're real And because you know,
very frequently they'll just be like this househol work. No
one will ever know it's you know, hig oh, no
one will ever buy this house and turn into Airbnb
(40:08):
and publicized that it's actually in Colorado. You know, hope
he makes money off of it. So um So Geronimo
surrenders a total chuck of four different times surrenders, escape, surrenders, escapes,
um And the reason he keeps escaping is because he
was about as hated as anyone ever was in this
stage of American history, not just out West, but even
(40:30):
back east. He was hated, mistrusted, um And there were
editorials that he would read written in the local paper
of wherever, whatever reservation he was having, he was being
held at um that we're calling for his immediate execution
and murder, sometimes by mobs and vigilante So apparently he
had a very large weakness for alcohol, and when he
(40:52):
got drunk, you could really convince him that they were
going to kill him if he didn't escape. So he
surrendered and escaped four different times games and on the
last time, uh, Krook was sent in with different marching orders,
this time by President Grover Cleveland, who said, there's no
terms of surrender anymore. Geronimo surrenders unconditionally or he dies.
(41:14):
And Krook said, that doesn't really sit well with me. Yeah,
he resigned, and uh, I think ever since then, you know,
or at least back then, of course, he was really
looked down upon for doing that by his fellow American soldiers.
So there's a bounty having integrity. Just want to be
(41:35):
clear about, uh, there's a bounty on Geronimo's head. At
this point for Grand a lot of money and a
new general takes over named General Nelson Miles. He was
sort of the opposite of Krook and that he had
no respect for the Apache. They had no respect for him. Uh.
He would do his leading from Fort's many many miles
(41:57):
away from the real action, and he was he kind
of ruined things in the end. Uh that that we'll
get to here in a second. But this last summer
of freedom here in eighty six for the Chericawa, um
I think it was Natchie was the chief at this point. Yeah,
and he was Tazza's brother, um who was not bred
(42:20):
to be chief. But Tazza died on a trip to Washington,
d C. So now you had a chief that was
easily manipulated through Geronimo, which just f y I. So
there was there were only like thirty seven uh free
Chiricawa at this point that were still down to battle.
Eighteen of them were the warrior types. There were thirteen
(42:42):
women and six kids, including a couple of infants. And
these thirty seven people were on the lamb for five
full months with a total of about you know, eight
to ten thousand either Army U S army or Mexican
soldiers or volunteers trying to find them. It's crazy, like
(43:04):
they could really blend into their territory. Yeah, they did
so well at that Chuck. There was only one death
that entire summer of that band of thirty seven, and
Geronimo was loving it. He was like in retrospect, he
was like, this was these were the salad days. I
did some of my best fighting. He's you know, there
were a few of us. Uh, you know, I I could.
(43:24):
I knew when they were coming. I didn't do the
Stevie Knicks, but I knew. I knew what was going
to happen before it happened. I was so on my game.
So that General Miles guy, he came up with a plan,
like he knew that the UM, the the Apache, the
Cherikawa that we're on San Carlos Reservation were still very
closely tied to this band of thirty seven that were
(43:45):
following Geronimo UM, and so he sent word through two
Apache scouts that the family members for the four and
thirty four Churikawa on the reservation had been shipped to
a prison in Florida, and that if they ever wanted
to see their family again. They needed to give up
and surrender, and this proved to be the last draw
(44:06):
for Geronimo. He said, okay, fine, I'm gonna surrender, and
he negotiated. He managed to negotiate terms. He agreed to
be uh to live in exile for two years as
a prisoner of war. But it turned out that the
the those terms were not honored and he never was
able to to make his way back to his his homeland,
his ancestral land in South Arizona, New Mexico again after
(44:30):
he left. That's right, I believe that they were. He
was reunited with his family eventually in Alabama, UH and
then moved out to Oklahoma. Yes, neither of which were
his original You know, I think to the Americans back then,
they're like, oh, look, we're sending you to Oklahoma, where
you're where your your people are from. So that's probably great, right. Yeah.
(44:53):
So the problem was that the people who finally did
make it to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, and again this
is just a male ling hodgepodgs there, like, if you're
a Native American, this is where you live now Oklahoma.
It was twenty seven years before any Chirrakawa were allowed
to move back to their ancestral lands, and at the
time about a third of them said, no, this is
(45:15):
our home now. Um, you know, most of us were
born here. A lot of us were born here. So
there's a Fort Sill, Oklahoma, um contingent of of Churacawa,
and then there's also the Mescalero Reservation Cherracawa that live.
About two thirds of them moved to that south south
(45:35):
southern Arizona area where they live still today. And Geronimo,
if you've ever seen uh, I mean, there are quite
a few famous portraits and photographs of Geronimo, and that's
because Geronimo went on to be pretty famous. Uh. He
later on toured with Buffalo Bill and his side show.
He would uh, he would sell his little trinkets from
(45:57):
his coat uh to two people who would pay top dollar,
like buttons, and then he just replaced it with another
button way for the next person. That's right. And he
rode and Teddy Roosevelt's election parade, and as legend has it,
a lot of people came to see Geronimo more so
than Teddy Roosevelt. Even he asked personally Teddy Roosevelt permission
(46:20):
to go back to his ancestral lands, and Teddy Roosevelt refused,
even those long past the two years that he had
negotiated in the terms of his surrender. Teddy Roosevelt said, basically,
you don't want to go back there. There's too many
people that want to see you hanged still. And so
Geronimo actually died on the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Um.
He had been drinking pretty heavily that day, fell off
(46:43):
his horse, Um and laid in a ditch all night
and apparently caught pneumonia. And as he was dying, he
regretted not having fought to the death, even though he
managed to live to be an old man. Um. And
in retrospect this the the Apache Wars were Um. Again,
that was, depending on how you look at it, the
(47:04):
longest lasting war in American history. And it was also
extraordinarily bloody, especially for the Americans. Remember the Cherikawa numbered
maybe hundred, and they managed to engage in a twenty
five year war with the American Army and the Mexican
Army simultaneously. And there's a famous quote from William to
(47:26):
Comps to Sherman, who said, we had one war with
Mexico to take Arizona and we should have another war
to make them take it back. That's how devastating the
Apache Wars were for the Americans. So that's the Apache Wars.
Oh one other thing, Chuck, So remember I said there
was a division among the Cherikawa um about ones who
(47:48):
were like, we just want to live in peace and
will adapt a reservation life, and the others they know,
we have to we have to fight to the death
for the old ways. Well, now, if you look back
and you go onto the Cherikawa tribe we site and
you look, they proclaimed themselves to be a peaceful tribe.
So it turns out that that faction ultimately one out
in the end. Very cool. Do you have anything else now? Okay, Well,
(48:12):
if you want to know more about the Cherikawa and
other Apache groups, there's plenty of really interesting history out
there for you on the Internet. And since I said
that it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this
reminder that we have a lot of episodes. Hello Josh
and Chuckers. I'm writing you today from Georgetown, Texas while
(48:34):
currently listening to How Kleptomaniacs Work from two thousand nine,
recently discovered your podcast and love it. So I decided
to start at the beginning. Do y'all know you'll have
eighteen and forty three episodes? I don't think that's right. Uh,
and Sarah says, Holy hell, it's taking a while to
get caught up. I really want to jump to new
But on the other hand, it's kind of fun and
(48:55):
interesting to listen to past episodes. For example, will the
world end in twelve? Dug a bullet on that one. Anyway,
I just want to send a quick hello, love the show,
Love how you smart guys. That's in quotes, by the way,
which means she doesn't really mean that, deliver info in
a funny way. I also love that I get your
random references to off the wall stuff Simpson's episode, old
(49:17):
school band names, et cetera. Keep up the great work.
You can't wait to hear what the future holds I
E episodes. That is from Sarah A yes, well, Chuck,
think about how red Sarah's face is going to be
when she finally gets to the episode where you suggest
sandwiching episodes. I know, well, I'm gonna tell Sarah. We'll
(49:38):
see what happens here. Okay, I'm gonna tell her I'm
reading this listener mail. We'll see if we can't tempt her.
I won't even tell her which episode it said. Okay,
so she'll hear this in like twenty seven years. No, no no, no,
I'm gonna let her know, and she may she may
start listening to your episodes. You know what I'm saying. Okay, Well,
I think we've reached the end of this episode. And
if you want to be like Sarah and get in
touch with us, you can send us an email to
(50:00):
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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