A relationship with several sides
The Army and Apache communities were not only opponents. From the early 1870s, the Army also hired Apache men as scouts, guides and interpreters, and during the Apache Wars Apache people served in a force that was at the same time fighting other Apache groups. This article follows that thread from the first enlistments to the present, with attention to why individuals made the choices they did. It does not judge them. Apache communities themselves hold a range of views on the scouts, and those views are respected here.
The first enlistments
The Army had used Native scouts in several regions before the Southwest campaigns, and in 1866 Congress authorized the Army to enlist Indian scouts. In Arizona the practice took on particular importance when General George Crook took command of the department in 1871. Crook believed that regular soldiers alone could not find Apache camps in rough country, and he enlisted Apache men, including members of Western Apache groups, to track and guide. Scouts were enlisted for limited terms, were paid, were issued rations and often served close to home.
During the 1872 and 1873 campaigns against Yavapai and Tonto Apache groups in central Arizona, scouts played a central part in Army operations. Several Apache scouts received the Medal of Honor for actions in those campaigns, a recognition that has been much discussed since, because it honored individual bravery in operations that brought severe suffering to other Apache and Yavapai people.
Why men enlisted
The reasons were mixed. The Army offered pay and rations at a time when reservation support was uncertain. Enlistment could also protect a man’s family, since a scout and his relatives were less likely to be treated as hostile. Old rivalries and kinship ties between local groups mattered as well, because many scouts were fighting people they considered enemies rather than relatives. Some men also saw service as a way to gain some influence with officers. None of these motives excludes the others.
Historians continue to debate how to interpret these choices. The wider scout loyalty debate asks whether such service should be read as collaboration, as survival, as a form of Apache politics, or as some combination. Apache descendants often emphasize that the scouts were not betraying “the Apache” as a whole, since no single Apache nation then existed to be betrayed.
The Cibecue Creek incident
In August 1881, an Army column under Colonel Eugene Carr moved to arrest a Western Apache religious leader at Cibecue Creek in Arizona. Fighting broke out, and some of the scouts accompanying the column turned on the soldiers. Several soldiers and the religious leader were killed, and some scouts were later tried, and some were executed or imprisoned. The Cibecue Creek incident shows both the strain placed on scouts, who were caught between their kin and the Army, and the Army’s growing suspicion of its own Apache units afterward.
The 1886 campaign
In the final campaign against Geronimo’s group in 1886, Apache scouts did much of the work of tracking, and the scouts in the 1886 campaign included both Western Apache and Chiricahua men. Two Chiricahua scouts, Martine and Kayitah, accompanied Lieutenant Charles Gatewood on his mission to find Geronimo’s camp and arrange a meeting with General Miles. Without scouts, the Army would probably have found the campaign far more difficult.
Imprisonment with the Chiricahua
Then came the hardest part of the story. After the surrender in September 1886, the Army sent the Chiricahua away. This included the scouts who had served at Fort Apache and elsewhere, including men who had helped end the campaign. Instead of being rewarded, many Chiricahua scouts were disarmed, discharged, and shipped east as prisoners with their families. They were held in Florida, then Alabama, then at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and the Chiricahua prisoners of war were not released from that status until 1913, some 27 years after the surrender.
The treatment of the Chiricahua scouts imprisoned is widely regarded as a betrayal. Some Army officers who had served alongside the scouts protested, but the policy as a whole remained in place until 1913. Writers and descendants today describe it as a profound injustice.
Scouts in the twentieth century
Apache scouts continued to serve in smaller numbers. The last organized scout detachment of the Army was stationed at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona, and the Army formally ended the Indian scout program in the 1940s. Scouts took on guard duty and patrol work in addition to tracking. The Fort Huachuca scouts are generally dated to that last period.
Later military service
From World War I onward, Apache people served in the armed forces as soldiers and sailors, not as a separate scout force. The story of Apache service in the World Wars is a separate subject. Since then, Apache men and women have served in many conflicts, and their nations honor them in various ways.
Remembering
How communities remember the scouts differs. Some emphasize survival and service. Some emphasize the injustice of the imprisonment and the pressure on families. Some consider the topic painful. Descendants of scouts have their own family histories, and readers are encouraged to learn from those sources, including the websites and cultural programs of the nations concerned.