Dragoons In Apacheland

In the fifteen years prior to the American Civil War, the U.S. Army established a presence in southern New Mexico, the homeland of Mescalero, Mimbres, and Mogollon bands of the Apache Indians. From the army’s perspective, the Apaches presented an obstacle to be overcome in making the region—newly acquired in the Mexican-American War—safe for Anglo settlers. In Dragoons in Apacheland, William S. Kiser recounts the conflicts that ensued and examines how both Apache warriors and American troops shaped the future of the Southwest Borderlands. Kiser narrates two distinct contests. The Apaches were defending their territory against the encroachment of soldiers and settlers. At the same time, the Anglo-Americans maneuvered against one another in a competition for political and economic power and for Apache territory. Cross-cultural misunderstandings, political corruption in Santa Fe and Washington, anti-Indian racism, troublemakers among both Apaches and settlers, irresponsible army officers and troops, corrupt American and Mexican traders, and policy disagreements among government officials all contributed to the ongoing hostilities. Kiser examines the behaviors and motivations of individuals involved in all aspects of these local, regional, and national disputes. Kiser is one of only a few historians to deal with this crucial period in Indian-white relations in the Southwest—and the first to detail the experiences of the First and Second United States Dragoons, elite mounted troops better equipped and trained than infantry to confront Apache guerrilla warriors more accustomed to the southwestern environment. Often led by the Gila leader Mangas Coloradas, the Apaches fought desperately to protect their lands and way of life. The Americans, Kiser shows, used unauthorized tactics of total warfare, encouraging field units to attack villages and destroy crops and livestock, particularly when the Apaches refused to engage the troops in pitched battles. Kiser’s insights into the pre–Civil War conflicts in southern New Mexico are essential to a deeper understanding of the larger U.S.-Apache war that culminated in the heroic resistance of Cochise, Victorio, and Geronimo.

The Trade and Intercourse Acts passed by Congress between 1796 and 1834 set up a system for individuals to receive monetary compensation from the federal government for property stolen or destroyed by American Indians. By the end of the Mexican-American War, both Anglo-Americans and Nuevomexicanos became experts in exploiting this system—and in using the army to collect on their often-fraudulent claims. As Gregory F. Michno reveals in Depredation and Deceit, their combined efforts created a precarious mix of false accusations, public greed, and fabricated fear that directly led to new wars in the American Southwest between 1849 and 1855. Tasked with responding to white settlers’ depredation claims and gaining restitution directly from Indian groups, soldiers typically had no choice but to search out often-innocent Indians and demand compensation or the surrender of the guilty party, turning once-friendly bands into enemy groups whenever these tense encounters exploded in violence. As the situation became more volatile, citizens demanded a greater army presence in the region, and lucrative military contracts became yet another reason to encourage the continuation of frontier violence. Although the records are replete with officers questioning accusations and discovering civilians’ deceit, more often than not the army was forced to act in direct counterpoint to its duties as a constabulary force. And whenever war broke out, the acquisition of more Indian land and wealth began the cycle of greed and violence all over again. The Trade and Intercourse Acts were manipulated by Anglo-Americans who ensured the continuation of the very conflicts that they claimed to abhor and that the acts were designed to prevent. In bringing these machinations to light, Michno’s book deepens—and darkens—our understanding of the conquest of the American Southwest.

This book reinterprets Southwestern history before the US-Mexican War through a case study of the poorly understood Apaches de paz and their adaptation to Hispanic rule.

In the tradition of Empire of the Summer Moon, a stunningly vivid historical account of the manhunt for Geronimo and the 25-year Apache struggle for their homeland. They called him Mickey Free. His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides--the Apaches and the white invaders—blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout, Apache Kid. In this sprawling, monumental work, Paul Hutton unfolds over two decades of the last war for the West through the eyes of the men and women who lived it. This is Mickey Free's story, but also the story of his contemporaries: the great Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio; the soldiers Kit Carson, O. O. Howard, George Crook, and Nelson Miles; the scouts and frontiersmen Al Sieber, Tom Horn, Tom Jeffords, and Texas John Slaughter; the great White Mountain scout Alchesay and the Apache female warrior Lozen; the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo; and the Apache Kid. These lives shaped the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern borderlands--a bleak and unforgiving world where a people would make a final, bloody stand against an American war machine bent on their destruction.

Most military biographies focus on officers, many of whom left diaries or wrote letters throughout their lives and careers. This collection offers new perspectives by focusing on the lives of enlisted soldiers from a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds. Comprised of ten biographies, Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands showcases the scholarship of experts who have mined military records, descendants’ recollections, genealogical sources, and even folklore to tell common soldiers’ stories. The essays examine enlisted soldiers’ cross-cultural interactions and dynamic, situational identities. They illuminate the intersections of class, culture, and race in the nineteenth-century Southwest. The men who served under U.S. or Mexican flags and on the payrolls of the federal government or as state or territorial volunteers represented most of the major ethnicities in the West—Hispanics, African Americans, Indians, American-born Anglos, and recent European immigrants—and many moved fluidly among various social and ethnic groups. For example, though usually described as an Apache scout, Mickey Free was born to Mexican parents, raised by an American stepfather, adopted by an Apache father, given an Irish name, and was ultimately categorized by federal authorities as an Irish Mexican White Mountain Apache. George Goldsby, a former slave of mixed ancestry, served as a white soldier in the Union army during the Civil War, and then served twelve years as a “Buffalo Soldier” in the all-black Tenth U.S. Cavalry. He also claimed some American Indian ancestry and was rumored to have crossed the Mexican border to fight alongside Pancho Villa. What motivated these soldiers? Some were patriots and adventurers. Others were destitute and had few other options. Enlisted men received little professional training, and possibilities for advancement were few. Many of these men witnessed, underwent, or inflicted extreme violence, some of it personal and much of it related to excruciating military campaigns. Spotlighting ordinary men who usually appear on the margins of history, the biographical essays collected here tell the stories of soldiers in the complex world of the Southwest after the U.S.-Mexican War.

These episodes are non-fiction accounts relating to New Mexico from the earliest visit by a priest, Fray Marcos de Niza, sent by the Viceroy of New Spain in 1539, to the unwelcome intrusion of an enemy saboteur in World War I. Between these extremes we meet a witness who recalls details of an abandoned dwelling whose owner lived there two hundred years earlier, newspaper accounts of a shoot-out at Pinos Atos and its bloody aftermath, a stage ride from Las Cruces to Silver City, and how cattleman John Chisum dealt with two knights of the road. Billy the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse is seen in a new light, and an introduction to the Lincoln County War will help the unfamiliar reader to understand what was truly a New Mexico horse opera, with tragic results. The role of the military in the nineteenth century is shown in a glimpse of life at one fort and the report of an Army scouting party that saw a part of the country prior to its settlement. And what would an anthology be without a dog story?

Illusions of Empire adopts a multinational view of North American borderlands, examining the ways in which Mexico's North overlapped with the U.S. Southwest in the context of diplomacy, politics, economics, and military operations during the Civil War era. William S. Kiser examines a fascinating series of events in which a disparate group of historical actors vied for power and control along the U.S.-Mexico border: from Union and Confederate generals and presidents, to Indigenous groups, diplomatic officials, bandits, and revolutionaries, to a Mexican president, a Mexican monarch, and a French king. Their unconventional approaches to foreign relations demonstrate the complex ways that individuals influence the course of global affairs and reveal that borderlands simultaneously enable and stifle the growth of empires. This is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican source materials to tell an important story of borderlands conflict with ramifications that are still felt in the region today.

This timely book offers a history of insurgencies and counterinsurgency beyond a traditional Western-centric narrative. Black probes the linkages between beliefs, events, and people, as well as changes over time. He shows the extent to which politics, technologies, and ideologies have evolved, creating new parameters and paradigms that have framed both governmental and public views.