Page 182 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

Fort West
Fort Goodwin Fort McRae Fort Selden Fort Cummings Fort Bayard
February 24, 1863 May 1, 1864 April 3, 1863 May 8, 1865 October 2, 1863 July 26, 1866.
Carleton ’s Indian Policy and the Death of Mangas Coloradas
sexes and that the children were to be sent to schools or reservations rather than sold into slavery. Ac- cordingly, Carleton unleashed his California and New Mexico Volunteers on the Navajos and the Apaches, although in the latter case he directed his
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initial campaign primarily against the Mescaleros. In the grand solution for the Indian problem, General Carleton conceived two plans. The first plan was for a large reservation on which he could settle each band or tribe as they were subjugated, and the second plan was for a series of new or reestablished forts to control those Indians he had not yet dealt with. The first idea resulted in Fort
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Sumner and the Bosque Redondo Reservation. The second led to the establishment of the following installations:
January 1863. He sent Joseph Rodman West, promoted the previous month to General, to take control of the situation. West moved out with a large column but sent Captain Edmund D. Shirland on ahead on January 14 with a patrol of 20 Californians
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to the Pinos Altos area to seek out the Apaches.
In the meantime, in late 1862, a party of 33 men and 50 pack animals had entered the mountain domain of Mangas Coloradas whose warriors had kept them bottled up. The prospectors were led by an old friend of “Kit” Carson, 63-year-old Joseph Red- deford (or Rutherford) Walker, and were attempt- ingtogettoTucsonorperhapsfarther. Theyhad been increasingly harassed by the Apaches especial- ly after passing below Fort Craig. They had entered the area via Cooke’s Spring where the only way they could obtain water was by driving the Apaches back
with rifle fire.
Still maneuvering to elude the Apaches, Walker’s
party proceeded along the old Southern Route to California and came across the aftermath of two examples of Mangas’s favorite games. Near Stein’s Peak they found three men hung by their ankles over small fires and at another location found eight people also partially burned but with the added twist of tying some of the victims to cactus plants before burning them. In both cases Walker’s men took time
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for only the shallowest of burials.
The prospectors then made their way back to a
place where a hot spring and a cold spring flowed from the ground in close proximity to each other (present-day Faywood Hot Springs). Walker’s men holed up in abandoned Fort McLane for several weeks because they had sufficient supplies and could not safely break the Apache cordon. Neither were the Indians willing to mount a frontal attack on the large group of experienced frontiersmen.
At this point the advanced patrol led by Captain Shirland arrived, and a plan was concocted to satisfy the needs of the military and the desires of the prospectors. John William “Jack” Swilling, others of Walker’s party, and some of the soldiers went to Pinos Altos and under a white flag, negotiated a parley with Mangas and a few of his men. Mangas agreed to go to the old fort and talk with the soldiers
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and prospectors.
had arrived with the rest of his column. Several witnesses later recorded different stories with regard to what happened the night of January 18-19, but the important issue is that during the night,
After getting the campaign against the Mescalero
Apaches firmly under control, Carleton’s next move
was against the Mimbres Apaches. He was par-
ticularly obsessed with controlling or destroying
Mangas Coloradas, of whom it was said had been the
cause of more mayhem than all the other Apache
chiefs combined. On January 2, 1863, Carleton
made his first move to send expeditions into the
mountains occupied by the Mimbres and their allied
bands. As a partial justification for the campaign
Carleton used the unexploited mineral richness of
the area and the protection of the miners around
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Pinos Altos.
About this time Captain John Carey Cremony, who
would soon be stationed at the Bosque Redondo Reservation, claimed to have been the first to pass through Cook’s Canyon after the massacre of a wagon train there. The Apaches had successfully attacked a Mexican wagon train in the canyon and carried off all of the women and children, but not before lashing the eight men upside-down to their wagon wheels and building a small fire under each,
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slowly roasting their brains.
As part of his move to control the Apaches in
general and Mangas Coloradas in particular, General Carleton reactivated Fort McLane in
In the meantime General West
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