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4 Fort Huachuca, 1885–1887 WOOD SIGNED his contract as acting assistant surgeon to the United States Army one month after Geronimo broke out of the White Mountain Reservation and ran for the Mexican mountains. Terrified Arizona and New Mexico settlers wanted the Apaches chased down and returned to the reservation; that required troops, and troops needed doctors . For a young surgeon who had never been out of New England, the rolling plains and oceans of wheat and corn were unfamiliar, but the open sky and expansive horizon were reminiscent of the ocean and a welcome respite from Boston’s urban claustrophobia.1 When the first settler came from the East, the Chiricahuas had been friendly; Cochise, allowed the Butterfield Stage Company to cross his land unmolested until 1861, when Lt. John Bascom wrongly accused the Apache chief of stealing horses and kidnapping a local white boy. Cochise came to Bascom under a flag of truce only to be imprisoned by the inexperienced officer who hanged three of his relatives. The chief escaped , gathered a force of young warriors, and retreated to Arizona’s Dragoon Mountains and then south to the remote safety of Mexico’s Sierra Madres, where the Apaches survived for ten years by stealing cattle and killing the ranchers who tried to stop them. In 1871, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs decided to bring the renegades to heel. The government offered a treaty that would confine the Apaches to a reservation, but Cochise, remembering his relatives hanging from United States Army gibbets, refused to negotiate.2 Besides , the Chiricahuas had no desire to leave their upland pine forests for the sand flats of the Arizona desert.3 That year, President Ulysses Grant sent General George Crook to Arizona with specific instructions to get the Apaches out of the hills, off the warpath, and onto a reservation.4 In the end, Cochise, exhausted by years of hiding in the mountains, let Crook bring him to the San Carlos Reservation, although he candidly admitted that neither he nor his tribe had any intention of giving up 17 raiding ranches, at least on the Mexican side of the border. The situation was complicated by the fact that the San Carlos Reservation was a jumble of different Apache bands and tribes, each with a long history of rivalries and hatreds but none with experience living together.5 Crook barely managed to keep the Chiricahuas under control until Cochise died in 1874. Taza succeeded his father as chief, but the young man, lacking the old chief’s charisma, could not hold the tribe together, and the Chiricahuas dissolved into small bands, drifted off into the mountains of Sonora, and went back to raiding ranches.6 Just when his maturity and judgment were most needed, Crook was transferred to the Department of the Platte to deal with a Plains Indian uprising, leaving John Clum, a sympathetic, honest Bureau of Indian Affairs agent, in charge of San Carlos. By 1875, Clum had installed an Apache police force and native-run courts on the reservation, but, just as things looked like they might stabilize even without Crook, Clum received orders to remove the Chiricahuas from San Carlos to a 2.5 million-acre reservation at White Mountain. Half the Chiricahuas agreed to the transfer, but the other half, including a band led by a fortysix -year-old Bedonkhe Apache named Goyathlay (Geronimo), broke away and melted into the Sierra Madres.7 Geronimo’s small group survived by stealing horses and cattle from Mexicans and bringing them across the border to be sold for cash or traded for rifles, hats, boots, and whiskey. While he raided in Mexico, Geronimo sometimes left his women and children camped near the Ojo Caliente agency in Arizona, a reservation occupied by his relatives the Mimbres Apaches. In March 1877, Clum was ordered to move the Mimbres tribe to White Mountain and to arrest Geronimo and any other renegades living around the agency.8 Geronimo was captured at Ojo Caliente and imprisoned for four months before being moved to White Mountain. The renegades tolerated the reservation until September 1881, when the cavalry, with the disingenuous justification that White Mountain held an uncontrollable number of the most recalcitrant Apaches, added several companies to their garrison. Geronimo responded by taking Cochise’s son Naiche and seventy braves, women, and children and slipping back into Mexico .9 As Wood started his second year at Harvard, Geronimo embarked...

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