saddlebag dispatches
was static; that Native American technology, religion, and geo-politics never changed. “You might say,” my patient told me, “our tribe started with the Mexican-American war.” If I had asked some more questions, perhaps I would have gone away a little wiser, but everything he said up to that point left me more confused. Years later, I saw a documentary about a famous Native American sculptor named Allan Houser. It turned out he was a Fort Sill Apache, too. The tribe was real, after all. It was new, just like my patient told me—the newest tribe in the United States, and it started—sort of—as a result of the Mexican American war. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago The Mexicans didn’t make many demands when they signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. They couldn’t. On March 29, 1847, U.S. General Winfield Scott had taken Veracruz, Mexico’s most important eastern port city. He established a supply line that kept his 12,000 man army fed and armed as they marched toward Mexico City. He defeated Santa Anna’s military and occupied the capitol by mid-October. Guerrilla militias kept up attacks on Scott’s supply lines, but his troops vanquished them within three months and forced the Mexicans to sign a treaty on Feb. 2, 1848. If they hadn’t surrendered, President Polk was prepared to take the entire country and turn it into an expansion of the southern pro-slavery territory of the United States. There was substantial support for that position at the time. The Mexicans gave up the northern third of their territory and they lost their president, Santa Anna, but they made one demand the North American government agreed to honor. Roving bands of Chiricahua Apaches had been raiding Mexican settlements for years. The U.S. agreed to keep the troublesome Indians on their side of the newly established border. Suppressing a disorganized collection of nomadic Indian bands must have sounded easy. The U.S. army had just defeated the second largest military force in the western hemisphere in only two years. But the Apach-
WINFIELD SCOTT Known to his men as "Old Fuss n' Feathers, General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City in 1846 with a 12,000 man army.
es, especially the Chiricahua were unlike any military the U.S. Army had ever encountered. The Apache War The United States government struggled to confine the Apaches for almost 38 years after the Mexican-American war, and weren’t successful until the cavalry tracked down and imprisoned one very special Chiricahua leader, Geronimo. The old war chief had been a problem for the military from the beginning of the Apache war until his final surrender at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. He didn’t recognize the authority of the army to tell him where he was allowed to go. The Army threw Geronimo into the guardhouse for leaving the first reservation they
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