The trail ended in the rocks just like that. The hoofprints had been there a moment before, plain as a road sign in the dust of southern New Mexico Territory. The buffalo soldier reading them, a corporal of Company E, 9th United States Cavalry, was twenty-eight years old and had been in the saddle for thirteen of those years. He had tracked horse thieves through the Wichita Mountains and chased deserters across two hundred miles of Texas hardpan.
His troop called him the best pair of eyes in the regiment. He stepped down from his horse, knelt, and ran his gloved hand across the broken ground. Nothing. Not a print, not a snapped twig, not a fleck of dropped meal from the bags the Apache were known to carry.
Behind him, the lieutenant waited for the answer that would decide whether 120 men rode north, south, east, or west into some of the worst country on the continent. The corporal stood up, looked at the empty hillside, and said the words a buffalo soldier was never supposed to say: “We have lost them, sir. ” It was the third time that month the Ninth Cavalry had lost Victoria’s trail. Before the summer ended, they would lose it eight more times.
Before the next summer ended, the man whose trail kept dissolving into stone would be dead, and the buffalo soldiers who had once laughed at the idea that an Apache could outthink them would be writing letters home that still sit in glass cases in Texas archives. The letters carried the same sentence in different handwriting scrolled by men who agreed on nothing else: We have never seen anything like him. The two regiments involved were the 9th and 10th Cavalry, both formed by an act of Congress in 1866, both made up entirely of Black men. Most had been born into slavery.
Some had served with the Union during the Civil War; others had been laborers, blacksmiths, and farmers told their whole lives that the country did not want them. All of them had volunteered to ride into the harshest country the United States had to offer for thirteen dollars a month, wearing uniforms cut for other bodies, riding horses that were the last picks from the remount depots, eating beef condemned for white regiments and shipped west. The Plains tribes who fought them called them Buffalo Soldiers, a name most accounts trace to their hair, which the Cheyenne and Comanche compared to the dense curled mane of the bison. The men took the name with quiet pride.
By the late 1870s, the 9th and 10th had the lowest desertion rates in the entire army, the fewest courts-martial, and the highest rates of re-enlistment. While other regiments crowded around stoves at Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth, the Buffalo Soldiers were already out on patrol, building telegraph lines through country so dry the mules died standing up, mapping springs no white surveyor had charted, escorting surveyors through Comanche country and freight wagons through Apache country. By 1879, they had begun to believe nothing in the desert could outwork them, nothing in the mountains could outride them, and nothing on the trail could outthink them. They were about to meet a man who would teach them otherwise.
His name was Victorio. He had been born around 1825 somewhere on the Black Range of southern New Mexico into the Chihenne band of the Chiricahua Apache. The Chihenne called themselves the Warm Springs people after the spring at Ojo Caliente that fed their homeland. Victorio learned every spring, every wash, every shortcut, every place where a man could hide and another man could not see him from twenty paces.
He grew up in the shadow of Mangas Coloradas, the great Chihenne chief who had signed a treaty with the United States in 1852 promising the Warm Springs people could keep their land. In 1863, Mangas Coloradas walked under a flag of truce into an American camp and was killed there, his body mutilated, his head sent east for study. Victorio never forgot. His sister Lozen, born around 1840, refused to marry, rode with the warriors, and could shoot, rope, and read country better than most men.
Victorio called her his right hand. According to the testimony of survivors, he would not move camp or commit to any direction until he had spoken with her. The story said Lozen could find the enemy by standing still, walking out alone, singing a quiet prayer to a power her people called Usen, stretching her arms out, palms up, and turning slowly in a circle. Whichever way her palms tingled, the soldiers were that way.
In 1877, the Indian Bureau closed the Warm Springs reservation and ordered the people moved to San Carlos in Arizona Territory, a basin of white alkali dust with no shade, no good water, and no game, where summer temperatures passed 110 degrees and disease moved through the camps. Victorio took his band out twice and came back twice, asking for nothing except the land he had been promised in writing. He was told no. The third time he left, in late August 1879, was the last.
On the twenty-first of August, he rode out of the Mescalero Apache Reservation with roughly eighty fighting men, his sister Lozen, the old war leader Nana, and the rest of his people. By the time the agent realized the camp was empty, Victorio was already in the mountains. The army had lost nearly a full day of his trail in a country where a day’s head start might as well have been a week. He moved west toward a herd of horses belonging to Company E of the 9th Cavalry, grazing at Ojo Caliente, the very place where his homeland had once been.
On the fourth of September, just before sunrise, Victorio struck. Sergeant Chapman and four privates were killed. Three men escaped. Forty-six horses were taken, along with every rifle and round of ammunition in the camp.
It was the first major engagement of what the newspapers were soon calling Victorio’s War. Major Albert Morrow took up the pursuit with five companies of the 9th Cavalry, nearly 150 men, and a column of Indian scouts. His superiors told him this would be a short campaign. It was not.
The pursuit lasted, by Morrow’s own count, more than two hundred days. In the first six weeks, he fought Victorio at Las Animas Canyon in the Black Range, where the Buffalo Soldiers were pinned down for an afternoon returning fire at an enemy they could not see. He fought him again weeks later in the Mogollon Mountains, where the Apache rolled boulders down on the troopers from a ridge. He fought him a third time in the Animas and a fourth near the headwaters of the Mimbres River.
Every time, the Apache melted into the country. By late autumn, Morrow’s horses were dying at the rate of one a day, and his men were eating mule. In his report he wrote a sentence historians have quoted ever since: “We are following a ghost, and the ghost is laughing at us. ” Lozen was almost certainly part of what made the ghost so hard to catch.
Whenever Victorio moved, she had gone ahead; whenever he rested, she had checked the horizon. Buffalo Soldier scouts told their lieutenants the Apache moved through country the way smoke moves through a forest. Morrow asked for reinforcements. In February 1880, Colonel Edward Hatch, commander of the entire 9th Cavalry, took the field personally, bringing every company he could muster, plus Apache and Navajo scouts and a column of the 10th Cavalry from Fort Bliss.
By spring he had almost a thousand men hunting one chief and his band. In late March, Apache scouts picked up Victorio’s trail in the San Andreas Mountains, tracking him into a small basin called Hembrillo, enclosed by ridges of granite, with one trail in and one trail out. Hatch devised a plan involving more than 500 Buffalo Soldiers and 150 Indian scouts, the largest operation of the entire Apache Wars. On the fifth of April, Captain Henry Carroll’s column of 100 men went into Hembrillo Basin at dusk.
They did not know Victorio’s lookouts had been watching them for three days, and that the fighting men had already moved into prepared positions on the high ground. When the troopers drank from the basin’s water, it was bad; within an hour, half the command was vomiting and staggering. The first shots came from the ridges. Carroll was wounded three times before he organized a defensive perimeter.
The other converging columns, slowed by darkness and faulty maps, did not reach the basin until dawn. The Buffalo Soldiers fought their way up the slopes and drove the Apache off the rim, but when they reached the high ground, the camp was gone. Victorio had slipped out in the night through a draw the maps had not shown. Hatch’s losses were officially two killed and seven wounded.
Several survivors never came right again and were discharged within the year. The Apache lost perhaps three men. There were no bodies left behind. There never were.
After Hembrillo, a column of more than a thousand soldiers descended on the Mescalero reservation on suspicion that some men had been helping Victorio. The Mescalero were not at war. The soldiers disarmed them, imprisoned the men of fighting age, and killed fourteen who tried to flee or resist. Their horses and guns were taken.
The reports called the reservation “secured,” but surviving letters make clear the affair felt to many officers like a punishment for their own failure. Through April and May of 1880, Victorio split his band into war parties and hit isolated ranches, mining camps, stagecoach lines, and freight wagons across southern New Mexico. A raid on the settlement of Alma was so terrible the reporting officer asked that the details not be repeated to the families. Forty-one civilians were killed in less than three weeks.
The newspapers grew louder, calling Victorio a monster and demanding his head. But the men riding after him with dying horses knew he was something more complicated. According to survivors, Victorio in the spring of 1880 had grown lean and quiet, sleeping only two or three hours at a time. He was fighting the way a man fights when he has decided he and everyone he loves are already dead.
The army was about to change the equation. Benjamin Grierson, forty-four in the summer of 1880, commanded the 10th Cavalry. Before the war he had been a music teacher in Illinois, terrified of horses after being kicked in the face. Then the war came, and he led one of the most famous cavalry raids of the entire Civil War, a six-hundred-mile ride through Mississippi behind Confederate lines.
After the war he spent three years mapping the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas, personally walking or riding nearly every spring, canyon, and passable route in the desert. He had concluded that you could not catch an Apache by chasing him. There was only one thing the Apache could not do without, the same thing every living thing in that desert needed: water. There were perhaps thirty places in all of West Texas where Victorio could get water in summer, and Grierson knew every one.
When word came in June 1880 that Victorio was likely to cross the Rio Grande and head for the Mescalero Reservation, Grierson did not chase. He took every company he could muster, plus a company of the 24th Infantry and Indian scouts, and placed them at the water holes: Tinaja de las Palmas, Eagle Springs, Van Horn’s Wells, Rattlesnake Springs. Then he waited. His staff thought he had lost his mind.
Some Buffalo Soldiers said openly that the new colonel was a fool. On the thirtieth of July 1880, just before noon at a rock outcrop called Tinaja de las Palmas, a sergeant looked up from his coffee and saw a column of dust on the southern horizon. It was Victorio coming north out of Mexico, heading straight for the water. Grierson had only seven men with him that morning, including his twenty-year-old son.
The fight began around eleven. The Apache probed the position cautiously, then charged. For two hours, seven men held the rocks until Captain Charles Viele’s Company C arrived, pushed over the country at a pace that killed three horses. Victorio broke off and recrossed the Rio Grande without a drop of water from the tinaja.
For the first time in fourteen months, he had been turned back by Black soldiers sitting at a water hole. Grierson knew he would come back, and he calculated the next nearest source on Victorio’s route would be Rattlesnake Springs, sixty-five miles north in the Sierra Diablo. On the fifth of August at three in the morning, he woke five companies of the 10th Cavalry, 170 officers and men, and began one of the hardest rides in the recorded history of the United States cavalry: sixty-five miles across broken desert under an August sun. Horses began to drop on the second day; the men walked beside them.
One trooper, Wesley Hardy, walked the last fifteen miles barefoot because his boots had cracked open in the heat. They reached Rattlesnake Springs in the late morning of the sixth of August, twenty-one hours, three horses lost, no men lost. They got there a few hours before Victorio. The Apache came up in the early afternoon, and the wind or a nervous horse gave them away before they rode into the trap.
They came on from a different angle, spread wide. The fight lasted from about two in the afternoon until the sun sank toward the Sierra Diablo. Victorio tried three times to push through to the water, from the south, the east, and the west. Each time the Buffalo Soldiers held.
For the second time in a week, Victorio was turned back without water, his ammunition running low, his horses beyond what the desert could carry. He understood that the war was ended, not because the soldiers had outridden him or outshot him, but because a music teacher from Illinois had put Black men at every drop of the one thing he could not do without. Victorio recrossed the Rio Grande into Mexico on the eleventh of August with perhaps a hundred fighting men, looking for a place to rest and gather for winter. He found one briefly in northern Chihuahua, a range of three low mountains called Tres Castillos, with a lake and grass.
He arrived on the thirteenth of October and let his people rest, believing they were beyond the reach of any soldier. He was wrong by less than a day. A Mexican colonel named Joaquín Terrazas with 260 men had been on his trail. He surrounded the camp at last light on the fourteenth.
The Apache had almost no ammunition. The fighting went on through the night. By the morning of the fifteenth, Victorio was gone. Some accounts say a scout shot him; some accounts, including those of his own people, say he took his own life rather than be captured.
The survivors would say only that he died fighting. Sixty-two Apache men were killed, along with sixteen people the Mexican records described as non-combatants. Sixty-eight more were captured, taken south, and sold or imprisoned. Three Mexican soldiers died.
Old Nana, absent on a raid with seventeen warriors, did not learn of his chief’s death for weeks. Lozen, escorting a Mescalero woman through the mountains, did not learn for nearly as long. The next summer, Nana, already in his seventies or eighties, led a raid of fifteen hundred miles through New Mexico with no more than forty men, fighting eight engagements with the army and winning them all. Lozen joined Geronimo’s holdouts in the Sierra Madre, fought beside him for six years, and surrendered with him in 1886.
She died of tuberculosis at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama on the seventeenth of June 1889, at forty-nine. The fort doctor recorded her in a ledger only as “Indian woman. ”
The Buffalo Soldiers who had spent fourteen months chasing Victorio did not kill him. A Mexican militia did.
But they had held the line at the water holes of West Texas, and they knew what they had been up against. The corporal of Company E aged ten years in fourteen months and told his grandchildren decades later that he had spent the best year of his life being outsmarted by the smartest man he had ever met, and he was not ashamed of it. He was proud to have ridden against a man like that. He regretted only one thing: that he had never met Victorio in peacetime, had never sat across a fire from him, had never asked him how a man with 150 fighters had walked the United States Army in circles for fourteen months across a country bigger than France.
Some men, he said, were born to a country the way a hawk is born to the sky. Victorio had been born to the desert. The rest of them had only been visiting.
