by Al Benson Jr.
The other night I watched the 1993 movie Geronimo: An American Legend. Ive seen it a couple times before and always enjoyed it. The rugged Southwestern scenery in it is something I enjoy seeing, a remembrance of my time in that part of the country, but also a reminder that I will never get to go back there. For a movie it was amazingly accurate as far as it went.
Although the movie did not deal with it, the background for much of the Apache trouble in Arizona was the infamous Tucson Ring. Odie B. Faulk, in his book The Geronimo Campaign dealt with the infamous Tucson Ring, as well as the machinations of some of the crooked Indian agents, which displayed many of the problems with the reservation system–one of America’s early problems with socialism.
Faulk noted, in part, “Then in the early 1880s, as the Chiricahuas were forced back on this reservation (San Carlos), functionaries in the Indian Bureau decreed that these proud warriors become farmers, despite the recommendations of such knowledgeable officers as Crawford, Davis and Gatewood that they be encouraged in pastoral pursuits…” That didn’t work. And anyone knowing anything about the Apaches could have told them it wouldn’t work, but trying to tell a government bureaucrat anything about what they mismanage is an exercise in utter futility.
Faulk observed that: “But it was black humor, for thereby the proud Apaches were reduced to living on rations provided for them through the Indian Office through the resident agent at each reservation–a system inviting graft, one allowing the Tucson Ring to get rich through connivance. One of (General) Crook’s aides, Captain John G. Bourke, later wrote, ‘The Tucson Ring was determined that no Apache should be put to the embarrassment of working for his own living; once let the Apaches become self-supporting, and what would become of ‘the boys?’ The Indians were aware of this system, too, knowing that rations intended for their consumption were being openly sold in neighboring towns, that they were being shorted on their allotments. The principal items of issue to them were flour and beef, but their week’s ration of flour would barely suffice for a day. The cattle sent them were held without water by the contractor until they crossed the river just before being weighed; The Government was paying a pretty stiff price for half a barrel of Gila River water delivered with each beef,’ wrote Britton Davis of this practice. In addition, the scales used were incorrect in favor of the contractors, And ‘there was not enough fat on the animals to fry a jackrabbit, many of them being mere skin and bones’ Davis asserted. He once accused the herders of actually carrying some of the cattle to the Agency on horseback, but the herders swore that all had walked.”
Faulk also noted: “The Tucson Ring likewise profited when the Apaches left the reservation. Lucrative contracts could be had for supplying grain, hay, and provisions for soldiers sent to quell uprisings. Sometimes they even wanted to benefit both from the Indians on the reservation and from more soldiers, the ‘boys’ would generate an Indian scare through their newspapers, then bombard Washington with requests for ‘protection.’ As Captain Bourke phrased it, ‘They had only to report by telegraph that the Apaches were ‘uneasy. refused to obey the orders of the agent, and a lot more stuff ofthe same kind and the Great Father would send in ten regiments to carry out the schemes of the ring, but he would never send one honest, truthful man to inquire whether the Apaches had a story or not.”
The “Great Father” in Washington had learned from what he had done to white Southerners during what was euphemistically labeled as “reconstruction” after the War of Northern Aggression that if he could get away with what he did during “reconstruction” then he could surely get away with what he did to the Indians afterward and who would dare question his great wisdom? What Washington did during “reconstruction” and to the Indians later on was an early example of a government declaring war on its own people–something this government has continued to do up to and including our own day!