Battle of Cibecue Creek

At Cibecue Creek on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, United States forces clashed with White Mountain Apaches during August 1881, in one of the notable engagements of the Apache Wars. A military expedition made up of scouts had taken into custody a well known medicine man from Cibecue named Nock-ay-det-klinne. As soldiers marched him back toward the fort, Apache warriors struck in ambush. Amid this clash, the soldiers ended up killing Nock-ay-det-klinné. Most of the twenty-three Apache scouts turned against the army in revolt, the largest mutiny of its kind ever recorded in the nation's history. Faced with this, the troops pulled back to Fort Apache. On the next day, White Mountain Apache fighters launched a counter-attack of their own. What followed was widespread turmoil, prompting White Mountain Apache warriors to abandon the reservation and throw in with Goyąąłé, meaning Wise man, the Bedonkohe Chiricahua Apache leader known more widely as Geronimo.

Background

Nock-ay-det-klinne held standing as a medicine man among the Cibecue Apache, a Western Apache group, and led the Cañon Creek band. Figures such as Cochise and Geronimo had sought his counsel on occasion. Conditions at Fort Apache Indian Reservation in eastern Arizona, marked by corruption and poor sanitation, prompted him to organize ghost dance ceremonies at Cibecue village. These gatherings formed part of a broader spiritual movement sweeping Native peoples during the late nineteenth century as they grappled with reservation confinement and the collapse of traditional life. Heavy drinking and hallucinogens like peyote frequently accompanied the rituals, which gave the Apache a means of voicing and rallying around their grievances about reservation existence. Local settlers watched the dances with growing unease, suspecting they signaled preparations for conflict, and the Army sent a force to look into matters and separate the medicine man from his following.

Fort Apache's garrison consisted of Troops D and E of the 6th Cavalry, Company D of the 12th Infantry, and Company A made up of Indian scouts. Captain Edmund Clarence Hentig, who had come to the fort in 1876, held command of Company D. Second Lieutenant Thomas Cruse led Company A, whose twenty-five scouts split between twelve men from Chief Pedro's band and thirteen Cibecue Apache, the latter counting Nock-ay-det-klinne among their own chiefs and medicine men. Military authorities allowed these scouts to attend the dances held near the post.

Cruse later recalled how, once the ceremonies began nearby, he noticed a marked shift in the scouts' behavior. Where they had once freely shared what they knew or observed, they grew silent and withheld information about other Indians or their own affairs. A rumor once reached him that the scouts had told a sawmill engineer they intended to clear out the post for themselves, though he could never trace the remark to a specific man. Whereas the scouts had once lingered around the soldiers' kitchens and quarters chatting freely about themselves and their leaders, this openness vanished so completely that everyone took notice, yet questioning them yielded nothing.

Around August 10, Colonel Eugene Asa Carr asked Cruse to assess the scouts' loyalty. Cruse answered that he distrusted the scouts entirely should the White Mountains rise up, believing nearly all would side with the enemy, and he urged their discharge. He had watched their attitudes and conduct shift, and he pointed out to Carr that any local uprising would draw in the scouts' own friends and relatives, meaning that even scouts who stayed loyal would prove useless in a fight. This view was shared by most officers at the post, along with Sam Bowman.

On August 13, Carr wired department headquarters, noting the widespread belief that the scout company would join their friends if trouble broke out, and asking for authority to discharge unreliable men and replace them. Authorization came through, but the telegraph line failed before it reached Carr, leaving him without word from the department for two and a half weeks, a stretch that included the ambush his troops suffered at Cibecue.

Each Sunday, officers customarily inspected the scout company, and following the August 14 inspection, Carr had Cruse collect their weapons, with instructions to explain that the guns would be kept safe from rain in his office. Normally these arms stayed in the orderly room, issued only to men on herd duty, those sent on detached service, and to everyone Saturday evenings ahead of Sunday inspection. The scouts interpreted this confiscation as distrust, though Cruse worked through an interpreter to ease tensions and believed the matter had been settled.

Carr resolved to bring his cavalry and Cruse's scouts to Cibecue while leaving the infantry behind at the fort. Though uneasy about including the scouts, he saw no real alternative, later explaining that as enlisted men under his command they were needed to locate the medicine man, and that if their loyalty proved false, he preferred it happen away from the post where officers' families, civilians, and government property remained.

On the morning of Sunday, August 28, not long after the scout Chapeau came back to the fort without Nock-ay-det-klinne, Carr instructed Cruse to let the scouts retain their weapons following inspection and prepare for departure the next day to bring in the medicine man. John Byrnes, an Irishman from Dublin serving with Company A, understood how deeply the scouts revered Nock-ay-det-

Battle

Carr's party pushed along the trail as it snaked through the timber lining the creek bottom