Apache Campaign (1896)

[1] Though the Apache Wars ended at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona in September 1886, when Geronimo surrendered, small bands of Chiricahuas continued to fight against the United States and Mexico from their strongholds in the Sierra Madre.

He remained in the civilian legal system until November 1889, when he escaped police custody during an incident known as the Kelvin Grade Massacre.

After Geronimo's surrender, Massai became famous for escaping the army in Missouri, while traveling on a train to Florida with other Apache prisoners.

According to an article by Britt W. Wilson, in the October 2001 issue of Wild West, by the mid-1890s, hostile Apache activity in southern Arizona increased.

The first was on May 8, 1896, when a combined scouting expedition under Second Lieutenant Nathan King Averill, 7th Cavalry, found the hostiles encamped in the Peloncillo Mountains, near Lang's Ranch, southwest of Cloverdale, New Mexico.

Two or three days after that, Captain James M. Bell, 7th Cavalry, sent Lieutenant Sedgwick Rice out from Fort Grant, Arizona with three Apache Scouts and four soldiers.

On the next day, May 12, the Apache scouts detected the hostiles' trail and determined that it was made by five horses, one of which had iron horseshoes and the other four were "shod with rawhide."

Before reaching the camp, Averill himself rode up to Rice and told him that the hostiles had crossed the international border about three miles west of Cloverdale.

According to Britt Wilson, "Guadalupe Canyon [is] a natural, protected pass leading into Mexico from Arizona Territory, [and] had been used by the Apaches for a long time as an escape route."

During Geronimo's War, in June 1885, a small battle was fought there when Chiricahuas attacked an army redoubt and a few years before that it was the site of the Guadalupe Canyon Massacre, in which Mexican policemen killed "Old Man" Clanton and his gang of cattle rustlers.

In May 1896, the United States Army could not legally enter Mexican territory but the newspapers concluded that the attack did take place south of the border.

This would be difficult though, the May 22 issue of the Tombstone Prospector described Guadalupe Canyon as being one of "precipitable character... the perpendicular or overhanging rocks and abrupt declivities making it an almost impossibility to get closer than long range shot."

Second Lieutenant Averill took with him twelve enlisted men, three Apache scouts, and the four man posse, to move north of the hostiles' camp.

Adelnietze was with Geronimo's band ten years before, but, instead of surrendering at Skeleton Canyon, he continued to live as a nomad with his family.

Britt Wilson says that "The [second] lieutenant sent a sergeant and two other soldiers to one canyon, and he took the other men behind a peak that he assumed lay on the back side of the Apache camp."

Averill looked through his field glasses and saw what he thought was Rice so he moved his men to the next ridge and ordered them to make sure they didn't open fire.

The soldiers also fired on Massai, who, by that time, was awake and he "made a hasty retreat from the camp, as the troopers' bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the rocks that provided him with cover."

The Tombstone Prospector later reported that both of the bodies were found and that much of Adelnietze's belongings were captured, including his 1873 Springfield rifle, "with a shortened barrel," a bow, two horses, moccasins and leggings "filled with blood."

On June 4, 1896, the Americans received permission from the Mexican government to pursue Apaches across the international border and shortly thereafter a small expedition was sent into Sonora.

On June 21, Lieutenant William Yates was leading the expedition through Pulpito Mountain, sixty miles south of the border, when he came across an Apache camp.

Apache May, photographed by C. S. Fly in Tombstone , Arizona.