The Wild Ones — Part I — Adelnietze

Worn out and demoralized by separation from their families, the bronco Chiricahua Apaches led by Geronimo and Naiche, the son of the great Cochise, surrendered for good on September 4, 1886.

Thus ended the Apache Wars.

Well, not quite. Even as Geronimo gave up moving like the wind across the desert southwest and northern Mexico, there were other Apaches hidden in the fastness of the Sierra Madre who would not turn themselves in to be exiled to Florida. And among Geronimo’s warriors was one who just could not bring himself to surrender.

Adelnietze was a hardened warrior. Ace Apache Wars historian Edwin R. Sweeney identifies him as one of the warriors who tore through New Mexico and Arizona in 1885 in  Ulzana’s epic raid. He’d been photographed by Tombstone, Arizona, photographer C.S. Fly in March 1886, in Cañon de los Embudos in Sonora, Mexico, as Geronimo negotiated a surrender to General George Crook. That surrender didn’t stick, and the Chiricahuas would run rampant for a few more months.

The photographs of Adelnietze portray a true warrior, a hard man and a killer, his stern and dignified visage bisected by a stripe of white paint; well-dressed and well armed with a Trapdoor Springfield carbine and a revolver with a birdshead grip, perhaps of ivory or pearl, with a lanyard dangling from the butt. He wears the traditional Apache headband and boot moccasins, and a buckaroo-style neckerchief secured by a concho slide. His hands are poised across his concho-studded gunbelt.

It’s a safe bet that he took much of his clothing and equipment from Mexican men he had slain in raids that tore a red swath across northern Sonora. Geronimo’s Apaches had made Mexico howl.

Geronimo and his tiny remnant band with just a handful of adult warriors had not been captured, though they had been pursued relentlessly by thousands of American and Mexican troops and scouts, who had authority to cross the international border in pursuit of the renegades. The Apaches were simply tired of living on the run, and they knew that their families had been packed off to far away Florida. For all their fearsomeness as warriors, the Apaches were family men — they yearned for their wives and children. The desire to be reunited finally won out over low-down freedom, and they gave themselves over to the forces of General Nelson A. Miles at Skeleton Canyon in Arizona.

Not Adelnietze. His wife had gone out with him on the warpath and evaded being incarcerated and exiled, so he lacked the incentive of his brothers to lay down his rifle. He and two other warriors, identified by historian Lynda Sanchez as the warriors Natculbaye and Satsinistu, along with three women, slipped away from Skeleton Canyon into the mountains. Adelnietze would roam and raid, a free man, for another 10 years.

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In his old age, Geronimo sometimes expressed regret for surrendering. He had two wishes: that he had killed more Mexicans and that he had died on the warpath. Adelnietze would not have to live with such regrets.

Sanchez notes, in a story in True West Magazine, that:

Adelnietze did not know about the horrors being heaped upon his brethren in the hellhole prisoner of war camps in Florida, Alabama and later Oklahoma Territory. No doubt he missed his kin, but at least he was free to smoke a cigarillo, take a cow when needed or trade with Mexicans. Perhaps he had turkey quills filled with gold dust to purchase supplies from willing traders. This fragile existence was much better than anything Naiche and Geronimo endured. But then the Apache murders of Horatio Merrill and his 16-year-old daughter in December 1895 and of Alfred Hand in March 1896 became the last straw.

It can’t be known for certain that Adelnietze was responsible for the Merrill killings. There were other bronco Apaches out there in the still-wild deserts and mountains of the bloody borderlands — not least of them the notorious Apache Kid. However, circumstantial evidence indicates that the murders can be laid to Adelnietze, who was by then raiding in the company of another famous Apache fugitive named Massai. The Chiricahua fugitives were stone killers.

The U.S. Army determined to make a springtime sweep of the borderlands to eliminate the raiders. Rancher John Slaughter led a posse into the field on the same mission.

Apache scouts, along with the legendary Mexican scout Merijildo Grijalva, who had been tracking Apaches since the days of Cochise in the 1860s, picked up the fugitive raiders’ trail. Two patrols of the 7^th Cavalry converged on Guadalupe Canyon, where the scouts had located a Rancheria embedded in the rough and rocky terrain.

Guadalupe Canyon was a place of blood. A funnel that ran across the corner where Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona meet, the canyon was trafficked by raiders and rustlers of three nations — Apache , American and Mexican — and had seen its share of battle and massacre. In 1881, Mexican vigilantes had attacked a camp of American cowboys they believed to be rustlers and they slaughtered Old Man Clanton and five other men in their bedrolls. Geronimo had fought U.S. soldiers there while making one of his many breaks for Old Mexico.

It is not at all clear whether the U.S. troops pursuing Adelnietze were still in Arizona or had crossed into Mexico. At that point in 1896, there was no border-crossing agreement in effect, so if they were in Mexico, they were there illegally. Not that anyone particularly cared.

The cavalry units and their scouts approached the renegades’ camp early on the morning of May 17, 1896. They were under orders not to harm the women, who were expected to give themselves up when the men went down. One of the women sounded an alarm and Adelnietze appeared.

The troopers and scouts opened fire and Adelnietze took a bullet. The Apaches, as befit their custom and their training, immediately scattered into the rocks and side canyons.

The patrols had failed to establish a blocking force in the right position, and Massai escaped clean. So did the women.

The only trail the scouts could pick up was a blood trail from the severely wounded Adelnietze. They tracked him to a spot where the ground was saturated with blood and they found a pair of bloody leggings — Adelnietze’s tall Apache moccasins.

These, along with an 1873 Springfield rifle with a shortened barrel, a pair of field glasses, bows and arrows and some clothing, were seized as trophies. The short, sharp, but indecisive action was the last significant military action against the Apaches. There would be violent episodes lasting well into the 1930s, but they would all involve civilian vigilantes or legal authorities.

A couple of days later, a patrol found the body of Adelnietze where he’d bled out from his wound. He’d had a 10 year run after the official Apache surrender and died the way Geronimo wished he had — on the warpath to the end.