Fire Season (20 page)

For an hour or two, out on the Ghost Divide, I move in thoughtlessness—allowing sights, sounds, and smells to wash over me—until I come upon a weathered human artifact. A trail sign, broken in three pieces, rests against a fallen log: “Ghost Creek 8,” one chunk says, indicating eight miles between here and there. Having studied the maps, I know this is false—unless it’s mileage meant for ravens. Using the math proposed by Black Larry’s Rule No. 6, I figure it must be more like twelve miles, minimum. “Entering Black Range Primitive Area,” another sign says, a relic of the time, pre-1980, when the Aldo Leopold Wilderness was only a wilderness study area and did not yet have the force of law.

Studying this second sign, I think of the men and women—many of them radical amateurs or low-paid wilderness advocates, people such as Dave Foreman and Kent Carlton and untold others whose identities remain unknown to me—who spent years of their lives inspecting the proposed boundaries of the Aldo in the 1970s, learning the lay of the land and writing letters and attending meetings and arguing with the Forest Service to include more roadless country in its final plan. Their work enlarged the wilderness by tens of thousands of acres, some of it to the east and south of where I stand. To offer but one example, the Forest Service initially argued that it didn’t want the country around Apache Peak included, on the off chance it might get the itch to build a road to the lookout one day. It goes without saying that I’m glad that never happened—glad the eco-freaks, god bless their funky souls, fought back—mainly because such a road would have fragmented wildlife habitat and become yet another corridor of death and destruction through the forest, littered with empty beer cans and the roadkill carcasses of squirrels and deer. Of course I’m also glad because I doubt I could have stood to be a lookout on a mountain overrun by the motorized hordes: only three lookout peaks in the Gila still require a hike to reach them. The other seven have roads carved right to their towers.

These half-rotted trail markers attempt to impose a human scale on the land, a project that begins to appear laughably puny when geology comes into account. It may be true that I stand on the old boundary of the Black Range Primitive Area, but I also stand inside the cauldron of a great volcanic eruption. Sometime around 34 million years ago, at the beginning of the Oligocene epoch, 500 cubic miles of ash, pumice, and hot gas spewed onto the surrounding landscape, a volume roughly equal to the amount of water in Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined. This explosion was a hundred times greater than that which gouged Oregon’s Crater Lake, and more than a thousand times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The volcanic outflow—called the Kneeling Nun Tuff by geologists—was welded by tremendous heat into a layer of harder-than-nails rock that grew thinner the farther it spread from the vent where it erupted. Some of the outflow sheet traveled more than a hundred miles. Apache Peak was near the epicenter. According to Jim Swetnam, who with his wife was the lookout on Apache Peak through most of the 1980s and was there to help build the current outhouse, it took six pounds of dynamite and a lot of chiseling to carve a three-foot vault from the rock.

I try sometimes to imagine the landscape roiling, pulsing, steaming, scalding the vegetation, oozing slowly onto the surrounding plains, but the magnitude and time span of it befuddle me. Geologists say that with the magma chambers of the volcano emptied, the surface of the earth collapsed, creating an oval cauldron thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide. This cauldron did not stay sunken for long. Resurgent magma exerted pressure from below, uplifting chunks of Precambrian granite a billion years old, some of them overlain by sediments from a time when the area was submerged beneath a warm-water sea, as recently as 65 million years ago. Magma spurted through vents in the rock to form rhyolite domes. After cooling, contracting, and cracking, the volcanic tuff eroded here and there into pinnacles and spires. Surface water carved deep valleys and washed the sediment in broad aprons toward the Rio Grande. The result of all this vulcanism, faulting, and erosion is a landscape of tremendous topographical variation: hoodoos, turrets, conical peaks, hogback ridges, steep canyons, bare cliffs. The pictorial definition of gnar-gnar.

Alice and I spend the night on the ridge, overlooking the gnarliness, and in the morning break camp and continue the walk to Ghost Creek. The trail barely shows on the ground along the last nine miles. Mostly the hike involves blind route finding, bushwhacking, retracing our steps and trying another way when the first choice fails. I lose Alice for half an hour on a massive prow of rock with couple-hundred-foot drop-offs on two sides. Once I find the path down, I shed my pack and hike back to the top to show her the way. It wasn’t obvious at first, even to me, and she sometimes freezes when she gets scared. By the time we reach the creek bottom her doggy pannier is a shambles. One side of it hangs by a few measly threads. I stuff it inside my own pack and let her run free. She promptly scares up several turkeys and three cow elk.

Challenging though our journey has been, we move through the landscape in a state of awe and joy unknown to some who’ve come before us. A stark reminder of this fact greets us in a meadow above Ghost Creek, where fifteen graves stretch in a row beneath a tattered American flag waving pathetically from a metal pole. Nearby, tucked in an alcove of a side canyon, a plaque displays a replica Medal of Honor encased in hard plastic. These military monuments testify to the fact that control over the piece of earth where we stand was once contested in blood.

Given the fractured topography, it’s little wonder the Warm Springs Apache increasingly used the area when chased by the U.S. cavalry in the late 1870s. Known by many names—Chihenne, Red Paint People, Copper Mine Apaches, Eastern Chiricahuas, Mimbres Apaches—they had hunted and camped here for hundreds of years though they lived mostly at Ojo Caliente, in the shadow of the San Mateo Mountains, just northeast of the Black Range. It was an easy morning’s ride from their home camp around the warm springs to high, cool country that beckoned in the heat of summer, beckoned for its plenitude of wild game, nuts, and berries. Given the option, they’d have preferred to stay forever on the land surrounding the springs, with hunting privileges in the Black Range and other nearby mountains. But the American government had other ideas.

After the end of the Civil War, settlers—many of them former Union and Confederate soldiers—streamed west in search of land, adventure, and riches. Prospectors struck gold and silver throughout the Gila region, ranchers undertook to meet the miners’ need for meat, and the army arrived to protect the interests of both. But the Apache had a reputation as warriors of the first rank, and their dominion over the land around the Mogollon Plateau and the Gila River had gone largely unchallenged for centuries. They would not go quietly.

Amid the flux of new settlement, Chief Victorio and his people lived much as they had for generations. They hunted deer, elk, and antelope. They gathered acorns and raspberries, yucca flowers and cactus flesh. They raided and traded, back and forth across the Mexican border, stealing horses and cattle to swap for guns and other provisions. In their reckoning, cattle, like deer, were part of nature’s bounty, only slower, stupider, and easier to liberate. Horses provided both meat and locomotion. The Apaches considered raiding an extension of hunting and gathering, an entirely natural pursuit. The ranchers they raided felt otherwise.

As the pace of settlement increased, Victorio sensed that his people’s wide-ranging existence would be constricted. He did not want open war with the new arrivals. He wanted to skim a bit of their bounty and he wanted the promise of a permanent reservation at Ojo Caliente. Again and again he repeated this hope. For a time his wish was granted, and an agency was established there. But government rations were insufficient and game increasingly sparse, forcing the Apaches to resume raiding surrounding ranches and villages for stock, which they then butchered or traded to Mexican settlers near the warm springs. The raiding led to pleas from the new arrivals to concentrate Victorio’s band with other Apaches on a single reservation, ideally across the border in Arizona, at San Carlos. By the 1870s, whenever a horse was stolen, a cow killed, or a gun fired anywhere in southern New Mexico or northern Chihuahua, the Apaches were blamed. To this day the word
Apache
is synonymous with the practice of scalping, though it was the Mexican government that encouraged widespread use of the tactic, paying Anglo and Hispanic bounty hunters handsome rewards for Apache scalps. Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian
, among the finest American novels of the past thirty years, reimagines that sordid episode with the care of a documentarian and the language of a biblical prophet; it is not for the faint of heart.

The Warm Springs Apache were rounded up and confined, at various times, to three different reservations, moving on and off them all through the 1870s. They found the San Carlos Reservation hot, dry, and dismal, with summer temperatures reaching 120 degrees; the water was bad and disease rampant. The short-lived Tularosa Reservation proved unsuitable for the kind of small-scale farming Victorio’s people had practiced at Ojo Caliente; to have stayed there would have been to court starvation. The Mescalero Reservation, in south-central New Mexico, offered a more hospitable climate—the Chihenne had complained that Tularosa was too cold—but it wasn’t home, and there too the government rations were insufficient to feed the population.

In 1870, the government had estimated it would cost $11,000 to buy out the mostly Mexican settlers around Ojo Caliente—none of whom had clear title to the land—and settle the Warm Springs Apache on the permanent reservation of their wish. When this idea was abandoned for good a decade later, the costs of war would run into the millions.

A series of corrupt and incompetent Indian agents inflamed distrust between Victorio’s people and the government. In August 1879, Victorio abruptly left the Mescalero Reservation. He paid a brief visit to Ojo Caliente, attacked a troop of cavalry, and embarked on a raiding mission into Mexico. When he returned to Ojo Caliente, he found U.S. soldiers had sacked the camp and killed his wife along with many other women, children, and elders. This was the second of his wives to be shot while unarmed. With his future closing in upon a series of unacceptable options, each of which would force him to abandon his homeland forever, Victorio chose freedom over confinement. He and a small band of warriors stole cattle and horses, crossed and recrossed the Mexican border, and skirmished with all manner of opposition—U.S. and Mexican troops, Arizona Rangers, Texas Rangers, civilian militias—in one of the greatest guerrilla campaigns ever waged on American soil. Rival Apaches and Navajos aided the U.S. Army as scouts and lent it what little success it claimed.

Though less well known than his contemporaries Cochise and Geronimo, Victorio and his war are studied to this day by the American military. Indeed, one military historian, Kendall D. Gott, has written a monograph for the Combat Institute Studies Press at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in which he equates the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the battle to subdue Victorio. Published in 2004,
In Search of an Elusive Enemy: The Victorio Campaign 1879–1880
seeks to encourage our beleaguered modern fighters with tales of past glory against tough enemies:

The Victorio Campaign bears many parallels to ongoing operations against Islamic terrorist movements. Victorio was a charismatic leader who many indeed considered a terrorist. On the other hand, his followers considered him a freedom fighter and gave him their unswerving loyalty. These warriors were fanatical in their support and willingly endured extreme hardship and depredation [
sic
] in the fight against their enemies… . Like today’s terrorist leaders, Victorio used an international border, that between the United States and Mexico, to great effect.

On September 18, 1879, after raiding a ranch on the south end of the Black Range, Victorio and his party turned north. They picked their way through the foothills, then turned up Ghost Creek into the mountains, heading for one of Victorio’s favorite camp spots. Their trail was plain—probably on purpose—and a company of Ninth Cavalry gave chase, led by Navajo scouts.

The Ninth Cavalry regiment had been mustered in 1866, in New Orleans, with most of its original members drawn from Louisiana and Kentucky. An all-black regiment, they became known to history as the Buffalo Soldiers. In the 1870s several companies of Ninth Cavalry arrived at Fort Bayard, just east of Silver City, to partake in the subjugation of the Apache. That September day in 1879, on the headwaters of Ghost Creek, marks a peculiar moment in America’s westward march: black soldiers, most of them former slaves or the sons of slaves, commanded by white officers, guided by Navajo scouts, hunting down Apaches to make the region safe for Anglo and Hispanic miners and ranchers. The melting pot set to boil.

The Apache trail turned up a side canyon north of Ghost Creek. Once inside the canyon, the soldiers found themselves trapped; they’d stumbled into an ambush. Boulders and rock ledges provided cover to Apache snipers, and all day long they kept the troops pinned down. Late in the day the soldiers retreated under heavy fire, dragging away their dead and wounded. They left behind a medical wagon, fifty-three horses and mules, and most of their personal baggage. Official reports and later accounts differ on the number of casualties. Chris Adams, the Black Range District archaeologist, puts the number around five or a couple more. The row of graves is suspicious for its neatness; cavalry tended to be buried where they fell, though sometimes a later reburial consolidated scattered graves. A memorial stone counts twelve Buffalo Soldiers and three Navajo scouts among the dead. No monument commemorates the victors of the battle.