Native American Indians

Chato: Part 32: Prisoner of War Life at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida.
This post is the thirty-second in a series of true stories about a Chiricahua chief, Chato, who lived in the times of the Apache wars, survived twenty-seven years of prisoner of war internment, and twenty-one years of life on the Mescalero reservation.
The events described in this post took place after Chato and nine other peaceful Chiricahuas traveled to Washington to present the scout’s case for staying on their farms at Fort Apache rather than being exiled with the renegades. These were scouts who supported the army in the chase after the Naiche-Geronimo band. Given a piece of meaningless paper that said they had visited the office of the Secretary of War, and Chato a silver medal, they thought they had succeeded. But rather than being returned to their farms at Fort Apache, they were taken to the prisoner of war camp at Fort Marion, Florida where there was insufficient food by bureaucratic directive, greatly overcrowded living conditions, and death by disease.
Most of the Chiricahua Apaches who came to Mescalero, after their release as prisoners of war from Fort Sill, OK, in 1913 were first interned at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. Their return to Mescalero is described in The Last Warrior, The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache, Book Three.
The Apaches were sent to Fort Marion in six groups. The first group were those who broke out with Geronimo and surrendered in late March 1886. It included leaders like Chihuahua, Loco, Nana and the famous woman warrior, sister of Victorio, Lozen. The second group had stayed on the reservation during Geronimo’s third breakout and made up about 75% of the Chiricahuas. The third group was the Chiricahua scouts who were still enlisted in the army and included warriors Martine and Kayitah who talked Geronimo into surrendering on September 4,1886 who had helped General Crook broker the first peace in March 1886. The fourth group included Chato, Loco, Kaytenne, Noche, Charley, Gon-altsis, Guydelkon and three women (Loco’s two wives and a granddaughter) who had been sent to Washington to ask that the scouts supporting the army be left at Fort Apache. It was a doomed-to-fail, face-saving political maneuver by General Miles. When this group left Washington, they believed they were on the way to Fort Apache. Less than a month later after stops in Carlisle to see children and relatives and a long visit to Fort Leavenworth, they were staring at the nine-twelve ft. thick walls of Castillo de San Marcos, aka Fort Marion, in San Augustine, FL. The fifth group included the women and children of the Naiche-Geronimo warriors who had surrendered in September. The sixth group were the families and children led by Mangas who surrendered six weeks after Geronimo.
The Apaches were not the first Indian prisoners of war to be sent to Fort Marion. Warriors and chiefs from the Plains tribes had been sent there in the mid 1870s and it’s where General Pratt got his start with his militarized Indian school approach carried on at Carlisle well into the twentieth century. Some of the Plains Indians had tuberculosis they had caught from white trappers and it is believed that they left traces of it at Fort Marion and in Carlisle where the Apaches developed the disease. Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay had not housed Plains Indians and Geronimo’s people there didn’t get sick from tuberculosis.
The first group sent to Fort Marion was shipped from Bowie Station a few miles north of Fort Bowie. There were seventy-seven prisoners–fifteen men, thirty-three women, and twenty-nine children. Among these were two wives and three children of Geronimo, and two wives, two children, and the mother of Naiche. They reached Fort Marion April 13, one day after General Miles relieved General Crook after his resignation when Geronimo failed to come in as he said he would. Later that year the War Department asked LTC Loomis L. Langdon (later to be commander at Fort Barrancas, Pensacola, Florida, which also controlled Fort Pickens), Fort Marion commander if he could take four or five hundred more prisoners. Langdon answered he could take at most another seventy-five but recommended not sending any more. He explained in a revealing letter the kinds of conditions under which his prisoners lived. The walls in which there were casemates, once inhabited by the garrison, surrounded the small 100 by 100 ft. parade ground. However, the terreplein above the casemates had become so dilapidated and leaked so badly the casemates were uninhabitable. Langdon wrote that he had put up eighteen tents on the terreplein, which was fifteen yards wide with four-foot-high walls around the edges, to shelter the first group of prisoners and could possibly put up twenty more tents on the terreplein to house eighty more, but that sanitary conditions would be bad. (There were only two bathtubs – one for men, one for women in the entire fort). The fort was surrounded by St. Augustine making it impractical to put tents outside the walls or on nearby islands (where the first group stayed for several weeks while the fort was made habitable again), which overflowed with water in the winter. Nevertheless, General Sheridan wrote on Langdon’s letter that, “the conditions stated by Col. Langdon need not interfere with sending the remainder of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Indians to Fort Marion.” By “remainder” Sheridan meant the nearly 400 peaceable Apaches then living quietly at Fort Apache.
By the end of August three of the young Apache children had died. One was the four year-old daughter of Geronimo who had been “feeble” when she arrived. Langdon and the post surgeon had tried to improve her health with milk and other good food, but to no avail. Langdon allowed the Apaches to go into town in small groups under es**rt to make purchases in the stores (often for food which was in short supply by bureaucratic edict). The women did a good business in selling their beadwork and the men in bows and arrows. According to Betzinez in I fought with Geronimo the people of St. Augustine were friendly and sympathetic.
On September 20, 381 Apaches arrived at Ft. Marion from the reservation a few days after the group of ten led by Chatto who had been sent to Washington earlier. 70 were adult men, 221 adult women, 41 children between five and twelve, and 62 under the age of four. Fort Marion now housed over 450 Apaches when the commander had told the War Department it would be badly overcrowded with a total of 160. Langdon put up as many tents as he could on the terreplein around the center drill area to house them. He allowed them to cook in leaking casemates with small fires; even wood was in short supply.
Eighteen died at Fort Marion before the end of the year (that is, in roughly four months). The interpreters who had accompanied the Washington delegation, Sam Bowman and Concepcion worked for a time at the post. Micki Free, who was not a Chiricahua, was sent back to Arizona. Langdon noted in his October 1 report that the Indian men, acting as sanitary police, kept the place “scrupulously clean,” and that the two bath tubs (for 469 persons) were in continuous use. During September Langdon reported seventy-six cases of illness of which sixty seemed to be malarial based (“intermittent fever”) and one old woman had died. The prisoners were to grow even more susceptible to illness when, after receiving regular army rations, the War Department made a drastic reduction in food supplies on the recommendation of the Commissary General of Subsistence who believed the Apaches could augment their rations by fishing. The Apaches refused to eat fish or any form of pork. They believed Ussen didn’t want them eating that “nasty” food and they wouldn’t even if it meant starving to death. Langdon protested the rations were insufficient but the regulations were issued on December 11, 1886 and they were cut again on April 23, 1887.
Among the new arrivals were fourteen scouts whose enlistments had not expired. Rather than let them continue to draw pay, the army mustered them out and they became prisoners like the rest on October 8. When the President and War Department began to feel the heat from public outrage at the unjust way the scouts had been treated, General Sheridan ordered COL Romeyn B. Ayres, then commander at Fort Marion to determine how many men had served as scouts. His report stated, “that of eighty-two adult male Indians, confined at Fort Marion, sixty-five served the Government as scouts during the whole or portion of the time Geronimo was out, viz from the Spring of 1885 until the Fall of 1886.” Of the 365 women and children confined at Fort Marion, 284 made up the families of the scouts and of four sub-chiefs who were too old to scout but kept peace and order on the reservation.
During October, the Interior Department made plans to educate the children between twelve and twenty-two at Carlisle, and those younger were being considered. There were twenty-four boys and fifteen girls in the older group, and forty boys and sixteen girls in the younger group. Angie Debo in Geronimo points out that the differences in numbers between boys and girls in the groups was that a number of girls had early marriages which precluded them from the count and boy’s ages were consistently underestimated. A woman, Bashdelehi, had been abandoned by a warrior who rode off with Geronimo and remarried in Mexico. Bashdelehi had a fourteen-year-old daughter, fearful of disease and what she would be taught, didn’t want her to go to Carlisle. She begged Chato, who had a wife, Nalthchedah, to marry her daughter, Begiscleyaihn (later named Helen), as his second wife so she wouldn’t be taken to Carlisle. Chato thought about the proposal until it was almost too late to save Helen but agreed to the marriage. It was the beginning of the end of his marriage to Nalthchedah.
In the older group of children, four were not well enough to go to go to Carlisle with the first contingent, which reached Carlisle on November 4. Two days later the children in Mangas’s band (the last group to surrender and included Daklugie and Frank Mangas) arrived at Fort Marion. A second group including those from Mangas’s band was sent to Carlisle on December 8. The total number at Carlisle from Fort Marion was then forty-four. Nearly half of these, including Geronimo’s twenty-two year old son, Chappo, died within three years at Carlisle or were returned to their parents to die at the prison camps.
The Indian Office made a contract with the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions For schooling the younger children on January 1,1887. Before he was taken to Carlisle, James Kaywaykla, the boy who had ridden with Victorio and Nana, went to this school and later recalled, “. . .I will never forget the kindness of those good women (the Catholic Sisters), nor the respect in which we held them. For the first time in my life I saw the interior of a church and dimly sensed that the White Eyes, too, worshipped Ussen.”
The army moved the Fort Marion prisoners (except of the families of Geronimo’s warriors who joined their men at Fort Pickens) to Mount Vernon Barracks, thirty miles north of Mobile, 27 April 1887. They were at Mount Vernon Barracks for seven years before they were moved to Fort Sill.
Next week: Prisoner of War Life at Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama.
Photo : Some Apache prisoners of war at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida, ca. 1887.