A heavy fog sat upon Captain Emmet Crawford’s camp on the morning of January 11, 1886.
The day before, after a forced march of 48 hours through the mountain range known to Mexicans as “Espina del Diablo,” or “Backbone of the Devil, Crawford and the 100 Apache scouts he led had surprised Geronimo and his warriors at their camp along the Aros River, 150 miles south of the U.S. border. Just before daylight his detachment attacked and drove Geronimo’s followers from their rancheria. The capture of Geronimo’s supplies was a terrible blow in the harsh winter conditions of the Sierra Madres, and toward the middle of the afternoon, a squaw came into the camp and said that Geronimo and his followers were camped a few miles away and wished to talk to Crawford about surrendering. Crawford agreed to meet with Geronimo, and everyone in the American camp seemed to collectively exhale, believing the Geronimo campaign was about to end.
Six-foot-one, with gray eyes, a fellow officer described Crawford, saying: “Mentally, morally, and physically he would have been an ideal knight of King Arthur’s Court.” The Apaches alternately called him “Tall Chief” because of his height, and “Captain Coffee” because of his apparent addiction to the beverage. When reenlisting scouts in October and November for the expedition, Crawford chose only White Mountain and friendly Chiricahua Apaches – mountain Indians whom he knew were ideally suited for the arduous task of trailing Geronimo in the difficult Sierra Madres. These Indians joined the expedition not only because they hated the renegades, but also because they trusted Crawford, who was known for his concern for the scouts serving under him.
Just as the light of dawn made the terrain around Crawford’s camp visible on the 11th, the sentries reported a large body of troops approaching. One scout, believing the oncoming party to be Major Wirt Davis and his scouts, called to the approaching force in Apache.
But they were not Apache scouts.
At the sound of Apache voices, the force of 150 Mexican irregulars opened fire on Crawford’s camp. Bullets hissed through the air, driving the officers and scouts into the rocks for cover. Crawford ordered his men to hold their fire while he and the other officers shouted in Spanish, identifying themselves as American soldiers and waving handkerchiefs. After about 15 minutes there was a lull in the shooting. Crawford climbed atop a prominent rock in plain view of the Mexicans. Although his blue field uniform was in tatters, his brown beard ensured that he looked nothing like an Apache. Waving a handkerchief in each hand, he shouted: “No tiro! No tiro! Soldados Americanos!”
Twenty-five yards away, across a small ravine, a Mexican steadied his rifle against a pine tree and took aim. A shot rang out. Lieutenant Marion P. Maus, Crawford’s second-in-command, turned and “saw the Captain lying on the rocks with a wound in his head, and some of his brains lying upon the rocks.”
Enraged, the immediately unleashed a furious fire upon the Nacionales. The battle raged for an hour as the Apaches and Mexicans blazed away at one another, while Crawford lay bleeding in the no-man’s-land between the combatants. Finally, the Mexicans raised their own white flag. Four on the American side were wounded, while the scouts killed four Mexicans and wounded five others. Crawford lingered in a coma for seven excruciating days, finally dying on January 18. General George Crook maintained that had Crawford lived, the Apache War would have ended there beside the Aros River in January 1886.
On a hillside across the river, the renegades sat and watched the battle rage. A member of the band still recalled 70 years later how “Geronimo watched it and laughed.”
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