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CHAPTER 1
A GENERAL IRRUPTION
THE SUMMER OF 1795 found Pedro de Nava a very concerned man. As the commandant general of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, Nava was responsible for the security of the northern frontier of Spain's vast imperial holdings, stretching from the Gulf of California in the west to the Gulf coast of Texas in the east. Into this region the complexities of Spain's international rivalries had increasingly escalated. Looking east beyond the great Mississippi River, Spanish officials were genuinely alarmed by the rapidly burgeoning power of the land-hungry United States of America. Spain's perennial enemy Great Britain was locked in a worldwide struggle against revolutionary France, and Spain had formed an unnatural and uneasy alliance with the British. In addition to open warfare in the Caribbean, the conflict had seen an influx of French revolutionary ideas and propaganda calling for the liberation of Spanish America and seeking to spark nascent independence movements in Spain's colonies. In the face of these threats, the last thing Pedro de Nava needed were problems within the frontier areas under his control.
Luckily for Nava, the Interior Provinces had been relatively calm for several years. Decades of warfare between the Spanish and numerous indigenous peoples of the region, especially the Apaches, had finally abated to something resembling peace. Across the wide expanse of the northern frontier, eight reservations had been set up for several Apache groups in an attempt to induce them to curtail their raiding activity. Almost two thousand Apaches were now frequenting the reservations, and a general quiescence had settled upon the area. Despite the increased costs to maintain these establishments, Nava believed they were vital to securing the peace and were more economical in the long run than large-scale military operations. Apaches still engaged in raids, but these were generally confined both in size and scale to a level Nava's subordinates could deal with. As they had for almost a decade, the Spaniards were willing to tolerate the disruptions of this "bad peace" rather than expend the resources required to decisively crush the Apaches in a "good war." Now, in the face of increasingly strident calls for cost cutting to help defray the expense of the war with France, Nava maintained that the Interior Provinces of New Spain were functioning peacefully and efficiently.
A native of the Canary Islands, Nava had enjoyed a long career that had seen him rise steadily, owing more to his organizational and administrative abilities than any combat experience. Between 1781 and 1789 he had served with distinction as garrison commander of the strategic city of Caracas, Venezuela, where he attained the rank of brigadier general. The following year, he was promoted to field marshal and named commandant general of the Interior Provinces. During the next five years, Nava labored long and hard to bring a semblance of peace with the Apaches, and it appeared he had been successful.
On August 6, 1795, Nava's thoughts were centered on far eastern Texas. He had received reports that a substantial group of Indians from east of the Mississippi River were seeking to settle in Spanish Texas. They claimed they were fleeing persecution from the Americans and promised to ally with the Spaniards in exchange for sanctuary. In writing to his superiors in Madrid, however, Nava questioned the veracity of these Indians and speculated that it was all a ruse. Allowing them to cross into Spanish territory might strain relations with the United States. Furthermore, permitting these Indians to settle in Texas might encourage others and lead to unforeseen consequences with Native groups already living in the region. With his eyes firmly fixed to the east, Nava confidently assured his superiors that he would act to ensure the continued tranquility of the frontier areas under his command. Unfortunately for him, on the very day he was writing his report, events were occurring in far western Texas that would make a mockery of his claims.
* * *
At fifty-one years of age, Josef Urías had served as a soldier for almost three decades. A native of the old Presidio of Conchos in the Province of Nueva Vizcaya, Urías had enlisted as a common soldier in 1768 at the age of twenty-three. Over the next twenty-eight years he rose steadily through the ranks until commissioned as an officer, becoming alférez, or ensign, of the Primera Compañía Volante, the First Flying Company, in June 1788. The First Volante was stationed north of the city of Chihuahua, the capital of the Interior Provinces; but like all of the compañías volantes, the First was designed to be a mobile force without a permanent base. Thus, they could operate throughout the frontier region. For the next seven years, Urías served in the First competently, if unspectacularly, having participated "in twenty campaigns and some corredurías [pursuits], and in these he had many combats with the enemy and in these he succeeded in killing two Apaches and recovering 589 animals." Overall, his superiors judged Alférez Urías as "a good officer for this war."
In late July 1795, Urías found himself in command of a body of troopers from the First Volante serving on detached duty at the Presidio del Príncipe, located at the village of Coyamé, some forty miles southwest of the confluence of the Río Conchos and the Rio Grande. Toward the end of the month, Urías was informed by the post commander, Captain José de Tovar, that he had received dispatches that two small groups of Indians had raided Spanish settlements and were reportedly heading toward Presidio del Príncipe. Captain Tovar determined that Urías, given his experience, would command a detachment that would try and locate the raiders.
The Indians Urías would be searching for had struck their targets several days earlier, far to the south of the presidio. On July 25, the garrison of the Presidio of San Carlos, sixty miles southwest of Príncipe, had been alerted that two parties of Indians, with four to six men each, had carried off twenty head of livestock from some ranches in the jurisdiction of Ciénega de los Olivos, more than one hundred miles farther south. Fortunately, the commander at San Carlos, Captain Antonio García de Texada, had at his disposal not only the seventy-three men of his own garrison, but also substantial detachments from the Third and Fourth Compañías Volantes, temporarily stationed at the presidio. He immediately sent out two separate squadrons in pursuit of the Indian raiders, one with twenty men from the Third Volante and the second with forty-four men from San Carlos and the Fourth Volante.
The latter detachment of troopers, under the command of Alféreces Don Cayetano Limón and Don Juan Fernández, pursued one group of the Indian raiders. The tracks they followed initially paralleled the course of the Río Conchos, to the east of San Carlos, but then began to veer to the northwest, clearly making for the Rio Grande. Whether through skill or luck, or a combination of the two, the pursuing Spaniards were able to successfully follow the Indian raiders' tracks for several days.
However, despite their best efforts, the men of the Third Volante in the other detachment eventually lost the trail of their quarry. But the signs indicated this group of Indians was generally heading to the northwest, into the area where the garrison of the Presidio del Príncipe regularly patrolled. The men from the Third immediately sent word of this fact to Captain Tovar at Príncipe.
By Sunday, August 2, 1795, Captain Tovar had given Alférez Urías his orders, and Urías and fifty troopers from the First Volante and Príncipe immediately rode out from the presidio to search for the raiders who were believed headed into their territory. Whether the men had the occasion to attend Mass, as was usual before their journey, is not known. As they scoured the terrain for signs, Urías and his party quickly discovered the trail of six Indians, which they immediately followed. After many hours of riding, the soldiers had covered nineteen leagues, or about forty-seven miles, heading west from Príncipe. On Monday, August 3, they arrived at the approaches of the Sierra del Carrizo, one of the numerous mountain ranges that covered the region. Though the tracks leading into the mountains indicated they were pursuing only six men, Alférez Urías's long-honed experience demanded caution. He decided to split his force, ordering a detachment of twenty-two men to guard the mules and horses of his supply train while he led the remaining twenty-eight soldados to reconnoiter the mountains.
Among this advanced party rode soldado Nolasco Medina, a thirty-four- year-old veteran with fourteen years of service. Standing only five feet tall, with a pock-marked and swarthy complexion, an aquiline nose, black hair, and black eyes, Medina was typical of the troopers that filled the Spanish military ranks on the northern frontier. Representing a diverse variety of features from Spanish, Indian, and black progenitors, these "sons of the Country" were classified into a complex number of castas, or racial castes, in the rigidly hierarchical society of the time. Yet most of these soldados were sufficiently Hispanicized so that whether out of necessity or conviction, they had volunteered and been accepted into military service.
As he spurred his horse forward into the Sierra del Carrizo, Medina's military career had so far proven mostly uneventful. Born into a farming family of Nueva Vizcaya, twenty-year-old Medina on September 1, 1781, had enlisted voluntarily for ten years as a light trooper in the company of the Presidio del Príncipe. After a decade of service, he reenlisted for another ten years on June 17, 1792. During his entire career he had been involved in at least three combats that resulted in the death of eleven Apache men and women and the capture of another twenty-five men, women, and children. Still, Medina appears not to have particularly distinguished himself and, despite all his service time, he was still only a private. In the coming hours, all of that was to change.
Medina and the other twenty-seven men under Alférez Urías had not ridden very far when they were suddenly ambushed. Ensconced among the rocks and outcroppings of the Sierra del Carrizo was a force estimated to contain 150 Mescalero Apache warriors. Using their superior numbers, the Apaches gradually surrounded Urías and his men. "Despite making the greatest resistance, fighting with extraordinary valor for more than one hour," Urías and his men were doomed. The Mescaleros were armed with muskets as well as bows and arrows, and given their numbers, their firepower soon began to tell. The most likely scenario is that Urías and many of his men were gradually shot down. As the number of Spaniards began to shrink, flight became the only hope for survival.
Despite being wounded by gunshot, soldado Nolasco Medina had continued fighting throughout the engagement. At some point, either on his own initiative or at the order of others, Medina put spurs to his horse and rode out of the ambush. According to later reports, "he broke the circle of the Enemy ... and was the first to warn the train." Four other wounded Spaniards followed in Medina's wake, and all reached the twenty-two men left with the supply train at the entrance to the mountains. However, the Apaches pursued the fugitives closely and now launched a second assault on the remaining Spaniards. Medina and the other survivors joined in the defense of the train, and Medina was hit again and again, taking another four wounds. The Apaches managed to capture some and perhaps all of the horses of the pack train, but Medina and the remaining twenty-six Spaniards were able to make good their escape.
Within a day the survivors brought word of the disaster back to Captain Tovar at Presidio del Príncipe. Tovar immediately sent dispatch riders to Commandant General Pedro de Nava at Chihuahua City with the news. The captain then set out with a substantial body of troops and returned to the Sierra del Carrizo to recover the bodies of Alférez Urías and his men for burial. After performing this grim task, on August 8, undoubtedly in an attempt to bolster the morale of his shaken command, Tovar promoted soldado Nolasco Medina to cabo de escuadra, or squad corporal, a testament to Medina's wounds, if not his valor. As the presidio recovered from these losses, unbeknownst to Captain Tovar, other recent events would further darken the morale of his men.
* * *
On the same day Urías's command was decimated, the second detachment of troops that had set out from San Carlos after the initial Indian raiders was still following its quarry's tracks. Over the course of a week and a half, the forty-four Spanish troopers had covered almost two hundred miles, as their two commanders pushed them relentlessly.
The senior officer in charge was actually almost twenty years younger than his subaltern. At thirty-five, First Alférez Cayetano Limón had been in the military practically his whole life. A native of the Presidio of Altar in Sonora, Limón's father and namesake was one of the most combat- hardened veterans along the entire northern frontier. The elder Limón, a mestizo from the Villa de Sinaloa, had joined the Company of Altar in 1754 while in his early twenties. Over the next thirteen years he had risen in rank from soldado, to cabo, then to sergeant, and finally obtained commissioned rank as alférez in 1767. Despite his mixed-race background, the elder Limón's ability as an Indian fighter was such that he participated in an inordinate amount of combat, so much so that his superiors described him as "excelling for war and knowledge of the field." During his thirty- five-year-long military career, the elder Limón was determined to have his two sons enter the military and advance even higher than he had himself. Both boys, Ygnacio and Cayetano, served as volunteers as soon as they were big enough to handle a musket. As they entered their teens, both enlisted as soldados, but their father petitioned that they be enrolled as officer cadets. Despite many delays, in 1787 both were eventually commissioned, with Cayetano admitted as a cadet at the Presidio of Buenavista and Ygnacio admitted as a cadet at Altar.
With such antecedents, the younger Cayetano Limón fully justified his family's reputation as skilled Indian fighters, and in 1789 he was commissioned as Second Alférez of the Fourth Volante in the neighboring Province of Nueva Vizcaya. Less than six months later, Cayetano was promoted to First Alférez and for the next six years saw much action. He took part in six campaigns and many raids and pursuits, in which twenty- seven Apaches were captured, as well as being credited with killing an Indian warrior in hand-to-hand combat. Despite his obvious valor, Limón was judged by his superiors as displaying less than stellar conduct and was rated only as "a medium officer."
His apparent lackluster behavior notwithstanding, Limón's aptitude for field service was unquestioned, even by his segundo for this operation, Second Alférez Juan Fernández. At fifty-two, Fernández was old enough to be Limón's father. Over three decades, the second alférez had ridden out on seventeen campaigns and participated in many smaller actions that had killed or captured twenty-five Apache warriors, or gandules as the Spanish labeled them. His superiors noted in his service record that "he was distinguished for entering at the point of the lance and killing two to the satisfaction of his superiors." Despite being much older and more experienced than Limón, Fernández appropriately deferred to Limón as his superior officer.
Both veteran officers doggedly hung on to the tracks of four Indian raiders they had been chasing from the vicinity of San Carlos since late July. By Wednesday, August 5, Limón, Fernández, and their troopers had reached the banks of the Rio Grande, which marked the boundary of what the Spaniards officially regarded as their territory. Beyond the river lay the lands of the Mescalero Apaches, who had traditionally cared not a whit for the Spanish predilections for lines on a map. Such distinctions were made clear to Limón and his men when they came to the ruins of the original site of the Presidio del Príncipe, near a ford on the Rio Grande called Los Pilares. Originally constructed in 1773, fifteen years later the presidio was relocated south to the village of Coyamé, ostensibly to better protect Spanish settlements from Mescalero raids. For now, the remains of the original presidio offered a campsite and landmark that Limón and his command most likely utilized.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Bad Peace And A Good War"
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