contributed by Paul and Dana Longley

From the Magazine...
FRONTIER WEST
December 1972

"THE WHITE APACHE" WHO TERRORIZED NEW MEXICO, By Glenn Kevin

Kidnapped to replace a brave's dead son, the blue-eyed youngster grew into the most diabolical killer in the territory. Had he lived long enough, he might have won his "holy war" against the settlers he'd learned to hate.

Matt Longley at age four did not look like he would become dreaded killer. As Apache Jack, he was a Jicarilla Apache who was considered most savage member of his tribe.

Map shows location of Fort Union and the two branches of the Santa Fe Trail. the portion in New Mexico was area of Apache Jack's raids and bloody ambushes. His mutilations of white women and children outraged settlers and troopers. Col. Carson finally ended the bloodshed.

Rare Denver Historical Society photo shows naked soldier who had been ambushed and mutilated by marauding Indians. Apache Jack attacked only women and children.

Legendary Colonel Kit Carson devised clever trick to apprehend the savage white Apache.

Apaches thumped their paint ponies from behind a mesa rock.

"I knowed we were in for it," Sam Rosenberry, the little caravan's combination guide an bullwhipper, said later. "Them poor buggers in the wagons was no ways a match for Apaches, the same being a bunch of dirt farmers from south Illinois and not worth a continental with guns, not even hardly being able to hit a standy-still jackrabbit.

Rosenberry bellowed to the immigrants to start firing at the Apaches. Then he jerked his Sharps carbine, a favorite weapon of the frontier West, out of its saddle boot. "I got two of them sons a bitches whilst I kicked my mount back along the wagons, meanwhile yelling for the woman and their pups to skootch down in the wagons."

Fortunately for Rosenberry and some, but not all, of the immigrants, a contingent of troopers from Fort Union, returning from escorting the Santa Fe Mail Stage through the Turkey Mountain passes heard the shooting. "We could also hear Apache death gobbles, the most horrible sound this side of Hades," Seargent Jesse Gilson said. "So we knew it was Jicarillas attacking a bunch of pilgrims whereupon we set out at once to their rescue hoping they could hold off until we got there."

Another minute, Rosenberry said, and it wouldn't have made any difference when the troopers got there. "There was just me and this one farmer left amongst us men and boys when them God-sent soldiers come a whooping and a shooting over that rise, the same being the most welcome sight I ever seen."

The problem of Sgt. Gilson and his troopers, like the problem of many another Army contingent, wasn't to defeat the Apaches but to bring them to fight. These wily Indians always avoided engagements in which the odds were not overwhelmingly in their favor, so this bunch, seeing the soldiers coming over the knoll, whirled their ponies and fled into a forest, still uttering their spine-chilling death gobbles.

"They left a sorry sight," Gilson reported. "The bull teams on two of the wagons had spooked and run off and the Apaches had been in them and what they did to the women and children with their knives was purely pitiful."

There were other dead; only Rosenberry, a farmer named Heppers or Jeffers - the spelling is obscured in the report, two women and four small children survived.

They were taken to the Fort where they were treated in its hospital. All of them, including Rosenberry who had been shot in his left shoulder, required some degree of medical treatmen.

The next morning a burial squad from Fort Union brought the victims' bodies to Garden Cemetery, a burial ground for both military and 'citizens' which adjoined the Fort's ordnance arsenal (according to a map drawn by Army Surveyor John Lamber in 1866).

"It was another of Apache Jack's doings," Gilson reported to Fort Union's Commanding Officer, Colonel Christopher Carson, who was the big bastion's CO from December 23, 1865 to April 21, 1866. (Col. Carson will be better known to Frontier West's readers as the legendary Kit Carson).

"Yes, sir," Gilson said, "It was Apache Jack's mischief. His marks were in the way he led his men to the attack, and the ways they mutilated - gutting and gouging out eyes while those pilgrims were still alive. Besides which the guide, Rosenberry, saw him close enough to see his blue eyes, this being proof beyound doubt."

Two days later - April 13, 1866 - a courier brought word to the Fort that an immigrant train on the Trinidad Road hadn't been as fortunate. There were no survivors this time. Apache Jack did it," the courier reported. "He left his mark in the peculiar way those poor buggers were knifed."

"Damn him! Damn him to hell!" Col. Carson cursed.

One way or another that beast had to be either killed or captured, he said, his face grim.

Carson had tried to immobilize Apache Jack. He had sent his best and most experienced men to pursue him. He had tried to trap him. But these strategies had failed. The Apaches were masters both of guerrilla attacks and the art of eluding pursuers. They were cunning, expert horsement and they possessed incredible endurance, a combination that had led the troopers on many a wild goose chase or, worse, into ambush.

"The aggravatin' part of it is," Col. Carson said bitterly, "that butcher isn't and Apache. He's just another white boy who went Indian."

The man they wanted, Apache Jack, was actually Matt Longley whose age was 22 and of all the white captives who had 'gone Indian', becoming ferocious enemies of their own people, none was more bestial than this young man.

His bloody career as a 'white Apache' had begun when he was 12, when he was accompanying his parents, Jeff and Sarah Longley, members of an Ohio immigrant party along the Cimaron Cut-off of the Santa Fe Trail.

The immigrants had made night camp between Points of Rocks and Whetstone River and the women were cooking a jackrabbit supper when a band of Jicarilla Apaches whooped down off the rocky slope in which they had been lurking.

Matt had been play-explorying about three hundred yards from camp. The terrified boy - he had seen his father shot down and his body axed - fled sobbing toward a clump of jackpines. Before he got to it he heard horses hooves behind him. "I looked back just in time to see this big Jicarilla warrior reach out for me suddenly. He swooped me up high and forked me on his pony in front of him and twisted my left arm in a lock so hard I bawled and did not think of trying to escape or to harm him, the pain being so hurty."

The Jicarilla, Blooded Knife, accompanied by other raiders, took Matt to their brush-lodge camp into the Black Mountains, almost due east of the site of the massacre of Matt's parents and the other immigrants.

When the Apaches captured a child it was to replace a dead one, or to supply an infirmed family with a child who could help with the work. In this case, Blooded Knife and his squaw, Bright Star, adopted Matt as a son to replace their own son, Small Black Horse, who had been kicked in the chest by a paint stallion and who had died in his mother's arms less than a month earlier.

A particularly interesting factor in the development of the West was the swift adjustment young white captives made from their Anglo-American culture to the customs of their Indian captors. Matt Longley, like the captives Olive Oatman, Sam Heckenlively, Mike Free and, best known of all - Cynthia Ann Parker who became the mother of Quannah, the last great Commanche chief - quickly learned Indian traits and the tribal language and customs, his own becoming dim in his memories.

By the time he was sixteen he was granted a clan affiliation, becoming in every way a functioning member of the Jicarilla branch of the Apache Nation.

When he was seventeen he went on his first raid, aiding in the ambush of a small immigrant train on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. He did himself well, perhaps to show his tribal brothers that just because he had been born white did not mean he was lacking in eithr (sic) courage or barbarity. When the raid was over there were only looted, burning wagons and mutilated corpses, two of which - by his own subsequent account - were his own victims.

Because of his conduct in his first battle with the white intruders of this Apache land, Matt was promoted to warrior status and permitted to take a wife. "I was burning with lust, and still a virgin - the Jicarillas being holy as all get out about laying with women," he was one day to say, "so I took a wife, Soft Beaver Pelt, her being fifteen and after she was stuck with the puberty stick, we went into the forest and didn't come back for a solid week and would have stayed longer, our wedding love being purely enjoyable, if Big Bear hadn't come for me saying that tomorrow we were going to 'bush another immigrant train which was coming down the Road'."

The Sante Fe Trail, both its Cimarron Cut-off and Mountain Branch, was a wilderness highway of commerce and migration which enourmously influenced the course of United States History. But the Jicarilla Apaches resented its penetration into Northern New Mexico which they claimed as their private preserve, even forbidding trespass to other Indians except their blood-cousins, the dreaded Mescalero Apaches of central-southern New Mexico, whom they occasionally invited to help with assaults upon the soldiers at Fort Union.

This fort had been built in 1851 on the Santa Fe Trail at the conjunction of the plains and the Rocky Mountains in the northwestern Territory of New Mexico where it functioned (until 1891) as a base for both military and civilian activities in the turbulent business of protecting the Trail's users from the Jicarillas.

This was the situation and the environment in which Matt Longley matriculated into a fully accepted blood-member of Jicarilla Apaches and it wasn't long after his marriage to Soft Beaver Pelt that he became a leader of a band of marauding Jicarillas of his approximate age, which was eighteen.

Within a year older Jicarillas joined his band and soon he was leader of the tribe's foremost war party, with men more than twice his age following his generalship.

"The pup's got a born talent for military devilment," Colonel Carson said. "It's a doggone shame he's on the other side of the fence and that we must subdue him, with death likely the only way of it."

This would be no small feat and none knew it better than Carson or his immediate predecessors, Lt. Co. Francisco P. Abreu (January-August 1865) and Lt. Col. Edward B Ellis, (August-December 1865). In fact the frequency and ferocity of Matt Longley's attacks was the reason for the brief tenures of Abreu and Ellis. Carson, the War Department hoped, would be able to tame the renegade because of his former successes in subduing hostile Indians.

Butt Matt, designated by the Jicarillas as White Soldier and by the White as Apache Jack, continued his depredations, pillaging in the summer of '66 the Relay Station at Deer Springs, staking the manager and hostlers onto the ground and slitting their eyelids so they could not close them against the remorseless New Mexico high country sun.

Within the week he ran off the cattle from the George Abbott ranch in the Rio Mora valley. Abbott, who had bought out legendary Samuel Watrous, whom the Jicarillas had deviled into bankruptcy, had been supplying Fort Union with beef.

After these two major raids Apache Jack resumed his favorite pastime of keeping stage escorts pinned down with rifle fire from behind rocks.

It seemed that the white boy who had become an Apache had cast aside or forgotten every vestige of allegience to his race. "Kill white" was his credo. This included women and children.

He was impossible to subdue, so it must have seemed to the endless number of patrols that chased him, tried to trap him, and laid in ambush for him. He had an uncanny sense of danger. Like a lobo wolf, they said, he could smell a trap, or in this case a trooper.

But in the end, Kit Carson outfoxed him. Though Carson had been succeeded on April 21, 1866 as Fort Union's commanding officer by Major John Thompson, the wily ex-scout, trapper, hunter, guide, explorer and soldier had wangled permission to remain at the Fort "for the intention of apprehending Matt Longley also known as White Soldier to the Jicarilla Apaches and as Apache Jack to the Army and Volunteer ranks and civilian populace"

Putting the kibosh on the renegade white had become a personal vendetta with Carson and he did it on October 22, 1866 by filling four bull-teamed Conestogas with crack Spencer-armed riflemen who were concealed under the big wagons' billowing canopies. Beside each soldier who masqueraded as an immigrant-driver sat another rifleman dressed as a woman.

Apache Jack and his Jicarillas swooped down on these wagons out of a hillside jackpine shelter on one of the Turkey Mountains northeast of the Fort. "They come a gobbling that real horrible Apache death cry." Sgt. John McAlester reported. "Like old Kit told us to do, we waited until we could smell their stink, then we opened fire with those eight-shot Spencers, the whole kit and kaboodle of us, and in the little while before those devils died the looks on their painted faces was something to behold, them showing surprise like they couldn't believe they had finally got their comeuppance."

When it was over eleven Apaches were dead, of a total of eighteen. Three were wounded. Among them was Matt Longley. "He was hurt bad, but talkable," Sgt McAlester said, "and all th eway back to the Fort - we took him in a wagon - he cussed me and my men and if it hadn't been for old Kit wanting him alive, and not thinking he'd ever be so fortunate, I would have cut his throat and considered I had performed a humane deed."

According to Fort Union's medical records of October 22, 1866 the renegade captive, Matt Longley was given "40 drops of laudnumn," a tincture of opium used in the period to induce sleep and dull pain.

Then the post surgeon, Captain Wade Kearney, removed bullets from Longley's chest, abdomen, right thigh and left leg, the latter bullet shattering both bones several inches above the ankle.

During subsequent days he told of his capture and rearing by the Jicarillas, and of his numerous attacks and ambusses upon immigrants, settlers and military parties. "He spoke in a heavily laden accent, the American language no longer being familiar to him," Kit Carson, who interrogated his prisoners, is quoted in the archives of the New Mexico Prioneers (sic) Historical Society.

Infection, a common aftermath of the era's surgery, set in on the prisoner's ankle wound. "I amputated the limb four inches below the knee, selecting this sight to assure a closure flap removed from the area of infection which had developed the color and stench of gangrene."

Longley never recovered from this operation. Infection developed under the flap of flesh and skin which covered his sawed off bones.

Dr. Kearney reduced his fever with doses of Glauber salts and gave him frequent doses of "twenty drops of Laudnumn" to reduce the agony "in the fibres of his bowels, the cavity being tube-drained twice daily and injected with oil of vitriol."

Longley died ten days after his capture. The medical records lists "gangrene of the intestines and left limb in its entirety above the site of the amputation" as the cause of death.

Apache Jack's death didn't end the Apache's devilments. It had become a way of live for these Indians; for two centuries they had terrorized the area between the Rio Grande and the Sangre de Cristos of Colorado, east of Comanche territory and west to the the middle Gila river in Arizona. But never again were their attacks so frequent or so barbaric.

Defeat came to the Apaches in 1873, though, when the tribes were rounded up and marched to the San Carlos reservation, except for the frame warrior-leader Geronimo who continued to terrorize the area with spasmodic raids until, finally realizing that the day of wild, free Indians carrying guns was past, he surrendered in 1886.

Even in the end the Apaches' defeat was more psychlogical than military. Pursued and harassed continually and everywhere observing the white man's seemingly endless numbers and determination to get what he wanted - "kill ten white men, twenty more come" - the Apache tribes finally realized the futility and cost to themselves of continuing resistance.

"The one thing I was the most scared of," Kit Carson said shortly before his death in 1868, "was something I guess he never thought of, and that was uniting the tribes and leading the whole Apache nation against us."

"Lord a'mighty, as bright and mean as that boy was, we would have been in a terrible pickle."

Updated on Friday, 01-Mar-2002 13:51:14 MST