Victorio was killed at Tres Castillos in October 1880, but the Warm Springs Apache struggle did not end there. Survivors had escaped, others were captive, and families remained separated across Mexico and the United States. Nana, an older fighter associated with Victorio, led a mobile campaign through New Mexico in 1881. His force raided for supplies and animals, avoided larger columns, and fought soldiers and armed civilians in several canyons. The campaign frightened settlements and inflicted deaths. It also expressed a continuing attempt by a damaged community to find its people and resist confinement after the loss of Ojo Caliente.
The Fort Sill Apache Tribe’s ancestral account describes Nana as a respected military leader who rode long distances despite age and arthritis, working to gather scattered people after Victorio’s death. That perspective matters beside the U.S. Army’s record of alarms, pursuits, and casualties. This fifth chapter in the Grant County Apache history series follows Victorio’s campaign. It names specific encounters without pretending that every fight occurred beside Fort Bayard.
What Nana inherited after Tres Castillos
Tres Castillos, in Chihuahua, had destroyed much of Victorio’s following. The National Park Service Warm Springs history records Victorio’s death, the killing of many people with him, the captivity of women and children, and the escape of small groups that included Nana’s. The aftermath was not a clean transfer of command to a new chief. People were scattered, some had been moved to agencies, and others faced captivity in Mexico. Any leader who tried to collect survivors had to find them across a landscape patrolled by hostile forces.
The Fort Sill Apache Tribe is careful about Nana’s status. It calls him a leader renowned for military skill rather than a chief. That distinction should guide the story. He could organize fighters and command respect without ruling all Warm Springs Apache people. Loco, another leader, pursued accommodation and tried to secure his people’s survival through negotiation. The decisions of Nana’s followers were their own and did not bind every family held at an agency or traveling elsewhere.
Nana’s age is often used as the whole story: an elderly man outruns an army. The tribal account does stress that he was old and physically impaired, but it also tells why he rode. The 1881 movement was a response to lost relatives and disrupted community, not a stunt to embarrass cavalry officers. At the same time, people attacked by his group experienced real danger and loss. Keeping both facts visible prevents an episode of violence from becoming either an adventure tale or a one-line denunciation.
The road through a divided homeland
The NPS Warm Springs history locates Chihenne country across southwestern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, and Chihuahua. The United States and Mexico claimed the same routes as national territory, while federal agencies assigned Apache families to reservations. A group moving through the country could encounter ranches, military roads, mining districts, and water sources. Each encounter created choices: pass unseen, trade, take animals or supplies, attack, or flee. These actions had immediate consequences for the people along the route.
A horse was more than a military asset. Mounted movement let a small group cover distance before several posts coordinated pursuit, carry food and ammunition, and reach a spring ahead of exhausted soldiers. But a horse had to drink and graze. A sudden loss of animals could strand people. Nana’s mobility therefore depended on a network of places and decisions, not a supernatural ability to vanish. The same geography shaped the pursuers. A patrol leaving one post could reach a canyon only if the animals were fit and reliable water lay along the way.
The campaign crossed regions that later readers may treat as separate local histories. An action near Carrizozo Spring, one near Fort Cummings, and the possible implications for Fort Bayard belong to a single New Mexico campaign, yet they are not one battlefield. County boundaries have changed, and similar place names can mislead. This article gives the locations supported by Army and NPS accounts, while resisting the urge to pull them all into Grant County to fit the series title.
Why soldiers from several posts pursued Nana
Fort Bayard was a base in the mining region around Pinos Altos and Santa Rita. Fort Cummings stood near Cooke’s Spring on an overland route toward California. Other detachments moved from farther east. The NPS biography of Brent Woods places B Troop of the Ninth Cavalry at Fort Cummings in 1881 and explains that its spring was important to westbound travel. The Army account of George Jordan places another Ninth Cavalry detachment in pursuit near Carrizo Canyon. The campaign was a network response, not one fort sending a single continuous column.
That network could still be slow. A messenger carried news of a raid; a commander assembled men; a patrol found tracks; animals needed water; and reports of Nana’s location aged while riders moved. Apache fighters could strike at one point and be miles away before a detachment arrived. But moving quickly also exposed Nana’s people to hunger and exhaustion. A group that needed food might raid a ranch, causing the owner to join a pursuing force. The engagement at Gavilan Canyon began with that combination of a reported ranch attack and a mixed troop of soldiers and cowboys.
The Ninth Cavalry was a Black regiment serving in a segregated Army. Its troopers’ skill and losses belong in the narrative as individual history, not a nameless force chasing an equally nameless “band.” Some accounts reserve names for white officers and civilian ranchers. The NPS Woods biography names Sergeant Brent Woods and the enlisted men killed in the Gavilan fight. Those names reveal the cost borne by Black soldiers who had little authority over federal Apache policy but faced its dangers on the ground.
Carrizo Canyon, August 12, 1881
An Army University Press account describes Captain Charles Parker leading nineteen Ninth Cavalry soldiers after Nana’s group into Carrizo Canyon on August 12, 1881. The canyon lay south of present-day Carrizozo Spring in New Mexico. Its slopes offered cover and elevated firing positions. An Army estimate of opposing guns appears in the account, but that estimate is not a reliable census of everyone traveling with Nana. It reflects what pursuers believed under fire.
Sergeant George Jordan led a small group up a slope to cover Parker’s movement through the canyon. According to the Army account, the main body came under fire from the opposite side, while Jordan’s men also faced fighters on their own flank. Jordan’s position helped keep the detachment from being surrounded and allowed it to withdraw toward the spring. First Sergeant Thomas Shaw was also present and later received the Medal of Honor for the action. The canyon dictated the fight: control of high ground and a narrow passage mattered more than a parade-ground comparison of numbers.
Jordan’s action did not destroy Nana’s force. The pursuit continued, and later August fighting took place elsewhere. An account focused on the Medal of Honor can make the episode sound like a stand-alone victory. The real outcome was a retreat from dangerous ground and the survival of the patrol. From Nana’s side, the group had again delayed pursuers and moved on. From the soldiers’ side, the stand kept men alive. The distinction between tactical survival and strategic end keeps the battle’s significance proportionate.
George Jordan beyond one battle
The Army account connects Jordan to an earlier 1880 defense of Fort Tularosa during Victorio’s campaign. Fort Tularosa was near today’s Aragon in Catron County, not Fort Bayard. Jordan and a detachment arrived, prepared a protected place for civilians and animals, and fought off an Apache attack. The actions across two years show how the same soldier’s service connected Victorio’s and Nana’s campaigns, although the two leaders were distinct people and the engagements were at distinct sites.
Jordan enlisted in the Ninth Cavalry and later became a senior noncommissioned officer. The Army says he received the Medal of Honor in 1890 for Carrizo Canyon and Fort Tularosa. His subsequent life included land ownership in Nebraska and struggles over access to veterans’ care. Those details keep him from disappearing when the fighting ends. Like the Apache families he pursued, he had a life beyond the campaign map. The article can recognize courage in protecting fellow soldiers and civilians while still asking why the U.S. Army was fighting Warm Springs people after a forced removal from Ojo Caliente.
The NPS Fort Union page on Buffalo Soldiers names Jordan among Ninth Cavalry honorees. A reader of local Grant County history may encounter his name in a fort exhibit and assume he fought near that fort. The Carrizo account locates his 1881 action elsewhere. Naming a soldier and locating a battle are separate tasks; both must be done correctly.
Fort Cummings and the trail toward Gavilan Canyon
Fort Cummings was built near Cooke’s Spring, east of today’s Deming. The NPS biography of Brent Woods explains why the spring mattered to travelers on the southern overland route. In August 1881, Lieutenant George W. Smith led seventeen men from B Troop, Ninth Cavalry, including Sergeant Woods, in pursuit of Nana. Rancher George Daly said Nana’s fighters had attacked his ranch, and roughly twenty local cowboys joined the soldiers. The resulting column joined military authority to immediate civilian anger and fear.
The mixture affected what happened at the canyon. On August 19, the NPS says Smith stopped as the force approached Gavilan Canyon because he feared an ambush. Daly and the cowboys rode in despite the warning; Smith followed with the soldiers to protect them. Apache fighters fired from concealed positions. Smith and Daly were killed, and the cowboys fled. The soldiers were left in a dangerous position. This sequence gives a concrete example of how local civilian decisions could change a military encounter. It also shows why a canyon selected for cover made pursuit hazardous.
The NPS account says Privates James Brown, Thomas Golding, and Monroe Overstreet were killed shortly after Smith. Their names and the lieutenant’s belong in the same account of loss. Summaries that list only “four soldiers” hide which lives were lost; versions that mention only the officer overlook the Black enlisted men. The record also includes the cowboys who had joined and fled, and the Apache fighters whose positions forced the column to respond. The engagement was a human sequence, not a diagram of arrows.
Brent Woods takes command at Gavilan Canyon
With Lieutenant Smith dead, Sergeant Brent Woods became the ranking soldier in the trapped detachment. The NPS biography says he ordered men up the canyon slopes to attack the Apache positions. Gaining the high ground changed their chance of survival. Another group of Buffalo Soldiers arrived, and Nana’s people withdrew. Woods received the Medal of Honor years later for saving soldiers and civilians in the detachment. The commendation describes a specific decision under fire, not a claim that the whole 1881 campaign ended there.
Woods had been born enslaved in Kentucky in 1855 and enlisted in the Ninth Cavalry in 1873, according to the NPS. That history matters in a chapter about the frontier Army. A man once legally held as property led soldiers in battle and saved them, yet he served within an institution and country still marked by racial inequality. His later burial and reinterment are also documented by the NPS. The life before and after Gavilan prevents a single award from standing in for the person.
Nana’s tactical withdrawal left several realities at once. The Army detachment survived through Woods’s leadership and reinforcements; soldiers and civilians had died; Nana’s mobile force continued beyond the canyon. There is no need to invent a decisive “victory” that settled all three. The episode shows that both sides adapted to terrain and that a few moments of civilian impatience, an officer’s caution, and a sergeant’s judgment could determine who lived.
Violence against civilians and the meaning of a raid
Nana’s fighters raided across New Mexico and neighboring regions, taking animals and supplies and causing civilian deaths. The Army Carrizo Canyon account describes the pursuit as a response to raids; the NPS Woods biography records Daly’s report of an attack on his ranch. Those statements should be neither softened into a harmless search for food nor inflated into proof that every Apache family was hostile. A raid could support mobility and survival while devastating a household that lost animals or kin.
The circumstances after Tres Castillos help explain why Nana’s group was moving, but explanation does not undo an attacker’s responsibility for a killing. Likewise, a rancher’s account of loss can be true even if the broader federal policy toward Warm Springs Apache people was coercive. Histories often present those propositions as if one must be chosen. The actual campaign contains both. Families in settlements feared the arrival of mounted fighters; Apache families feared capture, hunger, separation, and removal. Each fear shaped action.
The terms in nineteenth-century records are often harsh. Army narratives may call people “hostiles,” while Apache oral and tribal history remembers a leader trying to rebuild a scattered community. We can use the records for dates and unit movements without adopting every label as our own. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe’s account of Nana supplies his place in the people’s history; the Army and NPS soldier account supply the named encounters. Together they make a fuller story than either alone.
How the campaign connects to Grant County
The Ojo Caliente struggle began in a Warm Springs homeland that reached across what is now southwestern New Mexico. Fort Bayard, in present Grant County, was an important post in the military network around the mining region. The Fort Bayard National Register history connects the post to the later Apache wars, while the Fort Cummings account places Woods’s troop at a different post. Carrizo Canyon lay by present Carrizozo Spring. Gavilan Canyon was reached by men pursuing from Fort Cummings. These routes belong to New Mexico’s Apache war history without requiring a false claim that both battles took place in Grant County.
The distinction also helps a traveler understand why a regional history series must cross modern boundaries. Apache people moved among kin, water, and refuges; soldiers moved among posts and routes; miners and ranchers moved supplies and animals. A county line is useful for identifying today’s places but cannot contain a campaign. Fort Bayard’s history gives the local post, and Victorio’s chapter explains the policy and loss that preceded Nana’s ride.
The present day also invites caution with names. NPS calls one site Gavilan Canyon; the Army’s historical regimental listing uses older spellings for various canyons. Do not assume that a similarly named canyon on a modern recreation map is the battle site. The article’s main purpose is to tell who fought and why, not to send readers to an unverified coordinate on private or sensitive land. The accounts cited here support the broad location and sequence, including Fort Cummings and its role.
Two canyons, two different outcomes
Carrizo and Gavilan are sometimes compressed into a line saying Nana fought the Ninth Cavalry in 1881. The sequence is sharper than that. At Carrizo on August 12, Parker’s small column met fire in terrain that allowed fighters to cover the passage from above. Jordan and Shaw helped the soldiers escape. At Gavilan on August 19, another pursuing force had been joined by rancher Daly and cowboys. Smith warned of an ambush; the cowboys moved forward; the lieutenant and several soldiers died; Woods took charge and helped bring survivors out. Different officers, different enlisted men, different civilians, and different tactical decisions shaped each encounter. The Army’s Carrizo account and NPS Woods biography support the separation.
Neither canyon explains the entire campaign. The Army’s older Ninth Cavalry regimental history lists additional August engagements, including the San Mateo and Cuchillo Negro mountains. That record is written in the period’s military voice and uses spellings and labels that require care. Still, it shows how widely detachments were stretched. A pursuer who believed Nana was ahead in one canyon might hear days later of fighting across another mountain range. Nana’s advantage came from moving within a larger country than any single column could watch. His vulnerability came from the same constant movement: people, mounts, food, and ammunition all wore down. The named battles matter because they let us see both sides of that pressure in particular places, rather than using “raids” as a substitute for history.
After the raid
Nana’s 1881 movement did not restore the Ojo Caliente reservation or reunite every captive. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe remembers his effort to recover scattered people, and the later tribal history follows Apache people through forced imprisonment and resettlement. Some Warm Springs survivors remained under agency control; others later joined groups connected with Geronimo and Naiche. The NPS Warm Springs history records the exile to Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma after 1886 and the option for some to join the Mescalero Reservation in 1913.
Nor should Nana’s name be collapsed into the next campaign. Geronimo was a medicine man and influential leader; Naiche was a chief connected to Cochise’s family; Chihuahua and others led their own groups. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe’s portraits distinguishes these people and their standing. The 1885–86 chapter follows the later crisis and the surrender in Arizona. It explains why a famous name attached to the “end” of the Apache wars cannot represent every earlier Warm Springs choice.
Nana’s campaign is remembered for extraordinary movement by an aged leader and for sharp fights with small patrols. Its substance is larger: survivors of Tres Castillos sought relatives and options after forced removal; civilian communities suffered raids; Black soldiers made life-saving decisions in canyons far from the fort most associated with their regional service. Carrizo and Gavilan were separate engagements in that connected story. The Gavilan Canyon battle history follows Smith’s warning, the deaths, and Woods’s command in full. Locating them and naming Jordan, Woods, Brown, Golding, Overstreet, Smith, Daly, Victorio, Loco, and Nana gives the war people instead of only slogans.
