Legends of the Old West - BUFFALO SOLDIERS Ep. 4 | “Victorio’s War”

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

In 1879, Apache leader Victorio leads a campaign of deadly raids across New Mexico Territory. For nearly a year, the 9th Cavalry skirmishes with Victorio’s warriors, but can’t end the raids. In 1880, Victorio crosses into Texas and faces new tactics from the 10th Cavalry. The Buffalo Soldiers win decisive victories and force Victorio down into Mexico where he soon meets his end. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/lotow Thanks to our sponsor, Rocket Money! Use this link to start saving today: RocketMoney.com/LegendsOW Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At 3.30 in the morning on August 6, 1880, Colonel Benjamin Grierson and his small headquarters staff caught up to the rest of the roughly 170 troopers of his command, who were already in the Sierra Diablo Mountains of far west Texas. Colonel Greerson commanded the 10th Cavalry and the desolate region of West Texas that was called the District of the Pecos. He and five troops of the 10th Cavalry had just spent 21 hours in the saddle and covered 65 miles of dusty, brush-covered territory

in the height of a sweltering Texas summer. They had pushed themselves and their horses to the limit because they were in a race to reach a waterhole in a canyon in the mountains that was known as Rattlesnake Springs. They needed to reach the spring before Apache chief Victorio and his roughly 125 warriors arrived. The U.S. Army had been battling Victoria and his band of warriors throughout New Mexico and Texas for a solid year, with few positive results. But that was starting to change. Instead of chasing Victoria all over the map, a strategy which was hopeless because Victoria knew every inch of ground in the southwest better than all the soldiers combined,

the army started prioritizing the one element Victoria needed for survival, water. Buffalo soldiers of the 9th and 10th cavalry and the 24th and 25th infantry stationed themselves at as many natural springs in the southwest as possible. Sooner or later, Victorio's men would need water and they would come calling.

When they did, the soldiers hoped to capture or kill the renegades who had been terrorizing the region for the past year. The new strategy had already worked once, just a week earlier, and now Colonel Grierson hoped it would work again. On the afternoon of August 6th, about 11 hours after Grierson made it to Rattlesnake Springs, Victoria's warriors appeared on the horizon. While Grierson and his staff were stationed at the spring itself, two of his five companies had taken up firing positions in the rocks to guard the approaches to the canyon.

When those troopers spotted the first of Victorio's warriors, they opened fire. The warriors had been advancing cautiously, and now they pulled back to search for ways to enter the canyon while avoiding the soldiers or finding ways to gain an advantage on the soldiers. While the warriors stayed out of range of the soldiers in the hills, they were surprised by two of Grierson's companies who had charged into the fray. Captain Lewis Carpenter and companies B and H attacked the Apache and drove them away from the canyon. As the Apache force moved south away from the mountains, the warriors encountered the supply wagons of the 10th cavalry, which were guarded by a squad of troopers and a company of

the soldiers from the 24th infantry. Some of the warriors attempted to attack the supply train, but they were quickly repelled by the rifle fire of the infantrymen and cavalrymen. The warriors made a final attempt to salvage something from the episode by scattering a group of cavalry-packed mules, but that attempt failed as well. Victoria realized the waterhole was lost. With a combined force of infantry and cavalry, which now prowled the Sierra Diablo's, the Apache wouldn't make it to water

without suffering tremendous casualties. For one of the rare times in his year-long war, Victoria pulled his warriors back and ran south toward the Rio Grande. The army had won the field at Rattlesnake Springs, but Victoria was not finished. He had slipped the noose again, and the chase was far from over. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling a collection of stories about the famous Buffalo soldiers, the courageous black soldiers of the infantry and cavalry who served in the West after the Civil War. This is episode four, Victoria's War. By the late 1870s, the U.S. Army had been fighting the Apache off and on for 30 years. Campaign after campaign had pushed bands from one reservation to another, and still the raids continued. soldiers posted across New Mexico and Texas lived with the constant threat of ambush. Settlers along the frontier saw homesteads burned, families murdered, and wagons plundered in sudden attacks. Apache leaders Cochies and Mangus, Colorado, had been the most feared in the 1860s and

early 1870s, but by the late 1870s, it was Victoria. He was chief of the Warm Springs Apache, a band within the larger Chiricester. Marikawa people. Born in the 1820s in what is now southern New Mexico, he had grown up in the shadow of the Black Range Mountains. By the time American troops arrived in the region during the war with Mexico in the late 1840s, Victoria was already a seasoned warrior. Over the next three decades, he rose to prominence as a leader who was respected for his skill, his judgment, and above all, his ability to keep his people alive in the harshest country in the American West. Victoria understood strategy like few others.

He knew the mountains and deserts of the Southwest as intimately as other men knew their houses. He used every canyon, ridge, and dry wash to his advantage. He could disappear into the hills, strike a settlement, then vanish into the desert before the army had even mustered its scouts. He fought with discipline and patience. ambushes, diversions, and lightning-fast raids were meant to harass and demoralize the enemy, as well as provide supplies for his own people. For years, Victorio's warm springs Apache had been told they could remain near Ojo Caliente,

the warm natural springs in New Mexico territory that gave the band its name. But those assurances were always broken. By 1877, federal officials ordered the bands of the Chiricahua Apache to move to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona Territory. San Carlos was infamous. The land was barren, the water was bad, and the climate was punishing. Crops failed, rations were late, and sickness spread through the camp. The soldiers who guarded the reservation called it Hell's 40 acres.

For the Apache, the reservation lived up to its nickname. By 1879, Victoria and many of his Warm Springs band could no longer take it. Victoria was in his mid-50s when he led men, women, and children, and a small band of loyal warriors away from San Carlos. They returned to southern New Mexico, and what followed was one of the fiercest campaigns of resistance the Southwest had ever seen. The fighting started in April 1879. his Apache attacked settlers outside Silver City, New Mexico, the town from which a 16-year-old

kid named Henry Antrim had fled two years earlier. He was born Henry McCarty, and he started using the last name Antrim after his mother married a man named William Antrim. When young Henry went on the run, following some relatively minor charges, he began using the name William H. Bonnie, and he ended up killing a man in Arizona. After that, he returned to New Mexico and became known as the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid. After the Lincoln County War, and while Billy sat in jail and waited to be released through a secret deal he believed he had brokered

with the governor of New Mexico territory, 150 miles to the west, Victoria attacked settlers outside Silver City. The 9th Cavalry out of Fort Baird immediately went in pursuit. One of the troops was Lieutenant Henry Wright's Sea Troop, which had fought a different band of a pass. Apache warriors in the Florida mountains two years earlier. Sea Troop and I Troop fought Victorio's band in the Membrez Mountains.

The soldiers succeeded in forcing the Apache out of the mountains and destroyed the Apache camp, but they didn't catch Victorio's band. Two months later, Victoria and the members of his band were charged with murder in a Silver City court. In August 1879, Victoria, one of his top lieutenants, an old warrior who was called Nano, by Mexicans and about 80 warriors, plus their wives and children, went on the run. They had essentially started a rebellion, and they would be largely untouchable for the next year. Build, play, and display with the 3-1 Megablocks preschool sets. The Build and Go race car revamps into a pickup truck and hot rod,

and the build and enchant unicorn transforms into a puppy and Pegasus, Each easy-to-build set comes with rolling wheels, 26 blocks, and easy-to-read building steps, compatible with other megablocks sets for endless big building fun. Shop three-and-one megablocks at Walmart for ages 3-plus. On September 4, 1879, Victoria's war began in earnest. Forty warriors struck a company of the 9th cavalry. The warriors killed five soldiers, three civilians. and a family who live nearby.

One week later, about 30 miles from Fort Baird, warriors killed 10 armed civilians who were searching for Victorio's force. Exactly one week after that, on September 18th, Victoria and his warriors lured four companies of the 9th cavalry into a canyon in the Black Range Mountains.

The Apache ambushed the troopers and kept them pinned down for most of the day. After dark, the soldiers escaped the canyon, but they suffered numerous fatalities and casualties. Today, that area bears colorful names from the ambush. Hell's Canyon leads into Massacre Canyon, where the firefight happened, which leads into Victoria Canyon,

which has a waterhole called Dead Man Springs, all of which sits at the base of Victoria Peak. Ten days later, on the other side of the Black Range Mountains, 200 troopers of the 9th Cavalry and 36 scouts, engaged Victoria's warriors in a two-day running battle. The cavalry lost two more soldiers, but it's also believed to be the first time Victoria's force suffered casualties.

Two weeks later, in the second week of October, Victoria's band raided a ranch, which was in a kind of no-man's land between Fort Baird and the town of Las Cruces. Then the warriors killed nine civilians who were part of two separate rescue parties which had riddened to the ranch. Two weeks after the raid on the ranch, the 9th Cavalry trailed Victoria down into Mexico.

About 80 men from the 9th cavalry and a group of Apache scouts tracked Victoria's warriors into the Guzman Mountains, 30 miles south of the U.S. border. As always, the warriors had the high ground and good defensive positions, and the soldiers could not dislodge them from the mountains. Due to exhaustion and a desperate need for water, the soldiers retreated back to New Mexico. Two weeks later, regular as clockwork, Victoria's force wiped out a group of 18 Mexican civilians who were trying to stop the Apache Raiders. Then the warriors killed 15 of the 35 men in a second group who went to find the first group. Mercifully, for the soldiers and civilians of southern New Mexico and northern Mexico, that was where the fighting stopped for the year of 1879.

But it roared back to life in January 1880. On January 12th, 1880, two days after Billy the Kid killed a man named Joe Grant in a saloon in Fort Sumner, the 9th Cavalry attacked Victoria's warriors in the Black Range Mountains. The warriors had ridden up from Mexico and slipped past soldiers who tried to block the border. In the third engagement in the Black Range Mountains, the 9th Cavalry out of Fort Baird took artillery with them. But the field cannon still weren't enough to stop the Apache leader. Victoria led his warriors up to the San Mateo Mountains, about 30 miles north of the modern-day city of truth or consequences. Five days after the fight in the Black Range, the warriors fought the 9th cavalry in the San Mateo Mountains.

Again, Victoria's band attacked and fled. Two weeks later, Victoria lured another contingent of the 9th Cavalry into an ambush in the Cabio Mountains. The soldiers escaped with only one man injured and none killed, but the pattern was clearly repeating itself. The Apache moved, the soldiers followed, the Apache set a trap, the soldiers rode into it, the Apache won the fight, the soldiers retreated, the Apache moved on and started the pattern all over again. Two more engagements followed, one on February 3rd in the fabled slice of desert in southern New Mexico called the Jornada del Merto. The next happened six days later, on February 9th, in the San Andreas Mountains in the southern end of the Jornada del Merto. The cavalry killed some warriors, but they could not

completely stop Victorio's ban. And after a solid month of chasing and fighting the Apache, the 9th cavalry was spent. The troopers returned to Fort Baird to rest and resupply, and while the cavalry was forced to rest its horses and soldiers, the war shifted from continual fights which did a mild amount of damage to one side or the other to savage attacks from war parties like the old days. In March of 1880, Victoria's war parties stormed through the Rio Grande, Valley in New Mexico. They stole horses, supplies, weapons, and ammunition, and they killed at least

20 people. In the first week of April, Native American scouts for the army discovered that Victorio's band was camping near a natural spring in the San Andres Mountains about 90 miles east of Fort Baird. Colonel Edward Hatch, commander of the 9th cavalry, assembled the largest force yet sent against Victoria. Nearly 400 troopers plus 100 scouts rode east to try to encircle Victoria's camp. Colonel Hatch divided the column into four groups who would attack from different directions, but the plan was doomed nearly from the start. The only way to reach the camp was to ride straight across the widest part of the Jornada del Merto. One of the four groups never made it to the battlefield due to lack of water. When someone

the other groups attacked, the Apache used their high ground positions to keep the soldiers at bay. The Apache attacked when they had the advantage and then moved away during the night. After three days of sporadic fighting, Victoria's warriors disengaged and he led them out of the mountains. Again, the army had inflicted minimal damage and allowed the Apache to escape. And this time, there would be devastating consequences. Ten days after the battle in the St. Andres Mountains, the army moved in force against the Mescalero Apache Reservation on the other side of the mountains. The Mescalero had been sending warriors and supplies to Victoria's ban, and the army tried to shut down the supply line. According

to one account, the army imprisoned many of the men on the reservation and killed 14 who tried to resist or flee the area. Two weeks later, at the end of April, Victoria divided his force into multiple war parties, and they moved all the way west to the border of Arizona Territory. They killed six people near a mining camp, and then went on a rampage, killing 35 more people in the region. At least 41 people died during the raid on April 28, 1880, and the event became known as the Alma Massacre. And the Apache weren't even close to finished. They were truly relentless, but their time as the Domestic, dominating force in New Mexico was coming to an end.

On May 14th, the warriors attacked 25 troopers of the 9th cavalry and some townspeople who had taken shelter at Fort Tularosa. The defenders didn't lose anyone during the assault, and then the tide shifted against the Apache. Ten days later, on May 24th, a force of 60 Apache scouts who worked with the army, surprised Victoria and some of his warriors. It was the first time Victoria was caught off. guard. The scouts reportedly killed 30 members of Victorio's group. After Victorio's first defeat,

he led his people south toward Mexico. Near the town of Deming on June 5th, the group of scouts found another group of Victoria's band and killed 10 of them, including one of Victoria's sons. The Apache fighters made it down to Mexico and spent the rest of June and early July raiding settlements. When they had gathered enough lines, livestock and supplies, which they intended to take back up to the Mescalero Reservation, they turned north toward the U.S. They fought through Mexican military forces. On the return trip, they headed across the Rio Grande to southwest Texas.

At that time, they entered the domain of the Buffalo soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and the 24th Infantry. And Colonel Benjamin Grierson had a different strategy for fighting Victoria. In the desert, more than anywhere else, water was left. life. Chasing the now legendary Apache leader from place to place was pointless and costly. Instead, Grierson stationed soldiers at prominent natural springs and waited for Victoria to come to him. At the end of July, when Victoria's force crossed the Rio Grande near Fort Whitman, the strategy paid off. Just across the Rio Grande, in the most remote, least populated,

part of Texas, there was a canyon with a waterhole called Tenaha de Las Palmas. The common translation was, waterhole in the palm trees. At Tanahedales Palmas, three companies of buffalo soldiers lay in wait. When Victorio's band approached the canyon, now called Quitman Canyon on July 30th, they found soldiers already holding the spring. A sharp fight erupted. One cavalry men fell dead and several others were hit, but the soldiers held their ground. From behind rock outcroppings and in the draw around the waterhole, they poured steady fire into the Apache. Grierson later claimed seven of Victoria's men were killed before the chief pulled his warriors back. It was not a decisive battle, Victoria lived to fight again, but it was proof that the army's new strategy could work.

By denying Victoria water, they hoped to grind him down. Victoria escaped Tanah de Las Palmas, and now he and his band rode on a diagonal line into Texas. Grierson and his men paralleled the Apache force. Four days after the fight at Tanaha de Las Palmas, soldiers from Company H clashed with warriors at a waterhole called Alamo Springs. There were two other waterholes in the general vicinity, but Grierson soon, learned that it looked like Victoria was heading toward the Sierra Diablo Mountains, north of the tiny town of Van Horn, where there was a waterhole called Rattlesnake Springs. At 3 o'clock in the morning on August 5, 1880, Grierson and five companies of the 10th Cavalry

set out on a pounding 65-mile march to beat the Apache to Rattlesnake Springs. The soldiers covered the ground in 21 hours. The terrain was nothing but dust, rock, and brush. When the sun came up, it blistered the men with sweltering heat. At around midnight, the first of the troopers finally reached the springs in a canyon which now bears Victoria's name. Throughout the night, the five companies spread out to perform different jobs. Colonel Grierson and a small group were stationed at the spring itself. Two companies stationed themselves in the ridge of and Arroyos to watch the most likely approaches to the canyon. Two companies stayed south of the springs,

and one company patrolled the mountain passes to scout for any activity. At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the two companies who guarded the trails into the canyon spotted riders in the distance. Victoria's warriors, an estimated 125 fighters, approached cautiously as they would have known they were being shadowed by the army. The Buffalo soldiers of Company C and Company G, who spotted the Warriors, opened fire. They drove the Warriors back, but the Warriors regrouped and seemed to scout for other approaches.

When they did, Captain Lewis Carpenter led Company B and Company H into the fight. Those companies drove the Warriors away from the canyon. But at that time, the wagon train which supplied the 10th cavalry was moving into the area. Some of the warriors assaulted the wagon train, but they were quickly pushed back by the cavalry escort and the soldiers of the 24th infantry who guarded the wagons. After a half-hearted attempt to scatter the army's pack mules, the warriors fully retreated. For Victoria, Rattlesnake Springs was a bitter defeat. His warriors were exhausted, denied water, and forced to ride back to Mexico.

The campaign into Texas had been a disaster. As if to punctuate the frustration, the Apache struck a stage coach on their way out of Texas. On August 10, 1880, four days after the battle at Rattlesnake Springs, the Apache had retreated all the way back to the Rio Grande. Near Fort Quitman, where they had crossed the river two weeks earlier, they attacked a stagecoach. They killed the driver outright, and they mortally wounded one of the passengers. He was James J. Byrne, who had been a Union Army General during the Civil War. Now, years removed from the battlefields of the East, Victoria's warriors shot him and left him for dead in a desolate corner of Texas. Burn lingered for several days before dying of

his wounds. Meanwhile, Victoria and his warriors crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. The trip into Texas in the summer of 1880 was the last time Victoria saw the United States. Victoria went dark for the month of September 1880. After non-stop raids for the first eight months of the year, which culminated in the two losses in southwest Texas, he likely judged that his warriors needed rest. Victoria's people took shelter deep in the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico. They made their camp near an outcrop of three volcanic hills known as Trace Castillos,

three castles, which rose above the barren plain. The camp was in the far north of Mexico, and about 75 miles south of Fort Quitman along the Rio Grande. Since the Apache hadn't accumulated any supplies in Texas, they needed to restock in northern Mexico. So, on October 14, 1880, Victoria sent out two raiding parties, hoping to secure the ammunition and horses his people needed to survive. With the bulk of the warriors gone, about 250 Mexican soldiers encircled Victoria's camp. Supplies in camp were desperately low, and the people who remained had very little ammunition. When the soldiers attacked the camp, the resistance from the Apache was brave but futile,

and the attack quickly turned into a slaughter. The reported numbers were that the military killed 62 men and boys and 16 women and children. The soldiers took 68 women and children prisoner, and only a scant few Apache managed to escape. Victoria, who was around 56 years old, died during the one-sided battle. Some accounts claim he died by his own hand rather than surrender. Others say he was shot in the fighting. However he met his end, his year-long war was over. Accurate numbers will always be hard to find, but there were at least 20,

major raids and or engagements versus soldiers or civilians during the 12 months of Victoria's war, including the final fight at Trace Castillo's. Upwards of 20 Buffalo soldiers died during the year of chasing and fighting, and an unknown number of warriors died. Of the 13 Buffalo soldiers who received a Medal of Honor for their actions during service in the American West, seven were from the year of Victoria's war. Although Victoria died in October 1880, his rebellion had a last gasp. One of his top lieutenants, Nana, had been away from camp with the raiding parties when the Mexican army struck.

And Victoria's sister, Lozen, who was renowned as both a warrior and a spiritual leader, fought her way out of Trace Castillo's with a few others. Nana, who was 20 years older than Victoria, would lead a destructive campaign in the following summer of 1881. But the fighting wasn't done in 1880. Two weeks after most of Victorio's followers were killed or captured at Tres Castillos, the war took its deadliest turn for the Buffalo soldiers. A party of about 35 Apache had been riding south to reinforce Victoria at Tres Castillo. By the time they reached the Rio Grande, they learned the truth, that Victoria and most of his band were dead.

On October 28th near Fort Quitman along the Rio Grande in Texas, they stumbled into soldiers from the 10th Cavalry. In the ambush that followed, the warriors killed five troopers. For the 10th cavalry, it was the single deadliest day during its service in the West. The regiment wouldn't experience another like it until 1916, toward the end of General John J. Blackjack Pershing's expedition into Mexico to try to stop Pancho Villa. Though there was more fighting to come in the near future, and Geronimo's campaign was still on the distant horizon, Victoria's death at Trace Castillos marked a turning point in the Apache Wars. The summer campaigned by Victorio's Lieutenant Nana and the one-year campaign by Geronimo would mark the end of Apache resistance in the southwest.

Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's the story of some of the events of Nana's raid in the summer of 1881. The ancient warrior and a small band of followers covered an incredible amount of ground and terrorized communities in northern Mexico and New Mexico. At the end of the raid, over the course of a week, the 9th cavalry was back in action to fight its familiar enemy, the Apache. That's next week on Legends of the Old West. Old West.

Members of our Black Barrel Plus program received the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This episode was researched and written by Matthew Kearns. Additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Villeer. Thanks for listening.