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 Picos. 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 Victoria 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, Victoria'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,

...