Doomsday Rider

Historical Note

Doomsday Rider is, for the most part, set against the tumultuous backdrop of Gen. George Crook’s 1872 winter campaign to encircle and destroy Apache and Yavapai marauders in Arizona’s Tonto Basin and the Sierra Ancha and Superstition Mountains that bordered it.

Crook dispensed with the usual supply wagons, instead deploying flying columns of nine troops of the First and the Fifth Cavalry, riding out of Fort Apache and forts Verde, McDowell, and Grant.

Paiute scouts led each column, and Crook ordered his commanders to “stick to the trail and never lose it.”

He added: “The Indians should be induced to surrender whenever possible. But if they choose to fight, give them all the fighting they want.”

This strategy had a devastating effect on the Indians. Kept on the run and always short of food in the harsh winter months, they were cornered and attacked twenty times during the campaign and at least two hundred of their number killed.

The Apaches and Yavapais never recovered from these defeats, leaving the Tonto Basin to the white man, his towns, ranches, and cattle herds.

While I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to Ralph Compton’s outline for Doomsday Rider, I’ve taken a little poetic license with its history.

The song about General Crook sung by the famous scout Al Sieber was not composed during the Tonto Basin campaign but three years later in 1875, when the general was transferred to the northern plains to take command of the Department of the Platte and the war against Dull Knife, the great Cheyenne war chief.

Similarly, the song “The Czar and Grant and Friends” was written by the good people of Topeka, Kansas, to commemorate the 1872 visit of the son of Czar Alexander II and Empress Maria Aleksandrovna, and not, as I have it, Count and Countess Vorishilov.

Among the notables who accompanied the Russian prince on the inevitable buffalo hunt were Gen. George Armstrong Custer and Gen. Phil Sheridan. Little Phil, no enthusiastic hunter, posed for the photo ops, then “made an escape on a fast train back to Chicago.”

Finally, the Salado ruins near Globe, Arizona, are still there, and they’re a sight to see. From about A.D. 1300 to 1450, a small group of the last of this prehistoric people lived in the now-weathered cliff dwellings, built of stone and mud mortar.

Today these cliff homes are preserved as the Tonto National Monument.