Just before sunrise on May 15, 1885, Lieutenant Britton Davis, of the United States Third Cavalry, awoke in his tent at Turkey Creek, Arizona Territory. He stretched, pulled on his clothes and boots, and stepped into the clear cool of the morning.
In the forest glade where usually, at this hour, only the dark trunks of great pines were to be seen, he was instantly aware of the shadowy figures of perhaps forty Indians, huddled silently before his tent. Among them Davis recognized the chiefs and subchiefs of the most dangerous Apache band on the reservation: the Chiricahuas.
That in itself was not alarming, since Davis often met the chiefs for sunrise discussions. But on this morning things looked different. The chiefs seemed sullen. On top of a nearby knoll, keeping watch toward Fort Apache seventeen miles away—the nearest army garrison—Davis could see a pair of Indians; their silhouettes showed rifles. Another ominous circumstance was that Davis’ Apache scouts—Indians who had been enlisted on the theory that the Chiricahuas could be best policed by their own people—were also gathered in the glade in groups of four or five, and they too were armed. Clearly they expected trouble.
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