Riley, Staff Sergeant Sinew


Staff Sgt. Sinew Riley was the ranking Apache scout at Huachuca in the 30s and 40s. From the Whiteriver Reservation, Riley was a third generation scout. His grandfather was Dead Shot who had been hanged in 1883 for the Cibicue mutiny. Riley, a 1910 graduate of the Phoenix Indian School, lived with his second wife, known only as is Mamma, and his sixteen children in the little Indian village on the northwest side of Huachuca Creek just across from the housing area which would become known as Apache Flats. He had enlisted in1920. During World War II when Fort Huachucawas transformed into a training base for black infantry divisions, Riley encountered draftees for the first time. He wrote to his son Larrie, who had complained to him about not getting a furlough: ie...You remember that you are in the Army now. ...Being upset will get you nowhere. ...Most soldiers are that way when they get drafted in the Army now days. Us Veteran Old Soldiers are different way about it. We take it whatever it is. Whether we are getting Pass or not. ...A man must act like a man when he get in the Army. He do not get upset because they turn him down or canceled his Furlough. They had to do that.... [A] veteran knows that, its an order. Thats part of the Army Regulation. If not, the Army is not worth a Dam. ...It takes a good man to be a good soldier. Sergeant Riley knew that the Apache scouts were at the end of their usefulness as an Army unit. He regretted that he could not get in on the fighting in Europe and the Pacific. He wrote, irAs for me I am Old for Service, only good for home Guard.l, The Apache scouts were getting up in years in 1944. One lieutenant stationed at Huachuca in World War II said they sometimes needed help to mount their horses. But they still rode the forts perimeters keeping the fences in repair, tended livestock, and acted as the post™s Service Company, doing odd jobs of carpentry and blacksmithing. And they also participated in parades. The detachment of Indian scouts at Fort Huachuca was disbanded by direction of the Army on November 30, 1943. That meant that the scouts were carried only as a local Fort Huachuca unit known as Detachment Indian Scouts, Service Command Unit 1922. With the closure of the post in September 1947, there was no place in the Army for the last of the Apache scouts, so the detachment was disbanded on September 30, 1947, and the last four scouts officially retired in the grade of staff sergeant. SSgt. Riley died of appendicitis in 1960.



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