After Hands' death, the army launched an "aggressive campaign" to catch those responsible. Civilian posses also formed to assist the army in the search. There were only two important encounters during the campaign. The first was on May 8, 1896, when a combined scouting expedition under Second Lieutenant Nathan King Averill, 7th Cavalry, found the hostiles encamped in the Peloncillo Mountains, near Lang's Ranch, southwest of Cloverdale, New Mexico. However, other accounts say the skirmish occurred in the Guadalupe Mountains of Mexico, about fifty miles south of the border. Averill reported that his men killed or wounded one Apache man and wounded a woman while the rest fled. One of the Apaches fired a few shots from behind a tree before getting away. The Americans also captured a little girl who was left behind at the camp. She was later taken in by a member of the expedition, John Horton Slaughter, who claimed that he was the one who killed the Apache and that the man he shot was the Apache Kid.
Two or three days after that, Captain James M. Bell, 7th Cavalry, sent Lieutenant Sedgwick Rice out from Fort Grant, Arizona with three Apache Scouts and four soldiers. They first headed for San Simon Station, a town in San Simon Valley, and then south through the Peloncillos. On the next day, May 12, the Apache scouts detected the hostiles' trail and determined that it was made by five horses, one of which had iron horseshoes and the other four were "shod with rawhide." The scouts said that two of the horses were ridden by woman and that only one had a man on its back. It was getting dark by that time so Lieutenant Rice decided to make camp for the night. Early the next morning, on May 13, Rice and his men continued following the trail south until, on May 14, it turned east towards the Animas Valley of New Mexico.
Around this time, Rice met some of Second Lieutenant Averill's men, who were still scouting in the area. It was then decided that Rice would join Averill at his camp, in Guadalupe Canyon, to see Lieutenant Edwin C. Bullock, who was their superior. Before reaching the camp, Averill himself rode up to Rice and told him that the hostiles had crossed the international border about three miles west of Cloverdale. According to Britt Wilson, "Guadalupe Canyon [is] a natural, protected pass leading into Mexico from Arizona Territory, [and] had been used by the Apaches for a long time as an escape route." During Geronimo's War, in June 1885, a small battle was fought there when Chiricahuas attacked an army redoubt and a few years before that it was the site of the Guadalupe Canyon Massacre, in which Mexican policemen killed "Old Man" Clanton and his gang of cattle rustlers. Rice believed that the hostile Apaches were still in the area so, on the next day, May 15, he and Averill left camp and proceeded down the trail with twelve enlisted men, ten Apache scouts and four civilians, including John Slaughter and his ranch foreman, Jesse Fisher. The expedition did not catch up with the hostiles that day but that night,