11 minute read
Gems of Cochise County by Doug Hocking
For many years, members of a secretive society have stalked the Arizona deserts in search of ocotillo, extending its spiny fingers toward crimson flowers like bloody nails twitching in the dry air. It thrives on karst. Where there is limestone, there are sinkholes, and some of these exude the breath of the earth, revealing a path to a cave below.
Caves form in limestone at the top of the water-table, as water acidic with carbonic acid from rotting surface vegetation penetrates the ground and dissolves the stone. As the water-table recedes, caverns are left behind. Water continues to drip downward dissolving rock, and when it meets the open cavern, it evaporates, redepositing the stone as pencil thin soda straws or thickened stalactites. Where water drips to the cavern foor, a fried egg might form and grow into a stalagmite or eventually join with the stalactite above to form a column.
Water might drip along walls to form bacon and draperies. Depending on the temperature and other conditions, rock may form as calcite or aragonite or even become crystalline dogtooth spar, frostwork, or flower-like clusters of aragonite crystals. This growing wonderworld presents itself as palaces, thrones, princesses, and gargoyles enlivening the imagination. In some places, as in Bisbee, metallic minerals intrude covering stalactites and stalagmites in the fantastic colors of green malachite, yellow chalcopyrite, purple azurite, red cuprite, and turquoise chrysocolla.
As air pressure rises and falls, the earth breathes in and out. Cavers of the National Speleological Society seek that breath for it says, “Here is a cave.” In colder climes, the cave may exude fog or have its own highly localized snowstorm. But in the desert, there is only that faint breath. Perhaps that is why Arizona cavers are among the most secretive. They form in Grottos, and the Grottos break of in even smaller groups keeping tight their secrets lest anyone intrude and damage their caves. On Fort Huachuca, one cave, its broken speleothems covered in graffiti, is said to resemble a Sherwin-Williams test site. In November 1974, Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts discovered Kartchner Caverns and held the secret for fourteen years.
On a trip into the Huachuca Mountains, spelunkers took along implements strange to caving anywhere except in secretive Arizona—a tarpaulin, an eighty pound sack of concrete, fve gallons of water, a star drill and hammer made up the kit. Coming to the site of the cave, they laid out the tarpaulin. On one end, the cavers set out the surface litter in a manner approximating covering the cave entrance and then dug down three feet placing the fill dirt on the other end of the tarp. With the star drill and hammer they broke through three inches of concrete revealing a metal plate blocking the entrance. Once these things had been cleared, the cavers rappelled down thirty feet into the cave. Upon departure, they replaced the metal sheet and mixed concrete and water on top of it and then refilled the hole, carefully relaying the ground cover. The cave is only referred to by its initials, never its name, which might hint at its location.
Kartchner Cavern in the Whetstone Mountains south of Interstate 10 near Benson, Arizona, is said, at two and a half miles, to be the longest in Arizona. Its nearest competitor is nearby Colossal Cave, which it far outshines in the sheer grandeur of its decorations. It is home to the world’s longest, as far as we know, soda straw which stretches a full, oh, so delicate, twenty-one feet. Kubla Khan at ffty-one and a half feet is the tallest known column in Arizona.
Red Cave, near Kartchner, its entrance secret and nearly inaccessible, contains a rimstone basin where Hohokam worshipped. You can see a replica at the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson. The Colossal Cave legend speaks of buried treasure.
In 1887, near Pantano, robbers diverted the train onto an unfinished siding. Aboard Locomotive No. 95, James Guthries, engineer, and R.T. Bradford, fireman, jumped for their lives as the engine began a slow roll into Davidson Canyon. Landing in a mesquite fifty feet below, they glanced aloft to see the locomotive following them and again scrambled for their lives. Lacking an engineer’s life to threaten, the outlaws were forced to blow the door of the express car.
Inside, express agent Smith was busy hiding the money in the stove. “That stove trick don’t go this time, Smitty,” said an outlaw. A few months before, the same outlaws had robbed the train at this spot, and Smith had fooled them by hiding the cash in the stove. They then took the locomotive and headed toward Tucson. The cold engine was found the next day near Tucson by the posse who could not detect any tracks for two miles around. The outlaws had disappeared. The newspapers praised Smith but gave the game away, so that on their second attempt, the badmen made a lucrative haul riding away toward Colossal Cave.
In the legend, the bad men approached the cave with the posse close behind. Abandoning their horses, the outlaws entered the cavern. A few well-placed shots at the narrow entrance discouraged the posse men who decided to wait, reasoning that eventually the bandits would have to emerge in search of food and water. Deep within, the train robbers buried the loot, intending to return to retrieve it when the heat was off. They then departed the cave through the rear entrance where they had waiting mounts and rode away. All save one died in infamy, and the one returned after twenty years to recover the loot, only to be confronted by a patient sheriff who foiled the attempt. In 1988, tour guides at Colossal Cave were still displaying the money sacks left behind, noting that the treasure was still buried in the cave.
Sadly, there is another more historically accurate account. Fred Dodge, Wells Fargo & Co. agent, accompanied by Virgil Earp, his arm flapping for lack of an elbow joint removed after an assassination attempt in Tombstone five years before, pursued the outlaw trail to a rock shelter near Colossal Cave where the outlaws had made camp. August rains erased the trail, and the outlaws escaped across Cochise County to El Paso where, after a third train robbery attempt, they were arrested a few months later. They did not enter the cave and did not bury any treasure.
The Whetstone Mountains, where Kartchner Cavern resides, have their own legends and history. In the 1950s, the TV series Tombstone Territory claimed that its stories were ripped from the Tombstone Epitaph and were approved by their staff historian, thus it was a TV show presenting real history. A favorite episode had Geronimo hiding from the U.S. Cavalry in Tombstone, in a pool hall, shooting pool while smoking a stogie with a doxy on his arm played by Angie Dickinson. The sheriff learned of his presence and sought him out. Geronimo ran. Eventually he entered a saloon-tent, was cornered, but, sliding under the tent wall into an arroyo, he successfully escaped the sheriff. To our utter amazement the story did appear in the Epitaph! It was true in all details except that Angie Dickinson, as you might suspect, wasn’t there, and it wasn’t Geronimo the Apache as the show portrayed. It was Geronimo Miranda, the Mexican outlaw. This was undoubtedly a slight oversight by the staff historian who failed to realize that at the time of the story Apache Geronimo had already been “vacationing” on a Florida beach for over a year.
Geronimo Miranda had been involved in a bloody train robbery at Agua Zarca, Sonora, and had escaped to Cochise County. In French Joe Canyon, a little south of Kartchner Cavern, Sherif “Texas” John Slaughter and Deputy Burt Alvord surprised Geronimo and his companions at dawn. Two were hit by blasts from Slaughter’s shotgun, but Geronimo escaped, and Slaughter would pursue the bandito through the rest of his time in ofce as sherif of Cochise County. One of their subsequent encounters was the pool hall incident. Geronimo would escape, only to die in a gunfght after Slaughter left ofce.
In 1882, at Iron Spring in a canyon between the Whetstone and Mustang Mountains, Wyatt Earp and his Vendetta Posse stumbled upon Curly Bill Brocius and his friends. Braving a hail of lead, Wyatt put Bill away permanently. In 1869, at nearby Turkey Spring, Lieutenant Howard Cushing followed the trail of an Apache woman into an ambush and lost his life.
Discovered in 1974, Kartchner Caverns remained a secret until it was sold to the State of Arizona in 1988 for a reported $1.4 million dollars (some sources say $1.6) with the Kartchner family retaining an adjoining ninety acres for development and requiring that the name of the cave remain Kartchner Caverns. The caverns became Arizona’s twenty-fifth state park. The city of Benson extended its city limits over ten miles of vacant ranchland so that the cave would be “in Benson.” The city, its merchants, and the Kartchner family began aggressively marketing Kartchner Caverns products. Since Kartchner was the family name, the state could not trademark it to enjoy exclusive rights to put the name on T-shirts, caps, and other various other types of memorabilia.
In 2023, the ninety acres retained by the Kartchner family remains undeveloped, and there are still ten miles of ranchland between the cavern and downtown Benson. In 1998, the state parks commission, enraged at marketing by Kartchners and Benson merchants that wasn’t bringing the state any money, investigated the possibility of changing the name to Cochise Caverns. The sales contract stipulated that the name must remain Kartchner Caverns, and eventually the hubbub quieted down as merchants who weren’t Kartchner family members ceased marketing cavern goods. During this same time, the public was sadly disappointed and frustrated by extended delays in the opening of the cave to the public. The caverns were to open in 1992 and then 1994 and did not open until 1999. The state spent twenty-six million dollars developing RV parking and a visitor center and an airlock for the cave.
There were extended environmental impact studies that delayed opening and raised costs. The cave was home to a bat nursery, and measures needed to be taken so as not to disturb the bats during their season. The cave had high humidity, and the speleothems were and are still growing. Dry air would cause a cessation of growth. An airlock was required so that humidity would not escape the cave. Lighting has destroyed other caves by encouraging the growth of mold, which covers speleothems. This was taken into account in how the cave was lit in order to preserve its beauty. Eleven years went by before the cave opened to the public, and then the number of visitors was restricted, and it took months to gain a reservation.
One state employee, a manager at the caverns, broke ranks to say the cave was not being properly presented to the public. He, a long-time avocational spelunker, was represented as wanting the public to see the cave as he had, crawling through mud, climbing ladders, following unpaved paths by carbide light. It is a wonderful way to see a cave. There is no experience quite like it. Instead, the public is guided down paved streets where railings ensure they won’t touch fragile features. Lights come on as the group approaches, dramatically lighting the environment and showing of all the fnest features of the cave to their best advantage. Confronting Kubla Khan in low light, the tour is plunged into cave darkness and then orchestra music sounds as the lights come up revealing the great column in all its glory. It is a staged event, a visit to a theater of light and music, lacking any relation to the dark and dirty world of the spelunking explorer.
Doug Hocking was raised on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation in New Mexico. served in the US Army in Military Intelligence and Armored Cavalry. He spent many years in the Far East and speaks Chinese. He holds advanced degrees in American History, Social Anthropology, and Historical Archaeology. He writes both history and historical fction.
