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Tribal Passages: The Cochise of Cochise County
The Legacy of the Man Who Gave Cochise County its Name.
Tombstone, once the capital of Cochise County, was called the “condensation of wickedness,” by physician, surgeon, and gunshot expert, Dr. Edwin Goodfellow. He had the evidence to back up his statement, having stitched-up and operated on many gunshot victims during his lengthy tenure in Tombstone.
The county’s namesake, a chief of the Chiricahua Apache, Cochise, would have probably agreed with Goodfellow. Cochise, born in 1805 on land claimed by Spain, yearned for the simple life of his childhood. He once said, “When I was young, I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apache.”
Historians, such as Angie Debo, relate that Cochise tried diplomacy in the beginning of his relationship with the United States government. He kept his pledge to permit the Butterfield Overland Mail to cross through his territory, unchallenged. He even sold wood to the stage station at the gateway to Apache Pass.
Matters changed abruptly in 1861 when Felix Martinez Ward— a.k.a. Mickey Free—a half-Irish/ half-Mexican twelve-year-old, was kidnapped by an Apache band. Cochise was asked to come to where a young, inexperienced cavalry ofcer, Lieutenant George Bascom, was camped. He had been charged with investigating the kidnapping, and his chief suspect was Cochise. When Cochise denied any knowledge of the kidnapping, he and his companions were arrested. Bascom told Cochise they would be held as hostages until the boy was returned. Cutting their prison tent, Cochise and three of his men escaped and returned to their village. Cochise ordered Geronimo to attack a wagon train coming up the pass and take hostages. During the attack, Geronimo’s warriors killed six Hispanic drivers and captured three “White Eyes” (Europeans) along with two other Hispanics. The Apache tied the two Hispanics to the wheels of wagons and set the wagons on fre.
Cochise sent a message to Bascom, warning him that his hostages would receive the same treatment the imprisoned Apache were given. He demanded a prisoner exchange. This was denied, and the confict ended badly, with Cochise torturing and killing his captives and the military hanging theirs, among them, close relatives of Cochise.
Vowing vengeance, he joined Mangas Coloradas, his fatherin-law and chief of the Mimbreno band, in waging what became known as the Apache Wars, which caused the deaths of hundreds of Americans and Mexicans. Meanwhile, Mickey Free grew up as an Apache, evolving into a wellknown interpreter, and Cochise became a name to be feared.
The Civil War broke out, and U.S. troops were fghting Cochise and the Apache, while simultaneously trying to reach battle sites to confront the Confederates. In the Battle of Apache Pass, located in Cochise County, Cochise and one hundred ffty Chiricahua warriors attacked General James Carleton and his men while they were enroute to confront Confederate troops in Arizona and New Mexico.
When the two-day struggle between Carleton’s California Column and the Chiricahua ended on July 16, 1862, the military recognized a need for a fort to secure Apache Pass and protect soldiers, settlers, and mail coaches as they traveled through the region. On July 28, soldiers from the 5th California Volunteer Infantry began constructing a crude fort and named it after their commanding ofcer, Colonel George Washington Bowie.
In 1867, President Grant ordered General Philip Sherman to pacify the Native Americans on the plains. In response, Sherman used the same tactics he had employed in the Civil War. His men destroyed Apache crops to diminish their ability to fght. Cochise and Geronimo retaliated by ramping up their raids on wagon trains, stage coach stations, settlements, and ranches.
The Dragoon Mountains, the ancestral home of the Chiricahua Apache, which were named for the U.S. Dragoon regiment that battled Cochise and other Apache, are located in Cochise County. From Cochise Stronghold, a canyon in the Dragoons, Cochise launched his raids on ranches and settlements.
In 1870, Cochise met Thomas Jefords, a stage driver for the Butterfield Overland Stage. The two men became friends, and Jefords arranged a meeting with General Oliver O. Howard. Cochise and Howard hammered out a treaty with Geronimo close by. All hostilities and raiding between the Apache and the United States soldiers would cease, and warriors were guaranteed a safe passage to their homes. It also created the short-lived Chiricahua Apache reservation in Sulphur Spring Valley in Arizona.
Most white civilians knew nothing about the treaty. In A Century of Dishonor, author Helen Hunt Jackson described an atrocity that occurred near Camp Grant as reported by Lieutenant Royal E. Whitman, 3rd U.S. Cavalry. At the beginning of 1871, a young Apache chief asked the lieutenant if he would allow his people to settle in the area of the fort so they could feel safe. Whitman told him that he had no authority to make a treaty, but he would allow him to bring in his band, and they would be fed. Other bands joined them until over four hundred Apache were living in the area as voluntary prisoners of war. Meanwhile, Whitman wrote about the situation to his superiors but received no answer. He continued to feed the Apache and grew to know them very well. After asking for permission, the Apache moved farther away from the fort so that they could have more room. When Captain Stanwood arrived to assume command of the post, he carried verbal orders from General Stoneman to continue to feed the Apache and permit them to stay where they had settled.
On April 30, Whitman received a dispatch that a large party had left Tucson on April 28, vowing to kill all Indians at the Camp Grant post. He immediately sent two messengers to warn the Apache to come to the fort for protection. The messengers returned within an hour with the harrowing news that the Apache camp was burning, and they could fnd no living Indians. Whitman took the camp surgeon and a company of twenty soldiers and citizens to ofer aid and bury the dead. The surviving Apache trickled in and told him they had been attacked in their sleep at dawn. Of the four hundred Apache, about one hundred and twenty-fve were killed or missing. Of that number, only eight were men, with the rest being women and children.
Before Cochise passed away in 1874, he asked that his son Taza be named as chief. Taza and Geronimo honored the treaty. However, the government broke the agreement and relocated Taza’s band 180 miles to the San Carlos reservation, along with other Apache and Yavapai bands. This reservation earned its reputation as “Hell’s Forty Acres” due to the bad health and environmental conditions its inhabitants were asked to endure. Geronimo and other Apache felt no obligation to remain there. Over the years, Geronimo and his followers escaped and were captured and returned to the reservation four times.
One of these outbreaks in September 1881, led by Geronimo and two other well-known leaders, Juh and Naiche, resulted in death, destruction, and wide-spread panic. Among those killed were six teamsters from a wagon train, Cedar Springs Station agent John Mowlds, and an old man named Vance. The Apache also mutilated four Army telegraph linemen.
In October, a group of defenders quickly formed in Tombstone, which included Sherif John Behan, Marshal Virgil Earp, Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, Mayor John Clum, Billy Breakenridge, and George Parsons. The men set out as a posse intent on capturing the fleeing Apache and learned they had been stealing cattle and taking them to Horseshoe Canyon. After traveling to the canyon, they failed to fnd Geronimo, so they returned to Tombstone.
Hatred prevailed toward the Apache and other native tribes as evidenced by this article appearing in the Weekly Arizona Miner, May 5, 1882, “In Tombstone a pool of $250 has been put up as a reward for twenty-five Indian scalps, and a further sum of ten dollars for each additional scalp is ofered.”
Geronimo remained at large until January 1884, when he sur- rendered to General Crook and returned to the reservation, only to escape again the next year. He surrendered for the last time in 1886 and was sent with other Apache warriors to an internment camp in Florida before being imprisoned at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. At the time, Geronimo was called “the last Indian to surrender.”
Many people in the Tombstone area did not approve of Geronimo being sent to Indian Territory to serve out his life sentence. They thought he should have been put to death for his crimes. On February 15, 1890, Tombstone’s newspaper, the Tombstone Weekly Epitaph reported, “The Society of Arizona Pioneers have issued a strong protest against the removal of Geronimo to Indian Territory… the majority of whom have fought against the Apache and many of whom have lost relatives and friends by murder at the hands of these Indians….”
Geronimo died at Fort Still, Oklahoma in 1909 of pneumonia, having spent the last twenty-three years of his life as a prisoner of war. He occasionally was allowed to leave Fort Sill under escort for short periods of time, but President Roosevelt denied his repeated requests to return home to Cochise County. Geronimo’s last words at his deathbed were, “I never should have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.”
Regina McLemore is a Will Rogers Medallion Award-winning author and retired educator of Cherokee heritage. Her great, great grandmother, Susie Christie Clay, survived the Trail of Tears in 1839. Regina’s Young Adult Trilogy, Cherokee Passages, is a fctional retelling of her family’s history from the Trail of Tears down through the modern day. It includes the novels Cherokee Clay, Cherokee Stone, and Cherokee Steel.
