A People of the Mountains
The Chiricahua Apache are an Athapaskan-speaking people whose ancestral homeland spans the borderland Southwest: southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. They occupied this region for centuries before any national boundary cut across it. When the United States acquired the Southwest after the Mexican War of 1848, that boundary divided Chiricahua territory without reference to the people who lived there.
Scholars recognize four principal Chiricahua bands, each tied to a distinct part of the landscape. The Cokanén, known as Cochise's people, centered their world on the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The Dragoon Mountains, visible on a clear day from what would become Tombstone, were the heart of their territory. The Chokonen occupied the central Chiricahua range, overlapping with Cokanén territory. The Cihéne, sometimes called the Warm Springs or Ojo Caliente Apache, occupied west-central New Mexico. The Nédnai, the most southerly and most independent band, kept their traditional homeland in Mexico's Sierra Madre. Geronimo was born into the Bedonkohe, sometimes recognized as a fifth band.
These were not bands of wanderers. The Chiricahua had deep and specific attachments to particular mountains, canyons, and springs. The high Sierra Madre ranges to the south were called the "Blue Mountains," a distant refuge that could provide safety when conditions in the north became intolerable. Ojo Caliente in New Mexico was treasured by the Warm Springs people "not only for its beneficent water but because it was a place of natural defense." The Dragoon Mountains provided Cochise with the rocky stronghold from which he could not be dislodged for a decade. These were people rooted in a landscape they knew intimately.
The Spanish and Mexican Periods
From the time of the earliest Spanish explorations in the 1600s, the Chiricahua resisted efforts to settle in fixed locations. The Spanish colonial system of resettling indigenous people into mission-based villages ran directly against Chiricahua custom. The Apache were known to abandon any settlement upon a death or illness in the band, seeking purification through movement. A sedentary life on Spanish terms was not a life they recognized as their own.
The Spanish response was to build a cordon of presidios from Tucson to the Texas border, intending to stop Apache raids into Sonoran and Chihuahuan settlements. It did not work. Raiding parties simply went around and between the forts. By the late 1700s, Spanish colonial administrators had recognized the cordon was ineffective and shifted to a different approach: peace settlements that provided food and trade goods in exchange for calm. The settlement at Janos, in Chihuahua, became the principal exchange point under this system. The policy worked imperfectly, but for a generation it kept relative peace along the border. When the collapse of Spanish and then Mexican finances in the early 1800s made it impossible to sustain the resource-sharing system, raiding resumed. It is worth noting that when both sides honored a practical arrangement, the arrangement held.
Cochise and the Bascom Affair
The event that turned decades of sporadic conflict into open war was a misidentification, and the central figure in the resulting disaster came to the negotiating table in good faith.
On January 21, 1861, raiders struck the ranch of John Ward on Sonoita Creek, carrying off cattle and a twelve-year-old boy named Feliz Tellez. Suspicion fell on Cochise's band, though the raiders were almost certainly a different Apache group. The abducted boy eventually grew up among the Apache and became known as Mickey Free, who later served the Army as a scout. Cochise almost certainly had no hand in the raid.
Second Lieutenant George Bascom arrived at Apache Pass in early February 1861 with fifty-four infantry soldiers. Cochise came to meet him under a flag of truce, accompanied by members of his family. The meeting broke down quickly: accusations were exchanged, the Apache dropped the white flag and fled, and Bascom held several of Cochise's family members as hostages. In the standoff that followed, each side held the other's people. When negotiations collapsed, both sides killed their prisoners. Bascom hanged six Apache men from oak trees, reportedly "so high that even wolves could not touch them."
Cochise led his people in a guerrilla campaign through the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains that lasted more than a decade. The Apache were exceptionally effective in that terrain. The Army struggled to pin them down.
Thomas Jeffords and the Peace
In 1872, a former Army scout and stagecoach superintendent named Thomas Jeffords did something that no soldier had done: he rode alone into Cochise's stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains to negotiate safe passage for mail riders. The two men talked for several days and developed a genuine respect for each other. Jeffords later described Cochise as a man of absolute integrity within his own code of conduct: a leader who kept his word when his word was honored.
General Oliver Howard, a deeply religious one-armed Union veteran, arrived in Arizona in 1872 with a mandate to settle the Apache question through negotiation rather than force. He sought out Jeffords and asked him to take him to Cochise. Jeffords agreed only on the condition that they go without a military escort. The two men rode into the Dragoon Mountains and spent ten days negotiating with Cochise directly.
The result was the Chiricahua Reservation, established in 1872. It encompassed the Chiricahua Mountains, the Dragoon Mountains, and much of the surrounding country. This is a fact worth sitting with: the land on which Tombstone would be founded in 1877 was, until 1876, part of the Chiricahua Reservation. Cochise insisted on one condition of his own: that Jeffords be named the Indian agent. Howard agreed. Cochise upheld the treaty for the rest of his life. He died on June 8, 1874, and was buried secretly in the Dragoon Mountains. The precise location of his grave has never been confirmed.
The Reservation Closed
In June 1876, the Chiricahua Reservation was closed. The decision had nothing to do with military necessity or pressure from Arizona settlers. It was an Interior Department cost-cutting measure. Bureaucrats in Washington concluded that consolidating Apache bands onto a single reservation at San Carlos would save money. The man assigned to carry out the removal was John P. Clum, who would later found the Tombstone Epitaph. Clum moved approximately 600 Chiricahuas to San Carlos in June 1876, assisted by the Sixth Cavalry and his own Apache police force.
San Carlos was, in the words of James Kaywaykla, whose own people were among those removed: "a place of death. Few people endure the summer. There was nothing but cactus, rattlesnakes, heat, rocks, and insects." The Chiricahua had been taken from the mountain country they had known for centuries and deposited in a low desert basin that their entire culture told them was uninhabitable.
The reservation closed just one year before Ed Schieffelin arrived to prospect in the same mountains. Fort Huachuca had been established in February 1877 to provide enough military presence to make that kind of prospecting possible. When the soldiers at the fort warned Schieffelin he would find only "his tombstone" in Apache territory, they were speaking to conditions that a bureaucratic pen stroke in Washington had recently created.
Geronimo
Geronimo was not a chief. He was a war leader, born into the Bedonkohe, a man whose entire family had been killed in a Mexican Army massacre at Janos in 1851. His Apache name was Goyaałé, meaning "one who yawns." The name Geronimo was given to him by Mexican soldiers who had reason to fear him.
He was captured by John Clum at the Warm Springs agency in New Mexico in 1877 and sent to San Carlos. He broke out, returned to the Sierra Madre, and surrendered back to San Carlos again. He broke out again. His campaigns in 1881 and 1885 ran directly alongside the years of Tombstone's boom and decline. His presence was a constant fact of life in Cochise County.
C.S. Fly, Tombstone's pioneer photographer, photographed Geronimo and his band at Cañón de los Embudos in March 1886 during surrender talks with General Crook. These remain the only photographs ever taken of a hostile Apache camp before surrender. The talks failed when someone sold whiskey to the Apache and told them they would be killed when they crossed the border. Geronimo fled back to Mexico.
The final pursuit was led by Captain Henry Lawton, who set out from Fort Huachuca on May 5, 1886 with seventy-five men and followed Geronimo's trail into the Sierra Madre through four months of brutal summer heat. First contact came on August 25 near Fronteras, Sonora. Geronimo walked into Lawton's camp and greeted him with what Lawton described to his wife as "a very affectionate hug." Geronimo's first words were: "Have you anything to eat?" The soldiers had nothing to offer.
After two days of talks, Geronimo agreed to march north to meet General Miles in person. He would not surrender to anyone below Miles. The combined column halted at Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains. A factor that weighed heavily in Geronimo's final decision was something Lieutenant Gatewood told him during negotiations: Miles had already shipped the entire reservation Chiricahua population to Florida before the surrender was complete. When Geronimo learned there were no Chiricahuas left in Arizona, Gatewood later wrote, "it came as a complete shock to him and influenced him to surrender for the last time."
Miles arrived on September 3. He outlined the surrender terms by scratching lines and stones in the dust to represent the ocean and Fort Marion, Florida. Geronimo, exhausted and skeptical, agreed. His own account: "I did not greatly believe General Miles, but because the President of the United States had sent me word I agreed to make the treaty, and to keep it." He surrendered on September 4, 1886, with thirty-nine people, including women and children.
The Scouts Who Were Also Taken
The Apache scouts who had served the U.S. Army throughout the campaigns, who had tracked Geronimo through the Sierra Madre, who had made the capture possible, were also loaded onto trains and shipped east. They had not broken any agreement. They had done exactly what the Army asked. They went to Fort Marion in Florida anyway, because Miles's strategy was to remove the entire Chiricahua population, loyal and hostile alike, to permanently break the cycle of escape and return.
Approximately 388 Chiricahuas were transported from their homeland as prisoners of war. They were held at Fort Marion in Florida, then at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, and finally at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. In 1913, 187 Chiricahuas were released from prisoner-of-war status and relocated to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. Ninety-two chose to remain in Oklahoma.
What Remains
The Chiricahua presence persists in the landscape around Tombstone in the names given to the country they lived in: Cochise County, named for the cokanén chief, is the only Arizona county named for an individual Indian chief. The Chiricahua Mountains to the east, the Dragoon Mountains to the northwest, Cochise Stronghold in the heart of those mountains, Cochise Head on the Chiricahua Range skyline. These names are the record of a people who shaped this country and whose shaping of it has not been forgotten, even when the people themselves have been.
In 1986, a centennial celebration of the cessation of hostilities was held at Fort Bowie. Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt officially welcomed the Chiricahua Apache back to Arizona. Chiricahua descendants traveled to Skeleton Canyon to mark the hundredth anniversary of Geronimo's surrender at the place where it had happened.
To this day, the Chiricahua Apache have no official reservation or tribal territory of their own. The only federally recognized Chiricahua group in the United States is the Fort Sill Apache Tribe in Oklahoma. The homeland that became Cochise County belongs to other people now.
Sources
- Arreola, Daniel D. "Chiricahua Apache Homeland in the Borderland Southwest." The Geographical Review, Vol. 102, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 111–131. American Geographical Society.
- Mills, Charles K. "The Bascom Affair." The Cochise Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 3–23. Cochise County Historical Society.
- Mills, Charles K. "Cochise County: Cultures in Conflict." The Cochise Quarterly, Vol. 12, Nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1982). Cochise County Historical Society.
- Voeltz, Richard A. "'What Will Occur, No One Can Tell': Henry W. Lawton's Account of the 1886 Geronimo Campaign." Journal of Arizona History, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter 2016), pp. 405–422. Arizona Historical Society.