Smoke on the Apachería
CHIRICAHUA NATIONAL MONUMENT, WILCOX, ARIZONA
WE SAW SMOKE ON THE HORIZON JUST OVER THE ARIZONA border when we were still some thirty miles or more from the Chiricahua range. Concerned about what was clearly a forest fire ahead, we stopped at the crossroads at Animas and asked two grizzled men in a pickup about a road heading south. The map showed that a small road, Route 338, headed toward Mexico. “The fire’s not close to the road,” they said, “and since you don’t have four-wheel drive there’s no way you can go 338. There might be a road marked on your map, but nobody maintains it.” We thought of the Minas Road and the flat tire. Thanking the gentlemen, we took Route 80 toward the Chiricahua. We had wanted to see mountains anyway. We just hadn’t planned to see them in flames.
The lone grocery cart left in the United States alongside the border wall. Note also the new floodlights and road constructed by Homeland Security.
The Chiricahua Desert Museum parking lot on Route 80 was filled with firefighter vehicles when we pulled in—along with those of others assisting them, including the Border Patrol. We talked to a volunteer sitting at a food and water table. Already the fire on the mountain above had consumed fifteen hundred acres and the winds were up again, she said, with no rain in the forecast all week. As we talked, a plane spreading flame retardant flew over the peak nearby, the only visible sign of human activity. But she said there were hundreds of firefighters somewhere on the mountain digging trenches in the dry pine forests, trying desperately to keep the fire out of the park.
I asked the volunteer if it would be okay to talk with some of the Border Patrol officers I saw standing next to their vehicles in the second row. “You’re welcome to walk in there,” she said. I thanked her, put a donation in the box on the table, headed toward the green and white trucks, and approached two officers standing beside them.
“Hello, how is everything going?”
“Pretty well, considering.”
“I’m surprised to see so many Border Patrol vehicles here. Are you helping with the firefighting?”
“No, we’re here to catch the ones that run out from the smoke.”
“Are there people hiding up in the Chiricahua wilderness?”
“They’re everywhere!”
“Have you caught any people as a result of the fire here?”
“Not yet.”
There were four other Border Patrol trucks in the parking lot besides theirs, all of them new, large, and equipped with the most powerful Cummings Diesel engines—the top of the line.
Hope and I had driven and walked through much of the Chiricahua National Monument the previous year and I remembered the remote and difficult terrain well. In the heart of the park, hundreds, maybe thousands, of tall, chimney-like rock formations stand like columns of some massive ancient cathedral long decimated by time. We walked a trail to see the columns up close, and the heat there was so dry and intense that we had to ration our two quarts of water. We wanted to drink it all in the first mile. At the higher elevations tall ponderosa pines and Douglas firs tower above the rocks, so large that little vegetation grows beneath them. They were the ones I feared could burn.
As with all the other deserts we had passed through on foot, I couldn’t imagine someone lasting for more than a day or so on these peaks without bringing massive amounts of water and other provisions—particularly someone who is not indigenous to the place, as once were Cochise and his people.
Cochise and his kin were the Chiricahua, a subgroup of the Apaches who survived in these rocks for years while on the run from the cavalry. From certain vantage points in the park, one can see the upturned profile of Cochise’s face in a mountain range; his curved nose is one peak, his brow ridge another, his chin a third. He is resting, not dead, the legend goes; he was so tough that his spirit still remains alive in these hills.
Cochise and his people knew their territory well, and they used the borderlands of Mexico and the United States, particularly the labyrinth of rock formations that would become the real draw of the park, as hideouts. The U.S. Cavalry, who often had to dismount to navigate this place, never found the Chiricahua, and Cochise and his beleaguered family survived long enough to go down in history as victors of sorts, though they had to live on the run to do so.
As Hope and I hiked through the tall and thin spires of rock with their many overhangs and nooks, arches, and caves, we talked about the countless hiding places in this maze of rock. There were boulders on top of others providing natural shelters. The place was perfect for concealing oneself, but it was clear to us that without the water we carried with us for a morning jaunt, we could not have survived more than a day. To imagine dozens of people traveling with their children and hiding there for weeks was nearly impossible for me. Yet somehow the Chiricahua people possessed the needed hunting and scavenging skills and knew how to find water, and so they lived.
Could an uninitiated person who had inadvertently dropped into this landscape make it? No way in hell, I thought. But clearly the Border Patrol disagreed. I had to assume they knew what they were talking about. After all, there were Cochise’s people who had survived a previous government search, and not even Black Seminole scouts could find them. Starting back then, how many U.S. dollars had been spent on border hunts like that? The donation box for the firefighters couldn’t possibly compare.
. . .
AS WE DROVE southward paralleling the Chiricahua range, the smoke suddenly billowed higher and then flames leapt up over the closest ridge, and trees at its top burst into flames like torches. I knew many more resources and person hours were going to be required before that wildfire was out. Back in the parking lot, part of me had wanted to say something about the priorities in our national budget, but I knew the officers had nothing to do with making those choices. They were like the cavalry riding after Cochise: they had a job to do and they remained faithful to it.
We drove south on 80 with the Chiricahua range a safe distance off to our west, though we could still see smoke for many more miles. The fire continued to dominate our conversation until a state sign riveted my attention: marker for the site of Geronimo’s capture ahead, it announced. I stopped at the marker, got out on the hot roadside, and read the plaque on the tall stone obelisk. The graffiti-marred text said that in nearby Skeleton Canyon just off to the east of where I stood, Geronimo and his thirty-five bedraggled men and teenaged boys—along with 101 women and children—had surrendered to the cavalry. The year was 1886.
Several years before that, Geronimo and his people had agreed to live in the San Carlos reservation in the southeast Arizona Territory, but in 1885, hungry and suffering the indignities of captivity, they broke out, deciding to live the nomadic life again, which included raiding to survive. They headed toward the open mountain ranges some called the Apachería and made raids into both Mexico and the United States. For over a year, they lived as fugitives along the border near the Chiricahua as over five thousand troops and their auxiliaries pursued them. Then, after their discovery, they could run no more and they surrendered.
While on the run they had killed over seventy-five settlers and nine soldiers. They had lived in a desert where in May the sun can beat down at a hundred degrees during the day and get to near freezing at night. The cavalry and their scouts under the command of General Nelson Miles had finally tracked them into a dead-end canyon with high walls. There was no escape route. According to the plaque, this surrender “forever ended Indian warfare in the United States.” The famed Buffalo Soldiers had completed their mission.
Geronimo said in his autobiography that he had been tricked, and he had never agreed to go to a reservation to begin with. Following their capture, what was left of his tribe was taken to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and then later the families were split up and sent as far away as Florida and Alabama, and never allowed to return to their homeland again. Geronimo himself would experience something else.
Though his actual name was Goyaaté, this shaman-warrior later became a performer in public events and parades known as Geronimo. We still shout his name when jumping from high places. He has never left our language, or our imaginations. After their capture, he and his warriors were taken by boxcar toward captivity. On the way to Fort Sam Houston in September 1886, Geronimo and fifteen of his men were taken out of the boxcar on a hillside and photographed. Somehow even held at gunpoint and defenseless they still managed to look proud.
There is another well-known photograph of Geronimo with three warriors, all armed with rifles and wearing headbands, long sleeves, pants with loincloths, and high moccasins. They stand together in the desert looking straight into the camera. Taken year of the Skeleton Canyon capture, the photograph has remained iconic, even a symbol of American freedom. Today it appears on T-shirts sold in stores all over the Southwest. The four Apache men stare at the camera, seemingly daring anyone to pass. A common caption under the photo reads: “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492”—an ironic response to 9/11. Geronimo’s face is recognizable today in part because he appeared with Teddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show before thousands of spectators. He is remembered today in part because he played himself in the shoot-’em-up shows.
The Geronimo’s Capture monument, erected in 1934 by the city of Douglas, Arizona, tells of the end of one people’s freedom and the taming of this once feared place. The capture would also help usher in the state named Arizona in 1912, a state that would by 2010 become synonymous with the enforcement of borderlines and catching trespassers with sophisticated technologies. The place would never be home to people who live outside of boundaries again, and the life Geronimo had surrendered would never return. Now Homeland Security had come to mean something quite different from the scene on the T-shirts we still love to buy.