Beginning with the great California discovery in 1848, the cry of “Gold!” invariably brought swarms of unruly American prospectors in search of elusive riches. It occurred repeatedly throughout the mountain West in the decades following the California strike of 1848. Always, gold-seekers encountered resident Indians, shouldered them aside, ignored any government effort to protect them, and treated any who resisted with violence and death. Tribe after tribe lost their lands, some their lives. Apaches enjoyed no immunity from the ruling American conviction that mineral extraction prevailed over all other forms of land use.
Mexican lessees who mined at the Santa Rita copper mines intruded little on the Chiricahua world, nor did the few prospectors who probed the surrounding mountains for gold in late 1859 and early 1860. But on May 18, 1860, a party out of Mesilla made a big strike in the Pinos Altos Range northwest of the copper mines. By California standards, the influx of rough-hewn Americans set off by this discovery was minor, but by August 1860 seven hundred prospectors spread up the creeks from the new town of Pinos Altos. Mangas told his people to avoid the miners if possible, which was difficult.1
Because of the activity centered on the mining town of Pinos Altos, Geronimo was often drawn to these forested ridges and peaks. They rose to above eight thousand feet but did not offer the tangled terrain that made the Mogollon Mountains to the north so secure a haven for him. The Pinos Altos (Tall Pine) Range lay west of Geronimo’s birthplace and tapered down to the prairies that bore most of the human traffic west and east. They figured frequently in Geronimo’s life so long as miners continued to antagonize the Chiricahuas.
In May 1860 Agent Michael Steck, on leave in Washington, reached agreement with the commissioner of Indian affairs to establish a reservation on the upper Gila for the Mimbres and Bedonkohe Apaches. The reservation formed a square, fifteen miles on each side, anchored on the southeast corner by Santa Lucía Springs. The commissioner requested the US General Land Office to instruct the surveyor general of New Mexico to run the new boundaries.2
By July 1860, the New Mexico superintendent of Indian affairs, James L. Collins, worried that the new reservation would conflict with the invading miners. He looked to a new military post to be established at the foot of the Burro Mountains to guard the Indians against the miners. (A rude collection of cabins christened Fort Floyd soon sprang up, later to be renamed Fort McLane; it lasted only three years.) Collins’s worries quickly took form when a party of Americans settled on the Gila within the reservation intent on founding a town and cultivating the soil to sell food to the miners. Committed to the reservation, the government refused to honor the claim and instructed Collins to remove the interlopers.3
The world of Geronimo and his people verged on great change. Unknown to him, in November 1860 Americans had elected a new Great Father, Abraham Lincoln. Almost at once some of the southern states began to secede from the American union. More would follow, and in April 1861 civil war would break out between North and South. Though far distant from the homeland of the Chiricahuas, they would experience consequences of Americans fighting one another.
Since 1849, Americans had flowed in increasing numbers across the southern route to California. The overland trail brushed the southern edge of Mangas’s country but did not seriously disturb the Apaches. Westward, it climbed to a pass named for a prominent mountain headland, Stein’s Peak (named in honor of Captain Enoch Steen, pronounced Steen although misspelled). The Stein’s Peak Range of wrinkled brown desert mountains, pierced by Stein’s Pass, was shouldered on the south by the Peloncillo Range, a long series of mountains snaking northwest from Mexico across southwestern New Mexico and into Arizona’s Gila country. These mountain chains would play a continuing role in Chiricahua history.
After surmounting Stein’s Pass, the immigrant trail descended a long incline into the flat San Simon Valley, with the forested rocky up thrust of the Chiricahua Mountains rising against the western horizon. The trail then climbed into the Chiricahua Mountains. A large open gap lay to their north, but it was waterless, which forced all since Spanish times to cross the mountains through Apache Pass. Apache Springs (and several others nearby) provided the necessary water. On the north of the pass, the Dos Cabezos (Two Heads) reared their rocky knobs. On the south lay the peaks, forests, and rocky spires of the Chiricahua Mountains.
Much longer and more tortuous than Stein’s Pass, Apache Pass opened on the west to the Sulphur Springs Valley, separating the Chiricahua from the Dragoon Mountains. This broad valley, rich with nutritious grama grasses, proved ideal cattle country—once the Indian threat moderated.
These mountains and valleys formed the homeland of Cochise’s Chokonens. “Cochise’s Stronghold,” hidden among immense piles of boulders in the Dragoon Mountains, provided a virtually inaccessible base for the chief, but he frequently could be found in Apache Pass.
In 1858 the Butterfield Overland Mail began running stagecoaches from Saint Louis to San Francisco. The coaches had to labor through Apache Pass on the overland trail. The company established a relay station in the pass, and Cochise quickly made friends with the attendants, even supplying them with firewood. Apache Pass would loom in relations between Americans and Chiricahuas for twenty-six years after 1860.
The Chiricahua Mountains provided Cochise and his Chokonens with the equivalent of Geronimo’s Mogollon Mountains—a secure refuge against any intruders. Rimmed on east and west by two broad valleys, dry but grassy, the Chiricahuas rose to almost ten thousand feet at their highest peak. Twisting canyons drained the summits, providing ideal campsites, well-watered and rich with grass, the walls forming barriers against the incessant wind and the storms of snow and rain that swept the mountains in winter and summer. Ponderosa pine carpeted the heights with green. A forest of rock spires rose from a depression below a high ridge at the northern end. More than a refuge, the Chiricahuas provided the Chokonens with an abundance of game animals and edible plants. Apache Pass at the northern edge was more important to travelers than to the Chokonen residents.
“Cut the Tent,” the Apaches called it. The Bascom Affair, white students have called it ever since 1861. “Cut the Tent” turned Cochise into an unforgiving foe of Americans and set off a war against them that lasted more than a decade. It also alienated Mangas Coloradas and Geronimo from the Americans because they participated, although defense of their homeland from Pinos Altos miners remained their highest priority.4
In January 1861, Cochise returned to the Apache Pass area from a raid into Mexico. In his absence Mangas Coloradas, Geronimo, and some of their men, angry over the miners at Pinos Altos and other disturbances at home, had journeyed to the Chokonen country, then embarked on their own raid into Sonora. They had not returned when “Cut the Tent” began.
As February 1861 opened, Chokonen scouts brought word to Cochise, his people secure in winter lodges in a mountain canyon, of a column of mule-mounted soldiers approaching from the west. That was routine news. Soldiers often threaded Apache Pass, destined for the two forts to the west or to the supply bases on the Rio Grande.
On February 3 Cochise received word that the soldiers had camped near the Butterfield station in Apache Pass and that the officer wished to talk with him. Prodded by another messenger the next day, he arrived shortly before noon at the soldier camp, a line of tents near the Butterfield mail station. Sensing no danger, he had some of his family with him—his brother Coyuntura, two nephews, his wife, and two of his children. The officer, flanked by a few soldiers with muskets, exchanged greetings with Cochise, as the troops began their noon-hour lunch, and invited him into his tent at the end of the soldier line. Cochise and Coyuntura entered the tent and ate.
With a white man interpreting, the officer began to question Cochise. The questions actually amounted to an accusation. Cochise, the officer said, had led a raid that seized the young stepson of the interpreter and some of his oxen. The soldiers had come to retrieve them. Cochise vehemently denied the charge, although he knew about the raid. The raiders had not been Chokonens, he explained, but other Apaches. Given a week, Cochise thought he could regain the boy and restore him to his father.
Through the interpreter, the officer informed Cochise that he and his companions would be held prisoners until the boy was turned over. Furious that an American soldier would treat an Apache chief so insolently, Cochise instantly drew his knife, slashed the canvas wall of the tent, and bolted up the slope of a steep hill behind the line of soldier tents. The interpreter managed to fire a pistol round before the soldiers could even load their muskets. Swiftly Cochise gained the edge of a broad ravine and disappeared. Before he could follow, soldiers seized Coyuntura, as well as the rest of Cochise’s family. As Geronimo recalled years later, Cochise escaped by “cutting through the tent.”5
An hour after his escape, Cochise came to a hilltop and shouted, asking to see Coyuntura. The soldiers answered with a blast of musketry. Cochise replied to this affront by raising his hand and, through the interpreter, denouncing the soldiers for wrongly accusing him of theft. He swore revenge, then vanished behind the hills.
Early the next morning, February 5, Cochise dispatched a group of men to approach the stage station, where the troops now had barricaded themselves in the corrals. The Indians bore a white flag. A single Apache advanced to declare that Cochise wanted to talk between the lines. As the officer, interpreter, and two soldiers ventured out, so did Cochise and three comrades. Cochise tried to convince the officer that he did not have the boy and pleaded for the return of his family. The officer’s only response was a promise to release the family once the captive boy had been delivered.
With these talks under way, one of the station attendants, a friend of Cochise’s, set forth to try to make his own peace. As he tipped over the crest of a ravine, Apaches seized him. As they struggled, the officer and his group raced back to the station. The Indians opened fire, knocking one down with a bullet in his back. The others made it to the corral, where the barricaded soldiers returned the Apache fire. Now Cochise had his own prisoner to bargain with.
At this point Mangas Coloradas reached the scene. He and Geronimo and their Bedonkohe warriors had returned from the raid in Sonora and joined Cochise in grappling with the crisis. Cochise retained leadership, but Geronimo took part as directed by Cochise.
The following day, February 6, Cochise watched from the hills as soldiers cautiously led mules to water in Apache Springs. Still hoping to end the affair peacefully, he refrained from ambushing them on the trail twisting down a ravine to the springs. Instead, he appeared on a slope above the mail station leading the Butterfield employee seized the day before. He had bound the man’s hands behind his back and looped a rope around his neck. He offered to exchange the prisoner and sixteen mules for his family. Again the officer refused. Only the release of the captive boy would end the stalemate.
A few hours later Cochise gained more hostages for bargaining. A freight train of five wagons entered Apache Pass from the west. Cochise had followed its approach across the Sulphur Springs Valley. Near the summit he sprang the trap. Geronimo strongly implies that he participated in this atrocity. They surrounded the train, seized the mules, and took the teamsters prisoner. Of the nine men, they spared the three Americans but bound the six Mexicans to the wagon wheels, tortured them, and set the wagons afire. Geronimo’s hatred for Mexicans would have given him particular pleasure in slicing, then incinerating the Mexicans.
Even though he now held four American captives, Cochise thought more could be taken from the eastbound stagecoach approaching in the hours of darkness after midnight. At the summit he opened fire from the hills on all sides. His men hit two of the mules and the driver. A passenger jumped from the coach, cut out the fallen mules, mounted the box, and whipped the remaining mules into a gallop, the Apaches in pursuit. They had destroyed a rude stone bridge that carried the road across a steep ravine. The mules hurtled across the ravine and, spurred by the momentum of the coach, clawed their way back to the road. The chase continued three miles to the stage station. Cochise still held but four hostages.
Sending his people back to their winter homes, Cochise resolved on one last effort to regain his family. On February 8 Chokonens and Bedonkohes attacked another detachment leading mules to the springs for water. This resulted in a desperate conflict with reinforcements sent from the stage station, but as the Apaches drew off, they stampeded all the mules and left the soldiers on foot.
The stalemate, however, had ended. Cochise gave up the fight and with some Chokonens embarked on a raid into Sonora. Mangas Coloradas, with Geronimo and the Bedonkohes, turned east toward their home on the upper Gila. Before parting, however, they tortured, killed, and mutilated their prisoners and left their remains near the summit of the pass.
Reinforcements arrived for the soldiers, who remained for more than a week scouring the country for Apaches. Finding none, they marched away on February 19, pausing at the summit of Apache Pass to hang Cochise’s brother and two nephews from the limbs of oak trees. (The wife and children were liberated.)
The standoff with the officer had been bad enough, but nothing could have stoked Cochise’s fury more than the wanton hanging of his family as the soldiers left.
None of the Apaches knew the officer or much of what animated the military in conducting this mission. The officer was Second Lieutenant George N. Bascom, and part of his regiment, the Seventh Infantry, garrisoned Fort Buchanan.
The Gadsden Purchase, ratified in 1854, had added southern Arizona to the Territory of New Mexico. With Americans already in the little adobe town of Tucson and prospecting for gold farther up the Santa Cruz River, the New Mexico civil and military systems had to be projected into Arizona. Late in 1856 Major Enoch Steen led two squadrons of the First Dragoons through Stein’s Pass and marched to Tucson. Finding it unsuited for a military post, early in 1857 Steen moved fifty miles to the southeast and established Fort Buchanan in the verdant Sonoita Valley. Michael Steck showed up to try to cement relations with the Apaches to the north and west. To the east, Chiricahuas gave little trouble, but others, chiefly Aravaipas, brought on dragoon campaigns that accomplished little. By 1860 a sister post, Fort Breckinridge, had risen on the lower San Pedro River to help guard the Butterfield coaches that began to appear in 1859. West of Cochise’s country, therefore, two forts established American military presence in southern Arizona, Forts Buchanan and Breckinridge.6
On January 27, 1861, Aravaipa Apaches raided the ranch of John Ward in the Sonoita Valley near Fort Buchanan. They ran off some oxen and took captive Ward’s stepson, mixed-blood offspring of an Apache and Ward’s Mexican wife, a former captive of the Apaches. (Sold to and reared by the White Mountain Apaches, the boy grew up to figure prominently in Apache history as Mickey Free, an interpreter widely distrusted by the Chiricahuas.) Ward trailed the raiders only as far as the San Pedro, then hastened to Fort Buchanan to tell his story to Lieutenant Colonel Pitcairn Morrison. The trail, Ward contended, showed that the culprits were Cochise’s Chiricahuas in Apache Pass.
Morrison assigned a company of the Seventh Infantry to take the field and try to recover the boy. With the company’s captain and first lieutenant absent, the mission fell to Second Lieutenant Bascom. Morrison instructed Bascom to march to Apache Pass and take any measures he thought needed, including force, to recover the boy. Leading fifty-four infantrymen on mules and accompanied by John Ward to act as interpreter, Bascom set forth for Apache Pass. His arrival on February 3 led to the “Cut the Tent” sequence that so infuriated Cochise.7
On his return to Fort Buchanan, Lieutenant Bascom submitted a self-serving report that by omission and commission portrayed his role in the fiasco as an exercise in sound judgment and competent command. Colonel Morrison, possibly aware of his own culpability in sending an inexperienced young officer lacking in judgment to act in any way his judgment dictated, accepted the report at face value.
Bascom gained a commendation from the department commander and, with the outbreak of the Civil War, rose rapidly to captain. He was killed in the Battle of Valverde in 1862 and honored in the name of a short-lived military post, Fort Bascom.
Arizona paid a heavy price for Bascom’s blunder.
“After this trouble,” Geronimo recalled, “all the Indians agreed not to be friendly with the white men any more.”8
Although a significant understatement, the agreement did take place. It occurred after Mangas Coloradas, Geronimo, and the Bedonkohes had returned to their homes on the upper Gila following the “Cut the Tent” affair. They found conditions no better than when they had left, the Pinos Altos miners still making trouble for everyone—Apaches, the army at nearby Fort McLane, and freighters on the overland trail. The Bedonkohes began raiding far and wide. In April 1861 Mangas journeyed to Apache Pass for the war council with Cochise that Geronimo recalled.
The leaders agreed to strike in two groups of about sixty men each, Cochise in the area west of Stein’s Peak, Mangas the whites at Pinos Altos, the Santa Rita copper mines, and the Mimbres River. Freighters on the overland trail fell prey to the raiders and lost many mules. Farmers and ranchers on the Mimbres River fled their homes. Miners began to abandon Pinos Altos.
The Bedonkohes and Chihennes not only watched their victims yielding to their raids. They witnessed other strange happenings. For one, the Butterfield coaches disappeared from their accustomed passage on the overland trail. Even stranger, the soldiers began to march away from their forts, headed east. In New Mexico, the garrison of Fort McLane abandoned the post; in Arizona, the same occurred at Forts Buchanan and Breckinridge. They gathered at Fort Fillmore near Mesilla. Both Cochise and Mangas concluded they had driven the soldiers out of the country.
All that remained was to rid their homeland of all whites, and the war they agreed to in April continued through the summer into the fall without letup. The townsmen still clinging to Pinos Altos offered an especially tempting target.
Gradually, the Apaches learned that the soldiers had departed not because of Apache aggressions but because war had erupted in the East between North and South, and the soldiers in the West left to join in the fight of brother against brother. Some of these soldiers united with their southern brothers. Most remained in their blue uniforms to fight with their northern brothers.
A new era had dawned in the Apaches’ fight with the white people.9