AS MANGAS COLORADAS AND Cochise plotted further war on the Americans during the summer of 1861, they could not have been ignorant of events that drew more white men into the Chiricahua domain. They doubtless knew nothing of the conventions assembled in Mesilla and Tucson in March 1861 that voted to create a Confederate Territory of Arizona in southern New Mexico and Arizona. But they surely watched the military force that reached Mesilla from the south in July. They wore gray rather than blue uniforms (if they wore uniforms at all), and they forced the surrender of the bluecoats gathered from the abandoned posts at Fort Fillmore. These events did not affect the chiefs’ resolve to assail the closer enemies still living in Pinos Altos.
Geronimo took no part in these events. Increasingly he followed his own instincts rather than consistently join in the movements of Mangas Coloradas. During the summer of 1861, Geronimo set off with some Bedonkohes for a raid into Chihuahua in the vicinity of Casas Grandes. In a fierce battle with Mexican soldiers, he suffered a serious wound. His comrades treated him and withdrew to the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona, near Tucson, where they camped with their families as he healed. But Mexican troops had followed. In September, with many men absent hunting, the soldiers launched a surprise dawn attack. Geronimo succeeded in escaping with Chee-hash-kish, his second wife. But his third wife, Nana-tha-thithl, and their child died in the deadly fire that killed most of the women. The troops burned the camp and returned to Mexico with four women captives. Now Geronimo had lost two wives, four children, and his mother to Mexican troops. His rage at Mexicans is easily understood.1
As Geronimo fled the massacre of his people by Mexican soldiers far to the west, Cochise and Mangas assembled a large alliance of Chiricahuas to attack Pinos Altos. The force, several hundred strong, consisted of their own Bedonkohes and Chokonens as well as Chihennes. At daybreak on September 27 they surrounded the town and its satellite mining camps and attacked from all sides. The startled miners, isolated in scattered defenses, could not mount effective resistance. The battle raged all morning, with heavy casualties on both sides. Unknown to the Apaches, a small Confederate detachment was camped in the town. The officer organized his own men and the miners into a fighting force. Around noon they fired a small cannon filled with nails at the Apaches, then counterattacked. The Apaches gave way and fled the scene.2
The alliance attacked several freight trains on the overland road, but they found themselves now facing fresh soldiers. Mangas was now more than seventy years old; he tired easily and increasingly wanted peace. The younger Cochise, full of vigor, took the more active role in the warfare of the alliance. By the end of 1861 the two chiefs had parted, Cochise to strike into Mexico, Mangas to withdraw to his accustomed sanctuary on the upper Gila. Secure in his refuge, he may not have been fully aware of the actions of the new officers and troops at Mesilla. In February 1862 they sent a column west to take possession of Tucson. Also in the spring they sent more soldiers to occupy and defend Pinos Altos, and they tried to wage a war of extermination on the Chihennes.
The newcomers at Mesilla were a Texas regiment of Confederate troops under Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor. In February 1862 he sent a detachment under Captain Sherod Hunter to occupy Tucson. Soon a formidable brigade of Confederate Texans under Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley marched up the Rio Grande with the mission of conquering New Mexico and even Colorado for the Confederacy. While Baylor remained in Mesilla, Sibley defeated Union troops under Colonel Edward R. S. Canby in the Battle of Valverde, south of Socorro. Not until after seizing Santa Fe and advancing up the Santa Fe Trail toward Colorado did Sibley meet defeat. On March 26–28, 1862, at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, Colorado Volunteers turned back the Confederate invasion.
As Sibley’s battered, demoralized troops straggled down the Rio Grande and back to Texas, Baylor remained in Mesilla. He pursued a relentless campaign against the Chihennes. Alerted to the approach of a large Union force from the west, Baylor ordered Captain Hunter to withdraw his small force from Tucson. Cochise attacked them while they camped at Dragoon Springs, killed four men, and ran off thirty mules and twenty-five horses. Unmolested, the rest of the soldiers continued through Apache Pass and reached the Rio Grande in safety.
Cochise had also learned of the large column of bluecoats approaching Tucson from the west, marching across the desert in separate contingents because of the distance between water holes. He knew they entered Tucson and that some marched to reoccupy abandoned Forts Buchanan and Breckinridge. They then began to move eastward, again in separate detachments, toward the heart of Cochise’s homeland.
On June 25, 1862, Cochise looked down from the hills as 140 American soldiers camped at the abandoned Butterfield station in Apache Pass. With the execution of his brother and nephews by American soldiers still fresh in his memory, he did not greet these soldiers in friendship. From above Apache Springs, his men fired down at the troops watering their horses. They stopped, however, when a white flag appeared below. An hour later, backed by seventy-five men, Cochise ventured down to talk with the American officer. He assured the chief that they came in peace and wanted to be friends. He then handed over presents of tobacco and pemmican. After the meeting ended, the officer discovered that three of his soldiers had been shot, lanced, and stripped. A frantic pursuit of the culprits revealed only mocking Apaches watching from high hills and ridges. The soldiers moved two miles farther east and camped. During the night Apaches fired into the camp, wounding a soldier and killing a horse. The next morning the column formed and hastened east on the trail. The Apaches let them go.
From the officer’s revelations, Cochise quickly concluded that these American newcomers foreshadowed a fresh offensive into his country and that they numbered too many for him to contest without help. He sent out an appeal for another great alliance. Mangas Coloradas and his Bedonkohes responded. So did Chihennes of Victorio and Nana, and even Juh with a few Nednhis. Within hardly more than a week, they gathered at Apache Pass.
Victorio was a chief of the Warm Springs, or Ojo Caliente, local group of the Chihennes. Born about 1820, he rapidly became a conspicuous fighter. Shorter than Mangas Coloradas, he nevertheless boasted the usual powerful Apache physique and a potential for leadership that elevated him to chief. The less warlike Loco, also competent and respected, inherited a chieftainship at the same time as Victorio. When Chihenne war parties took the field, however, Victorio rather than Loco rode in the lead. Thus his speedy response to Cochise’s call for help at Apache Pass.3
Nana, a tall Warm Springs Chihenne with a decided limp, never attained a chieftainship. But he rode as a highly effective war leader for decades. He married Geronimo’s sister, Nah-dos-te (his one full sister, not a cousin). Staunchly loyal to Victorio, he could usually be found in any war expedition led by Victorio, such as the impending conflict at Apache Pass in 1862.4
Whether Geronimo and his followers, who had been struck by Mexicans in September 1861, participated in Cochise’s effort to fight off the return of the Americans is unrecorded. He dictated nothing of these significant events for his autobiography. Never, in fact, would he talk to whites about conflict with white soldiers. But he had participated in every previous important occasion that brought Mangas and Cochise together for war or raid, and so formidable and organized was the enterprise at Apache Pass that he must be assumed to have taken part.5
Late on July 14, 1862, Mangas and Cochise spotted a large dust cloud rising from Dragoon Springs, forty miles west of Apache Pass. From what Cochise had learned in his recent talk with the soldier chief at Apache Springs, they knew that another force of American soldiers advanced on the old stage road. They would march all night and into the next day, reaching Apache Pass exhausted and in dire want of water. The chiefs hid fighting men on the slopes shouldering both sides of the trail as it approached the abandoned stage station.
Aware of how the sweltering heat of July 15 would affect the soldiers, Mangas and Cochise let them straggle down the trail. Horsemen arrived at the stage station about noon and began to unsaddle. The footmen soon followed. Twenty men and two supply wagons, with two wheeled vehicles that the Apaches later called “wagon guns,” brought up the rear. The chiefs signaled the attack. From the hillsides, a deadly fusillade tore into these men, killing a soldier and wounding a teamster. From the rear, the Apaches then descended in force and charged the outnumbered rear guard. Soldiers from the station hastened back to the fray, fighting in hand-to-hand combat until the Apaches withdrew into the hills, hastened by rounds from the “wagon guns” bursting among them.
The soldiers still had not reached Apache Springs, some six hundred yards beyond the station in a narrow gorge dominated by steep, rock-strewn slopes on both sides. The Apaches had already studded the slopes with rock breastworks and commanded a field of fire that could sweep the springs below.
Even so, the soldiers had to have water. In the afternoon they deployed and worked carefully up the ravine toward the water. The barricaded Apaches opened fire, secure behind breastworks from any return fire. They had not reckoned, however, on the wagon guns. The soldiers sought to bombard them in their improvised forts. Bursting rounds, however, sprayed the deadly fragments of iron not on them but on the other side of the ridge. Soldiers fanned out in skirmish lines and charged up the slopes. Even though unharmed by the exploding shells, they frightened the defenders into hastily scattering from their defenses.
Amid the confusion, six horsemen galloped west up the trail. Mangas and about twenty men took up the chase. Beyond the summit of the pass, they caught up with the soldiers, wounded one, and hit two horses. One soldier had paused to rest his horse and found himself cut off. Quickly mounting, he expertly maneuvered his horse and avoided the Apaches closing in. He had a repeating carbine, which may have taken them off guard. One of his shots struck Mangas Coloradas in the chest and knocked him from his horse. Quickly his men bore their wounded chieftain to safety, and the soldier escaped.
As the Bedonkohes carried Mangas south to Janos for medical treatment, Cochise and the Chokonens, and any other warriors who had not yet left, reoccupied the breastworks above Apache Springs. Late that afternoon the soldiers marched out of the pass to the west but returned the next morning, July 16, with even more men. At the springs they formed on horseback and foot and advanced with military precision. The wagon guns barked again, the soldiers fired their weapons at the defenders, and then charged. Cochise’s men again scattered as the shells burst above them.
The Apaches had lost the two-day battle, and the soldiers commanded the springs.
Many more soldiers than Cochise had confronted were on the way. California had responded vigorously to the outbreak of the Civil War, raising more volunteer regiments than any other western state or territory. A full brigade of California Volunteers, more than two thousand strong, set forth in early 1862 to span the Southwest and help Colonel Canby fend off the invasion of New Mexico by Confederate general Sibley. Colonel James H. Carleton raised the force, receiving a brigadier’s star while en route. Part of his command defeated some of Captain Sherod Hunter’s Confederates in a brief skirmish at Picacho Peak, north of Tucson, and hastened his return to New Mexico.
A tough, dogmatic veteran of the prewar regular army, Carleton imposed firm discipline, possessed unbounded self-confidence, and had no tolerance for opposition. An experienced Indian fighter, he intended to sweep aside any Indians who interfered with his mission.
By early June 1862 Carleton and most of the California Column had arrived in Tucson. Seeking to open communication with Canby, he dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Edward E. Eyre and 140 cavalrymen to scout the overland trail as far as Mesilla. At Apache Pass on June 25, Eyre talked with Cochise and lost three men before proceeding on to Mesilla. By the time Eyre reached the Rio Grande and learned of Sibley’s defeat and retreat, Baylor had left for Texas and the last of his troops were evacuating Mesilla.
Meanwhile, Carleton planned to move the California Column in stages to the Rio Grande. The first contingent left Tucson on July 10 under Captain Thomas L. Roberts. It consisted of a mixed force of 126 infantry and cavalry, twenty-two teams, and 242 head of cattle. Two howitzers rumbled in the rear, manned by infantry. (Howitzers were cannon designed not for direct fire but for lobbing rounds into the air to descend on the target.) Depositing wagonloads of supplies on the San Pedro River for the next detachment, Roberts left an escort for the train and cattle to follow and, with sixty infantrymen, eight cavalrymen, and the howitzers, continued to Dragoon Springs. Resting here for two days, on the afternoon of July 14 he resumed the march across the Sulphur Springs Valley. The dust cloud raised by his column alerted Cochise and Mangas Coloradas that it would reach Apache Pass the next day, July 15.
The two-day Battle of Apache Pass ensued. Roberts proved a superior leader, expertly deploying his troops and his artillery. Both on July 15 and again on the next day, his howitzers proved the decisive factor in the victory, even though the shells burst over the reverse slope instead of above the Apaches.6
Captain Roberts had not only won an important victory. Even more significant, when General Carleton arrived at the pass on July 27, Roberts strongly recommended that a military post be erected on the top of the hill overlooking the springs. Otherwise, he argued, every command that attempted to pass would have to fight for water. Carleton readily agreed.
Fort Bowie, named for one of the California colonels, rose on this site. Later moved a short distance to the east, Fort Bowie would prove a festering sore in the heart of the Chiricahua domain for the remaining decades of Apache warfare. Not until eight years after the collapse of Apache resistance did the troops march away.7
Carleton reached Fort Thorn on the Rio Grande early in August 1862 and proceeded at once to Santa Fe. Canby had gained promotion to brigadier and a transfer to the East. Carleton inherited his command of the Department of New Mexico, over which he reigned tyrannically for the rest of the Civil War years. Confronted on his journey across the Southwest with evidence of the ferocity of Apache hostilities, he had left most of the California Column in southern New Mexico under his blustery second-in-command, Colonel Joseph R. West. Elevated to brigadier general in October 1862, West turned to the Apaches with the same venom as his Confederate predecessor, John R. Baylor.8
By mid-August 1862, Mangas and his followers who had fought at Apache Pass in July had returned to their home country. In Janos, his men had forced a Mexican doctor to dig the ball received in the battle out of their chief’s chest. Despite his age, he healed quickly enough to travel back to the upper Gila and the Mogollons. He wanted nothing more than to make peace with the Americans and resume farming at Santa Lucía.
Only about thirty families still lived in Pinos Altos, although a contingent of men formerly in Confederate service helped bolster their defenses. Mangas journeyed north to Ácoma to send an appeal for peace to the new general in Santa Fe. Receiving no answer, he went back home to try bargaining with the people at Pinos Altos. He found them receptive. In council in the town itself, he talked with a tall man, who promised to issue beef, blankets, and other provisions if he would bring all his people in. The tall man was Jack Swilling, a former Confederate militia officer. Mangas agreed to come back in two weeks.9
As so often in the past, Mangas trusted the Americans. After the meeting in Pinos Altos, he gathered the Bedonkohes south of Stein’s Peak in the Peloncillo Mountains for a council to decide the next move. Mangas described his hopes for the future: peace with the Americans and a life of undisturbed farming at Santa Lucía. He wished to lead the Bedonkohes to Pinos Altos and deliver this message. Few of the Bedonkohe leaders, including Geronimo, trusted the Americans or thought this a good idea, and they expressed their disapproval. But Mangas still projected the magnetism of old, and all consented to a compromise. Half the band would return to Pinos Altos under Mangas and learn whether the Americans acted in good faith. The other half would remain in Arizona to await word of how the Americans had reacted. In another indication of Geronimo’s increasing independence, he stayed in Arizona.
Before again heading for Pinos Altos, Mangas conferred with the Chihenne leaders Victorio and Nana. Both agreed with the Bedonkohes who waited in Arizona. The Americans could not be trusted. Even so, Victorio and some Chihennes joined Bedonkohes to act as a bodyguard for Mangas as he approached Pinos Altos.
Late in the morning of January 17, 1863, Mangas and his escort arrived within 150 yards of the town, walking slowly. The same tall man who had previously greeted Mangas, Jack Swilling, came forward from the men lined up behind him. When the two met, exchanging words in broken Spanish, Swilling looked back, and suddenly his men leveled their rifles. He informed Mangas that he now would remain as a hostage for the good behavior of his men. As the two started back to the town, the body guard advanced, too. Swilling informed Mangas that they would not be needed. As Mangas dismissed them, he stoically comprehended that he had been betrayed and would probably be killed. At an earlier stage of life, his cunning might have worked an escape. Now past seventy, he understood such an attempt to be futile.
At the edge of town, soldiers emerged from hiding in shacks and chaparral, although Swilling did not turn Mangas over to them. Geronimo, Victorio, Nana, and others who counseled against taking the Americans at their word had been right. Their chief should not have undertaken so risky a move. They knew the Americans could not be trusted.
The next day, the soldiers formed and, accompanied by Swilling with his own men and his prisoner, rode toward the old army post of Fort McLane. Although burned by the Apaches when abandoned, its ruins had been re-occupied by troops. Here Swilling turned Mangas over to an American general. He was Joseph H. West, a pompous little officer Carleton had left to war against the Apaches in southern New Mexico. Now aware of his impending fate, Mangas denied the general’s accusations that he had led all the bloody raids of the past few years in southern New Mexico and Arizona.
Warned that any attempt to escape would cost him his life, Mangas entered the shells of one of the fallen adobe buildings with two guards. The soldiers ordered him to the ground, gave him a single blanket, and built a fire nearby for themselves. As the night of January 18 turned bitterly cold, the chief bore the torment under the single blanket. At midnight four more soldiers replaced his two-man guard. One soldier walked sentry on half the building’s perimeter, a second on the other half. The two remaining with Mangas heated their bayonets in the fire and several times pressed them against his legs and feet. Mangas shifted from one side to another and tried to tighten the blanket around him. About an hour after the new guards took station, now January 19, 1863, Mangas raised on one elbow and loudly protested this treatment. Both soldiers raised their muskets and fired into the chief’s chest. He fell back on the ground. Another soldier advanced to fire a revolver into Mangas’s skull. If he was not already dead, he was now. The old man, now about seventy-three, had paid the price for his trust in the Americans.
General West himself had arranged for Mangas’s death. He personally instructed the guard detail before they took station beside Mangas at midnight: “Men, that old murderer has got away from every soldier command and has left a trail of blood for five hundred miles on the old stage line. I want him dead or alive tomorrow morning, do you understand? I want him dead.”
The next morning, January 19, 1863, West got what he wanted. His official report, contrived less for a sympathetic Carleton than for public consumption, explained that Mangas had been shot on his third attempt to escape. Hung together by one fabrication after another, the report concluded that “the good faith of the U.S. Military authorities was in no way compromised.”10
General West had not finished with the Apaches, as Geronimo would soon learn. But he had decisively ended a long and significant era in the history of all the Chiricahua bands. His treachery, backed by General Carleton, would forever blacken the record of American relations with the Apaches.
Although a Bedonkohe, Mangas Coloradas had towered over the history of all the Chiricahua bands for more than thirty years. Other influential chiefs of the bands and local groups had come and gone. Mangas reigned supreme. No other chief rivaled him in influence or stature. Cochise came close but had not attained this distinction by the time of the perfidious slaying of his friend and father-in-law.
Geronimo, Mangas’s most important protégé, had already begun to drift toward Cochise. He surely mourned his mentor’s death, but it freed him from the magnetism that had bound him to the old chief for twenty years. He would excel Mangas Coloradas in only one way: his name would resonate around the world as the best-known of all Indian leaders. In no other way, however, did Geronimo approach the significance of Mangas Coloradas.
Mangas Coloradas was simply the greatest of all Apache chiefs.