US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0137/01370.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 21KB | 355 lines

$Unique_ID{USH01370}
$Pretitle{120}
$Title{Fort Bowie and the Chiricahua Apaches
Chapter 4  The Cochise Wars}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Utley, Robert M.}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{apache
fort
pass
bowie
cochise
howard
indians
new
peace
post}
$Volume{}
$Date{1977}
$Log{George Washington Bowie*0137001.scf
}
Book:        Fort Bowie and the Chiricahua Apaches
Author:      Utley, Robert M.
Affiliation: National Park Service
Date:        1977

Chapter 4  The Cochise Wars

     One of the passengers on the eastbound stagecoach that almost fell prey
to Cochise's warriors was Lt. John Rogers Cooke, son of one of the Army's most
prominent cavalry officers, Col. Philip St. George Cooke.  The young officer's
presence on the coach was symptomatic of a gathering storm about to break over
the United States, for he was traveling east to resign his commission and
offer his services to his home State, Virginia, in case war should break out.

     Two months after the Bascom affair, South Carolina troops fired on Fort
Sumter, and the Civil War was on.  Texas troops that marched into the Rio
Grande Valley above El Paso in July 1861 found the citizens sympathetic to the
southern cause.  The commander, Lt. Col. John R. Baylor, proclaimed all of
southern New Mexico west to the Colorado River as the Confederate Territory of
Arizona.  The weak Federal garrisons at Forts Buchanan and Breckinridge
hastily abandoned their posts and withdrew northward, beyond the range of
Baylor's patrols.  The Butterfield stage line had already been moved to a more
northerly route.  In February 1862 a Confederate cavalry company under Capt.
Sherod Hunter marched west to occupy Tucson.  At the same time, a full brigade
of Texans under Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley thrust northward with the objective
of seizing all New Mexico and, ultimately, Denver and the Colorado gold mines.

     Knowing nothing of the great war in the East, the Apaches supposed that
they had frightened the soldiers into leaving.  Encouraged, they terrorized
the land with robbery, pillage, and murder.  Only in Tucson did white people
feel safe.  And Cochise all but choked off traffic at Apache Pass.

     To meet the threat posed by Sibley's invasion of New Mexico, Union
strategists organized a brigade of 1,800 volunteers to march eastward from
California.  Under Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, a flint-eyed, hard bitten
veteran of the Regular Army, the Californians occupied Tucson in May 1862.
Hunter's Confederates pulled back to the Rio Grande in the face of their
advance.

     In June Carleton sent out advance parties to prepare for the march to the
Rio Grande.  Already, Cochise's warriors had killed two couriers in Apache
Pass.  Later the chief and one of Carleton's officers warily exchanged
greetings in Apache Pass, but that night Indians shot and lanced three
soldiers who had strayed from the command and stirred a momentary turmoil by
pouring a volley of musketry into the military camp.

     Another advance party approached Apache Pass on July 15.  With 126 men,
both infantry and cavalry, a battery of two howitzers, and a large wagon
train, Capt. Thomas H. Roberts had set forth from Tucson five days earlier. At
Dragoon Springs he had divided his command, leaving Capt. John C. Cremony with
most of the cavalry and the train while he and the infantry and artillery
pushed on to see whether Apache Springs contained enough water. Among the
rocks and gullies of Apache Pass, the warriors of both Cochise and Mangas
Coloradas lay in wait.

     At noon on July 15 the infantry marched innocently into the ambush.  From
above and on both sides the Apaches opened fire.  Roberts quickly retreated,
re-formed his command, and advanced once more into the pass.  Skirmishing down
the old stage road, the troops reached the abandoned Butterfield station. They
could not get to water; however, for the Indians had gathered behind rock
breastworks on the slopes commanding the springs.  As Roberts later reported,
"they seemed very loath to let me have water."  He then ran his howitzers into
position, and the bursting artillery shells scattered the warriors over the
hill.  The soldiers took possession of the springs.

     Roberts sent six cavalrymen back to tell Captain Cremony that an infantry
detachment would be left to hold the springs while the rest marched back to
escort the wagons.  No sooner had the couriers left the pass than about 40
Apaches attacked them.  In a running fight Pvt. John W. Teal fell behind.  A
bullet dropped his horse.  Taking cover behind the dying animal, Teal held the
circling Indians at bay with his carbine and revolver.  A well-placed shot
wounded Mangas Coloradas himself, and the warriors promptly lost interest in
the contest.  Shouldering his saddle, Teal followed the trail of his comrades
and, after a 13-kilometer hike, joined them at Cremony's new camp.

     Roberts and his exhausted infantry arrived at midnight, and next morning
the entire command returned to the pass.  During the night the Indians had
reoccupied the breastworks above the springs and again an artillery
bombardment cleared them out.  After digging out the springs and increasing
the flow of water, the troops departed on July 17.  In the two-day battle,
Captain Roberts had lost two killed and two wounded, and he reported that his
men had killed nine Indians.  An Apache participant later told Captain
Cremony: "We would have done well enough if you had not fired wagons at us."

     Reporting the Battle of Apache Pass, Captain Roberts advised General
Carleton that "a force sufficient to hold the water and pass should be
stationed there, otherwise every command will have to fight for water."
Carleton, arriving at Apache Pass with the bulk of the Californians on July
27, agreed.  As he later reported, he found it "indispensably necessary to
establish a post in what is known as Apache Pass."

     At the old Butterfield mail station, Carleton's adjutant wrote out the
order establishing Fort Bowie, named in honor of the commander of the 5th
Infantry, California Volunteers, Col. George Washington Bowie.  The order
specified that 100 men of Companies A and G of the 5th would remain to build
the fort.  Maj. T. A. Coult would superintend construction and serve as the
first post commander.  He would also escort travelers, mail couriers, and
supply trains through the pass and "cause the Apache Indians to be attacked
whenever and wherever he may find them near his post."  The next day, July 28,
1862, Fort Bowie officially came to life.

[See George Washington Bowie: George Washington Bowie, colonel of the 5th
California Infantry, was the man for whom Fort Bowie was named.]

     Completed in two and one-half weeks, the new fort looked more like a
temporary camp than a permanent installation.  It sprawled on a hill
dominating the springs.  On the four faces of this hill the Californians built
defensive outworks.  As Coult described them:

The total length of wall around the post is 412 feet, the height four to four
and a half feet, and thickness from two and a half to three feet at bottom,
tapering to eighteen inches to two feet at top, and built of stones weighing
from twenty-five to 500 pounds.  The works are not of any regular form, my
only object being to build defenses which could be speedily completed, and at
the same time possess the requisites of sheltering their defenders, commanding
every approach to the hill, and protecting each other by flank fires along
their faces.

The breastworks enclosed canvas tents in which the men lived, as well as a
stone guardhouse equipped with firing ports.

     Even though a makeshift creation, Fort Bowie, Coult believed, would serve
its purpose.  It did.  Officers and men alike regarded it as an exceedingly
undesirable station even after a larger and more substantial post was built.
But despite any discomforts, the post was effective and the Chiricahuas never
again controlled Apache Pass.

     By the time Carleton reached the Rio Grande, General Sibley's
Confederates had been defeated and driven back to Texas by Volunteer troops
from Colorado.  For the remaining years of the Civil War, therefore, the
Californians joined New Mexico Volunteers in fighting Indians in both New
Mexico and the Territory of Arizona, which was carved out of western New
Mexico in 1863.

     One of the Californians' first blows fell on Mangas Coloradas.  After the
Battle of Apache Pass, a Mexican doctor had been forced to remove Teal's
carbine bullet from the chief's chest.  Six months later he was back home,
harassing miners at the Pinos Altos gold mines, near modern Silver City, N.M.
Some of Carleton's troops lured him into their grasp with a white flag and
made him prisoner.  That night, as the military report described it, Mangas
"made three efforts to escape and was shot on the third attempt."  A
prospector who was present later disclosed that the "efforts to escape" had
been provoked by heated bayonets applied to Mangas' bare feet.

     The death of Mangas merely confirmed Cochise in his bitterness and he led
his warriors in raids that spared no American or Mexican unlucky enough to
fall within his grasp.  Murders and depredations multiplied, and citizens and
officials cried in vain for enough troops to subjugate the Apaches.

     Almost alone, the tiny garrison at Fort Bowie stood against Cochise's
tribesmen.  Although the troops successfully carried out Carleton's
instructions to protect that part of his line of communication lying through
Apache Pass, they found it impossible to "cause the Apache Indians to be
attacked whenever and wherever" they might be found.  Rarely did the fort hold
more than 100 men; 50 was the usual complement.  Such a small force could do
little more than garrison the post and provide escort service through the
pass.  Occasional patrols sought to ferret out the Indians, but with scant
success.

     Fort Bowie afforded its occupants few of even the most basic comforts.
Describing the fort in 1863, an officer wrote to Carleton:

The quarters, if it is not an abuse of language to call them such, have been
constructed without system, regard to health, defense or convenience.  Those
occupied by the men are mere hovels, mostly excavations in the side hill,
damp, illy ventilated, and covered with decomposed granite taken from the
excavation, through which the rain passes very much as it would through a
sieve.  By the removal of a few tents, the place would present more the
appearance of a California digger rancheria than a military post.

Isolation, bad food, and widespread sickness added to the misery.  And if
Indians were seldom seen they were nevertheless present, making vigilance the
price of life.  To sustain morale, Carleton frequently rotated the garrison.
Not until more than a year after the close of the Civil War were the
California Volunteers discharged.  On May 3, 1866, Capt. W. H. Brown arrived
at Fort Bowie with Company E, 14th U.S. Infantry.

     The Regulars boasted no greater strength than had the Volunteers, but in
1868 they enlarged the fort and made it less primitive.  A new location was
selected on a plateau southeast of the first fort, and construction of adobe
quarters began at once.  Substantial barracks, a row of houses for officers,
corrals and storehouses, a post trader's store, and a commodious hospital soon
occupied the four sides of the sloping parade ground.  In subsequent years
more buildings were added.  At the time of its abandonment in 1894, Fort Bowie
consisted of some three dozen structures, most of them of adobe and milled
timbers.

     In 1866 mail service resumed between El Paso and Tucson.  A post office
opened at Fort Bowie, and mail carriers rode through Apache Pass twice a week.
Cochise's warriors ambushed some carriers.  Whenever one was killed patrols
normally set out in pursuit, but rarely did they catch the offenders.

     In 1869 an unusually able officer took command of Fort Bowie.  As a
dragoon sergeant, Reuben F. Bernard had ridden with the Fort Breckinridge
column to Lieutenant Bascom's relief in 1861.  Now as captain of Troop G, 1st
Cavalry, Bernard returned to Apache Pass to lead a series of aggressive
expeditions against Cochise.  In October 1869 he and 61 men fought a battle
with Apaches in the Chiricahua Mountains and killed 18 warriors.  A week later
he encountered Cochise again and, after a hard fight, found himself and his
troops surrounded and forced to fortify his position.  A relief party from
Bowie failed to break the siege, and only when a strong force from Camp
Crittenden approached did the Apaches scatter into the mountains.  Early in
1870 Bernard retaliated by surprising his foes in the Dragoon Mountains and
killing 13.  Again in January 1871 Bernard struck.  He fell on a hostile camp
in the Pinal Mountains, killed nine Indians, and wounded many more.

     Much of the same pattern of conflict prevailed throughout Arizona as
other Apaches followed Cochise's example.  The Regulars strove to meet this
challenge and established more forts - Crittenden, Grant, Lowell, Verde,
McDowell, and Apache.  Each provided a base for the kind of small-unit
operations that Captain Bernard mounted at Bowie.  But despite dozens of
battles and skirmishes, hostilities dragged on year after year.

     In 1871, to breathe new life into a lagging military effort, the Army
assigned a new commander to the Department of Arizona.  Although a junior
lieutenant colonel, George Crook had demonstrated in recent campaigns against
tribes in Idaho and Oregon that, unlike most Regular Army officers, he
understood the conditions of war with a foe that did not fight in the orthodox
manner.

     Crook's first objective was "to iron all the wrinkles out of Cochise's
band."  In the midst of a familiarization tour of Fort Bowie and other posts,
however, he learned that the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant had
decided to test its highly touted "Peace Policy" in Arizona.  Disgusted, Crook
suspended his plans while emissaries of the President attempted the new
approach of "conquest by kindness."

     The first two peace emissaries, Gen. Gordon Granger and Vincent Colyer,
failed to make a settlement with Cochise.  A third then tried.  He was Brig.
Gen. Oliver O. Howard, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War on loan to the
Interior Department.  His deep and prominently displayed piety led Crook to
view him as a pompous religious fanatic.  But Howard was wholly committed to
the Peace Policy.  While Crook chafed at the delay of his campaign, Howard
made one unsuccessful effort after another to open communication with Cochise.

     Finally, Howard chanced upon an army scout named Thomas J. Jeffords.

     In 1867 Jeffords had superintended the mail service between Fort Bowie
and Tucson but had resigned in disgust over the Army's inability to protect
his mail riders.  As a prospector, he had then worked out an arrangement with
Cochise personally that earned him immunity from Chiricahua war parties and
laid the basis for a lifelong friendship.  Jeffords consented to guide Howard
to Cochise's stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains if no military escort went
along.  Howard agreed to this condition.

     The party that rode westward across the Sulphur Springs Valley late in
September 1872 consisted only of Howard and his aide, Jeffords, and two
Chiricahuas.  Repeatedly, they kindled a ring of five fires on the prairie to
indicate that five people came in peace.  What their reception would be,
neither Jeffords nor the Apache guides would guess.  One evening two Indian
boys appeared at Howard's bivouac and led the party to a secluded mountain
valley that hid an Apache camp.  Next morning Cochise, accompanied by his
brother, son, and two wives rode into the camp.  "This is the man," whispered
Jeffords to Howard.  The general waited apprehensively.  Cochise dismounted,
embraced Jeffords warmly, then turned to Howard, grasped his hand, and said,
"Buenos dias, Senor."

Oliver Otis Howard

     Oliver Otis Howard is one of those persons who doesn't quite fit any
stereotype.  By profession he was a military man.  By choice he was a
humanitarian.  And throughout his entire life ran a river of idealism that
tempered every act.  He was a complex man who probably had more than his fair
share of admirers and critics.

     Howard was born November 8, 1830, in Leeds, Maine.  After graduation from
Bowdoin College in 1850, he entered West Point and graduated four years later,
fourth in his class.  When the Civil War broke out he began active service as
a colonel in the 3d Maine Regiment.  He lost his right arm at Fair Oaks, Va.,
and in 1893 Congress gave him the Medal of Honor for his courage in that
battle.  Though his personal bravery was never questioned, controversy
surrounded his decisions and judgments during the battles of Chancellorsville
and Gettysburg.  In 1864 he was promoted to brigadier general in the Regular
Army.

     At the end of the war, President Andrew Johnson appointed him
commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau.  In enthusiasm and passion Howard was a
choice without peer, but as an executive and administrator he was sorely
lacking.  He failed to see that his subordinates were inept and corrupt and
would not tolerate criticism of his staff.  He thereby effectively undermined
the workings of the Bureau and soon exhausted the reservoir of goodwill that
the Bureau had originally had.

     Howard was instrumental in founding Howard University, which was named
for him, and served as its first president from 1869 to 1874.  In the mid-
1870's he returned to active military life and participated mostly in the
Indian Wars, fighting against the Apaches, Nez Perce, the Bannocks, and
Paiutes.  From 1882 he was superintendent of West Point and in 1886 he was
promoted to major general.  Eight years later he retired.

Howard Meets Cochise

     Years after General Howard's meeting with Cochise, Howard wrote a
children's book about the incident.  This passage from Famous Indian Chiefs I
Have Known describes the initial confrontation:

We had just had our breakfast when the chief [Cochise] rode in. He wore a
single robe of stout cotton cloth and a Mexican sombrero on his head with
eagle feathers on it. With him were his sister and his wife, Natchee, his son,
about fourteen years old, and Juan, his brother, besides other Indians.  When
he saw us he sprang from his horse and threw his arms about Jeffords and
embraced him twice, first on one side, then on the other.  When Jeffords told
him who I was, he turned to me in a gentlemanly way, holding out his hand and
saying:  "Buenos dias, senor."  He greeted us all pleasantly and asked us to
go to the council ground where the chief Indians had already gathered . . . .

Ponce and Chie first told Cochise all about me, who I was, and what I had done
for other Indians.  He seemed very pleased with the story, and you may be sure
we watched very carefully to see how he took it. I answered him plainly that
the President had sent me to make peace with him.  He replied: "Nobody wants
peace more than I do. I have killed ten white men for every Indian I have
lost, but still the white men are no less, and my tribe keeps growing smaller
and smaller, till it will disappear from the face of the earth if we do not
have a good peace soon."

Cochise on Peace

     During the 1871 negotiations that ultimately failed, Cochise made a
statement of his hopes to Gen. Gordon Granger:

Now that I am cool I have come with my hands open to you to live in peace with
you.  I speak straight and do not wish to deceive or be deceived. I want a
good, strong and lasting peace.  When God made the world he gave one part to
the white man and another to the Apache.  Why was it?  Why did they come
together?  Now, that I am to speak, the sun, the moon, the earth, the air, the
waters, the birds and beasts, even the children unborn shall rejoice at my
words . . . .  I do not wish to hide anything from you nor have you hide
anything from me; I will not lie to you; do not lie to me. I want to live in
these mountains; I do not want to go to Tularosa.  That is a long ways off.
The flies on those mountains eat out the eyes of the horses.  The bad spirits
live there.  I have drunk of these waters and they have cooled me. I do not
want to leave here.