On the afternoon of February 4, 1861, a young lieutenant in a blue army coat stood at the entrance of a canvas tent in Apache Pass, a harsh gap between the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas mountains in the southeastern corner of what is now Arizona. His hand rested near the revolver on his hip. Facing him, a tall Chiricahua warrior with a scar on his temple stepped inside, leaving his rifle leaning against the door frame. Behind him came his wife, his young son, his older brother, and two of his nephews.
He had entered under a flag of truce, and he had brought his family because in this country, a man who brings his family is a man who has come in peace. The lieutenant, George Nicholas Bascom, was twenty-four years old and newly graduated from West Point. He had fifty-four infantrymen waiting outside, their rifles half-ready. The Chiricahua leader, a man the Mexicans called Cochise, listened as the lieutenant accused him of a crime he had not committed.
Cochise denied it. He said plainly that he would help find the boy. Bascom did not believe him. What happened in the next four minutes inside that tent ignited a fire that would burn until 1886.
For 165 years, Americans were told that the Apache Wars began because Cochise kidnapped a child and the army came to retrieve him. That was the story on the memorial plaques. That was the story in the textbooks. That was the story old cavalrymen told their grandchildren on the porch at dusk.
But it was not the complete story, and it was not even the true one. To understand what happened in that tent, one must understand the country. Apache Pass held the only reliable spring within a day’s march in any direction. Whoever controlled that spring controlled the pass, and whoever controlled the pass controlled the road between the Rio Grande settlements and the farms of California.
The Chiricahua Apache had controlled that spring for a long time. They were not a single tribe but a loose confederation of bands, and their leader in that country in that year was a man in his early fifties named Cochise. He was six feet tall, slender, with long black hair he wore loose or tied with a red cloth. He had spent the past three years keeping peace with the Americans while being at war with the Mexicans.
Mexicans had killed his father. Under the bounty laws of Sonora and Chihuahua, they paid a hundred pesos for every Apache scalp brought to the plaza, whether man, woman, or infant. The Americans, at that time, did nothing of the sort. When the Butterfield stage company built a station at Apache Springs in 1858, Cochise met the station manager, a man named James Tevis, and they struck an agreement.
The Chiricahua would supply the station with wood. The Americans would leave them alone. In return, the stagecoaches passed unmolested. For three years, not a single traveler on the Butterfield line lost a hair to the Chiricahua.
Then a man named John Ward changed everything. Ward was an Irishman from County Clare, a short, red-faced man who had come west to farm and ended up a rancher, working land he did not fully own. He lived with a Mexican woman named Jesusa Martinez, who had been captured by Apaches as a child and later escaped. She brought with her a boy of ten or eleven, with red hair, freckles, and one blind eye from an old injury.
The boy was called Felix. On October 27, 1860, a raiding party came down from the mountains and took cattle from Ward’s ranch. When Ward returned from Tucson, he found his oxen gone, his corral broken, and the boy missing. Jesusa said the Apaches had taken Felix.
Ward rode to Fort Buchanan the next morning and demanded the army recover the boy. He said Apaches had done it. Then he said Chiricahua. Then he said Cochise.
Whether he knew this, or was guessing, or simply blamed Cochise because that name was the one every white man in the territory knew, has been debated for a century and a half. What is now known from tribal oral tradition, from surviving records of Apache councils, and from the statements of Felix Ward himself when he became a man is this: it was not Cochise. The boy had been taken by a raiding band from the Pinal group of the Western Apache, a completely different people whose homeland lay 150 miles to the northwest. Cochise was three days away at the time, camped near the springs at Fort Cochise, working on a peace ceremony with a rival band.
But John Ward sat in the commander’s office at Fort Buchanan and said the Chiricahua had done it. The officer of the day wrote it into the records. That paper, and that single sentence, lit the Apache Wars. Fort Buchanan was commanded by Colonel Pitcairn Morrison, an old, sick man about to be replaced.
He did not want to send troops into the mountains on a rumor. He waited three months while John Ward came to the fort every two weeks, drunker and louder each time, demanding action. Finally, in late January 1861, Morrison issued the order. A detachment would go to Apache Pass.
It would negotiate with Cochise. It would demand the boy, and it would reclaim the cattle. The officer chosen to lead it was the youngest second lieutenant in the fort: George Nicholas Bascom. Bascom was tall, thin, blond, and had graduated from West Point twenty-second out of twenty-seven.
His fellow officers described him in their letters home as brave, obedient, and utterly lacking in imagination. He had never negotiated with an Apache in his life. He was given fifty-four men, three days of rations, and orders essentially to bring back the boy. On January 28, he rode out of Fort Buchanan under a gray winter sky.
Six days later, on February 3, he arrived at Apache Pass and camped near the stage station. He sent word into the mountains through the station keeper, a man who knew Cochise well and whom Cochise trusted. Cochise came. He did not have to come.
He could have vanished into the Chiricahua Mountains and never been found. But he came, in peace, with his family. His wife walked beside him, his six-year-old son held her hand. His older brother Coyuntura walked on his left, and two of his nephews, warriors in their early twenties, followed behind.
Bascom accused Cochise. Cochise denied it. Bascom said he did not believe him. Cochise said he would try to find the boy, but it would take ten days, perhaps more, because the boy was not with his people.
Bascom said that in that case, he would hold Cochise and his family until the boy was returned. That was the moment. Under Chiricahua law and the custom of the country, a man who came under a flag of truce was not to be seized. One did not take his family.
One did not lay hands on his brother or his nephews. To do so was not merely a crime but a moral impossibility. Cochise drew a knife from his belt, slashed the back wall of the tent in one low, long cut, and ran out before the soldiers outside could raise their rifles. A bullet from a Sharps rifle grazed his leg.
He kept going, climbing the slope toward the rocks, and disappeared. His brother, his nephews, his wife, and his young son remained inside the tent. Bascom took them as prisoners. In the next thirty-six hours, Cochise did not attack.
Instead, he called down from a rocky ledge above the stage station, shouting in Spanish that he had not taken the boy, that he could recover him if given time, that he would bring cattle and horses, that he would exchange any hostages he could take for the release of his family. Bascom refused. The next morning, a Butterfield wagon arrived from the east carrying a station employee named James Wallace, whom Cochise knew personally. Cochise stopped the wagon and invited Wallace to talk.
Wallace trusted him. He rode up into the rocks, and by the time he understood what was happening, he was a hostage. Cochise sent word to Bascom offering to exchange Wallace for his family. Bascom refused.
Wallace managed to send down a note written in pencil on a scrap of paper: “Treat them well and we will be treated well. Cochise wants the release of 40 of his people and will turn over his brother and nephews. I am now with these men, James F. Wallace.
” Bascom read the note. He said no. Over the next four days, Cochise and his warriors captured three more Americans, wagon drivers from a passing caravan. Now Cochise held four hostages.
Bascom held six. Each side offered a trade. Each side refused the other’s terms. On February 8, a company of cavalry arrived from Fort Breckinridge to reinforce Bascom, tipping the balance.
A brief fight broke out in the rocks above the spring on February 10. The Apache withdrew. Cochise, realizing his family would not return and that Bascom would not negotiate, made his decision. He took his four American hostages and did what the law of his people demanded at that moment.
What the Americans found the next morning was terrible. The four American bodies lay among the mesquite. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Isaiah Moore, turned to his sergeant and said quietly, “Hang the six. ” They hanged Cochise’s brother Coyuntura, his two nephews, and three other Apache men captured in the skirmishes of the previous days.
They hanged them from four oak trees along the road above the spring. The bodies were left hanging. Wagons that passed in March and April saw them still swinging. Bascom released Cochise’s wife and young son on February 14, pointing them west and ordering them to walk.
They walked all the way back to the Chiricahua camps in the mountains. When his wife reached Cochise and told him what she had seen, Cochise did not speak for an entire day. Then he called every fighting man in his band to council. He sent messengers north, east, south, and west.
He sent them to Mangas Coloradas, his father-in-law, the war leader of the Mimbreño Apache and the most feared man in the Southwest. He sent them to every man who had ever carried a bow or a rifle in Apache country. The message was one sentence: “The Americans have broken the world. Now we will break theirs.
”
For the next twenty-five years, that is what they did. The war Cochise declared in the mountains above Apache Pass in February 1861 was one of the longest and most costly conflicts in American history. It lasted until 1886, when Geronimo laid down his rifle in Skeleton Canyon. During those twenty-five years, more than five thousand people died: soldiers, settlers, freighters, miners, and Apaches.
In the four months after Apache Pass, Cochise’s warriors killed more Americans than all Apache tribes combined had killed in the previous twelve years. Freight traffic on the Southern Trail stopped. The Butterfield mail route was forced to shift north. Ranches were abandoned from the Rio Grande to the San Pedro.
The army in Arizona was withdrawn in July 1861 to fight the Civil War, leaving Cochise free to move across the territory for a full year. In July 1862, when a California column under General James Carleton marched east to reoccupy the region, Cochise ambushed them in the same Apache Pass. It became one of the largest engagements between the U. S.
Army and Apache forces. The Americans won only because they brought two small mountain howitzers, and Cochise’s warriors had never seen cannons before. Cochise later said that had he known the cannons were coming, he would have won. Mangas Coloradas came under a flag of truce to a place called Fort McLane in January 1863.
He was an old man of perhaps seventy. He believed the Americans would discuss peace. Instead, he was seized, tortured through the night by soldiers who heated their bayonets in the campfire, then shot by a guard who claimed he was trying to escape. His head was cut off, boiled in a pot, and his skull sent east to be measured by a phrenologist.
When word reached Cochise, he wept openly for the first time before his warriors, and he doubled the pace of the war. For nine more years, Cochise’s warriors controlled the country. No American traveled the overland road safely. The farms of southeastern Arizona sat empty.
Peace with the Chiricahua seemed as impossible as peace with the mountains themselves. Then in the fall of 1872, something strange happened. A one-armed general named Oliver Otis Howard, who had lost his arm at the Battle of Fair Oaks during the Civil War, rode alone into the Chiricahua Mountains with a single Apache scout as a guide. He carried no weapons.
He carried a message from the president saying, in essence, we want peace and will listen to your terms. Cochise met him. They sat together in the mountains for eleven days. Howard listened.
What Cochise finally asked was simple: that he be left in his own country, that his people not be moved to a reservation on the Rio Grande where the climate would kill them and their enemies would be waiting, and that his warriors be given permits to hunt in their old lands. Howard agreed. On October 12, 1872, Cochise and General Howard shook hands, and the war on the Chiricahua front was over. Cochise died on June 8, 1874, in his mountains and in his bed, of an illness that had been consuming him for years.
His warriors buried him in a crevice among the rocks in a place they never revealed to any white man. They killed his favorite horse over his grave, and they never spoke his name aloud in ceremony again, because for the Chiricahua, speaking the name of the dead disturbs their journey. But the Apache Wars did not end with Cochise’s death. Victorio of the Warm Springs took to the field in the late 1870s and led a campaign so brilliant that army officers compared him to Napoleon.
He was killed in a Mexican ambush in October 1880. Geronimo came after him, not a chief but a medicine man, a small, quiet man with an old Springfield rifle and an unyielding will. He led his band in and out of the reservation for six more years, until the last free Apaches surrendered in Skeleton Canyon on September 4, 1886. The surrendered Apaches were put on trains and sent to a prison in Florida.
They were not allowed to return to Arizona for twenty-seven years, and many died in captivity. Geronimo died in 1909 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a prisoner of war, forgotten except by tourists who paid him five cents to sign their names in his book. That was the Apache War. Those were its twenty-five years.
For a century and a half after it ended, the story told about its beginning remained a single simple one: Cochise kidnapped a boy. The army came to recover him. Things went wrong. War followed.
But the boy did not die. Felix Ward, the red-haired, freckled, partially blind boy, was taken north to the Pinal Apache country. The tribe adopted him, as was often done with captives. He was given a new name: “The Wolf Saw Him,” which white men later rendered as Mickey Free.
He grew up among the Apache, forgot English, learned Apache and Spanish, and became one of the finest trackers in the Southwest. In his early twenties, he returned to the American world and was hired as a scout by the U. S. Army.
He served under General George Crook and throughout the rest of the Apache Wars, tracking the people who had raised him, on the payroll of the same army whose mistake about his kidnapping had started the war. He told anyone who listened, from the 1880s until his death in 1894, that it had not been Cochise. He said it had been a Pinal band led by a chief named Pito. He said Cochise had nothing to do with it.
Nobody in the world of the 1880s and 1890s wanted to hear it. In the 1930s, the ethnographer Morris Opler from Columbia University spent summers among the Chiricahua elders in New Mexico and Oklahoma, recording in careful notebooks the accounts of men who had been young warriors under Cochise. Again and again, the same detail repeated: “It was not us. It was the Pinal, the Coyotero.
They took the boy, not us. ” In the 1970s, an army officer named Douglas McChristian, working in the records of Fort Buchanan at the National Archives, found a memorandum written by a quartermaster dated March 18, 1861, six weeks after the Bascom affair. The memorandum noted the kidnapping of the Ward boy by Pinal Apaches, based on Ward’s own statements after further questioning. John Ward, after the war had already ignited, after his accusation had cost the lives of Coyuntura and the four Americans among the rocks, had seemingly recanted part of his story.
He had told the quartermaster, casually, that perhaps it had been the Pinal after all. The quartermaster wrote it down. The commander ignored it. The memo sat in a cardboard box in a warehouse in Suitland, Maryland, for 113 years.
In the past twenty years, a team of historians, some of them Chiricahua themselves, working at the University of Arizona, at Fort Sill, and in Mexican archives that had not been read since they were written, assembled the evidence. There are seven separate Chiricahua oral accounts placing Cochise at a council with a rival band on October 27, 1860. The boy was taken by the Pinal Apache under a leader named Pito, carried 150 miles north, raised, and became Mickey Free. He told everyone who asked, for the rest of his life, that Cochise had no role in it.
Twenty-five years of war, five thousand dead, a people broken and exiled to Florida, then Alabama, then Oklahoma, barred from seeing their mountains for a generation. It all began with a lie told by an angry Irishman to a bored colonel in the commander’s office of a fort on an October afternoon. Whether John Ward believed the lie, or guessed, or blamed the most famous Apache chief because it was the only name he knew, no one can say. He died of pneumonia in 1867 at fifty-three without ever giving a fuller account.
There is a road through Apache Pass now, mostly dirt, branching off from Interstate 10. It climbs through grass and juniper toward the ruins of the old stage station. If you drive it at dusk in winter, you can stand at the spring and look at the rocks where Cochise tore through the tent. You can walk a hundred yards to the place where the four oak trees once stood where Coyuntura was hanged.
The oaks are gone now, cut down for firewood by a farmer in the 1890s. The stage station is low ruins of adobe walls no higher than a man’s knee. There is a plaque placed by the Park Service telling the story of the Bascom affair. Until recently, it still said the boy was taken from Ward’s ranch by Apaches, without identifying which ones.
It still described Bascom’s action as a misunderstanding. It does not mention the name Mickey Free. It does not mention the lie of John Ward. The rangers say the plaque is scheduled to be rewritten.
It has not been rewritten yet. A drawing of Cochise survives, made from memory in the 1870s by a soldier who saw him at the peace council with Howard. It hangs today in a small archive in Tucson. In it, Cochise stands straight, wearing a red headband and a simple shirt, a rifle resting on his knees, looking at the artist with an expression the soldier described in his accompanying letter as the look of a man who has already forgiven you and is waiting to see if you will notice.
For a century and a half, nobody noticed. The war that bears the name of Cochise, the war that killed him in its final throes, was a war built on a lie. The truth, now finally exposed, does not undo any of the damage of that fire.
It only tells us, at last, where the spark was struck.