February 1, 1998
Guardian of Apache Pass
"When I was young, I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people but the Apaches. After many summers, I walked again and found that another race of people had come to take it."
— Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua
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By James Abarr
Of the Journal
Tucked into the southeast corner of Arizona, close to the New Mexico border, a narrow and once-strategic pass winds between two mountain ranges.
More than a century ago, it was a broad stage for confrontation and high drama, but today, Apache Pass sleeps in the quiet of its mountain fastness with only the remains of a frontier fort and a stone stage station to recall its violent yesterday.
In the latter half of the 19th century, Apache Pass was a major gateway and a critical water stop for travelers between southern New Mexico and Tucson. Twisting its way between the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas Mountains, the wooded pass, reaching an elevation of 5,115 feet at its summit, represents an ecological transition zone between the Chihuahua Desert to the east and the much hotter Sonoran Desert to the west.
Desert grasslands merge with scatterings of oak woodlands with juniper and piñon dotting the higher slopes. Canopies of trees — willows, oak and black walnut — line sandy washes which can flood in times of sudden mountain rains. The riparian woodlands are shared by an abundance of wildlife — mule deer, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and an occasional mountain lion.
However, it was the dependable supply of water that was the lure of Apache Pass. Near the eastern entrance, where the trail snakes upward in the shadow of the rocky prominence of Helen's Dome, a steady flow of clear, cold water bubbles up from a deep underground reservoir tapped eons ago by a fault in the earth's surface.
This is Apache Spring, which travelers coveted, Indians and whites warred over, and the U.S. Army built a fort to protect. Today, the remains of that frontier outpost, Fort Bowie, are preserved as a National Historic Site.
Apache presence
For many generations, the Chiricahua Apaches cherished this mountain oasis to nurture their hunting-gathering lifestyle. It provided food, bountiful materials for tools, shelters, arrows and lances, and above all, the ceaseless spring to quench their thirst.
When American travelers first pushed through Apache Pass in growing numbers in the 1850s, the Chiricahuas were not overly concerned, because the newcomers did not tarry. The travelers were largely concerned with reaching Tucson and other settlements to the west. In 1858, this began to change.
It was the year that the Concord stage coaches and Celerity wagons of the famed Butterfield Overland Stage Line, on its 2,800-mile run from Missouri to California, via Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, began to rumble through Apache Pass.
John Butterfield, the adventurous businessman who had won the government contract for a mail and passenger route to link East and West, rallied his drivers plying the torturous route with the cry:
"Remember, boys, nothing on God's earth must stop the United States mail!"
Butterfield, unfortunately, had not reckoned with what became known as the Bascom affair, or with Cochise, perhaps the greatest of the Chiricahua leaders.
Despite the fact that Cochise viewed the whites as invaders of ancestoral Apache lands, he sought to live in peace. For three years, he allowed Butterfield coaches to traverse the pass without incident, and he didn't object when the stage line built a stone relay and passenger station near the spring.
Then, this tranquil arrangement began to come unraveled.
On Feb. 4, 1861, George Bascom, a newly-minted second lieutenant fresh out of West Point, led a company of 54 infantrymen mounted on mules into Apache Pass and pitched camp. He had come with orders to arrest Cochise, who was camped nearby, on charges of stealing cattle from the ranch of John Ward in the Sonoita Valley near Tucson and kidnapping his 12-year-old stepson.
Cochise, along with his brother and two nephews, was lured to Bascom's tent and confronted with the charges, which the Chiricahua leader vehemently denied. He told Bascom that Coyotero Apaches were responsible for the raid.
(It later was proved that the Chiricahuas had nothing to do with the raid when the actual culprits were apprehended).
A hail of bullets
Bascom was unimpressed and attempted to arrest Cochise, who drew his knife, slashed an opening in the rear of Bascom's tent and escaped in a hail of bullets. His kinsmen, however, were seized by the soliders.
On the following day, Cochise, accompanied by a large band of warriors, returned to Bascom's camp under a white flag to parley and offer to help the Army capture the perpetrators of the raid on Ward's ranch in exchange for the release of the Apache prisoners. Bascom refused, and a gunbattle erupted during which the Chiricahuas seized John Wallace, a Butterfield station worker, as a hostage.
That night, the Apaches, seeking additional hostages as bargaining chips, waylaid a large train of freight wagons entering the pass and captured a number of drivers, guards and 16 mules. However, in their angry mood, the warriors also tied eight drivers to wagon wheels and burned them alive.
When Cochise offered to exchange his hostages and the mules for his relatives, Bascom would not agree unless the Ward boy was included in the deal. This, of course, Cochise couldn't do — he didn't have the boy.
With negotiations at an impasse, the Apaches seized two stage coaches coming through the pass and also pilfered 28 mules from the Army's herd tethered near Apache Spring.
Bascom attempted to retaliate. Reinforced by troops from Fort Breckinridge, 50 miles north of Apache Pass, the young officer led his men into the hills in pursuit of the Chiricahuas, but all the soldiers found were the burned and mutilated body of Wallace and the unfortunate wagon drivers.
After several days of futile searching for the elusive Apaches, Bascom gave up the chase and ordered his men back to Fort Breckinridge. On the way out of Apache Pass, he hanged Cochise's relatives and left the bodies dangling from trees for the Chiricahua leader to find.
It was a tragic and foolish move that ignited 11 years of Indian warfare in southern Arizona. As western military historian Robert Utley noted:
"After the Bascom affair, memory of the false accusations and the execution of his kinsmen, even though in retaliation for his own excesses, aroused in him (Cochise) an implacable hostility toward all Americans and spurred him to wage upon them a bloody war that lasted for a decade."
Troops pull out
Two months after Bascom rode out of Apache Pass, the Civil War erupted and all federal troops were withdrawn from the Southwest for duty in the East.
As historian Utley wrote: "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 settlers feel safe, and Cochise all but choked off traffic through Apache Pass."
For a year, the vengeful Chiracahua leader and his rampaging warriors went unchallenged. Then, in June 1862, the California Column, an 1,800-man brigade of Union calvary and infantry under Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, marched eastward with orders to garrison New Mexico, which then included Arizona, and protect it from any future Confederate threat in the aftermath of the thwarted Rebel invasion which had been turned back in early 1862.
In mid-July, as two advance companies of the Californians entered Apache Pass to secure the vital water spring, they were ambushed by a large war party under Cochise and Mangus Coloradus (Bloody Sleeves), chief of the Mimbreno Apaches. A sharp-fought, day-long battle followed in which Union artillery proved decisive; the Apaches were routed from their positions on the high slopes of the pass by exploding howitzer shells, and the soldiers moved in to occupy the vital water supply.
As an Apache survivor of the battle reportedly told an Army officer later: "We would have done well enough if you had not fired your wagons at us."
It was the end of Apache control of the pass.
Carleton's staff advised the general that "a force sufficient to hold the water and the pass should be stationed there, otherwise every command will have to fight for water."
Carleton agreed. The result was Fort Bowie, a hastily-built post named in honor of Col. George Washington Bowie, commander of the 5th California Infantry. As Carleton's troops moved on to New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley, a 100-man detachment of the 5th California under Maj. T.A. Coult remained behind to man the crude, rag-tag fort, which was completed in less than three weeks.
Built atop a commanding hill near the eastern end of the pass, Fort Bowie was merely a stone breastworks surrounding crude shelters and a guardhouse. It provided its occupants with few comforts.
As one officer lamented in 1863: "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 ..."
Isolation, bad food and sickness added to the misery of the garrison.
Crude though it was, Fort Bowie was effective. Its garrison stood almost alone against Cochise's tribesmen, and although the warriors raided and pillaged throughout the surrounding area, they never again controlled Apache Pass or its priceless water.
A new fort
In 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, the California volunteers were replaced by troops of the regular Army, and in 1868, a new Fort Bowie went up on a plateau east of the early post.
Substantial barracks of adobe, officers quarters, corrals, storerooms, a post trader's store and a hospital were built around the four sides of a parade ground. The new fort even had a post office, a stop on the mail run from El Paso to Tucson.
In 1872, Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, a dedicated humanitarian and idealist, was instrumental in making peace with Cochise. As President Grant's personal emissary, Howard was guided to the Apache stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains by Tom Jeffords, a former Indian agent and close friend of Cochise, to parley with the Chiracahua leader.
After days of tense negotiations, during which the Apaches were promised they could live unhampered in their beloved mountains, Cochise told Howard:
"Hereafter, the white man and the Indian are to drink of the same water, eat of the same bread, and be at peace."
However, two events would combine to shatter that peace.
In 1874, Cochise died of illness, and more warlike elements succeeded to leadership of the Chiricahuas. In 1876, the Army, in carrying out Washington's new "Concentration Policy," moved the tribe and other Apache groups to the San Carlos Reservation, a hot, arid lowland in Arizona's Gila River Valley, about 100 miles north of the Chiricahua homeland.
Unable to tolerate San Carlos, which the mountain-bred Apaches detested, a new decade of warfare erupted, sparked by a rising leader with a fierce and implacable hatred of the "White Eyes."
This was Goyahkla, better known as Geronimo, and from 1876 to 1886, his warriors spread death and terror across a wide area of southern Arizona, southwest New Mexico and northern Mexico.
During this period, Fort Bowie was the center of operations for campaigns which eventually wore down the hostiles. However, it took 10 years, 5,000 soldiers and 250 Apache scouts working for the Army to defeat what some historians regard as the best guerrilla fighters in the world.
Finally, on Sept. 4, 1886, Geronimo surrendered to Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, 60 miles southeast of Fort Bowie. A decade of fighting had reduced his starving band to 16 warriors, 14 women and six children.
News of the surrender, which marked the final chapter in the long Indian wars, was flashed to the nation from Fort Bowie.
Geronimo and his followers were escorted to the fort the next day and held briefly before being taken by wagon to the rail line at Bowie Junction, 12 miles to the north. There they were put aboard an Army train and sent into captivity at Fort Marion, Fla.
In February 1909, Geronimo, then 82 years old, died at Fort Sill, Okla., still a prisoner after 23 years.
The leisure time
With the end of Indian troubles, Fort Bowie entered its final era, a time of leisure, recreation and training.
As a National Park Service historian explained:
"Fort Bowie, now in its mature years and with no Indians to fight, lit its pipe, drank a beer, played tennis and baseball, went dancing or hunting, held training maneuvers and tried to enjoy the remaining years of its life."
It also was a time of added facilities and amenities. Attractive frame buildings were added, including a school, an expanded hospital, a tailor shop, water and sewer systems, tennis courts and an impressive two-story, 13-room home for the commanding officer.
Maj. Eugene Beaumont, the home's first occupant, took exception to such luxury at a frontier post and protested:
"The large amount of useless and unnecessary ornamentation has been of great expense and waste of time."
Fort Bowie lingered for eight years after Geronimo's surrender, but its useful life as a military post was over. On Oct. 17, 1894, its flag was lowered for the last time, and the 118-man garrison, two troops of the 2nd Cavalry, rode away to new duties.
In 1964, ruins of the old post, diminished by time, weather and vandals, were declared a National Historic Site and came under the protection of the National Park Service.
Today, five miles of trails lead visitors on a walk through history in the outdoor splendor of Apache Pass. The ruins of the Butterfield stage station, the site of Bascom's camp in Siphon Canyon and venerable Fort Bowie — they are all there, the ghosts of another era.
Apache Spring also remains, its cool water still bubbling up from deep within the earth.
There has been little development of the site, for as the Park Service explains:
"The lonely remains of Fort Bowie ... have a haunting quality in a setting seldom found in our crowded, bustling world. Intensive development would destroy that quality.
"Therefore, it is proposed to preserve the site as it is — a primitive place with an old soul."
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