Five of us hiked along a creek bed west of Fort Huachuca, following a gambler’s notion. Against house odds, we bet that we could step into Turkey Creek Canyon and touch the past — and understand a hero born in this lost place in the Canelo Hills on March 21, 1883. His name was P.R. Childs, and he was on my mind as we rock-hopped along parched Turkey Creek under a sky roiling with black clouds.

I can’t say what others in our group were thinking when we reached the spot we’d marked on the map, for we each fell silent before splitting up to seek clues to the Apache Indian raid that swept through this part of the Arizona Territory.

The attack marked the start of a six-day rampage that left 26 settlers dead. The Apaches moved so swiftly through southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico, covering as much as 100 miles a day, that the U.S. Army thought they were dealing with two or more war parties.

But it was one Chiricahua Apache band, consisting of 25 or 26 men under Chatto, who set out to steal ammunition and return to his Mexican hideout. A member of the party, 23-year-old Tzoe, later told soldiers that the band intended “to kill everyone they met . . . whether they had guns or not.”

One of their killing fields was Clark’s charcoal camp, where stacks of wood were covered in mud and burned slowly for charcoal to be used in smelting ore. Newspapers said the camp was located in an unnamed canyon 12 miles west of the fort.

The first three workers to die were brought down by Apache rifle fire on the camp’s outskirts. The fourth, William Armstrong, was in the camp proper when he took a bullet through the chest, shouting, “I am killed! Look out, boys!”

Childs grabbed a rifle and sprinted down the creek past the renegades on the bluff above. He probably could have escaped by continuing to run, but that wasn’t Childs’ intention. He wanted to get a good shot at the Indians.

Realizing it was too dark, he returned to camp and got into a dugout in the ground. Two other workers had taken shelter in a tent.

The Apaches called for the men to come out. When they refused, the raiders fired into the tent, then Tzoe and another Apache, his good friend Beneactinay (“the crazy one”) rushed forward.

Childs shot and killed Beneactinay. The other Apaches rained fire on Childs, sending a bullet through his hatband and another through the stock of his rifle. Believing they faced additional armed men, the Apaches fled.

Angry whites later removed Beneactinay’s head, boiled it, polished it with wire brushes and mounted the skull on a flagpole in nearby Charleston. Citizens of that mill town presented Childs with a fancy rifle in appreciation for remaining to protect his friends.

But the episode continued to reverberate, and in a remarkable way.

Jason Betzinez, Beneactinay’s cousin and author of the 1959 book, I Fought With Geronimo, wrote that Tzoe was so despondent at his friend’s death he deserted the war party, defecting to Gen. George Crook’s ranks.

Two months later, this light-skinned Apache with the sweet-sounding nickname, Peaches, led Crook into the Mexican Sierra Madre, helping bring about the surrender of 374 Chiricahua Apaches, including Nana, Loco, Bonita and Geronimo.

Capt. John Gregory Bourke, Crook’s aide, called it “one of the boldest and most successful strokes ever achieved by an officer of the United States Army,” and impossible without Tzoe’s help — and Childs’ bravery.

So I had decided to learn more about the man who fired the fateful shot, and find the charcoal camp.

My first step was to ask Chuck Collins to join the search. He’s a civilian employee at Fort Huachuca, and author of Apache Nightmare: The Battle at Cibecue Creek, the definitive book on a violent Indian rebellion in August 1881.

A dogged researcher, he jumped at the chance to glue his nose to old maps, hoping they’d offer a hint of the camp’s location. No luck. The stack of newspaper stories I’d compiled didn’t help either.

Then someone mentioned Jim Pyeatt, a local rancher. Out of the blue and at the end of my tether, I called and recounted the fight for the hundredth time. When I told him troops from Huachuca were sent to protect Igo’s ranch, Pyeatt said, “This is the old Igo place.”

I came out of my chair. I was about to ask if we could stop by for a visit, but he beat me to it. “Why don’t you fellows come on down and we’ll figure it out,” Pyeatt said.

A few days later, Collins, photographer David Elms and I, rolled up to Pyeatt’s ranch. The more we talked, the more I realized how close at hand history remains in this corner of Arizona.

Pyeatt’s granddad, James Henry, came to the Territory in 1882. He was a friend of famed lawman John Slaughter and business partner with William C. Greene, known as the Buckaroo of Wall Street for the $50 million fortune he amassed from a Mexican copper mine. Henry ranched near Hereford before moving to a site outside Fort Huachuca’s west gate in 1898.

Based on research Pyeatt and his wife, Marie, had done prior to our arrival, and the recollections of Alex Gonzales, the area’s first forest ranger, Pyeatt already had a solid theory on the site of Clark’s camp.

“I believe it’s right here,” he said, pressing his finger on Turkey Creek Canyon south of Pyeatt’s ranch, 3 miles northwest of Parker Canyon Lake. “It’s high enough for the oak and pine trees you need to make charcoal, and it’s about 12 miles west of the fort. It fits.”

Hunched over maps spread out on the family’s dining room table, Marie warned against reading too much into the 12-mile figure, since today’s roads didn’t exist then. Collins raised a similar caution about another clue we found in Bourke’s diary, quoting Tzoe as saying the camp was “near the headwaters of Babocomari Creek,” near present-day Sonoita.

“I wouldn’t put much stock in that,” Collins said. “Apaches covered so much ground so quickly, and they used reference points pretty loosely. It’s impossible to know what near meant.”

Pyeatt dismissed it, since the grasslands of Sonoita wouldn’t provide the higher-elevation forests needed to make charcoal, which was sold to mines for smelting. No, Pyeatt was sticking to Turkey Creek Canyon, pointing to a line in one of the 1883 newspaper stories reporting that when the men in Clark’s camp first heard shooting, they assumed workers were hunting turkeys. “There’s still wild turkeys in that old canyon,” said Pyeatt.

Collins and I looked at each other and nodded. We knew we weren’t going to get any closer.

The canyon is about 10 miles south and slightly west of Pyeatt’s ranch, half of that down a tough, 5-mile-an-hour, boulder-strewn Forest Service road, with manzanita brush scraping at the doors. However, the trip offers picturesque views across the gentle Canelo Hills and deer bounding over range fences.

Along the way we picked up Gonzales, who, for 25 years, beginning in 1934, patrolled this country on horseback as a forest ranger.

“We’ll find where that fight was,” he said, climbing into Pyeatt’s truck. “I remember coming across charcoal pits up there.” The 87-year-old Gonzales wore a hearing aid and thick glasses. I wasn’t optimistic.

At the creek bed, we drove south over the rocks as far as possible, then continued on foot deeper into the canyon. Moving like a man half a century younger, Gonzales led the way, hopping a stack of boulders known as “the falls” and onto a flat area on the creek’s east edge.

Above the flats were tall bluffs, thick with trees that seemed to tickle the low-hanging clouds.

“This is where the charcoal pits were,” Gonzales said, chewing a slice of jerky. “Long time ago I found ten or 12 shells here, 45-70s.”

I soon realized I was wrong about him. Gonzales prowled the brush, turning over a log here, picking up a stick or rock there. He was keenly attuned to the landscape, able to see it, smell it and read it. Watching him work, I felt like I was attending a seminar hosted by a wolf in a straw cowboy hat.

Within an hour, the five of us had compiled significant evidence of an old charcoal camp. The ground was pitted with depressions that might’ve been where the wood was burned. We found bits of blackened charcoal, and a lead-soldered tin can, commonly found in campsites of that period.

I wondered if the canyon’s location was right for a war party up from Mexico. From here, the raiders rode northwest to the Empire Mountains, killing more men near the Total Wreck Mine. Pyeatt and Gonzales said yes, the location was perfect.

“If they went from here to the Total Wreck,” said Pyeatt, “they would’ve gone past Igo’s place and up to where the Babocomari starts, like Bourke’s diary said.”

“The evidence you can’t mistake is right here,” said Gonzales, standing next to an oak stump. “You can see axe marks where these trees were cut. Yeah, there was a big camp on this flat.”

But Collins made the most convincing discovery, on the ground at his feet — a spent shell of the same caliber as the ones Gonzales found decades before. Markings showed that it was manufactured at Bridgeport Arsenal (Connecticut) in October 1878.

“The timeframe is right, because it would’ve taken a while for the shells to get here,” Collins said. “And there were so few people here in that period, it’s highly likely this was Clark’s camp.”

I felt excitement that our search had almost certainly succeeded. But in another sense we had failed: P.R. Childs remains largely unknown.

He doesn’t turn up in census records. His birthplace is a mystery, the manner of his death unknown. The only official record containing his name is the 1882 Great Register of Cochise County. It identifies Philander Ronald Childs as a Tombstone carpenter, age 44.

The sky was gloomy as we hiked out of the canyon, the air smelling of a sweet rain that would never fall. The wild turkeys stayed hidden, just like Childs.

But as long as no one minds, and just for the record, I’ll take the liberty of adding another line to his sparse biography — hero of Turkey Creek Canyon, the man whose single shot helped win the Apache Wars.