Ambushed by Apaches

Secretive tiger rattlesnakes of the Sonoran Desert. “The tiger rattlesnake is kind of an enigmatic species,” he says. “Nobody’s ever studied them in detail.” While completing his doctorate in wildlife and fishery sciences, Goode utilized technology and a grant from the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s Heritage Fund to peer into the private world of the tigers. He has implanted radio transmitters in more than 30 snakes in Tucson’s foothills to monitor their lives and their eccentricities.

“They actually don’t do much of anything,” he admits. They find something to eat, he says, then hang out, build up fat, save energy.

“And, as rattlesnakes go, I think they’re even a little more couch potatoes than many other species,” he concludes.

His subjects are limited to the Sonoran Desert of northern Mexico and the Tucson-Phoenix area. In Mexico, they may live as low as sea level, but in Arizona they are found only in higher elevations and foothills, those rocky places with a view.

Tigers have a home range, land on which they live out their lives, spending every win-ter in the same den, alone. Adults average 2 to 3 feet long. They have the smallest head relative to body size of any rattlesnake, and at the other end, an equally dispro-portionate sized rattle—a big one. Their skins are banded in a palette of gray and brown desert colors.

As laid-back as they seem most of the year, they do have their moments of enthu-siasm. When summer monsoons and the nat-ural urges roll around, it’s Katy, bar the gate. “Boy, when the mating season comes, they’re moving all over the place,” Goode reports with the smile of a true snake voyeur.

The tigers cut to the age-old chase, up hill and dale and across the rocks of their foothill homes. One male in Saguaro National Park east of Tucson took off run-ning, make that slithering, like a snake on a hot rock.

“And he went over 2 miles ... way farther than anybody else has ever gone,” Goode states. “He found a few females along the way.”

The range-roving Romeo disappeared

From Goode’s study, having possibly found his promised land.

Tigers aren’t predictable. Why did one

fellow get up in the middle of hibernation

and change dens?

What about females who seek a variety of partners instead of being content with picking just the best one?

Who cares?

Goode cares. He hopes his work will lead to better management of snakes as they face human encroachment.

For several years in Arizona, no deaths were officially attributed to rattlesnake bites, but a deadly encounter occurred less than two years ago. Snakebite survivors can suffer serious damage - tissue loss and motion loss in the bitten body part. Humans play a role in these unfortunate meetings.

Jude McNally, managing director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, says, “Fifty percent [of snakebite vic-tims] saw the snake, recognized the snake as a venomous snake, and then they went after it.” “Oh, it’s a rattlesnake,” Goode says of the frequent reaction. “I gotta kill it.” Goode’s passion went in the opposite direction after being introduced to rattlers while a University of Wyoming student.

The school needed someone to clean the prairie rattlesnake cage, a cage big enough to hold a man. Oddly, they weren’t overrun with applicants. Then came Goode.

“This is cool, man,” Goode recalls thinking. “I can’t believe I got this job.” Twenty-five years later, he’s still ankle-deep in snakes, hiking through desert washes, climbing rocks, carrying his transmitter. He listens for beeps emitted from the guts of the earth and the tigers, and he wonders what they’ve been up to.

“They’re doing things behind my back,” he only half jokes.

Goode has found the tigers’ babies only once and has never seen the males fight for a female’s attention. These snakes still keep secrets.

“I guess I do worry about it,” he says of their future. He emphasizes co-existence but admits, “Society hasn’t put a huge priNo, but not every snake has a champion like Matt Goode, a bit nosy perhaps, but a champion nonetheless. Al

THE AMBUSH OF JOHNNY REB AT DRAGOON SPRINGS IN 1862, EVEN THE CONFEDERATES GOT A TASTE OF APACHE WAR

Confederate troops and Chiricahua Apaches. . . It takes a while to get used to the idea that the unlikely groups met in battle in Arizona. Gray-uniformed Rebels taking on long-haired Indian warriors. Cochise vs. Johnny Reb.

These two storied fighting groups saw their interests collide, for the briefest time, at Dragoon Springs, a stage stop on the old Butterfield Overland Mail line. The evidence lies at my feet in four rock-mound graves. Three hold the remains of Confederate dead, the only Rebel deaths to occur during the Civil War in what is now Arizona.

A rock on one of the three Confederate graves bears a lightly etched inscription: “S. Ford, May 5, 1862.” The fourth grave, also marked, holds a Tucson boy identified in his etching only as “Richardo,” perhaps a misspelling. Historians believe he might have been pressed unwillingly into service as a herder by the Rebel command.

These lonesome graves, each flying a Confederate flag, make a moving and thoroughly unexpected sight on this windswept rise overlooking the San Pedro River valley.

Part of the desolate beauty of Dragoon Springs, which lies 3 miles off Interstate 10 east of Benson, is that you arrive here on your own, without having to suffer

THE PLAN WAS bold AND YET doomed to fail, ALTHOUGH IT WORKED LONG ENOUGH TO PUT TUCSON UNDER A CONFEDERATE FLAG FOR SIX WEEKS.

the company of an intrusive, gabby tour guide. You park at the edge of a rocky dirt road and make a short hike to the ruins of a stage stop.

If you can excuse the distant sight of interstate traffic, and the closer sight of the tiny settlement of Dragoon to the north, everything on this empty bluff looks as it did the day of the fight-unpretentious and unadorned, except for small historical markers.

Nothing intrudes on the experience. For that reason, I love this spot. You can relive history in its purest form, accompanied only by the wind through the rocks and dead men under the grass.

The story these graves tell unfolded amid an unlikely attempt by Confederate leaders to extend their power all the way to California.

The plan was bold and yet doomed to fail, although it worked long enough to put Tucson under a Confederate flag for six weeks.

Capt. Sherod Hunter, the leading figure in the Confederates' Arizona campaign, might have been attracted to the Southern cause by personal tragedies that had left him adrift. In 1857, while living in Lincoln County, Tennessee, and running a grocery business, he lost his wife and infant son in childbirth.

Twenty-three years old, too grief-stricken to remain in Tennessee, Hunter made his way to Kansas, where most accounts say he worked as a freighter. He later moved to Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, near present-day Las Cruces, to work a small farm, and his political allegiance eventually drew him to the Confederacy.

In July 1861, with the 4-month-old Civil War raging in the East, Rebel sympathies in the Southwest flared to action with Confederate Lt. Col. John R. Baylor's defeat of a Yankee force in west Texas, according to L. Boyd Finch's Confederate Pathway to the Pacific. His book, along with The Civil War in the Western Territories, by historian Ray Colton, provided the bulk of the information for this article.

The high-strung and aggressive Baylor followed his victory by declaring a swath of land as the Confederate Territory of Arizona. It stretched south to Mexico from near present-day Wickenburg, and from the Texas Plains west to the Colorado River. He named himself governor and Mesilla the capital.

Early in 1862, Baylor sent 180 of his Texas cavalrymen, led by Hunter, his most able volunteer, west to capture Tucson.

With the withdrawal of Federal troops from Tucson months before, Hunter rode into the Old Pueblo unopposed on Febru-ary 28. The next day, March 1, the Rebel flag flew over town for the first time.

Hunter and his "mounted frontiersmen," as Finch calls them, garrisoned in Tucson while scouting to within 80 miles of the California border, the farthest western penetration of any Confederate troops.

But with a Yankee column of 2,400 men marching toward them from the west, Hunter could do little throughout March and April but harass his enemy, never stopping to engage the superior force in pitched battle.

Many historians record that the soldiers at Dragoon Springs were Hunter's troops retreating from Tucson, but Finch's account declares that by the time of the fight at the springs on May 5, Hunter's frontiersmen were still nine days from abandoning their attempted conquest of Arizona.

Even then, facing the steadfast march of the Yankee column from California, the daring Hunter continued believing he could hold his position in Arizona. The Rebels daring Hunter continued believing he could hold his position in Arizona. The Rebels who fought at Dragoon Springs were part of a foraging party sent to hunt for stray cattle. They were heading back to Tucson when the Apaches struck in a surprise ambush. Hunter had remained at the Tucson garrison and did not participate in the fight. In the absence of a Confederate battle report, which historians have been unable to locate, we cannot know exactly what happened that day.

But it must have happened in lightning-quick fashion, the natural silence of this place shattered by war whoops as the renegades charged, possibly led by Cochise himself. If I'm guessing correctly, the Rebels felt paralyzing fear at the sight. Anyone would.

By 1862, with Federal troops withdrawn, Cochise's Apaches had turned this portion of Arizona into a bloody wasteland, and part of the Confederate mission was to stop their depredations.

With the Apaches' reputation stuck in their heads, the Rebels must have suffered the overwhelming and instantaneous sense that they'd reached their last day. But they were soldiers, and if they had to die, they'd do so fighting.

We know that the stage station, built in 1858 and abandoned in 1861, would have offered the soldiers shelter. But we don't know whether any of them made it to defensive positions behind the rock walls.

The first thing you notice at the battle site is the open ground to the west, north and northeast, the landscape stretching, in shades of purple and brown, all the way back to where the mountains hold up the sky.

They make postcards from views like this. Wide open. Good riding country. Good country for dreams.

But if you stand inside the stacked-rock walls of the old station-portions of which still reach 7 feet high-and look east, everything changes. The Dragoon Mountains glower over the horizon and give entry to the mazelike hideout known as Cochise Stronghold. Even in the morning sunlight, so bright you can see it fanning down like in a hotel room painting, the mountains possess an aspect of deep foreboding.

If you're like me, it doesn't take much to imagine the Indians' horses gal-loping through that draw in the mountains and to hear the pounding of the hooves, and see the warriors' deadly lances outlined against the sky.

I'm betting the Rebels heard the advance of the Apaches early, their cries carried on the incessant wind. Around the town of Dra-goon, in the heart of southeast Arizona's Apache country, locals call it the Geronimo wind-a misnomer in the case of the Dra-goon Springs fight, because Geronimo's days as an Apache leader were still a generation away. But the moniker gets the point across. Loosely translated, it means something bad is coming.If newspapers reported the Dragoon Springs clash accurately, the Rebel command lost 30 mules and 25 horses, in addition to the four dead.

Assuming the Apaches attacked in the numbers historians believe-estimates run upward of 200, based on a fight at Apache Pass two months later - I wonder how any of the Rebels survived.

The fighting had to be hot indeed. The foraging party included three Yankee soldiers captured by the Rebels three months before during a fight on the Gila River. They, too, were pressed into action.

The Sacramento Union of October 18, 1862, reported that the prisoners "fought bravely, not so much to aid their captors as to defend themselves against the atrocious