MICKEY FREE

Bascom and Cochise

mountains, but they encountered no Apaches. On February 18, however, the scouting soldiers spotted buzzards hovering in the sky, and riding to the scene, a small valley on the west side of the Chiricahuas, they found the horribly mutilated bodies of Cochise's four prisonersWallace, Whitfield, Sanders and Brunner. Writing in 1877, primarily in defense of Bascom, Oury, who was present, said that only "by the gold filling in some of his teeth" was he able to identify Wallace. "All the bodies were literally riddled with lance holes," he said. The remains were taken to a mound studded with oak trees and buried. On the trip back to the station, Oury said the shaken command decided to hang all the Indians held byBascom "to the trees that shaded our new-made grave." After unsaddling his horse, Moore relayed his decision to Bascom, who objected, believing he would face the censure of his superiors. But Oury said that Moore, as ranking officer, told Bascom he would assume all responsibility. In his typescript, however, Irwin said the decision to hang the Indians was made at his initiative. "It was I who suggested," he wrote with evident pride, "their summary execution, man for man." When Bascom objected, Irwin claimed the right to execute the three prisoners he had taken, regardless of what Bascom did. At that, the lieutenant relented. The three Coyoteros most likely had nothing to do withthe Cochise-Bascom standoff. Irwin would later receive the Medal of Honor for their capture. The next day, Moore, Irwin and Bascom departed Apache Pass. When they reached the fresh graves of the four Americans, the soldiers stopped. Bascom led the six Indians to the oak trees and told them what was about to happen. The condemned men, according to Oberly, wanted to be shot instead of hanged, and they asked for whiskey. Both requests were denied. The Mesilla Times, a New Mexico newspaper, reported that one of the Indians, probably Coyuntura, went to the gallows "dancing and singing, saying that he was satisfied that he had killed twoMexicans in that month."

"Another," the paper said, "[was] begging piteously for his life" before, as Sergeant Robinson said, he and his fellows were "hoisted so high by the infantry that even the wolves could not touch them." Cochise's wife and two sons-including Naiche, who would become a chief himself and bedevil the Army in the war's last days-were subsequently turned loose. The Bascom Affair, which began as a sincere effort to rescue a young boy, spawned decades of bloody hostilities between Cochise's people and the Americans settling the Territory.

Adapted from the book Double Cross: Treachery in the Apache Wars, volume 10 in the Wild West Collection published by Arizona Highways Books.

AN ARMY SCOUT RAISED BY APACHES

The young boy was tending stock on a ranch in southern Arizona when Apache warriors kidnapped him. Thrust into a new life on that fateful day, January 27, 1861, he lived as an Apache. Eleven years later the boy became a U.S. Army scout known as Mickey Free, described as "half Irish, half Mexican, half Apache, and whole son of a [expletive]." It was meant as praise.

Mickey Free was born Felix Martinez about 1848 in Santa Cruz, Mexico. His mother was Jesus Martinez, and his father was a light-skinned, blue-eyed man, probably of Irish descent, named Tellez. In 1858, after Tellez's death, Jesus moved with her children into the Sonoita area of southern Arizona and took up with-though never married -a prosperous farmer named John Ward. In 1861, 12-yearold Felix was out with the herd on Ward's ranch when Apache renegades stole 20 head of cattle and took him with them. John Ward and Jesus Martinez never saw Felix again. They died about 1867 believing the boy was dead. But according to author Allan Radbourne, who studied Free's life for the English Westerners' Brand Book, the boy was handed over to the San Carlos Apaches, who raised him. "Felix Ward came into contact with a whole new way of life," wrote Radbourne, "and effectively disappeared from the pages of recorded history for over a decade, to eventually emerge as Mickey Free."

How Felix Martinez Ward got the name Mickey Free is unknown. One theory is that a bad pronunciation of his Apache name sounded like Mickey Free.

In his years with the San Carlos Apaches, Mickey learned to track, shoot, hunt and kill. He signed on as an Army scout at Fort Verde in December 1872. Army records listed him as 5 feet 7 inches tall and 135 pounds. His pay was $20 a month. In this role, he was to be present at almost every incident of the Apache conflict, from the Battle of Big Dry Wash to the escape of the Apache Kid and the pursuit of the renegade Victorio.

Al Sieber was the Army's famed chief of scouts. At first, Sieber neither trusted nor liked Free. But a bloody incident in Mogollon country in 1875 changed that.

Cavalrymen were herding some Apaches from Camp Verde to San Carlos when a snowstorm struck. In the flurry, a horse stumbled into a ravine and broke its neck, and one of its riders, a 9-year-old Yavapai Apache boy, broke his leg. Sieber pulled the boy onto the back of his horse and the group went on.

"They were hardly started when Sieber felt a sharp pain in his back," wrote A. Kinney Griffith, whose extensive writings on Free's life include a biography. "As he jerked around he felt the pain lessen and saw his own Bowie knife flash in the boy's hand for another stab." Free killed the boy with a knife, then shot the boy's mother in the head as she lunged at Sieber with a saber. "Twice in the space of a few breaths," wrote Griffith, "Mickey Free had saved Al Sieber's life."

From then on Sieber trusted Free and relied on him. It was Sieber who complimented Free by saying he was "half Irish, half Mexican, half Apache, and whole son of a [expletive]."

Once Sieber assigned Free to capture an Apache who had murdered a cavalry corporal and fled San Carlos. After tracking him for 300 miles, Free caught the renegade and slashed his throat.

But the body was too heavy to haul to the reservation, and Free needed proof of his kill. So he carved out the face of the renegade and wrapped it in the autobiography, Tom Horn called Free "the wildest daredevil in the world," a man with fiery red hair, a small red mustache, and "a mug that looked like the map of Ireland."

A more common description was "ugly." Free's left eye was a gray blob cocked at an odd angle, the result of a cataract he developed as an infant. He let his stringy, unkempt hair fall over his face to hide it.

In his history of Arizona published in 1916, J.H. McClintock wrote that Free was "about as worthless a biped dead man's jacket. He dropped the rotting trophy at Sieber's feet. For his work, Free got a good meal and a bottle of whiskey.

Many of the stories told about Free hint of romanticized exaggeration, if not outright fiction. Sieber said he "could track a shadow on a rainy night," and in his as could be imagined, ugly, dirty, unreliable and dishonest." McClintock was echoing Charles T. Connell, who worked with Free at San Carlos in 1880 and described him as a "wandering half-breed whose being caused the woeful events of a decade."

Although it was false, the half-breed label stuck, contributing to the view that Free was less than human. But the Army valued primitiveness in its scouts.

"The nearer an Indian approaches a savage state," wrote Gen. George Crook, who chased Geronimo without success, "the more likely he will prove valuable as a soldier."

Free quit the scouts in July 1893. Ten years later, Horn wrote that Free was living on the Fort Apache Reservation with "a large Indian family, and is wealthy in horses, cattle, squaws and dogs, as he himself puts it." Free married four times and fathered four children.

In his last years, Mickey Free was bent over, losing vision in his right eye and racked by tuberculosis. But in Prescott writer Kenneth Calhoun's manuscript on file at the Arizona Historical Society, the cunning tracker had one job left in him.

About 20 miles from Free's tin shack, another retired Apache scout and his son-inlaw were shot dead when they confronted two cowboys butchering one of their cattle. The old manhunter, hobbled by illness and near death, got his rifle and his knife and rode out.

In a few days, Free returned to Fort Apache leading two riderless horses. He sold the mounts, along with their saddles and bridles, and gave the money to the widow. But he kept the cowboys' guns and boots for himself.

A short time later, on December 31, 1915, Free was found dead in his shack with a Catholic missal in his hands. It was the final contradiction in the life of a man who took his pay, killed his master's enemies and survived.

Adapted from the book Days of Destiny: Fate Beckons Desperados & Lawmen, volume 1 in the Wild West Collection published by Arizona Highways Books.