War Chief

A lone horseman jogged slowly northward through the trackless sands of the upper Sulphur Springs Valley Little puffs of dust, lifted with the rise and fall of the horse's hoofs, floated gently for a moment and then dispersed into the quiet glare of the midday atmosphere.

The rider was a large, heavy-boned, pleasant appear-ing man with sandy hair and tawny whiskers. He was clad in the broad brimmed hat and rough but service-able habiliments of his day, and his carriage in the saddle was impressive. At ready hand in front of him rested his rifle and at his hip was the customary frontmarksman's holster. His course was direct, but his progress was cautious. Captain T. J. Jeffords had a job to do that day, and it was, to say the least, of a type unusual.

Had he listened intently, as he possibly did, he might have occasionally heard the click of a gun hammer rising to full cock from some point or place of concealment along the way, and his quick eye from time to time might have caught a fleeting glimpse of a brightly feathered shaft behind a bush as it slipped into place before a tautened rawhide bowstring.

But if he saw such, he gave no sign. He rode straight toward the stately pine-clad Graham Mountains, and in his heart was a cold and emotionless determination.

Captain Jeffords was riding to meet the wily war chief Cochise, cruelest, most relentless, and most in telligent and capable of all Southwestern Indian lead-ers the Apache chieftain who, when his pride was pricked by unjust accusation, laid waste a territory larg-er than the State of New Jersey, almost depopulated Southeastern Arizona of its white settlers, and held the United States Army at bay for a dozen years while he carried on his widespread and horror-ridden depredations.

Jeffords had a grievance and rightly so-but he rode that day to match wits, not arms, with the greatest of all the Western redskin warriors. Proprietor of a stage line that carried the mail through bloody Apache Pass from Silver City to Yuma, Captain Jeffords had lost twenty-two stage drivers during the past sixteen months to Indian bullets and arrows. The Dos Cabezas, the Chiricahuas and the Dragoon Mountains, and all the vast region lying in between, were aflame with pillage and running red with murder. No settler was safe, and no settler's flocks or family. Hundreds of lives were lost and thousands upon thousands of dollars in property was destroyed in that most protracted period of Indian vendetta in Arizona history a war of extermination that came about unnecessarily from a youthful army officer's misdirected zeal and miscalculated judgment.

Captain Jeffords, though he was certainly aware of the risks he ran and must have known that the Apache grapevine telegraph long ago had apprised the Indian chieftain of his coming, rode straight ahead into Cochise's lair far up on the slopes of the Graham Mountains.

Curiosity is a common trait and bravery an attribute that stirs the admiration even of the savage bosom. Cochise, kept informed of his visitor's progress, might have ordered Jefford's destruction at any moment of his journey but he did not do so. The white man's sheer audacity had caught the wily chieftain's fancy. Jeffords was suffered to proceed, while Cochise waited.

Arriving at the Indian village, Jeffords dismounted, handed his weapons to attendant squaws, strode boldly into Cochise's wickiup, nodded a greeting and, uninvited, seated himself upon a blanket.

The ensuing conversation is not recorded, but there in that crude lodge began one of the strangest associa tions and staunchest friendships between red man and white that ever graced the annals of those races. And there Jeffords achieved the power that in later years was to enable him to perform a service that all the resources of government and army could not accomplishrestore the peace to a scorched and bleeding country and put an end to terror.

Cochise was a brutal military leader, but he was a just and upright man. Jeffords must have made his ap peal to the warrior's ingrained sense of fairness. He did not at that first meeting stop the warfare-if, indeed, he even tried-nor was he successful in that respect at other conferences in after years; but from that day on, no Jeffords stage driver or express rider was at any time molested by the Indians. The Jeffords stages, alone of all the white men's enterprises, had safe conduct through the whole wide region lying under Apache domination.

At a later meeting, and upon Cochise's invitation. Jeffords and the Indian warrior, with forearms bared and flesh slashed to permit free bleeding, stood side by side, inter-mingled blood with blood, and by Apache ritual became blood-brothers.

The story of Cochise is the old, old story, with variation, of abuses of the Indian by the white man, The variation lay not in the methods employed by the whites but in Cochise's own disposition and character. The tale in its essentials in a sordid repetition of Caucasian misunderstanding and blind oppression. Those were the elements that brought about almost all of the frontier warfare the haughty bearing of young and inexperienced army officers just out of West Point, the disdainful and uncompromising attitude of the white man toward the redskin, the avarice and fraudulence of traders who plied the savage with rotgut whiskey in order that they might the more easily cheat him, the white encroachments on Indian lands and Indian hunting grounds, the broken word and unkept treaties.

Cochise was proud of his race and proud of his lineage, zealously honest, and square in his dealings. He expected no less of others. In his early life he had been a friend to the white man. Born in the Chiricahua Mountains in about the year 1815, according to Dr. Frank C. Lockwood, dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences of the University of Arizona, he had, prior to his forty-fifth year, forsworn the nomadic habits of his tribesmen, acquired some property, including a small herd of cattle, and become domesticated in an encamp-ment near the stage station in Apache Pass, where he and some of his followers engaged in supplying firewood for the station. He had even performed yeoman service as a go-between for the whites in the restoration of stolen cattle driven off by marauding Indians and in preventing raids on white settle-ments by hostile bands.

Then the white man broke faith; and for twelve years Cochise, at the head of a thousand warriors from among the braves of the Chiricahua Apaches, spread blood and fire, pillage and desolation over the whole broad region from the Gila River Valley southward into the Mexican state of Sonora and eastward from the Dragoon Mountains to the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico, in the fiercest, most savage and unrelenting warfare ever waged by Indian tribesmen. And the whole United States Army of the Southwest could not stop him.

In October of 1860, a small band of Apache renegades raided the ranch of Johnny Ward on the Sonoita River and carried off the son of a Mexican woman who was living there with the rancher. Ward appealed to the troops stationed at old Fort Buchanan, situated a short distance away, to assist him in the recovery of the child, and a young lieutenant, recently arrived from the East, George N. Bascom by name, was assigned to the undertaking.

The Army knew Cochise was encamped at Apache Pass, and that being the only known permanent Indian settlement in the district, though several days march from Fort Buchanan, Bascom and his men rode thither. They found Cochise and called a conference with the chieftain and his followers.

On the unwarranted assumption that Cochise had knowledge of the Ward boy's abduction, the young lieutenant demanded the return of the child to its mother. Cochise made inquiry among his braves and reported that none of them either had taken part in the raid or knew the identity of the participants.

Bascom called Cochise a liar. And that was a fighting word in those early frontier days even in the Indian language-particularly so when it was employed by a stripling lieutenant to catalog a proud old savage chief who prided himself on his honesty and fair dealing. Sharp words flew between the two in the already overheated desert atmosphere only a few ofthem, to be sure, but enough to seal the destiny of the Indian chief and write a desperate foreword of history.

Bascom ordered the arrest of Cochise and five of his councillors and their confinement under guard in an army tent in the bivouac. The Indian temper boiled over. Unsheathing a knife which was concealed in his clothing, Cochise slashed the wall of his canvas prison and fled toward the mountains.

Though wounded by a guard's bayonet thrust and followed closely by soldiers, the Apache chieftain gained the security of the hills, taking with him two white civilians as hostages. These he later offered to exchange for his imprisoned followers, but Bascom, who also had suffered a blow to his inordinate pride, refused to deal with the Indian.

Shortly thereafter, a stage station keeper named Walface, who had hitherto been friendly with the Apaches, voluntarily went into the hills in an attempt to mediate with the chieftain. Wallace was taken into custody by Cochise, who declined to receive him as a peacemaker, and with the other two white captives was escorted to a point within sight and hearing of the soldier camp, just out of gun range, where the whites shouted a plea to Bascom to permit an exchange of prisoners. The offended Bascom turned his back and ignored the plea, whereupon Wallace, by order of Cochise, was tortured and dragged to death behind a galloping pony before the eyes of the troopers. On the following day, as Bascom's detachment fell back on Fort Buchanan, the soldiers came upon the bodies of the other two white captives who also had been tortured and put to death by the Apaches. Bascom, in retaliation and on his own questionable authority, hanged his Indian prisoners.

The die was cast. The order which brought about the execution of the Cochise councillors was likewise a death sentence for hundreds of whites in the adjacent hills and valleys. Cochise called his warriors together and before them took a blood oath of terrible vengeance. With a thousand followers, the redoubtable chieftain withdrew into strongholds in the Chiricahua, Dragoon and Graham Mountains, from which they could make forays at will, and launched a war of extermination which went on and on because there were never enough soldiers in the territory even to check it.

In that same year there appeared on the Arizona horizon a new character. Captain Jeffords was not a westerner and he was not a frontiersman. He had been a Mississippi River steamboat captain and he came to the West from St. Louis as a driver of Butterfield stages, in search of adventure. A short time later he became a trader with the Indians, during which experience he picked up fragments of the Apache language and established a reputation among them as a man of rigid honesty and integrity-something that few of his kind could

Claim in their relationships with the redskins. He became widely known as a man of his word-once given never broken.

Thereafter, Jeffords entered into a sub-contract with Butter-field for mail delivery to points distant from the main Butter-field trail route, and finally became the operator of a stage line of his own, running from Silver City to Yuma. It was in the latter enterprise that he lost twenty-two drivers in sixteen months and was himself wounded in the shoulder from ambush by an Indian arrow. Mail delivery through Apache Pass in those days was a hazardous undertaking. It is said that riders were hired at a salary rate of $125 per month, which was a high figure as wages went at that time, but few of them ever lived long enough to draw the first pay envelope.

It was then that Jeffords rode alone to meet Cochise in the Grahams. Both were men of their word, both were brave, and each gave the other credit for honesty. Cochise had an oath to keep and he was keeping it well. Jeffords had a contract to fulfill in the delivery of the mail. Cochise admired in others the qualities of bravery and honesty possessed by himself, and he proved that he could be friends even with a member of the hated white race who demonstrated those traits and who kept his commitments.

The terms of their agreement were never known except to Cochise and Jeffords, but, thereafter, the mail went through unmolested as long as Jeffords held the contract, and Jeffords on his part always scrupulously kept his word never to harm or do ill to the Indians.

In 1872 nearly all the Indian nations had accepted President U. S. Grant's peace policy except the Chiricahua Apaches. The President, taking personal cognizance of the situation, sent his own emissary, General O. O. Howard, one-armed hero who had distinguished himself at the battle of Fair Oaks, to Silver City to do something about it. Howard was the first such agent of the government to bear plenipotent power to act, without referring his proposals and decisions to Washington.

Cochise at the time was in his Dragoon mountain Strong-hold, a great park-like valley lying well up in the eastern slopes of the Dragoons, a granite intrusion rising 1,000 feet above the surrounding country, and readily accessible from only one direction. The park is surrounded by numerous hid-den canyons, caves, ledges and bluffs, where the Apaches lived in safety when they returned from their frequent sorties and bloody depredations.

General Howard sent an Indian messenger into the Stronghold to ask Cochise for an audience. Cochise would have nothing to do with the military, and rejected the proposal. Later, however, when Howard had enlisted the good offices of Jeffords as an intermediary, Cochise permitted himself to be persuaded.

But Cochise, not General Howard, made the terms for the conference, and, for that matter, the terms of the peace that was to follow. Howard, he specified, was to be accompanied only by his aide, Captain Sladen, and by Jeffords, who was to act as interpreter. They were to come unarmed and were to be guided into the Stronghold by two sub-chieftains.

Though Howard had been warned not to go, upon the reassurance of Jeffords that Cochise's safe-conduct was good, the three white men proceeded, without weapons, into the Stronghold. At the edge of the park they were met by a huge band of Apache braves, daubed with paint and bedecked in full war regalia. Howard afterward commended the brilliant military disposition the chieftain had made of his warriors.

Cochise was not there. He awaited them at another point in the park, to which they were escorted to meet him.

"Can this man's word be trusted?" Cochise asked Jeffords.

"I don't know, but I believe it can," was the answer.

The conference continued for several days between the great war chief and the two white men whose bravery and honesty he found to his liking. Cochise said he wanted peace but an honorable peace for himself and his people. Howard proposed a reservation on the Rio Grande, but Cochise held out for Apache Pass and the adjacent country, and insisted that Jeffords be named as the new reservation's first Indian agent, to which Jeffords added the condition that if he accepted the agent's berth he must have absolute authority in his relations with the Indians. Howard acquiesced and the agreement was formally acknowledged in a joint ceremonial at Dragoon Springs.

Peace at long last returned to the Valley of the San Pedro. And the white man, for the first time in the history of Indian treaties, kept the faith-kept it, that is, until Cochise's death in 1874, after which his followers were rounded up and sent to the San Carlos reservation. Indian warfare did not again flare in Eastern Arizona until 1876, two years later.

Cochise never violated a single pledge he made to the white man. In later years his greatness was acknowledged. The whites gave his name not only to the Stronghold itself and to an Arizona county, but also to a mountain in the Chiricahua range, Cochise's Head, which bears a striking profile likeness to the chieftain's features; and in 1934 a monument to Cochise was erected and unveiled in the park of the Stronghold.

Two years after the peace treaty was made, Cochise became ill and sent word to Captain Jeffords to come to him at his camp in the Stronghold. Jeffords looked at his friend and decided to go to Fort Bowie to arrange for the attention of an Army physician.

"Will you see me alive again?" Cochise asked Jeffords before his departure. "I do not think so," was the candid answer.

The following day, in mid-morning, Cochise died, and his followers buried him there, high in the Stronghold, at a point which he himself, had designated beside a water course where every morning the warming rays of the rising sun would touch the grave of the chieftain.

But when Jeffords returned from Fort Bowie he found no mound of new turned earth to mark his friend's place of burial. No mound was there, but in its stead were countless hoofprints of galloping ponies covering a broad area, ponies that had been raced back and forth again and again by Cochise's warriors to hide from his enemies the spot where their beloved chief was forever resting. Only Jeffords knew the exact location and he was sworn to secrecy a secret he kept for forty years before he died, in 1914.

Each year, when the early autumn frosts have turned the oaks to scarlet, the Indians go into the Dragoon Mountains in search of winter provender, for there the bellotas are plentiful. But in Stronghold Canyon there is a spot where unto this day the acorns go ungathered. It is the Spirit Land of Cochise, and the Apaches reverently avoid it. There in a nameless grave, the great chieftain lies sleeping. In the sunny daylight hours the park is quiet and peaceful. But among the Indians there is a legend that occasionally on starry moonlit nights there can be heard, if you listen closely, faint warlike sounds, and sometimes there are fleeting glimpses of shadowy painted figures-figures that seem transparent.Who can doubt that even spirits, contemplating from afar the zany ways of mortal man, may now and then grow restless?