The Lure of Cochise Stronghold

COCHISE STRONGHOLD LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE BRAVE

COCHISE RISES. A strong-featured handsome man, at 56 he appears to be in his prime. The year is 1871, the occasion, a meeting with President Grant's personal emissary, Gen. Gordon Granger, in yet another attempt to negotiate peace with the U.S. government. There are no photographs, only the details of an eyewitness account by an Army doctor named Anderson Nelson Ellis: "While he was talking we had a fine opportunity to study this most remarkable man.... His height, five feet, ten inches; in person lithe and wiry, every muscle being well-rounded and firm. A silver thread was now and then visible in his otherwise black hair, which he wore cut straight around his head about on a level with his chin. His countenance displayed great force."

COCHISE speaks. Poetic, compressed in their eloquence, his words express puzzlement, regret, desolation: "When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it."

"How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die, that they carry their lives on their fingernails? They roam over the hills and plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but a few, and because of this they want to die - and so carry their lives on their fingernails."

In the tawny half-light, the painted figures on the flattened monolith are barely visible. The place is Council Rocks, a field of enormous tilted granite boulders, not far from the mouth of Stronghold Canyon on the west side of the Dragoon Mountains in Cochise County.

For a time during the middle of the last century, Cochise's Chiricahua Apache ruled these lands. The entire region was their stronghold, and nothing moved through there unless they permitted it.

Periodically, Chiricahua marauding halted the Butterfield Overland stage. Mail riders demanded and got high pay for duty in this country. Guerrilla fighters, the Indians hit and ran, fleeing quickly into narrow canyons in the Chiricahua, Peloncillo, Dragoon, Huachuca, and Whetstone moun-tains, where they seemed invincible, holding the heights against all comers until the California Volunteer Cavalry attacked them using small howitzers in the Apache Pass Battle of 1862.

PERHAPS COCHISE WATCHED AS AN APACHE CHILD SCRATCHED A DESIGN OF HIS OWN CREATION WITH A LUMP OF CHARCOAL.

Historically, Apache meant “enemy” to the settlers and some of the other Indian tribes in Arizona. Now only names Eskiminzin, Chiricahua, Cochise, Geronimo remind us of a vanquished people. While other names Fort Bowie, the Dragoons, Skeleton Canyon enshrine the deeds of their conquerors. However fiercely the Apache may have defended against the encroachments of the white man into their homeland, they were latecomers to this ground. Other native peoples, going back thousands of years, came before. Faded rock paintings, pictographs, tell their story.

Light comes on. I squint at the soaring rock panel and try to decode the lives painted there in red, orange, and black. Human effigies, stick figures with two sets of arms and hands, stand upright on webbed feet. Radial lines bursting from a common nucleus appear to be sun or star symbols. There are zigzag patterns, vertical and horizontal. Do they stand for running water? Serpents? Other forms are gridlike, suggesting the outlines of cultivated fields. In the center of the rock face is a large formless shape. I peer hard, and the blob begins to take on the outline of a hunkered-down toad or frog. Or is it simply an abstraction, a design hatched in someone's brain in an inspired moment? Another shape is a maze, a whirl of concentric lines spinning away from a central dot, a pattern anthropologists find worldwide.

Who made these figures? I wonder. What do they mean? And I find myself speculating no, believing that Cochise stood many times where I now stand and puzzled over the fainter figures, ones I see only with the help of drawings given me by Allan McIntyre, curator of the Amerind Foundation museum and archeological research facility in nearby Dragoon. Or perhaps Cochise watched as a child scratched a design of his own creation with a lump of charcoal.

The area around Council Rocks has everything for a settled life: water, grass for livestock, plenty of firewood, shelter and, most importantly, security. On the high ground with the jagged palisades of the Dragoons at their backs and 100-foot pinnacles nearby where sentinels could be posted to scan the horizon to the north, south, and west, the Indians must have found this to be a superbly defensible position. It's no wonder this site was used continually for centuries.

I've crawled inside a large chamber, one of many formed by enormous boulders tumbled athwart. I stand in the center with overhead room to spare. Pacing it off, I reckon the chamber to be about 15 by 30 feet. A large flat rock near the entrance apparently served as a table. The dirt floor is blackened by the ashes of many fires from prehistoric times until recently, so much fire ash and charcoal that accurate carbon dating of materials found here is impossible.

This chamber is one of a hive of shelters nestled among these tumbled rocks, some just big enough to house a single person, others, like this room, spacious enough for several people.

Most have more than one way in or out; many connect. From one of the chambers, a path descends to a wash flowing north into the main drainage of Stronghold Canyon, less than a mile away. The feet of generations of water bearers have worn the pathway smooth.

WHEN I COME UPON THESE GRINDING HOLES, THE MESSAGE SEEMS MORE DIRECT, AS IF A VOICE WERE SAYING 'SIT HERE ON THIS ROCK AS I DID.'

Scouting around, inside the chambers and out, I find grinding holes bored into the bedrock and in some of the boulders. One large boulder with a southeast exposure that catches the early rays of the winter sun is fairly pocked with metates.

In my mind's eye, I see them there, Indian women, basking in the sunny calm of a fine late-October morning such as this, squatting on their heels industriously milling nuts and seeds, talking small talk, scolding their children.

Crawling among the chambers, I come to a roomy alcove adjacent to the rock-art panel. Looking out I have a view between boulders bright with patterns of green lichen and pink-rust iron minerals to hills dotted with clumps of bear grass, yucca stalks, dried cudweed, and oak trees.

Ten or twelve miles off, I make out the spreading crowns of tall cottonwoods tracing the course of the San Pedro River and, rising out of the morning haze on the horizon, the peaks and ridges of the Huachuca Mountains. A room with a view!

In late afternoon, I hike into Stronghold Canyon. I want to see for myself the natural features that made this place a fortress,to try to experience the impossibility of slipping into a Chiricahua encampment unnoticed. Walking toward the trailhead, I come upon a stretch along Stronghold Canyon, where a subterranean stream flows aboveground for a distance of about 100 yards. I detour into the creek bed and meander upstream to where the water bubbles to the surface.

I wonder how long water has flowed in this short strip of canyon. And I find the answer carved in stone: more grinding holes in boulders in midstream and at streamside, including some that are not round but sluiceor trough-shaped, perhaps for washing clothes.

Like the others I've found, these mortars are in the "best" places. Places where black and yellow butterflies dance through dappled light above a small waterfall; places where the fragrance of mint leaf floats up the canyon on a light breeze; places where brown towhees scratch about in dead leaves on the bank; places where water striders dart across the surface of a still pool in which a single white feather floats among fallen leaves.

Constantly in this spot, I'm reminded of the human quest for beauty. Philosophers speak of the "collective unconscious" or of "archetypal patterns" in human experience to explain this need to discover beauty in the natural world and, having found it, to celebrate both the beauty and one's response to it, to leave something behind a red-ocher swirl on a rock, perhaps that says, "I was here; I saw this." But when I come upon these grinding holes, the message seems more personal, as if a voice were speaking to me across time, saying, "Sit here on this rock as I did, face this way, wait."

WHEN YOU GO

Getting there: In wet weather, travel into the west side of the stronghold should be attempted only in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. In fair weather, access is possible in a light truck or auto with high-ground clearance. Take Interstate 10 to Benson and turn south on State Route 80 to Middlemarch Road, approximately 1 mile north of Tombstone (milepost 315). Travel east on Middlemarch 10 miles to Forest Service road 687. Drive north approximately 6.6 miles to FS 687K; turn east to Council Rocks. The trailhead into West Stronghold Canyon is approximately 4.0 miles northeast of Council Rocks via FS 687.

The east side of Cochise Stronghold is the easiest to get to by auto. Take I-10 east from Tucson to State Route 666 (milepost 331). Turn south approximately 12 miles to the sign marking the entrance to the stronghold. Turn west approximately 10 miles to the Forest Service campground.

Other area attractions: The Amerind Foundation museum and archeological research facility near Dragoon (exit 1-10 at milepost 318); Tombstone, "the town too tough to die;" scenic Willcox Playa; the Cochise Visitor Center at Willcox; the ghost towns of Courtland and Gleeson.

Where to stay: Motel accommodations and restaurants are available in Benson, Tombstone, and Willcox. Twentythree campsites are available at the Forest Service campground on the east side of Cochise Stronghold.

IN ROCK CLEFTS, BRIGHT YELLOW CLUMPS OF RABBITBRUSH FLARE LIKE BEACONS.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 8 AND 9) Few traces of past habitation are more evocative than the metates used by women to prepare food for their families. Despite its rugged terrain, Cochise Stronghold is home to a variety of plants and trees, including low-branching shrubs such as rabbitbrush (ABOVE) and oaks in a sea of cudweed (OPPOSITE PAGE).

I continue my hike up the canyon. The wind has stilled. I'm about a mile up the trail going in from the west side of the range. From here it's another mile to the divide and four miles to the Forest Service campground on the east slope of the mountain. Already I'm hundreds of feet above the ravine bottom. Across the canyon, an immense pinnacle, Rockfellow Dome, rises to more than 6,600 feet. In 1883 John Rockfellow tried to homestead on the east side of the stronghold. Apache warriors scared him off, but when the Army drove out the Indians, he came back. Now, rockclimbers from around the West have discovered Rockfellow Dome, and when ice and snow prevent scaling El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, they head here instead. The temperature drops as I ascend; I pull a windbreaker from my pack. There's scat along the track, and, in one place just off the trail, an animal with powerful claws has churned up the ground. I can't name the scat or identify the digging animal. A Chiricahua child would have known them, and would have known, too, that jays flitting from tree to tree, scolding up the canyon ahead of me, signaled an intruder. I'd be a dead man, and I know it. But my mood has changed, and I've abandoned the game of sneaking into the stronghold. I no longer see this canyon as an impregnable fortress but rather as generations of sojourners before me may have seen it of an autumn evening. Below me in the canyon bottom, the leaves of cottonwood, velvet ash, sycamore, and walnut trees have changed color, yellow and gold mostly, with muted reds, none of the bright crimsons of fall where maples grow. In rock clefts, bright yellow clumps of rabbitbrush, mingled with cliff brake, flare like beacons. A wind-sculpted manzanita branch, fallen from a tree perched on the exposed canyon rim, lies pale gray and gnarled. The chilled air carries the faint odor, familiar and sweet, of decomposition. Hiking out, I stop often to listen, sniff the air, look around. Quite suddenly I've rekindled a childhood fantasy of seeing, hearing, sensing as an Indian might. All stealth, eyes and ears alert, missing nothing, every pore sensuously open to the natural world. Light is failing. I hurry down trail. I want to get back to Council Rocks before dark.

General Granger asks Cochise to stop raiding throughout the territory. Weary of fighting, his band in disarray, Cochise agrees. But when Granger asks him to abandon this place, his homeland, and go with his followers to a reservation in New Mexico, Cochise answers: "That is a long way off. The flies in those mountains eat out the eyes of our horses. Bad spirits live there. I have drunk of these waters. I do not want to leave here." The great Chiricahua Apache leader did not live to see these lands taken from his people. He died there in 1874. He is buried in his Dragoon Mountain stronghold. No one knows where exactly.