Cochise and Tom Jeffords Mortal Enemies; Close Friends

BY: C. L. Sonnichsen

COCHISE

In the 1870s, every pioneer in the Arizona Territory knew that Thomas H. Jeffords, a tall, lanky, red-bearded Army scout from New York state, a lifelong bachelor and a loner, was a close friend some said a blood brother - of the great Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise. At the time, this was truly remarkable and almost unthinkable. The Apache were the enemy, hated and feared by the white man. Cochise and his men had been on the warpath since 1862, raiding and looting, killing every settler or traveler they could catch. The settlers retaliated by killing every Apache they could catch. It was war, and Jeffords was suspected of fraternizing with a mortal foe.Three or four decades later, when the Apache were no longer a threat, the friendship could be regarded as admirable evidence of the brotherhood of man. By 1947, when Elliot Arnold published his best-selling novel Blood Brother, most readers accepted Arnold's view that the Indian was a better man than his white adversary and that the Indian's life way was superior. A few years later, the enormously popular motion picture Broken Arrow, based on the novel, converted many remaining skeptics.

The true story of the association between Jeffords and Cochise began in 1867 when Jeffords, who was about 35 years old, nearly 20 years younger than Cochise, was the mail contractor for the route between Tucson and the Rio Grande towns. He paid his riders well ($125 a month), but few lived to collect their wages. Usually traveling alone, they were particularly vulnerable to Indian attack, and Jeffords decided to do something about it.

My Enemy & My Friend

A very private man, he kept his story to himself until three weeks before his death in 1914, at age 82, when Thomas L. Farish, the Arizona state historian, came to Tucson to interview him for his History of Arizona. This is what Jeffords told him: "Cochise had killed twenty-one men, to my knowledge. Fourteen of them were in my employ. I made up my mind that I wanted to see him. I located one of his Indians and a camp where he came personally . . .

"Having been advised that Cochise would be at a certain place at a certain time, I went into his camp alone, fully armed. I told him I was there to talk with him personally and that I wanted to leave my arms in his possession or in the possession of one of his wives whom he had with him, to be returned to me when I was ready to leave, which would probably be a couple of days."

Cochise must have been astonished atthis extraordinary proposal, but the tac-iturn Jeffords said simply, "He seemed surprised." Did they already know each other? A stranger could hardly have passed the guards and ridden casu-ally into Cochise's Stronghold in the Dragoon Moun-tains. But even if they were ac-quainted, it took cold courage for Jeffords to do it. It was certainly the kind of ges-ture Cochise could appreciate. "He finally consented to my proposition," Jeffords said. "He took possession of my arms, and I spent two or three days with him discussing affairs and sizing him up.

JEFFORDS

"I found him to be a man of great natural ability, a splendid specimen of physical manhood, standing about six feet two, with the eye of the eagle. This was the commencement of my friendship with Cochise, and although I was frequently compelled to guide troops against him and his band, it never interfered with our friendship.

"He respected me, and I respected him. He was a man who scorned a liar, was always truthful in all things. His religion was truth and loyalty."

How could these two men "discuss affairs" when Cochise spoke no English? "I had acquired a smattering knowledge of the Indian language," Jeffords explained, but his smattering was good enough to persuade Cochise to let the mail riders alone, and to explore such ideas as truth and justice. Both may have filled in language gaps with Spanish, although there is nothing in the records to support this.

Jeffords indicated he became a familiar figure in the Chiricahua camps. "My name with Cochise," he told Farish, "was Chickasaw, or Brother, and among the tribe I was known as Tyazaliton, which means Sandy Whiskers."

Were he and Cochise indeed blood brothers? Jeffords never said so. His close associates never said so. But even in the years of their friendship, there was talk that they had been ceremonially united, and when Jeffords died, the Arizona newspapers noted, with delighted shivers, that "the two were blood brothers, made so by the mystic ceremony of intermin-gling of and supping of blood from each other's arms."

To a novelist or scriptwriter, of course, the ceremony was irresistible. Elliot Arnold described it in Blood Brother. InBroken Arrow, the movie version, Jeff Chandler as Cochise and Jimmy Stewart as Jeffords sit side by side before a crowd of Chiricahua witnesses "supping" each other's blood.

However the friendship was sealed, it helped to bring peace to a troubled land.

In 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant sent pious one-armed Civil War hero Gen. O. O. Howard to Arizona to make peace with the Chiricahua. At Ojo Caliente, Howard learned that Cochise was the key figure on the Indian side, and that Tom Jeffords was the only white man who could arrange a meeting. Jeffords agreed to take Howard to Cochise if he would go without an escort, and the great council took place. Cochise promised Howard that he would settle with his followers on a reservation in the Dragoon and Chiricahua mountains but stipulated that Jeffords had to be appointed agent.

Jeffords said he refused the appointment at first because Indian agents were political appointees, and he did not want to get "mixed up" in that sort of thing. For the good of the country and for the good of the Indians, however, he agreed to serve, and four years of peace was the result.

The new agent faced massive problems. Washington wanted to make farmers out of Cochise's warriors and was niggardly with money and supplies. Jeffords had to use his own funds to keep his charges fed and clothed, and his pleas to Washington for help often went unanswered. Working with Cochise, however, he kept things under control.

As a result, Jeffords enjoyed a certain amount of respect from the white communities, but the prejudice was still there, and sometimes it showed through the thin fabric of politeness.

A Tucson merchant's wife, Mrs. Edward Fish, once said to her daughter, Clara Fish Roberts, "Tom Jeffords was rough and ready. He was not the kind of man you would ask into your parlor."

William Ohnesorgen spoke out even more clearly as a result of his confrontation with some Chiricahua in November, 1873. He had bought a flock of sheep in Mexico and was driving them home through the reservation, where he had no business to be. When he tried to water his sheep at some holes dug by the Indians in the bed of a dry stream, warriors drove him off, killing a few of his animals. He sued unsuccessfully for damages, intensifying his dislike of Jeffords.

Years later Ohnesorgen expressed his feelings in an interview with Mrs. Edith Kitt of the Pioneers Historical Society: "I knew Captain Jeffords. He was Indian agent in our time a no-good Filthy fellow filthy in his way of living - lived right among those damned things. Once in a while he would go down and haul one home with him was blood brother or something of Cochise.

"He wasn't very bright. His clerk did all the work while he was agent. He could not even keep his Indians on the reservation."

When Cochise fell into his last illness, he asked his old friend to take charge of his people.

"But I am only one man," replied Jeffords, "and they are over 500, and they would not do what I ask them to do unless they want to." So Cochise called in his headmen, named his oldest son, Taza, as his successor, and made them promise to respect Jeffords' authority.

It was not enough. A few months after Cochise's death in 1874, the reservation came apart. Trouble started when the government reduced the Indians' already meager beef rations. To offset the shortage, Jeffords sent a portion of the band to hunt in the Dragoon Mountains to the west.

Trouble developed immediately. The Indians got into a ferocious fight among themselves and three were killed. Taza led most of the band back to the agency, but a few young hotheads fled to Mexico and reverted to the old raiding ways.

To make matters worse, Nicholas Rogers, who operated a stage stop and trading post on the eastern edge of the reservation, violated Jeffords' orders by selling whiskey to some of the raiders returning from Mexico with their loot. The Indians became inebriated and, when Rogers refused to sell them any more liquor, they killed him and his assistant, O. O. Spence. Soon after, still drunk, the raiders killed a rancher and made off with his horses.

White men had been killed on the reservation, and Washington was flooded with demands for Jeffords' removal and the closing of the reservation. The outcry was so vociferous that Washington did close the reservation and moved as many of the Chiricahua as would go to the bleak San Carlos Indian Reservation, which they hated.

Jeffords was terminated as Indian agent on May 3, 1876. When John P. Clum, the young and ambitious agent at San Carlos, came to move the band, Jeffords, though out of office and favor, gave him all the help he could.

It would seem that Jeffords had then paid the full price for his friendship with the great Apache leader, but there wasmore to come. All the long-buried hostility against this "Indian lover" boiled up in a bitter and totally unfounded attack in the Tucson Weekly Citizen by Editor John Wasson.

COCHISE & JEFFORDS

A citizen from Camp Bowie had, Wasson wrote, revealed all. Jeffords had been continuously drunk on duty, had encouraged his young Indians to raid in Mexico, had shared in the profits, had winked at the rape and murder of two young Mexican women on the reservation, and so on.

"The tale of this incarnate devil's doings for the last two years," Wasson thundered, "has so horrified us that if it lies within our weak power, we propose to bring the late Indian agent at Chiricahua to justice."

Jeffords wrote a vigorous defense, but Wasson would not print his letter. It finally appeared in the Prescott Arizona Miner, edited by John Marion, whom Wasson immediately attacked as a "brainless, marrowless, hermaphrodite." Marion, no stranger to this sort of journalistic mayhem, branded Wasson as a "blackguard and a driveler" who had "placed himself beneath the recognition of gentlemen."

'Do you think we will ever meet again?' Cochise asked. 'I don't know,' Jeffords replied.

Jeffords' defense was on record, and it was convincing, but his reputation was scarred permanently. With his usual detachment, however, he went about his business, which was chiefly copper mining. He found his final home in a small house near his claims in the Owls Head mining district, a wilderness area north of Tucson.

When he came in for his interview with historian Farish, the Tucson newspapers reported that he had not been seen on the city streets for the previous four years.

It was a lonely life, but it suited Jeffords, and he had his memories. It is worth noting that when Cochise was dying, he asked Jeffords, "Do you think we will ever meet again?"

"I don't know," Jeffords replied. "What do you think?"

"I have been giving it a great deal of thought since I have been sick here, and I think we will."

It is pleasant to imagine that the two old friends are together again somewhere "discussing affairs" and reminiscing.