The Darkest Heart (53 page)

A few minor points might be inaccurate. Some accounts states that Cochise and five braves greeted Bascom, not Cochise and his relatives, wife, and son. One account held that Cochise had six prisoners, not three, and the reason six Apaches were hanged was in direct retaliation for finding the six (not three) mutilated corpses.

For ten years Cochise and his warriors brought devastation upon the settlers and troops of the New Mexico Territory. Other tribes, led by other chiefs, fought for their freedom as well. But it was a losing battle. The Apaches were being exterminated slowly but surely, and in the process of hit-and-run warfare, they were also starving. After Cochise crushingly defeated the army’s best column of Indian fighters, led by Lieutenant Howard Cushing, who was also killed in the attack, the army decided upon a policy of conciliation. President Grant’s personal representative was sent to negotiate a peace with Cochise, who met with him and accepted the terms. The Chiricahua were promised that they could stay in their own land, but several months after the peace they were
removed to Tularosa, New Mexico. They later fled back into their own mountains.

While General George Crook began his vicious, unrelenting, and eventually successful campaign against the Tonto Apaches, General O. O. Howard and the famous frontiersman and ex-scout, Captain Tom Jeffords (who was also Cochise’s blood brother) negotiated another surrender from him. This time the Chiricahua got most of the land that was theirs as their reservation, and Jeffords was their agent.

But all the government’s promises did not materialize. The schools, hospitals, trading posts, supplies, and food never appeared. What food did come was the wrong kind, such as wheat, with which the Apaches were unfamiliar and did not know how to cook. Game was scarce, the Apaches were starving. Young braves resorted more and more to whiskey, and under its influence even continued to raid south. When two American whiskey peddlers were killed on the reservation, Congress took action, Jeffords was removed as the Indian agent, and the government prepared to remove the Chiricahuas to the swampland of the San Carlos reservation.

Cochise was dead. His son, Tahzay, and several other headmen were in favor of submission. Geronimo, Juh, and Nolgee fled with their followers south to the Sierra Madres. About 325 remaining Chiricahuas were moved to San Carlos.

Geronimo and other renegades fought viciously and brutally for another ten years. In April 1886, the last renegades, including Geronimo, were captured and surrendered at Fort Bowie in Apache Pass. They were shipped to Fort Marion, Florida.

There they were forgotten for years. Eventually they were moved to Alabama, then Oklahoma, and finally some 250 survivors were allowed to return to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. They were all that remained of what was originally a population of close to fifteen hundred. The government’s policy of extermination had almost been fulfilled.

I would like to add a final note. After I had written the first draft of this novel and was doing further research on the Apaches, I stumbled across an article at the Arizona Historical
Society, written by Professor R. A. Mulligan of the University of Arizona. He states that just prior to the events of February 1861, there were three Chiricahua chiefs; Cochise, Esconolea, and a man named Jack.…