Dragoon Mountains, Cochise County, Arizona

Southeastern Arizona is home to beautiful but forbidding country.  Rocky hills and valleys, covered in cactus and brush and swept by wind, the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains are still best left to experienced hikers and horseback riders.  Legends abound, Native, Mexican and Anglo.  Lost mines and wagon trains, outlaws and vendettas, and Apache raids, and one man who knew every crack and corner of this area and kept his secrets to himself.

Enough can't be said about Cochise, one of the last hereditary leaders of Chiricahua Apache.  A brilliant guerrilla leader and Native diplomat who welded various Apache bands into allies through marriages among his own family, he wasn't about to go anywhere he didn't want to go.  When he'd had enough of Mexican raiders and American miners and ranchers trespassing on Apache land, he would retire to the Dragoon Mountains, to a place only he knew about.  Legend calls it Cochise's Stronghold.  Said to be on or around Glenn Mountain, the highest peak in the range, in fact no one is sure where it was.  Tom Jeffords was the only White Man who accompanied the Apaches to bury Cochise in 1874.  He and they took the secrets to their graves.  Cochise Stronghold Memorial commemorates the legend.

The range lies North to South, South of I-10 in Cochise County.  The Chiricahua Mountains lie to the east and the Whetstone Mountains to the West.  A smaller subrange, the Little Dragoon Mountains, are north of Texas Canyon.  All of these wilderness areas are part of Coronado National Forest.  There are several ghost towns in the area. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did It Happen: Custer's Cheyenne Family

Image
Despite popular legends to the contrary, when Col. George Armstrong Custer's body was found after the Battle of the Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass in June 1876, he wasn't scalped or mutilated.  However, the corpses of many of the men nearby, including George's brother Thomas, were mutilated.  Although some White commentators at the time believed the lack of mutilation might have been the Natives way of showing respect to a brave enemy anyone who had rode and fought with Custer knew this idea held no water whatsoever.  No Native respected George Custer.  He had the blood of the Washita Massacre of 1868 on his hands.  There would have been plenty of Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors on the battlefield who would have taken the chance to show their disdain for him.  Other specular insists that it was because Custer wasn't in military dress, or that he'd cut his famous long, curly yellow hair prior to battle.  Still, someone could've recognized him and pointed him out. Co
Read more

Trapper and Guide: Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, 1805-1866

Image
The only son of Sacajawea of the Shoshone and Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trapper who may have been mixed-race himself, became a man of many talents.  Throughout his life, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, 1805-1866 was a trapper, trader, scout, guide and interpreter as well as a mayor, prospector and hotel operator.  He was also educated, well-traveled in Europe and America, and spoke English, French, Spanish, German and several Native languages including his mother's Shoshone. The life of this remarkable man began in 1805 at Fort Mandan, near present-day Washburn, North Dakota.  Toussaint Charbonneau had signed on with the Lewis and Clark expedition as a hunter, interpreter and guide, but the real draw was his pregnant teenaged wife, Sacajawea, a Shoshone by birth.  Lewis and Clark knew they would need to trade horses from the Shoshone to make it over the Rocky Mountains and they would need an in with the tribe when the time came.  Sacajawea went into labor and had a
Read more

Cameahwait and Sacajawea

Image
The story of Sacajawea's reunion with her family and tribe during the Lewis and Clark Expedition is a familiar one, told from her vantage point.  However, her brother, Cameahwait, by this time chief of the Salmon Eater band of the Lemhi Shoshone would have also had feelings in the matter. Little is known of Cameahwait's life or how he rose to a position of authority among his people.  Apparently, he was several years older than Sacajawea.  In their society, siblings and cousins are often considered the same relationship and spoken of in the same words.  Some sources suggest that they may have been cousins, or even half-siblings.  No matter what the exact familial rank, their actions when they met up again suggested a close family bond.  When Sacajawea was 12 and her brother much older and already an established warrior, the Hidatsa raided their hunting camp.  Four men, four boys and some elderly and children were killed.  Sacajawea and some other girls her own age were take p
Read more