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. 

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