Great Warriors II

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 ...

According to Arizona lore and the plot of the James Stewart movie Broken Arrow , a stage coach driver and post rider by the name of Tom Jeffords gets fed up with the Apache raids disrupting traffic on his mail lines in Arizona Territory.  So he heads into the Chiricahua Mountains to look up Cochise, walks into Cochise's camp and asks him to knock it off.  Impressed by Jeffords bravery, the two become friends and Jeffords talks Cochise into making peace with the White Man.  Did it happen?  A qualified yes. Thomas Jefferson Jeffords, 1832-1914, was born in Chautauqua County, New York, in what had once been Iroquois country.  As a boy, his family moved to Ashtabula, Ohio.  Tom worked as a sailor on the Great Lakes and even captained ships himself before deciding to follow a series of smaller gold rushes further and further out west.  He eventually ended up in New Mexico, working as a civilian courier at Fort Craig.  During the Civil War, Jeffords...