Cochise

Based on Wikipedia: Cochise

The Man Who Made the American Army Fear Oak Trees

In the Apache language, his name meant "having the quality or strength of oak." By the time he was finished, American and Mexican settlers across hundreds of miles of the Southwest understood exactly why.

Cochise stands as one of the most formidable military leaders in the history of North American resistance to European colonization. For eleven years, from 1861 to 1872, he waged a campaign so effective that vast stretches of what is now southern Arizona became, in the words of historians, "a burned-out wasteland." The United States Army, fresh from fighting the Civil War—the largest and most technologically advanced military conflict the world had yet seen—found itself consistently outmaneuvered by a force that never numbered more than a few hundred warriors.

This is the story of how one man's wrongful arrest sparked a decade of war, and how that war ended not through conquest, but through the unlikely friendship between an Apache chief and a white mail carrier.

Before the Americans

The Chiricahua Apache had been fighting European encroachment for nearly three centuries before Cochise was born around 1805. Their territory sprawled across what we now call northern Sonora in Mexico, southern Arizona, and New Mexico—a harsh landscape of mountains, deserts, and scrubland that the Apache knew intimately and that outsiders found almost impossibly difficult to traverse.

The Spanish, who arrived around 1600, quickly learned that the Apache were not going to be subjugated through military force alone. After generations of inconclusive warfare, the colonial government tried a different approach: dependency. They called it the "Galvez Peace Policy," and it worked by giving the Apache older firearms and regular rations of liquor. The idea was straightforward if cynical—make the Apache reliant on Spanish goods, and they would have no reason to raid.

When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and took control of the territory, the new government ended this practice. Perhaps they lacked the resources. Perhaps they objected to the morality of deliberately addicting indigenous peoples to alcohol. Whatever the reason, the result was predictable: by the 1830s, the Chiricahua bands had resumed raiding to acquire what the Mexicans would no longer sell them.

The Mexican government responded with military operations. The Apache fought back. Cochise's father was killed in the fighting.

This was the world that shaped Cochise—one of perpetual conflict, where violence was not an aberration but a constant feature of life, where the distinction between "war" and "peace" was largely meaningless. He grew into a physically imposing man, about six feet tall and 175 pounds, with the muscular frame that came from a life of raiding and warfare. Contemporary descriptions mention his classical features and the long black hair he wore in traditional Apache style.

A Fragile Peace

Everything changed in 1848, when the United States acquired most of the Southwest following the Mexican-American War. For a brief moment, there was hope that the cycle of violence might end.

The Americans were not Mexicans. They had no centuries of blood feud with the Apache. In the late 1850s, relations were peaceful enough that Cochise may have supplied firewood for the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach station at Apache Pass. Picture that for a moment: one of the most feared Apache war leaders, doing business with the Americans, hauling wood for their mail route.

The peace held for about a decade.

Then, in 1861, everything fell apart over a case of mistaken identity.

The Bascom Affair: A Study in How Wars Begin

A raiding party had struck a local ranch, driving off cattle and kidnapping a twelve-year-old boy named Felix Ward. The boy would later become famous in frontier history under the name Mickey Free, but at this moment, he was simply a missing child, and someone needed to be blamed.

The accusation fell on Cochise and his band. It was wrong. The raid had been carried out by the Coyotero Apache, a different group entirely. But Lieutenant George Bascom, a young Army officer, either didn't know this or didn't care. He invited Cochise to the Army encampment, supposedly to discuss the matter.

What happened next is remembered by Cochise's descendants to this day. They call it "Cut the Tent."

When Cochise arrived at the meeting, Bascom tried to arrest him. Cochise protested his innocence and offered to look into the matter with other Apache groups—a reasonable suggestion that might have resolved everything peacefully. Bascom refused. Cochise was to be detained.

Cochise drew a knife, slashed through the wall of the tent, and fled. Soldiers shot at him as he ran. He escaped, but some of his relatives were not so lucky—they were captured while Cochise was fighting his way out.

What followed was a classic escalation spiral, the kind that historians recognize from conflicts throughout human history. Cochise took hostages of his own, planning to exchange them for his captured relatives. Negotiations began. They might have succeeded.

Then American troop reinforcements arrived.

Cochise, seeing the military buildup, concluded that the situation was spiraling beyond his control. The negotiations collapsed. Both sides executed their remaining hostages.

And Cochise went to war.

Eleven Years of Fire

To understand what Cochise accomplished over the next eleven years, you need to understand how thoroughly the odds were stacked against him. The United States was, at that moment, mobilizing for the Civil War—the largest military effort in American history up to that point. The Army had rifles, artillery, supply chains, and virtually unlimited manpower. Cochise had perhaps a few hundred warriors at his peak, armed with a mix of traditional weapons and whatever firearms they could capture or trade for.

It should not have been a contest.

And yet.

Cochise joined forces with his father-in-law, Mangas Coloradas—whose name translates to "Red Sleeves"—the powerful chief of another Chiricahua band. Together, they launched a campaign of raids that reduced much of the Mexican and American settlement in southern Arizona to ashes. Historian Dan Thrapp estimated the death toll among settlers and travelers at 5,000, though most modern historians consider that figure too high and suggest it was more likely in the hundreds.

Even the lower estimate is remarkable. The Apache were not trying to hold territory in the conventional military sense. They were waging guerrilla warfare—striking at settlements and travelers, then melting back into terrain they knew better than any outsider ever could. The harsh deserts and mountain ranges of the Southwest, which made life so difficult for American settlers, were the Apache's greatest ally.

The United States, preoccupied with the Civil War, initially pulled military forces out of the region. This gave the Apache a freer hand than they would have otherwise enjoyed. But even after the Civil War ended and the Army turned its full attention to the Southwest, Cochise remained elusive.

The Battle of Apache Pass

In 1862, Cochise and Mangas Coloradas fought one of the rare conventional battles of the Apache Wars. A force of California volunteers, about 3,000 men under General James Henry Carleton, was marching through Apache Pass on their way to New Mexico. Cochise and Mangas Coloradas gathered approximately 500 fighters to stop them.

The Apache held their ground in the rocks above the pass, using the terrain to maximum advantage. For a time, it seemed they might actually halt the American advance. Then the Army brought up howitzers—carriage-mounted artillery pieces that could lob explosive shells into the Apache positions.

Against rifles, the Apache could fight. Against artillery, they could not. The howitzer fire sent them into immediate retreat.

It was a lesson in the limits of guerrilla warfare. The Apache could win countless small engagements, could make American settlement of the region impossibly costly, could tie down military forces that outnumbered them many times over. But in a pitched battle against a well-equipped conventional force, they simply could not match the firepower.

Cochise learned from this. There would be no more pitched battles.

The Murder of Mangas Coloradas

In January 1863, General Joseph West captured Mangas Coloradas. The method of capture would have lasting consequences: the Americans lured the Apache chief into a conference under a flag of truce, promising peaceful negotiations. Once he was in their power, they took him prisoner.

That night, the soldiers murdered him.

The exact circumstances remain disputed, but the basic facts are not: Mangas Coloradas came to parley under a flag of truce, was seized, and was killed while in American custody. To Cochise, this was an unforgivable violation of the rules of war. Even enemies were supposed to respect a flag of truce. The Americans, it seemed, would respect nothing.

If Cochise had needed any additional motivation, he now had it. The raids continued throughout the 1860s, with Cochise striking at American and Mexican positions alike.

Into the Dragoon Mountains

Gradually, the U.S. Army developed tactics that could effectively challenge the Apache on their own terrain. The key figures were General George Crook and later General Nelson Miles, who learned to fight the kind of war the Apache were fighting—small mobile units, intimate knowledge of the landscape, patient pursuit rather than conventional offensive operations.

Cochise and his remaining followers were pushed into Arizona's Dragoon Mountains. But "pushed into" is not the same as "defeated." The mountains became both refuge and base of operations. Cochise continued raiding from there, always retreating into terrain where pursuit was nearly impossible.

The place would later be known as the Cochise Stronghold.

Tom Jeffords and the End of War

The war might have continued until Cochise died or was killed. It had already lasted eleven years. Nothing suggested that either side was ready to give up.

What changed was a friendship.

Tom Jeffords was a mail carrier and scout who had lost fourteen of his riders to Apache attacks. Rather than continue losing men, he decided to do something almost unimaginably bold: he rode alone into Cochise's territory to ask for safe passage for his mail riders.

We don't know exactly what was said at that first meeting. We know only that Cochise agreed to let the mail through—and that somehow, over subsequent meetings, the two men became friends. Not allies. Not business partners. Friends.

By 1872, Jeffords was described as "the Apache leader's only white friend."

That year, General Oliver O. Howard was ordered to find Cochise and negotiate a peace treaty. Howard brought his aide, First Lieutenant Joseph A. Sladen, and Captain Samuel S. Sumner. But the key to making contact was Jeffords. Without him, there would have been no negotiation.

On October 12, 1872, a treaty was negotiated. Modern historians believe that Cochise's Spanish interpreter for these negotiations was none other than Geronimo—another name that would become famous in the Apache Wars.

The Chiricahua Reservation was established, and Cochise retired there, with his friend Jeffords serving as the reservation's agent.

Death and Legacy

Cochise died of natural causes on June 8, 1874—probably abdominal cancer. He was about sixty-nine years old, which was a remarkable lifespan for a man who had spent most of his adult life at war.

His people buried him in the rocks above one of his favorite camps in the Dragoon Mountains, in what is now called the Cochise Stronghold. Only the Apache who buried him and Tom Jeffords knew the exact location. None of them ever disclosed it.

The Chiricahua Reservation Cochise had retired to would not last long—the government closed it in 1876, just two years after his death. His descendants eventually ended up on the Mescalero Apache Reservation near Ruidoso, New Mexico, and in Oklahoma with the Fort Sill Apache Tribe.

No verified portrait of Cochise exists. A photograph that was long claimed to show him actually depicts a man named Juan Rey Abeita from the Pueblo of Isleta, photographed in 1903—nearly three decades after Cochise's death. The real Cochise remains faceless to history, known only through the words of those who met him and the deeds that made his name feared across the Southwest.

The Meaning of Resistance

What are we to make of Cochise's story? It is, unavoidably, a story of tragedy. The Apache way of life was destroyed. The land they had lived on for centuries passed into other hands. The reservations their descendants live on today are a fraction of their original territory.

But it is also a story of extraordinary capability. For more than a decade, Cochise held off a nation that would become one of the most powerful in human history. He did it with a few hundred warriors, with limited weapons, with nothing but tactical brilliance and intimate knowledge of the land. The United States Army, which had just won the Civil War, could not defeat him. In the end, the war stopped only because Cochise agreed to stop it.

Cochise County, Arizona, is named for him today. It is one of those peculiar gestures that settler societies make toward the peoples they displaced—naming places after the very leaders who fought hardest against the naming society's expansion. Whether this represents respect, guilt, or simply the recognition that certain names are too significant to be forgotten, is a question each person must answer for themselves.

What is beyond question is the strength of the oak.

A Note on Names

Cochise's family connections illustrate how central kinship was to Apache political organization. He married Dos-teh-seh, whose name translates roughly to "Something-at-the-campfire-already-cooked." She was the daughter of Mangas Coloradas, making Cochise's alliance with that powerful chief both political and personal.

They had two sons. Taza, born around 1842, died young in 1876. Naiche, born around 1856, lived until 1919—long enough to see the world his father had fought against become utterly dominant, long enough to become one of the last leaders of the free Chiricahua Apache.

The names themselves carry meaning. In Apache, Cochise was originally called Shi-ka-She or A-da-tli-chi, meaning "having the quality or strength of an oak." The shorter form, K'uu-ch'ish or Cheis, simply means "oak." A tree that bends but does not break. A tree that stands for centuries.

There are worse things to be named for.