President Franklin Pierce sent James Gadsden to Mexico City in 1853 with several proposals for buying from Mexico land to the south of the boundaries established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The preferred options would have given the United States a port on the Gulf of California which would allow much more expeditious transport…
Category: history
The Entry of the Spanish
The Conquistadors The voyages of Columbus were quickly followed by a burst of Spanish exploration and conquest in Cuba and Mexico. By 1517, Diego Velazquez, the governor of Cuba, was sending out expeditions to explore the shores of Yucatan and the Mexican Gulf. In November 1518, Hernan de Cortes landed in Mexico with five hundred…
The Battle of Apache Pass
Captain Thomas L. Roberts, First Infantry California Volunteers, with 126 men, was ordered to march east from Tucson to San Simon (about 175 miles) to set up a supply depot for the Column from California. Captain John Cremony was in charge of the cavalry escort and the wagon train consisting of 21 wagons and 242…
Lieutenant Emory Reports
During the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) troops and supplies needed to reach California from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, via the uncharted lands that now make up the states of New Mexico and Arizona. An expedition led by General Stephen Watts Kearny explored the territory from Fort Leavenworth to California. Lieutenant William Emory (pictured) led a topographical unit on this expedition…
Horses of the Plains
Written and Illustrated by Frederic Remington from The Century, a popular quarterly, Volume 37, Issue 3, January 1889 To men of all ages the horse of northern Africa has been the standard of worth and beauty and speed. It was bred for the purpose of war and reared under the most favorable climatic conditions, and its…
Pima / Maricopa Indians
John C. Cremony met Pima and Maricopa Indians for the first time in 1850 when he was traveling in the Gila Bend area with the Bartlett / Conde Boundary Commission. Cremony was very favorably impressed with their friendliness and good nature, as can be seen from the following excerpt about them taken from his book, Life…
The Heliograph in the Apache Wars
“The mountains and the sun…were made his allies, the eyes of his command, and the carriers of swift messages. By a system of heliograph signals, communications were sent with almost incredible swiftness; in one instance a message traveled seven hundred miles in four hours. The messages, flashed by mirrors from peak to peak of the mountains,…
The Capture of Geronimo
The illustration above shows Geronimo and his band returning from Mexico through Skeleton Canyon with a herd of horses stolen from ranchers in Mexico. Frederic Remington, published in Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1888 In Pursuit of Geronimo Following his surrender in 1883, Geronimo and his band had agreed to live on the San Carlos Reservation. In…
The Butterfield Overland Stage Route
In 1858 John Butterfield of Utica, N.Y. won a government contract of $600,000 a year for six years to carry mail from St Louis to San Francisco twice a week. Butterfield spent more than a million dollars getting the company started. He ran between 100 and 250 coaches, 1000 horses, 500 mules and had about…
The Civil War in Arizona / New Mexico Territory
Soon after the Gadsden Purchase the territorial legislature had begun petitioning the U.S. Congress to divide the huge expanse along an east-west line. The Congress in Washington, deeply involved in the sectional controversies that preceded the Civil War, refused to do this. Insofar as people in the territory were concerned about the Civil War, sympathies…