1885-86 written by Lieutenant Marion P. Maus, First Infantry Preface by General Nelson Miles In 1883 General George Crook made an expedition into Mexico which resulted in the return of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Indians under Geronimo and Natchez to the Apache reservation. For nearly two years they remained quiet, when tiring of peaceful…
Category: history
George Bascom and Cochise
The Bascom Incident In her book, Chains of Command: Arizona and the Army, 1856-1875, Constance Altshuler published a detailed study of the activities of the U.S. Army in Arizona, using military records from the National Archives and other primary source material. Her study of the Bascom Incident of 1861, “the most famous incident of the pre-Territorial period,…
Father Kino, Missionary to Pimeria Alta
Father Kino’s bones can be viewed by visitors to the memorial at Magdalena de Kino By the time Father Kino reached New Spain, Jesuit and Franciscan priests had established at least the outward form of Christianity from Durango to Chihuahua and from Culiacan to the present-day Arizona border. The passage into the northeast was blocked…
The Paleo-Indians
During the 100,000 years of the most recent Ice Age, while much of the Earth’s water was locked up in the ice caps, the level of the oceans at times dropped by as much as 300 feet. At these times the Bering Strait became dry land, and animals migrated across a wide territory known as…
The Presidio of Santa Cruz de Terrenate
Near the San Pedro River west of Tombstone the ruins of the Spanish Presidio de Terrenate still stand. The site was chosen on August 22, 1775 by Hugo O’Conor, the Irish mercenary who had come up with the plan of relocating the three presidios. He chose a spot on a bluff overlooking the San Pedro…
A Scout with the Buffalo Soldiers
written and illustrated by Frederic Remington Slightly abridged from The Century; a popular quarterly. Volume 37, Issue 6, April 1889. I sat smoking in the quarters of an army friend at Fort Grant, and through a green lattice-work was watching the dusty parade and congratulating myself on the possession of this spot of comfort in such…
The Horse in North America
New! The Horses of the Plains Most of the evolutionary development of the horse (54 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago) actually took place in North America, where they developed the very successful strategy of grazing (eating grass) rather than browsing (eating softer succulent leaves). These grazers had evolved specialized teeth for processing the…
The Apache language by John C. Cremony
The Apache Language | Its Remarkable Regularity and Copiousness | How Apaches are Named | Apache Beauties | Disinclination to tell their Apache Names From Life among the Apaches as observed by John C. Cremony, ca. 1862 Elsewhere it has been stated that my vocabulary of the Apache language had been forwarded to the Smithsonian Institute through General…
Old Tombstone
Silver in the Tombstone Hills In 1877, about the same time that Captain Whitside was sent to southeast Arizona to locate a site for a military camp, which turned out to be Camp (later Fort) Huachuca, a German from Pennsylvania was prospecting in northern Arizona. While prospecting up in the Walaipai country, Ed Schieffelin heard…
History
Cochise County, Land of Legends In the nineteenth century, Cochise, Geronimo, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday all were familiar with the Chiricahua mountains, Skeleton Canyon, the Tombstone hills, and the old San Bernardino ranch. But the story really began more than 11,000 years ago when the climate was moister, the Willcox playa was a lake,…