The Chiricahua Apache Wars, 1861-1886

The rancher's story kept changing. First the Coyotero had run off his cattle and taken his twelve-year-old stepson, Felix; then it was the Chiricahua; then, when it mattered most, it was Cochise himself.

On February 4, 1861, in Apache Pass, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant named George Bascom invited Cochise into his tent under a flag of truce and laid out the charge. Cochise denied it and offered to send riders to find the boy. Bascom's answer was that no Chiricahua would leave the tent until the boy came back. Cochise cut his way out through the canvas. His brother and two nephews, held behind, were hanged near the pass later that month, after Cochise's own captives had been killed, and a quarter century of war began.

From there the book tracks the Chokonen and their Chiricahua kin through the fight at Apache Pass, the killing of Mangas Coloradas after he came in to parley, Cochise's war and Victorio's, the San Carlos reservation years, and the campaigns of Crook and Miles into the Sierra Madre, where Lieutenant Charles Gatewood rode into Geronimo's camp to talk. It ends at Skeleton Canyon in September 1886, where Geronimo and Naiche surrendered, and in an exile that kept the Chiricahua prisoners of war for twenty-seven years. Cochise had offered to help find the boy. The Army wanted a hostage instead, and it got a war.