D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2008
Hiking Apacheria
Page: 2The desert around Bowie seems about the same as around Deming: soaptree yuccas, bear grass, cholla, prickly pear cactus and ocotillos, too. No barrel cactus. The temperature is almost always 10 degrees warmer than in Silver City. While I've not yet encountered them, rattlers, including the deadly Mojave rattlesnake, are common.
When we first met, Bill had spoken of a dozen interesting hikes in and around the forts, or in the Dos Cabezas, which loom large to the west of his place. He'd mentioned places where water could be found year round, or pictographs he'd seen painted on white, bleached stones, or deep mortar holes ground into rock near springs. It was clear he wanted to revisit some of those places with someone not only interested in seeing them but of a fairly adventurous nature.
We began our first hike one January day by visiting the top of Apache Pass. It was there, Bill said, that Bascom had hanged six Apaches — a form of death the Apaches believed denied them entry into the spirit world. Only three of those hanged were Chiricahuas. The others were hapless Coyoteros who'd been elsewhere when young Felix Ward was abducted.
"Why here?" I asked, as the January wind nearly blew me off a rock. Bill had insisted I not photograph the actual tree, to keep from disturbing any contemporary Apaches who might read this article.
"No one should know exactly where this happened," he said.
Reading through a file Bill loaned me about the Bascom Affair, I'd learned that Cochise had several rancherias above Apache Pass. They stood on some of the dominating peaks above the pass. So it was obvious that hanging the Apaches there meant their fellow warriors would see them, in their final horror.
The Apaches' rotting corpses swung there for two years, until the skeletons began to fall apart. I doubt that Bascom realized the affront would remain so long. Throttled by solid taboos against touching the dead and unleashing their ghosts, the Apache would have been horrified to have to look down at their brothers hanging from that tree. To pull them down was impossible in their taboo-ridden world.
"Josie [Lawhorne] told me," Bill said, referring to the former owner of the HYL Ranch, "that she had hired some Apaches to do some work for her a long time ago. She said they got spooked, and she asked them about it, and they said the 'hanging tree' made them very nervous." In recognition of their sensibilities, she'd cut the tree down; this was probably in the 1930s. The stump was still there, but Bill asked me to not even reveal where it lies. He said someone had come and sawn a chunk out of the stump, for a ghoulish souvenir. He was aghast at the idea and never wanted to have that travesty repeated.
In 1971, when Bill Hoy became the monument's Unit Manager, working under superintendent Bill Lukens, and with the help of others, he began building the hiking trail from the visitors parking lot in Goodwin Canyon to Fort Bowie. In the beginning, he'd been pretty much alone, out there in the hellfire of the Arizona Chihuahuan Desert, with the snakes and scrub brush. He also rehabilitated the original Butterfield Stage Trail, from the high ground of Apache Pass, near Apache Springs and down Siphon Canyon.
"We both agreed," Bill said, referring to Lukens, "that visitors should walk from the trailhead to the contact station. We both wanted visitors to feel the loneliness and empty silence of the place."
They succeeded. On that windy day in January, when we hiked from the top of Apache Pass to the Butterfield Station, the place had no one there but us. It was like a sector of the moon. No one in his right mind would have been out there but maniacs like ourselves.
With help from a solid maintenance man named Dickie Stansbury, and others, Bill cleared trail, set in water bars, aligned the track at times with previous "cowboy trails" that criss-crossed the grassy benches between Stage Station, Apache Springs, Siphon Canyon and the forts. Bill even traveled to the National Archives in Washington, DC, to secure photos of Lt. Bascom. He helped design a plaque, with a photo of Bascom, that describes the incident that began the long conflict with the Apache.
Before the first animals drank the waters of what would be called Apache Springs by the Americans, the mountains compressed, thrust up, tilted, cracked violently apart like snapping bones heard by no one. Shortly after, probably with the first rain or snow melt, came the water. It may have taken millions of years to pool and develop into a reliable spring. Where the water pools and plunges downhill, Americans built two forts, both called Bowie. Travel the trail in June or July and you will have walked through a blast furnace to get to the water. The towering mountain that looms up from where the water flows is called Bowie Peak.
In the 1600s, a Spanish Jesuit priest named Juan Nentvig, who came north from Mexico City along with soldiers to save the souls of whatever Indians he found, reported the Opata Indians called the mountains the "Chilicaguis," and that that the place was known for its "wild turkeys." A Spanish soldier named Capitano Don Joseph Antonio de Vildosola, who in 1780 was ordered to explore the region, named these mountains Las Sierra de Chiricagui.
Friendly Indians surely showed him not only the water, but also the portal through the mountains — of paramount interest to an explorer. Vilsosola called the pass El Puerto del Dado, "the Pass of Doubt." Besides being a natural way through the mountains, the pass had water. Everyone who walked or rode here made the place a stopping point. For an explorer, finding the pass must have been like hitting Hot Lotto.
In the war fought between the United States and Mexico and won by the former, the land around Bowie was ceded to the US on Feb. 2, 1848, with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A few years later, with its treasury badly depleted and in need of an infusion of cash, the Mexican government ceded even more territory under the Gadsden Purchase. Between the two land agreements, the country north and south of the Chiricahua Mountains, Apache Pass and Apache Springs became part of the United States. As almost always, the Anglos named everything their own way: Spanish names were translated into "Apache Pass," "Apache Springs," the "Chiricahua Mountains" and "the Chiricahua Apaches."
What had been a rather casual parade of Mexicans became a torrent of Americans and immigrants moving west. The Apache reported later they'd never seen so many people. If they had concerns their waters would be threatened by so many people, they chose to watch and wait.
American military men were sent west to find the best routes from the "frontier" of Missouri to California's Gold Rush country. One wagon route, the so-called Leach Wagon road, often ran along present-day Interstate 10 in many places. The problem with that route was there were vast stretches without water. It became clear that Apache Pass and Apache Springs, which lay south of that route, were a better fit.
Soon the US government determined it needed an overland mail route from St. Louis to San Diego and San Francisco — a distance of 2,700 miles. The winning bidder for the route was John Butterfield, of Utica, NY. Butterfield would receive $600,000 a year to run what he called the Overland Mail Company; most knew it as the Butterfield Stage. The first bone-jarring ride took 24 days, 18 hours, 26 minutes, San Francisco to St. Louis.