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Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings
Few western forts have a more dramatic history than
Fort Bowie (1862-94). Its eroding adobe walls today commemorate the
soldiers who for over two decades endured the hardships and dangers of
campaigns that rank among the most arduous and frustrating in military
history; and Chiricahua warriors, masters of guerilla tactics and for
two centuries obstinate defenders of their home land against the
Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. The hub of military operations
against the Chiricahuas, Fort Bowie was the base of the numerous
expeditions fielded by Gens. George Crook and Nelson A. Miles that
finally smashed the power of Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, Natchez, and
Geronimo. Climate and topography aided the Indians, skilled at avoiding
engagements where the odds were not overwhelmingly in their favor. For
the soldiers, the Apache wars (1861-86) consisted chiefly of endless
marches under the desert sun and only rare chances to come to grips with
the foe.
Located in the Chiricahua Mountains near the eastern
entrance of strategic Apache Pass, through which wound one of the major
transcontinental trails, the post protected military and civilian
traffic. The pass, whose history is closely interwoven with that of the
fort, was a twisting defile between the rocky foothills of the Dos
Cabezas and the Chiricahua Mountains. Its spring, a rarity in the
semidesert country, enhanced its attractiveness as a route. Traveling by
at various times were California-bound gold seekers, other emigrants,
explorers, Mexican boundary commissioners, railroad surveyors, and
troops.
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Fort Bowie about 1890.
(National Archives) |
Long before Americans began entering the region in
the mid-19th century, the Indians and Spaniards had used the pass. In
1857 San Antonio-San Diego mail coaches temporarily traversed it. The
following year the Butterfield Overland Mail, fixing its route between
St. Louis and San Francisco via the pass, built a stone relay station
and corral just west of the spring near the future site of the fort. The
company's picturesque Concord stages operated through the pass until the
outbreak of the Civil War, when the route was moved northward.
When the Americans arrived in the Apache Pass region,
the Chiricahua Indians were residing there. Since the 17th century their
homeland had been the Chiricahua Mountains just to the south and the
Dragoon Mountains to the west. One of their chiefs was the youthful
Cochise. Apart from occasional stage raids, he and his people were
relatively amicable until February 1861. That month a young lieutenant,
George N. Bascom, from Fort Buchanan, Ariz., attempted to arrest Cochise
in the pass for a depredation he probably was not guilty of and caused
blood to be spilled on both sides. The Bascom Affair enraged Cochise,
who launched an all-out war on the Americans.
The alienation was untimely, for a few months later
the outbreak of the Civil War brought about the withdrawal of many
troops from the frontier. New Mexico and Arizona lay open not only to
Indian attacks but also to Confederate invasion from Texas. When the
Texans arrived in the summer of 1861, they learned that the Apaches did
not distinguish between blue and gray. The Indians harassed the
southerners until the following year, when Gen. James H. Carleton's
California Volunteers drove the Confederates out of Arizona and New
Mexico.
The Volunteers swiftly received an introduction to
Apache warfare. In July 1862 about 500 Chiricahuas and Gilas, led by
Cochise and Mangas Coloradas, ambushed a detachment in the pass. Only by
employing artillery could the troops rout the braves from stone
breastworks commanding the waterhole. To meet such threats to his line
of communications through the pass with Tucson and California, Carleton
ordered Fort Bowie built on a hill overlooking the spring and dominating
the eastern entrance to the pass. The post consisted of hastily built
breastworks enclosing a group of tents and a stone guardhouse. Although
Carleton's aggressive policy decreased Indian hostilities in New Mexico,
it did not intimidate Arizona's Apaches. Despite the frequent patrols
sent out from the beleaguered Fort Bowie and other forts, by the close
of the Civil War most of the ranches in the Tucson area and the town of
Tubac had been deserted. Everywhere Apaches lurked in ambush. For 6
bloody years they continued to ravage southern Arizona.
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Indian police in front of the
San Carlos Agency guard house in 1880. (National
Archives) |
In 1866, the same year the Government restored mail
service between Tucson and Mesilla, N. Mex., Regulars replaced the
Volunteers at Fort Bowie, and 2 years later moved it onto a plateau to
the southeast of the original location.
To breathe new life into the Apache campaign, in 1871
General Crook assumed command of the Department of Arizona and stopped
at Fort Bowie before proceeding to Fort Apache. But he was forced to
suspend operations in southern Arizona while emissaries of President
Grant's Peace Policy tried a conciliatory approach. One of them, Gen.
Oliver O. Howard, succeeded the following year. At Cochise's Stronghold,
in the Dragoon Mountains, he persuaded the Chiricahuas to settle on a
newly created reservation at Sulphur Springs, whose agency was moved in
quick succession from there to San Simon and Pinery Canyon and in 1875
to Fort Bowie. Meantime Crook, ignoring the Peace Policy, had crushed
the Yavapais, or Apache-Mojaves, of central Arizona in the Tonto Basin
campaign (1872-73), for which he used Camp Verde as a base. Whether
coincidentally or not, peace with the Chiricahuas prevailed until Crook
was reassigned in 1875, the year after illness took the life of
Cochise.
Geronimo soon resumed raiding. In 1876, alarmed by
the rash of hostilities, the Indian Bureau abolished the Chiricahua
Reservation. Troops from Fort Bowie moved 325 Chiricahuas to the White
Mountain (Fort Apache) Reservation, on the north of San Carlos, where
the Apaches were being concentrated. But Geronimo and a group of
recalcitrants, refusing assignment there, conducted a 3-year reign of
terror. While the Chiricahuas were at peace in 1880 and 1881, Fort Bowie
troops aided the drive against the Warm Springs Apache Victorio and his
successor, Nana, in New Mexico. During the fall of 1881, however, a
series of clashes occurred between Fort Apache troops, reinforced by
those from Fort Bowie, and the White Mountain Apaches, who were
aggravated by an influx of settlers and miners onto reservation lands.
The Chiricahuas feared the Army would make no distinction between the
innocent and the guilty. Geronimo, Natchez, and 75 warriors, avoiding
pursuing columns, fled to Mexico's Sierra Madre and began 2 years of
raiding on both sides of the border. Their numbers, swelled by newly
recruited allies from the San Carlos Reservation, rose to 700. The U.S.
Army and the Mexican troops guarded the waterholes and trusted that
diligent pursuit and hardship would discourage the raiders.
In September 1882 Crook reassumed command in Arizona.
Maintaining his field headquarters at Fort Bowie, he tightened
discipline and reformed reservation management. Taking advantage of the
agreement made by Mexico and the United States to permit their troops to
follow Apaches across the international boundary, Crook employed large
numbers of his Apache scouts, led by white officers, to ferret the
Apaches out of the Sierra Madre. Convinced that the mountains no longer
afforded sanctuary, in 1883-84 Geronimo and more than 300 of his
followers returned to the San Carlos Reservation. But it continued to
simmer with unrest, intensified by Indian Bureau-Army friction over
reservation management.
After 2 years of comparative peace, in May 1885
Geronimo, Natchez, Nana, and 190 men once again fled into Mexico. The
persistent Crook, though winning no major victories, eventually wore
them down and in March 1886 they surrendered to him at Canon de los
Embudos, Mexico. En route to Fort Bowie, however, most of them escaped
to the Sierra Madre. Stung by the storm of public and official criticism
that greeted this defection, General Crook asked to be relieved.
General Miles took over the next month. He revamped
the supply system and, to improve communications, erected 27 heliograph
stations on high peaks in Arizona and New Mexico, one on Bowie Peak. His
newly organized "pursuing commands," possibly because of large
reinforcements, quickly crushed Geronimo. His final surrender in
September at Skeleton Canyon, Ariz., brought an end to the long and
bitter Apache wars. At Fort Bowie special precautions were required to
protect Geronimo and his fellow prisoners from the wrath of local
settlers until they were moved to Fort Pickens, Fla. Their fellow
Chiricahuas and some Warm Springs Apaches, including many scouts who had
served Crook with distinction, had preceded them earlier in the year and
had been sent to Fort Marion, Fla.
Until Fort Bowie was inactivated in 1894, the
garrison merely rounded up Apaches who wandered from the reservation and
investigated reports of depredations. Stagecoach service through Apache
Pass had ceased with the advent of the railroad in the region in
1881.
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Ruins of Fort Bowie.
(National Park Service) |
Fort Bowie National Historic Site was authorized by
Congress in 1964. An extensive restoration and interpretive program is
planned. Today only rock foundations and adobe remnants mark the site of
the original fort. Wall fragments and rock foundations of more than 40
buildings of the second dot the slope below Bowie Peak. The stone
corrals are essentially intact, and remains of the water system are
prominent. Well preserved traces of the stage route may be seen at
various points in the pass, and a pile of rock rubble north of the fort
cemetery and about 700 yards west of the spring marks the site of the
Butterfield stage station. The historical setting of the fort and pass
has been only slightly impaired by roads and ranching activity.
NHL Designation: 12/19/60
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/soldier-brave/sitea3.htm
Last Updated: 19-Aug-2005
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