The first Apache war [1861-1872] is now widely recognized to have originated in the blunders of US army personnel.
The incident began with the abduction of a young Irish-Mexican boy by an Apache raiding party. When his parents applied to the US army for his return, an inexperienced second lieutenant called George Bascom was sent with over fifty troops into the Chiricahua stronghold to arrange a meeting with Cochise. The unsuspecting leader duly obliged, only to find himself held to account for the actions of an Indian band totally outside of his control or knowledge. Although Cochise offered to retrieve the boy and find the offenders, he and his family were made victims of the same kind of trap that had ensnared Geronimo. However, the Chiricahua leader had not earned his reputation amongst white Americans as ‘an uncompromising enemy to all mankind’ for meekness and timidity. Finding himself under arrest, Cochise whipped out a knife, slashed the tent wall and escaped amidst a hail of bullets.
By the time Cochise had seized his own set of hostages no white official troubled himself to consider how they had arrived at this stand-off. Like the original kidnap of the boy, the round of revenge killings that ensued were all to be set down to Cochise’s account. When the army refused to release the chief’s relatives, he slaughtered a number of his captives, at which point Bascom hung his six Apache prisoners at the site of the whites’ remains. And so it escalated. Within days, fighting was general. Within three months the Apaches had killed 150 Americans.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Enemy and the People.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 214-15. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Roberts, Once They Moved, p. 89; see also Thrapp, Victorio, p. 72.
Further Reading:
Cochise (/koʊˈtʃiːs/; Cheis or A-da-tli-chi, in Apache K'uu-ch'ish "oak"
Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua: Goyaałé [kòjàːɬɛ́] "the one who yawns"
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