Along with Cochise, the other key Chiricahua leader was his father-in-law, Mangas Colorado. By 1863 he was about seventy, yet even in old age he retained the physical presence and natural authority that had led one commentator to suggest Mangas was ‘beyond all comparison the most famous Apache warrior and statesman’, who ‘exercised an influence never equaled by any savage of our time’. He had initially attempted friendly relations with the white settlers, but after being seized during a visit to a mining settlement and horsewhipped he had readily participated in Cochise’s campaign of attacks.
Then the old chief, despite his sage reputation and his years, made a second diplomatic mission to a white camp. Invited in under a flag of truce, Mangas quickly found himself placed under arrest once more. This time he would not pay so lightly for his trust. The commanding officer told the chief’s guard” ‘I want him dead or alive tomorrow morning, do you understand, I want him dead.’ During the night the two pickets duly obliged, heating their bayonets over an open fire and sticking them on the prisoner’s bare feet and legs. When at last the chief responded, they shot him six times through the head and torso. His body was rifled for souvenirs, while his corpse was later scalped and dismembered, the massive head being cut off and boiled down to the skull in a big pot.
Geronimo called this ‘Perhaps the greatest wrong ever done to the Indians’, while one contemporary Apache has described Mangas’ murder, along with Bascom’s arrest of Cochise and his family, as ‘his people’s “Pearl Harbor”’. For the tribe the decapitation of their great chief meant that he was doomed to wander headless through eternity. A number of them suggested that their own post-mortem mutilation of American victims was in response to this piece of white savagery.
Although this causative relationship is disputed, there is little doubt that the two assaults on the Chiricahua chiefs [the other being Cochise] helped launch a decade of warfare. The fighting would cost the lives of 5,000 whites. In one single seven-kilometre stretch of road, 400 were reputed to have died in only five years. In response, the US army between 1862 and 1871 expended $38 million on a campaign that resulted in the deaths of just 100 Apaches, including old men, women and children.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Enemy and the People.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 215-16. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Ceremony, Life Among the Apaches, p. 177.
Conner, Joseph Reddeford Walker, p. 34-42.
Barrett (ed.), Geronimo, p. 102.
Trimble, The People, p. 259.
Ball, In the Days of Victorio, p. 29.
Thrapp, Conquest of Apacheria, p. 18.
Clum, Apache Agent, p. 122.
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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