The Wrath of Cochise: The Bascom Affair and the Origins of the Apache Wars by Terry Mort

FIVE STARS


The Wrath of Cochise: The Bascom Affair and the Origins of the Apache Wars by Terry Mort

This is a book about American history and the dynamic driving forces that drove it: a captivating, fascinating, and engrossing look into people’s focused motivations.
I loved the descriptive prospective of historical happenings that Terry Mort brought together.

Excerpts from The Wrath of Cochise:
Large events and issues are also relevant to the story, the Mexican War, North-South politics and slavery, the impact of the Civil War, military training and strategy, the roles of mining, emigration, and transportation. In short, in the Bascom Affair we have a microcosm of, and in some ways a metaphor for, the development of the West.

Mexico agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo a week after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California. The treaty was a formal recognition of reality, because California was already occupied by the U.S. forces. Still, Santa Anna, Mexico’s once and future president, must have reflected ruefully on the sequence of events. Gold in California started a mass migration. Many hopeful gold seekers went by ship around Cape Horn; some went by ship to Panama, by canoe across the Isthmus and down a jungle river, to a further stretch of jungle paths on mule back, and finally to another ship heading north to California. But just as many went overland; it was faster. They would take a steamboat to Fort Leavenworth. From there, some would take the most direct route, across the Rockies. But others chose the southern route where the winter weather was not a problem. They would follow the Santa Fe Trail to southern New Mexico, turn west, and go through the Chiricahua country, following the Gila River trail, essentially the same trail blazed by Kearny first and then by the Mormon Battalion. (The Mormon Battalion, however, followed a more southerly route in Arizona, because they were burdened with wagons, unlike Kearny’s dragoons. They would therefore have followed the desert floors between mountain ranges. It’s unlikely that any of them went through Apache Pass, but certainly they passed close by. Similarly, gold-seeking Argonauts traveling in wagon trains would follow the Mormon Battalion’s route.)*

Human behavior routinely exposes the fact that the less entitled to respect some people feel themselves to be, the more noisily or vigorously they demand it.

A historical oddity; The Chiricahuas under Cochise’s leadership would go on to fight a war that lasted just over a decade, essentially the same length of time it took the Greeks to destroy Troy.

*The transcontinental telegraph was not completed until October 1861.
*California was admitted as a free state in 1850, quick work by Congress primarily because of the Gold Rush and the subsequent population explosion.