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Early Settlement and Indian Wars 67 4 EARLY ANgLO SETTLEMENT AND THE BEgINNINg OF THE INDIAN WARS Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves) was perhaps six feet four inches tall, with a powerful body and an enormous head. Indian agent Edward Wingfield called him “a noble specimen of the genus homo. He comes up nearer the poetic ideal of a chieftain . . . than any person I have ever seen.” Mangas Coloradas was probably born into the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apaches, whose homeland was southwestern New Mexico, but he formed close alliances with the other Chiricahua bands: Chokonens to the southwest, Chihennes to the southeast, Nednhis to the south. Although each band was autonomous, Mangas Coloradas became the most powerful chief from the 1840s to his death in 1863. He was a war leader, diplomat, and consummate strategist. Personal bravery and supernatural power were the two most important qualities in a Chiricahua leader, but kinship knit Apache society together. Mangas Coloradas married the three daughters of his Mexican wife, Carmen, to Navajo, Mescalero Apache, and Western Apache leaders. Dos-teh-seh, the daughter of one of his Apache wives, wed Cochise from the Chokonen band. Like a European monarch, Mangas Coloradas wove a web of marital alliances from northern Arizona to Chihuahua. His life spanned three chaotic epochs in southwestern history. He was born around 1790, at a time when Spaniards and Apaches were beginning to make peace with one another. As a young chief of the Bedonkohes known as El Fuerte, he and 153 of his followers settled at the Apache peace establishment near Janos presidio in 1814, remaining there off and on until rations tapered off in the early 1820s. When the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua abandoned the Apache peace program in 1831, Mangas Coloradas carried out most of his raids in Sonora, which adopted a policy of extermination against Apaches. Both sides made and broke peace treaties as hostilities spiraled in ever-widening gyres of bloodshed and revenge. The worst atrocity occurred in 1846, when scalp hunter James Kirker lured Chokonens and 68 arizona Nednhis into Galeana in northwestern Chihuahua. “My people were invited to a feast,” Mangas Coloradas recalled. “Aguardiente or whiskey was there; my people drank and became intoxicated, and were lying asleep, when a party of Mexicans came in and beat out their brains with clubs.” More than 130 Chiricahuas —men, women, and children—were slaughtered. Because Kirker was operating with the permission of the governor of Chihuahua, Mangas Coloradas and the Chiricahuas turned their rage on all Mexicans across the northwestern frontier. That was one of the reasons he welcomed US soldiers and urged General Stephen Watts Kearny to join with the Apaches and conquer northern Mexico once and for all. Over the next fifteen years, however, friendship degenerated into wariness and war. In 1860, prospectors discovered gold at Pinos Altos west of the Mimbres River in the Bedonkohe heartland. As miners descended on the area, Mangas Coloradas and the Chiricahuas felt that Anglo newcomers were overwhelming them. Apaches raided prospectors’ camps, and the miners retaliated. In July 1862, Mangas Coloradas joined his son-in-law Cochise to ambush a detachment of General James Carleton’s California Column in Apache Pass between the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains. Although Apaches outnumbered US troops by perhaps two to one, the soldiers had two howitzers, which they trained on the rock breastworks of the attackers. After a desperate battle, the soldiers dislodged the Chiricahuas and made it to Apache Spring. Soon afterward, Mangas Coloradas himself was shot in a skirmish with soldiers who had been sent back to warn others of the ambush. According to Apache oral tradition, his companions carried the old chief to Janos, where a doctor treated his wound. At least seventy by then, Mangas Coloradas retreated to the Mogollon Mountains, where the Gila Wilderness was established six decades later. He wanted to retire to a reservation he had been promised at Santa Lucia Springs near the upper Gila River, but those promises disintegrated as more and more settlers pushed into the Chiricahua homeland. Finally, in January 1863, Jack Swilling, a member of mountain man Joseph Reddeford Walker’s party of gold seekers, lured the old chief into the now-deserted mining camp of Pinos Altos to talk peace. Instead, the miners seized him and delivered him to General Joseph R. West, who had orders from Carleton to “punish the Gila Apaches, under that notorious robber, Mangus Colorado.” That evening, West placed...

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