Riding With Cochise: the Apache Story of America's Longest War by Steve Price

Author:Steve Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510774582
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

PLACES TO SEE: FORT BOWIE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

For more than two decades, Fort Bowie served as the primary center of military operations against the Chiricahua Apaches. Located on a strategic travel route through the Chiricahua Mountains known as Apache Pass, the Spanish called it Puerto del Dado, the Pass of Chance, because of the danger of moving through the home of Cochise.

There were actually two installations. The first, built during the summer of 1862, consisted of just thirteen tents surrounded by rough stone fortifications. It was named after Colonel George Washington Bowie, and took less than three weeks to establish.

The second fort, the ruins of which are still standing about three hundred yards southeast of the original, was started in 1868 and eventually grew to number nearly forty rock, wood, and adobe structures. For more than twenty years, soldiers stationed here fought not only Cochise but also Geronimo. Fort Bowie remained open as an active army post for eight additional years after Geronimo’s surrender in 1886, until it was abandoned in 1894. Known today as the Fort Bowie Historic Site, visitors here will find the remnants of the fort’s walls; a small, modern National Park Service visitor center and museum; and drinking water.

The trail also passes beside Apache Springs, the permanent water supply that made Apache Pass so important. Although a water control structure has been placed over the spring to redirect the water, the spring still flows freely today. The Battle of Apache Pass between the Apaches and Brigadier General James Carleton took place here July 15–16, 1862.

A small, lonely, wrought iron–enclosed cemetery a hundred yards from the stage station ruins contains the graves of a number of civilians who lived or worked at the fort, several of them killed by the Apaches. All military personnel and their dependents who had been buried there were moved to the National Cemetery in San Francisco in March 1895.

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