Adventure Magazine Cover — page 65: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

64 night attacks, men, women and children. Cochise found himself faced with a new set of conditions and changed his tactics to meet them. Le IT WAS the habit of the Apaches muge, to rest up between the long forced marches of their raids, choosing always a spot high in the mountains where the mescal plant grew. Here they would gather the roots of the thorny vegetables, bury them in the earth, kindle roaring fires over them and bake them. From these they got the sugar which their wasted bodies needed; and during the days at these camps they gained the rest which their aching bones craved. But the white man’s cavalry, guided by scouts recruited from the Tonto Basin Apaches and from settlers who knew the country, began tracking the renegades to their aerial refuges, and sometimes mas- sacred whole bands of them. Failing to steal upon them, the cavalry always man- aged to get them on the run once more, and that meant scant rations when full bellies were long overdue. In this manner the soldiers and settlers were making the Chiracahuas too hot for Cochise and his people. Then the war-chief led his tribe across the Sulphur Springs Valley to the northern end of the Dragoon Mountains where the peaks rise straight from the mesquite flat lands, two thousand feet of sheer walls whose sum- mits command a view for many miles; whose pinnacles and overhanging rocks give endless opportunity for hiding and ambush. In this sanctuary they found rest between raids during the early seven- ties; and the place is known to this day as Cochise’s Stronghold. Here one time a force of several hundred soldiers made camp in the lowlands, and strung a series of strong outposts through Middle Pass, cutting off the northern part of the range from all the rest of the world, holding it inside a ring of armed men. It ’ was such a siege as the warriors of the Mid- dle Ages used to wage, starving their walled- in enemies to surrender. For weeks the soldiers bided and sometimes got glimpses of the turbaned heads of Apache warriors who were gazing down on them from the rocks above. Then, one dark night, Cochise took his entire tribe, numbering somewhere between fond Adventure two and three hundred men, women and children, down the niches among the cliffs. Carrying their arms and their scanty bag- gage, the Apaches wormed their way from the crest to the plain two thousand feet below and crawled through the line of the besiegers. So adroitly was the thing maneu- vered that no one cut their trail, and two days passed before the escape was discov- ered. By that time the whole band were raiding down along the headwaters of the San Pedro, getting new horses from the herds of ranchers on the border.. In the old days this northern end of the Dragoon Mountains, which towers above the flat lands of the Sulphur Springs Valley on the one side and the rolling plains of the San Pedro on the other, had been known among the Apaches as the abode of the dead. Here, they said, the departed spirits of their ancestors whispered among the granite caves and pinnacles every evening with the coming of the night wind. But from now on they forgot the tribal. legends and looked upon the place as their inviolable refuge. Time after time the blue-clad troopers — but never pressed them farther. For Co- chise had developed into a consummate strategist and, for the first time in their history, the Apaches learned the art of mak- ing a stand against superior forces. To this day the rolling hills under those pinkish granite precipices show traces of the camps which the troopers occupied during successive sieges, only to abandon them on learning that their turbaned enemies had stolen away in some other quarter to resume their raiding all along the border. In some of the cafions which lead up to- ward the ragged crests of naked rock one ~ can still pick up old brass cartridge-shells, the relics of grim battles where the soldiers — always found themselves at a disadvantage, targets for the frowzy, naked savages who , chased them as far as the base of the cliffs, | slipped and squirmed among the granite masses above them like rattlesnakes. Far to the southward the Sierra Madre reared its lofty crests toward the flaring sky; and there Cochise established another sanctuary where his people could rest and hunt when the chase became too hot in Arizona. There his breech-clouted scouts discovered some dry placer diggings, and he bade his people mine the dust which he Connie locye) <SiiGO