Author: Bob Hagan

I’m once again miles behind in updating TrackingNana and posting relevant mat’l. In my defense, I had to write a piece last week for NM News Svc    Worse, I underwent some extensive dental work, and I don’t bounce back as I once did. When I was younger it wasn’t unusual to dash off 600 words before lunch, adjourn to the local cantina and return to pound out another 1,000 words by deadline. No more, I’m afraid. The greatest challenge of aging is in recognizing  your growing physical (and mental) limitations.

While I gather my failing strength, there’s news to note from Arizona, where a woman was attacked by javelinas. Years  ago I talked to a man in SW NM who hunted the little  peccaries with a .44 mag revolver. He told me they were hard to kill, but I had no idea they were dangerous to people. So I’ll have to add them to my list of the risks of exploring the back country: Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! Rattlers and wolves and skunks and field mice (remember Hantavirus?) Oh, No!

 

City Journal reviews a new bio of Ty Cobb, a great athlete whose posthumous rep has been thoroughly trashed in books, TV series and movies over the past 40 years. Author Charles Leerhsen’s careful research “could become a case study in sourcing information and vetting conventional wisdom. If commonly repeated facts can’t be substantiated, then their acceptance involves something other than scholarship.” Anybody who dabbles in writing (or rewriting) history, whether presented as fact or fiction, has an obligation to accurately represent the people and events chronicled.

Did Capt. Fetterman actually boast that with 80 men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation? Did Andrew Myrick contemptuously tell the Indians that if they were hungry they could eat grass? The latter quote is questionable, the former almost certainly invented post-mortem.

Legally you can’t libel the dead, but that certainly doesn’t negate our ethical and moral duty not to baselessly traduce their memories for profit or political advantage. In the end, a man’s name is all he leaves behind him, written in the sands of time.

 

Always something worth reading in the Albuquerque Journal, even if it often takes me a day or two to get to it — or my wife points it out to me.  According to an AP story in Wednesday’s paper, the search is resuming for the treasure hunter who went missing  north of Santa Fe in January . Apparently they found a backpack resembling his somewhere on Bandelier Nat’l Monument.

He was looking for Fenn’s Fabulous Hidden Hoard, a chest of gold and jewels Santa Fe antiquities dealer and author Forrest Fenn claims to have stashed somewhere in the back country to promote his self-published book, which allegedly contains clues to the treasure. According to him, some 65,000 people have gone hunting for the loot over the last couple of years.

The story reminds me more and more of the hunt for the Lost Adams Diggings, or the Treasure of Victorio Peak. Or the Lost Dutchman or Pegleg Pete’s or the dozens of other tall tales that have embellished Western history ever since Coronado arrived looking for the Seven Cities of Gold.

In all of those pursuits, the question inevitably arises: Is there really a there there? Or was it a fairytale from the beginning? Adams apparently personally led several expeditions in search of ZigZag Canyon (makes you wonder what the old man was smoking) but proved to be so fuddled and vague a guide that on at least one occasion he narrowly avoided getting lynched by his disappointed partners.

Here’s what I can’t get my head around: Does it really make sense to invest $2 million in gold and jewels to promote a self-published book? A massive ego might account for it, but the economics of the publishing business argue against a profit motive.

Fenn “said his intent was to get people outside and onto an adventure,” according to the AP.  A worthy goal, and one I am trying to pursue with this website, but I’ve grown somewhat skeptical of such open-handed philanthropy lately (see also: Clinton Foundation).  I’m tempted to hunt Fenn up and ask him the one question above all others that every reporter should ask himself if not his source: How do I know what you tell me is true?

Actually, I’m kind of surprised no one with fewer scruples than an Associated Press reporter has  thought of this. There are some very hard guys in the Rio Arriba country, and many of them believe in the direct approach. Rather than waste time looking for the gold, why not go looking for the one guy who certainly knows where it is, and ask him?  Politely at first, of course, but with increasing insistence if necessary. I’m sure Fenn, being a writer, has thought of this — it would make a good plot premise — and has taken the appropriate precautions.

And fortunately most of the clever thieves in Santa Fe are too busy stealing from the taxpayers to bother with such a penny-ante boodle.

 

 

Someone at the HSNM conference asked me where the Chiricahua stand now in their long quest to return to their home mountains. They just turned up in Albuquerque, according to the Journal. I’m not sure how much minority set aside business there is to be had from Kirtland AFB and other federal installations in the area, but I wish them luck.

Another good question from my presentation at HSNM conference: HOW MANY MEN DID NANA HAVE WITH HIM?

Estimates of the number of warriors in Nana’s raiding party at any given time vary from as few as a dozen to 70 or more.

All accounts seem to agree he was accompanied by 13-15 men and boys when he crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. (There may also have been a woman with them; I’m still looking for some confirmation of that tidbit of information. It wasn’t unknown for raiding parties to take along a woman or two to handle  the camp chores, although these were more usually the responsibility of young male ‘apprentices’ who were traditionally required to make four raids in this subordinate role before graduating to full warrior status.)

And most accounts agree that at some point 24 Mescalero joined the war party, although their agent  later denied that any of ‘his’ Indians were involved in the raid. When and where they joined up with Nana is not certain; most chroniclers place the meeting in the Sacramentos, but I suspect it was in the San Andre Mountains.

Robert Stapleton saw more than a dozen warriors including Mescalero and Navajo  when they passed by his sawmill in the San Mateos, and rancher Joseph Ware counted 20 in the raiding party that same day.  There were 19, including both Navajo and Apache, who attacked Rancho Cebolla, but that was after the raiding party had split into at least two and possibly three separate detachments.

Capt. Parker claimed he faced 40 in the fight in Carrizo Canyon, and Lt. Burnett later wrote that he counted 40 — and some of his men claimed 60 — hostiles in the fight at Canada Alamosa. But I tend to discount the numbers reported by the military, if only because they were generally trying to excuse their defeats.

 

I got detoured last week in doing another piece for New Mexico News Service (some of my past columns are here if you’re interested). Now that’s done I want to try to take the next couple days to respond to some of the questions & comments I got subsequent to my presentation at the Historical Society NM Conference.

Q: I AM INTERESTED IN FINDING INFORMATION ABOUT THE FIGHTING AROUND COOKE’s PEAK DURING THE 1800s.  ANY SUGGESTIONS?

A: Depending on how broadly you define “around Cooke’s Peak” that covers a lot of bloody ground over nearly a century. I can only recall one description of a fight in Cooke’s Canyon, and that one I find doubtful. In speaking to Eve Ball years later, James Kaywaykla recounted an encounter with buffalo soldiers and another with miners when he was passing through the canyon with his mother  in the winter or early spring of 1881. But I can’t fit his story around the geography of the canyon today, and I’ve seen no other reports of the incident. He was a very little boy at the time, and I suspect he may have conflated Cooke’s Canyon with another in the Candelaria Mountains in northern Mexico.

I include an account of the attacks on a wagon and a stagecoach in the Goodsight Mountains in Tracking Nana, and the final chapter (not posted yet) covers the attack on woodcutters at Mule Spring, which is in the general area of Cooke’s Peak.

Most general accounts of the Apache Wars include at least some mention of Cooke’s Peak, Fort Cummings, and the risks travelers encountered on the Butterfield Trail. I believe it’s certainly true that soldiers from the fort gathered up a number of graves along in the trail in the canyon and relocated the remains to the fort cemetery.

Histories of the Butterfield Trail, the buffalo soldiers, frontier forts, or back issues of True West or Wild West magazines may have more specifics on attacks near Cooke’s Peak but I can’t say I’ve found any. Most of my research has been focused specifically on Nana’s Raid, however, so I certainly missed some.

The Geronimo Springs Museum in TorC has a cache of old newspapers only very partially sorted and indexed, and that might be helpful.

Just finished reading Douglas Meed’s They Never Surrendered: Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madre, 1890-1935. Tracks the long and ultimately futile efforts of a Mexican rancher to recover his kidnapped little boy and revenge himself on the Apaches who killed his wife in 1927. At one point the story veers from tragedy to farce when the Douglas, Arizona, Chamber of Commerce seizes on the search to promote a foray into the Sierras as one last Apache hunt. The scheme was intended to draw tourists and bring new business to Douglas (the Tucson Ring would have been proud to see their unscrupulous tradition continued). The last of these feral Apaches were apparently killed off by the Mexicans in the 1930s, although I have read elsewhere that some Chiricahua (I’m not sure whether from Mescalero or Fort Sill) attempted to contact their lost relatives in the Sierra Madre as late as the 1980s.

Attended the Historical Society of NM annual conference in Farmington this past weekend, met some great people and made some contacts who  I hope will be able to help me in my continuing researches.

Thanks to all those who attended by presentation and made some valuable comments. I’m posting a version of my show  (sorry, I’m still working on slideshows in Webmaster 101; this is just a pdf of the ppt.)

 

 

Another in a continuing series:

A medical examiner has determined NFL quarterback Jay Cutler’s brother-in-law’s death was accidental, saying Michael Cavallari died of hypothermia after he crashed his car during a frigid temperatures while passing through a rocky & rural part of southern Utah.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2016/02/10/death-kristin-cavallari-brother-ruled-accidental/