"If those rocks could talk," a hike into history

Me at a scenic spot on the trail

By now, the readers of this blog certainly understand that I love to hike. In addition to hiking, I enjoy studying history. So when those two passions of my life collide, you know it was a great day.

Today the challenging hiking group drove 70 miles southeast to hike in the Dragoon Mountains on the Cochise Stronghold Trail.



A strange prohibition for a place that was once a battlefield

It took us an hour to drive to the trail and we set off about 9:30 a.m. on what was supposed to be a 6-mile hike (more on that later).

The trail wound up about 1,000-feet to the summit between the East and West strongholds that once sheltered the great Chiricahua Apache Chief Cochise and his warriors as they tried to fend off trespassing by American settlers and the U.S. Army sent to defend the settlers.

There has been a lot written about Cochise, but the war between him and the United States lasted about a dozen years, four of those overlapping with the Civil War.

Cochise was proud man who had been deceived by the U.S. Army and lost his brother and other warriors in a unsuccessful hostage standoff between the Army and the Indians.

There was plenty of violence and treachery on both sides and while there were estimates of thousands of murdered settlers, the real number is somewhere in the hundreds according to historians.



The sign at the trailhead

But the Dragoon Mountains and the unusual stone formations provided a formidable high ground from which Cochise could monitor and see the approach of the Army from a long way off.

The mountains provided perfect shelter for hit and run attacks  of Cochiseand the fact that the trail we were walking on might have been one of the Apache escape routes kept me in awe all day.

Walking among the same rocks that once heard the reports of Army and Indian gunfire was also a pause for thoughtful reflection.

Only two more miles to go and then all the way back

In the end, Cochise made peace with the white man and when he died in 1974, his tribe and his one while friend, Tom Jeffords, brought his body back to the mountains where he was laid to rest in a secret location known only to the people who brought him there.

All took the secret of his burial to their graves and no remains have ever been found. People do continue to look.

The history of the white man’s dealings with the Native Americans is a sour and checkered one, but walking among the hills where some of that history unfolded made today’s hike very special.

Once we got to the summit between the East and West Cochise Strongholds the group made a decision to continue forward to the West Stronghold. The hike leaders told us that would extend the hike by one mile in both directions so a total of 8 miles.

Our lunch stop at the mid-point of our hike

Someone didn’t read the signs right and it was actually an additional 2 miles in each direction which made it a 10-mile hike instead of the original 6-mile trek.

I arrived home from the strenuous hike just in time to attend tonight’s potluck supper with Joan, who made a delicious Apple and Baby Ruth candy bar salad that should have been a dessert.

If you would like to see additional photos from today’s historic hike, simply scroll down.