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Cochise Meets Clio
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19671 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1991 |
2,272 Words |
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
COCHISE: CHIRICAHUA APACHE CHIEF
Edwin R. Sweeney
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991
408 pp., $22.95
Native Americans often excite crowd interest, typically cursory and hazy, brief in nature and content. Occasionally, a notable individual emerges from the bitterly suppressed, long-repressed tribal milieu, from a past most folks would just as soon forget or try to glamorize (which can amount to the same thing). Among the specters capable of conjuring up memories of an epoch often dim in outline and grim in texture is the subject of Edwin R. Sweeney's Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief.
Cochise was born around 1805, either in southeastern Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains or in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. At the time of his birth, Spain claimed Cochise's homeland. Later, Mexican and Americans pressed their own cases for control. Cochise fought them all, which is the nature of his story: implacable resistance toward those who sought domination over him and his people.
What Edwin Sweeney captures in this book are emanations from a rattlesnake pit--a nest of vipers--that stretched across southern New Mexico and Arizona and penetrated deep into northern Mexico, a place of extreme climate, topography, and behaviors, where dangerous forces writhed, locked in the death grip of a fight for survival.
More than any other Indian-white conflict, it is the Apache wars, in which Cochise and fellow members of the tribe's Chiricahua division played such a prominent role, that call up memories of wholesale slaughter, scalp hunters, wily opponents, outright trickery, blistering torture, scorched earth, burned-out dwellings, and shattered lives. This popular image in no way violates the reality of that time and place.
Son-in-law of the illustrious Mangas Coloradas (Spanish for red sleeves), son or grandson of a chief, Cochise resonates even now as a unique character in the Apache saga. He was not the only important leader of Apaches in his time, but he was the only one who managed to forge the bands of his division of the tribe into a cohesive whole, unified by agreed-upon purpose.
Contending with the endless stratagems of Spaniards, Mexicans, Anglos, and Apaches, coping with a world conspicuous
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