relay of ponies and riders stretched across the continent.
Russell had purchased 500 semiwild outlaw horses and had 80 riders continuously en route, 40 westbound, 40 east, who had answered his ads calling for “daring young men, preferably orphans.”
Financially, the Pony Express was a failure, charging a staggering $5 per half ounce (soon lowered to $2) of mail that actually cost the company an even more staggering $16 to deliver. Within 19 months, the Pony Express was out of business, rendered obsolete by the completion of transcontinental telegraph lines. But in 650,000 miles of travel, the company lost only one consignment—and managed to capture the nation’s imagination.
Word for the Day
Laborers included
“The Only Good Indian…”
(1862-1891)
The West was a land of many dreams, but what we seem to remember most vividly are the nightmares. On the vast stage of prairie and mountain, the last act of a four-century tragedy was played out. The curtain had been raised by the crew of Christopher Columbus, who clashed with the people they called Indians on an island they called Hispaniola. From then on, warfare between Native Americans and European Americans was chronic and continual. When whites and Indians did not start wars between themselves, Indians became embroiled in wars between whites: the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and finally, the Civil War.
Read any standard history of the Civil War, and you will learn that this epic struggle was mainly an eastern conflict. In the West, battles were smaller and less frequent, yet often, they were uglier.
Blue, Gray—and Red
Union loyalists in the West feared that the Confederates would acquire Indian allies. The Confederacy recruited some members of some eastern tribes, and both the North and South recruited troops from among tribes that had been “removed” to Indian Territory: the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. But the more significant impact Indians had on the Civil War was to draw off some Union troops who otherwise would have been used against Confederates. Most important, the demands of the war meant that fewer troops occupied western posts, which provided Indians ample opportunity to raid settlers with relative impunity.
A Man Called Cochise
On the eve of the Civil War, Cochise (1812-74) emerged as leader of the Apaches. Feared throughout the Southwest by whites as well as other Indian tribes (Apache is a Hopi word for enemy), the Apaches had been fierce warriors and raiders for centuries. However, Cochise was actually inclined to like the American whites who settled in Arizona, and he even secured a contract with the Butterfield Overland Mail to supply fuel wood to the station at Apache Pass.
In 1861, Cochise was falsely accused of raiding a local rancher (a thoroughly disreputable drunk named John Ward), rustling his cattle, and abducting his son. Second Lieutenant George N. Bascom asked Cochise for a parley on February 4, 1861; Cochise came voluntarily, only to be taken captive with five others. The chief managed to escape by slitting a tent with his knife, and, enraged, he raided the Butterfield station, killing one employee and taking another prisoner. Cochise then ambushed a small wagon train and seized eight Mexicans and two Americans, He burned the Mexicans alive but offered to exchange the Americans for the Apache prisoners Bascom still held. When Bascom refused, Cochise murdered his remaining captives, and Bascom retaliated by summarily executing his hostages.
This scenario was the way of white-Indian war in the West: a crescendo of eye for eye, usually escalating into a full-scale war. In this case, war with the Apaches would consume the next quarter century.
Southwestern Terror
The entire Southwest was racked by violence. The outbreak of the Civil War stripped the U.S. Army’s western outposts of 313 officers—one-third of the entire officer corps—who resigned their commissions to fight on the side of the Confederacy. Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Robert Baylor exploited the Union’s weakened position to take possession of Arizona Territory for the Confederacy. Baylor was able to roll over the greatly diminished Union presence, but he didn’t count on the hostility of the Chiricahua and Mimbreno Apaches, who terrorized the region. Baylor hastily formed the Arizona Rangers in August 1861 and ordered them to “exterminate all hostile Indians.”
