June 6, 2007 Bonus Blog
Dealing with more double obsessioins: I want that train painting to be groovy. So yesterday morning I had Kathy take a couple of shots of Tomas and I pretending to be in a bucket brigade:



I told you they were embarrassing. These led to the following sketches:



But somehow, the poses were flat, and on flat ground, and I'm not getting the bank or angle of the scene. So I called up my neighbors and asked them if they'd pose in the creek bottom at lunchtime. They agreed. That led to this series:



And these shots were taken by Sheila:



And that's Bruce, on the right. This has better dynamics, and better costuming. We'll see if they help, tomorrow.

My second obsession is Big Dry Wash. Here is the run-up to the fight:

Apache Timeline

In the spring of 1881 a White Mountain Apache medicine man named Noch-ay-del-klinne teaches the Apaches a new dance. The performers are arranged like the spokes of a wheel, all facing inward, while the medicine man stands in the hub and sprinkles them with the sacred hoddentin as they circle around him. Apaches flock to the dances near Cibecue. Reservation agents become worried that Noch-ay-del-klinne is preaching that all the dead Apache chiefs will return from the dead and the white man will disappear. The agent at San Carlos, Joseph Capron Tiffany, sends his Indian police to arrest the prophet, but they come back empty-handed, grumbling about white aggression. The enlisted scouts at Fort Apache demand passes to attend the dances, and they return as converts.

August 14, 1881
Agent Tiffany sends a demand to Col. Eugene Asa Carr, the commander at Fort Apache. It reads: “I want him [the Apache medicine man] arrested or killed or both.”

August 29, 1881
Col. Carr sets out from Fort Apache with 117 men and 23 Apache scouts. Arriving at Cibicue, a 75 mile ride, Carr and his men arrest Noch-ay-del-klinne without incident, but his assembled followers follow Carr, who goes into camp (it is late in the day) a mile from the arrest site. After several confrontations a fight breaks out and Captain Hentig is shot point blank in the heart, killing him instantly. A bugler of Troop D shoots the prophet three times in the head (Carr had threatened to kill him if there was any trouble). The Indian scouts defect and in the ensuing fight, eight soldiers and 18 Apaches are killed.
Vastly outnumbered, Carr and his command slip away by night and make it back to Fort Apache.

Roving bands of Apaches make a sweep of the area killing soldiers and civilians wherever they can find them.
Geronimo, who has been living peacefully at San Carlos becomes nervous as 22 companies from California and New Mexico descend on the reservation (there had been no soldiers on the actual reservation since John Clum kicked them out in 1876.

September 25, 1881
Two small White Mountain bands come in to surrender. Camping near Geronimo, the authorities decide to rearrest Bonito and George.

September 30, 1881
Three companies of troops advance on the sub-agency where Geronimo and his band are receiving rations. Spooked, Geronimo jumps the reservation and leaves a trail of blood all the way into Mexico.

April 18, 1882
From their stronghold in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico, Geronimo, leading some seventy warriors crosses the line and raids the reservation, towards San Carlos, killing chief of police Albert Sterling and an Apache policeman, Sagotal.
Geronimo “liberates” (there is some question whether the Apaches went voluntarily) a band of kinsmen and head up the Gila River, killing anyone they encounter. The death toll reaches fifty as they make a deadly sweep back into Mexico. U.S. Troops, led by Al Sieber and his scouts, catch up to the Apaches just across the line and illegally attack them, killing a 14 Apaches before the rest escape, only to be attacked by Mexican troops who kill 78 and capture 33 women and children.

July 6, 1882
On the reservation, restless Cibicue insurgents find a leader in Na-ti-o-tish and they ambush the new San Carlos chief of police, John “Cibicue Charley” Colvig and three Indian policemen, killing them all.

Gathering adherants along the Gila, the renegades number about 54 fighting men, as the war party sweeps north towrds the Tonto Basin, killing and stealing everything they can. U.S. Army columns from several different forts converge on their trail and they clash at Big Dry Wash.

This timeline was taken from my 1994 Geronimo manuscript and edited by Charlie Waters. Someday I intend to get it out there. Amazing stuff, really. In the meantime, this is the back story to Big Dry Wash. Pretty dramatic, no?

Today marks at least a week that I can't access my email on AOL. The scuttlebutt is they updated their site and didn't take in account Mac computers. I assumed it would take them hours to adjust, but it's been at least a week. I think I'll keep track, just for grins. In the meantime, if you really need to contact me, send your emails to:

bozebell@aol.com

"Chiles have conquered the northern palates. The defining ingredients of Mexican cuisine stake out ever more of the culinary territory. Chili is the hot brand of this cuisine, corn and black beans its solid symbol; limes provide its lashings, filmy expanses of cheese form its flag. Chili con carne is its signature dish. Chili is part of the story of the Americanization of America, made from the repertoire of ingredients that predates the American annexation of the Soutwest and that, since then, have gradually conquered the conquerers."
—Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in his book The Americas: A Hemispheric History