JULY 28:

1642 Montreal Quebec Priest baptizes a 4 year old Algonquin boy.

1633 Quebec Quebec Flotilla of 140 Huron canoes arrives at Quebec.

1615 French River Ontario Samuel de Champlain arrives at Lake Huron on his way to Huronia.

July 28, 1756:  Today, Delaware Chief Teedyuscung, and 14 other chiefs, meet with Pennsylvania Governor Robert Morris, and other Pennsylvania leaders at Easton, Pennsylvania to discuss the Delaware uprising. Teedyuscung agrees to visit the warring members of the tribe, and to try to end the fighting.

July 28, 1862: Fort Bowie is established in the Apache Pass, in southeastern Arizona, by members of Brigadier General James Charlatan's California volunteers.

July 28, 1872: Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and twelve officers and 272 enlisted men begin an extended patrol of the area surrounding the Texas Panhandle. They include twenty Tonkawa scouts. They are looking for renegade Indians. One of their engagements is called the "Battle of the North Fork of the Red River." It happens on September 29, 1872
 

BACKGROUND:
 

FORT BOWIE
(1862-1894)

The fort was first established by the California Column of Volunteers on its way to New Mexico when a detachment was sent to protect the spring at Puerto de Dado. This is the fort where field artillery was first used against the Apache at the Battle of Apache Pass in June of 1862.

Operations were heightened when General George Crook took command in July 1871.  It became the focal point of operation against Geronimo and the Apache. From 1867-1886 there were constant skirmishes with the Apache renegades Victorio, Nana, Juh, Geronimo, Loco, and Natchez. The majority of the renegade Apache surrendered in April of 1886 and were sent to Fort Marion, Florida. General George Crook would resign his commission on April 12, 1886. General Nelson Miles would assume command. He would establish an elaborate heliograph system here, a system of mirrors used to communicate established throughout Arizona. On September 4, 1886 Lt. Charles Gatewood and Lt. Britton Davis were successful in convincing Geronimo to surrender. The next day he was brought to camp, with the rest of the renegades following three days later. There were all sent to Fort Marion, Florida for a limited term. Upon their agreed upon return a few years later, they were redirected to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. This officially ended the Indian Wars in Arizona. The fort became useless after that time and was officially abandoned October 17, 1894.
 

*****
 

Excerpts from http://www.cochisestronghold.com/history.html (It is worth
reading the full text of this website.)
 

...... The old warrior had been fighting white men for nine years. He was tired, outnumbered, out-gunned. He could see that this was not going to end for his people, but he was not yet ready to give up. The date was Oct. 20, 1869. There was a battle in those hills behind him, Sweeney said, that had its roots some 50 miles to the west, near Dragoon Springs, at the north end of the Dragoon Mountains.

On Oct. 5, 1869, a Col. John Finkle Stone, the 33-year-old president of Apache Pass Mine, near Ft. Bowie, headed back to his home in Tucson aboard a mail coach. He had an escort of four. When they approached an abandoned stagecoach station at the north end of the Dragoon Mountains, a bunch of Apaches camouflaged with weeds jumped out of a gully and hit them fast and hard. Stone, the coach driver, and all of the soldiers were killed. The news stunned Tucson, where Stone-for whom Stone Avenue was later named-was well-known and admired.

Within hours of this attack, Cochise and his band encountered a group of cowboys in the Sulphur Springs Valley. The men were moving a herd of cattle from Texas to California when Cochise and his band came upon them. The Apaches attacked, killing one of the men and stealing the cattle.

One member of that group, named Scott, managed to escape and fled to Ft. Bowie to ask for help.

Lt. William H. Winters and some 26 troopers left Bowie in pursuit of the Apaches, but before they reached the site they encountered another rider who told them of the attach on Stone and the mail coach. Winters had to decide which way to head. Finally, he declared, "I can't do anything for the dead, "but I sure can do something for the living," and turned towards Dragoon Springs.

Horrified by the carnage he found there, Winters took off after Cochise who, he knew, was driving his stolen cattle toward Mexico. When Cochise saw Winters and his troopers in the distance, he realized he'd never outrun them and make it across the border, so he changed course and headed into Rucker Canyon......

IT IS 129 years later and the Apaches with their small children are bunched together in rapt attention. "In the 1860's," said Sweeney, motioning to the pastoral wonderland at his back, "this was Cochise's principal Stronghold." This hideaway is not the same as today's Cochise Stronghold Campground. That's many miles to the west, in the Dragoon Mountains, and was where Cochise lived in old age.

In 1869 ... Cochise fled into this earlier stronghold between Red Rock and Turtle Mountain, above Rucker Canyon, and the army followed. Lt. Winters was quickly joined by another contingent from Ft. Bowie, led by Capt. Reuben Bernard, but the whole battle was essentially a storm in a glass of water, doing very little to advance the cause of peace or understanding The battle in Rucker was called The Campaign of the Rocky Mesa. Two soldiers who tried to ascend the mesa in pursuit of the Apaches were killed immediately. Various attempts to ford the hill-even placing sharpshooters on a nearby hill and trying to lob shells on the Apaches-were fruitless. The Apaches suffered 18 casualties, according to Bernard's account, but Bernard's credibility (as we shall see) was questionable.

Brief though the battle was it was a miserable confrontation for all involved. It was cold, rainy, and the light was fading fast. In the skirmishes that followed over the next week or so, Apache scouts assisting the Army and various Apache warriors were shouting to each other in their native language, the Indians inquiring about the possibility of coming to some kind of peaceful settlement, the Army officers responding through the scouts that the Apaches had to put down their arms and come in before any talks could  ...

... remembered a description of Cochise left behind by an Army doctor, Anderson Nelson Ellis, who had been an eyewitness to a meeting in 1871 between Cochise and Gen. Gordon Granger.

"While he was talking," Ellis wrote of the 56-year-old Apache chief, "we had a fine opportunity to study this most remarkable man...His height, five feet en inches; in person lithe and wiry, every muscle being well-rounded and firm. A silver thread was now and then visible in his otherwise black hair, which he wore cut straight around his head about on a level with his chin. His countenance displayed great force. Cochise spoke through an interpreter. He spoke in his language to one of his warriors who also spoke Spanish. The warrior repeated the words in Spanish to a Spanish speaker in Gen. Granger's contingent, who then translated them into English for the general. Cochise declared: "When I way young, I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it." "How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die, that they carry their lives on their fingernails? They roam over the hills and the plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation.

They are now but a few, and because of this they want to die, and so carry their lives on their fingernails."

At noon, Sweeney and Gillespie again faced the dozen Chiricahua Apaches in a clearing near the mouth of the canyon. It was on this spot, they said, that Cochise me with Gen. Oliver Otis Howard and agreed to make peace.