FullReads

You are of course at liberty to supply the details of that affair to suit yourself; but it is safe to say there was something in the way of battle before the last of these luckless travelers came to his end. For even the passengers went well armed in those days and were entirely willing to make a hard fight of it before they knuckled under; as witness the encounter at Stein’s Pass, where old Cochise and Mangus Colorado got the stage cornered on a bare hilltop with six passengers aboard one afternoon. The writer has given that story in detail elsewhere, but it is worth mentioning here that it took Cochise and Mangus Colorado and their five hundred warriors three long days to kill off the Free Thompson party–whose members managed to take more than one hundred and fifty Apaches along with them when they left this life.

But drivers were canny, and even the Apache with all his skill at ambush could not always entrap them. In the “Tucson Citizen” of April 20, 1872, under the heading “Local Matters,” we find this brief paragraph:

The eastern mail, which should have arrived here last Monday afternoon, did not get in until Tuesday. The Apaches attacked it at Dragoon Pass and the driver went back fifteen miles to Sulphur Springs; and on the second trial ran the gauntlet in safety.

Which reads as if there might have been considerable action and much manoeuvering on that April day in 1872 where the tracks of the Southern Pacific climb the long grade up from Wilcox to Dragoon Pass.

There was a driver by the name of Tingley on the Prescott line who had the run between Wickenburg and La Paz back in 1869. He had seen much Indian-fighting and was sufficiently seasoned to keep his head while the lead was flying around him. One February day he was on the box with two inside passengers, Joseph Todd of Prescott and George Jackson of Petaluma, California.

Everything was going well, and the old Concord came down the grade into Granite Wash with the horses on the jump and Tingley holding his foot on the brake. They reached the bottom of the hill, and the driver lined them out where the road struck the level going.

And then, when the ponies were surging into their collars, with the loose sand and gravel half-way to the hubs, somewhere between thirty and forty Apaches opened fire from the brush on both sides of the wagon-track.

The first volley came at close range; so close that in spite of the customary poor marksmanship of their kind the Indians wounded every man in the coach. A bullet got Tingley in the wrist. He dropped the reins, and before he could regain them the team was running away.

The six ponies turned off from the road at the first jump and plunged right into the midst of the Indians. Tingley could see the half-naked savages leaping for the bridles and clawing at the stage door as they strove to get hand-holds; but the speed was too great for them; the old Concord went reeling and bumping through the entire party, leaving several warriors writhing in the sand where the hoofs of the fright-maddened broncos had spurned them.

By this time Tingley had drawn his revolver, and the two passengers joined him in returning the fire of the enemy. Now he bent down and picked up the reins, and within the next two hundred yards or so he managed to swing the leaders back into the road.

From there on it was a race. The Apaches were catching up their ponies and surging along at a dead run to overtake their victims. But Tingley, to use the expression of the old-timers, poured the leather into his team, and kept the long lead which he had got.

The stage pulled up at Cullen’s Station with its load of wounded; and word was sent to Wickenburg for a doctor, who arrived in time to save the lives of the two inside passengers, although both men were shot through the body.