Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with Larry
Hedrick on mysteries of the superstition mountains the legend of Apache leap better known as the
legend of the Apache tears there's two versions to this story one of them is the one that tourists
are given when they buy a piece of jewelry made out of Apache tears
and then there's the longer version the short version runs something like the us army trapped
a band of Apaches on top of a mountain and rather than surrender they leaped to their deaths and the
wit the widows and wives of the lost their tears were absorbed by the obsidian of the Apache tears
that's the short version that everybody gets and when these people that buy jewelry go back
to their home country and somebody says what's that they get the legend just exactly that way
and it's well known all over the world the long version has a lot more information in it
that it mentions General Stoneman it mentions Camp Pinall or Picket Post which those
camps were the names were used interchangeably it suggests that the fight actually started at the
base of the mountain and the Apaches knew a way to get to the top well Stoneman, General Stoneman
when he established Camp Pinal at picket post about five miles west of superior
he immediately started to work on what is called today as Stoneman's grade
he needed to build a road from Camp Pinal up to what we call the top of the world today
it's the highest elevation from where you come from superior till you drop off down
in the globe and the reason for the establishing of snowman's grade was the for the mobility of
troops to respond to Indian uprisings that uh that may occur and to avoid the use of Devil's Canyon,
Devils Canyon is an absolutely wonderful marvelous beautiful place and it but it it floods the
Queen Creek runs right down through Devil's Canyon and it does a lot of flooding and therefore just
exactly when you need a path they can't use it plus the fact that in order to build in Devil's
Canyon you need modern equipment their soldiers could not move it's totally boulder strewn and
it's just impossible to build a road in Devils Canyon, Devils Canyon is also at the north end
of the very mountain that Apache leap took place in so the long version of the story
also mentions that there were 75 Indians involved in this this affair in 2013 there
was an archaeologist that gave it a lecture at the Tempe Historical Society and he just he displayed
brass cartridges that he found at the site on top of the leap i couldn't find any information about
the caliber of the of the um of the shells because he also mentioned the date of 1877 and that the
the shells that he found the brass cartridges did not match the date of 1871 formerly mentioned
i you know during the battle of skull cave the primary weapon of the u.s soldiers was sharps
rifles that had been converted from paper cartridges to brass cartridges
and they had a smattering of Remington rolling blocks the Sharps with a 50-70 caliber and the
rolling blocks had a number of different calibers 43-44 but they also had 50-70
and I would assume the army would stick with the same kind of a cartridge so they didn't have to
stock all different kinds of of ammunition but if that particular brass that he displayed was 45 70
that meant that they were working with the trapdoor rifle which didn't come out until 1873
and by the time it was issued to soldiers in the west uh it would have been about 1875 or or later
and if that would if it was 45-70 brass that he found that would establish the date pretty
well but it really doesn't matter the finding of military brass on the hill which this man
explained he found brass right up at the very edge of the cliff and some of the brass was
down at the bottom of the cliff which indicated that the soldiers were firing down the cliff
and they certainly weren't shooting dead people if the Apaches had found a way up the cliff he
assumed that they were escaping and that's why the soldiers were firing at him from the cliff
i was convinced that whatever caliber shells that were cartridges that were found during that search
would answer the question of the date that this occurred because in a speech that the
archaeologists had made in the Tempe Historical society he mentioned that the cartridges that were
found did not match the date that was commonly given for Apache leap and that it was the year
1871 which would have put this in the time period of general Stoneman at Camp Pinal
as it turns out there were two battles fought at the site of Apache leap one below the cliffs
and one up on top the cliffs a couple of names surfaced that really
surprised me and you might never recognize from other episodes that we've done on Picacho Pass
because the first battle took place in 1866 and was led by a man named john d walker walker was
part of the California Column that came in here in 1862 to deal with the Confederates that were in
Tucson he was the wagon master for the entire California Column there
must have been a lot of them because when when the battle of Picacho Pass was over
captain hunter sent lieutenant McCleave up to find out what happened to his missing men
and he saw 272 soldiers and 10 wagons going back to the panel villages so
that left about 2 000 more soldiers coming up the re the Gila river and obviously there must have
been an awful lot of wagons involved and that position called for the rank of a lieutenant
well when they got to the Sacaton villages Lieutenant Walker was in charge of distributing
the grain uh from the from the Maricopa and Pima Indians they had huge fields of grains
to the soldiers they were buying them from the Indians and shipping them to various places
where the California Column was as far away as El Paso well after the war was over
walker came back to the Pima villages he was very friendly with the Indians and he continued doing
business with him and in fact he uh he formed a militia unit out of the Pima and Maricopa
Indians the Apaches have been committing great depredations against the Pimas and the Maricopas
and they were really tired of it so he formed a militia unit
and was cooperating with fort Mcdowell which was established in 1865. a Lieutenant Ewing
uh came with a contingent of a small contingent of soldiers to the Pima villages and met with Captain
Walker who had formed this militia unit and they left the Pima villages with 300
Maricopa and Pimal up Pima Indians and marched 22 miles to what would have been Florence up the Gila
river and beyond and they crossed the river and camped the night and it was stated in his report
which is very accurate and complete report that at that point the Indians began making war clubs
the Indians evidently were not heavily armed or didn't particularly care to be so they were making
war clubs for for what was coming up ahead they marched 25 miles north of the Gila river which
would have put them very close if not in Queen Valley where there was permanent water and then
the forces split Lieutenant Ewing took up half the troop and went on up into the Tonto valley and
Walker took his group and went 15 miles east and that put him right where superior would be
and in them during the night they snuck up on this Apache rancheria area and was waiting for him by
dawn the fight started and they Killed 25 Apaches without any casualties on the sides of the
of the Indians nothing else was just accomplished at this particular battle and it was below the
cliffs not up on top the cliffs the women and children were taken captive the bodies were
just left where they fell and the the captives were turned over to this army at Fort Mcdowell
and that was the end of the 1866 raid the next raid and this was also
a documentation that was found in the army animals happened in June of 1869
this was led by Lieutenant Colonel Sanford and they left Apache they left Fort Mcdowell
went up the the salt river to the Tonto Basin where Roosevelt lake would be
and dropped south down Queen Creek through Globe on down to fort Grant
and from Fort Grant where they re-outfitted they worked their way way north to the Pinal mountains
and in the dark came upon the rancher that was on top of the cliff and
the name that came up there were three groups of mostly soldiers there was no mention of of
Pima or Maricopa Indians being in this particular group it was mostly all soldiers
and there was three groups of them all the outfits were named which I can't put to memory and
they combined into two groups and one of them was led by none other than lieutenant William Mccleave
if you might remember in our episode of Picacho pass
he was a captain who was captured by Captain Hunter and his confederates
and taken with Emile White who owned the mill there to messiah and now he was a Lieutenant
I don't think that meant that maybe he was demoted because he was captured I think
probably he was a brevit Captain at the time of of the civil war and now that was the war
was over he was back to his original rank as lieutenant anyway he made the initial contact and
the rancheria buildings and weapons and what they found was completely destroyed
and there were about 75 Apache casualties in this battle absolutely no mention in either one
of these reports said anything about the Apaches jumping over the edge or committing suicide or
being thrown over the edge what what information I've been able to gather there there's a couple
of other things that happened in Arizona that people thought that the Indians committed suicide
one of them was when General Crook took over he was on an inspection tour and
he was returning from Fort Apache to Camp Verde and his party was attacked by 30 or 40 Apaches and
a couple of them got separated during the fight and were over on the edge of the Mogolion rim
and the firing was so heavy they just jumped over the edge and everybody thought that they
committed suicide well eventually they walked over there to look down and see the remains
and there they both were almost the sheer cliff bounding from boulder to boulder making their
escape uh another has incident happened at turturt peak which is not far from where the first one
took place and there again stories were circulated that some of the Apaches jumped over the edge
absolutely there was no eyewitnesses to any of this that this either this is just something that
local legend has put put out there the ammunition that was found the cartridges were mostly
heavily 50-70 caliber which goes right along with the standard weapon that that they were
using at the skeleton cave which was the modified Sharps carbine modified from paper cartridge just
brass cartridges and fired 50 70 caliber there was a very small number of 56 50 caliber shells
found which would have been used in a Spencer carbine and that the information was suggesting
that some of the Indians were armed with Spencers now where would they have got these
um the governor had ordered in 500 Spencer carbines to be issued to civilians for their
self-defense and probably the Indians got those from civilians when they went on raids
the the cartridges were out of date they were no longer manufactured by 1869 and
when i was doing the story on the search for Dr Thorne's mine with Cooley, Cooley met up
with some Indians at that time that had figured out a way to save their brass and reload them
in fact one Indian showed him some metal that he had how he shaped these bullets and it turned out
that that metal was a almost pure silver nugget and they actually made the bullets to fit the gun
and if you ever saw uh an Indian make an arrowhead and how perfectly they can do this
you can understand that it would not necessarily be a difficult thing for an indent
to fashion a silver bullet to fit the weapon that he had the big problem was the primer
an Indian couldn't go buy a primer to fit that military or civilian gun so what they did
evidently powder was not hard to get and caps for cap and ball pistols were not that hard to get
so they took the smallest caps that would be used on a pistol and crushed them down into the primer
hole and then I'd done a little reloading in my time in a primer there's a little piece in there
called an anvil and that's what actually detonates the powder that's that's in the primer so they
took a small rock and put it on top of these crushed caps as the anvil and then crush some more
caps in there until it was smooth on the back of the cartridge so Indians were pretty clever and in
figuring this out so evidently there were some of them armed at Apache leap
so really as it comes down to it the only conclusion that I'm going to make
that has nothing to do with the reports is that articles that claim that the bones of Indians
could still be found there after several years could have only possibly been the 25 Indians that
were killed in the first raid and just left where they fell or else there was just in a complete
set exaggeration but anyway the two battles that took place and the one battle in 1869 by
Captain Mccleave Lieutenant Mccleave is in my opinion completely solved the mystery
of the Apache leap. Thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains