Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history, I love history and if you
love history too this is the channel for you. The Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor
to be offered to members of the United States Armed Forces, it is so prestigious that President
Harry Truman was famously quoted as saying that he would rather have won the Medal of Honor,
than been President of the United States. The medal was created in 1862, but it was possible to
nominate people for actions that had occurred in the past and that meant they were actually Medals
of Honor awarded for events that occurred before the Medal of Honor was created. And so it is that
the earliest event for which a Medal of Honor was awarded, occurred before the medal was created,
and actually even before the Civil War, for which the Medal of Honor was created. And it all has
to do with an event that is almost forgotten and yet still extremely important to American
history and still controversial today. The Medal of Honor that was awarded to Assistant Surgeon
Bernard Irwin, the first chronologically by date of action Medal of Honor to be awarded,
is history that deserves to be remembered. The peoples known as the Apache are people
indigenous to the southwestern United States who are part of the Athabaskan, or as it is also
called, the Dene language group. The language has three main groups of continuous languages,
the northern, the Pacific coast, and the southern. Interestingly, the Northern and Pacific Coast
groups are in Alaska, Canada and the Northwest Pacific coast, whereas the southern language
group, also called Apachean, which represents both the Apache and the Navajo tribal groups,
covers an area from northern Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico and into southern Colorado. It
might surprise some people to find out, that the language groups identified the Navajo and Apache,
as having diverged from peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and not from peoples of the plains to
the north and east, nor from peoples who came up from Mexico from the south, as those are
distinguished by having different language groups. The Apache were generally an independent people
who lived in family clusters of extended family. This was important in terms of their relationships
with other peoples, in that different family groups operated more or less independently, and so
different bands might have different relationships with their neighbors. Although there were many
cultural distinctions between groups, the Apache tended to be nomadic, and made limited use of
domesticated crops. Food was largely derived from hunting and gathering as well as trade. One part
of the culture was that the Apache tended to use the practice of raiding, as a way of supplementing
their diet. In general, the Apache distinguished raiding for economic purposes, from raiding for
war. They did not think of economic raiding as an act of war, and that usually occurred with
small bands, with specific purpose. This would become important as the Apache came into contact
with European settlers, as raiding was part of the Apache traditional life, whereas settlers
from Mexico and the United States tended to object to having their stock raided or stolen. Although
Europeans often did not recognize the distinction, Apache saw raiding for war as distinct from
raiding for economic reasons. Raiding for war included larger numbers of raiders and was
usually done for the purpose of retribution, and as part of that, the Apache treatment of
prisoners could include brutal torture. Apache conflict with Spanish settlers began nearly as
early as the two came into contact in the 16th century. The Spanish raided the Apache for slaves,
and the Apache raided Spanish settlements, moreover Apache from the plains were being
driven west by other people, the Comanche, and with less access to the Bison on the plains, the
Apache became more dependent upon raiding. As part of the long conflict the Spanish built a series
of fortifications along the frontier to protect from Apache raids, those were called presidios,
and they eventually became the centerpieces of major modern cities like San Antonio Texas,
Santa Fe New Mexico, and Tucson Arizona. The conflict continued after Mexican Independence
in 1821 and by the mid 1830s, Mexico took to paying for Apache scalps. Punitive expeditions
by the Mexicans and Anglos only intensified the conflict that cost at least thousands of lives and
left every Spanish settlement, mine or farmstead, subject to attack. Conflict with Americans started
with the Mexican-American War, and after much of northern Mexico was ceded to the United States
after the war, the increasing number of American settlers traveling down the Santa Fe Trail caused
conflict. Promises of peace by American officials were often not respected by American settlers,
conflict between gold miners and Apaches and their Ute allies in New Mexico, resulted in the conflict
called the Jicarilla War between 1849 and 1854. It was amid ongoing tensions, and raiding from both
sides, that in January of 1861, a group of Apaches raided a farmstead in southern Arizona owned by a
rancher named John Ward, taking some livestock and capturing Ward's twelve-year-old stepson Felix.
Ward traveled to the nearby army outpost of Fort Buchanan and complained to the fort commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Pitcairn Morrison of the U.S. 7th Infantry. Morrison dispatched Company C of
the 7th Infantry under Second Lieutenant George Bascom, a West Point graduate,
to retrieve the missing boy. As they picked up the trail from the raiders, it appeared to lead
towards the Chiricahua Mountains, leading Bascom to conclude that the Chiricahua Apache, whose
chief was named Cochise, had been responsible for the raid. While Cochise and his people largely did
their raiding in Mexico, they occasionally raided in Arizona, and in fact had at least twice rated
livestock from Fort Buchanan. Again remember that raiding was a common behavior for the Apache,
who did not see it as an act of war. While Bascom's assumption that the Chiricahua had done
the raid was understandable, it was incorrect, and that was a mistake that would prove critical.
On February 3rd, Bascom and his party camped near an Overland Mail station, and Bascom sent a message
to Cochise asking him to come in for a talk. Cochise, along with several members of his family,
came to the camp to talk. At this point neither side was expecting a violent confrontation.
Bascom demanded that Cochise return the kidnapped boy, Cochise denied knowing of the kidnapping but
offered to find the boy. Assuming that Cochise was being evasive, Bascom tried to take Cochise
and his party hostage until the boy and the cattle could be returned, but Cochise managed
to escape by pulling out a knife and cutting a hole in the tent which they're eating and running
away. The rest of his party however was taken hostage. Bascom and the sixty-five men returned
to the Overland Mail station which they fortified using wagons and grain and flour sacks, Bascom
noted with dismay that more Apache seemed to be arriving and he was besieged. While they had food,
water from the spring was more than a half mile away. Cochise managed to capture some Overland
Mail employees and offered to trade them for his captured family members, but Bascom refused unless
they returned the kidnapped boy. The problem was that Cochise did not have the boy, who had
been kidnapped by a different group of Apaches. On February 7th, a group of Cochise's Apache,
attacked a group of Bascom's men who were taking their mules to the spring for water, one Overland
Mail employee was killed and most of the mules were taken. Bascom came to the conclusion that
he was surrounded by as many as five hundred Apache and was in danger of attack, and so he
decided to send out two scouts to sneak through the lines, and seek help from Fort Buchanan.
The messengers arrived at Fort Buchanan on the evening of the 8th and Assistant Surgeon Bernard
John Dowling Irwin offered to take the only troops available, 11 men of Company H of the 7th infantry
to assist Bascom. On the way, Irwin and his small group encountered some Apache with stolen cattle,
and managed to capture three Apache Braves and several cattle. When Irwin's party
arrived at Bascom's camp on the 10th, the cattle provided much-needed beef. Irwin would later be
presented the Medal of Honor for his actions, volunteering to lead the party, and capturing
the Apache and cattle despite having such a small force. By date of action it is the earliest Medal
of Honor to have been awarded. Eventually seventy more men of the 1st Dragoons arrived as well, and
the group may have been helped in that a company of the 8th infantry marching 15 miles away, and
apparently unaware of Bascom's predicament, may have been interpreted by the Apache as planning
to attack their flank. Somewhere between the 14th and 16th, the Apache slipped away, killing their
prisoners, and leaving them for Bascom to find. In a decision that is controversial to this day,
the American officers decided to execute their hostages, the three Braves that Irwin
had captured and the three that Bascom had taken, although they did release the women and children
from Cochise's party. This turned out to be a grave error as the three Apache that Bascom had
captured were Cochise's brother and nephews, the decision to execute those men turned the
Apache anger from Mexico to the United States and sparked the Apache Wars, which would last for more
than two decades, and cost thousands of lives. One of the most controversial aspects of the
so-called Bascom affair was how much Lieutenant Bascom had to do with the decision to execute the
Apache prisoners. Bascom is usually presented as a villain, whose miscalculation started a bloody
war, but actually of the four officers that were there, from the 1st Dragoons, Assistant Surgeon
Irwin and Bascom, Bascom was the junior of the four, and records discovered since suggest that he
was the only one of the four to raise objections to the execution. In fact, the order for the
execution seems to have come from Assistant Surgeon Irwin. The records from the Bascom
Affair have largely been lost, as Fort Buchanan was abandoned at the start of the Civil War, and
Bascom's original report was apparently destroyed. George Bascom himself died leading a company of
the seventh infantry in the Battle of Valverde in February of 1862, part of the far western theater
of the U.S. Civil War. Assistant Surgeon Irwin served throughout the Civil War and eventually
achieved the rank of Colonel before retiring, he received the Medal of Honor for actions that
occurred in February of 1861, thirty-three years later in 1894, shortly before his retirement.
Cochise turned out to be one of the Army's most skilled adversaries, but eventually he
did agree to live peacefully on a reservation, and he died of natural causes in 1874. One of the most
surprising turns in the Bascom Affair has to do with the captured boy, Felix Ward, long thought
to have been killed, it turns out that he had been captured by a group of Pinal Apache, with
whom Cochise was unrelated and raised by them. He later served with the US Army as an Apache Scout
using the name Mickey Free. The Bascom affair was one of many examples where inexperienced officers
on the frontier made missteps that resulted in conflict, and that nearly forgotten event on
the border between the United States and Mexico in February of 1861, which sparked the bloody Apache
Wars which actually continued clear into the 20th century, is a good example of what can happen when
there is a clash of cultures, and possibly the inevitable result of American westward expansion.
It is history that deserves to be remembered. I'm the history guy, I hope you enjoyed this
edition of my channel, five minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten history five to ten
minutes long. If you enjoyed it hit the like button on your left, if you have any questions
or comments or suggestions feel free to write them in the comment section and if you want
five minutes more forgotten history then click the subscribe button on your right.