Tuesday, December 6, 2011

         I'll be experimenting with some historical features/documents that I will make available for the upcoming article on maps & boundaries & lines.
         There will be a number of historical documents available for viewing.
         The National Archives & Records Center in Washington, D.C., have millions upon millions of documents that relate to just about every possible subject matter that has fallen under the knife of cataloguers & list makers. In the case of the millions upon millions of documents that are devoted to the era of the Indian Wars, circa 1860-1899, there are numerous maps.
          The map below could as easily be called a "drawing" of the fire fight that occurred in October, 1869, between the forces of Lt. Col. Reuben Bernard. The drawings were made by a soldier & officer who were at the battle, and recorded in charcoal, I suspect, or pencil, the terrain in what is known as Tex Cañon.  Ft. Rucker was eventually opened along the route to the place called "The Rocky Mesa" fire fight site.  This was covered in an article I wrote about Lt. John Lafferty.
          In that article, Edwin Sweeney, the preeminent author of the history of the Chiricahua Apaches, visited the site so as to conincide with a party of Fred Lafferty & his wife, Betty, as well as a grandson named "Boomer" & his father, a man named Head.  I was along, and we wound up going to the site where this battle occurred. It is so unusual that a "map" is colocated in the National Archive records on microfilm in the sense that this is as much a drawing as a map.
          The legend for the map has a list of #s, which are penciled into the large terrain feature where Lt. Col
Bernard's men encountered the forces of Cochise in Tex Cañon.  By using those numbered locations, we were able to go as close as possible to the actual site (a large boulder), where Lt. John Lafferty had a portion of his jaw shot away. This was a permanent disabling wound, and he was pensioned out of the Army a few years later.
          I will also include other maps which accompanied "scouts," or what would amount to patrols, from various forts & camps. Often, those scouts recorded how many miles were "marched" in a day; whether water; timber; and grass were available for consumption & use by the cavalrymen & infantrymen.  "Marched"
is a term that denotes the # of miles made or traveled in a given day.  Even in the case of infantry units, the distances in Arizona & New Mexico Territories was so vast that infantry rode on mules in many cases.
      The microcopy series of National Archives microfilm rolls for this particular period is titled: Microcopy 619: Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series), 1861-1870, Roll 737 1869,  733-925.  A partial index is also provided for that roll of microfilm of microcopy #619.  These are the raw notes of the people who prosecuted the war against the Apache Indians of Arizona & New Mexico in this time frame -- i.e., specifically: 1869.  The troops of Lt. Colonel's Bernard troops were stationed @ Ft.Bowie.
       This area of the Chiricahua Mountains was just one part of the vast area that fell within the territory claimed by Cochise & his particular band of Chiricahua Apaches.

           I believe if you use whatever key stroke available to use to enlarge these images, you will see more detail.  Credit is given to
         Here are a few: