Cheis (Cochise)

Cochise led Chiricahua Apache resistance in Arizona for over a decade following the 1861 "Bascom Affair," in which he was wrongly accused of kidnapping a rancher's stepson and, after a tense standoff and hostage exchange gone violently wrong, launched a sustained war against American settlers and soldiers throughout the Arizona Territory. His forces, combined at times with Mangas Coloradas's, inflicted heavy losses on U.S. military and civilian targets for years, drawing on intimate knowledge of the region's mountains and canyons. In 1872, frontiersman Tom Jeffords, who had earned Cochise's rare personal trust, helped broker a peace agreement with General Oliver Howard establishing a Chiricahua reservation on Cochise's own homeland terms. Cochise honored that peace for the remaining two years of his life, dying in 1874 of natural causes on the reservation he had negotiated — one of the few Native leaders of the era to secure and keep a settlement largely on his own terms.