Happy birthday to me

Yesterday was my birthday and, because I really, really, really wanted to go there, we had fully intended to visit Biosphere 2. However, it being a long weekend here, we opted instead for a driving tour of Cochise Stronghold and the Chiricahua National Monument where the crowds wouldn't likely be.

We had learned about Cochise in the Chiricahua Regional Museum & Research Center in Willcox while we were killing time between seminars at the birding festival on the weekend. This small, volunteer-run organization, located in a former building supply store, doesn't look like much from the outside, but is chock-a-block with information -- history, anthropology, archaeology, geology, biology ... well, pretty much everything, really.

We were definitely hooked and curious to see an area which is so different from what's around us at our little house, yet physically not very far away.

Chez nous

Chez Cochise

Cochise was an incredibly effective guerrilla fighter of the Chiricahua Apache group. (There are 6 other Apache groups from this area, including the Navajo). Apparently, he was never captured, or at least managed to escape whenever he was temporarily detained. When he died, his followers took his body, along with his favourite horse and his favorite dog, into these mountains where they deposited all three in a canyon. The exact location is still unknown.

Also when he died, the US government repatriated to its own holdings the 1.3 million acres of reservation land they had given him. Maybe that's where the term "Indian giver" came from.