Thomas Jeffords

Evergreen Cemetery, Tucson Arizona

Thomas Jonathan Jeffords (b. January 1, 1832 - d. February 21, 1914) was a U.S. Army scout, Indian agent, and later a stagecoach driver in the Arizona Territory. His friendship with Cochise was instrumental in ending the Indian wars in that region.

Born in Chautauqua County, NY, Tom Jeffords came west to Arizona in 1862 as a scout for the U.S. Army. Warfare with the Chiricahua Apaches had begun the year before, when Cochise, one of their chiefs, was accused by the Army of kidnapping an 11-year-old white boy from a nearby ranch. (The abduction was the work of Pinal Indians.) Hearing this, Cochise came forward under a flag of truce when summoned by the Army to declare his innocence. The Army chose not to believe him and tried to place him under arrest. Cochise pulled his knife, slashed the wall of the tent in which the meeting was being held, and escaped into the brush. The six men who had accompanied him, including three relatives, were held and then hanged.

Cochise, formerly inclined toward peace with the white settlers, now joined other Apache chiefs in hostility to them. It was not long before the Army retaliated, and the war was on.

Jeffords was the superintendent of a mail line that later became part of the famous Pony Express system. After some of his mail riders were killed by Apache raiding parties, he rode alone into the camp of Cochise to parley. This bravery so impressed the chief that he became friend and blood brother to Jeffords, granting his mail riders safe passage.

President Grant sent General Oliver Howard to the Arizona Territory in 1871 with orders to end the Apache wars by negotiating treaties with the tribes. Howard was an apt choice, as he had been head of the Freedman's Bureau, the agency responsible for assisting freed black slaves after the Civil War. General Howard enlisted the help of Jeffords in concluding these treaties. Learning of his work with the Freedman's Bureau, Jeffords knew that Howard was honorable and would be respected by Cochise, and eventually conducted the general into Cochise’s camp. A treaty was signed in 1872, ending the decade-long war with the Chiricahua Apaches. Cochise requested that his people be allowed to remain in the Chiricahua Mountains and that Jeffords be made Indian agent for the region. These requests were granted, and the Indian raids subsided.

However, certain white residents of the area disapproved of this arrangement because it denied them access to the copper and silver that had been discovered on Apache lands. They branded Jeffords “Indian lover” and wrote scathing reports to politicians back in Washington. In 1875 he was removed as the federal agent and the Chiricahua Apaches were relocated to the San Carlos Reservation. Cochise was spared this; he had died less than a year after signing the now broken treaty. The Indian wars began again, but were ended in 1886 with the surrender of Geronimo, the last Apache leader.

Jeffords became a stagecoach driver, a deputy sheriff of Tombstone, AZ and finally a gold prospector. He lived out the last 22 years of his life in the Tortolita Mountains north of Tucson, AZ, at a homestead near the Owl Head Buttes. He died on February 21, 1914 and was buried in Tucson's Evergreen Cemetery.

Source: Wikipedia