ers were
killed by Apaches. The mail and stage were burned. Also there is
one passenger missing who was known to have left Apache Pass with
this stage.

You are of course at liberty to supply the details of that affair to
suit yourself; but it is safe to say there was something in the way of
battle before the last of these luckless travelers came to his end.
For even the passengers went well armed in those days and were
entirely willing to make a hard fight of it before they knuckled
under; as witness the encounter at Stein's Pass, where old Cochise and
Mangus Colorado got the stage cornered on a bare hilltop with six
passengers aboard one afternoon. The writer has given that story in
detail elsewhere, but it is worth mentioning here that it took Cochise
and Mangus Colorado and their five hundred warriors three long days to
kill off the Free Thompson party--whose members managed to take more
than one hundred and fifty Apaches along with them when they left this
life.

But drivers were canny, and even the Apache with all his skill at
ambush could not always entrap them. In the "Tucson Citizen" of April
20, 1872, under the heading "Local Matters," we find this brief
paragraph:

The eastern mail, which should have arrived here last Monday
afternoon, did not get in until Tuesday. The Apaches attacked it
at Dragoon Pass and the driver went back fifteen miles to Sulphur
Springs; and on the second trial ran the gauntlet in safety.

Which reads as if there might have been considerable action and much
manoeuvering on that April day in 1872 where the tracks of the
Southern Pacific climb the long grade up from Wilcox to Dragoon Pass.

There was a driver by the name of Tingley on the Prescott line who had
the run between Wickenburg and La Paz back in 1869. He had seen much
Indian-fighting and was sufficiently seasoned to keep his head while
the lead was flying around him. One February day he was on the box
with two inside passengers, Joseph Todd of Prescott and George Jackson
of Petaluma, California.

Everything was going well, and the old Concord came down the grade
into Granite Wash with the horses on the jump and Tingley holding his
foot on the brake. They reached the bottom of the hill, and the driver
lined them out where the road struck the level going.

And then, when the ponies were surging into their collars, with the
loose sand and gravel half-way to the hubs, somewhere between thirty
and forty Apac