Great Apache Chiefs / Mangas Coloradas

Mangas Coloradas (Span: `red sleeves') . A Mimbreno Apache chief. He pledged friendship to the Americans when Gen. S. W. Kearny took possession of New Mexico in 1846. The chief stronghold of the Mimbremo at that time was at the Santa Rita copper mines, south west New Mexico, where they had killed the miners in 1837 to avenge a massacre committed by white trappers who invited a number of Mimbrenos to a feast and murdered them to obtain the bounty of $100 offered by the state of Chihuahua for every Apache scalp. When the boundary commission made its headquarters at Santa Rita trouble arose over the taking from the Mimbreno Apache of some Mexican captives and over the murder of an Indian by a Mexican whom the Americans refused to hang on the spot: The Mimbrenos retaliated by stealing some horses and mules belonging to the commission, and when the commissioners went on to survey another section of the boundary the Indians conceived that they had driven them away. In consequence of indignities received at the hands of miners at the Pinos Altos gold mines, by whom he was bound and whipped,- Mangas Coloradas collected a large band of Apache and became the scourge of the white settlements for years. He formed an alliance with Cochise to resist the Californian volunteers who reoccupied the country when it was abandoned by troops at the beginning of the Civil war, and was wounded in an engagement at Apache pass, south east Arizona, that grew out of a misunderstanding regarding a theft of cattle. His men took him to Janos, in Chihuahua, and left him in the care of a surgeon with a warning that the town would be destroyed in case he were not cured: According to one account, soon after his recovery he was taken prisoner in Jan., 1863, by the Californians and was killed while attempting to escape, goaded, it is said, with a red-hot bayonet (Dunn, Massacres of Mts., 365, 374, 382, 1886), while Bell (New Tracks, ii, 24, 1869) states that in 1862 he was induced to enter Ft McLane, New Mexico, on the plea of making a treaty and receiving presents. The soldiers imprisoned him in a hut, and at night a sentry shot him under the pretext that he feared the Indian would escape.