A short history of Cochise County.
Apache homeland, mining boomtowns, and frontier forts — the backdrop to your stay.
The Apache homeland
This corner of Arizona is named for Cochise, the Chiricahua Apache leader who, with Geronimo after him, defended this homeland through decades of conflict in the mid-to-late 1800s. The sky-island mountains and canyons that make the region a birding paradise today were, for generations, Apache strongholds. Cochise County was formally established in 1881.
Silver, copper, and boomtowns
In 1877 the prospector Ed Schieffelin struck silver in the hills east of here — warned he'd find only his tombstone, he named his claim, and the boomtown of Tombstone followed. Its brief, raucous heyday gave us the legend of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1881) and a main street preserved as "the town too tough to die." Not far away, Bisbee grew into one of the richest copper-mining towns in the world, its Victorian houses still clinging to the steep Mule Mountain gulches.
Forts and Buffalo Soldiers
Fort Huachuca, at the mouth of Huachuca Canyon just north of us, was established in 1877 and made permanent in 1882. The fort's history includes the famed African American "Buffalo Soldiers," and it remains an active U.S. Army post today, home to a pair of museums worth a visit.