What is Cochise Stronghold?
The Dragoon Mountains rise out of the Sulphur Springs Valley as a jumble of granite domes, fins and boulders the size of houses, and two deep canyons come at the range from opposite sides and nearly meet at a divide in the middle. For about a decade beginning in 1861, Cochise and his band of Chiricahua Apache used those canyons as home and fortress; the Butterfield stage road ran within sight of the rocks, and the Army could never bring him to a fight he did not choose. He made peace in 1872, died in 1874 and was buried in the Stronghold by his people in a place that has never been found. The Forest Service treats the area as the historic site it is and asks visitors to as well.
The campground sits in East Stronghold Canyon at about 5,000 feet: 11 sites and two group sites under Emory and Arizona white oak, with tables, fire rings and vault toilets. There is no water. Two short trails start at the restrooms, the 0.4-mile Stronghold Nature Trail and the paved, wheelchair-accessible Stronghold History Trail. The real hike is the Cochise Trail #279, which climbs about 3 miles and 1,000 feet to Stronghold Divide at 5,900 feet, then drops to the West Stronghold trailhead in 4.7 miles total. The granite above camp is one of Arizona’s classic climbing areas and the oaks are full of acorn woodpeckers, Mexican jays and, when the acorns drop, black bears.
What you get is a small, old, cheap campground in some of the most storied ground in the Southwest, with a good trail out the back and a sky as dark as any in the state. What you do not get is water, a summer season, a reservation, a hookup or room for anything longer than a 16-foot trailer.
How to camp Cochise Stronghold right
Pay at the tube. $20 a night single, $40 double, first come, first served, cash or check at the fee tube or a pass bought online. Day use, including trailhead parking, is $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; the $40 Coronado annual pass covers it. Two vehicles and ten people per site; 14 days in any 60. Pass discounts apply only to the site the pass holder occupies.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east through Tucson and Benson to exit 331, US 191, then south 18 miles on US 191 past Cochise and Sunsites to Ironwood Road. Turn west and follow it 9 miles to the campground at the end; the first part is paved, the rest graded dirt that washboards but is fine for a car driven sensibly. About 205 minutes from Old Town. The campground loop is tight, and the Forest Service’s 16-foot trailer limit reflects that. Parking for day hikers is in the campground and costs the day-use fee.
Pick the season. September 1 to May 31. Closed all summer. Late October and November, when the oaks are still green and the rock glows at sunset, are the best weeks; winter nights freeze at 5,000 feet. Plan on a weeknight for a choice of sites, because climbers from Tucson take the campground on fall weekends.
Water. None, from US 191 onward. Bring every drop from Benson, Willcox or Sunsites.
Hike the divide. Take the Cochise Trail to Stronghold Divide in the morning for the view west into the other canyon, about 3 miles and 1,000 feet up, and turn around there unless someone can meet you at the West Stronghold trailhead; the road loop back is 40 miles. The 400-foot paved history trail by the restrooms is worth the five minutes before you go. For the climbing on the domes, the routes are long, traditional and graded for people who know what the class ratings mean.
Respect the rock art. Council Rocks on the west side holds Mogollon pictographs; do not touch them, and read our petroglyph entry on why.
Bears and vehicles. Store food in a hard-sided vehicle or the provided containers and use the bear-proof trash bins. Trailers to 16 feet, no hookups.
Dogs. On leash in camp; the trail is open to them.
Skip it if eleven dry sites and a long drive sound like too little. Bonita Canyon at Chiricahua is an hour further with water and flush toilets, and many people do both. Reef Townsite in the Huachucas and Lakeview at Parker Canyon Lake are the other southeast Arizona camps of the same size; Riggs Flat is the high, cool one when this is too warm.
The rocks where Cochise made peace
People used the Dragoon granite for shelter long before the Apache. At Council Rocks, on the west side of the range near the mouth of the other Stronghold canyon, Mogollon people around 1200 ground mesquite beans in bedrock mortars under the overhang and painted the pictographs that are still on the wall, with a few figures that may have been added by Apache visitors centuries later. The Chiricahua Apache were in these mountains by the 1400s or 1500s, and the range’s name comes from the U.S. Dragoons who set up posts in the area around 1856, three years after the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 made the country American. Cochise, leader of the Chokonen band, kept an uneasy peace with the newcomers for most of a decade; the Butterfield stage road ran through the pass at the north end of the range within sight of his camps.
The Bascom Affair ended that. In 1861 a young lieutenant at Apache Pass accused Cochise of a kidnapping he had not committed, held his relatives when he denied it, and hanged them after Cochise cut his way out of the tent; eleven years of war followed. The Stronghold was Cochise’s answer to the Army. Two canyons enter the Dragoons from opposite sides and nearly meet at a divide, each a maze of domes and boulders with water and grass inside, and from them Cochise could watch the stage road and the valleys and withdraw where no column could follow. The Army and the Mexicans both failed to bring him to a fight he did not choose, and the Confederates who briefly held the territory in 1862 fought him twice at Dragoon Springs, losing the first fight and winning the second a few days later.
Peace came through one man’s trust. Tom Jeffords, a red-bearded mail contractor and scout from New York, had ridden alone into Cochise’s camp to ask that his riders be spared, and the two became friends. In 1872 President Grant sent General Oliver O. Howard, the one-armed Civil War hero, to make peace with the Chiricahua, and Jeffords agreed to take him to Cochise if he came unarmed and without escort. The first meetings in October 1872 were at Council Rocks, the last at Dragoon Springs, and the result was a Chiricahua Reservation of more than 3,000 square miles, taking in the Dragoons, the Chiricahuas and the Sulphur Springs and San Simon valleys between, with Jeffords as agent on Cochise’s insistence. Cochise settled his people at the east entrance of the Stronghold, the canyon where the campground now sits. For four years there was no trouble on the reservation, and the raiding went south of the border.
Cochise died on June 8, 1874, probably of stomach cancer, and was buried in the Stronghold by his people; Jeffords was the only white man present, and he never told where. In April 1876, after Apaches killed a stage attendant over a dispute, Washington fired Jeffords, closed the reservation and sent John Clum to move the Chiricahua to San Carlos. He got about 325 of them there; the rest scattered to New Mexico and Sonora, and the Geronimo years began. The Dragoons went to ranchers, became the short-lived Dragoon National Forest in 1907 and part of the Coronado National Forest in 1908. The Forest Service built the East Stronghold campground sometime in the mid-20th century; the agency’s page gives no date, and we have not found one. Climbers have since made the Stronghold one of the state’s classic traditional areas, and the campground has been theirs on fall weekends for decades.
Why it matters
Cochise Stronghold is the most important place in Arizona’s Apache wars that you can sleep in. It explains why the Chiricahua could not be beaten and why they were, in the end, removed anyway: a fortress of rock, a peace made on trust between two men, and a government that broke it two years after one of them died. The granite is the same as it was in 1872, the oaks are the same, and the grave is still out there. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: come between October and April on a weeknight, bring all your water, walk to the divide, and treat the canyon as the cemetery and the council ground it is.