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Warriors Past

Mangas Coloradas 1863

"I come into Santa Rita and am told you will decide what country belongs to the United States and what belongs to Mexico. I know all about this, for I have talked with your General [Stephen] Kearny and your Colonel Cook....This country where we have hunted for all time does not belong to Mexicans. they cannot sell it to the United States. It belongs to Apaches. It is not right for either Americans or Mexicans to take our hunting grounds away from us."

- Mangas Coloradas, Chienne

Mangas Coloradas walks alone into a soldiers' camp to talk of peace. The same strategy employed in the Bascom Affair is repeated again. Mangas is seized and bound in irons. In the night, his captors prod him with red-hot bayonets. When Mangas flinches, he is shot for trying to escape. But the barbarity does not end.

"He went into their camp under promise of safety....As [his men] had anticipated, Mangas did not leave that place alive. Instead, the soldiers killed him and threw his body out of the camp, dug a shallow ditch, and buried him. That was not the worst: the next day they dug up his body, cut off his head, and boiled his head in a big black kettle. To an Apache, the mutilation of the body is much worse than death, because the body must go through eternity in the mutilated
condition. Little did the White Eyes know what they were starting...."

- Daklugie, Nednhi

"His head was severed from his body by a surgeon, and the brain taken out and weighed. The head measured larger than that of Daniel Webster, and the brain was of corresponding weight. the Skull was sent to Washington, and is now on exhibition at the Smithsonian
Institution."

- Tucson Arizona Star