The Cushing Hit Revisited

For some reason, I occasionally get notifications telling me Jim Cornelius has been cited in some academic paper. Probably a feature of having downloaded a few doctoral theses. It’s usually not me. “Are you the Jim Cornelius who wrote The impact of maritime user fees on Pacific Northwest wheat transportation : a network programming approach?”

Uh… no.

Last week, though, it was legit — a citation in a New Mexico Historical Review paper, “To Take Death from the Enemy”: The Juh-Cushing Battle Site by Deni J. Seymour. The citation was on my 2017 post The Cushing Hit:

The Cushing Hit

The post and Seymour’s paper deal with an 1871 firefight in which Nednhi Apaches up from Mexico ambushed an American cavalry patrol — apparently with the specific intent of assassinating its leader, Lt. Howard Cushing, who had been unusually effective in tracking, fixing, and killing Apaches.

Cutting Trail by Don Oelze.

The citation deals with the question of tracks that Cushing intercepted that helped to lure him into an ambush: whether the Apache woman (or, as Seymour posits, a novice warrior) who left them was crossing a road and then an arroyo or walking up the arroyo. This may seem nit-picky, but Seymour is engaged in a granular examination of all kinds of data to successfully determine the location of the battle site. She determined that the battle, which has traditionally been recounted as occurring in the Whetstone Mountains, was actually conducted in what is now called Mustang Mountains, which were considered part of the Whetstones in the 19th Century.

Seymour untangles all kinds of knots like this from the original sources, which were riddled with errors, misconceptions and misunderstandings. Those have been passed down through history, and, in the case of the tracks, apparently to me. I find Seymour utterly convincing, and have duly noted the correction in the original post.

If you’re into Apache Wars stuff, download the paper — it’s great.

One element that I found most interesting: Seymour argues, with evidence, that Juh’s warriors were armed in large part with old muzzleloaders, probably mostly smoothbores, which limited their effective range. This makes sense. This was a transitional period for the Apache. Many were still using bows and arrows and lances, while they also acquired and developed expertise in firearms.

Firearms technology in the Civil War era was undergoing rapid, revolutionary change, from muzzleloaders to breechloaders and self-contained metallic cartridges. Advanced firearms were deployed alongside near-obsolescent firearms in all populations on the frontier in this era. And obsolescence is a bit contingent; a good muzzleloader could and did get the job done for many a hunter in the 1870s and indeed into the 20th Century. But they were outclassed in a firefight, first by breech-loaders, then by repeaters.

The Nednhi, based in Mexico, would have had less access to the latest in American firearms than their other Chiricahua brethren, and it stands to reason that many of their firearms would be old and substandard.

Battle participant, Sgt. John Mott, reported seeing revolvers and breech-loading rifles among Juh’s warriors, but Seymour cites battlefield archaeology that shows a range of firearms types:

But the archaeology conducted at the Juh-Cushing battle site complicates Mott’s observation, telling us that some

of these Mexico-headquartered Apaches were still using flintlocks and lead shot, as well as caplocks with their telltale percussion caps. Among these muzzle-loading smoothbore firearms, flintlock pistols had an effective range of about twenty yards and muskets, fifty to seventy yards, and muzzle loaders, whether pistols or muskets, with loose powder and lead bullets, took time to reload, at best three rounds per minute for flintlocks in the hands of an experienced operator. Apaches’ use of flintlock, caplock, and muzzle-loading firearms meant that fighters who carried them fired fewer projectiles at Cushing’s men. Found at the Juh-Cushing site are buck-and-ball shot, large- and small-caliber spent lead, along with a few .50 caliber cartridges, percussion caps, and a pistol flint.