Alice Rollins Crane, upon returning to civilization after her adventure into Apacheland with her new friend Thomas Jeffords, wrote a letter to General Howard (as has been mentioned earlier) suggesting that the two of them shared a great passion:  the welfare of the Apache people. She also wrote to Joseph Alton Sladen, asking for his version of the historically important peace mission.  Sladen wrote back, and his long letter, a point-by-point retelling of the final weeks of the mission, was wonderfully written and glowing with detail.  He had drawn from his daily journal, which he had kept meticulously all during the journey, fleshing out details from memory.  The letter was dated October 26,1896 -- a good 24 years after the fact.  He had been deeply affected by his visit to Cochise's camp and this fact is obvious in the paragraphs devoted to the nearly two weeks he spent amongst Cochise's people.  He gave Crane a vivid picture of the campsite itself, although his description of the route taken to approach it was unfortunately somewhat obscure.

ALICE ROLLINS CRANE, CIRCA 1897 -  Photo copyright George Steckel, 1897 Surprisingly little has been written about this talented and adventurous woman, aside from the fact that she once enjoyed some noteriety as a poet, authoress, and a champion of women's rights long before her time.  She was born, by some accounts, in 1861 -- the same year that saw the beginning of Cochise's War.  We do know that she traveled to Tucson in 1895 in search of material for a book she was planning about Native Americans.  While in Tucson she made the acquaintance of the famous Thomas Jeffords, then in his mid-sixties, and immediately became fascinated by the Apaches, and the 1872 peace expedition that Jeffords had led.  It was one of her bw photos, taken while camping in the stronghold with Jeffords, that eventually found its way to this writer in 2001, and made the rediscovery of the actual campsite possible.  Crane later moved to Dawson, Alaska after divorcing her husband, and quickly made a reputation there as one of the first lady gold seekers to that far country.

     Mentioned several times was the "big rock" that dominated the place Cochise had chosen to erect his simple "shi-kow-ah", or house.  He wrote that Cochise spent many an hour atop this huge boulder, looking out over the vastness of the San Pedro Valley, deep in thought -- usually smoking -- always wrapped like a monarch in his favorite red blanket that had been given to him years before by a prominent and savvy rancher named Colonel Hooker.  Much of the time, according to Sladen, Cochise and Tom Jeffords would sit side by side on the "big rock", conversing infrequently in halting Spanish, sharing a bond that has become legendary over time.  The stories that have Tom Jeffords learning to speak fluent Apache before making Cochise's acquaintance are not accurate.  It is likely, however, that he had by this time picked up a smattering of the extremely difficult language, and it is true that Cochise was familiar with a few English words and phrases (at the end of General Howard's visit, as he prepared to leave the Apache camp after successfully hammering out a peace treaty, Cochise embraced the General and said, in English, "good-bye".) 

     The hand written note on the back of the "big rock" photo that Crane sent to Howard identifies this spot as "the big rock . . . where Captain [Jeffords] said you and Cochise had many a talk over peace . . ."   Furthermore, in her letter of introduction to General Howard in 1895, she alludes to the photo of the big rock and stipulates that it was upon this rock that Cochise and Howard stood together to announce to the Indians that there would be a peace treaty.  These are concrete and undeniable testimonies that the rock in the Crane photo was the one Sladen so often mentioned in his memoirs (and in his letter to Crane) -- and it was "behind" this rock, according again to Sladen, that Cochise had built his home.  (From Sladen's letter to Crane:  "Soon after we got back to camp from our visit to the top of the mountain, Cochise's wife called me to their domicile behind the big rock . . .")

     "Late in the afternoon," writes Sladen, "Cochise, Jeffords and myself sat on the old Chief's rock, as we called it, scanning the distant valleys and slopes for signs of approaching parties, and smoking and talking as we whiled the day away."  This was during a time when General Howard was absent, having been sent by Cochise to Fort Bowie to give orders that they not be molested by troops during Howard's visit.
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