They Didn’t Just K*ll His Parents – The H*RRIFYING Truth About Charley McComas

It is about noon on March 28th, 1883. The Animas Valley in the far southwest corner of New Mexico Territory. Wide flat desert grassland with the dark shapes of the Burro Mountains behind you. You are 37 years old. Your birthday was 3 weeks ago. Your name is Juanita McComas. You are sitting under a big walnut tree with your husband and your six-year-old son, unpacking a picnic lunch beside a rented buckboard wagon.

The hardest part of the trip is behind you. You have just come down out of a narrow, twisting canyon where everyone said an ambush could happen, if one ever did. Nothing happened. You made it through. Your little boy Charlie is blonde and fair, and he follows his father everywhere. You have never been to Lordsburg before. This was supposed to be a little adventure.

And then you see riders coming across the valley. In the next few minutes, your husband will run to the walnut tree with his rifle and fire seven shots before he is killed. You will grab the reins and drive the buckboard as hard as you can until a horse goes down. You will jump out and run around the back of the wagon to pull your son out, and that is the last thing you will ever do.

Your son will be tied to an Apache warrior’s waist with a rope and carried off toward Mexico. You have been told this is a story about a family murdered by Apaches. That is not the whole story. It is not even the most horrifying part because Charlie McComas survived that day. The United States Army launched one of the most daring expeditions of the Indian Wars to bring him back deep into the mountains of Mexico into country no American soldier had ever reached.

It found the camp where he was being held. And the attack that was supposed to rescue him is almost certainly what got him killed. And then for more than 50 years, people swore he was still alive, that the little blonde boy from Silver City had grown up to become the white-bearded chief of the last free Apaches in North America.

So what really happened on the Lordsburg road? Why did a careful, successful man take his wife and son into the most dangerous country in the Southwest? What happened to Charlie in the Sierra Madre? And who was the tall white man with the blonde beard riding with the Apaches as late as the 1930s? By the end of this, you will know. And if you saw our story on Mickey Free, you are about to meet some of the same people again 22 years later.

Now, back to Fort Scott, Kansas. In 1869, a lawyer and Civil War veteran is getting married. He has big dreams about the West. Hamilton Calhoun McComas was a man who believed in the West. He was born in Virginia in 1831 and became a lawyer at 21. He fought for the Union in the Civil War and rose to Lieutenant Colonel of the 107th Illinois Infantry. After the war, he settled in Fort Scott, Kansas, and practiced law. In 1869, he married Juanita Ware, the sister of a well-known Kansas writer and politician named Eugene Ware.

Juanita gave him two daughters and in November 1876 a son, Charles Ware McComas. Everyone called him Charlie. Charlie went almost everywhere with his father. In 1880, Hamilton McComas went out to New Mexico Territory to make his fortune. He left the family behind until he was established. And he did well. He practiced law. He invested in mines and businesses. And he became a judge in the community.

By March 1882, he believed it was safe enough to bring his family out. That December, he bought them a big brick house in Silver City, a booming mining town in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. On March 7th, 1883, Juanita turned 37. By every account, the family was happy, comfortable, and looking forward to a good life.

Then on March 26th, a telegram arrived from Lordsburg, a railroad town about 50 miles to the southwest. A mining company there needed the judge’s services. Juanita had lived in Silver City for a year and had never seen Lordsburg. Charlie wanted to go, and there had been no major Indian trouble reported in the area since the previous summer, so they decided to make it a family trip.

Hold on to that decision. Years later, historians would still be asking how a man as careful and intelligent as Judge McComas could have taken his family down that road in the spring of 1883. Because there was something happening in the country south of them that almost no one in Silver City knew about.

To understand it, you have to go back to the war that started at Apache Pass in 1861. If you saw our video on Mickey Free, you know how it began: a kidnapped boy, a tent, a chief who escaped by cutting through the canvas. That war had been going on in one form or another for 22 years. Cochise had made peace in 1872 and died two years later. The government then forced most of the Chiricahua Apaches onto the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. The Apaches hated it. It was hot, flat, crowded, and sick with malaria. Rations were short. Corrupt agents stole from them. Again and again, bands broke out.

By 1883, many of the most determined Chiricahua had fled south into the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Rugged, almost impossibly steep mountains where they believed no American army could ever follow. Leaders like Geronimo, Naiche, the son of Cochise, Chihuahua, Bonito, and a young war leader named Chato. And they had their own grievances. Mexican soldiers had been hunting them for decades. In the spring of 1882, Mexican troops ambushed a column of Apaches fleeing into Mexico and killed dozens of people, many of them women and children.

The Chiricahuas in the Sierra Madre needed something above all else: guns and ammunition. On March 21st, 1883, a raiding party of 26 warriors rode north out of the Sierra Madre and crossed into Arizona. Their leader was Chato. Their target was not any particular family. It was weapons. But on the first day in the hills near Fort Huachuca, they attacked a charcoal camp and killed four white men. And one of the raiders, a warrior named Beneactiney, was killed in the fight.

Among the Apaches, when one of your people was harmed, the whole group responsible could be held accountable. Any of them, all of them. The raiders were furious and they kept moving northeast, stealing horses, cutting telegraph lines, killing as they went. By the time they crossed into New Mexico Territory, they had killed 22 more people, and they were heading toward the southern end of the Burro Mountains toward the Lordsburg Road.

On March 27th, the McComas family loaded a rented buckboard in Silver City. The judge brought along his Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver just in case. They spent the night at a roadhouse called Mountain Home about 17 miles southwest of town. The next morning, March 28th, they crossed the Continental Divide and rode down into Thompson Canyon, a narrow, sandy, twisting trail through the Burro Mountains. If there was ever going to be an ambush, everyone said it would be here in the tightest part of the canyon just before the road came out on the western side.

The family passed through without a sign of trouble. They rode out of the canyon and about a mile into the open Animas Valley. It was around noon; they saw a big walnut tree and they decided to stop for a picnic lunch. They did not know that Chato’s raiders had just entered New Mexico Territory and turned southeast, riding fast, angry, and heading straight for the mouth of Thompson Canyon.

Picture the scene: a rented wagon, a blanket on the ground, a little boy, and somewhere out on the valley floor, dust. The McComases saw the riders coming and ran for the buckboard. The judge jumped onto the seat and tried to turn the horses around to race back up into the canyon. A bullet hit him. He leaped down from the wagon with his Winchester and ran for the walnut tree to make a stand and give his family time to get away.

He fired three shots as he ran. He fired four more from behind the tree. Then by the count of the men who found him later, about five more bullets hit him and Hamilton McComas was dead.

Juanita had grabbed the reins. She whipped the horses and the buckboard raced away across the valley with Charlie in the back. Some of the warriors chased her for about 300 yards. She held them off. Then one of the horses was shot and went down and the wagon stopped. And Juanita McComas did the one thing a mother would do. She did not run. She jumped out of the wagon, ran around the back, and tried to pull her son out. A mounted warrior rode up and struck her in the head with the butt of his rifle. Then he got down from his horse and hit her twice more with his pistol to make sure. She died beside the wagon, trying to reach her son.

Now the raiders had a choice to make. On Apache raids, small children were often killed without a second thought, but this time they decided to keep the blonde six-year-old. Two of the warriors began arguing over who had the right to him. Then Bonito, one of the leaders of the raid, rode up and claimed the boy for himself. He tied Charlie to his own waist with a rope, put him on his horse, and turned south.

The raiders stripped the bodies and plundered the wagon. The judge’s Winchester and his Colt were the prize of the day. Within an hour, two men came down the road and found the bodies. They raced off to spread the alarm. Charlie McComas was already gone.

The news hit the country like a lightning strike. A federal judge and his wife murdered on a public road. A little boy carried off by Apaches. Newspapers across the United States ran the story. Headlines asked a single question over and over:

“Where’s Charlie?”

The army scrambled. Lieutenant Colonel George Forsyth led cavalry from Fort Cummings to cut off the raiders. But when he heard about the McComas killings, he rode to the murder site first to find the trail himself. While he did, Chato’s raiders slipped east of Lordsburg and south across the border into Mexico. They were gone.

Juanita’s brother, Eugene Ware, came out from Kansas to take the bodies of his sister and brother-in-law home. They were buried on April 8th in Evergreen Cemetery in Fort Scott. But Eugene Ware did not go home. He stayed in New Mexico to try to find Charlie and buy him back.

And the man who would actually go after Charlie was General George Crook. Crook was the most experienced Indian fighter in the army and he had a theory: you could not catch Apaches with soldiers; only Apaches could catch Apaches. For months he had wanted to go into the Sierra Madre after the Chiricahua. What he had not had was permission to cross into Mexico or a reason the country would accept. Now he had both. The McComas raid gave him the reason and after talks with Mexican authorities, he got the permission.

On May 1st, 1883, Crook crossed the border into Mexico. His force was small and fast: about 40 cavalrymen under Major Adna Chaffee and around 190 Apache scouts under Captain Emmet Crawford and Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, rations for 60 days, 150 rounds of ammunition per man, hundreds of pack mules. Riding with them were the famous chief of scouts, Al Sieber, and as an interpreter, a one-eyed, red-haired former captive named Mickey Free.

Think about that for a moment. The boy whose kidnapping had started the Apache Wars in 1861 was now riding into Mexico to rescue another kidnapped boy 22 years later. And they had a guide, a young Apache named Tzoe, whom the soldiers called Peaches. He had actually ridden with Chato’s raiders in March, but he had left the raid before the McComas killings and come back to the reservation. Now he was leading the army to their stronghold.

The column followed the Bavispe River up into the mountains. The country was unbelievably harsh: cliffs, canyons, trails so steep that pack mules fell to their deaths. For two weeks they climbed deeper into a part of North America that no American army had ever entered. And on May 15th, 1883, the scouts found the village. It was the camp of Chato and Bonito, the man who had claimed Charlie McComas for himself.

Crook’s orders were clear:

“Spare the women and children.”

The Apache scouts did not follow them. Many of them were from Apache bands that had their own old hatreds with the Chiricahua. When they reached the camp, they charged in firing at anything that moved. Nine Chiricahuas were killed. Four children and one young woman were captured. The rest of the people fled into the canyons, and it was later said that among the dead was the mother of a young Chiricahua warrior named Speedy.

What happened next we know from one source. Among the people captured that day was a young woman named Ramona Chihuahua, the daughter of the chief Chihuahua. Years later, she told the story to another Apache, Jason Betzinez, who had ridden with Geronimo. In 1959, Betzinez published it in his memoir, I Fought with Geronimo. According to Ramona, in the chaos of the attack, Speedy found his mother dead. And in his rage and grief, he went looking for something to strike back at. He found Charlie McComas being led away into the canyon, and he killed him with rocks.

That is the account that most historians now accept. A little boy rescued from the soldiers’ point of view at the very moment he died. Killed not by the men who had kidnapped him, but in revenge for a death caused by the men who had come to save him.

The Apaches, when they talked to the soldiers afterward, told a different story. They said the white boy had been with them, but that when the attack began, he ran away into the mountains and they never found him. Some historians think they told that story to protect themselves. Chato and Bonito had wanted to keep the boy alive as a bargaining chip, something to trade if they ever had to surrender. Now he was gone, and admitting that he had been killed could have meant hanging. Whatever the reason, the soldiers searched. They never found a body. Charlie McComas had disappeared from the face of the earth.

The attack on Chato’s camp was a small fight, but it shattered something. The Chiricahuas had believed that no army could ever reach them in the Sierra Madre. Now Apache scouts, their own people, had walked right into their stronghold. Over the next days and weeks, the leaders came in to talk: Nana, Loco, Chihuahua, Naiche, and Geronimo. Crook marched more than 100 warriors and around 250 women and children back to the reservation in Arizona. He did not bring back Charlie McComas, and the peace did not last.

Within two years, Geronimo broke out again. The fighting went on until his final surrender in September 1886. And when it ended, the government did something that still stands as one of the most shameful acts of the Apache Wars. It rounded up the Chiricahuas—all of them, men, women, and children, including the Apache scouts who had served the army loyally, the men who had led Crook into the Sierra Madre—and it shipped them all as prisoners of war to Florida. Some historians believe the murder of the McComas family was one of the reasons the Chiricahuas were treated so harshly at the end. The country never forgot the little boy on the Lordsburg road.

And now here is the strangest twist of all. Remember Chato, the man who led the raid that killed Charlie’s parents? After he surrendered, he did not hang. Instead, he became a scout for the United States Army. He wore the uniform. He helped track the very bands he had once led. And in 1886, he traveled to Washington, D.C. with a delegation of Apaches to meet officials of the government. Riding along as interpreter on that trip was Mickey Free. The man who led the raid on the Lordsburg Road was received in the capital of the United States.

And on his way home, he was arrested. He was sent to Florida as a prisoner of war along with everyone else. The government had used him and then it locked him up with the people he had helped hunt down. Chato spent the next 27 years as a prisoner of war in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. He died in 1934. Everyone in this story, it seems, ended up a prisoner of something.

But Charlie’s story did not end in 1883. Back in Kansas, Eugene Ware never gave up. For years, he chased every rumor that came out of the borderlands: a white boy seen with the Apaches, a red-haired Indian riding in the mountains. As late as 1910, a year before Ware’s own death, he was still following reports of a fair-haired man riding with Apaches in the Southwest.

And the rumors did not stop when the war did. Not every Apache had surrendered in 1886. A small band of holdouts stayed in the Sierra Madre, living free and hidden, raiding Mexican ranches well into the 20th century. The Mexicans called them the Broncos, the wild ones. And again and again, people who saw them reported something astonishing: their leader was a tall white man, long flowing hair, a blonde beard.

In southern New Mexico, everyone knew who that had to be: Charlie McComas, all grown up, raised as an Apache, now leading the last free Apaches in North America. In the 1930s, a Norwegian explorer and anthropologist named Helge Ingstad traveled into the Sierra Madre to find the Broncos. He interviewed people who had seen them, and he became convinced that their blue-eyed leader really was Charlie McComas. The last report of the white man came in 1940. An Apache woman, the story goes, said that the bearded leader had been killed several years earlier. Some bones were found, but whose they were, no one could ever say.

It is a beautiful story: a lost boy who survived, became a chief, and lived free in the mountains for the rest of his life. But almost certainly it is not true. The man with the blonde beard was most likely someone else: another captive maybe, or a renegade, or a legend that grew in the telling. Charlie McComas almost certainly died in May 1883 in a canyon in the Sierra Madre at the age of six.

So, what is the truth about Charlie McComas? They did not just kill his parents. They took a six-year-old boy into a war that had been going on for 22 years before he was born. A war that began with another kidnapped boy in another tent, with another officer who would not wait. The raiders who took him were looking for guns and then for revenge. The soldiers who came after him were looking for a way into the Sierra Madre, and he gave them one. The scouts who attacked the camp had their own old hatreds. And the young warrior who killed him had just found his own mother dead. Every single person in that canyon was taking revenge for something. And the one person who had done nothing to anyone was a little boy tied to a stranger’s waist with a rope.

Go back to the walnut tree one more time. A judge running with his rifle, buying seconds. And a mother who could have run, but instead went around the back of the wagon to reach her son. For more than 50 years after that day, people told themselves that Charlie McComas was still out there, alive and free, a chief in the mountains. Maybe they needed to believe it. Maybe it was easier than the truth.

The truth is simpler and sadder. Charlie McComas never grew up. The war took his parents on the Lordsburg road and then in a canyon in Mexico, it took him too at the very moment it was supposed to be saving him. His body was never found, and somewhere in the Sierra Madre it is still there.