Happy Thanksgiving.

 

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York Island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway

I saw above me that endless skyway

I saw below me that golden valley

This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

While all around me a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling

A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,

This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York Island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.

Ta-ayz-slath, wife of Geronimo, & child

Mangas Coloradas 

 Chiricahua Apache Chief.

"On January 17, 1863, several of West's troopers and a party of miners raised a white flag at Pinos Altos in a symbolic invitation to a council for peace. Mangas responded. He came in good faith, escorted by 12 Chiricahuas, expecting, Sweeney said, "...that the whites would embrace his offers for peace...," especially after "...a war that the Apaches felt had been forced upon them by the whites." As Mangas and his escort arrived, under the white flag of truce, armed soldiers burst from hiding, and "...our squad suddenly leveled our guns upon the [Indians]...," a miner reported later. In an act of treachery, the Americans had taken the old warrior hostage. They released his 12 escorts, sending them back to their people to deliver the news of Mangas' capture.

The troopers took their lone prisoner about 15 miles south to Fort McLane, which had been abandoned and burned in 1861 but pressed back into service for West's campaign. One soldier commented that "Mangas was the most magnificent specimen of savage manhood that I have ever seen." General West, a pygmy by comparison, looked up at his tall prisoner, snidely calling him "an old scoundrel" and saying that he had murdered his "last white victim." In what would prove to be another act of deception, West told Mangas that he and his family would be imprisoned together but would be "well treated."

Meanwhile, West told his sentries, "I want him dead."

West had Mangas thrown into the makeshift adobe cell, where the old chief covered himself with a blanket against the cold and lay down to try to sleep when darkness fell. About midnight, his guards began to torment him, heating their bayonets in a campfire and burning Mangas' feet and legs with the hot metal. They watched him flinch at the searing pain, then they shot the old man to death, answering West's order to kill him. Mangas Coloradas had been "trying to escape," they said, giving West a cover.

"The soldiers who murdered him treacherously buried his body in a shallow grave," Daklugie told Eve Ball. "The next day they dug it up, cut his head off, and boiled it to remove the flesh. Then they sent the skull to the Smithsonian Institution."

In another interview, Daklugie had told Ball that Mangas' "...death was bad, but to the Apaches the troops' cutting his head off and boiling it to get his skull were much worse. That meant that their great chief must go through the Happy Place forever headless."

"The killing of an unarmed man who has gone to an enemy under truce was an incomprehensible act," James Kaywaykla told Eve Ball during an interview for In the Days of Victorio, "but infinitely worse was the mutilation of his body... Little did the White Eyes know how they would pay when they defiled the body of our great chief!"

General Carleton felt proud of the brave guards who shot Mangas Coloradas to death that night. He thought he had broken the back of Chiricahua resistance in southwestern New Mexico. He was wrong. Cochise and other Apache chiefs followed in the footsteps of Mangas Coloradas. The clash of cultures would continue for almost another quarter of a century."

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

While all around me a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me.