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This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move. Being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. We find Vecna. We end this once and for all.
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Together on December 25th. We have a plan. It's a bit insane. Everyone in he knows where we are. Watch out. Get ready for one last adventure. We stay true to ourselves, stay true to our friends. No matter the cost. Found You Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2 begins December 25th only on Netflix. The Florida mountains didn't need to be high to be dangerous. Rising 1500ft above the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico, just north of the Mexican border, the Floridas were jagged and dry. Their volcanic ridges were broken by steep draws and and patches of thorny brush. It was late January of 1877 and the winter wind sliced down from the heights like a blade. It whistled through the rock gaps and scattered the dust at the horse's hooves. The sun was bright and it cast long shadows that never seemed to hold still. Corporal Clinton Greaves blinked through the glare and watched the Apache camp below. It looked quiet. A few low wickiups dotted the clearing. They were small dome shaped shelters of bent poles covered with brush. Cook fires smoldered in pits in the ground. Smoke curled into the sky and blew apart in the wind. Women and children worked near the fires. A few men watched the soldiers as they approached, but otherwise the camp was still. Lt. Henry Wright rode just ahead of Greaves as he led the small detachment from C troop of the 9th Cavalry. There were seven soldiers and three Navajo scouts. Greaves was the second in command, the ranking non commissioned officer. He wasn't giving the orders, but he knew how quickly things could go wrong in country like this. They had been tracking this band of Apache for days. The soldiers and scouts had ridden hard out of Fort Baird at the base of the Pinos Altos Mountains in southwestern New Mexico territory. Based on the trail of the Apache, it looked like the group had started in Arizona Territory and had ridden east into New Mexico. That matched reports that a group of Chiricahua Apache, joined by warriors from the Warm Springs and Mescalero bands, had crossed the border after fighting the 6th Cavalry. They were not bound for a reservation. They were raiders and they were in no mood to surrender. Lt. Wright rode directly into the camp. The Apache women and children didn't speak. The soldiers dismounted and one of the Navajo scouts stepped forward to interpret. Wright told the Apache that they would be safely taken to the San Carlos reservation if they gave up their weapons and horses. Wright said there would be food and protection. Even if the group of Apache had fought the cavalry in Arizona a few days earlier, there was no need to fight now. For a few minutes, the camp held still. Corporal Greaves looked past the fire pits and the shelters. The women who had been cooking when they arrived were no longer there. The children had vanished, too. It was like watching the tide go out. Then men began to appear around the camp. Slowly, from behind wikiups in the creases in the hills, the boulders beyond the clearing, warriors started to materialize where there had been none a moment earlier. Greaves counted six, then a dozen, then 18. They were all armed and moving into position with the warriors who had stayed visible in the camp. They were forming a ring around the 10 men who had delivered themselves into a trap. The attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender had been well intentioned, but it now looked like a severe miscalculation. The soldiers were surrounded, outnumbered five to one, and their only way out was to fight. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling a collection of stories about the famous Buffalo Soldiers, the courageous black soldiers of the infantry and cavalry who served in the west after the Civil War. This is Episode two. Florida Mountains Fight. In the autumn of 1875, the men of the 9th Cavalry packed their gear, mounted their horses and rode west. They were leaving Texas behind. For nearly eight years, the regiment had crisscrossed the Lone Star frontier doing the hard, unglamorous work of the post Civil War Army. They escorted supply trains, guarded settlers, scouted Comanche country and enforced federal authority on contested ground. But now the order came down. The 9th Cavalry would relieve the 8th Cavalry in New Mexico Territory. The 9th had survived Comanche country, and now they were heading into Apache country. The men rode out in detachments, company by company, from posts like Fort Stockton, Fort Lancaster and Fort Brown. For Captain Charles Byers C Troop Clinton Greaves unit, the march began at Fort Brown, near present day Brownsville, Texas, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. The move would take three months and cover more than a thousand rugged miles across south and west Texas. They rode through Pecos Station and Fort Selden and finally into the high country of southwestern New Mexico. Their new post was Fort Baird, dry, remote and perched near the southern edge of a wilderness range which would be called the Gila National Forest. The men of Sea Troop arrived in December when when the cold wind blew hard across the ridgelines and the knights froze early. The relocation of the entire regiment took nearly a year. By May 1876, as the 7th Cavalry started its march across Dakota Territory toward an eventual clash with Sitting Bull and crazy horse, the 9th was spread thin across the southern Rockies. The 9th occupied seven posts, six in New Mexico and one in southern Colorado. Headquarters was established at Fort Union, north of the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. At present, the regiment's 670 man roster was misleading. Only 370 men were available for duty. The rest were sick, injured or dispersed across a dozen other assignments. In New Mexico, garrison life was both similar and different than it was in Texas. The landscape was still harsh and the outposts were still isolated. But now there were mountain ranges and forests to contend with in addition to rock and brush of the desert terrain. Soldiers were assigned to everything from wood cutting details to livestock herding to road building. Greaves unit Sea Troop, for example, spent part of 1876 grading and clearing the North Star Road, a primitive path over the mountains near the headwaters of the Gila River. It was demanding work in an unfamiliar land. The men were learning the terrain the only way they could, one mile at a time, often in the saddle and almost always under strain. Colonel Edward Hatch, the regiment's commanding officer, understood how little his officers knew of the region. Determined to correct that fact, he kept detachments in near constant motion throughout 1876. That year alone, the 9th Cavalry covered more than 8,800 miles on patrol. The patrols were relentless, grinding circuits of escorting mail carriers, scouting hostile territory and protecting isolated settlements from the ever present threat of Apache raids. Private Henry Bush, a Canadian born cook who served in C Troop, remembered his time in New Mexico. Continuously on scouting service, subjected to great exposure, no sleep for two days, sometimes subsisting on the most meager diet, sometimes marches of 90 miles in a hot scorching sun. The work was thankless. There were few newspapers in the territory. No one back east was paying much attention. No one was thinking about the most remote, least populated region in the country. But they would soon, and not just because of a soon to be legendary conflict between ranchers in Lincoln county. Detachments of the 9th Cavalry would soon experience their own conflict in New Mexico. And men of their regiment would earn the nation's highest military honor.