Massacre on the Lordsburg Road: A Tragedy of the Apache Wars (Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest)
by Marc Simmons
Category: Social Science

In the spring of 1883 Judge Hamilton C. McComas and his family were attacked by Apaches on a desolate road in New Mexico Territory. The judge and his wife were killed, and their six-year-old son, Charles, was kidnapped. Although America's reaction to the attack was intense and the search for the missing child as highly publicized as the later Lindbergh kidnapping, little was known or understood at the time about why or how the tragedy had occurred. Marc Simmons sheds the first light on the McComas family's fatal path and gives the first complete picture of circumstances surrounding this tragic event. From long-buried fragments, Simmons reconstructs the events of that fateful day, as well as the U.S. Army's first legal "hot pursuit" of an Apache raiding party into Mexico that followed. The puzzle of why a reputably wise and able man would lead his family into such a fatal predicament and the ironic circumstance of young Charles McComas's death at the hands of U.S. troops illustrate that past events were as complex and sometimes as confusing as those today.