The Story of the 1st Medal of Honor Recipient (1861)

And we continue with Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to American Stories.com. There are some of our favorites. Our next story comes to us from a man who is simply known as The History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy has also heard here on Our American Stories. You’ve heard The History Guy tell the story of the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Today, The History Guy remembers a desperate attempt to rescue soldiers besieged by Apache Indians, which resulted in the first Medal of Honor by date of action and starts the Apache War.

Here’s The History Guy.

The Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor to be offered to members of the United States Armed Forces. It is so prestigious that President Harry Truman was famously quoted as saying that he would rather have won the Medal of Honor than been president of the United States. The medal was created in eighteen sixty two, but it was possible to nominate people for actions that occurred in the past, and that meant that there were actually Medals of Honor awarded for events that occurred before the Medal of Honor was created. And so it is that the earliest event for which a Medal of Honor was awarded occurred before the medal was created, and actually even before the Civil War for which the Medal of Honor was created. And it all has to do with an event that is almost forgotten and yet still extremely important to American history and still controversial today: the Medal of Honor that was awarded to Assistant Surgeon Bernard Irwin, the first chronologically by date of action, Medal of Honor to be awarded, is history that deserves to be remembered. The peoples known as the Apache or, a people indigenous to the southwestern United States. The Apache were generally an independent people who lived in family clusters of extended family. This was important in terms of their relationationships with other peoples, in that different family groups operated more or less independently, and so different bands might have different relationships with their neighbors. Food was largely derived from hunting and gathering, as well as trade. One part of the culture was that the Apache tended to use the practice of rating as a way of supplementing their diet. In general, the Apache distinguished rating for economic purposes from rating for war. They did not think of economic rating as an act of war, and it usually occurred with small bands with specific purpose. Rating for war included larger numbers of raiders and was usually done for the purpose of retribution, and as part of that, the Apache treatment of prisoners could include brutal torture. Apache conflict with Spanish settlers began nearly as early as the two came into contact in the sixteenth century. As part of the long conflict, the Spanish built a series of fortifications along the frontier to protect from Apache raids. This was called pisidios, and they eventually became the centerpieces of major modern cities like San Antonio, Texas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Tucson, Arizona. Conflict with Americans started with the Mexican-American War, and after much of northern Mexico was ceded to the United States after the war, the increasing number of American settlers traveling down the Santa Fe Trail caused conflict. It was amid ongoing tensions and reading for both sides that in January of eighteen sixty-one, a group of Apaches rated a farmstead in southern Arizona owned by a wrench named John Ward, taking some livestock and capturing Ward’s twelve-year-old stepson, Felix. Ward traveled to the nearby army outpost of Fort Buchanan and complained to the fort commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pitcairn Morrison of the U.S. Seventh Infantry. Morrison dispatched Company C of the Seventh Infantry under Second Lieutenant George Bascom, a West Point graduate, to retrieve the missing boy. As they picked up the trail from the raiders that appeared to lead towards the Chiricahua Mountains, Lieutenant Bascom concluded that the Chiricahua Apache, whose chief was named Cochise, had been responsible for the raid. While Bascom’s assumption that the Cherikawa had done the raid was understandable, it was incorrect, and that was a mistake that would prove critical. On February 3rd, Bascom and his party camped near an Overland Mail Station, and Bascom sent a message to Cochise asking him to come in for a talk. Cochise, along with several members of his family, came to the camp to talk. At this point, neither side was expecting a violent confrontation. Bascom demanded that Cochise return the kidneck boy. Cochise denied knowing of the kidnapping, but offered to find the boy. Assuming that Cochise was being evasive, Bascom tried to take Cochise and his party hostage until the boy and the cattle could be returned, but Cochise managed to escape by pulling out a knife and cutting a hole in the tent in which they’re eating and running away. The rest of his party, however, was taken hostage. Bascom and the sixty-five men returned to the Overland Mail Station, which they fortified using wagons and great and flowers acts. Bascom noted with dismay that more Apaches seemed to be arriving, and he was besieged. While they had food, water from the spring was more than a half mile away. Cochise managed to capture some Overland Mail employees and offered to trade them for his captured family members, but Bascom refused unless they returned the kidneck boy. The problem was that Cochise did not have the boy, who had been kidnapped by a differ group of Apaches. On February 7th, a group of Cochise’s Apache attacked a group of Bascom’s men who were taking their mules to the spring for water. One Overland Mail employee was killed, and most of the mules were taken. Bascom came to the conclusion that he was surrounded by as many as five hundred Apache and was in danger of attack, and so he decided to send out two scouts to sneak through the lines and seek help from Fort Buchanan. The messengers arrived at Fort Buchanan on the evening of the 8th, and Assistant Surgeon Bernard John Dowling Erwin offered to take the only troops available, eleven men of Company H of the Seventh Infantry, to assist Bascom. On the way, Erwin and his small group encountered some Apache was stolen cattle and managed to capture three Apache braves and several cattle when Irwin’s party arrived at Bascom’s camp on the 10th. The cattle provided much-needed beef. Irwin would later be presented the Medal of Honor for his actions: volunteering to lead the party and capturing the Apache and cattle. Despite having such a small force, by date of action, it is the earliest Medal of Honor to have been awarded. Eventually, seventy more men of the First Dragoons arrived as well, and the group may have been helped in that a company of the Eighth Infantry, marching fifteen miles away and apparently unaware of Bascom’s predicament, may have been interpreted by the Apaches planning to attack their flank. Somewhere between February 14th and 16th, the Apaches slipped away, killing their prisoners and leaving them for Bascom to find. In the decision that is controversial to this day, the American officers decided to execute their hostages, the three Braves that Erwin had captured and the three that Bascom had taken, although they did release the women and children from Cochise’s party. This turned out to be a grave error, as the three Apache that Bascom had captured were Cochise’s brother and nephews. The decision to execute those men turned the Apache anger from Mexico to the United States and sparked the Apache Wars, which would last for more than two decades and cost thousands of lives. One of the most controversial aspects of the so-called Bascom Affair was how much Lieutenant Bascom had to do with the decision to execute the Apache prisoners. Bascom is usually presented as the villain whose miscalculation started a bloody war, but actually the four officers that were there: two from the First Dragoons, Assistant Surgeon Irwin, and Bascom. Bascom was the junior of the four, and records discovered sin suggests that he was the only one of the four to raise objections to the execution. In fact, the order for the execution seems to have come from Assistant Surgeon Irwin. The records from the Bascom Affair have largely been lost, as Fort Buchanan was abandoned at the start of the Civil War, and Bascom’s original report was apparently destroyed. George Bascom himself died leading a company of the Seventh Infantry in the Battle of Val Verde in February of eighteen sixty-two, part of the far Western theater of the U.S. Civil War. Assistant Surgeon Irwin served throughout the Civil War and eventually achieved the rank of colonel. Before retiring. He received the Medal of Honor for actions that occurred in February of eighteen sixty-one. Thirty-three years later, in eighteen ninety-four, shortly before his retirement. Cochise turned out to be one of the army’s most skilled adversaries, but eventually he did agree to live peacefully on a reservation, and he died of natural causes in eighteen seventy-four. One of the most surprising turns in the Bascom Affair has to do with the captured boy, Felix Ward. Long thought to have been killed, it turns out that he had been captured by a group of Bema Apache, with whom Cochise was unrelated, and raised by them. He later served with the U.S. Army as an Apache scout using the name Mickey Fee. The Bascom Affair was one of many examples where inexperienced officers on the frontier made missteps that resulted in conflict, and that nearly forgotten event on the border between the United States and Mexico in February of eighteen sixty-one, which sparked the Bloody Apache Wars, which actually continued clear into the twentieth century, is a good example of what can happen when there’s a clash of cultures. And possibly the inevitable result of American westward expansion. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

And great job as always by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to The History Guy, and if you want more stories of forgotten history, please subscribe to his YouTube channel, The History Guy.

History deserves to be remembered.

The story of the first Medal of Honor recipient in American history.

Here on Our American Stories.