Death Cave

The Peaceful Navajo iving around Newberry and Garces Mesas, two villages that were located a few miles north of Wolf Crossing and Trading Post on the Little Colorado River on the southern border of the Navajo Reservation, woke up to a cold morning early in the month of June in the year 1878. In that early morning dawn, a coyote babbled, hardly unusual, but with it was answered by a gobbling turkey, a sign the doomed Navajo’s knew was the worst. Within minutes that bloody June dawn, 1878, all the men, women and children, except three young girls taken prisoners, were slain by a hated Apache raiding party. Robbing the dead and pilfering Hogan’s for loot, the band of twenty raiders disappeared into the wastelands where their horses had been hidden from the sight of the villagers. Unbeknown to the Apache was that they had taken three daughters of an area chief’s family. Within 24 hours twenty five fighting Navajo braves and three area chiefs were on the pursuit. The marauding Apaches were found after two full days of searching hiding in a cave under the ghost town of Two Guns.