I don't know if it was stubborness or pride, or both, that drove me for so long to seek the Forbes site without doing further research.  Eventually, after dozens of fruitless attempts to locate it, I placed yet another call to my friend Ed Sweeney.  He had during a previous conversation suggested that I contact the man who had taken him to the site years before -- an archelogist named Bill Gillespie who at the time worked for the Arizona Historical Society.  Ed was unable to give me Bill's current contact information as they had not been in communcation with each other for years.  He was, however, certain that Bill would be happy to help me if I could locate him.

      Using the Internet, I narrowed my search and found an email address for someone named William Gillespie living in Sierra Vista.  It turned out to be the correct Bill Gillespie, and he invited me to give him a phone call.  Bill was most gracious and though he had only been to the site a couple of times, he was able to describe a couple of landmarks that I remembered seeing.  The next time out, after an hour or so of wandering into areas that, somehow, I had missed during my own endeavors, I found it.  The spot looked exactly the same as it had in 1913 when Robert Forbes took the photo that appears in "Making Peace With Cochise", except of course that the vegetation has changed considerably. 
 
 

ROBERT FORBES' PHOTO TAKEN IN 1913 OF THE SPOT THAT ROCKFELLOW HAD POINTED OUT AS "THE SITE OF THE PEACE TREATY".

THE SAME SITE AS IT APPEARS TODAY

      Step one had at long last been completed.  I spent an hour or so enjoying the spirit of this place where, according to Forbes, the peace treaty had taken place (it was during a subsequent trip to this spot that my good friend Marybeth Dawson, a deeply spiritual Cochise devotee, made her observation that the adjoining circle of rocks seemed to better fit the purpose of holding important meetings -- click here to review).  She has an astounding affinity for such things, and  more, a spiritual connection to Cochise himself that I have grown to respect.

      At this point I was feeling a rebirth of the enthusiasm I'd enjoyed a year or more before.  I carried with me on every hike a copy of the "big rock" photo that I'd received from Ed Sweeney -- the one taken in 1895 by Alice Rollins Crane.  I retrieved it from my camera bag and stood in the midst of the "peace treaty" rocks, scanning the distant foothills (the Forbes site sits in an open area about a half mile from the boulder fields that form the Dragoons foothills).  Suddenly a kind of fatigue pried its way into my enthusiasm.  I felt certain that Crane's photo had been taken within a relatively short distance of this spot -- but where?  I heaved a sigh as I beheld the vista before me, and then I did what some might call a strange thing . . .