Thomas Jefferson Jeffords (January 1, 1832 – February 19, 1914) [1] was a United States Army scout, Indian agent, prospector, and superintendent of overland mail in the Arizona Territory.

In October 1872, Jeffords led General Oliver O. Howard to Cochise's Stronghold, believed to be China Meadow, in the Dragoon Mountains.

Then renegade Apaches killed Nicholas Rogers who had sold them whiskey and the cry went out to abolish the reservation and remove Jeffords as agent.

[3] Tom Jeffords was born in Chautauqua County, New York, where his father was trying to earn enough money to purchase a farm.

Bored and in search of wealth, Tom followed the gold rush to Pike's Peak in 1859, working on the road from Leavenworth to Denver.

Since Confederate forces had invaded southern New Mexico and occupied the countryside as far as Tucson, Colonel Canby needed a brave courier who knew the route through the wilds along the Gila River.

Tom Jeffords returned east to Arizona Territory in 1862 as a scout with the lead companies of the California Column.

Captain Richard S. Ewell had been out to Apache Pass twice before to recover stock and had sworn he would, "proceed to force them to terms the next time".

He apparently gave people to understand that he had met Cochise during this period and negotiated a peace for his mail riders.

[3] In 1871 President Grant sent General Oliver Howard to the Arizona Territory with orders to end the Apache wars by negotiating treaties with the tribes.

Howard was an apt choice, as he had been head of the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency responsible for assisting freed black slaves after the Civil War.

[10][11] Cochise requested that his people be allowed to remain in the Chiricahua Mountains and that Jeffords be made Indian agent for the region.

With Nicholas Rogers and Sidney De Long, he staked a claim to the famed Brunckow Mine in 1875 and remained in control of it into the 1880s.

[15] He was a partner in a mine in Santa Rita, NM and head of a company trying to supply water to the city of Tucson, AZ.

[3] The story of Jeffords, General Howard, Cochise, and the Apache wars was told in historically-based but dramatized form in a novel by Elliott Arnold called Blood Brother.