CROOK RE-ASSIGNED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARIZONA—ALL THE APACHES ON
THE WAR-PATH—LIEUTENANTS MORGAN AND CONVERSE WOUNDED—CAPTAIN
HENTIG KILLED—CROOK GOES ALONE TO SEE THE HOSTILES—CONFERENCES
WITH THE APACHES—WHAT THE ARIZONA GRAND JURY SAID OF AN INDIAN
AGENT—CONDITION OF AFFAIRS AT THE SAN CARLOS AGENCY—WHISKEY SOLD
TO THE CHIRICAHUA APACHES—APACHE TRIALS BY JURY—ARIZONA IN
1882—PHŒNIX, PRESCOTT, AND TUCSON—INDIAN SCHOOLS.
Before the summer of 1882 had fairly begun, Indian affairs in
Arizona had relapsed into such a deplorable condition that the
President felt obliged to re-assign General Crook to the command. To
the occurrences of the next four years I will devote very few
paragraphs, because, although they formed an epoch of great
importance in our Indo-military history and in General Crook’s
career, they have previously received a fair share of my attention
in the volume, “An Apache Campaign,” to which there is little to
add. But for the sake of rounding out this narrative and supplying
data to those who may not have seen the book in question, it may be
stated that affairs had steadily degenerated from bad to worse, and
that upon Crook’s return to Prescott no military department could
well have been in a more desperate plight. In one word, all the
Apaches were again on the war-path or in such a sullen, distrustful
state of mind that it would have been better in some sense had they
all left the reservation and taken to the forests and mountains.
Crook was in the saddle in a day, and without even stopping to
inquire into the details of the new command—with which, however, he
was to a great extent familiar from his former experience—he left
the arrangement of such matters to his Adjutant-General, Colonel
James P. Martin, and started across the mountains to Camp Apache.
Not many of the Apaches were to be seen, and practically none except
the very old, the very feeble, or the very young. All the young men
who could shoot were hiding in the mountains, and several sharp
actions had already been had with the troops: the Third and Sixth
Cavalry had had a fight with the renegades from the reservation, and
had had two officers—Morgan and Converse, of the Third—severely
wounded; Captain Hentig, of the Sixth, had been killed on the Cibicu
some months before; and the prospects of peace, upon a permanent and
satisfactory basis, were extremely vague and unpromising. But there
was a coincidence of sentiment among all people whose opinion was
worthy of consultation, that the blame did not rest with the
Indians; curious tales were flying about from mouth to mouth, of the
gross outrages perpetrated upon the men and women who were trying
faithfully to abide in peace with the whites. It was openly asserted
that the Apaches were to be driven from the reservation marked out
for them by Vincent Collyer and General O. O. Howard, upon which
they had been living for more than eleven years. No one had ever
heard the Apaches’ story, and no one seemed to care whether they had
a story or not.
Crook made every preparation for a resumption of hostilities, but
he sent out word to the men skulking in the hills that he was
going out alone to see them and hear what they had to say, and
that if no killing of white people occurred in the meantime, not a
shot should be fired by the troops. In acting as he did at this
time, Crook lost a grand opportunity for gaining what is known as
military glory: he could have called for additional troops and
obtained them; the papers of the country would have devoted solid
columns to descriptions of skirmishes and marches and conferences,
what the military commander thought and said, with perhaps a
slight infiltration of what he did not think and did not say; but,
in any event, Crook would have been kept prominently before the
people. His was not, however, a nature which delighted in the
brass-band-and-bugle school of military renown: he was modest and
retiring, shy almost as a girl, and conscientious to a peculiar
degree. He had every confidence in his own purposes and in his own
powers, and felt that if not interfered with he could settle the
Apache problem at a minimum of cost. Therefore he set out to meet
the Apaches in their own haunts and learn all they had to say, and
he learned much. He took with him Mr. C. E. Cooley, formerly one
of his principal scouts, who was to act as interpreter; Al Seiber,
who had seen such wonderful service in that country; Surgeon J. O.
Skinner; and myself. Captain Wallace, with his company of the
Sixth Cavalry, remained in charge of the pack-train.
Upon the elevated plateau of broken basalt which separates the
current of the White River from that of the Black there is a long
line of forest, principally cedar, with no small amount of pine, and
much yucca, soapweed, Spanish bayonet, and mescal. The knot-holes in
the cedars seemed to turn into gleaming black eyes; the floating
black tresses of dead yucca became the snaky locks of fierce
outlaws, whose lances glistened behind the shoots of mescal and
amole. Twenty-six of these warriors followed us down to our bivouac
in the cañon of the “Prieto,” or Black River, and there held a
conference with General Crook, to whom they related their
grievances.
Before starting out from Camp Apache General Crook had held a
conference with such of the warriors as were still there, among whom
I may mention “Pedro,” “Cut-Mouth Moses,” “Alchise,” “Uklenni,”
“Eskitisesla,” “Noqui-noquis,” “Peltie,” “Notsin,” “Mosby,” “Chile,”
“Eskiltie,” and some forty others of both sexes. “Pedro,” who had
always been a firm friend of the whites, was now old and decrepit,
and so deaf that he had to employ an ear-trumpet. This use of an
ear-trumpet by a so-called savage Apache struck me as very
ludicrous, but a week after I saw at San Carlos a young baby sucking
vigorously from a rubber tube attached to a glass nursing-bottle.
The world does move.
From the journal of this conference, I will make one or two extracts
as illustrative of General Crook’s ideas on certain seemingly
unimportant points, and as giving the way of thinking and the manner
of expression of the Apaches.
GENERAL CROOK: “I want to have all that you say here go down on
paper, because what goes down on paper never lies. A man’s memory
may fail him, but what the paper holds will be fresh and true long
after we are all dead and forgotten. This will not bring back the
dead, but what is put down on this paper today may help the living.
What I want to get at is all that has happened since I left here to
bring about this trouble, this present condition of affairs. I want
you to tell the truth without fear, and to tell it in as few words
as possible, so that everybody can read it without trouble.”
ALCHISE: “When you left, there were no bad Indians out. We were all
content; everything was peace. The officers you had here were all
taken away, and new ones came in—a different kind. The good ones
must all have been taken away and the bad ones sent in their places.
We couldn’t make out what they wanted; one day they seemed to want
one thing, the next day something else. Perhaps we were to blame,
perhaps they were; but, anyhow, we hadn’t any confidence in them. We
were planting our own corn and melons and making our own living. The
agent at the San Carlos never gave us any rations, but we didn’t
mind that, as we were taking care of ourselves. One day the agent at
the San Carlos sent up and said that we must give up our own country
and our corn-patches and go down there to live, and he sent Indian
soldiers to seize our women and children and drive us all down to
that hot land. ‘Uclenni’ and I were doing all we could to help the
whites, when we were both put in the guard-house. All that I have
ever done has been honest; I have always been true and obeyed
orders. I made campaigns against Apache-Yumas, Apache-Tontos,
Pinalenos, and all kinds of people, and even went against my own
people. When the Indians broke out at the San Carlos, when Major
Randall was here, I helped him to go fight them; I have been in all
the campaigns. When Major Randall was here we were all happy; when
he promised a thing he did it; when he said a word he meant it; but
all that he did was for our own good and we believed in him and we
think of him yet. Where has he gone? Why don’t he come back? Others
have come to see us since he left, but they talk to us in one way
and act in another, and we can’t believe what they say. They say:
‘That man is bad, and _that_ man is bad.’ I think that the trouble
is, they themselves are bad. Oh, where is my friend Randall—the
captain with the big mustache which he always pulled? Why don’t he
come back? He was my brother, and I think of him all the time.”
Old “Pedro” talked in much the same vein: “When you (General Crook)
were here, whenever you said a thing we knew that it was true, and
we kept it in our minds. When Colonel Green was here, our women and
children were happy and our young people grew up contented. And I
remember Brown, Randall, and the other officers who treated us
kindly and were our friends. I used to be happy; now, I am all the
time thinking and crying, and I say, ‘Where is old Colonel John
Green, and Randall, and those other good officers, and what has
become of them? Where have they gone? Why don’t they come back?’ And
the young men all say the same thing.”
“Pedro” spoke of the absurdity of arresting Indians for dancing, as
had been done in the case of the “medicine man,” “Bobby-doklinny”—of
which he had much to say, but at this moment only his concluding
remarks need be preserved: “Often when I have wanted to have a
little fun, I have sent word to all the women and children and young
men to come up and have a dance; other people have done the same
thing; I have never heard that there was any harm in that; but that
campaign was made just because the Indians over on the Cibicu were
dancing. When you (General Crook) were here we were all content; but
we can’t understand why you went away. Why did you leave us?
Everything was all right while you were here.”
A matter of great grievance with the Apaches, which they could not
understand, being nothing but ignorant savages and not up to
civilized ways, was why their little farms, of which I will speak
before ending this volume, should be destroyed—as they were—and why
their cattle and horses should be driven off by soldiers and
citizens. “Severiano,” the interpreter, who was a Mexican by birth,
taken captive in early youth, and living among the Apaches all his
life, now said: “A lot of my own cattle were taken away by soldiers
and citizens.” Had the Apaches had a little more sense they would
have perceived that the whole scheme of Caucasian contact with the
American aborigines—at least the Anglo-Saxon part of it—has been
based upon that fundamental maxim of politics so beautifully and so
tersely enunciated by the New York alderman—“The ‘boys’ are in it
for the stuff.” The “Tucson ring” was determined that no Apache
should be put to the embarrassment of working for his own living;
once let the Apaches become self-supporting, and what would become
of “the boys”? Therefore, they must all be herded down on the
malaria-reeking flats of the San Carlos, where the water is salt and
the air poison, and one breathes a mixture of sand-blizzards and
more flies than were ever supposed to be under the care of the great
fly-god Beelzebub. The conventions entered into with General Howard
and Vincent Collyer, which these Apaches had respected to the
letter—nay, more, the personal assurances given by the President of
the United States to old “Pedro” during a visit made by the latter
to Washington—were all swept away like cobwebs, while the
conspirators laughed in their sleeves, because they knew a trick or
two worth all of that. They had only to report by telegraph that the
Apaches were “uneasy,” “refused to obey the orders of the agent,”
and a lot more stuff of the same kind, and the Great Father would
send in ten regiments to carry out the schemes of the ring, but he
would never send one honest, truthful man to inquire whether the
Apaches had a story or not.
It is within the limits of possibility, that as the American Indians
become better and better acquainted with the English language, and
abler to lay their own side of a dispute before the American people,
there may be a diminution in the number of outbreaks, scares, and
misunderstandings, which have cost the taxpayers such fabulous sums,
and which I trust may continue to cost just as much until the
tax-payer shall take a deeper and more intelligent interest in this
great question. Another fact brought out in this conference was the
readiness with which agents and others incarcerated Indians in
guard-houses upon charges which were baseless, or at least trivial.
At other times, if the charges were grave, nothing was done to press
the cases to trial, and the innocent as well as the guilty suffered
by the long imprisonment, which deprived the alleged criminals of
the opportunity to work for the support of their families. The
report of the Federal Grand Jury of Arizona—taken from the _Star_,
of Tucson, Arizona, October 24, 1882—shows up this matter far more
eloquently than I am able to do, and I need not say that a frontier
jury never yet has said a word in favor of a red man unless the
reasons were fully patent to the ordinary comprehension.
TO THE HONORABLE WILSON HOOVER, District Judge:
The greatest interest was felt in the examination into the cases
of the eleven Indian prisoners brought here for trial from San
Carlos. The United States District Attorney had spent much time in
preparing this investigation. The Department of Justice had
peremptorily ordered that these cases should be disposed of at
this term of court. Agent Wilcox had notified the district
attorney that he should release these Indians by October 1st if
they were not brought away for trial. The official correspondence
from the various departments with the district attorney included a
letter from Agent Tiffany to the Interior Department, asking that
these Indians be at once tried, and yet Agent Tiffany released all
the guilty Indians without punishment and held in confinement
these eleven men for a period of fourteen months without ever
presenting a charge against them, giving them insufficient food
and clothing, and permitting those whose guilt was admitted by
themselves and susceptible of overwhelming proof, to stalk about
unblushingly and in defiance of law. This, too, under the very
shadow of his authority, and in laughing mockery of every
principle of common decency, to say nothing of justice.
How any official possessing the slightest manhood could keep
eleven men in confinement for fourteen months without charges or
any attempt to accuse them, knowing them to be innocent, is a
mystery which can only be solved by an Indian agent of the Tiffany
stamp. The investigations of the Grand Jury have brought to light
a course of procedure at the San Carlos Reservation, under the
government of Agent Tiffany, which is a disgrace to the
civilization of the age and a foul blot upon the national
escutcheon. While many of the details connected with these matters
are outside of our jurisdiction, we nevertheless feel it our duty,
as honest American citizens, to express our utter abhorrence of
the conduct of Agent Tiffany and that class of reverend peculators
who have cursed Arizona as Indian officials, and who have caused
more misery and loss of life than all other causes combined. We
feel assured, however, that under the judicious and just
management of General Crook, these evils will be abated, and we
sincerely trust that he may be permitted to render the official
existence of such men as Agent Tiffany, in the future,
unnecessary.
The investigations of the Grand Jury also establish the fact that
General Crook has the unbounded confidence of all the Indians. The
Indian prisoners acknowledged this before the Grand Jury, and they
expressed themselves as perfectly satisfied that he would deal
justly with them all. We have made diligent inquiry into the
various charges presented in regard to Indian goods and the
traffic at San Carlos and elsewhere, and have acquired a vast
amount of information which we think will be of benefit. For
several years the people of this Territory have been gradually
arriving at the conclusion that the management of the Indian
reservations in Arizona was a fraud upon the Government; that the
constantly recurring outbreaks of the Indians and their consequent
devastations were due to the criminal neglect or apathy of the
Indian agent at San Carlos; but never until the present
investigations of the Grand Jury have laid bare the infamy of
Agent Tiffany could a proper idea be formed of the fraud and
villany which are constantly practised in open violation of law
and in defiance of public justice. Fraud, peculation, conspiracy,
larceny, plots and counterplots, seem to be the rule of action
upon this reservation. The Grand Jury little thought when they
began this investigation that they were about to open a Pandora’s
box of iniquities seldom surpassed in the annals of crime.
With the immense power wielded by the Indian agent almost any
crime is possible. There seems to be no check upon his conduct. In
collusion with the chief clerk and storekeeper, rations can be
issued _ad libitum_ for which the Government must pay, while the
proceeds pass into the capacious pockets of the agent. Indians are
sent to work on the coal-fields, superintended by white men; all
the workmen and superintendents are fed and frequently paid from
the agency stores, and no return of the same is made. Government
tools and wagons are used in transporting goods and working the
coal-mines, in the interest of this close corporation and with the
same result. All surplus supplies are used in the interest of the
agent, and no return made thereof. Government contractors, in
collusion with Agent Tiffany, get receipts for large amounts of
supplies never furnished, and the profit is divided mutually, and
a general spoliation of the United States Treasury is thus
effected. While six hundred Indians are off on passes, their
rations are counted and turned in to the mutual aid association,
consisting of Tiffany and his associates. Every Indian child born
receives rations from the moment of its advent into this vale of
tears, and thus adds its mite to the Tiffany pile. In the
meantime, the Indians are neglected, half-fed, discontented, and
turbulent, until at last, with the vigilant eye peculiar to the
savage, the Indians observe the manner in which the Government,
through its agent, complies with its sacred obligations.
This was the united testimony of the Grand Jury, corroborated by
white witnesses, and to these and kindred causes may be attributed
the desolation and bloodshed which have dotted our plains with the
graves of murdered victims.
FOREMAN OF THE GRAND JURY.
The above official report of a United States Grand Jury is about as
strong a document as is usually to be found in the dusty archives of
courts; to its contents it is not necessary for me to add a single
syllable. I prefer to let the intelligent reader form his own
conclusions, while I resume the thread of my narrative where I left
off in General Crook’s bivouac on the Black River.
The cañon of the Black River is deep and dark, walled in by towering
precipices of basalt and lava, the latter lying in loose blocks
along the trail down which the foot-sore traveller must descend,
leading behind him his equally foot-sore mule. The river was deep
and strong, and in the eddies and swirls amid the projecting rocks
were hiding some of the rare trout of the Territory, so coy that the
patience of the fisherman was exhausted before they could be induced
to jump at his bait. The forbidding ruggedness of the mountain
flanks was concealed by forests of pine and juniper, which extended
for miles along the course of the stream. The music of our
pack-train bells was answered by the silvery laughter of squaws and
children, as we had with us in this place over one hundred Apaches,
many of them following out from Camp Apache to hear the results of
the conference.
The Apaches with whom General Crook talked at this place were, in
addition to “Alchise” and several others who had been sent out from
Camp Apache to notify the members of the tribe hiding in the
mountains, “Nagataha,” “A-ha-ni,” “Comanchi,” “Charlie,” “Nawdina,”
“Lonni,” “Neta,” “Kulo,” “Kan-tzi-chi,” “Tzi-di-ku,” “Klishe.” The
whole subject of their relations with the whites was traversed, and
much information elicited. The only facts of importance to a volume
of this kind were: the general worthlessness and rascality of the
agents who had been placed in charge of them; the constant robbery
going on without an attempt at concealment; the selling of supplies
and clothing intended for the Indians, to traders in the little
towns of Globe, Maxey, and Solomonville; the destruction of the corn
and melon fields of the Apaches, who had been making their own
living, and the compelling of all who could be forced to do so to
depend upon the agent for meagre supplies; the arbitrary punishments
inflicted without trial, or without testimony of any kind; the
cutting down of the reservation limits without reference to the
Apaches. Five times had this been done, and much of the most
valuable portion had been sequestered; the copper lands on the
eastern side were now occupied by the flourishing town of Clifton,
while on the western limit Globe and MacMillin had sprung into
being.
Coal had been discovered at the head of Deer Creek on the southern
extremity, and every influence possible was at work to secure the
sequestration of that part of the reservation for speculators, who
hoped to be able to sell out at a big profit to the Southern Pacific
Railroad Company. The Mormons had trespassed upon the fields already
cultivated by the Apaches at Forestdale, and the agent had
approached a circle of twenty of the chiefs and head men assembled
at the San Carlos, and offered each of them a small bag, containing
one hundred dollars—Mexican—and told them that they must agree to
sign a paper, giving up all the southern part of the reservation, or
troops would be sent to kill them. A silver mine had been
discovered, or was alleged to have been discovered, and the agent
and some of his pals proposed to form a stock company, and work it
off on confiding brethren in the East. In none of the curtailments,
as consummated or contemplated, had the interests or feelings of the
Indians been consulted.
The rations doled out had shrunk to a surprising degree: one of the
shoulders of the small cattle of that region was made to do twenty
people for a week; one cup of flour was issued every seven days to
each adult. As the Indians themselves said, they were compelled to
eat every part of the animal, intestines, hoofs, and horns. Spies
were set upon the agency, who followed the wagons laden with the
Indian supplies to Globe and the other towns just named, to which
they travelled by night, there to unload and transfer to the men who
had purchased from the agent or his underlings. One of the Apaches
who understood English and Spanish was deputed to speak to the agent
upon the matter. It was the experience of Oliver Twist over again
when he asked for more. The messenger was put in the guardhouse,
where he remained for six months, and was then released without
trial or knowing for what he had been imprisoned. In regard to the
civilian agents, the Apaches said they ran from bad to worse, being
dishonest, indifferent, tyrannical, and generally incompetent. Of
Captain Chaffee, of the Sixth Cavalry, who had been for a while in
charge at San Carlos, the Apaches spoke in terms of respect, saying
that he was very severe in his notions, but a just and honest man,
and disposed to be harsh only with those who persisted in making,
selling, or drinking the native intoxicant, “tizwin.” The rottenness
of the San Carlos Agency extended all the way to Washington, and
infolded in its meshes officials of high rank. It is to the lasting
credit of Hon. Carl Schurz, then Secretary of the Interior, that
when he learned of the delinquencies of certain of his subordinates,
he swung his axe without fear or favor, and the heads of the
Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Inspector-General of the Indian
Bureau, and the agent at San Carlos fell into the basket.
At the San Carlos Agency itself, Crook met such men as “Cha-lipun,”
“Chimahuevi-sal,” “Navatane,” “Nodikun,” “Santos,” “Skinospozi,”
“Pedilkun,” “Binilke,” “Captain Chiquito,” “Eskiminzin,”
“Huan-klishe,” and numbers of others; those who had always lived in
the hills near the San Carlos were content to live in the country,
but such of the number as had been pulled away from the cool climate
and pure water of the Cibicu, Carrizo, and other cañons in the
vicinity of Camp Apache, and had seen their fields of corn tramped
down at the orders of the agent, were full of grievous complaint.
The Apache-Yumas and the Apaches are an entirely different people,
speaking different languages and resembling each other only in the
bitter hostility with which they had waged war against the whites.
The young men of the Apache-Yuma bands who attended the conferences,
were in full toilet—that is, they were naked from shoulders to
waist, had their faces painted with deer’s blood or mescal, their
heads done up in a plaster of mud three inches thick, and pendent
from the cartilage of the nose wore a ring with a fragment of
nacreous shell. General Crook’s own estimate of the results of these
conferences, which are entirely too long to be inserted here, is
expressed in the following General Orders (Number 43), issued from
his headquarters at Fort Whipple on the 5th of October, 1882.
“The commanding general, after making a thorough and exhaustive
examination among the Indians of the eastern and southern part of
this Territory, regrets to say that he finds among them a general
feeling of distrust and want of confidence in the whites,
especially the soldiery; and also that much dissatisfaction,
dangerous to the peace of the country, exists among them. Officers
and soldiers serving in this department are reminded that one of
the fundamental principles of the military character is justice to
all—Indians as well as white men—and that a disregard of this
principle is likely to bring about hostilities, and cause the
death of the very persons they are sent here to protect. In all
their dealings with the Indians, officers must be careful not only
to observe the strictest fidelity, but to make no promises not in
their power to carry out; all grievances arising within their
jurisdiction should be redressed, so that an accumulation of them
may not cause an outbreak.
“Grievances, however petty, if permitted to accumulate, will be
like embers that smoulder and eventually break into flame. When
officers are applied to for the employment of force against
Indians, they should thoroughly satisfy themselves of the
necessity for the application, and of the legality of compliance
therewith, in order that they may not, through the inexperience of
others, or through their own hastiness, allow the troops under
them to become the instruments of oppression. There must be no
division of responsibility in this matter; each officer will be
held to a strict accountability that his actions have been fully
authorized by law and justice, and that Indians evincing a desire
to enter upon a career of peace shall have no cause for complaint
through hasty or injudicious acts of the military.”
Crook’s management of the Department of Arizona was conducted on the
same lines as during his previous administration: he rode on
mule-back all over it, and met and understood each and every Indian
with whom he might have to deal as friend or enemy; he reorganized
his pack-trains and the Indian scouts, put the control of military
affairs at the San Carlos under charge of Captain Emmet Crawford,
Third Cavalry, a most intelligent and conscientious officer,
encouraged the Indians to prepare for planting good crops the next
spring, and made ready to meet the Chiricahuas. These Indians, for
whom a reservation had been laid out with its southern line the
boundary between the United States and the Mexican Republic, had
been dealing heavily at the ranch of Rogers and Spence, at Sulphur
Springs, where they were able to buy all the vile whiskey they
needed. In a row over the sale of liquor both Rogers and Spence were
killed, and the Apaches, fearing punishment, fled to the mountains
of Mexico—the Sierra Madre. From that on, for six long years, the
history of the Chiricahuas was one of blood: a repetition of the
long series of massacres which, under “Cocheis,” they had
perpetrated in the old days.
On several occasions a number of them returned to the San Carlos, or
pretended to do so, but the recesses of the Sierra Madre always
afforded shelter to small bands of renegades of the type of
“Ka-e-tan-ne,” who despised the white man as a liar and scorned him
as a foe. The unfortunate policy adopted by the Government towards
the “Warm Springs” Apaches of New Mexico, who were closely related
to the Chiricahuas, had an unhealthy effect upon the latter and upon
all the other bands. The “Warm Springs” Apaches were peremptorily
deprived of their little fields and driven away from their crops,
half-ripened, and ordered to tramp to the San Carlos; when the band
reached there the fighting men had disappeared, and only decrepit
warriors, little boys and girls, and old women remained. “Victorio”
went on the war-path with every effective man, and fairly deluged
New Mexico and Chihuahua with blood.
General Crook felt that the Chiricahua Apache problem was a burning
shame and disgrace, inasmuch as the property and lives not only of
our own citizens but of those of a friendly nation, were constantly
menaced. He had not been at San Carlos twenty-four hours before he
had a party of Apaches out in the ranges to the south looking for
trails or signs; this little party penetrated down into the northern
end of the Sierra Madre below Camp Price, and saw some of the
Mexican irregular troops, but found no fresh traces of the enemy.
Crook insisted upon the expulsion from the reservation of all
unauthorized squatters and miners, whether appearing under the guise
of Mormons or as friends of the late agents, and opposed resolutely
the further curtailment of the reservation or the proposition to
transfer the Apaches to the Indian Territory, having in mind the
contemptible failure of the attempt to evict the Cherokees from the
mountains of North Carolina, where some twenty-two hundred of them
still cling to the homes of their forefathers. He also insisted upon
giving to the Apaches all work which could be provided for them, and
in paying for the same in currency to the individual Indians without
the interposition of any middlemen or contractors in any guise.
This will explain in a word why Crook was suddenly abused so roundly
in the very Territory for which he had done so much. People who were
not influenced by the disappointed elements enumerated, saw that
General Crook’s views were eminently fair and sound, based upon the
most extended experience, and not the hap-hazard ideas of a
theoretical soldier. To quote from the Annual Message of Governor
Tritle: “The Indians know General Crook and his methods, and respect
both.” Had the notion ever taken root among the Apaches that they
were all to be transplanted to unknown regions, the country would
have had to face the most terrible and costly war in its history.
Crook did not want wars—he wanted to avert them. In a letter to
United States District Attorney Zabriskie, he used the following
language: “I believe that it is of far greater importance to prevent
outbreaks than to attempt the difficult and sometimes hopeless task
of quelling them after they do occur; this policy can only be
successful when the officers of justice fearlessly perform their
duty in proceeding against the villains who fatten on the supplies
intended for the use of Indians willing to lead peaceful and orderly
lives. Bad as Indians often are, I have never yet seen one so
demoralized that he was not an example in honor and nobility to the
wretches who enrich themselves by plundering him of the little our
Government appropriates for him.”
To prevent any of the Indians from slipping off from the agency,
they were all enrolled, made to wear tags as of yore, and compelled
to submit to periodical counts occurring every few days. It was
found that there were then at the San Carlos Agency eleven hundred
and twenty-eight males capable of bearing arms; this did not include
the bands at or near Camp Apache or the Chiricahuas. The Apaches
manifested the liveliest interest in the system of trial by jury,
and it was apparent that criminals stood but a small chance of
escaping punishment when arraigned before their own people. While we
were at San Carlos on this occasion Captain Crawford had arrested
two Apaches on the charge of making “tizwin,” getting drunk, and
arousing camp by firing off guns late at night. The jury was
impanelled, the trial began, and the room soon filled with
spectators. The prisoners attempted to prove an “alibi,” and
introduced witnesses to swear to the shooting having been done by
other parties.
“Eskiminzin” impatiently arose to his feet and interrupted the
proceedings: “That man is not telling the truth.”
“Tell ‘Eskiminzin’ to sit down and keep quiet,” ordered Captain
Crawford; “he must not interrupt the proceedings of the court.”
A few moments after, in looking down the long list of witnesses, it
was discovered that “Eskiminzin” was present as a witness, and he
was called upon to testify.
“Tell the Captain,” said the indignant chief, “that I have nothing
to say. I do not understand these white men; they let all kinds of
people talk at a trial, and would just as soon listen to the words
of a liar as those of a man telling the truth. Why, when I began to
tell him that So-and-so was lying, he made me sit down and keep my
mouth shut, but So-and-so went on talking, and every word he said
was put down on paper.”
It took some time to explain to “Eskiminzin” the intricacies of our
laws of evidence, and to pacify him enough to induce him to give his
version of the facts.
Our quarters while at San Carlos were the adobe building erected as
a “school-house,” at a cost to the Government of forty thousand
dollars, but occupied by the late agent as a residence. It had been
erected at a net cost of something between eight and nine thousand
dollars, or at least I would contract to duplicate it for that and
expect to make some money in the transaction besides. The walls were
covered over with charcoal scrawls of Apache gods, drawn by
irreverent youngsters, and the appearance of the place did not in
the remotest sense suggest the habitation of the Muses.
General Crook returned late in the fall of 1882 to his headquarters
at Fort Whipple, and awaited the inevitable irruption of the
Chiricahua Apaches from their stronghold in the Sierra Madre in
Mexico. Large detachments of Indian scouts, under competent
officers, were kept patrolling the boundary in the vicinity of
Cloverdale and other exposed points, and small garrisons were in
readiness to take the field from Fort Bowie and other stations. The
completion of the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and
Santa Fé systems, and the partial completion of the Atlantic and
Pacific Railroad, had wrought certain changes in the condition of
affairs, to which reference may be made. In a military sense they
had all been a great benefit by rendering the transportation of
troops and supplies a matter of most agreeable surprise to those who
still remembered the creaking ox-teams and prairie schooners, which
formerly hauled all stores from the banks of the distant Missouri;
in a social sense they had been the means of introducing
immigration, some of which was none too good, as is always the case
with the earlier days of railroad construction on the frontier.
The mining towns like Tombstone, then experiencing a “boom,” had
been increased by more than a fair quota of gamblers, roughs, and
desperate adventurers of all classes. Cowboys and horse thieves
flooded the southeastern corner of the Territory and the
southwestern corner of the next Territory—New Mexico; with
Cloverdale, in southwestern New Mexico, as a headquarters, they bade
defiance to the law and ran things with a high hand, and made many
people sigh for the better days when only red-skinned savages
intimidated the settlements. The town of Phoenix had arisen in the
valley of the Salt River, along the lines of prehistoric irrigating
ditches, marking the presence of considerable population, and
suggesting to Judge Hayden and others who first laid it out the
propriety of bestowing the name it now bears. The new population
were both intelligent and enterprising: under the superintendence of
the Hon. Clark Churchill they had excavated great irrigating canals,
and begun the planting of semi-tropical fruits, which has proved
unusually remunerative, and built up the community so that it has
for years been able to care for itself against any hostile attacks
that might be threatened. Prescott, being off the direct line of
railroad (with which, however, it has since been connected by a
branch), had not responded so promptly to the new condition of
affairs, but its growth had been steady, and its population had not
been burdened with the same class of loafers who for so long a time
held high carnival in Tombstone, Deming, and elsewhere. Prescott had
always boasted of its intelligent, bright family society—thoroughly
American in the best sense—and the boast was still true.
There is no point in the southwestern country so well adapted, none
that can compare with Prescott as the site of a large Indian school;
and when the time comes, as I am certain it is to come, when we
shall recognize the absurdity of educating a few Indian boys and
then returning them back to their tribes, in which they can exert no
influence, but can excite only jealousy on account of their superior
attainments—when by a slight increase of appropriations, the whole
race of Indian boys and girls could be lifted from savagery into the
path to a better life—Prescott will become the site of such a
school. It is education which is to be the main lever in this
elevation, but it is wholesale education, not retail. This phase of
the case impressed itself upon the early settlers in Canada, who
provided most liberally for the training of, comparatively speaking,
great numbers of the Algonquin youth of both sexes. In Mexico was
erected the first school for the education of the native
American—the college at Patzcuaro—built before foot of Puritan had
touched the rock of Plymouth.
Prescott possesses the advantages of being the centre of a district
inhabited by numbers of tribes whose children could be educated so
near their own homes that parents would feel easier in regard to
them, and yet the youngsters would be far removed from tribal
influences and in the midst of a thoroughly progressive American
community. The climate cannot be excelled anywhere; the water is as
good as can be found; and the scenery—of granite peaks, grassy
meads, balmy pine forests, and placid streamlets—cannot well be
surpassed. The post of Fort Whipple could be transferred to the
Interior Department, and there would be found ready to hand the
houses for teachers, the school-rooms, dormitories, refectories,
blacksmith-shops, wagoners’ shops, saddlers’ shops, stables,
granaries, and other buildings readily adaptable to the purposes of
instruction in various handicrafts. Five hundred children, equally
divided as to sex, could be selected from the great tribes of the
Navajos, Apaches, Hualpais, Mojaves, Yumas, Pimas, and Maricopas.
The cost of living is very moderate, and all supplies could be
brought in on the branch railroad, while the absence of excitement
incident to communities established at railroad centres or on
through lines will be manifest upon a moment’s reflection. It would
require careful, intelligent, absolutely honest administration, to
make it a success; it should be some such school as I have seen
conducted by the Congregationalists and Presbyterians among the
Santee Sioux, under the superintendence of Rev. Alfred Riggs, or by
the Friends among the Cherokees in North Carolina, under Mr. Spray,
where the children are instructed in the rudiments of Christian
morality, made to understand that labor is most honorable, that the
saddler, the carpenter, or blacksmith must be a gentleman and come
to the supper-table with clean face and combed hair, and that the
new life is in every respect the better life.
But if it is to be the fraud upon the confiding tax-payers that the
schools at Fort Defiance (Navajo Agency), Zuni, San Carlos, and
other places that I personally examined have been, money would be
saved by not establishing it at all. The agent of the Navajos
reported in 1880 that his “school” would accommodate eighty
children. I should dislike to imprison eight dogs that I loved in
the dingy hole that he called a “school”—but then the agent had a
pull at Washington, being the brother-in-law of a “statesman,” and I
had better not say too much; and the school-master, although an
epileptic idiot, had been sent out as the representative of the
family influence of another “statesman,” so I will not say more
about him. The Indians to be instructed in the school whose
establishment is proposed at Prescott, Arizona, should be trained in
the line of their “atavism,” if I may borrow a word from the medical
dictionary—that is, they should be trained in the line of their
inherited proclivities and tendencies. Their forefathers for
generations—ever since the time of the work among them of the
Franciscan missionaries—have been a pastoral people, raising great
flocks of sheep, clipping, carding, and spinning the wool, weaving
the most beautiful of rugs and blankets and sashes, and selling them
at a profit to admiring American travellers. They have been
saddle-makers, basket-makers, silver-smiths, and—as in the case of
the Mojaves, Pimas, and Maricopas—potters and mat-makers. In such
trades, preferentially, they should be instructed, and by the
introduction of a few Lamb knitting machines, they could be taught
to make stockings for the Southwestern market out of the wool raised
by their own families, and thus help support the institution and
open a better market for the products of their own tribe. They could
be taught to tan the skins of their own flocks and herds, and to
make shoes and saddles of the result. But all this must be put down
as “whimsical,” because there is no money in it “for the boys.” The
great principle of American politics, regardless of party lines, is
that “the boys” must be taken care of at all times and in all
places.
Tucson had changed the most appreciably of any town in the
Southwest; American energy and American capital had effected a
wonderful transformation: the old garrison was gone; the railroad
had arrived; where Jack Long and his pack-train in the old times had
merrily meandered, now puffed the locomotive; Muñoz’s corral had
been displaced by a round-house, and Muñoz himself by a one-lunged
invalid from Boston; the Yankees had almost transformed the face of
nature; the exquisite architectural gem of San Xavier del Bac still
remained, but the “Shoo Fly” restaurant had disappeared, and in its
place the town boasted with very good reason of the “San Xavier”
Hotel, one of the best coming within my experience as a traveller.
American enterprise had moved to the front, and the Castilian with
his “marromas” and “bailes” and saints’ days and “funcciones” had
fallen to the rear; telephones and electric lights and Pullman cars
had scared away the plodding burro and the creaking “carreta”; it
was even impossible to get a meal cooked in the Mexican style of
Mexican viands; our dreams had faded; the chariot of Cinderella had
changed back into a pumpkin, and Sancho was no longer governor.
“I tell you, Cap,” said my old friend, Charlie Hopkins, “them
railroads’s playin’ hob with th’ country, ’n a feller’s got to
hustle hisself now in Tucson to get a meal of frijoles or
enchiladas; this yere new-fangled grub doan’ suit me ’n I reckon
I’ll pack mee grip ’n lite out fur Sonora.”
Saddest of all, the old-timers were thinning out, or if not dead
were living under a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph; the Postons, Ourys,
Bradys, Mansfields, Veils, Rosses, Montgomerys, Duncans, Drachmans,
Handys, and others were unappreciated by the incoming tide of
“tenderfeet,” who knew nothing of the perils and tribulations of
life in Arizona and New Mexico before Crook’s genius and valor had
redeemed them from the clutch of the savage. On the Colorado River
Captain Jack Mellon still plied the good ship “Cocopah,” and Dan
O’Leary still dealt out to expectant listeners tales of the terrible
days when he “fit” with Crook; within sight of the “Wickytywiz,”
Charlie Spencer still lived among his Hualpai kinsmen, not much the
worse for the severe wounds received while a scout; the old Hellings
mill on the Salt River, once the scene of open-handed hospitality to
all travellers, still existed under changed ownership, and the
Arnolds, Ehls, Bowers, Bangharts, and other ranchmen of northern
Arizona were still in place; but the mill of Don José Peirson no
longer ground its toll by the current of the San Ignacio; the
Samaniegos, Suasteguis, Borquis, Ferreras, and other Spanish
families had withdrawn to Sonora; and, oldest survival of all,
“Uncle Lew Johnson” was living in seclusion with the family of
Charlie Hopkins on the Salumay on the slopes of the Sierra Ancha. It
would pay some enterprising man to go to Arizona to interview this
old veteran, who first entered Arizona with the earliest band of
trappers; who was one of the party led by Pauline Weaver; who knew
Kit Carson intimately; who could recall the days when Taos, New
Mexico, was the metropolis of fashion and commerce for the whole
Southwest, and the man who had gone as far east as St. Louis was
looked upon as a traveller whose recitals merited the closest
attention of the whole camp.