The chase is the natural outlet for much savagery; but the wild tribes
of North America are more hardly driven now than ever before, owing to
the rapid disappearance of game, especially the buffalo. Time was when
the _cibola_, as they called him, fed, warmed, and clothed the nomads.
Indians are now moved about as far west as they can go, and the buffalo
goes with them, but is disappearing much more rapidly than the Red Man
is.
The narrowing limits of his range make many a chase barren as that of
the English party in the Catskills, gayly hunting the great American
bison in the Summer of 1876.
He once ranged as far east as the Atlantic seaboard in Virginia and
the Carolinas. From Catesby we learn that, about the year 1712, herds
of buffalo were seen within thirty miles of Charleston, South Carolina.
The decrease of their main reliance for food and clothing alarmed the
tribes years ago; and in the last generation they brought forward the
fact in their pow-wows with commissioners: “The _cibola_ is dying,
and the red brother must keep peace with the pale face, and eat his
spotted buffalo.” (Indian for domestic cattle.) Such was the peaceful
and alluring speech of the war chief of the Apaches; but the promise
of peace was never kept. To steal and murder, and, under the show of
friendship beat out the brains of unsuspecting men; to carry off to
captivity worse than death the women and larger children, was merely a
question of _opportunity_.
The “spotted buffalo of the white brother” is hardier than the
ancient and lawful game which ranged in such vast herds along the
Arkansas, Republican and Platte Rivers, and the future geographers
will not regale ingenuous American youth with that blood-curdling,
hair-whitening picture of the shaggy and ferocious beasts rushing to
suicide over an awful precipice overhanging a bottomless abyss. The
bison will rather take his place in natural history with the extinct
dodo and the out-going cassowary.
The tanned skin of the buffalo is the best material for the manufacture
of “tepes,” and the “_bois de bache_” is as good fuel as the Indian
desires. It has been erroneously stated that only the white man kills
and wastes buffalo. They are, or have been frequently killed by war
parties, who take what may be needed as food; but the rest of the
carcass falls to the portion of wolves and ravens, never far off. Young
buffaloes fall a prey to the hungry gray wolf and coyotes, and a sick
or wounded buffalo has a long train attendant of wolves, thirsting for
his blood.
Coronado, the old Spanish explorer who crossed the Gila in 1540, wrote
a curious and accurate description of the _cibola_, of which I copy
a portion: “These oxen are the bigness and color of our bulls; but
their horns are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore
shoulders, and more hair upon their fore part than on their hinder
part; it is like wool. They have, as it were, a horse’s mane upon their
back-bone, and much hair and very long from the knee downward. They
have great tufts of hair hanging down their foreheads, and it seemeth
they have beards, because of the great store of hair hanging down at
their chins and throats. The males have very long tails, and a great
knob or flock at the end; so that, in some respects, they resemble
the lion, and, in some, the camel. Their masters have no other riches
or substance; of them they eat, they drink, they apparel, they shoe
themselves; and of their hides make many things, as houses and ropes;
of their bones they make bodkins; of their sinews and hair, thread;
of their horns, maws and bladders, vessels; and of their calf skins,
buckets, wherein they draw and keep water.”
[Illustration: Navajo Indian with Silver Ornaments.]
The whole living of the roving tribes is thus cut off with the buffalo.
The Apache love of meat is not fastidious, and they are fond of mule
and horse flesh. Deer, antelope--whatever the game may be--every
portion, except the bones, is consumed, the entrails being an especial
delicacy. They partially cook it, generally eating it extremely rare;
that is, about half raw. Fertile valleys in the territories bear a
small proportion to the extent of arid deserts, lava beds, and plains
of sand. Isolated peaks contain wood and springs, thus affording
protection for the sure-footed savage, who can outmarch our best
cavalry horses. The scant grass is soon exhausted, so he must move from
place to place, or starve, and thus necessity is added to inclination;
and they roam over immense tracts of country, seeking what they may
devour.
They have smoke signals by day and fire beacons at night, and systems
of telegraphy understood only by themselves. The displacement and
overturning of a few stones on a trail, or a bent or broken twig, is a
note of warning like the bugle call to disciplined troops. They cross
the _Jornada del Muerto_, “journey of death,” as the ninety mile desert
was called by the Spaniard, with an ease and fleetness no white man
can imitate, and, swooping down from refuges in the natural fortresses
of the mountains, pounce upon the travelers. The many crosses dotting
the roadsides of Southern Arizona and New Mexico mark the graves of
murdered men; indeed, the country seems one vast graveyard, if we
may judge by the frequency of these rude memorials. Trained by their
mothers to theft and murder from childhood, they are inured to all
extremes of heat and cold, hunger and thirst. They are cunning as
the red fox and insatiate as tigers, so ingenious in preparing for
surprises that they will envelop themselves in a gray blanket, sprinkle
it carefully with earth, to resemble a granite bowlder and be passed
within a few feet without suspicion. Again, they will cover themselves
with fresh grass, and, lying motionless, seem a natural portion of the
field, or hid among the yuccas, they imitate the appearance of the
tree, so as to pass for one of the plants.
Three-fourths of the Apache country consists of barren volcanic rocks
and sterile ridges, where no plow can be driven and no water found,
and campaigning in their country is exposure to severe privations and
dangers, aside from the attacks of the natives. There is no hope of
glory to cheer the soldier who upholds our flag in that dreary field;
there is no stimulus but duty. If he succeeds, the feeblest echo
reaches the ears of friends in the states; scant mention is made in
the papers; there is small honor in killing an Indian, still less in
falling before one. And the work is endless, fruitless. It is to be
recommenced every Spring, and as regularly stopped in the Fall by the
snows of Autumn. A passing interest is roused; but it is brief, because
the atrocities are so frequent and monotonous; always the same tale
of insult, torture, death; and every year the same inquiry is made at
Washington, and runs along the frontier, What can be done with the
Apaches?
They should be exterminated, you say.
Yes, dear reader; but, unfortunately for our gallant army,
extermination is a game two can play at.
Very few know, or care to know, that in the Apache War, ending October,
1880, more than four hundred white persons were scalped and tortured to
death with devilish ingenuity. The war began on account of the removal
of about four hundred Indians from their reservation at Ojo Caliente
(warm springs), New Mexico. This is the ideal of a happy hunting
ground. Standing on the parade ground at Fort Craig, you look toward
the Black Range mountains, clad in pine groves, abounding in game and
the precious stones so rare in New Mexico and Arizona. Morning and
evening wrap them in aerial tints of surpassing loveliness; and one can
well imagine such a spot would be very dear to any one calling it home,
be his color what it may. When the news came, the Indians received the
announcement with deep grief and bitter curses. The reason assigned by
our Government for the removal from this spot to the arid, volcanic
_mesa_ of Arizona was that two agencies might be consolidated, and the
expense of maintaining them lessened. They went unwillingly, because
this beautiful country was the land of their fathers, and because
they could not live peaceably with the Indians of the San Carlos
reservation, and only at the bayonet’s point would they march. Their
war chief was Victorio, successor to the renowned Magnus Colorado,
who was the most influential and successful statesman and warrior the
Apaches have had for a century. They left Ojo Caliente, with its green
fields and glorious mountains, in the Spring of 1877. In September,
of the same year, Victorio and his people stole away from San Carlos,
saying they would rather die than live there. They were pursued by our
cavalry, overtaken, and several of them killed; many women and children
were taken prisoners. The rest under Victorio, escaped, went to Fort
Wingate, and surrendered. They were sent back to Ojo Caliente, and held
as prisoners of war until the order came from Washington for them to
return to Arizona. Then they stole the cavalry horses and started on
the war-path.
The war was a series of ambuscades and retreats, lasting a year and a
half. The details of Indian fighting are much the same everywhere; but
Apaches surpass in cunning, strategy, secrecy, all the sons of men.
They are an enemy not to be despised, and as friends are _never_ to
be trusted. Their signal system is so perfect that by it they act in
perfect concert, and bands of fives, tens, and twenties, separated from
each other by twenty, thirty, even forty miles, manage to maintain
a perfect police intelligence over the vast region once their own
territory.
Victorio had one son named for the man who, beyond all men of the
civilized and even savage world, has had the confidence of his kind,
Washington; the one white man Indians admit to a place in their land
of happy spirits. He was shot near Fort Cummings, and his death was
a heavy blow to the chief, whose fame and blanket he was to inherit,
whose pride was centered in his son. In the Fall of 1879, Washington’s
body lay unburied in the deep defile where he fell; the long hair
matted and dried with blood, the flesh shrunken and skin tanned like
old leather. In the dry, dewless air of New Mexico, bodies are not
subject to decay as in the East, and will shrivel like a mummy by
exposure to sun and wind. Long before this time the flesh of the
chief’s son has probably been gnawed clean from the bones by the
ravening mountain wolf.
Washington had but one wife, contrary to the usual custom of his tribe,
and at twenty, wooed and won the “Princess,” as we used to call her,
because she was of the royal family of the illustrious Magnus Colorado.
She was a comely damsel, very young, who assumed some dignity and state
because of her high blood, and she never forgot the ancient splendors
of her line.
Victorio and his band were surrounded and killed in the Castillos
Mountains of Mexico, by troops under General Terassas (Mexican), and
the war ended with a grand parade in the city of Chihuahua. Cathedral
bells rang, bands played, and the victorious column marched the street
amid rousing cheers. Following General Terassas and his command came
prisoners, women and children on mules and ponies; they were to be
given away and find homes among their conquerors. Behind them were
seventy-eight Mexicans, carrying poles twenty feet high, on which were
scalps dangling like waving plumes. The whole head of hair was torn off
instead of one tuft, and the slayer of Victorio, a Farhumara Indian
bore aloft with pride a pole on which hung the gray scalp of the dead
chief. At sight of it the cheers of the Mexicans were redoubled, and I
could but think so barbaric a procession is rarely seen in one of the
oldest and wealthiest cities of the North American Continent. There
was great cause for rejoicing; the bravest and wiliest of the Apaches
was dead, and he had no son to succeed him, for with Victorio’s death
the cause was lost. His wife cut off her hair, as the old Greek wives
used to, and buried it, an offering to the spirit of the fallen chief
to whom she was devoted, yet said to be less slavish than most Indian
wives.
Victorio’s band were all stout fighters and _devilish_ when under the
influence of whiskey or _tiswin_, an intoxicating drink made from corn.
One of them, Rafael, split his child’s head open with an ax, when
drunk; another time stabbed his wife so that she died. He was then
overcome by penitence, sacrificed all of his beads and most of his
clothes to the dear departed, cut his and children’s hair short, and
sheared the horses’ manes and tails. These manifestations of anguish
over, he went up into a high hill, and howled with uplifted hands.
That shape, outlined against the intense azure of the sky, was a most
ridiculous sight. The funeral dirge was a long, slow, horrible wail.
There is no Apache law to touch such a criminal; and this case is less
distressing than one other which came under my notice in New Mexico.
An old Indian bought a young girl of her mother, paying her price in
ponies and blankets--much against her will--she, like a sensible girl,
preferring a younger man. She ran away, and hid in dark cañons and
pine woods, but the bridegroom tracked her and beat her on her head
with his gun for running off; and, worst of all, her mother thought
the son-in-law was exactly right in the matter. Finally, when her
skull was nearly broken, her spirit was entirely gone, and she yielded
to the inevitable, as so many women of the higher grade have done,
and silently took up the heavy burden of life allotted the wife of
the most barbarous of barbarians. Women are of so little account with
these people that few of their daughters are given a name, and even
their mothers often mourn at their birth, regarding them merely as an
incumbrance on the tribe. They are pretty as children, but the exposure
and hard work of their lot change them to wrinkled, muscular hags at
thirty, and when they die the Apache chief merely says: “It was only a
woman; no loss.”