CHAPTER XVI. SOMETHING ABOUT THE APACHE.

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.”