General Crook Relieved.
Gen. George Crook came to Arizona in 1870, remaining in command of the department here until 1875, when he was transferred to the department of the Platte, and was reassigned and returned to Arizona in 1882. In 1886, evidently taking exception to an implied criticism from the Department at Washington, and, as he expressed it, “having spent nearly eight years of the hardest work of his life in this department”, he asked to be relieved. Crook was criticized in Arizona at the time for a too abiding faith in the loyalty of his Indian scouts, and many of us believed this criticism to be fully justified. There is hardly a doubt that much of the ammunition used by the renegades was supplied them by these same scouts. It was but a few months prior to Crook’s being relieved that Capt. Crawford, a zealous and gallant officer, while engaged in his thankless task of ridding their own country of these pests, was treacherously killed by Mexican irregular troops in the Sierra Madre mountains. It is true that these irregular troops were Tarahumari Indians, possibly as wild and uncontrollable as the Apaches themselves, and that may extenuate the treachery to some extent, but the fact remains that the officers in command were not Indians, but Mexicans.