Paris Adopts Name of Apache
Being over in Paris a few years ago, a friend who had lived there a number of years, and who was as familiar with Paris from basement to roof-garden, as I am with Congress street of our good old town of Tucson, suggested one evening that we visit the “Apaches”. Expressing surprise that any of my people should have wandered so far from home, I suggested as a substitute the Moulin Rouge. However, the Apaches were agreed on, and in the evening, my friend, bringing a policeman with him, called for me at my hotel.
Arriving at the door of the Apache rendezvous in due course, we three—my friend, the policeman and myself—are readily admitted, the presence of our policeman assuring that, and we find ourselves in an underground dive, a large room with a low ceiling, barely furnished, dimly lighted, and reeking with the sour odor of stale beer. Looking about the room, by the dim light as it forces its way through the dense gloom of tobacco smoke, we are enabled to see two other policemen besides our own—there are two stationed there day and night—and a score or more of the toughest-looking lot of cut-throats I had ever had the pleasure of coming in contact with. This was the retreat, the gathering place, of as bad a lot of thieves, thugs, robbers, burglars and murderers as the world could boast of, and Paris, in seeking a name for them that would embody all of these characteristics, had searched the world over, and was almost in despair of finding a single word that would express all that is mean, wantonly cruel, murderous and cowardly, but at last attention was directed to the Apache of Arizona, and then it was discovered that the word which would embody all that and more had been found. And that was why I was enabled to find some of my own home people away off there in the world’s center of fashion. Settling for a few bottles of the vilest beer possible to brew, as a tip to the house, I was soon ready to ask my friend to call his policeman and get us away from this vile den.