The Camp Grant massacre aroused a great cry in the East. The East sided with the Apaches. But when he had arrived, Commissioner Colyer seemed to be going about with very odd notions. He was reported as thinking that the Apaches were only a poor ignorant race, who had been robbed of their lands and forced into war by the whites, and that they ought to be met with kindness alone. Then they would be peaceable. The Tucson Citizen asserted that he advised the Arizona people to avoid trouble by getting out of the Indians’ way. And the Citizen and the Prescott Miner published hot, sarcastic articles about him and the Peace Policy. The Apaches were being referred to as “Colyer’s babes” and “Colyer’s pets.”
“What’s that?” growled Joe. “Thinks the Chiricahuas an’ Tontos don’t know any better’n to hang folks up by their heels over a slow fire, does he? An’ that we ought to call off the troops an’ get off our ranches, so we won’t be irritatin’ the Injuns? Then they’d come in of themselves, to be civilized! Jest why the ’Paches who can live by fightin’ an’ stealin’ as they please will want to live by ploughin’, I’d like to hear. This is part o’ the United States, an’ the white people are jest as much entitled to protection as the ’Paches are.”
Camp Grant was a four- or five-company post located here in a desert basin where the valley of the Arivaipa Creek, from the east, and of the San Pedro River, from the south, joined. The San Pedro was supposed to flow on north, for a few miles, to the Gila River; but it and the Arivaipa were only dry sand-beds during the greater part of the year.
Camp Grant was not a pretty place; it was only a hollow square of clay or log huts and ragged tents, shaded in front by brush porches or ramadas.
Against it beat the sand-storms in the spring and the blazing sun throughout nine months of the year—temperature, one hundred and twenty in the shade! The giant cactuses, instead of trees, were many and extra large—and so were the rattle-snakes, scorpions and centipedes. And the Apache had always been extra bold.
One never might foresee what was about to occur, at Camp Grant. On some days it would be perfectly quiet, with only the sentries walking their hot beats, and the tame Indians squatting out of the sun; and again there would be a sudden running to and fro, and away would trot the cavalry, to rescue (if possible) a wagon train, and pursue the hostiles.
In a few days, at best, but likely enough not until after a week or more, back the troopers would come, maybe with wounded, maybe with prisoners, but in any case all fagged out, both men and horses.
Joe Felmer’s little ranch lay three miles south, up the San Pedro. As Joe was post blacksmith, and also sold ranch stuff to the quartermaster, Jimmie felt as though he belonged to the post, himself. He knew all the officers, and old Sergeants Warfield and John Mott, and others of the men; and “Six-toed,” and Antonio Besias the former Mexican captive of the Apaches, and Concepcion Equierre the half-Apache interpreter, and old Santos the short-legged Arivaipa ex-chief who was Chief Es-kim-en-zin’s father-in-law; and many more.
When he had left, last year, Grant had been occupied by some of the First and the Third Cavalry; but they had been transferred, Lieutenant Cushing’s and Lieutenant Bourke’s Troop K of the Third had been sent down to Camp Lowell near Tucson, and now the Fifth Cavalry was here.
It was in October when Commissioner Colyer, on his rounds, appeared at Camp Grant. Jimmie was lucky enough to drive down there, with Joe and a wagon-load of pumpkins, just in time to be present at some of the “doings.”