On the 18th (May, 1883), before 8.30 A.M., six new arrivals were reported—four squaws, one buck and a boy. Close upon their heels followed sixteen others—men, women, and young children. In this band was “Chihuahua” himself, a fine-looking man, whose countenance betokened great decision and courage.
This chief expressed to General Crook his earnest desire for peace, and acknowledged that all the Chiricahuas could hope to do in the future would be to prolong the contest a few weeks and defer their destruction. He was tired of fighting. His village had been destroyed and all his property was in our hands. He wished to surrender his band just as soon as he could gather it together. “Hieronymo,” “Chato,” and nearly all the warriors were absent, fighting the Mexicans, but he (“Chihuahua”) had sent runners out to gather up his band and tell his people they must surrender, without reference to what the others did.
Before night forty-five Chiricahuas had come in—men, women, and children. “Chihuahua” asked permission to go out with two young men and hurry his people in. This was granted. He promised to return without any delay. The women of the Chiricahuas showed the wear and tear of a rugged mountain life, and the anxieties and disquietudes of a rugged Ishmaelitish war. The children were models of grace and beauty, which revealed themselves through dirt and rags.
On May 19, 1883, camp was moved five of six miles to a position giving the usual abundance of water and rather better grass. It was a small park in the centre of a thick growth of young pines. Upon unsaddling, the Chiricahuas were counted, and found to number seventy, which total before noon had swollen to an even hundred, not including “Chihuahua” and those gone back with him.
The Chiricahuas were reserved, but good-humored. Several of them spoke Spanish fluently. Rations were issued in small quantity, ponies being killed for meat. Two or three of the Indians bore fresh bullet-wounds from the late fight. On the succeeding evening, May 20, 1883, the Chiricahuas were again numbered at breakfast. They had increased to 121—sixty being women and girls, the remainder, old men, young men, and boys.
All said that “Chihuahua” and his comrades were hard at work gathering the tribe together and sending them in.
Toward eight o’clock a fearful hubbub was heard in the tall cliffs overlooking camp; Indians fully armed could be descried running about from crag to crag, evidently much perplexed and uncertain what to do. They began to interchange cries with those in our midst, and, after a brief interval, a couple of old squaws ventured down the face of the precipice, followed at irregular distances by warriors, who hid themselves in the rocks half-way down.
They asked whether they were to be hurt if they came in.
One of the scouts and one of the Chiricahuas went out to them to say that it made no difference whether they came in or not; that “Chihuahua” and all his people had surrendered, and that if these new arrivals came in during the day they should not be harmed; that until “Chihuahua” and the last of his band had had a chance to come in and bring Charlie McComas hostilities should be suspended. The Chiricahuas were still fearful of treachery and hung like hawks or vultures to the protecting shadows of inaccessible pinnacles one thousand feet above our position. Gradually their fears wore off, and in parties of two and three, by various trails, they made their way to General Crook’s fire. They were a band of thirty-six warriors, led by “Hieronymo,” who had just returned from a bloody foray in Chihuahua. “Hieronymo” expressed a desire to have a talk; but General Crook declined to have anything to do with him or his party beyond saying that they had now an opportunity to see for themselves that their own people were against them; that we had penetrated to places vaunted as impregnable; that the Mexicans were coming in from all sides; and that “Hieronymo” could make up his mind for peace or war just as he chose.
This reply disconcerted “Hieronymo;” he waited for an hour, to resume the conversation, but received no encouragement. He and his warriors were certainly as fine-looking a lot of pirates as ever cut a throat or scuttled a ship; not one among them who was not able to travel forty to fifty miles a day over these gloomy precipices and along these gloomy cañons. In muscular development, lung and heart power, they were, without exception, the finest body of human beings I had ever looked upon. Each was armed with a breech-loading Winchester; most had nickel-plated revolvers of the latest pattern, and a few had also bows and lances. They soon began to talk with the Apache scouts, who improved the occasion to inform them that not only had they come down with General Crook, but that from both Sonora and Chihuahua Mexican soldiers might be looked for in swarms.