Our quarters while at San Carlos were the adobe building erected as a “school-house,” at a cost to the Government of forty thousand dollars, but occupied by the late agent as a residence. It had been erected at a net cost of something between eight and nine thousand dollars, or at least I would contract to duplicate it for that and expect to make some money in the transaction besides. The walls were covered over with charcoal scrawls of Apache gods, drawn by irreverent youngsters, and the appearance of the place did not in the remotest sense suggest the habitation of the Muses.
General Crook returned late in the fall of 1882 to his headquarters at Fort Whipple, and awaited the inevitable irruption of the Chiricahua Apaches from their stronghold in the Sierra Madre in Mexico. Large detachments of Indian scouts, under competent officers, were kept patrolling the boundary in the vicinity of Cloverdale and other exposed points, and small garrisons were in readiness to take the field from Fort Bowie and other stations. The completion of the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé systems, and the partial completion of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, had wrought certain changes in the condition of affairs, to which reference may be made. In a military sense they had all been a great benefit by rendering the transportation of troops and supplies a matter of most agreeable surprise to those who still remembered the creaking ox-teams and prairie schooners, which formerly hauled all stores from the banks of the distant Missouri; in a social sense they had been the means of introducing immigration, some of which was none too good, as is always the case with the earlier days of railroad construction on the frontier.
The mining towns like Tombstone, then experiencing a “boom,” had been increased by more than a fair quota of gamblers, roughs, and desperate adventurers of all classes. Cowboys and horse thieves flooded the southeastern corner of the Territory and the southwestern corner of the next Territory—New Mexico; with Cloverdale, in southwestern New Mexico, as a headquarters, they bade defiance to the law and ran things with a high hand, and made many people sigh for the better days when only red-skinned savages intimidated the settlements. The town of Phoenix had arisen in the valley of the Salt River, along the lines of prehistoric irrigating ditches, marking the presence of considerable population, and suggesting to Judge Hayden and others who first laid it out the propriety of bestowing the name it now bears. The new population were both intelligent and enterprising: under the superintendence of the Hon. Clark Churchill they had excavated great irrigating canals, and begun the planting of semi-tropical fruits, which has proved unusually remunerative, and built up the community so that it has for years been able to care for itself against any hostile attacks that might be threatened. Prescott, being off the direct line of railroad (with which, however, it has since been connected by a branch), had not responded so promptly to the new condition of affairs, but its growth had been steady, and its population had not been burdened with the same class of loafers who for so long a time held high carnival in Tombstone, Deming, and elsewhere. Prescott had always boasted of its intelligent, bright family society—thoroughly American in the best sense—and the boast was still true.
There is no point in the southwestern country so well adapted, none that can compare with Prescott as the site of a large Indian school; and when the time comes, as I am certain it is to come, when we shall recognize the absurdity of educating a few Indian boys and then returning them back to their tribes, in which they can exert no influence, but can excite only jealousy on account of their superior attainments—when by a slight increase of appropriations, the whole race of Indian boys and girls could be lifted from savagery into the path to a better life—Prescott will become the site of such a school. It is education which is to be the main lever in this elevation, but it is wholesale education, not retail. This phase of the case impressed itself upon the early settlers in Canada, who provided most liberally for the training of, comparatively speaking, great numbers of the Algonquin youth of both sexes. In Mexico was erected the first school for the education of the native American—the college at Patzcuaro—built before foot of Puritan had touched the rock of Plymouth.
Prescott possesses the advantages of being the centre of a district inhabited by numbers of tribes whose children could be educated so near their own homes that parents would feel easier in regard to them, and yet the youngsters would be far removed from tribal influences and in the midst of a thoroughly progressive American community. The climate cannot be excelled anywhere; the water is as good as can be found; and the scenery—of granite peaks, grassy meads, balmy pine forests, and placid streamlets—cannot well be surpassed. The post of Fort Whipple could be transferred to the Interior Department, and there would be found ready to hand the houses for teachers, the school-rooms, dormitories, refectories, blacksmith-shops, wagoners’ shops, saddlers’ shops, stables, granaries, and other buildings readily adaptable to the purposes of instruction in various handicrafts. Five hundred children, equally divided as to sex, could be selected from the great tribes of the Navajos, Apaches, Hualpais, Mojaves, Yumas, Pimas, and Maricopas. The cost of living is very moderate, and all supplies could be brought in on the branch railroad, while the absence of excitement incident to communities established at railroad centres or on through lines will be manifest upon a moment’s reflection. It would require careful, intelligent, absolutely honest administration, to make it a success; it should be some such school as I have seen conducted by the Congregationalists and Presbyterians among the Santee Sioux, under the superintendence of Rev. Alfred Riggs, or by the Friends among the Cherokees in North Carolina, under Mr. Spray, where the children are instructed in the rudiments of Christian morality, made to understand that labor is most honorable, that the saddler, the carpenter, or blacksmith must be a gentleman and come to the supper-table with clean face and combed hair, and that the new life is in every respect the better life.
But if it is to be the fraud upon the confiding tax-payers that the schools at Fort Defiance (Navajo Agency), Zuni, San Carlos, and other places that I personally examined have been, money would be saved by not establishing it at all. The agent of the Navajos reported in 1880 that his “school” would accommodate eighty children. I should dislike to imprison eight dogs that I loved in the dingy hole that he called a “school”—but then the agent had a pull at Washington, being the brother-in-law of a “statesman,” and I had better not say too much; and the school-master, although an epileptic idiot, had been sent out as the representative of the family influence of another “statesman,” so I will not say more about him. The Indians to be instructed in the school whose establishment is proposed at Prescott, Arizona, should be trained in the line of their “atavism,” if I may borrow a word from the medical dictionary—that is, they should be trained in the line of their inherited proclivities and tendencies. Their forefathers for generations—ever since the time of the work among them of the Franciscan missionaries—have been a pastoral people, raising great flocks of sheep, clipping, carding, and spinning the wool, weaving the most beautiful of rugs and blankets and sashes, and selling them at a profit to admiring American travellers. They have been saddle-makers, basket-makers, silver-smiths, and—as in the case of the Mojaves, Pimas, and Maricopas—potters and mat-makers. In such trades, preferentially, they should be instructed, and by the introduction of a few Lamb knitting machines, they could be taught to make stockings for the Southwestern market out of the wool raised by their own families, and thus help support the institution and open a better market for the products of their own tribe. They could be taught to tan the skins of their own flocks and herds, and to make shoes and saddles of the result. But all this must be put down as “whimsical,” because there is no money in it “for the boys.” The great principle of American politics, regardless of party lines, is that “the boys” must be taken care of at all times and in all places.
Tucson had changed the most appreciably of any town in the Southwest; American energy and American capital had effected a wonderful transformation: the old garrison was gone; the railroad had arrived; where Jack Long and his pack-train in the old times had merrily meandered, now puffed the locomotive; Muñoz’s corral had been displaced by a round-house, and Muñoz himself by a one-lunged invalid from Boston; the Yankees had almost transformed the face of nature; the exquisite architectural gem of San Xavier del Bac still remained, but the “Shoo Fly” restaurant had disappeared, and in its place the town boasted with very good reason of the “San Xavier” Hotel, one of the best coming within my experience as a traveller. American enterprise had moved to the front, and the Castilian with his “marromas” and “bailes” and saints’ days and “funcciones” had fallen to the rear; telephones and electric lights and Pullman cars had scared away the plodding burro and the creaking “carreta”; it was even impossible to get a meal cooked in the Mexican style of Mexican viands; our dreams had faded; the chariot of Cinderella had changed back into a pumpkin, and Sancho was no longer governor.
“I tell you, Cap,” said my old friend, Charlie Hopkins, “them railroads’s playin’ hob with th’ country, ’n a feller’s got to hustle hisself now in Tucson to get a meal of frijoles or enchiladas; this yere new-fangled grub doan’ suit me ’n I reckon I’ll pack mee grip ’n lite out fur Sonora.”
Saddest of all, the old-timers were thinning out, or if not dead were living under a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph; the Postons, Ourys, Bradys, Mansfields, Veils, Rosses, Montgomerys, Duncans, Drachmans, Handys, and others were unappreciated by the incoming tide of “tenderfeet,” who knew nothing of the perils and tribulations of life in Arizona and New Mexico before Crook’s genius and valor had redeemed them from the clutch of the savage. On the Colorado River Captain Jack Mellon still plied the good ship “Cocopah,” and Dan O’Leary still dealt out to expectant listeners tales of the terrible days when he “fit” with Crook; within sight of the “Wickytywiz,” Charlie Spencer still lived among his Hualpai kinsmen, not much the worse for the severe wounds received while a scout; the old Hellings mill on the Salt River, once the scene of open-handed hospitality to all travellers, still existed under changed ownership, and the Arnolds, Ehls, Bowers, Bangharts, and other ranchmen of northern Arizona were still in place; but the mill of Don José Peirson no longer ground its toll by the current of the San Ignacio; the Samaniegos, Suasteguis, Borquis, Ferreras, and other Spanish families had withdrawn to Sonora; and, oldest survival of all, “Uncle Lew Johnson” was living in seclusion with the family of Charlie Hopkins on the Salumay on the slopes of the Sierra Ancha. It would pay some enterprising man to go to Arizona to interview this old veteran, who first entered Arizona with the earliest band of trappers; who was one of the party led by Pauline Weaver; who knew Kit Carson intimately; who could recall the days when Taos, New Mexico, was the metropolis of fashion and commerce for the whole Southwest, and the man who had gone as far east as St. Louis was looked upon as a traveller whose recitals merited the closest attention of the whole camp.