On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

And not altogether without regret. There was a bright side to the old rookery, which shone all the more lustrously now that we were saying farewell.

We had never felt lonesome by any means. There was always something going on, always something to do, always something to see.

The sunrises were gorgeous to look upon at the hour for morning stables, when a golden and rosy flush bathed the purple peaks of the Pinaleño, and at eventide there were great banks of crimson and purple and golden clouds in the western horizon which no painter would have dared depict upon canvas.

There were opportunities for learning something about mineralogy in the “wash” of the cañons, botany on the hill-sides, and insect life and reptile life everywhere. Spanish could be picked up from Mexican guides and packers, and much that was quaint and interesting in savage life learned from an observation of the manners of the captives—representatives of that race which the Americans have so frequently fought, so generally mismanaged, and so completely failed to understand.

There was much rough work under the hardest of conditions, and the best school for learning how to care for men and animals in presence of a sleepless enemy, which no amount of “book l’arnin’” could supply.

The distance from Old Camp Grant to Tucson, Arizona, over the wagon-road, was fifty-five measured miles. The first half of the journey, the first day’s march—as far as the Cañon del Oro—has already been described. From the gloomy walls of the shady cañon, in which tradition says gold was found in abundance in the earliest days of occupation by the Caucasians, the wagons rolled rapidly over the Eight-mile Mesa, over some slightly hilly and sandy country, until after passing the Riito, when Tucson came in sight and the road became firmer. All the way, on both sides of the road, and as far as eye could reach, we had in sight the stately mescal, loaded with lovely velvety flowers; the white-plumed Spanish bayonet, the sickly green palo verde, without a leaf; the cholla, the nopal, the mesquite, whose “beans” were rapidly ripening in the sultry sun, and the majestic “pitahaya,” or candelabrum cactus, whose ruby fruit had long since been raided upon and carried off by flocks of bright-winged humming-birds, than which no fairer or more alert can be seen this side of Brazil. The “pitahaya” attains a great height in the vicinity of Grant, Tucson, and MacDowell, and one which we measured by its shadow was not far from fifty-five to sixty feet above the ground.

On this march the curious rider could see much to be remembered all the days of his life. Piles of loose stones heaped up by loving hands proclaimed where the Apaches had murdered their white enemies. The projection of a rude cross of mescal or Spanish bayonet stalks was evidence that the victim was a Mexican, and a son of Holy Mother Church. Its absence was no index of religious belief, but simply of the nationality being American.

Of the weird, blood-chilling tales that were narrated as each of these was passed I shall insert only one. It was the story, briefly told, of two young men whose train had been attacked, whose comrades had been put to flight, and who stood their ground resolutely until the arrows and bullets of the foe had ended the struggle. When found, one of the bodies was pierced with sixteen wounds, the other with fourteen.

On the left flank, or eastern side, the view was hemmed in for the whole distance by the lofty, pine-clad Sierra Santa Catalina; but to the north one could catch glimpses of the summit of the black Pinal; to the west there was a view over the low-lying Tortolita clear to the dim, azure outlines which, in the neighborhood of the Gila Bend, preserved in commemorative mesa-top the grim features of Montezuma, as Mexican myth fondly averred.

A little this side was the site of the “Casa Grande,” the old pile of adobe, which has been quite as curious a ruin in the contemplation of the irrepressible Yankee of modern days as it was to Coronado and his followers when they approached it under the name of “Chichilticale” more than three centuries and a half ago.