On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

He reminded me more of Daniel Boone than any other character, with this difference, that Crook, as might be expected, had the advantages of the better education of his day and generation. But he certainly recalled Boone in many particulars; there was the same perfect indifference to peril of any kind, the same coolness, an equal fertility of resources, the same inner knowledge of the wiles and tricks of the enemy, the same modesty and disinclination to parade as a hero or a great military genius, or to obtrude upon public notice the deeds performed in obedience to the promptings of duty.

Such was Arizona, and such was General George Crook when he was assigned to the task of freeing her from the yoke of the shrewdest and most ferocious of all the tribes encountered by the white man within the present limits of the United States.

A condensed account of the Apaches themselves would seem not to be out of place at this point, since it will enable the reader all the more readily to comprehend the exact nature of the operations undertaken against them, and what difficulties, if any, were to be encountered in their subjugation and in their elevation to a higher plane of civilization.

With a stupidity strictly consistent with the whole history of our contact with the aborigines, the people of the United States have maintained a bitter and an unrelenting warfare against a people whose name was unknown to them. The Apache is not the Apache; the name “Apache” does not occur in the language of the “Tinneh,” by which name, or some of its variants as “Inde,” “Dinde,” or something similar, our Indian prefers to designate himself “The Man;” he knows nothing, or did not know anything until after being put upon the Reservations, of the new-fangled title “Apache,” which has come down to us from the Mexicans, who borrowed it from the Maricopas and others, in whose language it occurs with the signification of “enemy.”

It was through the country of the tribes to the south that the Spaniards first were brought face to face with the “Tinneh” of Arizona, and it was from these Maricopas and others that the name was learned of the desperate fighters who lived in the higher ranges with the deer, the elk, the bear, and the coyote.

And as the Spaniards have always insisted upon the use of a name which the Apaches have as persistently repudiated; and as the Americans have followed blindly in the footsteps of the Castilian, we must accept the inevitable and describe this tribe under the name of the Apaches of Arizona, although it is much like invading England by way of Ireland, and writing of the Anglo-Saxons under the Celtic designation of the “Sassenach.”

The Apache is the southernmost member of the great Tinneh family, which stretches across the circumpolar portion of the American Continent, from the shores of the Pacific to the western line of Hudson’s Bay. In the frozen habitat of their hyperborean ancestors, the Tinneh, as all accounts agree, are perfectly good-natured, lively, and not at all hard to get along with.

But once forced out from the northern limits of the lake region of British America—the Great Slave, the Great Bear, and others—whether by over-population, failure of food, or other cause, the Tinneh appears upon the stage as a conqueror, and as a diplomatist of the first class; he shows an unusual astuteness even for an Indian, and a daring which secures for him at once and forever an ascendency over all the tribes within reach of him. This remark will apply with equal force to the Rogue Rivers of Oregon, the Umpquas of northern California, the Hoopas of the same State, and the Navajoes and Apaches of New Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora, all of whom are members of this great Tinneh family.

In the Apache the Spaniard, whether as soldier or priest, found a foe whom no artifice could terrify into submission, whom no eloquence could wean from the superstitions of his ancestors. Indifferent to the bullets of the arquebuses in the hands of soldiers in armor clad, serenely insensible to the arguments of the friars and priests who claimed spiritual dominion over all other tribes, the naked Apache, with no weapons save his bow and arrows, lance, war-club, knife and shield, roamed over a vast empire, the lord of the soil—fiercer than the fiercest of tigers, wilder than the wild coyote he called his brother.

For years I have collected the data and have contemplated the project of writing the history of this people, based not only upon the accounts transmitted to us from the Spaniards and their descendants, the Mexicans, but upon the Apache’s own story as conserved in his myths and traditions; but I have lacked both the leisure and the inclination to put the project into execution. It would require a man with the even-handed sense of justice possessed by a Guizot, and the keen, critical, analytical powers of a Gibbon, to deal fairly with a question in which the ferocity of the savage Red-man has been more than equalled by the ferocity of the Christian Caucasian; in which the occasional treachery of the aborigines has found its best excuse in the unvarying Punic faith of the Caucasian invader; in which promises on each side have been made only to deceive and to be broken; in which the red hand of war has rested most heavily upon shrieking mother and wailing babe.