On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

Johnson was “a man of honor.” He kept his word faithfully, and invited a large band of the Apaches in to see him and have a feast at the old Santa Rita mine in New Mexico—I have been on the spot and seen the exact site—and while they were eating bread and meat, suddenly opened upon them with a light fieldpiece loaded to the muzzle with nails, bullets, and scrap-iron, and filled the court-yard with dead.

Johnson, I say, was “a gentleman,” and abided by the terms of his contract; but Glanton was a blackguard, and set out to kill anything and everything in human form, whether Indian or Mexican. His first “victory” was gained over a band of Apaches with whom he set about arranging a peace in northern Chihuahua, not far from El Paso. The bleeding scalps were torn from the heads of the slain, and carried in triumph to the city of Chihuahua, outside of whose limits the “conquerors” were met by a procession of the governor, all the leading state dignitaries and the clergy, and escorted back to the city limits, where—as we are told by Ruxton, the English officer who travelled across Chihuahua on horse-back in 1835-1837—the scalps were nailed with frantic joy to the portals of the grand cathedral, for whose erection the silver mines had been taxed so outrageously.

Glanton, having had his appetite for blood excited, passed westward across Arizona until he reached the Colorado River, near where Fort Yuma now stands. There he attempted to cross to the California or western bank, but the Yuma Indians, who had learned of his pleasant eccentricities of killing every one, without distinction of age, sex, or race, who happened to be out on the trail alone, let Glanton and his comrades get a few yards into the river, and then opened on them from an ambush in the reeds and killed the last one.

And then there have been “Pinole Treaties,” in which the Apaches have been invited to sit down and eat repasts seasoned with the exhilarating strychnine. So that, take it for all in all, the honors have been easy so far as treachery, brutality, cruelty, and lust have been concerned. The one great difference has been that the Apache could not read or write and hand down to posterity the story of his wrongs as he, and he alone, knew them.

When the Americans entered the territory occupied or infested by the Apaches, all accounts agree that the Apaches were friendly. The statements of Bartlett, the commissioner appointed to run the new boundary line between the United States and Mexico, are explicit upon this point. Indeed, one of the principal chiefs of the Apaches was anxious to aid the new-comers in advancing farther to the south, and in occupying more of the territory of the Mexicans than was ceded by the Gadsden purchase. One of Bartlett’s teamsters—a Mexican teamster named Jesus Vasquez—causelessly and in the coldest blood drew bead upon a prominent Apache warrior and shot him through the head. The Apaches did nothing beyond laying the whole matter before the new commissioner, whose decision they awaited hopefully. Bartlett thought that the sum of thirty dollars, deducted from the teamster’s pay in monthly instalments, was about all that the young man’s life was worth. The Apaches failed to concur in this estimate, and took to the war-path; and, to quote the words of Bartlett, in less than forty-eight hours had the whole country for hundreds of miles in every direction on fire, and all the settlers that were not killed fleeing for their lives to the towns on the Rio Grande. A better understanding was reached a few years after, through the exertions of officers of the stamp of Ewell, who were bold in war but tender in peace, and who obtained great influence over a simple race which could respect men whose word was not written in sand.

At the outbreak of the war of the Rebellion, affairs in Arizona and New Mexico became greatly tangled. The troops were withdrawn, and the Apaches got the notion into their heads that the country was to be left to them and their long-time enemies, the Mexicans, to fight for the mastery.

Rafael Pumpelly, who at that time was living in Arizona, gives a vivid but horrifying description of the chaotic condition in which affairs were left by the sudden withdrawal of the troops, leaving the mines, which, in each case, were provided with stores or warehouses filled with goods, a prey to the Apaches who swarmed down from the mountains and the Mexican bandits who poured in from Sonora.

There was scarcely any choice between them, and occasionally it happened, when the mining superintendent had an unusual streak of good luck, that he would have them both to fight at once, as in Pumpelly’s own case.

Not very long previous to this, Arizona had received a most liberal contingent of the toughs and scalawags banished from San Francisco by the efforts of its Vigilance Committee, and until these last had shot each other to death, or until they had been poisoned by Tucson whiskey or been killed by the Apaches, Arizona’s chalice was filled to the brim, and the most mendacious real-estate boomer would have been unable to recommend her as a suitable place for an investment of capital.

It is among the possibilities that the Apaches could have been kept in a state of friendliness toward the Americans during these troublous days, had it not been for one of those accidents which will occur to disturb the most harmonious relations, and destroy the effect of years of good work. The Chiricahua Apaches, living close to what is now Fort Bowie, were especially well behaved, and old-timers have often told me that the great chief, Cocheis, had the wood contract for supplying the “station” of the Southern Overland Mail Company at that point with fuel. The Pinals and the other bands still raided upon the villages of northern Mexico; in fact, some of the Apaches have made their home in the Sierra Madre, in Mexico; and until General Crook in person led a small expedition down there, and pulled the last one of them out, it was always understood that there was the habitat and the abiding place of a very respectable contingent—so far as numbers were concerned—of the tribe.