On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

I have said that the exertions of the missionaries of the Roman Catholic Church, ordinarily so successful with the aborigines of our Continent, were nugatory with the Apaches of Arizona; I repeat this, at the same time taking care to say that unremitting effort was maintained to open up communication with the various bands nearest to the pueblos which, from the year 1580, or thereabout, had been brought more or less completely under the sway of the Franciscans.

With some of these pueblos, as at Picuris, the Apaches had intermarried, and with others still, as at Pecos, they carried on constant trade, and thus afforded the necessary loop-hole for the entrance of zealous missionaries. The word of God was preached to them, and in several instances bands were coaxed to abandon their nomadic and predatory life, and settle down in permanent villages. The pages of writers, like John Gilmary Shea, fairly glow with the recital of the deeds of heroism performed in this work; and it must be admitted that perceptible traces of it are still to be found among the Navajo branch of the Apache family, which had acquired the peach and the apricot, the sheep and the goat, the cow, the donkey and the horse, either from the Franciscans direct, or else from the pueblo refugees who took shelter with them in 1680 at the time of the Great Rebellion, in which the pueblos of New Mexico arose en masse and threw off the yoke of Spain and the Church, all for twelve years of freedom, and the Moquis threw it off forever. Arizona—the Apache portion of it—remained a sealed book to the friars, and even the Jesuits, in the full tide of their career as successful winners of souls, were held at arm’s length.

There is one point in the mental make-up of the Apache especially worthy of attention, and that is the quickness with which he seizes upon the salient features of a strategetical[strategetical] combination, and derives from them all that can possibly be made to inure to his own advantage. For generations before the invasion by the Castilians—that is to say, by the handful of Spaniards, and the colony of Tlascaltec natives and mulattoes, whom Espejo and Onate led into the valley of the Rio Grande between 1580 and 1590—the Apache had been the unrelenting foe of the Pueblo tribes; but the moment that the latter determined to throw off the galling yoke which had been placed upon their necks, the Apache became their warm friend, and received the fugitives in the recesses of the mountains, where he could bid defiance to the world. Therefore, we can always depend upon finding in the records of the settlements in the Rio Grande valley, and in Sonora and Chihuahua, that every revolt or attempted revolt, of the Pueblos or sedentary tribes meant a corresponding increase in the intensity of the hostilities prosecuted by the Apache nomads.

In the revolts of 1680, as well as those of 1745 and 1750, the Apache swept the country far to the south. The great revolt of the Pueblos was the one of 1680, during which they succeeded in driving the governor and the surviving Spanish colonists from Santa Fé down to the present town of Juarez (formerly El Paso del Norte), several hundred miles nearer Mexico. At that place Otermin made a stand, but it was fully twelve years before the Spanish power was re-established through the efforts of Vargas and Cruzate. The other two attempts at insurrection failed miserably, the second being merely a local one among the Papagoes of Arizona. It may be stated, in round terms, that from the year 1700 until they were expelled from the territory of Mexico, the exertions of the representatives of the Spanish power in “New Spain” were mainly in the direction of reducing the naked Apache, who drove them into a frenzy of rage and despair by his uniform success.

The Tarahumaris, living in the Sierra Madre south of the present international boundary, were also for a time a thorn in the side of the European; but they submitted finally to the instructions of the missionaries who penetrated into their country, and who, on one occasion at least, brought them in from the war-path before they had fired a shot.

The first reference to the Apaches by name is in the account of Espejo’s expedition—1581—where they will be found described as the “Apichi,” and from that time down the Spaniards vie with each other in enumerating the crimes and the atrocities of which these fierce Tinneh have been guilty. Torquemada grows eloquent and styles them the Pharaohs (“Faraones”) who have persecuted the chosen people of Israel (meaning the settlers on the Rio Grande).

Yet all the while that this black cloud hung over the fair face of nature—raiding, killing, robbing, carrying women and children into captivity—Jesuit and Franciscan vied with each other in schemes for getting these savages under their control.

Father Eusebio Kino, of whom I have already spoken, formulated a plan in or about 1710 for establishing, or re-establishing, a mission in the villages of the Moquis, from which the Franciscans had been driven in the great revolt and to which they had never permanently returned. Questions of ecclesiastical jurisdiction seem to have had something to do with delaying the execution of the plan, which was really one for the spiritual and temporal conquest of the Apache, by moving out against him from all sides, and which would doubtless have met with good results had not Kino died at the mission of Madalena a few months after. Father Sotomayor, another Jesuit, one of Kino’s companions, advanced from the “Pimeria,” or country of the Pimas, in which Tucson has since grown up, to and across the Salt River on the north, in an unsuccessful attempt to begin negotiations with the Apaches.

The overthrow of the Spanish power afforded another opportunity to the Apache to play his cards for all they were worth; and for fully fifty years he was undisputed master of Northwestern Mexico—the disturbed condition of public affairs south of the Rio Grande, the war between the United States and the Mexican Republic, and our own Civil War, being additional factors in the equation from which the Apache reaped the fullest possible benefit.

It is difficult to give a fair description of the personal appearance of the Apaches, because there is no uniform type to which reference can be made; both in physique and in facial lineaments there seem to be two distinct classes among them. Many of the tribes are scarcely above medium size, although they look to be still smaller from their great girth of chest and width of shoulders. Many others are tall, well-made, and straight as arrows. There are long-headed men, with fine brows, aquiline noses, well-chiselled lips and chins, and flashing eyes; and there are others with the flat occiput, flat nose, open nostrils, thin, everted lips, and projecting chins.