On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

Crook’s promise to provide a ready cash market for everything the Apaches could raise was nobly kept. To begin with, the enlistment of a force of scouts who were paid the same salary as white soldiers, and at the same periods with them, introduced among the Apaches a small, but efficient, working capital. Unaccustomed to money, the men, after receiving their first pay, spent much of it foolishly for candy and other trivial things. Nothing was said about that; they were to be made to understand that the money paid them was their own to spend or to save as they pleased, and to supply as much enjoyment as they could extract from it. But, immediately after pay-day, General Crook went among the Apaches on the several reservations and made inquiries of each one of the principal chiefs what results had come to their wives and families from this new source of wealth. He explained that money could be made to grow just as an acorn would grow into the oak; that by spending it foolishly, the Apaches treated it just as they did the acorn which they trod under foot; but by investing their money in California horses and sheep, they would be gaining more money all the time they slept, and by the time their children had attained maturity the hills would be dotted with herds of horses and flocks of sheep. Then they would be rich like the white men; then they could travel about and see the world; then they would not be dependent upon the Great Father for supplies, but would have for themselves and their families all the food they could eat, and would have much to sell.

The Apaches did send into Southern California and bought horses and sheep as suggested, and they would now be self-supporting had the good management of General Crook not been ruthlessly sacrificed and destroyed. Why it is that the Apache, living as he does on a reservation offering all proper facilities for the purpose, is not raising his own meat, is one of the conundrums which cannot be answered by any one of common sense. The influences against it are too strong: once let the Indian be made self-supporting, and what will become of the gentle contractor?

Some slight advance has been made in this direction during the past twenty years, but it has been ridiculously slight in comparison with what it should have been. In an examination which General Crook made into the matter in 1884 it was found that there were several herds of cattle among the Indians, one herd that I saw numbering 384 head. It was cared for and herded in proper manner; and surely if the Apaches can do that much in one, or two, or a dozen cases, they can do it in all with anything like proper encouragement. The proper encouragement of which I speak is “the ready cash market” promised by General Crook, and by means of which he effected so much.

In every band of aborigines, as in every community of whites, or of blacks, or of Chinese, there are to be found men and women who are desirous of improving the condition of themselves and families; and alongside of them are others who care for nothing but their daily bread, and are not particularly careful how they get that so that they get it. There should be a weeding out of the progressive from the non-progressive element, and by no manner of means can it be done so effectually as by buying from the industrious all that they can sell to the Government for the support of their own people. There should be inserted in every appropriation bill for the support of the army or of the Indians the provision that anything and everything called for under a contract for supplies, which the Indians on a reservation or in the vicinity of a military post can supply, for the use of the troops or for the consumption of the tribe, under treaty stipulations, shall be bought of the individual Indians raising it and at a cash price not less than the price at which the contract has been awarded. For example, because it is necessary to elucidate the simplest propositions in regard to the Indians, if the chief “A” has, by industry and thrift, gathered together a herd of one hundred cattle, all of the increase that he may wish to sell should be bought from him; he will at once comprehend that work has its own reward, and a very prompt and satisfactory one. He has his original numbers, and he has a snug sum of money too; he buys more cattle, he sees that he is becoming a person of increased importance, not only in the eyes of his own people but in that of the white men too; he encourages his sons and all his relatives to do the same as he has done, confident that their toil will not go unrewarded.

Our method has been somewhat different from that. Just as soon as a few of the more progressive people begin to accumulate a trifle of property, to raise sheep, to cultivate patches of soil and raise scanty crops, the agent sends in the usual glowing report of the occurrence, and to the mind of the average man and woman in the East it looks as if all the tribe were on the highway to prosperity, and the first thing that Congress does is to curtail the appropriations. Next, we hear of “disaffection,” the tribe is reported as “surly and threatening,” and we are told that the “Indians are killing their cattle.” But, whether they go to war or quietly starve on the reservation effects no change in the system; all supplies are bought of a contractor as before, and the red man is no better off, or scarcely any better off, after twenty years of peace, than he was when he surrendered. The amount of beef contracted for during the present year—1891—for the Apaches at Camp Apache and San Carlos, according to the Southwestern Stockman (Wilcox, Arizona), was not quite two million pounds, divided as follows: eight hundred thousand pounds for the Indians at San Carlos, on the contract of John H. Norton, and an additional five hundred thousand pounds for the same people on the contract of the Chiricahua Cattle Company; and five hundred thousand pounds for the Indians at Fort Apache, on the contract of John H. Norton. Both of the above contracting parties are known to me as reliable and trustworthy; I am not finding fault with them for getting a good, fat contract; but I do find fault with a system which keeps the Indian a savage, and does not stimulate him to work for his own support.

At one time an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out among the children on the Apache reservation, and numbers were carried off. Indians are prone to sacrifice property at the time of death of relations, and, under the advice of their “Medicine Men,” slaughtered altogether nearly two thousand sheep, which they had purchased with their own money or which represented the increase from the original flock. Crook bought from the Apaches all the hay they would cut, and had the Quartermaster pay cash for it; every pound of hay, every stick of wood, and no small portion of the corn used by the military at Camp Apache and San Carlos were purchased from the Apaches as individuals, and not from contractors or from tribes. The contractors had been in the habit of employing the Apaches to do this work for them, paying a reduced scale of remuneration and often in store goods, so that by the Crook method the Indian received from two to three times as much as under the former system, and this to the great advantage of Arizona, because the Indian belongs to the Territory of Arizona, and will stay there and buy what he needs from her people, but the contractor has gone out to make money, remains until he accomplishes his object, and then returns to some congenial spot where his money will do most good for himself. Of the contractors who made money in Arizona twenty years ago not one remained there: all went into San Francisco or some other large city, there to enjoy their accumulations. I am introducing this subject now because it will save repetition, and will explain to the average reader why it was that the man who did so much to reduce to submission the worst tribes this country has ever known, and who thought of nothing but the performance of duty and the establishment of a permanent and honorable peace, based—to quote his own language—“upon an exact and even-handed justice to red men and to white alike,” should have been made the target for the malevolence and the rancor of every man in the slightest degree interested in the perpetuation of the contract system and in keeping the aborigine in bondage.

To sum up in one paragraph, General Crook believed that the American Indian was a human being, gifted with the same god-like apprehension as the white man, and like him inspired by noble impulses, ambition for progress and advancement, but subject to the same infirmities, beset with the same or even greater temptations, struggling under the disadvantages of an inherited ignorance, which had the double effect of making him doubt his own powers in the struggle for the new life and suspicious of the truthfulness and honesty of the advocates of all innovations. The American savage has grown up as a member of a tribe, or rather of a clan within a tribe; all his actions have been made to conform to the opinions of his fellows as enunciated in the clan councils or in those of the tribe.

It is idle to talk of de-tribalizing the Indian until we are ready to assure him that his new life is the better one. By the Crook method of dealing with the savage he was, at the outset, de-tribalized without knowing it; he was individualized and made the better able to enter into the civilization of the Caucasian, which is an individualized civilization. As a scout, the Apache was enlisted as an individual; he was made responsible individually for all that he did or did not. He was paid as an individual. If he cut grass, he, and not his tribe or clan, got the money; if he split fuel, the same rule obtained; and so with every grain of corn or barley which he planted. If he did wrong, he was hunted down as an individual until the scouts got him and put him in the guard-house. If his friends did wrong, the troops did not rush down upon him and his family and chastise them for the wrongs of others; he was asked to aid in the work of ferreting out and apprehending the delinquent; and after he had been brought in a jury of the Apaches themselves deliberated upon the case and never failed in judgment, except on the side of severity.

There were two cases of chance-medley coming under my own observation, in both of which the punishment awarded by the Apache juries was much more severe than would have been given by a white jury. In the first case, the man supposed to have done the killing was sentenced to ten years’ hard labor; in the other, to three. A white culprit was at the same time sentenced in Tucson for almost the same offence to one year’s confinement in jail. Indians take to trials by jury as naturally as ducks take to water. Trial by jury is not a system of civilized people; it is the survival of the old trial by clan, the rudimentary justice known to all tribes in the most savage state.

General Crook believed that the Indian should be made self-supporting, not by preaching at him the merits of labor and the grandeur of toiling in the sun, but by making him see that every drop of honest sweat meant a penny in his pocket. It was idle to expect that the Indian should understand how to work intelligently in the very beginning; he represented centuries of one kind of life, and the Caucasian the slow evolution of centuries under different conditions and in directions diametrically opposite. The two races could not, naturally, understand each other perfectly, and therefore to prevent mistakes and the doing of very grievous injustice to the inferior, it was the duty and to the interest of the superior race to examine into and understand the mental workings of the inferior.