On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

The American Indian, born free as the eagle, would not tolerate restraint, would not brook injustice; therefore, the restraint imposed must be manifestly for his benefit, and the government to which he was subjected must be eminently one of kindness, mercy, and absolute justice, without necessarily degenerating into weakness. The American Indian despises a liar. The American Indian is the most generous of mortals: at all his dances and feasts the widow and the orphan are the first to be remembered. Therefore, when he meets with an agent who is “on the make,” that agent’s influence goes below zero at once; and when he enters the trader’s store and finds that he is charged three dollars and a half for a miserable wool hat, which, during his last trip to Washington, Albuquerque, Omaha, or Santa Fé, as the case may be, he has seen offered for a quarter, he feels that there is something wrong, and he does not like it any too well. For that reason Crook believed that the Indians should be encouraged to do their own trading and to set up their own stores. He was not shaken in this conviction when he found agents interested in the stores on the reservations, a fact well understood by the Apaches as well as by himself. It was a very touching matter at the San Carlos, a few years ago, to see the then agent counting the proceeds of the weekly sales made by his son-in-law—the Indian trader.

At the date of the reduction of the Apaches, the success of the Government schools was not clearly established, so that the subject of Indian instruction was not then discussed except theoretically. General Crook was always a firm believer in the education of the American Indian; not in the education of a handful of boys and girls sent to remote localities, and there inoculated with new ideas and deprived of the old ones upon which they would have to depend for getting a livelihood; but in the education of the younger generation as a generation. Had the people of the United States taken the young generation of Sioux and Cheyennes in 1866, and educated them in accordance with the terms of the treaty, there would not have been any trouble since. The children should not be torn away from the parents to whom they are a joy and a consolation, just as truly as they are to white parents; they should be educated within the limits of the reservation so that the old folks from time to time could get to see them and note their progress. As they advanced in years, the better qualified could be sent on to Carlisle and Hampton, and places of that grade. The training of the Indian boy or girl should be largely industrial, but as much as possible in the line of previous acquirement and future application. Thus, the Navajos, who have made such advances as weavers and knitters, might well be instructed in that line of progress, as might the Zunis, Moquis, and other Pueblos.

After the Indian had returned to his reservation, it was the duty of the Government to provide him with work in his trade, whatever it might be, to the exclusion of the agency hanger-on. Why should boys be trained as carpenters and painters, and then see such work done by white men at the agency, while they were forced to remain idle? This complaint was made by one of the boys at San Carlos. Why should Apache, Sioux, or Cheyenne children who have exerted themselves to learn our language, be left unemployed, while the work of interpretation is done, and never done any too well, at the agencies by white men? Does it not seem a matter of justice and common sense to fill all such positions, as fast as the same can be done without injustice to faithful incumbents under the present system, by young men trained in our ideas and affiliated to our ways? Let all watchmen and guardians of public stores—all the policemen on the reserves—be natives; let all hauling of supplies be done by the Indians themselves, and let them be paid the full contract rate if they are able to haul no more than a portion of the supplies intended for their use.

Some of these ideas have already been adopted, in part, by the Indian Bureau, and with such success that there is more than a reasonable expectancy that the full series might be considered and adopted with the best results. Instruct the young women in the rudiments of housekeeping, as already outlined. Provide the reservations with saw-mills and grist-mills, and let the Indians saw their own planks and grind their own meal and flour. This plan has been urged by the Apaches so persistently during recent years that it would seem not unreasonable to make the experiment on some of the reservations. Encourage them to raise chickens and to sell eggs; it is an industry for which they are well fitted, and the profits though small would still be profits, and one drop more in the rivulet of gain to wean them from idleness, ignorance, and the war-path. Let any man who desires to leave his reservation and hunt for work, do so; give him a pass; if he abuses the privilege by getting drunk or begging, do not give him another. I have known many Indians who have worked away from their own people and always with the most decided benefit. They did not always return, but when they did they did not believe in the prophecies of the “Medicine Men,” or listen to the boasts of those who still long for the war-path.

The notion that the American Indian will not work is a fallacious one; he will work just as the white man will—when it is to his advantage to do so. The adobes in the military post of Fort Wingate, New Mexico, were all made by Navajo Indians, the brothers of the Apaches. The same tribe did no small amount of work on the grading of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad where it passes across their country. The American Indian is a slave to drink where he can get it, and he is rarely without a supply from white sources; he is a slave to the passion of gaming; and he is a slave to his superstitions, which make the “Medicine Men” the power they are in tribal affairs as well as in those relating more strictly to the clan and family. These are the three stumbling-blocks in the pathway of the Indian’s advancement; how to remove them is a most serious problem. The Indian is not the only one in our country who stumbles from the same cause; we must learn to be patient with him, but merciless toward all malefactors caught selling intoxicating liquors to red men living in the tribal relation. Gambling and superstition will be eradicated in time by the same modifying influences which have wrought changes among the Caucasian nations; education will afford additional modes of killing time, and be the means of exposing the puerility of the pretensions of the prophets.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CLOSING DAYS OF CROOK’S FIRST TOUR IN ARIZONA—VISIT TO THE MOQUI VILLAGES—THE PAINTED DESERT—THE PETRIFIED FORESTS—THE GRAND CAÑON—THE CATARACT CAÑON—BUILDING THE TELEGRAPH LINE—THE APACHES USING THE TELEGRAPH LINE—MAPPING ARIZONA—AN HONEST INDIAN AGENT—THE CHIRICAHUA APACHE CHIEF, COCHEIS—THE “HANGING” IN TUCSON—A FRONTIER DANIEL—CROOK’S DEPARTURE FROM ARIZONA—DEATH VALLEY—THE FAIRY LAND OF LOS ANGELES—ARRIVAL AT OMAHA.

In the fall and winter of 1874, General Crook made a final tour of examination of his department and the Indian tribes therein. He found a most satisfactory condition of affairs on the Apache reservation, with the Indians working and in the best of spirits. On this trip he included the villages of the Moquis living in houses of rock on perpendicular mesas of sandstone, surrounded by dunes or “medanos” of sand, on the northern side of the Colorado Chiquito. The Apaches who had come in from the war-path had admitted that a great part of the arms and ammunition coming into their hands had been obtained in trade with the Moquis, who in turn had purchased from the Mormons or Utes. Crook passed some eight or ten days among the Moquis during the season when the peaches were lusciously ripe and being gathered by the squaws and children. These peach orchards, with their flocks of sheep and goats, are evidences of the earnest work among these Moquis of the Franciscan friars during the last years of the sixteenth and the earlier ones of the seventeenth centuries. Crook let the Moquis know that he did not intend to punish them for what might have been the fault of their ignorance, but he wished to impress upon them that in future they must in no manner aid or abet tribes in hostility to the Government of the United States. This advice the chiefs accepted in very good part, and I do not believe that they have since been guilty of any misdemeanor of the same nature.

Of this trip among the Moquis, and of the Moquis themselves, volumes might be written. There is no tribe of aborigines on the face of the earth, there is no region in the world, better deserving of examination and description than the Moquis and the country they inhabit. It is unaccountable to me that so many of our own countrymen seem desirous of taking a flying trip to Europe when at their feet, as it were, lies a land as full of wonders as any depicted in the fairy tales of childhood. Here, at the village of Hualpi, on the middle mesa, is where I saw the repulsive rite of the Snake Dance, in which the chief “Medicine Men” prance about among women and children, holding live and venomous rattlesnakes in their mouths. Here, one sees the “Painted Desert,” with its fantastic coloring of all varieties of marls and ochreous earths, equalling the tints so lavishly scattered about in the Cañon of the Yellowstone. Here, one begins his journey through the petrified forests, wherein are to be seen the trunks of giant trees, over one hundred feet long, turned into precious jasper, carnelian, and banded agate. Here, one is within stone’s throw of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado and the equally deep lateral cañons of the Cataract and the Colorado Chiquito, on whose edge he may stand in perfect security and gaze upon the rushing torrent of the mighty Colorado, over a mile beneath. Here is the great Cohonino Forest, through which one may ride for five days without finding a drop of water except during the rainy season. Truly, it is a wonderland, and in the Grand Cañon one can think of nothing but the Abomination of Desolation.

There is a trail descending the Cataract Cañon so narrow and dangerous that pack trains rarely get to the bottom without accidents. When I went down there with General Crook, we could hear the tinkling of the pack-train bell far up in the cliffs above us, while the mules looked like mice, then like rats, then like jack-rabbits, and finally like dogs in size. One of our mules was pushed off the trail by another mule crowding up against it, and was hurled over the precipice and dashed into a pulp on the rocks a thousand feet below. There is no place in the world at present so accessible, and at the same time so full of the most romantic interest, as are the territories of Arizona and New Mexico: the railroad companies have been derelict in presenting their attractions to the travelling public, else I am sure that numbers of tourists would long since have made explorations and written narratives of the wonders to be seen.