The rock-strewn mountains of Cook's cañon frowned darkly on us as we made our way into Fort Cummings. The sable garrison, it is said, never ventured beyond the high mud walls with less than twenty-five in the party, were it only to bring a load of wood from the nearest grove of scanty timber.
At no post, I am fain to confess, have I seen a larger number of mementos of Indian hostility than at this fort. And the negroes had all the more cause to dread attacks from the Indians, as they had been accosted the first time they went out—a fatigue-party, to cut wood—by an Indian chief, who told them that he was their brother, and that it was their duty to come and join his band against their common enemy, the white man. The black braves refused, returning to the post without their load of wood; and since that time no fatigue-party ever returned that did not bring back at least one of their number dead or wounded.
The last thing we did before leaving this post was to stop at the large basin of water, Cook's Spring, there to drink, and let the animals drink, a last draught of the pure, clear flood. How many a heart had this spring gladdened, when its sight broke on the longing eyes of the emigrant, before human habitations were ever to be found here! Just at the foot of the rough, endless mountain, the men who had come under protection of our train from Fort Cummings pointed out where the two mail-riders coming from Camp Bayard—our destination—had been ambushed and killed by the Indians only the week before. I had heard of these two men while at the Fort, one of whom, a young man hardly twenty, seemed to have an unusually large number of friends among men of all classes and grades. When smoking his farewell pipe before mounting his mule for the trip to Camp Bayard, he said: "Boys, this is my last trip. Mother writes that she is getting old and feeble; she wants me to come home; so I've thrown up my contract with Uncle Sam, and I'm going back to Booneville just as straight as God will let me, when I get back from Bayard. It's hard work and small pay, anyhow—sixty dollars a month, and your scalp at the mercy of the red devils every time you come out." The letter was found in the boy's pocket when the mutilated body was brought in.
It was no idle fancy when I thought I could see the ground torn up in one place as from the sudden striking out of horses' hoofs. One of the men confirmed the idea that it was not far from the place where the body had been found. The mule had probably taken the first fright just there, where the rider had evidently received the first arrow, aimed with such deadly skill that he fell in less than two minutes after it struck him.
This gloomy spot passed, the country opened far and wide before us; level and rather monotonous, but with nothing of the parched, sterile appearance that makes New Mexico so dreaded by most people. Trees were few and far between; but later, where the Mimbres river rolls its placid waters by, there are willows, and ash even, as I have heard people affirm. But I must not forget the hot spring we camped by for an hour or two, the Aqua Caliente of the Mexicans. A square pond, to approach which you must clamber up a natural mud wall some two feet high, lay bubbling and steaming near the shade of some half dozen wide-spreading trees. That corner of the pond where the water boils out of the earth had once been tapped, apparently, and the water led to the primitive bath-tubs, made by digging down into the hard, clayey ground. A dismantled building showed that the place had at some time been permanently occupied, which was said to be the case by the Mexican family living under one of the trees, and who were sojourning here for the purpose of having life restored to the paralyzed limbs of one of the children. The people who had lived here were driven off by Indians, but I have heard since that the place had been rebuilt.
The second day after leaving Fort Cummings we came in sight of a lovely valley, enclosed on all sides by low wooded hills, with bold, picturesque mountains rising to the sky beyond. A clear brook—so clear that it was rightly baptized Minne-ha-ha—gambolled and leaped and flashed among the green trees and the white tents they overhung; and in their midst a flag-staff, at whose head the stars and stripes were flying, told me that we had reached our journey's end.
TO TEXAS, AND BY THE WAY.
I had not seen New Orleans since I was eight years of age, and to Texas I had never been; so I was well pleased with the prospect of visiting the southern country. To one coming direct from California, overland by rail, it seems like entering a different world—a world that has been lying asleep for half a century—when the great "pan-handle" route is left to one side, and Louisville once passed. Though we know that the country was not asleep—only held in fetters by the hideous nightmare, Civil War—I doubt if the general condition of things would have been in a more advanced state of prosperity if the old order of affairs had remained unchanged, as the march of improvement seems naturally to lag in these languid, dreamy-looking southern lands.