Captain John G. Bourke, author of “On the Border with Crook,” and “An Apache Campaign,” who was with Gen. Crook, tells us that the Apache “is no coward, but that he has no false ideas about courage, that he would prefer to skulk like a coyote for hours and then kill his enemy, rather than by injudicious exposure receive a wound.” May we not attribute to the chivalrous spirit of Capt. Bourke, not to criticize a foe, his delicate way of putting this?
No, I do not recall that this early plague of the old pioneer ever “injudiciously exposed” himself unless driven to it. “Skulking like the coyote,” as Capt. Bourke so well expresses it, is my conception of his bravery. If forced to the open he would undoubtedly make a brave fight, but I have never heard of his voluntarily seeking that open, meeting his enemy on anything approaching equal terms.
Paris Adopts Name of Apache
Being over in Paris a few years ago, a friend who had lived there a number of years, and who was as familiar with Paris from basement to roof-garden, as I am with Congress street of our good old town of Tucson, suggested one evening that we visit the “Apaches”. Expressing surprise that any of my people should have wandered so far from home, I suggested as a substitute the Moulin Rouge. However, the Apaches were agreed on, and in the evening, my friend, bringing a policeman with him, called for me at my hotel.
Arriving at the door of the Apache rendezvous in due course, we three—my friend, the policeman and myself—are readily admitted, the presence of our policeman assuring that, and we find ourselves in an underground dive, a large room with a low ceiling, barely furnished, dimly lighted, and reeking with the sour odor of stale beer. Looking about the room, by the dim light as it forces its way through the dense gloom of tobacco smoke, we are enabled to see two other policemen besides our own—there are two stationed there day and night—and a score or more of the toughest-looking lot of cut-throats I had ever had the pleasure of coming in contact with. This was the retreat, the gathering place, of as bad a lot of thieves, thugs, robbers, burglars and murderers as the world could boast of, and Paris, in seeking a name for them that would embody all of these characteristics, had searched the world over, and was almost in despair of finding a single word that would express all that is mean, wantonly cruel, murderous and cowardly, but at last attention was directed to the Apache of Arizona, and then it was discovered that the word which would embody all that and more had been found. And that was why I was enabled to find some of my own home people away off there in the world’s center of fashion. Settling for a few bottles of the vilest beer possible to brew, as a tip to the house, I was soon ready to ask my friend to call his policeman and get us away from this vile den.
Judge McComas and Wife Murdered.
It is scarcely more than a quarter of a century, March, 1883, since Judge McComas, his wife and their little son Charlie, about seven years of age, coming from Silver City, New Mexico, to Lordsburg, were ambushed by a band of Apaches from San Carlos, the Judge and his wife killed, and poor little Charlie carried off to the Sierra Madres in Mexico, where, a few years later, an Apache squaw reported that on their camp being attacked by United States troops, Charlie, being frightened, ran off into the mountains, where he is supposed to have died of hunger and exposure.
It was during this same year that a band passing over the Whetstone range of mountains killed a teamster and two of his men and a wood-chopper, who were furnishing wood for the Total Wreck mine.
On July 3, 1885, Frank Peterson, who was carrying the United States mail between Crittenden and Lochiel, was killed by the Indians while returning from Lochiel to Crittenden. A sad feature in connection with this killing was that he had just been married.