I have sought distraction in these comments, but my sorrow returns to me, dear mother, and my eyes are too full of tears to be able to see the lines. Vale, poor Boston, and a grateful throb of gladness that I have a dear mother to whom I can tell my grief.
Your loving but unhappy Ellen.
CHAPTER X.
“Lo! the poor Indian.”
Imperfect definition and classification, followed by hasty, inaccurate, and unwarranted generalization, are fruitful sources of popular error. To the misinformed or uninformed mind the Indian is a noble savage, whose hunting-grounds and corn-fields have been taken from him by the ruthless paleface, and who passes his time pensively leaning upon his rifle, with his face to the setting sun, the while he makes touching appeals to the Great Spirit, and mourns the disappearance of his race.
In the country west of the Rocky Mountains and south of Green River, the sentimental Indian with whom Cooper doped American literature, has absolutely no existence. Uncas and Chingachgook never journeyed so far westward as the Rio Grande, and prosy old Leather Stocking, with his Sunday-school soliloquies, and his alleged marvelous marksmanship on knife blades at three hundred yards, would have been elected president of the Arizona Lying Club by acclamation.
Many tribes of Indians in that section of the country have scarcely any belief in a future state of existence, and no words in their jargons to represent the ideas of gratitude, of female chastity, or of hospitality. Their opportunities of obtaining food have been in nowise lessened by white occupation of the land. There never were any buffalo there, they never hunted bears or any combative animal, the fish and small game and pine-nuts are nearly as plentiful as ever, and the bacon-rinds and decayed vegetables to be found near every mining camp furnish the noble reds with a food supply more agreeable to their indolent habits than the hard-won trophies of the chase.
Yet there are Indians and Indians, as there are Christian bank presidents and unsanctified bank robbers, and it is as incorrect to class the devilish Chiricahua Apache with the dirty but gentle Yuma as it would be to similarly couple a hook-nosed vender of Louisiana lottery tickets with a blonde-haired solicitor for a church raffle.
In the mountains of Eastern Arizona and Western New Mexico, occupying a country hundreds of miles in area, a country which, for their benefit, has been reserved from miner, settler, and grazier, live the White Mountain Apaches during the winter months, when they are not “on the war path,” as their pillaging and murdering expeditions are somewhat bombastically designated.
Whatever may be said of other savages in other localities, the Arizona Apaches are without a single just cause of complaint against the government, or against any of the Caucasian race. No cruel white men have ever invaded their hunting-grounds, or given them high-priced whisky in exchange for low-priced peltry. Red-handed and tangle-haired have these marauders and their ancestors lived for centuries in their mountain lair.
Since the United States of America became, forty years ago, the nominal suzerain of the territory occupied by these peripatetic “vermin ranches,” they have been unprovoked invaders, thieves, and assassins, and their summer raids upon the miners, teamsters, and cattle ranchers of Arizona and New Mexico, have been as regular as their winter acceptance of the bacon and blankets with which a generous but mistaken policy feeds and warms them, at a cost equal to that of providing each savage with a suite of rooms at a fashionable hotel.