The Apaches are a nomadic tribe, living in huts of twigs, easily constructed, and abandoned with indifference. In the saddle from infancy, they are perfect horsemen, and usually well mounted—their horses being kept in excellent condition by the abundant pasture that clothes the pleasant hills between the Del Norte and the Gila. Round the skirts of these they hover, overlooking the plains of Chihuahua and Sonora, and watching for those caravans whose slender escort encourages an attack. They are inveterate thieves, faithless and treacherous; but their treatment by the Mexicans was ill calculated to improve their character, or to turn them from their evil courses. The Mexicans slew them unmercifully whenever they could catch them, and used every species of stratagem to decoy them into their power.
"The former governor of Sonora," Mr Emory informs us, "employed a bold and intrepid Irishman, named Kirker, to hunt the Apaches. He had in his employment whites and Delaware Indians, and was allowed, besides a per diem, 100 dollars per scalp, and 25 dollars for a prisoner. A story is also told of one Johnson, an Englishman, an Apache trader, who, allured by the reward, induced a number of these people to come to his camp, and placed a barrel of flour for them to help themselves. When the crowd of men, women, and children was thickest, he fired a six-pounder amongst them from a concealed place, and killed great numbers."
What wonder if tribes which have met such perfidious and cruel treatment are eminently distrustful of the white men! Two poor wretches, with whom the head of the American column fell in, could not believe their senses when suffered to ride away unmolested. They spoke no Spanish, but a language described by Mr Emory as resembling the bark of a mastiff; and it was thought they belonged to the tribe of Tremblers, so called from the emotion they display at meeting white men. Some distance down the Gila, a second band of Apaches was met. They were anxious to have "a talk," and the Americans wished to trade; but it was difficult to dispel Indian mistrust. Alone and unarmed, Mr Emory went to meet them at the top of a hill, where their chief, although well mounted, and surrounded by six or eight of his armed followers, showed great trepidation on receiving the weaponless white man. Mr Emory remained as a hostage, whilst a young Indian, bolder than his fellows, went into camp. The ice thus broken, intercourse followed. Amongst others, a middle-aged and particularly garrulous Apache lady visited the American bivouac.
"She had on a gauze-like dress, trimmed with the richest and most costly Brussels lace, pillaged, no doubt, from some fandango-going belle of Sonora. She straddled a fine grey horse; and whenever her blanket dropped from her shoulders, her tawny form could be seen through the transparent gauze. After she had sold her mule, she was anxious to sell her horse, and careered about to show his qualities. Charging at full speed up a steep hill, the fastenings of her dress broke, and her bare back was exposed to the crowd, who ungallantly raised a shout of laughter. Nothing daunted, she wheeled short round with surprising dexterity, and seeing the mischief done, coolly slipped the dress from her arms, and tucked it between the seat and the saddle. In this state of nudity she rode through camp, from fire to fire, until, at last, attaining the object of her ambition, a soldier's red flannel shirt, she made her adieu in that new costume."
Scattered through Mr Emory's journal, and especially after passing Santa Fé, and whilst following, with occasional deviations, the course of the Gila, are many notes and observations of much interest to the naturalist. Traversing the plains near the little town of Socoro on the Del Norte, Mr Emory noticed, as the chief growth of the sandy soil, the iodeodonda, or Larrea Mexicana—a new plant, which, when crushed, gives out a most offensive smell of creosote. It grows to about the height of a man on horseback, and is the only bush which mules, even when extremely hungry, refuse to eat. On the 8th October, shortly before attaining one of the southernmost points of his journey, Mr Emory found himself surrounded by a vegetable world totally different from that of the United States. The variety of enormous cacti was so great that it was impossible, with his slender means of transport, to carry away a complete collection of them. Just after turning off from the Del Norte, he passed through a valley where grew a new variety of the evergreen oak, with leaves like the holly, and which was covered with round red balls, the size and colour of apricots, the effects of disease, or of the sting of an insect. Three days later he fell in with the famous mezcal, (an agave,) "about three feet in diameter, having broad leaves, armed with shark-like teeth, and arranged in concentric circles, which terminate in the middle of the plant in a perfect cone. Of this the Apaches make molasses, and cook it with horse meat." In the districts where this plant flourishes, artificial craters are found, into which the Indians throw the fruit, with heated stones, to remove the sharp thorns and reduce it to its saccharine state. In the course of one of his botanical rambles, during a day's halt, rendered necessary by severe marches, Mr Emory came upon a settlement of tarantulas, which, on his approach, rushed fearlessly to the front of their little caves and assumed an attitude of defence. He threw a peeble at them, and it would be hard to imagine, he says, concentrated in so small a space, so much expression of defiance, fury, and ability to do mischief, as the pleasant little colony presented.
From the 1st to the 9th of November, we find frequent mention in the "Notes" of an extraordinary species of cactus, to which Dr Engelmann of St Louis, in an interesting botanical letter appended to Mr Emory's work, proposes to give the name of Cereus Giganteus. Under this name we find it depicted at page 96, in a plate where a mounted Indian, halted at its base, gives, by comparison, an imposing idea of its height. It also forms a most singular and striking feature of several of the landscapes scattered through this volume—of one particularly, on the Gila, where it has the effect of a chain of artificial columns or signal-posts. One of its most curious characteristics appears to be its invariable perpendicularity both of stem and branches; the latter, as soon as they bud out from the main trunk or from each other, hastening to turn their heads heavenwards, and to spring up in an exactly parallel direction to the parent stem. "The stem," says Dr Engelmann, "is tall, 25 to 60 feet high, and 2 to 6 feet in circumference—erect, simple, or with a few erect branches." Mr Emory's first mention of this pillar-like plant is as follows:—
"At the point where we left the Gila, there stands a cereus six feet in circumference, and so high that I could not reach half way to the top of it with the point of my sabre by many feet; and a short distance up the ravine is a grove of these plants, much larger than the one I measured, and with large branches. These plants bear a saccharine fruit much prized by the Indians and Mexicans. They are without leaves, the fruit growing to the boughs. The fruit resembles the burr of a chesnut, and is full of prickles; but the pulp resembles that of the fig, only more soft and luscious. In some it is white, in some red, and in others yellow, but always of exquisite taste."
The name of pitahaya is given to this cactus by the Californians; but that, according to Dr Engelmann, is a general name applied in Mexico and South America to all the large columnar cacti which bear an edible fruit. "We encamped in a grove of cacti of all kinds," writes Mr Emory on the 4th November; "amongst them the huge pitahaya, one of which was fifty feet high." The next day "we followed the Gila for six miles. The pitahaya and every other variety of cactus flourished in great luxuriance. The pitahaya, tall, erect, and columnar in its appearance, grew in every crevice from the base to the tops of the mountains, and in one place I saw it growing nearly to its full dimensions from a crevice not much broader than the back of my sabre. These extraordinary-looking plants seem to seek the wildest and most unfrequented places." Although the course of the Gila is nine degrees to the north of the tropics, the vegetation, as exhibited in a plate at page 112, has something very tropical in its gigantic luxuriance and strange character. The geological features of the country are of corresponding peculiarity. On the 8th November, the course of the expedition was traversed by "a seam of yellowish-coloured igneous rock, shooting up into irregular spires and turrets, one or two thousand feet in height. It ran at right angles to the river, and extended to the north and to the south, in a chain of mountains as far as the eye could reach. One of these towers was capped with a substance many hundred feet thick, disposed in horizontal strata of different colours, from deep red to light yellow." A sketch of this singular chain of natural spires and towers is annexed to Mr Emory's description by one of his companions. At this part of the journey, although beaver "sign" and tracks of game were seen, few animals made their appearance. On the 6th November, the only creatures observed were lizards, scorpions, and tarantulas. Five days after, however, Mr Emory secured a long-sought bird, an inhabitant of the mezquite tree, having indigo-blue plumage, with top knot and a long tail, and whose wings, when spread, exhibit a white ellipse. "Strolling over the hills alone," says Mr Emory, "in pursuit of seeds and geological specimens, my thoughts went back to the States; and when I turned from my momentary aberrations, I was struck most forcibly with the fact that not one object in the whole view, animal, vegetable, or mineral, had anything in common with the products of any State in the Union, with the single exception of the cotton-wood, which is found in the Western States, and seems to grow wherever water flows from the vertebral range of mountains of North America."
On the 9th November, the expedition, which had long been struggling over precipitous mountains and through deep cañones, emerged upon the plain, and for a moment all considered the difficulties of the journey at an end. The real gain was confined to the howitzers, which, dragged by main force of men and mules over a terribly rugged country, had by this time had every part of their running gear repeatedly broken and replaced. The artillerymen rejoiced at the level which lightened their labour. It was, however, but an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. Grass ceased when the mountains were left behind, and the mules were fain to feed on willow and cotton-wood. And soon there were short commons for men as well as for beasts. Their first day's march over the plain brought them into the vicinity of two Indian tribes of a very different stamp from the predatory Navajos and perfidious Apaches. The Maricopas and Pimos almost realise those virtuous and heroic savages whom we had hitherto thought to exist nowhere but in Fenimore Cooper's novels. They gallopped into the American camp in a frank confident style, delighted to find they had to do with white men instead of with their enemies the Apaches, of whose approach a report had been spread. There was a Pimo village nine miles off, and in three hours its inhabitants crowded into the camp, laden with corn, beans, honey, and water-melons, and opened a brisk trade. It was Mr Emory's observing night, but the throng, and, the perpetual galloping to and fro, interfered greatly with the correctness of his observations. He was struck by the unsuspicious character of these people, who would leave their packs in the camp and absent themselves for hours. Theft was apparently unknown amongst them. With the mounted party, which first came in, was a man on foot, who appeared able to keep pace with the fleetest horse, and who, on recovering his breath, announced himself as interpreter to Juan Antonio Llunas, chief of the Pimos. With him for a guide, Mr Emory and other officers visited some neighbouring ruined buildings, concerning whose origin he could give them no information except a wild tradition in which he himself did not believe. They then proceeded to the Pimos village, the interpreter going a pace which kept their mules at a long trot.
"We were much impressed with the beauty, order, and disposition of the arrangements for irrigating and draining the land. Corn, wheat, and cotton are the crops of this peaceful and intelligent race of people. All the crops have been gathered in, and the stubbles show they have been luxuriant. The cotton has been picked, and stacked for drying on the top of sheds. The fields are subdivided by ridges of earth into rectangles of about 200 x 100 feet, for the convenience of irrigating. The fences are of sticks wattled with willow and mezquite and, in this particular, set an example of economy in agriculture worthy to be followed by the Mexicans, who never use fences at all. The houses of the people are mere sheds, thatched with willow and corn stalks."