At a little spring some twenty miles away they had left their supplies and pack train.
Their Christmas holidays had been spent in pursuit of several bands of Apaches, and the scouts had reported that a large band of them was located in a cave on the Salt River cañon.
A pack mule had died in camp that day, and the Indian scouts were allowed to make a great feast upon its remains that they might set out on the expedition with full stomachs.
For years efforts had been made to concentrate the Apaches, who had been the scourge of Arizona and the Southwest, upon one or two reservations where, under guard, they could be watched and kept in bounds.
In the summer of 1872 General George Crook, after having held numerous councils with the Apaches, issued an ultimatum to the effect that, if those who were outside of the reservation did not return by the fifteenth of the coming November, active operations would begin against them. After that date every Indian found outside the reservation was to be treated as a hostile and dealt with accordingly.
The Apaches knew Crook only too well, for the "Old Grey Fox," as they called him, had always kept his word with them in the past.
Promptly on the day set General Crook took the field against the outlaw Apaches and hunted them down relentlessly day and night.
The region in which these operations took place is one of the roughest in the United States. It is located on the western side of the great "Tonto Basin" in central Arizona, and consists of ragged mountain ranges, and isolated peaks, while the whole area is cut and seamed with deep box cañons impassable for miles.
About fifty miles from the city of Phœnix, as the crow flies, and near the great Roosevelt irrigation reservoir and dam, four granite peaks pierce the sky.
Here Nature is found in one of her most inhospitable moods, and in the fastnesses of these "Four Peaks" several bands of the hunted, harassed Apaches took refuge.