On The Border With Crook. John Gregory Bourke
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had its share of incidents grave, gay, melancholy, ludicrous; men killed and wounded; Apaches ditto; and the usual amount of hard climbing by day, or marching by night upon trails which sometimes led us upon the enemy, and very often did not.
There was one very good man, Moore, if I remember his name correctly, who died of the “fever”—malaria—and was carried from the “Grassy Plain” into old Camp Goodwin, on the Gila, near the Warm Spring. No sooner had we arrived at Goodwin than one of the men—soldier or civilian employee, I do not know now—attempted to commit suicide, driven to despair by the utter isolation of his position; and two of our own company—Sergeant John Mott and one other, both excellent men—dropped down, broken up with the “fever,” which would yield to nothing but the most heroic treatment with quinine.
In a skirmish-with the Apaches near the head of Deer Creek, one of our men, named Shire, was struck by a rifle ball in the knee-cap, the ball ranging downward, and lodging in the lower leg near the ankle bone. We were sore distressed. There was no doctor with the little command, a criminal neglect for which Cushing was not responsible, and there was no guide, as Manuel Duran, who generally went out with us, was lying in Tucson seriously ill. No one was hurt badly enough to excite apprehension excepting Shire, whose wound was not bleeding at all, the hemorrhage being on the inside.
Sergeant Warfield, Cushing, and I stayed up all night talking over the situation, and doing so in a low tone, lest Shire should suspect that we had not been telling the truth when we persuaded him to believe that he had been hit by a glancing bullet, which had benumbed the whole leg but had not inflicted a very serious wound.
Our Mexican packers were called into consultation, and the result was that by four in the morning, as soon as a cup of coffee could be made, I was on my way over to the Aravaypa Cañon at the head of a small detachment in charge of the wounded man, who was firmly strapped to his saddle. We got along very well so long as we were on the high hills and mountains, where the horse of the sufferer could be led, and he himself supported by friendly hands on each side. To get down into the chasm of the Aravaypa was a horse of altogether a different color. The trail was extremely steep, stony, and slippery, and the soldier, heroic as he was, could not repress a groan as his horse jarred him by slipping under his weight on the wretched path. At the foot of the descent it was evident that something else in the way of transportation would have to be provided, as the man’s strength was failing rapidly and he could no longer sit up.
Lieutenant Cushing’s orders were for me to leave the party just as soon as I thought I could do so safely, and then ride as fast as the trail would permit to Camp Grant, and there get all the aid possible. It seemed to me that there could be no better time for hurrying to the post than the present, which found the detachment at a point where it could defend itself from the attack of any roving party of the enemy, and supplied with grass for the animals and fuel and water for the men.
Shire had fainted as I mounted and started with one of the men, Corporal Harrington, for the post, some twelve miles away. We did not have much more of the cañon to bother us, and made good speed all the way down the Aravaypa and into the post, where I hurriedly explained the situation and had an ambulance start up the cañon with blankets and other comforts, while in the post itself everything was made ready for the amputation in the hospital, which all knew to be a foregone conclusion, and a mounted party was sent to Tucson to summon Dr. Durant to assist in the operation.
Having done all this, I started back up the cañon and came upon my own detachment slowly making its way down. In another hour the ambulance had rolled up to the door of the hospital, and the wounded man was on a cot under the influence of anaesthetics. The amputation was made at the upper third of the thigh, and resulted happily, and the patient in due time recovered, although he had a close call for his life.
The winter of 1870 and the spring of 1871 saw no let up in the amount of scouting which was conducted against the Apaches. The enemy resorted to a system of tactics which had often been tried in the past and always with success. A number of simultaneous attacks were made at points widely separated, thus confusing both troops and settlers, spreading a vague sense of fear over all the territory infested, and imposing upon the soldiery an exceptional amount of work of the hardest conceivable kind.
Attacks were made in southern Arizona upon the stage stations at the San Pedro, and the Cienaga, as well as the one near the Picacho, and upon the ranchos in the Barbacomori valley, and in the San Pedro, near Tres Alamos. Then came the news of a fight at Pete Kitchen’s, and finally, growing bolder, the enemy drove off a herd of cattle from Tucson itself, some of them beeves, and others work-oxen belonging to a wagon-train from Texas. Lastly came the killing of the stage mail-rider, between the town and the Mission church of San Xavier, and the massacre of the party of Mexicans going down to Sonora, which occurred not far from the Sonoita.
One of the members of this last party was a beautiful young Mexican lady—Doña Trinidad Aguirre—who belonged to a very respectable family in the Mexican Republic, and was on her way back from a visit to relatives in Tucson.
That one so young, so beautiful and bright, should have been snatched away by a most cruel death at the hands of savages, aroused the people of all the country south of the Gila, and nothing was talked of, nothing was thought of, but vengeance upon the Apaches.
Cushing all this time had kept our troop moving without respite. There were fights, and ambuscades, and attacks upon “rancherias,” and night-marches without number, several resulting in the greatest success. I am not going to waste any space upon these, because there is much of the same sort to come, and I am afraid of tiring out the patience of my readers before reaching portions of this book where there are to be found descriptions of very spirited engagements.
The trail of the raiders upon the ranch at the “Cienaga” (now called “Pantano” by the Southern Pacific Railroad people) took down into the “Mestinez,” or Mustang Mountains, so called from the fact that a herd of wild ponies were to be found there or not far off. They did not number more than sixty all told when I last saw them in 1870, and were in all probability the last herd of wild horses within the limits of the United States. In this range, called also the “Whetstone” Mountains, because there exists a deposit or ledge of the rock known as “novaculite” or whetstone of the finest quality, we came upon the half calcined bones of two men burned to death by the Apaches; and after marching out into the open valley of the San Pedro, and crossing a broad expanse covered with yucca and sage-brush, we came to a secluded spot close to the San José range, where the savages had been tearing up the letters contained in one of Uncle Sam’s mail-bags, parts of which lay scattered about.
When the work-oxen of the Texans were run off, the Apaches took them over the steepest, highest and rockiest part of the Sierra Santa Catalina, where one would not believe that a bird would dare to fly. We followed closely, guided by Manuel Duran and others, but progress was difficult and slow, on account of the nature of the trail. As we picked our way, foot by foot, we could discern the faintest sort of a mark, showing that a trail had run across there and had lately been used by the Apaches. But all the good done by that hard march was the getting back of the meat of the stock which the Apaches killed just the moment they reached the cañons under the Trumbull Peak. Two or three of the oxen were still alive, but so nearly run to death that we killed them as an act of mercy.
Three of our party were hurt in the mêlée, and we scored three hits, one a beautiful shot by Manuel, who killed his man the moment he exposed himself to his aim, and two wounded, how seriously we could not tell, as by the time we had made our way to the top of the, rocks the enemy had gone with their wounded, leaving only two pools of blood to show where the bullets had taken effect.
The trail leading to the place where the Apaches had taken refuge was so narrow that one of our pack-mules lost his footing and fell down the precipice, landing upon the top of a tree below and staying there for a full minute, when the branches broke under him and let him have another fall, breaking his back and making it necessary to blow his brains out as soon as the action was over and we could take time to breathe.
Then followed the fearful scene of bloodshed known as the “Camp Grant Massacre,” which can only be referred to—a full description would require a volume of its own. A small party of Apaches had presented