On The Border With Crook. John Gregory Bourke
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to the commanding officer that they and their friends up in the Aravaypa Cañon were willing and anxious to make peace and to stay near the post, provided they could get food and clothing. They were told to return with their whole tribe, which they soon did, and there is no good reason for supposing that the greater portion of them were not honest in their professions and purposes. The blame of what was to follow could not be laid at the doors of the local military authorities, who exerted themselves in every way to convey information of what had happened to the Department headquarters, then at Los Angeles. As previously stated, there was no mode of communication in Arizona save the stage, which took five days to make the trip from Tucson to Los Angeles, and as many more for a return trip, there being no telegraph in existence.
Weeks and weeks were frittered away in making reports which should have reached headquarters at once and should have been acted upon without the delay of a second. The story was circulated and generally believed, that the first report was returned to the officer sending it, with instructions to return it to Department headquarters “properly briefed,” that is, with a synopsis of its contents properly written on the outer flap of the communication when folded. There was no effort made, as there should have been made, to separate the peaceably disposed Indians from those who still preferred to remain out on the warpath, and as a direct consequence of this neglect ensued one of the worst blots in the history of American civilization, the “Camp Grant Massacre.”
A party of more than one hundred Papago Indians, from the village of San Xavier, led by a small detachment of whites and half-breed Mexicans from Tucson, took up the trail of one of the parties of raiders which had lately attacked the settlers and the peaceable Indians in the valley of the Santa Cruz. What followed is matter of history. The pursuing party claimed that the trails led straight to the place occupied by the Apaches who had surrendered at Camp Grant, and it is likely that this is so, since one of the main trails leading to the country of the Aravaypa and Gila bands passed under the Sierra Pinaleno, near the point in question. It was claimed further that a horse belonging to Don Leopoldo Carrillo was found in the possession of one of the young boys coming out of the village, and that some of the clothing of Doña Trinidad Aguirre was also found.
These stories may be true, and they may be after-thoughts to cover up and extenuate the ferocity of the massacre which spared neither age nor sex in its wrath, but filled the valley of the Aravaypa with dead and dying. The incident, one of the saddest and most terrible in our annals, is one over which I would gladly draw a veil. To my mind it indicated the weak spot in all our dealings with the aborigines, a defective point never repaired and never likely to be. According to our system of settling up the public lands, there are no such things as colonies properly so called. Each settler is free to go where he pleases, to take up such area as the law permits, and to protect himself as best he can. The army has always been too small to afford all the protection the frontier needed, and affairs have been permitted to drift along in a happy-go-lucky sort of a way indicative rather of a sublime faith in divine providence than of common sense and good judgment.
The settlers, in all sections of the West, have been representative of the best elements of the older States from which they set forth, but it is a well-known fact that among them have been a fair, possibly more than a fair, share of the reckless, the idle and the dissolute. On the other hand, among the savages, there have been as many young bloods anxious to win renown in battle as there have been old wise-heads desirous of preserving the best feeling with the new neighbors. The worst members of the two races are brought into contact, and the usual results follow; trouble springs up, and it is not the bad who suffer, but the peaceably disposed on each side.
On the 5th day of May, 1871, Lieutenant Howard B. Cushing, Third Cavalry, with several civilians and three soldiers, was killed by the Chiricahua Apaches, under their famous chief “Cocheis,” at the Bear Springs, in the Whetstone Mountains, about thirty-five miles from Tucson and about the same distance to the east of old Camp Crittenden. Cushing’s whole force numbered twenty-two men, the larger part of whom were led into an ambuscade in the cañon containing the spring. The fight was a desperate one, and fought with courage and great skill on both sides. Our forces were surrounded before a shot had been fired; and it was while Cushing was endeavoring to lead his men back that he received the wounds which killed him. Had it not been for the courage and good judgment displayed by Sergeant John Mott, who had seen a great amount of service against the Apaches, not one of the command would have escaped alive out of the cañon.
Mott was in command of the rear-guard, and, in coming up to the assistance of Lieutenant Cushing, detected the Apaches moving behind a low range of hills to gain Cushing’s rear. He sent word ahead, and that induced Lieutenant Cushing to fall back.
After Cushing dropped, the Apaches made a determined charge and came upon our men hand to hand. The little detachment could save only those horses and mules which were ridden at the moment the enemy made the attack, because the men who had dismounted to fight on foot were unable to remount, such was the impetuosity of the rush made by the Chiricahuas. There were enough animals to “ride and tie,” and Mott, by keeping up on the backbone of the hills running along the Barbacomori Valley, was enabled to reach Camp Crittenden without being surrounded or ambuscaded.
Inside of forty-eight hours there were three troops of cavalry en route to Crittenden, and in pursuit of the Apaches, but no good could be effected. Major William J. Ross, at that time in command of Camp Crittenden, was most energetic in getting word to the various military commands in the southern part of the country, as well as in extending every aid and kindness to the wounded brought in by Mott.
When the combined force had arrived at Bear Spring, there was to be seen every evidence of a most bloody struggle. The bodies of Lieutenant Cushing and comrades lay where they had fallen, stripped of clothing, which the Apaches always carried off from their victims. In all parts of the narrow little cañon were the carcasses of ponies and horses half-eaten by the coyotes and buzzards; broken saddles, saddle-bags, canteens with bullet-holes in them, pieces of harness and shreds of clothing scattered about, charred to a crisp in the flames which the savages had ignited in the grass to conceal their line of retreat.
Of how many Apaches had been killed, there was not the remotest suggestion to be obtained. That there had been a heavy loss among the Indians could be suspected from the signs of bodies having been dragged to certain points, and there, apparently, put on pony-back.
The Chiricahuas seemed to have ascended the cañon until they had attained the crest of the range in a fringe of pine timber; but no sooner did they pass over into the northern foot-hills than they broke in every direction, and did not re-unite until near our boundary line with Mexico, where their trail was struck and followed for several days by Major Gerald Russell of the Third Cavalry. They never halted until they had regained the depths of the Sierra Madre, their chosen haunt, and towards which Russell followed them so long as his broken-down animals could travel.
Of the distinguished services rendered to Arizona by Lieutenant Cushing, a book might well be written. It is not intended to disparage anybody when I say that he had performed herculean and more notable work, perhaps, than had been performed by any other officer of corresponding rank either before or since. Southern Arizona owed much to the gallant officers who wore out strength and freely risked life and limb in her defence—men of the stamp of Devin, C. C. Carr, Sanford, Gerald Russell, Winters, Harris, Almy, Carroll, McCleave, Kelly, and many others. They were all good men and true; but if there were any choice among them I am sure that the verdict, if left to those soldiers themselves, would be in favor of Cushing.
Standing on the summit of the Whetstone Range, which has no great height, one can see the places, or the hills overlooking them, where several other officers met their death at the hands of the same foe. To the west is Davidson’s Cañon, where the Apaches ambushed and killed Lieutenant Reid T. Stewart and Corporal Black; on the north, the cone of Trumbull overlooks the San Carlos Agency, where the brave Almy fell; to the northwest are the Tortolita hills, near which Miller and Tappan were killed in ambuscade, as already narrated; and to the east are the Chiricahua Mountains, in whose bosom rests Fort Bowie with its grewsome graveyard filled with such inscriptions as “Killed by the Apaches,” “Met his death at the hands of the Apaches,” “Died of wounds inflicted by Apache Indians,” and at times “Tortured and killed by Apaches.” One visit