Frederick R. Bechdolt

“ The sun shines hot here on the summit of the ridge. Across the wide mesquite flat the granite ramparts of the Dragoons frown all the long day, and the bleak hill graveyard frowns back at them. Thus the men who came to this last resting-place frowned back at Death.
There was a day when every mining camp and cow-town from the Rio Grande to the Yellowstone owned its boot-hill; a day when lone graves marked the trails and solitary headboards rotted slowly in the unpeopled wilderness. Many of these isolated wooden monuments fell before the long assaults of the elements ”

“ John Slaughter’s wife was beside him on the driver’s seat. She saw the rider bursting out of the gloom, and then her eyes fell on the forty-five which he was in the very act of “throwing down.”
“That man has a gun in his hand,” she cried.
Without turning his head her husband answered, “So have I.”
She glanced down at his cocked revolver; its muzzle was moving, to follow the enshadowed figure in the saddle less than ten feet away. She raised her eyes; the horseman had lowered his weapon and was wheeling his pony off into the night. ”

“ It was an era in some respects very much like the feudal days of Europe, a time of champions and challenges and deeds of arms, a period when strong men took definite stands for right or wrong and were ready at all times to defend those positions with their lives. The Man from Bitter Creek had received John Slaughter’s gage within the hour. He had dismounted from his pony at the cattle-buyer’s camp, attracted by the spectacle of that enormous herd destined to pass through the country where he and his companions held sway, and he had hung about the place to see what he could see. ”

“ There came an era when a member of that stern straight-shooting breed who blazed the trails for the coming of the statutes wielded the powers of high justice, the middle, and the low. Outlaw and rustler opposed the dominion of this peace officer. Then the cemetery boomed like the young town. Finally things settled down to jury trials and men let lawyers do most of the fighting with forensics instead of forty-fives. Churches were built and school-houses; a new graveyard was established; brush and weeds hid the old one’s leaning headboards. Time passed; a city grew; the boot-hill was forgotten. ”

“ Survivors tell how some of the women wept under the covers of the prairie-schooners that night, but none of those mothers raised her voice in favor of retreat. They were pioneers, these people, and it seemed as if they did not know how to turn back.
None can ever set the fulness of their story down in words; for the Amargossa Desert has a wicked beauty which is beyond the telling, and one must journey out beyond the black escarpments of the Funeral Mountains and fight for his life in the silent reaches of that broken wilderness if he would begin to realize what they went through. ”

“ It was the dignity of men who knew that they were leaders of their people; who felt themselves on entire equality with the leader of the white man’s warriors; who felt the gravity of this occasion where they had been invited into conference with this blue-clad representative of a mighty government. Their head man was Cochise.
Like Lieutenant Bascom, he stood a pace ahead of his followers, a lean Apache, with a thinner face than most of his tribesmen and a remarkably high forehead. ”

“ So Private Smith clinched his teeth and did his best, while the deep-toned buffalo-guns roared and the rifles of the savages answered in a never-ending volley all around him. The leaden slugs droned past his ears as thick as swarming bees; the plunging hoofs showed 291 through the brown dust-clouds, and his arms ached from the strain of the tie-ropes.
Billy Dixon had thrown away his wide-rimmed sombrero and his long hair rippled in the wind. He had been through the battle at Adobe Walls and men knew him for one of the best shots in the country south of the Arkansas River. ”

“ These savages had owned the valleys and the ragged mountain ranges between them. They saw the white men drifting in, in twos and threes; they saw the lonely camps and cabins, tenanted by little groups of settlers, beyond all reach of help; they saw the wagon-trains and stages traveling without convoys. Their chiefs were wily, their warriors past masters of the art of ambush. They started in to kill off the new-comers; and they undoubtedly would have succeeded in depopulating most of New Mexico and Arizona if it had not been for that one trait of which Big Foot Wallace furnishes an example. ”

“ The old-timers go on to tell how Jim Shea came riding down the dry wash one day late in the summer with his rifle across his saddle-horn and a little troop of grim horsemen about him. Of that incident few details remain in the verbal chronicle which has come down through four decades. It is like a picture whose background has been blurred by age.
Somewhere ahead of these dusty, sunburned riders a band of Apaches were urging their wearied ponies onward under the hot sun. They herded a bunch of stolen horses before them as they fled. ”

“ Facing one end of its single brief street you looked out upon a dump of high-grade silver ore, and if you turned the other way you surveyed a sprouting little graveyard hard by a large corral. From almost any point you had a good view of the Dragoon mountains across a wide stretch of mesquite-covered lowlands, and at almost any hour of the day you were likely to see the smoke of at least one Apache signal-fire rising from those frowning granite ramparts. ”

“ And when the Concord coaches came to carry the mail between the frontier settlements and San Francisco, the men of wealth who financed the different lines announced there was big money in the ventures; the men of action who operated them claimed that high wages brought them into it.
So now you see them all: pathfinder, argonaut, teamster, stage-driver, pony-express rider, and capitalist, salving their consciences and soothing away the trepidations of their women-folk with the good old American excuse that they were going to make money. ”

“ So one night Rosita took the horse which he brought for her and rode off with him to California.
They made their journey with their mounts and a single pack animal across the hot plains and arid mountains of the south, then up the long King’s Highway which the padres had beaten down nearly one hundred years before their time. It was winter and California winter means Eastern spring; green grass rippling in the soft breezes, poppy-fields and a rioting of meadow-larks to make their honeymoon ideal. ”

“ Bad news travels fast. The tidings sped northward like a stray horse running home. One day a rider came to the ranch on the San Pedro with the story: how John Slaughter was last seen alive in the dismal hamlet at the foot of the Sierra Madre, abandoned by his Mexicans, with two cow-boys as his only companions, and half a hundred well-armed bandits on their way to murder him. A grim tale for the ears of a woman who was waiting word from Mexico. ”

“ The wide sidewalks under the wooden awnings which ran the length of every block, were crowded from wall to gutter with men intent on getting wealth or spending it.
The bad men mingled with the sidewalk throngs; they dropped into the Bird-Cage Opera House, where painted women sang in voices that clanged like brazen gongs; they took their places before the gambling-tables of the Crystal Palace, where girls were oftentimes to be found dealing faro; they joined the long lines before the bars and drank the stinging whisky which the wagon-trains had brought from Tucson. ”

“ Here then they come through the curtain of time’s mists, Indian fighter, town marshal, faro-dealer, and cow-boy. There are a few among them upon whom it is not worth while to gaze, those whose lives and deaths were unfit for recording; there are a vast multitude whose heroic stories were never told and never will be; and there are some whose deeds as they have come down from the lips of the old-timers should never die. ”

“ And then they went to the camp-fires of the soldiers.
They are passing from bleak graveyards on the alkali flats and in the northern mountains where the sage-brush meets the pines: gaunt men in laced boots and faded blue overalls who traveled once too often through the desert’s mirage searching for the golden ledges; big-boned hard rock men who died in underground passages where the steel was battering the living granite; men with soft hands and cold eyes who fattened on the fruits of robbery and murder. ”

“ But in the early eighties!
Apaches were raiding; claim-jumpers were battling; road-agents were robbing stages; bad men were slaying one another in the streets; and, taking it altogether, life was stepping to a lively tune.
Geronimo’s naked warriors were industrious. Now they would steal upon a pair of miners doing assessment work within sight of town. Now they would bag a teamster on the road from Tucson, or raid a ranch, or attack the laborers who were laying the water company’s pipe-line to the Huachucas. ”

“ They rode on northward into the Santa Clara valley where a gleaming mist of mustard blossoms hung under the great live oaks as far as the eye could reach; then they struck off eastward across the Coast Range and the flat lands of the San Joaquin, to climb into the red foot-hills where the Stanislaus comes out from the Sierras. Here they settled down and took a mining claim.
The feeling engendered by the Mexican War still rankled in many neighborhoods; and every mining camp had its lawless element whose members took full advantage of that prejudice against the conquered race. ”

“ A bullet got Tingley in the wrist. He dropped the reins, and before he could regain them the team was running away.
The six ponies turned off from the road at the first jump and plunged right into the midst of the Indians. Tingley could see the half-naked savages leaping for the bridles and clawing at the stage door as they strove to get hand-holds; but the speed was too great for them; the old Concord went reeling and bumping through the entire party, leaving several warriors writhing in the sand where the hoofs of the fright-maddened broncos had spurned them. ”

“ Morning was drawing on toward noon when John Ringo’s pony bore him downward from the living granite pinnacles to the glaring plain. Noon was passing as he jogged onward across the Sulphur Springs Valley.
To this day, when ranchers have drawn floods of limpid water from the bowels of the earth, the place 153 sees long periods whose heat is punishing. At that time the whole land was a desert; a flat floor, patched in spots by alkali deposits, girded round by steep-walled mountain ranges. Cacti grew there, and huge tufts of Spanish bayonets. ”

“ The men in the camp were, nearly all of them, old-timers in the West: miners from the Comstock lode whose boom was then on the wane, teamsters who had been freighting all over the blazing deserts of the Southwest, investors and merchants from Tucson, buffalo-hunters from western Kansas, Texas, and Colorado, 55 gamblers from Dodge City, El Paso, and Santa Fé, Indian-fighters, cattle-rustlers, professional claim-jumpers, and some gentle-voiced desperadoes of the real breed, equally willing to slay from behind or take a long chance in front, according to the way the play came up. ”

“ They drew away from the shelter of the mesquite and descended toward the valley bed. Some one heard a rifle bullet whining over his head. The man glanced around as the sharp report followed the leaden slug; and now every face was turned to the rear. Twelve cow-boys were following John Slaughter keeping their ponies to a dead run along the heights which Curly Bill and his band had so blithely forsaken.
It was a custom as old as Indian-fighting; this bringing on of the main force over the high ground whence they could guard against surprise and hold the advantage over luring enemies. ”

“ Far to the southward the Sierra Madre reared its lofty crests toward the flaring sky; and there Cochise established another sanctuary where his people could rest and hunt when the chase became too hot in Arizona. His breech-clouted scouts discovered some dry placer diggings here, and he bade the squaws mine the dust which he exchanged with crooked-souled white traders for ammunition. ”

“ Companies of Mexican smugglers came northward through its steep-walled border cañons driving their laden burros to lonely rendezvous where hard-eyed traders awaited them with pack-mules loaded down with dobie dollars. A few lonely ranch-houses where there was water in the lowlands; in the mountains a sawmill or two and some far-flung mines; here the habitations were like arsenals. Honest men must go armed to work and sleep with arms by their bedsides, and even then it was advisable for them to ask no questions of those who rode up to their cabins. ”