John Gregory Bourke

“ The valley, as we saw it from the bluffs amid which we marched, presented a most beautiful appearance—green with juicy grasses, and dark with the foliage of cottonwood and willow. Its sinuosities encircled many park-like areas of meadow, bounded on the land side by bluffs of drift. The Indians at first marched on the flank, but soon passed the column and took the lead, the “medicine men” in front; one of the head “medicine men” of the Crows kept up a piteous chant, reciting the cruelties of their enemies and stimulating the young men to deeds of martial valor. ”

“ The march from Fort Fetterman to old Fort Reno, a distance of ninety miles, led us through a country of which the less said the better; it is suited for grazing and may appeal to the eyes of a cow-boy, but for the ordinary observer, especially during the winter season, it presents nothing to charm any sense; the landscape is monotonous and uninviting, and the vision is bounded by swell after swell of rolling prairie, yellow with a thick growth of winter-killed buffalo or bunch grass, with a liberal sprinkling of that most uninteresting of all vegetation—the sage-brush. ”

“ Now the petulant, querulous treble of the squaws kept time with the shuffling feet, and again the deeper growl of the savage bull-dogs, who represented manhood in that cave, was flung back from the cold pitiless brown of the cliffs.
“Look out! Here they come!” Over the rampart, guided by one impulse, moving as if they were all part of the one body, jumped and ran twenty of the warriors—superb-looking fellows all of them; each carried upon his back a quiver filled with the long reed arrows of the tribe, each held in his hand a bow and a rifle, the latter at full cock. ”

“ There are many men in the world who are big chiefs and command many people, but you, I think, are the greatest of them all. I want you to be a father to me and treat me as your son. I want you to have pity on me. There is no doubt that all you do is right, because all you say is true. I trust in all you say; you do not deceive; all the things you tell us are facts. I am now in your hands. I place myself at your disposition to dispose of as you please. I shake your hand. I want to come right into your camp with my family and stay with you. ”

“ When the news of Crook’s death reached the Apache Reservation, the members of the tribe who had been his scouts during so many years were stupefied: those near Camp Apache sat down in a great circle, let down their hair, bent their heads forward on their bosoms, and wept and wailed like children. Probably no city in the country could better appreciate the importance of Crook’s military work against the savages than Omaha, which through the suppression of hostilities by General Crook had bounded from the dimensions of a straggling town to those of a metropolis of 150,000 people. ”

“ We did not reach the Belle Fourche that night, but a tributary called Willow Creek which answered every purpose, as it had an abundance of box-elder, willow, ash, and plum bushes, which before many minutes crackled and sprang skyward in a joyous flame; we piled high the dry wood wherever found, thinking to stimulate comrades who were weary with marching and sleeping without the cheerful consolation of a sparkling camp-fire. ”

“ This is, unfortunately, not the age of monument-building in America; if ever the day shall come when loyal and intelligent friendship for the American people shall receive due recognition, the strong, melancholy features of “Siutiega-leska,” or “Spotted Tail,” cast in enduring bronze, will overlook the broad area of Dakota and Nebraska, which his genius did so much to save to civilization. In youth a warrior of distinction, in middle age a leader among his people, he became, ere time had sprinkled his locks with snow, the benefactor of two races. ”

“ We arose early next morning to begin a march of great severity, which taxed to the utmost the strength, nervous system, and patience of riders and mules; much fallen timber blocked the trail, the danger of passing this being increased a hundredfold by boulders of granite and pools of unknown depth; the leaves of the pines had decayed into a pasty mass of peat, affording no foothold to the pedestrian or horseman, and added the peril of drowning in a slimy ooze to the terrors accumulated for the intimidation of the explorer penetrating these wilds. ”

“ The Spanish serenader, to judge him by his songs, is a curious blending of woe and despair, paying court to a damsel whose 90heart is colder than the crystalline ice that forms in the mountains. The worst of it all is, the young woman, whose charms of person are equalled by the charms of her mind, does not seem to care a rush what becomes of the despairing songster, who threatens to go away forever, to sail on unknown seas, to face the nameless perils of the desert, if his suit be not at once recognized by at least one frosty smile. ”

“ He came, as I say, without the slightest pomp or parade, and without any one in San Francisco, except his immediate superiors, knowing of his departure, and without a soul in Tucson, not even the driver of the stage which had carried him and his baggage, knowing of his arrival. There were no railroads, there were no telegraphs in Arizona, and Crook was the last man in the world to seek notoriety had they existed. His whole idea of life was to do each duty well, and to let his work speak for itself. ”

“ General Crook: “I have heard what you have said. It seems very strange that more than forty men should be afraid of three; but if you left the reservation for that reason, why did you kill innocent people, sneaking all over the country to do it? What did those innocent people do to you that you should kill them, steal their horses, and slip around in the rocks like coyotes? What had that to do with killing innocent people? There is not a week passes that you don’t hear foolish stories in your own camp; but you are no child—you don’t have to believe them. ”

“ Indifferent to the bullets of the arquebuses in the hands of soldiers in armor clad, serenely insensible to the arguments of the friars and priests who claimed spiritual dominion over all other tribes, the naked Apache, with no weapons save his bow and arrows, lance, war-club, knife and shield, roamed over a vast empire, the lord of the soil—fiercer than the fiercest of tigers, wilder than the wild coyote he called his brother. ”

“ Lieutenant Lemly found an immense one coiled up in his blankets, and waked the echoes with his yells for help. The weather had assumed a most charming phase; the gently undulating prairie upon whose bosom camp reposed was decked with the greenest and most nutritive grasses; our animals lazily nibbled along the hill skirts or slept in the genial light of the sun. In the shade of the box-elder and willows along the stream beds the song of the sweet-voiced meadow lark was heard all day. At rare moments the chirping of grasshoppers might be distinguished in the herbage ”

“ With no one to reproach him because face or hands are unclean, to scowl because his scanty allowance of clothing has run to tatters, and no long-winded lessons in geography or the Constitution of the United States, his existence is one uninterrupted gleam of sunshine. The Indian youngster knows every bird’s nest for miles around, every good place for bathing, every nice pile of sand or earth to roll in. ”

“ If the marching over the deserts had its unpleasant features, certainly the compensation offered by the camping places in the cañons, by limpid streams of rippling water, close to the grateful foliage of cottonwood, sycamore, ash, or walnut; or, in the mountains, the pine and juniper, and sheltered from the sun by walls of solid granite, porphyry or basalt, was a most delightful antithesis, and one well worthy of the sacrifices undergone to attain it. ”

“ There never was an officer in our military service so completely in accord with all the ideas, views, and opinions of the savages whom he had to fight or control as was General Crook. In time of campaign this knowledge placed him, as it were, in the secret councils of the enemy; in time of peace it enabled him all the more completely to appreciate the doubts and misgivings of the Indians at the outset of a new life, and to devise plans by which they could all the more readily be brought to see that civilization was something which all could embrace without danger of extinction. ”

“ All the men are whistling or have broken out in glad carol. Each heart is gay, for we have at last reached Tucson, the commercial entrepôt of Arizona and the remoter Southwest—Tucson, the Mecca of the dragoon, the Naples of the desert, which one was to see and die; Tucson, whose alkali pits yielded water sweeter than Well of Zemzen, whose maidens were more charming, whose society was more hospitable, merchants more progressive, magazines better stocked, climate more dreamy, than any town from Santa Fé to Los Angeles ”

“ It was this peculiarity of the Apaches that made them such a terror to all who came in contact with them, and had compelled the King of Spain to maintain a force of four thousand dragoons to keep in check a tribe of naked savages, who scorned to wear any protection against the bullets of the Castilians, who would not fight when pursued, but scattered like their own crested mountain quail, and then hovered on the flanks of the whites, and were far more formidable when dispersed than when they were moving in compact bodies. ”

“ We bivouacked on the extreme head-waters of the Rosebud, which was at that point a feeble rivulet of snow water, sweet and palatable enough when the muddy ooze was not stirred up from the bottom. Wood was found in plenty for the slight wants of the command, which made small fires for a few moments to boil coffee, while the animals, pretty well tired out by the day’s rough march of nearly forty miles, rolled and rolled again in the matted bunches of succulent pasturage growing at their feet. ”

“ Every man and boy is armed with one or two revolvers on hip. There are revolvers and rifles and shotguns along the walls and in every corner. Everything speaks of a land of warfare and bloodshed. The title of “Dark and Bloody Ground” never fairly belonged to Kentucky. Kentucky never was anything except a Sunday-school convention in comparison with Arizona, every mile of whose surface could tell its tale of horror were the stones and gravel, the sage-brush and mescal, the mesquite and the yucca, only endowed with speech for one brief hour. ”

“ Between Pete Kitchen and the Apaches a ceaseless war was waged, with the advantages not all on the side of Kitchen. His employees were killed and wounded, his stock driven away, his pigs filled with arrows, making the suffering quadrupeds look like perambulating pin-cushions—everything that could be thought of to drive him away; but there he stayed, unconquered and unconquerable.
Men like Estevan Ochoa and Pete Kitchen merit a volume by themselves. Arizona and New Mexico were full of such people, not all as determined and resolute as Pete ”

“ Men were getting pretty well exhausted, and each mile of the march saw squads of stragglers, something which we had not seen before; the rain was so unintermittent, the mud so sticky, the air so damp, that with the absence of food and warmth, men lost courage, and not a few of the officers did the same thing. Horses had to be abandoned in great numbers, but the best of them were killed to supply meat, which with the bull berries and water had become almost our only certain food, eked out by an occasional slice of antelope or jack rabbit. ”

“ After reaching San Bernardino, the aspect changed completely: the country became a fairyland, filled with grapes and figs and oranges, merry with the music of birds, bright with the bloom of flowers. Lowing herds and buzzing bees attested that this was indeed a land of milk and honey, beautiful to the eye, gladsome to every sense. The railroad had not yet reached Los Angeles, so that to get to San Francisco, travellers who did not care to wait for the weekly steamer were obliged to secure seats in the “Telegraph” stage line. ”

“ But while General Crook was admitted, even by the Indians, to be more of an Indian than the Indian himself, it must in no wise be understood that he ever occupied any other relation than that of the older and more experienced brother who was always ready to hold out a helping hand to the younger just learning to walk and to climb. Crook never ceased to be a gentleman. Much as he might live among savages, he never lost the right to claim for himself the best that civilization and enlightenment had to bestow. ”

“ The slopes of the hills seemed to be covered with Indian boys, ponies, and dogs. The small boy and the big dog are two of the principal features of every Indian village or Indian cavalcade; to these must be added the bulbous-eyed pappoose, in its bead-covered cradle slung to the saddle of its mother’s pony, and wrapped so tightly in folds of cloth and buckskin that its optics stick out like door-knobs. The Indian boy is far ahead of his white contemporary in healthy vigor and manly beauty. ”

“ For one-half this distance our road followed down through the centre of the Black Hills, a most entrancing country, laid out apparently by a landscape artist; it is not so high as the Big Horn range, although Harney’s and other peaks of granite project to a great elevation, their flanks dark with pine, fir, and other coniferæ; the foot-hills velvety with healthful pasturage; the narrow valleys of the innumerable petty creeks a jungle of willow, wild rose, live oak, and plum. Climbing into the mountains, one can find any amount of spruce, juniper, cedar, fir, hemlock, birch, and whitewood ”

“ 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. ”