Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/134

 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