Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/143

 *edge of the wiles and tricks of the enemy, the same modesty and disinclination to parade as a hero or a great military genius, or to obtrude upon public notice the deeds performed in obedience to the promptings of duty.

Such was Arizona, and such was General George Crook when he was assigned to the task of freeing her from the yoke of the shrewdest and most ferocious of all the tribes encountered by the white man within the present limits of the United States.

A condensed account of the Apaches themselves would seem not to be out of place at this point, since it will enable the reader all the more readily to comprehend the exact nature of the operations undertaken against them, and what difficulties, if any, were to be encountered in their subjugation and in their elevation to a higher plane of civilization.

With a stupidity strictly consistent with the whole history of our contact with the aborigines, the people of the United States have maintained a bitter and an unrelenting warfare against a people whose name was unknown to them. The Apache is not the Apache; the name "Apache" does not occur in the language of the "Tinneh," by which name, or some of its variants as "Inde," "Dinde," or something similar, our Indian prefers to designate himself "The Man;" he knows nothing, or did not know anything until after being put upon the Reservations, of the new-fangled title "Apache," which has come down to us from the Mexicans, who borrowed it from the Maricopas and others, in whose language it occurs with the signification of "enemy."

It was through the country of the tribes to the south that the Spaniards first were brought face to face with the "Tinneh" of Arizona, and it was from these Maricopas and others that the name was learned of the desperate fighters who lived in the higher ranges with the deer, the elk, the bear, and the coyote.

And as the Spaniards have always insisted upon the use of a name which the Apaches have as persistently repudiated; and as the Americans have followed blindly in the footsteps of the Castilian, we must accept the inevitable and describe this tribe under the name of the Apaches of Arizona, although it is much like invading England by way of Ireland, and writing of the Anglo-Saxons under the Celtic designation of the "Sassenach."

The Apache is the southernmost member of the great Tinneh family, which stretches across the circumpolar portion of the