Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/147

 king's forces had been driven off, to die a lingering death upon the sugar plantations of Cuba or in the mines of Guanaxuato.

Drawing nearer to our own days, we read the fact set down in the clearest and coldest black and white, that the state governments of Sonora and Chihuahua had offered and paid rewards of three hundred dollars for each scalp of an Apache that should be presented at certain designated headquarters, and we read without a tremor of horror that individuals, clad in the human form—men like the Englishman Johnson, or the Irishman Glanton—entered into contracts with the governor of Chihuahua to do such bloody work.

Johnson was "a man of honor." He kept his word faithfully, and invited a large band of the Apaches in to see him and have a feast at the old Santa Rita mine in New Mexico—I have been on the spot and seen the exact site—and while they were eating bread and meat, suddenly opened upon them with a light fieldpiece loaded to the muzzle with nails, bullets, and scrap-iron, and filled the court-yard with dead.

Johnson, I say, was "a gentleman," and abided by the terms of his contract; but Glanton was a blackguard, and set out to kill anything and everything in human form, whether Indian or Mexican. His first "victory" was gained over a band of Apaches with whom he set about arranging a peace in northern Chihuahua, not far from El Paso. The bleeding scalps were torn from the heads of the slain, and carried in triumph to the city of Chihuahua, outside of whose limits the "conquerors" were met by a procession of the governor, all the leading state dignitaries and the clergy, and escorted back to the city limits, where—as we are told by Ruxton, the English officer who travelled across Chihuahua on horse-back in 1835-1837—the scalps were nailed with frantic joy to the portals of the grand cathedral, for whose erection the silver mines had been taxed so outrageously.

Glanton, having had his appetite for blood excited, passed westward across Arizona until he reached the Colorado River, near where Fort Yuma now stands. There he attempted to cross to the California or western bank, but the Yuma Indians, who had learned of his pleasant eccentricities of killing every one, without distinction of age, sex, or race, who happened to be out on the trail alone, let Glanton and his comrades get a few yards