Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/159

 "Francesca," "Maria," and others I could name, who have amassed property and gained influence among the people who led them into slavery.

A brief account of the more prominent of foods entering into the dietary of the Apache may not be out of place, as it will serve to emphasize my remarks concerning his ability to practically snap his fingers at any attempts to reduce him to starvation by the ordinary methods. The same remarks, in a minor degree, apply to all our wilder tribes. Our Government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation. The Apache was not so well provided with meat as he might have been, because the general area of Arizona was so arid and barren that it could not be classed as a game country; nevertheless, in the higher elevations of the Sierra Mogollon and the San Francisco, there were to be found plenty of deer, some elk, and, in places like the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, the Cañon of the Rio Salado, and others, there were some Rocky Mountain sheep; down on the plains or deserts, called in the Spanish idiom "playas" or "beaches," there were quite large herds of antelope, and bears were encountered in all the high and rocky places.

Wild turkeys flock in the timbered ranges, while on the lower levels, in the thickets of sage-brush and mesquite, quail are numerous enough to feed Moses and all the Israelites were they to come back to life again. The jack-rabbit is caught by being "rounded up," and the field-rat adds something to the meat supply. The latter used to be caught in a very peculiar way. The rat burrowed under a mesquite or other bush, and cast up in a mound all the earth excavated from the spot selected for its dwelling; and down through this cut or bored five or six entrances, so that any intruder, such as a snake, would be unable to bar the retreat of the inmates, who could seek safety through some channel other than the one seized upon by the invader.

The Apache was perfectly well acquainted with all this, and laid his plans accordingly. Three or four boys would surround each habitation, and, while one took station at the main entrance and laid the curved end of his " rat-stick" across its mouth, the others devoted themselves to prodding down with their sticks into the other channels. The rats, of course, seeing one hole undisturbed, would dart up that, and, when each had reached