Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/194

 officer, who had no ideas about managing savages beyond treating them with kindness and justice.

General Crook not only saw to the condition of the Hualpais, but of their relatives, the Mojaves, on the river, and kept them both in good temper towards the whites; not only this, but more than this—he sent up among the Pi-Utes of Nevada and Southern Utah and explained the situation to them and secured the promise of a contingent of one hundred of their warriors for service against the Apaches, should the latter decline to listen to the propositions of the commissioner sent to treat with them. When hostilities did break out, the Pi-Utes sent down the promised auxiliaries, under their chief, "Captain Tom," and, like the Hualpais, they rendered faithful service.

What has become of the Pi-Utes I cannot say, but of the Hualpais I am sorry to have to relate that the moment hostilities ended, the Great Father began to ignore and neglect them, until finally their condition became so deplorable that certain fashionable ladies of New York, who were doing a great deal of good unknown to the world at large, sent money to General Crook to be used in keeping them from starving to death.

Liquor is freely given to the women, who have become fearfully demoralized, and I can assert of my own knowledge that five years since several photographers made large sales along the Atlantic and Pacific railroad of the pictures of nude women of this once dreaded band, which had committed no other offence than that of trusting in the faith of the Government of the United States.

In the desolate, romantic country of the Hualpais and their brothers, the Ava-Supais, amid the Cyclopean monoliths which line the cañons of Cataract Creek, the Little Colorado, the Grand Cañon or the Diamond, one may sit and listen, as I have often listened, to the simple tales and myths of a wild, untutored race. There are stories to be heard of the prowess of "Mustamho" and "Matyavela," of "Pathrax-sapa" and "Pathrax-carrawee," of the goddess "Cuathenya," and a multiplicity of deities—animal and human—which have served to beguile the time after the day's march had ended and night was at hand. All the elements of nature are actual, visible entities for these simple children—the stars are possessed of the same powers as man, all the chief animals have the faculty of speech, and the coyote is the one