Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/256

 the contract of the Chiricahua Cattle Company; and five hundred thousand pounds for the Indians at Fort Apache, on the contract of John H. Norton. Both of the above contracting parties are known to me as reliable and trustworthy; I am not finding fault with them for getting a good, fat contract; but I do find fault with a system which keeps the Indian a savage, and does not stimulate him to work for his own support.

At one time an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out among the children on the Apache reservation, and numbers were carried off. Indians are prone to sacrifice property at the time of death of relations, and, under the advice of their "Medicine Men," slaughtered altogether nearly two thousand sheep, which they had purchased with their own money or which represented the increase from the original flock. Crook bought from the Apaches all the hay they would cut, and had the Quartermaster pay cash for it; every pound of hay, every stick of wood, and no small portion of the corn used by the military at Camp Apache and San Carlos were purchased from the Apaches as individuals, and not from contractors or from tribes. The contractors had been in the habit of employing the Apaches to do this work for them, paying a reduced scale of remuneration and often in store goods, so that by the Crook method the Indian received from two to three times as much as under the former system, and this to the great advantage of Arizona, because the Indian belongs to the Territory of Arizona, and will stay there and buy what he needs from her people, but the contractor has gone out to make money, remains until he accomplishes his object, and then returns to some congenial spot where his money will do most good for himself. Of the contractors who made money in Arizona twenty years ago not one remained there: all went into San Francisco or some other large city, there to enjoy their accumulations. I am introducing this subject now because it will save repetition, and will explain to the average reader why it was that the man who did so much to reduce to submission the worst tribes this country has ever known, and who thought of nothing but the performance of duty and the establishment of a permanent and honorable peace, based—to quote his own language—"upon an exact and even-handed justice to red men and to white alike," should have been made the target for the malevolence and the rancor of every man in the slightest degree