Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/265

 little room for excessive profit for anybody in a country where all transportation was by wagon or on the backs of mules across burning deserts and over lofty mountains. The great task of building this line was carried out successfully by Major George F. Price, Fifth Cavalry, since dead, and by Lieutenant John F. Trout, Twenty-third Infantry.

One of the first messages transmitted over the wire from Prescott to Camp Apache was sent by an Apache Indian, to apprise his family that he and the rest of the detachment with him would reach home on a certain day. To use a Hibernicism, the wire to Apache did not go to Apache, but stopped at Grant, at the time of which I am writing. General Crook sent a message to the commanding officer at Camp Grant, directing him to use every endeavor to have the message sent by the Apache reach its destination, carrying it with the official dispatches forwarded by courier to Camp Apache. The family and friends of the scout were surprised and bewildered at receiving a communication sent over the white man's talking wire (Pesh-bi-yalti), of which they had lately been hearing so much; but on the day appointed they all put on their thickest coats of face paint, and donned their best bibs and tuckers, and sallied out on foot and horseback to meet the incoming party, who were soon descried descending the flank of an adjacent steep mountain. That was a great day for Arizona; it impressed upon the minds of the savages the fact that the white man's arts were superior to those which their own "Medicine Men" pretended to possess, and made them see that it would be a good thing for their own interests to remain our friends.

The Apaches made frequent use of the wire. A most amusing thing occurred at Crook's headquarters, when the Apache chief "Pitone," who had just come up from a mission of peace to the Yumas, on the Colorado, and who had a grievance against "Pascual," the chief of the latter tribe, had the operator, Mr. Strauchon, inform "Pascual" that if he did not do a certain thing which he had promised to do, the Apaches would go on the war-path, and fairly wipe the ground with the Yumas. There couldn't have been a quainter antithesis of the elements of savagery and enlightenment than the presence of that chief in the telegraph office on such a mission. The Apaches learned after a while how to stop the communication by telegraph, which they did very adroitly by pulling down the wire, cutting it in two, and