Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/268

 wounds had been burned out with a kind of "moxa" with which the savages of this continent are familiar. Trouble arose on account of this treaty from a combination of causes of no consequence when taken singly, but of great importance in the aggregate. The separation of the tribe into two sections, and giving one kind of treatment to one and another to another, had a very bad effect: some of the Chiricahuas called their brethren at the San Carlos "squaws," because they had to work; on their side, a great many of the Apaches at the San Carlos and Camp Apache, feeling that the Chiricahuas deserved a whipping fully as much as they did, were extremely rancorous towards them, and never tired of inventing stories to the disparagement of their rivals or an exaggeration of what was truth. There were no troops stationed on the Chiricahua reservation to keep the unruly young bucks in order, or protect the honest and well-meaning savages from the rapacity of the white vultures who flocked around them, selling vile whiskey in open day. All the troubles of the Chiricahuas can be traced to this sale of intoxicating fluids to them by worthless white men.

Complaints came up without cease from the people of Sonora, of raids alleged to have been made upon their exposed hamlets nearest the Sierra Madre; Governor Pesquiera and General Crook were in correspondence upon this subject, but nothing could be done by the latter because the Chiricahuas were not under his jurisdiction. How much of this raiding was fairly attributable to the Chiricahuas who had come in upon the reservation assigned them in the Dragoon Mountains, and how much was chargeable to the account of small parties which still clung to the old fastnesses in the main range of the Sierra Madre will never be known; but the fact that the Chiricahuas were not under military surveillance while all the other bands were, gave point to the insinuations and emphasis to the stories circulated to their disparagement.

Shortly after the Apaches had been put upon the various reservations assigned them, it occurred to the people of Tucson that they were spending a great deal of money for the trials, re-trials, and maintenance of murderers who killed whom they pleased, passed their days pleasantly enough in jail, were defended by shrewd "Jack lawyers," as they were called, and under one pre