Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/28

 *tion of the tropics, and whose lofty summits are black with the foliage of pines whose graceful branches bend in the welcome breezes from the temperate zone. Here one stumbles at almost every step upon the traces of former populations, of whom so little is known, or sees repeated from peak to peak the signal smokes of the fierce Apaches, whose hostility to the white man dates back to the time of Cortés.

I will begin my narrative by a brief reference to the condition of affairs in Arizona prior to the arrival of General Crook, as by no other means can the arduous nature of the work he accomplished be understood and appreciated. It was a cold and cheerless day—March 10, 1870—when our little troop, "F" of the Third Cavalry, than which a better never bore guidon, marched down the vertical-walled cañon of the Santa Catalina, crossed the insignificant sand-bed of the San Pedro, and came front into line on the parade-ground of Old Camp Grant, at the mouth of the Aravaypa. The sun was shining brightly, and where there was shelter to be found in the foliage of mesquite or cottonwood, there was the merry chatter of birds; but in the open spaces the fierce breath of the norther, laden with dust and discomfort, made the new-comers imagine that an old-fashioned home winter had pursued them into foreign latitudes. A few military formalities hastily concluded, a few words of kindly greeting between ourselves and the members of the First Cavalry whom we met there, and ranks were broken, horses led to the stables, and men filed off to quarters. We had become part and parcel of the garrison of Old Camp Grant, the memory of which is still fragrant as that of the most forlorn parody upon a military garrison in that most woe-begone of military departments, Arizona.

Of our march over from the Rio Grande it is not worth while to speak; as the reader advances in this book he will find references to other military movements which may compensate for the omission, even when it is admitted that our line of travel from Fort Craig lay through a region but little known to people in the East, and but seldom described. For those who may be sufficiently interested to follow our course, I will say that we started from Craig, marched to the tumble-down village of "Paraje de San Cristobal," at the head of the "Jornada del Muerto" (The Day's Journey of the Dead Man), which is the Sahara of New Mexico, then across to the long-since abandoned