Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/29

 camp at what was called Fort MacRae, where we forded the river to the west, and then kept along the eastern rim of the timber-clad Mimbres Mountains, through Cow Springs to Fort Cummings, and thence due west to Camp Bowie, situated in the "Apache Pass" of the Chiricahua Mountains in Southeastern Arizona, a total distance of some one hundred and seventy miles as we marched.

There were stretches of country picturesque to look upon and capable of cultivation, especially with irrigation; and other expanses not a bit more fertile than so many brick-yards, where all was desolation, the home of the cactus and the coyote. Arizona was in those days separated from "God's country" by a space of more than fifteen hundred miles, without a railroad, and the officer or soldier who once got out there rarely returned for years.

Our battalion slowly crawled from camp to camp, with no incident to break the dull monotony beyond the ever-recurring signal smokes of the Apaches, to show that our progress was duly watched from the peaks on each flank; or the occasional breaking down of some of the wagons and the accompanying despair of the quartermaster, with whose afflictions I sympathized sincerely, as that quartermaster was myself.

I used to think that there never had been such a wagon-train, and that there never could again be assembled by the Government mules of whose achievements more could be written—whose necks seemed to be ever slipping through their collars, and whose heels never remained on terra firma while there was anything in sight at which to kick. Increasing years and added experience have made me more conservative, and I am now free to admit that there have been other mules as thoroughly saturated with depravity as "Blinky Jim," the lop-eared dun "wheeler" in the water-wagon team; other artists whose attainments in profanity would put the blush upon the expletives which waked the echoes of the mirage-haunted San Simon, and other drivers who could get as quickly, unmistakably, emphatically, and undeniably drunk as Mullan, who was down on the official papers as the driver of the leading ambulance, but, instead of driving, was generally driven.

There would be very little use in attempting to describe Old Fort Grant, Arizona, partly because there was really no fort to describe, and partly because few of my readers would be suffi