Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/475

 young people grew up contented. And I remember Brown, Randall, and the other officers who treated us kindly and were our friends. I used to be happy; now, I am all the time thinking and crying, and I say, 'Where is old Colonel John Green, and Randall, and those other good officers, and what has become of them? Where have they gone? Why don't they come back?' And the young men all say the same thing."

"Pedro" spoke of the absurdity of arresting Indians for dancing, as had been done in the case of the "medicine man," "Bobby-doklinny"—of which he had much to say, but at this moment only his concluding remarks need be preserved: "Often when I have wanted to have a little fun, I have sent word to all the women and children and young men to come up and have a dance; other people have done the same thing; I have never heard that there was any harm in that; but that campaign was made just because the Indians over on the Cibicu were dancing. When you (General Crook) were here we were all content; but we can't understand why you went away. Why did you leave us? Everything was all right while you were here."

A matter of great grievance with the Apaches, which they could not understand, being nothing but ignorant savages and not up to civilized ways, was why their little farms, of which I will speak before ending this volume, should be destroyed—as they were—and why their cattle and horses should be driven off by soldiers and citizens. "Severiano," the interpreter, who was a Mexican by birth, taken captive in early youth, and living among the Apaches all his life, now said: "A lot of my own cattle were taken away by soldiers and citizens." Had the Apaches had a little more sense they would have perceived that the whole scheme of Caucasian contact with the American aborigines—at least the Anglo-Saxon part of it—has been based upon that fundamental maxim of politics so beautifully and so tersely enunciated by the New York alderman—"The 'boys' are in it for the stuff." The "Tucson ring" was determined that no Apache should be put to the embarrassment of working for his own living; once let the Apaches become self-supporting, and what would become of "the boys"? Therefore, they must all be herded down on the malaria-reeking flats of the San Carlos, where the water is salt and the air poison, and one breathes a mixture of sand-blizzards and more flies than were ever supposed