Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/485

 General Crook returned late in the fall of 1882 to his headquarters at Fort Whipple, and awaited the inevitable irruption of the Chiricahua Apaches from their stronghold in the Sierra Madre in Mexico. Large detachments of Indian scouts, under competent officers, were kept patrolling the boundary in the vicinity of Cloverdale and other exposed points, and small garrisons were in readiness to take the field from Fort Bowie and other stations. The completion of the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé systems, and the partial completion of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, had wrought certain changes in the condition of affairs, to which reference may be made. In a military sense they had all been a great benefit by rendering the transportation of troops and supplies a matter of most agreeable surprise to those who still remembered the creaking ox-teams and prairie schooners, which formerly hauled all stores from the banks of the distant Missouri; in a social sense they had been the means of introducing immigration, some of which was none too good, as is always the case with the earlier days of railroad construction on the frontier.

The mining towns like Tombstone, then experiencing a "boom," had been increased by more than a fair quota of gamblers, roughs, and desperate adventurers of all classes. Cowboys and horse thieves flooded the southeastern corner of the Territory and the southwestern corner of the next Territory—New Mexico; with Cloverdale, in southwestern New Mexico, as a headquarters, they bade defiance to the law and ran things with a high hand, and made many people sigh for the better days when only red-skinned savages intimidated the settlements. The town of Phoenix had arisen in the valley of the Salt River, along the lines of prehistoric irrigating ditches, marking the presence of considerable population, and suggesting to Judge Hayden and others who first laid it out the propriety of bestowing the name it now bears. The new population were both intelligent and enterprising: under the superintendence of the Hon. Clark Churchill they had excavated great irrigating canals, and begun the planting of semi-tropical fruits, which has proved unusually remunerative, and built up the community so that it has for years been able to care for itself against any hostile attacks that might be threatened. Prescott, being off the direct line of railroad (with which, however, it has since been connected