Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/505

 work done by "Chato" and the Chiricahuas who had remained on the reservation was of an inestimable value, and was fittingly recognized by General Crook, Captain Crawford, and the other officers in command of them.

Thirty-nine white people were killed in New Mexico and thirty four in Arizona, as established in official reports; in addition to these there were numbers of friendly Apaches killed by the renegades, notably in the raid made by the latter during the month of November, 1885, to the villages near Camp Apache, when they killed twelve of the friendlies and carried off six women and children captive. The White Mountain Apaches killed one of the hostile Chiricahuas and cut off his head. On the 23d of June, 1885, one of the hostile Chiricahua women was killed and fifteen women and children captured in an engagement in the Bavispe Mountains, northeast of Opata (Sonora, Mexico), by Chiricahua Apache scouts under command of Captain Crawford; these prisoners reported that one of their warriors had been shot through the knee-joint in this affair, but was carried off before the troops could seize him. July 29, 1885, two of the hostile Chiricahua bucks were ambushed and killed in the Hoya Mountains, Sonora, by the detachment of Apache scouts with Major Wirt Davis's command. August 7, 1885, five of the hostile Chiricahuas were killed (three bucks, one squaw, and one boy fifteen years old) by the Apache scouts of Wirt Davis's command, who likewise captured fifteen women and children in the same engagement (northeast of the little town of Nacori, Sonora, Mexico). On the 22d of September, 1885, the same scouts killed another Chiricahua in the mountains near Bavispe.

An ex-army-officer, writing on this subject of scouting in the southwestern country, to the Republican, of St. Louis, Mo., expressed his opinion in these words:

"It is laid down in our army tactics (Upton's 'Cavalry Tactics,' p. 477), that twenty-five miles a day is the maximum that cavalry can stand. Bear this in mind, and also that here is an enemy with a thousand miles of hilly and sandy country to run over, and each brave provided with from three to five ponies trained like dogs. They carry almost nothing but arms and ammunition; they can live on the cactus; they can go more than forty-eight hours without water; they know every water-hole and every foot of ground in this vast extent of country; they have incredible powers of endurance; they run in small bands, scattering at the first indications of pursuit. What can the United States soldier, mounted on his heavy American horse, with the neces