Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/63

 about, half-crazed with thirst, and maddened by the heat of the day or chilled by the cold winds of night in the mountains, and unable to tell which plants were of value as food and which were not.

The Apache was in no sense a coward. He knew his business, and played his cards to suit himself. He never lost a shot, and never lost a warrior in a fight where a brisk run across the nearest ridge would save his life and exhaust the heavily clad soldier who endeavored to catch him. Apaches in groups of two and three, and even individual Apaches, were wont to steal in close to the military posts and ranchos, and hide behind some sheltering rock, or upon the summit of some conveniently situated hill, and there remain for days, scanning the movements of the Americans below, and waiting for a chance to stampede a herd, or kill a herder or two, or "jump" a wagon-train.

They knew how to disguise themselves so thoroughly that one might almost step upon a warrior thus occupied before he could detect his presence. Stripped naked, with head and shoulders wrapped up in a bundle of yucca shoots or "sacaton" grass, and with body rubbed over with the clay or sand along which it wriggled as sinuously and as venomously as the rattler itself, the Apache could and did approach to within ear-shot of the whites, and even entered the enclosures of the military camps, as at Grant and Crittenden, where we on several occasions discovered his foot-prints alongside the "ollas," or water-jars.

On such occasions he preferred to employ his lance or bow, because these made no sound, and half or even a whole day might elapse before the stiffened and bloody corpse of the herder or wagoner would be found, and the presence of Indians in the vicinity become known. At least twenty such examples could be given from my own knowledge, occurring at Prescott, Tucson, Camp Grant, Camp Crittenden, Tres Alamos, Florence, Williamson's Valley, and elsewhere. They were regarded as the natural features of the country, and every settler rather expected them as a matter of course. Well did Torquemada, the Spanish writer ( 1709), deplore the inability of the Spaniards to make headway against this tribe of naked savages.

Californians old enough to remember the days when San Francisco had a Mining Stock Exchange, may recall the names of