Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/64

 Lent and Harpending, who were two of the most prominent of the members. An expedition, equipped at the expense of these gentlemen, made its way into Arizona to examine the mining "prospects" discovered in the vicinity of Fort Bowie. They had to come overland, of course, as there were no railroads, and wagons had to be taken from Los Angeles, the terminal point of steamer navigation, unless people preferred to keep on down to San Diego, and then cross the desert, via Fort Yuma, and on up the dusty valley of the Gila River to Tucson or Florence. The party of which I am now speaking was under the command of two gentlemen, one named Gatchell and the other Curtis, from the Comstock Mines in Nevada, and had reached and passed the picturesque little adobe town of Florence, on the Gila, and was progressing finely on the road toward Tucson, when "Cocheis," the bold leader of the Chiricahuas, on his march up from Sonora to trade stolen horses and have a talk with the Pinals, swooped down upon them. It was the old, old Arizona story. No one suspected danger, because there had been no signs of Indians on the trip since leaving the villages of the peaceful Pimas, on the Gila, near Maricopa Wells.

It was a perfect duplication of the Kennedy-Israel affair, almost to the slightest details. Mr. Curtis received a bad wound in the lungs. Mr. Gatchell was also wounded, but how severely I cannot remember, for the very good reason that there was so much of that kind of thing going on during the period of my stay at Camp Grant that it is really impossible to avoid mixing up some of the minor details of the different incidents so closely resembling one another.

When this party reached the post of Camp Grant they could easily have demanded the first prize at a tramp show; they were not clothed in rags—they were not clothed in anything. When they escaped from the wagon-train they were wearing nothing but underclothing, on account of the excessive heat of the day; when they got into Camp Grant most of the underwear had disappeared, torn off by the cactus, palo verde, mesquite, mescal, and other thorny vegetation run against in their flight. Their feet evidenced the rough, stony nature of the ground over which they had tramped and bumped, and thorns stuck in their legs, feet, and arms. There was not much done for these poor wretches, all of whom seemed to be gentlemen of education and