Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/22



Navajo and Apache Indians; and their petition, officers and men, to be allowed the privilege of paying their own expenses to the seat of actual war; anxious at any cost to be partakers in those thrilling events where the actors, making for themselves name and history, began the initial emblazonment of personal escutcheons.

The material composing our State troops was magnificent. Stalwart, bigbearded men, hardened and bronzed by habitual exposure to every vicissitude of a miner's and farmer's life, came forward in such crowds that it was impossible to receive all who applied. I well remember many such scenes at Camp Downey, near Oakland, in 1861, where companies recruited in the mountains, far above the regulation strength, marched up for inspection to that camp; and how grand they seemed to me in their simple, anxious, earnest looks, fearing they would not be wanted. Every man with a valise or carpet-bag; every one well dressed; every one bearing facial testimonials of men who could be trusted to take honest, hearty part in those patriotie services for which they now volunteered. And I also remember the lengthened visages of those rejected, necessarily, by the mustering officer, as being in excess of the company strength, and their strenuous efforts to get in somewhere, being determined not to be left out of the struggle. The testimony of old army-officers, men of the Mexican and Indian, wars, is to this day that they were the best men, in every sense of that word, they had ever commanded; and they are even now so indorsed by such veterans as Carleton, Black, A. T. Smith, Sprague, and others.

In the spring of 1862 the California troops had got well forward, and were distributed at various points from Los Angeles to the Rio Grande. Their usefulness and necessity were now apparent in the gradual diminishing of those Indi an attacks which, in consequence of the withdrawal of our former troops, had become of frequent occurrence. The Indians had become aware of the schism in the Pale-Face councils, and doubtless knew by experience what such schisms portended. They knew, none better, that a house divided against itself can not stand very long, and reaped a good harvest of plunder by the knowledge, taking the entire contents of several military posts in consequence of our schisms—of which they had a full understanding from their Confederate and Mexican allies. To counteract this condition of affairs, the California troops were put in garrison at the old posts, and at several new ones. Among the latter was established Fort West, named after Colonel West, of the 1st California Infantry —an officer of great gallantry and some experience. The post was located in the vicinity of the Palo Alto and Santa Rita copper mines; near also to the site of old Fort McLane, and the present Fort Bayard, and about twentyfive miles west of the Mimbres River. The Gila River—one of those spasmodic streams which, as in all highly porous countries, is one day a rivulet, the next a torrent—takes its rise from the confluence of several streams in the mountains north and east of Fort West. Issuing directly from the Sierra Diablo—a far more diabolical sierra than its namesake, whose daily glooms at Benicia only provoke admiration—it takes a sympathetic westward course, to mingle, ultimately, in sweet dalliance with the red, rough, and rugged Colorado, telling that old traveler of all the wonders it has seen, and contributing its samples in admiring tribute. But before it nears the post, there interposes a longitudinal spur of the black, basaltic mountain range from which the river had issued, and "diabolously" is the poor stream thyust on one side, and forced to take a direct dip to the south, until its