Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/556

428 taking four days' rations with us. On the morning of the second day we came in sight of the canyon. The Lieutenant took a good look at it through his glasses, after which he said: "Captain, I think you named it well when you called it a Black canyon, for it looks as if it would be impossible to enter it on horseback." That day and the next was spent in trying to find where the Indians entered the canyon, and we at last discovered that they entered it from the east and west with horses, by descending a very abrupt mountain, and they were strung up and down the canyon for five miles. After the Lieutenant had made examinations of the location we started back to headquarters.

The Lieutenant and I fell back to the rear in order to have a private conversation relative to the situation. He said: "To be honest with you, I don't think it safe to go in there with less than two thousand soldiers, especially at this time of the year. If the Indians are as strong as they look to be, and have the advantage of the ground that they seem to have, it would only be sport for them to lie behind those rocks and shoot the soldiers down as fast as they could enter the canyon. This is the first time I ever went out hunting Indians, found them, and had to go away and let them alone. To tell the truth, I don't know what to do, for if I report to the General he will come at once with all his forces and accomplish nothing when here."

The Black canyon is in the northwest corner of Arizona, where it joins on to California and Nevada. Since that time there have been more soldiers killed in that place than in all the balance of Arizona territory.