Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/649

Rh soldiers five to one, but that he was at the last outwitted and entrapped, and, instead of being the captor of the wily Indians, had himself been captured. Policy alone, they said, had dictated to the Indians the advisability of allowing him to return, without massacring his whole command; so they compelled him to take out to the reservation all their old and worthless squaws,—all the non-combatants, in fact,—and then, with loins girded for battle, and with only their most agile warriors and the youngest of their squaws, they started to make reprisals upon the hated Mexicans.

This, in truth, would have been but consistent with the mistaken policy hitherto pursued by our government: to treat the Indian like a spoiled child, to allow him to pillage and murder all summer, then to cajole him into returning to the reservation, where he might fatten upon his ill-gotten gains all winter, and thus recruit for another campaign of terror. The noble red man thereby holds our prowess in light esteem, as well he may; for the spectacle of a nation of fifty million people quaking with dread over the anticipated depredations of less than three hundred Indians, is well calculated to inspire not only contempt but disgust.

But there are always two sides to a story, and I think that the following statement, furnished me by the same officer who prepared the map, and to whom I am indebted for a graphic description of the Apache country and the terrible journey undertaken into it, is not only entitled to the fullest confidence, but will bear the test of the revelations of the future.

"General Crook has been severely criticised by certain people because of their complete ignorance of the situation. First, the campaign is deemed a failure because it did not terminate in the utter extermination of the Chiricahua tribe of Indians. Secondly, his policy is condemned because he chose to accept the surrender of the Indians, instead of remaining in the mountains and continuing the pursuit.

"In answer to the first objection, it may be stated that the object of the campaign, as explained to the Mexican officers and understood by the troops under his command, was to free the