On the Border With Crook - ERBzine

ALCHISE'S SPEECH. 437young people grew up contented. And I remember Brown,Bandall, and the other officers who treated us kindly and were ourfriends. I used to be happy ; now, I am all the time thinking'and crying, and I say, Where is old Colonel John Green, andRandall, and those other good officers, and what has become ofthem ? Where have they gone?Why don't they come back?'And the young men all say the same thing/'" Pedro" spoke of the absurdity of arresting Indians fordancing, as had been done in the case of the " medicine man,"" " Bobby-doklinny of which he had much to say, but at thismoment only his concluding remarks need be "preserved Often:when I have wanted to have a little fun, I have sent word to allthe women and children and young men to come up and have adance ;other people have done the same thing ;I have neverheard that there was any harm in that ;but that campaign wasmade just because the Indians over on the Cibicu were dancing.When you (General Crook) were here we were all content ;butwe can't understand why you went away. Why did you leaveus ?Everything was all right while you were here."A matter of great grievance with the Apaches, which theycould not understand, being nothing but ignorant savages andnot up to civilized ways, was why their little farms,of which Iwill speak before ending this volume, should be destroyed asthey were and why their cattle and horses should be driven offby soldiers and "citizens. Severiano," the interpreter, who wasa Mexican by birth, taken captive in early youth, and livingamong the Apaches all his life, now said : "A lot of my owncattle were taken away by soldiers and citizens." Had theApaches had a little more sense they would have perceived thatthe whole scheme of Caucasian contact with the Americanaborigines at least the Anglo-Saxon part of it has been basedupon that fundamental maxim of politics so beautifully and sotersely enunciated by the New York alderman "The ' boys'are in it for the stuff." The " "Tucson ring was determined thatno Apache should be put to the embarrassment of working forhis own living ;once let the Apaches become self-supporting, andwhat would become of "the boys"? Therefore, they must allbe herded down on the malaria-reeking flats of the San Carlos,where the water is salt and the air poison, and one breathes amixture of sand-blizzards and more flies than were ever supposed