into the river, and then opened on them from an ambush in the reeds and killed the last one.
And then there have been "Pinole Treaties," in which the Apaches have been invited to sit down and eat repasts seasoned with the exhilarating strychnine. So that, take it for all in all, the honors have been easy so far as treachery, brutality, cruelty, and lust have been concerned. The one great difference has been that the Apache could not read or write and hand down to posterity the story of his wrongs as he, and he alone, knew them.
When the Americans entered the territory occupied or infested by the Apaches, all accounts agree that the Apaches were friendly. The statements of Bartlett, the commissioner appointed to run the new boundary line between the United States and Mexico, are explicit upon this point. Indeed, one of the principal chiefs of the Apaches was anxious to aid the new-comers in advancing farther to the south, and in occupying more of the territory of the Mexicans than was ceded by the Gadsden purchase. One of Bartlett's teamsters—a Mexican teamster named Jesus Vasquez—causelessly and in the coldest blood drew bead upon a prominent Apache warrior and shot him through the head. The Apaches did nothing beyond laying the whole matter before the new commissioner, whose decision they awaited hopefully. Bartlett thought that the sum of thirty dollars, deducted from the teamster's pay in monthly instalments, was about all that the young man's life was worth. The Apaches failed to concur in this estimate, and took to the war-path; and, to quote the words of Bartlett, in less than forty-eight hours had the whole country for hundreds of miles in every direction on fire, and all the settlers that were not killed fleeing for their lives to the towns on the Rio Grande. A better understanding was reached a few years after, through the exertions of officers of the stamp of Ewell, who were bold in war but tender in peace, and who obtained great influence over a simple race which could respect men whose word was not written in sand.
At the outbreak of the war of the Rebellion, affairs in Arizona and New Mexico became greatly tangled. The troops were withdrawn, and the Apaches got the notion into their heads that the country was to be left to them and their long-time enemies, the Mexicans, to fight for the mastery.
Rafael Pumpelly, who at that time was living in Arizona, gives
