Page:Life among the Apaches.djvu/123

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LIFE AMONG THE APACHES.
117

people in cold blood. Finding that he had been discovered in his unspeakable villainies, he fled to New Mexico, where, by stealing and by purchase, he collected about two thousand five hundred head of sheep, with which he was passing into California, when he encountered his well-merited fate at the hands of the Yumas. Not a soul of his band escaped death.

At the period about which I am writing, Arizona and New Mexico were cursed by the presence of two or three hundred of the most infamous scoundrels it is possible to conceive. Innocent and unoffending men were shot down or bowie-knived merely for the pleasure of witnessing their death agonies. Men walked the streets and public squares with double-barreled shot guns, and hunted each other as sportsmen hunt for game. In the graveyard of Tucson there were forty-seven graves of white men in 1860, ten years after the events above recited, and of that number only two had died natural deaths, all the rest being murdered in broils and bar-room quarrels. Since Carleton's occupation of those Territories with his California Column, a great change for the better has taken place, and this melioration promises to gain ground.