Crook and his soldiers matched wits with the Indians and beat them at their own game. Wherever the Indians went there the troops followed them. They chased them on foot when their horses played out, lived on the scantiest possible allowance of food, slept in the deep snows with but a single blanket and without fires lest the telltale smoke give the Indians warning of their presence.
It was to surprise the occupants of one of these caves that Major Brown and his men were making this night march.
There the Apaches had fled, carrying into the cave great quant.i.ties of food and other necessary supplies, leaving their ponies behind to shift for themselves.
The cave itself is not a cave in the strict sense of the word, but rather a great weather-worn shelf, similar to those used by the ancient cliff dwellers for their habitations all over the Southwest.
At the outside edge the opening is about fifteen feet high from floor to roof, and sixty feet wide. The roof slopes back into the cliff for some thirty feet to a point where the rear wall is not over three feet high.
At the front, the floor of the cave projects some little distance beyond the overhanging cliff forming a sort of platform. Entirely around this platform the Apaches had raised a stone-wall several feet high, inside of which they rested in fancied security.
On top of the mountain Major Brown"s command, which numbered but fifty men and officers, with two civilian guides, waited while the two scouts wormed their way into the blackness of the canon"s depths in an attempt to make sure that the Indians did not have any pickets outside the cave to guard against surprise.
The cool night breeze made the soldiers" teeth chatter. Some dropped off to sleep, while others huddled together under the lee of the great rocks whose surface still gave off some slight warmth stored up during the day. Meantime they cursed, with a soldier"s vehemence, the slowness of the scouts in returning.
Finally they came, dropping into the midst of the men as if from above, so quietly did they move.
Five minutes of whispering followed between the guide, the Major and the Indians, and then Lieutenant W. J. Ross and a dozen men crawled away into the darkness with one of the Indians to guide them.
Again, those soldiers had begged to be taken as one of the party. No use to call for volunteers, they were all volunteers and envied the fortunate ones whom the tall First Sergeant named for the trip.
Ross was to endeavor to locate the entrance to the cave in order that the rest of the command might be posted in the most advantageous positions. His party dropped into the canon and was quickly swallowed up in its sombre shadows. Down they crept, stumbling over rocks, treading on the "Cholla" cactus b.a.l.l.s that covered the ground everywhere, and whose sharp needles will often pierce the heaviest buckskin gloves, moccasins or even leather boots. A misstep meant death far below in the canon, while every minute they looked for the crash of the Indians"
rifles.
As they felt their way carefully along, they saw the faint gleam of a campfire. Ross worked his men up as closely as he could, placing them in safe positions behind rocks scattered about. By the light of the fire, they made out some fifteen Indians standing about it while a lot of squaws were preparing food for them. The fire was but a few feet from the cave which could be seen dimly in the background, and it was quite evident the hostiles felt very secure in their retreat.
Scarcely daring to breathe, each picked out a brave for a target and at a whispered signal, fired. Those of the Indians who were not killed fled into the cave, while the report of the carbines quickly brought the rest of the command down into the canon.
Major Brown placed his men about the cave so as to prevent the escape of any of the Indians, waiting for daylight before attempting further operations.
One Apache managed to work his way out of the cave and through the cordon by some means. He was seen after he had pa.s.sed clear through the lines, standing for an instant on a great rock, his figure boldly outlined against the sky. His recklessness in his fancied security was his undoing, for one of the crack shots in the regiment, Private John Cahill, took a hasty shot at the form, and it came tumbling down the steep side of the canon.
After Major Brown had formed his lines about the cave he called on the Indians to surrender. This they answered with cries of defiance, followed by a few scattering shots which did no harm. Later on Brown again called on them to surrender, or if not that, to send out their women and children, promising no harm should come to them. Again the Indians refused to accept the offer. They heaped epithets, dear to the Apache heart, upon the soldiers, taunting them with cowardice, and a.s.suring them that they would soon be food for the buzzards and ravens.
"May the coyotes howl over your grave," is a favorite Apache expression of contempt, which they hurled at their opponents many times during the fight.
Daylight came slowly, and then the siege was on in earnest. Brown again renewed his offer of protection to the women and children, but to no purpose. Of arrows and lances, as well as fixed ammunition for their rifles, the Indians seemed to have an unlimited supply. They showered arrows upon the soldiers by hundreds, sending them high into the air, so they would fall upon the men lying behind the rocks scattered about.
Lances were also thrown in the same manner, but they were unable to inflict any damage upon the besiegers by such tactics. The Indians also played all the tricks belonging to their style of warfare. War bonnets and hats were raised upon lances above the wall with the intention of drawing the fire of some soldier and getting him exposed to a return shot. But Brown warned his men against all such schemes, and no harm was done by them.
Twice did small parties of the Indians make bold dashes out of the cave, evidently with the intention or hope of gaining the rear of the troopers to hara.s.s them from the heights above, or else to secure a.s.sistance from other bands of hostiles known to be in the vicinity. But these sorties were repulsed by the soldiers with a loss of several Indians.
Whether the trick of the Indians in shooting arrows at such an angle as to drop on the men behind the rocks suggested retaliation in kind, no one can say today; but finding direct firing without any great effect, Brown conceived the idea of having his men aim their carbines so that the bullets would strike against the roof of the cave; by so doing, he believed the bullets would be so deflected as to strike amongst the Indians huddled in the small s.p.a.ce below.
For some time the soldiers poured their fire against the rocky roof with no apparent results, although the shriek of a wounded squaw or the pitiful cry of some child, struck by the spattering lead, convinced them that some of the bullets were finding a mark.
The Indians fought with the desperation of trapped animals, but finally there came a lull in their fire. From the cave came a weird wild chant.
It was the death chant of the Apaches, which the scouts warned the officers meant a charge.
Soon they came; about twenty picked warriors clambering over the rocky wall, with the most desperate courage and recklessness. All were armed with both bow and rifle. Each carried on his back a quiver full of the slender reed arrows peculiar to the Apaches and, with a volley from their rifles, charged the soldiers behind their rocky breastworks.
Pandemonium reigned. The death chant was taken up by the squaws in the cave; the crack of guns in the deep canon, the shrieks of wounded and dying squaws and children, the yells of the soldiers as they met this fierce attack of the desperate savages, the flashing of rifle shots in the darkness, all made what an officer who was present (the late Captain John G. Bourke of the 3rd U. S. Cavalry) once told the writer was the most thrilling as well as the most appalling moment he ever knew during a lifetime full of exciting incidents.
But the efforts of the despairing Indians were fruitless, and they were driven back with heavy losses. Thus the fight went on for hours. The sun rose high in the heavens and beat down on the scene until the soldiers lying in the hot rocks suffered fearfully for water. Major Brown"s scheme was working, however, with frightful success. The death chant was ceaseless and the cries of defiance, rage, and despair rang out constantly from the penned-up savages.
One little Apache boy, possibly not over four years of age, toddled out of the side of the cave where the wall of rock was open, and stood gazing with wide-eyed wonder at the sight before him. One of Major Brown"s Indian scouts sprang from his hiding place behind a rock a few yards away, and running to the child, seized him by the arms, dragging him into the soldiers" lines before a single shot could be fired at him.
The small detachment, left behind as a rearguard and anxious to take part in the fighting, worked its way up to the cliff above the caves.
Below them they could hear the roar of carbines and the shrieks of the Indians. By means of straps, two adventurous soldiers were lowered far enough over the edge of the cliff to get a clear view of the scene below. The wall erected by the Apaches was several feet outside of the line of the cliff or cave, and from their dizzy height they could see the Indians lying behind their ramparts.
The top of the cliff was covered with boulders of all sizes, and the men at once conceived the idea of dropping boulders down on to the Indians beneath. This forced them to take refuge from the flying rocks, by retiring farther into the cave. When they did this the ricochette fire from the soldiers became more deadly and the end was not far off.
By noon the firing of the Indians had ceased. No sounds but the cries of the squaws or groans of wounded came from the interior of the cave.
Brown now prepared for a charge believing that the cave could be stormed without much if any loss. Corporal Hanlon of G-Troop, 5th Cavalry, was the first man over the stone-wall, the rest following him as rapidly as they could.
Inside the cave was a scene that made the roughest soldier among them shudder. Men, women, and children, either dead or in the agonies of death, were lying in piles three and four deep. At first it appeared as if danger was to be expected from some wounded Indian, and while part of the soldiers worked among the debris on the floor, others watched with guns in hand for signs of hostile intent. But nothing of the kind occurred.
Only one man was alive and he died soon after the soldiers entered the cave. Some seventy-eight dead bodies were lying in the cave, and of the living there were but eighteen, all squaws. Many of the wounded squaws could have been saved had the troops been accompanied by a surgeon or even provided with the necessary medical supplies.
The few that had lived through that awful hail of lead and rocks, were saved by screening themselves from the missiles under great slabs of slate which the squaws had packed into the caves for cooking purposes, or by hiding under or behind the dead bodies of their comrades.
The fight was over; the dead babies lay in their dead mothers" arms.
Rough men as they were, the sights made the soldiers sick at heart; such warfare was not to their liking.
As it was impossible to bury the dead, they were left in the cave where they fell and where they lie today, in great heaps of skulls and bones, together with clothing and other camp impedimenta which have survived the years in the dry atmosphere of the region.
After satisfying themselves that no more living were among the bodies the soldiers tramped wearily back to Fort McDowell with their prisoners and wounded, and the brief official report of the affair closed the incident.
It was more than a thousand miles over desert and mountain to the nearest railroad station and civilization. No war correspondent trailed along in their wake, armed with kodak and typewriter, to tell a waiting world of their prowess; no flaming headlines in the morrow"s paper would cry out their victory. They were "just regulars," and this was but the day"s work.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
[Ill.u.s.tration]
THE STAMPEDE ON THE TURKEY TRACK RANGE
By permission _The Cosmopolitan Magazine_
Dark. Well, it was dark, and no mistake. We had been holding a big herd of steers for a week. It was on the Turkey Track ranch, and they were mostly Turkey Track steers, that is, they were branded with the Santa Maria Cattle Company"s brand, which is a design ([symbol: Arrow]) on each side, called Turkey Track by the cowboys, who never think of using any other means of identifying a cow than by giving the name of the brand she carries.
And en pa.s.sant when a cowboy says "cow," he uses the word as a generic term for everything from a sucking calf up to a ten-year-old bull.
We were in camp in a n.o.ble valley some fifteen miles long by ten wide, dotted here and there by cedar groves, and at that season covered with splendid gra.s.s, where we were holding a bunch of steers that the company was getting ready to ship; it was a lazy enough life except the night-work. There was plenty of gra.s.s to graze them on in the daytime, and a big "dry lake" full of water, where three thousand head could drink at once, and never one bog or give any trouble. Two men on "day herd" at a time could handle them easily enough, and as there were nine of us, or enough for three guards of three men each, we didn"t have anything much to complain of.