When the West Was Young Part 24

The three living men took refuge under the wagons and stood off several rushes of the savages. Then the soldier who had been wounded got a second bullet and made up his mind he would be of more use in trying to seek help at Camp Grant than in staying where he was. He managed to creep off into the brush before the Indians got sight of him.

Now Whisky Bill and the other soldier settled down to make an afternoon's fight of it, and for three hours they held off the savages. Half a dozen naked bodies lay limp among the rocks to bear witness to the old teamster's marksmans.h.i.+p when a ball drilled him through the chest and he sank back dying.

There was only one chance now for the remaining trooper, and he took it. With his seven-shot rifle he dived out from under the wagon and gained the nearest clump of brush. At once the Apaches sallied forth from their cover in full cry after him.

Heedless of their bullets, he halted long enough to face about and slay the foremost of his pursuers; then ran on to a pile of rocks, where he made another brief stand, only to leave the place as his enemies hesitated before his fire. Thus he fled, stopping to shoot when those behind him were coming too close for comfort; and eventually they gave up the chase.

In Camp Grant, where he arrived at sundown, he found his fellow-trooper, badly wounded but expected to live, under care of the post surgeon. And the detachment who went out after the renegades buried the two teamsters beside the road where they had died fighting.

One against many; that was the rule in these grim fights. But the affair which took place on the Cienega de Souz, fifteen miles above the old San Simon stage-station and twenty-five miles from Port Bowie, tops them all when it comes to long odds. On October 21, 1871, one sick man battled for his life against sixty-odd Apaches and--won out.

R. M. Gilbert was his name; he was ranching and for the sake of mutual aid in case of Indian raids he had built his adobe house at one end of his holding, within two hundred yards of his neighbor's home. The building stood on bare ground at the summit of a little rise near the Cienega bottom, where the gra.s.s and tulles grew waist-high.

Early in the month of October Gilbert was stricken with fever, and Richard Barnes, the neighbor, moved into his house to take care of him. The patient dragged along after a fas.h.i.+on until the early morning of the twenty-first found him wasted almost to skin and bone, weak, bedridden. And about six o'clock that morning Barnes left the house to go to his own adobe.

The Apaches, according to their habit when they went forth to murder isolated settlers or prospectors, had chosen the dawn for the hour of attack, and they were lying in the tall gra.s.s in the Cienega bottom when Barnes emerged from the building. They let him go almost to the other adobe before they opened fire; and he dropped at the volley, dying from several wounds.

Then Gilbert, who had not stirred from his bed for many days, leaped from his blankets and took down a Henry rifle from the cabin wall. He had been weak; now that thing which men call "sand" gave strength unto him; and he ran from the house to rescue his companion.

The Apaches were rus.h.i.+ng from the tulles toward the prostrate form. He paused long enough to level his rifle and fire; then came on again.

And the savages fell back. It was easier to bide in the shelter of the tulles and kill off this mad white man than to show themselves and run a chance of getting one of his bullets.

They reasoned well enough; but something mightier than logic was behind Gilbert that morning. With the strength which comes to the fever-stricken in moments of supreme excitement he reached his friend, picked him up, and while the bullets of his enemies kicked up dust all about him bore him on his shoulders back into the cabin. There he laid him down and proceeded to hold the place against besiegers.

The Apaches deployed until they were surrounding the house. Then they opened fire once more, and as they shot they wriggled forward, coming ever closer until some of them were so near that they were able to place their bullets through the rude loopholes which the settler had made for defense of his home.

All the morning the battle went on. Sometimes the savages varied their tactics by rushes and even thrust the barrels of their rifles through the windows. The room was filled with smoke. During lulls in the firing Gilbert heard the groaning of his companion; he heard the moans change to the long, harsh death-rattle.

Some time during the noon-hour as he was standing at a loophole shooting at a bunch of naked, frowzy-haired warriors who had appeared in front of the building, an Apache brave who had stolen up behind the adobe took careful aim through a broken window and got him in the groin. But the sick man bound a handkerchief about the wound and dragged himself from window to window, loading his rifle, firing whenever a turban showed.

About midafternoon a venturesome group of warriors rushed the side hill, gained the cabin wall and flung bundles of blazing f.a.gots on the roof. And within ten minutes the inside of the place was seething with smoke-clouds; showers of sparks were dropping on the floor; flaming shreds of brush were falling all about the sick man.

He groped his way to the bed and called Barnes. There was no answer.

He bent down and peered through the fumes at the other's face. Death had taken his friend.

Gilbert loaded his rifle and a revolver. With a weapon in either hand he flung open the door, and as he ran forth he saw in the hot afternoon suns.h.i.+ne the shadow of an Indian who was hiding behind a corner of the building. He leaped toward the place and as the warrior was stepping forth shot him in the belly. Then he fled for the tulles in the Cienega bottom.

Under a shower of bullets he gained the shelter of the reeds. And during all the rest of that afternoon he lay there standing off the Apaches. When darkness came he crawled away. All night and all the next day he traveled on his hands and knees and finally reached the hay camp of David Wood, sixteen miles away.

Wood dressed his wounds and sent word to Camp Bowie, and a troop of cavalry chased the renegades into the Chiracahua Mountains, where they eventually escaped, to make their way back to the reservation in time for next ration-day.

These tales are authentic, and are but a few examples of the battles which the old-timers fought during the years while they were winning the Southwest away from the Indians. Some of those old-timers are living to this day.

There is one of them dwelling in Dragoon Pa.s.s, where the mountains come down to the lowlands like a huge promontory fronting the sea.

Uncle Billy Fourrs is his name; and if you pa.s.s his place you can see, on a rocky knoll, the fortress of boulders which he built to hold his lands against the renegades back in the seventies.

Not many years ago some Federal agents had Uncle Billy up in Tucson on a charge of fencing government land, for according to the records he had not gone through the formality of taking out some of the requisite papers for proper possession. That case is one instance of a man pleading guilty and getting acquittal.

For Uncle Billy Fourrs acknowledged the formal accusation and still maintained the land was his own.

"How," asked the government prosecutor, "did you get it?"

"I took it away from the Indians," was the answer. And the jury, being an Arizona jury, promptly acquitted him. Which, was, when you come to think over such incidents as the foregoing, only simple justice.

THE OVERLAND MAIL

From the time when the first lean and bearded hors.e.m.e.n in their garments of fringed buckskin rode out into the savage West, men gave the same excuse for traveling that hard road toward the setting sun.

The early pathfinders maintained there must be all manner of high-priced furs off there beyond the sky-line. The emigrants who followed in the days of '49, informed their neighbors that they were going to gather golden nuggets in California. The teamsters who drove the heavy freight-wagons over the new trails a few years later told their relatives and friends that they were going West to better their fortunes. And when the Concord coaches came to carry the mail between the frontier settlements and San Francisco, the men of wealth who financed the different lines announced there was big money in the ventures; the men of action who operated them claimed that high wages brought them into it.

So now you see them all: pathfinder, argonaut, teamster, stage-driver, pony-express rider, and capitalist, salving their consciences and soothing away the trepidations of their women-folk with the good old American excuse that they were going to make money.

As a matter of fact that excuse was only an excuse and nothing more.

In their inmost hearts all these men knew that they had other motives.

There was one individual who did not try to hoodwink himself or others about this Western business, and if you will but take the time to look into his case you will be able easily to diagnose an itching which was troubling all the rest of them.

That Individual was usually taken most acutely with his ailment on a warm May morning, one of those mornings when the lawless youths of the village decided to play hooky in the afternoon and test the temperature of the swimming-hole. On such a morning he was to be found somewhere near the center of the school-room, this being the point most remote from the distraction of open windows and hence selected for him by the teacher. He was seated at a small desk whose top was deeply scored by carven initials and monograms of rude design, all inked in to give them the boldness of touch necessary when one would have his art impress the beholder. An open book lay on that desk-top but the eyes of the Individual were not focused on its pages.

He was gazing--aslant so that the teacher would not detect him at it--through one of those remote open windows. And he was not seeing the roofs of the little town or the alluring line of low wooded bluffs across the river. He was seeing swarms of Indians mounted bare-back on swift ponies.

Swarms and swarms of them, stripped to the waist, befeathered, trousered in tightly fitting buckskin, they were defying all the laws of gravitation by the manner in which every one clung by a single heel to his mustang, allowing his body to droop alongside in a negligently graceful att.i.tude. These savages were circling round and round a stage-coach. And on the top of that stage-coach, with his trusty rifle at his shoulder--while the driver beside him died a painful death,--sat the Individual himself. None other. And he was certainly playing havoc with those redskins.

We need not undergo the weary ordeal of waiting with him while the clock's slothful hands creep around the dial. We may skip the interval--as he would do ever so gladly if he only could--and see him that night as he climbs from his bedroom window, crawls down the woodshed roof, and drops from the low eaves to make his way across the vacant lot next door and thence--out West.

As far perhaps as the next town, which lies seven miles or so away; where he is overhauled and ignominiously dragged back to civilization.

That Individual--the only one of them all who did not attain the consummation of his hopes, the only one who had to stay at home--is the sole member of the foregoing list who acknowledged his true motives. For he a.s.serted loudly, and with lamentations, that the spirit of adventure was blazing within him; he wanted to go out West to fight Indians and desperadoes.

Resisting the temptation to indulge in dissertation concerning the beneficial effects of the dime-novel on the morale of successive younger generations, we return to the men who said that they went beyond the Mississippi to gain money. Like the schoolboy they were hot with the l.u.s.t for adventure. The men of action wanted to risk their lives, and the men of wealth wanted to risk their dollars.

Which does not imply that the latter element were anxious to lose those dollars any more than it implies that the former expected to lose their lives. But both were eager for the hazard.

Like the schoolboy all of them dreamed dreams and saw visions. And the dreams were realized; the visions became actualities. Few of them justified their excuse of money-making; many came out of the adventure poorer in this world's goods than when they went into it. But every man of them had the time of his life and lived out his days with a wealth of memories more precious than gold; memories of a man's part in a great rough drama.

The Winning of the West, that drama has been called. Perhaps no act in the play attained the heights which were reached by the last one before the coming of the railroad, the one with which this story has to deal, wherein bold men allied themselves on different sides to get the contract of carrying the mails by stage-coaches on schedule time across the wilderness.

And in the tale of this great struggle there is another motive in addition to the love of adventure--and like that love, unacknowledged by those whom it stirred,--the strong instinctive desire for a closer union which exists among all Americans.

In the beginning there was a frontier two hundred miles or so west of the Mississippi River. Behind that frontier wide-stacked wood-burning locomotives were drawing long trains on tracks of steel; steamers came sighing up and down the muddy rivers; cities smeared the sky with clouds of coal smoke; under those sooty palls men in high hats and women in enormous hoop-skirts pa.s.sed in afternoon promenade down the sidewalks; newspapers displayed the day's tidings in black head-lines; the telegraph flashed messages from one end of that land to the other; and where the sharp church steeple of the most remote village cut the sky, the people read and thought and talked the same things which were being discussed in Delmonico's at the same hour.

Beyond the Sierra Nevadas there was another civilization. In San Francisco hotel lobbies men and women pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed one another dressed in Eastern fas.h.i.+ons--some months late, but Eastern fas.h.i.+ons none the less. Newspapers proclaimed the latest tidings from the East in large type. Men were falling out over the same political issues which embroiled men by the Atlantic seaboard; they were embarking in the same sort of business ventures.

But two thousand miles of wilderness separated these two portions of the nation. That vast expanse of prairies as level as the sea, of sage-brush plains, of snow-capped mountains and silent, deadly deserts, was made more difficult by bands of hostile Indians.