The Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DURABLE SINNER

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OWEN P. WHITE

The Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT,

1942,

BY

OWEN

P.

WHITE

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Jl.AKUPACTUa&D IK THE UKITKD STATE.SOP AMEalCA

Introduction

That it was my privilege to have been born six hundred miles from a railroad in a one-room adobe shack, with a dirt floor and a dirt roof that perpetually leaked scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and other forms of livestock down upon my mother and myself, was due to a very trivial thing. A mere scrap of paper. But as I look forward to the task ahead of mo-that of boastfully recording the events of a very unorthodox career-I realize that it has always been trivial things that have made my life-especially that part of it that was lived in the funniest, liveliest, and toughest town on the frontier -inspiring and educational. For instance if it had not been for as unimportant an item as a profane monkey sitting on a gatepost I would certainly never have met the irresistible Mrs. Tuck. And if I had never met Mrs. Tuck the probabilities are that she would never have recovered her lost fortune in diamonds, and neither would the heart of Pat Garrett, the mighty mankiller who destroyed Billy the Kid, have turned so many unrequited somersaults inside of his manly bosom. Or again, if old John Selman, after telling me to get the hell home, and to bed, had not shot Mr. John Wesley Hardin squarely in the back of the head, the chances arc that Albert B. Fall, who rode to sudden local fame on the coattails of the assassin, might have died an honest man. He might have, but I doubt it. All through this volume it will be exactly that way. Little things beget big ones. A wealthy Chinaman buys a ticket, enters the theater, glances upward into the eyes of a trio of Creole beauties in a box; the three lovely creatures draw straws for him, the youngest wins, and instantly the current of life for quite a number of people is switched off into a new channel.

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A clear-eyed young man draws one card in a poker game, and once more a mere scrap of paper has had an unhealthy influence on the morals and happiness of a whole lot of people in this country. According to local tradition that card was an ace. It made four for the young man, who won a hatful of money on the hand, and at once the notorious Bradley brothers, who together own a couple of Derby winners and the toniest gambling hell in America, and who also financed the inexplicable Dr. Cook in his alleged discovery of the North Pole, are on their way to fame and fortune. Kitty Freeman, dark and dangerous, shoots Alice Abbott, round, fat, and jolly, through the stomach with a -45· Alice dies, and on the day of her death a small red-headed doctor who has worked hard to save her says to a twelve-year-old boy that Heaven is no place for him if Alice Abbott can't get in. Finally, a good many years later, a bank fails. That twelve-yearold boy, now grown into a lean, gaunt man past forty, finding only thirty cents in his pocket, reluctantly decides that at last he will have to go to work. But at what? Having no asset, other than a most tolerant, comprehensive knowledge of sin, he decides to become a writer. Sin pays, because with astonishing ease he horns his way so close to the top in the field of jitney journalism that before long he finds his name carried at the masthead of Colliers: The National Weekly, as associate editor. It stays there for years, and during those years this man's knowledge of another kind of sin: covert sin, as it is practiced by the good and the great in contrast with the open sin honestly indulged in by gals, gamblers, and gunfighters, increases so amazingly that he makes up his mind that some day he will write a book about all of it. He is now doing so.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DURABLE SINNER

Chapter One

The small scrap of newspaper which shaped my destiny I still have with me. It is before me now, yellow with age and with grease spots still on it, and as I look it over I can picture exactly what happened. In the early fall of 1878, way up on the South Fork of the Platte River, a small, red-headed man had just finished loading his wagon with driftwood. Some of the logs he had heaved aboard were bigger than he was, and he was tired. He unhooked and hobbled his horses, turned them loose to graze, and sat down to eat his own lunch. As he ate it he read this scrap of newspaper-his lunch had been wrapped in it-and when, under "Government Appointments," he noted that S. C. Slade, of Talbot County, Maryland, had been named collector of customs at El Paso, Texas, he muttered to himself: "Huh, so Slade's going to El Paso, is he? Damn if I don't go there myself." That settled it. He went. He hooked up his team, drove home, announced his intention, saddled his horse, handed my mother the piece of newspaper, kissed her and my brother, who was then about a year old, a fond good-by, said that he'd send for them as soon as possible, and away he rode. About two months later, at the top of the Raton Pass in northern New Mexico, at night and in the midst of a snowstorm, the northbound stage from El Paso to Denver met a buckboard drawn by four mules going in the opposite direction. Both vehicles stopped, and a passenger in the stage shouted at the driver of the buckboard: "Is there any chance that you have Mrs. White with you?" "There is," replied my mother. "I am Mrs. White. What is it?" "I am delighted to greet you, madam," said the voice in the dark. "My name's Evans; I'm a special agent of the Treasury Department,

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and when I left El Paso, eight days ago, your husband asked me to tell you, if I met you on the road, to hurry along as he's very anxious for you to get there." "No more than I am," answered my mother, "but thank you, Mr. Evans, and if you ever get to El Paso again come and see us." "I will." The answer floated back through the snowstorm, and some twenty-five years later, under very peculiar circumstances, he did. He came to see me! The buckboard rolled on. Las Vegas appeared, and my mother welcomed the sight of the place, with its promise of a night's rest, as if it were a little bit of Heaven. In reality it was a very active comer of Hell. The Exchange Hotel faced the plaza, and from it during the early part of the night came the murmuring of many voices. They were determined voices, and in the morning, when my mother drew aside the window curtain and looked out and saw what they had meant she fell back, faint and sick at the sight that met her eyes. Hanging from the cross anns of an old windmill that stood in the center of the plaza dangled the bodies of four men! My mother never knew the particulars of this hanging, and neither do I know them. All I have been able to learn is that on that night, in November, 1878, the Vigilantes of Las Vegas cleaned up their town a bit by hanging a quartet of citizens of whose activities they disapproved. The remainder of that buckboard journey to El Paso, except for the nerve-shattering risks that go with fording rivers and driving along canyon rims, was accomplished without mishap. The Indian menace did not count. It was perpetual. My mother's hair was already white from having endured several years of it; and as it was also an old, old story to the driver, he met it by cussing his mules a bit more fervently, pouring the leather into them with greater vigor, and going through the danger zones, including the ninety- . mile dash across the waterless Jomado del Muerte, in the dark and on the run. In 1878 the only thing El Paso could brag about was its reputation. But that was enough. Ever since 1807, when Zebulon Pike, who discovered Pike's Peak, also discovered El Paso and in his reports advertised its glories to the world, the town had been known

Autobiography of a Durable Si1l1ler

s

adventurers everywhere as one whose liquor was cheap and potent, whose gambling was without limit, and whose dusky senoritas were gracious, and obliging. Only one more touch was needed to make El Paso utopian, and it had it. Except for a few custom house officers, whose sole duty was to discourage smugglers, it was without law. There wasn't even a town marshal, and murder was so frequent that El Paso had never acquired a permanent population of more than fifty Americans. Transients were numerous. Being located at the intersection of the old Spanish Trail from Sante Fe to Mexico City and the Butterfield Stage Route from San Antonio to Los Angeles, El Paso was a natural stop-over for many strangers. They came, they saw, they drank. They gambled, they loved, they quarreled, and they died. It was a constructive arrangement: one that permitted no weaklings to survive. In other words, in 1878, El Paso, with a population of less than forty Americans, who held undisputed six-shooter control over four or five hundred Mexicans, was a tough town in which the problem of housing a family would have been a hard one for most men to solve. But not for my father, who had gotten a job as deputy collector of customs. He solved it quite easily by calling at a Mexican's shack and suggesting to him that he fonhwith vacate. He fonhwith did so, and after my father had paid him the eight or nine dollars that the house was wonh my mother moved in, and thus found herself installed in an establishment that was all her own. And what an establishment that was! The Mexicans had a word for it. They called it a jacalito: a little hut, and that was all it was. Anything, though, that this jacalito lacked in appearance it made up for in location. It was at the center of everything. Standing in her own front door my mother had a clear view of the finish line of a straightaway race track, the Overland Stage Station, a big wagon yard, the community cockpit, the entrances to half a dozen saloons and gambling houses, and finally, of the custom house, in whose huge corral large bellowing herds of smuggled longhorns, seized by my father and other customs men, were always penned up. In such an environment as this, with horse races and cock fights constantly going on, with stages continually arriving and depaning, and with citizens, who felt it their civic duty to get drunk at least once every day, perpetually reeling in and out of the saloons, my to

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mother never endured a dull moment. In fact, due to the character of my father's job, she never enjoyed one that was free from worry. In those days cattle smuggling was the chief border industry, and as the men who engaged in it were always ready to resist arrest clear up to their last cartridge, the business of "riding the line" was a job for men only. Suange to say my father, who was a doctor by profession, actually enjoyed it even though he had to leave my mother and brother alone and unguarded in the little hut for days at a time. As an illustration of this: about two weeks before my birth, having picked up the uail of a pair of smugglers who had driven a herd of "wetbacks" across the river, my father and Joe Magoffin disappeared in a cloud of dust in pursuit of them. Ten days later they reappeared, and when my mother asked what he had been doing all that time my father replied: "Nothing. We just had to chase those fellows a long way. We ran them from here to Deming, from Deming to Columbus, and from Columbus down to Guzman." "What?" exclaimed my mother. "To Guzman! Why that's in Mexico; you didn't arrest them down there, did you?" "No," answered my father, "of course not. We didn't want to arrest them. We wouldn't have done that even if we had overtaken them on this side of the line." And then, soon after that conversation, with my mother bearing me, and my father delivering me and giving me the required smack to cause me to utter my first wail of protest, I was born.

Chapter Two

The .first thing of which I have any distinct recollection was a

pair of gaudily beaded Indian moccasins. I looked down at my feet md there they were. They were the only shoes I had. I was wearing them, and was trailing along behind my father, who had a gun on Im shoulder. Suddenly he stopped, blazed away at a hawk that flew over us, and I turned and headed for home. But home now was not the home in which I had been born. It was worse. Our El Paso ;.clllito had been located at the center of a community that was explosive and interesting, whereas this one, in Arivaca, Arizona, stood at the exact geometrical middle of about twenty-five or thirty thousand square miles of complete emptiness. At any rate from the two-foot elevation from which I was able to view the world, that was the way it seemed to me. Naturally I was slightly wrong about it, because if I had been able, as my brother was, to clamber to the roof of our mansion, I would have discovered that in the adjacent area there were perhaps a dozen other adobe huts which were all exactly alike, except that above ours there floated the American

ftag. Yes, there was the flag. I could see it, and appreciate it because my brother and I always enjoyed standing beside my father every morning and afternoon when he raised and lowered it. But what we enjoyed even more than the ceremony itself were the comments which accompanied it. They were lurid and eloquent, and as they were always the same it didn't take me very long to grasp the idea that the flag itself was responsible for the fact that we were not only living in the most dangerous spot on the Mexican border, but had also achieved an all-time low in a never too high standard of living.

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But this lack of luxury was not due to lack of diligence on my father's part. It was the exact reverse. In those robust days the government's reward to a man who had done a tough job well was to hand him a tougher one. And on that basis my father had qualified, because aher about ten months in El Paso he was transferred first to Silver City, New Mexico, where he remained for nearly two years, and then to Arivaca. Of course I was too young to remember these moves, but I've heard the story many times. When I was six months old I took my first ride in a stagecoach. The ride was a long one, six hundred miles of it, from El Paso to Denver; and as New Mexico, through which we traveled lengthwise, was then teeming with Apaches, it was not a journey that I would have undertaken if I could have avoided it. But I couldn't; I wasn't even consulted in the matter, and neither was my father. A "jackass" gentleman in Washington simply ordered him to go to Silver City and that settled it. He had to go, which was disastrous, as there was not a hut or a hovel in the town in which he could house his family. Consequently there was but one thing to do. He couldn't leave us alone in the wicked town of El Paso, he couldn't take us with him and stake us out, or store us in a cave, and so, on a bright cold morning in January 1880 he put us aboard the stagecoach, and started us back up the long trail to Colorado. I must have got a great kick out of that trip. There I was, cooped up in that stage with five other human beings-three gun-toting frontiersmen and my mother and brother-who were entirely at my mercy. I had none. According to my mother, I was as mean, as low, as ornery, and as indecent as a child could be. I was without reverence or respect either for her or any of the other passengers, and she always marveled, she said, at the patience and tolerance of the gunmen, who instead of hitting me over the head and heaving me out the window, took turns at allowing me to pull their whiskers, twist my fists in their heavy gold watch chains, and work my teeth through by chewing on the sights of their six-shooters. During this trip nothing startling occurred except that near Albuquerque we passed through a Mexican village just a few hours too late to be present at an Apache ceremony in which a man and a boy had been scalped, a couple of girls stolen, and several buildings burned.

Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

9 Although I know she gave no indication of it, the sight of those two dead men, and the thought of the two girls who had been captured and carried away must have made a lasting impression upon my mother. Up to that time her experience with Indians had been in the nature of real combat. Standing shoulder to shoulder with my father at his ranch on the Platte she had exchanged shot for shot with a shouting, yelling, visible enemy, and doubtless had gotten as much exhilaration out of it as had the men. But this thing in the Mexican village was different. The smoldering buildings, the scalped Mexicans, the soul-paralyzing thought of the fate in store for the two girls, brought before her for the first time a really clear picture of what Apache warfare meant. Then too she was now a mother. Up on the Platte her life had been spicy and romantic because of the element of danger. But then there had been no children. Now there were two baby boys and I know that right there in that little town in New Mexico, with no one around her except some of the rough men of the frontier, the weight of her responsibility must have come down upon her with tremendous force. But she did not falter. It wouldn't have done her any good if she had. 5m: had linked her destiny with that of her husband, he had linked his with that of the frontier, and so she went right ahead unwaveringly and wicomplainingly. She took life on the frontier just as she found it. We reached Evans, Colorado, safely, remained there in a little frame hotel with my mother's family for almost a year, and then in response to a mandate from my father, who had built a house for us, mostly with his own hands, we again started south-for Silver

City. This time the trip was much easier. The Santa Fe, which was building its line as rapidly as possible toward El Paso, had pushed its nilhead as far south as the station of Rincon, and so to that point we were able to travel by train. But it was not travel de luxe. An acconunodation car hooked on at the tail end of a string of flats 102ded with ties and rails was all the service the road provided, and as the fanher we went the softer the road bed became, it was not surprising that near Rincon our wood-burning engine jwnped the

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rails and rolled down into the ditch. This mishap saved our lives for us. My mother frequently told me the story of it. As a result of the accident we reached Rincon at noon instead of at six in the morning as we should have done. A profane stage driver, who had been notified by my father that we would be on that train, and six restless mules, were waiting at Rincon and we lost no time in getting away. My mother put my brother and myself aboard the stage, and as soon as the express and mail had been stowed in the boot and the driver and a couple of guards had swung the~lves to the box, we were off with the usual cloud of dust, the customary cheers from the bystanders, and the regulation popping of the sixteen-foot whiplash. It was lovely and picturesque and is fine to write about. The situation was filled with romance and motion-picture action, but the thrill of it all was ruined for my mother when one of the guards, after we had been on the road but a short time, leaned down from the box and comfortingly called out to her: "Like as not, ma'm, we're going to run into a little fight this afternoon, 'cause the Indians has been a-rampagin' around in these hills pretty regular for the past couple o' weeks." From Rincon to Silver City is about seventy miles. Today Rincon is a prosperous little railroad town plastered all over with "Safety First" and "Tum to the Right" signs, while Silver City is a semiaristocratic health resort composed mostly of sanatoriums and sleeping porches. Along the road between the two places there now flits a constant stream of heavily laden automobiles filled with gaping tourists, industrious salesmen, and hopeful Jungers. But in 1881 it was not like that. In that year nobody traveled the road between "Silver" and Rincon for his health, his pleasure, or to absorb the scenery. In fact at that time that particular bit of highway was looked upon by men who knew as one of the most unhealthy and unattractive stretches of road in America. It undoubtedly was. Whether my mother replied to the guard's cheerful announcement is not in the record. She probably didn't. She was probably too busy with her own anxieties, and my personal demands, to feel like indulging in any needless conversation, and so, in silence, the miles rolled out behind us.

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At the first stage station, where we should have changed mules, no mules were to be had. ''The Indians stole 'cm off the range early this mornin'," announced the station keeper, and then in a different tone he added, "And they got a couple of the boys who was hcrdin' 'cm too." 1bat was all the station keeper said, but it was very impressive. Neither the guards, nor the driver made any reply. They looked at one another and then they looked at my mother. They were thinking, and she knew it, not of themselves but of her and her two babies, and they were waiting for her to speak. She said: "Can we make it as far as Fort Bayard with these same mules?" The driver looked up at the sun. "Ycs'm," he said, ''we can, by dark maybe, and I reckon it's the best thing to do too, 'cause this ain't no place for you and them boys, and it ain't no place for a fight neither. Let's go." Reinforced by one man, the stationkcepcr, we were off again. The traveling was slow. The six mules had been pushed hard into their collars for three hours. They were tired, hungry, and stUbbom, and the miles and the minutes dragged heavily. Half an hour passed and the stage stopped suddenly. My mother heard some low muttering from the men on the box. and then one of the guards jumped down, came to the side of the coach and said, apologetically, and almost as if he were to blame for it: "They're a-comin' now, ma'm, a lot of 'cm. Thcy's a big dust up the road about three mile, we can see it plain, and pretty soon they's goin' to be quite a bit o' shooting. But don't you worry none, ma'm. You jest set tight, and take it easy, and we'll fight 'em off. You ain't afraid, arc you, ma'm?" ''No, I'm not afraid. I know you boys will get us out all right," and then, as the guard turned away from the window of the coach, my mother did a strange thing. From the bosom of her dress she drew out a locket, opened it, took out a folded paper, opened that, and after making sure that its contents-half a dozen harmlesslooking pills-were safe, she gathered my brother and myself close in her arms and "set tight." I have never liked to think of the agonized moments that followed. Over and over again my mother had promised my father that she

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would kill her two children and herself before she would let the Indians take us alive. In that locket was enough cyanide to kill a dozen people, and in my mother's heart was the unshaken resolve to fulfill her promise. It was to be the last thing, and of course was never resorted to, but the mere resolution has always represented to me a courage and a detennination that are indescribably sublime. The stage was turned around so that the mules would be somewhat protected from the fire of the Indians, and everybody waited. That was all they could do, and thus the grim moments passed until, when the Indians were within half a mile of us, and their forms could be clearly distinguished the whole band suddenly wheeled from the road, and still riding at top speed, headed for the foothills. For a moment or two this was inexplicable. My mother, the guards, and the driver gazed at the fleeing savages in amazement and then, out of a second cloud of dust, half a mile behind the one raised by the Apaches, came a troop of United States Cavalry. Half of this troop turned off in pursuit of the redskins; the other half came on to the stage, and as its dusty, dirty Captain-who, if he is still alive will undoubtedly remember the occasion-pulled up his horse at the side of the coach and jerked off his cap, he said: "I am Captain Whitehead, and, I thank God, Mrs. White, for the sight of you." "And I thank Him, most fervently, for the sight of you, Captain," replied my mother. That was all. There were no emotional exclamations of joy, and although in the years that have since elapsed I have frequently thanked God for Captain Whitehead myself, I said nothing about it at the time. The stage was again turned around and once more we began to make our way slowly toward Fort Bayard. On the way Captain Whitehead told my mother what happened. It was quite simple. All that had saved us had been the six-hour delay. The same band of Indians that stole the mules and "got" the two herders, had intended to "get" our stage, and undoubtedly would have done so had not the commanding officer at Fort Bayard, concluding from our nonarrival that we had already all been killed, sent Captain Whitehead out with instructions to bring in our "dead bodies if possible." This much of the news was received by my mother in silence,

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but when Captain Whitehead added: "And I'm sony, Mrs. White, but I think the Colonel sent a courier in to Silver to tell your husband you had been captured," she at once went into action. She called upon the driver, the Captain, and everybody concerned for more speed. In her mind she could see her husband, overcome with grief, doing something desperate; and so, in order that we might get to him as soon as possible and relieve his anxiety, the six worn-out mules were whipped into something resembling a gallop. W c reached Fort Bayard an hour after dark; my brother and I were hastily fed; six fresh mules were put in, and we were off again. It was still slow going. The road was rough, it was a dark night, and it was long after twelve when we pulled into Silver City. At the stage station the driver stopped to unload his mail. "No," said my mother decisively, "take me on to the house. You can come back with the mail later. But now go ahead." The driver obeyed. He drove us to the three-room adobe which was to be our home and there he stopped. The place was dark; not a light showed from a crack anywhere, and it was only after the driver had pounded strenuously upon the door with his whipstock that the lone inmate wanted to know: "Who the hell's out there?" My father had been asleep! His desperate grief had expressed itself in sound slumber, and my mother was naturally overcome with emotion. So was my father when. after a moment of silence, she devastated him with the remark: "What do you mean by being here asleep? Didn't you know we were all dead, killed by the Indians?" "No, dear," answered my father, "I didn't know it. They said so, but I didn't believe it. But if it's a fact. and if you are all dead, what can I do about it now, until after daylight?"

Chapter Three

In comparison with the El Paso house the one in Silver City was indeed sumptuous. It was of adobe, of course, and was flat-roofed, but as it had three rooms, and board floors and glass in the windows, and even a small front porch, it was a showy place in which we could have felt really elegant had we been allowed to remain there. But we were not. Down on the Arizona border an Indian situation that five or six thousand troops of the regular Anny were unable to deal with had developed, and so, after he had had his family with him in Silver City for slightly less than a year, my father, as a singlehanded representative of a stern government was sent down to Arivaca to see what he could do about smuggling. Obviously, except for going through the motions with the flag, thereby letting the Indians know exactly where to look for us in case they wanted us, he could do nothing. For fifty years the Apaches had been in the habit of passing back and forth across the Mexican boundary whenever they wanted to. And as Arivaca lay right in the middle of their private highway it was certainly no place for a custom house. Furthermore it was no place for a white man to live. Nevertheless we lived there, in a one room shack, located not far from the edge of what was called la cienega. A cienega is a swamp, and the memory of this one remains firmly embedded in my mind for two reasons. First, because I frequently acted as a retriever for my father when he went down to it late in the afternoon to shoot doves, and second, because from its mosquitoes we all contracted such persistent cases of malaria that for several years every member of the family had a regular afternoon chill. Also, in addition to the chills, which I didn't mind nearly 14

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as much as I did the quinine, there was the matter of food. But I didn't mind that either. On the contrary my brother and I ate cbile, frijoles, and tOTtilllls as ravenously as did the Mexican children who were our playmates, the result being, as far as I am concerned, that having cauterized my innards on that diet at such a tender age I have never yet known what it means to be afflicted with indigestion, or any kind of an intestinal ailment. In other respects also my time in Arivaca was not wasted. From my Mexican associates I learned to speak their language before I did my own, which has always been a great help to me, while at the same time, as I insisted upon playing with them as completely naked as they were I acquired a complexion that still enables me, in a pinch, to pass myself off as a genuine Aztec. Finally we were forced to leave Arivaca. It was very thrilling, and as I didn't have sense enough to be frightened, I enjoyed the experience. "Correl Correl Aqui vienenl Los Apaches, Jos Apaches!" (Run! Run! Here they come! The Apaches, the Apaches!) My mother heard the warning, grabbed my brother up under one arm, bundled me under the other, and ran for a thick-walled heavy-doored adobe house. All the Mexican women in the settlement were scurrying in the same direction and all were either herding or hauling their offspring along with them. When we were all inside, the door was closed and barred and there we remained. I can remember the scene inside that building very distinctly. The walls were whitewashed, and as it was without windows it was illuminated by a couple of candles. The Mexican women, their heads wrapped in rebosos, sat around the wall, chatted cheerfully, and smoked corn husk cigarettes. My mother, whose head was not wrapped in a reboso, and who was not smoking, chatted cheerfully with them, while my brother and I played with the rest of the children in the middle of the room. Shortly before dark the battle, if there had b~en one, was over, the men of Arivaca had repulsed the savages, and we were released and went home. Shortly after that Arivaca suffered an even worse experience. Two men went out to gather firewood and didn't return. After a day or two a scouting party took up their trail and found their bodies. It was horrible. The men had been captured by the Indians, who bound them to the tall, thorny trunks of a couple of sahuara cactuses,

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Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

pelted them with the spiny leaves of the prickly pear, and then scalped them. I heard all about this not only from my father, who. had been with the scouting party and described the whole thing to my mother, but also from the Mexican children who were greatly excited because their parents had decided to abandon Arivaca. That settled it. It would have been impossible for my father to remain there alone, and so, after notifying Washington of his intention, he rolled up the flag, tucked his tariff book under his arm, and moved the custom house to Tucson. Right here my memory plays a low trick on me. I can distinctly remember my beaded moccasins, our adobe shack, the cienega, and the family conference at which it was decided that we would have to move. I have no recollection whatever, though, of how we made the move. I don't know whether we traveled the fifty or sixty miles from Arivaca to Tucson in a private conveyance, a stagecoach, an army wagon with a cavalry escort, or, as is more likely, in a caravan made up of Mexicans who like ourselves were fleeing to the protection of the metropolis. But I do recall our first few days in Tucson very clearly. We reached the town late in the evening, slept that night on pallets on the floor of a very large room, and then the next morning, there we were, my brother and I, standing in front of what seemed to us a huge house watching two groups of Mexican workmen. One group was painting the front of the house, which had originally been white, a deep box-car red, while the other, under the supervision of my father, was setting up a thirty-foot flagpole at the comer of the building. This job was soon finished; the flag went up, and as it, according to my brother who was a very intellectual young man, would provide us with a marker by which we could find our way back, we immediately started off, absent without leave, to explore the city of Tucson. It was a valuable experience. I'll never forget it. Tucson was the largest town in the territory. It was the capital, and as the Southern Pacific had built its way in only a short while before, its streets were crowded with soldiers, gamblers, gunmen, miners, mule teams, ox carts, Mexicans' burros, Chinamen, and Papago Indians. It was marvelous, splendid, and the wonders of a world that had suddenly expanded to vast proportions so bewildered my brother and me that

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17

we lost the Bag. Thus we were lost. But even that was a help, because no sooner had we advertised our humiliation by setting up a loud wail about it, than a heavily anned stranger came to the rescue by inviting us to step into the nearest saloon with him and have a drink. We accepted by instinct, disclosed our identity, and thus it was that when my father, who was sent for, finally appeared he found his two sons standing up manfully in front of the bar in the celebrated C.Ongress Hall taking their nourishment direct from a couple of bottles. They were pop bottles to be sure, but even at that I fear that as far as I was concerned the situation was highly prophetic. Fallowing this first expedition it was a long time before my brother and I made another unattended trip into downtown Tucson. This docile obedience, however, was not due to the punishment which my mother had dealt out to us, but rather to the fact that my father made so much fun of us for having bawled publicly on the street that we were ashamed to do so. We discussed it, but were afraid to try it for fear we might again meet our heavily anned benefactor, who was, we were impressively told, none other than the celebrated Sheriff of Pima C.Ounty, Mr. Charles Shibcll. C.Onsequently with the metropolis out of bounds we at once began to explore the large desert area, covered with cactus, greasewood, and mesquite, that lay north and east of our new home. As a result we became naturalists. It was fascinating. As we already knew, from personal experience, human life in Arizona was not safe because men were perpetually trying to destroy one another. Now what we learned from observation was that in the desert, "where every flower has its thorn, and every insect has its sting," all bugs, birds, and animals were trying to do exactly the same thing. No matter what bushes we looked under or what holes we poked into we found proof of it. The black ants were constantly at war with the red ones; the scorpions battled with their own lesser brothers, the alicrans, and also with the centipedes. The lizards, numberless varieties of them, ate up ants, flies, and worms of all descriptions, and then when they were fat and juicy enough to be appealing they, in their tum, disappeared down the gullet of the chaparral cocks, or pllisanos. The paisanos died in the talons of the

18

Autobiography of a Durable Simzer

gll'Uilanes, or chickenhawks; the coyotes ate up the cottontails, and the jackrabbits, and even the beautiful and innocent little goldfinches and the red-breasted linnets perished by the hundreds before the attacks of the butcherbird. The latter is so called because, having captured a helpl~ victim, he impales him upon a mesquite thom and there leaves him until he is ripe enough to be tasty. .To my brother and myself this was barbarous, interesting, and imtructive. All living creatures, from men to mites, existed by murder. This idea hardened but didn't hurt us any. Instead it was beneficial in that it made us immune to that fear which causes tremors of dread to go racing up and down the spinal columns of civilized children at the sight of blood or at the mere mention of crawling, poisonous things. Of course we were frequently stung or bitten but what of it? An ant bite-and believe me, when an Arizona ant clamps down he means business-could be cured almost immediately by an application of plain cooking soda mixed with water, while as for the nip of a scorpion, a centipede, or even a tarantula, although they produced large swelling and were rather painful, they were never serious. I knew they were not, and so one night when I spotted an alicran sticking his head up through a crack in the floor and looking around in search of something to devour I said nothing about it. The alicran finally located his meal. It was my brother's bare foot. He pulled himself out of his crack and headed for his victim. He arrived, spread his nippers, and when he came down on my brother's big toe I let out a whoop of delight. The alicran died instantly, beneath my father's boot, the toe swelled beautifully, and my brother swore vengeance. The next day he had it. It was murderous. Sitting on our back porch was a nice, new icebox that had never been used. My brother saw it, realized its homicidal possibilities, and went to work. He got a large cork and a hammer, crawled under the box, drove the cork tightly into the drain hole, and then after enticing me into the box by telling me that it was a fine place to strike some sulphur matches, which he furnished, he slammed down the heavy lid, and went off to attend to his own affairs. Later, when my mother made inquiry as to my whereabouts he calmly informed her that I was in the icebox, and probably nice and dead. His prophecy lacked only a few minutes of being true, because, as he told me

Autobiography of a Durable Simzer

19

afterwards, when my mother pulled me out I was not only unconscious but was also a lovely shade of blue. This called for retaliation and finally, due to a happy combination of circumstances, my chance came. As Arizona is a treeless country my father, having decided to plant some, had had six holes, about two feet in diameter and four feet deep, dug in front of the house. They were just holes, and were utterly useless to me until a rainstorm blew up. It was a dandy, such a real gully washer that when it had pmcd there were those holes, filled to the brim with water, while there also, stooping right over one of them, was my brother. What a chance! I saw and seized it. I charged from the rear, caught him squarely on his rump and in he went, head first. He was in a tight spot. He couldn't holler, he couldn't get out, and, much to my disgust, he missed the distinction of being the only person on earth ever to die head down in a tree-hole only because my mother arrived in time to grab him by his heels and pull him ashore. After that, so far as I can remember, my brother and I made no further attempts to assassinate one another. Instead we became very good friends, which after all was exactly as it should have been because lifc as we thereafter led it was truly beautiful. Down in Arivaca, where my mother was constantly fearful that some thoughtless Apache would let himself in for a lot of real trouble by picking us up and running away with us, our field of action had been limited to her field of vision. In Tucson it wasn't. W c went where we wanted to, did as we pleased, and saw much that was thrilling and interesting. Why we were not trampled to death by the longhorns constantly milling around the custom house awaiting inspection is still a mystery to me. But we were not. W c roamed at will among the cattle, watched the cowboys brand calves and bust broncs, and even risked being run down at any second by standing on the sidelines several afternoons a week as spectators at guy o pullings. Guyo pulling is a gentle horseback sport not recommended for such amateur riders as foxhunters and polo players. The rules arc as follows: First, all players get very drunk. Second, a game rooster, whose head and neck have been thoroughly plucked and heavily greased, is buried in a shallow pit with only the greased portion of

20

Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

his anatomy sticking out. Third, the contestants, six or eight to a side, line up at each end of the course, and then riding head on at each other, and coming on the dead run, they lean down from their saddles and try to snatch the rooster out of the ground. It's a hard trick, and dangerous, as the riders, going in opposite directions and reaching down simultaneously for the rooster frequently collide, or grab at each other's hands instead of the bird. In either case they both hit the ground and come up fighting. Finally some rider disinters the bird and the real battle starts. I have never seen anything as idiotic or as reckless, and neither was I ever able to tell what it was all about, who won, or when. All that I could ever see was that as soon as some man had the rooster every other man, on both sides, would ride full tilt at him to take it away from him. As this was a piecemeal procedure, done a wing or a leg at a time, it was very tough on the rooster. Only the most durable bird could survive for more than ten minutes, and then when he was dead, and that round was over, the Mexicans would return to their bottles, take a few swigs of tequilll apiece, plant another rooster, tighten up their saddle cinches and start over again. With such interesting, he-man activities as these to divert us, my brother and I should have been satisfied with our lot. But we were not. We longed for companiship, female companionship, and as soon as we found out that a family of girls had moved into the neighborhood we went to their home to investigate. By carefully scouting the situation from a distance we discovered that these girls-there were three of them-were neat, clean, well dressed, and apparently civilized. That stumped us. Although we had had plenty of experience with Mexican girls who ran around raw, little white girls, who didn't, were animals we had never met. Consequently before running headlong into trouble by trying to scrape up an unsolicited acquaintance with such superior beings, we stopped and held a council about it. The vote was a unanimous, "aye," and so with my brother in the lead we marched boldly in on the young females. It was disastrous. We were very repulsive. The three little ladies screamed, yelled, stuck out their tongues, made faces, and in any number of ways told us to get the hell out of there and get quickly. Being young gentlemen of breeding as well as discretion we got. We went hurriedly, concealed ourselves

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21

behind a clump of mesquite, went into another huddle, adopted a new idea, and went back and called upon the girls a second time. This time our reception was different. This time no fists were shaken, no tongues were stuck out, and no faces were made. The little girls merely took one glance at our gleaming, glittering, glamorous, stark naked figures and away they went. One of the choice memories of my life is of the wrath of their mother. She appeared, saw us, and after us she came. It was useless. Grabbing up our clothes as we went, my brother and I faded silently away into the desert. Of course, later, we were very soundly spanked for our wickedness, but what of it? It was worth it, I still think so. Even now as I look back at it across an abyss of almost sixty years I am convinced that no single enterprise I ever took part in turned out as highly successful as that one.

Chapter Four

Thus it went. During the entire time we were in Tucson the outdoor life that my brother and I led was that of a pair of young savages. It was good for us. It taught us strategy and self-reliance. W c saw life with our own eyes, and although much of it was entirely beyond us, we nonetheless acquired important information that came in very handy in our later years. It was also, I think, helpful to our parents who never had to cmb~ themselves by telling us idiotic little stories about the birds, the bees, and the flowers. When nightfall came though, and we had been rounded-up and herded home, and scrubbed thoroughly in a tin washtub kept on the back porch for that purpose, and had been fed and watered., an entirely different atmosphere surrounded us. It is hard to describe it as no other civilized children that I ever heard of were subjected to such treatment. For example, we were not put to bed early, tucked in, crooned over, and told to go to sleep like nice little boys. To begin with, as we were not nice little boys, and as my parents were never so deluded as to think so, we were encouraged to keep late hours, and then when we finally did fall asleep, in bed, on the floor, or in the nice warm sand in the back yard we were allowed to remain right there until we awoke in the morning. Was this cruelty? Of course not. Being just a couple of little animals we liked it, while at the same time we also liked the irregular manner in which our parents. who were slightly irregular themselves, made us provide them with amusement. I don't know why it was. Perhaps my careful father disapproved of filling the iMoccnt minds of his two sons with such fabulous u

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23

nonsense as cows jumping over the moon, and cats fiddling, and baked blackbirds, with songs in their beaks, emerging from a pie, but at any rate there never was, in our home, a primer, a book of nursery rhymes, or a copy of Mother Goose. On the other hand, as a sample of the intellectual fodder we were compelled to consume, we did have, and loved them, a most gorgeously colored series of cards setting forth in picture and in verse the adventures of Baron Munchausen. How those cards delighted us! They're as vivid to me now as they were when my father used to read them to me every night. The Baron was making a horseback trip acr~ Russia. A snow storm came up. It snowed and snowed and snowed, and I shivered and shivered and shivered. Night fell. The Baron had to camp, and so, tying his horse to a "bit of stick" that protruded from the snow, he rolled himself in his scarlet cloak and went to sleep. But during the night there came a thaw: The greatest indeed that he ever saw, Meltin~ the snow and letting him down Right m the streets of a Russian town! It was marvelous and I cheered. The people gathered around, gazed curiously down at the sleeping Baron and also gazed curiously up at his horse which hung by the bridle rein to the top of the church steeple. The Baron awoke, sized up the situation, drew his pistol, cut down his horse with but one shot, mounted him when he hit the ground, and as I again cheered, away he rode. But trouble still rode with him, because: As he ambled gaily out of town The warden let the portcullis down. And did it so cleverly that it cut his horse squarely in two right back of the saddle. Unaware of the mishap the Baron rode on leaving the hind part of his horse behind him. Finally he missed something, turned, saw what it was, went back, got it, sewed his valiant charger together with willow twigs and went on to Africa, where just when he needed it the most, the twigs sprouted and grew into a beautiful canopy within whose shade he was able comfortably to travel acr~ the Sahara desert. That was the beginning of my literary education, and from there

24 Autobiography of a Durable Sinnef' on I went steadily forward along a course that soon landed me in the higher brackets of learning. There was no malice in it and neither was there any worthy motive. Reading matter was scarce; congenial companions were even scarcer; and as my father and mother both had huge stocks of all kinds of poetry stored away in their own memories, they amused themselves by teaching it to their sons. Being a strong character my brother was able to resist this cruelty to some extent, but I wasn't. Mine was the mentality of a phonograph record, the result being that instead of astonishing the neighborhood by reciting "Old Mother Hubbard," and "Simple Simon," I did it by reeling off with gestures and everything such poetic gems as "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "Bingen on the Rhine," and many others. Then, due to my father's suddenly reawakened interest in Shakespeare, my brother and I became actors. I'll never forget that reawakening. It took place in Tucson's Variety Theater, where a pair of eminent tragedians were doing a one night stand with IUchard Ill. My father attended the performance and took his sons with him. It was glorious. Never before had I ever seen anything quite as lovely as the girls who came around, before the show started and between the acts, sold beer to my father, and tried to be very nice to him. And how I admired him for the free and easy way in which he treated such gorgeous creatures. They scintillated with jewels, radiated rare odors, and wore dresses cut so low at the neck that as I looked at them I got glimpses of territory that I hadn't seen since the day I had been weaned. The curtain went up; the play was on; and instantly, when two men clad in shining armor began murdering each other with swords, I forgot all about the girls. I never have forgotten IUchard Ill though. I was not allowed to. On our way home, when we were all seething with excitement, my father, who knew the whole play by heart anyhow, kept reciting passages from it, and then the next night, after equipping my brother and myself with lath swords, he began to educate us in our parts. He kept this up for a long time and we enjoyed it. We enjoyed anything that had a fight in it, and so night after night with no audience save our father and mother, my brother and I trod the boards, ranted our lines, and slew each

Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

25

other. The fact that we frequently meant it, and fought real battles, thus upsetting history by having Caesar stab Brutus, or Richard Ill destroy the E.arl of Richmond, made no difference to our parents. They applauded us no matter what liberties we took with Shakespeare's plots. Another constructive thing that my father did to me in Tucson was to instill into me a wholesome and a lasting contempt for gunmen. In the opinion of the barflies they were heroes. In his, profanely expressed, they were nothing but a lot of murderers, and j~ to impress this upon me he took me to the railroad station and showed me where Wyatt Earp assisted by his sidekick, Doc Holliday, had assassinated a man named Frank Stillwell a year or two before. When he did this there were two things my father didn't know. He was not aware that as time rolled on Mr. Earp would become so encrusted with fame as to have Admiral Byrd's South Pole ship named after him, or that no matter how rapidly I wrote I would not be able to satiate the bloodthirsty appetite of the editors of Collier's for more and more stories about Western killers. But these things happened. Mr. Wyatt Earp became great, I became an accredited chronicler of the deeds of men of his stripe, and so before I leave Tucson I feel that I should very briefly set down the facts in regard to Wyatt's activities in Arizona. What happened to Mr. Earp before he got to Arizona was of no importance either to him or anyone else. Operating as a gunman and gambler in Kansas cow towns he had never done anything except wish himself in every time some happy citizen began to disturb the peace. There was really nothing to it. His was only a nuisance value no matter where he was, and so Dodge City was heartily glad of it when he, his two brothers, Virgil and Morgan, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, and Hook-nose Kate, who was a community gal for the gang, pUlled up stakes and moved to Tombstone. This was in 1880, and the town, as he first saw it, suited Mr. Earp exactly. It was hot. Its stamp mills were stamping, its guns popping, its girls squealing, its ore wagons creaking, and as its mines were producing ore that ran 16,ooo ounces of silver to the ton, it was probably the liveliest and most prosperous town on the planet.

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Autobiography of a Durable Sinner

Obviously what the poor down-trodden gamblers in a town like this needed was a gunman to protect their interests, and as that was Wyatt Earp's specialty he applied for and got the job. It was a dual one. To hold it he also had to deal faro in the Oriental. and as Doc Holliday was also dealing in the same joint, and as his two brothers soon wore badges as Tombstone's only policemen, Mr. Earp automatically became the real six-shooter boss of the town. It was a cinch. Although Tombstone was a gay town it wasn't a really bad town and so for more than a year, as the record shows, Mr. Earp was not called upon to explode a single cartridge. Finally he did. Four men from the near-by mining camp of Charleston: the two McLowery boys and two Clantons, dropped in to Tombstone to make merry, and as there was a feud on between the two towns the two Earp policemen, Virgil and Morgan, felt it their duty to curb the enthusiasm of the visitors. With the assistance of Wyatt and Doc Holliday they did so by catching the four men when they were unarmed and killing three of them. Naturally these murders had to be avenged, and they were. Virgil Earp got it first. He was shot from the rear but was only crippled, and then came Morgan's turn. The dose that he got proved fatal, and it was when Wyatt and Doc Holliday took his remains to Tucson to ship them to California that the killing, in that town, of Frank Stillwell occurred. No one knows the real story of that murder. Thirty years later Wyatt Earp said he did it to avenge Morgan, although how Stillwell, who was in Tucson when Morgan was shot in Tombstone, could have had anything to do with the crime is not at all clear. Wyatt Earp also said, thirty years later, that he alone did the job. He saw Stillwell at the railroad station and with a sawed-off shotgun he went after him, overtook him, and the pair of them fought for possession of the gun. He won and, placing the muzzle of the weapon under Stillwell's heart, he pulled the trigger. That was his story, but as three decades had elapsed before he told it Mr. Earp probably forgot that when the coroner examined Frank Stillwell's body he found that it had been pierced by six rifle bullets, and that in place of only one charge of buck-shot it showed two. Obviously then two men did that job. They were Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, and no sooner had they completed it than they fied the territory with Sheriff Johnny Behan hot on their trail and

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27

no regret save that he failed to overtake them. Every decent man in Arizona bemoaned the fact that they were not caught and lynched. Later, when I was around seventeen, I knew Sheriff johnny Behan very well. He was a good fellow and a good shot. At a pigeon shoot, where birds C05t twenty-five cents apiece, he took me to a good cleaning.

Chapter Five

I was never entirely satisfied with my father's explanation of why he lost his job as collector of customs. He said it was politics. My mother dissented. She said it was revenge, and under the circumstances I am inclined to agree with her. As the last special agent to appear in Tucson to check up the custom house, came a man named Schermerhorn. There are many Schermerhoms and to this day I never hear the name that I do not attach special significance to its last syllable. The reason is obvious. Our Mr. Schermerhorn had a very large nose and a very bad case of catarrh. As collector of customs my father did not practice medicine. But my mother did. She dosed everyone she could get a spoon into, had a remedy for every ill, and so no sooner did Mr. Schermerhorn air his ailment than she had a prescription for him. It was a simple one. The Papago Indians, who pounded some kind of a root into a pulp and made an emulsion of it, said some words over it, and inhaled it into their nostrils, never had catarrh. Why then should Mr. Schermerhorn have it? He agreed that he shouldn't, and when my mother handed him a basin filled with a mixture that an Indian had prepared for her he seized it and snuffed the stuff vigorously up his proboscis. I don't know the reason. My mother probably used the wrong words, but at any rate the results were terrific. The nose of the special agent swelled to twice its regular si7.e, lost all its lining, and kept him in bed for a week. Mr. Schermerhorn probably never had catarrh again in his whole life, but as gratitude in a special agent is a rare quality, while revenge is sweet, he got even with her, so my mother said, by having my 28

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29

father discharged. But she was glad of it. She had always wanted him to practice medicine and so when word of his dismissal came she began happily to pack up and get ready to move. El Paso was our ultimate objective but as my father owned the home in Silver City, as well as a small ranch on the Mimbres River which be wanted to sell, we went there first. The trip from Tucson to Silver City, made partly by stage and partly by train, was quite unpleasant to my brother and myself as we now had a little sister who, at eight months, was more of a nuisance to us than anything else. Later though, after we had educated her as she should have been educated, she became quite a person. She still is, and I still believe that she owes many of her sterling qualities to the training that we gave her when she was too young to resist. During the few months we were in Silver City four very important things happened to me. I discovered that I knew how to read. I started to school. I had my first fight with an adversary other than my brother, and I experienced the keen pleasure of seeing the last of the New Mexico Apaches brought in as prisoners. I don't know who taught me to read. Probably no one. I have seen Malays teach their infants to swim by tos&ng them into the ocean and allowing them to struggle ashore as best they could. I got my primary education in the same brutal fashion. Having filled me with reams of poetry and then taught me the alphabet, my careless parents heaved me overboard into a sea of books and magazines. What a mixed dose of literature that was! And how characteristically I reacted to it! Some loving aunt, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had never seen her dear little nephews, and didn't know they were savages, made my brother and me a present of a year's subscription to Saint Nicholas. My father took one look at that anemic publication, emitted a snort of disgust, and immediately provided us with an antidote for its poison by giving us The Golden Days for a year, and also by buying us a copy of Huckleberry Finn, then in its first edition. I shudder to think of what might have happened to me if he had not done this. Little Lord Fauntleroy was then running serially in Saint Nicholas; I read his story concurrently with that of the immortal Huck, with the natural result that as between the two I chose rags and rum, wickedness and profanity, in

30

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preference to black velvet suits, a sinless life, and the pernicious habit that would have completely floored my mother, of calling her "Dearest." To The Golden Days I also owe an eternal debt of gratitude. I wonder what's become of it. It was a grand magazine. One that was banned by careful parents everywhere for fear their offspring might be contaminated by it. But I wasn't. It saved me because after having absorbed its stories for a year or two I was never able to read either the Youths' Compll1lion or the talcs of Horatio Alger. They were too tame. I wanted sin, retaliation, and revenge in my literature, not piety, forgiveness, and perseverance; and in that respect The Golden Days suited me exactly. The school house in Silver City was a red brick, two-«ory edifice which filled me with rage and mortification because my brother, being a year and half older than I was-but no smarter-was placed above me. He went upstairs with the mental giants of the third grade while I had to remain below with the infants of the first. In the first grade I learned nothing that I didn't think I already knew, except that Miss Kate Card, my beautiful, red-headed teacher, did manage to instill into my young being-but only momentarily, thank God-a deadly and devastating fear of the Demon Rum. She achieved that miracle by putting a calfs brain into a fruit jar, pouring alcohol over it, and telling us, as we watched the healthy tissue turn into a sickly gray, that that was exactly what would happen to all of our cute little insides if we ever drank whisky. I mentally signed the pledge right then, but was a backslider before night because that afternoon when I told my father, who took his drinks with clock.like regularity, what he was doing to his intestinal arrangements be said it was all damn rot and for me to pay no attention to it. Only one other episode of my Silver City school life glares back at me. It was a great blow to my pride. It was Friday afternoon, visitors' day, and many parents, including my mother, were· on hand to watch their offspring perform. The feature of the afternoon was a spelling match in which the entire school, from the first to the fourth grades participated. Casualties came fast. One after another the helpless little victims fell by the wayside until finally only two:

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31

a little W bite boy from the first grade, and a little black girl from the fourth remained standing. Then, only the little black girl was left. I was licked, overcome by the smoke, and the shame of my defeat so rankled in my bosom that on Monday when the biggest boy in school commented upon it I started a fight with him. He licked me, of course, but as it was a distinction rather than a disgrace I am not ashamed of it. The boy was Harry Shipley; he grew into a three-hundred-pound giant, became famous as the owner of The Big Kid's Casino and Dance Hall in Juarez, Mexico, and forty years later I had my revenge by writing a piece about him and his disreputable but really delightful joint, for the N e-w York Times. Like all other experienced frontiersmen, I, at the age of seven, hated the Apaches and all their works. The only good one was a dead one, and so late in 1885 when a few renegades slaughtered and scalped a family living on the outskirts of town I prayed fervently to God that He assist the Army in capturing them and bringing them in. I even suggested that if He, in His infinite goodness and mercy, would have them brought in dead rather than alive I would deeply appreciate it. Then the next day, I stood on our front porch and watched the soldiers go by. In the lead were about forty Indian scouts on foot. They traveled in single file, at a dog trot, and without ever slackening their pace disappeared over the skyline of the foothills of the Mogollon Mountains. The cavalry men traveled more slowly. There was no trail through those hills, they had to force their horses as best they could up the rough slopes, and to my critical eye didn't present nearly as neat a spectacle as did the Indians. Despite this, those cavalrymen made good. They were gone about a week and when they returned they had with them a number of Apache prisoners. This was splendid, and as neither my brother nor I had ever yet seen an Apache under control, where we could examine him at close range, we at once went to the soldiers' camp to take a look at the captives. The spectacle suited us exactly. There they were, fifteen or twenty sullen-looking savages with some of their warpaint still sticking to their faces, all seated astride the hubs of the high wheels of army wagons, with their hands and feet securely bound to the spokes. What was to happen to those Indians we didn't know and didn't

32

Autobiography of a Durable Simzer

care. Provided it was drastic enough, we were utterly indifferent as to the fate of those prisoners. As the years have p~d, though, and as I've read history, my feelings toward the Apaches have undergone such a violent change that today I almost regret that when they wanted my scalp they didn't get it. They should have, because I belonged to a race which had dealt out to them nothing save deceit, treachery, and murder. That's true, and so, humbly contrite for having prayed to God that He destroy them, I now set down the real story of the Apaches. Skip it, unless you are prepared to have your American ego undergo considerable shrinkage. Prior to

1541

the Apache Indians had held possession of practically

all of Arizona and New Mexico. This territory was decidedly worth while. It teemed with game, it contained millions of acres of timber and fine grazing land, and as its hot springs provided a cure for every ill that they were heir to, the Apaches were economically self-sufficient. Furthermore every grown male was an independent citizen who did exactly as he pleased with himself, and with all that was his, including a harem which was limited in size only by his ability to care for the girls. C.Onsequently, except that the land itself, and all that it naturally produced was tribal property, the original Apache government was a pure individual capitalism. What an Apache owned he owned; what he could steal, no matter whether it was a horse, a buffalo robe, or a woman, he owned also, provided he was man enough to hold on to it. None therefore but the fittest of the braves survived the struggle, so that as time rolled on the Apaches naturally developed into men who were not only crafty and cunning but also were ~ of a fighting ability that enabled them to render the entire United States Army ridiculous for forty years. The Apaches were the purest bred of any American Indians. Pride lay behind this. To be a full-blood, which made him a part owner in the glorious Apache country, was a glorious thing to an Apache brave. For a squaw therefore to produce anything but a full-blooded papoose would result ingloriously for her. From this, though, it is not to be concluded that the Apaches were old-fashioned regarding female morals within the tribe. They were not. They were modern.

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If a neglected squaw chose to risk the beating that her lord would administer unto her if he caught her at it, it was her privilege to stray a bit with one of his brothct braves, and she would lose nothing by it, except perhaps. a few snatches of hair, an car or so, and a mouthful of teeth. On the other hand let her step outside the tribe to taste the embraces of a Comanche, a Ute, a Pueblo, or a Papago, and just as soon as the sisterhood from her own village could lay hands upon her she would forthwith, and publicly, be stoned to death. Ocarly this system of rugged individualism which destroyed weaklings, plus this mania for keeping the squaws uncontaminated, accounts for the fact that there never were as many as 5,000 warriors on the Apache muster roll. Nevertheless it took civilized white men 345 years to wrest their land from them. As this undoubtedly constitutes a world's record for a long-time resistance it would be both bloody and interesting to run through the entire history of the Apaches. However we can't do that, and so, merely for the purpose of providing them with a motive for murdering all Americans we will content ourselves by beginning with the day when the Apaches first met an English-speaking white man. This man, whose name was Santiago (Jack) Johnson, showed up in the Santa Rita Copper Camp near Silver City about 1830, and soon did the first deed of shame. To understand Johnson's activities we must first look at the copper camp. Although this camp was in the heart of the Apache country, and its mines had been operated ever since early in the seventeenth century, it is not to be inferred that they were worked contrary to the wishes of the Apaches. They never had been. The situation was peculiar. Although their land was rich in gold, silver, and copper, the Indians cared nothing for these metals. Why should they? Had they had gold and silver to bother with, and to upset the true value of pinto ponies, squaws, and arrow points, they would have been no more econoinically secure than we are today. Moreover, as mining was a form of hard work beneath the dignity of a brave, and too heavy for a squaw, the Apaches did none of it. On the other hand so long as the Spaniards and Mexicans who came to Santa Rita did nothing save foolishly tear into the everlasting hills for something the Apaches had no use for, they had no objection. On the

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centrary they welcomed .. the strangers because either by trading with them, or, if necessary, robbing them, they were able to obtain such necemties as beads, red flannel, and guns and gunpowder. Thus, entirely at the sufferance of the Apaches these mines had been in almost continuous operation for two centuries. Then came Johnson. He was a trader, and as he was also a white man who spoke English, he was looked upon by both the Mexicans and Apaches as a superior being in whom it would be wise and safe to repose confidence. They did so, and there was no trouble until the Apaches, in accord with their established way of collecting rent from the miners, held up and looted one of their wagon trains. Being used to this the Mexicans merely shrugged their shoulders, said, "Que le bace" (which is their way of saying, "Aw, what the hell"), and were willing to forget it. But Johnson wasn't. He'd settle matters, he said, and so, for $5,000 paid him by the Mexican governor of Chihuahua, at his own request, he agreed to murder not only the Apache chief but along with him as many of the tribe as he could get. Now get the picture. The Apaches trusted Johnson, the first American they had ever met, and so when he invited the chief of the Mimbrcs River tribe, from the district where my father owned his little ranch, to come to a feast of roast horsemeat, and a distnbution of gifts, and to bring his braves and squaws and papooses with him, the invitation was solemnly accepted. « The day came and with it came the Apaches, who, seating themselves in a close group in front of a pile of pack saddles, awaited the opening of the entertainment. It came quickly. Johnson walked up to the pile of pack saddles, spoke kindly to the Indians, told them in just a moment they would get all they had come for, and touching a lighted cigar to the end of a fuse he stepped quickly backwards. Instantly there was a terrific explosion and at least a hundred Apache men, women, and children lay either dead or wounded before a smoking, bell-mouthed howitzer, which, loaded to the muzzle with bolts, nuts, pieces of chain, and all kinds of deadly hardware from the scrap heap, and hidden under the pack saddles, had poured its charge into them. That act started a war that lasted fifty-one years, and yet was a war that the Apaches never believed in. It was incompre_hensible to

Autobiography of a Durable Simzer

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them that the Americans who spoke so beautifully of "The Great White Father in Washington" should resort to deception and ttickcry in place of indulging in open and honorable warfare. Hence they leveled their revenge at the Mexicans. As a starter they slaughtered every man, woman, and child at the Santa Rita mine except Johnson, who unfortunately got away, and then they declared war against Mexico itself. At about the same time, in 1836, Texas did likewise; ten years later the United States followed suit, the result being that the Apaches felt that they were our allies. They never changed their minds about it. Up to the last they always said they had been our brothers in arms and in many ways proved their sincerity. In 1850, for example, the first American Boundary Commission under Colonel John R. Bartlett left El Paso and headed north into the beautiful land of the Apaches. Much trouble was expected but none developed. For days the expedition moved cautiously onward and yet in spite of the bloody forecast of the Mexicans, who were in constant fear of the Apaches, not an Indian appeared. It was inexplicable until, after the copper camp at Santa Rita had been reached, in stalked Mangus Colorado, the chief of the ttibc, to tell the story. It was a very straightforward one. "You white men," said the red warrior, "are my amigos and I am your amigo. Fourteen suns ago I saw you leave El Paso and since that day you have never been out of my sight or without the protection of my warriors. My braves have always been on both sides of your trail, and my scouts have always traveled ahead of you to 1ee that no bad Indians or Mexican enemies attacked you. You are now in my own country. My own village, with my squaws and papooses, is near here, just a short travel away on the Rio Mimbrcs. These are my mountains and this is my stronghold, but you are welcome. You come in peace and you can remain in peace. There is no war between the Apaches and the white man." Then after Commissioner Bartlett had responded with words fully • friendly, but entirely insincere, the Apache chief asked, "Why cumot we Apaches have our own country? We have lived here throughout the lives of so many chiefs that we cannot remember rhem aU. You say you have come to put lines across our lands because you got them from Mexico. You could not have done this because

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they never belonged to Mexico. The Apaches are at war with Mexico. You were at war with Mexico, but you made peace. We cannot. We are still at war with Mexicans, but we are not at war with the Americans. There are many things that we do not understand, but we give you our friendship and will protect you against bad men who would steal your horses." That promise was faithfully kept. "At times," wrote Commissioner Bartlett in his chronicle, "our animals were stolen, but the Apaches always brought them back to us, sometimes with much labor and trouble to themselves." Eight years passed, the Americans living in the Apache country were not molested, and then at Pinos Altos, only a short distance from Santa Rita, Mangus Colorado again came to a group of American gold miners with a second word of peace. "I am Mangus Colorado, Chief of the Warm Springs Apaches," he said; "these are our hunting grounds and have been for all time. You only want gold, you do not want to live here. My people live here but do not want the gold. You scare away our deer and turkey and quail, so that we have no meat, and no hide for moccasins. There is little gold here, but in the Sierra Madres, five days to the south"-and this was the unvarnished truth-"there is much gold, very much, and my men will lead you to it if you will go." For that speech Mangus Colorado, an old man who had come alone to the camp of the whites, was chained to a tree and so severely Bogged with harness straps that he lay senseless on the ground for hours. When he regained consciousness he struggled away in the dark, told the story of his disgrace to but one man, a young chief named Victoria, and thereafter remained for weeks hidden in the mountains. Upon his return he was a changed man. He had not wanted to make war upon the Americans, but by blood only could the shame of the blows that had been rained upon him be washed away, and so to all the Apaches went the word that Mangus Colorado needed help. He got it immediately. For ten years the Apaches everywhere had been receiving brutal treatment from the white men who were terrorizing Arizona and New Mexico. From 1850 to 186o these territories "were cursed with the presence of several hundred of the most infamous scoundrels

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it is pomble to conceive. Innocent unoffending men were shot down merely for the pleasure of witnessing their death agonies. In the graveyard in Tucson there were 47 graves of white men in 186o, of which number all but two had been murdered." The number of murdered Apaches however, mostly squaws and papooses, and the number of young Indian girls who had been ravished by these representative Americans was unknown. But who cared about the number? The way the history of those early times bas been written it has been made to appear that no white man could venture abroad without getting an arrow in his back. That risk though was slight in comparison with the one the Apache ran of getting a bullet in his. Consequently all the tribes responded quickly to Mangus Colorado's call for help. But even at that the Old Chief took only a hundred men with him. That was enough. With that meager force, meagerly armed, he marched against Pinos Altos, where an equal number of white men were entrenched against him. The battle broke, and victory was with the Indians, who lost only ten warriors as compared with twenty-three for the white men, the rest of whom fled into the mountains. Nor were these fugitives pursued and slaughtered. Mangus Colorado would not permit it. "No," he said, "let them escape so that they may tell their story -to their brothers." They told it, and it became history, but never truthful because nowhere in their account of the "horrible massacre" at Pinos Altos did the white men refer to the disgraceful lashes they bad laid upon the bare back of the Apache chief. That incident ended Mangus Colorado's war against the white men. Never again did this wise old chief harm an American, or allow any of his people to do so. Yet what befell him? Five years later, in 1863, when he was out deer hunting with a few of his braves, the Old Chief encountered a couple of prospectors. He greeted them with "How, my brothers," and went on to get meat for his squaws and papooses. To the prospectors, however, he was just an Apache, and as soon as he and his braves were out of sight one of them went to tell some soldiers, camped a few miles away, that they had been set upon by Mangus Colorado and had barely escaped with their lives. The soldiers reacted characteristically by hiding themselves in the brush while one of the pros-

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pectors, catching up with Mangus Colorado, told him that the captain of the white soldiers wanted to see him; that he had gifts for him. "Very well," replied Mangus, ''we will go.'' "No," replied the prospector. "There are only a few soldiers; they are afraid of the Apaches and so the captain wants to see only the chief.'' And so the old chief went alone to the camp of the American soldiers to say "How" to Captain E. D. Shirland of the First Californian Volunteers. It was his last journey. He was shot down by the soldiers from ambush; "when he tried to escape," so the report read. Oearly the murder of such a man as this was bound to produce disastrous results. It did. Everything was changed. Mangus Colorado, who would never make war upon the Americans, was dead, and to succeed him there arose two young warriors, one a real chief named Victorio, while the other, who despite the halos hung upon him by the United States Army was nothing but a renegade, a horse-thief, and a murderer. He was called Geronimo. Victorio lasted from 1863 to 1880, when, after he had been driven across the Rio Grande by Texas Rangers, he was finally killed by Mexican troops over in Old Mexico. As for Geronimo it is notorious history that he was not taken until 1886 when by a trick very similar to the one used by Santiago Johnson, he, with his entire army of twenty-one half-starved warriors, was induced to surrender to General Miles, who had five thousand fat regulars and three hundred tame Indian scouts in the field against him. It was a glorious finale. The war of the United States of America against this one renegade had lasted 2 3 years, and as the cost of keeping it going had been about $4tooo,ooo per annum, or a total of $