“He said to me: ‘I will take you under government protection; I will
build you a house; I will fence you much land; I will give you cattle,
horses, mules, and farming implements. You will be furnished with men to
work the farm, for you yourself will not have to work. In the fall I
will send you blankets and clothing so that you will not suffer from
cold in the winter time.
“‘There is plenty of timber, water, and grass in the land to which I
shall send you,’ he told me. He said that I should live with my tribe
and with my family and that if I agreed to the treaty I should be with
my family within five days.
“Then I said to General Miles: ‘All the officers that have been in
charge of the Indians have talked that way, and it sounds like a story
to me; I hardly believe you.’
“‘This time,’ he said, ‘it is the truth,’ and he swept a spot of ground
clear with his hand and said: ‘Your past deeds shall be wiped out like
this, and you will start a new life.’
“All this talk was translated from English into Spanish and from Spanish
into Apache. It took a long time. Perhaps the interpreters did not make
any mistakes. I do not know.”
“Are you going to live on the reservation at San Carlos?” asked
Shoz-Dijiji.
“No. They are going to send us out of Arizona because they say that the
white men whose families and friends we have killed would always be
making a lot of trouble for us, that they would try to kill us.”
“Where are they going to send you?”
“To Fort Marion in a country called Florida.” The old man bowed his
head. Could it be that there were tears in those cold blue eyes?
Shoz-Dijiji placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. “I know now that I
shall never see you again,” he said. “The pindah-lickoyee, who have
never kept a promise that they have made to the Shis-Inday, will not
keep this one. When you have laid down your arms they will kill you, as
they killed Mangas Colorado.
“It is not too late even now to turn back,” continued the young man. “We
have ponies, we have arms, we have ammunition; and there are places in
the mountains of Sonora where a few men could elude the pindah-lickoyee
forever. Do not let them take you to a strange country where they will
either kill you or make a slave of you.”
Geronimo shook his head. “No, my son,” he said, “that cannot be. The war
chief of the pindah-lickoyee and the war chief of all the Apaches stood
between his troopers and my warriors. We placed a large stone on the
blanket before us. Our treaty was made by this stone, and it was to last
until the stone should crumble to dust. So we made the treaty and bound
each other with an oath. Geronimo will keep that treaty.”
Slowly Shoz-Dijiji turned and walked away. Far up among the rocks above
the rocky camp site he went; and there he remained all night praying to
Usen, praying to Intchi-Dijin, the black wind, asking for guidance,
asking for wisdom; for Shoz-Dijiji, the Black Bear, did not know what to
do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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