Since the United States of America became, forty years ago, the nominal suzerain of the territory occupied by these peripatetic “vermin ranches,” they have been unprovoked invaders, thieves, and assassins, and their summer raids upon the miners, teamsters, and cattle ranchers of Arizona and New Mexico, have been as regular as their winter acceptance of the bacon and blankets with which a generous but mistaken policy feeds and warms them, at a cost equal to that of providing each savage with a suite of rooms at a fashionable hotel. It is but a few years since a small party of the most vicious and untamable of these bandits, who were captured with the scalps of their victims at their belts, were declared by the authorities at Washington to be not answerable to trial or punishment by the courts of the Territory whose people they have robbed and murdered with impunity for many years. But, partly in deference to outraged public sentiment, and partly in apprehension of the acts of a possible committee of vigilance, these Indians were condemned for their crimes to imprisonment in a government fortress in Florida. Unlike white prisoners who were condemned to labor and isolation, these tawny murderers were allowed to be accompanied in their journey across the country by their wives and concubines, who were transported, fed, clothed, and made comfortable, at government cost. Arrived at their destination, it was found, after a few months’ sojourn, that the humid air, lower altitude, and uncongenial surroundings of Florida, and, later, of North Carolina, disagreed with the digestion and disgruntled the disposition of the noble reds, and, upon a proper showing that their health demanded a return to their former homes, lest confirmed nostalgia should set in, and possibly remove them permanently from the scene of human activities, they were surreptitiously returned by the government to their old reservation, where they promptly expressed their appreciation of the clemency accorded them by breaking out once more and heading for the Mexican Sierras, marking their track with burning ranch houses and murdered settlers. In the summer of 1893 a party of about forty of these Apaches, headed by the most cruel, malignant, and treacherous of savages—the thrice-pardoned and faith-breaking Geronimo—left the reservation for their annual raid. The military post at Fort Lowell having been abandoned and the troops removed in the interest of government parsimony, the savages found it convenient to make a detour by the valley of the Santa Cruz, so as to cross the railroad track in the vicinity of Tucson, and reach their mountain fastnesses in Sonora by the Arivaca Pass.