The dread Apache: That early-day scourge of the SouthwestFreeman, Merrill Pingree
History
The dread Apache: That early-day scourge of the Southwest
Freeman, Merrill Pingree
Apache Indians; Apache Kid, approximately 1860-; Indians of North America -- Southwest, New
Being over in Paris a few years ago, a friend who had lived there a
number of years, and who was as familiar with Paris from basement to
roof-garden, as I am with Congress street of our good old town of
Tucson, suggested one evening that we visit the “Apaches”. Expressing
surprise that any of my people should have wandered so far from home, I
suggested as a substitute the Moulin Rouge. However, the Apaches were
agreed on, and in the evening, my friend, bringing a policeman with
him, called for me at my hotel.
Arriving at the door of the Apache rendezvous in due course, we
three--my friend, the policeman and myself--are readily admitted, the
presence of our policeman assuring that, and we find ourselves in an
underground dive, a large room with a low ceiling, barely furnished,
dimly lighted, and reeking with the sour odor of stale beer. Looking
about the room, by the dim light as it forces its way through the dense
gloom of tobacco smoke, we are enabled to see two other policemen
besides our own--there are two stationed there day and night--and a
score or more of the toughest-looking lot of cut-throats I had ever
had the pleasure of coming in contact with. This was the retreat, the
gathering place, of as bad a lot of thieves, thugs, robbers, burglars
and murderers as the world could boast of, and Paris, in seeking a name
for them that would embody all of these characteristics, had searched
the world over, and was almost in despair of finding a single word that
would express all that is mean, wantonly cruel, murderous and cowardly,
but at last attention was directed to the Apache of Arizona, and then
it was discovered that the word which would embody all that and more
had been found. And that was why I was enabled to find some of my own
home people away off there in the world’s center of fashion. Settling
for a few bottles of the vilest beer possible to brew, as a tip to the
house, I was soon ready to ask my friend to call his policeman and get
us away from this vile den.
Judge McComas and Wife Murdered.
It is scarcely more than a quarter of a century, March, 1883, since
Judge McComas, his wife and their little son Charlie, about seven
years of age, coming from Silver City, New Mexico, to Lordsburg, were
ambushed by a band of Apaches from San Carlos, the Judge and his wife
killed, and poor little Charlie carried off to the Sierra Madres in
Mexico, where, a few years later, an Apache squaw reported that on
their camp being attacked by United States troops, Charlie, being
frightened, ran off into the mountains, where he is supposed to have
died of hunger and exposure.
It was during this same year that a band passing over the Whetstone
range of mountains killed a teamster and two of his men and a
wood-chopper, who were furnishing wood for the Total Wreck mine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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