On the Border with Crook

Dante Alighieri, it has always seemed to me, made the mistake of his life in dying when he did in the picturesque capital of the Exarchate five hundred and fifty years ago. Had he held on to this mortal coil until after Uncle Sam had perfected the “Gadsden Purchase,” he would have found full scope for his genius in the description of a region in which not only purgatory and hell, but heaven likewise, had combined to produce a bewildering kaleidoscope of all that was wonderful, weird, terrible, and awe-inspiring, with not a little that was beautiful and romantic.

The vast region in the southwest corner of the United States, known on the maps as the Territories of Arizona and New Mexico, may, with perfect frankness, be claimed as the wonder-land of the northern part of America, with the exception, perhaps, of the Republic of Mexico, of which it was once a fragment, and to which, ethnographically, it has never ceased to belong.

In no other section can there be found such extensive areas of desert crossed in every direction by the most asperous mountains, whose profound cañons are the wonder of the world, whose parched flanks are matted with the thorny and leafless vegetation of the tropics, and whose lofty summits are black with the foliage of pines whose graceful branches bend in the welcome breezes from the temperate zone. Here one stumbles at almost every step upon the traces of former populations, of whom so little is known, or sees repeated from peak to peak the signal smokes of the fierce Apaches, whose hostility to the white man dates back to the time of Cortés.

I will begin my narrative by a brief reference to the condition of affairs in Arizona prior to the arrival of General Crook, as by no other means can the arduous nature of the work he accomplished be understood and appreciated. It was a cold and cheerless day—March 10, 1870—when our little troop, “F” of the Third Cavalry, than which a better never bore guidon, marched down the vertical-walled cañon of the Santa Catalina, crossed the insignificant sand-bed of the San Pedro, and came front into line on the parade-ground of Old Camp Grant, at the mouth of the Aravaypa. The sun was shining brightly, and where there was shelter to be found in the foliage of mesquite or cottonwood, there was the merry chatter of birds; but in the open spaces the fierce breath of the norther, laden with dust and discomfort, made the new-comers imagine that an old-fashioned home winter had pursued them into foreign latitudes. A few military formalities hastily concluded, a few words of kindly greeting between ourselves and the members of the First Cavalry whom we met there, and ranks were broken, horses led to the stables, and men filed off to quarters. We had become part and parcel of the garrison of Old Camp Grant, the memory of which is still fragrant as that of the most forlorn parody upon a military garrison in that most woe-begone of military departments, Arizona.