Harvest of Fury

by Jeanne Williams

  Students at Scott Valley learned some things that were probably not taught in any other school in all Arizona. Besides the standard spelling, arithmetic, grammar, geography, and reading, Cat taught how Papagos lived in the desert, harvesting mesquite beans and saguaro fruits; of the Yaquis’ holy pueblos and valiant fighters; of Mexico’s struggle for independence from Spain and its later war with the United States when her father, an Irishman, had changed sides to fight for Mexico. And she told them all she knew of the Apaches.

  Of Ussen, the supreme god, who, as a rain shower, had given White Painted Woman a child, Born of Waters, who had grown up to kill terrible monsters and teach his people the right way to live; of the way a boy sought power on the mountain and became a warrior by serving humbly on four raids; of how girls were initiated into womanhood with rites binding them to White Painted Woman and celebrating the awesome ability to bring forth new life.

  She told how Mangus Coloradas had given her brothers a twin cradleboard and how that great chief had died by treachery. One gangling fourteen-year-old had sniffed at that and raised his chapped red paw.

  “Miz Cat, my daddy says we’d ought to kill every savage in the territory. Says crooked contractors make fortunes feeding them and the army and the reservation just gives ’em a place to rest and draw rations till they’re ready to break away again.”

  Cat decided that if the students could hear that sort of talk, they could hear about the Camp Grant massacre, and she told them. That night, several outraged parents descended on Jared and her. As head of the school board, he calmly told them he agreed with everything his sister-in-law was doing, and anyone who didn’t like it could try whipping him. No one felt that lucky, and Cat continued with her unorthodox curriculum.

  Jared, still vigorous and hearty at sixty, red hair faintly seasoned with gray, was Talitha’s father, an officer in the Mormon Battalion who’d settled on the Verde twenty years ago and taken a second wife who’d given him three sons before dying of ague. Besides Jordan, two of Jared’s other half brothers had built homes along the Verde and had growing families. All the clan except for Jordan were Mormons, and life in the little settlement had a strong dedication to work, sobriety, and high morals.

  Jared could shoe a horse, build a house, dig a well, plow the straightest furrow beneath the Mogollon Rim; and on winter evenings while the women sewed, knitted and, mended, he told stories about the white temple at Nauvoo, the forced search for lands to the west, how he’d marched with the Mormon Battalion through Arizona while it was still part of Mexico, his adventures in the California gold fields.

  And there had been plenty of excitement since then, here on the Verde. A wrestle with a bear whose claws had indelibly scarred his back and sides; the epic of Mormon settlements spreading down from Utah to cluster in the Arizona Strip and thrust down the valley of the Little Colorado, renowned as being “too thin to plow but too thick to drink.” In the past few years settlements had been started on the San Pedro, the Gila, and the Salt. Mesa, laid out in 1878 on the same plan as Salt Lake City, would someday have a temple, but till then couples who wanted the solemn rites that bound them through eternity traveled to the nearest temple at St. George, Utah, armed with “recommends” from the local bishop that they had been living according to the laws of the church.

  Benjamin, Jared’s eldest son, had just returned with his dainty little bride, Ruth, from such a wedding trip, which had taken a month each way. They spoke with awe of Grand Falls, higher than Niagara, spilling down lava flows, primeval ancient eruptions from the San Francisco Peaks; looming walls of ancient Indian fortresses, friendly Hopi and Navajo farmers tilling their fields, deserts where water had to be doled carefully from barrels and the few springs were bitter; the harrowing ascent and descent of Lee’s Backbone, horses straining to keep from plunging into the cañon; towering cliffs and the high, pine-scented Kaibab forest, until at last, glimpsed across fertile fields and the surrounding settlement, gleamed the spired white temple.

  Twenty-year-old Benjamin was like a younger brother to Cat, who’d kept house for Jared’s womanless family since Jordan had brought her to the Verde ten years ago. She was also fond of fair-haired little Ruth, who, for all her butterfly looks, could milk and chum, make cheese and soap, bake crusty bread, and sew much finer and neater stitches than Cat’s. Still, when they glowingly talked about their honeymoon trip, Cat, with a pang, would avoid Jordan’s eyes.

  She had tried to be a good wife to him. She had been, in all the things that could be willed, in outward behavior. But she couldn’t pretend passion in his arms, response to his loving, be it tender or desperate.

  “Can’t you forget him?” he had breathed one time.

  When she couldn’t answer, he’d dressed and gone out, not returning till morning. He had never again reproached her even that much. She’d tried to make up in other ways for what she couldn’t give him, but she was glad they lived with a large household where it was easy to avoid private conversations and even much private life.

  As time dulled her grief over James and Cinco, as the busy life in a new place among new people dimmed memories, and as Michael Patrick, her son, born on her own September birthday in 1871, grew from baby perfection into a wiry little boy who was now, at ten, almost as tall as she and proudly carried her father’s flaming hair, Cat was often content, sometimes happy.

  She missed Talitha, her brothers, and all the Socorro people, of course. Cat had refused to leave the ranch till after Talitha’s baby girl, Judith, was born that July of 1871, and she often wondered what the little girl was like. Patrick had visited several times, for he had mining interests now at Prescott, Wickenburg, and Bisbee. On his latest journey he’d brought his bride, a radiant Sewa, just turned seventeen.

  “Guess without knowing it I was just waiting for her to grow up,” he’d said, and the way they looked at each other brought a lump to Cat’s throat. He looked so much as she remembered their father, except for that branded cheek. And Sewa? In her dark beauty, those black-lashed golden eyes, something of Santiago lived, mingled at last with the flesh of the woman he’d loved and the man who’d been his comrade. They had a daughter, born in 1876, named after Cat, who had never seen her. And Vi had a brother.

  Sometimes Cat yearned for her loved ones and the ranch till she felt almost sick and would have given anything for a long, comforting talk with Talitha. Then she’d remind herself sternly of how good Jordan was to her, and how glad she was to have her son, something of James to love and to nurture to what James might have been if life hadn’t tragically shaped him into Fierro.

  Michael always had an orphan animal or bird to raise, or a hurt one to cure. Young as he was, he was called to help with his small, sensitive hands when a mare or a ewe or a cow was having a hard time giving birth. Apart from the skill he was acquiring, there seemed to be an actual quality in him that helped animals or people get well.

  Jared had accepted her with great kindness, lavishing on her some of the love and care he hadn’t been able to show Talitha. To this day he didn’t know that his lost wife Judith had borne a son to Juh, not the Nedhni chief presently the terror of northern Mexico, but a Mimbreño, dead for years. Still less did he dream that his supposed nephew, Michael Patrick, known as Mike, soon to be ten years old, was the grandson of Juh and the son of the raider Fierro, whose name brought terror from the Mogollon Rim to the Sierra Madres, from Apache Pass to Fort Grant.

  Mangus had killed his scores, Cochise his hundreds, and Victorio and Geronimo were at large, but Fierro was more feared. His lightning strikes, first along the San Pedro, next on the Gila or Salt, then on roads leading to the booming mining towns of Bisbee, Wickenburg, and Tombstone, brought back the terrors Apache raids had caused when Gen. George Crook took command in 1871, when the Camp Grant massacre had shocked the government into paying some attention to Arizona.

  Congress had already appropriated some money for setting up reservations, and in August of 1871 President Grant’s peace com
missioner, Vincent Colyer, an idealistic Quaker, arrived in Arizona to talk with the Indians, hear their grievances, and select temporary reservations for them. He was convinced that the whites were completely to blame for all the troubles, and General Crook’s plan for an all-out campaign to kill or bring in the hostiles had to be delayed till Colyer left in October.

  It was a good thing he’d traveled under military escort. The outrage of the citizenry was summed up in the Arizona Miner, which said the people “ought in justice to our murdered dead, to dump the old devil into the shaft of some mine, and pile rocks upon him until he is dead. A rascal who comes here to thwart the efforts of military and citizens to conquer a peace from our savage foe, deserves to be stoned to death, like the treacherous black-hearted dog that he is.”

  President Grant had threatened to put Arizona under martial law if the men who’d carried out the Camp Grant massacre were not brought to trial. A military court would have surely found them guilty, so, with reluctance, the grand jury indicted more than a hundred men, who were tried in the person of Sidney DeLong in December 1871. The others would be found guilty or innocent along with him. After a five-day trial, when Lieutenant Whitman seemed more the defendant than the accuser, the jury spent only nineteen minutes in finding DeLong not guilty.

  Crook hadn’t been idle during Colyer’s visit. He had organized five companies of the 3rd Cavalry under the ablest officers in Arizona and tempered them with a grueling seven-hundred-mile expedition from Fort Bowie near the New Mexican border north to Camp Apache and over the Mogollon Rim to Camp Verde and Fort Whipple, the departmental headquarters near Prescott. Along the way he recruited Apache scouts. To supply his men Crook turned painstaking attention to his pack train. Each mule was of the best, with a packsaddle specially fitted to it, well shod, fed and groomed. Packers who drank and ill-used their animals were dismissed and good men hired. As a result, Crook’s mules carried an average of more than three hundred pounds compared to the Army’s usual one hundred and seventy-five. The Apaches respected Crook who was just and fair and kept his word, a quality highly valued by them. They called him Nantan Lupan, or Chief Gray Fox. An expert hunter, inured to hardship, preferring a mule to a horse and comfortable old clothes to a uniform, Crook didn’t swear, smoke or drink. This astounded the citizens though they were impressed by his erect, muscular height, stern face and keen stare. The Apaches, though, knew him at once for a warrior and a friend.

  Coyoteros came in to Camp Apache, Aravaipas and Pinals to Camp Grant, the Tontos to Camp McDowell, Mohaves to Camp Verde and Date Creek, and the Hualapais to Beale’s Springs’. An Army officer was in charge at each place. Food and clothing were to be issued and the Indians encouraged to farm, cut and sell hay and wood, and become self-supporting.

  Before Crook could go after the Apache holdouts, though, in March of 1872 President Grant sent another peace commissioner, a one-armed Civil War hero, the so-called Christian General, O. O. Howard. Unlike Colyer, Howard listened to both sides. Though he told Crook to pursue hostiles who absolutely refused to settle on reservations, he tried to deal with Indian wrongs. Among other things, he compelled the Mexican families who’d adopted six of the little Camp Grant captives to return them to their relatives. He also persuaded seven leaders from the Papagos, Pimas, and Apaches to come with him to Washington to meet “the Great White Father.” He hoped to impress them with white civilization and show the Apaches that resistance would only bring their destruction. These leaders returned with Bibles, medals, and new blue suits, while Howard penetrated into the Chiricahuas to talk with Cochise.

  Escorted by Tom Jeffords, Cochise’s blood brother, who had years before won protection for his stagecoaches, Howard parleyed for eleven days, hearing all of Cochise’s quarrels with the whites, going back to when soldiers had hanged his kinsmen at Apache Pass in 1861. In the end, the Chiricahua chief agreed to peace, provided his people’s reservation was in their home country, and that was promised.

  As soon as Howard had departed for Washington in November of 1872, Crook ordered commands from seven posts to converge on the Tonto Basin, pursuing hostiles wherever found. Jordan served as a civilian scout under famed Al Sieber. As often as possible, women and children were to be protected and prisoner warriors well treated and enlisted as scouts. But at the end of December, at Skull Cave, cornered Yavapai refused to send out their women and children and defiantly sang death songs, battling till seventy-five were killed. Only eighteen women and children lived to be taken captive.

  A January campaign in the Superstitions was followed by the murder of three settlers near Wickenburg. The killers refuged in Turret Mountain, a columnlike butte west of the Verde, and thought no one could follow, but soldiers crawled on their bellies, by night, up the steep, loose-rocked incline and charged at sunrise, killing most of the men.

  The Indians had thought Skull Cave and Turret Mountain unconquerable strongholds. Defeated at both places immediately after they had raided white settlers, they had to realize there was no eluding the Gray Fox’s troopers, now led by scouts who knew every trail and retreat. Most warriors came in for peace.

  Crook’s efforts to make the Indians self-supporting, able to raise most of their food and sell hay and corn to the posts, were unpopular with contractors and settlers who wanted to supply both posts and reservations. Civilian agents had replaced military supervisors in December of 1872. Dishonest ones paid for inferior food or supplies the Indians never even got. Crook angrily condemned such corruption, but he was transferred out of the territory in 1875.

  That year the Bureau of Indian Affairs moved the Tontos and Yavapai from Camp Verde, where they were irrigating and growing their own food in familiar country, down to San Carlos, which they detested. Coyoteros from Camp Apache were also sent there, much against their will.

  This cramping of feuding bands together in country most of them didn’t like was bound to lead to outbreaks. When some Chiricahuas began raiding in Sonora and the San Pedro Valley, this band was ordered to also go to San Carlos. The peaceful ones, including sons of the now dead Cochise, unhappily obeyed, while the wilder ones stayed out, raiding on both sides of the border.

  Jared said that none of it would have happened if the Mimbreños and Chiricahuas had been left on their familiar reservations. He shook his graying head over the Mormon settlements on the Gila that were diverting so much water that some downstream Apache crops had failed.

  “I never thought to feel sorry for Apaches,” he mused. “Not after what they did to my wife and her brothers and father, or the way they raided and killed in the sixties. But now they know they’re whipped. They’re trying their best, the most of ’em, to live on a little scrap of land when they’ve had the run of all of what the Mexicans called El Gran Chichimeca, the northern wilderness.”

  Jordan nodded broodingly. As a civilian scout for Crook, living closely with the Apache ones, he had much respect for them. “They’re cheated and starved and lied to till it’s no wonder they break away.” He looked at Cat, and she knew he was thinking of James. “If I were one of them, I reckon I’d rather take Nana’s or Victorio’s or Fierro’s way. Die free in the mountains rather than cooped up for whites to make a profit off me.”

  Young Benjamin, whose red hair was more carrot-hued than that of his father and uncle, cast a keen blue glance at Jordan. “Didn’t you know that Nocadelklinny who’s holding dances around the Cibecue on the San Carlos reservation?”

  “He was one of our best Coyotero scouts,” said Jordan. “He was sent to Washington and met President Grant—got a peace medal that he wears around his neck.”

  Jared frowned. “After all that, seems funny he’d stir his people up. Agent Tiffany gave him permission to dance at first, but now he’s getting nervous and wants the army to stop it.”

  Jordan shrugged. “I don’t think Bobby, as we used to call him, meant to stir up anyone. I hear he went to an Indian school at Santa Fe for a while and learned a little about Christianity. What must have
really stuck with him was the resurrection. You can’t blame him for wanting to bring dead chiefs back to help their people.”

  A chill shot down Cat’s spine. “That’s what he’s doing?”

  “That’s how it started.” He was dancing near the graves of Eskiole and Diablo. That gives a notion of how desperate the Apaches are because they’re scared of the dead. More Coyoteros started coming to the dances and now I hear the Fort Apache scouts are attending.”

  Jared said dryly, “The mail carrier was telling folks at the mill that when Nocadelklinny didn’t resurrect anyone, some warriors threatened to kill him. That’s when he said the leaders wouldn’t return till the whites were driven out.”

  “I expect what Bobby said and what others say he said have gotten pretty well mixed,” Jordan replied slowly.

  Benjamin put his hand over. Ruth’s as if to protect her. “Whatever started it, that kind of thing’s bound to pull in some hostiles. They say Tiffany’s scared because bands that have usually been feuding are getting together for the dancing. There are even rumors that Fierro’s been drawn in.”

  Cat stiffened at the name. Jordan’s gaze was like a steadying touch, but no one else noticed.

  “Fierro!” whispered Michael, James’s secret son, whose dark blue eyes, shockingly like his father’s, shone with eagerness. “I’d like to see him someday!”

  “You’d change your mind in a hurry!” scoffed fifteen-year-old Dick, Jared’s youngest son. “He’d cut off your eyelids and—”

  “That’s enough, Dick,” rebuked Jared.

  Beneath the checked tablecloth Cat’s fingers twisted and locked. James on the Cibecue, a few days’ ride away? She would give anything, all the rest of her life, if she could see him one more time as the man she had loved, James, before he became Fierro.