Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  2

  THE CALABOZO TO which we were confined when not working in the mines bore an elegantly written sign over its door: DESTINACIÓN DE LOS GATTIVOS. That was the most civilized thing about the place. Windowless and floored in dirt, lit only by a guttering oil lamp, it provided no bunks or latrine. We prisoners, about half a hundred of us, relieved ourselves in the far northwest corner of the communal cell, the coolest part of that Stygian pit, on the theory that the smell would be less offensive emanating from that quarter. Once a month, perhaps, the guards issued shovels and a wheelbarrow so that we might “muck out the stable.” Otherwise the ordure would have smothered us. At night and often during the day those prisoners who had serapes or blankets wrapped them tightly around their heads to muffle the stench. I had neither.

  Though the temperatures outside the prison walls could reach or exceed 100 degrees in the summer and fall, the nights were cold regardless of season. With a dozen other unfortunates who had nothing in which to wrap themselves I huddled for mutual warmth in a rank, louse-ridden knot of misery—a snoring, coughing, farting, wheezing hillock of filth.

  My motive in first befriending Jorge Guay mas was because he had a blanket: a large, thick one, woven of goats’ hair. It had been sent him by his mother when she learned of his imprisonment. I have no idea what kind of mordida he paid the guards to actually acquire possession of this gift, but that blanket was big enough for two. Jorge was a small man, not very assertive; larger prisoners were always stealing his porridge or elbowing him into the dung heap when he crouched to relieve himself. I, on the other hand, was the tallest man in the calabozo, and, if I dare say, the most adept at fisticuffs. One afternoon, shortly after Jorge’s arrival at the jail, a prisoner named Candelário Guzman, a poor-box pilferer from Las Cruces, grabbed the water ladle from Jorge’s hand just as he was about to drink. I stepped in and hit the man with a quick right hand beneath the ribs, a short, twisting little liver punch I had learned in the ring at Swartsburg. Usually this blow is so painful as to render its recipient incapable of further aggression. Candelário bounced back, however, all the more enraged at my effrontery; he came bulling in wide open, whereupon I hammered him with a facer which flattened his nose, and my, how the claret flowed! That finished the fray, of course. All of this was done quickly, surreptitiously, so the guards might not see and retaliate with their ever-ready bludgeons.

  Jorge’s gratitude for my intervention was immediate and effusive; in short order we were sharing his blanket.

  AND THUS DID those first four years crawl by, though we scarcely had need to keep track of them in that place. Yet with each day, each month, each season, the hatred I felt for Lafcadio Dade grew more intense, more measured, more venomous, etched deeper and more bitterly into my soul. Occasionally through the guards we would pick up bits of news from the outside world: Apaches had raided a conducta coming up from Chihuahua with supplies for the town; Yaquis or Comanches or Kiowa Apaches were killing and thieving and burning their way through the countryside between Santa Rita and Socorro, then disappearing again into the mountains or the llanos to the east; whole parties of Anglo trappers had been wiped out by indios along the Gila or the San Juan River. I prayed each time that one of the names mentioned in these massacres would be that of Lafe Dade; but no.

  Finally, in 1837, the people of Chihuahua had had enough of these Indian depredations: a junta took control of affairs in the provincial capital and proclaimed a Proyecto de Guerra against the Apaches and their allies. This cunning “Scheme for War” offered the citizenry a reward of $100 for the scalp of every adult male Apache brought to the capital, $50 for every squaw’s scalp, and $25 for that of each Apache child.

  In no time the vultures were descending, most of them Anglos, I’m sorry to say. After all, the beaver trade was about played out, due mainly to that change in men’s fashions Sam Tulloch had mentioned to us at Fort Cass. All the haut monde were now wearing silk hats rather than felt. By the late 1830s the West was full of hard, ruthless, proficient white men, Americans, British, French Canadian, who had learned the wiles of the Indian warfare the hard way, whether from the Blackfeet or the Sioux, the Pawnee or Comanche or Kiowa. What difference did it make to them if the hair they now sought came from a beaver or a red man? Indeed, Indian hair paid far better, with beaver bringing barely two dollars a plew these days.

  The first to take advantage of Chihuahua’s generous bounties was, of course, our old friend Lafcadio Dade. He arrived at the presidio of Santa Rita del Cobre on a fine spring day in 1837, soon after the Proyecto had been announced. He had a proposal for the alcalde. Up until now the Mimbreños had confined their raiding to areas far south of us, down around El Paso del Norte and Chihuahua; they still maintained a careful peace with the Santa Ritans, and their main village remained on the banks of the nearby Mimbres River. From a friendly guard we learned that Dade planned to invite all the Mimbreños to a great fiesta, celebrating the continued, nay eternal, friendship between Santa Rita and the Mimbreños. There would be musica and danza, games of chance, cut-rate prices on the goods in all the tiendas. An entire herd of steers would be roasted on spits, along with flocks of chickens, goats, and turkeys; the women of the town would provide tamales, tortillas, arroz, et cetera. Ay, por Dios—mescál would flow like the Mimbres River in spate; a mountain of the finest, sweetest socorro, a veritable Popocátapetl of the stuff, would rise from the town zocolo, or plaza, for the delectation of all… higher even than the towers of Palácio de Méjico itself. To ensure that the Apaches might feel completely safe, even the threatening cannons mounted atop the martello towers would be removed for the occasion.

  “Won’t the indios take advantage of this generosity to attack us?” asked Jorge of the guard.

  That man winked a slow wink. “It is not to worry,” he said. “El Capitan Dade has considered all eventualities. Wait and see what happens.”

  The Sunday of the Fiesta Granda broke cool and clear, the sun beaming down from the crest of the Mimbres like a fat, warm, benevolent uncle. Brave music filled the streets of Santa Rita: trumpets, flutes, castanets, tambours, guitars, drums; bells pealed from the squat adobe tower of the Iglesia San Pedro Martír; even a sweet-voiced choir of schoolboys was at hand, clad in flowing white robes and under the direction of Fray Bartolomeo, a young Dominican friar who administered Last Rites to dying prisoners. All the damas and senoritas of the town had donned their most colorful dresses; the plaza was a riot of reds and gold, blues and greens and purples.

  The Mimbreños entered the plaza through the Puerte del Rio, and their women, too, were wearing their finest: supple deerskin shirts bleached white in the sun and cryptically patterned with elaborate beadwork, colorful skirts of dyed reeds or bark or reworked Navajo blankets; around their necks dangled baubles of native gold and silver from the secret places in the mountains which the Apache guarded so tenaciously. Even the children were carefully washed and scrubbed, their customary nakedness covered with loincloths.

  We prisoners had been allowed out of the calabozo for the morning, under heavy guard to be sure. Colonel Ortega himself ensured strict attention to duty in this matter with a keen and threatening eye. We would be allowed half an hour at the fiesta, during which time we might eat as much as we could hold; then it would be back to the mines. I scanned the Apache crowd carefully, in hopes of spotting Pine Leaf among the women. I could not find her, neither did I see Mangas Coloradas among the men, most of them elderly, who accompanied the indio women and children. Nor could I spot the other war chief of the Mimbreños, Cuchillo Negro, the Black Knife, a villainous-looking Apache who had been pointed out to me on other occasions during one of his rare visits to Santa Rita.

  Well, perhaps they were off on a raid, I reassured myself, and Bar-che-am-pe with them. But I knew that was not so. She was dead. Suddenly I felt it in my very guts, and with that realization my hatred for Dade boiled up in bitter bile from my stomach, and I vomited onto the stones.

  “Que pasa?” asked
Jorge, alarmed. “Are you ill?”

  “No,” I said, shrugging his arm from my shoulder. “I’m only hungry”

  Yes, hungry beyond belief, beyond starvation, for Pine Leaf’s strong arms, her warm naked body pressed against mine beneath a buffalo robe, somewhere up there in the cool mountains of the north, hungry above all for vengeance on Dade… .

  And then at that very instant I saw him, for the first time since he had sold me into this Hell on Earth. He was standing well away from the crowd, smoking a long black cigarro, his back to a pile of pack saddles stacked against the wall of shrubbery which grew at the western end of the zocolo. On the bushes behind him hung many empty grain bags in which the socorro had been brought to the fiesta.

  I searched Dade’s face carefully for … for what? Evidence that he had found my gold mine? What could I detect if he had?

  Some indication of self-satisfaction, of cupidity fulfilled, of course. The same look I had seen on my own face in Bar-che-am-pe’s looking glass, back there in White Hart Hollow, the day I discovered that the creek bore abundant alluvial gold.

  I detected no such glow in Lafcadio Dade’s eye—rather, a shifty nervousness behind his usual cocksure smirk.

  By now the Apaches had swarmed to the big trestle tables laden with food at the center of the plaza. The feasting had begun, but still our guards held us back with the threatening muzzles of their escopetas. The Mimbreños wolfed down meat and socorro as only Indians can eat; men, women, and children filling their bellies as fast as their hands could stuff it in their mouths, then washing it all down with great drafts of mescal from the gourds provided for that purpose. Jorge lamented, “At this rate there will be no comida left, not a crumb for nosotros. … Pobres cattîvos!”

  Then I saw Dade gesture with his hand, the most subtle of signals, and the Santa Ritans at the serving tables sidled clear of the indios.

  Dade stepped back to the edge of the shrubbery. Some of the sacking that draped the branches was pulled aside by hands within the thicket. Dade himself toppled the pile of pack saddles. Now from within the leafy shadows I caught a quick glint of brass. The ugly belled muzzle of a six-pounder, one of the very cannon whose removal from the martello towers had been meant to reassure these Indians, poked out of the brush, aimed straight at the feasting multitude. Dade took a deep pull on his cigarro. The coal sparked bright red; he reached down and applied it to the touch hole.

  A brazen, clanging roar; a great tongue of fire flashed out at the Apaches, quick as a snake, and a double charge of grape, chainshot, nails, scrap metal, and stones tore through them. Some of the balls reached the far side of the plaza, pocking the adobe walls and felling half a dozen burros secured at the rail in front of the presidio. As the smoke cleared, a great writhing mass of Indian bodies lay revealed. Big chunks of meat, some of it roast beef, some human, dangled from the trestles and the surrounding ornamental plants; a cloud of cornmeal blown from the tables mixed with the gun smoke and settled to cover the scene of slaughter like some pale, diaphanous shroud. Strangely, there were no cries, no curses, no groans or ululations of grief. Not even the dying children would cry out in pain, such was their tribal stoicism. Apaches.

  Now Dade’s men and a detachment of soldados from the presidio descended on the dead and wounded, most with scalp knives in hand, or with cocked muskets to finish off the wounded. I later heard that 243 Apache scalps were taken that day, mostly those of women and children, which fetched Dade and the town fathers of Santa Rita del Gobre the equivalent in pesos of more than $16,000.

  When all the hair had been lifted, Colonel Ortega gave a signal; our guards at last raised their escopetas and told us to “dig in.” The rest of the food was ours for the taking. Sad to say, most of the prisoners dashed down to that horrid scene of mutilation and commenced stuffing into their mouths whatever they could chew: cornmeal, beef, tamales, chicken, and even, in their haste, I’m sure, some gobbets of Apache flesh. But that was the condition to which we had been reduced.

  3

  THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY following the slaughter of the Apaches were ones of loud exultation for the citizens of Santa Rita. Masses were offered up at the Iglesia, praising the Lord for his aid in bringing off this great triumph over the hated enemy. Dade and his crew, along with two members of the ayuntamiento, had departed for the capital soon after the massacre, bearing two burlap sacks full of Mimbreño scalps, to collect a fortune in reward money, some of which would be shared with the townsfolk. Another communal fiesta was bruited, this time to celebrate the famous victory, but supplies were low in the tiendas and storehouses, thanks to the lavish outlay for the feast that had baited the trap. Still no one was worried. Not yet. A large conducta was expected momentarily from Chihuahua, and it was decided to put off the celebration until its arrival.

  But then, as the thrill faded, some townsfolk remembered that a few of the Apaches had escaped the massacre, fleeing town as fast as their legs would carry them. What kind of vengeance would they plan in the wake of this betrayal? The names of Mangas and Cuchillo Negro flitted ominously through the collective mind, along with those of such other well-known young Apache raiders as Delgadito (the Slim One), Poncé, Coletto Amarillo (the Yellow Tail), Pedro Azul, and, the most murderous of all, Victorio. These were names that would ring down through the sad history of the Southwest in coming years, along with the countless funeral bells they caused to toll. When scouts returned from the Mimbreño camp with reports that the ashes in the fire rings were cold, the jacales empty of all but garbage, not an Indian in sight, people began to sleep uneasily at night.

  Dade and the ayuntamiento members failed to return within ten days, as had been promised, with the reward money. Nor did the supply conducta appear, though it was now a week overdue. The alcalde posted watchmen on the summit of a natural torreón near town called the Needle, with orders to report the first sign of a dust cloud from the approaching supply train. Rations had grown quite short, and people tightened their belts. We prisoners simply went hungry, subsisting each day on a handful of cornmeal per man and all the water we could drink. We drank plenty but soon were too weak to work. Some of the Indian prisoners caught locusts, beetles, ants, and song-birds, picked up what carrion they could on the march to and from the mines, ate this, and were the stronger for it. Finally, though, the mines were shut down, pending arrival of supplies.

  Sometimes at night from the adobes in town we could hear the wailing of hungry children, mingled in an atonal counterpoint with the song of coyotes on the mountains all around. It struck me as oddly affecting. Sometimes I wept.

  At last the alcalde could wait no longer. He issued an official pronunciamento: the conducta was not coming. His town was dying. Santa Rita’s 320 citizens, men, women, and children, were to pack only the most necessary of their belongings and prepare for a long march to El Paso del Norte. The presidio’s fifty valorous soldados, those noble heroes who had so roundly defeated the treacherous Apaches in the recent Battle of Santa Rita, would in consort with the castillo’s twenty-five trustworthy guards provide an armed escort sufficient to ensure the safety of all. The sturdy prisoners from the minería had volunteered to serve as additional transport, two-legged, strong-backed burros and mules to carry the town’s scant burdens. This would allow the brave officers of fort and presidio, as well as the gallant Caballeros of the citizenry, to remain mounted in case of trouble from the indios. Clearly the Apaches were on the warpath; ambush was always a slim possibility, but these brave soldiers and gentlemen would ensure a safe trip for all. Every due precaution would be taken.

  The following day we departed, heading southeast. Beyond the village walls we passed the long, low mound in which were buried the hairless victims of Santa Rita’s treachery. Townsmen averted their eyes. A day, two days we marched through rocky hills and arid flats gray with sagebrush. Behind us accumulated the litter of a people in flight: furniture at first, chairs and tables and bedsteads, then cook pots and chamberpots, mattresses, family portrai
ts, utensils, finally dolls and other toys of the squalid children. Then the youngest children themselves began to die, some of hunger or sheer exhaustion. They were buried in hasty shallow graves while coyotes looked on. Axletrees broke; mules and burros died. By the fourth day out of Santa Rita, we were all bone-weary, our nerves frayed by the constant sense that we were being watched from the nearby hillsides, and not only by four-legged vermin. There were Apaches up there. We could feel the vengeance in their hearts. It was palpable, fiercer than the sun.

  On that day, in a narrow, winding arroyo, we came at high noon upon the remains of the conducta on which we had relied for succor. Buzzards flapped up from the tattered skeletons of mules and men. Coyotes slunk away into the boulders that studded the sides of the gulch. Empty crates, burnt wagons, overturned carts lay on the hillsides as if tossed there by the hand of an angry giant; ripped sacks that had once contained cornmeal fluttered on the slopes, snagged in their haphazard flight by the teeth of cactus. The dessicated corpse of a man, burnt nearly black by the sun, stood in the center of the road, impaled on the shaft of a Spanish lance planted butt-first in the sand. The alcalde recognized the dead man as his brother, Coronel de Milicia Rodrigo Mondragon y Carrabal, commandant of the El Paso militia.

  We prisoners were detailed to remove the body from the spear and bury it. Jorge chose to work with the gravediggers. I helped with the corpse. The body was crisp as a popover after its days in the pitiless sun, but do not believe that a mummy does not stink. This one stank plenty. After laying Colonel Mondragon to rest and listening to fulsome prayers from Padre Terrazas, followed by a seemingly endless elegy from the bereaved alcalde, we set to work digging a pit in which to bury the other victims of the Apache attack. Every moment we spent with pick and shovel down in that long trench we harbored fear of ambush: each shovel load might be our last; and each man’s back, I am sure, itched and twitched as mine did with fear of the bite of a silent, plummeting Mimbreño arrow. It did not come to pass, though, and late in the afternoon the refugee column moved a mile or two farther down the road to a more defensible piece of ground before encamping. Our sentries were doubled that night, but no one, I am sure, slept well.