Notes of a Summer Tour Among the Indians of the Southwest (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Notes of a Summer Tour Among the Indians of the Southwest

My annual tour in the Indian country this year included a most interesting visit to Fort Sill, O. T.,where the Chiricahua band of Apache prisoners have their home.

To travel through Arizona and hear the people talk of Geronimo, the Apache arch-fiend, who, if he set foot in the Territory, would be hanged for murder without the formality of a trial, is impressive. But to pass up into Oklahoma and find this same Geronimo putting in his honest eight hours of work daily as a farmer in the fields, and at intervals donning his uniform as a United States scout and presenting himself with the other scouts for inspection, is still more so.

Most Indian outbreaks have been the result of a situation which, in a measure at least, justified them. To go upon the warpath is sometimes the only means left to a tribe for calling the attention of the Government and the people sharply to the wrongs it has been suffering. Other cases find a type in the last campaign of Chief Joseph, who, after the Government had wickedly removed the Nez Perces to a region where they died like sheep smitten with a murrain, led his people across the country on a march which has, perhaps, never been paralleled in military history, and which need not have cost a single human life but for the folly of his pursuers.

No excuse seems, however, to have been urged or sought in the case of Geronimo.

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