Harvest of Fury (41 page)

General Crook made two campaigns into Mexico after them, for an agreement had been made between that country and the United States to allow each other's forces to cross the border when in hot pursuit of desperadoes or hostiles. On the second campaign Crook worked out a surrender which Geronimo accepted; but before they could leave for Fort Bowie, a trader sold the Indians some mescal and scared them with stories that they would be killed once they reached the Fort. Geronimo and some twenty warriors with about that many women and children fled back to the Sierra Madres. The other prisoners, after reaching Fort Bowie, were sent to Fort Marion, Florida.

Crook felt he had followed the best course with the Apaches. Further, he'd promised those who surrendered that they'd be kept only two years in the East before they could come back to Arizona. Now Sheridan and most Arizonans and New Mexicans wanted them kept East permanently.

Unhappy with his superiors' decisions, Crook resigned his command and was succeeded by Gen. Nelson Miles, who was given a total of five thousand men, a quarter of the whole U.S. Army, to put an end to Apache troubles. He set up twenty-seven heliograph stations to keep track of hostiles; a message could flash over eight hundred miles across mountain peaks in under four hours.

At last, on September 4, 1886, Geronimo surrendered in Skeleton Cañon, near the border. With soldiers everywhere, the old raiding days were done. Besides, most of his warriors wanted to join their families who had been treacherously sent to Florida, though they'd been living peacefully at San Carlos.

In August all Chiricahuas at the reservation had been put under guard and taken to Holbrook, where they were put on a train to Florida. Their number included many scouts who had served Crook faithfully. General Crook was outraged, but his protests were ignored along with those of Capt. John Bourke. They were sure mountain Apaches would sicken in the flat, low, humid place they'd been sent, and especially denounced the imprisonment of the scouts. Moreover, instead of being united with their families, as Miles had promised, the men had been sent to Fort Pickens, while their women and children were crowded miserably at Fort Marion. Children over twelve were sent off to the Indian school at Carlisle in Pennsylvania and the younger taught by nuns, to the fury of San Augustine's Protestant clergy.

It was an awful winter for the half-naked, crowded Apaches, separated from husbands or from wives and children.

At last, General Crook's bitter protests and the work of Captain Bourke with Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association convinced President Cleveland that something should be done to remedy the situation. Most of the Apaches were sent to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama and the families of men at Fort Pickens were allowed to join them there.

But the sandy earth wasn't good for farming, and rations were insufficient. By the fall of 1887 disease had broken out, especially tuberculosis. Lozen, Victorio's famed warrior sister, was one of the many who sickened and died. Seven children dying of tuberculosis were sent back to Mount Vernon from the school for Indians at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to which children over twelve had been assigned. Their deaths were soon followed by a dozen more.

Crook visited the imprisoned Apaches in January of 1890 and promised to plead their cause again in Washington. He did that, but died of a heart attack in March, still fighting for his former enemies and the scouts who'd been his friends. When the Indians heard of his death, his former scouts sat down in a great circle, let down their hair, bowed their heads, and wept.

The argument over where to send the Chiricahuas raged on. When Congress appropriated money in 1894 to scatter them on military reservations throughout the country, even General Miles, who'd shipped the innocent three quarters of them to Florida along with the guilty, thought it was cruel and unfair. He suggested the Indian Territory again, and in September the War Department ordered them to be moved there and settled on lands of the Comanches and Kiowas who twenty years earlier had been compelled to give up their wanderings and raids that had ranged from Kansas into Mexico.

It was to Fort Sill that young Dr. Michael Scott with his wife, Rosemary, and their small son, Santiago, went to treat the Chiricahuas, who were divided into village groups, with each family haying ten acres on which to grow food. In this land of rich pasture and water, the Indians were proving as good at raising cattle as they had previously been at stealing them. They liked the young doctor, who seemed almost an Apache in spite of his red hair, and came to him for advice.

In his second winter at Fort Sill, while coming home from attending a sick old woman, Michael's horse snapped a leg in a gopher hole and fell on him, breaking his neck. Sick with grief, never very strong, Rosemary developed pneumonia and died within the month. Since her parents lived the nomadic life of the military, it was decided that little Sant, as he was called, would be better off with his father's relatives at Rancho del Socorro.

Patrick had gone to fetch him. Chris, at five, was a whole year older and had no intention of letting him forget it, but when Patrick got out of the buckboard, lifting down a tired little boy who held tightly to him and hid his face from all the strangers rushing to greet him, Chris, remembering in a vivid rush how it was to suddenly look into a sea of strange faces, however kind, tugged at her grandfather's arm.

“Let him come with me, Grande.” That was the name she'd struck on for calling all her grandparents and great-aunts and uncles. “You grown-ups scare him. He can have my bed tonight. I'll tell him stories till he goes to sleep.”

“That might be best tonight,” Talitha agreed. “Take him to Chris's room, Patrick, and I'll bring him something to eat.”

Chris had the room that had once been shared by Caterina and Sewa. Since there was plenty of room, the hobbyhorse that Caterina, Sewa, Vi, Shea, and the other children had used, with its real horsehair mane and tail, stood by the fireplace. On the niche above was the carved wooden hawk James had given Caterina, and in a larger niche sat the Judith doll Shea had given Talitha when she wasn't much older than Chris was now, though Chris found it hard to imagine her grandmother being a child instead of the one who saw to everything and looked after everyone.

The twin cradleboard with its turquoise and charms, given by Mangus Coloradas to Chris's grandfather Patrick and Uncle Miguel, hung on the wall. It had been Talitha's idea to put all these treasured family things in Chris's room and tell her the stories that went with them.

When her grandfather put Sant down and two vaqueros brought his trunk, Chris took him over to the horse. “Azul was your grandmother's. I'm too big to ride him, so he's been lonely. He's glad you're here.”

The little boy carefully touched the mane. “I can ride him?”

“He'll be sad if you don't.” Chris turned to the trunk, which Patrick had opened before he left. “What do you sleep in?”

He came over and burrowed around till he found a white nightshirt. “You go 'way,” he blurted, clutching it to him. “It's not nice to undress with girls, Mama says.…” His face crumpled as he remembered.

Chris put her arms around him and let him cry, though she'd started to snap his head off for telling her to leave her own room. “Let me help you get your shoes off,” she suggested when his sobs were less convulsive. “Then I'll wait outside while you get into your nightshirt. Grande Talitha will bring you something good to eat—”

“Not hungry.”

Chris got off one shoe and looked up at him grimly. “You have to eat, or you'll get sick, and then you can't go riding on a real horse or learn to rope or do anything. And I won't tell you stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Good ones.”

“You'll tell them till I go to sleep?” He looked around the room, and she read his thoughts. Who, more than she, knew about fear of the dark? “I'll ask Grande Talitha if we can have another bed. Then I'd be right here if you wanted a drink or something.” She gave him an encouraging smile and stepped into the courtyard.

He needed to be taken care of. Listening to the splash of the fountain among the pomegranate trees, she felt a rush of gratefulness that her own parents were alive, though her father's serving in the legislature, now moved back to Prescott, and going into business there kept him and Mother away most of the time. Here at the ranch with all of the Grandes, she didn't miss them much. They'd never been part of her daily life. Daddy's work as a geologist had kept him on the move and his Katie had followed, leaving Chris with what she thought of as her Big Family. The one time Chris had been taken along, when she was about two years old, she'd been left at Tomochic with her nurse and Cruz while her parents went on a hazardous mule journey into the Sierra to get ore samples from an old mine.

She couldn't remember any of that. The first memory of her life, burned forever in her consciousness, was a blazing church, women and children running out, crumpling and screaming as they were blasted down by bullets. Chris saw that from the house where Cruz, the giant Tarahumare, guarded her and her nurse. Then she saw nothing, only blackness shot with flame.

Later, she'd know why every male of Tomochic over thirteen had died fighting or been killed when they ran out of water and ammunition. The fiercely independent Tarahumare-Spanish mixed people of the little mountain village had in their church two paintings reputedly by the great artist Murillo. If copies, they were good ones. The governor of Chihuahua thought they would make an excellent gift for President Porfirio Díaz' wife, thus ensuring his own “reelection” to office. The henchman sent to steal them was stopped by the men of the town, whose leader, Cruz Chavez, pointed out that the governor should buy his gifts and not rob a poor village. Tomochic kept its pictures, but its people were reported as being dangerous rebels. Part of this was because they believed in the young faith healer, Santa Teresa de Cabora, who was being denounced by many priests as a heretic and was feared by the Díaz government as an incendiary revolutionist because rebelling Yaquis, Mayos, and people like those of Tomochic revered her, came in thousands to be healed, and made her their patroness.

An English mine manager telegraphed the Díaz government, protesting the “lawlessness” around Tomochic and asking for protection. In vain, Chavez pointed out to the manager that in two hundred years his villagers had never waylaid a pack train and that if the manager was afraid, the Tomochitecos would themselves escort the silver to Guerrero.

Knowing they were considered rebels, though not really understanding why, Cruz Chavez and his men went to Cabora to seek counsel from the girl they venerated as a saint. Meanwhile, learning that her arrest had been ordered, Teresa Urrea and her father went to Cocorit and surrendered. The Tomochitecos, fighting off an army ambush, reached her home to find her gone. They prayed in her chapel, however, and started back to Tomochic, pursued by soldiers and skirmishing. Some of them may have gone to Arizona to buy guns, because by the time they returned to their village in February of 1892, they had repeating Winchesters, vastly superior to the smoothbore single-shot Mausers of the Federals.

Cruz Chavez prayed daily at the altar. If his people submitted, he and a few others would be shot and the rest of the men conscripted into the army or sent as slave laborers to the henequen hells of Yucatán, but it might touch off a blaze among the smoldering Yaquis, Mayos, and Tarahumares that would force the government to respect their rights.

The Mayos did rebel in May, and Díaz ordered Teresa Urrea to be deported. Her father went with her. She was his illegitimate daughter by a vaquero's daughter, and though he was a wealthy
hacendado
with many children, legitimate and otherwise, it was this girl with the wavy dark red hair and lovely brown eyes that he loved to the extent of going into exile with her for the rest of his life. He never believed her to be a saint; indeed, she herself said she wasn't and only used the healing power God had given her. Before the cataleptic trance that lasted for over three months in 1889 when she was sixteen, she was a merry, mischievous girl who played the guitar and sang
corridos
, though she'd always been able to do things that seemed uncanny. Her strongest playmates couldn't lift her unless she allowed it, and she had flashes of seeing things happening far away. After the long trance, she had the gift of healing. Soon thousands of maimed, crippled, diseased folk made their way to her father's ranch.

“
You can see
.” Twelve years later, Chris would still hear that softly thrilling sweet voice. “
Christina, small one, you can see
.”

Cool hands had touched her eyelids. A surge of delicious sparkling coursed through Chris, centering in her eyes. “God's world is beautiful,” went on the musical voice. A sweet smell, like flowers, came from those hands. “Look at me, Christina.”

And she did. The first face she saw since those terror-stricken ones in Tomochic was that of Teresita. Glowing, luminous eyes enveloped Chris before, smiling, Teresita kissed her. She refused pay from the astounded Reviers and O'Sheas who'd driven to Bosque, the ranch where the Urreas lived that year of 1894, only three miles from Tumacácori. Chris's Grandes left money, though, for feeding the poor who came for healing, and this was accepted.

Chris never saw her again, but she never forgot that voice or that lovely face and those wonderful eyes. The Urreas had moved to El Paso, and after a time to Clifton; Arizona, where Teresita had died only this January, in her thirty-third year.

Five-year-old Chris had been remembering all of this, waiting in the courtyard for her some-kind-of-cousin to get ready for bed. When at last he called her, she hurried inside as Grande Talitha arrived with rich, cheesy corn soup, flan, and a big glass of milk.

“Feed myself,” he told his great-aunt, who smiled and put the food tray on the table by the bed.