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58 10 General Crook sent runners out to all the people to tell them to stay close to Camp Verde, saying that they would be given all the food they wanted, along with blankets, calicos, corn, and wheat and barley seeds to plant on the bottomlands. All the headmen of the different bands got together and talked about what was best to do, and they decided to come within a week’s time. In the meantime, some of their young men went out hunting deer and antelope and happened to notice great lines of horsemen at some distance. They came to notify the others. Most all of the Indians broke camp and went toward the Verde River, the opposite direction from where the soldiers were heading. The three young men returned to Camp Verde to tell General Crook that in four or five days there would be a great number of Indians coming in. They told him that when the Indians left their camps there would be lots of smoke from their fires, and they asked that the soldiers meet them outside the post. Some people from the red rocks were the first to arrive. Barsukaelaelah had been their head chief. He had come to the post some time before and was put in the guardhouse for attempting to stab the commanding officer. The way it happened was this. Those three young men had been rounded up earlier and sent off to Prescott, where General Crook was stationed. The interpreter, a man named Joe Gacka, whose father was a Mojave and mother a Yavapai, told him that the three young men had gone home to the mountains. Barsukaelaelah knew that this was a lie, and he said that the whites had better tell him the truth or he would make them pay. The commanding officer told him the same story, saying that the three young men had gone home, told to gather up the people and bring them here to live near the post and be fed by his men. The more Barsukaelaelah was told that the three men had returned to their homes, the angrier he grew. He Chapter Ten 59 got so mad that he jumped up, grabbed the officer by the throat, and made a motion to pull his knife out. Two or three officers standing nearby disarmed him and dragged him to the guardhouse. When the rest of the Indians heard what had happened, they went off to the mountains in the middle of the night and were past the red rock country by morning. About two weeks later, Barsukaelaelah caught a guard and tried to take his gun from him. Another soldier shot him and killed him. If he had been told the truth, that the three young men had been taken prisoner and sent to Prescott, then he would have gone there to try to negotiate with General Crook to have them released. But that was the way government commanders dealt with Indians. I know of many similar cases but would not like to say too much about it. The people did not know what had happened to Barsukaelaelah, and about three thousand Yavapais and Tontos came in from the Tonto Basin. Several hundred more had already come in from the ranges near Squaw Peak in the south and the Bloody Basin and east of the Agua Fria. The soldiers took all the men and paraded them before the commanding general, then marched them to the guardhouse just so they could claim that they had captured all the renegade bands of Apaches. There must have been about ten thousand men, women, and children besides the Apache Yumas, who had come in from the west. They were all told to go out four or five miles into the hills and cut cedar and bring the wood to the post. They brought back several thousand cords of wood on their backs and were met by soldiers who gave some of them banknotes, others blankets, and still others corn. At about that time another fifteen hundred men, women, and children from the south came in. Their chief was Motha, or Cloud. A man had been sent out to them. He must have been an agent, because he didn’t dress like an army officer. He had a black suit and a large black hat, and so the Indians called the white man “Big Black Hat.” It happened that a few families did not come in, for no...

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