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1 1 I cannot say exactly when or where I was born, because I belonged to an Apache Indian family whose parents were not educated, so that I could not find any records of my birthplace. Only educated people keep records of their children so that they can know where they were born, and besides, there are no older Indians left alive now. All of my people were killed by the soldiers and by Indian scouts who worked for the government. This was in 1872, in a cave on the north side of the Salt River, where about 225 souls—men, women, and poor innocent children—were living. The place is on the north side of the mouth of Fish Creek on the Salt River, where Horseshoe Dam is now. I left that camp a few days before the slaughter, traveling north with an old man, my uncle, and a horse that carried me on its back. We were overtaken by soldiers in the middle of the night, and I was left alone when my uncle ran away. I got in a rock hole and stayed there all night without any clothes or blankets. The Four Peaks were white with snow, and I was only a few miles away from them. How I got through that freezing night is a miracle. In the morning about sunup I came out of the hole. I had been listening through the night to see if there were any enemies close by, but I could not hear a thing, so I crawled out from a different entrance from the one I entered and went up to a little hill overlooking the countryside. My uncle and I had built a camp the previous night, with a fire to lie beside, but now there were many men in blue clothing there. They made a rush for me. I didn’t move, and they came and caught hold of my little arm. They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not. The rest of the soldiers were looking for more Indians over the hill, but when they found none they joined us. I was taken to an officer, Captain James Burns of the Fifth US Cavalry. This all happened on December 22, 1872, a date recorded by Lieutenant E. D. Thomas, who was under Captain 2 chapter one Burns’s command. They were from Fort McDowell, the place where I am living now. It is a mysterious thing, the fact that I am alive to tell how I was saved, while every last one of my tribe was killed. I can only guess that I was born in 1864, because Lieutenant Thomas told me that on the day I was captured he reckoned me to be seven or eight years old. That would make me sixty-six years old now, though I know that I am older than that because I know many things from way back. I can remember when my mother was killed by soldiers a few miles east of Mormon Flat. She ran for her life and crawled into a rock hole, too, and she was pulled out and shot many times. I then had two children to take care of, a little brother and a baby sister. I remember that as if it had happened just a short time ago. It was an awful day for me after I lost my poor mother and had to look after two children. My aunt had a baby, and so that way my little sister was nursed. From that time on my father had a bitter hatred for soldiers and all white people. My father and others would go down into the Salt River Valley looking for soldiers or white men to kill. Once they brought seven or eight ponies into our camp, and they gave one to another man whose camp was beyond the Four Peaks to the north. I was away from our camp at the time. Then soldiers came, and they captured thirty-two women and children and brought them to Fort McDowell, somewhere in the last part of December 1872. The prisoners were taken in wagons across the desert to Florence and then to old Fort Grant on the San Pedro River. A few weeks later the command moved nearer the Superstition and Pinal Mountains, coming across the country to where Globe is now—this was before the town was built—and then...

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