MENTAL AND MORAL CHARACTERISTICS. 101

artifice than valour; and on any defeat submit to the most ignominious
terms, but keep their treaties no longer than suits their convenience. His
Majesty has ordered that if any require peace, it should be granted, and
even offered, to them before they are attacked. But this generosity they con-
strue to proceed from fear... These people, during the last eighty years
past, have been the dread of Sonora, no part of which was secure from
their violence... Of late years, the insolence of these savages has been
carried to the most audacious height from the success of some of their stra-
tagems... The Apaches penetrate into the province from different passes,
and, after loading themselves with booty, will travel in one night fifteen,
eighteen or twenty leagues. To pursue them over mountains is equally
dangerous and difficult, and in the levels they follow no paths. On any
entrance into their country, they give notice to one another by smokes or
fires; and at a signal they all hide themselves. The damages they have
done in the villages, settlements, farms, roads, pastures, woods and mines
are beyond description; and many of the latter, though very rich, have been
forsaken” !,

The Spaniards were indeed well qualified to describe the Apaches and
their ways. They knew them but too well, especially since 1680, when these
savages fell upon the foreigners’ settlements which they destroyed, and were
afterwards constantly at war with them. The Apaches are, with their congeners,
the Navahoes, “the savages by whose means the whole country has been
almost swept of its inhabitants, and changed from a fertile garden into a barren
waste”. This was written in 1869, and reflects more or less the gloom that
fell over the land of the southern Dénés as a consequence of the wars which
followed the American occupation of their ancestral homes.

The constant warfare which this occasioned caused another American
author to call the Apaches “the most cruel and barbarous race of Indians
living on the American continent’®. To the whites of northern Mexico the
Apaches, by their daring raids and cruelties, had by that time become a veri-
table terror. “The whole people at last became so terrified, that if they heard
of a band of Apaches fifty miles off, they very frequently left everything
and fled’’4,

That they are not as devoid of courage as the above quoted Spanish
writer imagined was abundantly proved by the dashing raids of one of their
last leaders, Victorio, whose main exploits took place between 1878 and 1880.
Then, at the head of only 250 or 300 fighting men opposed by more than
four times as many well armed United States troops, “this warrior usually

* Quoted by W. A. Bell in “New Tracks in North America”, vol. I, pp. 233—34.
? Ibid., ibid., p. 178.

* “The Marvellous Country”, p. 43.

“ “New Tracks in North America”, vol. I, p. 187.