102 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

inflicted severer punishment than he suffered. In his raids 200 citizens of New
Mexico, and as many more of Mexico, were killed. At one time, the band
was virtually surrounded by a force of more than 2000 cavalry and several
hundred Indian scouts, but Victorio eluded capture, and fled across the Mexican
border, where he continued his bloody campaign” '.

The way he defended himself with his last 100 followers who, sur-
rounded on all sides by Mexican troops, “refused to surrender until Victorio,
who had been wounded several times, finally fell dead’, denotes more than
simple courage. Heroism is a word scarcely too strong under the circum-
stances.

Will the reader have a more recent appreciation of the Apache character ?
Here is what the representative of the United States among one of their bands
wrote of his wards in his last official report: “The progress of these people,
as a whole, is not sufficiently manifest to afford much encouragement. While
certain individual members of the tribe have renounced those inherited ten-
dencies and forsaken those racial characteristics which have so long constituted
barriers to their advancement, it is a fact that a great many members, notably
the old women, have determined that they will never — no, never — abandon
their nomadic habits. They were born savages, have relapsed into savagery
and will die savages. They cling tenaciously to savage customs, cultivate that
hatred of the white man which is innate, exert every influence to prevent the
young from adopting the pursuits of civilized life, and thus constitute a mill-
stone around the neck of the tribe against which the younger element must
constantly struggle or else be drowned in that sea of barbarism from which
the white man is endeavouring to rescue them’’S.

The timid Hare.

Let now the kind reader leave for a moment the mountain fastnesses
and the parched plains of the south for the desolate wastes of the frozen
north. The first thing that will strike him in the brothers of the Apaches
settled there will be their excessive timidity and their incomparable meekness.
All the explorers are agreed on this point, and, for once, their testimony iS
the very image of truth.

Samuel Hearne was himself so cowardly that he evidently stood in fear
of them. He could not well stultify himself by insisting too much on their
excessive timorousness, especially after the discreditable occurrences he had
to record as taking place in his company, occurrences which a man with a
minimum of nerve and influence would have easily prevented. Yet he could

‘ From the advance proofs of a Hand-book of the Indians kindly sent me by Prof.
W. H. Holmes, Director of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington.

2 Article “Apache”, op. cit.

> Rep. of U. S. Govt. Agent Mescalero Agency, 1904.