The commanding officer, a lieutenant of no great experience, sent for the brother of Cocheis, and demanded the return of the babe; the reply was made, and, in the light of years elapsed, the reply is known to have been truthful, that the Chiricahuas knew nothing of the kidnapped youngster and therefore could not restore him. The upshot of the affair was that Cocheis’s brother was killed “while resisting arrest.” In Broadway, if a man “resist arrest,” he is in danger of having his head cracked by a policeman’s club; but in the remoter West, he is in great good luck, sometimes, if he don’t find himself riddled with bullets.
It is an excellent method of impressing an Indian with the dignity of being arrested; but the cost of the treatment is generally too great to make it one that can fairly be recommended for continuous use. In the present instance, Cocheis, who had also been arrested, but had cut his way out of the back of the tent in which he was confined, went on the war-path, and for the next ten years made Arizona and New Mexico—at least the southern half of them—and the northern portions of Sonora and Chihuahua, about the liveliest places on God’s footstool.
The account, if put down by a Treasury expert, would read something like this:
“The United States to Cocheis, “For one brother, killed ‘while resisting arrest.’”
“By ten thousand (10,000) men, women, and children killed, wounded, or tortured to death, scared out of their senses or driven out of the country, their wagon and pack-trains run off and destroyed, ranchos ruined, and all industrial development stopped.”
If any man thinks that I am drawing a fancy sketch, let him write to John H. Marion, Pete Kitchen, or any other old pioneer whose residence in either Arizona or New Mexico has been sufficiently long to include the major portion of the time that the whole force of the Apache nation was in hostilities.
I have said that the exertions of the missionaries of the Roman Catholic Church, ordinarily so successful with the aborigines of our Continent, were nugatory with the Apaches of Arizona; I repeat this, at the same time taking care to say that unremitting effort was maintained to open up communication with the various bands nearest to the pueblos which, from the year 1580, or thereabout, had been brought more or less completely under the sway of the Franciscans.