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.
With some of these pueblos, as at Picuris, the Apaches had intermarried, and with others still, as at Pecos, they carried on constant trade, and thus afforded the necessary loop-hole for the entrance of zealous missionaries. The word of God was preached to them, and in several instances bands were coaxed to abandon their nomadic and predatory life, and settle down in permanent villages. The pages of writers, like John Gilmary Shea, fairly glow with the recital of the deeds of heroism performed in this work; and it must be admitted that perceptible traces of it are still to be found among the Navajo branch of the Apache family, which had acquired the peach and the apricot, the sheep and the goat, the cow, the donkey and the horse, either from the Franciscans direct, or else from the pueblo refugees who took shelter with them in 1680 at the time of the Great Rebellion, in which the pueblos of New Mexico arose en masse and threw off the yoke of Spain and the Church, all for twelve years of freedom, and the Moquis threw it off forever. Arizona—the Apache portion of it—remained a sealed book to the friars, and even the Jesuits, in the full tide of their career as successful winners of souls, were held at arm's length.
There is one point in the mental make-up of the Apache especially worthy of attention, and that is the quickness with which he seizes upon the salient features of a strategetical combination, and derives from them all that can possibly be made to inure to his own advantage. For generations before the invasion by the Castilians—that is to say, by the handful of Spaniards, and the colony of Tlascaltec natives and mulattoes, whom Espejo and Onate led into the valley of the Rio Grande between 1580 and 1590—the Apache had been the unrelenting foe of the
