CHAPTER XXXV. 



Apachedom Is Truth stranger than Fiction ? What Trappers say of the 

 Apaches What the Philanthropists Apache Notions of Generosity 

 The mental Differences between Races Impossibility of Civilising the 

 Apaches Their consequent natural Extinction The Mexican of To-day. 



SOME years spent in the heart of Apachedom between 

 Mexico and Arizona have given me perhaps as fair a 

 chance as any other man to know something about the 

 wildest and most untamable of American savages, and 

 stored my memory with many an incident and adventure 

 of frontier life. But which of them would interest, which 

 be but inflictions and bores, is hard to determine. To the 

 man to whom it would be "a most strange and extra- 

 ordinary adventure, you know," to spend a night sleeping 

 in the open air, only his clothes between him and the 

 ground, only clouds between him and the sky, incidents 

 and details that would appear trivial and unworthy of 

 mention to the old campaigner may from their novelty be 

 interesting ; while to him, stirring actions and startling 

 adventures, from their resemblance to what he has read in 

 works of imagination, and from lacking the dramatic com- 

 pleteness and denouement that all well-constructed fictitious 



