WESTERN FRONTIER POSTS. 83 



at the period to which we refer, hardly one of their 

 silent tenants had died in his bed. Some were slain 

 in the frequent pot-house brawls that took place in these 

 lawless regions; but in the vast majority of cases the 

 record on the rude head-boards was " Killed by Indians " 

 "KILLED" shall we say? 



Alas ! many of these poor fellows were not only 

 " killed, " but had gone to their long homes after un- 

 dergoing all the prolonged tortures which the inge- 

 nuity of these red fiends could invent. 



And yet we are told by the eastern philanthropist 

 that the blood of the western man had no cause to 

 boil at the recital of these numberless atrocities! So 

 deeply, as a matter of fact, was the whole cast of the 

 western thought affected by the memory of these 

 things, that the various Indian fights and " killings " 

 served as milestones to record the dates of local events, 

 and the distances, or exact locality, of particular spots, 

 which the speaker desired to impress upon the minds of 

 his audience. 



Thus, an event did not occur last month, or last 

 year, but "Jes' about the time Pete Kitchen's ranch 

 was jumped" "The night before the Maricopa stage 

 war tuck in " "A week or two arter Winters made 

 his last killin' in the Dragoons " " The year the Injuns 

 run off Tully, n'de long bull teams" "Th'night arter 

 DufHeld drawed his gun on Jedge Titus " and so forth. * 



If a man wanted to explain to another how far it 

 was to a certain point, it was not fifty miles, nor sixty 

 miles, but rather "Jes' on the rise of the Mesa (table- 

 land), as you git to the place whar Samaniego's train 



* On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke, Captain 3rd 

 Cavalry U.S.A., published 1892, p. 64. 



