~ RECENT SIGNS OF INDIANS. 175 
We have been surrounded by these constantly, but all 
were abandoned; and although the stealthy Apache was 
watching us from every rocky look-out, we could nowhere 
catch sight of him. An inexperienced traveller would have 
imagined that there had been a general exodus, and that the 
whole race had disappeared—had gone to the Tonto basin, or 
the Gila, or some remote hiding-place. 
If he wanted to have this mistake corrected, he should 
have done as we did: he should have gone down into a cafion 
and travelled along its bed for a few miles, until he had 
reached a place where you can look up on either side and not 
discover the remotest chance of getting out—where ahead, 
and in the rear, as far as you can see, it looks like a deep 
grey coffin. Then suddenly he would hear a war-whoop that 
would make him think that all the savages in the Rocky 
Mountains, from Fort Bridger to Apache Pass, were within 
bow-and-arrow range. 
A week or two ago, on an occasion very similar to the 
above, General Gregg was with me. We were hunting for a 
route from the Val de Chino, eastward to the Colorado 
Chiquito, by crossing the head-waters of the streams flowing 
into the Rio Verde close up to where they emerged from the 
high rocky wall at the base of the San Francisco Mountains, 
when we came to the caiion of Sycamore Fork. We succeeded 
in descending the gorge; but the ascent was so exceedingly 
steep, that we thought the pack-train could not climb up 
out of it; and concluded, in spite of its violating the funda- 
mental rule of Indian warfare in these mountains, to return 
to the bed of the cafion and follow it to its mouth. 
It was strewn with fragments of red sandstone, from the 
. size of a church to that of a pebble, over which we dragged 
our foot-sore animals very slowly. We had made some eight 
