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  The Valiant Women

  Jeanne Williams

  For Alice Papcun,

  a most lovely and valiant lady

  whose shining spirit inspires

  those fortunate enough to know her

  WHO’S REAL?

  Though my principal characters are imaginary, they move in real country and real events, among real people.

  Mangus Coloradas and Cochise are true. So are Charles Poston, Fred Hulsemann, the Penningtons and Pages, Gray, Schuchard, Pete Kitchen and Doña Rosa, Colonel Douglass, Captain Ewell and Dr. Irwin. The names of the commanders of the forts and presidios are real, and of course the background figures in government, commerce and military affairs are actual. Except for the Rancho del Socorro, Don Narcisco’s mine and the enterprises of Judah Frost and Marc Revier, the mines and companies mentioned did exist, and the raids and expeditions are as detailed, though I omitted some Apache raids. There were simply too many of them to record.

  This is a work of fiction trying to reflect a reality. I have allowed my characters to communicate rather more easily than they probably could have in view of their different languages—that is, I accelerated the speed with which they’d have acquired each other’s tongues. Also, Apaches did not use real names in address or in referring to someone, but this is awkward to duplicate.

  Shea’s ordeal by thirst and conviction that he had died is taken from the true experience of Pablo Valencia who endured six days without water in the scorching desert August of 1905. Valencia’s story was written by W. F. McGee, who found and saved him, and published in the Interstate Medical Journal, 1906. In effect, all four of my principal starting characters have died—by extreme disasters, they have lost the lives they expected to lead, but in that end was their beginning.

  “Among the above-mentioned favors which our lord has granted us in these expeditions … one is the great, good and abundant fruit which, in the service of the two Majesties, can be secured, not only in the discovered parts, but also in this very extensive northern district of all this North America, which is the greatest and best remaining portion of the world.…

  “We could make exact maps of this entire unknown North America which are usually drawn with so many mistakes, malevolent exaggerations and imaginary wealth of a crowned king that is carried in chairs of gold, of towers and walled cities, of lakes of gold and quicksilver.…

  “… that the principal and true riches that do exist are the innumerable souls …”

  —Father Eusebio Kino, S.J., 1699, Letter to Philip V, 1704

  “For most of these lands are very rich and fertile, most of the Indians industrious, many of the lands mineral bearing, and most of them of a climate so good that it is very similar to the best of Europe or that of Castilla.…”

  —Father Eusebio Kino, S.J., 1699,

  Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta

  “All that will be said is … over there once stood a mission called Tumacácori; at the foot of the Santa Catalinas was another called San Xavier, and so on with all the rest—but all were destroyed by Apaches.”

  —Father Bartolome Ximeno, Letter, March 5, 1773, written from Tumácacori

  “… so desolated, desert and God-forsaken that a wolf could not make a living on it.”

  —Kit Carson quoted during hearings on Gadsden Purchase, 1854

  “Now we should pay Mexico ten million to take it back.”

  —Senatorial wit after Gadsden Purchase

  “From 1848 to 1860, then, Arizona was a no man’s land, into which the golden hopes, the expansionist dreams and the sectional fears of the United States were projected with extraordinary vigor.”

  —Howard Roberts Lamar,

  The Far Southwest: A Territorial History, 1846–1912

  PART I

  THE SAN PATRICIO

  I

  She followed the gray-yellow shadow because it was alive, stumbling on after the coyote had vanished. The empty leather water jug slapped mockingly against her thigh. She had drained the last tepid drops yesterday, chewed the last parched corn and dried meat.

  How many days had she wandered since the Indians killed her father and the others? Four? Five? The Areneños had lanced the water skins, looted the wagon, stripped the four escorting soldiers of clothing and weapons. Consuelo, her maid, had been used by all the Indios before they cut her throat because, perhaps, she kept screaming.

  Socorro hadn’t screamed; had fought silently till her mind retreated into merciful numbness. They may have thought her dead. Whyever, they hadn’t killed her.

  She forced the nightmare away as she came upon a trail, narrow and at times lost among rocks and barren earth. It must be used by the coyote and other creatures. Perhaps it led to water. All living things must drink.

  Doves flew up from what seemed merely a pile of more blackish rocks. Another trail joined the one she followed, running toward the flight of doves.

  Doves, two trails joining. Socorro had seldom been outside Alamos, the ancient silver city, and knew little about the wilderness, but the doves seemed a sign of hope to her, and the worn tracks must mean something. She pressed on.

  Abruptly she was looking down into a deep broad cañon, almost choked in spots with the large ironwoods, paloverdes, and piles of gray-black rock worn smooth by floods. Directly below glinted water, reflecting the sky, a hollow in the stone perhaps eight feet across. Beyond that was another natural cistern or tinaja From it, a deer streaked away.

  Socorro’s ragged skirt caught often on thorns and branches as she hurried down the trail, sliding on loose volcanic rubble, checking a fall by gripping an acacia which pronged her hand with its whitish thorns. She scarcely felt it, moaning with eagerness, seeing only the water, that wonderful blessing for her cracked lips and dry throat.

  Falling on her knees, she lowered her face and drank gratefully though it was scummed with green in which were tufted bits of feather, bird droppings, small insects. Nothing had ever tasted so good. She knew, though, that too much water at once could make her sick. When her most violent thirst was calmed, she splashed her face and arms, washed off her father’s blood and the blood of the Indian he’d killed in his last moments.

  Only Enrique, an arrow in his chest, had still been alive when she’d recovered enough to drag herself painfully to see what had happened to the others. She’d seen with a shuddering sob that her father was dead, crossed herself and crept to Enrique. Blood frothed from his mouth and he groaned. The arrow jerked up and down with his gasping breaths. Socorro, gritting her teeth, took hold of the cane arrow and started to tug.

  “Leave it!” he cried, flinching. “I’m dying, my lady. Listen! Take water and food. Go north. There’s a ranch beyond that highest mountain, Pinacate. If you stay here, those Indios will be back.” His voice choked off in pinkish foam.

  She found a wineskin, tipped it to his lips. He swallowed. “It will just leak out of me.” He grinned, sweat standing on his leathery face. “Go! You can’t help me.”

  But she stayed with him till he died, holding him in her arms, bathing his face. Outside the wagon, her father was skewered on a lance. He had an arrow in his shoulder, another in his thigh. His eyes stared at the sun. Beyond him sprawled the soldiers, naked and mutilated, brought down in the first seconds of the ambush, muskets unfired.

  Socorro had retched when she found Consuelo. They had grown up together and the girl was more friend than servant, her mother the housekeeper for widowed Don Esteban Quintana, assuming even more control after the recent death of Socorro’s aunt and dueña, Doña Catalina.

  Socorro
covered the ruined body. Then she pressed her foot against her father to tear out the lance.

  She dragged him to an arroyo. At the brink, she kissed him, closed his eyes, whispered a prayer, asked him to forgive her that she couldn’t dig a grave in the rocky soil. Next she dragged Enrique over, then Consuelo, and shoved rocks down till the bodies were covered and no hand or knee protruded.

  Sickening to send boulders down on top of those she loved, but better that than letting them be torn by birds and beasts.

  She was exhausted now. The poor men of the escort would simply have to lie as they were, but she knelt by them and prayed for their souls, crossed each of them and promised to burn candles for them if she lived to reach a shrine.

  The chests had been ransacked. They had held her wedding finery and heirlooms, including a dozen silver goblets given to a Quintana by the King of Spain, intended for the home she was to have established with her second cousin who waited for her in Los Angeles.

  Such things couldn’t help her now. She was grateful for the few things the Areneños had left. In a blue cotton rebozo she tied as much dried corn and meat as she thought she could carry without losing speed, fastened a knife around her waist, and the precious water jug.

  Kneeling once more by the burial arroyo, she turned her face north, toward the distant purple mountain.

  How far? And the ranch beyond? When?

  Dread had frozen the girl. For a moment she hesitated. Perhaps she should follow the wagon ruts and hope to meet some merchant from Caborca or the south. She hated to lose the track of human beings, the sign of where they had at least been and might come again. It was also where the Areneños, or Sand Papagos, waited for travelers. And the travelers … Socorro shivered.

  Luck to meet a merchant in this region below the Gran Desierto. Bandits, more likely, or scalp hunters, many of them gringos who often didn’t care whether they collected bounty for Mexican or Papago scalps instead of Apache. Even Socorro’s sheltered upbringing hadn’t shielded her from the grim realities of life in Sonora in 1847. The government had long been powerless against the Apaches and the war with the United States had left the frontier even more exposed. Battling the terror that rose in her, she left the crude road and moved northward.

  The farming Indians with settled villages had usually accepted the padres and baptism, though the Yaqui of her own region had adopted the faith of the Spaniards without their government, ferociously resisting Mexico City’s occasional attempts to colonize the rich delta.

  In this northern area, even though they’d rebelled in 1751, Pima and Papago had generally been glad of any protection Spanish, and now Mexican, troops could give them. They were frequently raided by various Apache bands who roamed the vast mountain ranges of northern Sonora and Chihuahua and spilled over into the plains of Texas, which had successfully revolted against Mexico in 1836 and been annexed to the United States in 1845.

  There was no end to the problems caused by Texas. Instead of its proper boundary of the Nueces River, it had claimed all the land to the Rio Grande, which would have included that far northern outpost of the Spanish, Santa Fe, as well as southeast to the Gulf.

  Father had said the Yanquis only wanted any excuse to seize California and as much land as possible. The United States had, in the spring of 1846, occupied the disputed miles of brush and desert between the Nueces and Rio Grande; Mexican troops crossed the river, and since then battles had raged through central Mexico as the Yanquis fought their way south. Buena Vista, Saltillo, Monterrey … At the latest news they were advancing on Mexico City itself. That was when her father had decided to take her without delay to California.

  “If the Yanquis take California, it may be impossible to have the wedding for years,” he’d worried. “Your cousin is twenty-seven. He can’t be expected to wait forever.”

  “He could come to Alamos, Papa, and marry me in our cathedral.”

  “He can’t leave his ranch,” returned her father. “And it was agreed that you should travel to him. No, we shall leave as soon as I can get an escort.”

  Her poor harassed father. He’d gone to death, not a wedding.

  Socorro drank again, from the higher water hole, wiped a wispy feather from her lip. The cañon wound like a great serpent, curving out of sight. She filled her water jug, hesitated before she climbed slowly up the steep rocky wall. Once there, where the trails met, she stared at the mountain, her goal for days. It seemed no nearer than when she’d started. Certainly it was farther than this jug could take her. And she had no food.

  She shrank from the idea of killing any of the birds or animals coming for water, but she might learn from them what could be eaten. She’d have a better chance of reaching that ranch behind the mountain if she rested a few days near this water, collected such food as she could.

  The sun was sinking beyond the scattered peaks and worn-away rims of what had been volcanoes. Light turned the distant sand dunes a luminous rose and the mountains half-buried by them glowed blue as the madonna’s robe. Socorro knew the softness was a cruel deceit, a trick of sun and desert air. The dunes were said to run all the way to the muddy salt flats of the bay and those enchanted mountains were really barren gray stone like those west and north.

  As she had done the other nights of her ordeal, she found a stretch of fine sand amid a spill of rocks and left her jug there while she searched for food before darkness fell.

  It was early October, not the time for bird eggs, and such cactus fruits as hadn’t been devoured were starting to dry up, but she picked these into a fold of her rebozo, as well as any small tender prickly pear pads she found.

  Some animal with either sharp hoofs or horns had broken open and eaten part of a great mass of hundred-headed cactus. With her knife, she cut out a chunk of the greenish-white pulp, chewed it cautiously.

  Almost tasteless, but at least it was filling and contained considerable moisture. She ate several more pieces, then, with her knife, rearranged the broken part to shelter the cavity. Tomorrow she’d eat from it again. Now it was twilight, time to retreat to her chosen place of rest.

  With great care, she peeled some of the cactus fruits, being sure to get off the tiny tufts of spines. They had a tangy taste like wild berries.

  Tomorrow she must look for something with more strength in it. She had no flint and steel for making fire so she couldn’t cook anything, but perhaps she could find seeds. And it might be that the pods of acacia, ironwood and paloverde could be eaten like mesquite beans. She wrapped the extra rebozo closer against the cooling desert night, sighed and curled up next to the sun-warmed rocks.

  There were paddings and sounds but these didn’t frighten her as much as before. Apart from snakes and man she had little to fear. This wasn’t bear territory. Coyotes didn’t attack people and mountain lions seldom did.

  Several times in the night she woke shivering, turned on her other side and burrowed deeper in the sand. An impossible country! One burned by day and froze by night! But the knowledge that she was near water, didn’t have to press on tomorrow in a desperate search for it, let her drift back to sleep till her final waking with the sun dazzling in her eyes as it climbed above reddish craters and black cones.

  After a breakfast of cactus fruit and water, she started on another food hunt, first leaning several dead yucca stalks together to mark the descent to the water hole and orienting herself, the long crater east, that elusive purple mountain north, shimmering dunes south and west.

  Within a few hours she filled her rebozo with acacia and ironwood pods and more cactus fruit, or tunas. The beans in the pods were much too hard for chewing, but by the water hole she’d seen several hollows in the rocks that would serve for metates.

  Returning, she selected a depression shaded by a large ironwood and soon found a smooth black elongated stone that fitted the inside of the hollow.

  As she husked beans into the grinding hole, Socorro’s spine chilled. Wasn’t it likely that these natural metates were used by Aren
eño women? Certainly the Indians living in this arid wasteland knew every water hole. Sooner or later they were bound to turn up here.

  Holding her breath, she looked slowly up and down both rims of the cañon, relaxed a trifle when she saw no one, but her sense of refuge was shattered. She would risk spending tomorrow near the water but the next morning she’d move on.

  She ground beans till her arms ached. Since there was no way to bake or cook gruel, she mixed enough water with the meal to make small flat cakes which she spread to sun-dry on the rocks.

  That afternoon when she was gathering more pods and cactus fruit, she saw an eagle swoop, the gold of his plumage shining. His talons closed on a large rabbit, which after one frantic convulsion was limp.

  Socorro didn’t pause to argue the rights of robbing the eagle of meat she wouldn’t have killed herself. Snatching up a dead branch, she shouted, running forward. For a moment it seemed that the giant bird, whose wingspan was more than her height, might battle, but when she struck at it the eagle gave an angry shriek and winged upward, abandoning its prey.

  Socorro couldn’t eat the raw flesh and she felt sick by the time she’d unskillfully cut and peeled off the hide. She cut the meat in thin strips and thrust them on an all-thorn bush to dry. She simply couldn’t do anything with the intestines and heart, so she left these far from camp to make some other creature’s dinner. She did save the bigger bits of furry skin. Her soft leather shoes were wearing out and she could pad the soles with the luckless rabbit’s coat.

  Late that afternoon she bathed in the lower water hole, and then luxuriated in what, even without salt, seemed a magnificent feast of meal cakes, partially dried meat, tunas and wedges cut from the hundred-headed cactus.

  It was strange. During the day, heartened by the acquisition of meat and growing stack of cakes, she’d begun to have a real hope of getting out of the desert alive. But when darkness fell, she huddled in her rebozo and felt as if she were the only human in all the world. Her father seemed to watch from the shadows. She tried to talk to him but he couldn’t answer. At last she slept.