Part 26 (1/2)

It is hard, in these days of steam and gasolene and electricity, to understand how men did such things with horse-flesh. The quality of the men themselves explains that. One can judge that quality by an affair which took place at Stein's Pa.s.s.

”Steen's Pa.s.s,” as the old-timers spelled it--and as the name is still p.r.o.nounced--is a gap in the mountains just west of Lordsburg, New Mexico. The Southern Pacific comes through it to-day. One afternoon Mangus Colorado and Cochise were in the neighborhood with six hundred Apache warriors, when a smoke signal from distant scouts told them that the overland stage was approaching without an armed escort. The two chieftains posted their naked followers behind the rocks and awaited the arrival of their victims.

When one remembers that such generals as Crook have expressed their admiration for the strategy of Cochise, and that Mangus Colorado was the man who taught him, one will realize that Stein's Pa.s.s, which is admirably suited for all purposes of ambush, must have been a terribly efficient death-trap when the Concord stage came rumbling and rattling westward into it on that blazing afternoon.

There were six pa.s.sengers in the coach, all of them old-timers in the West. And they were known as the Free Thompson party, from the name of the leader. Every one of these men was armed with a late model rifle and was taking full advantage of the company's rule which allowed the carrying of as much ammunition as one pleased. They had several thousand rounds of cartridges.

Such a seasoned company as this was not likely to go into a place like Stein's Pa.s.s without taking a look or two ahead; and six hundred Apaches were certain to offer some evidence of their presence to keen eyes. Which probably explains why the horses were not killed at once.

For they were not. The driver was able to get the coach to the summit of a low bare knoll a little way off the road. The Free Thompson party made their stand on that hilltop.

They were cool men, uncursed by the fear of death, the sort who could roll a cigarette or bite a mouthful from a plug of chewing-tobacco between shots and enjoy the smoke or the cud; the sort who could look upon the advance of overwhelming odds and coolly estimate the number of yards which lay between.

These things are known of them and it is known that the place where they made their stand was far from water, a bare hilltop under a flaming sun, and round about them a ring of yelling Apaches.

There were a few rocks affording a semblance of cover. You can picture those seven men, with their weather-beaten faces, their old-fas.h.i.+oned slouching wide-rimmed hats, and their breeches tucked into their boot-tops. You can see them lying behind those boulders with their leathern cheeks pressed close to their rifle-stocks, their narrowed eyes peering along the lined sights; and then, as time went on, crouching behind the bodies of their slain horses.

And you can picture the turbaned Apaches with their frowzy hair and the ugly smears of paint across their grinning faces. You can see them creeping on their bellies through the clumps of coa.r.s.e bear-gra.s.s, gliding like bronze snakes among the rocks, slowly enough--the Apache never liked the music of a rifle-bullet--but coming closer every hour.

Every gully and rock and clump of p.r.i.c.kly pear for a radius of a half-mile about that knoll sheltered its portion of the venomous brown swarm.

Night followed day; hot morning grew into scorching noontide; the full flare of the Arizona afternoon came on; and night again. The rifles cracked in the bear-gra.s.s. Thin jets of pallid flame spurted from behind the rocks. The bullets kicked up little dust-clouds.

So for three days and three nights. For it took those six hundred Apaches that length of time to kill the seven white men.

But before the last of them died, the Free Thompson party slew between 135 and 150 Indians.

In after years Cochise told of the battle.

”They were the bravest men I ever saw,” he said. ”They were the bravest men I ever heard of. Had I five hundred warriors such as they, I would own all of Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, and Arizona.”

That was the breed of men who kept the b.u.t.terfield stage line open, and the affair at Stein's Pa.s.s is cited to show something of their character, although it took place after the company began removing its rolling-stock. For in 1860 Russel, Majors & Waddel accomplished a remarkable coup and brought the overland mail to the northern route.

They performed what is probably the most daring exploit in the history of transportation. The story of their venture bristles with action; it is adorned by such names as Wild Bill Hickok, Pony Bob Haslam, Buffalo Bill, and Colonel Alexander Majors.

Colonel Majors held the broadhorn record on the old Santa Fe trail, ninety-two days on the round trip with oxen. He was the active spirit of the firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel. In 1859 these magnates of the freighting business had more than six thousand huge wagons and more than 75,000 oxen on the road between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, hauling supplies for government posts and mining companies; they were operating a stage line to Denver where gold excitements were bringing men in droves.

One day in the winter of 1859-60 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California had a meeting with Majors' senior partner, William H. Russel, and several New York capitalists in Was.h.i.+ngton. Senator Gwinn proposed a plan to show the world that the St. Joseph-San Francisco route was practical throughout the year.

That scheme was the pony express; men on horseback with fresh relays every ten or twelve miles, to carry letters at top speed across the wilderness. Congress had pigeonholed his bill to finance such a venture. He urged now that private capital undertake it, and he talked so convincingly that Russel committed himself to enlist his partners in the enterprise.

Russel went back to Leavenworth, Kansas, the headquarters of the firm, and put the matter up to Majors and Waddel. They showed him in a very few minutes that he had been talked into a sure way of losing several hundred thousand dollars. But he reminded them that he had committed himself to the undertaking. They said that settled it; they would stand by him and make his word good.

Their stage line had stations every ten or twelve miles as far as Salt Lake; beyond that point there was not a single building; but within two months from the day when Russel had that talk with Senator Gwinn, the firm had completed the chain of those stations clear to Sacramento, purchased five hundred half-breed mustang ponies which they apportioned along the route, hired eighty riders and what stock-tenders were necessary, and hauled feed and provisions out across the intermountain deserts. They had droves of mules beating down trails through the deep drifts of the Sierras and the Rockies.

On April 3, 1860, Henry Roff swung into the saddle at Sacramento and Alexander Carlyle leaped on a brown mare in St. Joseph, Missouri.

While cannon boomed and crowds cheered in those two remote cities, the ponies came toward each other from the ends of that two-thousand-mile trail on a dead run.

At the end of ten miles or so a relay mount was waiting for each rider. As he drew near the station each man let out a long coyote yell; the hostlers led his animal into the roadway. The messenger charged down upon them, drew rein, sprang to the earth, and while the agent lifted the pouches from one saddle to the other--as quickly as you read these words describing the process--gained the back of his fresh horse and sped on. At the end of his section--the length of these intervals varied from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five miles--each rider dismounted for the last time and turned the pouches over to a successor.

In this manner the mail went across prairie and sage-brush plain, through mountain pa.s.ses where the snow lay deep beside the beaten trail and across the wide silent reaches of the Great American Desert.

And the time on that first trip was ten days for both east and west bound pouches.