Page 198 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

post commander allowed the train to proceed but forwarded charges against trooper Roberts to Fort
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Craig.
Perhaps surviving and staying out of trouble in the
military was largely a matter of attitude. Several of the veterans, who either kept diaries or wrote their memoirs and frequently poked fun at themselves or others, seemed more resilient to problems or tragedies. Second Lieutenant John Gregory Bourke (Figure 46) was an example of this personality type.
During his indoctrination period in the Southwest, Bourke claimed that he used to ride across the countryside for enjoyment and occasionally
came on bevies of women — old matrons and pretty maidens, splashing in the limpid water,
the approach of a stranger being the signal for a general scramble until they were all immersed up to their necks [no small task in most Southwestern streams or water tanks]. They never seemed to mind it in the least and I may as well admit that I rather enjoyed these
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mitted it to President Ulysses Simpson Grant. Grant signed the document on April 29, finally legalising the four-square-mile military reservation
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for Fort Cummings.
The Apaches displayed their usual disregard for
the elevation in status of Fort Cummings. Captain Hedberg again asked for a detachment of cavalry to patrol Cooke’s Canyon after his men had observed Indians between Fort Cummings and the Mimbres River. To support his request, Hedberg cited inci- dents that had taken place recently: the mail carrier had been fired on and the bullet passed through his saddle bags; five head of stock belonging to Albion K. Watts, the post butcher and trader, had been stolen; and several small parties of Indians had been
In February 1870, Bourke was a member of the Third Cavalry expeditionary forces sent from Fort Craig. When they stopped at Fort Cummings, Major John Van Deusen DuBois appointed Bourke quartermaster for the column. That night Bourke and Second Lieutenant William Wallace Robinson, Jr., the junior officers, mixed toddies for the others.
Captain Gerald Russell, who had started military service as a lowly Irish immigrant private in the Mounted Riflemen, not was satis- fied until he outlasted all the others. Afterward Bourke and Robinson
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“poured him into bed.”
morning, they moved out through Cooke’s Canyon.
On April 15, 1870, the survey of Fort Cummings completed in December 1868 finally made it through military channels and was forwarded by General John Mc- Allister Schofield to General William Tecumseh Sherman. On April 26, Sher- man in turn forwarded it to Secretary of War William Worth Belknap, who sub-
Early the next
Indian Fighting and Post War Emigration
seen close to the military reservation.
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Figure 46. John Gregory Bourke. Photo courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, #8808.
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