Page 38 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

followed the lead, adding 50 pesos for an Indian woman’s scalp and 25 for a child’s. As a result of the Mexican scalp bounty, a notorious border ruffian and scalp hunter from Kentucky, John James Johnson, and his followers perpetrated a mass execution on one of the Apache bands, April 22, 1837, using a concealed cannon heavily loaded with lead balls and scrap iron.
Lured to the scene by promises of food and trade, J uan J ose Compa, head of the Mimbres, and an uncer- tain but large number of his people were murdered by
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Johnson and his rapscallions.
ing blow, the Mimbrenos, led by their new chief, Man- gas Coloradas, launched a series of retaliations that were disastrous for the Americans and Mexicans. All the intruders, including those operating the copper mines, were either killed or forced to flee the region. 107
From that time on, there would be no peace or any quarter offered between the Apaches and the Mexicans. Anglo trappers were also murdered throughout the area, and in 1838 the Santa Rita del Cobre copper mine, always operating spasmodically due to fluctuating Indian tolerance, was again shut down and abandoned, and nearly all the people who
had worked there were wiped out while fleeing for
Chihuahua. The copper mine would remain unin- 108
habited until the 1850s.
At the close of the pre-American period, the area
had become the uncontested homeland of the Mimbres Apache. Long gone were the Mogollon and prehistoric Mimbres, patiently recording something of themselves in the virgin rock and on the ceramic can- vas of their pottery. After centuries of quiet farming and concentration on developing rock and pottery art to a high form, they had disappeared — forever. Their successors would claim this land until forcefully removed by a society more advanced in numbers and technology. But, as long as the Apaches held the land, they would exact their economic tax in the form of raids and, when provoked, would lash out in a rage of self- consuming fury unparalleled in intensity and vicious- ness. With the Apache trouble brewing in the Southwest, and American entrepreneurs trickling into New Mexico and California, Mexico did not need the additional vexation in the form of the Texas declara- tion of independence and the cataclysmic events that
soon followed.
Mexicans, Americans, and Others
Despite this stagger-
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