The Valiant Women

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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.