ALL-TEXT VERSION
DATELINE: Fort Grant,
Arizona Territory, Saturday, May 23, 1896.
Edgar Rice Burroughs,
age 20, arrived here today to begin a harrowing ten-month tour of duty
with the 7th U.S. Cavalry. A graduate of Michigan Military Academy, Burroughs
had recently failed the entrance exam to West Point. Yet youthful optimism
led him to believe a commission might still be attained from the ranks.
Enlisted at Detroit with consent of his father (former Civil War Maj. George
Tyler Burroughs), underage Ed had now achieved his rather perverse but
expressed desire to be sent to “the worst post in the United States.” At
Fort Grant his high hopes for rapid advancement would soon be crushed upon
hard Arizona rocks.
Unknown to Burroughs, those same jagged rocks concealed
a living legend—the Apache Kid. Kid roamed ghost-like through the remote
mountain vastness, a $5,000 bounty on his head on both sides of the border.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose own legend was still unlit, would soon join
the hunt for this famed phantom outlaw—thus tying his name forever to the
Apache Kid saga.
Burroughs’ Arizona adventure began the previous day in
the roughneck cowtown of Willcox. Arriving by rail with one dollar in his
pocket, he had missed the daily mail and passenger stage to the fort. “Terribly
hungry and equally sleepy,” Ed found a room at (probably) the Willcox Hotel.
Bedeviled by bed bugs Burroughs abandoned his cot, spending most of his
first night in Arizona perched uncomfortably on the hotel’s front porch.
Posted to Fort Grant
In 1896, Edgar Rice Burroughs posed (standing, left)
with soldier friends who formed “The May Have Seen Better Days Club” at
Fort Grant. Each member was from a different troop and all came from prosperous
families. They met once each month after payday at the headquarters stables
where Burroughs cared for 14 horses.
The following morning Burroughs boarded the stagecoach
for Fort Grant (possibly driven by Warren Earp). Decades later, Ed recalled
of this trip: “There were other passengers, but only one whom I remember,
a painted lady from the hog ranch three miles from the post… She was not
very old, but she was motherly and kind hearted. We dropped her at the
hog ranch and I never saw her again.” One can only wonder if this “painted
lady” voiced some encouraging words to new recruit Burroughs, headed to
his first duty station. Her kindly impression lingered with him for life.
Sworn in and assigned to Troop B, U.S. 7th Cavalry under
command of 1st Lt. Selah R. H. “Tommy” Tompkins, Pvt. Burroughs now began
his training and indoctrination. An accomplished horseman, he easily
adapted to mounted cavalry drills. Saber exercises he quickly mastered
as well.
Burroughs soon became disenchanted with the lot of junior
enlisted men at Grant, whose chief duties amounted to what he ruefully
referred to as ditch digging and “boulevard building.” This led to keen
contempt for the post’s commanding officer Col. Edwin Vose Sumner, Jr.
(son of Civil War Gen. Edwin Vose “Bull” Sumner). Of his commanding officer,
Burroughs recalled: “Sumner was a very fat man who conducted regimental
maneuvers from an army ambulance. It required nothing short of a derrick
to hoist him onto a horse. He was then and is now my idea of the ultimate
zero in cavalry officers.” Burroughs noticed considerable tension between
many of the officers and enlisted men. He laid all blame for perceived
low troop morale squarely on the post commandant’s shoulders.
In contrast, Burroughs had great respect for the Buffalo
Soldiers he interacted with. “A couple of companies of the 24th Infantry,
a colored regiment, were quartered at Grant at the time I was there. They
were wonderful soldiers and as hard as nails… On several occasions I worked
under colored sergeants, and without exception they were excellent men
who took no advantage of their authority over us and on the whole were
better to work under than our white sergeants.”
Army Life in Arizona
Situated near
the southwestern slopes of the lofty Pinaleño range, Fort Grant
boasted comfortable living quarters, a well-stocked commissary, even an
artificial lake adjacent to Officers’ Row.
For relaxation soldiers could patronize the post canteen.
Beyond that a motley collection of saloons, dance halls and gambling dens
beckoned from nearby Bonita. Come payday a lonely trooper might visit the
local bordello or “hog-ranch,” there to have his saddle-weary ashes hauled
with the professional assistance of a soiled dove.
Fortunately, the future author of Tarzan and John Carter
of Mars preferred to indulge his creative muse in his spare time. Burroughs
enjoyed sketching scenes of post life, jotting down notes and impressions,
and writing letters home. These creative efforts, combined with vivid memories,
later inspired Burroughs to pen two insightful novels of the Apache Wars:
The
War Chief (1927) and Apache Devil (1933).
Burroughs was treated at the Fort Grant post hospital
for dysentery contracted from contaminated drinking water. Burroughs recalled
being maltreated by uncaring (and drunken) medical officers, as well as
an abusive hospital steward.
With the arrival of summer electrical storms, Burroughs
noted, “The drinking water became impossible because of the rain and I
presently achieved dysentery.” He soon landed in the post hospital where
his sufferings continued unabated under the care of a pair of drunken medical
officers and an abusive hospital steward. Burroughs recalled, “I was so
weak that I could scarcely stand and they would not give me anything to
eat …but castor oil.” He recalled being punished severely for attempting
to devour an unauthorized crust of toast. He later wrote that “the most
disagreeable part of my service at Fort Grant were my various contacts
with the medical department.”
Relief came in a call to duty. Burroughs remembered: “There
was always a lot of excitement at Fort Grant. The Apaches were corralled
at another post not far distant [San Carlos Reservation] and there were
constant rumors of another uprising similar to those led by old Geronimo.
The Apache Kid and his band of renegades were giving trouble in the south…
We were always expecting boots and saddles and praying for it.”
The Apache Kid
As Burroughs later
recalled, a man and his daughter had been murdered on the Solomonville
trail, and the Apache Kid’s band were the presumed perpetrators. In late
August, B Troop was ordered out on scout to hunt for the Apache Kid. Still
suffering with dysentery, Burroughs pleaded his way out of the hospital
in order to ride with his troop. The ensuing journey followed a wagon trail
“short cut” over the high crags of Mt. Graham. This became a hellish ordeal
for Burroughs, who was literally falling out of his saddle most of the
way. “All during this march I was carrying fourteen pounds of ammunition
and weapons around my waist—a weight which did not greatly alleviate the
intense abdominal pain I was suffering.” In the field several weeks, B
troop was at times split into two-man patrols sent out in different directions.
Years later, Burroughs observed: “As I look at it now, we were just bait.”
In his memoirs, Burroughs recounted an interesting anecdote
about B Troop’s Apache scouts: “We went into camp on the Gila River, not
far from Duncan, Arizona. We camped in a grove of large cottonwoods beneath
a low cliff. Our Apache scouts camped at a little distance from us and
nearer the cliff. At night, sometimes, we heard owls hooting at the top
of the cliff and the call would be answered from the camp of our scouts.
The old timers said that the renegades were communicating with our scouts
and it was thus that they kept in touch with the movements of the troop.”
Apaches feared owls above all creatures, believing them to be embodied
spirits of dead relatives, so it is unlikely any Apache would communicate
in this fashion. Burroughs’ anecdote is far more revealing in what it says
about the older soldiers’ suspicions and distrust of the loyalties of Apache
scouts.
Of Apache women Burroughs observed: “A never ending source
of interest to me were the Apache scouts and their families. We saw little
or nothing of their women, though several that I did see among the younger
ones were really beautiful. Their figures and carriages were magnificent
and the utter contempt in which they held the white soldier was illuminating,
to say the least.”
Birth of a Western Novelist
B Troop never
encountered Apache Kid or his band. But Burroughs found an important part
of himself on the backbone of Dzil Nchaa Si An (“Big Seated Mountain,”
the Apache name for Mt. Graham). Sick as he was, he probably should have
remained at the fort. But had he done so he would have regretted that choice
the rest of his life.
Diagnosed with a heart condition (which made receiving
a commission impossible) Burroughs was discharged from the Army on March
23, 1897. Lt. “Tommy” Tompkins, whom Burroughs greatly admired, gave him
an “excellent” character rating.
Burroughs’ legacy of frontier soldiering lives on in his
two masterful Apache War novels written nearly a hundred years ago. Within
their pages Geronimo, Juh, Cochise and Victorio live again, along with
Shoz-Dijiji the Black Bear and his beloved Ish-kay-nay, Cibeque medicine
man Nakay-do-klunni and others. Painstakingly researched, written from
the heart, and daringly presented from the Apache point of view, The
War Chief and Apache Devil contain all the love,
hatred and pathos of human existence caught in the crucible of war.
