High Lonesome by Louis L'amour

Author:Louis L'amour
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-07-19T16:45:23+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

Dave Spanyer had never known a time when he did not possess a gun, and use it when needed. The frontier where he grew up made guns a necessity, for despite what some easterners thought about the Indians, the Indian was first and last a warrior.

His standards of behavior had nothing to do with the standards of the white men who opposed him, nor was he properly understood except by a very few people—and all of them were men who had lived with and around Indians. Failure to understand Indian standards and ideas had done as much harm as had well-meaning but uninformed people, do-gooders and such, and the political appointees who were the Indian agents.

One of the basic mistakes in dealing with people of another cultural background is to attribute to them the ideas one has oneself. For instance, the white man’s standards of what constitutes mercy are strictly his own, and the American Indian had no such ideas. Battle was his joy. Battle and horse-stealing, combined with hunting, were his only means to honor and wealth, and a good horse thief was honored and respected more than a good hunter. An Indian would go miles upon miles to steal horses or get into a good fight. Dave Spanyer had never known a time when he was not in the vicinity of Indians, usually hostile ones. He understood them, often hunted with them, fought them when necessary. He knew that for an Apache the word cruelty had no meaning. Torture was amusing to him, and he felt no sympathy for a captured enemy. The Apache respected courage, fortitude, and strength, for these were qualities by which he himself survived. He also respected cunning. On the whole, Dave Spanyer had more respect for most Indians than for many of the white men he had known. He fought them, and they fought him, but each respected the other.

The Indians understood and fought each other, and their customs and occupations were much the same until the white man entered the scene with superior weapons, a different set of standards, and a persistence scarcely understood by the Indian, who fought his battles for sport, for honor, and for loot, but rarely for territory to be seized and held.

Choosing the ground for a fight was not easy to do when the Apache was the enemy, for he knew every inch of his desert land, and was a master in the use of terrain from a tactical sense. Dave Spanyer, however, knew this country south of the Gila and the Salt River Valley almost as well as did any Apache. He had no doubt they had followed every step of his progress for some time, and by now they had decided where the fight was to take place. By this time they undoubtedly knew something of him, too, for a man on a trail in Indian country soon reveals himself to a skilled observer. He reveals himself in the way he travels, in his

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