A Portal to Paradise by Alden C. Hayes

Author:Alden C. Hayes [Hayes, Alden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816543328
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Before her marriage to Neil Erickson, Emma Peterson had visited Camp Bonita on picnics from Fort Bowie, and she fell in love with that canyon. When the army abandoned it, she bought the cabin that was its nucleus with her meager savings. Built by a man named Newton, rumored to have been an army deserter, the cabin was currently owned by J. Hugh Stafford, whose place was just up the canyon a rifle shot away. A year after their marriage, Emma and her husband homesteaded the site but continued to operate the restaurant in Volcano to increase their grubstake. Neil worked at day labor for a dollar or less at any job he could pick up in Lordsburg, Separ, or Deming. In 1888 they moved onto the ranch, but Neil continued to work out wherever he could. But he was home one May morning in 1890, working with his brother John, hauling away spoil from a recently dug well, when Stafford’s hired girl, Mary Fife, came running up, skirts flying.

“Indians are coming down the canyon,” she cried.

Stafford had gone out to a small trap to catch up his horses to take a load of produce from his truck garden for sale at Fort Bowie. He found the fresh track of a big moccasin and returned to the house and sent Mary to warn the Ericksons.

Erickson sent John horseback a mile and a half down the creek to warn the Prues while he stationed himself outside the stone cellar with a .45-70 and a belt of ammunition to watch for Indians. He was at his post when Mrs. Stafford came to the house with her two small daughters and told him her husband hadn’t seen an Indian, just moccasin tracks. She stayed with Mary, Emma, and the Ericksons’ two-year-old daughter, Lillian, while Neil went to join Stafford in checking out the sign.

One horse was missing from Stafford’s trap. A single set of tracks showed that the Indian had tried to catch up a mare also, but she had evaded him. They followed the sign to where it was joined by a smaller footprint, apparently a woman’s. Indications were that the two Indians had watched Stafford from there until he went back to the house. Then the man had put the woman on the horse and followed her up the canyon. Cautiously Erickson and Stafford followed the tracks a mile through thick brush and over fallen logs, then went back to their wives and children. John hadn’t returned.

When John Erickson reached Prue’s, he found that Louis already knew about the Indians. The day before, Jim Phillips and his half-brother, Malcolm Barfoot, who had places in Pinery Canyon, had taken their families on a Sunday visit to see sister Jennie’s new baby. When they returned, they found the Phillips cabin ransacked. Moccasin tracks told the story. They sent a message to the Fort Bowie commandant, and at daylight troops from the post passed Prue’s to head up Pinery shortly before John Erickson arrived.

John set out after them to tell them the Indians were now in Bonito.

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