Through the constant depredations carried on against the Mexican
settlements in northern Sonora and Chihuahua, under the leadership of Juan
Jose, an Apache chief educated among the Mexicans, those two states were
led, in 1837, to offer a bounty for Apache scalps. The horror of this
policy lay in the fact that the scalp of a friendly Indian brought the
same reward as that of the fiercest warrior, and worse still, no exception
was made of women or children. Nothing could have been more effective than
this scalp bounty in arousing all the savagery in these untamed denizens
of the mountains, and both Mexico and the United States paid dearly in
lives for every Apache scalp taken under this barbarous system. Predatory
warfare continued unabated during the next forty years in spite of all the
Mexican government could do. With the consummation of the treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, the Apache problem became one to be solved by
the United States as well.
In 1864, under General James H. Carleton, the "war of extermination" was
begun in a most systematic manner. On April 20 this officer communicated a
proposal of co-operation to Don Ignacio Pesqueira, Governor of Sonora,
saying: "If your excellency will put a few hundred men into the field on
the first day of next June, and keep them in hot pursuit of the Apaches of
Sonora, say for sixty or ninety days, we will either exterminate the
Indians or so diminish their numbers that they will cease their murdering
and robbing propensities and live at peace.
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