Mike Burns - The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian

A few days before Christmas of 1872, a hundred-odd miles to the north and east of what is now Phoenix, Arizona, advance scouts of a force of American soldiers, the vanguard of the military campaign that launched the Apache Wars, captured a young Indian boy about eight or ten years old. The boy had been looking for a missing horse with his uncle, who, it seems, abandoned him at the enemy's approach. Alone, freezing, the boy waited to be killed, for that was the way of the bluecoats. Instead, the scouts, whom army rolls listed as Tonto Apachestonto coming from the Spanish word for fool or idiot and apparently an insult used by other Indians in reference to collaboratorsterrified their young captive into revealing the whereabouts of his family, who were hiding in the safety of the Salt River Canyon. Within a few days, the time it took the American soldiers to pick their way through the rugged mountains to reach the remote ranchera, Hoomothya, Wet Nose, was an orphan.

The people the Americans found there were Kwevkepayas, members of one of the four far-flung tribal branches that would eventually be subsumed under the name Yavapai. About a hundred of these Kwevkepayas were sheltering under a rock overhang in a canyon above the Salt River when some hundred and twenty soldiers, accompanied by more than a hundred Akimel O'odham (Pima) and Maricopa auxiliaries and a small detachment of Tonto Apache scouts, attacked. The soldiers rained fire from across the canyon, ricocheting bullets from the roof to cut down the sheltered defenders. An American commander, Capt. James Burns, ordered that boulders be rolled down from above the cave to crush other Kwevkepayas. When the shooting stopped, the Akimel O'odham advanced, crushing the skulls of the dying with rifle butts and rocks. Some seventy-six Kwevkepayas died. Hoomothya's father, two younger siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather were among the dead of whatbecame known as the Battle of the Caves, which an eyewitness, an officer named John Gregory Bourke, called the most signal blow ever received by the Apaches in Arizona. History now knows the event as the Skeleton Cave Massacre, a more accurate term, since the so-called battle was decidedly one-sided: one Akimel O'odham fighter died, but otherwise the attacking force did not suffer a single casualty.

The Kwevkepayas had ranged across much of the central Arizona highlands for generations, ever since their ancestors moved eastward from the Colorado River country in search of game and a place where fewer enemies lived. Their luck ran out with the arrival of the Americans, who, beginning in the 1860s, effectively declared war on the indigenous peoples of the region, most of whom they collectively called Apaches, although only the easternmost of the peoples of the high country were true Apaches, Athapaskans who had migrated into Arizona from far north hundreds of years earlier. The Kwevkepayas and their cousins, the Tolkepayas, were variously known as Apache Mohaves (or Mojaves), Mohave (or Mojave) Apaches, and Yuma Apaches; the Tontos were Yavapais who lived in the Mogollon Rim country near the Verde River and present-day Payson. After 1865, when a mining boom drew hundreds of whites to the region near Prescott and Jerome, no ethnographic niceties were ventured. All Indians became Apaches, and all Apaches became targets.

James Burns took Hoomothya, whom he called Mickey or Mike, into his household as something between ward and servant, and there Mike Burns remained for several months, until the captain took ill and left for Washington, leaving it to his family to follow him. The boy's duties were several: he mucked the stables, cleaned the house, shined boots, did odd jobsand, it appears, was dispatched to spy on Yavapais interned near Fort Whipple, witnessing their destruction as one band after another surrendered before the promise of reservations near their highlands homeland.

The promise was not honored. No American officer ever expected that it would be, and the Yavapais were soon relocated to the much-hated San Carlos Reservation along the Gila River in southeastern Arizona. Mike was by this time the charge of a man who would become something of a foster father to him, Capt. Hall S. Bishop, and for the next few years he and Bishop would cross the western frontier,fighting many Indian nations and accumulating adventures that, as Mike relates them in this autobiography, sometimes verge on the improbableand sometimes even unbelievable.

Mike Burns lived in two worlds, and he was at home in neither. The whites alongside whom he served as an army scout and later in various roles never saw him as anything other than an Indian, which was no good thing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Uprooted and without kin, Mike had only tenuous contact with his own people for many years. Only in his twenties, when he married, did he hear his own language regularly spoken; only then did he receive an education in Kwevkepaya and Tolkepaya lifeways from his in-laws and neighbors. Until his death in 1934 he continued to gather material about his people's beliefs and history, making notes such as this: To know all the names of the ranges of mountains and peaks: the noted Superstition Mountains are called by the Indians Wee-git-a-sour-ha, a rock looking up. Wee-ga-jaide-haw is the mountain called Four Peaks. We call the Salt River Ah-haw-gith-e-la.

Mike tried at several points to publish his historical and ethnographic pieces, turning to help where he could, as he did with one correspondent, a well-meaning schoolteacher: This is all I can say just now, but if you need more, or if you can get someone who would be interested in what I write, I wish you would tell me so. I need help all the time, as you know; I am an Indian, and I have a large family, and I am the only one now living to look after my children. Please let me hear from you soon. Good-bye, Miss Ruth Arnold. I am a lonely Indian. Alas, Miss Arnold could do nothing, it appears, to fulfill Mike's dream of presenting the lives of his people fromthat anthropological desideratum above all othersthe native point of view. Neither, as we will see, could anyone else of his own time. At least, no one did.

The memoir that you hold in your hands likewise inhabits the space between two worlds. Written originally in a language that is not quite English, interspersed with grammatical constructions that are not quite Yavapai, Burns's autobiography, most of which takes place in the fourteen tumultuous years from 1872 to 1886, follows a path as circuitous as the history Burns relates.