women, and children, killed; the property destroyed, and the detriment
to the settlement of Arizona cannot be computed. The cost of the war
against Cochise would have purchased John Ward a string of yokes of oxen
reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and as for his woman's son,
Micky Free, he afterwards became an Indian scout and interpreter, and
about as infamous a scoundrel as those who generally adorn that
profession. I am on very friendly terms with him and all his family, and
would not write a word in derogation of his character, or of his
step-father, John Ward, but to vindicate history.

The Vigilance Committee of San Francisco sent a considerable number of
unsavory immigrants to Arizona, who with the refugees from Mexico, Texas
and Arkansas, rendered mule property rather insecure in the early days.
Gambling has been an industrial pursuit since the first settlement of
the country, and the saloon business flourishes with the prosperity of
the times. Strange to say, amidst this heterogeneous population there
has never been a vigilance committee.

The Company and the country (synonymous terms) continued to improve,
with occasional interruptions by the Apaches, until the beginning of
1861, when the reverberations of the gun fired at Sumter were heard in
the Arizona mountains. A newspaper had been started by the company at
Tubac, called _The Arizonian_. Our mail came overland by Butterfield
coaches, at the rate of a hundred miles a day, but at last we waited for
"the mail that never came." In the spring of 1861 a coach was started
out from the Rio Grande with thirteen of the bravest buckskin boys of
the West, and ten or twelve thousand dollars in gold, to pay off the
line and withdraw the service; but the Apaches waylaid the coach in
Stein's Pass, killed all of the men, and captured the gold.