University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X

“So soon?” Mrs. Reed inquired in a stricken tone,
glancing around the ugly square room with the worn furniture that
had seen service with so many officers' families. There was little
beautiful about it, or even attractive, she admitted to herself,
but it had the well-lived-in look that rooms acquire when people
have been comfortable and happy in them. They were leaving their
first home, the thought with a small pang. “But we've hardly been
here any time at all.”

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“That's Army life for you.” Reed said philosophically.
“The Army's quite a lot like the Methodist Church -it doesn't
give you a chance to stagnate in one spot. My childhood training
in frequent moves will come in handy. Personally, I'll be glad
to miss the rest of the August heat here. It's cooler at Camp
Apache, and wilder country, too, in that part of Arizona.”

“Wilder? What about the Indians?”

“I don't think we need worry about Indians. All the Apaches
in the state except the scouts enlisted in the Army and a few out-
laws are at San Carlos Reservation now, and behaving themselves.
It was the tribes under Geronimo and Victorio who were making most
of the trouble, and now that Clum's got them on the reserva-
tion they'll probably be good.” No point to alarming Emilie with
the information that the young civilian Indian agent, John Clum,
who had made a model reservation of San Carlos,. had just resigned
in p his post in protest because troops had been stationed there.
Already, Reed had been told, the fierce and crafty Geronimo, whom
Clum and his Apache police had captured and imprisoned, after the
Army had several times failed to catch him, had been liberated and
given the run of the reservation.

On August 11th, 1877, Reed and his wife were ready to set
off on their second major wagon expedition, to proceed “by the
shortest usually traveled route,” as the Army orders of that day
always expressed it, to Camp Apache, north of Tucson in the White
Mountains. The baggage wagon, loaded with such household furnish-
ings as could withstand the rough two hundred mile trip, had
started the previous morning, and at nine o'clock the doherty
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wagon, painted white to turn a little of the burning heat, waited
outside their quarters for the doctor and his wife.

“You're sure you haven't forgotten anything, Dr. Reed?” Mrs.
Reed questioned anxiously as she hurried out of the house. Her
little dog, Undina, wedged tightly under her arm, began to sniff
with excitement.

“If I have, I really don't wh know where we would put it
now,” Reed observed, watching his wife's expression with amusement
as she surveyed the ambulance. He, the driver, and the strapping
corporal who sat up front with the driver had packed it to the brim.

Only the back seat, on which he and Mrs. Reed and the dog
were to sit, was vacant. Beneath it was an emergency kit of medi-
cines, a large lunch box, a pair of Reed's boots and a bulging
bag which rattled with coffee pot, frying pan and sauce pans. A
couple of folding chairs, a valise, blankets, a bundle of shawls,
a work basket, a feather pillow and some light reading crowded the
front seat, while under it were packed a mess chest containing
tableware for the journey, a box of provisions and a clothes basket
holding an assortment of necessaries. Two hats, Reed's sword, an
umbrella, firearms, a pair of shoes and two canteens full of water
swung from the roof. Outside, underneath the front seat, Reed had
stowed his heavy instrument case beside a sack of grain and the
driver's ten days' rations. His trunk, and a mat-
tress and bedding tied in a canvas cover, were securely strapped
on behind.

“A very stylish equipage, don't you think, my dear?” he in-
quired smilingly. “At last I feel completely at home in the Army.
The only difference is that Pa didn't arm to the teeth when he
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traveled. Hop in and let's be off. We've a forty mile run ahead
of us today.”

Seasoned travelers by now, the Reeds enjoyed the ten day
trip through the almost uninhabited Apache domain. Hazards and
hardships were, at their best, fun; at their worst, merely routine.

The road skirted the southern edge of the mountain range
that lay between Tucson and Camp Apache. A leading item on the fun
side of the ledger was Undina's behavior. Unsubdued by a temper-
ature of a hundred and ten degrees, she barked at the top of
her lungs the whole first day out, and jumped tirelessly back and
forth across the seats. Having made herself too hoarse even to yelp,
she thereafter behaved with more composure.

Under routine hazards came anxiety about hostile Indians.
Reed, recalling that they sometimes frequented a spot called the
Lime Kilns which his party was to pass on the second day, kept his
weapons loaded and close at hand, and avoided the topic of Indians,
in which his wife was showing an untimely interest. The wagon, how-
ever, rattled unmolested along the hot road past the danger spot,
between the innocent greasewood and miesquite bushes which concealed
nothing more alarming than an occasional reptile.

Bending north off the stage route to cross the plain, the
road left to the right the Dragoon Mountains, still infested with
outlaw Indians, where a stage driver had been murdered only a week
before. and It led them through the green Aravaipa Valley to Camp
Thomas, where they spent the night with Lieutenant Powell, an ac-
quaintance of Reed's. Mrs. Reed was the first woman who had ever
been on the post, and a small dog, catching sight of her, ran away
yelping with alarm.

From then on, they had to camp out, sleeping in the do-
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herty wagon, with Undina, who demanded all the comforts of hom, on
the bed at their feet. There were no way stations or even houses
along the trail which ran through the Indian res San Carlos Reser-
vation, which they had now entered, but there were Indians. It
gave Mrs. Reed rather a turn when, at their first halt in the open,
an Apache came into the camp. He laid down his rifle and sat be-
side the doctor, and explained with unsmiling friendliness that he
was on his way to Camp Apache and would like something to eat.
When he had devoured a loaf of bread, he said “Adios” and walked away.

The fishing expedition Reed undertook one afternoon was a
complete failure. They had reached camp -that is, the nearest
water -early that day, and after spendingReed spent an hour dangling his
line in Ash Creek. His only bite was a turtle, and after spending
another hour trying to get it off his hook, he gave up. A sudden
downpour that evening, just at dinner time, flooded the oven, ruined
the bread and depressed the spirits of their soldier-cook without
dampening those of Reed and his wife at all. Bad weather, they
agreed, was part of the fun -if you could stay in the doherty wagon.

The way was now gradually ascending into the White Mountains,
and the trail was becoming almost impassable, even to stout hearts
and Army mules. How to get up and down hills where the track was
only a steep jumble of barrel sized rocks became the major problem.
Leaving the baggage wagon stuck on a tremendous hill with the sol-
diers who were to unload it and bring it up empty the next morning,
Reed one evening pushed ahead with the ambulance. Again those bug-
aboos, bears and Indians, so potent a fiction in the safe nurseries
of the east and so real a danger in the lonely reaches of the far
west, haunted Mrs. Reed. The sight, however, of the blazing fire
under the tall pines and of her husband preparing supper for them
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reminded her that life in the open made her even more hungry than
nervous.

Heroic measures -in trying to keep the wagon from going
over a steep bump with a fatal smash, Reed was jerked along behind
it with such violence that the soles were ripped from his shoes-
brought them safe and whole, in body and baggage, over the last lap
and into Camp Apache. They were to live at this post, one of the
most inaccessible in all this wild and inaccessible region, for the
next three years.

* * *

It was the last month of 1877. The year, so eventful and
so crowded with new experiences for Walter and Emilie Lawrence Reed,
still had one major novelty in store for them. On December 4th
their first child was born.

Reed knocked very softly at the door, and bent his neat
brown head attentively toward it.

“Come in,” his wife called. “I'm not asleep.”

He entered and closed the door quietly.

“The future President is, though,” she greeted him.

“He's nice, isn't he,” Reed said, bending over to look at
the tiny baby. “He already looks just like you. I feel unreason-
ably proud of him.”

The baby opened his eyes and stared unwinkingly at his
father. Reed picked him up gently and looked at him with a combin-
ation of fatherly tenderness and professional interest.

“A sound specimen, doctor?” Mrs. Reed asked with a smile.

“A fine specimen, ma'am,” he assured her, “and a credit to
his parents.”

She laughed and reached out for the baby. Reed carefully
laid him beside her and pulled a chair up to the bedside.

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“Hadn't we better give him a name pretty soon?” he sug-
gested. “We've had him now for three days, and it isn't very con-
venient just to call him ‘he’ all the time.”

“I want him named after his father,” Mrs. Reed asserted.
“And I want him to grow up like him, too,” she added positively.

“We can easily arrange for your first request, anyway,”
Reed agreed, “but the other will have to wait for a while. I want
him named after you, though, but I'll compromise. Let's name
him Walter Lawrence, and call him Lawrence.”

Mrs. Reed though that a splendid solution. The object of
the discussion, however, was not interested. He had gone back to
sleep.again.

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