distinguished
Governor of his State. Originally a powerful tribe occupying both
banks of the lower Rio Grando to the south of the Comanches, in their
wars with Texans and Mexicans the Lipans had dwindled until only this
handful remained. Three years earlier the entire band had been
captured after a desperate fight, and removed by the Mexican
authorities to a small reservation five hundred miles southwest of
Musquiz. But at the end of two years, as soon as the guard over them
relaxed, indomitable as Dull Knife and his Cheyennes in their desperate
fight (in 1879) to regain their northern highland home, Juan Galan and
his pathetically small following jumped their reservation and dodged
and fought their way back to the Musquiz Mountains; and there for the
last ten months, constantly harassed and harassing, they had been
fighting for the right to die among the hills they loved. To the
natives they were blood-thirsty wolves, beasts to be exterminated; to
an impartial onlooker they were a heroic band courting death in a
splendid last fight for fatherland. Their bold deeds would fill a
book. Even in this town of fifteen hundred people guarded by a troop
of cavalry, no one ventured out at night except from the most pressing
necessity; and of the seventy killed by them since their return, nearly
a third were macheted in the streets of Musquiz during Juan Galan's
night raids on the town.

The most effective work against them was done by a band of about a
hundred Seminole-negro half-breeds, to whom the Government had made a
grant of four square leagues twenty-five miles west of Musquiz, on the
Nacimiento. Come originally out of the Indian territory in the United
States, where the Seminoles had cross-bred with their negro slaves,
this same band a few years earlier had been most efficient scouts for
our own troops at Fort dark, and other border garrisons, and it was
this record that led the Mexican Government to seek and lodge them on
the Nacimiento, as a buffer against the Lipans.

That night arrangements for our trip were concluded: the Captain
consented to furnish me old Tomas Alvarez and a young soldier named
Manuel, but only on condition that he himself should escort us, with
fifty men of his troop, one day's march up the river, which would carry
us beyond the recent range of the Lipans. So early the next morning we
marched out westward, passing the last house a half-mile outside the
centre of the town, along a dim, li