CARLOS MONTEZUMA, M. D.- THE SAGA OF WASSAJA

Picket Post, Ghost of a Ghost Town

Sullivan's return marked the beginning of the end that, within a few months, left the Silver King a dangerous, water-filled hole a thousand feet deep. Wildcat promoters followed. Each one boomed the certainty that the "lost vein" would be found. But the Silver King ore body, of a type generally called by miners "a chimney" or "a chute," was gone.

Then last year, 1937, Frank P. Gonzales, of Superior, saw wealth where others had seen only desolation. Maybe Gonzales had read the old Pinal Drill in which Brook once boasted that "the dust of the five-mile stretch of road between the mine and the mill will average at least $5 a ton in silver." Anyhow, he drove his truck to the old townsite, hired a crew of men, and scraped up every ounce of tailings and mill dust. Even the crevices on the hillside where the mill stood were brushed out and hauled to the smelter in Superior. It was said he sold the dust for as much as $15 per ton. Today cattle loll in the shade of mesquite trees that have grown to maturity since the last old building was torn down. A few rust-eaten boilers, dislodged from their foundations, mark the site of the old mill. Picket Post, or Pinal City, as you like, is now but a romantic legend, one of hundreds that are fitted into Arizona's history. Hundreds of people living in the great copper camp, Superior, two miles away, hardly know it ever existed.

Picture, if you will, a soft summer night in Arizona's Superstition Mountains back in the days of the middle 1870s, when Indian raids were rife in Apache country. Here, rows of Mohave Apache wickiups loom against the skyline. A hideous war whoop suddenly stabs the mountain stillness! Pima warriors, nearly one hundred strong, armed with guns, knives, and clubs, seethe down the row of wickiups, dealing death blows on the slumbering colony of Apaches. From the camp a little boy, at five years old enough to sense the danger of the situation, darts across the ridge now illuminated by the flare of burning wickiups. Now he hears footsteps. On the dense evergreen foliage behind him, the shadows of two human beings slither into his view. Thinking his parents are out looking for him, he clears his throat to reveal his whereabouts. But it is two enemies who ferret out the frightened lad and lead him back to the camp, now smoldering. Wassaja's captors took him to Florence, where contact with prospective purchasers could usually be made. It wasn't long before an itinerant photographer and publisher stopped in the town to have repairs made on his prairie schooner in which he was to make the journey to Trinidad, Colorado, then the western terminus of the Santa Fe Railway. He noticed the crow-black hair of little Wassaja, and his wife had little trouble persuading her husband that the Indian boy would make a good study subject in his New York studio. John Teely bought Wassaja and paid the Pimas thirty silver coins. While waiting for the blacksmith to put his covered wagon in traveling condition, Teely and his wife spent much time winning the confidence of little Wassaja. In a few weeks, he had learned the English names for many of the objects around him. A Roman Catholic, Teely had Wassaja baptised as one. He rechristened the boy: He was now Carlos Montezuma. Teely sold his outfit before leaving Trinidad. They bought tickets for New York City. Montezuma marveled at the twenty-mile-an-hour speed of the iron horse, and as they rolled across the Great Plains, he wondered whether he would ever see mountains again. Teely soon met with some financial reverses, and so made arrangements with one of his friends in Chicago to take Montezuma. This woman, while somewhat wealthy, did not lavish spending money on the boy, but gave adequate financial backing for his education. She encouraged him in his studies, and as a consequence, it wasn't long before the once wild Mohave Apache boy had established himself as a favorite among his schoolmates and teachers. After being graduated from high school, Montezuma matriculated at the University of Illinois. We next see him in Northwestern University, where for the next two years, you could have seen him experimenting in its medical laboratories. After receiving his M.D. degree, Montezuma began the practice of medicine in the Windy City, a real Indian medicine man now prescribing for the white man's ills. He specialized in digestive ailments. The Chicago School of Medicine, having long had an eagle-eye on Dr. Montezuma, now induced him to join its faculty as lecturer. In fact, the demand for the young doctor's professional services became so insistent and pronounced that he couldn't possibly keep up with it. Realizing that about the only way he could get a breathing

Carlos Montezuma, M.D. the Saga of Wassaja

spell from his arduous practice would be to absent himself from it, he went to Dearborn Station and bought a train ticket to Phoenix.

At Fort McDowell, he found some of his tribesmen. A Mrs. Dickens, one of the two Indian women who survived that midnight raid by the Pimas, was living there with her three sons Charley, George, and Richard who, Dr. Montezuma learned, were his cousins. Eager to revisit the scene of his capture, he engaged the Dickens boys to ride horseback with him back into the Superstitions.

Following directions given by Mrs. Dickens, they had little trouble finding the spot. They sauntered around the old camp site, picking up arrowheads, examining old pots and pans, and mentally surveying the situation. Montezuma went out to the edge of the rim rock and for some time stood there meditating. "Right down there, by that rock wall," he pointed out, "is where the Pimas nabbed me that night."

Upon Montezuma's return to Chicago, there was a letter on his desk from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, inquiring whether Dr. Montezuma would accept assignment as physician at one of the Indian schools or agencies.

Montezuma reasoned that he was an Indian, and this might be the avenue that would lead to his contributing something worthwhile to the Indian people. He accepted, and was forthwith assigned to the nonreservation school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His heart was set on ministering to the more primitive the adult Indians - however, and we next see him as agency physician in Nevada. He thus had the opportunity of observing the policies and the accomplishments of the federal Indian Bureau.

Montezuma was fired with a zeal to help his brothers. He now allied himself with the American Indian Association, and with his silver-tongued oratory became that society's most ardent champion. Audiences in large cities from Denver to New York listened spellbound while Dr. Montezuma painted the plight of the American Indian. The years passed The very next day she found him packing his suitcases. "Where to this trip?" she inquired of him solicitously. "Back to Fort McDowell, Arizona," he returned seriously. She mused a minute or two, for himself. He turned a deaf ear to all of their pleadings. He seemed to know that his time had come to go. Within six weeks after he took to his bed on the bare earth in a Fort McDowell wickiup, he passed Montezuma made it plain to Dr. Stroud that he would not leave the flickering fires of his cousin's wickiup.

and the older he became, the more vehemently he championed their rights.

He also began publishing a monthly pamphlet to acquaint the public with the status of the American Indians.

Dr. Montezuma, in one issue of Wassaja, wrote: "May this issue fall upon fertile ground. May its humble appeal help to arouse the hands and hearts of some justice-loving and Godfearing men and women, so that, with their great means of action, freedom and citizenship in this wonderful country may be given to the native Americans, my brothers and sisters, the Reservation Indians."

In 1922 Dr. Montezuma's own sun was approaching the western horizon. Somewhere in his ministering to the sick, he had picked up the tuberculosis germ. One day he complained to his wife that he felt tired, and that no amount of rest seemed to help him any. then continued, "Shall I pack your overcoat and some of your books?"

The doctor shook his head resignedly. "Guess I'll not need them where I'm going."

His wife knew that the doctor was ill, and she came with him.

Dr. Stroud, physician for the Fort McDowell Reservation, visited Dr. Montezuma, who was clad only in a loin cloth in the camp of Richard Dickens, and tried to persuade him to come to a hospital in Phoenix, where better care could be given him. But Montezuma was through with the bright lights of the cities, and he made it plain to Dr. Stroud that he would not leave the flickering fires of his cousin's wickiup.

Notables from various parts of the country, learning of Dr. Montezuma's plight and his refusal to abide by any doctor's prescriptions, wrote him letters, begging him to make some determined effort to effect a cure away, thus bringing to an end the career of an Indian, who, although born in the remote silences of the Arizona wilds, nevertheless made his niche in the white man's world; yet who chose to die as he had been born a Mohave Apache Indian.

At that time, the Reverend Percival, of the Baptist church in Phoenix, voiced this tribute to his memory: "The life of Dr. Montezuma symbolizes for us the wonderful relationship between the two people, the red and the white; the Indian and the American, the first and the last American.

"His life links together in a marvelous way, the past and the present of our country its oldest savagery with its newest civilization."

Dr. Montezuma's body was interred in the Mohave Apache burial ground at Fort McDowell, February 3, 1923.