Chapter 2: The Hunt Continues

Jason returned to the archives and continued his search with a renewed enthusiasm. It was going well, but as each day passed with no word from Maria, he began to slip back into a state of despair. Two weeks later, as he was sorting through his mail, he spotted it.

The ordinary business envelope addressed to him with no return address postmarked three days earlier from Tuscan. Tearing it open, he quickly scanned the single sheet of paper.

‘Jason, still on the hunt? Look for the journal of Samuel Strong. Good Luck, Maria’

Jason was both elated and frustrated. He had hoped for more of a personal interaction with her. Apparently, she did not wish to converse with him, that any correspondence between the two would be one way only.

After a long sleepless night, he returned to the archives and started his search for Samuel Strong and his journal. Two hours later, he was given access to a file room, which held old documents recorded on film that were still awaiting funding to allow them to be digitized. He carefully scrolled through the several films, scrutinizing each document; approximately half way through the file box, he hit pay dirt – ‘The Journal of Samuel Strong.’

June 6, 1892

‘My name is Samuel Strong, I am fifty-three years old, still in relatively good health, but I want to get these experiences out of my head and onto paper, because on paper they exist.’

Jason began to skim through the first twenty pages, about how he came to the ‘New Mexico’ Territory and how, along with about 120 Confederate Cavalrymen, road into the small settlement of Tucson and declared it the capital of the western district of the Confederate Arizona Territory. Samuel was among a squad of confederate soldiers scouting the extreme western area of the district when a group of Union Calvary soldiers attacked them at Picacho Pass. A fierce battle took place in the thick mesquite and arroyos lasting over ninety minutes. As nightfall settled over the area, the confederates, fearing Union reinforcements, retreated back to Tucson, thus ending the only skirmish in the Arizona Territory. Soon after, the Confederate troops retreated from the territory altogether and re-grouped in Texas. All that is, but one.

‘I was dam sure that the Confederacy was doomed and I pledged to myself that I was not going to go down with it. Anyway, it wasn’t my fight. They chose me, not me them. I headed north from Tucson, finding work on a small farm near the Salt River. I worked there for basically room and board for the next twenty-five years, then the lure of riches became too strong and I joined up with a mining company that was prospecting for gold in the nearby Superstition Mountains.’

Jason’s attention was suddenly refocused fully on the next entry in the journal.

‘For the next year, myself and six other men toiled in the mountains during the extreme weather, digging a hole about two hundred feet into the side of one of the peaks. It was backbreaking work. Especially for me since at the age of forty-nine I was nearly twice as old as the others.

‘One morning, before starting our day in the mine, our foreman, Zeke, told me to take the wagon into town and pick up our weekly supplies. I was always the one who would have to pick up the supplies. I thought it was because Zeke liked me, but my best friend Willie told me that the real reason Zeke sent me rather than one of the others was because he got twice the amount of work out the other guys, so losing me for the entire day was no great loss. That didn’t bother me too much; I knew it was true; therefore, I couldn’t blame him.

“I hitched up the horses and got ready to go. The last thing that Zeke said to me was, ‘and don’t stop at the saloon before you come back.’

“Little did I know that those words would be the last words that Zeke would ever say to me. I started out at a leisurely pace and had just made the turn out of our camp, just around a small outcropping of rock, when I heard a great deal of shouting and gun shots. The trail was too narrow for me to turn around so I stopped, jumped off the wagon, and ran back to the outcropping. Peering around the side, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There must have been about twenty of them. They were on foot and swarming over the hopelessly out numbered miners. Most of the miners were unarmed, their pistols were still in their tents, only Zeke appeared to have his gun but he quickly ran out of bullets, having never hit any of them. They were Indian warriors for sure. Each was naked from the waist up, only wearing a loincloth and moccasins. Most had their knives drawn and were ganging up on the individual miners. I watched helplessly as one of the warriors wrestled my best friend Willie down to the ground, his face pushed hard into the dirt as his attacker sat on his back. With one hand the warrior removed his knife from its sheath and with the other took a fist full of Willie’s hair and cut his throat from ear to ear.”