Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1895 — A Scout's Marvellous Faculty. [ARTICLE]

A Scout's Marvellous Faculty.

Every one wlio lias spent much time j upon the frontier has heard of Hie remarkable faculty of Dolores Sanchez, the fatuous trailer of New Mexico and Southern Arizona. So eminent an authority as General Nelson A. Miles, who has had unusual | personal knowledge of the work of trailers and scouts, is quoted as saying that some of Sanchez’s accomplish-| meats are more than extraordinary j and that his powers bore on the mythical. General Huger tells the following story of an experience with this remarkable man to show the skill of an expert scout: “I was once in pursuit of a lot of Comanches, who had been followed, scattered, and the trail abandoned by a company of so-called Texas Rangers. On the eighth day after tlie scattering Sanchez found the trail from a single shod horse. When we were fairly into tlie rough, rocky Guadaloupe Mountains he stopped, dismounted, and picked up from Hie root of a tree the four shoes of the horse ridden by the Indian. “With a grim smile he handed the shoes to me and said that the Indian had tried to hide the trail. For six days we journeyed over the roughest mountains, turning and twisting in apparently the most objectionable way, not a man iu the whole command being able to discover, sometimes for hours, a single mark by which Sanchez might direct himself. Sometimes I lost patience and demanded that lie show me what lie was following. 'l’oco tiempo’ (pretty soon). he would abtraetedly answer, and, iu a longer or shorter time, show me the clear-cut footprints of tlie horse in the soft bank of a mountain stream or point with his long wiping-stick to some other most unmistakable 'sign.' Sanchez led us, following the devious windings of this trail for over 150 miles, and. only three or four times dismounting so as to more closely examine the ground, he finally brought me to where the Indians had reunited.”