Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 August 1893 — RANCHMAN OF RENOWN. [ARTICLE]

RANCHMAN OF RENOWN.

Greatest Indian Fighter Since Daniel Boone. John R. Spears, writing to the New York Sun from Socorro, N. M., tells of meeting Patterson, the famous which we extract the following: “One reads now and then of mon who settle on the frontier, and eventtally, when people began to settle within forty miles of them, complained of the country being, too crowded. The story is told as a joke, but Patterson is actually one of those frontiersmen. He showed it by settling in the country where he is now when Socorro, one hundred miles away, held his nearest civilized neighbor. But there were Apaches nearer —sometimes a good deal nearer. They did not want any white men in that region, and they determined that Patterson should go. They were a bit cautious about carrying out their designs, however, for they had had a bit of trouble with him over on the Rio Grande, near a Mexican settlement, where Patterson got his wife. Patterson and another white man were cultivating a patch of corn there, and the Apaches came down the river to make fodder of it- There were, it is said, about sixty of the Apaches, but Patterson and his friend stood back to back and kept their rifles hot, and pretty soon it was all the survivors of the sixty could do to carry off the dead and wounded and keep their ponies. But when Patterson located a claim 100 miles from anybody, the Apaches held a war dance, and one day a bunch (no one knows how many were in it) seemed to rise up out of the sand just out of range of Patterson’s rifle as he was at work out on the plain. Then they charged on him Indian fashion—ran from sage bush and sand hillock forward to other sage bushes and sand hillocks, behind which they could partly hide themselves.. Moreover, they had a trick when Patterson drew down his rifle on one, the rest (for they were spread out in a half-circle) would jump up and run forward. Patterson saw through the trick at the first run, and thereafter an Indian fell every time the rifle was drawn down, but it was never- the one at whom the weapon was first aimed. He drew down on one behind a hillock, and then quickly shifted his aim to one of the reds that were charging forward. “It took quick work; the sight was pretty caurse at every shot, but I aimed low and didn’t miss many,” said Patterson in telling the story. “Of course they were shooting at me all the time, and one of them hit me, too, but I didn’t let them know it, and pretty soon it got too hot for them. You see, because I stood up and fired without shelter.” “How many of them did you get?” “They said ten afterward.”

It was a game fight, and the truth of Patterson’s story is vouched for. by such men as A. B. Chase, of Socorro, who was at one time connected with the Apache agency on the. Tulerosa and often heard the story told by the Indians. But the Apaches were not satified with that fight. They came for him again in like fashion, and they only lost eight in that fight. There was no discipline among them that would hold them to the charge after Patterson’s old rifle began to bark and a brave fell at every discharge. “They knew Patterson after that.” as Patterson says. He killed but one thereafter, they say. Two braves came along one day, intending to sneak up ahd do some damage to the family at the house in Patterson’s absence or at night. Not far away they met some Mexican sheep herders who told them Patterson was not at home. So they boldly started to make camp near the house, but they had scarcely dismounted when one fell over with a bullet in him and the other fled in terror. “We had to shoot everything with long hair in those days,” said Patterson that night. There have been some noted Indian killers in Arizona and New Mexico, and they had cunning and implacable foes in the Apaches—foes that could only be controlled by sea it is agreed on all sides that Patterson easily leads the entire field of Indian fighters. No other man, they say, ever stood off single handed and unsheltered, a host of from thirty to fifty wellarmed savages, coming at him spread out new moon fashion across the open plains. When one says to him, as it often is said, that he does not know what fear is, he disclaims the compliment. “Why, I never thought of leaving the house in those days without a rifle,” he says, “and I built my house right out in the open, where there wasn’t a tree or a bush that one of the Apaches could hide behind. I’ve several time seen two men start for town for supplies, and one came back, leaving the other dead, with an Apache bullet in him. When I went I always traveled by night and hid by day.”