The gentleman from Harper's Weekly, who didn't know mesquite beans from goat shit, looked up from his reference collection of back issues and said, “I've got it!” Very pleased with himself. “We'll call this affair…are you ready? The Early-Moon Feud.”

The news reporters in the Gold Dollar shrugged and thought some more, though most of them went on calling it the Rincon Mountains War, which seemed to have enough ring to it.

Somebody said, “What's the matter with the Sweetmary War?” Sweetmary being the name of the mining town where all the gawkers and news reporters had gathered to watch the show. The man from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wanted to call it the Last of The Great Indian Wars. Or-he also mentioned to see how it would sound-the Great Apache Uprising of 1893. Or the Bloody Apache Uprising, etc.

The man from the St. Louis newspaper was reminded that, first, it wasn't an uprising and, second, there weren't just Apache Indians up in the mountains; there were also some niggers. The man from St. Louis, being funny, said, “Well, what if we call it the Last of the Great Indian-Nigger Wars?” A man from Florence said, “Well, you have got the chili-pickers in it also. What about them?” Yes, there were some Mexican settlers too, who had been farming up there a hundred years; they were also involved.

What it was, it was a land war.

The LaSalle Mining Company of New Jersey wanted the land. And the Indians from the White Tanks agency, the colored and the Mexicans-all of them actually living up there-wanted it also.

Dana Moon was the Indian Agent at White Tanks, originally established as a reservation for Warm Springs Apaches, or Mimbreños, and a few Lipan and Tonto-Mojave family groups. The agency was located sixteen miles north of Sweetmary and about the same distance west of the San Pedro River. The reservation land was not in dispute. The problem was, many of Moon's Apaches had wandered away from White Tanks-a bleak, young-desert area-to set up rancherías in the mountains. No one, until now, had complained about it.