ter's Revenge," or
"The Three-Fingered Might of the West." But we did read them and long
for the great life of the plains. Even Jesse James was a hero to many
of us.

But for a New Englander educated at Harvard to the practice of
medicine to pick up his deeply driven stakes and actually go into this
realm of romance was unusual in the extreme; and to be so well trained
and in such good condition, with such high courage as to make good at
once amongst those men who looked down on an Eastern tender-foot was
sufficiently rare to promise much for the future.

The young man had the love of romance that all young lives have, but
he had the unusual stimulus to it that led him to make it for the
moment his actual life. And those who study his whole life will find
again and again that when the parting of the ways came he invariably
took the road of adventure, provided that it was always in the service
of his country. Such then was the makeup and the condition of this
young man when in the spring of 1886 Captain Lawton, having {36}
received orders to assume command of the expedition into Mexico
against the hostile Apache, included Wood as one of his four officers.
The force consisted of forty-five troopers, twenty Indian scouts,
thirty infantrymen and two pack trains. And thus began the
two-thousand-mile chase into the fastnesses of Sonora and Chihuahua
which ended with the surrender of Geronimo.

General Miles' campaign methods differed from those of General Crook
in many ways. He always assumed the aggressive. His motto was, "Follow
the Indian wherever he goes and strike him whenever you can. No matter
how bad the country, go on." Under these instructions the troops went
over the border and down into the depths of the Sonora, jumping the
Indian whenever an opportunity offered, never giving him any rest.
Wherever he went the troops followed. If he struck the border, a well
arranged system of heliostat stations passed the word along to a body
of waiting or passing scouts. General Miles' methods differed from
those of General Crook also in the matter of the use of the heliostat,
a system of signaling based on flashes of the sun's rays from {37}
mirrors. He had used them experimentally while stationed in the
Department of the Columbia, and now determined to make them of
practical use at his new station. Over the vast tracts of rough,
unpopulated land of Arizona and Mexico the signals flashed, keeping
different detachments in to