Witchcraft er b o v*tt£lVMFfMQySalem
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Rena Ml Jones. 36-year-eld Yuma
Indian, admitted in a federal court
preliminary hearing that he killed
John Stokes, a fellow tribesman,
because he believed Stokes to be
a witch.
Bv Mildred Gordon
■N old Salem, almost 250 years ago.
the Puritan fathers hung witches
on the scaffolds of gnarled oak
’ trees Only the tightening of the
I
noose about the neck could garrote the
magic of the evil eye.
Out on the hot desert Lands this yeai
the terror of witchcraft, thought dead
for these many centuries, stalks through
the hogans. the wicki-ups and the
adobes of a primitive people
As in Salem, here witches may kill
their victims by just a glance As in
Salem, too. the death of a witch is the
only salvation for the one who is cursed
Only this time witches die to the roar
of a shotgun or to the thud of a heavy
ax.
It is murder as cold and relentless
as in the days of the Puritan fathers
that is bringing weather-beaten desert
sleuths and Department of Justice
agents riding through the sun-tire king
doms of cactus and ecraggly mesquite
in a far-flung investigation into strange
cults of witchcraft
Medicine men arc scurrying for covet
and terror-stricken tribesmen are tom
between fear of the sorcerers and the
long arm of their Uncle Sam as the in
tensive search is centered on the Yuma
Indian reservation. Tire entire reserva
tion. a barren strip of dune country
which stretches along the Colorado
river from Boulder Dam to the Mexi
can barrier, is being sifted through a
fine screen.
The ax-slaying of John Elee Stokes,
a 58-year-old Yuman made the witches
brew boil over.
A motorist, bouncing along over the
narrow “washboard” road that leads
into the little river town of Paiker.
Ariz... noticed an Indian lying under a
mesquite tree, just off the highway
Squiming has eyes against the glare
of a blazing April sun. he saw that
the man was stretched out with his
face in the sand, and that there was
an ugly gash on the back of his head
Driving at full speed into Parker he
notified Deputy Sheriff James Washum
who in turn advised 6. H. Cmder.
superintendent of the Indian agency
In less than an hour, deputies were
scouring the sandy desert trails and
rocky bluffs in search of the killer
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There were bizarre accounts ot murder in the night and
bodies hidden where no white man would find them
WHEN Deputy Washum and Justice ol
** the Peace J. B Roberts arrived a
short time later, little groups of tribes
men had gathered Although they
grunted volubly in their guttural native
tongue, their sun-blackened faces
showed no traces of the good humor
so characteristic of the southwestern
tribes.
Searching the ground in the kleig
like brilliance of the desert sun. Wash
um and Roberts found only one thing
Ihat they thought might be a clew to
the mystery Perfectly imprinted in
the hot sand near the body was a «el
of tire tracks Washum did not over
look the fact that they might have been
the tracks ot any of a hundred passing
cars, but Hist the same he kept an
image ol them un his mind
In questioning the Indians, the au
thorities encountered more than the
usual reticence Stokes was well-known
on the reservation, and from the great
flow of Yuma words, the officers knew
that excitement was at fever heat
Gradually the Indians became strangely
silent, and fear settled over the crowd
Washum had difficulty breaking the
silence
"Stokes was a witch.” came the
grudging admission from a chunky old
chieftain, whose face was the color and
texture of burned toast. The deputies
turned to the other tribesmen. They
nodded
“The aneient one was filled with
devils.” declared another. “He caused
the dealh of his own son.”
“You mean he murdered him?”
Washum asked
“No.” said the chieftain. “He be
witched him. He put the curse on him
He was angered because his son had
married a girl who looked with scorn
on the ways of our forefathers. So he
made him die.”
“But tiow?” the deputies insisted
The Indian shifted his weigh, to the
other foot and shook bis head
“Who knows —wtio but witches?”
For years, wild fantastic stories had
filtered through to white men from lit
tle villages lost in the sand dunes—
tales of witches and fetishes and strange
deaths. There were bizarre account.-
of evil ones murdered in the dark of
night and of bodies hidden where no
white men ever would find them
When investigators began to talk to
the Yumans about possible suspects,
they found the lips of the braves sealed
in the legendary stoicism of the Indian
Before, in other strange murders of
the Indian land, that silence had al
most balked some of the cleverest ius
tice agents in the nation
There was the time in 1933 when the
beautiful Columbia university co-ed
Henrietta Schmcrler. had been found on
the Apache reservation, hacked tc
death with rocks. Many months went
by before her fiendish slayer. Golnev
Seymour, an Apache vouth. was trailed
down
Remembering such cases, the desert
sleuths worked feverishly From adobe
huts to little shacks of cactus wood
went the leathery-faced riders, accom
panied by Indian interpreter-guides,
but everywhere only the shaking of
heads answered their queries.
Then one day. while stopping cars
along the desert roads leading into
Parker, they saw one with tire treads
similar to the impressions in the sand
near the scene of the killing. The driver
of the car was a handsome, wiry Yuman
in his middle 30's.
The investigators, who had been
joined by this time by W. E. Miller, a
crack Department of Justice agent,
found that the Indian was Ronald Jones,
a hard-working farmer, who lived
quietly with his wife and two children
in an adobe house on the hot waste
lands that stretch along the Colorado
“Sure, I knew Stokes,” he admitted,
talking along quietly in fluent English
“His son married a relative of mine ”
lanky Indian hesitated for a mo
ment and scuffed one toe of his shoe
in the sand. “What’s all this about
Stokes being a witch?” someone asked
“The old man was a witch, all right.’
declared Jones gravely. “He was wild
when his son married. And he put the
curse on him to make him die a hor
rible, lingering death.”
Suddenly his eyes narrowed.
“I hated Stokes.” he said “He swore
that he would bewitch my wife and put
the evil eye on my children And 1
knew he would.”
A few weeks later, when Jones was
taken into federal court in Phoenix for
a preliminary hearing, he related the
grisly details of how he killed Stokes
with an ax
r I"'HAT the eerie witchcraft-murder ot
A John Stokes is not alone in the re
cent crime annals of the wasteland.- is
believed by numerous archaeologists In
the backwashes of the Indian country
—the mountain-locked villages where
the white man seldom, if ever, treks—
bands of witch-doctors gather in caves
at night to chant their hideous songs
of death
Up inlo the forgotten worlds ot the
Navajos recently went Richard Van
Valkenburgh. trained for years in the
ways of these nomads of the sagebrush
Reporting to the Museum of Northern
Arizona, at Flagstaff, for which he is
a research worker, he told of the Un
toes (Poisoners).
“The price of initiation into a band
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An Apache Indian executing the
Devil Dance, Me at the weirdest ot
all southwestern ceremonials, and
rarely photographed
of witches is the killing ol a person
dearest to you in your family,” Van
Valkenburgh wrote in a bulletin which
was released by the museum.
“This fraternity or band ot witches
gathers and holds ‘sings’ in hidden
caves. They make pictures on the
floor of colored ashes of the person that
they desire to be-witch After the pic
ture is made, usually the head witch
and his assistants take a small bow
and shoot a turquoise at the picture,
and where the stone strikes, the person
whom they wish to be-witch is affected
there.”
In the Apache wilds, where wicki
ups dot the mesas and valleys where
Geronimo led has last war against the
whites, federal authorities are sifting
through the evidence in eight brutal
murders of the last 18 months on the
chance that sorcery might have played
weird roles. The dances of the Apaches,
where painted, masked dervishes whirl
in secret, age-old rituals, also are being
watched.