In a Canyon

Alone in a shack on the White River, Ariz., four miles from the Apache reservation, lived Henrietta Schmerler, 23, a New York girl who wanted to learn Indian tribal secrets. A brilliant student of anthropology and ethnology at Columbia University under famed Professor Franz Boas, she had been granted a fellowship to go west and study red men in situ.

In a canyon on the reservation last week was found the body of Student Schmerler. She had been stabbed, beaten, choked, thrown into the deep ravine. A few days before, she was said to have set out with Apache Claude Gilbert, 25, to attend a native dance at White River. Alarmed at her long absence from her shack, a white deputy sheriff organized a posse of Indians. They brought back the battered corpse fastened to the back of a horse.

Young Apache Gilbert admitted the dance engagement but said the white girl had changed her mind, refused to go with him. When her disappearance was first reported he was arrested and jailed on a charge of selling beer. He said he knew nothing of the girl's fate. Attempts to obtain information from two other taciturn Indians who were held, were equally fruitless. U. S. District Attorney John C. Gung'l went from Phoenix to White River. Friend of Indians, he announced: "It is unfair to condemn the Apache tribe because this brutal killing took place on its reservation."

Theories offered to explain the killing: that an Indian girl, resenting the white woman's friendship with Gilbert, had killed her in a jealous rage; that she had been murdered by squaws who were angered at having her come among them asking personal questions. But then was found an unmailed letter from the girl to her kin in the East. She told of one Indian buck who, as white people had warned her might happen, had taken advantage of her friendly interest, tried to molest her. She wrote that she feared this Indian. Authorities started looking for him. He was, they said, a nomadic Apache from the hills.

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