Tulapai

In grim, guttural Apache, Golney ("Mac") Seymour, undersized Redskin buck, told a Federal court in Globe. Ariz. last week how he happened to attack and kill white Henrietta Schmerler, Columbia University student, last summer (TIME, Aug. 3, Nov. 15).

"I visited my father that day," his literally translated confession began. "He told me of dance and asked me get my wife Elizabeth. On way I bought 50-c- worth beer and drank a few times. Got Elizabeth. We both had horses. Reached my father's wickiup. Robert Gatewood [his brother-in-law] invited me in to drink. I drank some tulapai [aboriginal moonshine]. I rode past white girl's house. She stopped me and offered me a drink of water, then she spoke of dance. Asked me if I would lend her a horse. I said only had one. She said, 'Maybe I ride behind you, eh? I see lots of your people doing it.' I said. 'Those people married.' She said, 'That's all right.' Then she asked me in. She had something in a bottle ... I drank some. It burned my neck.

"She mixed some with sugar and water.

It tasted good. She kissed me. We started for dance on my horse. We stopped at muddy draw to walk across. Then she began hitting me with her bag, teasing me. I thought she wanted to marry me. She didn't fight. . . .

"Then I felt very bad about Elizabeth.

I told her I was going back to Elizabeth at dance. She got very mad. She threw a rock and hit me in the chest. She cried she was going to tell on me. Then she got a knife out of her bag and tried to cut me. I threw her down and took.the knife. I hit her with a rock and cut her neck. . . . Then she got up and walked few steps, then fell down. Then I felt very bad. I cried. I went to horse and made horse travel fast away from her.''

A Department of Justice operative rode the Apache reservation for three months before he found the murderer of Miss Schmerler. A graduate student of ethnology, she had gone to live on the White River Reservation to study for her thesis. Brought to trial Prisoner Seymour had firm backing from his tribe. His bewildered 19-year-old wife, mother of two, testified in his behalf. An old patriarch called "R-14" (Indian agents can not figure out how his name should be Anglicized) donated $1,500 to hire a defense lawyer.

With a written confession to the crime already in the Government's hands, substantiated almost completely in person last week by the 21-year-old prisoner, counsel for the defense concentrated on a self-defense plea to save his client from the looming gallows. "I propose to prove," he told the jury, "that this girl, many times the boy's mental and emotional superior, made him drink a quantity of liquor before he would take her to the dance. I propose to remind this court what is known to everyone here--that tulapai to an Apache is murder."

The prisoner's stolid, blanketed kinsmen sat in the sun outside the courthouse, occasionally rising to peer curiously through the windows at a ritual they did not understand. Some of the more adventurous found a place in Globe where "the picture that dances" was being exhibited. Cinema ushers had to limit them to two performances in succession for one admission.

Found guilty, Apache Seymour was condemned to life imprisonment.

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