Urban Scalp Hunting

Under the guise of a followup story about sleeper agent Wayne “Rip Van” Wiggins, the Post puts out a clear call for yet more cellphone pictures of sleeping agents:

Station agents, this is your wake-up call.

A Post reader spied yet another transit snorer dozing in his booth, and the paper has received a half-dozen similar reports yesterday from straphangers who didn’t have a camera handy.

“I can’t believe these guys are paid to sleep,” said Frank Donati, who spotted this agent taking a 7:45 a.m. nap last Friday at the Northern Boulevard station on the R line.

For historical reference, see Mountain Men of the Gila:

The most historically significant of the Gila mountain men was a contemporary of [James Ohio] Pattie’s named James Kirker (1793-1853). Kirker arrived at the Gila trapper’s headquarters, the Santa Rita copper mines, in 1826, and he stayed for a decade at least, trapping the Gila streams and acting as a guard, scout and manager of the mines. By his own account he was “highly successful” as a trapper. According to William C. McGaw, author of the Kirker biography, Savage Scene, Kirker was once gone off in the wilderness, hunting and trapping, for 18 months! As late as 1837, when beaver were of little economic consequence due to their scarcity, Kirker emerged from the Gila Wilderness with over 1,000 beaver pelts, only to lose the entirety to an Indian raid.

But Kirker would be of minor historical interest had his career ended with beaver trapping. Instead, following the Apache uprising in 1837, Kirker turned to a more lucrative pursuit: scalp hunting. Hiring out to the Mexican government at $200 per scalp, Kirker led vigilantes of 50 to 100 men, many of them Shawnee and Delaware Indians, on punitive expeditions against the Apaches. The scourge lasted a half dozen years and ranged over the wilderness, from Taos to Santa Rita to Chihuahua City. The toll of Apache dead eventually exceeded 500; the scalps hung in gruesome display in the Ciudad Chihuahua square. One of Kirker’s recruits, James Hobbs, wrote: “We would fight certain tribes . . . for the fun of the thing, and for common humanity, even if we were not rewarded for every scalp.”