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+Project Gutenberg's Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Through Our Unknown Southwest
+
+Author: Agnes C. Laut
+
+Release Date: March 15, 2010 [EBook #31646]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Montezuma's Castle, the ruined cliff dwelling on Beaver
+Creek between the Coconino and Prescott National Forests, Arizona]
+
+
+
+
+THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST
+
+THE WONDERLAND OF THE UNITED STATES--LITTLE
+KNOWN AND UNAPPRECIATED--THE
+HOME OF THE CLIFF DWELLER AND THE
+HOPI, THE FOREST RANGER AND THE NAVAJO,--THE
+LURE OF THE PAINTED DESERT
+
+BY
+
+AGNES C. LAUT
+
+Author of _The Conquest of the Great Northwest_, _Lords of the North_
+and _Freebooters of the Wilderness_
+
+NEW YORK
+McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
+1913
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.
+
+_Second Printing
+October, 1913_
+
+_Published May, 1913_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                       i
+
+I THE NATIONAL FORESTS                             1
+
+II NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST              22
+
+III THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS                     44
+
+IV THE CITY OF THE DEAD                           60
+
+V THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA                     78
+
+VI ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT                     100
+
+VII ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT (_continued_)      116
+
+VIII GRAND CAŅON AND THE PETRIFIED FORESTS       137
+
+IX THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE             153
+
+X THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE (_continued_)            169
+
+XI TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND                       183
+
+XII TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA       196
+
+XIII SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA           214
+
+XIV CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA                     226
+
+XV SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION                    251
+
+
+
+
+THE ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Cliff dwelling ruins, known as Montezuma Castle,      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                         FACING PAGE
+
+South House of Frijoles Caņon                                     ii
+
+Indian woman making pottery                                      xii
+
+Indian girl of Isleta, N. M.                                      xx
+
+One way of entering the desert                                     4
+
+In the Coconino Forest of Arizona                                 14
+
+Forest ranger fighting a ground fire with his blanket             22
+
+Pueblo boys at play                                               34
+
+Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling                      46
+
+Los Pueblos, Taos, N. M.                                          56
+
+Entrance to a cliff dwelling                                      64
+
+Ruins of Frijoles Caņon                                           74
+
+A Hopi wooing                                                     80
+
+A Hopi weaver                                                     86
+
+A shy little Hopi maid                                            92
+
+At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna                      96
+
+A handsome Navajo boy                                            106
+
+The Pueblo of Walpi                                              122
+
+The Grand Caņon                                                  140
+
+The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe                                154
+
+A pool in the Painted Desert                                     160
+
+Street in Santa Fe                                               166
+
+Ancient adobe gateway                                            172
+
+San Ildefonso                                                    180
+
+Taos                                                             188
+
+Over the roofs of Taos                                           198
+
+A metal worker of Taos                                           208
+
+A mud house of the Southwest                                     220
+
+The enchanted Mesa of Acoma                                      230
+
+Navajo crossing mesa                                             246
+
+At the Mission of San Xavier                                     254
+
+A Moki City on a mesa                                            262
+
+
+
+
+THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age--neolithic,
+paleolithic, troglodytic man--with a roofless city of the dead lying in
+the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the
+yawning caverns of the cliff face above.
+
+My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in
+the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run
+back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial æons when the
+advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas
+where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the
+sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the
+brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.
+
+Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to
+welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance,
+or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on
+his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with
+calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high
+fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a
+flat _metate_ stone with a round grinding stone on top. From the shape
+and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of
+these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water
+jar.
+
+On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to
+apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley
+floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a
+500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush
+with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little
+round "cat holes" through the walls--"cat holes" for a people who are
+not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from
+room to room through all the walls.
+
+On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside,
+round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed
+serpent--"Awanya," guardian of the waters--whose presence always
+presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as
+the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could
+see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about
+in other cave houses are stone "bells" to call to meals or prayers, and
+cobs of corn, and prayer plumes--owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and
+be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian
+idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People
+lived--well, when _did_ they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that
+was when the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the
+glacial waters, began.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings
+of Frijoles Caņon, after excavation]
+
+"The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established," says
+Winchell, the great western geologist, "that implies man during the
+period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is
+as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace
+of man." Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago;
+and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the
+implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial
+silt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for
+days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; _where you can
+literally shake hands with the Stone Age_.
+
+Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound
+like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it
+strong; but it is also meticulously and simply--true. A few doors away
+from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body--no, not a mummy! We
+are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to
+find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of
+about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg
+bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth
+from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis
+when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date were
+skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature
+gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with
+simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair.
+Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black
+hair shiny and lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the
+finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all
+well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in
+which the corpse has lain.
+
+In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which
+archæologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B.
+C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead
+to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last
+year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an
+Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of
+the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.
+
+Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the caņon again! To
+right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow _tufa_
+precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone
+Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds
+of rooms--"the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and
+the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces;
+nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest
+there."
+
+Listen! You can almost hear it--the fulfillment of Isaiah's old
+prophecy--the lonely "hoo-hoo-hoo" of the turtle dove; and the lonelier
+cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper
+cliffs! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the caņon
+in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez
+Mountains; and one night from my camp in this caņon, I heard the coyotes
+howling from the empty caves.
+
+Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone Age, and the dancing
+floors, and the irrigation canals used to this day, and the stream
+leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a rushing
+torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern
+men's dreams.
+
+Far off to the right, where the worshipers must always have been in
+sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert
+sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise
+blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age
+people who dwelt in this caņon. It is a great concave hollowed out of
+the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the
+highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this
+distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for worshipers when you climb
+the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a
+white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have
+witnessed! I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first
+rays came over the caņon walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal,
+for incense, for water urns, mark the inner walls of this chamber, too.
+Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the
+hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a
+darksome, eerie place with _sipapu_--the holes in the floor--for the
+mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't
+smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has
+driven his nerves too hard in town?--To go back to the Soil and let Dame
+Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth
+Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Curious how geology and archæology agree on the rise and evanishment of
+these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the
+northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk
+living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were
+forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff.
+That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Archæology says as
+the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache--Asthapascan stock--came ramping
+from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the
+inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. "It was not until the nomadic
+robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the
+crowded form of existence," says Archæology. Sounds like an explanation
+of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life,
+doesn't it?
+
+Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men
+were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse.
+Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for
+thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the caņon, and
+the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and
+Zuņi have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of
+corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe.
+Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region--"place of the bird
+people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years
+before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people
+dispersed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part
+of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petræ, or amid the sand-covered columns
+of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging
+excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in
+the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be--well,
+just _au fait_, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is
+in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular
+line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2
+a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing
+ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin
+is in the Frijoles Caņon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such
+ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New
+Mexico. By joining the Archæological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out
+to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines
+in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought
+round-trip tickets to our own West and back--pleasure, not
+business--over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I
+don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he
+was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the
+amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave--_one_ to our own wonders,
+to _two_ for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He
+thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific
+Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to
+Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500;
+but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the
+average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to
+$2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous
+discrepancy--thirty million dollars _versus_ one hundred and twenty
+million. _The Statist_ of London places the total spent by Americans in
+Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and
+twenty million.
+
+Of the 3,700,000 people who went to the Seattle Exposition, it is a
+pretty safe guess that not 100,000 Easterners out of the lot saw the
+real West. What did they see? They saw the Exposition, which was like
+any other exposition; and they saw Western cities, that are imitations
+of Eastern cities; and they patronized Western hotel rotundas and dining
+places, where you pay forty cents for Grand Junction and Hood River
+fruit, which you can buy in the East for twenty-five; and they rode in
+the rubberneck cars with the gramophone man who tells Western variations
+of the same old Eastern lies; and they came back thoroughly convinced
+that there was no more real West.
+
+And so 120,000 Americans yearly go to Europe spending a good average of
+$1,000 apiece. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed,
+though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the
+north to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, with hundreds of peaks which no one has
+climbed and which you can visit for not more than fifty dollars for a
+four weeks' holiday. We tramp through Spain for the picturesque, quite
+oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about
+10,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right down in the heart of
+America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in King
+Alphonso's crown was taken. We rent a "shootin' box in Scotland" at a
+trifling cost of from $1,200 to $12,000 a season, because game is "so
+scarce out West, y' know." Yet I can direct you to game haunts out West
+where you can shoot a grizzly a week at no cost at all but your own
+courage; and bag a dozen wild turkeys before breakfast; and catch
+mountain trout faster than you can string them and pose for a
+photograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor
+boast of what it cost you; for you can do it at two dollars a day from
+start to finish. It would take you a good half-day to count up the
+number of tourist and steamboat agencies that organize sightseeing
+excursions to go and apostrophize the Sphinx, and bark your shins and
+swear and sweat on the Pyramids. Yet it would be a safe wager that
+outside official scientific circles, there is not a single organization
+in America that knows we have a Sphinx of our own in the West that
+antedates Egyptian archæology by 8,000 years, and stone lions older than
+the columns of Phrygia, and kings' palaces of 700 and 1,000 rooms. Am I
+yarning; or dreaming? Neither! Perfectly sober and sane and wide awake
+and just in from spending two summers in those same rooms and shaking
+hands with a corpse of the Stone Age.
+
+A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set out on the
+around-the-world tour that was to give him that world-weary feeling that
+was to make him live happy ever afterwards. In Nagasaki, a little brown
+Jappy-chappie of great learning, who was a prince or something or other
+of that sort, which made it possible for Harvard to know him, asked in
+choppy English about "the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties in y'or
+Souf Wes'." When young Harvard got it through his head that
+"anti-kwatties" meant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out
+for a smoke; but it came back at him again in Egypt. They were standing
+below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an
+English traveler turned to young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom
+beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus
+in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't
+you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed
+they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of
+Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her
+ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest
+crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own
+home State. The experience gave him something to think about.
+
+The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to
+Europe for holiday. _We have to go abroad to learn how to come home._ We
+go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you
+are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino
+Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming
+to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos,
+who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year
+for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are
+various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to
+catch trout and not be a sucker.
+
+Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on
+going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of
+them lies.
+
+Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it--that it costs more to
+go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means
+staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza,
+where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but
+traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the
+beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go
+drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and
+catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as
+you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home.
+From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over
+$33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that,
+unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the
+backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now
+comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a
+good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not
+see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your
+holiday stamping ground, Sundance Caņon, South Dakota; or the New
+Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona;
+or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest; or the White Rock Caņon of
+the Rio Grande, where the most important of the wonderful prehistoric
+remains exist; and you can stay at a ranch house where food and
+cleanliness will be quite as good as at the Waldorf for from $1.50 to $2
+a day.
+
+[Illustration: In the bright Arizona sunshine before their little square
+adobe houses Indian women are fashioning pottery into curious shapes]
+You can usually find the name of the ranch house by inquiries from the
+station agent where you get off. The ranch house may be of adobe and
+look squatty; but remember that adobe squattiness is the best protection
+against wind and heat; and inside, you will find hot and cold water,
+bathroom, and meals equal to the best hotels in Chicago and New York. In
+New York or Chicago, that amount would afford you mighty chancy fare and
+only a back hall room. I know of hundreds of such ranch houses all along
+the backbone of the Rockies.
+
+Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big
+hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a
+motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig
+at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro outright for from $5
+to $10. Even if the burro takes a prize for ugliness, remember he also
+takes a prize for sure-footedness; and he doesn't take a prize for
+bucking, which the broncho often does. Figure up now the cost of a
+month's holiday; and I repeat--it will cost you less than staying at
+home. But if this total is still too high, there are ways of reducing
+the expense by half. Take your own tent; and $20 will not exceed "the
+grub box" contents for a month. Or all through the Rockies are deserted
+shacks, mining and lumber shanties, herders' cabins, horse camps. You
+can quarter yourself in one of these for nothing; and the sole expense
+will be "the grub box;" and my tin trunk for camp cooking has never cost
+me more than $50 a month for four people. Or best and most novel
+experience of all--along White Rock Caņon of the Rio Grande, in Mesa
+Verde Park, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the
+cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There is no danger of wolves,
+or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook
+below happens to be good. Hundreds of archæologists, who come from
+Egypt, Greece, Italy, England, to visit these remains, spend their
+summer holiday this way. Why can't you? Or if you are not a good
+adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer school that goes
+out to the caves from Santa Fe every summer.
+
+Is it safe? That question to a Westerner is a joke. Safer, much safer,
+than in any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White
+Mountains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on
+the Saskatchewan; and I never locked a door, because there wasn't any
+lock; and I never attempted to bar the door, because there wasn't any
+need. Can you say as much of New York, or Chicago, or Washington? The
+question may be asked--Will this kind of a holiday not be hot in summer?
+You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some
+mid-summer, when nearly everything inside the pullman car melted into a
+jelly. Yes, it will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a
+railroad naturally follows the lowest grade. But if you go back to the
+ranch houses of the Upper Mesas and of foothills and caņons, you will be
+from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and will need winter wraps
+each night, and may have to break the ice for your washing water in the
+morning--I did.
+
+Another reason why so many Americans do not see their own country is
+that while one species of fool has scared away holiday seekers by tales
+of extortionate cost, another sort of fool wisely promulgates the lie--a
+lie worn shiny from repetition--that "game is scarce in the West." "No
+more big game"--and your romancer leans back with wise-acre air to let
+that lie sink in, while he clears his throat to utter another--"trout
+streams all fished out." In the days when we had to swallow logic
+undigested in college, we had it impressed upon us that one single
+specific fact was sufficient to refute the broadest generality that was
+ever put in the form of a syllogism. Well, then,--for a few facts as to
+that "no-game" lie!
+
+In one hour you can catch in the streams of the Pecos, or the Jemez, or
+the White Mountains, or the Upper Sierras of California, or the New
+Glacier Park of the North, more trout than you can put on a string. If
+you want confirmation of that fact, write to the Texas Club that has its
+hunting lodge opposite Grass Mountain, and they will send you the
+picture of one hour's trout catch. By measurement, the string is longer
+than the height of a water barrel; and these were fish that didn't get
+away.
+
+Last year, twenty-six bear were shot in the Sangre de Christo Caņon in
+three months.
+
+Two years ago, mountain lions became so thick in the Pecos that hunters
+were hired to hunt them for bounty; and the first thing that happened to
+one of the hunters, his horse was throttled and killed by a mountain
+lion, though his little spaniel got revenge by treeing four lions a few
+weeks later, and the hunter got three out of the four.
+
+Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of
+hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed.
+
+In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in
+the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain.
+Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the
+other still haunts the caņons defiant of repeater.
+
+From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can
+nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone
+ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here.
+
+The week I reached Frijoles Caņon, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in
+front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front
+door.
+
+The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff
+caves, we disturbed a herd of deer.
+
+Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It is if you follow the
+beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild
+turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look
+for it. Believe me--though it may sound a truism--you won't find big
+game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.
+
+Or, if your quest is not hunting but studying game, what better ground
+for observation than the Wichita in Oklahoma? Here a National Forest has
+been constituted a perpetual breeding ground for native American game.
+Over twenty buffalo taken from original stock in the New York Park are
+there--back on their native heath; and there are two or three very
+touching things about those old furry fellows taken back to their own
+haunts. In New York's parks, they were gradually degenerating--getting
+heavier, less active, ceasing to shed their fur annually. When they were
+set loose in the Wichita Game Resort, they looked up, sniffed the air
+from all four quarters, and rambled off to their ancestral pasture
+grounds perfectly at home. When the Comanches heard that the buffalo had
+come back to the Wichita, the whole tribe moved in a body and camped
+outside the fourteen-foot fence. There they stayed for the better part
+of a week, the buffalo and the Comanches, silently viewing each other.
+It would have been worth Mr. Nature Faker's while to have known their
+mutual thoughts.
+
+There is another lie about not holidaying West, which is not only
+persistent but cruel. When the worker is a health as well as rest
+seeker, he is told that the West does not want him, especially if he is
+what is locally called "a lung-er;" and there is just enough truth in
+that lie to make it persistent. It is true the consumptive is not wanted
+on the beaten trail, in the big general hotel, in the train where other
+people want draughts of air, but he can't stand them. On the beaten
+trail, he is a danger both to himself and to others--especially if he
+hasn't money and may fall a burden on the community; but that is only a
+half truth which is usually a lie. Let the other half be known! All
+through the West along the backbone of the Rockies, from Montana to
+Texas, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, are the tent
+cities--communities of health seekers living in half-boarded tents, or
+mosquito-wired cabins that can be steam-heated at night. There are
+literally thousands of such tent dwellers all through the Rocky Mountain
+States; and the cost is as you make it. If you go to a sanitarium tent
+city, you will have to pay all the way from $15 to $25 a week for house,
+board, nurse, medicine and doctor's attendance; but if you buy your own
+portable house and do your own catering, the cost will be just what you
+make it. A house will cost $50 to $100; a tent, $10 to $20.
+
+Still another baneful lie that keeps the American from seeing America
+first is that our New World West lacks "human interest;" lacks "the
+picturesqueness of the shepherds in Spain and Switzerland," for
+instance; lacks "the historic marvels" of church and monument and
+relic.
+
+If there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster of them all. Will
+you tell me why "the human interest" of a legend about Dick Turpin's
+head festering on Newgate, England, is any greater to Americans than the
+truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd,
+when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New
+Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train
+robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between
+England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of
+outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Caņon up the Pecos, or took
+possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the
+Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than
+descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on
+our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in
+quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro
+in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled
+eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons
+and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled
+bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long
+before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful
+to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near
+Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone
+lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions
+carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before
+William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the
+antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins
+of a church--at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters--that
+was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to
+America.
+
+You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the
+Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the
+gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks,
+and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who
+interviewed Eve--all right here in your own American Southwest, with the
+difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler,
+who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the
+Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the
+springs.
+
+To be sure, there are 400,000 miles of motor roads in Europe; but isn't
+it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? That is
+what you can do following the "Camino Real" from Texas to Wyoming, or
+crossing the mountains of New Mexico by the great Scenic Highway built
+for motors to the very snow tops.
+
+[Illustration: An Indian girl of Isleta, New Mexico, carrying a water
+jar.]
+
+And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at
+Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the
+legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but
+America. This is a story by itself--a beautiful one, also in spots a
+funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from
+Oxford, England, took quarters in one of the pueblos at Santa Clara or
+thereabout to study Indian arts and crafts. One night in her adobe
+quarters, her orderly British soul was aroused by such a dire din of
+shouting, fighting, screams, as she thought could come only from some
+inferno of crime. She sprang out of bed and dashed across the _placito_
+in her nightdress to her guardian protector in the person of an old
+Indian. He ran through the dark to see what the matter was, while she
+stood in hiding of the wall shadows curdling in horror of "bluggy
+deeds."
+
+"Pah," said the old fellow coming back, "dat not'ing! Young man, he git
+marry an' dey--how you call?--chiv-ar-ee-heem."
+
+"Then, what are you laughing at?" demanded the irate British dame; for
+she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in
+suffocated laughter. "How dare you laugh?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I laugh, Mees," he sputtered out, "'cos you scare me so bad when you
+call, I jomp in my coat mistake for my pants. Dat's all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would
+pay to let a little daylight in on the abysmal blank regarding the
+wonder-land of our own world--wouldn't it?
+
+I don't know whether the affectation recognized as "the foreign pose"
+comes foremost or hindermost as a cause of this neglect of the wonders
+of our own land. When you go to our own Western Wonder Land, you can't
+say you have been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is
+wonderful what a paying thing that pose is in a harvest of "fooleries."
+There is a well-known case of an American author, who tried his hand on
+delineating American life and was severely let alone because he was
+too--not abroad, but broad. He dropped his own name, assumed the pose of
+a grand dame familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of
+the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. His books have
+"gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are
+abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.
+
+The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of
+Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the
+historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an
+implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and
+superiority, which is pretense--is another matter. Let us take the dire
+and damning deficiencies of America!
+
+"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone
+Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to
+fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.
+
+There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma--islands of
+rock, sheer precipice of yellow _tufa_ for hundreds of feet--amid the
+Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated
+in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders,
+brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all
+this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or there are the
+three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table
+lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and
+desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or,
+there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Caņon de Chelly (Shay)
+forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses
+of Washington.
+
+"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and
+the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is
+the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through
+Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions
+galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered
+Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a
+bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There
+is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway;
+and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of
+wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange
+Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in
+cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one
+end of a main thoroughfare, you can see the site of the old Spanish
+Gareta prison, in the walls of which bullets were found embedded in
+human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the
+braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street
+and of small talk--then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and
+the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of
+the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the
+gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the
+apple bloom.
+
+What was the other charge? Oh, yes--"lacks the human," whatever that
+means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than
+true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Caņon and the cliff houses of
+Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to
+hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium
+more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the
+Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of
+Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys,
+Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did
+not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money
+which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are
+not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to
+American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of
+the Old World?
+
+Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America
+usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar
+prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes--but America
+lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."
+
+"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition
+period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle
+baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain
+in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of
+American feudalism--fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area
+of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat
+clad _cap-ā-pie_ in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at
+Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet
+hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years
+back--and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing
+of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism,
+the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted
+troops the big iron chest for the gold--iron chests that you can see to
+this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial
+in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by
+secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver
+of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of
+New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's--an era
+that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki,
+Spirit of Evil, smiled with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade
+the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were
+alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north
+as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia
+groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed
+horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough,
+remnants of some sort of domesticated creatures are found in the cave
+men's houses, centuries before the coming of horses and cattle and sheep
+with the Spanish. The trouble is, up to the present when men like Curtis
+and dear old Bandelier and Burbank, and the whole staff of the
+Smithsonian and the School of Santa Fe have gone to work, we have not
+taken the trouble in America to gather up the prehistoric legends and
+ferret out their race meaning. We have fallen too completely in the last
+century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave
+races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending
+half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes
+below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in
+gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. You
+remember Kipling's poem on the neolithic man, and Jack London's fiction.
+Now as a matter of fact--which is a bit disturbing to all these
+accretions of pseudo-science--the remains of these cave people don't
+show them to have been simian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing
+when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony Comstock's activities
+as to clothes. They had decorated pottery ware of which we have lost the
+pigments, and a knowledge of irrigation which would be unique in apes,
+and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some
+day, when the evolutionary piffle has passed, we'll study out these
+prehistoric legends and their racial meaning.
+
+As to the "lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared
+that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the
+Southwest. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Fe, or Lungrun's
+wonderful desert pictures, or Moran's or Gamble's, or Harmon's Spanish
+scenes--then talk about "lack of _decadent_ art" if you will, but don't
+talk about "lack of art." Why, in the ranch house of Lorenzo Hubbell,
+the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely
+Southwestern pictures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance,
+that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest
+scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above
+10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the
+leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine
+forests, past Cloudcroft--the sky-top resort--up through the orchard
+lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over
+the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all
+the wonders of Colorado's National Park. With the exception of a very
+bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the
+southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the
+Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and
+flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the
+tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars
+of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down
+to California, you can swerve into Grand Caņon, where the gods of fire
+and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red
+into a swimming caņon of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest
+peaks of the Rockies.
+
+In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old
+Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor
+along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't
+take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed;
+second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were
+allowed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only
+from a life-time knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of the West--and
+that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of "shootin'
+irons" and "faintin' females" are forever past, except in the
+undergraduate's salad dreams. You are safer in the cave dwellings of the
+Stone Age, in the Pajarito Plateau of the cliff "bird people," in the
+Painted Desert, among the Indians of the Navajo Reserve than you are in
+Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London. I would trust a young friend
+of mine--boy or girl--quicker to the Western environment than the
+Eastern. You can get into mischief in the West if you hunt for it; but
+the mischief doesn't come out and hunt you. Also, danger spots are
+self-evident on precipices of the Western wilds. They aren't
+self-evident; danger spots are glazed and paved to the edges over which
+youth goes to smash in the East.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What about cost? Aye, there's the rub!
+
+First, there's the steamboat ticket to Europe, about the same price as
+or more than the average round trip ticket to the Coast and back;
+but--please note, please note well--the agent who sells the steamboat
+ticket gets from forty to 100 per cent. bigger commission on it than the
+agent who sells the railroad tickets; so the man who is an agent for
+Europe can afford to advertise from forty to 100 per cent. more than the
+man who sells the purely American ticket.
+
+Secondly, European hotel men are adepts at catering to the lure of the
+American sightseer. (Of course they are: it's worth one hundred to two
+hundred million dollars to them a year.) In the American West, everybody
+is busy. Except for the real estate man, they don't care one iota
+whether you come or stay.
+
+Thirdly, when you go to Europe, a thousand hands are thrust out to point
+you the way to the interesting places. Incidentally, also, a thousand
+hands are thrust out to pick your pocket, or at least relieve it of any
+superfluous weight. In our West, who cares a particle what you do; or
+who will point you the way? The hotels are expensive and for the most
+part located in the most expensive zone--the commercial center. It is
+only when you get out of the expense zone away from commercial centers
+and railway, that you can live at $1 or $2 a day, or if you have your
+own tent at fifty cents a day; but it isn't to the real estate agent's
+interests to have you go away from the commercial center or expense
+zone. Who is there to tell you what or where to see off the line of heat
+and tips? Outside the National Park wardens and National Forest Rangers,
+there isn't anyone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How, then, are you to manage? Frankly, I never knew of either monkeys or
+men accomplishing anything except in one way--just going out and doing
+it. Choose what you want to see; and go there! The local railroad agent,
+the local Forest Ranger, the local ranch house, will tell you the rest;
+and naturally, when you go into the wilderness, don't leave all your
+courtesy and circumspection and common-sense back in town. Equipped with
+those three, you can "See America First," and see it cheaply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE NATIONAL FORESTS, A SUMMER PLAYGROUND FOR THE PEOPLE
+
+
+If a health resort and national playground were discovered guaranteed to
+kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay
+listlessness and set the human spirit free from the nagging worries and
+toil-wear that make you feel like a washed-out rag at the end of a
+humdrum year--imagine the stampede of the lame and the halt in body and
+spirit; the railroad excursions and reduced fares; the disputations of
+the physicians and the rage of the thought-ologists at present coining
+money rejuvenating neurotic humanity!
+
+Yet such a national playground has been discovered; and it isn't in
+Europe, where statisticians compute that Americans yearly spend from a
+quarter to half a billion dollars; and it isn't the Coast-to-Coast trip
+which the president of a transcontinental told me at least a hundred
+thousand people a year traverse. A health resort guaranteed to banish
+care, to stab apathy, to enlarge littleness, to slay listlessness, would
+pretty nearly put the thought-ologists out of commission. Yet such a
+summer resort exists at the very doors of every American capable of
+scraping together a few hundred dollars--$200 at the least, $400 at the
+most. It exists in that "twilight zone" of dispute and strong language
+and peanut politics known as the National Forests.
+
+In America, we have foolishly come to regard National Forests as solely
+allied with conservation and politics. That is too narrow. National
+Forests stand for much more. They stand for a national playground and
+all that means for national health and sanity and joy in the exuberant
+life of the clean out-of-doors. In Germany, the forests are not only a
+source of great revenue in cash; they are a source of greater revenue in
+health. They are a holiday playground. In America, the playground
+exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful playground in the whole
+world--and the most accessible; but we haven't yet discovered it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the three or four million people who have attended the Pacific Coast
+Expositions of the past ten years, it is a safe wage that half went, not
+to see the Exposition (for people from a radius round Chicago and
+Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went
+to see the Exposition as an exponent of the Great West. How much of the
+Great West did they really see? They saw the Alaska Exhibit. Well--the
+Alaska Exhibit was afterwards shown in New York. They saw the special
+buildings assigned to the special Western States. Well--the special
+Western States had special buildings at the other expositions. What
+else of the purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three
+travelers:
+
+"Been a great trip" (Two Chicagoans talking in duet). "We've seen
+everything and stopped off everywhere. We stopped at Denver and Salt
+Lake and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Portland and Seattle!"
+
+"What did you do at these places?"
+
+"Took a taxi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Saw
+all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the
+West is going ahead."
+
+"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged
+feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman,
+baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really
+seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before.
+They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down
+in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to
+go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and
+wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and
+see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it
+_seeing_ the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and
+sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and
+experience the real thing?"
+
+"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only
+time we got away from the excursion party was when a land boomster took
+us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the
+West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What
+I want to know is how to get away from that. That boomster fellow was an
+Easterner, anyway."
+
+Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not
+the duet that went round the cities in a sightseeing car and judged the
+West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns
+fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real
+estate project by an Eastern land boomster. And each wanted to find the
+real thing--had paid money to find a holiday playground, to forget care
+and stab apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the
+extortionate charges on every side in the city life. And two out of
+three went back a little disappointed that they had not seen the fabled
+wonders of the West--the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famous
+caņons, the mountain lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to explain
+to the New Yorker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels
+charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain western
+wilds, whether you are a man, woman, child, or group of all three--could
+go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees and mountain lakes
+and snowy peaks--I was greeted with that peculiarly New Yorky look
+suggestive of Ananias and De Rougement.
+
+[Illustration: One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents,
+but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary]
+
+Sadder is the case of the invalid migrating West. He has come with high
+hopes looking for the national health resort. Does he find it? Not once
+in a thousand cases. If health seekers have money, they take a private
+house _in the city_, where the best of air is at its worst; but many
+invalids are scarce of money, and come seeking the health resort at
+great pecuniary sacrifice. Do they find it? Certainly not knocking from
+boarding house to boarding house and hotel to hotel, re-infecting
+themselves with their own germs till the very telephone booths have to
+be guarded. At one famous "lung" city where I stayed, I heard three
+invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room happened to
+be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 and $3 and $5 a day without
+meals. At a cost of $10 for train fare, I went out to one of the
+National Forests--the pass over the Divide 11,000 feet, the village
+center of the Forest 8,000 feet above sea level, the charge with meals
+at the hotel $10 a week. Better still, $10 for a roomy tent, $1.50 for a
+camp stove and as much or as little as you like for a fur rug, and the
+cost of meals would have been seventy-five cents a day at the hotel,
+seventy-five cents for life in air that was almost constant sunshine,
+air as pure and life-giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That
+altitude would probably not suit all invalids--that is for a doctor to
+say; but certainly, whether one is out for health or play, that regimen
+is cheaper and more life-giving than a stuffy hotel at $2, $3 and $5 a
+day for a room alone.
+
+It is incredible when you come to think of it. Here is a nation of
+ninety million people scouring the earth for a playground; and there is
+an undiscovered playground in its own back yard, the most wonderful
+playground of mountain and forest and lake in the whole world; a
+playground in actual area half the size of a Germany, or France, with
+wonders of cave and waterway and peak unknown to Germany or France. What
+are the railroads thinking about? If three million people visited an
+exposition to see the West, how many would yearly visit the National
+Forests if the railroads granted facilities, and the ninety million
+Americans knew how? It is absurd to regard the National Forests purely
+as timber; and timber for politics! They are a nation's playground and
+health resort; and one of these times will come a Peary or an Abruzzi
+discovering them. Then we'll give him a prize and begin going.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you will not
+find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress
+parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of flame in the upper
+alpine meadows. And you will not find gaping on-lookers to break down
+fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirrel swearing
+at you for coming too near his _cache_ of pine cones at the foot of some
+giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing in the National
+Forests; but there is a great tinkling of waters; and there are many
+voices of rills with a roar of flood torrents at rain time, or thunder
+of avalanche when the snows come over a far ridge in spray fine as a
+waterfall. In fair weather, you may spare yourself the trouble of a tent
+and camp under a stretch of sky hung with stars, resinous of balsams,
+spiced with the life of the cinnamon smells and the ozone tang. There
+will be lakes of light as well as lakes of water, and an all-day diet of
+condensed sunbeams every time you take a breath. Your bed will be
+hemlock boughs--be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or
+you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood
+stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying
+for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better
+stay in Newport.
+
+The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will
+welcome you and help you to find camping ground.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of
+the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man,
+woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National
+Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get
+established?
+
+Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National
+Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and
+playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New
+Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me,
+there is a peculiar attraction in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all
+are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line--high, dry park-like
+forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor.
+You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes
+panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a
+horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie
+on one side--Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the
+Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, the trail; and across
+that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests.
+There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National
+Forests. Windfall, there is almost none. It has been cleared out and
+sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been
+carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees,
+all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off.
+These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.
+
+Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests
+there, by trips to the wonderful caņons out from Ogden, or to the
+natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you
+have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the
+ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big
+trees in the Sequoia Forest; the Yosemite in the Stanislaus; forests in
+the northern part of the State where you could dance on the stump of a
+redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the
+northern mountains, are the voices of the waters and the white,
+burnished, shining peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one
+summer by driving up in a tented wagon through the National Forests from
+Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and truck bed were in the democrat
+wagon. An outfitter supplied the horses for a rental which I have
+forgotten. The borders of most of the National Forests may be reached by
+wagon. The higher and more intimate trails may be essayed only on foot
+or on horseback.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How much will the trip cost? You must figure that out for yourself.
+There is, first of all, your railway fare from the point you leave. Then
+there is the fare out to the Forest--usually not $10. Go straight to the
+supervisor or forester of the district. He will recommend the best hotel
+of the little mountain village where the supervisor's office is usually
+located. At those hotels, you will board as a transient at $10 a week;
+as a permanent, for less. In many of the mountain hamlets are outfitters
+who will rent you a team of horses and tented wagon; and you can cater
+for yourself. In fact, as to clothing, and outfit, you can buy cheaper
+camp kit at these local stores than in your home town. Many Eastern
+things are not suitable for Western use. For instance, it is foolish to
+go into the thick, rough forests of heavy timber with an expensive
+eastern riding suit for man or woman. Better buy a $4 or $6 or $8 khaki
+suit that you can throw away when you have torn it to tatters. An
+Eastern waterproof coat will cost you from $10 to $30. You can get a
+yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more serviceable for
+$2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get them East, as I like an
+elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good deal of
+cork in the sole to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in
+the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too
+stiff! I like an elk-skin that will let the water out fast as it comes
+in if you ever have to wade, and which will not shrink in the drying. If
+you forswear hotels and take to a sky tent, or canvas in misty weather,
+better carry eatables in what the guides call a tin "grub box," in other
+words a cheap $2 tin trunk. It keeps out ants and things; and you can
+lock it when you go away on long excursions. As to beds, each to his own
+taste! Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for me.
+Besides, I am never comfortable on it. If you camp near the snow peaks,
+a chill strikes up to the small of your back in the small of the
+morning. I don't care to feel like using a derrick every time I roll
+over. The most comfortable bed I know is a piece of twenty-five cent
+oilcloth laid over the slicker on hemlock boughs, fur rug over that,
+with suit case for pillow, and a plain gray blanket. The hardened
+mountaineer will laugh at the next recommendation; but the town man or
+woman going out for play or health is not hardened, and to attempt
+sudden hardening entails the endurance of a lot of aches that are apt to
+spoil the holiday. You may say you like the cold plunge in the icy water
+coming off a snowy mountain. I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge,
+even if you do like it, you are in such a hurry to come out of it that
+you don't linger to scrub. I like my hot scrub; and you can have that
+only by taking along (no, not a rubber bath) a $1.50 camp stove to heat
+the water in the tent while you are eating your supper out round the
+camp fire that burns with such a delicious, barky smell. Besides, late
+in the season, there will be rains and mist. Your camp stove will dry
+out the tent walls and keep your kit free of rain mold. Do you need a
+guide? That depends entirely on yourself. If you camp under direction
+and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.
+
+Whether you go out as a health seeker, or a pleasure seeker, $8 to $10
+will buy you a miner's tent--a miner's, preferable to a tepee because
+the walls lift the canvas roof high enough not to bump your head; $2
+will buy you a tin trunk or grub box; $1.50 will cover the price of
+oilcloth to spread over the boughs which you lay all over the floor to
+keep you above the earth damp; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove
+to keep the inside of your tent warm and dry for the hot night bath; $10
+will cover cost of pail and cooking utensils. That leaves of what would
+be your monthly expenses at even a moderate hotel, $125 for food--bacon,
+flour, fresh fruit; and your food should not exceed $10 each a month. If
+you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder, by whipping the
+mountain streams for trout. If you need an attendant, that miner's tent
+is big enough for two. Or if you will stand $5 or $6 more expense, buy
+a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will be windy days in
+fall and spring when an extra tent with a camp stove in it will prove
+useful for the nightly hot bath.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What reward do you reap for all the bother? You are away from all dust
+irritating to weak lungs. You are away from all possibility of
+re-infecting yourself with your own disease. Except in late autumn and
+early spring, you are living under almost cloudless skies, in an
+atmosphere steeped in sunshine, spicy with the healing resin of the
+pines and hemlocks and spruce, that not only scent the air but literally
+permeate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far
+above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. Instead of
+the clang of street car bells and the jangle of nerves tangled from too
+many humans in town, you hear the flow and the sing and the laughter and
+the trebles of the glacial streams rejoicing in their race to the sea.
+You climb the rough hills; and your town lungs blow like a whale as you
+climb; and every beat pumps inertia out and the sun-healing air in. If
+an invalid, you had better take a doctor's advice as to how high you
+should camp and climb. In town, amid the draperies and the portičres and
+the steam-heated rooms, an invalid is seeking health amid the habitat of
+mummies. In the Forests, whether you will or not, you live in sunshine
+that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it
+is the sting of pulsing, superabundant life, not the lethargy of a
+gradual decay.
+
+At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the
+remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses
+near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in
+unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico
+or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the
+flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan
+hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of
+the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New
+Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines,
+and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on
+the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to
+the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red
+sandstone.
+
+And besides the prehistoric in the Forests--what will you find? The
+plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.
+You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was
+pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a
+haze of dust, and you--you are up in that cloudless air, where the light
+hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the
+clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing
+life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns
+and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on
+the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the
+ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun,
+to the god of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are
+accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking;
+and here is the realm of pure light.
+
+Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest
+gives a bump. You are in darkness--diving through some tunnel or other;
+and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a
+couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance
+Caņon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven
+miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But
+patience! The road into Sundance Caņon takes you to the top of the
+world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little
+Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line,
+pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600
+you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.
+
+Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each
+other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good
+100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good
+by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road
+has been cork-screwing up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as
+a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on
+the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist
+behind the engineer--the man behind the modern gun of conquest--has paid
+the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the
+clouds--a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the mountains
+across the desert towards the Pacific.
+
+[Illustration: From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona]
+
+You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie
+the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of
+the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer
+margin of this rock wall with slab and log and shingle cottages, built
+literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a
+stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in
+the whole world. In Sundance Caņon, South Dakota, summer people have
+built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.
+Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but
+dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets
+composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like
+cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds,
+and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure
+turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and
+there is a pair of green lakes below you--emerald jewels pendant from
+the neck of the old mountain god; and with a bump and a rattle of the
+wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go--believe me,
+a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's
+shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.
+
+You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental
+Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It
+isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any
+shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must
+wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of worship and
+quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake
+and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of
+fire in the sunset, and the plain--there are no more plains--this is the
+top of the world!
+
+Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back
+this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen
+in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear grass tossed before it like the
+waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below--you knew why
+their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in
+disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench
+them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be
+told are laid flat on the ground up here.
+
+When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National
+Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coarse upper grasses
+provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the
+National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all
+the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big
+rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of
+intruding flocks and herds.
+
+Then, the train is literally racing down hill--with the trucks bumping
+heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang
+comes to the ozone--the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon
+smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and
+imprisoned fragrance--the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years
+of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of
+Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.
+
+The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and
+you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce
+and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from
+the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen
+dust--pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree--with the
+purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the
+conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you
+somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some
+conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed,
+whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes,
+airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth,
+though the process may take the trifling æon of a thousand years or so.
+At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the
+yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but
+know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season--the season
+when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests--the very atmosphere is
+alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the
+wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb
+like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded
+branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the
+broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the veering wind,
+the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded
+branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled,
+perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a
+cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and
+crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire
+tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall
+on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting
+nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see
+the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From
+the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth,
+you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?)
+language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the
+evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows
+the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire
+when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight
+and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the burned or scant
+slopes, he rifles the _cache_ of this little furred forester, who
+suspects your noisy trainload of robbery--robbery--sc--scur--r--there!
+
+Then, the train bumps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on
+the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop
+off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man
+is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train
+is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud
+against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the
+curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage
+green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree--the ranger, absurdly
+young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres
+compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily
+deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those
+confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority
+which backs that body of men.
+
+You have mounted your pony--men and women alike ride astride in the
+Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the
+ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet
+above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodpecker, the scur of a
+rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft _thug_ of the
+unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the
+soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the
+jangle of city cars in that stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested
+town, isn't it?
+
+If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of
+the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills
+of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are
+hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have
+the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when
+eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine
+needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles
+like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of
+these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods;
+for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made
+offerings to the gods of old, the temple which our modern churches
+imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in
+open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no
+apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically
+from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which
+permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust
+is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will
+make you over, will these forest gods, if you will let them, if you will
+lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the
+chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.
+
+And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods
+halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness
+unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you
+and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
+
+
+You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before
+you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds.
+No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill
+comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels
+must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available--never
+farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you
+on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of
+matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds
+than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in
+the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger
+and yeggman, that stalks the town.
+
+[Illustration: The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with
+his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West]
+
+To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little
+boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress.
+Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the
+death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly
+traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone
+into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have
+never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I
+have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you
+need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when
+they combine two qualities--comfort and thick enough soles to protect
+your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too,
+to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from passing trees and
+jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you
+chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or
+snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You
+may get them if you like to spend the money--$8 leggings and $8
+horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the
+other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the
+tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a
+$3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let
+the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing
+garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.
+
+This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who
+determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent
+by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast.
+They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog
+blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you
+consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds
+of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they
+had gone off the trail trout fishing. "If they had been good
+path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream
+down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt
+criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about
+it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut
+through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at
+the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were
+driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your
+directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost
+impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow
+down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest
+sense of direction. Compass signs of forest-lore fail here. There are
+few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west;
+and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree.
+All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman
+lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.
+
+"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.
+
+"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled
+ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the
+children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the
+morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take
+fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put
+out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."
+
+All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National
+Forests.
+
+It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National
+Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the
+rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married,
+have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the
+Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the
+ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality
+characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the
+ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could
+have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where
+the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you
+could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might
+put a New York dinner to shame--all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at
+this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry
+Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to
+tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in
+mind--do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or
+the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are
+prepared to look after yourself.
+
+And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do?
+You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the
+hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God
+has landscaped the playground for a nation; or you can go in for
+records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most
+marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can
+prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who
+flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities,
+contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in
+the British Museum marked 20,000 B. C. It isn't every day you can wander
+through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist
+agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in
+Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff
+and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River,
+Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples
+in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the
+first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier
+houses literally on the tip-top of the world?
+
+The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the
+jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and
+delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen
+floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if
+you go in the spirit of an investigator, you will get that permission.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The question isn't _what is there to do_. It is _which of the countless
+things there are to do_ are you going to choose to do? When Mr.
+Roosevelt goes to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross
+Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they
+take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools
+at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you
+can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest
+its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association
+to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how
+sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy
+Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got
+their names from old Spanish _padres_ riding their burros into the
+wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the
+Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff
+dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In
+the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of
+prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.
+
+Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain
+climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests--bear, mountain
+sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a
+man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to
+mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Caņon, above
+Ouray, at Pike's Peak--a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and
+his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy
+of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand
+with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a
+trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man
+who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the
+upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of
+snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out!
+If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope
+clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and
+recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far
+patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the
+West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten
+miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I
+told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the
+forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed
+to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs.
+Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly
+slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the
+track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side.
+The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the
+track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's
+shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it
+coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of
+time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get
+his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and
+child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a
+timber. It must have been the concussion of the air--they weren't even
+bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up
+where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but
+they were dead, all three."
+
+And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak.
+"That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's
+doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught
+him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife
+didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain;
+and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It
+came--quick--" with a snap of his fingers--"as that; and he was gone."
+
+It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who
+monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch
+above a clean-swept slope.
+
+And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National
+Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been
+told so often that you have come to believe it--that our mountains in
+America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and
+race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go
+West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that
+has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top
+guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's
+Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the
+Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him.
+Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You
+have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western
+mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in
+the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against
+the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this
+arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.
+
+"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here.
+We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades.
+See that hole in the mountain?"
+
+"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, dear no! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It
+used to be an almost impossible trail to get up there; but there has
+been a hermit fellow there for the last ten years, living in his cabin
+and hunting; and year after year, never paid by anybody, he has been
+building that trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to
+lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course,
+the people in the valley think him crazy."
+
+Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and
+its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to
+lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest
+dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the
+dust eaters, the insects of the city ant heaps, the true troglodytes
+and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think
+there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You have been told so often that the National Forests lock up timber
+from use that it comes as a surprise as you ride up the woodland trail
+to hear the song of the crosscut saw and the buzzing hum of a
+mill--perhaps a dozen mills--running full blast here in this National
+Forest. Heaps of sawdust emit the odors of imprisoned flowers. Piles of
+logs lie on all sides stamped at the end U. S.--timber sold on the stump
+to any lumberman and scaled as inspected by the ranger and paid by the
+buyer. To be sure, the lumberman cannot have the lumber for nothing; and
+it was for nothing that the Forests were seized and cut under the old
+régime.
+
+How was the spoliation effected? Two or three ways. The law of the
+public domain used to permit burn and windfall to be taken out free.
+Your lumberman, then, homesteaded 160 acres on a slope of forest
+affording good timber skids and chutes. So far, no wrong! Was not public
+domain open to homesteading? Good; but your homesteading lumberman now
+watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely
+accidentally, you understand, the fire sprang up and swept the entire
+slope of green forest away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman
+then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did
+less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope would be
+left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your
+lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free.
+Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public
+domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I
+could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this
+manner.
+
+That was the principle of Congress when it withdrew from public domain
+these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include
+grazing and woodland not properly administered under public domain. The
+making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The ranger's job is to
+prevent fires. Also he permits the cutting of only ripe, full-grown
+trees, or dead tops, or growth stunted by crowding; and all timber sold
+off the forests must be marked for cutting and stamped by the ranger.
+
+But the old spirit assumes protean forms. The latest way of working the
+old trick is through the homestead law. You have been told that
+homesteaders cannot go in on the National Forests. Yet there, as you
+ride along the trail, is a cleared space of 160 acres where a Swedish
+woman and her boys are making hay; and inquiry elicits the fact that
+millions of acres are yearly homesteaded in the National Forests. Just
+as fast as they can be surveyed, all farming lands in the National
+Forests are opened to the homesteader. Where, then, is the trick? Your
+farmer man comes in for a homestead and he picks out 160 acres where the
+growth of big trees is so dense they will yield from $10,000 to $40,000
+in timber per quarter section. Good! Hasn't the homesteader a right to
+this profit? He certainly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he
+doesn't clear more than a few hundred feet round his cabin, and hasn't a
+cent of money to pay the heavy expense of clearing the rest, and sells
+out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars? Supposing
+such farmer men are brought in by excursion loads by a certain big
+lumber company, and all sell out at a few hundred dollars, claims worth
+millions, to that certain big lumber company--is this true homesteading
+of free land; or a grabbing of timber for a lumber trust?
+
+The same spirit explains the furious outcry that miners are driven off
+the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors
+can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary
+operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then
+yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to
+a big smelting trust--a merry game worked in one of the Western States
+for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.
+
+To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require
+larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being
+tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space
+occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that
+you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or
+build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road
+building is not so paltry as it sounds.
+
+Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's
+cabin,--picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with
+slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood.
+Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of
+town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as
+an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's
+cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention
+appropriateness.
+
+Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger
+tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log
+partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs,
+natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had
+been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of
+the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more
+suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised--surely
+better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that
+you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city
+people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate
+this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked
+cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of
+hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to
+see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are
+fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken
+to the country all the cares of the city house, a regiment of servants
+or hostiles, and a mansion of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to
+me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees "back to the farm."
+
+[Illustration: Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zuņi, New Mexico.
+The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens]
+
+What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven
+and earth on the lonely forested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the
+snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. That is,
+over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber
+cruiser, sales agent, United States marshal, forester, gardener,
+naturalist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector,
+arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, surveyor, mine inspector, field
+man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman. When
+you consider that each man's patrol stretched out in a straight line
+would reach from New York past Albany, or from St. Paul to Duluth,
+without any of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge
+the layman, you may say the ranger is a pretty busy man.
+
+What sort of man is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, with these differences: He is very much
+younger. I think there is a regulation somewhere in the Department that
+a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures
+enthusiasm, weeding out the misfits, the formation of a body of men
+trained to the work; but I am not sure that it is not a mistake. There
+is a saying among the men of the North that "it takes a wise old dog to
+catch a wary old wolf;" and "there are more things in the woods than
+ever taught in l'pe'tee cat--ee--cheesm." I am not sure that the
+weathered old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world,
+with lots of hard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the
+difficulties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post-graduate
+from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on fist, and the brain behind the
+fist. I am quite sure that many of the blackguard tricks assailing the
+Forest Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had
+to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, gentlemen always, but
+with some wise and weathered old dog of frontier life who wouldn't
+consult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would
+consult them, you know; but it would be afterwards. Just now, while the
+rangers are consulting the red tape, the trickster gets away with the
+goods.
+
+In the next place, your Forest ranger is not clothed with the authority
+to back up his fight which the N.W.M.P. man possesses. In theory, your
+ranger is a United States marshal, just as your Mounted Policeman is a
+constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where
+the N.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest,
+try, convict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered
+by official red tape. For instance, riding out with a ranger one day, we
+came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the
+profanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast.
+
+"Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out! I want to see for myself
+exactly what you men have to deal with!"
+
+Now, if that mill man had used such language to a Mounted Policeman, he
+would have been arrested, sentenced to thirty days and a fine, all
+inside of twenty-four hours. What was it all about? An attempt to
+bulldoze a young government man into believing that the taking of logs
+without payment was permissible.
+
+"What will you do to straighten it all out?" I asked.
+
+"Lay a statement of the facts before the District Supervisor. The
+Supervisor will forward all to Denver. Denver will communicate with
+Washington. Then, soon as the thing has been investigated, word will
+come back from Washington."
+
+Investigated? If you know anything about government investigations, you
+will not stop the clock, as Joshua played tricks with the sun dial, to
+prevent speed.
+
+"Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect
+for law in that gentleman's heart?" I asked.
+
+"Perhaps longer," said the college man without a suspicion of irony,
+"and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the
+Forests."
+
+"And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free
+hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good."
+
+"Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away
+with logs that didn't belong to them. Once, when I came back to the
+first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U.
+S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from
+Washington, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been
+shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was
+doing; but we forced pay for those logs."
+
+It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make
+a good Mounted Policeman--eight years to jounce the duffer out and the
+man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken.
+For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning
+at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain
+tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester
+more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers
+remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise
+old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of
+the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester
+struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line
+strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and
+post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own
+fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose
+mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his
+sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger
+homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily
+expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men
+dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as
+Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland
+forests.
+
+Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the
+Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for
+thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present
+régime, such men are not kept when found out, nor shielded when caught.
+For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the
+Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day;
+and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the
+force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar
+picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against
+ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and
+under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and
+grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism
+look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially
+never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest
+rangers! _In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than
+Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force
+was organized._
+
+Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together,
+who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass
+herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the
+animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become--what?--is
+it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs
+and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The
+flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and butterfly that it may
+perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species
+that shall surpass itself. The tree trying to encompass and overcome the
+law of its own being--fixity--by sending its seeds sailing, whirling,
+aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.
+
+You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the
+National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't
+you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the
+centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate
+almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with
+the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle
+up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing
+life and strength straight from the sun.
+
+The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you
+suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to
+you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead
+branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal
+rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our
+weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be
+fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy
+anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the
+useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that
+can't stand fast against the shocks of life!
+
+You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause
+made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of
+life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who
+divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet,
+not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it
+needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the
+seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard
+and set--marking the ages of the trees--all have their prototypes in the
+human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth,
+air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young
+conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of
+poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the
+quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the
+same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much
+shade, fire, drought, passing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the
+weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living
+begins--it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for
+the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree
+reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three
+score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines
+and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning,
+the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what
+a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm
+wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even
+sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree
+uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on
+whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the
+crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will
+to live--cork-screwing sidewise for light, forking into two branches
+where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking
+the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder
+swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist
+barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not
+devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun
+and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds--seeds shaped like
+parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its
+own fixity--life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the
+scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's
+heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing.
+
+And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see
+it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has
+run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting
+half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high
+with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter
+here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the
+poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened
+to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than
+eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky
+Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took
+smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and
+Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high,
+leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a
+hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second
+growth of such trees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two
+families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I
+thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health
+seekers.
+
+"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care
+of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.
+
+"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They
+think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO
+
+
+The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless,
+sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any
+day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos
+National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in
+northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four
+feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my
+bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in
+New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all
+right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and
+mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas.
+You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different
+National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet;
+and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000
+feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or
+Grass Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Caņon.
+
+There are several other ways in which the National Forests of New
+Mexico discount Eastern expectation.
+
+First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of
+trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the
+wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to
+be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to
+Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New
+Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will
+stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If
+you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the
+National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back,
+leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet
+of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters
+of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens--_There is
+still a no-tip land._ As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can
+literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can
+stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the
+transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an
+hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast.
+In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than
+$2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you
+more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or
+you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have
+your own horse for a six weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month
+would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2--where
+will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch
+houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized,
+where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself
+an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel
+that has been too popular; that day has been long passed in the ranches
+of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your
+room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from
+the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard
+or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold
+water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the
+old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture
+of the Southwest--conical arches opening from one room into another,
+shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are
+flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper
+roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire
+halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health
+seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others
+by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers
+living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico
+that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said
+that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take
+tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a
+holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship
+worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy
+his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made
+for sending in meals.
+
+[Illustration: Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The
+structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its
+feathers, which are used in religious rites]
+
+The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the
+excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of _most_
+of the Forests by motor, of _all_ of the Forests by team (be sure to
+hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the
+highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner.
+In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by
+the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons
+been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain
+ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to
+ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in
+the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible caņons,
+shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge
+mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial
+lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is
+not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May;
+but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road,
+going up the caņon from south to north.
+
+The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great
+plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White
+Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can
+still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout
+than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still
+abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they
+constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs
+hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As
+for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the
+Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the caņons forking off the Pecos at
+right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.
+
+Lastly, the mountain caņons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none
+in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that
+will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the
+conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the
+Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to
+remember--with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation,
+excellent trails and abundance of game--these National Forests of New
+Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago,
+only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that
+the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the
+West.
+
+You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las
+Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered
+by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the
+scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over
+the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that
+just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills
+rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue
+horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests--trees
+eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching
+and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann
+spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National
+Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the
+ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings
+have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are
+growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out
+by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and
+in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in
+five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years
+this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval
+state.
+
+The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged
+in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley
+stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade
+system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish
+first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little
+checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A
+glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The
+goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer
+raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in
+the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty
+cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn
+that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2
+a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not
+wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year
+keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier
+looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of
+old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing
+better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.
+
+Then suddenly, it dawns on you--this is not America at all. It is a bit
+of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the
+wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health,
+and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief.
+The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the
+fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter
+skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats
+bleating on the red sand hills--all complete the illusion that you have
+waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to
+Canada, New Mexico is to the United States--a mosaic in color; a bit of
+the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the
+picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of
+progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are
+still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive,
+undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and
+falls back in social envy and class hate. "Our people, no, they are not
+ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth--no--we
+have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little
+whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on
+de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"
+
+"Mighty good," though I was not thinking of the poem. I was thinking of
+the spirit that is contented enough to _see_ poetry in the great white
+mountains through the door of a little whitewashed adobe room; and in
+this case, it was a sick room. Presently, he got up out of his bed, and
+donned an old military cape, and came out in the sunlight to have me
+photograph him, so that his friends would have it _after_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses
+in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few
+words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put
+you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you. Any
+normal traveler does not need to be told that these ranch houses are
+not regular boarding houses as you understand that term; but as a great
+many travelers are not normal, perhaps I should explain. The custom of
+taking strangers has arisen from those old days when there were no inns
+and all passers-by were given beds and meals as a matter of course.
+Those days are past, but luckily for outsiders, the custom survives;
+only remember while you pay, you go as a _guest_, and must not expect a
+valet to clean your boots and to quake at any discord of nerves untuned
+by the jar of town.
+
+In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were
+spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling,
+earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the
+little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of
+settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse. Presently,
+at an elevation of 8,000 feet; we pulled up in Pecos Town before the
+long, low, whitewashed ranch house, the two ends coming back in an L
+round the court, the main entrance on the other side of it. You expected
+to find wilderness. Well, there is an upright piano, and there is a
+gramophone with latest musical records, and close by the davenport where
+hangs a grizzly bear pelt, stands a banjo. You have scarcely got travel
+togs off before dinner is sounded by the big copper ranch bell hung on
+the piazza after the fashion of the Missions.
+
+After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going
+up the caņon. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a
+great many reasons. He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for,
+your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with
+the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt
+predatory animals--bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion--you need no
+permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey
+and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country
+as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that
+the forests in the upper caņons are very dense; and that you might get
+lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge
+who knows where you have gone?
+
+On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in
+and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican,
+has been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and is somewhat of
+a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views.
+
+"What is going to happen in Old Mexico?"
+
+"Ah, only one t'ing possible--los Americanos must go in."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot--cannot control. Madero, he cannot
+control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."
+
+It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe
+huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass
+windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and
+sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the
+devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet
+walls.
+
+Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built
+in--well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare
+say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell
+of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way
+for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in
+demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were
+so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell
+away and buried it in the mountains--where, no man knows: it has never
+since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of
+America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to
+believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is
+most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the
+snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the caņon with a span
+of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a
+very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not
+need to describe the trails up Pecos Caņon. I consider it a safer road
+than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway
+or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor
+car, though the scenic highway cutting this at right angles will be
+when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who
+jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn
+several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of
+jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the
+mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Caņon, now down on a
+level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer
+as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going
+and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the
+driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and
+the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger
+whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With
+carelessness--well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went
+over the edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily
+wooded and you can't slide far.
+
+Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for "the tent
+dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how
+they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your
+own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from
+Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where
+the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and
+heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and
+miniature waterfalls. Wherever the caņon widens to little fields, the
+Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch
+to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round
+rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the caņon forks to right
+and left up other forested caņons, many of which, save for the hunter,
+have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge
+round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords,
+loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the
+two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty
+miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You
+are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no
+lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the
+wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear
+their summits is the head of Pecos Caņon--a sort of snow top to the
+sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the
+west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right
+on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except
+the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.
+
+[Illustration: The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically
+communal dwellings five stories in height]
+
+I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in
+addition a cowboy slicker and was cold--this in a land where the
+Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old
+Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining
+camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the caņon.
+Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say
+it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks
+me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my
+collapsible drinking cup to go down to the caņon for some water.
+Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup
+off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten
+years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.
+
+Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the caņon. From this
+point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks
+seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a
+dozen caņons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them.
+In fact, if you followed up any of these side caņons, you would find
+them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet
+untrod.
+
+Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a
+bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high
+known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past
+the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through
+the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this
+10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another
+important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing
+worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own
+depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and
+twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy
+occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what
+thousands are doing--combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing
+with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this
+ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.
+
+Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper
+Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the
+exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for
+the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the
+snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of
+the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Caņon, and the whole Pecos Valley
+below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom
+cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the
+work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and
+hunt in Pecos Caņon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire;
+and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this
+compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of
+trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all
+through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put
+out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local
+congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of
+funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest
+timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the
+fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of
+penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year
+the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the
+men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle
+against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long
+past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making
+will do to prevent fires.
+
+We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down
+the east side into the Las Vegas Caņon. Four feet of snow still clung to
+the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across
+the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper
+peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that
+Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement
+that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though
+it is so very old. The holy _padre_ was jogging along on his mule one
+night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his
+vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule
+stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his
+book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on
+the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an _Ave
+Maria_; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as
+Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CAŅON
+
+
+I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction
+but fact. I am not speculating as to _how_ those folk of neolithic times
+lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses _where_ they lived,
+sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance
+stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined
+tread of æons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world
+from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley
+a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred _kiva_ or
+ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a
+circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before
+Julius Cæsar was born, before--if Egyptian archæologists be correct--the
+dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their
+own oblivion. To my right and left for miles--for twelve miles, to be
+correct--are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the
+cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered
+Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock
+at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls
+too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow
+pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this
+valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before
+the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a
+record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England,
+contemporaneous, perhaps--for all science knows to the contrary--with
+that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.
+
+Lying in my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and
+to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow cliff wall, I
+fell to wondering on this puzzle of archæologist and historian--what
+desolated these bygone nations? The theory of desiccation, or drought,
+so plausible elsewhere, doesn't hold for one minute when you are here on
+the spot; for there is the mountain brook brawling through the Valley
+not five minutes' scramble from any one of these caves; and there on the
+far western sky-line are the snows of the Jemez Mountains, which must
+have fed this brook since this part of the earth began. Was it war, or
+pestilence, or captivity, that made of the populous city a den of
+wolves, a resort for hoot owl and bittern and fox? If pestilence, then
+why are the skeletons not found in the great ossuaries and masses that
+mark the pestilential destruction of other Indian races? There remain
+only the alternatives of war, or captivity; and of either, not the
+vestige of a shadow of a tradition remains. One man's guess is as good
+as another's; and the scientist's guesses vary all the way from 8,000 B.
+C. to 400 A. D. So there you are! You have as good a right to a guess
+as the highest scientist of them all; and while I refrain from
+speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that
+these people of the Stone Age were not the gibbering, monkey-tailed
+maniacs of claw finger nails and simian jaw which the half-baked
+pseudo-evolutionist loves to picture of Stone Age denizens. As Jack
+Donovan, a character working at Judge Abbott's in the Valley
+said--"Sure, monkey men wud a' had a haard time scratchin' thro' thim
+cliffs and makin' thim holes in the rocks." Remnants of shard and
+pottery, structure of houses, decorations and woven cloths and skins
+found wrapped as cerements round the dead all prove that these men were
+a sedentary and for that age civilized people. When our Celt and Saxon
+ancestors were still chasing wild boars through the forests, these
+people were cultivating corn on the Upper and Lower Mesas. When Imperial
+Rome's common populace boasted few garments but the ones in which they
+had been born, these people were wearing a cloth woven of fiber and
+rushes. When European courts trod the stately over floors of filthy
+rushes, these cliff dwellers had flooring of plaster and cement, and
+rugs of beaver and wolf and bear. All this you can see with your own
+eyes by examining the caves and skeletons of the Jemez Forests; and the
+fine glaze of the beautiful pottery work is as lost an art as the
+pigments of old Italy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go into the Jemez to
+dream. You go to Pecos to hunt and fish. So you do to the Jemez; but it
+is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of
+man you are fishing for. As the Pecos Forests appeal to the strenuous
+holiday hunter--the man who considers he has not had his fun till he has
+broken a leg killing a bear, or stood mid-waist in snow-water stringing
+fish on a line like beads on a string--so the Jemez appeals to the
+dreamer, the scholar, the scientist, the artist; and I can imagine no
+more ideal (nor cheaper) holiday than to join the American School of
+Archæology, about which I have already spoken, that comes in here with
+scientists from every quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and
+dig, and delve, and revel in the past of moonlight nights round
+campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the
+face of the cliff. The School has been a going concern for only a few
+years. Yet last year over 150 scientists came in from every quarter of
+the globe.
+
+Spite of warnings to the contrary given to me both East and West, the
+trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest you can make in
+America. You strike in from Santa Fe; and right here, let me set down as
+emphatically as possible, two or three things pleasant and unpleasant
+about Santa Fe.
+
+First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not
+excepting Quebec. Color, age, leisure; a medley of races; sand-hills
+engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor
+blending with the braying of a Mexican burro trotting to market loaded
+out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain and New America; streets with
+less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's
+Board of Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the
+sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and
+chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West
+Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe
+houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door
+or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty
+governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the
+Archæological Society has its rooms with Lotave's beautiful mural
+paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has
+neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is
+such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set
+down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America,
+yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.
+
+[Illustration: Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez
+Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants]
+
+Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashamed of
+itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask a Santa Fe man why in
+the world, with all its attraction of the picturesque, the antique, the
+snowy mountains, and the weak-lunged one's ideal climate, it has so few
+tourists; and he answers you with a depreciatory shrug that "it's off
+the main line." "Off the main line?" So is Quebec off the main line; yet
+200,000 Americans a year see it. So is Yosemite off the main line; and
+10,000 people go out to it every year. I have never heard that the Nile
+and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the main line; yet foreigners
+yearly reap a fortune catering to visiting Americans. Personally, it is
+a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe-trotter,
+for I am one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa Fe
+blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed to it by the
+grand dons of Spain that is averse to sounding the brass band, I love
+the appealing, picturesque, inert laziness of it all; but I love better
+to ask: "Why go to Egypt, when you have the wonders of an Egypt
+unexplored in your own land? Why scour the crowded Alps when the snowy
+domes of the Santa Fe and Jemez and Sangre de Christo lie unexplored
+only an easy motor ride from your hotel?" If Santa Fe, as it is, were
+known to the big general public, 200,000 tourists a year would find
+delight within its purlieus; and while I like the places untrodden by
+travelers, still--being an outsider, myself,--I should like the
+outsiders to know the same delight Santa Fe has given me.
+
+To finish with the things of the mundane, you strike in to Santa Fe from
+a desolate little junction called Lamy, where the railroad has built a
+picturesque little doll's house of a hotel after the fashion of an old
+Spanish mansion. To reach the Jemez Forests where the ruins of the Cave
+Dwellers exist, you can drive or motor (to certain sections only) or
+ride. As the distance is forty miles plus, you will find it safer and
+more comfortable to drive. If you take a driver and a team, and keep
+both over two days, it will cost you from $10 to $14 for the round trip.
+If you go in on a burro, you can buy the burro outright for $5 or $10.
+(Don't mind if your feet do drag on the ground. It will save being
+pitched.) If you go out with the American School of Archæology (Address
+Santa Fe for particulars) your transportation will cost you still less,
+perhaps not $2. Once out, in the caņons of the Cave Dwellers, you can
+either camp out with your own tenting and food; or put up at Judge
+Abbott's hospitable ranch house; or quarter yourself free of charge in
+one of the thousands of cliff caves and cook your own food; or sleep in
+the caves and pay for your meals at the ranch. At most, your living
+expenses will not exceed $2 a day. If you do your own cooking, they need
+not be $1 a day.
+
+One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is
+that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way.
+We left Santa Fe at six A. M., the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills.
+I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid
+on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red
+and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me
+that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew
+quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured
+nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet
+to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or
+less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in
+earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande
+and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met
+only two Mexican teams on the way.
+
+From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in
+pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops
+over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely
+deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic _tufa_ hub deep in ash dust,
+so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are
+really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In
+fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural
+dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will
+miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look
+back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths
+have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the
+sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the
+gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then
+your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa
+and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20.
+Here, White Rock Caņon lines both sides of the Rio Grande--precipices
+steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square
+block; and coming into this caņon at right angles are the caņons where
+lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers--some of them hundreds of feet above
+the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain
+streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible caņons, you must drive
+up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand
+feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.
+
+We lunched in a little water caņon, which gashed the mesa side where a
+mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to
+be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the
+Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is
+better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for
+this particular caņon being inaccessible to motors--a climb steep as a
+stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which
+only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper
+mesa--acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park
+but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary
+cloud-line, still girt by that snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We
+followed the trail at a rattling pace--the Archæological School had
+placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Caņon--and presently, by great
+mounds of building stone covered feet deep by the dust and débris of
+ages, became aware that we were on historic ground. Nor can the theory
+of drought explain the abandonment of this mesa. While it rains heavily
+only two months in the year--July and August--the mesa is so high that
+it is subject to sprinkling rains all months of the year; to be sure not
+enough for springs, but ample to provide forage and grow corn; and for
+water, these sky-top dwellers had access to the water caņons both
+before and behind. What hunting ground it must have been in those old
+days! Even yet you are likely to meet a flock of wild turkey face to
+face; or see a mountain lion slink away, or hear the bark of coyote and
+fox.
+
+"Is this it, Gregoire?" I asked. The mound seemed irregularly to cover
+several acres--pretty extensive remains, I thought.
+
+"Ah, no--no Seņorita--wait," warned Gregoire expectantly.
+
+I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short and
+plumb as if you tossed a biscuit over the edge of the Flatiron roof. I
+got out and looked down and then--went dumb! Afterwards, Mrs. Judge
+Abbott told me they thought I was afraid to come down. It wasn't that!
+The thing so far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed or seen; and the
+color--well--those artists accused of over-coloration could not have
+over-colored if they had tried. Pigments have not been invented that
+could do it!
+
+Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara,
+three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of
+blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout
+across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black
+basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge
+and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind
+angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red.
+And picture the face of the cliff under your feet, the sides of the
+massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives,
+pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched
+caves and winding recess and portholes--a city of the dead, silent as
+the dead, old almost as time!
+
+The wind came soughing up the caņon with the sound of the sea. The note
+of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down
+among the tender green, lining the caņon stream, a mourning dove uttered
+her sad threnody--then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more
+silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on
+the edge of the caņon wall and let the palpable past come touching me
+out of the silence.
+
+A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the
+floor of the valley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a
+city of one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other,
+reached by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep in the stone. Where had the
+people gone; and why? What swept their civilization away? When did the
+age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the city of
+their building and choice, of their loves and their hates, and their
+wooing and their weddings, of their birth and their deaths--do not leave
+without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this place of beauty
+and security and thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did
+the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pursued like deer by the
+Apache and the Ute and the Navajo? Or were they marched out captives,
+weeping? Or did they fall by the pestilence? Answer who can! Your guess
+is as good as mine! But there is the sacred ceremonial underground
+chamber where they worshiped the sacred fire and the plumed serpent,
+guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of
+manhood and instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and
+cleanliness and reticence. "If thou art stricken, die like the deer with
+a silent throat," says the adage of the modern Pueblo Indian. "When the
+foolish speak, keep thou silent." "When thou goest on the trail, carry
+only a light blanket." Good talk, all of it, for young boys coming to
+realize themselves and life! And there farther down the valley is the
+stone circle or dancing floor where the people came down from their
+cliff to make merry and express in rhythm the emotions which other
+nations express in poetry and music. The whole city must have been the
+grandstand when the dancing took place down there.
+
+It was Gregoire who called me to myself.
+
+"We cannot take the wagon down there," he said. "No wagon has ever gone
+down here. You walk down slow and I come with the horses, one by one."
+
+It sounded a good deal easier than it looked. I haven't seen a steeper
+stair; and if you imagine five ladders trucked up zigzag against the
+Flatiron Building and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it
+is, you'll have an idea of the appearance of the situation; but it
+looked a great deal harder than it really was, and the trail has since
+been improved. The little steps cut in the volcanic _tufa_ or white
+pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold. They grit to your footstep
+and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to
+make this wonderful Frijoles Caņon accessible to the public, or if the
+Archæological School can raise the means and coöperate with the Forestry
+Service trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the
+face of this caņon, graded gradually enough for a motor. The day that is
+done, visitors will number not 150 a year but 150,000; for nothing more
+exquisitely beautiful and wonderful exists in America.
+
+It seems almost incredible that Judge and Mrs. Abbott have brought down
+this narrow, steep tier of 600 steps all the building material, all the
+furniture, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place;
+but there the materials are and there is no other trail in but one still
+less accessible.
+
+That afternoon, Mrs. Abbott and I wandered up the valley two or three
+miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundreds of feet up
+the face of the precipice. The cave was first discovered by Judge and
+Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday afternoon walks. The Archæological
+School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the débris and accumulated erosion
+of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber in its original condition.
+"Restoring the ruins" does not mean "manufacturing ruins." It means
+digging out the erosion that has washed and washed for thousands of
+years down the hillsides during the annual rains. All the caves have
+been originally plastered in a sort of terra cotta or ocher stucco.
+When that is reached and the charred wooden beams of the smoked, arched
+ceilings, restoration stops. The aim is to put the caves as they were
+when the people abandoned them. On the floors is a sort of rock bottom
+of plaster or rude cement. When this is reached, digging stops. It is in
+the process of digging down to these floors that the beautiful specimens
+of prehistoric pottery have been rescued. Some of these specimens may be
+seen in Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian and the Natural History
+Museum in New York, and in the Santa Fe Palace, and the Field Museum of
+Chicago. Sometimes as many as four feet of erosion have overlaid the
+original flooring. When digging down to the flooring of the ceremonial
+cave, an _estufa_ or sacred secret underground council chamber was
+found; and this, too, was restored. The pueblo of roofless chambers seen
+from the hilltop on the floor of the valley was dug from a mound of
+débris. In fact, too great praise cannot be given Dr. Hewitt and his
+co-workers for their labors of restoration; and the fact that Dr. Hewitt
+was a local man has added to the effectiveness of the work, for he has
+been in a position to learn from New Mexican Indians of any discoveries
+and rumors of discoveries in any of the numerous caves up the Rio
+Grande. For instance, when about halfway down the trail that first day,
+at the Frijoles Caņon or Rito de los Frijoles, as it is called, I met on
+an abrupt bend in the trail a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara--blue jean
+suit, red handkerchief around neck, felt hat, huge silver earrings and
+teeth white as pearls--Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the caņon,
+who knows every foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white
+pumice background, it was for an instant as if one of the cave people
+had stepped from the past. Well, it was Wan, as we outsiders call him,
+who one day brought word to the Archæological workers that he had found
+in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was
+cleaned out or restored, and proved to be a back apartment or burial
+chamber behind other chambers, which had been worn away by the
+centuries' wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a woven cloth
+like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body lying to-day,
+proving that these people understood the art of weaving long before the
+Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade.
+
+You could stay in the Rito Caņon for a year and find a cave of fresh
+interest each day. For instance, there is the one where the form of a
+huge plumed serpent has been etched like a molding round under the
+arched roof. The serpent, it was, that guarded the pools and the
+springs; and when one considers where snakes are oftenest found, it is
+not surprising that the serpent should have been taken as a totem
+emblem. Many of the chambers show six or seven holes in the
+floor--places to connect with the Great Earth Magician below. Little
+alcoves were carved in the arched walls for the urns of meal and water;
+and a sacred fireplace was regarded with somewhat the same veneration as
+ancient Orientals preserved their altar fires. In one cave, some old
+Spanish _padre_ has come and carved a huge cross, in rebuke to pagan
+symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of
+goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish régime; and there are other
+caves where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the
+Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could
+speak they "would a tale unfold."
+
+[Illustration: Looking down on the ruins of a prehistoric dwelling from
+one of the upper caves in the Rito de las Frijoles, New Mexico]
+
+The aim of the Archæological Society is year by year to restore portions
+till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial
+aid, complete restoration can hardly take place inside a century. When
+you consider that the Rito is only one of many prehistoric areas of New
+Mexico, of Utah, of Colorado, awaiting restoration, you are constrained
+to wish that some philanthropist would place a million or two at the
+disposal of the Archæological Society. If this were done, no place on
+earth could rival the Rito; for the funds would make possible not only
+the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of débris,
+but it would make the Caņon accessible to the general public by easier,
+nearer roads. The inaccessibility of the Rito may be in harmony with its
+ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thousands of
+tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests.
+
+There are other things to do in the Caņon besides explore the City of
+the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through
+parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet
+classified. There is the globe cactus high up on the black basalt
+rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun.
+There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse
+beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the
+short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which
+Tennyson sings in "Maud." Presently, you notice the stream banks
+crushing together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite
+and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as
+mist.
+
+Follow farther down! The caņon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor
+between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to
+follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm
+day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for
+if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down
+a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain,
+and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and
+darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of
+spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery
+as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down--down--down--tumbled the
+waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge
+to another in spray, then down--down--down to the Rio Grande, many feet
+below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a
+shiver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the
+great archæologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the
+simple words--"The Rito is a beautiful place."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA
+
+
+They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a
+sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and
+down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said
+that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has
+said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted
+Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream
+Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and
+deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart
+business tricks of modern Yankeedom.
+
+Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old
+pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there
+was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off
+that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish,
+present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted
+pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First
+march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to
+leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn.
+Back at Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one
+of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet
+hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish dons are
+followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides
+the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700,
+sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of
+the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me
+whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa--called
+Enchanted--or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of
+the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is--pagan
+hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with
+the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed
+these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.
+
+Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors
+have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a
+winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can
+imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and
+necklaces and turquoise-set buttons down trouser leg, scouring below
+these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the
+Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts
+and crafts of the Hopi people--silver work, weaving, basketry--into the
+Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether
+the raid took place a minute before midday, or a second after
+nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads
+over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and
+Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took
+refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find.
+There you can see their cities and towns to this day.
+
+And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost
+in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line
+from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and
+Laguna and Acoma and Zuņi and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and
+Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will
+find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will,
+which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not
+even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some
+of these ruins--in the Manzanos and in western Arizona--would house a
+modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they:
+council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once
+peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you
+not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert,
+this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than
+picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?
+
+[Illustration: A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among
+the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household]
+
+There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel
+as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But
+if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff
+Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from
+the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand
+Caņon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously
+known as Moki, Zuņi, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and
+life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them,
+though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can
+visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but
+Isleta has been so frequently "toured" by sightseers, I preferred to go
+to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the
+western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the
+Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can
+cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.
+
+Up to the present, the inconvenience of reaching Acoma will effectually
+prevent it ever being "toured." When you have to take a local train that
+lands you in an Indian town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in
+the morning, or else take a freight, which you reach by driving a mile
+out of town, fording an irrigation ditch and crawling under a barb wire
+fence--there is no immediate danger of the objective point being rushed
+by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the
+traffic. If anything as unique and wonderful as Acoma existed in Egypt
+or Japan, it would be featured and visited by thousands of Americans
+yearly. As it is, I venture to say, not a hundred travelers see Acoma's
+Enchanted Mesa in a year, and half the number going out fail to see it
+properly owing to inexperience in Western ways of meeting and managing
+Indians. For instance, the day before I went out, a traveler all the way
+from Germany had dropped off the transcontinental and taken a local
+freight for the Hopi towns. When a tourist wants to see things in
+Germany, he finds a hundred willing palms out to collect and point the
+way; but when a tourist leaves the beaten trail in America, if he asks
+too many questions, he is promptly told to "go to--" I'll not say where.
+That German wasn't in a good mood when he dropped off the freight train
+at Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the Marmons, but there is no
+regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good
+Westerner, you will carry your own luncheon, or take cheerful pot luck
+as it comes; but the German wasn't a good Westerner; and it didn't
+improve his temper to have butter served up mixed with flies to the tune
+of the landlady's complaint that "it didn't pay nohow to take tourists"
+and she "didn't see what she did it for anyway."
+
+They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from
+twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once,
+Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as
+easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his
+temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity
+leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart
+rock and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course,
+missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is
+a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could
+not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at
+Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the
+crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too
+fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically
+characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own
+advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a
+good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a
+month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff--and thousands of
+travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma,
+literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world;
+and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to
+put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder
+people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw
+away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round
+that way so you could see it by moonlight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me _very_ seriously to rise
+at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile
+to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an
+_acequia_ ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.
+The desert sunrise atoned for all--air pure wine, the red-winged
+blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the
+overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough
+to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of
+the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man
+edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the
+true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and shirts seen on the figures
+moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in
+diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed
+brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed
+fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less
+than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue,
+brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder
+straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments
+completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet
+cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep
+stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are
+now affecting the latter.
+
+The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible
+drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie
+dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost
+knocks you off your feet.
+
+The railroad passes almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that
+when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story
+houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get
+off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of
+Laguna are past. Long ago--in the fifties or thereabouts--the dam to the
+lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of
+flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away
+for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged
+herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated
+here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology
+that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all
+that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town
+limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds;
+or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme
+a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is
+female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his
+saddle and bridle, and leave.
+
+"I marry, yes," said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, "and I have one
+girl--her," pointing to a pretty child, "but my man, I guess he--a bad
+boy--he leave me."
+
+If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and
+bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.
+
+I set this fact down because a whole school of modern sex sociologists,
+taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an
+Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution of
+woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality
+among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.
+
+At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you
+must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance
+luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr.
+Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the
+Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has
+usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower
+people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the
+pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi
+communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of
+the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early
+seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married
+Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After
+almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879
+succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to
+school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading
+citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce
+children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day,
+there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and
+Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen
+hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you
+may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of
+downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through
+the roof.
+
+[Illustration: _Copyright by H. S. Poley_
+
+A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave]
+
+Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet
+straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of
+doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant--Marie
+Iteye--speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching
+and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets--1st, 2nd
+and 3rd, they call them--of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a
+white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all
+whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the
+first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but
+then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the
+porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling,
+purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the
+sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these
+third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the
+floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways
+opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy
+being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads
+and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of
+the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians
+curiously discouraged about results.
+
+"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one
+teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."
+
+"Doubt if it ever does much good?" I should like to take that teacher
+and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and
+then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not
+be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and
+sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has
+barely begun--well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four
+winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could
+barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large
+pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer. At Acoma, you
+feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and
+traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking
+your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid
+and degenerate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma;
+and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as
+you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a
+motor if you have one.
+
+Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the
+yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes
+straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous,
+voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and
+carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf,
+miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod--gorgeous
+desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was
+an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have
+not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.
+
+Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of
+Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San José River,
+jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been,
+or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of
+the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull
+steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods
+over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy
+river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and
+the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat
+topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant
+sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It
+dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.
+Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split
+by the shimmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors,
+transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam
+shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus shines with
+the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern
+conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild
+poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars,
+they draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like
+bits of heaven, because their faces shine with the light of an unclouded
+sky from dawn to dark.
+
+You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses
+belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on
+horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the
+figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses
+and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in
+Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off
+earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids
+enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an
+Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and
+lilac light and heat haze shimmering and unreal as a poet's vision.
+
+It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the
+planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to shimmer and
+shift and lift from earth in mirage altogether.
+
+You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of
+herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not
+poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready
+money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches
+suffice for meal.
+
+Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pass into a
+large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow
+_tufa_ walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky
+and unreal. Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when
+you lift your eyes, and there--straight ahead--lies an enchanted island
+in this lake of light, shimmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical
+yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three
+Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of
+perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or
+sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple
+sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.
+
+Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. "The
+Enchanted Mesa," he says.
+
+I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man
+has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a
+race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge
+rock? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Are there pottery remnants of
+a dead city? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Both men climbed the
+rock, though Hill Ki tells me confidentially they "were very scare,"
+when it came to throwing a rope up over the end of the rock, to pull the
+climber up as if by pulley. Marmon and Pratt have both been up; and Hill
+Ki tells me so have two venturesome white women climbers, whose names he
+does not know, but "they weren't scare." As we pass from the end to the
+side of the Enchanted Mesa, it is seen to be an oblong slab utterly cut
+off from all contact but so indented halfway up at one end as to be
+ascended by a good climber to within distance of throwing a rope over
+the top. The quarrel between Lummis and Hodge has waxed hotter and
+hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa without any finale to the dispute; and
+far be it from an outsider like myself to umpire warfare amid the gods
+of the antiquarian; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acoma
+Indians may explain the whole matter; and that both men may be partly
+right? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports
+that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony. Before a
+youth reaches manhood, while he is still being instructed in the
+mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council room or _kiva_, it is
+customary for the Acomas to blindfold him and send him to the top of the
+Enchanted Mesa for a night's lonely vigil with a jar of water as
+oblation to the spirits. These jars explain the presence of pottery,
+which Lummis describes. They would also give credence to at least
+periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of house ruins, on the
+other hand, would explain why Hodge scouted Lummis' theory. The Indians
+explained to Miss McLain that a boy could climb blindfolded where he
+could not go open-eyed, a fact that all mountain engineers will
+substantiate.
+
+[Illustration: A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona]
+
+But what matters the quarrel? Is not the whole region an Enchanted Mesa,
+one of the weirdest bits of the New World? You have barely rounded the
+Enchanted Mesa, when another oblong colossus looms to the fore, sheer
+precipice, but accessible by tiers of sand and stone at the far end;
+that is, accessible by handhold and foothold. Look again! Along the top
+of the walled precipice, a crest to the towering slab, is a human wall,
+the walls of an adobe streetful of houses, little windows looking out
+flush with the precipice line like the portholes of a ship. Then you see
+something red flutter and move at the very edge of the rock top--Hopi
+urchins, who have spied us like young eagles in their eyrie, and shout
+and wave down at us, though we can barely hear their voices. It looks
+for all the world like the top story of a castle above a moat.
+
+At the foot of the sand-hill, I ask Hill Ki, why, now that there is no
+danger from Spaniard and Navajo, the Hopi continue to live so high up
+where they must carry all their supplies sheer, vertical hundreds of
+feet, at least 1,500 if you count all the wiggling in and out and around
+the stone steps and stone ladders, and niched handholds. Hill Ki grins
+as he unhitches his horses, and answers: "You understan' when you go up
+an' see!" But he does not offer to escort me up.
+
+As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little
+Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.
+Though she cannot speak one word of English and I cannot speak one word
+of Hopi we keep up a most voluble conversation by gesture. Don't ask how
+we did it! It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. She is
+dressed in white, home-woven skirt with a white rag for a head
+shawl--badge of the good girl; and her stockings come only to the
+ankles, leaving the feet bare. The feet of all the Hopi are abnormally
+small, almost monkey-shaped; and when you think of it, it is purely
+cause and effect. The foot is not flat and broad, because it is
+constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the
+Hopi women look at my broad-soled, box-toed outing boots in amazement.
+At hard spots in the climb, they would turn and point to my boots and
+offer me help till I showed them that the sole, though thick, was
+pliable as a moccasin.
+
+The little girl signaled; did I want to go up?
+
+I nodded.
+
+She signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; or the long,
+easy path by the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well
+as foothold, and the sand promised to roll you back fast as you climbed
+up, I signaled the hard way; and off we set. I asked her how old she
+was; and she seemed puzzled how to answer by signs till she thought of
+her fingers--then up went eight with a tap to her chest signifying self.
+I asked her what had caused such sore inflammation in her eyes. She
+thought a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winnowed one hand as of
+wind--the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation up for three
+hours without a word being spoken; but by this, a little hand sought
+mine in various affectionate squeezes, and a pair of very sore eyes
+looked up with confidence, and what was lacking in words, she made up in
+shy smiles. Poor little Hopi kiddie! Will your man "be bad boy," too, by
+and by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white
+civilization that is encroaching on your tenacious, conservative race?
+After all, you are better off, little kiddie, a thousand fold, than if
+you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York.
+
+By this, what with wind, and sand, and the weight of a kodak and a
+purse, and the hard ascent, one of the two climbers has to pause for
+breath; and what do you think that eight-year-old bit of small humanity
+does? Turns to give me a helping hand. That is too much for gravity. I
+laugh and she laughs and after that, I think she would have given me
+both hands and both feet and her soul to boot. She offers to carry my
+kodak and films and purse; and for three hours, I let her. Can you
+imagine yourself letting a New York, or Paris, or London street gamin
+carry your purse for three hours? Yet the Laguna people had told me to
+look out for myself. I'd find the Acomas uncommonly sharp.
+
+That climb is as easy to the Acomas as your home stairs to you; but it's
+a good deal more arduous to the outsider than a climb up the whole
+length of the Washington Monument, or up the Metropolitan Tower in New
+York; but it is all easily possible. Where the sand merges to stone, are
+handhold niches as well as stone steps; and where the rock steps are too
+steep, are wooden ladders. At last, we swing under a great overhanging
+stone--splendid weapon if the Navajos had come this way in old days, and
+splendid place for slaughter of the Spanish soldiers, who scaled Acoma
+two centuries ago--up a tier of stone steps, and we are on top of the
+white limestone Mesa, in the town of Acoma, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
+streets, and its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd story houses, the first roof reached
+by a movable ladder, the next two roofs by stone steps.
+
+I shall not attempt to describe the view from above. Take Washington's
+Shaft; multiply by two, set it down in Sahara Desert, climb to the top
+and look abroad! That is the view from Acoma. Is the trip worth while?
+Is mountain climbing worth while? Do you suppose half a hundred people
+would yearly break their necks in Switzerland if climbing were not worth
+while? As Hill Ki said when I asked him why they did not move their city
+down now that all danger of raid had passed, "You go up an' see!" Now I
+understood. The water pools were but glints of silver on the yellow
+sands. The flocks of sheep and goats looked like ants. The rampart rocks
+that engirt the valley were yellow rims below; and across the tops of
+the far mesas could be seen scrub forests and snowy peaks. Have
+generations--generations on generations--of life amid such color had
+anything to do with the handicrafts of these people--pottery, basketry,
+weaving, becoming almost an art? Certainly, their work is the most
+artistic handicraft done by Indians in America to-day.
+
+Boys and girls, babies and dogs, rush to salute us as we come up; but my
+little guide only takes tighter hold of my hand and "shoos" them off. We
+pass a deep pool of waste water from the houses, lying in the rocks, and
+on across the square to the twin-towered church in front of which is a
+rudely fenced graveyard. The whole mesa is solid, hard rock; and to make
+this graveyard for their people, the women have carried up on their
+backs sand and soil enough to fill in a depression for a burying place.
+The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally
+a bank of human limestone.
+
+[Illustration: At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the
+pueblos in New Mexico]
+
+I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma
+who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the
+square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red
+skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise
+ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak
+such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It
+is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another
+shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.
+
+She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the
+finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above
+sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest
+gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the
+railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out
+in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at
+the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for
+ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.
+
+Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and
+chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier
+of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third
+story room; and a cleaner room I have never seen in a white woman's
+house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window
+between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle
+might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking
+water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement,
+and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is
+spotless.
+
+"Where do you sleep, Marie?" I ask.
+
+"Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime."
+
+And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her
+father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone
+through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.
+
+And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact
+testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon
+and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as
+different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the
+Bowery.
+
+All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting
+wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts
+of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as
+the Acomas descend.
+
+We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps,
+preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act
+took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours'
+visit amid the gamins of New York, or London? At the foot of the cliff,
+we shook hands all round and said good-by; and when I looked back up the
+valley, the children were still waving and waving. If this be humble
+Indian life in its Simon pure state, with all freedom from our rules of
+conduct, all I have to say is it is infinitely superior to the hoodlum
+life of our cities and towns.
+
+One point more: I asked Marie as I had asked Mr. Marmon, "Do you think
+your people are Indians, or Aztecs?" and the answer came without a
+moment's hesitation--"Aztecs; we are not Indian like Navajo and
+Apaches."
+
+Opposite the Enchanted Mesa, I looked back. My little guide was still
+gazing wistfully after us, waving her shawl and holding tight to a coin
+which I trust no old grimalkin pried out of her hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND
+
+
+When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail
+on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or
+all three courses if you have time.
+
+You may strike up into Zuņi Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the
+White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated
+that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of
+the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found
+under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain
+cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man--and likely
+to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and
+forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock
+declivity, an almost desert-forest growth--dwarf juniper and cedar and
+giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off
+intruders--and you can understand why some of the most magnificent
+specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here
+undisturbed by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains,
+you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the
+Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you
+find Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, the former, a colossal
+community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders;
+the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in
+almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate
+all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came
+in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric
+occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the
+second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that
+quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.
+
+Or you may skip the short trip out to Zuņi off the main traveled
+highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains--two weeks
+at the very shortest, and you should make it six--and leave Gallup, just
+at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve
+and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab,
+round the Grand Caņon up towards the State lines of California and Utah.
+If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last
+one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and
+mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of
+high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting
+seas of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the
+movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It
+isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first
+high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world,
+a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks
+and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America
+at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these
+Navajo boys--a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a
+hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or
+bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white
+cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more
+silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an
+Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red
+sand knobs--you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their
+_hogan_ houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain,
+scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving
+at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night
+and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of
+silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the
+juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the
+wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot
+vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat--bleating till the air
+quivers--driven by little Navajo girls on horseback, born to the
+saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.
+
+If you can't go to Zuņi Land and the White Mountain Forest and the
+Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the
+sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort.
+Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own
+Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in
+antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of
+the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place--in the Coconino
+and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Caņon. And if the lure of the antique
+still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent
+lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is
+emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me
+there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the
+antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric
+ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of
+the world in the School of Archæology at Rome, "the more undecided we
+become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America,
+or that of America preceded the Orient."
+
+For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into
+Caņon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above
+the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined
+chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could
+hide and lose a dozen of our national White House. Who built the
+aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in
+it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of
+answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you
+haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do
+your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route--cost for
+team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a
+well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will
+know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered
+the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.
+
+To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at
+Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Caņon; but to cross it,
+you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and
+drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to
+point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to
+$7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack
+animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price--$25 to
+$40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a
+white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is
+as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools
+where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in
+the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months--July and
+August--does not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and
+night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof,
+and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air
+that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like
+jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself
+into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at
+midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling;
+but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000
+to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in
+the Canadian Northwest.
+
+Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr.
+Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers
+crossing the Desert--open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered
+money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult.
+It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door
+was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you
+expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was
+presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely
+sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum
+and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of
+the _noblesse oblige_ which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code
+of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but
+vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write,
+ill-suited to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the
+Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows
+that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern
+Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining
+passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see
+again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In
+the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this
+was well; but to-day--well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where
+the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals
+come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to
+hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a
+dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and
+sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the
+Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kitchen
+quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt;
+Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would
+respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness
+that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted
+Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived
+unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host
+that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his
+at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the
+house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for
+three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very
+roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly
+ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His
+host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his
+own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through
+the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after
+all."
+
+[Illustration: A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and
+picturesque]
+
+"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused
+me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this
+instant."
+
+The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American
+travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands
+of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When
+that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all
+visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp
+kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point,
+or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three
+Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.
+
+We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team
+locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip,
+though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy
+sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day
+we wanted them.
+
+The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town
+till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and
+cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost
+air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled
+ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch
+house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their
+spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in
+the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa--globe
+cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue
+forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod
+mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you
+drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming
+below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows--blue shadows, sure
+sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is
+the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but
+a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in
+the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a
+sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected.
+You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuņi boys are loping along
+the trail in front of you--red headband, hair in a braid, red sash,
+velvet trousers--the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite
+of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is
+a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the Zuņi or Hopi,
+and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuņi lads will
+set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles
+in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo
+girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It
+all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering
+her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and
+you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own
+desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.
+
+The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped _tufa_ rocks to the right of the road,
+mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has
+splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all
+travelers--a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the
+face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain,
+but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects
+struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests
+another explanation.
+
+Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St.
+Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white,
+green-shuttered building as silent as the grave--St. Michael's Mission,
+where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway
+to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the
+mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off
+beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr. and Mrs. Day, two of the best
+known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the
+convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive
+structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and
+Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.
+
+And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being
+lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother
+Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only
+we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine
+quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work
+of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to
+the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians
+into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians
+with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are
+to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins
+alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to
+post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the
+Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad
+enough for them to expand--14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land--and
+against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father
+Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or
+three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers
+among the Navajos. Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are
+doing.
+
+You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter
+appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard
+will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough,
+brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine
+yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There
+is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated
+scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit
+missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do
+you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay
+helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his
+share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and
+issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!
+
+Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School,
+drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second
+volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined
+glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and
+crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician
+would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the
+masterpiece of his life--hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten
+years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for
+their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets
+and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the
+heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the
+names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures
+instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and
+other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone
+sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal
+dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he
+has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels
+anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum
+of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky
+way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white,
+blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine
+man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes
+Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars--and puff, with one breath he
+has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all
+over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid"
+teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi
+deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who
+taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the
+Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn
+stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up
+to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian drawings
+are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman
+deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo
+lore? If all ethnologists and archæologists had founded their studies on
+the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy
+version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in
+our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.
+
+Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo
+blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering
+by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever
+Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a
+drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For
+instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a
+Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of "green" in it. Dressing in
+disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the
+alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the
+benefit of gullible tourists.
+
+"Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?" Father Berrard asked
+the unsuspecting dealer.
+
+"From frog ponds," answered the store man of a region where water is
+scarce as hens' teeth.
+
+Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the
+medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars
+are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished
+and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his _nom de plume_ shall
+be "Frog Pond Green."
+
+If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at
+either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were
+conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School
+for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not
+to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside
+and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all
+fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in
+birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the
+first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit
+relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other
+associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous
+cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never
+saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced,
+black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness
+should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil;
+that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to
+be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one
+yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common;
+and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning
+up for future festivities.
+
+We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room,
+parlor and refectory, where two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts
+of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside
+world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in
+every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender,
+understanding eyes.
+
+Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell
+sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know
+this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on
+the hill to the right--eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the
+fading light.
+
+Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in
+vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces
+bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from
+the stalls--is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that
+age-old, never-failing spring of Service?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND (_continued_)
+
+
+There are two ways to travel even off the beaten trail. One is to take a
+map, stake out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up
+to them lightning-flier fashion. If you want to, and are prepared to
+kill your horses, you can cross Navajo Land in from three to four days.
+Even going at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring
+of the Painted Desert, of the light lying in shimmering heat layers
+split by the refraction of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an
+atmosphere with the tang of northern ozone and the resinous scent of
+incense and frankincense and myrrh. You can see the Desert flowers that
+vie with the sun in brilliant coloring; and feel the Desert night sky
+come down so close to you that you want to reach up a hand and pluck the
+jack-o'-lantern stars swinging so low through the pansy-velvet mist. You
+can even catch a flying glimpse of the most picturesque Indian race in
+America, the Navajos. Their _hogans_ or circular, mud-wattled houses,
+are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and just
+when you think you are most alone, driving through the sagebrush and
+dwarf juniper, the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attention to a
+flock of sheep and goats scattered almost invisibly up a blue-green
+hillside. Blue-green, did you say? Yes: that's another thing you can
+unlearn on a flying trip--the geography definition of a Desert is about
+as wrong as a definition could be made. A Desert isn't necessarily a
+vast sandy plain, stretching out in flat and arid waste. It's as
+variegated in its growth and landscape as your New England or Old
+England hills and vales, only your Eastern rivers flow all the time, and
+your Desert rivers are apt to disappear through evaporation and sink
+below the surface during the heat of the day, coming up again in floods
+during the rainy months, and in pools during the cool of morning and
+evening.
+
+But on a flying trip, you can't learn the secret moods of the Painted
+Desert. You can't draw so much of its atmosphere into your soul that you
+can never think of it again without such dream-visions floating you away
+in its blue-gray-lilac mists as wrapped the seers of old in clairvoyant
+prophetic ecstasy. On a flying trip, you can learn little or nothing of
+the Arab life of our own Desert nomads. You have to depend on Blue Book
+reports of "the Navajos being a dangerous, warlike race" blasted into
+submission by the effulgent glory of this, that, and the other military
+martinet writing himself down a hero. Whereas, if you go out leisurely
+among the traders and missionaries and Indians themselves, who--more's
+the pity--have no hand in preparing official reports, you will learn
+another story of a quiet, pastoral race who have for three hundred
+years been the victims of white man greed and white man lust, of
+blundering incompetency and hysterical cowardice.
+
+These are strong words. Let me give some instances. We were having
+luncheon in the priests' refectory of the Franciscan Mission; and for
+the benefit of those who imagine that missionaries to the Indians are
+fat and bloated on three hundred a year, I should like to set down the
+fact that the refectory was in a sort of back kitchen, that we ate off a
+red table-cloth with soup served in a basin and bath towels extemporized
+into serviettes. I had asked about a Navajo, who not long ago went
+locoed right in Cincinnati station and began stabbing murderously right
+and left.
+
+"In the first place," answered the Franciscan, "that Indian ought not to
+have been in Cincinnati at all. In the second place, he ought not to
+have been there alone. In the third place, he had great provocation."
+
+Here is the story, as I gathered it from traders and missionaries and
+Indians. The Navajo was having trouble over title to his land. That was
+wrong the first on the part of the white man. It was necessary for him
+to go to Washington to lay his grievance before the Government. Now for
+an Indian to go to Washington is as great an undertaking as it was for
+Stanley to go to Darkest Africa. The trip ought not to have been
+necessary if our Indian Office had more integrity and less red-tape;
+but the local agency provided him with an interpreter. The next great
+worry to the Navajo was that he could not get access to "The Great White
+Father." There were interminable red-tape and delay. Finally, when he
+got access to the Indian Office, he could get no definite, prompt
+settlement. With this accumulation of small worries, insignificant
+enough to a well-to-do white man but mighty harassing to a poor Indian,
+he set out for home; and at the station in Washington, the interpreter
+left him. The Navajo could not speak one word of English. Changing cars
+in Cincinnati, hustled and jostled by the crowds, he suddenly felt for
+his purse--he had been robbed. Now, the Navajo code is if another tribe
+injures his tribe, it is his duty to go forth instantly and strike that
+offender. Our own Saxon and Highland Scotch ancestors once had a code
+very similar. The Indian at once went locoed--lost his head, and began
+stabbing right and left. The white man newspaper told the story of the
+murderous assault in flare head lines; but it didn't tell the story of
+wrongs and procrastination. The Indian Office righted the land matter;
+but that didn't undo the damage. Through the efforts of the missionaries
+and the traders, the Indian was permitted to plead insanity. He was sent
+to an asylum, where he must have had some queer thoughts of white man
+justice. Just recently, he has been released under bonds.
+
+The most notorious case of wrong and outrage and cowardice and murder
+known in Navajo Land was that of a few years ago, when the Indian agent
+peremptorily ordered a Navajo to bring his child in to the Agency
+School. Not so did Marmon and Pratt sway the Indians at Laguna, when the
+Pueblos there were persuaded to send their children to Carlisle; and
+Miss Drexel's Mission has never yet issued peremptory orders for
+children to come to school; but the martinet mandate went forth. Now,
+the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also
+stipulates that the school shall be placed within reach of the child;
+and the Navajo knew that he was within his right in refusing to let the
+child leave home when the Government had failed to place the school
+within such distance of his _hogan_. He was then warned by the agent
+that unless the child were sent within a certain time, troops would be
+summoned from Ft. Wingate and Ft. Defiance. The Indians met, pow-wowed
+with one another, and decided they were still within their right in
+refusing. There can be no doubt but that if Captain Willard, himself,
+had been in direct command of the detachment, the cowardly murder would
+not have occurred; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops
+arrived on the scene in charge of a hopelessly incompetent subordinate,
+who proved himself not only a bully but a most arrant coward. According
+to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the
+Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of them were in one of the mud
+_hogans_. They offered no resistance. They say they were not even
+summoned to surrender. Traders, who have talked with the Navajos
+present, say the troopers surrounded the _hogan_ in the dark, a
+soldier's gun went off by mistake and the command was given in
+hysterical fright to "fire." The Indians were so terrified that they
+dashed out to hide in the sagebrush. "Bravery! Indian bravery--pah," one
+officer of the detachment was afterwards heard to exclaim. Two Navajos
+were killed, one wounded, eleven captured in as cold-blooded a murder as
+was ever perpetrated by thugs in a city street. Without lawyers, without
+any defense whatsoever, without the hearing of witnesses, without any
+fair trial whatsoever, the captives were sentenced to the penitentiary.
+It needed only a finishing touch to make this piece of Dreyfusism
+complete; and that came when a little missionary voiced the general
+sense of outrage by writing a letter to a Denver paper. President
+Roosevelt at once dispatched someone from Washington to investigate; and
+it was an easy matter to scare the wits out of the little preacher and
+declare the investigation closed. In fact, it was one of the things that
+would not bear investigation; but the evidence still exists in Navajo
+Land, with more, which space forbids here but which comes under the
+sixty-fifth Article of War. The officer guilty of this outrage has since
+been examined as to his sanity and brought himself under possibilities
+of a penitentiary term on another count. He is still at middle age a
+subordinate officer.
+
+These are other secrets of the Painted Desert you will daily con if you
+go leisurely across the great lone Reserve and do not take with you the
+lightning-express habits of urban life.
+
+For instance, in the account of the Cave Dwellers of the Frijoles
+reference was made to the Indian legend of "the heavens raining fire"
+(volcanic action) and driving the prehistoric Pueblo peoples from their
+ancient dwelling. Mrs. Day of St. Michael's, who has forgotten more lore
+than the scientists will ever pick up, told me of a great chunk of lava
+found by Mr. Day in which were embedded some perfect specimens of
+corn--which seems to sustain the Indian legend of volcanic outburst
+having destroyed the ancient nations here. The slab was sent East to a
+museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a
+fusion of adobe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward
+by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading
+post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed
+Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led
+through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of
+such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of grass grows below the
+conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour; and there is an
+all-pervasive odor, not of burning, but of steaming resin, or pine sap
+heated to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs up to an
+altitude of almost 9,000 feet, with air so light that you feel a buoyant
+lift to your heart-beats and a clearing of the cobwebs from your brain.
+You can lose lots of sleep here and not feel it. All heaviness has gone
+out of body and soul. In fact, when you come back to lower levels, the
+air feels thick and hard to breathe. And you can go hard here and not
+tire, and stand on the crest of mesas that anywhere else would be
+considered mountains, and wave your arms above the top of the world. So
+high you are--you did not realize it--that the rim of encircling
+mountains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge
+of an inverted blue bowl.
+
+[Illustration: The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona,
+stands on a mesa high above the plain]
+
+The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line
+altogether among the sagebrush shimmering in pure light; and you become
+aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain
+peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is--life of
+bird or beast--at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the
+scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the
+side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life
+of any kind possible in the Desert.
+
+Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just
+at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cluster of adobe ranch
+houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats
+and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering
+pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each
+child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that
+child's wealth for life. Navajo men rode up and down the arroyo bed as
+graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store
+building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the
+season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children
+squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in
+the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in
+the close-fitting plush shirts; color in the Germantown blankets--for
+the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and
+lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red
+sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where
+riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder
+Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land
+of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't
+seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously
+beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best
+work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in
+Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands
+only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy
+Lands equals in expressiveness and power Lungren's studies of the
+Desert; though the Pre-Raphaelites commanded prices of $10,000 and
+$25,000, where we as a nation grumble about paying our artists one
+thousand and two thousand.
+
+The Navajo driver nodded back to us that this was Ganado; and in a few
+moments Mr. Hubbell had come from the trading post to welcome us under a
+roof that in thirty years has never permitted a stranger to pass its
+doors unwelcomed. As Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell has already entered history in
+the makings of Arizona and as he shuns the limelight quite as
+"mollycoddles" (his favorite term) seek the spotlights, a slight account
+of him may not be out of place. First, as to his house: from the outside
+you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot
+winds are the enemies to comfort. You notice as you enter the front door
+that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a breath. You
+had expected a bare ranch interior with benches and stiff chairs backed
+up against the wall. Instead, you see a huge living-room forty or fifty
+feet long, every square foot of the walls covered by paintings and
+drawings of Western life. Every artist of note (with the exception of
+one) who has done a picture on the Southwest in the last thirty years is
+represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week studying the
+paintings of the Hubbell Ranch. Including sepias, oils and watercolors,
+there must be almost 300 pictures. By chance, you look up to the
+raftered ceiling; a specimen of every kind of rare basketry made by the
+Indians hangs from the beams. On the floor lie Navajo rugs of priceless
+value and rarest weave. When you go over to Mr. Hubbell's office, you
+find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of
+Moki and Navajo blankets. On the walls of the office are more pictures;
+on the floors, more rugs; in the safes and cases, specimens of rare
+silver-work that somehow again remind you of the affinity between Hindoo
+and Navajo. Mr. Hubbell yearly does a quarter-of-a-million-dollar
+business in wool, and yearly extends to the Navajos credit for amounts
+running from twenty-five dollars to fifty thousand dollars--a trust
+which they have never yet betrayed.
+
+Along the walls of the living-room are doors opening to the sleeping
+apartments; and in each of the many guest rooms are more pictures, more
+rugs. Behind the living-room is a _placito_ flanked by the kitchen and
+cook's quarters.
+
+Now what manner of man is this so-called "King of Northern Arizona"? A
+lover of art and a patron of it; also the shrewdest politician and
+trader that ever dwelt in Navajo Land; a man with friends, who would
+like the privilege of dying for him; also with enemies who would keenly
+like the privilege of helping him to die. What the chief factors of the
+Hudson's Bay Company used to be to the Indians of the North, Lorenzo
+Hubbell has been to the Indians of the Desert--friend, guard, counselor,
+with a strong hand to punish when they required it, but a stronger hand
+to befriend when help was needed; always and to the hilt an enemy to the
+cheap-jack politician who came to exploit the Indian, though he might
+have to beat the rascal at his own game of putting up a bigger bluff. In
+appearance, a fine type of the courtly Spanish-American gentleman with
+Castilian blue eyes and black, beetling brows and gray hair; with a
+courtliness that keeps you guessing as to how much more gracious the
+next courtesy can be than the last, and a funny anecdote to cap every
+climax. You would not think to look at Mr. Hubbell that time was when he
+as nonchalantly cut the cards for $30,000 and as gracefully lost it all,
+as other men match dimes for cigars. And you can't make him talk about
+himself. It is from others you must learn that in the great cattle and
+sheep war, in which 150 men lost their lives, it was he who led the
+native Mexican sheep owners against the aggressive cattle crowd. They
+are all friends now, the old-time enemies, and have buried their feud;
+and dynamite will not force Mr. Hubbell to open his mouth on the
+subject. In fact, it was a pair of the "rustlers" themselves who told me
+of the time that the cowboys took a swoop into the Navajo Reserve and
+stampeded off 300 of the Indians' best horses; but they had reckoned
+without Lorenzo Hubbell. In twenty-four hours he had got together the
+swiftest riders of the Navajos; and in another twenty-four hours, he had
+pursued the thieves 125 miles into the wildest caņons of Arizona and had
+rescued every horse. One of the men, whom he had pursued, wiped the
+sweat from his brow in memory of it. He is more than a type of the
+Spanish-American gentleman. He is a type of the man that the Desert
+produces: quiet, soft spoken--powerfully soft spoken--alert, keen,
+relentless and versatile; but also a dreamer of dreams, a seer of
+visions, a passionate patriot, and a lover of art who proves his love by
+buying.
+
+The Navajos are to-day by long odds the most prosperous Indians in
+America. Their vast Reserve offers ample pasturage for their sheep and
+ponies; and though their flocks are a scrub lot, yielding little more
+than fifty to seventy cents a head in wool on the average, still it
+costs nothing to keep sheep and goats. Both furnish a supply of meat.
+The hides fetch ready money. So does the wool, so do the blankets; and
+the Navajos are the finest silversmiths in America. Formerly, they
+obtained their supply of raw silver bullion from the Spaniards; but
+to-day, they melt and hammer down United States currency into butterfly
+brooches and snake bracelets and leather belts with the fifty-cent coins
+changed into flower blossoms with a turquoise center. Ten-cent pieces
+and quarters are transformed into necklaces of silver beads, or buttons
+for shirt and moccasins. If you buy these things in the big Western
+cities, they are costly as Chinese or Hindoo silver; but on the Reserve,
+there is a very simple way of computing the value. First, take the value
+of the coin from which the silver ornament is made. Add a dollar for the
+silversmith's labor; and also add whatever value the turquoise happens
+to be; and you have the price for which true Navajo silver-work can be
+bought out on the Reserve.
+
+Among the Navajos, the women weave the blankets and baskets; among the
+Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The value
+of these out on the Reserve is exactly in proportion to the intricacy of
+the work, the plain native wool colors--black, gray, white and
+brown--varying in price from seventy cents to $1.25 a pound; the fine
+bayetta or red weave, which is finer than any machine can produce and
+everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the
+owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wool shades, I
+need scarcely say here, are in bought mineral dyes. True bayettas, which
+are almost a lost art, bring as high as $1,500 each from a connoisseur.
+Other native wools vary in price according to size and color from $15 to
+$150. Off the Reserve, these prices are simply doubled. From all of
+which, it should be evident that no thrifty Navajo need be poor. His
+house costs nothing. It is made of cedar shakes stuck up in the ground
+crutchwise and wattled with mud. Strangely enough, the Navajo no longer
+uses his own blankets. They are too valuable; also, too heavy for the
+climate. He uses the cheap and gaudy Germantown patterns.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest
+teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from
+Ganado for Keam's Caņon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert
+travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with
+you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied
+passers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a
+system that must surely be changed, not because the public love Mr.
+Hubbell "less, but more."
+
+The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac
+light--tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued
+glory--with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through
+notches of the painted peaks. _Hogan_ after _hogan_, with sheep corrals
+in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys and girls were driving the
+sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you
+drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the
+Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the
+summit--the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you
+are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon
+miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented
+bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the
+appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender
+light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an
+incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin
+to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests.
+In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab
+Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the
+Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two
+belts.
+
+Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you
+hardly realize it till you slither down a sand bank and find yourself
+between the yellow pumice walls of a blind _cul-de-sac_ in the
+rock--nooning place--where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out
+of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone.
+Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have
+fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the
+walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in the
+Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range
+ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds
+flashing phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks
+and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."
+
+This spring is about half of the fifty-five miles between Ganado and
+Keam's Caņon; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the
+first: more lilac-colored mesas high above the top of the world, with
+the encircling peaks like the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue
+as the bluest turquoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of
+evergreens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the lower world, and you are
+in Keam's Caņon, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods,
+steep as a carved wall. You pass the ruins of the old government school,
+where the floods drove the scholars out, and see the big rock
+commemorating Kit Carson's famous fight long ago, and come on the new
+Indian schools where 150 little Navajos and Mokis are being taught by
+Federal appointees--schools as fine in every respect as the best
+educational institutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must
+obtain a permit to go on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas and Oraibi
+and Hotoville are the _Ultima Thule_ of the trail across the Painted
+Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civilization and as
+hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) as when the Spaniard
+first came among them. In fact, the only remnants of Spanish influence
+left at some of these mesas are the dwarfed peach orchards growing in
+the arid sands. These were planted centuries ago by the Spanish
+_padres_.
+
+The trading post managed by Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr., at Keam's Caņon is
+but a replica of his father's establishment at Ganado. Here is the same
+fine old Spanish hospitality. Here, too, is a rare though smaller
+collection of Western paintings. There are rugs from every part of the
+Navajo Land, and specimens of pottery from the Three Mesas--especially
+from Nampaii, the wonderful woman pottery maker of the First Mesa--and
+fine silver-work gathered from the Navajo silversmiths. And with it all
+is the gracious perfection of the art that conceals art, the air that
+you are conferring a favor on the host to accept rest in a little
+rose-covered bower of two rooms and a parlor placed at the command of
+guests.
+
+The last lap of the drive across the Painted Desert is by all odds the
+hardest stretch of the road, as well as the most interesting. It is here
+the Mokis, or Hopi, have their reservation in the very heart of Navajo
+Land; and there will be no quarrel over possession of this land. It lies
+a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands--600, 1,000, 1,500 feet
+above the plains--of yellow _tufa_ and white gypsum rock, sides as sheer
+as a wall, the top a flat plateau but for the crest where perch the Moki
+villages. Up the narrow acclivities leading to these mesa crests the
+Mokis must bring all provisions, all water, their ponies and donkeys. If
+they could live on atmosphere, on views of a painted world at their feet
+receding to the very drop over the sky-line, with tones and half-tones
+and subtle suggestions of opaline snow peaks swimming in the lilac haze
+hundreds of miles away, you would not wonder at their choosing these
+eerie eagle nests for their cities; for the coloring below is as
+gorgeous and brilliant as in the Grand Caņon. But you see their little
+farm patches among the sand billows below, the peach trees almost
+uprooted by the violence of the wind, literally and truly, a stone
+placed where the corn has been planted to prevent seed and plantlet from
+being blown away. Or if the Navajo still raided the Moki, you could
+understand them toiling like beasts of burden carrying water up to these
+hilltops; but the day of raid and foray is forever past.
+
+It was on our way back over this trail that we learned one good reason
+why the dwellers of this land must keep to the high rock crests.
+Crossing the high mesa, we had felt the wind begin to blow, when like
+Drummond's Habitant Skipper, "it blew and then it blew some more." By
+the time we reached the sandy plain below, such a hurricane had broken
+as I have seen only once before, and that was off the coast of Labrador,
+when for six hours we could not see the sea for the foam. The billows of
+sand literally lifted. You could not see the sandy plain for a dust fine
+as flour that wiped out every landmark three feet ahead of your horses'
+noses. The wheels sank hub deep in sand. Of trail, not a sign was left;
+and you heard the same angry roar as in a hurricane at sea. But like the
+eternal rocks, dim and serene and high above the turmoil, stood the
+First Mesa village of Moki Land. Perhaps after all, these little squat
+Pueblo Indians knew what they were doing when they built so high above
+the dust storms. Twice the rear wheels lifted for a glorious upset; but
+we veered and tacked and whipped the fagged horses on. For three hours
+the hurricane lasted, and when finally it sank with an angry growl and
+we came out of the fifteen miles of sand into sagebrush and looked back,
+the rosy tinge of an afterglow lay on the gray pile of stone where the
+Moki town crests the top of the lofty mesa.
+
+In justice to travelers and Desert dwellers, two or three facts should
+be added. Such dust storms occur only in certain spring months. So much
+in fairness to the Painted Desert. Next, I have cursorily given slight
+details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers
+to think the Painted Desert can be crossed with the comfort of a Pullman
+car. You have to pay for your fun. We paid in that blinding, stinging,
+smothering blast as from a furnace, from three to half past five. Women
+are supposed to be irrepressible talkers. Well--we came to the point
+where not a soul in the carriage could utter a word for the dust.
+Lastly, when we saw that the storm was to be such a genuine old-timer,
+we ought to have tied wet handkerchiefs across our mouths. Glasses we
+had to keep the dust out of our eyes; but that dust is alkali, and it
+took a good two weeks' sneezing and a very sore throat to get rid of it.
+
+Of the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville, space forbids details
+except that they are higher than the village at Acoma. Overlooking the
+Painted Desert in every direction, they command a view that beggars all
+description and almost staggers thought. You seem to be overlooking
+Almighty God's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored infinity; and
+naturally you go dumb with joy of the beauty of it and lose your own
+personality and perspective utterly. We lunched on the brink of a white
+precipice 1,500 feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that
+declivity with urns of water on their heads, and photographed naked
+urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood above
+_estufas_, or sacred underground council chambers, where the Pueblos
+held their religious rites before the coming of the Spaniards.
+
+Of the Moki towns, Oraibi is, perhaps, cleaner and better than the Three
+Mesas. The mesas are indescribably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you
+can wander through adobe houses clean as your own home quarters, the
+adobe hard as cement, the rooms divided into sleeping apartments,
+cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the
+Grand Caņon, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as
+the Caņon.
+
+If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains,
+which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to
+the Grand Caņon. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands,
+dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way
+we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from
+Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the
+footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa.
+
+"We love you," exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government
+doctor interpreted for us), "we love you with all our hearts and have
+come down to wish you a good-by."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE GRAND CAŅON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS
+
+
+The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land
+comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified
+Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round
+Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Caņon, and the western slope
+between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.
+
+Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than
+to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and
+then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the
+wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of
+2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think
+you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on
+a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but
+with pictographs resembling the ancient Phoenician signs from which
+our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed
+the caņons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings
+round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there
+are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet
+high in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of
+Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the
+Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a
+great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge
+meteorite.
+
+Of the Grand Caņon little need be said here; not because there is
+nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all
+the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You
+can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole
+length of the Grand Caņon--200 miles--and hundreds of the lesser caņons
+that strike off sidewise from Grand Caņon are still unexplored and
+unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on
+down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in
+from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp
+holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit
+and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and
+forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An
+average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified
+Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff
+dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Caņon and
+100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland
+Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own
+Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National Forests are not the
+People's Playground of _all_ America; that they do not belong to the
+East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned
+in maintaining and protecting them?
+
+You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana
+admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to
+another--both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in
+a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from
+$1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the
+charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges
+varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The
+hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made,
+with the greatest ease in a day.
+
+Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big
+knock-you-down variety! To go from the spacious glories of the boundless
+Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is
+like passing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery,
+London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go
+looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like
+Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied
+wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come
+away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as
+much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in
+the Painted Desert.
+
+In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to
+reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic,
+sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light,
+when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and
+cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when
+you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see
+whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by
+spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the
+shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and
+wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.
+Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars
+on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods
+of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the
+gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a
+tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and
+someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both
+ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent
+trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we
+went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and
+he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants
+must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of
+big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply
+buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and
+broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no
+excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.
+The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are
+unknown. Only water--oceans and æons of water--could have rolled and
+swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient
+sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a
+sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and
+that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop
+making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.
+
+[Illustration: There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Caņon
+in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and
+been disappointed]
+
+But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a
+prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of
+petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of
+the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands,
+caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.
+Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in
+blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and
+primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same
+colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard
+you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard,
+fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This
+hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified
+Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the
+petrified wood was exploited commercially and shipped away in carloads
+to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any
+of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood
+required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a
+hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the
+Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.
+
+You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a prone
+giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130
+feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an
+emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a
+child--picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been
+a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into
+colored diamonds.
+
+I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if
+you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every
+single bit of rock is ashine with the colors of broken rainbows; or go
+there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of
+light--there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big
+thrill with a capital "B."
+
+There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which
+you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All
+these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was
+a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana,
+was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert
+Potter of the Forestry Department, Washington, who rescued Sheriff Woods
+of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days.
+Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others
+he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man
+and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At
+Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000
+worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and
+Scott and Wilson--mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses
+which they didn't steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on
+the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you'll not
+lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You'll
+find your way in, if you know how; and if you don't know how, no man can
+teach you. And at Adamana, don't forget to see the pictograph rocks.
+Then you'll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity
+of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.
+
+Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the
+gateway to many Aztec ruins--much more easily accessible to the public
+than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by
+easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Caņon. These differ from the
+Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken
+advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable precipices
+and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not
+so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation.
+The débris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe
+brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice
+into Walnut Caņon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation
+would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the
+débris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes' scratching over of
+one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum shell that from the
+perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service
+has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government
+might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some
+slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and
+suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling
+gray stone caņons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of
+these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff
+houses--hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At
+the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark caņon was evidently once a
+stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race;
+and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.
+
+Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma's Castle and
+Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6
+a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle and the Well, where
+you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.
+
+It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the
+Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks
+of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an
+easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of
+the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a
+ranch house in a cool caņon where health and holiday seekers can stay
+all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to
+the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the
+creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you
+drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at
+Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived
+up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp
+outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month
+as it now has between 100 and 200.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When you reach the Grand Caņon, you have come to the uttermost wonder of
+the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America.
+There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no
+one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Caņon and gone away
+disappointed. If the Grand Caņon were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe
+to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who
+yearly throng Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year
+visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.
+
+You can do the Caņon cheaply, or you can do it extravagantly. You can go
+to it by driving across the Painted Desert, 200 miles; or motoring in
+from Flagstaff--a half-day trip; or by train from Williams, return
+ticket something more than $5. Or you can take your own pack horses, and
+ride in yourself; or you can employ one of the well known local trail
+makers and guides, like John Bass, and go off up the Caņon on a camping
+trip of weeks or months.
+
+Once you reach the rim of the Caņon, you can camp under your own tent
+roof and cater your own meals. Or you may go to the big hotel and pay $4
+to $15 a day. Or you may get tent quarters at the Bright Angel Camp--$1
+a day, and whatever you pay for your meals. Or you may join one of John
+Bass' Camps which will cost from $4 up, according to the number of
+horses and the size of your party.
+
+First of all, understand what the Grand Caņon is, and what it isn't. We
+ordinarily think of a caņon as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks,
+seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very seldom more
+than a few miles long. The Grand Caņon is nearly as long as from New
+York to Canada, as wide as the city of New York is long, and as deep
+straight as a plummet as the Canadian Rockies or lesser Alps are high.
+In other words, it is 217 miles long, from thirteen to twenty wide, and
+has a straight drop a mile deep, or seven miles as the trail zigzags
+down. You think of a caņon as a great trench between mountains. This one
+is a colossal trench with side caņons going off laterally its full
+length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone.
+Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot mountain, you have to go up. At the
+Grand Caņon, you come to the brink of the sagebrush plain and jump
+off--to climb these peaks. Peak after peak, you lose count of them in
+the mist of primrose fire and lilac light and purpling shadows. To climb
+these peaks, you go down, down 7,000 feet a good deal steeper than the
+ordinary stair and in places quite as steep as the Metropolitan Tower
+elevator. In fact, if the Metropolitan Tower and the Singer Building and
+the Flatiron and Washington's Shaft in the Capital City were piled one
+on top of another in a pinnacled pyramid, they would barely reach up
+one-seventh of the height of these massive peaks swimming in countless
+numbers in the color of the Caņon.
+
+So much for dimensions! Now as to time. If you have only one day, you
+can dive in by train in the morning and out by night, and between times
+go to Sunrise Point or--if you are a robust walker--down Bright Angel
+Trail to the bank of the Colorado River, seven miles. If you have two
+days at your disposal, you can drive out to Grand View--fourteen
+miles--and overlook the panorama of the Caņon twenty miles in all
+directions. If you have more days yet at your disposal, there are good
+trips on wild trails to Dripping Springs and to Gertrude Point and to
+Cataract Caņon and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the
+Kaibab Plateau on the other side. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand
+Caņon a year and were not afraid of trailless trips, you could find a
+new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember
+that the Caņon itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral caņons
+uncounted.
+
+When you reach El Tovar you are told two of the first things to do are
+take the drives--three miles each way--to Sunrise and to Sunset Points.
+Don't! Save your dollars, and walk them both. By carriage, the way leads
+through the pine woods back from the rim for three miles to each point.
+By walking, you can keep on an excellent trail close to the rim and do
+each in twenty minutes; for the foot trails are barely a mile long. Also
+by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who
+bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful
+just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and
+upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge
+when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. In fact, if you keep
+looking long enough through that lilac fire above seas of primrose
+mists, you can almost fancy those hoary old gods of Beauty and Power
+floating round angles of the massive lower mountains, shifting the
+scenes and beckoning one another from the wings of this huge
+amphitheater. The space-filling talker is still bawling out about "the
+mighty powers of erosion"; and a thin-faced curate is putting away a
+figure of speech about "Almighty Power" for his next sermon. Personally,
+I prefer the old pagan way of expressing these things in the short cut
+of a personifying god who did a smashing big business with the hammer of
+Thor, or the sea horses of Neptune or the forked lightnings of old
+loud-thundering Jove.
+
+You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the
+Caņon; but unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the
+knees, you'll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the
+way down is steep as a stair and the distance is seven miles. In that
+case, better spend the night at the camp known as the Indian Gardens
+halfway down in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regular
+daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or you can join
+the regular tourist party both going down and coming up. Mainly because
+we wanted to see the sunrise, but also because a big party on a narrow
+trail is always unsafe and a gabbling crowd on a beautiful trail is
+always agony, two of us rose at four A. M. and walked down the trail
+during sunrise, leaving orders for a special guide to fetch mules down
+for us to the river. Space forbids details of the tramp, except to say
+it was worth the effort, twice over worth the effort in spite of knees
+that sent up pangs and protests for a week.
+
+It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if
+rain brings out the colors of the Petrified Forests, you can imagine
+what it does to sunrise in a sea of blood-red mountain peaks. Much of
+the trail is at an angle of forty-five degrees; but it is wide and well
+shored up at the outer edge. The foliage lining the trail was dripping
+wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf in spangles of gold. An
+incense as of morning worship filled the air with the odor of cedars and
+cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds
+below the Caņon rim than above it; and the dawn was filled with snatches
+of song from bluebirds and yellow finches and water ousels, whose notes
+were like the tinkle of pure water. What looked like a tiny red hillock
+from the rim above is now seen to be a mighty mountain, four, five,
+seven thousand feet from river to peak, with walls smooth as if planed
+by the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between
+these peaks would be dignified by the names of caņons. Here, they are
+mere wings to the main stage setting of the Grand Caņon. We reached the
+Indian Garden's Camp in time for breakfast and rested an hour before
+going on down to the river. The trail followed a gentle descent over
+sand-hills and rocky plateaus at first, then suddenly it began to drop
+sheer in the section known as the Devil's Corkscrew. The heat became
+sizzling as you descended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the
+stupendous height and sheer sides of the brilliantly colored gorges and
+masses of shadows above. Then the Devil's Corkscrew fell into a sandy
+dell where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of
+many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst would fill this gorge in
+about a jiffy; but a cloudburst is the last thing on earth you need
+expect in this land of scant showers and no water. Suddenly, you turn a
+rock angle, and the yellow, muddy, turbulent flood of the Colorado
+swirls past you, tempestuous, noisy, sullen and dark, filling the narrow
+caņon with the war of rock against water. What seemed to be mere
+foothills far above, now appear colossal peaks sheer up and down,
+penning the angry river between black walls. It was no longer hot. We
+could hear a thunder shower reverberating back in some of the valleys of
+the Caņon; and the rain falling between us and the red rocks was as a
+curtain to the scene shifting of those old earth and mountain and water
+gods hiding in the wings of the vast amphitheater.
+
+And if you want a wilder, more eery trail than down Bright Angel, go
+from Dripping Springs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great many wild
+mountain trails in the Rockies, North and South; but I have never known
+one that will give more thrills from its sheer beauty and sheer daring.
+You go out round the ledges of precipice after precipice, where nothing
+holds you back from a fall 7,000 feet straight as a stone could drop,
+nothing but the sure-footedness of your horse; out and out, round and
+round peak after peak, till you are on the tip top and outer edge of one
+of the highest mountains in the Caņon. This is the trail of old Louis
+Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the
+center of the Caņon and built his own trail to one of its grandest
+haunts. Louis used to live under the arch formed by the Dripping
+Springs; but Louis has long since left, and the trail is falling away
+and is now one for a horse that can walk on air and a head that doesn't
+feel the sensations of champagne when looking down a straight 7,000 feet
+into darkness. If you like that kind of a trail, take the trip; for it
+is the best and wildest view of the Caņon; but take two days to it, and
+sleep at Louis' deserted camp under the Dripping Springs. Yet if you
+don't like a trail where you wonder if you remembered to make your will
+and what would happen if the gravel slipped from your horse's feet one
+of these places where the next turn seems to jump off into atmosphere,
+then wait; for the day must surely come when all of the Grand Caņon's
+217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American
+public as Egypt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE
+
+
+It lies to the left of the city Plaza--a long, low, one-story building
+flanking the whole length of one side of the Plaza, with big yellow pine
+pillars supporting the arcade above the public walk, each pillar
+surmounted by the fluted architrave peculiar to Spanish-Moorish
+architecture. It is yellow adobe in the sunlight--very old, very sleepy,
+very remote from latter-day life, the most un-American thing in all
+America, the only governor's palace from Athabasca to the Gulf of
+Mexico, from Sitka to St. Lawrence, that exists to-day precisely as it
+existed one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred
+years ago, four hundred years ago--back, back beyond that to the days
+when there were no white men in America. Uncover the outer plaster in
+the six-foot thickness of the walls in the Governor's Palace of Santa
+Fe, and what do you find? Solid adobe and brick? Not much! The
+walled-up, conical fireplaces and meal bins and corn caves of a pueblo
+people who lived on the site of modern Santa Fe hundreds of years before
+the Spanish founded this capital here in 1605. For years it has been a
+dispute among historians--Bandelier, Hodge, Twitchell, Governor Prince,
+Mr. Reed--whether any prehistoric race dwelt where Santa Fe now stands.
+Only in the summer of 1912, when it was necessary to replace some old
+beams and cut some arches through the six-foot walls was it discovered
+that the huge partitions covered in their centers walls antedating the
+coming of the Spaniards--walls with the little conical fireplaces of
+Indian pueblos, with such meal bins and corn shelves as you find in the
+prehistoric cave dwellings.
+
+We have such a passion for destroying the old and replacing it with the
+new in America that you can scarcely place your hand on a structure in
+the New World that stands intact as it was before the Revolution. We
+somehow or other take it for granted that these mute witnesses of
+ancient heroism have nothing to teach us with their mossed walls and
+low-beamed ceilings and dumb, majestic dignity.
+
+[Illustration: The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, within the
+walls of which are found the conical fireplaces of the Indians who lived
+here hundreds of years before the Spaniards came]
+
+To this, the Governor's Palace of Santa Fe is the one and complete
+exception in America. It flanks the cottonwoods of the Plaza, yellow
+adobe in the sunlight--very old, very sleepy, very remote from
+latter-day life, but with a quaint, quiet atmosphere that travelers
+scour Europe to find. Look up to the _vigas_, or beams of the ceiling,
+yellowed and browned and mellowed with age. Those _vigas_ have witnessed
+strange figures stalking the spacious halls below. If the ceiling beams
+could throw their memories on some moving picture screen, there would be
+such a panorama of varied personages as no other palace in the world has
+witnessed. Leave out the hackneyed tale of General Lew Wallace writing
+"Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace; or the fact that three different
+flags flung their folds over old Santa Fe in a single century. He who
+knows anything at all about Santa Fe, knows that Spanish power gave
+place to Mexican, and the Mexican régime to American rule. Also, that
+General Lew Wallace wrote "Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace, while
+he was governor of New Mexico. And you only have to use your eyes to
+know that Santa Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in the modern
+United States of America. The donkeys trotting to market under loads of
+wood, the ragged peon riders bestriding burros no higher than a saw
+horse, the natives stalking past in bright serape or blanket, moccasined
+and hatless--all tell you that you are in a region remote from
+latter-day America.
+
+But here is another sort of picture panorama! It is between 1680 and
+1710.
+
+A hatless youth, swarthy from five years of terrible exposure, hair
+straight as a string, gabbling French but speaking no Spanish, a slave
+white traded from Indian tribe to Indian tribe, all the way from the
+Gulf of Mexico to the interior of New Spain, is brought before the
+viceroy. Do you know who he is? He is Jean L'Archevęque, the
+French-Canadian lad who helped to murder La Salle down on Trinity Bay in
+Texas. What are the French doing down on Trinity Bay? Do they intend to
+explore and claim this part of America, too? In the abuses of slavery
+among the Indians for five years, the lad has paid the terrible penalty
+for the crime into which he was betrayed by his youth. He is scarred
+with wounds and beatings. He is too guilt-stricken ever to return to New
+France. His information may be useful to New Spain; so he is enrolled in
+the guards of the Spanish Viceroy of Santa Fe; and he is sent out to San
+Ildefonso and Santa Clara, where he founds a family and where his
+records may be seen to this day. For those copy-book moralists who like
+to know that Divine retribution occasionally works out in daily life, it
+may be added that Jean L'Archevęque finally came to as violent a death
+as he had brought to the great French explorer, La Salle.
+
+Or take a panorama of a later day. It is just before the fall of Spanish
+rule. The Governor sits in his Palace at Santa Fe, a mightier autocrat
+than the Pope in Rome; for, as the Russians say, "God is high in His
+Heavens," and the King is far away, and those who want justice in Santa
+Fe, must pay--pay--pay--pay in gold coin that can be put in the iron
+chest of the viceroy. (You can see specimens of those iron chests all
+through New Mexico yet--chests with a dozen secret springs to guard the
+family fortune of the hidden gold bullion.) A woman bursts into the
+presence of the Viceroy, and throws herself on her knees. It is a
+terrible tale--the kind of tale we are too finical to tell in these
+modern days, though that is not saying there are not many such tales to
+be told. The woman's young sister has married an officer of the
+Viceroy's ring. He has beaten her as he would a slave. He has treated
+her to vile indecencies of which only Hell keeps record. She had fled to
+her father; but the father, fearing the power of the Viceroy, had sent
+her back to the man; and the man has killed her with his brutalities. (I
+have this whole story from a lineal descendant of the family.) The woman
+throws back her _rebozo_, drops to her knees before the Viceroy, and
+demands justice. The Viceroy thinks and thinks. A woman more or less!
+What does it matter? The woman's father had been afraid to act,
+evidently. The husband is a member of the government ring. Interference
+might stir up an ugly mess--revelations of extortion and so on! Besides,
+justice is worth so much per; and this woman--what has she to pay? This
+Viceroy will do nothing. The woman rises slowly, incredulous. Is this
+justice? She denounces the Viceroy in fiery, impassioned speech. The
+Viceroy smiles and twirls his mustachios. What can a woman do? The woman
+proclaims her imprecation of a court that fails of justice. (Do our
+courts fail of justice? Is there no lesson in that past for us?) Do you
+know what she did? She did what not one woman in a million could do
+to-day, when conditions are a thousand fold easier. She went back to her
+home. It was just about where the pretty Spanish house of Mr. Morley of
+the Archæological School stands to-day. She gathered up all the loose
+gold she could and bound it in a belt around her waist. Then she took
+the most powerful horse she had from the kraal, saddled him and rode
+out absolutely alone for the city of Old Mexico--900 miles as the trail
+ran. Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, beset the way. She rode at night and
+slept by day. The trail was a desert waste of waterless, bare, rocky
+hills and quicksand rivers and blistering heat. God, or the Virgin to
+whom she constantly prayed, or her own dauntless spirit, must have
+piloted the way; for she reached the old city of Mexico, laid her case
+before the King's representatives, and won the day. Her sister's death
+was avenged. The husband was tried and executed: and the Viceroy was
+deposed. Most of us know of almost similar cases. I think of a man who
+has repeatedly tried for a federal judgeship in New Mexico, who has
+literally been guilty of every crime on the human calendar. Yet we don't
+at risk of life push these cases to retribution. Is that one of the
+lessons the past has for us? Spanish power fell in New Mexico because
+there came a time when there was neither justice nor retribution in any
+of the courts.
+
+Other panoramas there were beneath the age-mellowed beams of the Palace
+ceiling, panoramas of Comanche and Navajo and Ute and Apache stalking in
+war feathers before a Spanish governor clad in velvets and laces.
+Tradition has it that a Ute was once struck dead in the Governor's
+presence. Certainly, all four tribes wrought havoc and raid to the very
+doors of the Palace. Within only the last century, a Comanche chief and
+his warriors came to Santa Fe demanding the daughter of a leading
+trader in marriage for the chief's son. The garrison was weak, in spite
+of fustian and rusty helmets and battered breastplates and velvet
+doublets and boots half way to the waist--there were seldom more than
+200 soldiers, and the pusillanimous Governor counseled deception. He
+told the Comanche that the trader's daughter had died, and ordered the
+girl to hide. The only peace that an Indian respects--or any other man,
+for that matter--is the peace that is a victory. The Indian suspected
+that the answer was the answer of the coward, a lie, and came back with
+his Comanche warriors. While the soldiers huddled inside the Palace
+walls, the town was raided. The trader was murdered and the daughter
+carried off to the Comanches, where she died of abuse. When these
+tragedies fell on daughters of the Pilgrims in New England, the Saxon
+strain of the warrior women in their blood rose to meet the challenge of
+fate; and they brained their captors with an ax; but no such warrior
+strain was in the blood of the daughters of Spain. By religion, by
+nationality, by tradition, the Spanish girl was the purely convent
+product: womanhood protected by a ten-foot wall. When the wall fell
+away, she was helpless as a hot-house flower set out amid violent winds.
+
+Diagonally across the Plaza from the Governor's Palace stands the old
+Fonda, or Exchange Hotel, whence came the long caravans of American
+traders on the Santa Fe Trail. Behind the Palace about a quarter of a
+mile, was the Gareta, a sort of combined custom house and prison. The
+combination was deeply expressive of Spanish rule in those early days,
+for independent of what the American's white-tented wagon might
+contain--baled hay or priceless silks or chewing tobacco--a duty of $500
+was levied against each mule-team wagon of the American trader. Did a
+trader protest, or hold back, he was promptly clapped in irons. It was
+cheaper to pay the duty than buy a release. The walls of both the Fonda
+and the Gareta were of tremendous thickness, four to six feet of solid
+adobe, which was hard as our modern cement. In the walls behind the
+Gareta and on the walls behind the Palace, pitted bullet holes have been
+found. Beneath the holes was embedded human hair.
+
+Nothing more picturesque exists in America's past than the panorama of
+this old Santa Fe Trail. Santa Fe was to the Trail what Cairo was to the
+caravans coming up out of the Desert in Egypt. Twitchell, the modern
+historian, and Gregg, the old chronicler of last century's Trail, give
+wonderfully vivid pictures of the coming of the caravans to the Palace.
+"As the caravans ascended the ridge which overlooks the city, the
+clamorings of the men and the rejoicings of the bull whackers could be
+heard on every side. Even the animals seemed to participate in the humor
+of their riders. I doubt whether the first sight of Jerusalem brought
+the crusaders more tumultuous and soul-enrapturing joy."
+
+[Illustration: A pool in the Painted Desert whither came thousands of
+goats and sheep, driven by Navajo girls on horseback]
+
+We talk of the picturesque fur trade of the North, when brigades of
+birch canoes one and two hundred strong penetrated every river and lake
+of the wilderness of the Northwest. Let us take a look at these caravan
+brigades of the traders of the Southwest! Teams were hitched tandem to
+the white-tented wagons. Drivers did not ride in the wagons. They rode
+astride mule or horse, with long bull whips thick as a snake skin, which
+could reach from rear to fore team. I don't know how they do it; but
+when the drivers lash these whips out full length, they cause a
+crackling like pistol shots. The owner of the caravan was usually some
+gentleman adventurer from Virginia or Kentucky or Louisiana or Missouri;
+but each caravan had its captain to command, and its outriders to scout
+for Indians. These scouts were of every station in life with morals of
+as varied aspect as Joseph's coat of many colors. Kit Carson was once
+one of these scouts. Governor Bent was one of the traders. Stephen B.
+Elkins first came to New Mexico with a bull whacker's caravan. In the
+morning, every teamster would vie with his fellows to hitch up fastest.
+Teams ready, he would mount and call back--"All's set." An uproar of
+whinnying and braying, the clank of chains, and then the captain's
+shout--"Stretch out," when the long line of twenty or thirty
+white-tented wagons would rumble out for the journey of thirty to sixty
+days across the plains. Each wagon had five yoke of oxen, with six or
+eight extra mule teams behind in case of emergency. About three tons
+made a load. Twenty miles was a good day's travel. Camping places near
+good water and pasturage were chosen ahead by the scouts. Wagons kept
+together in groups of four. In case of attack by Comanche or Ute, these
+wagons wheeled into a circle for defense with men and beasts inside the
+extemporized kraal. Campfires were kept away from wagons to avoid giving
+target to foes. Blankets consisted of buffalo robes, and the rations
+"hard tack," pork and such game as the scouts and sharpshooters could
+bring down. A favorite trick of Indian raiders was to wait till all
+animals were tethered out for pasturage, and then stampede mules and
+oxen. In the confusion, wagons would be overturned and looted.
+
+As the long white caravans came to their journey's end at Santa Fe,
+literally the whole Spanish and Indian population crowded to the Plaza
+in front of the Palace. "Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!"--were
+the shouts ringing through the streets; and Santa Fe's perpetual siesta
+would be awakened to a week's fair or barter. Wagons were lined up at
+the custom house; and the trader presented himself before the Spanish
+governor, trader and governor alike dressed in their best regimentals.
+Very fair, very soft spoken, very profuse of compliments was the
+interview; but divested of profound bows and flowery compliments, it
+ended in the American paying $500 a wagon, or losing his goods. The
+goods were then bartered at a staggering advance. Plain broadcloth sold
+at $25 a yard, linen at $4 a yard, and the price on other goods was
+proportionate. Goods taken in exchange were hides, wool, gold and silver
+bullion, Indian blankets and precious stones.
+
+Travelers from Mexico to the outside world went by stage or private
+omnibus with outriders and guards and sharpshooters. Young Spanish girls
+sent East to school were accompanied by such a retinue of defenders,
+slaves and servants, as might have attended a European monarch; and a
+whole bookful of stories could be written of adventures among the young
+Spanish nobility going out to see the world. The stage fare varied from
+$160 to $250 far as the Mississippi. Though Stephen B. Elkins went to
+New Mexico with a bull whacker's team, it was not long before he was
+sending gold bullion from mining and trading operations out to St. Louis
+and New York. How to get this gold bullion past the highwaymen who
+infested the stage route, was always a problem. I know of one old
+Spanish lady, who yearly went to St. Louis to make family purchases and
+used to smuggle Elkins' gold out for him in belts and petticoats and
+disreputable looking old hand bags. Once, when she was going out in
+midsummer heat, she had a belt of her husband's drafts and Elkins' gold
+round her waist. The way grew hotter and hotter. The old lady unstrapped
+the buckskin reticule--looking, for all the world, like a woman's
+carry-all--and threw it up on top of the stage. An hour later,
+highwaymen "went through" the passengers. Rings, watches, jewels, coin
+were taken off the travelers; and the mail bags were looted; but the
+bandits never thought of examining the old bag on top of the stage, in
+which was gold worth all the rest of the loot.
+
+In those days, gambling was the universal passion of high and low in New
+Mexico; and many a Spanish don and American trader, who had taken over
+tens of thousands in the barter of the caravan, wasted it over the
+gaming table before dawn of the next day. The Fonda, or old Exchange
+Hotel, was the center of high play; but it may as well be acknowledged,
+the highest play of all, the wildest stakes were often laid in the
+Governor's Palace.
+
+Luckily, the passion for destroying the old has not invaded Santa Fe.
+The people want their Palace preserved as it was, is, and ever shall be;
+and the recent restoration has been, not a reconstruction, but a taking
+away of all the modern and adventitious. Where modern pillars have been
+placed under the long front portico, they are being replaced by the old
+_portal_ type of pillar--the fluted capital across the main column
+supporting the roof beams. This type of _portal_ has come in such favor
+in New Mexico that it is being embodied in modern houses for arcades,
+porches and gardens.
+
+The main entrance of the Palace is square in the center. You pass into
+what must have been the ancient reception room leading to an audience
+chamber on the left. What amazes you is the enormous thickness of these
+adobe walls. Each window casement is wider than a bench; and an open
+door laid back is not wider than the thickness of the wall. To-day the
+reception hall and, indeed, the rooms of the center Palace present some
+of the finest mural paintings in America. These have been placed on the
+walls by the Archæological School of America which with the Historical
+Society occupies the main portions of the old building. You see drawings
+of the coming of the first Spanish caravels, of Coronado, of Don Diego
+de Vargas, who was the Frontenac of the Southwest, reconquering the
+provinces in 1680-94, about the same time that the great Frontenac was
+playing his part in French Canada. There are pictures, too, of the
+caravans crossing the plains, of the coming of American occupation, of
+the Moki and Hopi and Zuņi pueblos, of the Missions of which only ruins
+to-day mark the sites in the Jemez, at Sandia, and away out in the
+Desert of Abo.
+
+To the left of the reception room is an excellent art gallery of
+Southwestern subjects. Here, artists of the growing Southwestern School
+send their work for exhibition and sale. It is significant that within
+the last few years prices have gone up from a few dollars to hundreds
+and thousands. Nausbaum's photographic work of the modern Indian is one
+of the striking features of the Palace. Of course, there are pictures by
+Curtis and Burbank and Sharpe and others of the Southwestern School; but
+perhaps the most interesting rooms to the newcomer, to the visitor, who
+doesn't know that we have an ancient America, are those where the mural
+drawings are devoted to the cave dwellers and prehistoric races. These
+were done by Carl Lotave of Paris out on the ground of the ancient
+races. In conception and execution, they are among the finest murals in
+America.
+
+Long ago, the Governor's Palace had twin towers and a chapel. Bells in
+the old Spanish churches were not tolled. They were struck gong fashion
+by an attendant, who ascended the towers. These bells were cast of a
+very fine quality of old copper; and the tone was largely determined by
+the quality of the cast. Old Mission bells are scarce to-day in New
+Mexico; and collectors offer as high as $1,500 and $3,000 for the
+genuine article. Vesper bells played a great part in the life of the old
+Spanish régime. Ladies might be promenading the Plaza, workmen busy over
+their tasks, gamblers hard at the wheel and dice. At vesper call, men,
+women and children dropped to knees; and for a moment silence fell, all
+but the calling of the vesper bells. Then the bells ceased ringing, and
+life went on in its noisy stream.
+
+[Illustration: There are streets in Santa Fe where one may see box-like
+adobe houses beside dwellings of modern architecture]
+
+No account of the Governor's Palace would be complete without some
+mention of the marvels of dress among the dons and doņas of the old
+régime. Could we see them promenading the Plaza and the Palace as they
+paraded their gayety less than half a century ago, we would imagine
+ourselves in some play house of the French Court in its most luxurious
+days. Indians dressed then as they dress to-day, in bright-colored
+blankets fastened gracefully round hip and shoulders. Peons or peasants
+wore serapes, blankets with a slit in the center, over the shoulders.
+Women of position wore not hats but the silk _rebozo_ or scarf, thrown
+over the head with one end back across the left shoulder. On the street,
+the face was almost covered by this scarf. Presumably the purpose was to
+conceal charms; but when you consider the combination of dark eyes and
+waving hair and a scarf of the finest color and texture that could be
+bought in China or the Indies, it is a question whether that scarf did
+not set off what it was designed to conceal. About the shawls used as
+scarfs there is much misconception. These are not of Spanish or Mexican
+make. They come down in the Spanish families from the days when the
+vessels of the traders of Mexico trafficked with China and Japan. These
+old shawls to-day bring prices varying all the way from $200 to $2,000.
+
+The don of fashion dressed even more gayly than his spouse. Jewelry was
+a passion with both men and women; and the finest type of old jewelry in
+America to-day is to be found in New Mexico. The hat of the don was the
+wide-brimmed sombrero. Around this was a silver or gold cord, with a
+gold or silver cockade. The jackets were of colored broadcloth with
+buttons of silver or gold, not brass; but the trousers were at once the
+glory and the vanity of the wearer. Gold and silver buttons ornamented
+the seams of the legs from hip to knee. There were gold clasps at the
+garter and gold clasps at the knee. A silk sash with tasseled cords or
+fringe hanging down one side took the place of modern suspenders.
+Leather leggings for outdoor wear were carved or embossed. A serape or
+velvet cape lined with bright-colored silk completed the costume.
+Bridles and horse trappings were gorgeous with silver, the pommel and
+stirrups being overlaid with it. The bridle was a barbarous silver thing
+with a bit cruel enough to control tigers; and the rowels of the spurs
+were two or three inches long.
+
+No, these were not people of French and Spanish courts. They were people
+of our own Western America less than a century ago; but though they were
+not people of the playhouse, as they almost seem to us, they are
+essentially a play-people. The Spaniard of the Southwest lived, not to
+work, but to play; and when he worked, it was only that he might play
+the harder. Los Americanos came and changed all that. They turned the
+Spanish play-world up side down and put work on top. Roam through the
+Governor's Palace! Call up the old gay life! We undoubtedly handle more
+money than the Spanish dons and doņas of the old days; but
+frankly--which stand for the more joy out of life; those laughing
+philosophers, or we modern work-demons?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE (_Continued_)
+
+
+Of all the traditions clinging round the old Palace at Santa Fe, those
+connected with Don Diego de Vargas, the reconqueror of New Mexico, are
+best known and most picturesque. Yearly, for two and a quarter
+centuries, the people of New Mexico have commemorated De Vargas' victory
+by a procession to the church which he built in gratitude to Heaven for
+his success. This procession is at once a great public festival and a
+sacred religious ceremony; for the image of the Virgin, which De Vargas
+used when he planted the Cross on the Plaza in front of the Palace and
+sang the Te Deum with the assembled Franciscan monks, is the same image
+now used in the theatrical procession of the religious ceremony yearly
+celebrated by Indians, Spanish and Americans.
+
+The De Vargas procession is a ceremony unique in America. The very
+Indians whose ancestors De Vargas' arms subjugated, now yearly reënact
+the scenes of the struggles of their forefathers to throw off white
+rule. Young Mexicans, descendants of the very officers who marched with
+De Vargas in his campaigns of 1692-3-4, take the part of the conquering
+heroes. Costumes, march, religious ceremonies of thanks, public
+festival--all have been kept as close to original historic fact as
+possible.
+
+De Vargas, himself, was to the Southwest what Frontenac was to French
+Canada--a bluff soldier animated by religious motives, who believed only
+in the peace that is a victory, put the fear of God in the hearts of his
+enemies, and built on that fear a superstructure of reverence and love.
+It need not be told that such a character rode rough-shod over official
+red-tape, and had a host of envious curs barking at his heels. They
+dragged him down, for a period of short eclipse, these Lilliputian
+enemies, just as Frontenac's enemies caused his recall by a charge of
+misusing public funds; but in neither case could the charges be
+sustained. Bluff warriors, not counting house clerks, were needed; and
+De Vargas, like Frontenac, came through all charges unscathed.
+
+The two heroes of America's Indian wars--Frontenac of the North, De
+Vargas of the South--were contemporaries. It will be remembered how up
+on the St. Lawrence and among the Mohawk tribes of New York, a wave of
+revolt against white man rule swept from 1642 to 1682. It was not
+unnatural that the red warrior should view with alarm the growing
+dominance and assumption of power on the part of the white. In Canada,
+we know the brandy of the white trader hastened the revolt and added
+horror to the outrages, when the settlements lying round Montreal and
+Quebec were ravaged and burnt under the very cannon mouths of the two
+impotent and terrified forts. The same wave of revolt that scourged
+French Canada in the eighties, went like wild fire over the Southwest
+from 1682 to 1694. Was there any connection between the two efforts to
+throw off white man rule? To the historian, seemingly, there was not;
+but ask the Navajo or Apache of the South about traders in the North,
+and you will be astonished how the traditions of the tribes preserve
+legends of the Athabascan stock in the North, from whom they claim
+descent. Ask a modern Indian of the interior of British Columbia about
+the Navajos, and he will tell you how the wise men of the tribe preserve
+verbal history of a branch of this people driven far South--"those other
+Denes," he will tell you. Traders explain the wonderful way news has of
+traveling from tribe to tribe by the laconic expression, "moccasin
+telegram."
+
+Whether or not the infection of revolt spread by "moccasin telegram"
+from Canada to Mexico, the storm broke, and broke with frightful
+violence over the Southwest. The immediate cause was religious
+interference. All pueblo people have secret lodges held in underground
+_estufas_ or _kivas_. To these ceremonies no white man however favored
+is ever admitted. White men know as little of the rites practiced in
+these lodges by the pueblo people as when Coronado came in 1540. To the
+Spanish governors and priests, the thing was anathema--abomination of
+witchcraft and sorcery and secrecy that risked the eternal damnation of
+converts' souls. There was a garrison of only 250 men at the Palace;
+yet already the church boasted fifty friars, from eleven to seventeen
+missions, and converts by the thousands. But the souls of the holy
+_padres_ were sorely tried by these _estufa_ rites, "_platicas de
+noche_," "night conversations"--the priests called them. Well might all
+New Spain have been disturbed by these "night conversations." The
+subject bound under fearful oath of secrecy was nothing more nor less
+than the total extermination of every white man, woman and child north
+of the Rio Grande.
+
+Some unwise governor--Trevino, I think it was--had issued an edict in
+1675 forbidding the pueblos to hold their secret lodges in the
+_estufas_. By way of enforcing his edict, he had forty-seven of the wise
+men or Indian priests (he called them "sorcerers") imprisoned; hanged
+three in the jail yard of the Palace as a warning, and after severe
+whipping and enforced fasts, sent the other forty-four home. Picture the
+situation to yourself! The wise men or governors of the pueblos are
+always old men elected out of respect for their superior wisdom, men
+used to having their slightest word implicitly obeyed. Whipped, shamed,
+disgraced, they dispersed from the Palace, down the Rio Grande to
+Isleta, west to the city on the impregnable rocks of Acoma, north to
+that whole group of pueblo cities from Jemez to Santa Fe and Pecos and
+Taos. What do you think they did? Fill up the underground _estufas_ and
+hang their heads in shame among men? Then, you don't know the Indian!
+You may break his neck; but you can't bend it. The very first thing they
+did was to gather their young warriors in the _estufas_. Picture that
+scene to yourself, too! An old rain priest at San Ildefonso, through the
+kindness of Dr. Hewitt of the Archæological School, took us down the
+_estufa_ at that pueblo, where some of the bloodiest scenes of the
+rebellion were enacted. Needless to say, he took us down in the day
+time, when there are no ceremonies.
+
+[Illustration: An adobe gateway of old-world charm in Santa Fe]
+
+The _estufa_ is large enough to seat three or four hundred men. It is
+night time. A few oil tapers are burning in stone saucers, the pueblo
+lamp. The warriors come stealing down the ladder. No woman is admitted.
+The men are dressed in linen trousers with colored blankets fastened
+Grecian fashion at the waist. They seat themselves silently on the adobe
+or cement benches around the circular wall. The altar place, whence
+comes the Sacred Fire from the gods of the under world, is situated just
+under the ladder. The priests descend, four or five of them, holding
+their blankets in a square that acts as a drop curtain concealing the
+altar. When all have descended, a trap door of brush above is closed.
+The taper lamps go out. The priests drop their blankets; and behold on
+the altar the sacred fire; and the outraged wise man in impassioned
+speech denouncing white man rule, insult to the Indian gods, destruction
+of the Spanish ruler!
+
+Of the punished medicine men, one of the most incensed was an elderly
+Indian called Popé, said to be originally from San Juan, but at that
+time living in Taos. I don't know what ground there is for it, but
+tradition has it that when Popé effected the curtain drop round the
+sacred fire of the _estufa_ in Taos, he produced, or induced the
+warriors looking on breathlessly to believe that he produced, three
+infernal spirits from the under world, who came from the great war-god
+Montezuma to command the pueblo race to unite with the Navajo and Apache
+in driving the white man from the Southwest. If there be any truth in
+the tradition, it is not hard to account for the trick. Tradition or
+trick, it worked like magic. The warriors believed. Couriers went
+scurrying by night from town to town, with the knotted cord--some say it
+was of deer thong, others of palm leaf. The knots represented the number
+of days to the time of uprising. The man, for instance, who ran from
+Taos to Pecos, would pull out a knot for each day he ran. A new courier
+would carry the cord on to the next town. There was some confusion about
+the untying of those knots. Some say the rebellion was to take place on
+the 11th of August, 1682; others, on the 13th. Anyway, the first blow
+was struck on the 10th. Not a pueblo town failed to rally to the call,
+as the Highlanders of old responded to the signal of the bloody cross.
+New Mexico at this time numbered some 3,000 Spanish colonists, the
+majority living on ranches up and down the Rio Grande and surrounding
+Santa Fe. The captain-general, who had had nothing to do with the
+foolish decrees that produced the revolt, happened to be Don Antonio de
+Otermin, with Alonzo Garcia as his lieutenant. In spite of no women
+being admitted to the secret, the secret leaked out. Popé's son-in-law,
+the governor of San Juan, was setting out to betray the whole plot to
+the Spaniards, when he was killed by Popé's own hand.
+
+Such widespread preparations could not proceed without the Mission
+converts getting some inkling; and on August 9, Governor Otermin heard
+that two Indians of Tesuque out from Santa Fe had been ordered to join a
+rebellion. He had the Indians brought before him in the audience chamber
+on the 10th. They told him all they knew; and they warned him that any
+warrior refusing to take part would be slain. Here, as always in times
+of great confusion, the main thread of the story is lost in a
+multiplicity of detail. Warning had also come down from the alcalde at
+Taos. Otermin scarcely seems to have grasped the import of the news; for
+all he did was to send his own secret scouts out, warning the settlers
+and friars to seek refuge in Isleta, or Santa Fe; but it was too late.
+The Indians got word they had been betrayed and broke loose in a mad
+lust of revenge and blood that very Saturday when the governor was
+sending out his spies.
+
+It would take a book to tell the story of all the heroism and martyrdom
+of the different Missions. Parkman has told the story of the martyrdom
+of the Jesuits in French Canada; and many other books have been written
+on the subject. No Parkman has yet risen to tell the story of the
+martyrdom of the Franciscans in New Mexico. In one fell day, before the
+captain-general knew anything about it, 400 colonists and twenty-one
+missionaries had been slain--butchered, shot, thrown over the rocks,
+suffocated in their burning chapels. Popé was in the midst of it all,
+riding like an incarnate fury on horseback wearing a bull's horn in the
+middle of his forehead. Apaches and Navajos, of course, joined in the
+loot. At Taos, out of seventy whites, two only escaped; and they left
+their wives and children dead on the field and reached Isleta only after
+ten days' wandering in the mountains at night, having hidden by day. At
+little Tesuque, north of Santa Fe, only the alcalde escaped by spurring
+his horse to wilder pace than the Indians could follow. The alcalde had
+seen the friar flee to a ravine. Then an Indian came out wearing the
+priest's shield; and it was blood-spattered. At Santa Clara, soldiers,
+herders and colonists were slain on the field as they worked. The women
+and children were carried off to captivity from which they never
+returned. At Galisteo, the men were slain, the women carried off.
+Rosaries were burned in bonfires. Churches were plundered and profaned.
+At Santo Domingo, the bodies of the three priests were piled in a heap
+in front of the church, as an insult to the white man faith that would
+have destroyed the Indian _estufas_. Down at Isleta, Garcia, the
+lieutenant, happened to be in command, and during Saturday night and
+Sunday morning, he rounded inside the walls of Isleta seven
+missionaries and 1,500 settlers, of whom only 200 had firearms.
+
+What of Captain-General Otermin, cooped up in the Governor's Palace of
+Santa Fe, awaiting the return of his scouts? The reports of his scouts,
+one may guess. Reports came dribbling in till Tuesday, and by that time
+there were no Spanish left alive outside Santa Fe and Isleta. Then
+Otermin bestirred himself mightily. Citizens were called to take refuge
+in the Palace. The armory was opened and arquebuses handed out to all
+who could bear arms. The Holy Sacrament was administered. Then the
+sacred vessels were brought to the Governor's Palace and hidden. There
+were now 1,000 persons cooped up in the Governor's Palace, less than 100
+capable of bearing arms. Trenches were dug, windows barricaded, walls
+fortified. Armed soldiers mounted the roofs of houses guarding the Plaza
+and in the streets approaching it were stationed cannon.
+
+Having wiped out the settlements, the pueblos and their allies swooped
+down on Santa Fe, led by Juan of Galisteo riding with a convent flag
+round his waist as sash. To parley with an enemy is folly. Otermin sent
+for Juan to come to the Palace; and in the audience chamber upbraided
+him. Juan, one may well believe, laughed. He produced two crosses--a red
+one and a white one. If the Spaniards would accept the white one and
+withdraw, the Indians would desist from attack; if not--then--red stood
+for blood. Otermin talked about "pardon for treason," when he should
+have struck the impudent fellow to earth, as De Vargas, or old
+Frontenac, would have done in like case.
+
+When Juan went back across the Plaza, the Indians howled with joy,
+danced dervish time all night, rang the bells of San Miguel, set fire to
+the church and houses, and cut the water supply off from the yard of the
+Palace. The valor of the Spaniards could not have been very great from
+August 14th to 20th, for only five of the 100 bearing arms were killed.
+At a council of war on the night of August 19th, it was decided to
+attempt to rush the foe, trampling them with horses, and to beat a way
+open for retreat. Otermin says 300 Indians were killed in this rally;
+but it is a question. The Governor himself came back with an arrow wound
+in his forehead and a flesh wound near his heart. Within twenty-four
+hours, he decided--whichever way you like to put it--"to go to the
+relief of Isleta," where he thought his lieutenant was; or "to retreat"
+south of the Rio Grande. The Indians watched the retreat in grim
+silence. The Spanish considered their escape "a miracle." It was a
+pitiful wresting of comfort from desperation.
+
+But at Isleta, the Governor found that his lieutenant had already
+retreated taking 1,500 refugees in safety with him. It was the end of
+September when Otermin himself crossed the Rio Grande, at a point not
+far from modern El Paso. At Isleta, the people will tell you to this day
+legends of the friar's martyrdom. Every Mexican believes that the holy
+_padre_ buried in a log hollowed out for coffin beneath the chapel rises
+every ten years and walks through the streets of Isleta to see how his
+people are doing. Once every ten years or so, the Rio Grande floods
+badly; and the year of the flood, the ghost of the friar rises to warn
+his people. Be that as it may, a few years ago, a deputation of
+investigators took up the body to examine the truth of the legend. It
+lies in a state of perfect preservation in its log coffin.
+
+The pueblos had driven the Spanish south of the Rio Grande and
+practically kept them south of the Rio Grande for ten years. Churches
+were burned. Images were profaned. Priestly vestments decked wild Indian
+lads. Converts were washed in Santa Fe River to cleanse them of baptism.
+All the records in the Governor's Palace were destroyed, and the Palace
+itself given over to wild orgies among the victorious Indians; but the
+victory brought little good to the tribes. They fell back to their
+former state of tribal raid and feud. Drought spoiled the crops; and
+perhaps, after all, the consolation and the guidance of the Spanish
+priests were missed. When the Utes heard that the Spanish had retreated,
+these wild marauders of the northern desert fell on the pueblo towns
+like wolves. There is a legend, also, that at this time there were great
+earthquakes and many heavenly signs of displeasure. Curiously enough,
+the same legends exist about Montreal and Quebec. Otermin hung timidly
+on the frontier, crossing and recrossing the Rio Grande; but he could
+make no progress in resettling the colonists.
+
+Comes on the scene now--1692-98--Don Diego de Vargas. It isn't so much
+what he did; for when you are brave enough, you don't need to do. The
+doors of fate open before the golden key. He resubjugated the Southwest
+for Spain; and he resubjugated it as much by force of clemency as force
+of cruelty. But mark the point--it was _force that did it, not
+pow-wowing and parleying and straddling cowardice with conscience_. De
+Vargas could muster only 300 men at El Paso, including loyal Indians. On
+August 21, 1692, he set out for the north.
+
+It has taken many volumes to tell of the victories of Frontenac. It
+would take as many again to relate the victories of De Vargas. He was
+accompanied, of course, by the fearless and quenchless friars. All the
+pueblos passed on the way north he found abandoned; but when he reached
+Santa Fe on the 13th of September, he found it held and fortified by the
+Indians. The Indians were furiously defiant; they would perish, but
+surrender--never! De Vargas surrounded them and cut off the water
+supply. The friars approached under flag of truce. Before night, Santa
+Fe had surrendered without striking a blow. One after another, the
+pueblos were visited and pacified; but it was not all easy victory. The
+Indians did not relish an order a year later to give up occupation of
+the Palace and retire to their own villages. In December they closed all
+entrances to the Plaza and refused to surrender. De Vargas had prayers
+read, raised the picture of the Virgin on the battle flag, and advanced.
+Javelins, boiling water, arrows, assailed the advancing Spaniards; but
+the gate of the Plaza stockade was attacked and burned. Reinforcements
+came to the Indians, and both sides rested for the night. During the
+night, the Indian governor hanged himself. Next morning, seventy of the
+Indians were seized and court-martialed on the spot. De Vargas planted
+his flag on the Plaza, erected a cross and thanked God.
+
+[Illustration: A view of part of San Ildefonso, New Mexico, showing the
+famous Black Mesa in the background]
+
+One of the hardest fights of '94 was out on the Black Mesa, a huge
+precipitous square of basalt, frowning above San Ildefonso. This mesa
+was a famous prayer shrine to the Indians and is venerated as sacred to
+this day. All sides are sheer but that towards the river. Down this is a
+narrow trail like a goat path between rocks that could be hurled on
+climbers' heads. De Vargas stormed the Black Mesa, on top of which great
+numbers of rebels had taken refuge. Four days the attack lasted, his 100
+soldiers repeatedly reaching the edge of the summit only to be hurled
+down. After ten days the siege had to be abandoned, but famine had done
+its work among the Indians. For five years, the old general slept in his
+boots and scarcely left the warpath. It was at the siege of the Black
+Mesa that he is said to have made the vow to build a chapel to the
+Virgin; and it is his siege of Santa Fe that the yearly De Vargas
+Celebration commemorates to this day. And in the end, he died in his
+boots on the march at Bernalillo, leaving in his will explicit
+directions that he should be buried in the church of Santa Fe "under the
+high altar beneath the place where the priest puts his feet when he says
+mass." The body was carried to the parish church in his bed of state and
+interred beneath the altar; and the De Vargas celebration remains to
+this day one of the quaintest ceremonies of the old Governor's Palace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND AND ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTHWEST
+
+
+As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem
+in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers
+of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in
+armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on
+Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the
+desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare
+mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the
+quicksands. To Taos came Franciscan _padres_ long before Champlain had
+built stockades at Port Royal or Quebec. Just as the Jesuits won the
+wilderness of the up-country by martyr blood, so the Franciscans
+attacked the strongholds of paganism amid the pueblos of the South.
+Spanish _conquistadores_ have been represented as wading through blood
+to victory, with the sword in one hand, the cross in the other; but that
+picture is only half the truth. Let it be remembered that the Spanish
+were the only conquerors in America who gave the Indians perpetual
+title, intact and forever, to the land occupied when the Spanish
+came--which titles the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude
+soldiers, or even officers, might be guilty of such unprovoked attacks
+as occurred at Bernalillo in Coronado's expedition of 1540, the crown
+stood sponsor for the well-being and salvation of the Indian's soul.
+Wherever the conqueror marched, the sandaled and penniless Franciscan
+remained and too often paid the penalty of the soldier's crimes. In the
+Tusayan Desert, at Taos, at Zuņi, at Acoma, you will find Missions that
+date back to the expedition of Coronado; and at every single Mission the
+_padres_ paid for their courage and their faith with their lives.
+
+But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man.
+Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the
+pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people
+from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised
+Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of
+Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the
+Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of
+Eden, "the place of the Morning Glow;" but when war and pestilence and
+ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the
+Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When
+did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos
+thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added,
+they live very much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white
+man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones;
+some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead
+of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations,
+there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The
+whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the
+old _estufas_, or _kivas_, are still used for religious ceremony, and
+election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the
+Indians threshing their grain by the trampling of goats on a threshing
+floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy,
+while a man scrapes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are
+white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of
+Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these
+white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own
+laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own
+prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos
+Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that
+civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman
+Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East;
+but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He
+has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open
+fields and the friendship of his gods--what more can life offer?
+
+Don't leave the Southwest without seeing Taos. It might be part of
+Turkey, or Persia, or India. It is the most un-American thing in
+America; and yet, it is the most typical of those ancient days in
+America, when there was no white man. Just here, before the ethnologist
+arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do
+not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the
+Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute
+legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo
+legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The easiest way to reach Taos is by the ancient city of Santa Fe. You go
+by rail to Servilleta, or Barrancas, then stage it out to the Indian
+pueblos. Better wire for your stage accommodation from the railroad. We
+did not wire, and when we left the railroad, we found seven people and a
+stage with space for only four. The railroad leads almost straight north
+from Santa Fe over high, clear mesas of yellow ocher covered with scrub
+juniper. There is little sign of water after you leave the Rio Grande,
+for water does not flow uphill; and you are at an altitude of 8,000 feet
+when you cross the Divide. You pass through fruit orchards along the
+river, low headed and heavy with apples. Then come the Indian villages,
+San Ildefonso, and Espaņola, and Santa Clara, where the strings of red
+chile bake in the sunlight against the glare adobe. Women go up from
+the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the
+famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail
+across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and
+pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright
+blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment
+stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in
+the shade are the old people--people of a great age, 104 one old woman
+numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you
+are in a region where nothing grows but piņon and juniper. There is not
+a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train
+shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the
+right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black
+basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all
+Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see
+its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran
+down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the
+left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops
+and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes--White Rock
+Caņon--marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers.
+On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge
+cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa
+Clara Indians.
+
+Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more
+sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station;
+and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.
+
+A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at
+this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage--a
+famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn--made eight; and we packed into a
+two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight
+drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been
+driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that
+rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the
+wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede
+them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts
+varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told
+here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild horse. It is a
+combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is
+a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild
+one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles
+but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.
+
+[Illustration: The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace
+their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish
+conquistadores]
+
+Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only
+dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the
+Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds
+scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through
+the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting
+star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines
+of the mountains--wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe,
+coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give
+a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along
+abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land,
+a jumping-off place for all the earth--too high for irrigation farming,
+too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the
+twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties,
+where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is
+too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild
+bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads.
+The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo,
+where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a
+telephone line in.
+
+Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an
+utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls
+amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a
+pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable--then,
+suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has
+come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a
+plummet--two caņons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches
+through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together
+at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old
+friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain
+snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower
+levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another caņon slashed
+through the rocks in a deep trench--both rivers silver in the moonlight,
+with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or
+the waves of the sea.
+
+What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with
+a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump
+off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled
+Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent
+and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern
+adventure.
+
+I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be
+taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists
+have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two caņons are so
+close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one
+picture except from an airship. It is as if the earth were suddenly
+rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend
+tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down!
+The bronchos will manage that, where an Eastern horse would break his
+neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a
+terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the
+Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It
+could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything
+between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the
+places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the
+wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the
+horse, too.
+
+But, before you know it, you have switched round the last turn and are
+rattling across the Bridge. Some Mexican teamsters are in camp below the
+rock wall of the river. The reflection of the figures and firelight and
+precipices in the deep waters calls up all sorts of tales of Arabian
+Nights and road robbers and old lawless days. Then, you pull up sharp at
+the toll house for supper, as quaint an inn as anything in Switzerland
+or the Himalayas. The back of the house is the rock wall of the caņon.
+The front is adobe. The halls are long and low and narrow, with
+low-roofed rooms off the front side only. From the Bridge you can go on
+to Taos by motor in moonlight; but the whole way by stage and motor in
+one day makes a hard trip, and there is as much of interest at the
+Bridge as at Taos. You don't expect to find settlers in this dim silver
+underworld, do you? Well, drive a few miles up the Arroyo Hondo, where
+the stream widens out into garden patch farms, and you will find as odd
+specimens of isolated humans as exist anywhere in the world--relics of
+the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle
+Ages--Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or Crucifixion people, who yearly at
+Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the Cross, and until
+very recent years even re-enacted the Crucifixion.
+
+After supper we strolled out down the caņon. It is impossible to
+exaggerate its beauty. Each gash is only the width of the river with
+sides straight as walls. The walls are yellow and black basalt, all
+spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the frosts.
+The rivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from
+the springs in the snows. Snows and clear water and frost in the Desert?
+Yes: that is as the Desert is in reality, not in geography books. Below
+the Bridge, you can follow the Rio Grande down to some famous hot
+springs; and in this section, the air is literally spicy with the oil of
+sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the
+rapids, and you may catch the lilt of a mocking-bird, or see a bluebird
+examining some frost-touched berries. It is October; but the
+goldfinches, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads
+here.
+
+The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the
+Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a
+people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The
+houses of the Arroyo Hondo are very small and very poor; for the
+Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The
+orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have
+been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if
+living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a
+peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the
+Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders
+that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in
+the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are
+practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light--La Luz--and the
+Brothers of the Darkness--Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as
+Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one
+narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of
+membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death
+occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After
+Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final
+services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break
+the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to
+help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that
+politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get
+patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill
+above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where
+Penitentes have whipped themselves senseless with cactus belts, or
+dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring--1912--a
+woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby
+was bound. We passed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died
+from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907.
+
+The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the
+Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their
+naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers
+with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general
+congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop
+to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? "To appease divine
+wrath," they say; but they might ask us--why have we dipsomaniacs and
+kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because "Julia
+O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their
+skins." Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of
+emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are
+only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow caņon shut off
+from the rest of the world.
+
+They were not dolorous emotions that found vent as we drove back down
+Arroyo Hondo to the Bridge. Our driver got out a mouth organ. Then he
+played and sang snatches of dance tunes of the old, old days in the True
+West.
+
+    "Allamahoo, right hand to your partner
+    And grand hodoo."
+
+    "Watch your partner and watch her close;
+    And when you catch her, a double doze."
+
+    "The cock flies out and the hen flies in--
+    All hands round and go it agen."
+
+In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted
+and pristine on the trip to Taos.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA
+
+
+Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso--these were to the Southwest what Port Royal,
+Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and
+Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the
+Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of
+the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the
+watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish
+territory in the wilderness land of the New World.
+
+Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders
+from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader
+trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon.
+Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and
+Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads
+and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven
+blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish
+bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three
+Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains
+round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers from the
+peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley
+with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the
+mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the
+trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos
+was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of
+forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. "Walled city,"
+you say, "before the coming of white men to the West?" Yes, you can see
+those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540
+by hundreds of years.
+
+No motor can climb up and down the steep switchback to the Arroyo Hondo
+of the Bridge. Cars taken over that trail must be towed; but from the
+Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the
+river bed, you see the mountains ahead rise in black basalt like
+castellated walls, with tower and battlement jagged into the very
+clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where
+frost has touched the foliage; and you haven't gone very many miles into
+the lilac mist of the morning light--shimmering as it always shimmers
+above the sagebrush blue and sandy gold of the Upper Mesas--before you
+hear the laughter of living waters coming down from the mountain snows.
+One understands why the Indians chose the uplands; while the white man,
+who came after, had to choose the shadowy bottoms of the walled-in
+caņons. Someone, back in the good old days when we were not afraid to be
+poetic, said something about "traveling on the wings of the morning." I
+can't put in words what he meant; but you do it here--going up and up so
+gradually that you don't realize that you are in the lap, not of
+mountains, but of mountain peaks; breathing, not air, but ozone;
+uplifted by a great weight being taken off spirit and body; looking at
+life through rose-colored tints, not metaphorically, but really; for
+there is something in this high rare air--not dust, not moisture--that
+splits white light into its seven prismatic hues. You look through an
+atmosphere wonderfully rare, but it is never clear, white light. It is
+lavender, or lilac, or primrose, or gold, or red as blood according to
+the hours and the mood of hours; and if you want to carry the metaphor
+still farther, you may truthfully add that the hours on these high
+uplands are dancing hours. You never feel time to be a heavy, slow thing
+that oppresses the soul.
+
+[Illustration: Climbing home over your neighbor's roof and bolting your
+door by pulling up the ladder is customary in Taos]
+
+As the streams laugh down from the mountains, ranches grow more and more
+frequent. It is characteristic of the West that you don't cross the
+_acequias_ on bridges. You cross them on two planks, with risk to your
+car if the driver swerve at the steering wheel. All the houses are red
+earth adobe, thick of wall to shut out both heat and cold, with a smell
+of juniper wood in the fireplaces of each room. Much of this
+land--nearly all of it, in fact--is owned by the Taos Indians and held
+in common for pasturage and cultivation. Title was given by Spain four
+centuries ago, and the same title holds to-day in spite of white
+squatters' attempt to break down the law by cutting the wire of the
+pasture fences and taking the case to the courts. It was in this way
+that squatters broke down the title of old Spanish families to thousands
+and hundreds of thousands of acres granted before American occupation.
+To be sure, an American land commission took evidence on these titles,
+in the quarrel between Yankee squatter and Spanish don; but the squatter
+had "friends in court." The old Spanish don hadn't. He saw titles that
+had held good from 1540 slipping from his neighbor's hands; and he
+either contested the case to lose out before he had begun, or sold and
+sold at a song to save the wreckage of his fortunes. Of all the Spanish
+land grants originally partitioning off what is now New Mexico, I know
+of only one held by the family of the original grantee; and it is now in
+process of partition. It is an untold page of Southwestern history, this
+"stampeding" of Spanish titles. Some day, when we are a little farther
+away from it, the story will be told. It will not make pleasant reading,
+nor afford a bill of health to some family fortunes of the Southwest.
+Perjuries, assassinations, purchase in open markets of judges drawing
+such small pittances that they were in the auction mart for highest bid,
+forged documents, incendiary fires to destroy true titles--these were
+the least and most decent of the crimes of this era. "Ramona" tells what
+happened to Indian titles in California. Paint Helen Hunt Jackson's
+colors red instead of gray; multiply the crimes by ten instead of two;
+and you have a faint picture of the land-jockey period of New Mexican
+history. Something of this sort is going on at Taos to-day among the
+pueblos for their land, and down at Sacaton among the Pimas for water.
+Treaty guaranteed the Indian his rights, but at Taos the squatter cut
+the pueblo fences and carried the case to court. At Sacaton, the big
+squatter, the irrigation company, took the Pimas' water; so that the
+Indian can no longer raise crops. If you want to know what the courts do
+in these cases, ask the pueblo governor at Taos; or the Pima chief at
+Sacaton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is late September. A parrot calls out in Spanish from the center of
+the patio where our rooms look out on an arcade running round the court
+in a perfect square. A mocking-bird trills saucily from his cage amid
+the cosmos bloom. Donkeys and burros amble past the rear gate with loads
+of wood strapped to their backs. Your back window looks out on the
+courtyard. Your front window faces the street across from a plaza, or
+city square. Stalwart, thick-set, muscular figures, hair banded back by
+red and white scarfs, trousers of a loose, white pantaloon sort, tunic a
+gray or white blanket, wrapped Arab fashion from shoulders to waist,
+stalk with quick, nervous tread along the plaza; for it is the feast of
+Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will
+be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and
+foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia;
+and it is not Palestine; and it is not Spain. It is just plain,
+commonplace America out at Taos--white man's Taos, at the old Columbia
+Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns.
+
+As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and
+poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in
+adobe casement and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner
+patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the
+roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old
+Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been
+called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in
+the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and
+a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the
+Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to
+accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were
+diligently "skied" by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was
+deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself;
+and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they
+to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in
+Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that
+would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler.
+It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is
+sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in
+our own country.
+
+Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old Spanish mansions
+occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street
+entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit
+Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there
+does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine
+where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could
+brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four
+streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are
+alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as
+"alcalde," it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish
+dons lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and
+buckled shoes, and Spanish _conquistadores_ rode past armed cap-ā-pie,
+and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the
+lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you
+will find the deep casement windows very high in the wall. I asked a
+descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. "For
+protection," she said.
+
+"Indians?" I asked.
+
+"No--Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside
+world."
+
+The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town.
+Laguna, Acoma, Zuņi, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert--all lie on
+hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the
+exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley
+among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one
+on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the
+houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they
+are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are
+practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned
+to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two
+huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three
+to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire
+pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the
+village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and
+bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos
+after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You
+see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of
+Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to
+the roofs and can be drawn up--the pueblo way of bolting the door. The
+houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color
+outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly
+inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these
+ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the
+Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls
+over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing
+blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of
+ladders to the very top of a five storied house, and look out. You can
+see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in common. On the
+outskirts of the village, men and boys are threshing, that is--they are
+chasing ponies round and round inside a kraal, with a flag stuck up to
+show which way the wind blows, one man forking chaff with the wind,
+another scraping the grain outside the circle.
+
+Glance inside the houses. The upstairs is evidently the living-room; for
+the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn
+and meal bins, and you can see the _metate_ or stone on which the corn
+is ground by the women as in the days of Old Testament record. Though
+there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in the forties,
+and an old Mission church dating almost from 1540, you can see from the
+roof dozens of _estufas_, where the men are practicing for their dances
+and masked theatricals. Tony, the assistant governor, an educated man of
+about forty who has traveled with Wild West shows, acts as our guide,
+and tells us about the squatters trying to get the Indian land. How
+would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle of your farm and
+fence off 160 acres? The Indians didn't like it, and cut the fences.
+Then the troops were sent out. That was in 1910--a typical "uprising,"
+when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has
+gone to the courts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be settled very soon.
+In fact, Tony likes their own form of government better than the white
+man's. All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is
+not only assistant governor: he is constable to keep white men from
+bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own
+governor. That governor's word is absolutely supreme for his tenure of
+office. Is there a dispute over crops, or cattle? The governor's word
+settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers.
+
+"Supposing the guilty man doesn't obey the governor?" we ask.
+
+"Then we send our own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in
+the lock-up," and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and
+the lock-up. These stocks clamp down a man's head as well as his hands
+and feet. A man with his neck and hands anchored down between his feet
+in a black room naturally wouldn't remain disobedient long.
+
+The method of voting is older than the white man's ballot. The Indians
+enter the _estufa_. A mark is drawn across the sand. Two men are
+nominated. (No--women do not vote; the women rule the house absolutely.
+The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then
+signify their choice by marks on the sand.
+
+Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common;
+but the product of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own
+and not in common--the nearest approach to socialistic life that America
+has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other
+pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far back as the origin
+of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all
+other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact
+with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost
+unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as
+among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but
+the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.
+
+We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know
+him as a _cacique_. Associated with him are the old men--_mayores_, or
+council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the
+lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We
+have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who
+harangue from the housetops, or _estufas_. As women stoop over the
+_metates_ grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The
+chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the
+grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church,
+the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and
+in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never
+been able to learn the ceremonies of the _estufas_.
+
+Women never enter the _estufas_.
+
+Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but
+it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three
+companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez
+expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to
+Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the
+Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they
+reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast,
+undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition
+of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the
+Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de
+Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare
+the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One
+can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made
+between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in
+September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine
+the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When
+Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zuņi, near the modern
+Gallup, he was met with the warning "Go back; or you will be put to
+death." His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zuņi people promptly
+killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the
+lay brothers. Zuņi was called "_cibola_" owing to the great number of
+buffalo skins (_cibolas_) in camp.
+
+Fray Marcos' report encouraged the Emperor of Spain to go on with
+Coronado's expedition. That trip need not be told here. It has been told
+and retold in half the languages of the world. The Spaniards set out
+from Old Mexico 300 strong, with 800 Indian escorts and four priests
+including Marcos and a lay brother. What did they expect? Probably a
+second Peru, temples with walls of gold and images draped in jewels of
+priceless worth. What did they find? In Zuņi and the Three Mesas and
+Taos, small, sun-baked clay houses built tier on tier on top of each
+other like a child's block house, with neither precious stones, nor
+metals of any sort, but only an abundance of hides and woven cloth. When
+the soldiers saw Zuņi, they broke out in jeers and curses at the priest.
+Poor Fray Marcos was thinking more of souls saved from perdition than of
+loot, and returned in shamed embarrassment to New Spain.
+
+Across the Desert to the Three Mesas and the Caņon of the Colorado, east
+again to Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, up to the pueblo town now known
+as the city of Santa Fe, into the Pecos, and north, yet north of Taos,
+Coronado's expedition practically made a circuit of all the Southwest
+from the Colorado River to East Kansas. The knightly adventurers did not
+find gold, and we may guess, as winter came on with heavy snows in the
+Upper Desert, they were in no very good mood; for now began that contest
+between white adventurers and Pueblos which lasted down to the middle of
+the Nineteenth Century. At the pueblo now known as Bernalillo, the
+soldiers demanded blankets to protect them from the cold. The Indians
+stripped their houses to help their visitors, but in the męlée and no
+doubt in the ill humor of both sides there were attacks and insults by
+the white aggressors, and a state of siege lasted for two months.
+Practically from that date to 1840, the pueblo towns were a unit against
+the white man.
+
+[Illustration: A fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has
+not adhered to the native costume]
+
+The last great uprising was just after the American Occupation. Bent,
+the great trader of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, was governor. Kit
+Carson, who had run away from the saddler's trade at sixteen and for
+whom a reward of one cent was offered, had joined the Santa Fe caravans
+and was now living at Taos, an influential man among the Indians.
+According to Col. Twitchell, whose work is the most complete on New
+Mexico and who received the account direct from the governor's daughter,
+Governor Bent knew that danger was brewing. The Pueblos had witnessed
+Spanish power overthrown; then, the expulsion of Mexican rule. Why
+should they, themselves, not expel American domination?
+
+It was January 18, 1847. Governor Bent had come up from Santa Fe to
+visit Taos. He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a
+trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders' rum
+had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to
+the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to
+complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had
+harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion. Governor Bent
+and his family were in bed in the house you can see over to the left of
+the Plaza. In the kraal were plenty of horses for escape, but the
+family were awakened at daybreak by a rabble crowding into the central
+courtyard. Kit Carson's wife, Mrs. Bent, Mrs. Boggs and her children
+hurried into the shelter of an inner room. Young Alfredo Bent, only ten
+years old, pulled his gun from the rack with the words--"Papa, let us
+fight;" but Bent had gone to the door to parley with the leaders.
+
+Taking advantage of the check, the women and an Indian slave dug a hole
+with a poker and spoon under the adobe wall of the room into the next
+house. Through this the family crawled away from the besieged room to
+the next house, Mrs. Bent last, calling for her husband to come; but it
+was too late. Governor Bent was shot in the face as he expostulated;
+clubbed down and literally scalped alive. He dragged himself across the
+floor, to follow his wife; but Indians came up through the hole and down
+over the roof and in through the windows; and Bent fell dead at the feet
+of his family.
+
+The family were left prisoners in the room without food, or clothing
+except night dresses, all that day and the next night. At daybreak
+friendly Mexicans brought food, and the women were taken away disguised
+as squaws. Once, when searching Indians came to the house of the old
+Mexican who had sheltered the family, the rescuer threw the searchers
+off by setting his "squaws" to grinding meal on the kitchen floor. Kit
+Carson, at this time, unfortunately happened to be in California. He was
+the one man who could have restrained the Indians.
+
+The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo Hondo to catch some mule
+loads of whiskey and provisions, which were expected through the narrow
+caņon. The mill where the mules had been unharnessed was surrounded that
+night. The teamsters plugged up windows and loaded for the fray that
+must come with daylight. Seven times the Indians attempted to rush an
+assault. Each time, a rifle shot puffed from the mill and an Indian
+leaped into the air to fall back dead. Then the whole body of 500
+Indians poured a simultaneous volley into the mill. Two of the Americans
+inside fell dead. A third was severely wounded. By the afternoon of the
+second day, the Americans were without balls or powder. The Indians then
+crept up and set fire to the mill. The Americans hid themselves among
+the stampeding stock of the kraal. Night was coming on. The Pueblos were
+crowding round in a circle. The surviving Americans opened the gates and
+made a dash in the dark for the mountains. Two only escaped. The rest
+were lanced and scalped as they ran; and in the loot of the teams, the
+Indians are supposed to have secured some well-filled chests of gold
+specie.
+
+By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five
+companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and
+four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where
+the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait
+his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of a mesa at Santa
+Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of
+the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only
+one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and
+forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date;
+and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the
+narrowing caņons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred
+Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and piņon. The
+soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not
+withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here.
+Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands;
+and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been
+drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered
+great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could
+not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were
+completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the
+walls. A shell was fired--the church wall battered down, and the
+dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feb. 4th, old men,
+women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The
+ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew
+off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss
+was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to
+overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if
+the Indians had not been spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with
+counter plots of their own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in
+white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw
+off white rule--these Pueblos--but for four centuries they have
+withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent
+the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open
+revolt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA
+
+
+If you want to plunge into America's Egypt, there are as many ways to go
+as you have moods. You explain that the ocean voyage is half the
+attraction to European travel. There may be a difference of opinion on
+that, as I know people who would like to believe that the Atlantic could
+be bridged; but if you are keen on an ocean voyage, you can reach the
+Egypt of America by boat to Florida, then west by rail; or by boat
+straight to any of the Texas harbors. By way of Florida, you can take
+your fill of the historic and antique and the picturesque in St.
+Augustine and Pensacola and New Orleans; and if there are any yarns of
+rarer flavor in all the resorts of Europe than in the old quarters of
+these three places, I have never heard of them. You can drink of the
+spring of the elixir of life in St. Augustine, and lose yourself in the
+trenches of old Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, and wander at will in the
+old French town of New Orleans. Each place was once a pawn in the
+gambles of European statesmen. Each has heard the clang of armed
+knights, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other. Each has seen
+the pirate fleet with death's head on the flag at the masthead come
+tacking up the bays, sometimes to be shattered and sunk by cannon shot
+from the fort bastions. Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the
+buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at
+terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who
+was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight
+of her watching father.
+
+But whether you enter the Egypt of America by rail overland, or by sea,
+San Antonio is the gateway city from the south to the land of play and
+mystery. It is to the Middle West what Quebec is to Canada, what Cairo
+is to Egypt--the gateway, the meeting place of old and new, of Latin and
+Saxon, of East and West, of North and South. Atmosphere? Physically, the
+atmosphere is champagne: spiritually, you have not gone ten paces from
+the station before you feel a flavor as of old wine. There are the open
+Spanish plazas riotous with bloom flanked by Spanish-Moorish ruins flush
+on the pavement, with skyscraper hotels that are the last word in
+modernity. Live oaks heavy with Spanish moss hang over sleepy streams
+that come from everywhere and meander nowhere. You see a squad of
+soldiers from Fort Sam Houston wheeling in measured tread around a
+square (only there isn't anything absolutely square in all San Antonio)
+and they have hardly gone striding out of sight before you see a Mexican
+burro trotting to market with a load of hay tied on its back. A motor
+comes bumping over the roads--such roads as only the antique can
+boast--and if it is fiesta time, or cowboy celebration, you are apt to
+see cowboys cutting such figure eights in the air as a motor cannot
+execute on antique pavement.
+
+You enter a hotel and imagine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the
+Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the marble walls isn't gilt;
+and it isn't tapestry. The frieze is a long panel in bronze
+_alto-relievo_. I think it is a testimonial to San Antonio's sense of
+the fitness of things that that frieze is not of Roman gladiators, or
+French gardens with beringed ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of
+the cowboys taking a stampeding herd up the long trail--drifting and
+driving but held together by a rough fellow in top boots and sombrero;
+and the rotunda has a frieze of cowboys because that three
+million-dollar hotel was built out of "cow" money. Old and new, past and
+present, Saxon and Latin, North and South, East and West--that is San
+Antonio. You can never forget it for a minute. It is such a shifting
+panorama as you could only get from traveling thousands of miles
+elsewhere, or comparing a hundred Remington drawings. San Antonio is a
+curious combination of Remington and Alma Tadema in real life; and I
+don't know anywhere else in the world you can get it. There are three
+such huge hotels in San Antonio besides a score of lesser ones, to take
+care of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in
+San Antonio; but remember that while 30,000 seems a large number of
+tourists for one place, that is only one-tenth the number of Americans
+who yearly see Europe.
+
+And never for a moment can you forget that as Cairo is the gateway to
+Eastern travel, so San Antonio is on the road to Old Mexico and all the
+former Spanish possessions of the South. It was here that Madero's band
+of revolutionists lived and laid the plans that overthrew Diaz. Long
+ago, before the days of railway, it was here that the long caravans of
+mule trains used to come with, silver and gold from the mines of Old
+Mexico. It was here the highwaymen and roughs and toughs and scum of the
+earth used to lie in wait for the passing bullion; and it was here the
+Texas Rangers came with short, quick, sharp shrift for rustlers and
+robbers. There is one corner in San Antonio where you can see a Mission
+dating back to the early seventeen hundreds, and not a stone's throw
+away, one of the most famous gambling joints of the wildest days of the
+wild Southwest--the site of the old Silver King, where cowboys and
+miners from the South used to come in "to clean out" their earnings of a
+year, sometimes to ride horses over faro tables, or pot-shot rows of
+champagne. A man had "to smile" when he called his "pardner" pet names
+in the Silver King; or there would be crackle of more than champagne
+corks. Men would duck for hiding. A body would be dragged out, sand
+spread on the floor, and the games went on morning, noon and night. The
+Missions are crumbling ruins. So is the Silver King. Frontiersmen will
+tell you regretfully of the good old days forever gone, when the night
+passed but dully if the cowboys did not shoot up all the saloons and
+"hurdle" the gaming tables.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yesterday, it was cowboy and mines in San Antonio. To-day, it is polo
+and tourist; and the transition is a natural growth. One would hate to
+think of the risks of the Long Trail, for miners from Old Mexico to Fort
+Leavenworth, for cowboys from Fort Worth to Wyoming and St. Louis, and
+not see the risks rewarded in fortunes to these trail makers. The cowboy
+and miner of the olden days--the cowboy and miner who survived, that
+is--are the capitalists taking their pleasure in San Antonio to-day. It
+was natural that the cow pony bred to keeping its feet in mid-air, or on
+earth, should develop into the finest type of polo pony ever known. For
+years, the polo clubs of the North, Lenox, Long Island, Milbrook, have
+made a regular business of scouring Texas for polo ponies. Horses giving
+promise of good points would be picked up at $80, $100, $150. They would
+then be rounded on a ranch and trained. San Antonio is situated almost
+700 feet up on a high, clear plateau rimmed by blue ridges in the
+distance. Recently, a polo ground of 3,200 acres has been laid out; and
+the polo clubs of the North are to be invited to San Antonio for the
+winter fiestas. As Fort Sam Houston boasts one of the best polo clubs of
+the South, competition is likely to attract the sportsmen from far and
+near.
+
+You know how it is in all these new Western cities. They are feverish
+with a mania of progress. They have grown so fast they cannot keep track
+of their own hobble-de-hoy, sprawling limbs. They are drunk with
+prosperity. In real estate alone, fortunes have come, as it were,
+overnight. All this San Antonio has not escaped. They will tell you with
+pardonable pride how this little cow town, where land wasn't worth two
+cents an acre outside the Mission walls, has jumped to be a metropolitan
+city of over 100,000; how it is the center of the great truck and
+irrigation farm district. Fort Sam Houston always has 700 or 800
+soldiers in garrison, and sometimes has as many as 4,000; and when army
+maneuvers take place, there is an immense reservation outside the city
+where as many as 20,000 men can practice mimic war. The day of two cents
+or even $20 an acre land round San Antonio is forever past. Land under
+the ditch is too valuable for the rating of twenty acres to one steer.
+
+All this and more you will see of modern San Antonio; but still if at
+sundown you set out on a vagrant and solitary tour of the old Missions,
+I think you will feel as I felt that it was the dauntless spirit of the
+old régime that fired the blood of the moderns for the new day that is
+dawning. I don't know why it is, but anything in life that is worth
+having seems to demand service and sacrifice and, oftener than not, the
+martyrdom of heroic and terrible defeat. Then, when you think that the
+flag of the cause is trampled in a mire of bloodshed, phoenix-like
+the cause rises on eagles' wings to new height, new daring, new victory.
+It was so in Texas.
+
+When you visit the Missions of San Antonio, go alone; or go with a
+kindred spirit. Don't talk! Let the mysticism and wonder of it sink in
+your soul! Soak yourself in the traditions of the Past. Let the dead
+hand of the Past reach out and touch you. You will live over again the
+heroism of the Alamo, the heroism that preceded the Alamo--that of the
+Franciscans who tramped 300 leagues across the desert of Old Mexico to
+establish these Missions; the heroism that preceded the
+Franciscans--that of La Salle traveling thrice 300 leagues to establish
+the cross on the Gulf of Mexico, and perishing by assassin's hand as he
+turned on the backward march. You will see the iron cross to his memory
+at Levaca. It was because La Salle, the Frenchman, found his way to the
+Gulf, that Spain stirred up the viceroys of New Mexico to send sword and
+cross over the desert to establish forts in the country of the Tejas
+(Texans).
+
+Do you realize what that means? When I cross the arid hills of the Rio
+Grande, I travel in a car cooled by electric fans, with two or three
+iced drinks between meals. These men marched--most of them on foot, the
+cowled priests in sandals, the knights in armor plate from head to
+heel--over cactus sands. Do you wonder that they died on the way? Do you
+wonder that the marchers coming into the well-watered plains of the San
+Antonio with festooned live oaks overhanging the green waters, paused
+here and built their string of Missions of which the chief was the one
+now known as "The Alamo"--the Mission of the cottonwood trees?
+
+[Illustration: An excellent example of the entrance to an adobe house of
+the Southwest, embodying the best traditions of this kind of
+architecture]
+
+Six different flags have flown over the land of the Tejas: the French,
+the Spanish, the Mexican, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate, the
+Union. In such a struggle for ascendancy, needless to tell, much blood
+was shed righteously and unrighteously; but of the battle fought at the
+Alamo, no justification need be given. It is part of American history,
+but it is the kind of history that in other nations goes to make battle
+hymns. Details are in every school book. Santa Ana, the newly risen
+Mexican dictator, had ordered the 30,000 Americans who lived in Texas,
+to disarm. Sam Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis, had sprung to arms with
+a call that rings down to history yet:
+
+     "Fellow citizens and compatriots," wrote Travis from the
+     doomed Alamo Mission, to Houston and the other leaders
+     outside, "I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under
+     Santa Ana. I have sustained a continued bombardment for
+     twenty-four hours and have not lost a man.... The garrison
+     is to be put to the sword if the place is taken. I have
+     answered the summons with a cannon shot and our flag still
+     waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender, nor
+     retreat. I call on you in the name of liberty, and of
+     everything dear to the American character, to come to our
+     aid with all despatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements
+     daily, and will no doubt increase to 3,000 or 4,000 in four
+     or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am
+     determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die
+     like a soldier who forgets not what is due to his own honor
+     and that of his country--Victory or Death!
+
+                        W. Barrett Travis
+                            Lieut.-Col. Commanding."
+
+
+
+In the fort with Travis were 180 men under Bowie and Crockett. The siege
+began on Feb. 23, 1836, and ended on March 6th. Besides the frontiersmen
+in the fort were two women, two children and two slaves. The Mission was
+arranged in a great quadrangle fifty-four by 154 yards with _acequias_
+or irrigation ditches both to front and rear. The garrison had succeeded
+in getting inside the walls about thirty bushels of corn and eighty beef
+cattle; so there was no danger of famine. The big courtyard was in the
+rear. The convent projected out in front of the courtyard. To the left
+angle of the convent was the chapel or Mission of the Alamo. Santa Ana
+had come across the desert with 5,000 men. To the demand for surrender,
+Travis answered with a cannon shot. The Mexican leader then hung the red
+flag above his camp and ordered the band to play "no quarter." For eight
+days, shells came hurtling inside the walls incessantly, dawn to dark,
+dark to dawn. Just at sunset on March 3rd, there was a bell. Travis
+collected his men and gave them their choice of surrendering and being
+shot, or cutting their way out through the besieging line. The
+besiegers at this time consisted of 2,500 infantrymen bunched close to
+the walls of the Alamo--too close to be shot from above, and 2,500
+cavalry and infantry back on the Plaza and encircling the Mission to cut
+off all avenue of escape.
+
+Travis drew a line on the ground with his sword.
+
+"Every man who will die with me, come across that line! Who will be
+first? March!"
+
+Every man leaped over the line but Bowie, who was ill on a cot bed.
+
+"Boys, move my cot over the line," he said.
+
+At four o'clock next morning, the siege was resumed. The bugle blew a
+single blast. With picks, crowbars and ladders, the Mexicans closed in.
+The besieged waited breathlessly. The Mexicans placed the ladders and
+began scaling. The sharpshooters inside the walls waited till the heads
+appeared above the walls--then fired. As the top man fell back, the one
+beneath on the ladder stepped in the dead man's place. Then the
+Americans clubbed their guns and fought hand to hand. By that, the
+Mexicans knew that ammunition was exhausted and the defenders few. The
+walls were scaled and battered down first in a far corner of the convent
+yard. Behind the chapel door, piles of sand had been stacked. From the
+yard, the Texans were driven to the convent, from the convent to the
+chapel. Travis fell shot at the breach in the yard wall. Bowie was
+bayoneted on the cot where he lay. Crockett was clubbed to death just
+outside the chapel door to the left. By nine o'clock, no answering shot
+came from the Alamo. The doors were rammed and rushed. Not a Texan
+survived. Two women, two children and a couple of slaves were pulled out
+of hiding from chancel and stalls. These were sent across to the main
+camp. The bodies of the 182 heroes were piled in a pyramid with fagots;
+and fired. So ended the Battle of the Alamo, one of the most terrible
+defeats and heroic defenses in American history. It is unnecessary to
+relate that Sam Houston exacted from the Mexicans on the battlefield of
+San Jacinto a terrible punishment for this defeat. Captured and killed,
+his toll of defeated Mexicans down at Houston came to almost 1,700.
+
+Such is the story of one of San Antonio's Missions. One other has a tale
+equally tragic; but all but two are falling to utter ruin. I don't know
+whether it would be greater desecration to lay hand on them and save
+them, or let them fall to dust. It was nightfall when I went to the
+three on the outskirts of the city. Two have little left but the walls
+and the towers. A third is still used as place of worship by a little
+settlement of Mexicans. The slant light of sunset came through the
+darkened, vacant windows, the tiers of weathered stalls, the empty,
+twin-towered belfries. You could see where the well stood, the bake
+house, the school. Shrubbery planted by the monks has grown wild in the
+courtyards; but you can still call up the picture of the cowled priests
+chanting prayers. The Missions are ruins; but the hope that animated
+them, the fire, the heroism, the dauntless faith, still burn in Texas
+blood as the sunset flame shines through the dismantled windows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA
+
+
+If someone should tell you of a second Grand Caņon gashed through
+wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very
+high mountains--a second Grand Caņon, where lived a race of little men
+not three feet tall, where wild turkeys were domesticated as household
+birds and every man's door was in the roof and his doorstep a ladder
+that he carried up after him--you would think it pure imagination,
+wouldn't you? The Lilliputians away out in "Gulliver's Travels," or
+something like that? And if your narrator went on about magicians who
+danced with live rattlesnakes hanging from their teeth and belted about
+their waists, and played with live fire without being burned, and walked
+up the faces of precipices as a fly walks up a wall--you would think him
+rehearsing some Robinson Crusoe tale about two generations too late to
+be believed.
+
+Yet there is a second Grand Caņon not a stone's throw from everyday
+tourist travel, wilder in game life and rock formation if not so large,
+with prehistoric caves on its precipice walls where sleeps a race of
+little mummied men behind doors and windows barely large enough to admit
+a half-grown white child. Who were they? No one knows. When did they
+live? So long ago that they were cave men, stone age men; so long ago
+that neither history nor tradition has the faintest echo of their
+existence. Where did they live? No, it was not Europe, Asia, Africa or
+Australia. If it were, we would know about them. As it happens, this
+second Grand Caņon is only in plain, nearby, home-staying America; so
+when boys of the Forest Service pulled Little Zeke out of his gypsum and
+pumice stone dust and measured him up and found him only twenty-three
+inches long, though the hair sticking to the skull was gray and the
+teeth were those of an adult--as it happened in only matter-of-fact,
+commonplace America, poor Little Zeke couldn't get shelter. They
+trounced his little dry bones round Silver City, New Mexico, for a few
+months. Then they boxed him up and shipped him away to be stored out of
+sight in the cellars of the Smithsonian, at Washington. As Zeke has been
+asleep since the Ice Age, or about ten to eight thousand years B. C., it
+doesn't make very much difference to him; but one wonders what in the
+world New Mexico was doing allowing one of the most wonderful specimens
+of a prehistoric dwarf race ever found to be shipped out of the country.
+
+It was in the Gila Caņon that the Forestry Service boys found him. By
+some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy "Zeke." The Gila is a
+typical box-caņon, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the
+Grand Caņon, literally terraced and honeycombed with the cave dwellings
+of a prehistoric race. It lies some fifty miles as the crow flies from
+Silver City; but the way the crow flies and the way man travels are an
+altogether different story in the wild lands of the Gila Mountains.
+You'll have to make the most of the way on horseback with tents for
+hotels, or better still the stars for a roof. Besides, what does it
+matter when or how the little scrub of a twenty-three-inch man lived
+anyway? We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how
+cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave
+men--ask Jack London if you don't believe it--were hairy monsters, not
+quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal
+appendage--hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the
+hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
+That is the way they got their wives. (Perhaps, if Little Zeke could
+speak, he would think he ought to sue moderns for libel. He might think
+that our "blond-beast" theories are a reflex of our own civilization. He
+might smile through his grinning jaws.)
+
+Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements
+of fine woven cloth with fluffy-ruffles and fol-de-rols of woven blue
+jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck. Zeke's people
+understood weaving. Also Zeke wears on his feet sandals of yucca fiber
+and matting. I don't know what our ancestors wore--according to
+evolutionists, it may have been hair and monkey pads. So if you
+understood as much about Zeke's history as you do about the Pyramids,
+you'd settle some of the biggest disputes in theology and ethnology and
+anthropology and a lot of other "ologies," which have something more or
+less to do with the salvation and damnation of the soul.
+
+How is it known that Zeke is a type of a race, and not a freak specimen
+of a dwarf? Because other like specimens have been found in the same
+area in the last ten years; and because the windows and the doors of the
+cave dwellings of the Gila would not admit anything but a dwarf race.
+They may not all have been twenty-four and thirty-six and forty inches;
+but no specimens the size of the mummies in other prehistoric dwellings
+have been found in the Gila. For instance, down at Casa Grande, they
+found skeletons buried in the gypsum dust of back chambers; but these
+skeletons were six-footers, and the roofs of the Casa Grande chambers
+were for tall men. Up in the Frijoles cave dwellings, they have dug out
+of the _tufa_ dust of ten centuries bodies swathed in woven cloth; but
+these bodies are of a modern race five or six feet tall. You have only
+to look at Zeke to know that he is not, as we understand the word, an
+Indian. Was he an ancestor of the Aztecs or the Toltecs?
+
+Though you cannot go out to the Gila by motor to a luxurious hotel,
+there are compensations. You will see a type of life unique and
+picturesque as in the Old World--countless flocks of sheep herded by
+soft-voiced peons. It is the only section yet left in the West where
+freighters with double teams and riders with bull whips wind in and out
+of the narrow caņons with their long lines of tented wagons. It is still
+a land where game is plentiful as in the old days, trout and turkey and
+grouse and deer and bear and mountain lion, and even bighorn, though the
+last named are under protection of closed season just now. I'm always
+afraid to tell an Easterner or town dweller of the hunt of these old
+trappers of the box caņons; but as many as thirteen bear have been
+killed on the Gila in three weeks. The altitude of the trail from Silver
+City to the Gila runs from 6,000 to 9,150 feet. When you have told that
+to a Westerner, you don't need to tell anything else. It means burros
+for pack animals. In the Southwest it means forests of huge yellow
+pines, open upland like a park, warm, clear days, cool nights, and
+though in the desert, none of the heat nor the dust of the desert.
+
+It is the ideal land for tuberculosis, though all invalids should be
+examined as to heart action before attempting any altitude over 4,000
+feet. And the Southwest has worked out an ideal system of treatment for
+tuberculosis patients. They are no longer housed in stuffy hotels and
+air tight, super-heated sanitariums. Each sanitarium is now a tent
+city--portable houses or tents floored and boarded halfway up, with the
+upper half of the wall a curtain window, and a little stove in each
+tent. Each patient has, if he wants it, a little hospital all to
+himself. There is a central dining-room. There is also a dispensary. In
+some cases, there are church and amusement hall. Where means permit it,
+a family may have a little tent city all to itself; and they don't call
+the tent city a sanitarium. They call it "Sun Mount," or "Happy Caņon,"
+or some other such name. The percentage of recoveries is wonderful; but
+the point is, the invalids must come in time. Wherever you go along the
+borders of Old and New Mexico searching for prehistoric ruins, you come
+on these tent cities.
+
+[Illustration: The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras,
+and its top as flat as a billiard table]
+
+Where can one see these cliff and cave dwellings of a prehistoric dwarf?
+Please note the points. Cliff and cave dwellings are not the same. Cliff
+dwellings are houses made by building up the front of a natural arch.
+This front wall was either in stone or sun-baked adobe. Cave dwellings
+are houses hollowed out of the solid rock, a feat not so difficult as it
+sounds when you consider the rock is only soft pumice or tufa, that
+yields to scraping more readily than bath brick or soft lime. The cliff
+dwellings are usually only one story. The cave dwellings may run five
+stories up inside the rock, natural stone steps leading from tier to
+tier of the rooms, and tiny porthole windows looking down precipices 500
+to 1,000 feet. The cliff dwellings are mostly entered by narrow trails
+leading along the ledge of a precipice sheer as a wall. The first story
+of the cave dwellings was entered by a light ladder, which the owner
+could draw up after him. Remember it was the Stone Age: no metals, no
+firearms, no battering rams, nor devices for throwing projectiles. A
+man with a rock in his hand in the doorway of either type of dwelling
+could swiftly and deftly and politely speed the parting guest with a
+brickbat on his head. Similar types of pottery and shell ornament are
+found in both sorts of dwellings; but I have never seen any cliff
+dwellings with evidences of such religious ceremony as in the cave
+houses. Perhaps the difference between cliff folk and cave folk would be
+best expressed by saying that the cliff people were to ancient life what
+the East Side is to us: the cave people what upper Fifth Avenue
+represents. One the riff-raff, the weak, the poor, driven to the wall;
+the other, the strong, the secure and defended.
+
+You go to one section of ruins, and you come to certain definite
+conclusions. Then you go on to another group of ruins; and every one of
+your conclusions is reversed. For instance, what drove these races out?
+What utterly extinguished their civilization so that not a vestige, not
+an echo of a tradition exists of their history? Scientists go up to the
+Rio Grande in New Mexico, see evidence of ancient irrigation ditches, of
+receding springs and decreasing waters; and they at once
+pronounce--desiccation. The earth is burning up at the rate of an inch
+or two of water in a century; moisture is receding toward the Poles as
+it has in Mars, till Mars is mostly arid, sun-parched desert round its
+middle and ice round the Poles. Good! When you look down from the cliff
+dwellings of Walnut Caņon, near Flagstaff, that explanation seems to
+hold good. There certainly must have been water once at the bottom of
+this rocky box-caņon. When the water sank below the level of the
+springs, the people had to move out. Very well! You come on down to the
+cave dwellings of the Gila. The bottom falls out of your explanation,
+for there is a perpetual gush of water down these rock walls from
+unfailing mountain springs. Why, then, did the race of little people
+move out? What wiped them out? Why they moved in one can easily
+understand. The box caņons are so narrow that half a dozen pigmy boys
+deft with a sling and stones could keep out an army of enemies. The
+houses were so built that a child could defend the doorway with a club;
+and where the houses have long hallways and stairs as in Casa Grande,
+the passages are so narrow as to compel an enemy to wiggle sideways; and
+one can guess the inmates would not be idle while the venturesome
+intruder was wedging himself along. Also, the bottoms of these
+box-caņons afforded ideal corn fields. The central stream permitted easy
+irrigation on each side by tapping the waterfall higher up; and the wash
+of the silt of centuries ensured fertility to men, whose plowing must
+have been accomplished by the shoulder blade of a deer used as a hoe.
+
+Modern pueblo Indians claim to be descendants of these prehistoric dwarf
+races. So are we descendants of Adam; but we don't call him our uncle;
+and if he had a say, he might disown us. Anyway, how have modern
+descendants of the dwarf types developed into six-foot modern Pimas and
+Papagoes? It is said the Navajo and Apache came originally from
+Athabasca stock. Maybe; but the Pimas and Papagoes claim their Garden of
+Eden right in the Southwest. They call their Garden of Eden by the
+picturesque name of "Morning Glow."
+
+How reach the caves of the dwarf race?
+
+To the Gila group, you must go by way of Silver City; and better go in
+with Forest Service men, for this is the Gila National Forest and the
+men know the trails. You will find ranch houses near, where you can
+secure board and room for from $1.50 to $2 a day. The "room" may be a
+boarded up tent; but that is all the better. Or you may take your own
+blanket and sleep in the caves. Perfectly safe--believe me, I have fared
+all these ways--when you have nearly broken your neck climbing up a
+precipice to a sheltered cave room, you need not fear being followed.
+The caves are clean as if kalsomined from centuries and centuries of
+wash and wind. You may hear the wolves bark--bark--bark under your
+pillowed doorway all night; but wolves don't climb up 600-foot precipice
+walls. Also if it is cold in the caves, you will find in the corner of
+nearly all, a small, high fireplace, where the glow of a few burning
+juniper sticks will drive out the chill.
+
+What did they eat and how did they live, these ancient people, who wore
+fine woven cloth at an era when Aryan races wore skins? Like all desert
+races, they were not great meat eaters; and the probabilities are that
+fish were tabooed. You find remains of game in the caves, but these are
+chiefly feather decorations, prayer plumes to waft petitions to the
+gods, or bones used as tools. On the other hand, there is abundance of
+dried corn in the caves, of gourds and squash seeds; and every cave has
+a _metate_, or grinding stone. In many of the caves, there are alcoves
+in the solid wall, where meal was stored; and of water jars, urns,
+ollas, there are remnants and whole pieces galore. It is thought these
+people used not only yucca fiber for weaving, but some species of hemp
+and cotton; for there are tatters and strips of what might have been
+cotton or linen. You see it wrapped round the bodies of the mummies and
+come on it in the accumulation of volcanic ash.
+
+Near many of the ruins is a huge empty basin or pit, which must have
+been used as a reservoir in which waters were impounded during siege of
+war. Like conies of the rocks, or beehives of modern skyscrapers, these
+denizens lived. The most of the mummies have been found in sealed up
+chambers at the backs of the main houses; but these could hardly have
+been general burying places, for comparatively few mummies have yet been
+found. Who, then, were these dwarf mummies, placed in sealed vaults to
+the rear of the Gila caves? Perhaps a favorite father, brother, or
+sister; perhaps a governor of the tribe, who perished during siege and
+could not be taken out to the common burial ground.
+
+Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to 700 feet high,
+literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave
+doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-caņons in the Southwest are
+of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and
+gypsum white. Owing to the great altitude--some of the ruins are 9,000
+feet above sea level, 1,000 above valley bottom--the atmosphere has that
+curious quality of splitting white light into its seven prismatic hues.
+Artists of the Southwestern School account for this by the fact of
+desert dust being a silt fine as flour, which acts like crystal or glass
+in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this
+hardly explains these high box-caņons, for there is no dust here. My own
+theory (please note, it is only a theory and may be quite wrong) is that
+the air is so rare at altitudes above 6,000 feet, so rare and pure that
+it splits light up, if not in seven prismatic colors, then in elementary
+colors that give the reds and purples and fire tints predominance.
+Anyway, at sunset and sunrise, these box-caņons literally swim in a
+glory of lavender and purple and fiery reds. You almost fancy it is a
+fire where you can dip your hand and not be burned; a sea in which
+spirits, not bodies, swim and move and have their being; a sea of fiery
+rainbow colors.
+
+The sunset fades. The shadows come down like invisible wings. The
+twilight deepens. The stars prick through the indigo blue of a desert
+sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern
+window and door the deep red of juniper and cedar log glow in the
+fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his
+plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the
+big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a
+metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a
+bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing
+floors in the middle of the narrow caņon. You can see the dancing rings
+yet, where the feet of a thousand years have beaten the raw earth hard.
+Men only dance. These are not sex dances. They are dances of thanks to
+the gods for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases
+clapping. The campfires that scent the caņon with juniper smells,
+flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance
+ceases and fades in the darkness.
+
+That was ten thousand years agone. Where are the races that danced to
+the beat of the priest's clapper gong?
+
+I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail
+of the turtle dove; and there came back that old prophecy--it used to
+give me cold shivers down my spine as a child--that the habitat of the
+races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and
+bat and fox.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the
+Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the
+Morning Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions;
+the scene of their mythical "golden age," when there were no Apaches
+raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a
+perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all
+animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in
+pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water.
+
+Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in
+the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according
+to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the
+Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after
+the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was
+blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa
+Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods.
+The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give
+yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey,
+the Government Custodian of the ruins.
+
+The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive
+out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where
+the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone
+ages.
+
+"How old are they?" I asked my driver, as we passed a huge cactus high
+as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root,
+the great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by
+little desert birds for water.
+
+"Oh, centuries and centuries old," he said; "and the queer part is that
+in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their
+roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the
+bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep
+the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up
+all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that
+big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts;
+settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next
+time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards."
+
+Far as you could look were the little adobe houses and white tents of
+the pioneers, stretching barb wire lines round 160-acre patches of
+mesquite with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for
+a spring. These settlers have to bore down the sixty feet to water level
+with very inadequate tools; and you see little burros chasing homemade
+windlasses round and round, to pump up water. It looks like "the faith
+that lays it down and dies." Slow, hard sledding is this kind of
+farming, but it is this kind of dauntless faith that made Phoenix and
+made Yuma and made Imperial Valley. Twenty years ago, you could squat on
+Imperial Valley Land. To-day it costs $1,000 an acre and yields high
+percentage on that investment. To-day you can buy Casa Grande lands from
+$5 to $25 an acre. Wait till the water is turned in the ditch, and it
+will not seem such tedious work. If you want to know just how hard and
+lonely it is, drive past the homesteads just at nightfall as I did. The
+white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence strung along
+juniper poles and cedar shakes; no house, no stable, no buildings of any
+sort. The horses are staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the
+chip fire. A lantern hangs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles
+ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the
+outlines of another tent--the homesteader's nearest neighbor. Just now
+Casa Grande town boasts 400 people housed chiefly in one story adobe
+dwellings. Come in five years, and Casa Grande will be boasting her ten
+and twenty thousand people. Like mushrooms overnight, the little towns
+spring up on irrigation lands.
+
+You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen miles out--a red
+roof put on by the Government, then a huge, square, four story mass of
+ruins surrounded by broken walls, with remnants of big elevated
+courtyards, and four or five other compounds the size of this central
+house, like the bastions at the four corners of a large, old-fashioned
+walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness--six feet in
+the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade--a thickness
+that in an age of only stone weapons must have been impenetrable. The
+doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend
+almost double to enter; and the supposition is this was to prevent the
+entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome
+visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with _vigas_ of
+cedar strengthened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a
+horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house is laid out
+on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to
+compel passage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled
+scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course,
+open squares off the halls or other rooms; but in addition to these
+openings, you will find close to the floor of each room, little round
+"cat holes," one or two or three of them, big enough for a beam but
+without a beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through
+walls four or five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room
+opposite the fireplace. Fewkes and others think they may have been
+ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blowing back in the room, but
+in Casa Grande they are in rooms where there is no fireplace. Others
+think they were whispering tubes, for use in time of war or religious
+ceremony; but in a house of open doors, would it not have been as simple
+to call through the opening? Yet another explanation is that they were
+for drainage purpose, the cave man's first rude attempt at modern
+plumbing; but that explanation falls down, too; for these openings don't
+drain in any regular direction. Such a structure as Casa Grande must
+have housed a whole tribe in time of religious festival or war; so you
+come back to the explanation of ventilator shafts.
+
+The ceilings of Casa Grande are extraordinarily high; and bodies found
+buried in sealed up chambers behind the ruins of the other compounds are
+five or six feet long, showing this was no dwarf race. The rooms do not
+run off rectangular halls as our rooms do. You tumble down stone steps
+through a passage so narrow as to catch your shoulders into a room deep
+and narrow as a grave. Then you crack your head going up other steps off
+this room to another compartment. Bodies found at Casa Grande lie flat,
+headed to the east. Bodies found in the caves are trussed up knees to
+chin, but as usual the bodies found at Casa Grande have been shipped
+away East to be stored in cellars instead of being left carefully
+glassed over, where they were found.
+
+Lower altitude, or the great age, or the quality of the clays, may
+account for the peculiarly rich shades of the pottery found at Casa
+Grande. The purples and reds and browns are tinged an almost iridescent
+green. Running back from the Great House is a heavy wall as of a former
+courtyard. Backing and flanking the walls appear to have been other
+houses, smaller but built in the same fashion as Casa Grande. Stand on
+these ruined walls, or in the doorway of the Great House, and you can
+see that five such big houses have once existed in this compound. Two or
+three curious features mark Casa Grande. Inside what must have been the
+main court of the compound are elevated earthen stages or platforms
+three to six feet high, solid mounds. Were these the foundations of
+other Great Houses, or platforms for the religious theatricals and
+ceremonials which enter so largely into the lives of Southwestern
+Indians? At one place is the dry bed of a very ancient reservoir; but
+how was water conveyed to this big community well? The river is two
+miles away, and no spring is visible here. Though you can see the
+footpath of sandaled feet worn in the very rocks of eternity, an
+irrigation ditch has not yet been located. This, however, proves
+nothing; for the sand storms of a single year would bury the springs
+four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is
+the old tree growing up out of the center; and that brings up the
+question how we know the age of these ancient ruins--that is, the age
+within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is;
+and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face
+of things, Casa Grande must be thousands of years older than the other
+ruins of the Southwest.
+
+Why?
+
+First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when
+he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great
+House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who
+have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by
+1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great Jesuit, was
+the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he
+gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said mass there about 1694.
+What a weird scene it must have been--the Sacaton Mountains glimmering
+in the clear morning light; the shy Indians in gaudy tunics and yucca
+fiber pantaloons crowding sideways through the halls to watch what to
+them must have been the gorgeous vestments of the priest. Then followed
+the elevation of the host, the bowing of the heads, the raising of the
+standard of the Cross; and a new era, that has not boded well for the
+Pimas and Papagoes, was ushered in. Then the Indians scattered to their
+antelope plains and to the mountains; and the priest went on to the
+Mission of San Xavier del Bac.
+
+The Jesuits suffered expulsion, and Garcez, the Franciscan, came in
+1775, and also held mass in Casa Grande. Garcez says that it was a
+tradition among the Moki of the northern desert that they had originally
+come from the south, from the Morning Glow of Casa Grande, and that they
+had inhabited the box-caņons of the Gila in the days when they were "a
+little people." This establishes Casa Grande as prior to the cave
+dwellings of the Gila or Frijoles; and the cave dwellings were
+practically contemporaneous with the Stone Age and the last centuries of
+the Ice Age. Now, the cave dwellings had been abandoned for centuries
+before the Spaniards came. This puts the cave age contemporaneous with
+or prior to the Christian era.
+
+In the very center of the Casa Grande reservoir, across the doorways of
+caves in Frijoles Caņon, grew trees that have taken centuries to come to
+maturity.
+
+The Indian tradition is that soon after a very great flood of turbulent
+waters, in the days when the Desert was knee-deep in grass, the Indian
+Gods came from the Underworld to dwell in Casa Grande. (Not so very
+different from theories of evolution and transmigration, is it?) The
+people waxed so numerous that they split off in two great families. One
+migrated to the south--the Pimas, the Papagoes, the Maricopas; the
+others crossed the mountains to the north--the Zuņis, the Mokis, the
+Hopis.
+
+Yet another proof of the great antiquity is in the language. Between
+Papago and Moki tongue is not the faintest resemblance. Now if you trace
+the English language back to the days of Chaucer, you know that it is
+still English. If you trace it back to 55 B. C. when the Roman and Saxon
+conquerors came, there are still words you recognize--thane, serf, Thor,
+Woden, moors, borough, etc. That is, you can trace resemblances in
+language back 1,900 years. You find no similarity in dialects between
+Pima and Moki, and very few similarities in physical conformation. The
+only likenesses are in types of structure in ancient houses, and in arts
+and crafts. Both people build tiered houses. Both people make wonderful
+pottery and are fine weavers, Moki of blankets and Pima of baskets; and
+both people ascribe the art of weaving to lessons learned from their
+goddess, the Spider Maid.
+
+There are few fireplaces among the ancient dwellings of the Pimas and
+Papagoes, but lots of fire pits--_sipapus_--where the spirits of the
+Gods came through from the Underworld. Dancing floors, may pole rings,
+abound among the cave dwellings: mounds and platforms and courts among
+the Casa Grande ruins. The sun and the serpent were favored symbols to
+both people, a fact which is easily understood in a cloudless land,
+where serpents signified nearness of water springs, the greatest need of
+the people. You can see among the cave dwellings where earthquakes have
+tumbled down whole masses of front rooms; and both Moki and Papago have
+traditions of "the heavens raining fire."
+
+It has been suggested by scientists that the cliffs were cities of
+refuge in times of war, the caves and Great Houses were permanent
+dwellings. This is inferred because there were no _kivas_ or temples
+among the cliff ruins, and many exist among the caves and Great Houses.
+Cushing and Hough and I think two or three others regard Casa Grande as
+a temple or great community house, where the tribes of the Southwest
+repaired semi-annually for their religious ceremonies and theatricals.
+
+We moderns express our emotions through the rhythm of song, of dance, of
+orchestra, of play, of opera, of art. The Indian had his pictographs on
+the rocks for art, and his pottery and weaving to express his
+craftsmanship; but the rest of his artistic nature was expressed chiefly
+by religious ceremonial or theatrical dance, similar to the old miracle
+plays of the Middle Ages. For instance, the Indians have not only a
+tradition of a great flood, but of a maiden who was drawn from the
+Underworld by her lover playing a flute; and the Flute Clans celebrate
+this by their flute dance. The yearly cleansing of the springs was as
+great a religious ceremony as the Israelites' cleansing of personal
+impurity. Each family belonged to a clan, and each clan had a religious
+lodge, secret as any modern fraternal order.
+
+[Illustration: It isn't America at all! It's Arabia, and the Bedouins of
+the Painted Desert are Navajo boys]
+
+The mask dances of the Southwest are much misunderstood by white people.
+We see in them only what is grotesque or perhaps obscene. Yet the
+spirits of evil and the spirits of goodness are represented under the
+Indian's masked dances, just as the old miracle plays represented Faith,
+Hope, Charity, Lust, Greed, etc. There is the Bird Dance representing
+the gyrations of hummingbird, mocking-bird, quail, eagle, vulture. There
+is the dance of the "mud-heads." Have we no "mud-heads" befuddling life
+at every turn of the way? There is the dance of the gluttons and the
+monsters. Have we no unaccountable monsters in modern life? Read the
+record of a single day's crime; and ask yourself what mad motive tempted
+humans to such certain disaster. We explain a whole rigmarole of motives
+and inheritance and environment. The Indian shows it up by his dance of
+the monsters.
+
+Perhaps one of the most beautiful ceremonials is the corn dance. Picture
+to yourself the _kivas_ crowded with spectators. The priests come down
+bearing blankets in a circle. The blanket circle surrounds the altar
+fire. The audience sits breathless in the dark. Musicians strike up a
+beating on the stone gong. A flute player trills his air. The blankets
+drop. In the flare of the altar fire is seen a field of corn, round
+which the actors dance. The priests rise. The blankets hide the fire. It
+is the Indian curtain drop. When you look again, there is neither
+pageant of dancers, nor field of corn. So the play goes on--a dozen acts
+typifying a dozen scenes in a single night.
+
+Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial
+dances. "If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the
+arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat." "When you go to the
+hunt, travel with a light blanket." We talk of getting back to Mother
+Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth
+Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part
+in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a
+dance.
+
+Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the
+Vandals of Europe--Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great
+Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the
+Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of
+extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such
+heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man
+stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the
+peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard to say; for the white man
+began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of
+slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when
+every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima
+and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What
+does the Indian know of "prior rights" in filing for water? Have not
+these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came
+with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-caņons of the Gila
+and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior
+rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of
+government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped
+the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.
+They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the
+overflow of the torrential rains--that only brings the alkali wash to
+the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no
+longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to
+starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has
+taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally
+protected as they crossed the continent to California.
+
+What are the American people going to do about it? Nothing, of course.
+When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by
+inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article
+about it, or some ethnologist a brochure about an exterminated people.
+Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat
+owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of
+"the Golden Age," "the Morning Glow."
+
+We drove back from Casa Grande by starlight over the antelope plains. I
+looked back to the crumbling ruins of the Great House, and its five
+compounds, where the men and women and children of the Morning Glow came
+to dance and worship according to all the light they had. Its falling
+walls and dim traditions and fading outlines seemed typical of the
+passing of the race. Why does one people pass and another come?
+
+Christians say that those who fear not God, shall pass away from the
+memory of men, forever.
+
+Evolutionists say that those who are not fit, shall not survive.
+
+The Spaniard of the Southwest shrugs his gay shoulders under a tilted
+sombrero hat, and says _Quien sabe?_ "Who knows?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA
+
+
+It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin
+of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise
+comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the
+mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled
+in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams--a mist shot with the
+gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the
+dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in
+the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying
+prone, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as
+the faces of god-like races ever are.
+
+You wind round a juniper grove--"cedars of Lebanon," the Old Testament
+would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come
+down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of
+Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds--only they call them "herders,"
+fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of
+Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms
+shade the ground. And the maidens are there, "drawing water from the
+well," carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of
+perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers,
+hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled.
+
+You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with
+the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,--and a winged horseman spurs
+past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of
+rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red
+chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick
+or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse--that is why
+the Oriental always called an enemy "a dog." Pottery makers look up from
+their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote passerby. The
+basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old
+woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her
+basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight
+strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye;
+and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools.
+
+Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.
+
+You have turned a spur of the Mountains, dipped into a valley, come up
+on the Mesa into the sunlight, and there It is--the eternal mountains
+with their eternal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats
+of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtain where you may paint
+your own pictures of fancy, and in the midst of the great amphitheater
+rises an island rock; and on the island rock is a grotto; and in the
+grotto is the figure of the Mother of Christ--in purplish blue, of
+course, as betokens eternal purity--and below the island of rock in the
+midst of the amphitheater something swims into your ken that is neither
+of Heaven nor earth. White, glaringly white as the very spotlessness of
+Heaven, twin-towered as befitting the dual nature of man, flesh and
+spirit; pointed in its towers and minarets and belfries, betokening the
+reaching of the spirit of Man up to God; lions between the arches of the
+roofed piazzas, as betokening the lion-hearted spirit of Man fighting
+his enemies of Flesh and Spirit up to God!
+
+Palms before arched white walls shut out the world--Peace and Seclusion
+and Purity!
+
+You dip into a valley, the scent of the cedars in your nostrils and
+lungs, the peace of God in your heart. Then you come up to a high mesa
+and you see the vision of the white symbol swimming between earth and
+sky but always pointing skyward.
+
+Where are you, anyway: in Persia amid floating palaces, on the Nile,
+approaching the palaces of Allahabad in India, or coming up to Moorish
+minarets and twin towns of the Alhambra in Spain?
+
+Believe me, you are in neither Europe, Asia, nor Africa. You are in a
+much despised land called "America," whence wealth and culture run off
+to Europe, Asia and Africa, to find what they call "art" and
+"antiquity."
+
+It is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old
+Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been
+falling in torrents. Rain is not supposed to fall in the Desert, but it
+has been coming down in slant torrents and the sky is reflected
+everywhere in the roadside pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for
+the altitude is only 2,000 feet; too high to be languid, too low for the
+sting of autumn frosts.
+
+We motor, first, through the old Spanish town--relics of a grandeur that
+America does not know to-day, a grandeur more of spirit than display.
+The old Spanish grandee never counted his dollars, nor measured up the
+value of a meal to a guest. But he counted honor dear as the Virgin
+Mary, and made a gamble of life, and hated tensely as he loved. The old
+mansion houses are fallen in disrepute, to-day. They are given over, for
+the most part to Chinese and Japanese merchants; but through the open
+windows you can still see plazas and patios of inner courtyards, where
+oleanders are in perpetual bloom and roses climb the trellis work, and
+the parrot calls out "swear words" of Spanish pirate and highwayman. St.
+Augustine Mission, where heroes shed martyr blood, is now a saloon and
+dance hall, but where rags and tatters flaunted from the clothes lines
+of negro and Japanese and Chinese tenant, I could not but think of the
+torn flags that mark the most heroic action of regiments.
+
+[Illustration: The Mission of the San Xavier at Tucson, Arizona, one of
+the most ancient in the New World, has an almost Oriental aspect]
+
+From the Spanish Town of Tucson, which any other nation would have
+treasured as a landmark and capitalized in dollars for the tourist, you
+pass modern mansions that wisely follow the Spanish-Moorish type of
+architecture, most suited to Desert atmosphere.
+
+Then you come on the Tucson Farms Company Irrigation project, now
+sagebrush and cactus land put under the ditch from Santa Cruz River and
+turned over to settlers from Old Mexico--who were driven out by the
+Revolution--for $25 an acre. You see the lonely eyed woman pioneer
+sitting at the door of the tent flap.
+
+Moisture steams up from the river like a morning incense to the sun. The
+Tucson Range of mountains shimmers. Giant cactus stand ghost-like,
+centuries old, amid the mesquite bush; and in the columnar hole of the
+cactus trees you see the holes where the little desert wren has pecked
+through for water in a waterless season.
+
+Then, before you know it, you are in the Papago Indian Reserve. The
+finest basket makers of the world, these Papagoes are. They make baskets
+of such close weave that they will hold water, and you see the Papago
+Indian women with jars--ollas--of water on their head going up and down
+from the water pools. Basket makers weave in front of the sun-baked
+adobe walls where hang the red strings of chile like garlands. On the
+whole, the Indian faces are very happy and good. They do not care for
+wealth, these children of the Desert. Give them "this day their daily
+bread," and they are content, and thank God.
+
+Then the mountains close in a cup round the shimmering valley. In the
+center of the valley rises an island of rock, the rock of the Grotto of
+the Virgin; and a white dome and twin towers show, glare white, almost
+unearthly, with arches pointing to Heaven, and lions in white all along
+the roof typifying the strength that is of God. There is a dome in the
+middle of the roof line--that is the Moorish influence brought in by
+Spain. There are twin towers on each side; and in the towers on the
+right hand side are three brass bells to call to work and matins and
+vespers. It may be said here that the French Mission may always be known
+by its single spire and cross; the Spanish Mission by its twin towers
+and bells. The French Mission rings its bell. The Spanish Mission
+strikes its bells with a hammer or gong. One utters cheer. The other
+sounds a rich, low, mellow call to worship. The walls and pillars and
+arches are all marble white; and you are looking on one of the most
+ancient Missions of the New World--San Xavier del Bac, of Tucson,
+Arizona.
+
+The whole effect is so oriental as to be startling. The white dome might
+be Indian or Persian, but the pointed arches and minarets are
+unmistakably Moorish--that is, Moorish brought across by Spain. The
+entrance is under an arched white wall, and the courtyard looks out
+behind through arched white gateway to the distant mountains.
+
+Here four sisters of St. Joseph conduct a school for the little
+Papagoes; and what a school it is! It might do honor to the Alhambra.
+Palms line the esplanade in front of the arched, walled entrance.
+Collie dogs rise lazily under the deep embrasures of the arched plazas.
+A parrot calls out some Spanish gibberish of bygone days. A snow-white
+Persian kitten frisks its plumy tail across the brick-paved walk of the
+inner patio; and across the courtyard I catch a glimpse of two Shetland
+ponies nosing for notice over a fence beside an ancient Don Quixote nag
+that evidently does duty for dignitaries above Shetland ponies. An air
+of repose, of antiquity, of apartness, rests on the marble white
+Mission, as of oriental dreams and splendor or European antiquity and
+culture.
+
+I ring the bell of the reception room to the right of the church
+entrance. Not a sound but the echo of my own ring! I enter, cross
+through the parlor and come on the Spanish patio or central courtyard.
+What a place for prayers and meditation and the soul's repose! Arched
+promenades line both sides of the inner court. Here Jesuit and
+Franciscan monks have walked and prayed and meditated since the
+Sixteenth Century. By the hum as of busy bees to the right, I locate the
+schoolrooms, and come on the office of the Mother Superior Aquinias.
+
+What a pity so many of us have an early impress of religion as of
+vinegar aspect and harsh duty hard as flint and unhuman as a block of
+wood. This Mother Superior is merry-faced and red-blooded and human and
+dear. She evidently believes that goodness should be warmer, dearer,
+truer, more attractive and kindly than evil; and all the little Indian
+wards of the four schoolrooms look happy and human and red-blooded as
+the Mother Superior.
+
+A collie pup flounders round us up and down the court walk where the old
+missionary monks suffered cruel martyrdom. Poll, the parrot, utters
+sententious comment; and the Shetland ponies whinny greetings to their
+mistress. All this does not sound like vinegar goodness, does it?
+
+But it is when you enter the church that you get the real surprise.
+Three times, the desertion of this Mission was forced by massacre and
+pillage. Twice it was abandoned owing to the expulsion of Jesuit and
+Franciscan by temporal power. For seventy years, the only inhabitants of
+a temple stately as the Alhambra were the night bats, the Indian
+herders, the border outlaws of the United States and Mexico. Yet, when
+you enter, the walls are covered with wonderful mural painting. Saints'
+statues stand about the altar, and grouped about the dome of the groined
+ceiling are such paintings as would do honor to a European Cathedral.
+
+The brick and adobe walls are from two to six feet thick. Not a nail has
+ever been driven in the adobe edifice. The doors are of old wood in huge
+panels mortised and dovetailed together. The latch is an iron bar carved
+like a Damascus sword. The altar is a mass of gilding and purple. To be
+sure, the saints' fingers have been hacked off by wandering cowboy and
+outlaw and Indian; but you find that sort of vandalism in the British
+Museum and Westminster Abbey. The British Museum had careful
+custodians. For over seventy years, this ancient Mission stood open to
+the winds of heaven and the torrential rains and the midnight bats. Only
+the faithfulness of an old Indian chief kept the sacred vessels from
+desecration. When the fathers were expelled for political reasons, old
+José, of the Papagoes, carried off the sacred chalices and candles till
+the _padres_ should return, when he brought them from hiding.
+
+Gothic temples are usually built in one long, clear arch. The roof of
+San Xavier del Bac is a series of the most perfect groined domes, with
+the deep embrasures of the windows on each side colored shell tints in
+wave-lines. Because of the height and depth of the windows, the light is
+wonderfully clear and soft. The church is used now only by Indian
+children; and did Indian children ever have such a magnificent temple in
+which to worship? To the left of the entrance is a wonderful old
+baptismal font of pure copper, which has been the envy of all
+collectors. One wonders looking at the ancient vessel whether it was
+baptized with the blood of all the martyrs who died for San
+Xavier--Francesca Garcez, for instance? There is a window in this
+baptistry, too, that is the envy of critics and collectors. It is set
+more deeply in the wall than any window in the Tower of London, with
+pointed Gothic top that sends shafts of sunlight clear across the
+earthen floor.
+
+From the baptistry I ascended to the upper towers. The stairs are old
+timber set in adobe and brick, through solid walls of a thickness of
+six feet. The view from the belfries above is wonderful. You see the
+mountains shimmering in the haze. You see the little square adobe
+matchbox houses of Papago Indians, with the red chile hanging against
+the wall, and the women coming from the spring, and the men husking the
+corn. You wonder if when San Xavier was besieged and besieged and
+besieged yet again by Apache and Navajo and Pima, the beleaguered
+priests took refuge in these towers, and came down to die, only to save
+their Mission. Against Indian arms, it may be said, San Xavier would be
+an impregnable fortress. Yet the priests of San Xavier were three times
+utterly destroyed by Indians.
+
+When you come to seek the history of San Xavier, you will find it as
+difficult to get, as a guide out to the Mission. As a purely tourist
+resort, leaving out all piety and history, it should be worth hundreds
+of thousands of dollars a year to Tucson. Yet it took me the better part
+of a day to find out that San Xavier is only nine miles and not eighteen
+from Tucson.
+
+And this is typical of the difficulty of getting the real history of the
+place. Jesuit Relations of New France have been published in every kind
+of edition, cheap and dear. Jesuit Relations of New Spain, who knows?
+The Franciscans succeeded the Jesuits; and the Franciscans do not read
+the history of the Jesuits. It comes as a shock to know that Spanish
+_padres_ were on the Colorado and Santa Cruz at the time Jacques
+Cartier was exploring the St. Lawrence. We have always believed that
+Spanish _conquistadores_ slaughtered the Indians most ruthlessly. Study
+the mission records and you get another impression, an impression of
+penniless, friendless, unprotected friars "footing" it 600, 700, 900
+miles from Old Mexico to the inmost recesses of the Desert caņons. In
+late days, when a friar set out on his journey, twenty mounted men acted
+as his escort; and that did not always save him from death; for there
+were stretches of the journey ninety miles without water, infested every
+mile of the way by Apaches; and these stretches were known as the
+Journeys of Death. When you think of the ruthless slaughter of the
+_conquistadores_, think also of the friars tramping the parched sand
+plains for 900 miles.
+
+While Fray Juan de la Asuncion and Pedro Nadol are the first
+missionaries known in Arizona about 1538, Father Kino was the great
+missionary of 1681 to 1690, officiating at the Arizona Missions of San
+Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori. There are reports of the Jesuits being
+among the Apaches as early as 1630--say early as the days of the Jesuits
+in Canada; but who the missionaries were, I am unable to learn.
+Rebellion and massacre devastated the Missions in 1680 and in 1727; but
+by 1754, the missionaries were back at San Xavier and had twenty-nine
+stations commanding seventy-three different pueblos. In 1767, for
+political reasons, the Jesuits suffered expulsion; and the Franciscans
+came in--tramping, as told before, 600 and 900 miles. It was under the
+Franciscans that the present structure of San Xavier was built. Garcez
+was the most famous of the Franciscans. He spent seven years among the
+Pimas and Papagoes and Yumas; but one hot midsummer Sunday--July 17,
+1781--during early mass, the Indians rose and slew four priests, all the
+Spanish soldiers and all the Spanish servants. Garcez was among the
+martyrs. San Xavier, as it at present stands, is supposed to have been
+completed in 1797; but in 1827-9, came another political turnover and
+all foreign missionaries were expelled. Tumacacori and San Xavier were
+always the most important of the Arizona Missions. Originally quite as
+magnificent a structure as San Xavier, Tumacacori has been allowed to go
+to ruin. Of late, it has been made a United States monument. It is a
+day's journey from Tucson.
+
+To describe San Xavier is quite impossible, except through canvas and
+photograph. There is something intangibly spiritual and unearthly in its
+very architecture; and this is the spirit in which it was originally
+built. At daybreak, a bell called the builders to prayers of
+consecration. At nightfall, vesper bells sent the laborer home with the
+blessing of the church. For the most part, the workers were Mexicans and
+Indians; and as far as can be gathered from the annals, voluntary
+workers. The Papagoes and Pimas at that time numbered 5,000, of whom 500
+lived round the Missions, the rest spending the summers hunting in the
+mountains.
+
+[Illustration: On top of the world--a Moki city on a Mesa in the Painted
+Desert. At the left are the ends of a ladder leading from an underground
+council chamber]
+
+When the American Government took over Arizona, San Xavier went under
+the diocese of New Mexico. From Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Tucson was 600
+miles across desert mountains and caņons, every foot of the way infested
+by Apache warriors; and the heroism of that trail was marked by the same
+courage and constancy as signalized the founding and maintenance of the
+other early Spanish Missions.
+
+It would be a mistake to say that San Xavier has been restored.
+Restoration implies innovation; and San Xavier stands to-day as it stood
+in the sixteen hundreds, when Father Kino, the famous mathematician and
+Jesuit from Bavaria, came wandering up from the Missions of Lower
+California, preaching to the Yumas and Pimas of the hot, smoking hot,
+Gila Desert, and held mass in Casa Grande, the Great House or Garden of
+Eden of the Indian's Morning Glow. A lucky thing it is that restoration
+did not imply change in San Xavier; for the Mission floats in the
+shimmering desert air, unearthly, eerie, unreal, a thing of beauty and
+dreams rather than latter day life, white as marble, twin-towered, roof
+domed and so dazzling in the sunlight to the unaccustomed eye that you
+somehow know why rows of restful, drowsy palms were planted in line
+along the front of the wall.
+
+Perhaps it is that it comes on you as such a complete surprise. Perhaps
+it is the desert atmosphere in this cup of the mountains; but all the
+other missions of the Southwest are adobe gray, or earth color showing
+through a veneer of drab whitewash.
+
+There is the giant, century-old desert cactus twisted and gnarled with
+age like the trees in Dante's Inferno, but with bird nests in the
+pillared trunks, where little wrens peck through the bark for water. You
+look again. A horseman has just dismounted beneath the shade of a fine
+old twisted oak; but beyond the oak the vision is there, glare,
+dazzling, white, twin-towered and arched, floating in mid-air, a vision
+of beauty and dreams.
+
+Life seems to sleep at San Xavier. The mountains hemming in the valley
+seem to sleep. The shimmering blue valley sleeps. The sunlight sleeps
+against the glare white walls. The huge old mortised door to the church
+stands open, all silent and asleep. The door of the Mission parlor
+stands open--sunlight asleep on a checkered floor. You enter. Your
+footsteps have an echo of startling impudence--modern life jumping back
+into past centuries! You ring the gong. The sound stabs the sleeping
+silence, and you almost expect to see ghosts of Franciscan friar and
+Jesuit priest come walking along the arcaded pavement of the inner
+courtyard to ask you what all this modern noise is about; but no ghosts
+come. In fact, no one comes. San Xavier is all asleep. You cross through
+the parlor to the inner patio or courtyard, arched all around three
+sides with the fourth side looking through a wonderfully high arched
+gateway out to the far mountains. Polly turns on her perch in her cage,
+and goes back to sleep. The white Persian kitten frisks his
+white-plumed tail; and also turns over and goes to sleep. Two collie
+dogs don't even emit a "woof." They arch their pointed noses with the
+fine old aristocratic air of the unspoken question: what are you of the
+Twenty Century doing wandering back into the mystery and mysticism and
+quietude of the religious sixteen hundred? But if you keep on going, you
+will find the gentle-voiced sisterhood teaching the little Pimas and
+Papagoes in the schoolrooms.
+
+San Xavier, architecturally, is sheer delight to the eye. The style is
+almost pure Moorish. The yard walls are arched in harmony with the
+arched outline of the roof; and in the inner courtyard you will notice
+the Spanish lion at the intersection of all the roof arches. In front of
+the Mission buildings is a walled space of some sixty by forty feet,
+where the Indians used to assemble for discussion of secular matters
+before worship. On the front wall in high relief are placed the arms of
+St. Francis of Assisi, and in the sacristry to the right of the altar
+you will find mural drawings and a painting of Saint Ignatius. Thus San
+Xavier claims as her founders and patrons both Franciscan and Jesuit.
+This is easily explained. The Franciscans came up overland across the
+Desert from the City of Mexico. The Jesuits came up inland from their
+Mission on the Gulf of California. Father Kino, the Jesuit, from a
+Bavarian university, was the first missionary to hold services among the
+Pimas and Papagoes, and if he did not lay the foundations of San
+Xavier, then they were laid by his immediate successors. The escutcheon
+of the Franciscans on the wall is a twisted cord and a cross on which
+are nailed the arms of the Christ and the arm of St. Francis. The Christ
+arm is bare. The Franciscan's arm is covered.
+
+Unlike other Missions built of adobe, San Xavier is of stone and brick.
+It is 100 by thirty feet. The transept on each side of the nave runs out
+twenty-one feet square. The roof above the nave is supported by groined
+arches from door to altar. The cupola above the altar is fifty feet to
+the dome. The other vaults are only thirty feet high. The windows are
+high in the clearstory and set so deeply in the casement that the light
+falling on the mural paintings and fresco work is sifted and softened.
+Practically all the walls, cupola, dome, transept, nave, are covered
+with mural paintings. There is the coming of the Spirit to the
+Disciples. There is the Last Supper. There is the Conception. There is
+the Rosary. There is the Hidden Life of the Lord.
+
+The main altar has evidently been constructed by the Jesuits; for the
+statue of St. Francis Xavier stands below the Virgin between figures of
+St. Peter and St. Paul and God, the Creator. On the groined arches of
+the dome are figures of the Wise Men, the Flight to Egypt, the
+Shepherds, the Annunciation. Gilded arabesques colored in Moorish shell
+tints adorn the main altar. Statues of the saints stand in the alcoves
+and niches of the pillars and vaults. Two small doors lead up to the
+towers from the main door. Look well at these doors and stairways. Not a
+nail has been driven. The doors are mortised of solid pieces. The first
+flight of stairs leads to the choir. Around the choir are more mural
+paintings. Two more twists of the winding stair; and you are in the
+belfry. Twenty-two more steps bring you to the summit of the tower--a
+galleried cupola, seventy-five feet above the ground, where you may look
+out on the whole world.
+
+Pause for a moment, and look out. The mountains shimmer in their pink
+mists. The sunlight sleeps against the adobe walls of the scattered
+Indian house. You can hear the drone of the children from the
+schoolrooms behind the Mission. You can see the mortuary chapel down to
+the right and the lions supporting the arches of the Mission roof.
+Father Kino was a famous European scholar and gentleman. He threw aside
+scholarship. He threw aside comfort. He threw aside fame; and he came to
+found a Mission amid arabs of the American Desert. The hands that
+wrought these paintings on the walls were not the hands of bunglers.
+They were the hands of artists, who wrought in love and devotion. Three
+times, San Xavier was dyed in martyr blood by Indian revolt.
+
+Priests, whose names even have been lost in the chronicles, were
+murdered on the altars here, thrown down the stairs, cut to pieces in
+their own Mission yard. Before a death which they coveted as glory, what
+a life they must have led. To Tucson Mission was nine miles; but to
+Tumacacori was eighty; to Old Mexico, 900. Occasionally, they had escort
+of twelve soldiers for these long trips; but the soldiers' vices made so
+much trouble for the holy fathers that the missionaries preferred to
+travel alone, or with only a lay brother. Sandaled missionaries tramped
+the cactus desert in June, when the heat was at its height; and they
+traversed the mountains when winter snows filled all the passes. They
+have not even left annals of their hardships. You know that in such a
+year, Father Kino tramped from the Gulf of California to the Gila, and
+from the Gila to the Rio Grande. You know in such another year, nineteen
+priests were slain in one day. On such another date, a missionary was
+thrown over a precipice; or slain on the high altar of San Xavier. And
+always, the priests opposed the outrages of the soldiery, the injustice
+of the ruling rings. Father Kino petitions the royal house of Spain in
+1686 that converts be not forcibly seized and "dragged off to slavery in
+the mines, where they were buried alive and seldom survived the abuse."
+He gets a respite from the King for all converts for twenty years. He
+does not permit converts to be taken as slaves in the mines or slaves in
+the pearl fisheries; so the ruling rings of Old Mexico obstruct his
+enterprises, lie about his Missions, slander him to the patrons who
+supply him with money, and often reduce his missions to desperate
+straits; but wherever there is a Mission, Father Kino sees to it that
+there are a few goats. The goats supply milk and meat.
+
+The fathers weave their own clothing, grow their own food, and hold the
+fort against the enemy as against the subtle designs of the Devil. These
+fathers mix their own mortar, make their own bricks, cut their own
+beams, lay the plaster with their own hands. Now, remember that the
+priests who did all this were men who had been artists, who had been
+scholars, who had been court favorites of Europe. Father Kino was,
+himself, of the royal house of Bavaria. But jealousy left the Missions
+unprotected by the soldiers. Soldier vices roused the Indians to fury;
+and the priests were the first to fall victims. Go across the Moki
+Desert. You will find peach orchards planted by the friars; but you
+cannot find the graves of the dead priests. We considered the Apaches a
+dangerous lot as late as 1880. In 1686, in 1687, in 1690, Father Kino
+crossed Apache land alone. I cannot find any record of the Spanish
+Missions at this period ever receiving more than $15,000 a year for
+their support. Ordinarily, a missionary's salary was about $150 a year.
+Out of that, if he employed soldiers, he must pay their wages and keep.
+
+Well, by and by, the jealousy of the governing ring, kept from abusing
+the Indians by the priests, brought about the expulsion of the Jesuits.
+The Franciscans took up the work where the Jesuits left off. Came
+another political upheaval. The Franciscans were driven out. San
+Xavier's broken windows blew to the rains and winds of the seven
+heavens. Cowboys, outlaws, sheep herders, housed beneath mural
+paintings and frescoes that would have been the pride of a European
+palace. Came American occupation; and San Xavier was--not restored--but
+redeemed. It was completely cleaned out and taken over by the church as
+a Mission for the Indians.
+
+To-day, no one worships in San Xavier but the little Indian scholars.
+Look at the drawings of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Wise Men! Look at
+the dreams of faith wrought into the aged and beautiful walls!
+Frankly--let us be brutally frank and truthful, was it all worth while?
+Wouldn't Kino have done better to have continued to grace the courts of
+Bavaria?
+
+In the old days, Pima and Papago roped their wives as in a hunt, and if
+the fancy prompted, abused them to death. On the walls of San Xavier is
+the Annunciation to the Virgin, another view of birth and womanhood. In
+the old days, the Indians killed a child at birth, if they didn't want
+it. On the walls of San Xavier are pictured the wise men adoring a
+Child. Spanish rings and trusts wanted little slaves of industry as
+American rings and trusts want them to-day. Behold a Christ upon the
+walls setting free the slaves! Was it all worth while? It depends on
+your point of view and what you want. Though the winds of the seven
+heavens blew through San Xavier for seventy years and bats habited the
+frescoed arches, it stands to-day as it stood two centuries ago, a thing
+unearthly, of visions and dreams; pointing the way, not to gain, but to
+goodness; making for a little space of time on a little space of Desert
+earth what a peaceful heaven life might be.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut
+
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
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+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Through Our Unknown Southwest
+
+Author: Agnes C. Laut
+
+Release Date: March 15, 2010 [EBook #31646]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><a name="front" id="front"></a></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 388px;">
+<img src="images/fig-001.jpg" width="388" height="650" alt="Montezuma&#39;s Castle, the ruined cliff dwelling on Beaver
+Creek between the Coconino and Prescott National Forests, Arizona" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Montezuma&#39;s Castle, the ruined cliff dwelling on Beaver
+Creek between the Coconino and Prescott National Forests, Arizona</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST</h1>
+
+<h3>
+THE WONDERLAND OF THE UNITED STATES&mdash;LITTLE<br />
+KNOWN AND UNAPPRECIATED&mdash;THE<br />
+HOME OF THE CLIFF DWELLER AND THE<br />
+HOPI, THE FOREST RANGER AND THE NAVAJO,&mdash;THE<br />
+LURE OF THE PAINTED DESERT<br />
+</h3>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>AGNES C. LAUT</h2>
+
+<p class="center">Author of <i>The Conquest of the Great Northwest</i>, <i>Lords of the North</i>
+and <i>Freebooters of the Wilderness</i><br /><br /><br />
+
+NEW YORK<br />
+McBRIDE, NAST &amp; COMPANY<br />
+1913<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1913, By<br />
+McBRIDE, NAST &amp; CO.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Second Printing<br />
+October, 1913</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Published May, 1913</i><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="tocnum">PAGE</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Introduction</span>                                       <span class="tocnum"><a href="#Page_i">i</a></span><br />
+<br />
+I <span class="smcap">The National Forests</span>                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></span><br />
+<br />
+II <span class="smcap">National Forests of the Southwest</span>             <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_22'>22</a></span><br />
+<br />
+III <span class="smcap">Through the Pecos Forests</span>                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_44'>44</a></span><br />
+<br />
+IV <span class="smcap">The City of the Dead</span>                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_60'>60</a></span><br />
+<br />
+V <span class="smcap">The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma</span>                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_78'>78</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VI <span class="smcap">Across the Painted Desert</span>                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_100'>100</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VII <span class="smcap">Across the Painted Desert</span> (<i>continued</i>)       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_116'>116</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VIII <span class="smcap">Grand Ca&ntilde;on and the Petrified Forests</span>      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_137'>137</a></span><br />
+<br />
+IX <span class="smcap">The Governor's Palace of Santa Fe</span>            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_153'>153</a></span><br />
+<br />
+X <span class="smcap">The Governor's Palace</span> (<i>continued</i>)      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_169'>169</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XI <span class="smcap">Taos, the Promised Land</span>                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_183'>183</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XII <span class="smcap">Taos, the Most Ancient City in America</span>      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_196'>196</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XIII <span class="smcap">San Antonio, the Cairo of America</span>          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_214'>214</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XIV <span class="smcap">Casa Grande and the Gila</span>                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_226'>226</a></span><br />
+<br />
+XV <span class="smcap">San Xavier Del Bac Mission</span>                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_251'>251</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+Cliff dwelling ruins, known as Montezuma Castle,      <span class="tocnum"><i><a href="#front">Frontispiece</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="tocnum">FACING PAGE</span><br />
+<br />
+South House of Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on                                     <span class="tocnum"><a href="#Page_ii">ii</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Indian woman making pottery                                      <span class="tocnum"><a href="#Page_xii">xii</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Indian girl of Isleta, N. M.                                      <span class="tocnum"><a href="#Page_xx">xx</a></span><br />
+<br />
+One way of entering the desert                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_4'>4</a></span><br />
+<br />
+In the Coconino Forest of Arizona                                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_14'>14</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Forest ranger fighting a ground fire with his blanket            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_22'>22</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Pueblo boys at play                                              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_34'>34</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_46'>46</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Los Pueblos, Taos, N. M.                                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Entrance to a cliff dwelling                                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_64'>64</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ruins of Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on                                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_74'>74</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Hopi wooing                                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_80'>80</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Hopi weaver                                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_86'>86</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A shy little Hopi maid                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_92'>92</a></span><br />
+<br />
+At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_96'>96</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A handsome Navajo boy                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_106'>106</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Pueblo of Walpi                                             <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_122'>122</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Grand Ca&ntilde;on                                                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_140'>140</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe                               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_154'>154</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A pool in the Painted Desert                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_160'>160</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Street in Santa Fe                                              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_166'>166</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ancient adobe gateway                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_172'>172</a></span><br />
+<br />
+San Ildefonso                                                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_180'>180</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Taos                                                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_188'>188</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Over the roofs of Taos                                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_198'>198</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A metal worker of Taos                                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_208'>208</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A mud house of the Southwest                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_220'>220</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The enchanted Mesa of Acoma                                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_230'>230</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Navajo crossing mesa                                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_246'>246</a></span><br />
+<br />
+At the Mission of San Xavier                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_254'>254</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Moki City on a mesa                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_262'>262</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age&mdash;neolithic,
+paleolithic, troglodytic man&mdash;with a roofless city of the dead lying in
+the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the
+yawning caverns of the cliff face above.</p>
+
+<p>My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in
+the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run
+back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial &aelig;ons when the
+advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas
+where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the
+sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the
+brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.</p>
+
+<p>Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to
+welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance,
+or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on
+his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with
+calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high
+fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a
+flat <i>metate</i> stone with a round grinding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</a></span> stone on top. From the shape
+and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of
+these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water
+jar.</p>
+
+<p>On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to
+apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley
+floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a
+500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush
+with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little
+round "cat holes" through the walls&mdash;"cat holes" for a people who are
+not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from
+room to room through all the walls.</p>
+
+<p>On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside,
+round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed
+serpent&mdash;"Awanya," guardian of the waters&mdash;whose presence always
+presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as
+the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could
+see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about
+in other cave houses are stone "bells" to call to meals or prayers, and
+cobs of corn, and prayer plumes&mdash;owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and
+be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian
+idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People
+lived&mdash;well, when <i>did</i> they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that
+was when the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the
+glacial waters, began.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-012.jpg" width="650" height="337" alt="Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings
+of Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on, after excavation" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings
+of Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on, after excavation</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established," says
+Winchell, the great western geologist, "that implies man during the
+period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is
+as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace
+of man." Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago;
+and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the
+implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial
+silt.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for
+days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; <i>where you can
+literally shake hands with the Stone Age</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound
+like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it
+strong; but it is also meticulously and simply&mdash;true. A few doors away
+from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body&mdash;no, not a mummy! We
+are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to
+find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of
+about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg
+bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth
+from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis
+when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span> were
+skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature
+gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with
+simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair.
+Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black
+hair shiny and lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the
+finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all
+well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in
+which the corpse has lain.</p>
+
+<p>In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which
+arch&aelig;ologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B.
+C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead
+to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last
+year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an
+Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of
+the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.</p>
+
+<p>Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the ca&ntilde;on again! To
+right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow <i>tufa</i>
+precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone
+Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds
+of rooms&mdash;"the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and
+the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces;
+nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest
+there."</p>
+
+<p>Listen! You can almost hear it&mdash;the fulfillment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span> of Isaiah's old
+prophecy&mdash;the lonely "hoo-hoo-hoo" of the turtle dove; and the lonelier
+cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper
+cliffs! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the ca&ntilde;on
+in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez
+Mountains; and one night from my camp in this ca&ntilde;on, I heard the coyotes
+howling from the empty caves.</p>
+
+<p>Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone Age, and the dancing
+floors, and the irrigation canals used to this day, and the stream
+leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a rushing
+torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern
+men's dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Far off to the right, where the worshipers must always have been in
+sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert
+sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise
+blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age
+people who dwelt in this ca&ntilde;on. It is a great concave hollowed out of
+the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the
+highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this
+distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for worshipers when you climb
+the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a
+white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have
+witnessed! I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first
+rays came over the ca&ntilde;on walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal,
+for incense, for water urns, mark<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> the inner walls of this chamber, too.
+Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the
+hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a
+darksome, eerie place with <i>sipapu</i>&mdash;the holes in the floor&mdash;for the
+mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't
+smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has
+driven his nerves too hard in town?&mdash;To go back to the Soil and let Dame
+Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth
+Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Curious how geology and arch&aelig;ology agree on the rise and evanishment of
+these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the
+northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk
+living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were
+forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff.
+That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Arch&aelig;ology says as
+the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache&mdash;Asthapascan stock&mdash;came ramping
+from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the
+inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. "It was not until the nomadic
+robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the
+crowded form of existence," says Arch&aelig;ology. Sounds like an explanation
+of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life,
+doesn't it?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men
+were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse.
+Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for
+thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the ca&ntilde;on, and
+the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and
+Zu&ntilde;i have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of
+corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe.
+Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region&mdash;"place of the bird
+people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years
+before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people
+dispersed.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part
+of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petr&aelig;, or amid the sand-covered columns
+of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging
+excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in
+the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be&mdash;well,
+just <i>au fait</i>, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is
+in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular
+line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2
+a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing
+ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin
+is in the Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on; but there are hundreds,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> thousands, of such
+ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New
+Mexico. By joining the Arch&aelig;ological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out
+to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines
+in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought
+round-trip tickets to our own West and back&mdash;pleasure, not
+business&mdash;over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I
+don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he
+was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the
+amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave&mdash;<i>one</i> to our own wonders,
+to <i>two</i> for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He
+thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific
+Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to
+Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500;
+but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the
+average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to
+$2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous
+discrepancy&mdash;thirty million dollars <i>versus</i> one hundred and twenty
+million. <i>The Statist</i> of London places the total spent by Americans in
+Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and
+twenty million.</p>
+
+<p>Of the 3,700,000 people who went to the Seattle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span> Exposition, it is a
+pretty safe guess that not 100,000 Easterners out of the lot saw the
+real West. What did they see? They saw the Exposition, which was like
+any other exposition; and they saw Western cities, that are imitations
+of Eastern cities; and they patronized Western hotel rotundas and dining
+places, where you pay forty cents for Grand Junction and Hood River
+fruit, which you can buy in the East for twenty-five; and they rode in
+the rubberneck cars with the gramophone man who tells Western variations
+of the same old Eastern lies; and they came back thoroughly convinced
+that there was no more real West.</p>
+
+<p>And so 120,000 Americans yearly go to Europe spending a good average of
+$1,000 apiece. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed,
+though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the
+north to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, with hundreds of peaks which no one has
+climbed and which you can visit for not more than fifty dollars for a
+four weeks' holiday. We tramp through Spain for the picturesque, quite
+oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about
+10,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right down in the heart of
+America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in King
+Alphonso's crown was taken. We rent a "shootin' box in Scotland" at a
+trifling cost of from $1,200 to $12,000 a season, because game is "so
+scarce out West, y' know." Yet I can direct you to game haunts out West
+where you can shoot a grizzly a week at no cost at all but your own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span>
+courage; and bag a dozen wild turkeys before breakfast; and catch
+mountain trout faster than you can string them and pose for a
+photograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor
+boast of what it cost you; for you can do it at two dollars a day from
+start to finish. It would take you a good half-day to count up the
+number of tourist and steamboat agencies that organize sightseeing
+excursions to go and apostrophize the Sphinx, and bark your shins and
+swear and sweat on the Pyramids. Yet it would be a safe wager that
+outside official scientific circles, there is not a single organization
+in America that knows we have a Sphinx of our own in the West that
+antedates Egyptian arch&aelig;ology by 8,000 years, and stone lions older than
+the columns of Phrygia, and kings' palaces of 700 and 1,000 rooms. Am I
+yarning; or dreaming? Neither! Perfectly sober and sane and wide awake
+and just in from spending two summers in those same rooms and shaking
+hands with a corpse of the Stone Age.</p>
+
+<p>A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set out on the
+around-the-world tour that was to give him that world-weary feeling that
+was to make him live happy ever afterwards. In Nagasaki, a little brown
+Jappy-chappie of great learning, who was a prince or something or other
+of that sort, which made it possible for Harvard to know him, asked in
+choppy English about "the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties in y'or
+Souf Wes'." When young Harvard got it through his head that
+"anti-kwatties"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span> meant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out
+for a smoke; but it came back at him again in Egypt. They were standing
+below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an
+English traveler turned to young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom
+beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus
+in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't
+you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed
+they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of
+Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her
+ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest
+crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own
+home State. The experience gave him something to think about.</p>
+
+<p>The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to
+Europe for holiday. <i>We have to go abroad to learn how to come home.</i> We
+go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you
+are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino
+Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming
+to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos,
+who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year
+for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are
+various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to
+catch trout and not be a sucker.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on
+going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of
+them lies.</p>
+
+<p>Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it&mdash;that it costs more to
+go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means
+staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza,
+where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but
+traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the
+beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go
+drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and
+catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as
+you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home.
+From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over
+$33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that,
+unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the
+backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now
+comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a
+good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not
+see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your
+holiday stamping ground, Sundance Ca&ntilde;on, South Dakota; or the New
+Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona;
+or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest; or the White Rock Ca&ntilde;on of
+the Rio Grande, where the most important of the wonderful prehistoric
+remains exist; and you can stay at a ranch house where food and
+cleanliness will be quite as good as at the Waldorf for from $1.50 to $2
+a day.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-024.jpg" width="650" height="366" alt="In the bright Arizona sunshine before their little square
+adobe houses Indian women are fashioning pottery into curious shapes" title="" />
+<span class="caption">In the bright Arizona sunshine before their little square
+adobe houses Indian women are fashioning pottery into curious shapes</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span>
+You can usually find the name of the ranch house by inquiries from the
+station agent where you get off. The ranch house may be of adobe and
+look squatty; but remember that adobe squattiness is the best protection
+against wind and heat; and inside, you will find hot and cold water,
+bathroom, and meals equal to the best hotels in Chicago and New York. In
+New York or Chicago, that amount would afford you mighty chancy fare and
+only a back hall room. I know of hundreds of such ranch houses all along
+the backbone of the Rockies.</p>
+
+<p>Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big
+hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a
+motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig
+at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro outright for from $5
+to $10. Even if the burro takes a prize for ugliness, remember he also
+takes a prize for sure-footedness; and he doesn't take a prize for
+bucking, which the broncho often does. Figure up now the cost of a
+month's holiday; and I repeat&mdash;it will cost you less than staying at
+home. But if this total is still too high, there are ways of reducing
+the expense by half. Take your own tent; and $20 will not exceed "the
+grub box" contents for a month. Or all through the Rockies are deserted
+shacks, mining and lumber shanties,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span> herders' cabins, horse camps. You
+can quarter yourself in one of these for nothing; and the sole expense
+will be "the grub box;" and my tin trunk for camp cooking has never cost
+me more than $50 a month for four people. Or best and most novel
+experience of all&mdash;along White Rock Ca&ntilde;on of the Rio Grande, in Mesa
+Verde Park, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the
+cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There is no danger of wolves,
+or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook
+below happens to be good. Hundreds of arch&aelig;ologists, who come from
+Egypt, Greece, Italy, England, to visit these remains, spend their
+summer holiday this way. Why can't you? Or if you are not a good
+adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer school that goes
+out to the caves from Santa Fe every summer.</p>
+
+<p>Is it safe? That question to a Westerner is a joke. Safer, much safer,
+than in any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White
+Mountains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on
+the Saskatchewan; and I never locked a door, because there wasn't any
+lock; and I never attempted to bar the door, because there wasn't any
+need. Can you say as much of New York, or Chicago, or Washington? The
+question may be asked&mdash;Will this kind of a holiday not be hot in summer?
+You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some
+mid-summer, when nearly everything inside the pullman car melted into a
+jelly. Yes, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span> will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a
+railroad naturally follows the lowest grade. But if you go back to the
+ranch houses of the Upper Mesas and of foothills and ca&ntilde;ons, you will be
+from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and will need winter wraps
+each night, and may have to break the ice for your washing water in the
+morning&mdash;I did.</p>
+
+<p>Another reason why so many Americans do not see their own country is
+that while one species of fool has scared away holiday seekers by tales
+of extortionate cost, another sort of fool wisely promulgates the lie&mdash;a
+lie worn shiny from repetition&mdash;that "game is scarce in the West." "No
+more big game"&mdash;and your romancer leans back with wise-acre air to let
+that lie sink in, while he clears his throat to utter another&mdash;"trout
+streams all fished out." In the days when we had to swallow logic
+undigested in college, we had it impressed upon us that one single
+specific fact was sufficient to refute the broadest generality that was
+ever put in the form of a syllogism. Well, then,&mdash;for a few facts as to
+that "no-game" lie!</p>
+
+<p>In one hour you can catch in the streams of the Pecos, or the Jemez, or
+the White Mountains, or the Upper Sierras of California, or the New
+Glacier Park of the North, more trout than you can put on a string. If
+you want confirmation of that fact, write to the Texas Club that has its
+hunting lodge opposite Grass Mountain, and they will send you the
+picture of one hour's trout catch. By measurement,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a></span> the string is longer
+than the height of a water barrel; and these were fish that didn't get
+away.</p>
+
+<p>Last year, twenty-six bear were shot in the Sangre de Christo Ca&ntilde;on in
+three months.</p>
+
+<p>Two years ago, mountain lions became so thick in the Pecos that hunters
+were hired to hunt them for bounty; and the first thing that happened to
+one of the hunters, his horse was throttled and killed by a mountain
+lion, though his little spaniel got revenge by treeing four lions a few
+weeks later, and the hunter got three out of the four.</p>
+
+<p>Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of
+hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed.</p>
+
+<p>In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in
+the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain.
+Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the
+other still haunts the ca&ntilde;ons defiant of repeater.</p>
+
+<p>From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can
+nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone
+ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here.</p>
+
+<p>The week I reached Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in
+front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front
+door.</p>
+
+<p>The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff
+caves, we disturbed a herd of deer.</p>
+
+<p>Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">[Pg xvii]</a></span> is if you follow the
+beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild
+turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look
+for it. Believe me&mdash;though it may sound a truism&mdash;you won't find big
+game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.</p>
+
+<p>Or, if your quest is not hunting but studying game, what better ground
+for observation than the Wichita in Oklahoma? Here a National Forest has
+been constituted a perpetual breeding ground for native American game.
+Over twenty buffalo taken from original stock in the New York Park are
+there&mdash;back on their native heath; and there are two or three very
+touching things about those old furry fellows taken back to their own
+haunts. In New York's parks, they were gradually degenerating&mdash;getting
+heavier, less active, ceasing to shed their fur annually. When they were
+set loose in the Wichita Game Resort, they looked up, sniffed the air
+from all four quarters, and rambled off to their ancestral pasture
+grounds perfectly at home. When the Comanches heard that the buffalo had
+come back to the Wichita, the whole tribe moved in a body and camped
+outside the fourteen-foot fence. There they stayed for the better part
+of a week, the buffalo and the Comanches, silently viewing each other.
+It would have been worth Mr. Nature Faker's while to have known their
+mutual thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>There is another lie about not holidaying West, which is not only
+persistent but cruel. When the worker is a health as well as rest
+seeker, he is told<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">[Pg xviii]</a></span> that the West does not want him, especially if he is
+what is locally called "a lung-er;" and there is just enough truth in
+that lie to make it persistent. It is true the consumptive is not wanted
+on the beaten trail, in the big general hotel, in the train where other
+people want draughts of air, but he can't stand them. On the beaten
+trail, he is a danger both to himself and to others&mdash;especially if he
+hasn't money and may fall a burden on the community; but that is only a
+half truth which is usually a lie. Let the other half be known! All
+through the West along the backbone of the Rockies, from Montana to
+Texas, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, are the tent
+cities&mdash;communities of health seekers living in half-boarded tents, or
+mosquito-wired cabins that can be steam-heated at night. There are
+literally thousands of such tent dwellers all through the Rocky Mountain
+States; and the cost is as you make it. If you go to a sanitarium tent
+city, you will have to pay all the way from $15 to $25 a week for house,
+board, nurse, medicine and doctor's attendance; but if you buy your own
+portable house and do your own catering, the cost will be just what you
+make it. A house will cost $50 to $100; a tent, $10 to $20.</p>
+
+<p>Still another baneful lie that keeps the American from seeing America
+first is that our New World West lacks "human interest;" lacks "the
+picturesqueness of the shepherds in Spain and Switzerland," for
+instance; lacks "the historic marvels" of church and monument and
+relic.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">[Pg xix]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster of them all. Will
+you tell me why "the human interest" of a legend about Dick Turpin's
+head festering on Newgate, England, is any greater to Americans than the
+truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd,
+when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New
+Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train
+robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between
+England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of
+outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Ca&ntilde;on up the Pecos, or took
+possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the
+Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than
+descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on
+our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in
+quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro
+in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled
+eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons
+and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled
+bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long
+before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful
+to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near
+Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone
+lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">[Pg xx]</a></span> two great stone lions
+carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before
+William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the
+antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins
+of a church&mdash;at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters&mdash;that
+was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to
+America.</p>
+
+<p>You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the
+Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the
+gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks,
+and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who
+interviewed Eve&mdash;all right here in your own American Southwest, with the
+difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler,
+who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the
+Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the
+springs.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, there are 400,000 miles of motor roads in Europe; but isn't
+it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? That is
+what you can do following the "Camino Real" from Texas to Wyoming, or
+crossing the mountains of New Mexico by the great Scenic Highway built
+for motors to the very snow tops.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 395px;">
+<img src="images/fig-034.jpg" width="395" height="650" alt="An Indian girl of Isleta, New Mexico, carrying a water
+jar." title="" />
+<span class="caption">An Indian girl of Isleta, New Mexico, carrying a water
+jar.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">[Pg xxi]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at
+Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the
+legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but
+America. This is a story by itself&mdash;a beautiful one, also in spots a
+funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from
+Oxford, England, took quarters in one of the pueblos at Santa Clara or
+thereabout to study Indian arts and crafts. One night in her adobe
+quarters, her orderly British soul was aroused by such a dire din of
+shouting, fighting, screams, as she thought could come only from some
+inferno of crime. She sprang out of bed and dashed across the <i>placito</i>
+in her nightdress to her guardian protector in the person of an old
+Indian. He ran through the dark to see what the matter was, while she
+stood in hiding of the wall shadows curdling in horror of "bluggy
+deeds."</p>
+
+<p>"Pah," said the old fellow coming back, "dat not'ing! Young man, he git
+marry an' dey&mdash;how you call?&mdash;chiv-ar-ee-heem."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, what are you laughing at?" demanded the irate British dame; for
+she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in
+suffocated laughter. "How dare you laugh?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"I laugh, Mees," he sputtered out, "'cos you scare me so bad when you
+call, I jomp in my coat mistake for my pants. Dat's all."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It would pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would
+pay to let a little daylight in on the abysmal blank regarding the
+wonder-land of our own world&mdash;wouldn't it?</p>
+
+<p>I don't know whether the affectation recognized as "the foreign pose"
+comes foremost or hindermost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">[Pg xxii]</a></span> as a cause of this neglect of the wonders
+of our own land. When you go to our own Western Wonder Land, you can't
+say you have been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is
+wonderful what a paying thing that pose is in a harvest of "fooleries."
+There is a well-known case of an American author, who tried his hand on
+delineating American life and was severely let alone because he was
+too&mdash;not abroad, but broad. He dropped his own name, assumed the pose of
+a grand dame familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of
+the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. His books have
+"gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are
+abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.</p>
+
+<p>The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of
+Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the
+historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an
+implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and
+superiority, which is pretense&mdash;is another matter. Let us take the dire
+and damning deficiencies of America!</p>
+
+<p>"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone
+Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to
+fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.</p>
+
+<p>There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma&mdash;islands of
+rock, sheer precipice of yellow <i>tufa</i> for hundreds of feet&mdash;amid the
+Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">[Pg xxiii]</a></span>
+in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders,
+brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all
+this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or there are the
+three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table
+lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and
+desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or,
+there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Ca&ntilde;on de Chelly (Shay)
+forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses
+of Washington.</p>
+
+<p>"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and
+the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is
+the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through
+Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions
+galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered
+Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a
+bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There
+is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway;
+and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of
+wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange
+Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in
+cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one
+end of a main thoroughfare, you can see the site of the old Spanish
+Gareta prison, in the walls of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">[Pg xxiv]</a></span> which bullets were found embedded in
+human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the
+braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street
+and of small talk&mdash;then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and
+the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of
+the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the
+gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the
+apple bloom.</p>
+
+<p>What was the other charge? Oh, yes&mdash;"lacks the human," whatever that
+means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than
+true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Ca&ntilde;on and the cliff houses of
+Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to
+hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium
+more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the
+Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of
+Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys,
+Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did
+not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money
+which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are
+not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to
+American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of
+the Old World?</p>
+
+<p>Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America
+usually assumes the air of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxv" id="Page_xxv">[Pg xxv]</a></span> superiority supposed to be the peculiar
+prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes&mdash;but America
+lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."</p>
+
+<p>"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition
+period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle
+baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain
+in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of
+American feudalism&mdash;fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area
+of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat
+clad <i>cap-&agrave;-pie</i> in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at
+Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet
+hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years
+back&mdash;and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing
+of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism,
+the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted
+troops the big iron chest for the gold&mdash;iron chests that you can see to
+this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial
+in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by
+secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver
+of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of
+New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's&mdash;an era
+that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki,
+Spirit of Evil, smiled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxvi" id="Page_xxvi">[Pg xxvi]</a></span> with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade
+the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were
+alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north
+as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia
+groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed
+horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough,
+remnants of some sort of domesticated creatures are found in the cave
+men's houses, centuries before the coming of horses and cattle and sheep
+with the Spanish. The trouble is, up to the present when men like Curtis
+and dear old Bandelier and Burbank, and the whole staff of the
+Smithsonian and the School of Santa Fe have gone to work, we have not
+taken the trouble in America to gather up the prehistoric legends and
+ferret out their race meaning. We have fallen too completely in the last
+century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave
+races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending
+half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes
+below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in
+gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. You
+remember Kipling's poem on the neolithic man, and Jack London's fiction.
+Now as a matter of fact&mdash;which is a bit disturbing to all these
+accretions of pseudo-science&mdash;the remains of these cave people don't
+show them to have been simian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing
+when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxvii" id="Page_xxvii">[Pg xxvii]</a></span> Comstock's activities
+as to clothes. They had decorated pottery ware of which we have lost the
+pigments, and a knowledge of irrigation which would be unique in apes,
+and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some
+day, when the evolutionary piffle has passed, we'll study out these
+prehistoric legends and their racial meaning.</p>
+
+<p>As to the "lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared
+that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the
+Southwest. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Fe, or Lungrun's
+wonderful desert pictures, or Moran's or Gamble's, or Harmon's Spanish
+scenes&mdash;then talk about "lack of <i>decadent</i> art" if you will, but don't
+talk about "lack of art." Why, in the ranch house of Lorenzo Hubbell,
+the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely
+Southwestern pictures.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance,
+that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest
+scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above
+10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the
+leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine
+forests, past Cloudcroft&mdash;the sky-top resort&mdash;up through the orchard
+lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over
+the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all
+the wonders of Colorado's National Park.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxviii" id="Page_xxviii">[Pg xxviii]</a></span> With the exception of a very
+bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the
+southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the
+Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and
+flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the
+tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars
+of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down
+to California, you can swerve into Grand Ca&ntilde;on, where the gods of fire
+and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red
+into a swimming ca&ntilde;on of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest
+peaks of the Rockies.</p>
+
+<p>In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old
+Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor
+along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't
+take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed;
+second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were
+allowed.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only
+from a life-time knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of the West&mdash;and
+that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of "shootin'
+irons" and "faintin' females" are forever past, except in the
+undergraduate's salad dreams. You are safer in the cave dwellings of the
+Stone Age, in the Pajarito Plateau of the cliff "bird people," in the
+Painted Desert, among the Indians of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxix" id="Page_xxix">[Pg xxix]</a></span> the Navajo Reserve than you are in
+Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London. I would trust a young friend
+of mine&mdash;boy or girl&mdash;quicker to the Western environment than the
+Eastern. You can get into mischief in the West if you hunt for it; but
+the mischief doesn't come out and hunt you. Also, danger spots are
+self-evident on precipices of the Western wilds. They aren't
+self-evident; danger spots are glazed and paved to the edges over which
+youth goes to smash in the East.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What about cost? Aye, there's the rub!</p>
+
+<p>First, there's the steamboat ticket to Europe, about the same price as
+or more than the average round trip ticket to the Coast and back;
+but&mdash;please note, please note well&mdash;the agent who sells the steamboat
+ticket gets from forty to 100 per cent. bigger commission on it than the
+agent who sells the railroad tickets; so the man who is an agent for
+Europe can afford to advertise from forty to 100 per cent. more than the
+man who sells the purely American ticket.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, European hotel men are adepts at catering to the lure of the
+American sightseer. (Of course they are: it's worth one hundred to two
+hundred million dollars to them a year.) In the American West, everybody
+is busy. Except for the real estate man, they don't care one iota
+whether you come or stay.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, when you go to Europe, a thousand hands are thrust out to point
+you the way to the interesting places. Incidentally, also, a thousand
+hands are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxx" id="Page_xxx">[Pg xxx]</a></span> thrust out to pick your pocket, or at least relieve it of any
+superfluous weight. In our West, who cares a particle what you do; or
+who will point you the way? The hotels are expensive and for the most
+part located in the most expensive zone&mdash;the commercial center. It is
+only when you get out of the expense zone away from commercial centers
+and railway, that you can live at $1 or $2 a day, or if you have your
+own tent at fifty cents a day; but it isn't to the real estate agent's
+interests to have you go away from the commercial center or expense
+zone. Who is there to tell you what or where to see off the line of heat
+and tips? Outside the National Park wardens and National Forest Rangers,
+there isn't anyone.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How, then, are you to manage? Frankly, I never knew of either monkeys or
+men accomplishing anything except in one way&mdash;just going out and doing
+it. Choose what you want to see; and go there! The local railroad agent,
+the local Forest Ranger, the local ranch house, will tell you the rest;
+and naturally, when you go into the wilderness, don't leave all your
+courtesy and circumspection and common-sense back in town. Equipped with
+those three, you can "See America First," and see it cheaply.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NATIONAL FORESTS, A SUMMER PLAYGROUND FOR THE PEOPLE</h3>
+
+
+<p>If a health resort and national playground were discovered guaranteed to
+kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay
+listlessness and set the human spirit free from the nagging worries and
+toil-wear that make you feel like a washed-out rag at the end of a
+humdrum year&mdash;imagine the stampede of the lame and the halt in body and
+spirit; the railroad excursions and reduced fares; the disputations of
+the physicians and the rage of the thought-ologists at present coining
+money rejuvenating neurotic humanity!</p>
+
+<p>Yet such a national playground has been discovered; and it isn't in
+Europe, where statisticians compute that Americans yearly spend from a
+quarter to half a billion dollars; and it isn't the Coast-to-Coast trip
+which the president of a transcontinental told me at least a hundred
+thousand people a year traverse. A health resort guaranteed to banish
+care, to stab apathy, to enlarge littleness, to slay listlessness, would
+pretty nearly put the thought-ologists out of commission. Yet such a
+summer resort exists at the very doors of every American capable of
+scraping together a few hundred dollars&mdash;$200 at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> the least, $400 at the
+most. It exists in that "twilight zone" of dispute and strong language
+and peanut politics known as the National Forests.</p>
+
+<p>In America, we have foolishly come to regard National Forests as solely
+allied with conservation and politics. That is too narrow. National
+Forests stand for much more. They stand for a national playground and
+all that means for national health and sanity and joy in the exuberant
+life of the clean out-of-doors. In Germany, the forests are not only a
+source of great revenue in cash; they are a source of greater revenue in
+health. They are a holiday playground. In America, the playground
+exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful playground in the whole
+world&mdash;and the most accessible; but we haven't yet discovered it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Of the three or four million people who have attended the Pacific Coast
+Expositions of the past ten years, it is a safe wage that half went, not
+to see the Exposition (for people from a radius round Chicago and
+Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went
+to see the Exposition as an exponent of the Great West. How much of the
+Great West did they really see? They saw the Alaska Exhibit. Well&mdash;the
+Alaska Exhibit was afterwards shown in New York. They saw the special
+buildings assigned to the special Western States. Well&mdash;the special
+Western States had special buildings at the other expositions. What
+else<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> of the purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three
+travelers:</p>
+
+<p>"Been a great trip" (Two Chicagoans talking in duet). "We've seen
+everything and stopped off everywhere. We stopped at Denver and Salt
+Lake and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Portland and Seattle!"</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do at these places?"</p>
+
+<p>"Took a taxi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Saw
+all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the
+West is going ahead."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged
+feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman,
+baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really
+seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before.
+They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down
+in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to
+go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and
+wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and
+see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it
+<i>seeing</i> the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and
+sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and
+experience the real thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only
+time we got away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> from the excursion party was when a land boomster took
+us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the
+West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What
+I want to know is how to get away from that. That boomster fellow was an
+Easterner, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not
+the duet that went round the cities in a sightseeing car and judged the
+West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns
+fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real
+estate project by an Eastern land boomster. And each wanted to find the
+real thing&mdash;had paid money to find a holiday playground, to forget care
+and stab apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the
+extortionate charges on every side in the city life. And two out of
+three went back a little disappointed that they had not seen the fabled
+wonders of the West&mdash;the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famous
+ca&ntilde;ons, the mountain lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to explain
+to the New Yorker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels
+charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain western
+wilds, whether you are a man, woman, child, or group of all three&mdash;could
+go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees and mountain lakes
+and snowy peaks&mdash;I was greeted with that peculiarly New Yorky look
+suggestive of Ananias and De Rougement.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-050.jpg" width="650" height="359" alt="One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents,
+but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary" title="" />
+<span class="caption">One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents,
+but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sadder is the case of the invalid migrating West. He has come with high
+hopes looking for the national health resort. Does he find it? Not once
+in a thousand cases. If health seekers have money, they take a private
+house <i>in the city</i>, where the best of air is at its worst; but many
+invalids are scarce of money, and come seeking the health resort at
+great pecuniary sacrifice. Do they find it? Certainly not knocking from
+boarding house to boarding house and hotel to hotel, re-infecting
+themselves with their own germs till the very telephone booths have to
+be guarded. At one famous "lung" city where I stayed, I heard three
+invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room happened to
+be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 and $3 and $5 a day without
+meals. At a cost of $10 for train fare, I went out to one of the
+National Forests&mdash;the pass over the Divide 11,000 feet, the village
+center of the Forest 8,000 feet above sea level, the charge with meals
+at the hotel $10 a week. Better still, $10 for a roomy tent, $1.50 for a
+camp stove and as much or as little as you like for a fur rug, and the
+cost of meals would have been seventy-five cents a day at the hotel,
+seventy-five cents for life in air that was almost constant sunshine,
+air as pure and life-giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That
+altitude would probably not suit all invalids&mdash;that is for a doctor to
+say; but certainly, whether one is out for health or play, that regimen
+is cheaper and more life-giving than a stuffy hotel at $2, $3 and $5 a
+day for a room alone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is incredible when you come to think of it. Here is a nation of
+ninety million people scouring the earth for a playground; and there is
+an undiscovered playground in its own back yard, the most wonderful
+playground of mountain and forest and lake in the whole world; a
+playground in actual area half the size of a Germany, or France, with
+wonders of cave and waterway and peak unknown to Germany or France. What
+are the railroads thinking about? If three million people visited an
+exposition to see the West, how many would yearly visit the National
+Forests if the railroads granted facilities, and the ninety million
+Americans knew how? It is absurd to regard the National Forests purely
+as timber; and timber for politics! They are a nation's playground and
+health resort; and one of these times will come a Peary or an Abruzzi
+discovering them. Then we'll give him a prize and begin going.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you will not
+find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress
+parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of flame in the upper
+alpine meadows. And you will not find gaping on-lookers to break down
+fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirrel swearing
+at you for coming too near his <i>cache</i> of pine cones at the foot of some
+giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing in the National
+Forests; but there is a great tinkling of waters; and there are many
+voices of rills with a roar of flood torrents at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> rain time, or thunder
+of avalanche when the snows come over a far ridge in spray fine as a
+waterfall. In fair weather, you may spare yourself the trouble of a tent
+and camp under a stretch of sky hung with stars, resinous of balsams,
+spiced with the life of the cinnamon smells and the ozone tang. There
+will be lakes of light as well as lakes of water, and an all-day diet of
+condensed sunbeams every time you take a breath. Your bed will be
+hemlock boughs&mdash;be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or
+you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood
+stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying
+for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better
+stay in Newport.</p>
+
+<p>The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will
+welcome you and help you to find camping ground.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of
+the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man,
+woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National
+Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get
+established?</p>
+
+<p>Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National
+Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and
+playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New
+Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me,
+there is a peculiar attraction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all
+are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line&mdash;high, dry park-like
+forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor.
+You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes
+panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a
+horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie
+on one side&mdash;Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the
+Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, the trail; and across
+that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests.
+There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National
+Forests. Windfall, there is almost none. It has been cleared out and
+sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been
+carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees,
+all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off.
+These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.</p>
+
+<p>Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests
+there, by trips to the wonderful ca&ntilde;ons out from Ogden, or to the
+natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you
+have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the
+ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big
+trees in the Sequoia Forest; the Yosemite in the Stanislaus; forests in
+the northern part of the State where you could dance on the stump of a
+redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+northern mountains, are the voices of the waters and the white,
+burnished, shining peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one
+summer by driving up in a tented wagon through the National Forests from
+Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and truck bed were in the democrat
+wagon. An outfitter supplied the horses for a rental which I have
+forgotten. The borders of most of the National Forests may be reached by
+wagon. The higher and more intimate trails may be essayed only on foot
+or on horseback.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How much will the trip cost? You must figure that out for yourself.
+There is, first of all, your railway fare from the point you leave. Then
+there is the fare out to the Forest&mdash;usually not $10. Go straight to the
+supervisor or forester of the district. He will recommend the best hotel
+of the little mountain village where the supervisor's office is usually
+located. At those hotels, you will board as a transient at $10 a week;
+as a permanent, for less. In many of the mountain hamlets are outfitters
+who will rent you a team of horses and tented wagon; and you can cater
+for yourself. In fact, as to clothing, and outfit, you can buy cheaper
+camp kit at these local stores than in your home town. Many Eastern
+things are not suitable for Western use. For instance, it is foolish to
+go into the thick, rough forests of heavy timber with an expensive
+eastern riding suit for man or woman. Better buy a $4 or $6 or $8 khaki
+suit that you can throw away when you have torn it to tatters. An
+Eastern waterproof coat will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> cost you from $10 to $30. You can get a
+yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more serviceable for
+$2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get them East, as I like an
+elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good deal of
+cork in the sole to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in
+the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too
+stiff! I like an elk-skin that will let the water out fast as it comes
+in if you ever have to wade, and which will not shrink in the drying. If
+you forswear hotels and take to a sky tent, or canvas in misty weather,
+better carry eatables in what the guides call a tin "grub box," in other
+words a cheap $2 tin trunk. It keeps out ants and things; and you can
+lock it when you go away on long excursions. As to beds, each to his own
+taste! Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for me.
+Besides, I am never comfortable on it. If you camp near the snow peaks,
+a chill strikes up to the small of your back in the small of the
+morning. I don't care to feel like using a derrick every time I roll
+over. The most comfortable bed I know is a piece of twenty-five cent
+oilcloth laid over the slicker on hemlock boughs, fur rug over that,
+with suit case for pillow, and a plain gray blanket. The hardened
+mountaineer will laugh at the next recommendation; but the town man or
+woman going out for play or health is not hardened, and to attempt
+sudden hardening entails the endurance of a lot of aches that are apt to
+spoil the holiday. You may say you like the cold plunge in the icy water
+coming off a snowy mountain.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge,
+even if you do like it, you are in such a hurry to come out of it that
+you don't linger to scrub. I like my hot scrub; and you can have that
+only by taking along (no, not a rubber bath) a $1.50 camp stove to heat
+the water in the tent while you are eating your supper out round the
+camp fire that burns with such a delicious, barky smell. Besides, late
+in the season, there will be rains and mist. Your camp stove will dry
+out the tent walls and keep your kit free of rain mold. Do you need a
+guide? That depends entirely on yourself. If you camp under direction
+and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.</p>
+
+<p>Whether you go out as a health seeker, or a pleasure seeker, $8 to $10
+will buy you a miner's tent&mdash;a miner's, preferable to a tepee because
+the walls lift the canvas roof high enough not to bump your head; $2
+will buy you a tin trunk or grub box; $1.50 will cover the price of
+oilcloth to spread over the boughs which you lay all over the floor to
+keep you above the earth damp; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove
+to keep the inside of your tent warm and dry for the hot night bath; $10
+will cover cost of pail and cooking utensils. That leaves of what would
+be your monthly expenses at even a moderate hotel, $125 for food&mdash;bacon,
+flour, fresh fruit; and your food should not exceed $10 each a month. If
+you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder, by whipping the
+mountain streams for trout. If you need an attendant, that miner's tent
+is big enough for two. Or if you will stand $5 or $6 more expense,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> buy
+a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will be windy days in
+fall and spring when an extra tent with a camp stove in it will prove
+useful for the nightly hot bath.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What reward do you reap for all the bother? You are away from all dust
+irritating to weak lungs. You are away from all possibility of
+re-infecting yourself with your own disease. Except in late autumn and
+early spring, you are living under almost cloudless skies, in an
+atmosphere steeped in sunshine, spicy with the healing resin of the
+pines and hemlocks and spruce, that not only scent the air but literally
+permeate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far
+above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. Instead of
+the clang of street car bells and the jangle of nerves tangled from too
+many humans in town, you hear the flow and the sing and the laughter and
+the trebles of the glacial streams rejoicing in their race to the sea.
+You climb the rough hills; and your town lungs blow like a whale as you
+climb; and every beat pumps inertia out and the sun-healing air in. If
+an invalid, you had better take a doctor's advice as to how high you
+should camp and climb. In town, amid the draperies and the porti&egrave;res and
+the steam-heated rooms, an invalid is seeking health amid the habitat of
+mummies. In the Forests, whether you will or not, you live in sunshine
+that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it
+is the sting of pulsing, superabundant life, not the lethargy of a
+gradual decay.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the
+remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses
+near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in
+unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico
+or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the
+flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan
+hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of
+the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New
+Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines,
+and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on
+the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to
+the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red
+sandstone.</p>
+
+<p>And besides the prehistoric in the Forests&mdash;what will you find? The
+plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.
+You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was
+pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a
+haze of dust, and you&mdash;you are up in that cloudless air, where the light
+hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the
+clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing
+life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns
+and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on
+the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun,
+to the god of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are
+accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking;
+and here is the realm of pure light.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest
+gives a bump. You are in darkness&mdash;diving through some tunnel or other;
+and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a
+couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance
+Ca&ntilde;on off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven
+miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But
+patience! The road into Sundance Ca&ntilde;on takes you to the top of the
+world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little
+Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line,
+pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600
+you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each
+other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good
+100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good
+by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road
+has been cork-screwing up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as
+a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on
+the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist
+behind the engineer&mdash;the man behind the modern gun of conquest&mdash;has paid
+the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the
+clouds&mdash;a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the mountains
+across the desert towards the Pacific.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 390px;">
+<img src="images/fig-062.jpg" width="390" height="650" alt="From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona" title="" />
+<span class="caption">From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie
+the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of
+the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer
+margin of this rock wall with slab and log and shingle cottages, built
+literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a
+stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in
+the whole world. In Sundance Ca&ntilde;on, South Dakota, summer people have
+built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.
+Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but
+dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets
+composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like
+cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds,
+and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure
+turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and
+there is a pair of green lakes below you&mdash;emerald jewels pendant from
+the neck of the old mountain god; and with a bump and a rattle of the
+wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go&mdash;believe me,
+a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's
+shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.</p>
+
+<p>You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> the Continental
+Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It
+isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any
+shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must
+wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of worship and
+quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake
+and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of
+fire in the sunset, and the plain&mdash;there are no more plains&mdash;this is the
+top of the world!</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back
+this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen
+in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear grass tossed before it like the
+waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below&mdash;you knew why
+their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in
+disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench
+them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be
+told are laid flat on the ground up here.</p>
+
+<p>When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National
+Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coarse upper grasses
+provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the
+National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all
+the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big
+rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of
+intruding flocks and herds.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then, the train is literally racing down hill&mdash;with the trucks bumping
+heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang
+comes to the ozone&mdash;the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon
+smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and
+imprisoned fragrance&mdash;the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years
+of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of
+Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.</p>
+
+<p>The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and
+you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce
+and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from
+the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen
+dust&mdash;pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree&mdash;with the
+purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the
+conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you
+somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some
+conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed,
+whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes,
+airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth,
+though the process may take the trifling &aelig;on of a thousand years or so.
+At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the
+yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but
+know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season&mdash;the season
+when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> very atmosphere is
+alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the
+wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb
+like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded
+branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the
+broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the veering wind,
+the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded
+branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled,
+perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a
+cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and
+crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire
+tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall
+on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting
+nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see
+the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From
+the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth,
+you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?)
+language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the
+evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows
+the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire
+when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight
+and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> burned or scant
+slopes, he rifles the <i>cache</i> of this little furred forester, who
+suspects your noisy trainload of robbery&mdash;robbery&mdash;sc&mdash;scur&mdash;r&mdash;there!</p>
+
+<p>Then, the train bumps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on
+the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop
+off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man
+is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train
+is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud
+against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the
+curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage
+green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree&mdash;the ranger, absurdly
+young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres
+compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily
+deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those
+confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority
+which backs that body of men.</p>
+
+<p>You have mounted your pony&mdash;men and women alike ride astride in the
+Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the
+ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet
+above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodpecker, the scur of a
+rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft <i>thug</i> of the
+unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the
+soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the
+jangle of city cars in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested
+town, isn't it?</p>
+
+<p>If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of
+the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills
+of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are
+hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have
+the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when
+eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine
+needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles
+like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of
+these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods;
+for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made
+offerings to the gods of old, the temple which our modern churches
+imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in
+open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no
+apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically
+from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which
+permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust
+is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will
+make you over, will these forest gods, if you will let them, if you will
+lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the
+chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.</p>
+
+<p>And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods
+halfway? Then, the woods will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> close round you with a chill loneliness
+unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you
+and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST</h3>
+
+
+<p>You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before
+you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds.
+No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill
+comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels
+must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available&mdash;never
+farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you
+on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of
+matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds
+than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in
+the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger
+and yeggman, that stalks the town.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-072.jpg" width="650" height="366" alt="The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with
+his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with
+his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little
+boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress.
+Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the
+death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly
+traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone
+into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have
+never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I
+have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you
+need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when
+they combine two qualities&mdash;comfort and thick enough soles to protect
+your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too,
+to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from passing trees and
+jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you
+chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or
+snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You
+may get them if you like to spend the money&mdash;$8 leggings and $8
+horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the
+other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the
+tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a
+$3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let
+the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing
+garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.</p>
+
+<p>This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who
+determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent
+by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast.
+They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog
+blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you
+consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds
+of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they
+had gone off<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> the trail trout fishing. "If they had been good
+path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream
+down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt
+criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about
+it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut
+through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at
+the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were
+driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your
+directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost
+impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow
+down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest
+sense of direction. Compass signs of forest-lore fail here. There are
+few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west;
+and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree.
+All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman
+lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.</p>
+
+<p>"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled
+ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the
+children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the
+morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take
+fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put
+out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National
+Forests.</p>
+
+<p>It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National
+Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the
+rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married,
+have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the
+Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the
+ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality
+characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the
+ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could
+have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where
+the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you
+could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might
+put a New York dinner to shame&mdash;all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at
+this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry
+Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to
+tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in
+mind&mdash;do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or
+the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are
+prepared to look after yourself.</p>
+
+<p>And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do?
+You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the
+hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God
+has landscaped the playground<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> for a nation; or you can go in for
+records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most
+marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can
+prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who
+flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities,
+contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in
+the British Museum marked 20,000 B. C. It isn't every day you can wander
+through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist
+agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in
+Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff
+and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River,
+Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples
+in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the
+first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier
+houses literally on the tip-top of the world?</p>
+
+<p>The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the
+jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and
+delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen
+floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if
+you go in the spirit of an investigator, you will get that permission.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The question isn't <i>what is there to do</i>. It is <i>which of the countless
+things there are to do</i> are you going to choose to do? When Mr.
+Roosevelt goes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross
+Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they
+take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools
+at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you
+can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest
+its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association
+to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how
+sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy
+Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got
+their names from old Spanish <i>padres</i> riding their burros into the
+wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the
+Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff
+dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In
+the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of
+prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.</p>
+
+<p>Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain
+climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests&mdash;bear, mountain
+sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a
+man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to
+mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Ca&ntilde;on, above
+Ouray, at Pike's Peak&mdash;a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and
+his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy
+of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a
+trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man
+who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the
+upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of
+snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out!
+If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope
+clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and
+recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far
+patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the
+West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten
+miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I
+told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the
+forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed
+to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs.
+Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly
+slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the
+track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side.
+The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the
+track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's
+shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it
+coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of
+time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get
+his wife. Before he could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> come out, it was on us. Man and wife and
+child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a
+timber. It must have been the concussion of the air&mdash;they weren't even
+bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up
+where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but
+they were dead, all three."</p>
+
+<p>And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak.
+"That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's
+doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught
+him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife
+didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain;
+and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It
+came&mdash;quick&mdash;" with a snap of his fingers&mdash;"as that; and he was gone."</p>
+
+<p>It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who
+monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch
+above a clean-swept slope.</p>
+
+<p>And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National
+Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been
+told so often that you have come to believe it&mdash;that our mountains in
+America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and
+race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go
+West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that
+has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top
+guide, its refugee from civilization, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> simply its lover of God's
+Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the
+Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him.
+Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You
+have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western
+mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in
+the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against
+the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this
+arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here.
+We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades.
+See that hole in the mountain?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear no! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It
+used to be an almost impossible trail to get up there; but there has
+been a hermit fellow there for the last ten years, living in his cabin
+and hunting; and year after year, never paid by anybody, he has been
+building that trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to
+lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course,
+the people in the valley think him crazy."</p>
+
+<p>Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and
+its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to
+lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest
+dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the
+dust eaters, the insects of the city ant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> heaps, the true troglodytes
+and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think
+there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>You have been told so often that the National Forests lock up timber
+from use that it comes as a surprise as you ride up the woodland trail
+to hear the song of the crosscut saw and the buzzing hum of a
+mill&mdash;perhaps a dozen mills&mdash;running full blast here in this National
+Forest. Heaps of sawdust emit the odors of imprisoned flowers. Piles of
+logs lie on all sides stamped at the end U. S.&mdash;timber sold on the stump
+to any lumberman and scaled as inspected by the ranger and paid by the
+buyer. To be sure, the lumberman cannot have the lumber for nothing; and
+it was for nothing that the Forests were seized and cut under the old
+r&eacute;gime.</p>
+
+<p>How was the spoliation effected? Two or three ways. The law of the
+public domain used to permit burn and windfall to be taken out free.
+Your lumberman, then, homesteaded 160 acres on a slope of forest
+affording good timber skids and chutes. So far, no wrong! Was not public
+domain open to homesteading? Good; but your homesteading lumberman now
+watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely
+accidentally, you understand, the fire sprang up and swept the entire
+slope of green forest away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman
+then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did
+less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> would be
+left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your
+lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free.
+Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public
+domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I
+could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>That was the principle of Congress when it withdrew from public domain
+these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include
+grazing and woodland not properly administered under public domain. The
+making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The ranger's job is to
+prevent fires. Also he permits the cutting of only ripe, full-grown
+trees, or dead tops, or growth stunted by crowding; and all timber sold
+off the forests must be marked for cutting and stamped by the ranger.</p>
+
+<p>But the old spirit assumes protean forms. The latest way of working the
+old trick is through the homestead law. You have been told that
+homesteaders cannot go in on the National Forests. Yet there, as you
+ride along the trail, is a cleared space of 160 acres where a Swedish
+woman and her boys are making hay; and inquiry elicits the fact that
+millions of acres are yearly homesteaded in the National Forests. Just
+as fast as they can be surveyed, all farming lands in the National
+Forests are opened to the homesteader. Where, then, is the trick? Your
+farmer man comes in for a homestead and he picks out 160 acres where the
+growth of big trees is so dense they will yield from $10,000 to $40,000
+in timber per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> quarter section. Good! Hasn't the homesteader a right to
+this profit? He certainly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he
+doesn't clear more than a few hundred feet round his cabin, and hasn't a
+cent of money to pay the heavy expense of clearing the rest, and sells
+out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars? Supposing
+such farmer men are brought in by excursion loads by a certain big
+lumber company, and all sell out at a few hundred dollars, claims worth
+millions, to that certain big lumber company&mdash;is this true homesteading
+of free land; or a grabbing of timber for a lumber trust?</p>
+
+<p>The same spirit explains the furious outcry that miners are driven off
+the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors
+can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary
+operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then
+yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to
+a big smelting trust&mdash;a merry game worked in one of the Western States
+for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.</p>
+
+<p>To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require
+larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being
+tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space
+occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that
+you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or
+build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road
+building is not so paltry as it sounds.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's
+cabin,&mdash;picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with
+slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood.
+Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of
+town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as
+an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's
+cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention
+appropriateness.</p>
+
+<p>Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger
+tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log
+partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs,
+natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had
+been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of
+the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more
+suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised&mdash;surely
+better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that
+you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city
+people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate
+this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked
+cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of
+hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to
+see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are
+fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken
+to the country all the cares of the city house, a regiment of servants
+or hostiles, and a mansion of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to
+me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees "back to the farm."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-086.jpg" width="650" height="362" alt="Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zu&ntilde;i, New Mexico.
+The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zu&ntilde;i, New Mexico.
+The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven
+and earth on the lonely forested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the
+snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. That is,
+over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber
+cruiser, sales agent, United States marshal, forester, gardener,
+naturalist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector,
+arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, surveyor, mine inspector, field
+man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman. When
+you consider that each man's patrol stretched out in a straight line
+would reach from New York past Albany, or from St. Paul to Duluth,
+without any of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge
+the layman, you may say the ranger is a pretty busy man.</p>
+
+<p>What sort of man is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, with these differences: He is very much
+younger. I think there is a regulation somewhere in the Department that
+a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures
+enthusiasm, weeding out the misfits, the formation of a body of men
+trained to the work; but I am not sure that it is not a mistake. There
+is a saying among the men of the North that "it takes a wise old dog to
+catch a wary old wolf;" and "there are more things in the woods than
+ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> taught in l'pe'tee cat&mdash;ee&mdash;cheesm." I am not sure that the
+weathered old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world,
+with lots of hard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the
+difficulties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post-graduate
+from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on fist, and the brain behind the
+fist. I am quite sure that many of the blackguard tricks assailing the
+Forest Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had
+to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, gentlemen always, but
+with some wise and weathered old dog of frontier life who wouldn't
+consult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would
+consult them, you know; but it would be afterwards. Just now, while the
+rangers are consulting the red tape, the trickster gets away with the
+goods.</p>
+
+<p>In the next place, your Forest ranger is not clothed with the authority
+to back up his fight which the N.W.M.P. man possesses. In theory, your
+ranger is a United States marshal, just as your Mounted Policeman is a
+constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where
+the N.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest,
+try, convict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered
+by official red tape. For instance, riding out with a ranger one day, we
+came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the
+profanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> I want to see for myself
+exactly what you men have to deal with!"</p>
+
+<p>Now, if that mill man had used such language to a Mounted Policeman, he
+would have been arrested, sentenced to thirty days and a fine, all
+inside of twenty-four hours. What was it all about? An attempt to
+bulldoze a young government man into believing that the taking of logs
+without payment was permissible.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you do to straighten it all out?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Lay a statement of the facts before the District Supervisor. The
+Supervisor will forward all to Denver. Denver will communicate with
+Washington. Then, soon as the thing has been investigated, word will
+come back from Washington."</p>
+
+<p>Investigated? If you know anything about government investigations, you
+will not stop the clock, as Joshua played tricks with the sun dial, to
+prevent speed.</p>
+
+<p>"Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect
+for law in that gentleman's heart?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps longer," said the college man without a suspicion of irony,
+"and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the
+Forests."</p>
+
+<p>"And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free
+hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away
+with logs that didn't belong<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> to them. Once, when I came back to the
+first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U.
+S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from
+Washington, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been
+shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was
+doing; but we forced pay for those logs."</p>
+
+<p>It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make
+a good Mounted Policeman&mdash;eight years to jounce the duffer out and the
+man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken.
+For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning
+at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain
+tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester
+more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers
+remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise
+old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of
+the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester
+struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line
+strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and
+post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own
+fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose
+mother kept house in the cabin, was chief<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> ranger. In the group was his
+sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger
+homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily
+expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men
+dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as
+Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland
+forests.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the
+Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for
+thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present
+r&eacute;gime, such men are not kept when found out, nor shielded when caught.
+For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the
+Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day;
+and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the
+force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar
+picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against
+ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and
+under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and
+grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism
+look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially
+never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest
+rangers! <i>In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than
+Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force
+was organized.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together,
+who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass
+herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the
+animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become&mdash;what?&mdash;is
+it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs
+and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The
+flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and butterfly that it may
+perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species
+that shall surpass itself. The tree trying to encompass and overcome the
+law of its own being&mdash;fixity&mdash;by sending its seeds sailing, whirling,
+aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.</p>
+
+<p>You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the
+National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't
+you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the
+centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate
+almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with
+the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle
+up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing
+life and strength straight from the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you
+suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to
+you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead
+branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal
+rocks, teaching us to anchor on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> facts, not fictions, destroying our
+weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be
+fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy
+anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the
+useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that
+can't stand fast against the shocks of life!</p>
+
+<p>You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause
+made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of
+life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who
+divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet,
+not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it
+needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the
+seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard
+and set&mdash;marking the ages of the trees&mdash;all have their prototypes in the
+human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth,
+air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young
+conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of
+poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the
+quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the
+same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much
+shade, fire, drought, passing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the
+weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living
+begins&mdash;it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for
+the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> old tree
+reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three
+score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines
+and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning,
+the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what
+a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm
+wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even
+sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree
+uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on
+whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the
+crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will
+to live&mdash;cork-screwing sidewise for light, forking into two branches
+where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking
+the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder
+swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist
+barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not
+devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun
+and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds&mdash;seeds shaped like
+parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its
+own fixity&mdash;life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the
+scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's
+heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing.</p>
+
+<p>And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see
+it in the bleached skeleton spars<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> of the dead forest where the burn has
+run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting
+half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high
+with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter
+here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the
+poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened
+to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than
+eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky
+Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took
+smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and
+Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high,
+leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a
+hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second
+growth of such trees.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two
+families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I
+thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health
+seekers.</p>
+
+<p>"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care
+of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.</p>
+
+<p>"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They
+think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO</h3>
+
+
+<p>The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless,
+sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any
+day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos
+National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in
+northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four
+feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my
+bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in
+New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all
+right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and
+mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas.
+You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different
+National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet;
+and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000
+feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or
+Grass Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Ca&ntilde;on.</p>
+
+<p>There are several other ways in which the National<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> Forests of New
+Mexico discount Eastern expectation.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of
+trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the
+wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to
+be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to
+Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New
+Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will
+stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If
+you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the
+National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back,
+leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet
+of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters
+of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens&mdash;<i>There is
+still a no-tip land.</i> As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can
+literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can
+stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the
+transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an
+hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast.
+In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than
+$2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you
+more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or
+you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have
+your own horse for a six<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month
+would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2&mdash;where
+will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch
+houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized,
+where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself
+an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel
+that has been too popular; that day has been long passed in the ranches
+of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your
+room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from
+the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard
+or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold
+water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the
+old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture
+of the Southwest&mdash;conical arches opening from one room into another,
+shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are
+flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper
+roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire
+halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health
+seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others
+by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers
+living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico
+that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said
+that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take
+tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a
+holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship
+worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy
+his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made
+for sending in meals.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-100.jpg" width="650" height="360" alt="Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The
+structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its
+feathers, which are used in religious rites" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The
+structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its
+feathers, which are used in religious rites</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the
+excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of <i>most</i>
+of the Forests by motor, of <i>all</i> of the Forests by team (be sure to
+hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the
+highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner.
+In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by
+the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons
+been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain
+ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to
+ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in
+the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible ca&ntilde;ons,
+shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge
+mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial
+lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is
+not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May;
+but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road,
+going up the ca&ntilde;on from south to north.</p>
+
+<p>The great surprise in the National Forests of New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> Mexico is the great
+plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White
+Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can
+still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout
+than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still
+abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they
+constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs
+hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As
+for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the
+Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the ca&ntilde;ons forking off the Pecos at
+right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, the mountain ca&ntilde;ons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none
+in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that
+will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the
+conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the
+Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to
+remember&mdash;with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation,
+excellent trails and abundance of game&mdash;these National Forests of New
+Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago,
+only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that
+the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the
+West.</p>
+
+<p>You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las
+Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> main line of the railroad. I entered
+by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the
+scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over
+the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that
+just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills
+rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue
+horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests&mdash;trees
+eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching
+and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann
+spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National
+Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the
+ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings
+have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are
+growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out
+by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and
+in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in
+five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years
+this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval
+state.</p>
+
+<p>The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged
+in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley
+stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade
+system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish
+first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little
+checkerboard farm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> patches under the same primitive ditch system. A
+glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The
+goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer
+raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in
+the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty
+cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn
+that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2
+a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not
+wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year
+keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier
+looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of
+old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing
+better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly, it dawns on you&mdash;this is not America at all. It is a bit
+of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the
+wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health,
+and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief.
+The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the
+fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter
+skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats
+bleating on the red sand hills&mdash;all complete the illusion that you have
+waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to
+Canada, New Mexico is to the United<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> States&mdash;a mosaic in color; a bit of
+the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the
+picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of
+progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are
+still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive,
+undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and
+falls back in social envy and class hate. "Our people, no, they are not
+ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth&mdash;no&mdash;we
+have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little
+whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on
+de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mighty good," though I was not thinking of the poem. I was thinking of
+the spirit that is contented enough to <i>see</i> poetry in the great white
+mountains through the door of a little whitewashed adobe room; and in
+this case, it was a sick room. Presently, he got up out of his bed, and
+donned an old military cape, and came out in the sunlight to have me
+photograph him, so that his friends would have it <i>after</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses
+in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few
+words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put
+you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you. Any
+normal traveler does not need to be told that these ranch houses are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+not regular boarding houses as you understand that term; but as a great
+many travelers are not normal, perhaps I should explain. The custom of
+taking strangers has arisen from those old days when there were no inns
+and all passers-by were given beds and meals as a matter of course.
+Those days are past, but luckily for outsiders, the custom survives;
+only remember while you pay, you go as a <i>guest</i>, and must not expect a
+valet to clean your boots and to quake at any discord of nerves untuned
+by the jar of town.</p>
+
+<p>In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were
+spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling,
+earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the
+little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of
+settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse. Presently,
+at an elevation of 8,000 feet; we pulled up in Pecos Town before the
+long, low, whitewashed ranch house, the two ends coming back in an L
+round the court, the main entrance on the other side of it. You expected
+to find wilderness. Well, there is an upright piano, and there is a
+gramophone with latest musical records, and close by the davenport where
+hangs a grizzly bear pelt, stands a banjo. You have scarcely got travel
+togs off before dinner is sounded by the big copper ranch bell hung on
+the piazza after the fashion of the Missions.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going
+up the ca&ntilde;on. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a
+great many reasons.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for,
+your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with
+the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt
+predatory animals&mdash;bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion&mdash;you need no
+permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey
+and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country
+as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that
+the forests in the upper ca&ntilde;ons are very dense; and that you might get
+lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge
+who knows where you have gone?</p>
+
+<p>On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in
+and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican,
+has been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and is somewhat of
+a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views.</p>
+
+<p>"What is going to happen in Old Mexico?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, only one t'ing possible&mdash;los Americanos must go in."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot&mdash;cannot control. Madero, he cannot
+control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."</p>
+
+<p>It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe
+huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass
+windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and
+sat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the
+devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet
+walls.</p>
+
+<p>Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built
+in&mdash;well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare
+say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell
+of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way
+for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in
+demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were
+so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell
+away and buried it in the mountains&mdash;where, no man knows: it has never
+since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of
+America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to
+believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is
+most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the
+snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the ca&ntilde;on with a span
+of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a
+very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not
+need to describe the trails up Pecos Ca&ntilde;on. I consider it a safer road
+than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway
+or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor
+car, though the scenic highway<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> cutting this at right angles will be
+when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who
+jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn
+several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of
+jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the
+mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Ca&ntilde;on, now down on a
+level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer
+as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going
+and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the
+driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and
+the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger
+whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With
+carelessness&mdash;well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went
+over the edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily
+wooded and you can't slide far.</p>
+
+<p>Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for "the tent
+dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how
+they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your
+own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from
+Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where
+the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and
+heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and
+miniature waterfalls. Wherever the ca&ntilde;on widens to little fields, the
+Mexican farmer's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch
+to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round
+rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the ca&ntilde;on forks to right
+and left up other forested ca&ntilde;ons, many of which, save for the hunter,
+have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge
+round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords,
+loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the
+two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty
+miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You
+are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no
+lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the
+wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear
+their summits is the head of Pecos Ca&ntilde;on&mdash;a sort of snow top to the
+sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the
+west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right
+on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except
+the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-112.jpg" width="650" height="370" alt="The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically
+communal dwellings five stories in height" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically
+communal dwellings five stories in height</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in
+addition a cowboy slicker and was cold&mdash;this in a land where the
+Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old
+Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining
+camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the ca&ntilde;on.
+Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say
+it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks
+me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my
+collapsible drinking cup to go down to the ca&ntilde;on for some water.
+Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup
+off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten
+years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.</p>
+
+<p>Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the ca&ntilde;on. From this
+point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks
+seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a
+dozen ca&ntilde;ons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them.
+In fact, if you followed up any of these side ca&ntilde;ons, you would find
+them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet
+untrod.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a
+bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high
+known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past
+the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through
+the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this
+10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another
+important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing
+worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own
+depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and
+twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy
+occupation, conditions are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> almost ideal for recovery; and that is what
+thousands are doing&mdash;combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing
+with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this
+ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.</p>
+
+<p>Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper
+Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the
+exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for
+the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the
+snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of
+the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Ca&ntilde;on, and the whole Pecos Valley
+below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom
+cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the
+work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and
+hunt in Pecos Ca&ntilde;on every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire;
+and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this
+compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of
+trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all
+through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put
+out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local
+congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of
+funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest
+timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the
+fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of
+penuriousness reacted on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> Service in the Northwest that last year
+the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the
+men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle
+against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long
+past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making
+will do to prevent fires.</p>
+
+<p>We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down
+the east side into the Las Vegas Ca&ntilde;on. Four feet of snow still clung to
+the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across
+the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper
+peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that
+Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement
+that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though
+it is so very old. The holy <i>padre</i> was jogging along on his mule one
+night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his
+vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule
+stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his
+book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on
+the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an <i>Ave
+Maria</i>; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as
+Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CA&Ntilde;ON</h3>
+
+
+<p>I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction
+but fact. I am not speculating as to <i>how</i> those folk of neolithic times
+lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses <i>where</i> they lived,
+sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance
+stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined
+tread of &aelig;ons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world
+from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley
+a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred <i>kiva</i> or
+ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a
+circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before
+Julius C&aelig;sar was born, before&mdash;if Egyptian arch&aelig;ologists be correct&mdash;the
+dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their
+own oblivion. To my right and left for miles&mdash;for twelve miles, to be
+correct&mdash;are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the
+cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered
+Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock
+at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls
+too narrow for two men to walk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> abreast, with vertical walls of yellow
+pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this
+valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before
+the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a
+record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England,
+contemporaneous, perhaps&mdash;for all science knows to the contrary&mdash;with
+that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.</p>
+
+<p>Lying in my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and
+to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow cliff wall, I
+fell to wondering on this puzzle of arch&aelig;ologist and historian&mdash;what
+desolated these bygone nations? The theory of desiccation, or drought,
+so plausible elsewhere, doesn't hold for one minute when you are here on
+the spot; for there is the mountain brook brawling through the Valley
+not five minutes' scramble from any one of these caves; and there on the
+far western sky-line are the snows of the Jemez Mountains, which must
+have fed this brook since this part of the earth began. Was it war, or
+pestilence, or captivity, that made of the populous city a den of
+wolves, a resort for hoot owl and bittern and fox? If pestilence, then
+why are the skeletons not found in the great ossuaries and masses that
+mark the pestilential destruction of other Indian races? There remain
+only the alternatives of war, or captivity; and of either, not the
+vestige of a shadow of a tradition remains. One man's guess is as good
+as another's; and the scientist's guesses vary all the way from 8,000 B.
+C. to 400 A.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> D. So there you are! You have as good a right to a guess
+as the highest scientist of them all; and while I refrain from
+speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that
+these people of the Stone Age were not the gibbering, monkey-tailed
+maniacs of claw finger nails and simian jaw which the half-baked
+pseudo-evolutionist loves to picture of Stone Age denizens. As Jack
+Donovan, a character working at Judge Abbott's in the Valley
+said&mdash;"Sure, monkey men wud a' had a haard time scratchin' thro' thim
+cliffs and makin' thim holes in the rocks." Remnants of shard and
+pottery, structure of houses, decorations and woven cloths and skins
+found wrapped as cerements round the dead all prove that these men were
+a sedentary and for that age civilized people. When our Celt and Saxon
+ancestors were still chasing wild boars through the forests, these
+people were cultivating corn on the Upper and Lower Mesas. When Imperial
+Rome's common populace boasted few garments but the ones in which they
+had been born, these people were wearing a cloth woven of fiber and
+rushes. When European courts trod the stately over floors of filthy
+rushes, these cliff dwellers had flooring of plaster and cement, and
+rugs of beaver and wolf and bear. All this you can see with your own
+eyes by examining the caves and skeletons of the Jemez Forests; and the
+fine glaze of the beautiful pottery work is as lost an art as the
+pigments of old Italy.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go into the Jemez to
+dream. You go to Pecos to hunt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> and fish. So you do to the Jemez; but it
+is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of
+man you are fishing for. As the Pecos Forests appeal to the strenuous
+holiday hunter&mdash;the man who considers he has not had his fun till he has
+broken a leg killing a bear, or stood mid-waist in snow-water stringing
+fish on a line like beads on a string&mdash;so the Jemez appeals to the
+dreamer, the scholar, the scientist, the artist; and I can imagine no
+more ideal (nor cheaper) holiday than to join the American School of
+Arch&aelig;ology, about which I have already spoken, that comes in here with
+scientists from every quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and
+dig, and delve, and revel in the past of moonlight nights round
+campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the
+face of the cliff. The School has been a going concern for only a few
+years. Yet last year over 150 scientists came in from every quarter of
+the globe.</p>
+
+<p>Spite of warnings to the contrary given to me both East and West, the
+trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest you can make in
+America. You strike in from Santa Fe; and right here, let me set down as
+emphatically as possible, two or three things pleasant and unpleasant
+about Santa Fe.</p>
+
+<p>First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not
+excepting Quebec. Color, age, leisure; a medley of races; sand-hills
+engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor
+blending with the braying of a Mexican burro trotting to market loaded
+out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> and New America; streets with
+less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's
+Board of Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the
+sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and
+chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West
+Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe
+houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door
+or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty
+governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the
+Arch&aelig;ological Society has its rooms with Lotave's beautiful mural
+paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has
+neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is
+such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set
+down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America,
+yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 445px;">
+<img src="images/fig-122.jpg" width="445" height="650" alt="Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez
+Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez
+Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashamed of
+itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask a Santa Fe man why in
+the world, with all its attraction of the picturesque, the antique, the
+snowy mountains, and the weak-lunged one's ideal climate, it has so few
+tourists; and he answers you with a depreciatory shrug that "it's off
+the main line." "Off the main line?" So is Quebec off the main line; yet
+200,000 Americans a year see it. So is Yosemite off the main line; and
+10,000 people go out to it every year. I have never heard that the Nile
+and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the main line; yet foreigners
+yearly reap a fortune catering to visiting Americans. Personally, it is
+a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe-trotter,
+for I am one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa Fe
+blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed to it by the
+grand dons of Spain that is averse to sounding the brass band, I love
+the appealing, picturesque, inert laziness of it all; but I love better
+to ask: "Why go to Egypt, when you have the wonders of an Egypt
+unexplored in your own land? Why scour the crowded Alps when the snowy
+domes of the Santa Fe and Jemez and Sangre de Christo lie unexplored
+only an easy motor ride from your hotel?" If Santa Fe, as it is, were
+known to the big general public, 200,000 tourists a year would find
+delight within its purlieus; and while I like the places untrodden by
+travelers, still&mdash;being an outsider, myself,&mdash;I should like the
+outsiders to know the same delight Santa Fe has given me.</p>
+
+<p>To finish with the things of the mundane, you strike in to Santa Fe from
+a desolate little junction called Lamy, where the railroad has built a
+picturesque little doll's house of a hotel after the fashion of an old
+Spanish mansion. To reach the Jemez Forests where the ruins of the Cave
+Dwellers exist, you can drive or motor (to certain sections only) or
+ride. As the distance is forty miles plus, you will find it safer and
+more comfortable to drive. If you take a driver and a team, and keep
+both over two days, it will cost you from $10 to $14 for the round trip.
+If you go in on a burro, you can buy the burro outright for $5 or $10.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+(Don't mind if your feet do drag on the ground. It will save being
+pitched.) If you go out with the American School of Arch&aelig;ology (Address
+Santa Fe for particulars) your transportation will cost you still less,
+perhaps not $2. Once out, in the ca&ntilde;ons of the Cave Dwellers, you can
+either camp out with your own tenting and food; or put up at Judge
+Abbott's hospitable ranch house; or quarter yourself free of charge in
+one of the thousands of cliff caves and cook your own food; or sleep in
+the caves and pay for your meals at the ranch. At most, your living
+expenses will not exceed $2 a day. If you do your own cooking, they need
+not be $1 a day.</p>
+
+<p>One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is
+that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way.
+We left Santa Fe at six <span class="smcap">a. m.</span>, the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills.
+I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid
+on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red
+and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me
+that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew
+quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured
+nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet
+to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or
+less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in
+earnest; and in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande
+and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met
+only two Mexican teams on the way.</p>
+
+<p>From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in
+pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops
+over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely
+deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic <i>tufa</i> hub deep in ash dust,
+so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are
+really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In
+fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural
+dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will
+miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look
+back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths
+have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the
+sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the
+gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then
+your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa
+and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20.
+Here, White Rock Ca&ntilde;on lines both sides of the Rio Grande&mdash;precipices
+steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square
+block; and coming into this ca&ntilde;on at right angles are the ca&ntilde;ons where
+lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers&mdash;some of them hundreds of feet above
+the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible ca&ntilde;ons, you must drive
+up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand
+feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.</p>
+
+<p>We lunched in a little water ca&ntilde;on, which gashed the mesa side where a
+mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to
+be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the
+Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is
+better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for
+this particular ca&ntilde;on being inaccessible to motors&mdash;a climb steep as a
+stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which
+only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper
+mesa&mdash;acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park
+but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary
+cloud-line, still girt by that snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We
+followed the trail at a rattling pace&mdash;the Arch&aelig;ological School had
+placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on&mdash;and presently, by great
+mounds of building stone covered feet deep by the dust and d&eacute;bris of
+ages, became aware that we were on historic ground. Nor can the theory
+of drought explain the abandonment of this mesa. While it rains heavily
+only two months in the year&mdash;July and August&mdash;the mesa is so high that
+it is subject to sprinkling rains all months of the year; to be sure not
+enough for springs, but ample to provide forage and grow corn; and for
+water, these sky-top dwellers had access to the water<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> ca&ntilde;ons both
+before and behind. What hunting ground it must have been in those old
+days! Even yet you are likely to meet a flock of wild turkey face to
+face; or see a mountain lion slink away, or hear the bark of coyote and
+fox.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this it, Gregoire?" I asked. The mound seemed irregularly to cover
+several acres&mdash;pretty extensive remains, I thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no&mdash;no Se&ntilde;orita&mdash;wait," warned Gregoire expectantly.</p>
+
+<p>I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short and
+plumb as if you tossed a biscuit over the edge of the Flatiron roof. I
+got out and looked down and then&mdash;went dumb! Afterwards, Mrs. Judge
+Abbott told me they thought I was afraid to come down. It wasn't that!
+The thing so far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed or seen; and the
+color&mdash;well&mdash;those artists accused of over-coloration could not have
+over-colored if they had tried. Pigments have not been invented that
+could do it!</p>
+
+<p>Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara,
+three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of
+blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout
+across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black
+basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge
+and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind
+angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red.
+And picture the face of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> cliff under your feet, the sides of the
+massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives,
+pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched
+caves and winding recess and portholes&mdash;a city of the dead, silent as
+the dead, old almost as time!</p>
+
+<p>The wind came soughing up the ca&ntilde;on with the sound of the sea. The note
+of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down
+among the tender green, lining the ca&ntilde;on stream, a mourning dove uttered
+her sad threnody&mdash;then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more
+silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on
+the edge of the ca&ntilde;on wall and let the palpable past come touching me
+out of the silence.</p>
+
+<p>A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the
+floor of the valley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a
+city of one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other,
+reached by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep in the stone. Where had the
+people gone; and why? What swept their civilization away? When did the
+age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the city of
+their building and choice, of their loves and their hates, and their
+wooing and their weddings, of their birth and their deaths&mdash;do not leave
+without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this place of beauty
+and security and thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did
+the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pursued like deer by the
+Apache and the Ute and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> Navajo? Or were they marched out captives,
+weeping? Or did they fall by the pestilence? Answer who can! Your guess
+is as good as mine! But there is the sacred ceremonial underground
+chamber where they worshiped the sacred fire and the plumed serpent,
+guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of
+manhood and instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and
+cleanliness and reticence. "If thou art stricken, die like the deer with
+a silent throat," says the adage of the modern Pueblo Indian. "When the
+foolish speak, keep thou silent." "When thou goest on the trail, carry
+only a light blanket." Good talk, all of it, for young boys coming to
+realize themselves and life! And there farther down the valley is the
+stone circle or dancing floor where the people came down from their
+cliff to make merry and express in rhythm the emotions which other
+nations express in poetry and music. The whole city must have been the
+grandstand when the dancing took place down there.</p>
+
+<p>It was Gregoire who called me to myself.</p>
+
+<p>"We cannot take the wagon down there," he said. "No wagon has ever gone
+down here. You walk down slow and I come with the horses, one by one."</p>
+
+<p>It sounded a good deal easier than it looked. I haven't seen a steeper
+stair; and if you imagine five ladders trucked up zigzag against the
+Flatiron Building and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it
+is, you'll have an idea of the appearance of the situation; but it
+looked a great deal harder than it really was, and the trail has since
+been improved. The little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> steps cut in the volcanic <i>tufa</i> or white
+pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold. They grit to your footstep
+and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to
+make this wonderful Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on accessible to the public, or if the
+Arch&aelig;ological School can raise the means and co&ouml;perate with the Forestry
+Service trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the
+face of this ca&ntilde;on, graded gradually enough for a motor. The day that is
+done, visitors will number not 150 a year but 150,000; for nothing more
+exquisitely beautiful and wonderful exists in America.</p>
+
+<p>It seems almost incredible that Judge and Mrs. Abbott have brought down
+this narrow, steep tier of 600 steps all the building material, all the
+furniture, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place;
+but there the materials are and there is no other trail in but one still
+less accessible.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon, Mrs. Abbott and I wandered up the valley two or three
+miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundreds of feet up
+the face of the precipice. The cave was first discovered by Judge and
+Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday afternoon walks. The Arch&aelig;ological
+School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the d&eacute;bris and accumulated erosion
+of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber in its original condition.
+"Restoring the ruins" does not mean "manufacturing ruins." It means
+digging out the erosion that has washed and washed for thousands of
+years down the hillsides during the annual rains. All the caves have
+been originally plastered in a sort<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> of terra cotta or ocher stucco.
+When that is reached and the charred wooden beams of the smoked, arched
+ceilings, restoration stops. The aim is to put the caves as they were
+when the people abandoned them. On the floors is a sort of rock bottom
+of plaster or rude cement. When this is reached, digging stops. It is in
+the process of digging down to these floors that the beautiful specimens
+of prehistoric pottery have been rescued. Some of these specimens may be
+seen in Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian and the Natural History
+Museum in New York, and in the Santa Fe Palace, and the Field Museum of
+Chicago. Sometimes as many as four feet of erosion have overlaid the
+original flooring. When digging down to the flooring of the ceremonial
+cave, an <i>estufa</i> or sacred secret underground council chamber was
+found; and this, too, was restored. The pueblo of roofless chambers seen
+from the hilltop on the floor of the valley was dug from a mound of
+d&eacute;bris. In fact, too great praise cannot be given Dr. Hewitt and his
+co-workers for their labors of restoration; and the fact that Dr. Hewitt
+was a local man has added to the effectiveness of the work, for he has
+been in a position to learn from New Mexican Indians of any discoveries
+and rumors of discoveries in any of the numerous caves up the Rio
+Grande. For instance, when about halfway down the trail that first day,
+at the Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on or Rito de los Frijoles, as it is called, I met on
+an abrupt bend in the trail a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara&mdash;blue jean
+suit, red handkerchief around neck, felt hat, huge silver earrings and
+teeth white as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> pearls&mdash;Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the ca&ntilde;on,
+who knows every foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white
+pumice background, it was for an instant as if one of the cave people
+had stepped from the past. Well, it was Wan, as we outsiders call him,
+who one day brought word to the Arch&aelig;ological workers that he had found
+in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was
+cleaned out or restored, and proved to be a back apartment or burial
+chamber behind other chambers, which had been worn away by the
+centuries' wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a woven cloth
+like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body lying to-day,
+proving that these people understood the art of weaving long before the
+Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade.</p>
+
+<p>You could stay in the Rito Ca&ntilde;on for a year and find a cave of fresh
+interest each day. For instance, there is the one where the form of a
+huge plumed serpent has been etched like a molding round under the
+arched roof. The serpent, it was, that guarded the pools and the
+springs; and when one considers where snakes are oftenest found, it is
+not surprising that the serpent should have been taken as a totem
+emblem. Many of the chambers show six or seven holes in the
+floor&mdash;places to connect with the Great Earth Magician below. Little
+alcoves were carved in the arched walls for the urns of meal and water;
+and a sacred fireplace was regarded with somewhat the same veneration as
+ancient Orientals preserved their altar fires. In one cave, some old
+Spanish <i>padre</i> has come and carved a huge cross, in rebuke to pagan
+symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of
+goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish r&eacute;gime; and there are other
+caves where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the
+Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could
+speak they "would a tale unfold."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-134.jpg" width="650" height="368" alt="Looking down on the ruins of a prehistoric dwelling from
+one of the upper caves in the Rito de las Frijoles, New Mexico" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Looking down on the ruins of a prehistoric dwelling from
+one of the upper caves in the Rito de las Frijoles, New Mexico</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The aim of the Arch&aelig;ological Society is year by year to restore portions
+till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial
+aid, complete restoration can hardly take place inside a century. When
+you consider that the Rito is only one of many prehistoric areas of New
+Mexico, of Utah, of Colorado, awaiting restoration, you are constrained
+to wish that some philanthropist would place a million or two at the
+disposal of the Arch&aelig;ological Society. If this were done, no place on
+earth could rival the Rito; for the funds would make possible not only
+the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of d&eacute;bris,
+but it would make the Ca&ntilde;on accessible to the general public by easier,
+nearer roads. The inaccessibility of the Rito may be in harmony with its
+ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thousands of
+tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests.</p>
+
+<p>There are other things to do in the Ca&ntilde;on besides explore the City of
+the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through
+parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet
+classified. There is the globe cactus high up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> on the black basalt
+rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun.
+There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse
+beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the
+short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which
+Tennyson sings in "Maud." Presently, you notice the stream banks
+crushing together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite
+and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as
+mist.</p>
+
+<p>Follow farther down! The ca&ntilde;on is no longer a valley. It is a corridor
+between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to
+follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm
+day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for
+if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down
+a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain,
+and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and
+darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of
+spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery
+as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down&mdash;down&mdash;down&mdash;tumbled the
+waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge
+to another in spray, then down&mdash;down&mdash;down to the Rio Grande, many feet
+below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a
+shiver of sheer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the
+great arch&aelig;ologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the
+simple words&mdash;"The Rito is a beautiful place."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA</h3>
+
+
+<p>They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a
+sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and
+down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said
+that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has
+said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted
+Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream
+Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and
+deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart
+business tricks of modern Yankeedom.</p>
+
+<p>Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old
+pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there
+was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off
+that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish,
+present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted
+pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First
+march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to
+leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn.
+Back at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one
+of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet
+hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish dons are
+followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides
+the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700,
+sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of
+the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me
+whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa&mdash;called
+Enchanted&mdash;or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of
+the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is&mdash;pagan
+hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with
+the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed
+these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.</p>
+
+<p>Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors
+have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a
+winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can
+imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and
+necklaces and turquoise-set buttons down trouser leg, scouring below
+these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the
+Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts
+and crafts of the Hopi people&mdash;silver work, weaving, basketry&mdash;into the
+Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether
+the raid took place a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> minute before midday, or a second after
+nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads
+over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and
+Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took
+refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find.
+There you can see their cities and towns to this day.</p>
+
+<p>And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost
+in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line
+from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and
+Laguna and Acoma and Zu&ntilde;i and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and
+Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will
+find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will,
+which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not
+even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some
+of these ruins&mdash;in the Manzanos and in western Arizona&mdash;would house a
+modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they:
+council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once
+peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you
+not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert,
+this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than
+picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 410px;">
+<img src="images/fig-142.jpg" width="410" height="650" alt="A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among
+the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among
+the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel
+as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But
+if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff
+Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from
+the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand
+Ca&ntilde;on in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously
+known as Moki, Zu&ntilde;i, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and
+life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them,
+though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can
+visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but
+Isleta has been so frequently "toured" by sightseers, I preferred to go
+to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the
+western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the
+Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can
+cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the present, the inconvenience of reaching Acoma will effectually
+prevent it ever being "toured." When you have to take a local train that
+lands you in an Indian town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in
+the morning, or else take a freight, which you reach by driving a mile
+out of town, fording an irrigation ditch and crawling under a barb wire
+fence&mdash;there is no immediate danger of the objective point being rushed
+by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the
+traffic. If anything as unique and wonderful as Acoma existed in Egypt
+or Japan, it would be featured and visited by thousands of Americans
+yearly. As it is, I venture to say, not a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> hundred travelers see Acoma's
+Enchanted Mesa in a year, and half the number going out fail to see it
+properly owing to inexperience in Western ways of meeting and managing
+Indians. For instance, the day before I went out, a traveler all the way
+from Germany had dropped off the transcontinental and taken a local
+freight for the Hopi towns. When a tourist wants to see things in
+Germany, he finds a hundred willing palms out to collect and point the
+way; but when a tourist leaves the beaten trail in America, if he asks
+too many questions, he is promptly told to "go to&mdash;" I'll not say where.
+That German wasn't in a good mood when he dropped off the freight train
+at Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the Marmons, but there is no
+regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good
+Westerner, you will carry your own luncheon, or take cheerful pot luck
+as it comes; but the German wasn't a good Westerner; and it didn't
+improve his temper to have butter served up mixed with flies to the tune
+of the landlady's complaint that "it didn't pay nohow to take tourists"
+and she "didn't see what she did it for anyway."</p>
+
+<p>They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from
+twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once,
+Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as
+easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his
+temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity
+leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart
+rock<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course,
+missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is
+a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could
+not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at
+Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the
+crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too
+fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically
+characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own
+advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a
+good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a
+month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff&mdash;and thousands of
+travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma,
+literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world;
+and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to
+put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder
+people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw
+away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round
+that way so you could see it by moonlight.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me <i>very</i> seriously to rise
+at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile
+to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an
+<i>acequia</i> ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.
+The desert sunrise atoned for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> all&mdash;air pure wine, the red-winged
+blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the
+overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough
+to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of
+the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man
+edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the
+true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and shirts seen on the figures
+moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in
+diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed
+brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed
+fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less
+than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue,
+brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder
+straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments
+completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet
+cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep
+stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are
+now affecting the latter.</p>
+
+<p>The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible
+drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie
+dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost
+knocks you off your feet.</p>
+
+<p>The railroad passes almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that
+when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story
+houses up and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get
+off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of
+Laguna are past. Long ago&mdash;in the fifties or thereabouts&mdash;the dam to the
+lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of
+flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away
+for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged
+herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated
+here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology
+that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all
+that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town
+limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds;
+or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme
+a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is
+female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his
+saddle and bridle, and leave.</p>
+
+<p>"I marry, yes," said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, "and I have one
+girl&mdash;her," pointing to a pretty child, "but my man, I guess he&mdash;a bad
+boy&mdash;he leave me."</p>
+
+<p>If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and
+bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.</p>
+
+<p>I set this fact down because a whole school of modern sex sociologists,
+taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an
+Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> of
+woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality
+among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.</p>
+
+<p>At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you
+must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance
+luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr.
+Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the
+Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has
+usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower
+people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the
+pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi
+communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of
+the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early
+seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married
+Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After
+almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879
+succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to
+school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading
+citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce
+children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day,
+there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and
+Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen
+hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you
+may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of
+downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through
+the roof.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-150.jpg" width="650" height="388" alt="Copyright by H. S. Poley
+
+A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><i>Copyright by H. S. Poley</i><br />
+
+A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet
+straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of
+doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant&mdash;Marie
+Iteye&mdash;speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching
+and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets&mdash;1st, 2nd
+and 3rd, they call them&mdash;of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a
+white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all
+whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the
+first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but
+then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the
+porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling,
+purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the
+sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these
+third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the
+floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways
+opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy
+being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads
+and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of
+the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians
+curiously discouraged about results.</p>
+
+<p>"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one
+teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Doubt if it ever does much good?" I should like to take that teacher
+and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and
+then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not
+be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and
+sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has
+barely begun&mdash;well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four
+winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could
+barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large
+pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer. At Acoma, you
+feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and
+traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking
+your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid
+and degenerate.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma;
+and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as
+you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a
+motor if you have one.</p>
+
+<p>Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the
+yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes
+straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous,
+voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye&mdash;cactus, blood-red and gold and
+carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf,
+miniature English daisies over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> which Tennyson's "Maud" trod&mdash;gorgeous
+desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women&mdash;who said our Southwest was
+an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have
+not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of
+Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jos&eacute; River,
+jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been,
+or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of
+the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull
+steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods
+over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy
+river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and
+the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat
+topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant
+sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It
+dawns on you suddenly&mdash;this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.
+Turner would have gone wild with joy over it&mdash;light, pure light, split
+by the shimmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors,
+transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam
+shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus shines with
+the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern
+conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild
+poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars,
+they draw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like
+bits of heaven, because their faces shine with the light of an unclouded
+sky from dawn to dark.</p>
+
+<p>You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses
+belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on
+horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the
+figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses
+and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in
+Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off
+earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids
+enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil&mdash;an unreal Dream World, an
+Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and
+lilac light and heat haze shimmering and unreal as a poet's vision.</p>
+
+<p>It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the
+planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to shimmer and
+shift and lift from earth in mirage altogether.</p>
+
+<p>You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of
+herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not
+poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready
+money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches
+suffice for meal.</p>
+
+<p>Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pass into a
+large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow
+<i>tufa</i> walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky
+and unreal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when
+you lift your eyes, and there&mdash;straight ahead&mdash;lies an enchanted island
+in this lake of light, shimmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical
+yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three
+Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of
+perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or
+sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple
+sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.</p>
+
+<p>Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. "The
+Enchanted Mesa," he says.</p>
+
+<p>I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man
+has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a
+race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge
+rock? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Are there pottery remnants of
+a dead city? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Both men climbed the
+rock, though Hill Ki tells me confidentially they "were very scare,"
+when it came to throwing a rope up over the end of the rock, to pull the
+climber up as if by pulley. Marmon and Pratt have both been up; and Hill
+Ki tells me so have two venturesome white women climbers, whose names he
+does not know, but "they weren't scare." As we pass from the end to the
+side of the Enchanted Mesa, it is seen to be an oblong slab utterly cut
+off from all contact but so indented halfway up at one end as to be
+ascended by a good climber to within distance of throwing a rope over
+the top. The quarrel between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> Lummis and Hodge has waxed hotter and
+hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa without any finale to the dispute; and
+far be it from an outsider like myself to umpire warfare amid the gods
+of the antiquarian; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acoma
+Indians may explain the whole matter; and that both men may be partly
+right? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports
+that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony. Before a
+youth reaches manhood, while he is still being instructed in the
+mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council room or <i>kiva</i>, it is
+customary for the Acomas to blindfold him and send him to the top of the
+Enchanted Mesa for a night's lonely vigil with a jar of water as
+oblation to the spirits. These jars explain the presence of pottery,
+which Lummis describes. They would also give credence to at least
+periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of house ruins, on the
+other hand, would explain why Hodge scouted Lummis' theory. The Indians
+explained to Miss McLain that a boy could climb blindfolded where he
+could not go open-eyed, a fact that all mountain engineers will
+substantiate.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 409px;">
+<img src="images/fig-158.jpg" width="409" height="650" alt="A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But what matters the quarrel? Is not the whole region an Enchanted Mesa,
+one of the weirdest bits of the New World? You have barely rounded the
+Enchanted Mesa, when another oblong colossus looms to the fore, sheer
+precipice, but accessible by tiers of sand and stone at the far end;
+that is, accessible by handhold and foothold. Look again! Along the top
+of the walled precipice, a crest to the towering slab, is a human wall,
+the walls of an adobe streetful of houses, little windows looking out
+flush with the precipice line like the portholes of a ship. Then you see
+something red flutter and move at the very edge of the rock top&mdash;Hopi
+urchins, who have spied us like young eagles in their eyrie, and shout
+and wave down at us, though we can barely hear their voices. It looks
+for all the world like the top story of a castle above a moat.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the sand-hill, I ask Hill Ki, why, now that there is no
+danger from Spaniard and Navajo, the Hopi continue to live so high up
+where they must carry all their supplies sheer, vertical hundreds of
+feet, at least 1,500 if you count all the wiggling in and out and around
+the stone steps and stone ladders, and niched handholds. Hill Ki grins
+as he unhitches his horses, and answers: "You understan' when you go up
+an' see!" But he does not offer to escort me up.</p>
+
+<p>As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little
+Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.
+Though she cannot speak one word of English and I cannot speak one word
+of Hopi we keep up a most voluble conversation by gesture. Don't ask how
+we did it! It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. She is
+dressed in white, home-woven skirt with a white rag for a head
+shawl&mdash;badge of the good girl; and her stockings come only to the
+ankles, leaving the feet bare. The feet of all the Hopi are abnormally
+small, almost monkey-shaped; and when you think of it, it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> purely
+cause and effect. The foot is not flat and broad, because it is
+constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the
+Hopi women look at my broad-soled, box-toed outing boots in amazement.
+At hard spots in the climb, they would turn and point to my boots and
+offer me help till I showed them that the sole, though thick, was
+pliable as a moccasin.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl signaled; did I want to go up?</p>
+
+<p>I nodded.</p>
+
+<p>She signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; or the long,
+easy path by the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well
+as foothold, and the sand promised to roll you back fast as you climbed
+up, I signaled the hard way; and off we set. I asked her how old she
+was; and she seemed puzzled how to answer by signs till she thought of
+her fingers&mdash;then up went eight with a tap to her chest signifying self.
+I asked her what had caused such sore inflammation in her eyes. She
+thought a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winnowed one hand as of
+wind&mdash;the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation up for three
+hours without a word being spoken; but by this, a little hand sought
+mine in various affectionate squeezes, and a pair of very sore eyes
+looked up with confidence, and what was lacking in words, she made up in
+shy smiles. Poor little Hopi kiddie! Will your man "be bad boy," too, by
+and by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white
+civilization that is encroaching on your tenacious, conservative race?
+After all, you are better<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> off, little kiddie, a thousand fold, than if
+you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York.</p>
+
+<p>By this, what with wind, and sand, and the weight of a kodak and a
+purse, and the hard ascent, one of the two climbers has to pause for
+breath; and what do you think that eight-year-old bit of small humanity
+does? Turns to give me a helping hand. That is too much for gravity. I
+laugh and she laughs and after that, I think she would have given me
+both hands and both feet and her soul to boot. She offers to carry my
+kodak and films and purse; and for three hours, I let her. Can you
+imagine yourself letting a New York, or Paris, or London street gamin
+carry your purse for three hours? Yet the Laguna people had told me to
+look out for myself. I'd find the Acomas uncommonly sharp.</p>
+
+<p>That climb is as easy to the Acomas as your home stairs to you; but it's
+a good deal more arduous to the outsider than a climb up the whole
+length of the Washington Monument, or up the Metropolitan Tower in New
+York; but it is all easily possible. Where the sand merges to stone, are
+handhold niches as well as stone steps; and where the rock steps are too
+steep, are wooden ladders. At last, we swing under a great overhanging
+stone&mdash;splendid weapon if the Navajos had come this way in old days, and
+splendid place for slaughter of the Spanish soldiers, who scaled Acoma
+two centuries ago&mdash;up a tier of stone steps, and we are on top of the
+white limestone Mesa, in the town of Acoma, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
+streets, and its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd story houses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> the first roof reached
+by a movable ladder, the next two roofs by stone steps.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not attempt to describe the view from above. Take Washington's
+Shaft; multiply by two, set it down in Sahara Desert, climb to the top
+and look abroad! That is the view from Acoma. Is the trip worth while?
+Is mountain climbing worth while? Do you suppose half a hundred people
+would yearly break their necks in Switzerland if climbing were not worth
+while? As Hill Ki said when I asked him why they did not move their city
+down now that all danger of raid had passed, "You go up an' see!" Now I
+understood. The water pools were but glints of silver on the yellow
+sands. The flocks of sheep and goats looked like ants. The rampart rocks
+that engirt the valley were yellow rims below; and across the tops of
+the far mesas could be seen scrub forests and snowy peaks. Have
+generations&mdash;generations on generations&mdash;of life amid such color had
+anything to do with the handicrafts of these people&mdash;pottery, basketry,
+weaving, becoming almost an art? Certainly, their work is the most
+artistic handicraft done by Indians in America to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Boys and girls, babies and dogs, rush to salute us as we come up; but my
+little guide only takes tighter hold of my hand and "shoos" them off. We
+pass a deep pool of waste water from the houses, lying in the rocks, and
+on across the square to the twin-towered church in front of which is a
+rudely fenced graveyard. The whole mesa is solid, hard rock; and to make
+this graveyard for their people, the women have carried up on their
+backs sand and soil enough to fill in a depression for a burying place.
+The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally
+a bank of human limestone.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-164.jpg" width="650" height="363" alt="At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the
+pueblos in New Mexico" title="" />
+<span class="caption">At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the
+pueblos in New Mexico</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma
+who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the
+square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red
+skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise
+ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak
+such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It
+is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another
+shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.</p>
+
+<p>She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the
+finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above
+sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest
+gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the
+railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out
+in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at
+the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for
+ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and
+chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier
+of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third
+story room; and a cleaner room I have never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> seen in a white woman's
+house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window
+between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle
+might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking
+water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement,
+and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is
+spotless.</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you sleep, Marie?" I ask.</p>
+
+<p>"Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime."</p>
+
+<p>And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her
+father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone
+through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.</p>
+
+<p>And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact
+testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon
+and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as
+different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the
+Bowery.</p>
+
+<p>All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting
+wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts
+of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as
+the Acomas descend.</p>
+
+<p>We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps,
+preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act
+took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours'
+visit amid the gamins of New York,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> or London? At the foot of the cliff,
+we shook hands all round and said good-by; and when I looked back up the
+valley, the children were still waving and waving. If this be humble
+Indian life in its Simon pure state, with all freedom from our rules of
+conduct, all I have to say is it is infinitely superior to the hoodlum
+life of our cities and towns.</p>
+
+<p>One point more: I asked Marie as I had asked Mr. Marmon, "Do you think
+your people are Indians, or Aztecs?" and the answer came without a
+moment's hesitation&mdash;"Aztecs; we are not Indian like Navajo and
+Apaches."</p>
+
+<p>Opposite the Enchanted Mesa, I looked back. My little guide was still
+gazing wistfully after us, waving her shawl and holding tight to a coin
+which I trust no old grimalkin pried out of her hand.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND</h3>
+
+
+<p>When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail
+on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or
+all three courses if you have time.</p>
+
+<p>You may strike up into Zu&ntilde;i Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the
+White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated
+that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of
+the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found
+under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain
+cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man&mdash;and likely
+to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and
+forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock
+declivity, an almost desert-forest growth&mdash;dwarf juniper and cedar and
+giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off
+intruders&mdash;and you can understand why some of the most magnificent
+specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here
+undisturbed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains,
+you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the
+Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you
+find Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, the former, a colossal
+community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders;
+the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in
+almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate
+all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came
+in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric
+occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the
+second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that
+quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.</p>
+
+<p>Or you may skip the short trip out to Zu&ntilde;i off the main traveled
+highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains&mdash;two weeks
+at the very shortest, and you should make it six&mdash;and leave Gallup, just
+at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve
+and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab,
+round the Grand Ca&ntilde;on up towards the State lines of California and Utah.
+If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last
+one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and
+mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of
+high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting
+seas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the
+movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It
+isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first
+high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world,
+a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks
+and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America
+at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these
+Navajo boys&mdash;a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a
+hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or
+bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white
+cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more
+silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an
+Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red
+sand knobs&mdash;you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their
+<i>hogan</i> houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain,
+scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving
+at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night
+and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of
+silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the
+juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the
+wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot
+vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat&mdash;bleating till the air
+quivers&mdash;driven by little Navajo girls on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> horseback, born to the
+saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.</p>
+
+<p>If you can't go to Zu&ntilde;i Land and the White Mountain Forest and the
+Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the
+sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort.
+Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own
+Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in
+antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of
+the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place&mdash;in the Coconino
+and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Ca&ntilde;on. And if the lure of the antique
+still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent
+lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is
+emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me
+there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the
+antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric
+ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of
+the world in the School of Arch&aelig;ology at Rome, "the more undecided we
+become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America,
+or that of America preceded the Orient."</p>
+
+<p>For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into
+Ca&ntilde;on de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above
+the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined
+chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could
+hide and lose a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> dozen of our national White House. Who built the
+aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in
+it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of
+answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you
+haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do
+your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route&mdash;cost for
+team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a
+well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will
+know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered
+the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.</p>
+
+<p>To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at
+Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Ca&ntilde;on; but to cross it,
+you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and
+drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to
+point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to
+$7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack
+animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price&mdash;$25 to
+$40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a
+white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is
+as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools
+where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in
+the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months&mdash;July and
+August&mdash;does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and
+night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof,
+and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air
+that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like
+jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself
+into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at
+midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling;
+but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000
+to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in
+the Canadian Northwest.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr.
+Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers
+crossing the Desert&mdash;open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered
+money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult.
+It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door
+was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you
+expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was
+presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely
+sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum
+and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of
+the <i>noblesse oblige</i> which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code
+of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but
+vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write,
+ill-suited<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the
+Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows
+that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern
+Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining
+passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see
+again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In
+the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this
+was well; but to-day&mdash;well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where
+the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals
+come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to
+hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a
+dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and
+sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the
+Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kitchen
+quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt;
+Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would
+respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness
+that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted
+Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived
+unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host
+that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his
+at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the
+house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for
+three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very
+roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly
+ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His
+host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his
+own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through
+the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after
+all."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 406px;">
+<img src="images/fig-176.jpg" width="406" height="650" alt="A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and
+picturesque" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and
+picturesque</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused
+me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this
+instant."</p>
+
+<p>The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American
+travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands
+of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When
+that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all
+visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp
+kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point,
+or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three
+Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.</p>
+
+<p>We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team
+locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip,
+though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy
+sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day
+we wanted them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town
+till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and
+cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost
+air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled
+ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch
+house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their
+spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in
+the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa&mdash;globe
+cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue
+forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod
+mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you
+drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming
+below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows&mdash;blue shadows, sure
+sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is
+the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but
+a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in
+the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a
+sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected.
+You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zu&ntilde;i boys are loping along
+the trail in front of you&mdash;red headband, hair in a braid, red sash,
+velvet trousers&mdash;the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite
+of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is
+a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> Zu&ntilde;i or Hopi,
+and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zu&ntilde;i lads will
+set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles
+in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo
+girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It
+all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering
+her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and
+you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own
+desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.</p>
+
+<p>The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped <i>tufa</i> rocks to the right of the road,
+mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has
+splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all
+travelers&mdash;a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the
+face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain,
+but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects
+struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests
+another explanation.</p>
+
+<p>Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St.
+Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white,
+green-shuttered building as silent as the grave&mdash;St. Michael's Mission,
+where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway
+to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the
+mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off
+beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> and Mrs. Day, two of the best
+known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the
+convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive
+structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and
+Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.</p>
+
+<p>And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being
+lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother
+Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only
+we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine
+quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work
+of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to
+the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians
+into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians
+with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are
+to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins
+alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to
+post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the
+Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad
+enough for them to expand&mdash;14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land&mdash;and
+against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father
+Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or
+three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers
+among the Navajos.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are
+doing.</p>
+
+<p>You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter
+appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard
+will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough,
+brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine
+yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There
+is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated
+scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit
+missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do
+you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay
+helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his
+share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and
+issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!</p>
+
+<p>Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School,
+drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second
+volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined
+glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and
+crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician
+would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the
+masterpiece of his life&mdash;hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten
+years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for
+their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets
+and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the
+heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the
+names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures
+instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and
+other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone
+sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal
+dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he
+has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels
+anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum
+of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky
+way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white,
+blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine
+man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes
+Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars&mdash;and puff, with one breath he
+has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all
+over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid"
+teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi
+deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who
+taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the
+Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn
+stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up
+to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> drawings
+are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman
+deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo
+lore? If all ethnologists and arch&aelig;ologists had founded their studies on
+the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy
+version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in
+our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.</p>
+
+<p>Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo
+blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering
+by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever
+Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a
+drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For
+instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a
+Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of "green" in it. Dressing in
+disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the
+alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the
+benefit of gullible tourists.</p>
+
+<p>"Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?" Father Berrard asked
+the unsuspecting dealer.</p>
+
+<p>"From frog ponds," answered the store man of a region where water is
+scarce as hens' teeth.</p>
+
+<p>Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the
+medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars
+are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his <i>nom de plume</i> shall
+be "Frog Pond Green."</p>
+
+<p>If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at
+either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were
+conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School
+for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not
+to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside
+and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all
+fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in
+birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the
+first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit
+relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other
+associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous
+cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never
+saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced,
+black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness
+should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil;
+that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to
+be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one
+yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common;
+and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning
+up for future festivities.</p>
+
+<p>We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room,
+parlor and refectory, where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts
+of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside
+world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in
+every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender,
+understanding eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell
+sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know
+this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on
+the hill to the right&mdash;eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the
+fading light.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in
+vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces
+bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from
+the stalls&mdash;is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that
+age-old, never-failing spring of Service?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND (<i>continued</i>)</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are two ways to travel even off the beaten trail. One is to take a
+map, stake out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up
+to them lightning-flier fashion. If you want to, and are prepared to
+kill your horses, you can cross Navajo Land in from three to four days.
+Even going at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring
+of the Painted Desert, of the light lying in shimmering heat layers
+split by the refraction of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an
+atmosphere with the tang of northern ozone and the resinous scent of
+incense and frankincense and myrrh. You can see the Desert flowers that
+vie with the sun in brilliant coloring; and feel the Desert night sky
+come down so close to you that you want to reach up a hand and pluck the
+jack-o'-lantern stars swinging so low through the pansy-velvet mist. You
+can even catch a flying glimpse of the most picturesque Indian race in
+America, the Navajos. Their <i>hogans</i> or circular, mud-wattled houses,
+are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and just
+when you think you are most alone, driving through the sagebrush and
+dwarf juniper,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attention to a
+flock of sheep and goats scattered almost invisibly up a blue-green
+hillside. Blue-green, did you say? Yes: that's another thing you can
+unlearn on a flying trip&mdash;the geography definition of a Desert is about
+as wrong as a definition could be made. A Desert isn't necessarily a
+vast sandy plain, stretching out in flat and arid waste. It's as
+variegated in its growth and landscape as your New England or Old
+England hills and vales, only your Eastern rivers flow all the time, and
+your Desert rivers are apt to disappear through evaporation and sink
+below the surface during the heat of the day, coming up again in floods
+during the rainy months, and in pools during the cool of morning and
+evening.</p>
+
+<p>But on a flying trip, you can't learn the secret moods of the Painted
+Desert. You can't draw so much of its atmosphere into your soul that you
+can never think of it again without such dream-visions floating you away
+in its blue-gray-lilac mists as wrapped the seers of old in clairvoyant
+prophetic ecstasy. On a flying trip, you can learn little or nothing of
+the Arab life of our own Desert nomads. You have to depend on Blue Book
+reports of "the Navajos being a dangerous, warlike race" blasted into
+submission by the effulgent glory of this, that, and the other military
+martinet writing himself down a hero. Whereas, if you go out leisurely
+among the traders and missionaries and Indians themselves, who&mdash;more's
+the pity&mdash;have no hand in preparing official reports, you will learn
+another story of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> quiet, pastoral race who have for three hundred
+years been the victims of white man greed and white man lust, of
+blundering incompetency and hysterical cowardice.</p>
+
+<p>These are strong words. Let me give some instances. We were having
+luncheon in the priests' refectory of the Franciscan Mission; and for
+the benefit of those who imagine that missionaries to the Indians are
+fat and bloated on three hundred a year, I should like to set down the
+fact that the refectory was in a sort of back kitchen, that we ate off a
+red table-cloth with soup served in a basin and bath towels extemporized
+into serviettes. I had asked about a Navajo, who not long ago went
+locoed right in Cincinnati station and began stabbing murderously right
+and left.</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place," answered the Franciscan, "that Indian ought not to
+have been in Cincinnati at all. In the second place, he ought not to
+have been there alone. In the third place, he had great provocation."</p>
+
+<p>Here is the story, as I gathered it from traders and missionaries and
+Indians. The Navajo was having trouble over title to his land. That was
+wrong the first on the part of the white man. It was necessary for him
+to go to Washington to lay his grievance before the Government. Now for
+an Indian to go to Washington is as great an undertaking as it was for
+Stanley to go to Darkest Africa. The trip ought not to have been
+necessary if our Indian Office had more integrity and less red-tape;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+but the local agency provided him with an interpreter. The next great
+worry to the Navajo was that he could not get access to "The Great White
+Father." There were interminable red-tape and delay. Finally, when he
+got access to the Indian Office, he could get no definite, prompt
+settlement. With this accumulation of small worries, insignificant
+enough to a well-to-do white man but mighty harassing to a poor Indian,
+he set out for home; and at the station in Washington, the interpreter
+left him. The Navajo could not speak one word of English. Changing cars
+in Cincinnati, hustled and jostled by the crowds, he suddenly felt for
+his purse&mdash;he had been robbed. Now, the Navajo code is if another tribe
+injures his tribe, it is his duty to go forth instantly and strike that
+offender. Our own Saxon and Highland Scotch ancestors once had a code
+very similar. The Indian at once went locoed&mdash;lost his head, and began
+stabbing right and left. The white man newspaper told the story of the
+murderous assault in flare head lines; but it didn't tell the story of
+wrongs and procrastination. The Indian Office righted the land matter;
+but that didn't undo the damage. Through the efforts of the missionaries
+and the traders, the Indian was permitted to plead insanity. He was sent
+to an asylum, where he must have had some queer thoughts of white man
+justice. Just recently, he has been released under bonds.</p>
+
+<p>The most notorious case of wrong and outrage and cowardice and murder
+known in Navajo Land<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> was that of a few years ago, when the Indian agent
+peremptorily ordered a Navajo to bring his child in to the Agency
+School. Not so did Marmon and Pratt sway the Indians at Laguna, when the
+Pueblos there were persuaded to send their children to Carlisle; and
+Miss Drexel's Mission has never yet issued peremptory orders for
+children to come to school; but the martinet mandate went forth. Now,
+the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also
+stipulates that the school shall be placed within reach of the child;
+and the Navajo knew that he was within his right in refusing to let the
+child leave home when the Government had failed to place the school
+within such distance of his <i>hogan</i>. He was then warned by the agent
+that unless the child were sent within a certain time, troops would be
+summoned from Ft. Wingate and Ft. Defiance. The Indians met, pow-wowed
+with one another, and decided they were still within their right in
+refusing. There can be no doubt but that if Captain Willard, himself,
+had been in direct command of the detachment, the cowardly murder would
+not have occurred; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops
+arrived on the scene in charge of a hopelessly incompetent subordinate,
+who proved himself not only a bully but a most arrant coward. According
+to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the
+Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of them were in one of the mud
+<i>hogans</i>. They offered no resistance. They say they were not even
+summoned to surrender. Traders,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> who have talked with the Navajos
+present, say the troopers surrounded the <i>hogan</i> in the dark, a
+soldier's gun went off by mistake and the command was given in
+hysterical fright to "fire." The Indians were so terrified that they
+dashed out to hide in the sagebrush. "Bravery! Indian bravery&mdash;pah," one
+officer of the detachment was afterwards heard to exclaim. Two Navajos
+were killed, one wounded, eleven captured in as cold-blooded a murder as
+was ever perpetrated by thugs in a city street. Without lawyers, without
+any defense whatsoever, without the hearing of witnesses, without any
+fair trial whatsoever, the captives were sentenced to the penitentiary.
+It needed only a finishing touch to make this piece of Dreyfusism
+complete; and that came when a little missionary voiced the general
+sense of outrage by writing a letter to a Denver paper. President
+Roosevelt at once dispatched someone from Washington to investigate; and
+it was an easy matter to scare the wits out of the little preacher and
+declare the investigation closed. In fact, it was one of the things that
+would not bear investigation; but the evidence still exists in Navajo
+Land, with more, which space forbids here but which comes under the
+sixty-fifth Article of War. The officer guilty of this outrage has since
+been examined as to his sanity and brought himself under possibilities
+of a penitentiary term on another count. He is still at middle age a
+subordinate officer.</p>
+
+<p>These are other secrets of the Painted Desert you will daily con if you
+go leisurely across the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> great lone Reserve and do not take with you the
+lightning-express habits of urban life.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, in the account of the Cave Dwellers of the Frijoles
+reference was made to the Indian legend of "the heavens raining fire"
+(volcanic action) and driving the prehistoric Pueblo peoples from their
+ancient dwelling. Mrs. Day of St. Michael's, who has forgotten more lore
+than the scientists will ever pick up, told me of a great chunk of lava
+found by Mr. Day in which were embedded some perfect specimens of
+corn&mdash;which seems to sustain the Indian legend of volcanic outburst
+having destroyed the ancient nations here. The slab was sent East to a
+museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a
+fusion of adobe.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward
+by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading
+post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed
+Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led
+through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of
+such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of grass grows below the
+conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour; and there is an
+all-pervasive odor, not of burning, but of steaming resin, or pine sap
+heated to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs up to an
+altitude of almost 9,000 feet, with air so light that you feel a buoyant
+lift to your heart-beats and a clearing of the cobwebs from your brain.
+You can lose lots of sleep here and not feel it. All heaviness has gone
+out of body and soul. In fact, when you come back to lower levels, the
+air feels thick and hard to breathe. And you can go hard here and not
+tire, and stand on the crest of mesas that anywhere else would be
+considered mountains, and wave your arms above the top of the world. So
+high you are&mdash;you did not realize it&mdash;that the rim of encircling
+mountains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge
+of an inverted blue bowl.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-193.jpg" width="650" height="363" alt="The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona,
+stands on a mesa high above the plain" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona,
+stands on a mesa high above the plain</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line
+altogether among the sagebrush shimmering in pure light; and you become
+aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain
+peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is&mdash;life of
+bird or beast&mdash;at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the
+scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the
+side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life
+of any kind possible in the Desert.</p>
+
+<p>Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just
+at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cluster of adobe ranch
+houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats
+and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering
+pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each
+child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that
+child's wealth for life. Navajo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> men rode up and down the arroyo bed as
+graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store
+building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the
+season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children
+squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in
+the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in
+the close-fitting plush shirts; color in the Germantown blankets&mdash;for
+the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and
+lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red
+sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where
+riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder
+Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land
+of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't
+seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously
+beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best
+work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in
+Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands
+only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy
+Lands equals in expressiveness and power Lungren's studies of the
+Desert; though the Pre-Raphaelites commanded prices of $10,000 and
+$25,000, where we as a nation grumble about paying our artists one
+thousand and two thousand.</p>
+
+<p>The Navajo driver nodded back to us that this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> was Ganado; and in a few
+moments Mr. Hubbell had come from the trading post to welcome us under a
+roof that in thirty years has never permitted a stranger to pass its
+doors unwelcomed. As Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell has already entered history in
+the makings of Arizona and as he shuns the limelight quite as
+"mollycoddles" (his favorite term) seek the spotlights, a slight account
+of him may not be out of place. First, as to his house: from the outside
+you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot
+winds are the enemies to comfort. You notice as you enter the front door
+that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a breath. You
+had expected a bare ranch interior with benches and stiff chairs backed
+up against the wall. Instead, you see a huge living-room forty or fifty
+feet long, every square foot of the walls covered by paintings and
+drawings of Western life. Every artist of note (with the exception of
+one) who has done a picture on the Southwest in the last thirty years is
+represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week studying the
+paintings of the Hubbell Ranch. Including sepias, oils and watercolors,
+there must be almost 300 pictures. By chance, you look up to the
+raftered ceiling; a specimen of every kind of rare basketry made by the
+Indians hangs from the beams. On the floor lie Navajo rugs of priceless
+value and rarest weave. When you go over to Mr. Hubbell's office, you
+find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of
+Moki and Navajo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> blankets. On the walls of the office are more pictures;
+on the floors, more rugs; in the safes and cases, specimens of rare
+silver-work that somehow again remind you of the affinity between Hindoo
+and Navajo. Mr. Hubbell yearly does a quarter-of-a-million-dollar
+business in wool, and yearly extends to the Navajos credit for amounts
+running from twenty-five dollars to fifty thousand dollars&mdash;a trust
+which they have never yet betrayed.</p>
+
+<p>Along the walls of the living-room are doors opening to the sleeping
+apartments; and in each of the many guest rooms are more pictures, more
+rugs. Behind the living-room is a <i>placito</i> flanked by the kitchen and
+cook's quarters.</p>
+
+<p>Now what manner of man is this so-called "King of Northern Arizona"? A
+lover of art and a patron of it; also the shrewdest politician and
+trader that ever dwelt in Navajo Land; a man with friends, who would
+like the privilege of dying for him; also with enemies who would keenly
+like the privilege of helping him to die. What the chief factors of the
+Hudson's Bay Company used to be to the Indians of the North, Lorenzo
+Hubbell has been to the Indians of the Desert&mdash;friend, guard, counselor,
+with a strong hand to punish when they required it, but a stronger hand
+to befriend when help was needed; always and to the hilt an enemy to the
+cheap-jack politician who came to exploit the Indian, though he might
+have to beat the rascal at his own game of putting up a bigger bluff. In
+appearance, a fine type of the courtly Spanish-American gentleman with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+Castilian blue eyes and black, beetling brows and gray hair; with a
+courtliness that keeps you guessing as to how much more gracious the
+next courtesy can be than the last, and a funny anecdote to cap every
+climax. You would not think to look at Mr. Hubbell that time was when he
+as nonchalantly cut the cards for $30,000 and as gracefully lost it all,
+as other men match dimes for cigars. And you can't make him talk about
+himself. It is from others you must learn that in the great cattle and
+sheep war, in which 150 men lost their lives, it was he who led the
+native Mexican sheep owners against the aggressive cattle crowd. They
+are all friends now, the old-time enemies, and have buried their feud;
+and dynamite will not force Mr. Hubbell to open his mouth on the
+subject. In fact, it was a pair of the "rustlers" themselves who told me
+of the time that the cowboys took a swoop into the Navajo Reserve and
+stampeded off 300 of the Indians' best horses; but they had reckoned
+without Lorenzo Hubbell. In twenty-four hours he had got together the
+swiftest riders of the Navajos; and in another twenty-four hours, he had
+pursued the thieves 125 miles into the wildest ca&ntilde;ons of Arizona and had
+rescued every horse. One of the men, whom he had pursued, wiped the
+sweat from his brow in memory of it. He is more than a type of the
+Spanish-American gentleman. He is a type of the man that the Desert
+produces: quiet, soft spoken&mdash;powerfully soft spoken&mdash;alert, keen,
+relentless and versatile; but also a dreamer of dreams, a seer of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+visions, a passionate patriot, and a lover of art who proves his love by
+buying.</p>
+
+<p>The Navajos are to-day by long odds the most prosperous Indians in
+America. Their vast Reserve offers ample pasturage for their sheep and
+ponies; and though their flocks are a scrub lot, yielding little more
+than fifty to seventy cents a head in wool on the average, still it
+costs nothing to keep sheep and goats. Both furnish a supply of meat.
+The hides fetch ready money. So does the wool, so do the blankets; and
+the Navajos are the finest silversmiths in America. Formerly, they
+obtained their supply of raw silver bullion from the Spaniards; but
+to-day, they melt and hammer down United States currency into butterfly
+brooches and snake bracelets and leather belts with the fifty-cent coins
+changed into flower blossoms with a turquoise center. Ten-cent pieces
+and quarters are transformed into necklaces of silver beads, or buttons
+for shirt and moccasins. If you buy these things in the big Western
+cities, they are costly as Chinese or Hindoo silver; but on the Reserve,
+there is a very simple way of computing the value. First, take the value
+of the coin from which the silver ornament is made. Add a dollar for the
+silversmith's labor; and also add whatever value the turquoise happens
+to be; and you have the price for which true Navajo silver-work can be
+bought out on the Reserve.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Navajos, the women weave the blankets and baskets; among the
+Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The value<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+of these out on the Reserve is exactly in proportion to the intricacy of
+the work, the plain native wool colors&mdash;black, gray, white and
+brown&mdash;varying in price from seventy cents to $1.25 a pound; the fine
+bayetta or red weave, which is finer than any machine can produce and
+everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the
+owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wool shades, I
+need scarcely say here, are in bought mineral dyes. True bayettas, which
+are almost a lost art, bring as high as $1,500 each from a connoisseur.
+Other native wools vary in price according to size and color from $15 to
+$150. Off the Reserve, these prices are simply doubled. From all of
+which, it should be evident that no thrifty Navajo need be poor. His
+house costs nothing. It is made of cedar shakes stuck up in the ground
+crutchwise and wattled with mud. Strangely enough, the Navajo no longer
+uses his own blankets. They are too valuable; also, too heavy for the
+climate. He uses the cheap and gaudy Germantown patterns.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest
+teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from
+Ganado for Keam's Ca&ntilde;on. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert
+travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with
+you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied
+passers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a
+system that must surely be changed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> not because the public love Mr.
+Hubbell "less, but more."</p>
+
+<p>The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac
+light&mdash;tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued
+glory&mdash;with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through
+notches of the painted peaks. <i>Hogan</i> after <i>hogan</i>, with sheep corrals
+in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys and girls were driving the
+sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you
+drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the
+Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the
+summit&mdash;the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you
+are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon
+miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented
+bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the
+appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender
+light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an
+incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin
+to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests.
+In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab
+Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the
+Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two
+belts.</p>
+
+<p>Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you
+hardly realize it till you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> slither down a sand bank and find yourself
+between the yellow pumice walls of a blind <i>cul-de-sac</i> in the
+rock&mdash;nooning place&mdash;where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out
+of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone.
+Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have
+fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the
+walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in the
+Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range
+ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds
+flashing phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks
+and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."</p>
+
+<p>This spring is about half of the fifty-five miles between Ganado and
+Keam's Ca&ntilde;on; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the
+first: more lilac-colored mesas high above the top of the world, with
+the encircling peaks like the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue
+as the bluest turquoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of
+evergreens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the lower world, and you are
+in Keam's Ca&ntilde;on, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods,
+steep as a carved wall. You pass the ruins of the old government school,
+where the floods drove the scholars out, and see the big rock
+commemorating Kit Carson's famous fight long ago, and come on the new
+Indian schools where 150 little Navajos and Mokis are being taught by
+Federal appointees&mdash;schools as fine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> in every respect as the best
+educational institutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must
+obtain a permit to go on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas and Oraibi
+and Hotoville are the <i>Ultima Thule</i> of the trail across the Painted
+Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civilization and as
+hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) as when the Spaniard
+first came among them. In fact, the only remnants of Spanish influence
+left at some of these mesas are the dwarfed peach orchards growing in
+the arid sands. These were planted centuries ago by the Spanish
+<i>padres</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The trading post managed by Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr., at Keam's Ca&ntilde;on is
+but a replica of his father's establishment at Ganado. Here is the same
+fine old Spanish hospitality. Here, too, is a rare though smaller
+collection of Western paintings. There are rugs from every part of the
+Navajo Land, and specimens of pottery from the Three Mesas&mdash;especially
+from Nampaii, the wonderful woman pottery maker of the First Mesa&mdash;and
+fine silver-work gathered from the Navajo silversmiths. And with it all
+is the gracious perfection of the art that conceals art, the air that
+you are conferring a favor on the host to accept rest in a little
+rose-covered bower of two rooms and a parlor placed at the command of
+guests.</p>
+
+<p>The last lap of the drive across the Painted Desert is by all odds the
+hardest stretch of the road, as well as the most interesting. It is here
+the Mokis, or Hopi, have their reservation in the very heart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> of Navajo
+Land; and there will be no quarrel over possession of this land. It lies
+a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands&mdash;600, 1,000, 1,500 feet
+above the plains&mdash;of yellow <i>tufa</i> and white gypsum rock, sides as sheer
+as a wall, the top a flat plateau but for the crest where perch the Moki
+villages. Up the narrow acclivities leading to these mesa crests the
+Mokis must bring all provisions, all water, their ponies and donkeys. If
+they could live on atmosphere, on views of a painted world at their feet
+receding to the very drop over the sky-line, with tones and half-tones
+and subtle suggestions of opaline snow peaks swimming in the lilac haze
+hundreds of miles away, you would not wonder at their choosing these
+eerie eagle nests for their cities; for the coloring below is as
+gorgeous and brilliant as in the Grand Ca&ntilde;on. But you see their little
+farm patches among the sand billows below, the peach trees almost
+uprooted by the violence of the wind, literally and truly, a stone
+placed where the corn has been planted to prevent seed and plantlet from
+being blown away. Or if the Navajo still raided the Moki, you could
+understand them toiling like beasts of burden carrying water up to these
+hilltops; but the day of raid and foray is forever past.</p>
+
+<p>It was on our way back over this trail that we learned one good reason
+why the dwellers of this land must keep to the high rock crests.
+Crossing the high mesa, we had felt the wind begin to blow, when like
+Drummond's Habitant Skipper, "it blew and then it blew some more." By
+the time we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> reached the sandy plain below, such a hurricane had broken
+as I have seen only once before, and that was off the coast of Labrador,
+when for six hours we could not see the sea for the foam. The billows of
+sand literally lifted. You could not see the sandy plain for a dust fine
+as flour that wiped out every landmark three feet ahead of your horses'
+noses. The wheels sank hub deep in sand. Of trail, not a sign was left;
+and you heard the same angry roar as in a hurricane at sea. But like the
+eternal rocks, dim and serene and high above the turmoil, stood the
+First Mesa village of Moki Land. Perhaps after all, these little squat
+Pueblo Indians knew what they were doing when they built so high above
+the dust storms. Twice the rear wheels lifted for a glorious upset; but
+we veered and tacked and whipped the fagged horses on. For three hours
+the hurricane lasted, and when finally it sank with an angry growl and
+we came out of the fifteen miles of sand into sagebrush and looked back,
+the rosy tinge of an afterglow lay on the gray pile of stone where the
+Moki town crests the top of the lofty mesa.</p>
+
+<p>In justice to travelers and Desert dwellers, two or three facts should
+be added. Such dust storms occur only in certain spring months. So much
+in fairness to the Painted Desert. Next, I have cursorily given slight
+details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers
+to think the Painted Desert can be crossed with the comfort of a Pullman
+car. You have to pay for your fun. We paid in that blinding, stinging,
+smothering blast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> as from a furnace, from three to half past five. Women
+are supposed to be irrepressible talkers. Well&mdash;we came to the point
+where not a soul in the carriage could utter a word for the dust.
+Lastly, when we saw that the storm was to be such a genuine old-timer,
+we ought to have tied wet handkerchiefs across our mouths. Glasses we
+had to keep the dust out of our eyes; but that dust is alkali, and it
+took a good two weeks' sneezing and a very sore throat to get rid of it.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville, space forbids details
+except that they are higher than the village at Acoma. Overlooking the
+Painted Desert in every direction, they command a view that beggars all
+description and almost staggers thought. You seem to be overlooking
+Almighty God's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored infinity; and
+naturally you go dumb with joy of the beauty of it and lose your own
+personality and perspective utterly. We lunched on the brink of a white
+precipice 1,500 feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that
+declivity with urns of water on their heads, and photographed naked
+urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood above
+<i>estufas</i>, or sacred underground council chambers, where the Pueblos
+held their religious rites before the coming of the Spaniards.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Moki towns, Oraibi is, perhaps, cleaner and better than the Three
+Mesas. The mesas are indescribably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you
+can wander through adobe houses clean as your own home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> quarters, the
+adobe hard as cement, the rooms divided into sleeping apartments,
+cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the
+Grand Ca&ntilde;on, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as
+the Ca&ntilde;on.</p>
+
+<p>If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains,
+which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to
+the Grand Ca&ntilde;on. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands,
+dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way
+we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from
+Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the
+footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa.</p>
+
+<p>"We love you," exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government
+doctor interpreted for us), "we love you with all our hearts and have
+come down to wish you a good-by."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GRAND CA&Ntilde;ON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS</h3>
+
+
+<p>The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land
+comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified
+Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round
+Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Ca&ntilde;on, and the western slope
+between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than
+to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and
+then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the
+wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of
+2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think
+you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on
+a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but
+with pictographs resembling the ancient Ph&oelig;nician signs from which
+our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed
+the ca&ntilde;ons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings
+round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there
+are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet
+high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of
+Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the
+Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a
+great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge
+meteorite.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Grand Ca&ntilde;on little need be said here; not because there is
+nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all
+the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You
+can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole
+length of the Grand Ca&ntilde;on&mdash;200 miles&mdash;and hundreds of the lesser ca&ntilde;ons
+that strike off sidewise from Grand Ca&ntilde;on are still unexplored and
+unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on
+down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in
+from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp
+holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit
+and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and
+forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An
+average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified
+Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff
+dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Ca&ntilde;on and
+100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland
+Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own
+Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> Forests are not the
+People's Playground of <i>all</i> America; that they do not belong to the
+East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned
+in maintaining and protecting them?</p>
+
+<p>You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana
+admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to
+another&mdash;both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in
+a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from
+$1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the
+charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges
+varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The
+hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made,
+with the greatest ease in a day.</p>
+
+<p>Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big
+knock-you-down variety! To go from the spacious glories of the boundless
+Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is
+like passing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery,
+London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go
+looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like
+Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied
+wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come
+away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as
+much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in
+the Painted Desert.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to
+reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic,
+sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light,
+when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and
+cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when
+you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see
+whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by
+spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the
+shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and
+wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.
+Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars
+on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods
+of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the
+gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a
+tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and
+someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both
+ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent
+trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we
+went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and
+he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants
+must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of
+big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply
+buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and
+broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no
+excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.
+The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are
+unknown. Only water&mdash;oceans and &aelig;ons of water&mdash;could have rolled and
+swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient
+sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a
+sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and
+that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop
+making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-213.jpg" width="650" height="363" alt="There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Ca&ntilde;on
+in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and
+been disappointed" title="" />
+<span class="caption">There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Ca&ntilde;on
+in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and
+been disappointed</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a
+prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of
+petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of
+the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands,
+caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.
+Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in
+blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and
+primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same
+colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard
+you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard,
+fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This
+hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified
+Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the
+petrified wood was exploited commercially<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> and shipped away in carloads
+to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any
+of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood
+required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a
+hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the
+Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.</p>
+
+<p>You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a prone
+giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130
+feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an
+emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a
+child&mdash;picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been
+a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into
+colored diamonds.</p>
+
+<p>I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if
+you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every
+single bit of rock is ashine with the colors of broken rainbows; or go
+there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of
+light&mdash;there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big
+thrill with a capital "B."</p>
+
+<p>There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which
+you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All
+these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was
+a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana,
+was one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert
+Potter of the Forestry Department, Washington, who rescued Sheriff Woods
+of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days.
+Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others
+he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man
+and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At
+Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000
+worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and
+Scott and Wilson&mdash;mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses
+which they didn't steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on
+the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you'll not
+lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You'll
+find your way in, if you know how; and if you don't know how, no man can
+teach you. And at Adamana, don't forget to see the pictograph rocks.
+Then you'll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity
+of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.</p>
+
+<p>Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the
+gateway to many Aztec ruins&mdash;much more easily accessible to the public
+than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by
+easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Ca&ntilde;on. These differ from the
+Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken
+advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> precipices
+and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not
+so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation.
+The d&eacute;bris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe
+brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice
+into Walnut Ca&ntilde;on. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation
+would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the
+d&eacute;bris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes' scratching over of
+one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum shell that from the
+perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service
+has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government
+might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some
+slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and
+suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling
+gray stone ca&ntilde;ons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of
+these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff
+houses&mdash;hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At
+the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark ca&ntilde;on was evidently once a
+stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race;
+and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.</p>
+
+<p>Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma's Castle and
+Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6
+a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> and the Well, where
+you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.</p>
+
+<p>It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the
+Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks
+of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an
+easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of
+the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a
+ranch house in a cool ca&ntilde;on where health and holiday seekers can stay
+all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to
+the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the
+creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you
+drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at
+Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived
+up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp
+outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month
+as it now has between 100 and 200.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When you reach the Grand Ca&ntilde;on, you have come to the uttermost wonder of
+the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America.
+There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no
+one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Ca&ntilde;on and gone away
+disappointed. If the Grand Ca&ntilde;on were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe
+to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who
+yearly throng<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year
+visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.</p>
+
+<p>You can do the Ca&ntilde;on cheaply, or you can do it extravagantly. You can go
+to it by driving across the Painted Desert, 200 miles; or motoring in
+from Flagstaff&mdash;a half-day trip; or by train from Williams, return
+ticket something more than $5. Or you can take your own pack horses, and
+ride in yourself; or you can employ one of the well known local trail
+makers and guides, like John Bass, and go off up the Ca&ntilde;on on a camping
+trip of weeks or months.</p>
+
+<p>Once you reach the rim of the Ca&ntilde;on, you can camp under your own tent
+roof and cater your own meals. Or you may go to the big hotel and pay $4
+to $15 a day. Or you may get tent quarters at the Bright Angel Camp&mdash;$1
+a day, and whatever you pay for your meals. Or you may join one of John
+Bass' Camps which will cost from $4 up, according to the number of
+horses and the size of your party.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, understand what the Grand Ca&ntilde;on is, and what it isn't. We
+ordinarily think of a ca&ntilde;on as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks,
+seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very seldom more
+than a few miles long. The Grand Ca&ntilde;on is nearly as long as from New
+York to Canada, as wide as the city of New York is long, and as deep
+straight as a plummet as the Canadian Rockies or lesser Alps are high.
+In other words, it is 217 miles long, from thirteen to twenty wide, and
+has a straight drop a mile deep, or seven miles as the trail<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> zigzags
+down. You think of a ca&ntilde;on as a great trench between mountains. This one
+is a colossal trench with side ca&ntilde;ons going off laterally its full
+length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone.
+Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot mountain, you have to go up. At the
+Grand Ca&ntilde;on, you come to the brink of the sagebrush plain and jump
+off&mdash;to climb these peaks. Peak after peak, you lose count of them in
+the mist of primrose fire and lilac light and purpling shadows. To climb
+these peaks, you go down, down 7,000 feet a good deal steeper than the
+ordinary stair and in places quite as steep as the Metropolitan Tower
+elevator. In fact, if the Metropolitan Tower and the Singer Building and
+the Flatiron and Washington's Shaft in the Capital City were piled one
+on top of another in a pinnacled pyramid, they would barely reach up
+one-seventh of the height of these massive peaks swimming in countless
+numbers in the color of the Ca&ntilde;on.</p>
+
+<p>So much for dimensions! Now as to time. If you have only one day, you
+can dive in by train in the morning and out by night, and between times
+go to Sunrise Point or&mdash;if you are a robust walker&mdash;down Bright Angel
+Trail to the bank of the Colorado River, seven miles. If you have two
+days at your disposal, you can drive out to Grand View&mdash;fourteen
+miles&mdash;and overlook the panorama of the Ca&ntilde;on twenty miles in all
+directions. If you have more days yet at your disposal, there are good
+trips on wild trails to Dripping Springs and to Gertrude<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> Point and to
+Cataract Ca&ntilde;on and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the
+Kaibab Plateau on the other side. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand
+Ca&ntilde;on a year and were not afraid of trailless trips, you could find a
+new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember
+that the Ca&ntilde;on itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral ca&ntilde;ons
+uncounted.</p>
+
+<p>When you reach El Tovar you are told two of the first things to do are
+take the drives&mdash;three miles each way&mdash;to Sunrise and to Sunset Points.
+Don't! Save your dollars, and walk them both. By carriage, the way leads
+through the pine woods back from the rim for three miles to each point.
+By walking, you can keep on an excellent trail close to the rim and do
+each in twenty minutes; for the foot trails are barely a mile long. Also
+by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who
+bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful
+just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and
+upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge
+when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. In fact, if you keep
+looking long enough through that lilac fire above seas of primrose
+mists, you can almost fancy those hoary old gods of Beauty and Power
+floating round angles of the massive lower mountains, shifting the
+scenes and beckoning one another from the wings of this huge
+amphitheater. The space-filling talker is still bawling out about "the
+mighty powers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> erosion"; and a thin-faced curate is putting away a
+figure of speech about "Almighty Power" for his next sermon. Personally,
+I prefer the old pagan way of expressing these things in the short cut
+of a personifying god who did a smashing big business with the hammer of
+Thor, or the sea horses of Neptune or the forked lightnings of old
+loud-thundering Jove.</p>
+
+<p>You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the
+Ca&ntilde;on; but unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the
+knees, you'll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the
+way down is steep as a stair and the distance is seven miles. In that
+case, better spend the night at the camp known as the Indian Gardens
+halfway down in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regular
+daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or you can join
+the regular tourist party both going down and coming up. Mainly because
+we wanted to see the sunrise, but also because a big party on a narrow
+trail is always unsafe and a gabbling crowd on a beautiful trail is
+always agony, two of us rose at four A. M. and walked down the trail
+during sunrise, leaving orders for a special guide to fetch mules down
+for us to the river. Space forbids details of the tramp, except to say
+it was worth the effort, twice over worth the effort in spite of knees
+that sent up pangs and protests for a week.</p>
+
+<p>It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if
+rain brings out the colors of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> the Petrified Forests, you can imagine
+what it does to sunrise in a sea of blood-red mountain peaks. Much of
+the trail is at an angle of forty-five degrees; but it is wide and well
+shored up at the outer edge. The foliage lining the trail was dripping
+wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf in spangles of gold. An
+incense as of morning worship filled the air with the odor of cedars and
+cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds
+below the Ca&ntilde;on rim than above it; and the dawn was filled with snatches
+of song from bluebirds and yellow finches and water ousels, whose notes
+were like the tinkle of pure water. What looked like a tiny red hillock
+from the rim above is now seen to be a mighty mountain, four, five,
+seven thousand feet from river to peak, with walls smooth as if planed
+by the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between
+these peaks would be dignified by the names of ca&ntilde;ons. Here, they are
+mere wings to the main stage setting of the Grand Ca&ntilde;on. We reached the
+Indian Garden's Camp in time for breakfast and rested an hour before
+going on down to the river. The trail followed a gentle descent over
+sand-hills and rocky plateaus at first, then suddenly it began to drop
+sheer in the section known as the Devil's Corkscrew. The heat became
+sizzling as you descended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the
+stupendous height and sheer sides of the brilliantly colored gorges and
+masses of shadows above. Then the Devil's Corkscrew fell into a sandy
+dell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of
+many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst would fill this gorge in
+about a jiffy; but a cloudburst is the last thing on earth you need
+expect in this land of scant showers and no water. Suddenly, you turn a
+rock angle, and the yellow, muddy, turbulent flood of the Colorado
+swirls past you, tempestuous, noisy, sullen and dark, filling the narrow
+ca&ntilde;on with the war of rock against water. What seemed to be mere
+foothills far above, now appear colossal peaks sheer up and down,
+penning the angry river between black walls. It was no longer hot. We
+could hear a thunder shower reverberating back in some of the valleys of
+the Ca&ntilde;on; and the rain falling between us and the red rocks was as a
+curtain to the scene shifting of those old earth and mountain and water
+gods hiding in the wings of the vast amphitheater.</p>
+
+<p>And if you want a wilder, more eery trail than down Bright Angel, go
+from Dripping Springs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great many wild
+mountain trails in the Rockies, North and South; but I have never known
+one that will give more thrills from its sheer beauty and sheer daring.
+You go out round the ledges of precipice after precipice, where nothing
+holds you back from a fall 7,000 feet straight as a stone could drop,
+nothing but the sure-footedness of your horse; out and out, round and
+round peak after peak, till you are on the tip top and outer edge of one
+of the highest mountains in the Ca&ntilde;on. This is the trail of old Louis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the
+center of the Ca&ntilde;on and built his own trail to one of its grandest
+haunts. Louis used to live under the arch formed by the Dripping
+Springs; but Louis has long since left, and the trail is falling away
+and is now one for a horse that can walk on air and a head that doesn't
+feel the sensations of champagne when looking down a straight 7,000 feet
+into darkness. If you like that kind of a trail, take the trip; for it
+is the best and wildest view of the Ca&ntilde;on; but take two days to it, and
+sleep at Louis' deserted camp under the Dripping Springs. Yet if you
+don't like a trail where you wonder if you remembered to make your will
+and what would happen if the gravel slipped from your horse's feet one
+of these places where the next turn seems to jump off into atmosphere,
+then wait; for the day must surely come when all of the Grand Ca&ntilde;on's
+217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American
+public as Egypt.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It lies to the left of the city Plaza&mdash;a long, low, one-story building
+flanking the whole length of one side of the Plaza, with big yellow pine
+pillars supporting the arcade above the public walk, each pillar
+surmounted by the fluted architrave peculiar to Spanish-Moorish
+architecture. It is yellow adobe in the sunlight&mdash;very old, very sleepy,
+very remote from latter-day life, the most un-American thing in all
+America, the only governor's palace from Athabasca to the Gulf of
+Mexico, from Sitka to St. Lawrence, that exists to-day precisely as it
+existed one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred
+years ago, four hundred years ago&mdash;back, back beyond that to the days
+when there were no white men in America. Uncover the outer plaster in
+the six-foot thickness of the walls in the Governor's Palace of Santa
+Fe, and what do you find? Solid adobe and brick? Not much! The
+walled-up, conical fireplaces and meal bins and corn caves of a pueblo
+people who lived on the site of modern Santa Fe hundreds of years before
+the Spanish founded this capital here in 1605. For years it has been a
+dispute among historians&mdash;Bandelier, Hodge, Twitchell, Governor Prince,
+Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> Reed&mdash;whether any prehistoric race dwelt where Santa Fe now stands.
+Only in the summer of 1912, when it was necessary to replace some old
+beams and cut some arches through the six-foot walls was it discovered
+that the huge partitions covered in their centers walls antedating the
+coming of the Spaniards&mdash;walls with the little conical fireplaces of
+Indian pueblos, with such meal bins and corn shelves as you find in the
+prehistoric cave dwellings.</p>
+
+<p>We have such a passion for destroying the old and replacing it with the
+new in America that you can scarcely place your hand on a structure in
+the New World that stands intact as it was before the Revolution. We
+somehow or other take it for granted that these mute witnesses of
+ancient heroism have nothing to teach us with their mossed walls and
+low-beamed ceilings and dumb, majestic dignity.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-229.jpg" width="650" height="366" alt="The Governor&#39;s Palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, within the
+walls of which are found the conical fireplaces of the Indians who lived
+here hundreds of years before the Spaniards came" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The Governor&#39;s Palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, within the
+walls of which are found the conical fireplaces of the Indians who lived
+here hundreds of years before the Spaniards came</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To this, the Governor's Palace of Santa Fe is the one and complete
+exception in America. It flanks the cottonwoods of the Plaza, yellow
+adobe in the sunlight&mdash;very old, very sleepy, very remote from
+latter-day life, but with a quaint, quiet atmosphere that travelers
+scour Europe to find. Look up to the <i>vigas</i>, or beams of the ceiling,
+yellowed and browned and mellowed with age. Those <i>vigas</i> have witnessed
+strange figures stalking the spacious halls below. If the ceiling beams
+could throw their memories on some moving picture screen, there would be
+such a panorama of varied personages as no other palace in the world has
+witnessed. Leave out the hackneyed tale of General Lew Wallace writing
+"Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace; or the fact that three different
+flags flung their folds over old Santa Fe in a single century. He who
+knows anything at all about Santa Fe, knows that Spanish power gave
+place to Mexican, and the Mexican r&eacute;gime to American rule. Also, that
+General Lew Wallace wrote "Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace, while
+he was governor of New Mexico. And you only have to use your eyes to
+know that Santa Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in the modern
+United States of America. The donkeys trotting to market under loads of
+wood, the ragged peon riders bestriding burros no higher than a saw
+horse, the natives stalking past in bright serape or blanket, moccasined
+and hatless&mdash;all tell you that you are in a region remote from
+latter-day America.</p>
+
+<p>But here is another sort of picture panorama! It is between 1680 and
+1710.</p>
+
+<p>A hatless youth, swarthy from five years of terrible exposure, hair
+straight as a string, gabbling French but speaking no Spanish, a slave
+white traded from Indian tribe to Indian tribe, all the way from the
+Gulf of Mexico to the interior of New Spain, is brought before the
+viceroy. Do you know who he is? He is Jean L'Archev&ecirc;que, the
+French-Canadian lad who helped to murder La Salle down on Trinity Bay in
+Texas. What are the French doing down on Trinity Bay? Do they intend to
+explore and claim this part of America, too? In the abuses of slavery
+among the Indians for five years, the lad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> has paid the terrible penalty
+for the crime into which he was betrayed by his youth. He is scarred
+with wounds and beatings. He is too guilt-stricken ever to return to New
+France. His information may be useful to New Spain; so he is enrolled in
+the guards of the Spanish Viceroy of Santa Fe; and he is sent out to San
+Ildefonso and Santa Clara, where he founds a family and where his
+records may be seen to this day. For those copy-book moralists who like
+to know that Divine retribution occasionally works out in daily life, it
+may be added that Jean L'Archev&ecirc;que finally came to as violent a death
+as he had brought to the great French explorer, La Salle.</p>
+
+<p>Or take a panorama of a later day. It is just before the fall of Spanish
+rule. The Governor sits in his Palace at Santa Fe, a mightier autocrat
+than the Pope in Rome; for, as the Russians say, "God is high in His
+Heavens," and the King is far away, and those who want justice in Santa
+Fe, must pay&mdash;pay&mdash;pay&mdash;pay in gold coin that can be put in the iron
+chest of the viceroy. (You can see specimens of those iron chests all
+through New Mexico yet&mdash;chests with a dozen secret springs to guard the
+family fortune of the hidden gold bullion.) A woman bursts into the
+presence of the Viceroy, and throws herself on her knees. It is a
+terrible tale&mdash;the kind of tale we are too finical to tell in these
+modern days, though that is not saying there are not many such tales to
+be told. The woman's young sister has married an officer of the
+Viceroy's ring.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> He has beaten her as he would a slave. He has treated
+her to vile indecencies of which only Hell keeps record. She had fled to
+her father; but the father, fearing the power of the Viceroy, had sent
+her back to the man; and the man has killed her with his brutalities. (I
+have this whole story from a lineal descendant of the family.) The woman
+throws back her <i>rebozo</i>, drops to her knees before the Viceroy, and
+demands justice. The Viceroy thinks and thinks. A woman more or less!
+What does it matter? The woman's father had been afraid to act,
+evidently. The husband is a member of the government ring. Interference
+might stir up an ugly mess&mdash;revelations of extortion and so on! Besides,
+justice is worth so much per; and this woman&mdash;what has she to pay? This
+Viceroy will do nothing. The woman rises slowly, incredulous. Is this
+justice? She denounces the Viceroy in fiery, impassioned speech. The
+Viceroy smiles and twirls his mustachios. What can a woman do? The woman
+proclaims her imprecation of a court that fails of justice. (Do our
+courts fail of justice? Is there no lesson in that past for us?) Do you
+know what she did? She did what not one woman in a million could do
+to-day, when conditions are a thousand fold easier. She went back to her
+home. It was just about where the pretty Spanish house of Mr. Morley of
+the Arch&aelig;ological School stands to-day. She gathered up all the loose
+gold she could and bound it in a belt around her waist. Then she took
+the most powerful horse she had from the kraal,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> saddled him and rode
+out absolutely alone for the city of Old Mexico&mdash;900 miles as the trail
+ran. Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, beset the way. She rode at night and
+slept by day. The trail was a desert waste of waterless, bare, rocky
+hills and quicksand rivers and blistering heat. God, or the Virgin to
+whom she constantly prayed, or her own dauntless spirit, must have
+piloted the way; for she reached the old city of Mexico, laid her case
+before the King's representatives, and won the day. Her sister's death
+was avenged. The husband was tried and executed: and the Viceroy was
+deposed. Most of us know of almost similar cases. I think of a man who
+has repeatedly tried for a federal judgeship in New Mexico, who has
+literally been guilty of every crime on the human calendar. Yet we don't
+at risk of life push these cases to retribution. Is that one of the
+lessons the past has for us? Spanish power fell in New Mexico because
+there came a time when there was neither justice nor retribution in any
+of the courts.</p>
+
+<p>Other panoramas there were beneath the age-mellowed beams of the Palace
+ceiling, panoramas of Comanche and Navajo and Ute and Apache stalking in
+war feathers before a Spanish governor clad in velvets and laces.
+Tradition has it that a Ute was once struck dead in the Governor's
+presence. Certainly, all four tribes wrought havoc and raid to the very
+doors of the Palace. Within only the last century, a Comanche chief and
+his warriors came to Santa Fe demanding the daughter of a leading<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+trader in marriage for the chief's son. The garrison was weak, in spite
+of fustian and rusty helmets and battered breastplates and velvet
+doublets and boots half way to the waist&mdash;there were seldom more than
+200 soldiers, and the pusillanimous Governor counseled deception. He
+told the Comanche that the trader's daughter had died, and ordered the
+girl to hide. The only peace that an Indian respects&mdash;or any other man,
+for that matter&mdash;is the peace that is a victory. The Indian suspected
+that the answer was the answer of the coward, a lie, and came back with
+his Comanche warriors. While the soldiers huddled inside the Palace
+walls, the town was raided. The trader was murdered and the daughter
+carried off to the Comanches, where she died of abuse. When these
+tragedies fell on daughters of the Pilgrims in New England, the Saxon
+strain of the warrior women in their blood rose to meet the challenge of
+fate; and they brained their captors with an ax; but no such warrior
+strain was in the blood of the daughters of Spain. By religion, by
+nationality, by tradition, the Spanish girl was the purely convent
+product: womanhood protected by a ten-foot wall. When the wall fell
+away, she was helpless as a hot-house flower set out amid violent winds.</p>
+
+<p>Diagonally across the Plaza from the Governor's Palace stands the old
+Fonda, or Exchange Hotel, whence came the long caravans of American
+traders on the Santa Fe Trail. Behind the Palace about a quarter of a
+mile, was the Gareta, a sort of combined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> custom house and prison. The
+combination was deeply expressive of Spanish rule in those early days,
+for independent of what the American's white-tented wagon might
+contain&mdash;baled hay or priceless silks or chewing tobacco&mdash;a duty of $500
+was levied against each mule-team wagon of the American trader. Did a
+trader protest, or hold back, he was promptly clapped in irons. It was
+cheaper to pay the duty than buy a release. The walls of both the Fonda
+and the Gareta were of tremendous thickness, four to six feet of solid
+adobe, which was hard as our modern cement. In the walls behind the
+Gareta and on the walls behind the Palace, pitted bullet holes have been
+found. Beneath the holes was embedded human hair.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing more picturesque exists in America's past than the panorama of
+this old Santa Fe Trail. Santa Fe was to the Trail what Cairo was to the
+caravans coming up out of the Desert in Egypt. Twitchell, the modern
+historian, and Gregg, the old chronicler of last century's Trail, give
+wonderfully vivid pictures of the coming of the caravans to the Palace.
+"As the caravans ascended the ridge which overlooks the city, the
+clamorings of the men and the rejoicings of the bull whackers could be
+heard on every side. Even the animals seemed to participate in the humor
+of their riders. I doubt whether the first sight of Jerusalem brought
+the crusaders more tumultuous and soul-enrapturing joy."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-237.jpg" width="650" height="359" alt="A pool in the Painted Desert whither came thousands of
+goats and sheep, driven by Navajo girls on horseback" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A pool in the Painted Desert whither came thousands of
+goats and sheep, driven by Navajo girls on horseback</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We talk of the picturesque fur trade of the North, when brigades of
+birch canoes one and two hundred strong penetrated every river and lake
+of the wilderness of the Northwest. Let us take a look at these caravan
+brigades of the traders of the Southwest! Teams were hitched tandem to
+the white-tented wagons. Drivers did not ride in the wagons. They rode
+astride mule or horse, with long bull whips thick as a snake skin, which
+could reach from rear to fore team. I don't know how they do it; but
+when the drivers lash these whips out full length, they cause a
+crackling like pistol shots. The owner of the caravan was usually some
+gentleman adventurer from Virginia or Kentucky or Louisiana or Missouri;
+but each caravan had its captain to command, and its outriders to scout
+for Indians. These scouts were of every station in life with morals of
+as varied aspect as Joseph's coat of many colors. Kit Carson was once
+one of these scouts. Governor Bent was one of the traders. Stephen B.
+Elkins first came to New Mexico with a bull whacker's caravan. In the
+morning, every teamster would vie with his fellows to hitch up fastest.
+Teams ready, he would mount and call back&mdash;"All's set." An uproar of
+whinnying and braying, the clank of chains, and then the captain's
+shout&mdash;"Stretch out," when the long line of twenty or thirty
+white-tented wagons would rumble out for the journey of thirty to sixty
+days across the plains. Each wagon had five yoke of oxen, with six or
+eight extra mule teams behind in case of emergency. About three tons
+made a load. Twenty miles was a good day's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> travel. Camping places near
+good water and pasturage were chosen ahead by the scouts. Wagons kept
+together in groups of four. In case of attack by Comanche or Ute, these
+wagons wheeled into a circle for defense with men and beasts inside the
+extemporized kraal. Campfires were kept away from wagons to avoid giving
+target to foes. Blankets consisted of buffalo robes, and the rations
+"hard tack," pork and such game as the scouts and sharpshooters could
+bring down. A favorite trick of Indian raiders was to wait till all
+animals were tethered out for pasturage, and then stampede mules and
+oxen. In the confusion, wagons would be overturned and looted.</p>
+
+<p>As the long white caravans came to their journey's end at Santa Fe,
+literally the whole Spanish and Indian population crowded to the Plaza
+in front of the Palace. "Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!"&mdash;were
+the shouts ringing through the streets; and Santa Fe's perpetual siesta
+would be awakened to a week's fair or barter. Wagons were lined up at
+the custom house; and the trader presented himself before the Spanish
+governor, trader and governor alike dressed in their best regimentals.
+Very fair, very soft spoken, very profuse of compliments was the
+interview; but divested of profound bows and flowery compliments, it
+ended in the American paying $500 a wagon, or losing his goods. The
+goods were then bartered at a staggering advance. Plain broadcloth sold
+at $25 a yard, linen at $4 a yard, and the price on other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> goods was
+proportionate. Goods taken in exchange were hides, wool, gold and silver
+bullion, Indian blankets and precious stones.</p>
+
+<p>Travelers from Mexico to the outside world went by stage or private
+omnibus with outriders and guards and sharpshooters. Young Spanish girls
+sent East to school were accompanied by such a retinue of defenders,
+slaves and servants, as might have attended a European monarch; and a
+whole bookful of stories could be written of adventures among the young
+Spanish nobility going out to see the world. The stage fare varied from
+$160 to $250 far as the Mississippi. Though Stephen B. Elkins went to
+New Mexico with a bull whacker's team, it was not long before he was
+sending gold bullion from mining and trading operations out to St. Louis
+and New York. How to get this gold bullion past the highwaymen who
+infested the stage route, was always a problem. I know of one old
+Spanish lady, who yearly went to St. Louis to make family purchases and
+used to smuggle Elkins' gold out for him in belts and petticoats and
+disreputable looking old hand bags. Once, when she was going out in
+midsummer heat, she had a belt of her husband's drafts and Elkins' gold
+round her waist. The way grew hotter and hotter. The old lady unstrapped
+the buckskin reticule&mdash;looking, for all the world, like a woman's
+carry-all&mdash;and threw it up on top of the stage. An hour later,
+highwaymen "went through" the passengers. Rings, watches, jewels, coin
+were taken off the travelers; and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> mail bags were looted; but the
+bandits never thought of examining the old bag on top of the stage, in
+which was gold worth all the rest of the loot.</p>
+
+<p>In those days, gambling was the universal passion of high and low in New
+Mexico; and many a Spanish don and American trader, who had taken over
+tens of thousands in the barter of the caravan, wasted it over the
+gaming table before dawn of the next day. The Fonda, or old Exchange
+Hotel, was the center of high play; but it may as well be acknowledged,
+the highest play of all, the wildest stakes were often laid in the
+Governor's Palace.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily, the passion for destroying the old has not invaded Santa Fe.
+The people want their Palace preserved as it was, is, and ever shall be;
+and the recent restoration has been, not a reconstruction, but a taking
+away of all the modern and adventitious. Where modern pillars have been
+placed under the long front portico, they are being replaced by the old
+<i>portal</i> type of pillar&mdash;the fluted capital across the main column
+supporting the roof beams. This type of <i>portal</i> has come in such favor
+in New Mexico that it is being embodied in modern houses for arcades,
+porches and gardens.</p>
+
+<p>The main entrance of the Palace is square in the center. You pass into
+what must have been the ancient reception room leading to an audience
+chamber on the left. What amazes you is the enormous thickness of these
+adobe walls. Each window casement is wider than a bench; and an open
+door laid back is not wider than the thickness of the wall.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> To-day the
+reception hall and, indeed, the rooms of the center Palace present some
+of the finest mural paintings in America. These have been placed on the
+walls by the Arch&aelig;ological School of America which with the Historical
+Society occupies the main portions of the old building. You see drawings
+of the coming of the first Spanish caravels, of Coronado, of Don Diego
+de Vargas, who was the Frontenac of the Southwest, reconquering the
+provinces in 1680-94, about the same time that the great Frontenac was
+playing his part in French Canada. There are pictures, too, of the
+caravans crossing the plains, of the coming of American occupation, of
+the Moki and Hopi and Zu&ntilde;i pueblos, of the Missions of which only ruins
+to-day mark the sites in the Jemez, at Sandia, and away out in the
+Desert of Abo.</p>
+
+<p>To the left of the reception room is an excellent art gallery of
+Southwestern subjects. Here, artists of the growing Southwestern School
+send their work for exhibition and sale. It is significant that within
+the last few years prices have gone up from a few dollars to hundreds
+and thousands. Nausbaum's photographic work of the modern Indian is one
+of the striking features of the Palace. Of course, there are pictures by
+Curtis and Burbank and Sharpe and others of the Southwestern School; but
+perhaps the most interesting rooms to the newcomer, to the visitor, who
+doesn't know that we have an ancient America, are those where the mural
+drawings are devoted to the cave dwellers and prehistoric races.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> These
+were done by Carl Lotave of Paris out on the ground of the ancient
+races. In conception and execution, they are among the finest murals in
+America.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago, the Governor's Palace had twin towers and a chapel. Bells in
+the old Spanish churches were not tolled. They were struck gong fashion
+by an attendant, who ascended the towers. These bells were cast of a
+very fine quality of old copper; and the tone was largely determined by
+the quality of the cast. Old Mission bells are scarce to-day in New
+Mexico; and collectors offer as high as $1,500 and $3,000 for the
+genuine article. Vesper bells played a great part in the life of the old
+Spanish r&eacute;gime. Ladies might be promenading the Plaza, workmen busy over
+their tasks, gamblers hard at the wheel and dice. At vesper call, men,
+women and children dropped to knees; and for a moment silence fell, all
+but the calling of the vesper bells. Then the bells ceased ringing, and
+life went on in its noisy stream.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-245.jpg" width="650" height="349" alt="There are streets in Santa Fe where one may see box-like
+adobe houses beside dwellings of modern architecture" title="" />
+<span class="caption">There are streets in Santa Fe where one may see box-like
+adobe houses beside dwellings of modern architecture</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No account of the Governor's Palace would be complete without some
+mention of the marvels of dress among the dons and do&ntilde;as of the old
+r&eacute;gime. Could we see them promenading the Plaza and the Palace as they
+paraded their gayety less than half a century ago, we would imagine
+ourselves in some play house of the French Court in its most luxurious
+days. Indians dressed then as they dress to-day, in bright-colored
+blankets fastened gracefully round hip and shoulders. Peons or peasants
+wore serapes, blankets with a slit in the center, over the shoulders.
+Women of position wore not hats but the silk <i>rebozo</i> or scarf, thrown
+over the head with one end back across the left shoulder. On the street,
+the face was almost covered by this scarf. Presumably the purpose was to
+conceal charms; but when you consider the combination of dark eyes and
+waving hair and a scarf of the finest color and texture that could be
+bought in China or the Indies, it is a question whether that scarf did
+not set off what it was designed to conceal. About the shawls used as
+scarfs there is much misconception. These are not of Spanish or Mexican
+make. They come down in the Spanish families from the days when the
+vessels of the traders of Mexico trafficked with China and Japan. These
+old shawls to-day bring prices varying all the way from $200 to $2,000.</p>
+
+<p>The don of fashion dressed even more gayly than his spouse. Jewelry was
+a passion with both men and women; and the finest type of old jewelry in
+America to-day is to be found in New Mexico. The hat of the don was the
+wide-brimmed sombrero. Around this was a silver or gold cord, with a
+gold or silver cockade. The jackets were of colored broadcloth with
+buttons of silver or gold, not brass; but the trousers were at once the
+glory and the vanity of the wearer. Gold and silver buttons ornamented
+the seams of the legs from hip to knee. There were gold clasps at the
+garter and gold clasps at the knee. A silk sash with tasseled cords or
+fringe hanging down one side took the place of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> modern suspenders.
+Leather leggings for outdoor wear were carved or embossed. A serape or
+velvet cape lined with bright-colored silk completed the costume.
+Bridles and horse trappings were gorgeous with silver, the pommel and
+stirrups being overlaid with it. The bridle was a barbarous silver thing
+with a bit cruel enough to control tigers; and the rowels of the spurs
+were two or three inches long.</p>
+
+<p>No, these were not people of French and Spanish courts. They were people
+of our own Western America less than a century ago; but though they were
+not people of the playhouse, as they almost seem to us, they are
+essentially a play-people. The Spaniard of the Southwest lived, not to
+work, but to play; and when he worked, it was only that he might play
+the harder. Los Americanos came and changed all that. They turned the
+Spanish play-world up side down and put work on top. Roam through the
+Governor's Palace! Call up the old gay life! We undoubtedly handle more
+money than the Spanish dons and do&ntilde;as of the old days; but
+frankly&mdash;which stand for the more joy out of life; those laughing
+philosophers, or we modern work-demons?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE (<i>Continued</i>)</h3>
+
+
+<p>Of all the traditions clinging round the old Palace at Santa Fe, those
+connected with Don Diego de Vargas, the reconqueror of New Mexico, are
+best known and most picturesque. Yearly, for two and a quarter
+centuries, the people of New Mexico have commemorated De Vargas' victory
+by a procession to the church which he built in gratitude to Heaven for
+his success. This procession is at once a great public festival and a
+sacred religious ceremony; for the image of the Virgin, which De Vargas
+used when he planted the Cross on the Plaza in front of the Palace and
+sang the Te Deum with the assembled Franciscan monks, is the same image
+now used in the theatrical procession of the religious ceremony yearly
+celebrated by Indians, Spanish and Americans.</p>
+
+<p>The De Vargas procession is a ceremony unique in America. The very
+Indians whose ancestors De Vargas' arms subjugated, now yearly re&euml;nact
+the scenes of the struggles of their forefathers to throw off white
+rule. Young Mexicans, descendants of the very officers who marched with
+De Vargas in his campaigns of 1692-3-4, take the part of the conquering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+heroes. Costumes, march, religious ceremonies of thanks, public
+festival&mdash;all have been kept as close to original historic fact as
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>De Vargas, himself, was to the Southwest what Frontenac was to French
+Canada&mdash;a bluff soldier animated by religious motives, who believed only
+in the peace that is a victory, put the fear of God in the hearts of his
+enemies, and built on that fear a superstructure of reverence and love.
+It need not be told that such a character rode rough-shod over official
+red-tape, and had a host of envious curs barking at his heels. They
+dragged him down, for a period of short eclipse, these Lilliputian
+enemies, just as Frontenac's enemies caused his recall by a charge of
+misusing public funds; but in neither case could the charges be
+sustained. Bluff warriors, not counting house clerks, were needed; and
+De Vargas, like Frontenac, came through all charges unscathed.</p>
+
+<p>The two heroes of America's Indian wars&mdash;Frontenac of the North, De
+Vargas of the South&mdash;were contemporaries. It will be remembered how up
+on the St. Lawrence and among the Mohawk tribes of New York, a wave of
+revolt against white man rule swept from 1642 to 1682. It was not
+unnatural that the red warrior should view with alarm the growing
+dominance and assumption of power on the part of the white. In Canada,
+we know the brandy of the white trader hastened the revolt and added
+horror to the outrages, when the settlements lying round Montreal and
+Quebec were ravaged and burnt under the very cannon mouths of the two
+impotent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> and terrified forts. The same wave of revolt that scourged
+French Canada in the eighties, went like wild fire over the Southwest
+from 1682 to 1694. Was there any connection between the two efforts to
+throw off white man rule? To the historian, seemingly, there was not;
+but ask the Navajo or Apache of the South about traders in the North,
+and you will be astonished how the traditions of the tribes preserve
+legends of the Athabascan stock in the North, from whom they claim
+descent. Ask a modern Indian of the interior of British Columbia about
+the Navajos, and he will tell you how the wise men of the tribe preserve
+verbal history of a branch of this people driven far South&mdash;"those other
+Denes," he will tell you. Traders explain the wonderful way news has of
+traveling from tribe to tribe by the laconic expression, "moccasin
+telegram."</p>
+
+<p>Whether or not the infection of revolt spread by "moccasin telegram"
+from Canada to Mexico, the storm broke, and broke with frightful
+violence over the Southwest. The immediate cause was religious
+interference. All pueblo people have secret lodges held in underground
+<i>estufas</i> or <i>kivas</i>. To these ceremonies no white man however favored
+is ever admitted. White men know as little of the rites practiced in
+these lodges by the pueblo people as when Coronado came in 1540. To the
+Spanish governors and priests, the thing was anathema&mdash;abomination of
+witchcraft and sorcery and secrecy that risked the eternal damnation of
+converts' souls.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> There was a garrison of only 250 men at the Palace;
+yet already the church boasted fifty friars, from eleven to seventeen
+missions, and converts by the thousands. But the souls of the holy
+<i>padres</i> were sorely tried by these <i>estufa</i> rites, "<i>platicas de
+noche</i>," "night conversations"&mdash;the priests called them. Well might all
+New Spain have been disturbed by these "night conversations." The
+subject bound under fearful oath of secrecy was nothing more nor less
+than the total extermination of every white man, woman and child north
+of the Rio Grande.</p>
+
+<p>Some unwise governor&mdash;Trevino, I think it was&mdash;had issued an edict in
+1675 forbidding the pueblos to hold their secret lodges in the
+<i>estufas</i>. By way of enforcing his edict, he had forty-seven of the wise
+men or Indian priests (he called them "sorcerers") imprisoned; hanged
+three in the jail yard of the Palace as a warning, and after severe
+whipping and enforced fasts, sent the other forty-four home. Picture the
+situation to yourself! The wise men or governors of the pueblos are
+always old men elected out of respect for their superior wisdom, men
+used to having their slightest word implicitly obeyed. Whipped, shamed,
+disgraced, they dispersed from the Palace, down the Rio Grande to
+Isleta, west to the city on the impregnable rocks of Acoma, north to
+that whole group of pueblo cities from Jemez to Santa Fe and Pecos and
+Taos. What do you think they did? Fill up the underground <i>estufas</i> and
+hang their heads in shame among men? Then, you don't know the Indian!
+You may break his neck; but you can't bend it. The very first thing they
+did was to gather their young warriors in the <i>estufas</i>. Picture that
+scene to yourself, too! An old rain priest at San Ildefonso, through the
+kindness of Dr. Hewitt of the Arch&aelig;ological School, took us down the
+<i>estufa</i> at that pueblo, where some of the bloodiest scenes of the
+rebellion were enacted. Needless to say, he took us down in the day
+time, when there are no ceremonies.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 406px;">
+<img src="images/fig-253.jpg" width="406" height="650" alt="An adobe gateway of old-world charm in Santa Fe" title="" />
+<span class="caption">An adobe gateway of old-world charm in Santa Fe</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The <i>estufa</i> is large enough to seat three or four hundred men. It is
+night time. A few oil tapers are burning in stone saucers, the pueblo
+lamp. The warriors come stealing down the ladder. No woman is admitted.
+The men are dressed in linen trousers with colored blankets fastened
+Grecian fashion at the waist. They seat themselves silently on the adobe
+or cement benches around the circular wall. The altar place, whence
+comes the Sacred Fire from the gods of the under world, is situated just
+under the ladder. The priests descend, four or five of them, holding
+their blankets in a square that acts as a drop curtain concealing the
+altar. When all have descended, a trap door of brush above is closed.
+The taper lamps go out. The priests drop their blankets; and behold on
+the altar the sacred fire; and the outraged wise man in impassioned
+speech denouncing white man rule, insult to the Indian gods, destruction
+of the Spanish ruler!</p>
+
+<p>Of the punished medicine men, one of the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> incensed was an elderly
+Indian called Pop&eacute;, said to be originally from San Juan, but at that
+time living in Taos. I don't know what ground there is for it, but
+tradition has it that when Pop&eacute; effected the curtain drop round the
+sacred fire of the <i>estufa</i> in Taos, he produced, or induced the
+warriors looking on breathlessly to believe that he produced, three
+infernal spirits from the under world, who came from the great war-god
+Montezuma to command the pueblo race to unite with the Navajo and Apache
+in driving the white man from the Southwest. If there be any truth in
+the tradition, it is not hard to account for the trick. Tradition or
+trick, it worked like magic. The warriors believed. Couriers went
+scurrying by night from town to town, with the knotted cord&mdash;some say it
+was of deer thong, others of palm leaf. The knots represented the number
+of days to the time of uprising. The man, for instance, who ran from
+Taos to Pecos, would pull out a knot for each day he ran. A new courier
+would carry the cord on to the next town. There was some confusion about
+the untying of those knots. Some say the rebellion was to take place on
+the 11th of August, 1682; others, on the 13th. Anyway, the first blow
+was struck on the 10th. Not a pueblo town failed to rally to the call,
+as the Highlanders of old responded to the signal of the bloody cross.
+New Mexico at this time numbered some 3,000 Spanish colonists, the
+majority living on ranches up and down the Rio Grande and surrounding
+Santa Fe. The captain-general, who had had nothing to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> do with the
+foolish decrees that produced the revolt, happened to be Don Antonio de
+Otermin, with Alonzo Garcia as his lieutenant. In spite of no women
+being admitted to the secret, the secret leaked out. Pop&eacute;'s son-in-law,
+the governor of San Juan, was setting out to betray the whole plot to
+the Spaniards, when he was killed by Pop&eacute;'s own hand.</p>
+
+<p>Such widespread preparations could not proceed without the Mission
+converts getting some inkling; and on August 9, Governor Otermin heard
+that two Indians of Tesuque out from Santa Fe had been ordered to join a
+rebellion. He had the Indians brought before him in the audience chamber
+on the 10th. They told him all they knew; and they warned him that any
+warrior refusing to take part would be slain. Here, as always in times
+of great confusion, the main thread of the story is lost in a
+multiplicity of detail. Warning had also come down from the alcalde at
+Taos. Otermin scarcely seems to have grasped the import of the news; for
+all he did was to send his own secret scouts out, warning the settlers
+and friars to seek refuge in Isleta, or Santa Fe; but it was too late.
+The Indians got word they had been betrayed and broke loose in a mad
+lust of revenge and blood that very Saturday when the governor was
+sending out his spies.</p>
+
+<p>It would take a book to tell the story of all the heroism and martyrdom
+of the different Missions. Parkman has told the story of the martyrdom
+of the Jesuits in French Canada; and many other books<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> have been written
+on the subject. No Parkman has yet risen to tell the story of the
+martyrdom of the Franciscans in New Mexico. In one fell day, before the
+captain-general knew anything about it, 400 colonists and twenty-one
+missionaries had been slain&mdash;butchered, shot, thrown over the rocks,
+suffocated in their burning chapels. Pop&eacute; was in the midst of it all,
+riding like an incarnate fury on horseback wearing a bull's horn in the
+middle of his forehead. Apaches and Navajos, of course, joined in the
+loot. At Taos, out of seventy whites, two only escaped; and they left
+their wives and children dead on the field and reached Isleta only after
+ten days' wandering in the mountains at night, having hidden by day. At
+little Tesuque, north of Santa Fe, only the alcalde escaped by spurring
+his horse to wilder pace than the Indians could follow. The alcalde had
+seen the friar flee to a ravine. Then an Indian came out wearing the
+priest's shield; and it was blood-spattered. At Santa Clara, soldiers,
+herders and colonists were slain on the field as they worked. The women
+and children were carried off to captivity from which they never
+returned. At Galisteo, the men were slain, the women carried off.
+Rosaries were burned in bonfires. Churches were plundered and profaned.
+At Santo Domingo, the bodies of the three priests were piled in a heap
+in front of the church, as an insult to the white man faith that would
+have destroyed the Indian <i>estufas</i>. Down at Isleta, Garcia, the
+lieutenant, happened to be in command, and during Saturday night and
+Sunday<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> morning, he rounded inside the walls of Isleta seven
+missionaries and 1,500 settlers, of whom only 200 had firearms.</p>
+
+<p>What of Captain-General Otermin, cooped up in the Governor's Palace of
+Santa Fe, awaiting the return of his scouts? The reports of his scouts,
+one may guess. Reports came dribbling in till Tuesday, and by that time
+there were no Spanish left alive outside Santa Fe and Isleta. Then
+Otermin bestirred himself mightily. Citizens were called to take refuge
+in the Palace. The armory was opened and arquebuses handed out to all
+who could bear arms. The Holy Sacrament was administered. Then the
+sacred vessels were brought to the Governor's Palace and hidden. There
+were now 1,000 persons cooped up in the Governor's Palace, less than 100
+capable of bearing arms. Trenches were dug, windows barricaded, walls
+fortified. Armed soldiers mounted the roofs of houses guarding the Plaza
+and in the streets approaching it were stationed cannon.</p>
+
+<p>Having wiped out the settlements, the pueblos and their allies swooped
+down on Santa Fe, led by Juan of Galisteo riding with a convent flag
+round his waist as sash. To parley with an enemy is folly. Otermin sent
+for Juan to come to the Palace; and in the audience chamber upbraided
+him. Juan, one may well believe, laughed. He produced two crosses&mdash;a red
+one and a white one. If the Spaniards would accept the white one and
+withdraw, the Indians would desist from attack; if not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>&mdash;then&mdash;red stood
+for blood. Otermin talked about "pardon for treason," when he should
+have struck the impudent fellow to earth, as De Vargas, or old
+Frontenac, would have done in like case.</p>
+
+<p>When Juan went back across the Plaza, the Indians howled with joy,
+danced dervish time all night, rang the bells of San Miguel, set fire to
+the church and houses, and cut the water supply off from the yard of the
+Palace. The valor of the Spaniards could not have been very great from
+August 14th to 20th, for only five of the 100 bearing arms were killed.
+At a council of war on the night of August 19th, it was decided to
+attempt to rush the foe, trampling them with horses, and to beat a way
+open for retreat. Otermin says 300 Indians were killed in this rally;
+but it is a question. The Governor himself came back with an arrow wound
+in his forehead and a flesh wound near his heart. Within twenty-four
+hours, he decided&mdash;whichever way you like to put it&mdash;"to go to the
+relief of Isleta," where he thought his lieutenant was; or "to retreat"
+south of the Rio Grande. The Indians watched the retreat in grim
+silence. The Spanish considered their escape "a miracle." It was a
+pitiful wresting of comfort from desperation.</p>
+
+<p>But at Isleta, the Governor found that his lieutenant had already
+retreated taking 1,500 refugees in safety with him. It was the end of
+September when Otermin himself crossed the Rio Grande, at a point not
+far from modern El Paso. At Isleta, the people will tell you to this day
+legends<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> of the friar's martyrdom. Every Mexican believes that the holy
+<i>padre</i> buried in a log hollowed out for coffin beneath the chapel rises
+every ten years and walks through the streets of Isleta to see how his
+people are doing. Once every ten years or so, the Rio Grande floods
+badly; and the year of the flood, the ghost of the friar rises to warn
+his people. Be that as it may, a few years ago, a deputation of
+investigators took up the body to examine the truth of the legend. It
+lies in a state of perfect preservation in its log coffin.</p>
+
+<p>The pueblos had driven the Spanish south of the Rio Grande and
+practically kept them south of the Rio Grande for ten years. Churches
+were burned. Images were profaned. Priestly vestments decked wild Indian
+lads. Converts were washed in Santa Fe River to cleanse them of baptism.
+All the records in the Governor's Palace were destroyed, and the Palace
+itself given over to wild orgies among the victorious Indians; but the
+victory brought little good to the tribes. They fell back to their
+former state of tribal raid and feud. Drought spoiled the crops; and
+perhaps, after all, the consolation and the guidance of the Spanish
+priests were missed. When the Utes heard that the Spanish had retreated,
+these wild marauders of the northern desert fell on the pueblo towns
+like wolves. There is a legend, also, that at this time there were great
+earthquakes and many heavenly signs of displeasure. Curiously enough,
+the same legends exist about Montreal and Quebec. Otermin hung timidly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+on the frontier, crossing and recrossing the Rio Grande; but he could
+make no progress in resettling the colonists.</p>
+
+<p>Comes on the scene now&mdash;1692-98&mdash;Don Diego de Vargas. It isn't so much
+what he did; for when you are brave enough, you don't need to do. The
+doors of fate open before the golden key. He resubjugated the Southwest
+for Spain; and he resubjugated it as much by force of clemency as force
+of cruelty. But mark the point&mdash;it was <i>force that did it, not
+pow-wowing and parleying and straddling cowardice with conscience</i>. De
+Vargas could muster only 300 men at El Paso, including loyal Indians. On
+August 21, 1692, he set out for the north.</p>
+
+<p>It has taken many volumes to tell of the victories of Frontenac. It
+would take as many again to relate the victories of De Vargas. He was
+accompanied, of course, by the fearless and quenchless friars. All the
+pueblos passed on the way north he found abandoned; but when he reached
+Santa Fe on the 13th of September, he found it held and fortified by the
+Indians. The Indians were furiously defiant; they would perish, but
+surrender&mdash;never! De Vargas surrounded them and cut off the water
+supply. The friars approached under flag of truce. Before night, Santa
+Fe had surrendered without striking a blow. One after another, the
+pueblos were visited and pacified; but it was not all easy victory. The
+Indians did not relish an order a year later to give up occupation of
+the Palace and retire to their own villages. In December they closed all
+entrances to the Plaza and refused to surrender. De Vargas had prayers
+read, raised the picture of the Virgin on the battle flag, and advanced.
+Javelins, boiling water, arrows, assailed the advancing Spaniards; but
+the gate of the Plaza stockade was attacked and burned. Reinforcements
+came to the Indians, and both sides rested for the night. During the
+night, the Indian governor hanged himself. Next morning, seventy of the
+Indians were seized and court-martialed on the spot. De Vargas planted
+his flag on the Plaza, erected a cross and thanked God.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-263.jpg" width="650" height="363" alt="A view of part of San Ildefonso, New Mexico, showing the
+famous Black Mesa in the background" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A view of part of San Ildefonso, New Mexico, showing the
+famous Black Mesa in the background</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One of the hardest fights of '94 was out on the Black Mesa, a huge
+precipitous square of basalt, frowning above San Ildefonso. This mesa
+was a famous prayer shrine to the Indians and is venerated as sacred to
+this day. All sides are sheer but that towards the river. Down this is a
+narrow trail like a goat path between rocks that could be hurled on
+climbers' heads. De Vargas stormed the Black Mesa, on top of which great
+numbers of rebels had taken refuge. Four days the attack lasted, his 100
+soldiers repeatedly reaching the edge of the summit only to be hurled
+down. After ten days the siege had to be abandoned, but famine had done
+its work among the Indians. For five years, the old general slept in his
+boots and scarcely left the warpath. It was at the siege of the Black
+Mesa that he is said to have made the vow to build a chapel to the
+Virgin; and it is his siege of Santa Fe that the yearly De Vargas
+Celebration commemorates to this day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> And in the end, he died in his
+boots on the march at Bernalillo, leaving in his will explicit
+directions that he should be buried in the church of Santa Fe "under the
+high altar beneath the place where the priest puts his feet when he says
+mass." The body was carried to the parish church in his bed of state and
+interred beneath the altar; and the De Vargas celebration remains to
+this day one of the quaintest ceremonies of the old Governor's Palace.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND AND ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTHWEST</h3>
+
+
+<p>As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem
+in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers
+of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in
+armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on
+Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the
+desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare
+mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the
+quicksands. To Taos came Franciscan <i>padres</i> long before Champlain had
+built stockades at Port Royal or Quebec. Just as the Jesuits won the
+wilderness of the up-country by martyr blood, so the Franciscans
+attacked the strongholds of paganism amid the pueblos of the South.
+Spanish <i>conquistadores</i> have been represented as wading through blood
+to victory, with the sword in one hand, the cross in the other; but that
+picture is only half the truth. Let it be remembered that the Spanish
+were the only conquerors in America who gave the Indians perpetual
+title, intact and forever, to the land occupied when the Spanish
+came&mdash;which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> titles the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude
+soldiers, or even officers, might be guilty of such unprovoked attacks
+as occurred at Bernalillo in Coronado's expedition of 1540, the crown
+stood sponsor for the well-being and salvation of the Indian's soul.
+Wherever the conqueror marched, the sandaled and penniless Franciscan
+remained and too often paid the penalty of the soldier's crimes. In the
+Tusayan Desert, at Taos, at Zu&ntilde;i, at Acoma, you will find Missions that
+date back to the expedition of Coronado; and at every single Mission the
+<i>padres</i> paid for their courage and their faith with their lives.</p>
+
+<p>But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man.
+Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the
+pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people
+from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised
+Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of
+Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the
+Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of
+Eden, "the place of the Morning Glow;" but when war and pestilence and
+ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the
+Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When
+did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos
+thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added,
+they live very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white
+man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones;
+some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead
+of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations,
+there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The
+whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the
+old <i>estufas</i>, or <i>kivas</i>, are still used for religious ceremony, and
+election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the
+Indians threshing their grain by the trampling of goats on a threshing
+floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy,
+while a man scrapes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are
+white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of
+Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these
+white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own
+laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own
+prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos
+Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that
+civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman
+Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East;
+but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He
+has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open
+fields and the friendship of his gods&mdash;what more can life offer?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Don't leave the Southwest without seeing Taos. It might be part of
+Turkey, or Persia, or India. It is the most un-American thing in
+America; and yet, it is the most typical of those ancient days in
+America, when there was no white man. Just here, before the ethnologist
+arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do
+not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the
+Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute
+legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo
+legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The easiest way to reach Taos is by the ancient city of Santa Fe. You go
+by rail to Servilleta, or Barrancas, then stage it out to the Indian
+pueblos. Better wire for your stage accommodation from the railroad. We
+did not wire, and when we left the railroad, we found seven people and a
+stage with space for only four. The railroad leads almost straight north
+from Santa Fe over high, clear mesas of yellow ocher covered with scrub
+juniper. There is little sign of water after you leave the Rio Grande,
+for water does not flow uphill; and you are at an altitude of 8,000 feet
+when you cross the Divide. You pass through fruit orchards along the
+river, low headed and heavy with apples. Then come the Indian villages,
+San Ildefonso, and Espa&ntilde;ola, and Santa Clara, where the strings of red
+chile bake in the sunlight against the glare adobe. Women go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> up from
+the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the
+famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail
+across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and
+pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright
+blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment
+stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in
+the shade are the old people&mdash;people of a great age, 104 one old woman
+numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you
+are in a region where nothing grows but pi&ntilde;on and juniper. There is not
+a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train
+shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the
+right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black
+basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all
+Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see
+its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran
+down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the
+left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops
+and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes&mdash;White Rock
+Ca&ntilde;on&mdash;marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers.
+On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge
+cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa
+Clara Indians.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more
+sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station;
+and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.</p>
+
+<p>A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at
+this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage&mdash;a
+famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn&mdash;made eight; and we packed into a
+two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight
+drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been
+driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that
+rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the
+wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede
+them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts
+varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told
+here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild horse. It is a
+combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is
+a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild
+one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles
+but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-273.jpg" width="650" height="373" alt="The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace
+their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish
+conquistadores" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace
+their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish
+conquistadores</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only
+dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the
+Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds
+scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through
+the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting
+star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines
+of the mountains&mdash;wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe,
+coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give
+a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along
+abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land,
+a jumping-off place for all the earth&mdash;too high for irrigation farming,
+too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the
+twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties,
+where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is
+too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild
+bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads.
+The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo,
+where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a
+telephone line in.</p>
+
+<p>Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an
+utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls
+amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a
+pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable&mdash;then,
+suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has
+come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a
+plummet&mdash;two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> ca&ntilde;ons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches
+through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together
+at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old
+friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain
+snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower
+levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another ca&ntilde;on slashed
+through the rocks in a deep trench&mdash;both rivers silver in the moonlight,
+with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or
+the waves of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with
+a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump
+off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled
+Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent
+and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern
+adventure.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be
+taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists
+have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two ca&ntilde;ons are so
+close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one
+picture except from an airship. It is as if the earth were suddenly
+rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend
+tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down!
+The bronchos will manage that, where an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> Eastern horse would break his
+neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a
+terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the
+Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It
+could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything
+between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the
+places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the
+wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the
+horse, too.</p>
+
+<p>But, before you know it, you have switched round the last turn and are
+rattling across the Bridge. Some Mexican teamsters are in camp below the
+rock wall of the river. The reflection of the figures and firelight and
+precipices in the deep waters calls up all sorts of tales of Arabian
+Nights and road robbers and old lawless days. Then, you pull up sharp at
+the toll house for supper, as quaint an inn as anything in Switzerland
+or the Himalayas. The back of the house is the rock wall of the ca&ntilde;on.
+The front is adobe. The halls are long and low and narrow, with
+low-roofed rooms off the front side only. From the Bridge you can go on
+to Taos by motor in moonlight; but the whole way by stage and motor in
+one day makes a hard trip, and there is as much of interest at the
+Bridge as at Taos. You don't expect to find settlers in this dim silver
+underworld, do you? Well, drive a few miles up the Arroyo Hondo, where
+the stream widens out into garden patch farms, and you will find as odd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+specimens of isolated humans as exist anywhere in the world&mdash;relics of
+the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle
+Ages&mdash;Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or Crucifixion people, who yearly at
+Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the Cross, and until
+very recent years even re-enacted the Crucifixion.</p>
+
+<p>After supper we strolled out down the ca&ntilde;on. It is impossible to
+exaggerate its beauty. Each gash is only the width of the river with
+sides straight as walls. The walls are yellow and black basalt, all
+spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the frosts.
+The rivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from
+the springs in the snows. Snows and clear water and frost in the Desert?
+Yes: that is as the Desert is in reality, not in geography books. Below
+the Bridge, you can follow the Rio Grande down to some famous hot
+springs; and in this section, the air is literally spicy with the oil of
+sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the
+rapids, and you may catch the lilt of a mocking-bird, or see a bluebird
+examining some frost-touched berries. It is October; but the
+goldfinches, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads
+here.</p>
+
+<p>The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the
+Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a
+people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The
+houses of the Arroyo Hondo are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> very small and very poor; for the
+Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The
+orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have
+been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if
+living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a
+peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the
+Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders
+that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in
+the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are
+practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light&mdash;La Luz&mdash;and the
+Brothers of the Darkness&mdash;Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as
+Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one
+narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of
+membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death
+occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After
+Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final
+services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break
+the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to
+help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that
+politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get
+patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill
+above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where
+Penitentes have whipped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> themselves senseless with cactus belts, or
+dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring&mdash;1912&mdash;a
+woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby
+was bound. We passed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died
+from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907.</p>
+
+<p>The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the
+Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their
+naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers
+with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general
+congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop
+to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? "To appease divine
+wrath," they say; but they might ask us&mdash;why have we dipsomaniacs and
+kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because "Julia
+O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their
+skins." Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of
+emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are
+only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow ca&ntilde;on shut off
+from the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>They were not dolorous emotions that found vent as we drove back down
+Arroyo Hondo to the Bridge. Our driver got out a mouth organ. Then he
+played and sang snatches of dance tunes of the old, old days in the True
+West.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Allamahoo, right hand to your partner<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And grand hodoo."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Watch your partner and watch her close;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when you catch her, a double doze."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The cock flies out and the hen flies in&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All hands round and go it agen."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted
+and pristine on the trip to Taos.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA</h3>
+
+
+<p>Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso&mdash;these were to the Southwest what Port Royal,
+Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and
+Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the
+Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of
+the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the
+watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish
+territory in the wilderness land of the New World.</p>
+
+<p>Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders
+from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader
+trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon.
+Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and
+Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads
+and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven
+blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish
+bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three
+Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains
+round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> from the
+peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley
+with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the
+mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the
+trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos
+was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of
+forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. "Walled city,"
+you say, "before the coming of white men to the West?" Yes, you can see
+those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540
+by hundreds of years.</p>
+
+<p>No motor can climb up and down the steep switchback to the Arroyo Hondo
+of the Bridge. Cars taken over that trail must be towed; but from the
+Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the
+river bed, you see the mountains ahead rise in black basalt like
+castellated walls, with tower and battlement jagged into the very
+clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where
+frost has touched the foliage; and you haven't gone very many miles into
+the lilac mist of the morning light&mdash;shimmering as it always shimmers
+above the sagebrush blue and sandy gold of the Upper Mesas&mdash;before you
+hear the laughter of living waters coming down from the mountain snows.
+One understands why the Indians chose the uplands; while the white man,
+who came after, had to choose the shadowy bottoms of the walled-in
+ca&ntilde;ons. Someone, back in the good old days when we were not afraid to be
+poetic, said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> something about "traveling on the wings of the morning." I
+can't put in words what he meant; but you do it here&mdash;going up and up so
+gradually that you don't realize that you are in the lap, not of
+mountains, but of mountain peaks; breathing, not air, but ozone;
+uplifted by a great weight being taken off spirit and body; looking at
+life through rose-colored tints, not metaphorically, but really; for
+there is something in this high rare air&mdash;not dust, not moisture&mdash;that
+splits white light into its seven prismatic hues. You look through an
+atmosphere wonderfully rare, but it is never clear, white light. It is
+lavender, or lilac, or primrose, or gold, or red as blood according to
+the hours and the mood of hours; and if you want to carry the metaphor
+still farther, you may truthfully add that the hours on these high
+uplands are dancing hours. You never feel time to be a heavy, slow thing
+that oppresses the soul.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-285.jpg" width="650" height="362" alt="Climbing home over your neighbor&#39;s roof and bolting your
+door by pulling up the ladder is customary in Taos" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Climbing home over your neighbor&#39;s roof and bolting your
+door by pulling up the ladder is customary in Taos</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As the streams laugh down from the mountains, ranches grow more and more
+frequent. It is characteristic of the West that you don't cross the
+<i>acequias</i> on bridges. You cross them on two planks, with risk to your
+car if the driver swerve at the steering wheel. All the houses are red
+earth adobe, thick of wall to shut out both heat and cold, with a smell
+of juniper wood in the fireplaces of each room. Much of this
+land&mdash;nearly all of it, in fact&mdash;is owned by the Taos Indians and held
+in common for pasturage and cultivation. Title was given by Spain four
+centuries ago, and the same title holds to-day in spite of white
+squatters' attempt to break down the law by cutting the wire of the
+pasture fences and taking the case to the courts. It was in this way
+that squatters broke down the title of old Spanish families to thousands
+and hundreds of thousands of acres granted before American occupation.
+To be sure, an American land commission took evidence on these titles,
+in the quarrel between Yankee squatter and Spanish don; but the squatter
+had "friends in court." The old Spanish don hadn't. He saw titles that
+had held good from 1540 slipping from his neighbor's hands; and he
+either contested the case to lose out before he had begun, or sold and
+sold at a song to save the wreckage of his fortunes. Of all the Spanish
+land grants originally partitioning off what is now New Mexico, I know
+of only one held by the family of the original grantee; and it is now in
+process of partition. It is an untold page of Southwestern history, this
+"stampeding" of Spanish titles. Some day, when we are a little farther
+away from it, the story will be told. It will not make pleasant reading,
+nor afford a bill of health to some family fortunes of the Southwest.
+Perjuries, assassinations, purchase in open markets of judges drawing
+such small pittances that they were in the auction mart for highest bid,
+forged documents, incendiary fires to destroy true titles&mdash;these were
+the least and most decent of the crimes of this era. "Ramona" tells what
+happened to Indian titles in California. Paint Helen Hunt Jackson's
+colors red instead of gray; multiply the crimes by ten instead of two;
+and you have a faint picture of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> the land-jockey period of New Mexican
+history. Something of this sort is going on at Taos to-day among the
+pueblos for their land, and down at Sacaton among the Pimas for water.
+Treaty guaranteed the Indian his rights, but at Taos the squatter cut
+the pueblo fences and carried the case to court. At Sacaton, the big
+squatter, the irrigation company, took the Pimas' water; so that the
+Indian can no longer raise crops. If you want to know what the courts do
+in these cases, ask the pueblo governor at Taos; or the Pima chief at
+Sacaton.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is late September. A parrot calls out in Spanish from the center of
+the patio where our rooms look out on an arcade running round the court
+in a perfect square. A mocking-bird trills saucily from his cage amid
+the cosmos bloom. Donkeys and burros amble past the rear gate with loads
+of wood strapped to their backs. Your back window looks out on the
+courtyard. Your front window faces the street across from a plaza, or
+city square. Stalwart, thick-set, muscular figures, hair banded back by
+red and white scarfs, trousers of a loose, white pantaloon sort, tunic a
+gray or white blanket, wrapped Arab fashion from shoulders to waist,
+stalk with quick, nervous tread along the plaza; for it is the feast of
+Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will
+be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and
+foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia;
+and it is not Palestine; and it is not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> Spain. It is just plain,
+commonplace America out at Taos&mdash;white man's Taos, at the old Columbia
+Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns.</p>
+
+<p>As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and
+poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in
+adobe casement and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner
+patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the
+roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old
+Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been
+called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in
+the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and
+a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the
+Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to
+accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were
+diligently "skied" by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was
+deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself;
+and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they
+to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in
+Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that
+would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler.
+It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is
+sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in
+our own country.</p>
+
+<p>Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> Spanish mansions
+occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street
+entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit
+Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there
+does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine
+where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could
+brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four
+streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are
+alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as
+"alcalde," it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish
+dons lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and
+buckled shoes, and Spanish <i>conquistadores</i> rode past armed cap-&agrave;-pie,
+and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the
+lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you
+will find the deep casement windows very high in the wall. I asked a
+descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. "For
+protection," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Indians?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside
+world."</p>
+
+<p>The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town.
+Laguna, Acoma, Zu&ntilde;i, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert&mdash;all lie on
+hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the
+exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley
+among the mountains,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> two castellated, five story adobe structures, one
+on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the
+houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they
+are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are
+practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned
+to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two
+huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three
+to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire
+pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the
+village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and
+bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos
+after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You
+see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of
+Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to
+the roofs and can be drawn up&mdash;the pueblo way of bolting the door. The
+houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color
+outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly
+inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these
+ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the
+Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls
+over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing
+blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of
+ladders to the very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> top of a five storied house, and look out. You can
+see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in common. On the
+outskirts of the village, men and boys are threshing, that is&mdash;they are
+chasing ponies round and round inside a kraal, with a flag stuck up to
+show which way the wind blows, one man forking chaff with the wind,
+another scraping the grain outside the circle.</p>
+
+<p>Glance inside the houses. The upstairs is evidently the living-room; for
+the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn
+and meal bins, and you can see the <i>metate</i> or stone on which the corn
+is ground by the women as in the days of Old Testament record. Though
+there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in the forties,
+and an old Mission church dating almost from 1540, you can see from the
+roof dozens of <i>estufas</i>, where the men are practicing for their dances
+and masked theatricals. Tony, the assistant governor, an educated man of
+about forty who has traveled with Wild West shows, acts as our guide,
+and tells us about the squatters trying to get the Indian land. How
+would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle of your farm and
+fence off 160 acres? The Indians didn't like it, and cut the fences.
+Then the troops were sent out. That was in 1910&mdash;a typical "uprising,"
+when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has
+gone to the courts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be settled very soon.
+In fact, Tony likes their own form of government better than the white
+man's.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is
+not only assistant governor: he is constable to keep white men from
+bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own
+governor. That governor's word is absolutely supreme for his tenure of
+office. Is there a dispute over crops, or cattle? The governor's word
+settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers.</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing the guilty man doesn't obey the governor?" we ask.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we send our own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in
+the lock-up," and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and
+the lock-up. These stocks clamp down a man's head as well as his hands
+and feet. A man with his neck and hands anchored down between his feet
+in a black room naturally wouldn't remain disobedient long.</p>
+
+<p>The method of voting is older than the white man's ballot. The Indians
+enter the <i>estufa</i>. A mark is drawn across the sand. Two men are
+nominated. (No&mdash;women do not vote; the women rule the house absolutely.
+The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then
+signify their choice by marks on the sand.</p>
+
+<p>Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common;
+but the product of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own
+and not in common&mdash;the nearest approach to socialistic life that America
+has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other
+pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> back as the origin
+of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all
+other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact
+with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost
+unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as
+among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but
+the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.</p>
+
+<p>We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know
+him as a <i>cacique</i>. Associated with him are the old men&mdash;<i>mayores</i>, or
+council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the
+lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We
+have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who
+harangue from the housetops, or <i>estufas</i>. As women stoop over the
+<i>metates</i> grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The
+chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the
+grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church,
+the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and
+in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never
+been able to learn the ceremonies of the <i>estufas</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Women never enter the <i>estufas</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but
+it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three
+companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to
+Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the
+Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they
+reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast,
+undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition
+of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the
+Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de
+Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare
+the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One
+can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made
+between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in
+September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine
+the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When
+Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zu&ntilde;i, near the modern
+Gallup, he was met with the warning "Go back; or you will be put to
+death." His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zu&ntilde;i people promptly
+killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the
+lay brothers. Zu&ntilde;i was called "<i>cibola</i>" owing to the great number of
+buffalo skins (<i>cibolas</i>) in camp.</p>
+
+<p>Fray Marcos' report encouraged the Emperor of Spain to go on with
+Coronado's expedition. That trip need not be told here. It has been told
+and retold in half the languages of the world. The Spaniards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> set out
+from Old Mexico 300 strong, with 800 Indian escorts and four priests
+including Marcos and a lay brother. What did they expect? Probably a
+second Peru, temples with walls of gold and images draped in jewels of
+priceless worth. What did they find? In Zu&ntilde;i and the Three Mesas and
+Taos, small, sun-baked clay houses built tier on tier on top of each
+other like a child's block house, with neither precious stones, nor
+metals of any sort, but only an abundance of hides and woven cloth. When
+the soldiers saw Zu&ntilde;i, they broke out in jeers and curses at the priest.
+Poor Fray Marcos was thinking more of souls saved from perdition than of
+loot, and returned in shamed embarrassment to New Spain.</p>
+
+<p>Across the Desert to the Three Mesas and the Ca&ntilde;on of the Colorado, east
+again to Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, up to the pueblo town now known
+as the city of Santa Fe, into the Pecos, and north, yet north of Taos,
+Coronado's expedition practically made a circuit of all the Southwest
+from the Colorado River to East Kansas. The knightly adventurers did not
+find gold, and we may guess, as winter came on with heavy snows in the
+Upper Desert, they were in no very good mood; for now began that contest
+between white adventurers and Pueblos which lasted down to the middle of
+the Nineteenth Century. At the pueblo now known as Bernalillo, the
+soldiers demanded blankets to protect them from the cold. The Indians
+stripped their houses to help their visitors, but in the m&ecirc;l&eacute;e and no
+doubt in the ill humor of both sides there were attacks and insults by
+the white aggressors, and a state of siege lasted for two months.
+Practically from that date to 1840, the pueblo towns were a unit against
+the white man.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 410px;">
+<img src="images/fig-297.jpg" width="410" height="650" alt="A fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has
+not adhered to the native costume" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has
+not adhered to the native costume</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The last great uprising was just after the American Occupation. Bent,
+the great trader of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, was governor. Kit
+Carson, who had run away from the saddler's trade at sixteen and for
+whom a reward of one cent was offered, had joined the Santa Fe caravans
+and was now living at Taos, an influential man among the Indians.
+According to Col. Twitchell, whose work is the most complete on New
+Mexico and who received the account direct from the governor's daughter,
+Governor Bent knew that danger was brewing. The Pueblos had witnessed
+Spanish power overthrown; then, the expulsion of Mexican rule. Why
+should they, themselves, not expel American domination?</p>
+
+<p>It was January 18, 1847. Governor Bent had come up from Santa Fe to
+visit Taos. He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a
+trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders' rum
+had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to
+the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to
+complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had
+harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion. Governor Bent
+and his family were in bed in the house you can see over to the left of
+the Plaza. In the kraal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> were plenty of horses for escape, but the
+family were awakened at daybreak by a rabble crowding into the central
+courtyard. Kit Carson's wife, Mrs. Bent, Mrs. Boggs and her children
+hurried into the shelter of an inner room. Young Alfredo Bent, only ten
+years old, pulled his gun from the rack with the words&mdash;"Papa, let us
+fight;" but Bent had gone to the door to parley with the leaders.</p>
+
+<p>Taking advantage of the check, the women and an Indian slave dug a hole
+with a poker and spoon under the adobe wall of the room into the next
+house. Through this the family crawled away from the besieged room to
+the next house, Mrs. Bent last, calling for her husband to come; but it
+was too late. Governor Bent was shot in the face as he expostulated;
+clubbed down and literally scalped alive. He dragged himself across the
+floor, to follow his wife; but Indians came up through the hole and down
+over the roof and in through the windows; and Bent fell dead at the feet
+of his family.</p>
+
+<p>The family were left prisoners in the room without food, or clothing
+except night dresses, all that day and the next night. At daybreak
+friendly Mexicans brought food, and the women were taken away disguised
+as squaws. Once, when searching Indians came to the house of the old
+Mexican who had sheltered the family, the rescuer threw the searchers
+off by setting his "squaws" to grinding meal on the kitchen floor. Kit
+Carson, at this time, unfortunately happened to be in California. He was
+the one man who could have restrained the Indians.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo Hondo to catch some mule
+loads of whiskey and provisions, which were expected through the narrow
+ca&ntilde;on. The mill where the mules had been unharnessed was surrounded that
+night. The teamsters plugged up windows and loaded for the fray that
+must come with daylight. Seven times the Indians attempted to rush an
+assault. Each time, a rifle shot puffed from the mill and an Indian
+leaped into the air to fall back dead. Then the whole body of 500
+Indians poured a simultaneous volley into the mill. Two of the Americans
+inside fell dead. A third was severely wounded. By the afternoon of the
+second day, the Americans were without balls or powder. The Indians then
+crept up and set fire to the mill. The Americans hid themselves among
+the stampeding stock of the kraal. Night was coming on. The Pueblos were
+crowding round in a circle. The surviving Americans opened the gates and
+made a dash in the dark for the mountains. Two only escaped. The rest
+were lanced and scalped as they ran; and in the loot of the teams, the
+Indians are supposed to have secured some well-filled chests of gold
+specie.</p>
+
+<p>By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five
+companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and
+four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where
+the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait
+his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> mesa at Santa
+Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of
+the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only
+one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and
+forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date;
+and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the
+narrowing ca&ntilde;ons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred
+Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and pi&ntilde;on. The
+soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not
+withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here.
+Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands;
+and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been
+drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered
+great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could
+not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were
+completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the
+walls. A shell was fired&mdash;the church wall battered down, and the
+dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feb. 4th, old men,
+women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The
+ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew
+off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss
+was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to
+overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if
+the Indians had not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> been spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with
+counter plots of their own.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in
+white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw
+off white rule&mdash;these Pueblos&mdash;but for four centuries they have
+withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent
+the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open
+revolt.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA</h3>
+
+
+<p>If you want to plunge into America's Egypt, there are as many ways to go
+as you have moods. You explain that the ocean voyage is half the
+attraction to European travel. There may be a difference of opinion on
+that, as I know people who would like to believe that the Atlantic could
+be bridged; but if you are keen on an ocean voyage, you can reach the
+Egypt of America by boat to Florida, then west by rail; or by boat
+straight to any of the Texas harbors. By way of Florida, you can take
+your fill of the historic and antique and the picturesque in St.
+Augustine and Pensacola and New Orleans; and if there are any yarns of
+rarer flavor in all the resorts of Europe than in the old quarters of
+these three places, I have never heard of them. You can drink of the
+spring of the elixir of life in St. Augustine, and lose yourself in the
+trenches of old Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, and wander at will in the
+old French town of New Orleans. Each place was once a pawn in the
+gambles of European statesmen. Each has heard the clang of armed
+knights, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other. Each has seen
+the pirate fleet with death's head on the flag at the masthead come
+tacking up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> the bays, sometimes to be shattered and sunk by cannon shot
+from the fort bastions. Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the
+buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at
+terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who
+was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight
+of her watching father.</p>
+
+<p>But whether you enter the Egypt of America by rail overland, or by sea,
+San Antonio is the gateway city from the south to the land of play and
+mystery. It is to the Middle West what Quebec is to Canada, what Cairo
+is to Egypt&mdash;the gateway, the meeting place of old and new, of Latin and
+Saxon, of East and West, of North and South. Atmosphere? Physically, the
+atmosphere is champagne: spiritually, you have not gone ten paces from
+the station before you feel a flavor as of old wine. There are the open
+Spanish plazas riotous with bloom flanked by Spanish-Moorish ruins flush
+on the pavement, with skyscraper hotels that are the last word in
+modernity. Live oaks heavy with Spanish moss hang over sleepy streams
+that come from everywhere and meander nowhere. You see a squad of
+soldiers from Fort Sam Houston wheeling in measured tread around a
+square (only there isn't anything absolutely square in all San Antonio)
+and they have hardly gone striding out of sight before you see a Mexican
+burro trotting to market with a load of hay tied on its back. A motor
+comes bumping over the roads&mdash;such roads as only the antique can
+boast&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> if it is fiesta time, or cowboy celebration, you are apt to
+see cowboys cutting such figure eights in the air as a motor cannot
+execute on antique pavement.</p>
+
+<p>You enter a hotel and imagine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the
+Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the marble walls isn't gilt;
+and it isn't tapestry. The frieze is a long panel in bronze
+<i>alto-relievo</i>. I think it is a testimonial to San Antonio's sense of
+the fitness of things that that frieze is not of Roman gladiators, or
+French gardens with beringed ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of
+the cowboys taking a stampeding herd up the long trail&mdash;drifting and
+driving but held together by a rough fellow in top boots and sombrero;
+and the rotunda has a frieze of cowboys because that three
+million-dollar hotel was built out of "cow" money. Old and new, past and
+present, Saxon and Latin, North and South, East and West&mdash;that is San
+Antonio. You can never forget it for a minute. It is such a shifting
+panorama as you could only get from traveling thousands of miles
+elsewhere, or comparing a hundred Remington drawings. San Antonio is a
+curious combination of Remington and Alma Tadema in real life; and I
+don't know anywhere else in the world you can get it. There are three
+such huge hotels in San Antonio besides a score of lesser ones, to take
+care of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in
+San Antonio; but remember that while 30,000 seems a large number of
+tourists for one place, that is only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> one-tenth the number of Americans
+who yearly see Europe.</p>
+
+<p>And never for a moment can you forget that as Cairo is the gateway to
+Eastern travel, so San Antonio is on the road to Old Mexico and all the
+former Spanish possessions of the South. It was here that Madero's band
+of revolutionists lived and laid the plans that overthrew Diaz. Long
+ago, before the days of railway, it was here that the long caravans of
+mule trains used to come with, silver and gold from the mines of Old
+Mexico. It was here the highwaymen and roughs and toughs and scum of the
+earth used to lie in wait for the passing bullion; and it was here the
+Texas Rangers came with short, quick, sharp shrift for rustlers and
+robbers. There is one corner in San Antonio where you can see a Mission
+dating back to the early seventeen hundreds, and not a stone's throw
+away, one of the most famous gambling joints of the wildest days of the
+wild Southwest&mdash;the site of the old Silver King, where cowboys and
+miners from the South used to come in "to clean out" their earnings of a
+year, sometimes to ride horses over faro tables, or pot-shot rows of
+champagne. A man had "to smile" when he called his "pardner" pet names
+in the Silver King; or there would be crackle of more than champagne
+corks. Men would duck for hiding. A body would be dragged out, sand
+spread on the floor, and the games went on morning, noon and night. The
+Missions are crumbling ruins. So is the Silver King. Frontiersmen will
+tell you regretfully of the good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> old days forever gone, when the night
+passed but dully if the cowboys did not shoot up all the saloons and
+"hurdle" the gaming tables.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Yesterday, it was cowboy and mines in San Antonio. To-day, it is polo
+and tourist; and the transition is a natural growth. One would hate to
+think of the risks of the Long Trail, for miners from Old Mexico to Fort
+Leavenworth, for cowboys from Fort Worth to Wyoming and St. Louis, and
+not see the risks rewarded in fortunes to these trail makers. The cowboy
+and miner of the olden days&mdash;the cowboy and miner who survived, that
+is&mdash;are the capitalists taking their pleasure in San Antonio to-day. It
+was natural that the cow pony bred to keeping its feet in mid-air, or on
+earth, should develop into the finest type of polo pony ever known. For
+years, the polo clubs of the North, Lenox, Long Island, Milbrook, have
+made a regular business of scouring Texas for polo ponies. Horses giving
+promise of good points would be picked up at $80, $100, $150. They would
+then be rounded on a ranch and trained. San Antonio is situated almost
+700 feet up on a high, clear plateau rimmed by blue ridges in the
+distance. Recently, a polo ground of 3,200 acres has been laid out; and
+the polo clubs of the North are to be invited to San Antonio for the
+winter fiestas. As Fort Sam Houston boasts one of the best polo clubs of
+the South, competition is likely to attract the sportsmen from far and
+near.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>You know how it is in all these new Western cities. They are feverish
+with a mania of progress. They have grown so fast they cannot keep track
+of their own hobble-de-hoy, sprawling limbs. They are drunk with
+prosperity. In real estate alone, fortunes have come, as it were,
+overnight. All this San Antonio has not escaped. They will tell you with
+pardonable pride how this little cow town, where land wasn't worth two
+cents an acre outside the Mission walls, has jumped to be a metropolitan
+city of over 100,000; how it is the center of the great truck and
+irrigation farm district. Fort Sam Houston always has 700 or 800
+soldiers in garrison, and sometimes has as many as 4,000; and when army
+maneuvers take place, there is an immense reservation outside the city
+where as many as 20,000 men can practice mimic war. The day of two cents
+or even $20 an acre land round San Antonio is forever past. Land under
+the ditch is too valuable for the rating of twenty acres to one steer.</p>
+
+<p>All this and more you will see of modern San Antonio; but still if at
+sundown you set out on a vagrant and solitary tour of the old Missions,
+I think you will feel as I felt that it was the dauntless spirit of the
+old r&eacute;gime that fired the blood of the moderns for the new day that is
+dawning. I don't know why it is, but anything in life that is worth
+having seems to demand service and sacrifice and, oftener than not, the
+martyrdom of heroic and terrible defeat. Then, when you think that the
+flag of the cause is trampled in a mire of bloodshed, ph&oelig;nix-like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+the cause rises on eagles' wings to new height, new daring, new victory.
+It was so in Texas.</p>
+
+<p>When you visit the Missions of San Antonio, go alone; or go with a
+kindred spirit. Don't talk! Let the mysticism and wonder of it sink in
+your soul! Soak yourself in the traditions of the Past. Let the dead
+hand of the Past reach out and touch you. You will live over again the
+heroism of the Alamo, the heroism that preceded the Alamo&mdash;that of the
+Franciscans who tramped 300 leagues across the desert of Old Mexico to
+establish these Missions; the heroism that preceded the
+Franciscans&mdash;that of La Salle traveling thrice 300 leagues to establish
+the cross on the Gulf of Mexico, and perishing by assassin's hand as he
+turned on the backward march. You will see the iron cross to his memory
+at Levaca. It was because La Salle, the Frenchman, found his way to the
+Gulf, that Spain stirred up the viceroys of New Mexico to send sword and
+cross over the desert to establish forts in the country of the Tejas
+(Texans).</p>
+
+<p>Do you realize what that means? When I cross the arid hills of the Rio
+Grande, I travel in a car cooled by electric fans, with two or three
+iced drinks between meals. These men marched&mdash;most of them on foot, the
+cowled priests in sandals, the knights in armor plate from head to
+heel&mdash;over cactus sands. Do you wonder that they died on the way? Do you
+wonder that the marchers coming into the well-watered plains of the San
+Antonio with festooned live oaks overhanging the green waters, paused
+here and built their string of Missions of which the chief was the one
+now known as "The Alamo"&mdash;the Mission of the cottonwood trees?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-311.jpg" width="650" height="377" alt="An excellent example of the entrance to an adobe house of
+the Southwest, embodying the best traditions of this kind of
+architecture" title="" />
+<span class="caption">An excellent example of the entrance to an adobe house of
+the Southwest, embodying the best traditions of this kind of
+architecture</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Six different flags have flown over the land of the Tejas: the French,
+the Spanish, the Mexican, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate, the
+Union. In such a struggle for ascendancy, needless to tell, much blood
+was shed righteously and unrighteously; but of the battle fought at the
+Alamo, no justification need be given. It is part of American history,
+but it is the kind of history that in other nations goes to make battle
+hymns. Details are in every school book. Santa Ana, the newly risen
+Mexican dictator, had ordered the 30,000 Americans who lived in Texas,
+to disarm. Sam Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis, had sprung to arms with
+a call that rings down to history yet:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Fellow citizens and compatriots," wrote Travis from the
+doomed Alamo Mission, to Houston and the other leaders
+outside, "I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under
+Santa Ana. I have sustained a continued bombardment for
+twenty-four hours and have not lost a man.... The garrison
+is to be put to the sword if the place is taken. I have
+answered the summons with a cannon shot and our flag still
+waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender, nor
+retreat. I call on you in the name of liberty, and of
+everything dear to the American character, to come to our
+aid with all despatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements
+daily, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> will no doubt increase to 3,000 or 4,000 in four
+or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am
+determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die
+like a soldier who forgets not what is due to his own honor
+and that of his country&mdash;Victory or Death!</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+W. Barrett Travis<br />
+Lieut.-Col. Commanding."<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the fort with Travis were 180 men under Bowie and Crockett. The siege
+began on Feb. 23, 1836, and ended on March 6th. Besides the frontiersmen
+in the fort were two women, two children and two slaves. The Mission was
+arranged in a great quadrangle fifty-four by 154 yards with <i>acequias</i>
+or irrigation ditches both to front and rear. The garrison had succeeded
+in getting inside the walls about thirty bushels of corn and eighty beef
+cattle; so there was no danger of famine. The big courtyard was in the
+rear. The convent projected out in front of the courtyard. To the left
+angle of the convent was the chapel or Mission of the Alamo. Santa Ana
+had come across the desert with 5,000 men. To the demand for surrender,
+Travis answered with a cannon shot. The Mexican leader then hung the red
+flag above his camp and ordered the band to play "no quarter." For eight
+days, shells came hurtling inside the walls incessantly, dawn to dark,
+dark to dawn. Just at sunset on March 3rd, there was a bell. Travis
+collected his men and gave them their choice of surrendering and being
+shot, or cutting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> their way out through the besieging line. The
+besiegers at this time consisted of 2,500 infantrymen bunched close to
+the walls of the Alamo&mdash;too close to be shot from above, and 2,500
+cavalry and infantry back on the Plaza and encircling the Mission to cut
+off all avenue of escape.</p>
+
+<p>Travis drew a line on the ground with his sword.</p>
+
+<p>"Every man who will die with me, come across that line! Who will be
+first? March!"</p>
+
+<p>Every man leaped over the line but Bowie, who was ill on a cot bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Boys, move my cot over the line," he said.</p>
+
+<p>At four o'clock next morning, the siege was resumed. The bugle blew a
+single blast. With picks, crowbars and ladders, the Mexicans closed in.
+The besieged waited breathlessly. The Mexicans placed the ladders and
+began scaling. The sharpshooters inside the walls waited till the heads
+appeared above the walls&mdash;then fired. As the top man fell back, the one
+beneath on the ladder stepped in the dead man's place. Then the
+Americans clubbed their guns and fought hand to hand. By that, the
+Mexicans knew that ammunition was exhausted and the defenders few. The
+walls were scaled and battered down first in a far corner of the convent
+yard. Behind the chapel door, piles of sand had been stacked. From the
+yard, the Texans were driven to the convent, from the convent to the
+chapel. Travis fell shot at the breach in the yard wall. Bowie was
+bayoneted on the cot where he lay. Crockett was clubbed to death just
+outside the chapel door to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> left. By nine o'clock, no answering shot
+came from the Alamo. The doors were rammed and rushed. Not a Texan
+survived. Two women, two children and a couple of slaves were pulled out
+of hiding from chancel and stalls. These were sent across to the main
+camp. The bodies of the 182 heroes were piled in a pyramid with fagots;
+and fired. So ended the Battle of the Alamo, one of the most terrible
+defeats and heroic defenses in American history. It is unnecessary to
+relate that Sam Houston exacted from the Mexicans on the battlefield of
+San Jacinto a terrible punishment for this defeat. Captured and killed,
+his toll of defeated Mexicans down at Houston came to almost 1,700.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the story of one of San Antonio's Missions. One other has a tale
+equally tragic; but all but two are falling to utter ruin. I don't know
+whether it would be greater desecration to lay hand on them and save
+them, or let them fall to dust. It was nightfall when I went to the
+three on the outskirts of the city. Two have little left but the walls
+and the towers. A third is still used as place of worship by a little
+settlement of Mexicans. The slant light of sunset came through the
+darkened, vacant windows, the tiers of weathered stalls, the empty,
+twin-towered belfries. You could see where the well stood, the bake
+house, the school. Shrubbery planted by the monks has grown wild in the
+courtyards; but you can still call up the picture of the cowled priests
+chanting prayers. The Missions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> are ruins; but the hope that animated
+them, the fire, the heroism, the dauntless faith, still burn in Texas
+blood as the sunset flame shines through the dismantled windows.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA</h3>
+
+
+<p>If someone should tell you of a second Grand Ca&ntilde;on gashed through
+wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very
+high mountains&mdash;a second Grand Ca&ntilde;on, where lived a race of little men
+not three feet tall, where wild turkeys were domesticated as household
+birds and every man's door was in the roof and his doorstep a ladder
+that he carried up after him&mdash;you would think it pure imagination,
+wouldn't you? The Lilliputians away out in "Gulliver's Travels," or
+something like that? And if your narrator went on about magicians who
+danced with live rattlesnakes hanging from their teeth and belted about
+their waists, and played with live fire without being burned, and walked
+up the faces of precipices as a fly walks up a wall&mdash;you would think him
+rehearsing some Robinson Crusoe tale about two generations too late to
+be believed.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there is a second Grand Ca&ntilde;on not a stone's throw from everyday
+tourist travel, wilder in game life and rock formation if not so large,
+with prehistoric caves on its precipice walls where sleeps a race of
+little mummied men behind doors and windows barely large enough to admit
+a half-grown white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> child. Who were they? No one knows. When did they
+live? So long ago that they were cave men, stone age men; so long ago
+that neither history nor tradition has the faintest echo of their
+existence. Where did they live? No, it was not Europe, Asia, Africa or
+Australia. If it were, we would know about them. As it happens, this
+second Grand Ca&ntilde;on is only in plain, nearby, home-staying America; so
+when boys of the Forest Service pulled Little Zeke out of his gypsum and
+pumice stone dust and measured him up and found him only twenty-three
+inches long, though the hair sticking to the skull was gray and the
+teeth were those of an adult&mdash;as it happened in only matter-of-fact,
+commonplace America, poor Little Zeke couldn't get shelter. They
+trounced his little dry bones round Silver City, New Mexico, for a few
+months. Then they boxed him up and shipped him away to be stored out of
+sight in the cellars of the Smithsonian, at Washington. As Zeke has been
+asleep since the Ice Age, or about ten to eight thousand years B. C., it
+doesn't make very much difference to him; but one wonders what in the
+world New Mexico was doing allowing one of the most wonderful specimens
+of a prehistoric dwarf race ever found to be shipped out of the country.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the Gila Ca&ntilde;on that the Forestry Service boys found him. By
+some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy "Zeke." The Gila is a
+typical box-ca&ntilde;on, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the
+Grand Ca&ntilde;on, literally terraced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> and honeycombed with the cave dwellings
+of a prehistoric race. It lies some fifty miles as the crow flies from
+Silver City; but the way the crow flies and the way man travels are an
+altogether different story in the wild lands of the Gila Mountains.
+You'll have to make the most of the way on horseback with tents for
+hotels, or better still the stars for a roof. Besides, what does it
+matter when or how the little scrub of a twenty-three-inch man lived
+anyway? We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how
+cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave
+men&mdash;ask Jack London if you don't believe it&mdash;were hairy monsters, not
+quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal
+appendage&mdash;hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the
+hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
+That is the way they got their wives. (Perhaps, if Little Zeke could
+speak, he would think he ought to sue moderns for libel. He might think
+that our "blond-beast" theories are a reflex of our own civilization. He
+might smile through his grinning jaws.)</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements
+of fine woven cloth with fluffy-ruffles and fol-de-rols of woven blue
+jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck. Zeke's people
+understood weaving. Also Zeke wears on his feet sandals of yucca fiber
+and matting. I don't know what our ancestors wore&mdash;according to
+evolutionists, it may have been hair and monkey<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> pads. So if you
+understood as much about Zeke's history as you do about the Pyramids,
+you'd settle some of the biggest disputes in theology and ethnology and
+anthropology and a lot of other "ologies," which have something more or
+less to do with the salvation and damnation of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>How is it known that Zeke is a type of a race, and not a freak specimen
+of a dwarf? Because other like specimens have been found in the same
+area in the last ten years; and because the windows and the doors of the
+cave dwellings of the Gila would not admit anything but a dwarf race.
+They may not all have been twenty-four and thirty-six and forty inches;
+but no specimens the size of the mummies in other prehistoric dwellings
+have been found in the Gila. For instance, down at Casa Grande, they
+found skeletons buried in the gypsum dust of back chambers; but these
+skeletons were six-footers, and the roofs of the Casa Grande chambers
+were for tall men. Up in the Frijoles cave dwellings, they have dug out
+of the <i>tufa</i> dust of ten centuries bodies swathed in woven cloth; but
+these bodies are of a modern race five or six feet tall. You have only
+to look at Zeke to know that he is not, as we understand the word, an
+Indian. Was he an ancestor of the Aztecs or the Toltecs?</p>
+
+<p>Though you cannot go out to the Gila by motor to a luxurious hotel,
+there are compensations. You will see a type of life unique and
+picturesque as in the Old World&mdash;countless flocks of sheep herded by
+soft-voiced peons. It is the only section yet left<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> in the West where
+freighters with double teams and riders with bull whips wind in and out
+of the narrow ca&ntilde;ons with their long lines of tented wagons. It is still
+a land where game is plentiful as in the old days, trout and turkey and
+grouse and deer and bear and mountain lion, and even bighorn, though the
+last named are under protection of closed season just now. I'm always
+afraid to tell an Easterner or town dweller of the hunt of these old
+trappers of the box ca&ntilde;ons; but as many as thirteen bear have been
+killed on the Gila in three weeks. The altitude of the trail from Silver
+City to the Gila runs from 6,000 to 9,150 feet. When you have told that
+to a Westerner, you don't need to tell anything else. It means burros
+for pack animals. In the Southwest it means forests of huge yellow
+pines, open upland like a park, warm, clear days, cool nights, and
+though in the desert, none of the heat nor the dust of the desert.</p>
+
+<p>It is the ideal land for tuberculosis, though all invalids should be
+examined as to heart action before attempting any altitude over 4,000
+feet. And the Southwest has worked out an ideal system of treatment for
+tuberculosis patients. They are no longer housed in stuffy hotels and
+air tight, super-heated sanitariums. Each sanitarium is now a tent
+city&mdash;portable houses or tents floored and boarded halfway up, with the
+upper half of the wall a curtain window, and a little stove in each
+tent. Each patient has, if he wants it, a little hospital all to
+himself. There is a central dining-room. There is also a dispensary. In
+some cases, there are church and amusement hall. Where means permit it,
+a family may have a little tent city all to itself; and they don't call
+the tent city a sanitarium. They call it "Sun Mount," or "Happy Ca&ntilde;on,"
+or some other such name. The percentage of recoveries is wonderful; but
+the point is, the invalids must come in time. Wherever you go along the
+borders of Old and New Mexico searching for prehistoric ruins, you come
+on these tent cities.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 414px;">
+<img src="images/fig-323.jpg" width="414" height="650" alt="The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras,
+and its top as flat as a billiard table" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras,
+and its top as flat as a billiard table</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Where can one see these cliff and cave dwellings of a prehistoric dwarf?
+Please note the points. Cliff and cave dwellings are not the same. Cliff
+dwellings are houses made by building up the front of a natural arch.
+This front wall was either in stone or sun-baked adobe. Cave dwellings
+are houses hollowed out of the solid rock, a feat not so difficult as it
+sounds when you consider the rock is only soft pumice or tufa, that
+yields to scraping more readily than bath brick or soft lime. The cliff
+dwellings are usually only one story. The cave dwellings may run five
+stories up inside the rock, natural stone steps leading from tier to
+tier of the rooms, and tiny porthole windows looking down precipices 500
+to 1,000 feet. The cliff dwellings are mostly entered by narrow trails
+leading along the ledge of a precipice sheer as a wall. The first story
+of the cave dwellings was entered by a light ladder, which the owner
+could draw up after him. Remember it was the Stone Age: no metals, no
+firearms, no battering rams, nor devices for throwing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> projectiles. A
+man with a rock in his hand in the doorway of either type of dwelling
+could swiftly and deftly and politely speed the parting guest with a
+brickbat on his head. Similar types of pottery and shell ornament are
+found in both sorts of dwellings; but I have never seen any cliff
+dwellings with evidences of such religious ceremony as in the cave
+houses. Perhaps the difference between cliff folk and cave folk would be
+best expressed by saying that the cliff people were to ancient life what
+the East Side is to us: the cave people what upper Fifth Avenue
+represents. One the riff-raff, the weak, the poor, driven to the wall;
+the other, the strong, the secure and defended.</p>
+
+<p>You go to one section of ruins, and you come to certain definite
+conclusions. Then you go on to another group of ruins; and every one of
+your conclusions is reversed. For instance, what drove these races out?
+What utterly extinguished their civilization so that not a vestige, not
+an echo of a tradition exists of their history? Scientists go up to the
+Rio Grande in New Mexico, see evidence of ancient irrigation ditches, of
+receding springs and decreasing waters; and they at once
+pronounce&mdash;desiccation. The earth is burning up at the rate of an inch
+or two of water in a century; moisture is receding toward the Poles as
+it has in Mars, till Mars is mostly arid, sun-parched desert round its
+middle and ice round the Poles. Good! When you look down from the cliff
+dwellings of Walnut Ca&ntilde;on, near Flagstaff, that explanation seems to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+hold good. There certainly must have been water once at the bottom of
+this rocky box-ca&ntilde;on. When the water sank below the level of the
+springs, the people had to move out. Very well! You come on down to the
+cave dwellings of the Gila. The bottom falls out of your explanation,
+for there is a perpetual gush of water down these rock walls from
+unfailing mountain springs. Why, then, did the race of little people
+move out? What wiped them out? Why they moved in one can easily
+understand. The box ca&ntilde;ons are so narrow that half a dozen pigmy boys
+deft with a sling and stones could keep out an army of enemies. The
+houses were so built that a child could defend the doorway with a club;
+and where the houses have long hallways and stairs as in Casa Grande,
+the passages are so narrow as to compel an enemy to wiggle sideways; and
+one can guess the inmates would not be idle while the venturesome
+intruder was wedging himself along. Also, the bottoms of these
+box-ca&ntilde;ons afforded ideal corn fields. The central stream permitted easy
+irrigation on each side by tapping the waterfall higher up; and the wash
+of the silt of centuries ensured fertility to men, whose plowing must
+have been accomplished by the shoulder blade of a deer used as a hoe.</p>
+
+<p>Modern pueblo Indians claim to be descendants of these prehistoric dwarf
+races. So are we descendants of Adam; but we don't call him our uncle;
+and if he had a say, he might disown us. Anyway, how have modern
+descendants of the dwarf types developed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> into six-foot modern Pimas and
+Papagoes? It is said the Navajo and Apache came originally from
+Athabasca stock. Maybe; but the Pimas and Papagoes claim their Garden of
+Eden right in the Southwest. They call their Garden of Eden by the
+picturesque name of "Morning Glow."</p>
+
+<p>How reach the caves of the dwarf race?</p>
+
+<p>To the Gila group, you must go by way of Silver City; and better go in
+with Forest Service men, for this is the Gila National Forest and the
+men know the trails. You will find ranch houses near, where you can
+secure board and room for from $1.50 to $2 a day. The "room" may be a
+boarded up tent; but that is all the better. Or you may take your own
+blanket and sleep in the caves. Perfectly safe&mdash;believe me, I have fared
+all these ways&mdash;when you have nearly broken your neck climbing up a
+precipice to a sheltered cave room, you need not fear being followed.
+The caves are clean as if kalsomined from centuries and centuries of
+wash and wind. You may hear the wolves bark&mdash;bark&mdash;bark under your
+pillowed doorway all night; but wolves don't climb up 600-foot precipice
+walls. Also if it is cold in the caves, you will find in the corner of
+nearly all, a small, high fireplace, where the glow of a few burning
+juniper sticks will drive out the chill.</p>
+
+<p>What did they eat and how did they live, these ancient people, who wore
+fine woven cloth at an era when Aryan races wore skins? Like all desert
+races, they were not great meat eaters; and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> probabilities are that
+fish were tabooed. You find remains of game in the caves, but these are
+chiefly feather decorations, prayer plumes to waft petitions to the
+gods, or bones used as tools. On the other hand, there is abundance of
+dried corn in the caves, of gourds and squash seeds; and every cave has
+a <i>metate</i>, or grinding stone. In many of the caves, there are alcoves
+in the solid wall, where meal was stored; and of water jars, urns,
+ollas, there are remnants and whole pieces galore. It is thought these
+people used not only yucca fiber for weaving, but some species of hemp
+and cotton; for there are tatters and strips of what might have been
+cotton or linen. You see it wrapped round the bodies of the mummies and
+come on it in the accumulation of volcanic ash.</p>
+
+<p>Near many of the ruins is a huge empty basin or pit, which must have
+been used as a reservoir in which waters were impounded during siege of
+war. Like conies of the rocks, or beehives of modern skyscrapers, these
+denizens lived. The most of the mummies have been found in sealed up
+chambers at the backs of the main houses; but these could hardly have
+been general burying places, for comparatively few mummies have yet been
+found. Who, then, were these dwarf mummies, placed in sealed vaults to
+the rear of the Gila caves? Perhaps a favorite father, brother, or
+sister; perhaps a governor of the tribe, who perished during siege and
+could not be taken out to the common burial ground.</p>
+
+<p>Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 700 feet high,
+literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave
+doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-ca&ntilde;ons in the Southwest are
+of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and
+gypsum white. Owing to the great altitude&mdash;some of the ruins are 9,000
+feet above sea level, 1,000 above valley bottom&mdash;the atmosphere has that
+curious quality of splitting white light into its seven prismatic hues.
+Artists of the Southwestern School account for this by the fact of
+desert dust being a silt fine as flour, which acts like crystal or glass
+in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this
+hardly explains these high box-ca&ntilde;ons, for there is no dust here. My own
+theory (please note, it is only a theory and may be quite wrong) is that
+the air is so rare at altitudes above 6,000 feet, so rare and pure that
+it splits light up, if not in seven prismatic colors, then in elementary
+colors that give the reds and purples and fire tints predominance.
+Anyway, at sunset and sunrise, these box-ca&ntilde;ons literally swim in a
+glory of lavender and purple and fiery reds. You almost fancy it is a
+fire where you can dip your hand and not be burned; a sea in which
+spirits, not bodies, swim and move and have their being; a sea of fiery
+rainbow colors.</p>
+
+<p>The sunset fades. The shadows come down like invisible wings. The
+twilight deepens. The stars prick through the indigo blue of a desert
+sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern
+window and door the deep red of juniper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> and cedar log glow in the
+fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his
+plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the
+big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a
+metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a
+bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing
+floors in the middle of the narrow ca&ntilde;on. You can see the dancing rings
+yet, where the feet of a thousand years have beaten the raw earth hard.
+Men only dance. These are not sex dances. They are dances of thanks to
+the gods for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases
+clapping. The campfires that scent the ca&ntilde;on with juniper smells,
+flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance
+ceases and fades in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>That was ten thousand years agone. Where are the races that danced to
+the beat of the priest's clapper gong?</p>
+
+<p>I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail
+of the turtle dove; and there came back that old prophecy&mdash;it used to
+give me cold shivers down my spine as a child&mdash;that the habitat of the
+races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and
+bat and fox.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the
+Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the
+Morning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions;
+the scene of their mythical "golden age," when there were no Apaches
+raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a
+perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all
+animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in
+pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water.</p>
+
+<p>Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in
+the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according
+to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the
+Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after
+the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was
+blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa
+Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods.
+The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give
+yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey,
+the Government Custodian of the ruins.</p>
+
+<p>The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive
+out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where
+the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone
+ages.</p>
+
+<p>"How old are they?" I asked my driver, as we passed a huge cactus high
+as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root,
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by
+little desert birds for water.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, centuries and centuries old," he said; "and the queer part is that
+in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their
+roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the
+bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep
+the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up
+all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that
+big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts;
+settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next
+time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards."</p>
+
+<p>Far as you could look were the little adobe houses and white tents of
+the pioneers, stretching barb wire lines round 160-acre patches of
+mesquite with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for
+a spring. These settlers have to bore down the sixty feet to water level
+with very inadequate tools; and you see little burros chasing homemade
+windlasses round and round, to pump up water. It looks like "the faith
+that lays it down and dies." Slow, hard sledding is this kind of
+farming, but it is this kind of dauntless faith that made Ph&oelig;nix and
+made Yuma and made Imperial Valley. Twenty years ago, you could squat on
+Imperial Valley Land. To-day it costs $1,000 an acre and yields high
+percentage on that investment. To-day you can buy Casa Grande lands from
+$5 to $25 an acre. Wait till<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> the water is turned in the ditch, and it
+will not seem such tedious work. If you want to know just how hard and
+lonely it is, drive past the homesteads just at nightfall as I did. The
+white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence strung along
+juniper poles and cedar shakes; no house, no stable, no buildings of any
+sort. The horses are staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the
+chip fire. A lantern hangs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles
+ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the
+outlines of another tent&mdash;the homesteader's nearest neighbor. Just now
+Casa Grande town boasts 400 people housed chiefly in one story adobe
+dwellings. Come in five years, and Casa Grande will be boasting her ten
+and twenty thousand people. Like mushrooms overnight, the little towns
+spring up on irrigation lands.</p>
+
+<p>You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen miles out&mdash;a red
+roof put on by the Government, then a huge, square, four story mass of
+ruins surrounded by broken walls, with remnants of big elevated
+courtyards, and four or five other compounds the size of this central
+house, like the bastions at the four corners of a large, old-fashioned
+walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness&mdash;six feet in
+the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade&mdash;a thickness
+that in an age of only stone weapons must have been impenetrable. The
+doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend
+almost double to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> enter; and the supposition is this was to prevent the
+entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome
+visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with <i>vigas</i> of
+cedar strengthened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a
+horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house is laid out
+on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to
+compel passage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled
+scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course,
+open squares off the halls or other rooms; but in addition to these
+openings, you will find close to the floor of each room, little round
+"cat holes," one or two or three of them, big enough for a beam but
+without a beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through
+walls four or five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room
+opposite the fireplace. Fewkes and others think they may have been
+ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blowing back in the room, but
+in Casa Grande they are in rooms where there is no fireplace. Others
+think they were whispering tubes, for use in time of war or religious
+ceremony; but in a house of open doors, would it not have been as simple
+to call through the opening? Yet another explanation is that they were
+for drainage purpose, the cave man's first rude attempt at modern
+plumbing; but that explanation falls down, too; for these openings don't
+drain in any regular direction. Such a structure as Casa Grande<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> must
+have housed a whole tribe in time of religious festival or war; so you
+come back to the explanation of ventilator shafts.</p>
+
+<p>The ceilings of Casa Grande are extraordinarily high; and bodies found
+buried in sealed up chambers behind the ruins of the other compounds are
+five or six feet long, showing this was no dwarf race. The rooms do not
+run off rectangular halls as our rooms do. You tumble down stone steps
+through a passage so narrow as to catch your shoulders into a room deep
+and narrow as a grave. Then you crack your head going up other steps off
+this room to another compartment. Bodies found at Casa Grande lie flat,
+headed to the east. Bodies found in the caves are trussed up knees to
+chin, but as usual the bodies found at Casa Grande have been shipped
+away East to be stored in cellars instead of being left carefully
+glassed over, where they were found.</p>
+
+<p>Lower altitude, or the great age, or the quality of the clays, may
+account for the peculiarly rich shades of the pottery found at Casa
+Grande. The purples and reds and browns are tinged an almost iridescent
+green. Running back from the Great House is a heavy wall as of a former
+courtyard. Backing and flanking the walls appear to have been other
+houses, smaller but built in the same fashion as Casa Grande. Stand on
+these ruined walls, or in the doorway of the Great House, and you can
+see that five such big houses have once existed in this compound. Two or
+three curious features mark Casa Grande. Inside what must have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> been the
+main court of the compound are elevated earthen stages or platforms
+three to six feet high, solid mounds. Were these the foundations of
+other Great Houses, or platforms for the religious theatricals and
+ceremonials which enter so largely into the lives of Southwestern
+Indians? At one place is the dry bed of a very ancient reservoir; but
+how was water conveyed to this big community well? The river is two
+miles away, and no spring is visible here. Though you can see the
+footpath of sandaled feet worn in the very rocks of eternity, an
+irrigation ditch has not yet been located. This, however, proves
+nothing; for the sand storms of a single year would bury the springs
+four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is
+the old tree growing up out of the center; and that brings up the
+question how we know the age of these ancient ruins&mdash;that is, the age
+within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is;
+and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face
+of things, Casa Grande must be thousands of years older than the other
+ruins of the Southwest.</p>
+
+<p>Why?</p>
+
+<p>First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when
+he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great
+House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who
+have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by
+1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> Jesuit, was
+the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he
+gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said mass there about 1694.
+What a weird scene it must have been&mdash;the Sacaton Mountains glimmering
+in the clear morning light; the shy Indians in gaudy tunics and yucca
+fiber pantaloons crowding sideways through the halls to watch what to
+them must have been the gorgeous vestments of the priest. Then followed
+the elevation of the host, the bowing of the heads, the raising of the
+standard of the Cross; and a new era, that has not boded well for the
+Pimas and Papagoes, was ushered in. Then the Indians scattered to their
+antelope plains and to the mountains; and the priest went on to the
+Mission of San Xavier del Bac.</p>
+
+<p>The Jesuits suffered expulsion, and Garcez, the Franciscan, came in
+1775, and also held mass in Casa Grande. Garcez says that it was a
+tradition among the Moki of the northern desert that they had originally
+come from the south, from the Morning Glow of Casa Grande, and that they
+had inhabited the box-ca&ntilde;ons of the Gila in the days when they were "a
+little people." This establishes Casa Grande as prior to the cave
+dwellings of the Gila or Frijoles; and the cave dwellings were
+practically contemporaneous with the Stone Age and the last centuries of
+the Ice Age. Now, the cave dwellings had been abandoned for centuries
+before the Spaniards came. This puts the cave age contemporaneous with
+or prior to the Christian era.</p>
+
+<p>In the very center of the Casa Grande reservoir,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> across the doorways of
+caves in Frijoles Ca&ntilde;on, grew trees that have taken centuries to come to
+maturity.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian tradition is that soon after a very great flood of turbulent
+waters, in the days when the Desert was knee-deep in grass, the Indian
+Gods came from the Underworld to dwell in Casa Grande. (Not so very
+different from theories of evolution and transmigration, is it?) The
+people waxed so numerous that they split off in two great families. One
+migrated to the south&mdash;the Pimas, the Papagoes, the Maricopas; the
+others crossed the mountains to the north&mdash;the Zu&ntilde;is, the Mokis, the
+Hopis.</p>
+
+<p>Yet another proof of the great antiquity is in the language. Between
+Papago and Moki tongue is not the faintest resemblance. Now if you trace
+the English language back to the days of Chaucer, you know that it is
+still English. If you trace it back to 55 B. C. when the Roman and Saxon
+conquerors came, there are still words you recognize&mdash;thane, serf, Thor,
+Woden, moors, borough, etc. That is, you can trace resemblances in
+language back 1,900 years. You find no similarity in dialects between
+Pima and Moki, and very few similarities in physical conformation. The
+only likenesses are in types of structure in ancient houses, and in arts
+and crafts. Both people build tiered houses. Both people make wonderful
+pottery and are fine weavers, Moki of blankets and Pima of baskets; and
+both people ascribe the art of weaving to lessons learned from their
+goddess, the Spider Maid.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are few fireplaces among the ancient dwellings of the Pimas and
+Papagoes, but lots of fire pits&mdash;<i>sipapus</i>&mdash;where the spirits of the
+Gods came through from the Underworld. Dancing floors, may pole rings,
+abound among the cave dwellings: mounds and platforms and courts among
+the Casa Grande ruins. The sun and the serpent were favored symbols to
+both people, a fact which is easily understood in a cloudless land,
+where serpents signified nearness of water springs, the greatest need of
+the people. You can see among the cave dwellings where earthquakes have
+tumbled down whole masses of front rooms; and both Moki and Papago have
+traditions of "the heavens raining fire."</p>
+
+<p>It has been suggested by scientists that the cliffs were cities of
+refuge in times of war, the caves and Great Houses were permanent
+dwellings. This is inferred because there were no <i>kivas</i> or temples
+among the cliff ruins, and many exist among the caves and Great Houses.
+Cushing and Hough and I think two or three others regard Casa Grande as
+a temple or great community house, where the tribes of the Southwest
+repaired semi-annually for their religious ceremonies and theatricals.</p>
+
+<p>We moderns express our emotions through the rhythm of song, of dance, of
+orchestra, of play, of opera, of art. The Indian had his pictographs on
+the rocks for art, and his pottery and weaving to express his
+craftsmanship; but the rest of his artistic nature was expressed chiefly
+by religious ceremonial or theatrical dance, similar to the old miracle
+plays of the Middle Ages. For instance, the Indians have not only a
+tradition of a great flood, but of a maiden who was drawn from the
+Underworld by her lover playing a flute; and the Flute Clans celebrate
+this by their flute dance. The yearly cleansing of the springs was as
+great a religious ceremony as the Israelites' cleansing of personal
+impurity. Each family belonged to a clan, and each clan had a religious
+lodge, secret as any modern fraternal order.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-341.jpg" width="650" height="371" alt="It isn&#39;t America at all! It&#39;s Arabia, and the Bedouins of
+the Painted Desert are Navajo boys" title="" />
+<span class="caption">It isn&#39;t America at all! It&#39;s Arabia, and the Bedouins of
+the Painted Desert are Navajo boys</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The mask dances of the Southwest are much misunderstood by white people.
+We see in them only what is grotesque or perhaps obscene. Yet the
+spirits of evil and the spirits of goodness are represented under the
+Indian's masked dances, just as the old miracle plays represented Faith,
+Hope, Charity, Lust, Greed, etc. There is the Bird Dance representing
+the gyrations of hummingbird, mocking-bird, quail, eagle, vulture. There
+is the dance of the "mud-heads." Have we no "mud-heads" befuddling life
+at every turn of the way? There is the dance of the gluttons and the
+monsters. Have we no unaccountable monsters in modern life? Read the
+record of a single day's crime; and ask yourself what mad motive tempted
+humans to such certain disaster. We explain a whole rigmarole of motives
+and inheritance and environment. The Indian shows it up by his dance of
+the monsters.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps one of the most beautiful ceremonials is the corn dance. Picture
+to yourself the <i>kivas</i> crowded with spectators. The priests come down
+bearing blankets in a circle. The blanket circle surrounds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> the altar
+fire. The audience sits breathless in the dark. Musicians strike up a
+beating on the stone gong. A flute player trills his air. The blankets
+drop. In the flare of the altar fire is seen a field of corn, round
+which the actors dance. The priests rise. The blankets hide the fire. It
+is the Indian curtain drop. When you look again, there is neither
+pageant of dancers, nor field of corn. So the play goes on&mdash;a dozen acts
+typifying a dozen scenes in a single night.</p>
+
+<p>Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial
+dances. "If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the
+arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat." "When you go to the
+hunt, travel with a light blanket." We talk of getting back to Mother
+Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth
+Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part
+in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a
+dance.</p>
+
+<p>Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the
+Vandals of Europe&mdash;Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great
+Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the
+Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of
+extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such
+heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man
+stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the
+peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> to say; for the white man
+began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of
+slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when
+every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima
+and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What
+does the Indian know of "prior rights" in filing for water? Have not
+these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came
+with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-ca&ntilde;ons of the Gila
+and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior
+rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of
+government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped
+the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.
+They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the
+overflow of the torrential rains&mdash;that only brings the alkali wash to
+the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no
+longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to
+starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has
+taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally
+protected as they crossed the continent to California.</p>
+
+<p>What are the American people going to do about it? Nothing, of course.
+When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by
+inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article
+about it, or some ethnologist a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> brochure about an exterminated people.
+Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat
+owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of
+"the Golden Age," "the Morning Glow."</p>
+
+<p>We drove back from Casa Grande by starlight over the antelope plains. I
+looked back to the crumbling ruins of the Great House, and its five
+compounds, where the men and women and children of the Morning Glow came
+to dance and worship according to all the light they had. Its falling
+walls and dim traditions and fading outlines seemed typical of the
+passing of the race. Why does one people pass and another come?</p>
+
+<p>Christians say that those who fear not God, shall pass away from the
+memory of men, forever.</p>
+
+<p>Evolutionists say that those who are not fit, shall not survive.</p>
+
+<p>The Spaniard of the Southwest shrugs his gay shoulders under a tilted
+sombrero hat, and says <i>Quien sabe?</i> "Who knows?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin
+of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise
+comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the
+mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled
+in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams&mdash;a mist shot with the
+gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the
+dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in
+the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying
+prone, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as
+the faces of god-like races ever are.</p>
+
+<p>You wind round a juniper grove&mdash;"cedars of Lebanon," the Old Testament
+would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come
+down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of
+Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds&mdash;only they call them "herders,"
+fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of
+Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms
+shade the ground. And the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> maidens are there, "drawing water from the
+well," carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of
+perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers,
+hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled.</p>
+
+<p>You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with
+the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,&mdash;and a winged horseman spurs
+past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of
+rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red
+chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick
+or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse&mdash;that is why
+the Oriental always called an enemy "a dog." Pottery makers look up from
+their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote passerby. The
+basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old
+woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her
+basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight
+strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye;
+and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools.</p>
+
+<p>Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.</p>
+
+<p>You have turned a spur of the Mountains, dipped into a valley, come up
+on the Mesa into the sunlight, and there It is&mdash;the eternal mountains
+with their eternal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats
+of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtain where you may paint
+your own pictures of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> fancy, and in the midst of the great amphitheater
+rises an island rock; and on the island rock is a grotto; and in the
+grotto is the figure of the Mother of Christ&mdash;in purplish blue, of
+course, as betokens eternal purity&mdash;and below the island of rock in the
+midst of the amphitheater something swims into your ken that is neither
+of Heaven nor earth. White, glaringly white as the very spotlessness of
+Heaven, twin-towered as befitting the dual nature of man, flesh and
+spirit; pointed in its towers and minarets and belfries, betokening the
+reaching of the spirit of Man up to God; lions between the arches of the
+roofed piazzas, as betokening the lion-hearted spirit of Man fighting
+his enemies of Flesh and Spirit up to God!</p>
+
+<p>Palms before arched white walls shut out the world&mdash;Peace and Seclusion
+and Purity!</p>
+
+<p>You dip into a valley, the scent of the cedars in your nostrils and
+lungs, the peace of God in your heart. Then you come up to a high mesa
+and you see the vision of the white symbol swimming between earth and
+sky but always pointing skyward.</p>
+
+<p>Where are you, anyway: in Persia amid floating palaces, on the Nile,
+approaching the palaces of Allahabad in India, or coming up to Moorish
+minarets and twin towns of the Alhambra in Spain?</p>
+
+<p>Believe me, you are in neither Europe, Asia, nor Africa. You are in a
+much despised land called "America," whence wealth and culture run off
+to Europe, Asia and Africa, to find what they call "art" and
+"antiquity."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old
+Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been
+falling in torrents. Rain is not supposed to fall in the Desert, but it
+has been coming down in slant torrents and the sky is reflected
+everywhere in the roadside pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for
+the altitude is only 2,000 feet; too high to be languid, too low for the
+sting of autumn frosts.</p>
+
+<p>We motor, first, through the old Spanish town&mdash;relics of a grandeur that
+America does not know to-day, a grandeur more of spirit than display.
+The old Spanish grandee never counted his dollars, nor measured up the
+value of a meal to a guest. But he counted honor dear as the Virgin
+Mary, and made a gamble of life, and hated tensely as he loved. The old
+mansion houses are fallen in disrepute, to-day. They are given over, for
+the most part to Chinese and Japanese merchants; but through the open
+windows you can still see plazas and patios of inner courtyards, where
+oleanders are in perpetual bloom and roses climb the trellis work, and
+the parrot calls out "swear words" of Spanish pirate and highwayman. St.
+Augustine Mission, where heroes shed martyr blood, is now a saloon and
+dance hall, but where rags and tatters flaunted from the clothes lines
+of negro and Japanese and Chinese tenant, I could not but think of the
+torn flags that mark the most heroic action of regiments.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-351.jpg" width="650" height="363" alt="The Mission of the San Xavier at Tucson, Arizona, one of
+the most ancient in the New World, has an almost Oriental aspect" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The Mission of the San Xavier at Tucson, Arizona, one of
+the most ancient in the New World, has an almost Oriental aspect</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>From the Spanish Town of Tucson, which any other nation would have
+treasured as a landmark and capitalized in dollars for the tourist, you
+pass modern mansions that wisely follow the Spanish-Moorish type of
+architecture, most suited to Desert atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>Then you come on the Tucson Farms Company Irrigation project, now
+sagebrush and cactus land put under the ditch from Santa Cruz River and
+turned over to settlers from Old Mexico&mdash;who were driven out by the
+Revolution&mdash;for $25 an acre. You see the lonely eyed woman pioneer
+sitting at the door of the tent flap.</p>
+
+<p>Moisture steams up from the river like a morning incense to the sun. The
+Tucson Range of mountains shimmers. Giant cactus stand ghost-like,
+centuries old, amid the mesquite bush; and in the columnar hole of the
+cactus trees you see the holes where the little desert wren has pecked
+through for water in a waterless season.</p>
+
+<p>Then, before you know it, you are in the Papago Indian Reserve. The
+finest basket makers of the world, these Papagoes are. They make baskets
+of such close weave that they will hold water, and you see the Papago
+Indian women with jars&mdash;ollas&mdash;of water on their head going up and down
+from the water pools. Basket makers weave in front of the sun-baked
+adobe walls where hang the red strings of chile like garlands. On the
+whole, the Indian faces are very happy and good. They do not care for
+wealth, these children of the Desert. Give them "this day their daily
+bread," and they are content, and thank God.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then the mountains close in a cup round the shimmering valley. In the
+center of the valley rises an island of rock, the rock of the Grotto of
+the Virgin; and a white dome and twin towers show, glare white, almost
+unearthly, with arches pointing to Heaven, and lions in white all along
+the roof typifying the strength that is of God. There is a dome in the
+middle of the roof line&mdash;that is the Moorish influence brought in by
+Spain. There are twin towers on each side; and in the towers on the
+right hand side are three brass bells to call to work and matins and
+vespers. It may be said here that the French Mission may always be known
+by its single spire and cross; the Spanish Mission by its twin towers
+and bells. The French Mission rings its bell. The Spanish Mission
+strikes its bells with a hammer or gong. One utters cheer. The other
+sounds a rich, low, mellow call to worship. The walls and pillars and
+arches are all marble white; and you are looking on one of the most
+ancient Missions of the New World&mdash;San Xavier del Bac, of Tucson,
+Arizona.</p>
+
+<p>The whole effect is so oriental as to be startling. The white dome might
+be Indian or Persian, but the pointed arches and minarets are
+unmistakably Moorish&mdash;that is, Moorish brought across by Spain. The
+entrance is under an arched white wall, and the courtyard looks out
+behind through arched white gateway to the distant mountains.</p>
+
+<p>Here four sisters of St. Joseph conduct a school for the little
+Papagoes; and what a school it is! It might do honor to the Alhambra.
+Palms line the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> esplanade in front of the arched, walled entrance.
+Collie dogs rise lazily under the deep embrasures of the arched plazas.
+A parrot calls out some Spanish gibberish of bygone days. A snow-white
+Persian kitten frisks its plumy tail across the brick-paved walk of the
+inner patio; and across the courtyard I catch a glimpse of two Shetland
+ponies nosing for notice over a fence beside an ancient Don Quixote nag
+that evidently does duty for dignitaries above Shetland ponies. An air
+of repose, of antiquity, of apartness, rests on the marble white
+Mission, as of oriental dreams and splendor or European antiquity and
+culture.</p>
+
+<p>I ring the bell of the reception room to the right of the church
+entrance. Not a sound but the echo of my own ring! I enter, cross
+through the parlor and come on the Spanish patio or central courtyard.
+What a place for prayers and meditation and the soul's repose! Arched
+promenades line both sides of the inner court. Here Jesuit and
+Franciscan monks have walked and prayed and meditated since the
+Sixteenth Century. By the hum as of busy bees to the right, I locate the
+schoolrooms, and come on the office of the Mother Superior Aquinias.</p>
+
+<p>What a pity so many of us have an early impress of religion as of
+vinegar aspect and harsh duty hard as flint and unhuman as a block of
+wood. This Mother Superior is merry-faced and red-blooded and human and
+dear. She evidently believes that goodness should be warmer, dearer,
+truer, more attractive and kindly than evil; and all the little Indian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+wards of the four schoolrooms look happy and human and red-blooded as
+the Mother Superior.</p>
+
+<p>A collie pup flounders round us up and down the court walk where the old
+missionary monks suffered cruel martyrdom. Poll, the parrot, utters
+sententious comment; and the Shetland ponies whinny greetings to their
+mistress. All this does not sound like vinegar goodness, does it?</p>
+
+<p>But it is when you enter the church that you get the real surprise.
+Three times, the desertion of this Mission was forced by massacre and
+pillage. Twice it was abandoned owing to the expulsion of Jesuit and
+Franciscan by temporal power. For seventy years, the only inhabitants of
+a temple stately as the Alhambra were the night bats, the Indian
+herders, the border outlaws of the United States and Mexico. Yet, when
+you enter, the walls are covered with wonderful mural painting. Saints'
+statues stand about the altar, and grouped about the dome of the groined
+ceiling are such paintings as would do honor to a European Cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>The brick and adobe walls are from two to six feet thick. Not a nail has
+ever been driven in the adobe edifice. The doors are of old wood in huge
+panels mortised and dovetailed together. The latch is an iron bar carved
+like a Damascus sword. The altar is a mass of gilding and purple. To be
+sure, the saints' fingers have been hacked off by wandering cowboy and
+outlaw and Indian; but you find that sort of vandalism in the British
+Museum and Westminster Abbey. The British Museum had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> careful
+custodians. For over seventy years, this ancient Mission stood open to
+the winds of heaven and the torrential rains and the midnight bats. Only
+the faithfulness of an old Indian chief kept the sacred vessels from
+desecration. When the fathers were expelled for political reasons, old
+Jos&eacute;, of the Papagoes, carried off the sacred chalices and candles till
+the <i>padres</i> should return, when he brought them from hiding.</p>
+
+<p>Gothic temples are usually built in one long, clear arch. The roof of
+San Xavier del Bac is a series of the most perfect groined domes, with
+the deep embrasures of the windows on each side colored shell tints in
+wave-lines. Because of the height and depth of the windows, the light is
+wonderfully clear and soft. The church is used now only by Indian
+children; and did Indian children ever have such a magnificent temple in
+which to worship? To the left of the entrance is a wonderful old
+baptismal font of pure copper, which has been the envy of all
+collectors. One wonders looking at the ancient vessel whether it was
+baptized with the blood of all the martyrs who died for San
+Xavier&mdash;Francesca Garcez, for instance? There is a window in this
+baptistry, too, that is the envy of critics and collectors. It is set
+more deeply in the wall than any window in the Tower of London, with
+pointed Gothic top that sends shafts of sunlight clear across the
+earthen floor.</p>
+
+<p>From the baptistry I ascended to the upper towers. The stairs are old
+timber set in adobe and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> brick, through solid walls of a thickness of
+six feet. The view from the belfries above is wonderful. You see the
+mountains shimmering in the haze. You see the little square adobe
+matchbox houses of Papago Indians, with the red chile hanging against
+the wall, and the women coming from the spring, and the men husking the
+corn. You wonder if when San Xavier was besieged and besieged and
+besieged yet again by Apache and Navajo and Pima, the beleaguered
+priests took refuge in these towers, and came down to die, only to save
+their Mission. Against Indian arms, it may be said, San Xavier would be
+an impregnable fortress. Yet the priests of San Xavier were three times
+utterly destroyed by Indians.</p>
+
+<p>When you come to seek the history of San Xavier, you will find it as
+difficult to get, as a guide out to the Mission. As a purely tourist
+resort, leaving out all piety and history, it should be worth hundreds
+of thousands of dollars a year to Tucson. Yet it took me the better part
+of a day to find out that San Xavier is only nine miles and not eighteen
+from Tucson.</p>
+
+<p>And this is typical of the difficulty of getting the real history of the
+place. Jesuit Relations of New France have been published in every kind
+of edition, cheap and dear. Jesuit Relations of New Spain, who knows?
+The Franciscans succeeded the Jesuits; and the Franciscans do not read
+the history of the Jesuits. It comes as a shock to know that Spanish
+<i>padres</i> were on the Colorado and Santa Cruz at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> the time Jacques
+Cartier was exploring the St. Lawrence. We have always believed that
+Spanish <i>conquistadores</i> slaughtered the Indians most ruthlessly. Study
+the mission records and you get another impression, an impression of
+penniless, friendless, unprotected friars "footing" it 600, 700, 900
+miles from Old Mexico to the inmost recesses of the Desert ca&ntilde;ons. In
+late days, when a friar set out on his journey, twenty mounted men acted
+as his escort; and that did not always save him from death; for there
+were stretches of the journey ninety miles without water, infested every
+mile of the way by Apaches; and these stretches were known as the
+Journeys of Death. When you think of the ruthless slaughter of the
+<i>conquistadores</i>, think also of the friars tramping the parched sand
+plains for 900 miles.</p>
+
+<p>While Fray Juan de la Asuncion and Pedro Nadol are the first
+missionaries known in Arizona about 1538, Father Kino was the great
+missionary of 1681 to 1690, officiating at the Arizona Missions of San
+Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori. There are reports of the Jesuits being
+among the Apaches as early as 1630&mdash;say early as the days of the Jesuits
+in Canada; but who the missionaries were, I am unable to learn.
+Rebellion and massacre devastated the Missions in 1680 and in 1727; but
+by 1754, the missionaries were back at San Xavier and had twenty-nine
+stations commanding seventy-three different pueblos. In 1767, for
+political reasons, the Jesuits suffered expulsion; and the Franciscans
+came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> in&mdash;tramping, as told before, 600 and 900 miles. It was under the
+Franciscans that the present structure of San Xavier was built. Garcez
+was the most famous of the Franciscans. He spent seven years among the
+Pimas and Papagoes and Yumas; but one hot midsummer Sunday&mdash;July 17,
+1781&mdash;during early mass, the Indians rose and slew four priests, all the
+Spanish soldiers and all the Spanish servants. Garcez was among the
+martyrs. San Xavier, as it at present stands, is supposed to have been
+completed in 1797; but in 1827-9, came another political turnover and
+all foreign missionaries were expelled. Tumacacori and San Xavier were
+always the most important of the Arizona Missions. Originally quite as
+magnificent a structure as San Xavier, Tumacacori has been allowed to go
+to ruin. Of late, it has been made a United States monument. It is a
+day's journey from Tucson.</p>
+
+<p>To describe San Xavier is quite impossible, except through canvas and
+photograph. There is something intangibly spiritual and unearthly in its
+very architecture; and this is the spirit in which it was originally
+built. At daybreak, a bell called the builders to prayers of
+consecration. At nightfall, vesper bells sent the laborer home with the
+blessing of the church. For the most part, the workers were Mexicans and
+Indians; and as far as can be gathered from the annals, voluntary
+workers. The Papagoes and Pimas at that time numbered 5,000, of whom 500
+lived round the Missions, the rest spending the summers hunting in the
+mountains.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<img src="images/fig-361.jpg" width="650" height="374" alt="On top of the world&mdash;a Moki city on a Mesa in the Painted
+Desert. At the left are the ends of a ladder leading from an underground
+council chamber" title="" />
+<span class="caption">On top of the world&mdash;a Moki city on a Mesa in the Painted
+Desert. At the left are the ends of a ladder leading from an underground
+council chamber</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When the American Government took over Arizona, San Xavier went under
+the diocese of New Mexico. From Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Tucson was 600
+miles across desert mountains and ca&ntilde;ons, every foot of the way infested
+by Apache warriors; and the heroism of that trail was marked by the same
+courage and constancy as signalized the founding and maintenance of the
+other early Spanish Missions.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a mistake to say that San Xavier has been restored.
+Restoration implies innovation; and San Xavier stands to-day as it stood
+in the sixteen hundreds, when Father Kino, the famous mathematician and
+Jesuit from Bavaria, came wandering up from the Missions of Lower
+California, preaching to the Yumas and Pimas of the hot, smoking hot,
+Gila Desert, and held mass in Casa Grande, the Great House or Garden of
+Eden of the Indian's Morning Glow. A lucky thing it is that restoration
+did not imply change in San Xavier; for the Mission floats in the
+shimmering desert air, unearthly, eerie, unreal, a thing of beauty and
+dreams rather than latter day life, white as marble, twin-towered, roof
+domed and so dazzling in the sunlight to the unaccustomed eye that you
+somehow know why rows of restful, drowsy palms were planted in line
+along the front of the wall.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it is that it comes on you as such a complete surprise. Perhaps
+it is the desert atmosphere in this cup of the mountains; but all the
+other missions of the Southwest are adobe gray, or earth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> color showing
+through a veneer of drab whitewash.</p>
+
+<p>There is the giant, century-old desert cactus twisted and gnarled with
+age like the trees in Dante's Inferno, but with bird nests in the
+pillared trunks, where little wrens peck through the bark for water. You
+look again. A horseman has just dismounted beneath the shade of a fine
+old twisted oak; but beyond the oak the vision is there, glare,
+dazzling, white, twin-towered and arched, floating in mid-air, a vision
+of beauty and dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Life seems to sleep at San Xavier. The mountains hemming in the valley
+seem to sleep. The shimmering blue valley sleeps. The sunlight sleeps
+against the glare white walls. The huge old mortised door to the church
+stands open, all silent and asleep. The door of the Mission parlor
+stands open&mdash;sunlight asleep on a checkered floor. You enter. Your
+footsteps have an echo of startling impudence&mdash;modern life jumping back
+into past centuries! You ring the gong. The sound stabs the sleeping
+silence, and you almost expect to see ghosts of Franciscan friar and
+Jesuit priest come walking along the arcaded pavement of the inner
+courtyard to ask you what all this modern noise is about; but no ghosts
+come. In fact, no one comes. San Xavier is all asleep. You cross through
+the parlor to the inner patio or courtyard, arched all around three
+sides with the fourth side looking through a wonderfully high arched
+gateway out to the far mountains. Polly turns on her perch in her cage,
+and goes back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> to sleep. The white Persian kitten frisks his
+white-plumed tail; and also turns over and goes to sleep. Two collie
+dogs don't even emit a "woof." They arch their pointed noses with the
+fine old aristocratic air of the unspoken question: what are you of the
+Twenty Century doing wandering back into the mystery and mysticism and
+quietude of the religious sixteen hundred? But if you keep on going, you
+will find the gentle-voiced sisterhood teaching the little Pimas and
+Papagoes in the schoolrooms.</p>
+
+<p>San Xavier, architecturally, is sheer delight to the eye. The style is
+almost pure Moorish. The yard walls are arched in harmony with the
+arched outline of the roof; and in the inner courtyard you will notice
+the Spanish lion at the intersection of all the roof arches. In front of
+the Mission buildings is a walled space of some sixty by forty feet,
+where the Indians used to assemble for discussion of secular matters
+before worship. On the front wall in high relief are placed the arms of
+St. Francis of Assisi, and in the sacristry to the right of the altar
+you will find mural drawings and a painting of Saint Ignatius. Thus San
+Xavier claims as her founders and patrons both Franciscan and Jesuit.
+This is easily explained. The Franciscans came up overland across the
+Desert from the City of Mexico. The Jesuits came up inland from their
+Mission on the Gulf of California. Father Kino, the Jesuit, from a
+Bavarian university, was the first missionary to hold services among the
+Pimas and Papagoes, and if he did not lay the foundations of San
+Xavier,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> then they were laid by his immediate successors. The escutcheon
+of the Franciscans on the wall is a twisted cord and a cross on which
+are nailed the arms of the Christ and the arm of St. Francis. The Christ
+arm is bare. The Franciscan's arm is covered.</p>
+
+<p>Unlike other Missions built of adobe, San Xavier is of stone and brick.
+It is 100 by thirty feet. The transept on each side of the nave runs out
+twenty-one feet square. The roof above the nave is supported by groined
+arches from door to altar. The cupola above the altar is fifty feet to
+the dome. The other vaults are only thirty feet high. The windows are
+high in the clearstory and set so deeply in the casement that the light
+falling on the mural paintings and fresco work is sifted and softened.
+Practically all the walls, cupola, dome, transept, nave, are covered
+with mural paintings. There is the coming of the Spirit to the
+Disciples. There is the Last Supper. There is the Conception. There is
+the Rosary. There is the Hidden Life of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>The main altar has evidently been constructed by the Jesuits; for the
+statue of St. Francis Xavier stands below the Virgin between figures of
+St. Peter and St. Paul and God, the Creator. On the groined arches of
+the dome are figures of the Wise Men, the Flight to Egypt, the
+Shepherds, the Annunciation. Gilded arabesques colored in Moorish shell
+tints adorn the main altar. Statues of the saints stand in the alcoves
+and niches of the pillars<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> and vaults. Two small doors lead up to the
+towers from the main door. Look well at these doors and stairways. Not a
+nail has been driven. The doors are mortised of solid pieces. The first
+flight of stairs leads to the choir. Around the choir are more mural
+paintings. Two more twists of the winding stair; and you are in the
+belfry. Twenty-two more steps bring you to the summit of the tower&mdash;a
+galleried cupola, seventy-five feet above the ground, where you may look
+out on the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>Pause for a moment, and look out. The mountains shimmer in their pink
+mists. The sunlight sleeps against the adobe walls of the scattered
+Indian house. You can hear the drone of the children from the
+schoolrooms behind the Mission. You can see the mortuary chapel down to
+the right and the lions supporting the arches of the Mission roof.
+Father Kino was a famous European scholar and gentleman. He threw aside
+scholarship. He threw aside comfort. He threw aside fame; and he came to
+found a Mission amid arabs of the American Desert. The hands that
+wrought these paintings on the walls were not the hands of bunglers.
+They were the hands of artists, who wrought in love and devotion. Three
+times, San Xavier was dyed in martyr blood by Indian revolt.</p>
+
+<p>Priests, whose names even have been lost in the chronicles, were
+murdered on the altars here, thrown down the stairs, cut to pieces in
+their own Mission yard. Before a death which they coveted as glory, what
+a life they must have led. To Tucson Mission<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> was nine miles; but to
+Tumacacori was eighty; to Old Mexico, 900. Occasionally, they had escort
+of twelve soldiers for these long trips; but the soldiers' vices made so
+much trouble for the holy fathers that the missionaries preferred to
+travel alone, or with only a lay brother. Sandaled missionaries tramped
+the cactus desert in June, when the heat was at its height; and they
+traversed the mountains when winter snows filled all the passes. They
+have not even left annals of their hardships. You know that in such a
+year, Father Kino tramped from the Gulf of California to the Gila, and
+from the Gila to the Rio Grande. You know in such another year, nineteen
+priests were slain in one day. On such another date, a missionary was
+thrown over a precipice; or slain on the high altar of San Xavier. And
+always, the priests opposed the outrages of the soldiery, the injustice
+of the ruling rings. Father Kino petitions the royal house of Spain in
+1686 that converts be not forcibly seized and "dragged off to slavery in
+the mines, where they were buried alive and seldom survived the abuse."
+He gets a respite from the King for all converts for twenty years. He
+does not permit converts to be taken as slaves in the mines or slaves in
+the pearl fisheries; so the ruling rings of Old Mexico obstruct his
+enterprises, lie about his Missions, slander him to the patrons who
+supply him with money, and often reduce his missions to desperate
+straits; but wherever there is a Mission, Father Kino sees to it that
+there are a few goats. The goats supply milk and meat.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The fathers weave their own clothing, grow their own food, and hold the
+fort against the enemy as against the subtle designs of the Devil. These
+fathers mix their own mortar, make their own bricks, cut their own
+beams, lay the plaster with their own hands. Now, remember that the
+priests who did all this were men who had been artists, who had been
+scholars, who had been court favorites of Europe. Father Kino was,
+himself, of the royal house of Bavaria. But jealousy left the Missions
+unprotected by the soldiers. Soldier vices roused the Indians to fury;
+and the priests were the first to fall victims. Go across the Moki
+Desert. You will find peach orchards planted by the friars; but you
+cannot find the graves of the dead priests. We considered the Apaches a
+dangerous lot as late as 1880. In 1686, in 1687, in 1690, Father Kino
+crossed Apache land alone. I cannot find any record of the Spanish
+Missions at this period ever receiving more than $15,000 a year for
+their support. Ordinarily, a missionary's salary was about $150 a year.
+Out of that, if he employed soldiers, he must pay their wages and keep.</p>
+
+<p>Well, by and by, the jealousy of the governing ring, kept from abusing
+the Indians by the priests, brought about the expulsion of the Jesuits.
+The Franciscans took up the work where the Jesuits left off. Came
+another political upheaval. The Franciscans were driven out. San
+Xavier's broken windows blew to the rains and winds of the seven
+heavens. Cowboys, outlaws, sheep herders, housed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> beneath mural
+paintings and frescoes that would have been the pride of a European
+palace. Came American occupation; and San Xavier was&mdash;not restored&mdash;but
+redeemed. It was completely cleaned out and taken over by the church as
+a Mission for the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, no one worships in San Xavier but the little Indian scholars.
+Look at the drawings of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Wise Men! Look at
+the dreams of faith wrought into the aged and beautiful walls!
+Frankly&mdash;let us be brutally frank and truthful, was it all worth while?
+Wouldn't Kino have done better to have continued to grace the courts of
+Bavaria?</p>
+
+<p>In the old days, Pima and Papago roped their wives as in a hunt, and if
+the fancy prompted, abused them to death. On the walls of San Xavier is
+the Annunciation to the Virgin, another view of birth and womanhood. In
+the old days, the Indians killed a child at birth, if they didn't want
+it. On the walls of San Xavier are pictured the wise men adoring a
+Child. Spanish rings and trusts wanted little slaves of industry as
+American rings and trusts want them to-day. Behold a Christ upon the
+walls setting free the slaves! Was it all worth while? It depends on
+your point of view and what you want. Though the winds of the seven
+heavens blew through San Xavier for seventy years and bats habited the
+frescoed arches, it stands to-day as it stood two centuries ago, a thing
+unearthly, of visions and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> dreams; pointing the way, not to gain, but to
+goodness; making for a little space of time on a little space of Desert
+earth what a peaceful heaven life might be.</p>
+
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Through Our Unknown Southwest
+
+Author: Agnes C. Laut
+
+Release Date: March 15, 2010 [EBook #31646]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Montezuma's Castle, the ruined cliff dwelling on Beaver
+Creek between the Coconino and Prescott National Forests, Arizona]
+
+
+
+
+THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST
+
+THE WONDERLAND OF THE UNITED STATES--LITTLE
+KNOWN AND UNAPPRECIATED--THE
+HOME OF THE CLIFF DWELLER AND THE
+HOPI, THE FOREST RANGER AND THE NAVAJO,--THE
+LURE OF THE PAINTED DESERT
+
+BY
+
+AGNES C. LAUT
+
+Author of _The Conquest of the Great Northwest_, _Lords of the North_
+and _Freebooters of the Wilderness_
+
+NEW YORK
+McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
+1913
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.
+
+_Second Printing
+October, 1913_
+
+_Published May, 1913_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                       i
+
+I THE NATIONAL FORESTS                             1
+
+II NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST              22
+
+III THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS                     44
+
+IV THE CITY OF THE DEAD                           60
+
+V THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA                     78
+
+VI ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT                     100
+
+VII ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT (_continued_)      116
+
+VIII GRAND CANYON AND THE PETRIFIED FORESTS      137
+
+IX THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE             153
+
+X THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE (_continued_)            169
+
+XI TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND                       183
+
+XII TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA       196
+
+XIII SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA           214
+
+XIV CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA                     226
+
+XV SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION                    251
+
+
+
+
+THE ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Cliff dwelling ruins, known as Montezuma Castle,      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                         FACING PAGE
+
+South House of Frijoles Canyon                                    ii
+
+Indian woman making pottery                                      xii
+
+Indian girl of Isleta, N. M.                                      xx
+
+One way of entering the desert                                     4
+
+In the Coconino Forest of Arizona                                 14
+
+Forest ranger fighting a ground fire with his blanket             22
+
+Pueblo boys at play                                               34
+
+Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling                      46
+
+Los Pueblos, Taos, N. M.                                          56
+
+Entrance to a cliff dwelling                                      64
+
+Ruins of Frijoles Canyon                                          74
+
+A Hopi wooing                                                     80
+
+A Hopi weaver                                                     86
+
+A shy little Hopi maid                                            92
+
+At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna                      96
+
+A handsome Navajo boy                                            106
+
+The Pueblo of Walpi                                              122
+
+The Grand Canyon                                                 140
+
+The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe                                154
+
+A pool in the Painted Desert                                     160
+
+Street in Santa Fe                                               166
+
+Ancient adobe gateway                                            172
+
+San Ildefonso                                                    180
+
+Taos                                                             188
+
+Over the roofs of Taos                                           198
+
+A metal worker of Taos                                           208
+
+A mud house of the Southwest                                     220
+
+The enchanted Mesa of Acoma                                      230
+
+Navajo crossing mesa                                             246
+
+At the Mission of San Xavier                                     254
+
+A Moki City on a mesa                                            262
+
+
+
+
+THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age--neolithic,
+paleolithic, troglodytic man--with a roofless city of the dead lying in
+the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the
+yawning caverns of the cliff face above.
+
+My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in
+the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run
+back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial aeons when the
+advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas
+where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the
+sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the
+brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.
+
+Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to
+welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance,
+or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on
+his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with
+calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high
+fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a
+flat _metate_ stone with a round grinding stone on top. From the shape
+and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of
+these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water
+jar.
+
+On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to
+apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley
+floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a
+500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush
+with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little
+round "cat holes" through the walls--"cat holes" for a people who are
+not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from
+room to room through all the walls.
+
+On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside,
+round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed
+serpent--"Awanya," guardian of the waters--whose presence always
+presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as
+the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could
+see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about
+in other cave houses are stone "bells" to call to meals or prayers, and
+cobs of corn, and prayer plumes--owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and
+be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian
+idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People
+lived--well, when _did_ they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that
+was when the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the
+glacial waters, began.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings
+of Frijoles Canyon, after excavation]
+
+"The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established," says
+Winchell, the great western geologist, "that implies man during the
+period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is
+as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace
+of man." Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago;
+and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the
+implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial
+silt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for
+days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; _where you can
+literally shake hands with the Stone Age_.
+
+Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound
+like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it
+strong; but it is also meticulously and simply--true. A few doors away
+from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body--no, not a mummy! We
+are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to
+find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of
+about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg
+bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth
+from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis
+when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date were
+skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature
+gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with
+simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair.
+Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black
+hair shiny and lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the
+finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all
+well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in
+which the corpse has lain.
+
+In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which
+archaeologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B.
+C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead
+to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last
+year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an
+Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of
+the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.
+
+Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the canyon again! To
+right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow _tufa_
+precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone
+Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds
+of rooms--"the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and
+the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces;
+nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest
+there."
+
+Listen! You can almost hear it--the fulfillment of Isaiah's old
+prophecy--the lonely "hoo-hoo-hoo" of the turtle dove; and the lonelier
+cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper
+cliffs! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the canyon
+in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez
+Mountains; and one night from my camp in this canyon, I heard the coyotes
+howling from the empty caves.
+
+Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone Age, and the dancing
+floors, and the irrigation canals used to this day, and the stream
+leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a rushing
+torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern
+men's dreams.
+
+Far off to the right, where the worshipers must always have been in
+sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert
+sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise
+blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age
+people who dwelt in this canyon. It is a great concave hollowed out of
+the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the
+highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this
+distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for worshipers when you climb
+the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a
+white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have
+witnessed! I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first
+rays came over the canyon walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal,
+for incense, for water urns, mark the inner walls of this chamber, too.
+Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the
+hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a
+darksome, eerie place with _sipapu_--the holes in the floor--for the
+mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't
+smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has
+driven his nerves too hard in town?--To go back to the Soil and let Dame
+Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth
+Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Curious how geology and archaeology agree on the rise and evanishment of
+these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the
+northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk
+living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were
+forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff.
+That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Archaeology says as
+the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache--Asthapascan stock--came ramping
+from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the
+inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. "It was not until the nomadic
+robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the
+crowded form of existence," says Archaeology. Sounds like an explanation
+of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life,
+doesn't it?
+
+Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men
+were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse.
+Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for
+thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the canyon, and
+the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and
+Zuni have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of
+corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe.
+Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region--"place of the bird
+people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years
+before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people
+dispersed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part
+of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petrae, or amid the sand-covered columns
+of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging
+excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in
+the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be--well,
+just _au fait_, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is
+in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular
+line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2
+a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing
+ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin
+is in the Frijoles Canyon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such
+ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New
+Mexico. By joining the Archaeological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out
+to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines
+in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought
+round-trip tickets to our own West and back--pleasure, not
+business--over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I
+don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he
+was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the
+amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave--_one_ to our own wonders,
+to _two_ for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He
+thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific
+Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to
+Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500;
+but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the
+average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to
+$2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous
+discrepancy--thirty million dollars _versus_ one hundred and twenty
+million. _The Statist_ of London places the total spent by Americans in
+Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and
+twenty million.
+
+Of the 3,700,000 people who went to the Seattle Exposition, it is a
+pretty safe guess that not 100,000 Easterners out of the lot saw the
+real West. What did they see? They saw the Exposition, which was like
+any other exposition; and they saw Western cities, that are imitations
+of Eastern cities; and they patronized Western hotel rotundas and dining
+places, where you pay forty cents for Grand Junction and Hood River
+fruit, which you can buy in the East for twenty-five; and they rode in
+the rubberneck cars with the gramophone man who tells Western variations
+of the same old Eastern lies; and they came back thoroughly convinced
+that there was no more real West.
+
+And so 120,000 Americans yearly go to Europe spending a good average of
+$1,000 apiece. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed,
+though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the
+north to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, with hundreds of peaks which no one has
+climbed and which you can visit for not more than fifty dollars for a
+four weeks' holiday. We tramp through Spain for the picturesque, quite
+oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about
+10,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right down in the heart of
+America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in King
+Alphonso's crown was taken. We rent a "shootin' box in Scotland" at a
+trifling cost of from $1,200 to $12,000 a season, because game is "so
+scarce out West, y' know." Yet I can direct you to game haunts out West
+where you can shoot a grizzly a week at no cost at all but your own
+courage; and bag a dozen wild turkeys before breakfast; and catch
+mountain trout faster than you can string them and pose for a
+photograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor
+boast of what it cost you; for you can do it at two dollars a day from
+start to finish. It would take you a good half-day to count up the
+number of tourist and steamboat agencies that organize sightseeing
+excursions to go and apostrophize the Sphinx, and bark your shins and
+swear and sweat on the Pyramids. Yet it would be a safe wager that
+outside official scientific circles, there is not a single organization
+in America that knows we have a Sphinx of our own in the West that
+antedates Egyptian archaeology by 8,000 years, and stone lions older than
+the columns of Phrygia, and kings' palaces of 700 and 1,000 rooms. Am I
+yarning; or dreaming? Neither! Perfectly sober and sane and wide awake
+and just in from spending two summers in those same rooms and shaking
+hands with a corpse of the Stone Age.
+
+A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set out on the
+around-the-world tour that was to give him that world-weary feeling that
+was to make him live happy ever afterwards. In Nagasaki, a little brown
+Jappy-chappie of great learning, who was a prince or something or other
+of that sort, which made it possible for Harvard to know him, asked in
+choppy English about "the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties in y'or
+Souf Wes'." When young Harvard got it through his head that
+"anti-kwatties" meant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out
+for a smoke; but it came back at him again in Egypt. They were standing
+below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an
+English traveler turned to young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom
+beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus
+in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't
+you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed
+they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of
+Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her
+ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest
+crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own
+home State. The experience gave him something to think about.
+
+The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to
+Europe for holiday. _We have to go abroad to learn how to come home._ We
+go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you
+are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino
+Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming
+to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos,
+who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year
+for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are
+various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to
+catch trout and not be a sucker.
+
+Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on
+going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of
+them lies.
+
+Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it--that it costs more to
+go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means
+staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza,
+where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but
+traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the
+beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go
+drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and
+catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as
+you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home.
+From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over
+$33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that,
+unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the
+backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now
+comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a
+good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not
+see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your
+holiday stamping ground, Sundance Canyon, South Dakota; or the New
+Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona;
+or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest; or the White Rock Canyon of
+the Rio Grande, where the most important of the wonderful prehistoric
+remains exist; and you can stay at a ranch house where food and
+cleanliness will be quite as good as at the Waldorf for from $1.50 to $2
+a day.
+
+[Illustration: In the bright Arizona sunshine before their little square
+adobe houses Indian women are fashioning pottery into curious shapes]
+You can usually find the name of the ranch house by inquiries from the
+station agent where you get off. The ranch house may be of adobe and
+look squatty; but remember that adobe squattiness is the best protection
+against wind and heat; and inside, you will find hot and cold water,
+bathroom, and meals equal to the best hotels in Chicago and New York. In
+New York or Chicago, that amount would afford you mighty chancy fare and
+only a back hall room. I know of hundreds of such ranch houses all along
+the backbone of the Rockies.
+
+Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big
+hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a
+motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig
+at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro outright for from $5
+to $10. Even if the burro takes a prize for ugliness, remember he also
+takes a prize for sure-footedness; and he doesn't take a prize for
+bucking, which the broncho often does. Figure up now the cost of a
+month's holiday; and I repeat--it will cost you less than staying at
+home. But if this total is still too high, there are ways of reducing
+the expense by half. Take your own tent; and $20 will not exceed "the
+grub box" contents for a month. Or all through the Rockies are deserted
+shacks, mining and lumber shanties, herders' cabins, horse camps. You
+can quarter yourself in one of these for nothing; and the sole expense
+will be "the grub box;" and my tin trunk for camp cooking has never cost
+me more than $50 a month for four people. Or best and most novel
+experience of all--along White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande, in Mesa
+Verde Park, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the
+cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There is no danger of wolves,
+or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook
+below happens to be good. Hundreds of archaeologists, who come from
+Egypt, Greece, Italy, England, to visit these remains, spend their
+summer holiday this way. Why can't you? Or if you are not a good
+adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer school that goes
+out to the caves from Santa Fe every summer.
+
+Is it safe? That question to a Westerner is a joke. Safer, much safer,
+than in any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White
+Mountains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on
+the Saskatchewan; and I never locked a door, because there wasn't any
+lock; and I never attempted to bar the door, because there wasn't any
+need. Can you say as much of New York, or Chicago, or Washington? The
+question may be asked--Will this kind of a holiday not be hot in summer?
+You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some
+mid-summer, when nearly everything inside the pullman car melted into a
+jelly. Yes, it will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a
+railroad naturally follows the lowest grade. But if you go back to the
+ranch houses of the Upper Mesas and of foothills and canyons, you will be
+from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and will need winter wraps
+each night, and may have to break the ice for your washing water in the
+morning--I did.
+
+Another reason why so many Americans do not see their own country is
+that while one species of fool has scared away holiday seekers by tales
+of extortionate cost, another sort of fool wisely promulgates the lie--a
+lie worn shiny from repetition--that "game is scarce in the West." "No
+more big game"--and your romancer leans back with wise-acre air to let
+that lie sink in, while he clears his throat to utter another--"trout
+streams all fished out." In the days when we had to swallow logic
+undigested in college, we had it impressed upon us that one single
+specific fact was sufficient to refute the broadest generality that was
+ever put in the form of a syllogism. Well, then,--for a few facts as to
+that "no-game" lie!
+
+In one hour you can catch in the streams of the Pecos, or the Jemez, or
+the White Mountains, or the Upper Sierras of California, or the New
+Glacier Park of the North, more trout than you can put on a string. If
+you want confirmation of that fact, write to the Texas Club that has its
+hunting lodge opposite Grass Mountain, and they will send you the
+picture of one hour's trout catch. By measurement, the string is longer
+than the height of a water barrel; and these were fish that didn't get
+away.
+
+Last year, twenty-six bear were shot in the Sangre de Christo Canyon in
+three months.
+
+Two years ago, mountain lions became so thick in the Pecos that hunters
+were hired to hunt them for bounty; and the first thing that happened to
+one of the hunters, his horse was throttled and killed by a mountain
+lion, though his little spaniel got revenge by treeing four lions a few
+weeks later, and the hunter got three out of the four.
+
+Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of
+hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed.
+
+In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in
+the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain.
+Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the
+other still haunts the canyons defiant of repeater.
+
+From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can
+nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone
+ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here.
+
+The week I reached Frijoles Canyon, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in
+front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front
+door.
+
+The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff
+caves, we disturbed a herd of deer.
+
+Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It is if you follow the
+beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild
+turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look
+for it. Believe me--though it may sound a truism--you won't find big
+game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.
+
+Or, if your quest is not hunting but studying game, what better ground
+for observation than the Wichita in Oklahoma? Here a National Forest has
+been constituted a perpetual breeding ground for native American game.
+Over twenty buffalo taken from original stock in the New York Park are
+there--back on their native heath; and there are two or three very
+touching things about those old furry fellows taken back to their own
+haunts. In New York's parks, they were gradually degenerating--getting
+heavier, less active, ceasing to shed their fur annually. When they were
+set loose in the Wichita Game Resort, they looked up, sniffed the air
+from all four quarters, and rambled off to their ancestral pasture
+grounds perfectly at home. When the Comanches heard that the buffalo had
+come back to the Wichita, the whole tribe moved in a body and camped
+outside the fourteen-foot fence. There they stayed for the better part
+of a week, the buffalo and the Comanches, silently viewing each other.
+It would have been worth Mr. Nature Faker's while to have known their
+mutual thoughts.
+
+There is another lie about not holidaying West, which is not only
+persistent but cruel. When the worker is a health as well as rest
+seeker, he is told that the West does not want him, especially if he is
+what is locally called "a lung-er;" and there is just enough truth in
+that lie to make it persistent. It is true the consumptive is not wanted
+on the beaten trail, in the big general hotel, in the train where other
+people want draughts of air, but he can't stand them. On the beaten
+trail, he is a danger both to himself and to others--especially if he
+hasn't money and may fall a burden on the community; but that is only a
+half truth which is usually a lie. Let the other half be known! All
+through the West along the backbone of the Rockies, from Montana to
+Texas, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, are the tent
+cities--communities of health seekers living in half-boarded tents, or
+mosquito-wired cabins that can be steam-heated at night. There are
+literally thousands of such tent dwellers all through the Rocky Mountain
+States; and the cost is as you make it. If you go to a sanitarium tent
+city, you will have to pay all the way from $15 to $25 a week for house,
+board, nurse, medicine and doctor's attendance; but if you buy your own
+portable house and do your own catering, the cost will be just what you
+make it. A house will cost $50 to $100; a tent, $10 to $20.
+
+Still another baneful lie that keeps the American from seeing America
+first is that our New World West lacks "human interest;" lacks "the
+picturesqueness of the shepherds in Spain and Switzerland," for
+instance; lacks "the historic marvels" of church and monument and
+relic.
+
+If there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster of them all. Will
+you tell me why "the human interest" of a legend about Dick Turpin's
+head festering on Newgate, England, is any greater to Americans than the
+truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd,
+when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New
+Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train
+robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between
+England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of
+outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Canyon up the Pecos, or took
+possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the
+Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than
+descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on
+our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in
+quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro
+in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled
+eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons
+and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled
+bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long
+before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful
+to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near
+Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone
+lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions
+carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before
+William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the
+antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins
+of a church--at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters--that
+was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to
+America.
+
+You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the
+Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the
+gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks,
+and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who
+interviewed Eve--all right here in your own American Southwest, with the
+difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler,
+who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the
+Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the
+springs.
+
+To be sure, there are 400,000 miles of motor roads in Europe; but isn't
+it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? That is
+what you can do following the "Camino Real" from Texas to Wyoming, or
+crossing the mountains of New Mexico by the great Scenic Highway built
+for motors to the very snow tops.
+
+[Illustration: An Indian girl of Isleta, New Mexico, carrying a water
+jar.]
+
+And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at
+Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the
+legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but
+America. This is a story by itself--a beautiful one, also in spots a
+funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from
+Oxford, England, took quarters in one of the pueblos at Santa Clara or
+thereabout to study Indian arts and crafts. One night in her adobe
+quarters, her orderly British soul was aroused by such a dire din of
+shouting, fighting, screams, as she thought could come only from some
+inferno of crime. She sprang out of bed and dashed across the _placito_
+in her nightdress to her guardian protector in the person of an old
+Indian. He ran through the dark to see what the matter was, while she
+stood in hiding of the wall shadows curdling in horror of "bluggy
+deeds."
+
+"Pah," said the old fellow coming back, "dat not'ing! Young man, he git
+marry an' dey--how you call?--chiv-ar-ee-heem."
+
+"Then, what are you laughing at?" demanded the irate British dame; for
+she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in
+suffocated laughter. "How dare you laugh?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I laugh, Mees," he sputtered out, "'cos you scare me so bad when you
+call, I jomp in my coat mistake for my pants. Dat's all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would
+pay to let a little daylight in on the abysmal blank regarding the
+wonder-land of our own world--wouldn't it?
+
+I don't know whether the affectation recognized as "the foreign pose"
+comes foremost or hindermost as a cause of this neglect of the wonders
+of our own land. When you go to our own Western Wonder Land, you can't
+say you have been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is
+wonderful what a paying thing that pose is in a harvest of "fooleries."
+There is a well-known case of an American author, who tried his hand on
+delineating American life and was severely let alone because he was
+too--not abroad, but broad. He dropped his own name, assumed the pose of
+a grand dame familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of
+the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. His books have
+"gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are
+abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.
+
+The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of
+Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the
+historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an
+implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and
+superiority, which is pretense--is another matter. Let us take the dire
+and damning deficiencies of America!
+
+"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone
+Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to
+fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.
+
+There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma--islands of
+rock, sheer precipice of yellow _tufa_ for hundreds of feet--amid the
+Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated
+in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders,
+brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all
+this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or there are the
+three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table
+lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and
+desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or,
+there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Canyon de Chelly (Shay)
+forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses
+of Washington.
+
+"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and
+the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is
+the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through
+Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions
+galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered
+Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a
+bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There
+is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway;
+and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of
+wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange
+Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in
+cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one
+end of a main thoroughfare, you can see the site of the old Spanish
+Gareta prison, in the walls of which bullets were found embedded in
+human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the
+braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street
+and of small talk--then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and
+the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of
+the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the
+gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the
+apple bloom.
+
+What was the other charge? Oh, yes--"lacks the human," whatever that
+means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than
+true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Canyon and the cliff houses of
+Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to
+hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium
+more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the
+Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of
+Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys,
+Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did
+not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money
+which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are
+not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to
+American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of
+the Old World?
+
+Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America
+usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar
+prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes--but America
+lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."
+
+"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition
+period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle
+baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain
+in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of
+American feudalism--fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area
+of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat
+clad _cap-a-pie_ in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at
+Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet
+hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years
+back--and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing
+of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism,
+the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted
+troops the big iron chest for the gold--iron chests that you can see to
+this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial
+in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by
+secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver
+of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of
+New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's--an era
+that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki,
+Spirit of Evil, smiled with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade
+the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were
+alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north
+as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia
+groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed
+horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough,
+remnants of some sort of domesticated creatures are found in the cave
+men's houses, centuries before the coming of horses and cattle and sheep
+with the Spanish. The trouble is, up to the present when men like Curtis
+and dear old Bandelier and Burbank, and the whole staff of the
+Smithsonian and the School of Santa Fe have gone to work, we have not
+taken the trouble in America to gather up the prehistoric legends and
+ferret out their race meaning. We have fallen too completely in the last
+century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave
+races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending
+half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes
+below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in
+gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. You
+remember Kipling's poem on the neolithic man, and Jack London's fiction.
+Now as a matter of fact--which is a bit disturbing to all these
+accretions of pseudo-science--the remains of these cave people don't
+show them to have been simian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing
+when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony Comstock's activities
+as to clothes. They had decorated pottery ware of which we have lost the
+pigments, and a knowledge of irrigation which would be unique in apes,
+and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some
+day, when the evolutionary piffle has passed, we'll study out these
+prehistoric legends and their racial meaning.
+
+As to the "lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared
+that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the
+Southwest. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Fe, or Lungrun's
+wonderful desert pictures, or Moran's or Gamble's, or Harmon's Spanish
+scenes--then talk about "lack of _decadent_ art" if you will, but don't
+talk about "lack of art." Why, in the ranch house of Lorenzo Hubbell,
+the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely
+Southwestern pictures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance,
+that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest
+scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above
+10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the
+leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine
+forests, past Cloudcroft--the sky-top resort--up through the orchard
+lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over
+the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all
+the wonders of Colorado's National Park. With the exception of a very
+bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the
+southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the
+Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and
+flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the
+tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars
+of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down
+to California, you can swerve into Grand Canyon, where the gods of fire
+and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red
+into a swimming canyon of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest
+peaks of the Rockies.
+
+In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old
+Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor
+along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't
+take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed;
+second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were
+allowed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only
+from a life-time knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of the West--and
+that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of "shootin'
+irons" and "faintin' females" are forever past, except in the
+undergraduate's salad dreams. You are safer in the cave dwellings of the
+Stone Age, in the Pajarito Plateau of the cliff "bird people," in the
+Painted Desert, among the Indians of the Navajo Reserve than you are in
+Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London. I would trust a young friend
+of mine--boy or girl--quicker to the Western environment than the
+Eastern. You can get into mischief in the West if you hunt for it; but
+the mischief doesn't come out and hunt you. Also, danger spots are
+self-evident on precipices of the Western wilds. They aren't
+self-evident; danger spots are glazed and paved to the edges over which
+youth goes to smash in the East.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What about cost? Aye, there's the rub!
+
+First, there's the steamboat ticket to Europe, about the same price as
+or more than the average round trip ticket to the Coast and back;
+but--please note, please note well--the agent who sells the steamboat
+ticket gets from forty to 100 per cent. bigger commission on it than the
+agent who sells the railroad tickets; so the man who is an agent for
+Europe can afford to advertise from forty to 100 per cent. more than the
+man who sells the purely American ticket.
+
+Secondly, European hotel men are adepts at catering to the lure of the
+American sightseer. (Of course they are: it's worth one hundred to two
+hundred million dollars to them a year.) In the American West, everybody
+is busy. Except for the real estate man, they don't care one iota
+whether you come or stay.
+
+Thirdly, when you go to Europe, a thousand hands are thrust out to point
+you the way to the interesting places. Incidentally, also, a thousand
+hands are thrust out to pick your pocket, or at least relieve it of any
+superfluous weight. In our West, who cares a particle what you do; or
+who will point you the way? The hotels are expensive and for the most
+part located in the most expensive zone--the commercial center. It is
+only when you get out of the expense zone away from commercial centers
+and railway, that you can live at $1 or $2 a day, or if you have your
+own tent at fifty cents a day; but it isn't to the real estate agent's
+interests to have you go away from the commercial center or expense
+zone. Who is there to tell you what or where to see off the line of heat
+and tips? Outside the National Park wardens and National Forest Rangers,
+there isn't anyone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How, then, are you to manage? Frankly, I never knew of either monkeys or
+men accomplishing anything except in one way--just going out and doing
+it. Choose what you want to see; and go there! The local railroad agent,
+the local Forest Ranger, the local ranch house, will tell you the rest;
+and naturally, when you go into the wilderness, don't leave all your
+courtesy and circumspection and common-sense back in town. Equipped with
+those three, you can "See America First," and see it cheaply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE NATIONAL FORESTS, A SUMMER PLAYGROUND FOR THE PEOPLE
+
+
+If a health resort and national playground were discovered guaranteed to
+kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay
+listlessness and set the human spirit free from the nagging worries and
+toil-wear that make you feel like a washed-out rag at the end of a
+humdrum year--imagine the stampede of the lame and the halt in body and
+spirit; the railroad excursions and reduced fares; the disputations of
+the physicians and the rage of the thought-ologists at present coining
+money rejuvenating neurotic humanity!
+
+Yet such a national playground has been discovered; and it isn't in
+Europe, where statisticians compute that Americans yearly spend from a
+quarter to half a billion dollars; and it isn't the Coast-to-Coast trip
+which the president of a transcontinental told me at least a hundred
+thousand people a year traverse. A health resort guaranteed to banish
+care, to stab apathy, to enlarge littleness, to slay listlessness, would
+pretty nearly put the thought-ologists out of commission. Yet such a
+summer resort exists at the very doors of every American capable of
+scraping together a few hundred dollars--$200 at the least, $400 at the
+most. It exists in that "twilight zone" of dispute and strong language
+and peanut politics known as the National Forests.
+
+In America, we have foolishly come to regard National Forests as solely
+allied with conservation and politics. That is too narrow. National
+Forests stand for much more. They stand for a national playground and
+all that means for national health and sanity and joy in the exuberant
+life of the clean out-of-doors. In Germany, the forests are not only a
+source of great revenue in cash; they are a source of greater revenue in
+health. They are a holiday playground. In America, the playground
+exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful playground in the whole
+world--and the most accessible; but we haven't yet discovered it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the three or four million people who have attended the Pacific Coast
+Expositions of the past ten years, it is a safe wage that half went, not
+to see the Exposition (for people from a radius round Chicago and
+Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went
+to see the Exposition as an exponent of the Great West. How much of the
+Great West did they really see? They saw the Alaska Exhibit. Well--the
+Alaska Exhibit was afterwards shown in New York. They saw the special
+buildings assigned to the special Western States. Well--the special
+Western States had special buildings at the other expositions. What
+else of the purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three
+travelers:
+
+"Been a great trip" (Two Chicagoans talking in duet). "We've seen
+everything and stopped off everywhere. We stopped at Denver and Salt
+Lake and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Portland and Seattle!"
+
+"What did you do at these places?"
+
+"Took a taxi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Saw
+all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the
+West is going ahead."
+
+"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged
+feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman,
+baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really
+seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before.
+They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down
+in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to
+go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and
+wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and
+see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it
+_seeing_ the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and
+sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and
+experience the real thing?"
+
+"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only
+time we got away from the excursion party was when a land boomster took
+us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the
+West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What
+I want to know is how to get away from that. That boomster fellow was an
+Easterner, anyway."
+
+Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not
+the duet that went round the cities in a sightseeing car and judged the
+West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns
+fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real
+estate project by an Eastern land boomster. And each wanted to find the
+real thing--had paid money to find a holiday playground, to forget care
+and stab apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the
+extortionate charges on every side in the city life. And two out of
+three went back a little disappointed that they had not seen the fabled
+wonders of the West--the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famous
+canyons, the mountain lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to explain
+to the New Yorker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels
+charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain western
+wilds, whether you are a man, woman, child, or group of all three--could
+go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees and mountain lakes
+and snowy peaks--I was greeted with that peculiarly New Yorky look
+suggestive of Ananias and De Rougement.
+
+[Illustration: One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents,
+but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary]
+
+Sadder is the case of the invalid migrating West. He has come with high
+hopes looking for the national health resort. Does he find it? Not once
+in a thousand cases. If health seekers have money, they take a private
+house _in the city_, where the best of air is at its worst; but many
+invalids are scarce of money, and come seeking the health resort at
+great pecuniary sacrifice. Do they find it? Certainly not knocking from
+boarding house to boarding house and hotel to hotel, re-infecting
+themselves with their own germs till the very telephone booths have to
+be guarded. At one famous "lung" city where I stayed, I heard three
+invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room happened to
+be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 and $3 and $5 a day without
+meals. At a cost of $10 for train fare, I went out to one of the
+National Forests--the pass over the Divide 11,000 feet, the village
+center of the Forest 8,000 feet above sea level, the charge with meals
+at the hotel $10 a week. Better still, $10 for a roomy tent, $1.50 for a
+camp stove and as much or as little as you like for a fur rug, and the
+cost of meals would have been seventy-five cents a day at the hotel,
+seventy-five cents for life in air that was almost constant sunshine,
+air as pure and life-giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That
+altitude would probably not suit all invalids--that is for a doctor to
+say; but certainly, whether one is out for health or play, that regimen
+is cheaper and more life-giving than a stuffy hotel at $2, $3 and $5 a
+day for a room alone.
+
+It is incredible when you come to think of it. Here is a nation of
+ninety million people scouring the earth for a playground; and there is
+an undiscovered playground in its own back yard, the most wonderful
+playground of mountain and forest and lake in the whole world; a
+playground in actual area half the size of a Germany, or France, with
+wonders of cave and waterway and peak unknown to Germany or France. What
+are the railroads thinking about? If three million people visited an
+exposition to see the West, how many would yearly visit the National
+Forests if the railroads granted facilities, and the ninety million
+Americans knew how? It is absurd to regard the National Forests purely
+as timber; and timber for politics! They are a nation's playground and
+health resort; and one of these times will come a Peary or an Abruzzi
+discovering them. Then we'll give him a prize and begin going.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you will not
+find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress
+parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of flame in the upper
+alpine meadows. And you will not find gaping on-lookers to break down
+fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirrel swearing
+at you for coming too near his _cache_ of pine cones at the foot of some
+giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing in the National
+Forests; but there is a great tinkling of waters; and there are many
+voices of rills with a roar of flood torrents at rain time, or thunder
+of avalanche when the snows come over a far ridge in spray fine as a
+waterfall. In fair weather, you may spare yourself the trouble of a tent
+and camp under a stretch of sky hung with stars, resinous of balsams,
+spiced with the life of the cinnamon smells and the ozone tang. There
+will be lakes of light as well as lakes of water, and an all-day diet of
+condensed sunbeams every time you take a breath. Your bed will be
+hemlock boughs--be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or
+you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood
+stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying
+for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better
+stay in Newport.
+
+The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will
+welcome you and help you to find camping ground.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of
+the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man,
+woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National
+Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get
+established?
+
+Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National
+Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and
+playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New
+Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me,
+there is a peculiar attraction in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all
+are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line--high, dry park-like
+forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor.
+You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes
+panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a
+horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie
+on one side--Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the
+Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, the trail; and across
+that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests.
+There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National
+Forests. Windfall, there is almost none. It has been cleared out and
+sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been
+carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees,
+all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off.
+These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.
+
+Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests
+there, by trips to the wonderful canyons out from Ogden, or to the
+natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you
+have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the
+ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big
+trees in the Sequoia Forest; the Yosemite in the Stanislaus; forests in
+the northern part of the State where you could dance on the stump of a
+redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the
+northern mountains, are the voices of the waters and the white,
+burnished, shining peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one
+summer by driving up in a tented wagon through the National Forests from
+Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and truck bed were in the democrat
+wagon. An outfitter supplied the horses for a rental which I have
+forgotten. The borders of most of the National Forests may be reached by
+wagon. The higher and more intimate trails may be essayed only on foot
+or on horseback.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How much will the trip cost? You must figure that out for yourself.
+There is, first of all, your railway fare from the point you leave. Then
+there is the fare out to the Forest--usually not $10. Go straight to the
+supervisor or forester of the district. He will recommend the best hotel
+of the little mountain village where the supervisor's office is usually
+located. At those hotels, you will board as a transient at $10 a week;
+as a permanent, for less. In many of the mountain hamlets are outfitters
+who will rent you a team of horses and tented wagon; and you can cater
+for yourself. In fact, as to clothing, and outfit, you can buy cheaper
+camp kit at these local stores than in your home town. Many Eastern
+things are not suitable for Western use. For instance, it is foolish to
+go into the thick, rough forests of heavy timber with an expensive
+eastern riding suit for man or woman. Better buy a $4 or $6 or $8 khaki
+suit that you can throw away when you have torn it to tatters. An
+Eastern waterproof coat will cost you from $10 to $30. You can get a
+yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more serviceable for
+$2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get them East, as I like an
+elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good deal of
+cork in the sole to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in
+the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too
+stiff! I like an elk-skin that will let the water out fast as it comes
+in if you ever have to wade, and which will not shrink in the drying. If
+you forswear hotels and take to a sky tent, or canvas in misty weather,
+better carry eatables in what the guides call a tin "grub box," in other
+words a cheap $2 tin trunk. It keeps out ants and things; and you can
+lock it when you go away on long excursions. As to beds, each to his own
+taste! Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for me.
+Besides, I am never comfortable on it. If you camp near the snow peaks,
+a chill strikes up to the small of your back in the small of the
+morning. I don't care to feel like using a derrick every time I roll
+over. The most comfortable bed I know is a piece of twenty-five cent
+oilcloth laid over the slicker on hemlock boughs, fur rug over that,
+with suit case for pillow, and a plain gray blanket. The hardened
+mountaineer will laugh at the next recommendation; but the town man or
+woman going out for play or health is not hardened, and to attempt
+sudden hardening entails the endurance of a lot of aches that are apt to
+spoil the holiday. You may say you like the cold plunge in the icy water
+coming off a snowy mountain. I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge,
+even if you do like it, you are in such a hurry to come out of it that
+you don't linger to scrub. I like my hot scrub; and you can have that
+only by taking along (no, not a rubber bath) a $1.50 camp stove to heat
+the water in the tent while you are eating your supper out round the
+camp fire that burns with such a delicious, barky smell. Besides, late
+in the season, there will be rains and mist. Your camp stove will dry
+out the tent walls and keep your kit free of rain mold. Do you need a
+guide? That depends entirely on yourself. If you camp under direction
+and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.
+
+Whether you go out as a health seeker, or a pleasure seeker, $8 to $10
+will buy you a miner's tent--a miner's, preferable to a tepee because
+the walls lift the canvas roof high enough not to bump your head; $2
+will buy you a tin trunk or grub box; $1.50 will cover the price of
+oilcloth to spread over the boughs which you lay all over the floor to
+keep you above the earth damp; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove
+to keep the inside of your tent warm and dry for the hot night bath; $10
+will cover cost of pail and cooking utensils. That leaves of what would
+be your monthly expenses at even a moderate hotel, $125 for food--bacon,
+flour, fresh fruit; and your food should not exceed $10 each a month. If
+you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder, by whipping the
+mountain streams for trout. If you need an attendant, that miner's tent
+is big enough for two. Or if you will stand $5 or $6 more expense, buy
+a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will be windy days in
+fall and spring when an extra tent with a camp stove in it will prove
+useful for the nightly hot bath.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What reward do you reap for all the bother? You are away from all dust
+irritating to weak lungs. You are away from all possibility of
+re-infecting yourself with your own disease. Except in late autumn and
+early spring, you are living under almost cloudless skies, in an
+atmosphere steeped in sunshine, spicy with the healing resin of the
+pines and hemlocks and spruce, that not only scent the air but literally
+permeate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far
+above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. Instead of
+the clang of street car bells and the jangle of nerves tangled from too
+many humans in town, you hear the flow and the sing and the laughter and
+the trebles of the glacial streams rejoicing in their race to the sea.
+You climb the rough hills; and your town lungs blow like a whale as you
+climb; and every beat pumps inertia out and the sun-healing air in. If
+an invalid, you had better take a doctor's advice as to how high you
+should camp and climb. In town, amid the draperies and the portieres and
+the steam-heated rooms, an invalid is seeking health amid the habitat of
+mummies. In the Forests, whether you will or not, you live in sunshine
+that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it
+is the sting of pulsing, superabundant life, not the lethargy of a
+gradual decay.
+
+At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the
+remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses
+near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in
+unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico
+or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the
+flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan
+hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of
+the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New
+Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines,
+and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on
+the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to
+the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red
+sandstone.
+
+And besides the prehistoric in the Forests--what will you find? The
+plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.
+You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was
+pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a
+haze of dust, and you--you are up in that cloudless air, where the light
+hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the
+clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing
+life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns
+and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on
+the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the
+ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun,
+to the god of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are
+accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking;
+and here is the realm of pure light.
+
+Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest
+gives a bump. You are in darkness--diving through some tunnel or other;
+and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a
+couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance
+Canyon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven
+miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But
+patience! The road into Sundance Canyon takes you to the top of the
+world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little
+Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line,
+pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600
+you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.
+
+Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each
+other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good
+100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good
+by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road
+has been cork-screwing up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as
+a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on
+the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist
+behind the engineer--the man behind the modern gun of conquest--has paid
+the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the
+clouds--a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the mountains
+across the desert towards the Pacific.
+
+[Illustration: From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona]
+
+You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie
+the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of
+the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer
+margin of this rock wall with slab and log and shingle cottages, built
+literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a
+stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in
+the whole world. In Sundance Canyon, South Dakota, summer people have
+built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.
+Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but
+dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets
+composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like
+cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds,
+and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure
+turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and
+there is a pair of green lakes below you--emerald jewels pendant from
+the neck of the old mountain god; and with a bump and a rattle of the
+wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go--believe me,
+a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's
+shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.
+
+You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental
+Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It
+isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any
+shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must
+wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of worship and
+quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake
+and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of
+fire in the sunset, and the plain--there are no more plains--this is the
+top of the world!
+
+Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back
+this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen
+in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear grass tossed before it like the
+waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below--you knew why
+their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in
+disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench
+them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be
+told are laid flat on the ground up here.
+
+When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National
+Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coarse upper grasses
+provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the
+National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all
+the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big
+rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of
+intruding flocks and herds.
+
+Then, the train is literally racing down hill--with the trucks bumping
+heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang
+comes to the ozone--the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon
+smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and
+imprisoned fragrance--the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years
+of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of
+Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.
+
+The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and
+you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce
+and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from
+the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen
+dust--pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree--with the
+purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the
+conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you
+somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some
+conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed,
+whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes,
+airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth,
+though the process may take the trifling aeon of a thousand years or so.
+At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the
+yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but
+know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season--the season
+when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests--the very atmosphere is
+alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the
+wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb
+like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded
+branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the
+broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the veering wind,
+the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded
+branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled,
+perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a
+cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and
+crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire
+tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall
+on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting
+nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see
+the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From
+the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth,
+you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?)
+language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the
+evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows
+the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire
+when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight
+and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the burned or scant
+slopes, he rifles the _cache_ of this little furred forester, who
+suspects your noisy trainload of robbery--robbery--sc--scur--r--there!
+
+Then, the train bumps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on
+the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop
+off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man
+is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train
+is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud
+against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the
+curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage
+green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree--the ranger, absurdly
+young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres
+compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily
+deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those
+confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority
+which backs that body of men.
+
+You have mounted your pony--men and women alike ride astride in the
+Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the
+ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet
+above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodpecker, the scur of a
+rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft _thug_ of the
+unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the
+soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the
+jangle of city cars in that stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested
+town, isn't it?
+
+If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of
+the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills
+of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are
+hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have
+the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when
+eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine
+needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles
+like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of
+these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods;
+for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made
+offerings to the gods of old, the temple which our modern churches
+imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in
+open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no
+apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically
+from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which
+permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust
+is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will
+make you over, will these forest gods, if you will let them, if you will
+lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the
+chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.
+
+And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods
+halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness
+unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you
+and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
+
+
+You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before
+you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds.
+No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill
+comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels
+must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available--never
+farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you
+on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of
+matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds
+than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in
+the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger
+and yeggman, that stalks the town.
+
+[Illustration: The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with
+his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West]
+
+To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little
+boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress.
+Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the
+death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly
+traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone
+into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have
+never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I
+have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you
+need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when
+they combine two qualities--comfort and thick enough soles to protect
+your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too,
+to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from passing trees and
+jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you
+chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or
+snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You
+may get them if you like to spend the money--$8 leggings and $8
+horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the
+other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the
+tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a
+$3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let
+the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing
+garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.
+
+This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who
+determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent
+by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast.
+They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog
+blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you
+consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds
+of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they
+had gone off the trail trout fishing. "If they had been good
+path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream
+down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt
+criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about
+it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut
+through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at
+the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were
+driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your
+directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost
+impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow
+down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest
+sense of direction. Compass signs of forest-lore fail here. There are
+few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west;
+and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree.
+All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman
+lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.
+
+"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.
+
+"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled
+ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the
+children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the
+morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take
+fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put
+out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."
+
+All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National
+Forests.
+
+It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National
+Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the
+rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married,
+have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the
+Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the
+ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality
+characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the
+ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could
+have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where
+the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you
+could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might
+put a New York dinner to shame--all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at
+this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry
+Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to
+tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in
+mind--do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or
+the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are
+prepared to look after yourself.
+
+And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do?
+You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the
+hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God
+has landscaped the playground for a nation; or you can go in for
+records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most
+marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can
+prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who
+flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities,
+contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in
+the British Museum marked 20,000 B. C. It isn't every day you can wander
+through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist
+agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in
+Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff
+and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River,
+Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples
+in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the
+first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier
+houses literally on the tip-top of the world?
+
+The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the
+jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and
+delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen
+floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if
+you go in the spirit of an investigator, you will get that permission.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The question isn't _what is there to do_. It is _which of the countless
+things there are to do_ are you going to choose to do? When Mr.
+Roosevelt goes to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross
+Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they
+take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools
+at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you
+can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest
+its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association
+to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how
+sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy
+Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got
+their names from old Spanish _padres_ riding their burros into the
+wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the
+Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff
+dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In
+the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of
+prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.
+
+Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain
+climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests--bear, mountain
+sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a
+man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to
+mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Canyon, above
+Ouray, at Pike's Peak--a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and
+his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy
+of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand
+with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a
+trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man
+who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the
+upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of
+snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out!
+If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope
+clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and
+recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far
+patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the
+West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten
+miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I
+told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the
+forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed
+to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs.
+Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly
+slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the
+track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side.
+The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the
+track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's
+shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it
+coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of
+time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get
+his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and
+child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a
+timber. It must have been the concussion of the air--they weren't even
+bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up
+where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but
+they were dead, all three."
+
+And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak.
+"That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's
+doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught
+him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife
+didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain;
+and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It
+came--quick--" with a snap of his fingers--"as that; and he was gone."
+
+It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who
+monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch
+above a clean-swept slope.
+
+And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National
+Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been
+told so often that you have come to believe it--that our mountains in
+America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and
+race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go
+West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that
+has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top
+guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's
+Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the
+Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him.
+Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You
+have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western
+mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in
+the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against
+the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this
+arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.
+
+"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here.
+We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades.
+See that hole in the mountain?"
+
+"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, dear no! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It
+used to be an almost impossible trail to get up there; but there has
+been a hermit fellow there for the last ten years, living in his cabin
+and hunting; and year after year, never paid by anybody, he has been
+building that trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to
+lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course,
+the people in the valley think him crazy."
+
+Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and
+its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to
+lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest
+dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the
+dust eaters, the insects of the city ant heaps, the true troglodytes
+and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think
+there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You have been told so often that the National Forests lock up timber
+from use that it comes as a surprise as you ride up the woodland trail
+to hear the song of the crosscut saw and the buzzing hum of a
+mill--perhaps a dozen mills--running full blast here in this National
+Forest. Heaps of sawdust emit the odors of imprisoned flowers. Piles of
+logs lie on all sides stamped at the end U. S.--timber sold on the stump
+to any lumberman and scaled as inspected by the ranger and paid by the
+buyer. To be sure, the lumberman cannot have the lumber for nothing; and
+it was for nothing that the Forests were seized and cut under the old
+regime.
+
+How was the spoliation effected? Two or three ways. The law of the
+public domain used to permit burn and windfall to be taken out free.
+Your lumberman, then, homesteaded 160 acres on a slope of forest
+affording good timber skids and chutes. So far, no wrong! Was not public
+domain open to homesteading? Good; but your homesteading lumberman now
+watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely
+accidentally, you understand, the fire sprang up and swept the entire
+slope of green forest away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman
+then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did
+less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope would be
+left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your
+lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free.
+Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public
+domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I
+could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this
+manner.
+
+That was the principle of Congress when it withdrew from public domain
+these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include
+grazing and woodland not properly administered under public domain. The
+making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The ranger's job is to
+prevent fires. Also he permits the cutting of only ripe, full-grown
+trees, or dead tops, or growth stunted by crowding; and all timber sold
+off the forests must be marked for cutting and stamped by the ranger.
+
+But the old spirit assumes protean forms. The latest way of working the
+old trick is through the homestead law. You have been told that
+homesteaders cannot go in on the National Forests. Yet there, as you
+ride along the trail, is a cleared space of 160 acres where a Swedish
+woman and her boys are making hay; and inquiry elicits the fact that
+millions of acres are yearly homesteaded in the National Forests. Just
+as fast as they can be surveyed, all farming lands in the National
+Forests are opened to the homesteader. Where, then, is the trick? Your
+farmer man comes in for a homestead and he picks out 160 acres where the
+growth of big trees is so dense they will yield from $10,000 to $40,000
+in timber per quarter section. Good! Hasn't the homesteader a right to
+this profit? He certainly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he
+doesn't clear more than a few hundred feet round his cabin, and hasn't a
+cent of money to pay the heavy expense of clearing the rest, and sells
+out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars? Supposing
+such farmer men are brought in by excursion loads by a certain big
+lumber company, and all sell out at a few hundred dollars, claims worth
+millions, to that certain big lumber company--is this true homesteading
+of free land; or a grabbing of timber for a lumber trust?
+
+The same spirit explains the furious outcry that miners are driven off
+the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors
+can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary
+operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then
+yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to
+a big smelting trust--a merry game worked in one of the Western States
+for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.
+
+To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require
+larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being
+tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space
+occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that
+you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or
+build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road
+building is not so paltry as it sounds.
+
+Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's
+cabin,--picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with
+slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood.
+Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of
+town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as
+an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's
+cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention
+appropriateness.
+
+Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger
+tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log
+partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs,
+natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had
+been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of
+the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more
+suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised--surely
+better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that
+you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city
+people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate
+this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked
+cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of
+hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to
+see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are
+fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken
+to the country all the cares of the city house, a regiment of servants
+or hostiles, and a mansion of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to
+me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees "back to the farm."
+
+[Illustration: Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zuni, New Mexico.
+The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens]
+
+What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven
+and earth on the lonely forested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the
+snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. That is,
+over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber
+cruiser, sales agent, United States marshal, forester, gardener,
+naturalist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector,
+arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, surveyor, mine inspector, field
+man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman. When
+you consider that each man's patrol stretched out in a straight line
+would reach from New York past Albany, or from St. Paul to Duluth,
+without any of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge
+the layman, you may say the ranger is a pretty busy man.
+
+What sort of man is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian
+Northwest Mounted Policeman, with these differences: He is very much
+younger. I think there is a regulation somewhere in the Department that
+a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures
+enthusiasm, weeding out the misfits, the formation of a body of men
+trained to the work; but I am not sure that it is not a mistake. There
+is a saying among the men of the North that "it takes a wise old dog to
+catch a wary old wolf;" and "there are more things in the woods than
+ever taught in l'pe'tee cat--ee--cheesm." I am not sure that the
+weathered old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world,
+with lots of hard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the
+difficulties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post-graduate
+from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on fist, and the brain behind the
+fist. I am quite sure that many of the blackguard tricks assailing the
+Forest Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had
+to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, gentlemen always, but
+with some wise and weathered old dog of frontier life who wouldn't
+consult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would
+consult them, you know; but it would be afterwards. Just now, while the
+rangers are consulting the red tape, the trickster gets away with the
+goods.
+
+In the next place, your Forest ranger is not clothed with the authority
+to back up his fight which the N.W.M.P. man possesses. In theory, your
+ranger is a United States marshal, just as your Mounted Policeman is a
+constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where
+the N.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest,
+try, convict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered
+by official red tape. For instance, riding out with a ranger one day, we
+came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the
+profanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast.
+
+"Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out! I want to see for myself
+exactly what you men have to deal with!"
+
+Now, if that mill man had used such language to a Mounted Policeman, he
+would have been arrested, sentenced to thirty days and a fine, all
+inside of twenty-four hours. What was it all about? An attempt to
+bulldoze a young government man into believing that the taking of logs
+without payment was permissible.
+
+"What will you do to straighten it all out?" I asked.
+
+"Lay a statement of the facts before the District Supervisor. The
+Supervisor will forward all to Denver. Denver will communicate with
+Washington. Then, soon as the thing has been investigated, word will
+come back from Washington."
+
+Investigated? If you know anything about government investigations, you
+will not stop the clock, as Joshua played tricks with the sun dial, to
+prevent speed.
+
+"Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect
+for law in that gentleman's heart?" I asked.
+
+"Perhaps longer," said the college man without a suspicion of irony,
+"and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the
+Forests."
+
+"And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free
+hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good."
+
+"Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away
+with logs that didn't belong to them. Once, when I came back to the
+first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U.
+S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from
+Washington, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been
+shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was
+doing; but we forced pay for those logs."
+
+It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make
+a good Mounted Policeman--eight years to jounce the duffer out and the
+man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken.
+For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning
+at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain
+tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester
+more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers
+remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise
+old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of
+the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester
+struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line
+strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and
+post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own
+fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose
+mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his
+sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger
+homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily
+expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men
+dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as
+Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland
+forests.
+
+Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the
+Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for
+thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present
+regime, such men are not kept when found out, nor shielded when caught.
+For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the
+Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day;
+and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the
+force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar
+picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against
+ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and
+under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and
+grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism
+look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially
+never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest
+rangers! _In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than
+Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force
+was organized._
+
+Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together,
+who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass
+herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the
+animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become--what?--is
+it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs
+and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The
+flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and butterfly that it may
+perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species
+that shall surpass itself. The tree trying to encompass and overcome the
+law of its own being--fixity--by sending its seeds sailing, whirling,
+aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.
+
+You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the
+National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't
+you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the
+centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate
+almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with
+the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle
+up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing
+life and strength straight from the sun.
+
+The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you
+suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to
+you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead
+branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal
+rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our
+weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be
+fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy
+anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the
+useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that
+can't stand fast against the shocks of life!
+
+You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause
+made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of
+life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who
+divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet,
+not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it
+needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the
+seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard
+and set--marking the ages of the trees--all have their prototypes in the
+human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth,
+air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young
+conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of
+poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the
+quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the
+same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much
+shade, fire, drought, passing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the
+weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living
+begins--it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for
+the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree
+reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three
+score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines
+and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning,
+the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what
+a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm
+wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even
+sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree
+uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on
+whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the
+crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will
+to live--cork-screwing sidewise for light, forking into two branches
+where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking
+the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder
+swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist
+barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not
+devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun
+and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds--seeds shaped like
+parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its
+own fixity--life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the
+scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's
+heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing.
+
+And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see
+it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has
+run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting
+half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high
+with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter
+here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the
+poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened
+to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than
+eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky
+Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took
+smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and
+Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high,
+leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a
+hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second
+growth of such trees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two
+families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I
+thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health
+seekers.
+
+"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care
+of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.
+
+"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They
+think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO
+
+
+The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless,
+sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any
+day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos
+National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in
+northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four
+feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my
+bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in
+New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all
+right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and
+mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas.
+You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different
+National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet;
+and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000
+feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or
+Grass Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Canyon.
+
+There are several other ways in which the National Forests of New
+Mexico discount Eastern expectation.
+
+First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of
+trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the
+wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to
+be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to
+Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New
+Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will
+stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If
+you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the
+National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back,
+leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet
+of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters
+of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens--_There is
+still a no-tip land._ As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can
+literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can
+stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the
+transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an
+hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast.
+In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than
+$2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you
+more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or
+you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have
+your own horse for a six weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month
+would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2--where
+will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch
+houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized,
+where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself
+an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel
+that has been too popular; that day has been long passed in the ranches
+of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your
+room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from
+the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard
+or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold
+water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the
+old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture
+of the Southwest--conical arches opening from one room into another,
+shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are
+flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper
+roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire
+halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health
+seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others
+by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers
+living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico
+that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said
+that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take
+tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a
+holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship
+worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy
+his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made
+for sending in meals.
+
+[Illustration: Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The
+structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its
+feathers, which are used in religious rites]
+
+The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the
+excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of _most_
+of the Forests by motor, of _all_ of the Forests by team (be sure to
+hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the
+highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner.
+In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by
+the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons
+been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain
+ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to
+ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in
+the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible canyons,
+shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge
+mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial
+lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is
+not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May;
+but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road,
+going up the canyon from south to north.
+
+The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great
+plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White
+Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can
+still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout
+than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still
+abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they
+constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs
+hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As
+for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the
+Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the canyons forking off the Pecos at
+right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.
+
+Lastly, the mountain canyons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none
+in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that
+will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the
+conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the
+Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to
+remember--with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation,
+excellent trails and abundance of game--these National Forests of New
+Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago,
+only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that
+the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the
+West.
+
+You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las
+Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered
+by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the
+scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over
+the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that
+just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills
+rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue
+horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests--trees
+eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching
+and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann
+spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National
+Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the
+ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings
+have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are
+growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out
+by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and
+in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in
+five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years
+this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval
+state.
+
+The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged
+in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley
+stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade
+system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish
+first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little
+checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A
+glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The
+goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer
+raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in
+the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty
+cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn
+that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2
+a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not
+wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year
+keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier
+looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of
+old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing
+better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.
+
+Then suddenly, it dawns on you--this is not America at all. It is a bit
+of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the
+wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health,
+and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief.
+The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the
+fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter
+skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats
+bleating on the red sand hills--all complete the illusion that you have
+waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to
+Canada, New Mexico is to the United States--a mosaic in color; a bit of
+the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the
+picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of
+progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are
+still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive,
+undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and
+falls back in social envy and class hate. "Our people, no, they are not
+ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth--no--we
+have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little
+whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on
+de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"
+
+"Mighty good," though I was not thinking of the poem. I was thinking of
+the spirit that is contented enough to _see_ poetry in the great white
+mountains through the door of a little whitewashed adobe room; and in
+this case, it was a sick room. Presently, he got up out of his bed, and
+donned an old military cape, and came out in the sunlight to have me
+photograph him, so that his friends would have it _after_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses
+in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few
+words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put
+you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you. Any
+normal traveler does not need to be told that these ranch houses are
+not regular boarding houses as you understand that term; but as a great
+many travelers are not normal, perhaps I should explain. The custom of
+taking strangers has arisen from those old days when there were no inns
+and all passers-by were given beds and meals as a matter of course.
+Those days are past, but luckily for outsiders, the custom survives;
+only remember while you pay, you go as a _guest_, and must not expect a
+valet to clean your boots and to quake at any discord of nerves untuned
+by the jar of town.
+
+In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were
+spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling,
+earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the
+little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of
+settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse. Presently,
+at an elevation of 8,000 feet; we pulled up in Pecos Town before the
+long, low, whitewashed ranch house, the two ends coming back in an L
+round the court, the main entrance on the other side of it. You expected
+to find wilderness. Well, there is an upright piano, and there is a
+gramophone with latest musical records, and close by the davenport where
+hangs a grizzly bear pelt, stands a banjo. You have scarcely got travel
+togs off before dinner is sounded by the big copper ranch bell hung on
+the piazza after the fashion of the Missions.
+
+After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going
+up the canyon. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a
+great many reasons. He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for,
+your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with
+the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt
+predatory animals--bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion--you need no
+permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey
+and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country
+as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that
+the forests in the upper canyons are very dense; and that you might get
+lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge
+who knows where you have gone?
+
+On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in
+and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican,
+has been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and is somewhat of
+a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views.
+
+"What is going to happen in Old Mexico?"
+
+"Ah, only one t'ing possible--los Americanos must go in."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot--cannot control. Madero, he cannot
+control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."
+
+It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe
+huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass
+windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and
+sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the
+devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet
+walls.
+
+Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built
+in--well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare
+say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell
+of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way
+for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in
+demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were
+so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell
+away and buried it in the mountains--where, no man knows: it has never
+since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of
+America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to
+believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is
+most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the
+snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the canyon with a span
+of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a
+very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not
+need to describe the trails up Pecos Canyon. I consider it a safer road
+than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway
+or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor
+car, though the scenic highway cutting this at right angles will be
+when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who
+jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn
+several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of
+jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the
+mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Canyon, now down on a
+level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer
+as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going
+and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the
+driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and
+the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger
+whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With
+carelessness--well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went
+over the edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily
+wooded and you can't slide far.
+
+Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for "the tent
+dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how
+they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your
+own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from
+Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where
+the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and
+heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and
+miniature waterfalls. Wherever the canyon widens to little fields, the
+Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch
+to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round
+rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the canyon forks to right
+and left up other forested canyons, many of which, save for the hunter,
+have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge
+round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords,
+loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the
+two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty
+miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You
+are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no
+lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the
+wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear
+their summits is the head of Pecos Canyon--a sort of snow top to the
+sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the
+west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right
+on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except
+the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.
+
+[Illustration: The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically
+communal dwellings five stories in height]
+
+I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in
+addition a cowboy slicker and was cold--this in a land where the
+Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old
+Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining
+camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the canyon.
+Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say
+it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks
+me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my
+collapsible drinking cup to go down to the canyon for some water.
+Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup
+off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten
+years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.
+
+Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the canyon. From this
+point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks
+seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a
+dozen canyons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them.
+In fact, if you followed up any of these side canyons, you would find
+them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet
+untrod.
+
+Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a
+bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high
+known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past
+the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through
+the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this
+10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another
+important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing
+worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own
+depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and
+twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy
+occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what
+thousands are doing--combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing
+with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this
+ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.
+
+Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper
+Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the
+exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for
+the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the
+snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of
+the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Canyon, and the whole Pecos Valley
+below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom
+cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the
+work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and
+hunt in Pecos Canyon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire;
+and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this
+compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of
+trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all
+through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put
+out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local
+congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of
+funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest
+timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the
+fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of
+penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year
+the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the
+men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle
+against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long
+past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making
+will do to prevent fires.
+
+We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down
+the east side into the Las Vegas Canyon. Four feet of snow still clung to
+the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across
+the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper
+peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that
+Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement
+that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though
+it is so very old. The holy _padre_ was jogging along on his mule one
+night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his
+vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule
+stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his
+book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on
+the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an _Ave
+Maria_; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as
+Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CANYON
+
+
+I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction
+but fact. I am not speculating as to _how_ those folk of neolithic times
+lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses _where_ they lived,
+sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance
+stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined
+tread of aeons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world
+from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley
+a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred _kiva_ or
+ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a
+circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before
+Julius Caesar was born, before--if Egyptian archaeologists be correct--the
+dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their
+own oblivion. To my right and left for miles--for twelve miles, to be
+correct--are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the
+cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered
+Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock
+at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls
+too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow
+pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this
+valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before
+the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a
+record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England,
+contemporaneous, perhaps--for all science knows to the contrary--with
+that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.
+
+Lying in my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and
+to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow cliff wall, I
+fell to wondering on this puzzle of archaeologist and historian--what
+desolated these bygone nations? The theory of desiccation, or drought,
+so plausible elsewhere, doesn't hold for one minute when you are here on
+the spot; for there is the mountain brook brawling through the Valley
+not five minutes' scramble from any one of these caves; and there on the
+far western sky-line are the snows of the Jemez Mountains, which must
+have fed this brook since this part of the earth began. Was it war, or
+pestilence, or captivity, that made of the populous city a den of
+wolves, a resort for hoot owl and bittern and fox? If pestilence, then
+why are the skeletons not found in the great ossuaries and masses that
+mark the pestilential destruction of other Indian races? There remain
+only the alternatives of war, or captivity; and of either, not the
+vestige of a shadow of a tradition remains. One man's guess is as good
+as another's; and the scientist's guesses vary all the way from 8,000 B.
+C. to 400 A. D. So there you are! You have as good a right to a guess
+as the highest scientist of them all; and while I refrain from
+speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that
+these people of the Stone Age were not the gibbering, monkey-tailed
+maniacs of claw finger nails and simian jaw which the half-baked
+pseudo-evolutionist loves to picture of Stone Age denizens. As Jack
+Donovan, a character working at Judge Abbott's in the Valley
+said--"Sure, monkey men wud a' had a haard time scratchin' thro' thim
+cliffs and makin' thim holes in the rocks." Remnants of shard and
+pottery, structure of houses, decorations and woven cloths and skins
+found wrapped as cerements round the dead all prove that these men were
+a sedentary and for that age civilized people. When our Celt and Saxon
+ancestors were still chasing wild boars through the forests, these
+people were cultivating corn on the Upper and Lower Mesas. When Imperial
+Rome's common populace boasted few garments but the ones in which they
+had been born, these people were wearing a cloth woven of fiber and
+rushes. When European courts trod the stately over floors of filthy
+rushes, these cliff dwellers had flooring of plaster and cement, and
+rugs of beaver and wolf and bear. All this you can see with your own
+eyes by examining the caves and skeletons of the Jemez Forests; and the
+fine glaze of the beautiful pottery work is as lost an art as the
+pigments of old Italy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go into the Jemez to
+dream. You go to Pecos to hunt and fish. So you do to the Jemez; but it
+is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of
+man you are fishing for. As the Pecos Forests appeal to the strenuous
+holiday hunter--the man who considers he has not had his fun till he has
+broken a leg killing a bear, or stood mid-waist in snow-water stringing
+fish on a line like beads on a string--so the Jemez appeals to the
+dreamer, the scholar, the scientist, the artist; and I can imagine no
+more ideal (nor cheaper) holiday than to join the American School of
+Archaeology, about which I have already spoken, that comes in here with
+scientists from every quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and
+dig, and delve, and revel in the past of moonlight nights round
+campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the
+face of the cliff. The School has been a going concern for only a few
+years. Yet last year over 150 scientists came in from every quarter of
+the globe.
+
+Spite of warnings to the contrary given to me both East and West, the
+trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest you can make in
+America. You strike in from Santa Fe; and right here, let me set down as
+emphatically as possible, two or three things pleasant and unpleasant
+about Santa Fe.
+
+First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not
+excepting Quebec. Color, age, leisure; a medley of races; sand-hills
+engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor
+blending with the braying of a Mexican burro trotting to market loaded
+out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain and New America; streets with
+less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's
+Board of Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the
+sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and
+chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West
+Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe
+houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door
+or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty
+governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the
+Archaeological Society has its rooms with Lotave's beautiful mural
+paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has
+neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is
+such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set
+down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America,
+yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.
+
+[Illustration: Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez
+Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants]
+
+Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashamed of
+itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask a Santa Fe man why in
+the world, with all its attraction of the picturesque, the antique, the
+snowy mountains, and the weak-lunged one's ideal climate, it has so few
+tourists; and he answers you with a depreciatory shrug that "it's off
+the main line." "Off the main line?" So is Quebec off the main line; yet
+200,000 Americans a year see it. So is Yosemite off the main line; and
+10,000 people go out to it every year. I have never heard that the Nile
+and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the main line; yet foreigners
+yearly reap a fortune catering to visiting Americans. Personally, it is
+a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe-trotter,
+for I am one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa Fe
+blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed to it by the
+grand dons of Spain that is averse to sounding the brass band, I love
+the appealing, picturesque, inert laziness of it all; but I love better
+to ask: "Why go to Egypt, when you have the wonders of an Egypt
+unexplored in your own land? Why scour the crowded Alps when the snowy
+domes of the Santa Fe and Jemez and Sangre de Christo lie unexplored
+only an easy motor ride from your hotel?" If Santa Fe, as it is, were
+known to the big general public, 200,000 tourists a year would find
+delight within its purlieus; and while I like the places untrodden by
+travelers, still--being an outsider, myself,--I should like the
+outsiders to know the same delight Santa Fe has given me.
+
+To finish with the things of the mundane, you strike in to Santa Fe from
+a desolate little junction called Lamy, where the railroad has built a
+picturesque little doll's house of a hotel after the fashion of an old
+Spanish mansion. To reach the Jemez Forests where the ruins of the Cave
+Dwellers exist, you can drive or motor (to certain sections only) or
+ride. As the distance is forty miles plus, you will find it safer and
+more comfortable to drive. If you take a driver and a team, and keep
+both over two days, it will cost you from $10 to $14 for the round trip.
+If you go in on a burro, you can buy the burro outright for $5 or $10.
+(Don't mind if your feet do drag on the ground. It will save being
+pitched.) If you go out with the American School of Archaeology (Address
+Santa Fe for particulars) your transportation will cost you still less,
+perhaps not $2. Once out, in the canyons of the Cave Dwellers, you can
+either camp out with your own tenting and food; or put up at Judge
+Abbott's hospitable ranch house; or quarter yourself free of charge in
+one of the thousands of cliff caves and cook your own food; or sleep in
+the caves and pay for your meals at the ranch. At most, your living
+expenses will not exceed $2 a day. If you do your own cooking, they need
+not be $1 a day.
+
+One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is
+that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way.
+We left Santa Fe at six A. M., the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills.
+I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid
+on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red
+and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me
+that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew
+quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured
+nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet
+to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or
+less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in
+earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande
+and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met
+only two Mexican teams on the way.
+
+From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in
+pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops
+over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely
+deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic _tufa_ hub deep in ash dust,
+so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are
+really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In
+fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural
+dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will
+miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look
+back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths
+have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the
+sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the
+gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then
+your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa
+and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20.
+Here, White Rock Canyon lines both sides of the Rio Grande--precipices
+steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square
+block; and coming into this canyon at right angles are the canyons where
+lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers--some of them hundreds of feet above
+the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain
+streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible canyons, you must drive
+up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand
+feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.
+
+We lunched in a little water canyon, which gashed the mesa side where a
+mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to
+be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the
+Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is
+better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for
+this particular canyon being inaccessible to motors--a climb steep as a
+stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which
+only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper
+mesa--acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park
+but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary
+cloud-line, still girt by that snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We
+followed the trail at a rattling pace--the Archaeological School had
+placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Canyon--and presently, by great
+mounds of building stone covered feet deep by the dust and debris of
+ages, became aware that we were on historic ground. Nor can the theory
+of drought explain the abandonment of this mesa. While it rains heavily
+only two months in the year--July and August--the mesa is so high that
+it is subject to sprinkling rains all months of the year; to be sure not
+enough for springs, but ample to provide forage and grow corn; and for
+water, these sky-top dwellers had access to the water canyons both
+before and behind. What hunting ground it must have been in those old
+days! Even yet you are likely to meet a flock of wild turkey face to
+face; or see a mountain lion slink away, or hear the bark of coyote and
+fox.
+
+"Is this it, Gregoire?" I asked. The mound seemed irregularly to cover
+several acres--pretty extensive remains, I thought.
+
+"Ah, no--no Senorita--wait," warned Gregoire expectantly.
+
+I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short and
+plumb as if you tossed a biscuit over the edge of the Flatiron roof. I
+got out and looked down and then--went dumb! Afterwards, Mrs. Judge
+Abbott told me they thought I was afraid to come down. It wasn't that!
+The thing so far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed or seen; and the
+color--well--those artists accused of over-coloration could not have
+over-colored if they had tried. Pigments have not been invented that
+could do it!
+
+Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara,
+three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of
+blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout
+across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black
+basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge
+and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind
+angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red.
+And picture the face of the cliff under your feet, the sides of the
+massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives,
+pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched
+caves and winding recess and portholes--a city of the dead, silent as
+the dead, old almost as time!
+
+The wind came soughing up the canyon with the sound of the sea. The note
+of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down
+among the tender green, lining the canyon stream, a mourning dove uttered
+her sad threnody--then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more
+silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on
+the edge of the canyon wall and let the palpable past come touching me
+out of the silence.
+
+A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the
+floor of the valley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a
+city of one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other,
+reached by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep in the stone. Where had the
+people gone; and why? What swept their civilization away? When did the
+age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the city of
+their building and choice, of their loves and their hates, and their
+wooing and their weddings, of their birth and their deaths--do not leave
+without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this place of beauty
+and security and thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did
+the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pursued like deer by the
+Apache and the Ute and the Navajo? Or were they marched out captives,
+weeping? Or did they fall by the pestilence? Answer who can! Your guess
+is as good as mine! But there is the sacred ceremonial underground
+chamber where they worshiped the sacred fire and the plumed serpent,
+guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of
+manhood and instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and
+cleanliness and reticence. "If thou art stricken, die like the deer with
+a silent throat," says the adage of the modern Pueblo Indian. "When the
+foolish speak, keep thou silent." "When thou goest on the trail, carry
+only a light blanket." Good talk, all of it, for young boys coming to
+realize themselves and life! And there farther down the valley is the
+stone circle or dancing floor where the people came down from their
+cliff to make merry and express in rhythm the emotions which other
+nations express in poetry and music. The whole city must have been the
+grandstand when the dancing took place down there.
+
+It was Gregoire who called me to myself.
+
+"We cannot take the wagon down there," he said. "No wagon has ever gone
+down here. You walk down slow and I come with the horses, one by one."
+
+It sounded a good deal easier than it looked. I haven't seen a steeper
+stair; and if you imagine five ladders trucked up zigzag against the
+Flatiron Building and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it
+is, you'll have an idea of the appearance of the situation; but it
+looked a great deal harder than it really was, and the trail has since
+been improved. The little steps cut in the volcanic _tufa_ or white
+pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold. They grit to your footstep
+and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to
+make this wonderful Frijoles Canyon accessible to the public, or if the
+Archaeological School can raise the means and cooperate with the Forestry
+Service trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the
+face of this canyon, graded gradually enough for a motor. The day that is
+done, visitors will number not 150 a year but 150,000; for nothing more
+exquisitely beautiful and wonderful exists in America.
+
+It seems almost incredible that Judge and Mrs. Abbott have brought down
+this narrow, steep tier of 600 steps all the building material, all the
+furniture, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place;
+but there the materials are and there is no other trail in but one still
+less accessible.
+
+That afternoon, Mrs. Abbott and I wandered up the valley two or three
+miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundreds of feet up
+the face of the precipice. The cave was first discovered by Judge and
+Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday afternoon walks. The Archaeological
+School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the debris and accumulated erosion
+of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber in its original condition.
+"Restoring the ruins" does not mean "manufacturing ruins." It means
+digging out the erosion that has washed and washed for thousands of
+years down the hillsides during the annual rains. All the caves have
+been originally plastered in a sort of terra cotta or ocher stucco.
+When that is reached and the charred wooden beams of the smoked, arched
+ceilings, restoration stops. The aim is to put the caves as they were
+when the people abandoned them. On the floors is a sort of rock bottom
+of plaster or rude cement. When this is reached, digging stops. It is in
+the process of digging down to these floors that the beautiful specimens
+of prehistoric pottery have been rescued. Some of these specimens may be
+seen in Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian and the Natural History
+Museum in New York, and in the Santa Fe Palace, and the Field Museum of
+Chicago. Sometimes as many as four feet of erosion have overlaid the
+original flooring. When digging down to the flooring of the ceremonial
+cave, an _estufa_ or sacred secret underground council chamber was
+found; and this, too, was restored. The pueblo of roofless chambers seen
+from the hilltop on the floor of the valley was dug from a mound of
+debris. In fact, too great praise cannot be given Dr. Hewitt and his
+co-workers for their labors of restoration; and the fact that Dr. Hewitt
+was a local man has added to the effectiveness of the work, for he has
+been in a position to learn from New Mexican Indians of any discoveries
+and rumors of discoveries in any of the numerous caves up the Rio
+Grande. For instance, when about halfway down the trail that first day,
+at the Frijoles Canyon or Rito de los Frijoles, as it is called, I met on
+an abrupt bend in the trail a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara--blue jean
+suit, red handkerchief around neck, felt hat, huge silver earrings and
+teeth white as pearls--Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the canyon,
+who knows every foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white
+pumice background, it was for an instant as if one of the cave people
+had stepped from the past. Well, it was Wan, as we outsiders call him,
+who one day brought word to the Archaeological workers that he had found
+in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was
+cleaned out or restored, and proved to be a back apartment or burial
+chamber behind other chambers, which had been worn away by the
+centuries' wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a woven cloth
+like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body lying to-day,
+proving that these people understood the art of weaving long before the
+Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade.
+
+You could stay in the Rito Canyon for a year and find a cave of fresh
+interest each day. For instance, there is the one where the form of a
+huge plumed serpent has been etched like a molding round under the
+arched roof. The serpent, it was, that guarded the pools and the
+springs; and when one considers where snakes are oftenest found, it is
+not surprising that the serpent should have been taken as a totem
+emblem. Many of the chambers show six or seven holes in the
+floor--places to connect with the Great Earth Magician below. Little
+alcoves were carved in the arched walls for the urns of meal and water;
+and a sacred fireplace was regarded with somewhat the same veneration as
+ancient Orientals preserved their altar fires. In one cave, some old
+Spanish _padre_ has come and carved a huge cross, in rebuke to pagan
+symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of
+goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish regime; and there are other
+caves where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the
+Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could
+speak they "would a tale unfold."
+
+[Illustration: Looking down on the ruins of a prehistoric dwelling from
+one of the upper caves in the Rito de las Frijoles, New Mexico]
+
+The aim of the Archaeological Society is year by year to restore portions
+till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial
+aid, complete restoration can hardly take place inside a century. When
+you consider that the Rito is only one of many prehistoric areas of New
+Mexico, of Utah, of Colorado, awaiting restoration, you are constrained
+to wish that some philanthropist would place a million or two at the
+disposal of the Archaeological Society. If this were done, no place on
+earth could rival the Rito; for the funds would make possible not only
+the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of debris,
+but it would make the Canyon accessible to the general public by easier,
+nearer roads. The inaccessibility of the Rito may be in harmony with its
+ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thousands of
+tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests.
+
+There are other things to do in the Canyon besides explore the City of
+the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through
+parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet
+classified. There is the globe cactus high up on the black basalt
+rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun.
+There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse
+beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the
+short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which
+Tennyson sings in "Maud." Presently, you notice the stream banks
+crushing together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite
+and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as
+mist.
+
+Follow farther down! The canyon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor
+between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to
+follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm
+day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for
+if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down
+a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain,
+and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and
+darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of
+spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery
+as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down--down--down--tumbled the
+waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge
+to another in spray, then down--down--down to the Rio Grande, many feet
+below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a
+shiver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the
+great archaeologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the
+simple words--"The Rito is a beautiful place."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA
+
+
+They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a
+sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and
+down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said
+that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has
+said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted
+Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream
+Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and
+deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart
+business tricks of modern Yankeedom.
+
+Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old
+pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there
+was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off
+that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish,
+present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted
+pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First
+march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to
+leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn.
+Back at Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one
+of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet
+hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish dons are
+followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides
+the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700,
+sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of
+the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me
+whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa--called
+Enchanted--or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of
+the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is--pagan
+hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with
+the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed
+these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.
+
+Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors
+have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a
+winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can
+imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and
+necklaces and turquoise-set buttons down trouser leg, scouring below
+these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the
+Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts
+and crafts of the Hopi people--silver work, weaving, basketry--into the
+Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether
+the raid took place a minute before midday, or a second after
+nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads
+over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and
+Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took
+refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find.
+There you can see their cities and towns to this day.
+
+And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost
+in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line
+from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and
+Laguna and Acoma and Zuni and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and
+Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will
+find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will,
+which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not
+even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some
+of these ruins--in the Manzanos and in western Arizona--would house a
+modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they:
+council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once
+peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you
+not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert,
+this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than
+picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?
+
+[Illustration: A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among
+the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household]
+
+There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel
+as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But
+if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff
+Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from
+the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand
+Canyon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously
+known as Moki, Zuni, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and
+life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them,
+though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can
+visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but
+Isleta has been so frequently "toured" by sightseers, I preferred to go
+to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the
+western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the
+Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can
+cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.
+
+Up to the present, the inconvenience of reaching Acoma will effectually
+prevent it ever being "toured." When you have to take a local train that
+lands you in an Indian town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in
+the morning, or else take a freight, which you reach by driving a mile
+out of town, fording an irrigation ditch and crawling under a barb wire
+fence--there is no immediate danger of the objective point being rushed
+by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the
+traffic. If anything as unique and wonderful as Acoma existed in Egypt
+or Japan, it would be featured and visited by thousands of Americans
+yearly. As it is, I venture to say, not a hundred travelers see Acoma's
+Enchanted Mesa in a year, and half the number going out fail to see it
+properly owing to inexperience in Western ways of meeting and managing
+Indians. For instance, the day before I went out, a traveler all the way
+from Germany had dropped off the transcontinental and taken a local
+freight for the Hopi towns. When a tourist wants to see things in
+Germany, he finds a hundred willing palms out to collect and point the
+way; but when a tourist leaves the beaten trail in America, if he asks
+too many questions, he is promptly told to "go to--" I'll not say where.
+That German wasn't in a good mood when he dropped off the freight train
+at Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the Marmons, but there is no
+regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good
+Westerner, you will carry your own luncheon, or take cheerful pot luck
+as it comes; but the German wasn't a good Westerner; and it didn't
+improve his temper to have butter served up mixed with flies to the tune
+of the landlady's complaint that "it didn't pay nohow to take tourists"
+and she "didn't see what she did it for anyway."
+
+They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from
+twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once,
+Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as
+easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his
+temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity
+leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart
+rock and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course,
+missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is
+a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could
+not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at
+Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the
+crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too
+fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically
+characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own
+advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a
+good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a
+month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff--and thousands of
+travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma,
+literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world;
+and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to
+put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder
+people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw
+away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round
+that way so you could see it by moonlight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me _very_ seriously to rise
+at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile
+to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an
+_acequia_ ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.
+The desert sunrise atoned for all--air pure wine, the red-winged
+blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the
+overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough
+to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of
+the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man
+edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the
+true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and shirts seen on the figures
+moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in
+diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed
+brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed
+fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less
+than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue,
+brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder
+straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments
+completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet
+cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep
+stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are
+now affecting the latter.
+
+The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible
+drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie
+dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost
+knocks you off your feet.
+
+The railroad passes almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that
+when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story
+houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get
+off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of
+Laguna are past. Long ago--in the fifties or thereabouts--the dam to the
+lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of
+flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away
+for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged
+herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated
+here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology
+that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all
+that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town
+limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds;
+or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme
+a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is
+female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his
+saddle and bridle, and leave.
+
+"I marry, yes," said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, "and I have one
+girl--her," pointing to a pretty child, "but my man, I guess he--a bad
+boy--he leave me."
+
+If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and
+bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.
+
+I set this fact down because a whole school of modern sex sociologists,
+taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an
+Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution of
+woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality
+among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.
+
+At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you
+must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance
+luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr.
+Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the
+Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has
+usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower
+people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the
+pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi
+communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of
+the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early
+seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married
+Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After
+almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879
+succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to
+school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading
+citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce
+children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day,
+there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and
+Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen
+hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you
+may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of
+downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through
+the roof.
+
+[Illustration: _Copyright by H. S. Poley_
+
+A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave]
+
+Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet
+straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of
+doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant--Marie
+Iteye--speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching
+and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets--1st, 2nd
+and 3rd, they call them--of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a
+white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all
+whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the
+first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but
+then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the
+porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling,
+purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the
+sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these
+third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the
+floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways
+opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy
+being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads
+and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of
+the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians
+curiously discouraged about results.
+
+"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one
+teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."
+
+"Doubt if it ever does much good?" I should like to take that teacher
+and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and
+then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not
+be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and
+sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has
+barely begun--well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four
+winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could
+barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large
+pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer. At Acoma, you
+feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and
+traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking
+your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid
+and degenerate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma;
+and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as
+you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a
+motor if you have one.
+
+Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the
+yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes
+straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous,
+voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and
+carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf,
+miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod--gorgeous
+desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was
+an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have
+not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.
+
+Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of
+Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jose River,
+jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been,
+or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of
+the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull
+steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods
+over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy
+river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and
+the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat
+topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant
+sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It
+dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.
+Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split
+by the shimmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors,
+transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam
+shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus shines with
+the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern
+conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild
+poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars,
+they draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like
+bits of heaven, because their faces shine with the light of an unclouded
+sky from dawn to dark.
+
+You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses
+belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on
+horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the
+figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses
+and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in
+Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off
+earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids
+enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an
+Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and
+lilac light and heat haze shimmering and unreal as a poet's vision.
+
+It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the
+planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to shimmer and
+shift and lift from earth in mirage altogether.
+
+You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of
+herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not
+poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready
+money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches
+suffice for meal.
+
+Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pass into a
+large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow
+_tufa_ walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky
+and unreal. Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when
+you lift your eyes, and there--straight ahead--lies an enchanted island
+in this lake of light, shimmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical
+yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three
+Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of
+perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or
+sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple
+sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.
+
+Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. "The
+Enchanted Mesa," he says.
+
+I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man
+has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a
+race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge
+rock? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Are there pottery remnants of
+a dead city? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Both men climbed the
+rock, though Hill Ki tells me confidentially they "were very scare,"
+when it came to throwing a rope up over the end of the rock, to pull the
+climber up as if by pulley. Marmon and Pratt have both been up; and Hill
+Ki tells me so have two venturesome white women climbers, whose names he
+does not know, but "they weren't scare." As we pass from the end to the
+side of the Enchanted Mesa, it is seen to be an oblong slab utterly cut
+off from all contact but so indented halfway up at one end as to be
+ascended by a good climber to within distance of throwing a rope over
+the top. The quarrel between Lummis and Hodge has waxed hotter and
+hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa without any finale to the dispute; and
+far be it from an outsider like myself to umpire warfare amid the gods
+of the antiquarian; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acoma
+Indians may explain the whole matter; and that both men may be partly
+right? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports
+that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony. Before a
+youth reaches manhood, while he is still being instructed in the
+mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council room or _kiva_, it is
+customary for the Acomas to blindfold him and send him to the top of the
+Enchanted Mesa for a night's lonely vigil with a jar of water as
+oblation to the spirits. These jars explain the presence of pottery,
+which Lummis describes. They would also give credence to at least
+periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of house ruins, on the
+other hand, would explain why Hodge scouted Lummis' theory. The Indians
+explained to Miss McLain that a boy could climb blindfolded where he
+could not go open-eyed, a fact that all mountain engineers will
+substantiate.
+
+[Illustration: A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona]
+
+But what matters the quarrel? Is not the whole region an Enchanted Mesa,
+one of the weirdest bits of the New World? You have barely rounded the
+Enchanted Mesa, when another oblong colossus looms to the fore, sheer
+precipice, but accessible by tiers of sand and stone at the far end;
+that is, accessible by handhold and foothold. Look again! Along the top
+of the walled precipice, a crest to the towering slab, is a human wall,
+the walls of an adobe streetful of houses, little windows looking out
+flush with the precipice line like the portholes of a ship. Then you see
+something red flutter and move at the very edge of the rock top--Hopi
+urchins, who have spied us like young eagles in their eyrie, and shout
+and wave down at us, though we can barely hear their voices. It looks
+for all the world like the top story of a castle above a moat.
+
+At the foot of the sand-hill, I ask Hill Ki, why, now that there is no
+danger from Spaniard and Navajo, the Hopi continue to live so high up
+where they must carry all their supplies sheer, vertical hundreds of
+feet, at least 1,500 if you count all the wiggling in and out and around
+the stone steps and stone ladders, and niched handholds. Hill Ki grins
+as he unhitches his horses, and answers: "You understan' when you go up
+an' see!" But he does not offer to escort me up.
+
+As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little
+Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.
+Though she cannot speak one word of English and I cannot speak one word
+of Hopi we keep up a most voluble conversation by gesture. Don't ask how
+we did it! It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. She is
+dressed in white, home-woven skirt with a white rag for a head
+shawl--badge of the good girl; and her stockings come only to the
+ankles, leaving the feet bare. The feet of all the Hopi are abnormally
+small, almost monkey-shaped; and when you think of it, it is purely
+cause and effect. The foot is not flat and broad, because it is
+constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the
+Hopi women look at my broad-soled, box-toed outing boots in amazement.
+At hard spots in the climb, they would turn and point to my boots and
+offer me help till I showed them that the sole, though thick, was
+pliable as a moccasin.
+
+The little girl signaled; did I want to go up?
+
+I nodded.
+
+She signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; or the long,
+easy path by the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well
+as foothold, and the sand promised to roll you back fast as you climbed
+up, I signaled the hard way; and off we set. I asked her how old she
+was; and she seemed puzzled how to answer by signs till she thought of
+her fingers--then up went eight with a tap to her chest signifying self.
+I asked her what had caused such sore inflammation in her eyes. She
+thought a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winnowed one hand as of
+wind--the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation up for three
+hours without a word being spoken; but by this, a little hand sought
+mine in various affectionate squeezes, and a pair of very sore eyes
+looked up with confidence, and what was lacking in words, she made up in
+shy smiles. Poor little Hopi kiddie! Will your man "be bad boy," too, by
+and by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white
+civilization that is encroaching on your tenacious, conservative race?
+After all, you are better off, little kiddie, a thousand fold, than if
+you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York.
+
+By this, what with wind, and sand, and the weight of a kodak and a
+purse, and the hard ascent, one of the two climbers has to pause for
+breath; and what do you think that eight-year-old bit of small humanity
+does? Turns to give me a helping hand. That is too much for gravity. I
+laugh and she laughs and after that, I think she would have given me
+both hands and both feet and her soul to boot. She offers to carry my
+kodak and films and purse; and for three hours, I let her. Can you
+imagine yourself letting a New York, or Paris, or London street gamin
+carry your purse for three hours? Yet the Laguna people had told me to
+look out for myself. I'd find the Acomas uncommonly sharp.
+
+That climb is as easy to the Acomas as your home stairs to you; but it's
+a good deal more arduous to the outsider than a climb up the whole
+length of the Washington Monument, or up the Metropolitan Tower in New
+York; but it is all easily possible. Where the sand merges to stone, are
+handhold niches as well as stone steps; and where the rock steps are too
+steep, are wooden ladders. At last, we swing under a great overhanging
+stone--splendid weapon if the Navajos had come this way in old days, and
+splendid place for slaughter of the Spanish soldiers, who scaled Acoma
+two centuries ago--up a tier of stone steps, and we are on top of the
+white limestone Mesa, in the town of Acoma, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
+streets, and its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd story houses, the first roof reached
+by a movable ladder, the next two roofs by stone steps.
+
+I shall not attempt to describe the view from above. Take Washington's
+Shaft; multiply by two, set it down in Sahara Desert, climb to the top
+and look abroad! That is the view from Acoma. Is the trip worth while?
+Is mountain climbing worth while? Do you suppose half a hundred people
+would yearly break their necks in Switzerland if climbing were not worth
+while? As Hill Ki said when I asked him why they did not move their city
+down now that all danger of raid had passed, "You go up an' see!" Now I
+understood. The water pools were but glints of silver on the yellow
+sands. The flocks of sheep and goats looked like ants. The rampart rocks
+that engirt the valley were yellow rims below; and across the tops of
+the far mesas could be seen scrub forests and snowy peaks. Have
+generations--generations on generations--of life amid such color had
+anything to do with the handicrafts of these people--pottery, basketry,
+weaving, becoming almost an art? Certainly, their work is the most
+artistic handicraft done by Indians in America to-day.
+
+Boys and girls, babies and dogs, rush to salute us as we come up; but my
+little guide only takes tighter hold of my hand and "shoos" them off. We
+pass a deep pool of waste water from the houses, lying in the rocks, and
+on across the square to the twin-towered church in front of which is a
+rudely fenced graveyard. The whole mesa is solid, hard rock; and to make
+this graveyard for their people, the women have carried up on their
+backs sand and soil enough to fill in a depression for a burying place.
+The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally
+a bank of human limestone.
+
+[Illustration: At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the
+pueblos in New Mexico]
+
+I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma
+who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the
+square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red
+skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise
+ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak
+such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It
+is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another
+shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.
+
+She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the
+finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above
+sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest
+gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the
+railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out
+in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at
+the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for
+ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.
+
+Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and
+chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier
+of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third
+story room; and a cleaner room I have never seen in a white woman's
+house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window
+between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle
+might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking
+water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement,
+and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is
+spotless.
+
+"Where do you sleep, Marie?" I ask.
+
+"Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime."
+
+And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her
+father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone
+through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.
+
+And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact
+testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon
+and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as
+different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the
+Bowery.
+
+All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting
+wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts
+of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as
+the Acomas descend.
+
+We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps,
+preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act
+took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours'
+visit amid the gamins of New York, or London? At the foot of the cliff,
+we shook hands all round and said good-by; and when I looked back up the
+valley, the children were still waving and waving. If this be humble
+Indian life in its Simon pure state, with all freedom from our rules of
+conduct, all I have to say is it is infinitely superior to the hoodlum
+life of our cities and towns.
+
+One point more: I asked Marie as I had asked Mr. Marmon, "Do you think
+your people are Indians, or Aztecs?" and the answer came without a
+moment's hesitation--"Aztecs; we are not Indian like Navajo and
+Apaches."
+
+Opposite the Enchanted Mesa, I looked back. My little guide was still
+gazing wistfully after us, waving her shawl and holding tight to a coin
+which I trust no old grimalkin pried out of her hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND
+
+
+When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail
+on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or
+all three courses if you have time.
+
+You may strike up into Zuni Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the
+White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated
+that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of
+the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found
+under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain
+cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man--and likely
+to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and
+forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock
+declivity, an almost desert-forest growth--dwarf juniper and cedar and
+giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off
+intruders--and you can understand why some of the most magnificent
+specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here
+undisturbed by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains,
+you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the
+Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you
+find Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, the former, a colossal
+community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders;
+the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in
+almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate
+all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came
+in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric
+occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the
+second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that
+quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.
+
+Or you may skip the short trip out to Zuni off the main traveled
+highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains--two weeks
+at the very shortest, and you should make it six--and leave Gallup, just
+at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve
+and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab,
+round the Grand Canyon up towards the State lines of California and Utah.
+If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last
+one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and
+mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of
+high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting
+seas of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the
+movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It
+isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first
+high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world,
+a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks
+and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America
+at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these
+Navajo boys--a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a
+hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or
+bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white
+cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more
+silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an
+Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red
+sand knobs--you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their
+_hogan_ houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain,
+scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving
+at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night
+and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of
+silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the
+juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the
+wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot
+vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat--bleating till the air
+quivers--driven by little Navajo girls on horseback, born to the
+saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.
+
+If you can't go to Zuni Land and the White Mountain Forest and the
+Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the
+sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort.
+Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own
+Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in
+antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of
+the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place--in the Coconino
+and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Canyon. And if the lure of the antique
+still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent
+lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is
+emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me
+there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the
+antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric
+ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of
+the world in the School of Archaeology at Rome, "the more undecided we
+become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America,
+or that of America preceded the Orient."
+
+For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into
+Canyon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above
+the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined
+chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could
+hide and lose a dozen of our national White House. Who built the
+aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in
+it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of
+answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you
+haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do
+your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route--cost for
+team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a
+well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will
+know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered
+the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.
+
+To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at
+Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Canyon; but to cross it,
+you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and
+drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to
+point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to
+$7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack
+animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price--$25 to
+$40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a
+white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is
+as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools
+where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in
+the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months--July and
+August--does not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and
+night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof,
+and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air
+that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like
+jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself
+into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at
+midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling;
+but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000
+to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in
+the Canadian Northwest.
+
+Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr.
+Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers
+crossing the Desert--open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered
+money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult.
+It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door
+was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you
+expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was
+presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely
+sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum
+and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of
+the _noblesse oblige_ which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code
+of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but
+vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write,
+ill-suited to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the
+Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows
+that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern
+Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining
+passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see
+again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In
+the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this
+was well; but to-day--well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where
+the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals
+come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to
+hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a
+dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and
+sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the
+Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kitchen
+quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt;
+Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would
+respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness
+that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted
+Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived
+unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host
+that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his
+at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the
+house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for
+three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very
+roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly
+ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His
+host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his
+own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through
+the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after
+all."
+
+[Illustration: A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and
+picturesque]
+
+"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused
+me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this
+instant."
+
+The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American
+travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands
+of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When
+that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all
+visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp
+kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point,
+or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three
+Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.
+
+We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team
+locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip,
+though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy
+sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day
+we wanted them.
+
+The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town
+till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and
+cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost
+air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled
+ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch
+house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their
+spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in
+the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa--globe
+cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue
+forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod
+mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you
+drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming
+below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows--blue shadows, sure
+sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is
+the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but
+a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in
+the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a
+sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected.
+You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuni boys are loping along
+the trail in front of you--red headband, hair in a braid, red sash,
+velvet trousers--the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite
+of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is
+a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the Zuni or Hopi,
+and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuni lads will
+set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles
+in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo
+girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It
+all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering
+her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and
+you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own
+desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.
+
+The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped _tufa_ rocks to the right of the road,
+mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has
+splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all
+travelers--a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the
+face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain,
+but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects
+struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests
+another explanation.
+
+Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St.
+Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white,
+green-shuttered building as silent as the grave--St. Michael's Mission,
+where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway
+to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the
+mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off
+beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr. and Mrs. Day, two of the best
+known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the
+convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive
+structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and
+Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.
+
+And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being
+lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother
+Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only
+we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine
+quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work
+of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to
+the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians
+into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians
+with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are
+to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins
+alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to
+post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the
+Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad
+enough for them to expand--14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land--and
+against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father
+Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or
+three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers
+among the Navajos. Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are
+doing.
+
+You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter
+appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard
+will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough,
+brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine
+yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There
+is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated
+scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit
+missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do
+you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay
+helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his
+share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and
+issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!
+
+Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School,
+drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second
+volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined
+glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and
+crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician
+would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the
+masterpiece of his life--hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten
+years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for
+their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets
+and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the
+heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the
+names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures
+instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and
+other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone
+sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal
+dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he
+has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels
+anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum
+of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky
+way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white,
+blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine
+man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes
+Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars--and puff, with one breath he
+has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all
+over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid"
+teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi
+deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who
+taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the
+Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn
+stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up
+to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian drawings
+are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman
+deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo
+lore? If all ethnologists and archaeologists had founded their studies on
+the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy
+version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in
+our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.
+
+Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo
+blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering
+by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever
+Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a
+drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For
+instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a
+Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of "green" in it. Dressing in
+disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the
+alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the
+benefit of gullible tourists.
+
+"Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?" Father Berrard asked
+the unsuspecting dealer.
+
+"From frog ponds," answered the store man of a region where water is
+scarce as hens' teeth.
+
+Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the
+medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars
+are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished
+and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his _nom de plume_ shall
+be "Frog Pond Green."
+
+If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at
+either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were
+conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School
+for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not
+to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside
+and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all
+fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in
+birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the
+first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit
+relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other
+associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous
+cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never
+saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced,
+black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness
+should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil;
+that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to
+be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one
+yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common;
+and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning
+up for future festivities.
+
+We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room,
+parlor and refectory, where two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts
+of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside
+world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in
+every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender,
+understanding eyes.
+
+Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell
+sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know
+this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on
+the hill to the right--eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the
+fading light.
+
+Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in
+vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces
+bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from
+the stalls--is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that
+age-old, never-failing spring of Service?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND (_continued_)
+
+
+There are two ways to travel even off the beaten trail. One is to take a
+map, stake out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up
+to them lightning-flier fashion. If you want to, and are prepared to
+kill your horses, you can cross Navajo Land in from three to four days.
+Even going at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring
+of the Painted Desert, of the light lying in shimmering heat layers
+split by the refraction of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an
+atmosphere with the tang of northern ozone and the resinous scent of
+incense and frankincense and myrrh. You can see the Desert flowers that
+vie with the sun in brilliant coloring; and feel the Desert night sky
+come down so close to you that you want to reach up a hand and pluck the
+jack-o'-lantern stars swinging so low through the pansy-velvet mist. You
+can even catch a flying glimpse of the most picturesque Indian race in
+America, the Navajos. Their _hogans_ or circular, mud-wattled houses,
+are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and just
+when you think you are most alone, driving through the sagebrush and
+dwarf juniper, the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attention to a
+flock of sheep and goats scattered almost invisibly up a blue-green
+hillside. Blue-green, did you say? Yes: that's another thing you can
+unlearn on a flying trip--the geography definition of a Desert is about
+as wrong as a definition could be made. A Desert isn't necessarily a
+vast sandy plain, stretching out in flat and arid waste. It's as
+variegated in its growth and landscape as your New England or Old
+England hills and vales, only your Eastern rivers flow all the time, and
+your Desert rivers are apt to disappear through evaporation and sink
+below the surface during the heat of the day, coming up again in floods
+during the rainy months, and in pools during the cool of morning and
+evening.
+
+But on a flying trip, you can't learn the secret moods of the Painted
+Desert. You can't draw so much of its atmosphere into your soul that you
+can never think of it again without such dream-visions floating you away
+in its blue-gray-lilac mists as wrapped the seers of old in clairvoyant
+prophetic ecstasy. On a flying trip, you can learn little or nothing of
+the Arab life of our own Desert nomads. You have to depend on Blue Book
+reports of "the Navajos being a dangerous, warlike race" blasted into
+submission by the effulgent glory of this, that, and the other military
+martinet writing himself down a hero. Whereas, if you go out leisurely
+among the traders and missionaries and Indians themselves, who--more's
+the pity--have no hand in preparing official reports, you will learn
+another story of a quiet, pastoral race who have for three hundred
+years been the victims of white man greed and white man lust, of
+blundering incompetency and hysterical cowardice.
+
+These are strong words. Let me give some instances. We were having
+luncheon in the priests' refectory of the Franciscan Mission; and for
+the benefit of those who imagine that missionaries to the Indians are
+fat and bloated on three hundred a year, I should like to set down the
+fact that the refectory was in a sort of back kitchen, that we ate off a
+red table-cloth with soup served in a basin and bath towels extemporized
+into serviettes. I had asked about a Navajo, who not long ago went
+locoed right in Cincinnati station and began stabbing murderously right
+and left.
+
+"In the first place," answered the Franciscan, "that Indian ought not to
+have been in Cincinnati at all. In the second place, he ought not to
+have been there alone. In the third place, he had great provocation."
+
+Here is the story, as I gathered it from traders and missionaries and
+Indians. The Navajo was having trouble over title to his land. That was
+wrong the first on the part of the white man. It was necessary for him
+to go to Washington to lay his grievance before the Government. Now for
+an Indian to go to Washington is as great an undertaking as it was for
+Stanley to go to Darkest Africa. The trip ought not to have been
+necessary if our Indian Office had more integrity and less red-tape;
+but the local agency provided him with an interpreter. The next great
+worry to the Navajo was that he could not get access to "The Great White
+Father." There were interminable red-tape and delay. Finally, when he
+got access to the Indian Office, he could get no definite, prompt
+settlement. With this accumulation of small worries, insignificant
+enough to a well-to-do white man but mighty harassing to a poor Indian,
+he set out for home; and at the station in Washington, the interpreter
+left him. The Navajo could not speak one word of English. Changing cars
+in Cincinnati, hustled and jostled by the crowds, he suddenly felt for
+his purse--he had been robbed. Now, the Navajo code is if another tribe
+injures his tribe, it is his duty to go forth instantly and strike that
+offender. Our own Saxon and Highland Scotch ancestors once had a code
+very similar. The Indian at once went locoed--lost his head, and began
+stabbing right and left. The white man newspaper told the story of the
+murderous assault in flare head lines; but it didn't tell the story of
+wrongs and procrastination. The Indian Office righted the land matter;
+but that didn't undo the damage. Through the efforts of the missionaries
+and the traders, the Indian was permitted to plead insanity. He was sent
+to an asylum, where he must have had some queer thoughts of white man
+justice. Just recently, he has been released under bonds.
+
+The most notorious case of wrong and outrage and cowardice and murder
+known in Navajo Land was that of a few years ago, when the Indian agent
+peremptorily ordered a Navajo to bring his child in to the Agency
+School. Not so did Marmon and Pratt sway the Indians at Laguna, when the
+Pueblos there were persuaded to send their children to Carlisle; and
+Miss Drexel's Mission has never yet issued peremptory orders for
+children to come to school; but the martinet mandate went forth. Now,
+the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also
+stipulates that the school shall be placed within reach of the child;
+and the Navajo knew that he was within his right in refusing to let the
+child leave home when the Government had failed to place the school
+within such distance of his _hogan_. He was then warned by the agent
+that unless the child were sent within a certain time, troops would be
+summoned from Ft. Wingate and Ft. Defiance. The Indians met, pow-wowed
+with one another, and decided they were still within their right in
+refusing. There can be no doubt but that if Captain Willard, himself,
+had been in direct command of the detachment, the cowardly murder would
+not have occurred; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops
+arrived on the scene in charge of a hopelessly incompetent subordinate,
+who proved himself not only a bully but a most arrant coward. According
+to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the
+Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of them were in one of the mud
+_hogans_. They offered no resistance. They say they were not even
+summoned to surrender. Traders, who have talked with the Navajos
+present, say the troopers surrounded the _hogan_ in the dark, a
+soldier's gun went off by mistake and the command was given in
+hysterical fright to "fire." The Indians were so terrified that they
+dashed out to hide in the sagebrush. "Bravery! Indian bravery--pah," one
+officer of the detachment was afterwards heard to exclaim. Two Navajos
+were killed, one wounded, eleven captured in as cold-blooded a murder as
+was ever perpetrated by thugs in a city street. Without lawyers, without
+any defense whatsoever, without the hearing of witnesses, without any
+fair trial whatsoever, the captives were sentenced to the penitentiary.
+It needed only a finishing touch to make this piece of Dreyfusism
+complete; and that came when a little missionary voiced the general
+sense of outrage by writing a letter to a Denver paper. President
+Roosevelt at once dispatched someone from Washington to investigate; and
+it was an easy matter to scare the wits out of the little preacher and
+declare the investigation closed. In fact, it was one of the things that
+would not bear investigation; but the evidence still exists in Navajo
+Land, with more, which space forbids here but which comes under the
+sixty-fifth Article of War. The officer guilty of this outrage has since
+been examined as to his sanity and brought himself under possibilities
+of a penitentiary term on another count. He is still at middle age a
+subordinate officer.
+
+These are other secrets of the Painted Desert you will daily con if you
+go leisurely across the great lone Reserve and do not take with you the
+lightning-express habits of urban life.
+
+For instance, in the account of the Cave Dwellers of the Frijoles
+reference was made to the Indian legend of "the heavens raining fire"
+(volcanic action) and driving the prehistoric Pueblo peoples from their
+ancient dwelling. Mrs. Day of St. Michael's, who has forgotten more lore
+than the scientists will ever pick up, told me of a great chunk of lava
+found by Mr. Day in which were embedded some perfect specimens of
+corn--which seems to sustain the Indian legend of volcanic outburst
+having destroyed the ancient nations here. The slab was sent East to a
+museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a
+fusion of adobe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward
+by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading
+post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed
+Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led
+through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of
+such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of grass grows below the
+conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour; and there is an
+all-pervasive odor, not of burning, but of steaming resin, or pine sap
+heated to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs up to an
+altitude of almost 9,000 feet, with air so light that you feel a buoyant
+lift to your heart-beats and a clearing of the cobwebs from your brain.
+You can lose lots of sleep here and not feel it. All heaviness has gone
+out of body and soul. In fact, when you come back to lower levels, the
+air feels thick and hard to breathe. And you can go hard here and not
+tire, and stand on the crest of mesas that anywhere else would be
+considered mountains, and wave your arms above the top of the world. So
+high you are--you did not realize it--that the rim of encircling
+mountains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge
+of an inverted blue bowl.
+
+[Illustration: The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona,
+stands on a mesa high above the plain]
+
+The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line
+altogether among the sagebrush shimmering in pure light; and you become
+aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain
+peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is--life of
+bird or beast--at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the
+scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the
+side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life
+of any kind possible in the Desert.
+
+Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just
+at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cluster of adobe ranch
+houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats
+and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering
+pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each
+child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that
+child's wealth for life. Navajo men rode up and down the arroyo bed as
+graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store
+building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the
+season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children
+squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in
+the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in
+the close-fitting plush shirts; color in the Germantown blankets--for
+the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and
+lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red
+sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where
+riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder
+Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land
+of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't
+seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously
+beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best
+work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in
+Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands
+only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy
+Lands equals in expressiveness and power Lungren's studies of the
+Desert; though the Pre-Raphaelites commanded prices of $10,000 and
+$25,000, where we as a nation grumble about paying our artists one
+thousand and two thousand.
+
+The Navajo driver nodded back to us that this was Ganado; and in a few
+moments Mr. Hubbell had come from the trading post to welcome us under a
+roof that in thirty years has never permitted a stranger to pass its
+doors unwelcomed. As Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell has already entered history in
+the makings of Arizona and as he shuns the limelight quite as
+"mollycoddles" (his favorite term) seek the spotlights, a slight account
+of him may not be out of place. First, as to his house: from the outside
+you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot
+winds are the enemies to comfort. You notice as you enter the front door
+that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a breath. You
+had expected a bare ranch interior with benches and stiff chairs backed
+up against the wall. Instead, you see a huge living-room forty or fifty
+feet long, every square foot of the walls covered by paintings and
+drawings of Western life. Every artist of note (with the exception of
+one) who has done a picture on the Southwest in the last thirty years is
+represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week studying the
+paintings of the Hubbell Ranch. Including sepias, oils and watercolors,
+there must be almost 300 pictures. By chance, you look up to the
+raftered ceiling; a specimen of every kind of rare basketry made by the
+Indians hangs from the beams. On the floor lie Navajo rugs of priceless
+value and rarest weave. When you go over to Mr. Hubbell's office, you
+find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of
+Moki and Navajo blankets. On the walls of the office are more pictures;
+on the floors, more rugs; in the safes and cases, specimens of rare
+silver-work that somehow again remind you of the affinity between Hindoo
+and Navajo. Mr. Hubbell yearly does a quarter-of-a-million-dollar
+business in wool, and yearly extends to the Navajos credit for amounts
+running from twenty-five dollars to fifty thousand dollars--a trust
+which they have never yet betrayed.
+
+Along the walls of the living-room are doors opening to the sleeping
+apartments; and in each of the many guest rooms are more pictures, more
+rugs. Behind the living-room is a _placito_ flanked by the kitchen and
+cook's quarters.
+
+Now what manner of man is this so-called "King of Northern Arizona"? A
+lover of art and a patron of it; also the shrewdest politician and
+trader that ever dwelt in Navajo Land; a man with friends, who would
+like the privilege of dying for him; also with enemies who would keenly
+like the privilege of helping him to die. What the chief factors of the
+Hudson's Bay Company used to be to the Indians of the North, Lorenzo
+Hubbell has been to the Indians of the Desert--friend, guard, counselor,
+with a strong hand to punish when they required it, but a stronger hand
+to befriend when help was needed; always and to the hilt an enemy to the
+cheap-jack politician who came to exploit the Indian, though he might
+have to beat the rascal at his own game of putting up a bigger bluff. In
+appearance, a fine type of the courtly Spanish-American gentleman with
+Castilian blue eyes and black, beetling brows and gray hair; with a
+courtliness that keeps you guessing as to how much more gracious the
+next courtesy can be than the last, and a funny anecdote to cap every
+climax. You would not think to look at Mr. Hubbell that time was when he
+as nonchalantly cut the cards for $30,000 and as gracefully lost it all,
+as other men match dimes for cigars. And you can't make him talk about
+himself. It is from others you must learn that in the great cattle and
+sheep war, in which 150 men lost their lives, it was he who led the
+native Mexican sheep owners against the aggressive cattle crowd. They
+are all friends now, the old-time enemies, and have buried their feud;
+and dynamite will not force Mr. Hubbell to open his mouth on the
+subject. In fact, it was a pair of the "rustlers" themselves who told me
+of the time that the cowboys took a swoop into the Navajo Reserve and
+stampeded off 300 of the Indians' best horses; but they had reckoned
+without Lorenzo Hubbell. In twenty-four hours he had got together the
+swiftest riders of the Navajos; and in another twenty-four hours, he had
+pursued the thieves 125 miles into the wildest canyons of Arizona and had
+rescued every horse. One of the men, whom he had pursued, wiped the
+sweat from his brow in memory of it. He is more than a type of the
+Spanish-American gentleman. He is a type of the man that the Desert
+produces: quiet, soft spoken--powerfully soft spoken--alert, keen,
+relentless and versatile; but also a dreamer of dreams, a seer of
+visions, a passionate patriot, and a lover of art who proves his love by
+buying.
+
+The Navajos are to-day by long odds the most prosperous Indians in
+America. Their vast Reserve offers ample pasturage for their sheep and
+ponies; and though their flocks are a scrub lot, yielding little more
+than fifty to seventy cents a head in wool on the average, still it
+costs nothing to keep sheep and goats. Both furnish a supply of meat.
+The hides fetch ready money. So does the wool, so do the blankets; and
+the Navajos are the finest silversmiths in America. Formerly, they
+obtained their supply of raw silver bullion from the Spaniards; but
+to-day, they melt and hammer down United States currency into butterfly
+brooches and snake bracelets and leather belts with the fifty-cent coins
+changed into flower blossoms with a turquoise center. Ten-cent pieces
+and quarters are transformed into necklaces of silver beads, or buttons
+for shirt and moccasins. If you buy these things in the big Western
+cities, they are costly as Chinese or Hindoo silver; but on the Reserve,
+there is a very simple way of computing the value. First, take the value
+of the coin from which the silver ornament is made. Add a dollar for the
+silversmith's labor; and also add whatever value the turquoise happens
+to be; and you have the price for which true Navajo silver-work can be
+bought out on the Reserve.
+
+Among the Navajos, the women weave the blankets and baskets; among the
+Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The value
+of these out on the Reserve is exactly in proportion to the intricacy of
+the work, the plain native wool colors--black, gray, white and
+brown--varying in price from seventy cents to $1.25 a pound; the fine
+bayetta or red weave, which is finer than any machine can produce and
+everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the
+owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wool shades, I
+need scarcely say here, are in bought mineral dyes. True bayettas, which
+are almost a lost art, bring as high as $1,500 each from a connoisseur.
+Other native wools vary in price according to size and color from $15 to
+$150. Off the Reserve, these prices are simply doubled. From all of
+which, it should be evident that no thrifty Navajo need be poor. His
+house costs nothing. It is made of cedar shakes stuck up in the ground
+crutchwise and wattled with mud. Strangely enough, the Navajo no longer
+uses his own blankets. They are too valuable; also, too heavy for the
+climate. He uses the cheap and gaudy Germantown patterns.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest
+teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from
+Ganado for Keam's Canyon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert
+travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with
+you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied
+passers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a
+system that must surely be changed, not because the public love Mr.
+Hubbell "less, but more."
+
+The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac
+light--tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued
+glory--with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through
+notches of the painted peaks. _Hogan_ after _hogan_, with sheep corrals
+in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys and girls were driving the
+sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you
+drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the
+Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the
+summit--the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you
+are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon
+miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented
+bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the
+appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender
+light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an
+incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin
+to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests.
+In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab
+Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the
+Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two
+belts.
+
+Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you
+hardly realize it till you slither down a sand bank and find yourself
+between the yellow pumice walls of a blind _cul-de-sac_ in the
+rock--nooning place--where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out
+of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone.
+Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have
+fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the
+walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in the
+Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range
+ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds
+flashing phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks
+and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."
+
+This spring is about half of the fifty-five miles between Ganado and
+Keam's Canyon; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the
+first: more lilac-colored mesas high above the top of the world, with
+the encircling peaks like the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue
+as the bluest turquoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of
+evergreens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the lower world, and you are
+in Keam's Canyon, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods,
+steep as a carved wall. You pass the ruins of the old government school,
+where the floods drove the scholars out, and see the big rock
+commemorating Kit Carson's famous fight long ago, and come on the new
+Indian schools where 150 little Navajos and Mokis are being taught by
+Federal appointees--schools as fine in every respect as the best
+educational institutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must
+obtain a permit to go on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas and Oraibi
+and Hotoville are the _Ultima Thule_ of the trail across the Painted
+Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civilization and as
+hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) as when the Spaniard
+first came among them. In fact, the only remnants of Spanish influence
+left at some of these mesas are the dwarfed peach orchards growing in
+the arid sands. These were planted centuries ago by the Spanish
+_padres_.
+
+The trading post managed by Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr., at Keam's Canyon is
+but a replica of his father's establishment at Ganado. Here is the same
+fine old Spanish hospitality. Here, too, is a rare though smaller
+collection of Western paintings. There are rugs from every part of the
+Navajo Land, and specimens of pottery from the Three Mesas--especially
+from Nampaii, the wonderful woman pottery maker of the First Mesa--and
+fine silver-work gathered from the Navajo silversmiths. And with it all
+is the gracious perfection of the art that conceals art, the air that
+you are conferring a favor on the host to accept rest in a little
+rose-covered bower of two rooms and a parlor placed at the command of
+guests.
+
+The last lap of the drive across the Painted Desert is by all odds the
+hardest stretch of the road, as well as the most interesting. It is here
+the Mokis, or Hopi, have their reservation in the very heart of Navajo
+Land; and there will be no quarrel over possession of this land. It lies
+a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands--600, 1,000, 1,500 feet
+above the plains--of yellow _tufa_ and white gypsum rock, sides as sheer
+as a wall, the top a flat plateau but for the crest where perch the Moki
+villages. Up the narrow acclivities leading to these mesa crests the
+Mokis must bring all provisions, all water, their ponies and donkeys. If
+they could live on atmosphere, on views of a painted world at their feet
+receding to the very drop over the sky-line, with tones and half-tones
+and subtle suggestions of opaline snow peaks swimming in the lilac haze
+hundreds of miles away, you would not wonder at their choosing these
+eerie eagle nests for their cities; for the coloring below is as
+gorgeous and brilliant as in the Grand Canyon. But you see their little
+farm patches among the sand billows below, the peach trees almost
+uprooted by the violence of the wind, literally and truly, a stone
+placed where the corn has been planted to prevent seed and plantlet from
+being blown away. Or if the Navajo still raided the Moki, you could
+understand them toiling like beasts of burden carrying water up to these
+hilltops; but the day of raid and foray is forever past.
+
+It was on our way back over this trail that we learned one good reason
+why the dwellers of this land must keep to the high rock crests.
+Crossing the high mesa, we had felt the wind begin to blow, when like
+Drummond's Habitant Skipper, "it blew and then it blew some more." By
+the time we reached the sandy plain below, such a hurricane had broken
+as I have seen only once before, and that was off the coast of Labrador,
+when for six hours we could not see the sea for the foam. The billows of
+sand literally lifted. You could not see the sandy plain for a dust fine
+as flour that wiped out every landmark three feet ahead of your horses'
+noses. The wheels sank hub deep in sand. Of trail, not a sign was left;
+and you heard the same angry roar as in a hurricane at sea. But like the
+eternal rocks, dim and serene and high above the turmoil, stood the
+First Mesa village of Moki Land. Perhaps after all, these little squat
+Pueblo Indians knew what they were doing when they built so high above
+the dust storms. Twice the rear wheels lifted for a glorious upset; but
+we veered and tacked and whipped the fagged horses on. For three hours
+the hurricane lasted, and when finally it sank with an angry growl and
+we came out of the fifteen miles of sand into sagebrush and looked back,
+the rosy tinge of an afterglow lay on the gray pile of stone where the
+Moki town crests the top of the lofty mesa.
+
+In justice to travelers and Desert dwellers, two or three facts should
+be added. Such dust storms occur only in certain spring months. So much
+in fairness to the Painted Desert. Next, I have cursorily given slight
+details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers
+to think the Painted Desert can be crossed with the comfort of a Pullman
+car. You have to pay for your fun. We paid in that blinding, stinging,
+smothering blast as from a furnace, from three to half past five. Women
+are supposed to be irrepressible talkers. Well--we came to the point
+where not a soul in the carriage could utter a word for the dust.
+Lastly, when we saw that the storm was to be such a genuine old-timer,
+we ought to have tied wet handkerchiefs across our mouths. Glasses we
+had to keep the dust out of our eyes; but that dust is alkali, and it
+took a good two weeks' sneezing and a very sore throat to get rid of it.
+
+Of the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville, space forbids details
+except that they are higher than the village at Acoma. Overlooking the
+Painted Desert in every direction, they command a view that beggars all
+description and almost staggers thought. You seem to be overlooking
+Almighty God's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored infinity; and
+naturally you go dumb with joy of the beauty of it and lose your own
+personality and perspective utterly. We lunched on the brink of a white
+precipice 1,500 feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that
+declivity with urns of water on their heads, and photographed naked
+urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood above
+_estufas_, or sacred underground council chambers, where the Pueblos
+held their religious rites before the coming of the Spaniards.
+
+Of the Moki towns, Oraibi is, perhaps, cleaner and better than the Three
+Mesas. The mesas are indescribably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you
+can wander through adobe houses clean as your own home quarters, the
+adobe hard as cement, the rooms divided into sleeping apartments,
+cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the
+Grand Canyon, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as
+the Canyon.
+
+If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains,
+which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to
+the Grand Canyon. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands,
+dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way
+we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from
+Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the
+footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa.
+
+"We love you," exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government
+doctor interpreted for us), "we love you with all our hearts and have
+come down to wish you a good-by."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE GRAND CANYON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS
+
+
+The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land
+comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified
+Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round
+Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Canyon, and the western slope
+between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.
+
+Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than
+to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and
+then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the
+wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of
+2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think
+you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on
+a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but
+with pictographs resembling the ancient Phoenician signs from which
+our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed
+the canyons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings
+round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there
+are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet
+high in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of
+Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the
+Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a
+great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge
+meteorite.
+
+Of the Grand Canyon little need be said here; not because there is
+nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all
+the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You
+can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole
+length of the Grand Canyon--200 miles--and hundreds of the lesser canyons
+that strike off sidewise from Grand Canyon are still unexplored and
+unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on
+down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in
+from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp
+holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit
+and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and
+forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An
+average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified
+Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff
+dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canyon and
+100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland
+Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own
+Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National Forests are not the
+People's Playground of _all_ America; that they do not belong to the
+East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned
+in maintaining and protecting them?
+
+You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana
+admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to
+another--both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in
+a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from
+$1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the
+charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges
+varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The
+hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made,
+with the greatest ease in a day.
+
+Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big
+knock-you-down variety! To go from the spacious glories of the boundless
+Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is
+like passing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery,
+London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go
+looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like
+Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied
+wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come
+away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as
+much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in
+the Painted Desert.
+
+In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to
+reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic,
+sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light,
+when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and
+cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when
+you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see
+whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by
+spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the
+shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and
+wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.
+Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars
+on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods
+of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the
+gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a
+tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and
+someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both
+ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent
+trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we
+went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and
+he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants
+must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of
+big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply
+buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and
+broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no
+excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.
+The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are
+unknown. Only water--oceans and aeons of water--could have rolled and
+swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient
+sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a
+sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and
+that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop
+making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.
+
+[Illustration: There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Canyon
+in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and
+been disappointed]
+
+But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a
+prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of
+petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of
+the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands,
+caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.
+Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in
+blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and
+primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same
+colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard
+you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard,
+fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This
+hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified
+Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the
+petrified wood was exploited commercially and shipped away in carloads
+to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any
+of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood
+required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a
+hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the
+Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.
+
+You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a prone
+giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130
+feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an
+emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a
+child--picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been
+a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into
+colored diamonds.
+
+I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if
+you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every
+single bit of rock is ashine with the colors of broken rainbows; or go
+there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of
+light--there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big
+thrill with a capital "B."
+
+There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which
+you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All
+these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was
+a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana,
+was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert
+Potter of the Forestry Department, Washington, who rescued Sheriff Woods
+of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days.
+Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others
+he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man
+and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At
+Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000
+worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and
+Scott and Wilson--mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses
+which they didn't steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on
+the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you'll not
+lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You'll
+find your way in, if you know how; and if you don't know how, no man can
+teach you. And at Adamana, don't forget to see the pictograph rocks.
+Then you'll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity
+of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.
+
+Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the
+gateway to many Aztec ruins--much more easily accessible to the public
+than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by
+easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon. These differ from the
+Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken
+advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable precipices
+and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not
+so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation.
+The debris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe
+brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice
+into Walnut Canyon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation
+would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the
+debris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes' scratching over of
+one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum shell that from the
+perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service
+has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government
+might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some
+slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and
+suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling
+gray stone canyons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of
+these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff
+houses--hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At
+the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark canyon was evidently once a
+stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race;
+and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.
+
+Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma's Castle and
+Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6
+a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle and the Well, where
+you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.
+
+It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the
+Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks
+of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an
+easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of
+the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a
+ranch house in a cool canyon where health and holiday seekers can stay
+all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to
+the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the
+creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you
+drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at
+Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived
+up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp
+outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month
+as it now has between 100 and 200.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When you reach the Grand Canyon, you have come to the uttermost wonder of
+the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America.
+There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no
+one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Canyon and gone away
+disappointed. If the Grand Canyon were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe
+to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who
+yearly throng Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year
+visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.
+
+You can do the Canyon cheaply, or you can do it extravagantly. You can go
+to it by driving across the Painted Desert, 200 miles; or motoring in
+from Flagstaff--a half-day trip; or by train from Williams, return
+ticket something more than $5. Or you can take your own pack horses, and
+ride in yourself; or you can employ one of the well known local trail
+makers and guides, like John Bass, and go off up the Canyon on a camping
+trip of weeks or months.
+
+Once you reach the rim of the Canyon, you can camp under your own tent
+roof and cater your own meals. Or you may go to the big hotel and pay $4
+to $15 a day. Or you may get tent quarters at the Bright Angel Camp--$1
+a day, and whatever you pay for your meals. Or you may join one of John
+Bass' Camps which will cost from $4 up, according to the number of
+horses and the size of your party.
+
+First of all, understand what the Grand Canyon is, and what it isn't. We
+ordinarily think of a canyon as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks,
+seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very seldom more
+than a few miles long. The Grand Canyon is nearly as long as from New
+York to Canada, as wide as the city of New York is long, and as deep
+straight as a plummet as the Canadian Rockies or lesser Alps are high.
+In other words, it is 217 miles long, from thirteen to twenty wide, and
+has a straight drop a mile deep, or seven miles as the trail zigzags
+down. You think of a canyon as a great trench between mountains. This one
+is a colossal trench with side canyons going off laterally its full
+length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone.
+Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot mountain, you have to go up. At the
+Grand Canyon, you come to the brink of the sagebrush plain and jump
+off--to climb these peaks. Peak after peak, you lose count of them in
+the mist of primrose fire and lilac light and purpling shadows. To climb
+these peaks, you go down, down 7,000 feet a good deal steeper than the
+ordinary stair and in places quite as steep as the Metropolitan Tower
+elevator. In fact, if the Metropolitan Tower and the Singer Building and
+the Flatiron and Washington's Shaft in the Capital City were piled one
+on top of another in a pinnacled pyramid, they would barely reach up
+one-seventh of the height of these massive peaks swimming in countless
+numbers in the color of the Canyon.
+
+So much for dimensions! Now as to time. If you have only one day, you
+can dive in by train in the morning and out by night, and between times
+go to Sunrise Point or--if you are a robust walker--down Bright Angel
+Trail to the bank of the Colorado River, seven miles. If you have two
+days at your disposal, you can drive out to Grand View--fourteen
+miles--and overlook the panorama of the Canyon twenty miles in all
+directions. If you have more days yet at your disposal, there are good
+trips on wild trails to Dripping Springs and to Gertrude Point and to
+Cataract Canyon and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the
+Kaibab Plateau on the other side. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand
+Canyon a year and were not afraid of trailless trips, you could find a
+new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember
+that the Canyon itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral canyons
+uncounted.
+
+When you reach El Tovar you are told two of the first things to do are
+take the drives--three miles each way--to Sunrise and to Sunset Points.
+Don't! Save your dollars, and walk them both. By carriage, the way leads
+through the pine woods back from the rim for three miles to each point.
+By walking, you can keep on an excellent trail close to the rim and do
+each in twenty minutes; for the foot trails are barely a mile long. Also
+by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who
+bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful
+just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and
+upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge
+when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. In fact, if you keep
+looking long enough through that lilac fire above seas of primrose
+mists, you can almost fancy those hoary old gods of Beauty and Power
+floating round angles of the massive lower mountains, shifting the
+scenes and beckoning one another from the wings of this huge
+amphitheater. The space-filling talker is still bawling out about "the
+mighty powers of erosion"; and a thin-faced curate is putting away a
+figure of speech about "Almighty Power" for his next sermon. Personally,
+I prefer the old pagan way of expressing these things in the short cut
+of a personifying god who did a smashing big business with the hammer of
+Thor, or the sea horses of Neptune or the forked lightnings of old
+loud-thundering Jove.
+
+You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the
+Canyon; but unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the
+knees, you'll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the
+way down is steep as a stair and the distance is seven miles. In that
+case, better spend the night at the camp known as the Indian Gardens
+halfway down in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regular
+daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or you can join
+the regular tourist party both going down and coming up. Mainly because
+we wanted to see the sunrise, but also because a big party on a narrow
+trail is always unsafe and a gabbling crowd on a beautiful trail is
+always agony, two of us rose at four A. M. and walked down the trail
+during sunrise, leaving orders for a special guide to fetch mules down
+for us to the river. Space forbids details of the tramp, except to say
+it was worth the effort, twice over worth the effort in spite of knees
+that sent up pangs and protests for a week.
+
+It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if
+rain brings out the colors of the Petrified Forests, you can imagine
+what it does to sunrise in a sea of blood-red mountain peaks. Much of
+the trail is at an angle of forty-five degrees; but it is wide and well
+shored up at the outer edge. The foliage lining the trail was dripping
+wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf in spangles of gold. An
+incense as of morning worship filled the air with the odor of cedars and
+cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds
+below the Canyon rim than above it; and the dawn was filled with snatches
+of song from bluebirds and yellow finches and water ousels, whose notes
+were like the tinkle of pure water. What looked like a tiny red hillock
+from the rim above is now seen to be a mighty mountain, four, five,
+seven thousand feet from river to peak, with walls smooth as if planed
+by the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between
+these peaks would be dignified by the names of canyons. Here, they are
+mere wings to the main stage setting of the Grand Canyon. We reached the
+Indian Garden's Camp in time for breakfast and rested an hour before
+going on down to the river. The trail followed a gentle descent over
+sand-hills and rocky plateaus at first, then suddenly it began to drop
+sheer in the section known as the Devil's Corkscrew. The heat became
+sizzling as you descended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the
+stupendous height and sheer sides of the brilliantly colored gorges and
+masses of shadows above. Then the Devil's Corkscrew fell into a sandy
+dell where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of
+many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst would fill this gorge in
+about a jiffy; but a cloudburst is the last thing on earth you need
+expect in this land of scant showers and no water. Suddenly, you turn a
+rock angle, and the yellow, muddy, turbulent flood of the Colorado
+swirls past you, tempestuous, noisy, sullen and dark, filling the narrow
+canyon with the war of rock against water. What seemed to be mere
+foothills far above, now appear colossal peaks sheer up and down,
+penning the angry river between black walls. It was no longer hot. We
+could hear a thunder shower reverberating back in some of the valleys of
+the Canyon; and the rain falling between us and the red rocks was as a
+curtain to the scene shifting of those old earth and mountain and water
+gods hiding in the wings of the vast amphitheater.
+
+And if you want a wilder, more eery trail than down Bright Angel, go
+from Dripping Springs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great many wild
+mountain trails in the Rockies, North and South; but I have never known
+one that will give more thrills from its sheer beauty and sheer daring.
+You go out round the ledges of precipice after precipice, where nothing
+holds you back from a fall 7,000 feet straight as a stone could drop,
+nothing but the sure-footedness of your horse; out and out, round and
+round peak after peak, till you are on the tip top and outer edge of one
+of the highest mountains in the Canyon. This is the trail of old Louis
+Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the
+center of the Canyon and built his own trail to one of its grandest
+haunts. Louis used to live under the arch formed by the Dripping
+Springs; but Louis has long since left, and the trail is falling away
+and is now one for a horse that can walk on air and a head that doesn't
+feel the sensations of champagne when looking down a straight 7,000 feet
+into darkness. If you like that kind of a trail, take the trip; for it
+is the best and wildest view of the Canyon; but take two days to it, and
+sleep at Louis' deserted camp under the Dripping Springs. Yet if you
+don't like a trail where you wonder if you remembered to make your will
+and what would happen if the gravel slipped from your horse's feet one
+of these places where the next turn seems to jump off into atmosphere,
+then wait; for the day must surely come when all of the Grand Canyon's
+217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American
+public as Egypt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE
+
+
+It lies to the left of the city Plaza--a long, low, one-story building
+flanking the whole length of one side of the Plaza, with big yellow pine
+pillars supporting the arcade above the public walk, each pillar
+surmounted by the fluted architrave peculiar to Spanish-Moorish
+architecture. It is yellow adobe in the sunlight--very old, very sleepy,
+very remote from latter-day life, the most un-American thing in all
+America, the only governor's palace from Athabasca to the Gulf of
+Mexico, from Sitka to St. Lawrence, that exists to-day precisely as it
+existed one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred
+years ago, four hundred years ago--back, back beyond that to the days
+when there were no white men in America. Uncover the outer plaster in
+the six-foot thickness of the walls in the Governor's Palace of Santa
+Fe, and what do you find? Solid adobe and brick? Not much! The
+walled-up, conical fireplaces and meal bins and corn caves of a pueblo
+people who lived on the site of modern Santa Fe hundreds of years before
+the Spanish founded this capital here in 1605. For years it has been a
+dispute among historians--Bandelier, Hodge, Twitchell, Governor Prince,
+Mr. Reed--whether any prehistoric race dwelt where Santa Fe now stands.
+Only in the summer of 1912, when it was necessary to replace some old
+beams and cut some arches through the six-foot walls was it discovered
+that the huge partitions covered in their centers walls antedating the
+coming of the Spaniards--walls with the little conical fireplaces of
+Indian pueblos, with such meal bins and corn shelves as you find in the
+prehistoric cave dwellings.
+
+We have such a passion for destroying the old and replacing it with the
+new in America that you can scarcely place your hand on a structure in
+the New World that stands intact as it was before the Revolution. We
+somehow or other take it for granted that these mute witnesses of
+ancient heroism have nothing to teach us with their mossed walls and
+low-beamed ceilings and dumb, majestic dignity.
+
+[Illustration: The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, within the
+walls of which are found the conical fireplaces of the Indians who lived
+here hundreds of years before the Spaniards came]
+
+To this, the Governor's Palace of Santa Fe is the one and complete
+exception in America. It flanks the cottonwoods of the Plaza, yellow
+adobe in the sunlight--very old, very sleepy, very remote from
+latter-day life, but with a quaint, quiet atmosphere that travelers
+scour Europe to find. Look up to the _vigas_, or beams of the ceiling,
+yellowed and browned and mellowed with age. Those _vigas_ have witnessed
+strange figures stalking the spacious halls below. If the ceiling beams
+could throw their memories on some moving picture screen, there would be
+such a panorama of varied personages as no other palace in the world has
+witnessed. Leave out the hackneyed tale of General Lew Wallace writing
+"Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace; or the fact that three different
+flags flung their folds over old Santa Fe in a single century. He who
+knows anything at all about Santa Fe, knows that Spanish power gave
+place to Mexican, and the Mexican regime to American rule. Also, that
+General Lew Wallace wrote "Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace, while
+he was governor of New Mexico. And you only have to use your eyes to
+know that Santa Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in the modern
+United States of America. The donkeys trotting to market under loads of
+wood, the ragged peon riders bestriding burros no higher than a saw
+horse, the natives stalking past in bright serape or blanket, moccasined
+and hatless--all tell you that you are in a region remote from
+latter-day America.
+
+But here is another sort of picture panorama! It is between 1680 and
+1710.
+
+A hatless youth, swarthy from five years of terrible exposure, hair
+straight as a string, gabbling French but speaking no Spanish, a slave
+white traded from Indian tribe to Indian tribe, all the way from the
+Gulf of Mexico to the interior of New Spain, is brought before the
+viceroy. Do you know who he is? He is Jean L'Archeveque, the
+French-Canadian lad who helped to murder La Salle down on Trinity Bay in
+Texas. What are the French doing down on Trinity Bay? Do they intend to
+explore and claim this part of America, too? In the abuses of slavery
+among the Indians for five years, the lad has paid the terrible penalty
+for the crime into which he was betrayed by his youth. He is scarred
+with wounds and beatings. He is too guilt-stricken ever to return to New
+France. His information may be useful to New Spain; so he is enrolled in
+the guards of the Spanish Viceroy of Santa Fe; and he is sent out to San
+Ildefonso and Santa Clara, where he founds a family and where his
+records may be seen to this day. For those copy-book moralists who like
+to know that Divine retribution occasionally works out in daily life, it
+may be added that Jean L'Archeveque finally came to as violent a death
+as he had brought to the great French explorer, La Salle.
+
+Or take a panorama of a later day. It is just before the fall of Spanish
+rule. The Governor sits in his Palace at Santa Fe, a mightier autocrat
+than the Pope in Rome; for, as the Russians say, "God is high in His
+Heavens," and the King is far away, and those who want justice in Santa
+Fe, must pay--pay--pay--pay in gold coin that can be put in the iron
+chest of the viceroy. (You can see specimens of those iron chests all
+through New Mexico yet--chests with a dozen secret springs to guard the
+family fortune of the hidden gold bullion.) A woman bursts into the
+presence of the Viceroy, and throws herself on her knees. It is a
+terrible tale--the kind of tale we are too finical to tell in these
+modern days, though that is not saying there are not many such tales to
+be told. The woman's young sister has married an officer of the
+Viceroy's ring. He has beaten her as he would a slave. He has treated
+her to vile indecencies of which only Hell keeps record. She had fled to
+her father; but the father, fearing the power of the Viceroy, had sent
+her back to the man; and the man has killed her with his brutalities. (I
+have this whole story from a lineal descendant of the family.) The woman
+throws back her _rebozo_, drops to her knees before the Viceroy, and
+demands justice. The Viceroy thinks and thinks. A woman more or less!
+What does it matter? The woman's father had been afraid to act,
+evidently. The husband is a member of the government ring. Interference
+might stir up an ugly mess--revelations of extortion and so on! Besides,
+justice is worth so much per; and this woman--what has she to pay? This
+Viceroy will do nothing. The woman rises slowly, incredulous. Is this
+justice? She denounces the Viceroy in fiery, impassioned speech. The
+Viceroy smiles and twirls his mustachios. What can a woman do? The woman
+proclaims her imprecation of a court that fails of justice. (Do our
+courts fail of justice? Is there no lesson in that past for us?) Do you
+know what she did? She did what not one woman in a million could do
+to-day, when conditions are a thousand fold easier. She went back to her
+home. It was just about where the pretty Spanish house of Mr. Morley of
+the Archaeological School stands to-day. She gathered up all the loose
+gold she could and bound it in a belt around her waist. Then she took
+the most powerful horse she had from the kraal, saddled him and rode
+out absolutely alone for the city of Old Mexico--900 miles as the trail
+ran. Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, beset the way. She rode at night and
+slept by day. The trail was a desert waste of waterless, bare, rocky
+hills and quicksand rivers and blistering heat. God, or the Virgin to
+whom she constantly prayed, or her own dauntless spirit, must have
+piloted the way; for she reached the old city of Mexico, laid her case
+before the King's representatives, and won the day. Her sister's death
+was avenged. The husband was tried and executed: and the Viceroy was
+deposed. Most of us know of almost similar cases. I think of a man who
+has repeatedly tried for a federal judgeship in New Mexico, who has
+literally been guilty of every crime on the human calendar. Yet we don't
+at risk of life push these cases to retribution. Is that one of the
+lessons the past has for us? Spanish power fell in New Mexico because
+there came a time when there was neither justice nor retribution in any
+of the courts.
+
+Other panoramas there were beneath the age-mellowed beams of the Palace
+ceiling, panoramas of Comanche and Navajo and Ute and Apache stalking in
+war feathers before a Spanish governor clad in velvets and laces.
+Tradition has it that a Ute was once struck dead in the Governor's
+presence. Certainly, all four tribes wrought havoc and raid to the very
+doors of the Palace. Within only the last century, a Comanche chief and
+his warriors came to Santa Fe demanding the daughter of a leading
+trader in marriage for the chief's son. The garrison was weak, in spite
+of fustian and rusty helmets and battered breastplates and velvet
+doublets and boots half way to the waist--there were seldom more than
+200 soldiers, and the pusillanimous Governor counseled deception. He
+told the Comanche that the trader's daughter had died, and ordered the
+girl to hide. The only peace that an Indian respects--or any other man,
+for that matter--is the peace that is a victory. The Indian suspected
+that the answer was the answer of the coward, a lie, and came back with
+his Comanche warriors. While the soldiers huddled inside the Palace
+walls, the town was raided. The trader was murdered and the daughter
+carried off to the Comanches, where she died of abuse. When these
+tragedies fell on daughters of the Pilgrims in New England, the Saxon
+strain of the warrior women in their blood rose to meet the challenge of
+fate; and they brained their captors with an ax; but no such warrior
+strain was in the blood of the daughters of Spain. By religion, by
+nationality, by tradition, the Spanish girl was the purely convent
+product: womanhood protected by a ten-foot wall. When the wall fell
+away, she was helpless as a hot-house flower set out amid violent winds.
+
+Diagonally across the Plaza from the Governor's Palace stands the old
+Fonda, or Exchange Hotel, whence came the long caravans of American
+traders on the Santa Fe Trail. Behind the Palace about a quarter of a
+mile, was the Gareta, a sort of combined custom house and prison. The
+combination was deeply expressive of Spanish rule in those early days,
+for independent of what the American's white-tented wagon might
+contain--baled hay or priceless silks or chewing tobacco--a duty of $500
+was levied against each mule-team wagon of the American trader. Did a
+trader protest, or hold back, he was promptly clapped in irons. It was
+cheaper to pay the duty than buy a release. The walls of both the Fonda
+and the Gareta were of tremendous thickness, four to six feet of solid
+adobe, which was hard as our modern cement. In the walls behind the
+Gareta and on the walls behind the Palace, pitted bullet holes have been
+found. Beneath the holes was embedded human hair.
+
+Nothing more picturesque exists in America's past than the panorama of
+this old Santa Fe Trail. Santa Fe was to the Trail what Cairo was to the
+caravans coming up out of the Desert in Egypt. Twitchell, the modern
+historian, and Gregg, the old chronicler of last century's Trail, give
+wonderfully vivid pictures of the coming of the caravans to the Palace.
+"As the caravans ascended the ridge which overlooks the city, the
+clamorings of the men and the rejoicings of the bull whackers could be
+heard on every side. Even the animals seemed to participate in the humor
+of their riders. I doubt whether the first sight of Jerusalem brought
+the crusaders more tumultuous and soul-enrapturing joy."
+
+[Illustration: A pool in the Painted Desert whither came thousands of
+goats and sheep, driven by Navajo girls on horseback]
+
+We talk of the picturesque fur trade of the North, when brigades of
+birch canoes one and two hundred strong penetrated every river and lake
+of the wilderness of the Northwest. Let us take a look at these caravan
+brigades of the traders of the Southwest! Teams were hitched tandem to
+the white-tented wagons. Drivers did not ride in the wagons. They rode
+astride mule or horse, with long bull whips thick as a snake skin, which
+could reach from rear to fore team. I don't know how they do it; but
+when the drivers lash these whips out full length, they cause a
+crackling like pistol shots. The owner of the caravan was usually some
+gentleman adventurer from Virginia or Kentucky or Louisiana or Missouri;
+but each caravan had its captain to command, and its outriders to scout
+for Indians. These scouts were of every station in life with morals of
+as varied aspect as Joseph's coat of many colors. Kit Carson was once
+one of these scouts. Governor Bent was one of the traders. Stephen B.
+Elkins first came to New Mexico with a bull whacker's caravan. In the
+morning, every teamster would vie with his fellows to hitch up fastest.
+Teams ready, he would mount and call back--"All's set." An uproar of
+whinnying and braying, the clank of chains, and then the captain's
+shout--"Stretch out," when the long line of twenty or thirty
+white-tented wagons would rumble out for the journey of thirty to sixty
+days across the plains. Each wagon had five yoke of oxen, with six or
+eight extra mule teams behind in case of emergency. About three tons
+made a load. Twenty miles was a good day's travel. Camping places near
+good water and pasturage were chosen ahead by the scouts. Wagons kept
+together in groups of four. In case of attack by Comanche or Ute, these
+wagons wheeled into a circle for defense with men and beasts inside the
+extemporized kraal. Campfires were kept away from wagons to avoid giving
+target to foes. Blankets consisted of buffalo robes, and the rations
+"hard tack," pork and such game as the scouts and sharpshooters could
+bring down. A favorite trick of Indian raiders was to wait till all
+animals were tethered out for pasturage, and then stampede mules and
+oxen. In the confusion, wagons would be overturned and looted.
+
+As the long white caravans came to their journey's end at Santa Fe,
+literally the whole Spanish and Indian population crowded to the Plaza
+in front of the Palace. "Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!"--were
+the shouts ringing through the streets; and Santa Fe's perpetual siesta
+would be awakened to a week's fair or barter. Wagons were lined up at
+the custom house; and the trader presented himself before the Spanish
+governor, trader and governor alike dressed in their best regimentals.
+Very fair, very soft spoken, very profuse of compliments was the
+interview; but divested of profound bows and flowery compliments, it
+ended in the American paying $500 a wagon, or losing his goods. The
+goods were then bartered at a staggering advance. Plain broadcloth sold
+at $25 a yard, linen at $4 a yard, and the price on other goods was
+proportionate. Goods taken in exchange were hides, wool, gold and silver
+bullion, Indian blankets and precious stones.
+
+Travelers from Mexico to the outside world went by stage or private
+omnibus with outriders and guards and sharpshooters. Young Spanish girls
+sent East to school were accompanied by such a retinue of defenders,
+slaves and servants, as might have attended a European monarch; and a
+whole bookful of stories could be written of adventures among the young
+Spanish nobility going out to see the world. The stage fare varied from
+$160 to $250 far as the Mississippi. Though Stephen B. Elkins went to
+New Mexico with a bull whacker's team, it was not long before he was
+sending gold bullion from mining and trading operations out to St. Louis
+and New York. How to get this gold bullion past the highwaymen who
+infested the stage route, was always a problem. I know of one old
+Spanish lady, who yearly went to St. Louis to make family purchases and
+used to smuggle Elkins' gold out for him in belts and petticoats and
+disreputable looking old hand bags. Once, when she was going out in
+midsummer heat, she had a belt of her husband's drafts and Elkins' gold
+round her waist. The way grew hotter and hotter. The old lady unstrapped
+the buckskin reticule--looking, for all the world, like a woman's
+carry-all--and threw it up on top of the stage. An hour later,
+highwaymen "went through" the passengers. Rings, watches, jewels, coin
+were taken off the travelers; and the mail bags were looted; but the
+bandits never thought of examining the old bag on top of the stage, in
+which was gold worth all the rest of the loot.
+
+In those days, gambling was the universal passion of high and low in New
+Mexico; and many a Spanish don and American trader, who had taken over
+tens of thousands in the barter of the caravan, wasted it over the
+gaming table before dawn of the next day. The Fonda, or old Exchange
+Hotel, was the center of high play; but it may as well be acknowledged,
+the highest play of all, the wildest stakes were often laid in the
+Governor's Palace.
+
+Luckily, the passion for destroying the old has not invaded Santa Fe.
+The people want their Palace preserved as it was, is, and ever shall be;
+and the recent restoration has been, not a reconstruction, but a taking
+away of all the modern and adventitious. Where modern pillars have been
+placed under the long front portico, they are being replaced by the old
+_portal_ type of pillar--the fluted capital across the main column
+supporting the roof beams. This type of _portal_ has come in such favor
+in New Mexico that it is being embodied in modern houses for arcades,
+porches and gardens.
+
+The main entrance of the Palace is square in the center. You pass into
+what must have been the ancient reception room leading to an audience
+chamber on the left. What amazes you is the enormous thickness of these
+adobe walls. Each window casement is wider than a bench; and an open
+door laid back is not wider than the thickness of the wall. To-day the
+reception hall and, indeed, the rooms of the center Palace present some
+of the finest mural paintings in America. These have been placed on the
+walls by the Archaeological School of America which with the Historical
+Society occupies the main portions of the old building. You see drawings
+of the coming of the first Spanish caravels, of Coronado, of Don Diego
+de Vargas, who was the Frontenac of the Southwest, reconquering the
+provinces in 1680-94, about the same time that the great Frontenac was
+playing his part in French Canada. There are pictures, too, of the
+caravans crossing the plains, of the coming of American occupation, of
+the Moki and Hopi and Zuni pueblos, of the Missions of which only ruins
+to-day mark the sites in the Jemez, at Sandia, and away out in the
+Desert of Abo.
+
+To the left of the reception room is an excellent art gallery of
+Southwestern subjects. Here, artists of the growing Southwestern School
+send their work for exhibition and sale. It is significant that within
+the last few years prices have gone up from a few dollars to hundreds
+and thousands. Nausbaum's photographic work of the modern Indian is one
+of the striking features of the Palace. Of course, there are pictures by
+Curtis and Burbank and Sharpe and others of the Southwestern School; but
+perhaps the most interesting rooms to the newcomer, to the visitor, who
+doesn't know that we have an ancient America, are those where the mural
+drawings are devoted to the cave dwellers and prehistoric races. These
+were done by Carl Lotave of Paris out on the ground of the ancient
+races. In conception and execution, they are among the finest murals in
+America.
+
+Long ago, the Governor's Palace had twin towers and a chapel. Bells in
+the old Spanish churches were not tolled. They were struck gong fashion
+by an attendant, who ascended the towers. These bells were cast of a
+very fine quality of old copper; and the tone was largely determined by
+the quality of the cast. Old Mission bells are scarce to-day in New
+Mexico; and collectors offer as high as $1,500 and $3,000 for the
+genuine article. Vesper bells played a great part in the life of the old
+Spanish regime. Ladies might be promenading the Plaza, workmen busy over
+their tasks, gamblers hard at the wheel and dice. At vesper call, men,
+women and children dropped to knees; and for a moment silence fell, all
+but the calling of the vesper bells. Then the bells ceased ringing, and
+life went on in its noisy stream.
+
+[Illustration: There are streets in Santa Fe where one may see box-like
+adobe houses beside dwellings of modern architecture]
+
+No account of the Governor's Palace would be complete without some
+mention of the marvels of dress among the dons and donas of the old
+regime. Could we see them promenading the Plaza and the Palace as they
+paraded their gayety less than half a century ago, we would imagine
+ourselves in some play house of the French Court in its most luxurious
+days. Indians dressed then as they dress to-day, in bright-colored
+blankets fastened gracefully round hip and shoulders. Peons or peasants
+wore serapes, blankets with a slit in the center, over the shoulders.
+Women of position wore not hats but the silk _rebozo_ or scarf, thrown
+over the head with one end back across the left shoulder. On the street,
+the face was almost covered by this scarf. Presumably the purpose was to
+conceal charms; but when you consider the combination of dark eyes and
+waving hair and a scarf of the finest color and texture that could be
+bought in China or the Indies, it is a question whether that scarf did
+not set off what it was designed to conceal. About the shawls used as
+scarfs there is much misconception. These are not of Spanish or Mexican
+make. They come down in the Spanish families from the days when the
+vessels of the traders of Mexico trafficked with China and Japan. These
+old shawls to-day bring prices varying all the way from $200 to $2,000.
+
+The don of fashion dressed even more gayly than his spouse. Jewelry was
+a passion with both men and women; and the finest type of old jewelry in
+America to-day is to be found in New Mexico. The hat of the don was the
+wide-brimmed sombrero. Around this was a silver or gold cord, with a
+gold or silver cockade. The jackets were of colored broadcloth with
+buttons of silver or gold, not brass; but the trousers were at once the
+glory and the vanity of the wearer. Gold and silver buttons ornamented
+the seams of the legs from hip to knee. There were gold clasps at the
+garter and gold clasps at the knee. A silk sash with tasseled cords or
+fringe hanging down one side took the place of modern suspenders.
+Leather leggings for outdoor wear were carved or embossed. A serape or
+velvet cape lined with bright-colored silk completed the costume.
+Bridles and horse trappings were gorgeous with silver, the pommel and
+stirrups being overlaid with it. The bridle was a barbarous silver thing
+with a bit cruel enough to control tigers; and the rowels of the spurs
+were two or three inches long.
+
+No, these were not people of French and Spanish courts. They were people
+of our own Western America less than a century ago; but though they were
+not people of the playhouse, as they almost seem to us, they are
+essentially a play-people. The Spaniard of the Southwest lived, not to
+work, but to play; and when he worked, it was only that he might play
+the harder. Los Americanos came and changed all that. They turned the
+Spanish play-world up side down and put work on top. Roam through the
+Governor's Palace! Call up the old gay life! We undoubtedly handle more
+money than the Spanish dons and donas of the old days; but
+frankly--which stand for the more joy out of life; those laughing
+philosophers, or we modern work-demons?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE (_Continued_)
+
+
+Of all the traditions clinging round the old Palace at Santa Fe, those
+connected with Don Diego de Vargas, the reconqueror of New Mexico, are
+best known and most picturesque. Yearly, for two and a quarter
+centuries, the people of New Mexico have commemorated De Vargas' victory
+by a procession to the church which he built in gratitude to Heaven for
+his success. This procession is at once a great public festival and a
+sacred religious ceremony; for the image of the Virgin, which De Vargas
+used when he planted the Cross on the Plaza in front of the Palace and
+sang the Te Deum with the assembled Franciscan monks, is the same image
+now used in the theatrical procession of the religious ceremony yearly
+celebrated by Indians, Spanish and Americans.
+
+The De Vargas procession is a ceremony unique in America. The very
+Indians whose ancestors De Vargas' arms subjugated, now yearly reenact
+the scenes of the struggles of their forefathers to throw off white
+rule. Young Mexicans, descendants of the very officers who marched with
+De Vargas in his campaigns of 1692-3-4, take the part of the conquering
+heroes. Costumes, march, religious ceremonies of thanks, public
+festival--all have been kept as close to original historic fact as
+possible.
+
+De Vargas, himself, was to the Southwest what Frontenac was to French
+Canada--a bluff soldier animated by religious motives, who believed only
+in the peace that is a victory, put the fear of God in the hearts of his
+enemies, and built on that fear a superstructure of reverence and love.
+It need not be told that such a character rode rough-shod over official
+red-tape, and had a host of envious curs barking at his heels. They
+dragged him down, for a period of short eclipse, these Lilliputian
+enemies, just as Frontenac's enemies caused his recall by a charge of
+misusing public funds; but in neither case could the charges be
+sustained. Bluff warriors, not counting house clerks, were needed; and
+De Vargas, like Frontenac, came through all charges unscathed.
+
+The two heroes of America's Indian wars--Frontenac of the North, De
+Vargas of the South--were contemporaries. It will be remembered how up
+on the St. Lawrence and among the Mohawk tribes of New York, a wave of
+revolt against white man rule swept from 1642 to 1682. It was not
+unnatural that the red warrior should view with alarm the growing
+dominance and assumption of power on the part of the white. In Canada,
+we know the brandy of the white trader hastened the revolt and added
+horror to the outrages, when the settlements lying round Montreal and
+Quebec were ravaged and burnt under the very cannon mouths of the two
+impotent and terrified forts. The same wave of revolt that scourged
+French Canada in the eighties, went like wild fire over the Southwest
+from 1682 to 1694. Was there any connection between the two efforts to
+throw off white man rule? To the historian, seemingly, there was not;
+but ask the Navajo or Apache of the South about traders in the North,
+and you will be astonished how the traditions of the tribes preserve
+legends of the Athabascan stock in the North, from whom they claim
+descent. Ask a modern Indian of the interior of British Columbia about
+the Navajos, and he will tell you how the wise men of the tribe preserve
+verbal history of a branch of this people driven far South--"those other
+Denes," he will tell you. Traders explain the wonderful way news has of
+traveling from tribe to tribe by the laconic expression, "moccasin
+telegram."
+
+Whether or not the infection of revolt spread by "moccasin telegram"
+from Canada to Mexico, the storm broke, and broke with frightful
+violence over the Southwest. The immediate cause was religious
+interference. All pueblo people have secret lodges held in underground
+_estufas_ or _kivas_. To these ceremonies no white man however favored
+is ever admitted. White men know as little of the rites practiced in
+these lodges by the pueblo people as when Coronado came in 1540. To the
+Spanish governors and priests, the thing was anathema--abomination of
+witchcraft and sorcery and secrecy that risked the eternal damnation of
+converts' souls. There was a garrison of only 250 men at the Palace;
+yet already the church boasted fifty friars, from eleven to seventeen
+missions, and converts by the thousands. But the souls of the holy
+_padres_ were sorely tried by these _estufa_ rites, "_platicas de
+noche_," "night conversations"--the priests called them. Well might all
+New Spain have been disturbed by these "night conversations." The
+subject bound under fearful oath of secrecy was nothing more nor less
+than the total extermination of every white man, woman and child north
+of the Rio Grande.
+
+Some unwise governor--Trevino, I think it was--had issued an edict in
+1675 forbidding the pueblos to hold their secret lodges in the
+_estufas_. By way of enforcing his edict, he had forty-seven of the wise
+men or Indian priests (he called them "sorcerers") imprisoned; hanged
+three in the jail yard of the Palace as a warning, and after severe
+whipping and enforced fasts, sent the other forty-four home. Picture the
+situation to yourself! The wise men or governors of the pueblos are
+always old men elected out of respect for their superior wisdom, men
+used to having their slightest word implicitly obeyed. Whipped, shamed,
+disgraced, they dispersed from the Palace, down the Rio Grande to
+Isleta, west to the city on the impregnable rocks of Acoma, north to
+that whole group of pueblo cities from Jemez to Santa Fe and Pecos and
+Taos. What do you think they did? Fill up the underground _estufas_ and
+hang their heads in shame among men? Then, you don't know the Indian!
+You may break his neck; but you can't bend it. The very first thing they
+did was to gather their young warriors in the _estufas_. Picture that
+scene to yourself, too! An old rain priest at San Ildefonso, through the
+kindness of Dr. Hewitt of the Archaeological School, took us down the
+_estufa_ at that pueblo, where some of the bloodiest scenes of the
+rebellion were enacted. Needless to say, he took us down in the day
+time, when there are no ceremonies.
+
+[Illustration: An adobe gateway of old-world charm in Santa Fe]
+
+The _estufa_ is large enough to seat three or four hundred men. It is
+night time. A few oil tapers are burning in stone saucers, the pueblo
+lamp. The warriors come stealing down the ladder. No woman is admitted.
+The men are dressed in linen trousers with colored blankets fastened
+Grecian fashion at the waist. They seat themselves silently on the adobe
+or cement benches around the circular wall. The altar place, whence
+comes the Sacred Fire from the gods of the under world, is situated just
+under the ladder. The priests descend, four or five of them, holding
+their blankets in a square that acts as a drop curtain concealing the
+altar. When all have descended, a trap door of brush above is closed.
+The taper lamps go out. The priests drop their blankets; and behold on
+the altar the sacred fire; and the outraged wise man in impassioned
+speech denouncing white man rule, insult to the Indian gods, destruction
+of the Spanish ruler!
+
+Of the punished medicine men, one of the most incensed was an elderly
+Indian called Pope, said to be originally from San Juan, but at that
+time living in Taos. I don't know what ground there is for it, but
+tradition has it that when Pope effected the curtain drop round the
+sacred fire of the _estufa_ in Taos, he produced, or induced the
+warriors looking on breathlessly to believe that he produced, three
+infernal spirits from the under world, who came from the great war-god
+Montezuma to command the pueblo race to unite with the Navajo and Apache
+in driving the white man from the Southwest. If there be any truth in
+the tradition, it is not hard to account for the trick. Tradition or
+trick, it worked like magic. The warriors believed. Couriers went
+scurrying by night from town to town, with the knotted cord--some say it
+was of deer thong, others of palm leaf. The knots represented the number
+of days to the time of uprising. The man, for instance, who ran from
+Taos to Pecos, would pull out a knot for each day he ran. A new courier
+would carry the cord on to the next town. There was some confusion about
+the untying of those knots. Some say the rebellion was to take place on
+the 11th of August, 1682; others, on the 13th. Anyway, the first blow
+was struck on the 10th. Not a pueblo town failed to rally to the call,
+as the Highlanders of old responded to the signal of the bloody cross.
+New Mexico at this time numbered some 3,000 Spanish colonists, the
+majority living on ranches up and down the Rio Grande and surrounding
+Santa Fe. The captain-general, who had had nothing to do with the
+foolish decrees that produced the revolt, happened to be Don Antonio de
+Otermin, with Alonzo Garcia as his lieutenant. In spite of no women
+being admitted to the secret, the secret leaked out. Pope's son-in-law,
+the governor of San Juan, was setting out to betray the whole plot to
+the Spaniards, when he was killed by Pope's own hand.
+
+Such widespread preparations could not proceed without the Mission
+converts getting some inkling; and on August 9, Governor Otermin heard
+that two Indians of Tesuque out from Santa Fe had been ordered to join a
+rebellion. He had the Indians brought before him in the audience chamber
+on the 10th. They told him all they knew; and they warned him that any
+warrior refusing to take part would be slain. Here, as always in times
+of great confusion, the main thread of the story is lost in a
+multiplicity of detail. Warning had also come down from the alcalde at
+Taos. Otermin scarcely seems to have grasped the import of the news; for
+all he did was to send his own secret scouts out, warning the settlers
+and friars to seek refuge in Isleta, or Santa Fe; but it was too late.
+The Indians got word they had been betrayed and broke loose in a mad
+lust of revenge and blood that very Saturday when the governor was
+sending out his spies.
+
+It would take a book to tell the story of all the heroism and martyrdom
+of the different Missions. Parkman has told the story of the martyrdom
+of the Jesuits in French Canada; and many other books have been written
+on the subject. No Parkman has yet risen to tell the story of the
+martyrdom of the Franciscans in New Mexico. In one fell day, before the
+captain-general knew anything about it, 400 colonists and twenty-one
+missionaries had been slain--butchered, shot, thrown over the rocks,
+suffocated in their burning chapels. Pope was in the midst of it all,
+riding like an incarnate fury on horseback wearing a bull's horn in the
+middle of his forehead. Apaches and Navajos, of course, joined in the
+loot. At Taos, out of seventy whites, two only escaped; and they left
+their wives and children dead on the field and reached Isleta only after
+ten days' wandering in the mountains at night, having hidden by day. At
+little Tesuque, north of Santa Fe, only the alcalde escaped by spurring
+his horse to wilder pace than the Indians could follow. The alcalde had
+seen the friar flee to a ravine. Then an Indian came out wearing the
+priest's shield; and it was blood-spattered. At Santa Clara, soldiers,
+herders and colonists were slain on the field as they worked. The women
+and children were carried off to captivity from which they never
+returned. At Galisteo, the men were slain, the women carried off.
+Rosaries were burned in bonfires. Churches were plundered and profaned.
+At Santo Domingo, the bodies of the three priests were piled in a heap
+in front of the church, as an insult to the white man faith that would
+have destroyed the Indian _estufas_. Down at Isleta, Garcia, the
+lieutenant, happened to be in command, and during Saturday night and
+Sunday morning, he rounded inside the walls of Isleta seven
+missionaries and 1,500 settlers, of whom only 200 had firearms.
+
+What of Captain-General Otermin, cooped up in the Governor's Palace of
+Santa Fe, awaiting the return of his scouts? The reports of his scouts,
+one may guess. Reports came dribbling in till Tuesday, and by that time
+there were no Spanish left alive outside Santa Fe and Isleta. Then
+Otermin bestirred himself mightily. Citizens were called to take refuge
+in the Palace. The armory was opened and arquebuses handed out to all
+who could bear arms. The Holy Sacrament was administered. Then the
+sacred vessels were brought to the Governor's Palace and hidden. There
+were now 1,000 persons cooped up in the Governor's Palace, less than 100
+capable of bearing arms. Trenches were dug, windows barricaded, walls
+fortified. Armed soldiers mounted the roofs of houses guarding the Plaza
+and in the streets approaching it were stationed cannon.
+
+Having wiped out the settlements, the pueblos and their allies swooped
+down on Santa Fe, led by Juan of Galisteo riding with a convent flag
+round his waist as sash. To parley with an enemy is folly. Otermin sent
+for Juan to come to the Palace; and in the audience chamber upbraided
+him. Juan, one may well believe, laughed. He produced two crosses--a red
+one and a white one. If the Spaniards would accept the white one and
+withdraw, the Indians would desist from attack; if not--then--red stood
+for blood. Otermin talked about "pardon for treason," when he should
+have struck the impudent fellow to earth, as De Vargas, or old
+Frontenac, would have done in like case.
+
+When Juan went back across the Plaza, the Indians howled with joy,
+danced dervish time all night, rang the bells of San Miguel, set fire to
+the church and houses, and cut the water supply off from the yard of the
+Palace. The valor of the Spaniards could not have been very great from
+August 14th to 20th, for only five of the 100 bearing arms were killed.
+At a council of war on the night of August 19th, it was decided to
+attempt to rush the foe, trampling them with horses, and to beat a way
+open for retreat. Otermin says 300 Indians were killed in this rally;
+but it is a question. The Governor himself came back with an arrow wound
+in his forehead and a flesh wound near his heart. Within twenty-four
+hours, he decided--whichever way you like to put it--"to go to the
+relief of Isleta," where he thought his lieutenant was; or "to retreat"
+south of the Rio Grande. The Indians watched the retreat in grim
+silence. The Spanish considered their escape "a miracle." It was a
+pitiful wresting of comfort from desperation.
+
+But at Isleta, the Governor found that his lieutenant had already
+retreated taking 1,500 refugees in safety with him. It was the end of
+September when Otermin himself crossed the Rio Grande, at a point not
+far from modern El Paso. At Isleta, the people will tell you to this day
+legends of the friar's martyrdom. Every Mexican believes that the holy
+_padre_ buried in a log hollowed out for coffin beneath the chapel rises
+every ten years and walks through the streets of Isleta to see how his
+people are doing. Once every ten years or so, the Rio Grande floods
+badly; and the year of the flood, the ghost of the friar rises to warn
+his people. Be that as it may, a few years ago, a deputation of
+investigators took up the body to examine the truth of the legend. It
+lies in a state of perfect preservation in its log coffin.
+
+The pueblos had driven the Spanish south of the Rio Grande and
+practically kept them south of the Rio Grande for ten years. Churches
+were burned. Images were profaned. Priestly vestments decked wild Indian
+lads. Converts were washed in Santa Fe River to cleanse them of baptism.
+All the records in the Governor's Palace were destroyed, and the Palace
+itself given over to wild orgies among the victorious Indians; but the
+victory brought little good to the tribes. They fell back to their
+former state of tribal raid and feud. Drought spoiled the crops; and
+perhaps, after all, the consolation and the guidance of the Spanish
+priests were missed. When the Utes heard that the Spanish had retreated,
+these wild marauders of the northern desert fell on the pueblo towns
+like wolves. There is a legend, also, that at this time there were great
+earthquakes and many heavenly signs of displeasure. Curiously enough,
+the same legends exist about Montreal and Quebec. Otermin hung timidly
+on the frontier, crossing and recrossing the Rio Grande; but he could
+make no progress in resettling the colonists.
+
+Comes on the scene now--1692-98--Don Diego de Vargas. It isn't so much
+what he did; for when you are brave enough, you don't need to do. The
+doors of fate open before the golden key. He resubjugated the Southwest
+for Spain; and he resubjugated it as much by force of clemency as force
+of cruelty. But mark the point--it was _force that did it, not
+pow-wowing and parleying and straddling cowardice with conscience_. De
+Vargas could muster only 300 men at El Paso, including loyal Indians. On
+August 21, 1692, he set out for the north.
+
+It has taken many volumes to tell of the victories of Frontenac. It
+would take as many again to relate the victories of De Vargas. He was
+accompanied, of course, by the fearless and quenchless friars. All the
+pueblos passed on the way north he found abandoned; but when he reached
+Santa Fe on the 13th of September, he found it held and fortified by the
+Indians. The Indians were furiously defiant; they would perish, but
+surrender--never! De Vargas surrounded them and cut off the water
+supply. The friars approached under flag of truce. Before night, Santa
+Fe had surrendered without striking a blow. One after another, the
+pueblos were visited and pacified; but it was not all easy victory. The
+Indians did not relish an order a year later to give up occupation of
+the Palace and retire to their own villages. In December they closed all
+entrances to the Plaza and refused to surrender. De Vargas had prayers
+read, raised the picture of the Virgin on the battle flag, and advanced.
+Javelins, boiling water, arrows, assailed the advancing Spaniards; but
+the gate of the Plaza stockade was attacked and burned. Reinforcements
+came to the Indians, and both sides rested for the night. During the
+night, the Indian governor hanged himself. Next morning, seventy of the
+Indians were seized and court-martialed on the spot. De Vargas planted
+his flag on the Plaza, erected a cross and thanked God.
+
+[Illustration: A view of part of San Ildefonso, New Mexico, showing the
+famous Black Mesa in the background]
+
+One of the hardest fights of '94 was out on the Black Mesa, a huge
+precipitous square of basalt, frowning above San Ildefonso. This mesa
+was a famous prayer shrine to the Indians and is venerated as sacred to
+this day. All sides are sheer but that towards the river. Down this is a
+narrow trail like a goat path between rocks that could be hurled on
+climbers' heads. De Vargas stormed the Black Mesa, on top of which great
+numbers of rebels had taken refuge. Four days the attack lasted, his 100
+soldiers repeatedly reaching the edge of the summit only to be hurled
+down. After ten days the siege had to be abandoned, but famine had done
+its work among the Indians. For five years, the old general slept in his
+boots and scarcely left the warpath. It was at the siege of the Black
+Mesa that he is said to have made the vow to build a chapel to the
+Virgin; and it is his siege of Santa Fe that the yearly De Vargas
+Celebration commemorates to this day. And in the end, he died in his
+boots on the march at Bernalillo, leaving in his will explicit
+directions that he should be buried in the church of Santa Fe "under the
+high altar beneath the place where the priest puts his feet when he says
+mass." The body was carried to the parish church in his bed of state and
+interred beneath the altar; and the De Vargas celebration remains to
+this day one of the quaintest ceremonies of the old Governor's Palace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND AND ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTHWEST
+
+
+As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem
+in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers
+of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in
+armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on
+Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the
+desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare
+mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the
+quicksands. To Taos came Franciscan _padres_ long before Champlain had
+built stockades at Port Royal or Quebec. Just as the Jesuits won the
+wilderness of the up-country by martyr blood, so the Franciscans
+attacked the strongholds of paganism amid the pueblos of the South.
+Spanish _conquistadores_ have been represented as wading through blood
+to victory, with the sword in one hand, the cross in the other; but that
+picture is only half the truth. Let it be remembered that the Spanish
+were the only conquerors in America who gave the Indians perpetual
+title, intact and forever, to the land occupied when the Spanish
+came--which titles the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude
+soldiers, or even officers, might be guilty of such unprovoked attacks
+as occurred at Bernalillo in Coronado's expedition of 1540, the crown
+stood sponsor for the well-being and salvation of the Indian's soul.
+Wherever the conqueror marched, the sandaled and penniless Franciscan
+remained and too often paid the penalty of the soldier's crimes. In the
+Tusayan Desert, at Taos, at Zuni, at Acoma, you will find Missions that
+date back to the expedition of Coronado; and at every single Mission the
+_padres_ paid for their courage and their faith with their lives.
+
+But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man.
+Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the
+pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people
+from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised
+Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of
+Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the
+Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of
+Eden, "the place of the Morning Glow;" but when war and pestilence and
+ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the
+Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When
+did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos
+thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added,
+they live very much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white
+man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones;
+some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead
+of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations,
+there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The
+whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the
+old _estufas_, or _kivas_, are still used for religious ceremony, and
+election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the
+Indians threshing their grain by the trampling of goats on a threshing
+floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy,
+while a man scrapes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are
+white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of
+Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these
+white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own
+laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own
+prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos
+Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that
+civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman
+Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East;
+but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He
+has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open
+fields and the friendship of his gods--what more can life offer?
+
+Don't leave the Southwest without seeing Taos. It might be part of
+Turkey, or Persia, or India. It is the most un-American thing in
+America; and yet, it is the most typical of those ancient days in
+America, when there was no white man. Just here, before the ethnologist
+arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do
+not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the
+Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute
+legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo
+legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The easiest way to reach Taos is by the ancient city of Santa Fe. You go
+by rail to Servilleta, or Barrancas, then stage it out to the Indian
+pueblos. Better wire for your stage accommodation from the railroad. We
+did not wire, and when we left the railroad, we found seven people and a
+stage with space for only four. The railroad leads almost straight north
+from Santa Fe over high, clear mesas of yellow ocher covered with scrub
+juniper. There is little sign of water after you leave the Rio Grande,
+for water does not flow uphill; and you are at an altitude of 8,000 feet
+when you cross the Divide. You pass through fruit orchards along the
+river, low headed and heavy with apples. Then come the Indian villages,
+San Ildefonso, and Espanola, and Santa Clara, where the strings of red
+chile bake in the sunlight against the glare adobe. Women go up from
+the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the
+famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail
+across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and
+pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright
+blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment
+stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in
+the shade are the old people--people of a great age, 104 one old woman
+numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you
+are in a region where nothing grows but pinon and juniper. There is not
+a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train
+shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the
+right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black
+basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all
+Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see
+its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran
+down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the
+left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops
+and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes--White Rock
+Canyon--marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers.
+On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge
+cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa
+Clara Indians.
+
+Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more
+sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station;
+and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.
+
+A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at
+this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage--a
+famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn--made eight; and we packed into a
+two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight
+drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been
+driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that
+rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the
+wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede
+them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts
+varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told
+here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild horse. It is a
+combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is
+a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild
+one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles
+but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.
+
+[Illustration: The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace
+their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish
+conquistadores]
+
+Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only
+dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the
+Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds
+scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through
+the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting
+star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines
+of the mountains--wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe,
+coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give
+a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along
+abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land,
+a jumping-off place for all the earth--too high for irrigation farming,
+too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the
+twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties,
+where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is
+too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild
+bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads.
+The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo,
+where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a
+telephone line in.
+
+Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an
+utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls
+amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a
+pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable--then,
+suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has
+come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a
+plummet--two canyons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches
+through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together
+at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old
+friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain
+snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower
+levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another canyon slashed
+through the rocks in a deep trench--both rivers silver in the moonlight,
+with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or
+the waves of the sea.
+
+What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with
+a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump
+off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled
+Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent
+and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern
+adventure.
+
+I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be
+taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists
+have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two canyons are so
+close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one
+picture except from an airship. It is as if the earth were suddenly
+rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend
+tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down!
+The bronchos will manage that, where an Eastern horse would break his
+neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a
+terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the
+Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It
+could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything
+between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the
+places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the
+wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the
+horse, too.
+
+But, before you know it, you have switched round the last turn and are
+rattling across the Bridge. Some Mexican teamsters are in camp below the
+rock wall of the river. The reflection of the figures and firelight and
+precipices in the deep waters calls up all sorts of tales of Arabian
+Nights and road robbers and old lawless days. Then, you pull up sharp at
+the toll house for supper, as quaint an inn as anything in Switzerland
+or the Himalayas. The back of the house is the rock wall of the canyon.
+The front is adobe. The halls are long and low and narrow, with
+low-roofed rooms off the front side only. From the Bridge you can go on
+to Taos by motor in moonlight; but the whole way by stage and motor in
+one day makes a hard trip, and there is as much of interest at the
+Bridge as at Taos. You don't expect to find settlers in this dim silver
+underworld, do you? Well, drive a few miles up the Arroyo Hondo, where
+the stream widens out into garden patch farms, and you will find as odd
+specimens of isolated humans as exist anywhere in the world--relics of
+the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle
+Ages--Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or Crucifixion people, who yearly at
+Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the Cross, and until
+very recent years even re-enacted the Crucifixion.
+
+After supper we strolled out down the canyon. It is impossible to
+exaggerate its beauty. Each gash is only the width of the river with
+sides straight as walls. The walls are yellow and black basalt, all
+spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the frosts.
+The rivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from
+the springs in the snows. Snows and clear water and frost in the Desert?
+Yes: that is as the Desert is in reality, not in geography books. Below
+the Bridge, you can follow the Rio Grande down to some famous hot
+springs; and in this section, the air is literally spicy with the oil of
+sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the
+rapids, and you may catch the lilt of a mocking-bird, or see a bluebird
+examining some frost-touched berries. It is October; but the
+goldfinches, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads
+here.
+
+The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the
+Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a
+people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The
+houses of the Arroyo Hondo are very small and very poor; for the
+Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The
+orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have
+been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if
+living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a
+peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the
+Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders
+that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in
+the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are
+practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light--La Luz--and the
+Brothers of the Darkness--Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as
+Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one
+narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of
+membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death
+occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After
+Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final
+services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break
+the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to
+help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that
+politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get
+patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill
+above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where
+Penitentes have whipped themselves senseless with cactus belts, or
+dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring--1912--a
+woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby
+was bound. We passed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died
+from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907.
+
+The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the
+Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their
+naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers
+with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general
+congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop
+to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? "To appease divine
+wrath," they say; but they might ask us--why have we dipsomaniacs and
+kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because "Julia
+O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their
+skins." Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of
+emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are
+only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow canyon shut off
+from the rest of the world.
+
+They were not dolorous emotions that found vent as we drove back down
+Arroyo Hondo to the Bridge. Our driver got out a mouth organ. Then he
+played and sang snatches of dance tunes of the old, old days in the True
+West.
+
+    "Allamahoo, right hand to your partner
+    And grand hodoo."
+
+    "Watch your partner and watch her close;
+    And when you catch her, a double doze."
+
+    "The cock flies out and the hen flies in--
+    All hands round and go it agen."
+
+In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted
+and pristine on the trip to Taos.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA
+
+
+Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso--these were to the Southwest what Port Royal,
+Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and
+Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the
+Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of
+the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the
+watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish
+territory in the wilderness land of the New World.
+
+Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders
+from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader
+trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon.
+Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and
+Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads
+and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven
+blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish
+bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three
+Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains
+round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers from the
+peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley
+with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the
+mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the
+trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos
+was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of
+forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. "Walled city,"
+you say, "before the coming of white men to the West?" Yes, you can see
+those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540
+by hundreds of years.
+
+No motor can climb up and down the steep switchback to the Arroyo Hondo
+of the Bridge. Cars taken over that trail must be towed; but from the
+Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the
+river bed, you see the mountains ahead rise in black basalt like
+castellated walls, with tower and battlement jagged into the very
+clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where
+frost has touched the foliage; and you haven't gone very many miles into
+the lilac mist of the morning light--shimmering as it always shimmers
+above the sagebrush blue and sandy gold of the Upper Mesas--before you
+hear the laughter of living waters coming down from the mountain snows.
+One understands why the Indians chose the uplands; while the white man,
+who came after, had to choose the shadowy bottoms of the walled-in
+canyons. Someone, back in the good old days when we were not afraid to be
+poetic, said something about "traveling on the wings of the morning." I
+can't put in words what he meant; but you do it here--going up and up so
+gradually that you don't realize that you are in the lap, not of
+mountains, but of mountain peaks; breathing, not air, but ozone;
+uplifted by a great weight being taken off spirit and body; looking at
+life through rose-colored tints, not metaphorically, but really; for
+there is something in this high rare air--not dust, not moisture--that
+splits white light into its seven prismatic hues. You look through an
+atmosphere wonderfully rare, but it is never clear, white light. It is
+lavender, or lilac, or primrose, or gold, or red as blood according to
+the hours and the mood of hours; and if you want to carry the metaphor
+still farther, you may truthfully add that the hours on these high
+uplands are dancing hours. You never feel time to be a heavy, slow thing
+that oppresses the soul.
+
+[Illustration: Climbing home over your neighbor's roof and bolting your
+door by pulling up the ladder is customary in Taos]
+
+As the streams laugh down from the mountains, ranches grow more and more
+frequent. It is characteristic of the West that you don't cross the
+_acequias_ on bridges. You cross them on two planks, with risk to your
+car if the driver swerve at the steering wheel. All the houses are red
+earth adobe, thick of wall to shut out both heat and cold, with a smell
+of juniper wood in the fireplaces of each room. Much of this
+land--nearly all of it, in fact--is owned by the Taos Indians and held
+in common for pasturage and cultivation. Title was given by Spain four
+centuries ago, and the same title holds to-day in spite of white
+squatters' attempt to break down the law by cutting the wire of the
+pasture fences and taking the case to the courts. It was in this way
+that squatters broke down the title of old Spanish families to thousands
+and hundreds of thousands of acres granted before American occupation.
+To be sure, an American land commission took evidence on these titles,
+in the quarrel between Yankee squatter and Spanish don; but the squatter
+had "friends in court." The old Spanish don hadn't. He saw titles that
+had held good from 1540 slipping from his neighbor's hands; and he
+either contested the case to lose out before he had begun, or sold and
+sold at a song to save the wreckage of his fortunes. Of all the Spanish
+land grants originally partitioning off what is now New Mexico, I know
+of only one held by the family of the original grantee; and it is now in
+process of partition. It is an untold page of Southwestern history, this
+"stampeding" of Spanish titles. Some day, when we are a little farther
+away from it, the story will be told. It will not make pleasant reading,
+nor afford a bill of health to some family fortunes of the Southwest.
+Perjuries, assassinations, purchase in open markets of judges drawing
+such small pittances that they were in the auction mart for highest bid,
+forged documents, incendiary fires to destroy true titles--these were
+the least and most decent of the crimes of this era. "Ramona" tells what
+happened to Indian titles in California. Paint Helen Hunt Jackson's
+colors red instead of gray; multiply the crimes by ten instead of two;
+and you have a faint picture of the land-jockey period of New Mexican
+history. Something of this sort is going on at Taos to-day among the
+pueblos for their land, and down at Sacaton among the Pimas for water.
+Treaty guaranteed the Indian his rights, but at Taos the squatter cut
+the pueblo fences and carried the case to court. At Sacaton, the big
+squatter, the irrigation company, took the Pimas' water; so that the
+Indian can no longer raise crops. If you want to know what the courts do
+in these cases, ask the pueblo governor at Taos; or the Pima chief at
+Sacaton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is late September. A parrot calls out in Spanish from the center of
+the patio where our rooms look out on an arcade running round the court
+in a perfect square. A mocking-bird trills saucily from his cage amid
+the cosmos bloom. Donkeys and burros amble past the rear gate with loads
+of wood strapped to their backs. Your back window looks out on the
+courtyard. Your front window faces the street across from a plaza, or
+city square. Stalwart, thick-set, muscular figures, hair banded back by
+red and white scarfs, trousers of a loose, white pantaloon sort, tunic a
+gray or white blanket, wrapped Arab fashion from shoulders to waist,
+stalk with quick, nervous tread along the plaza; for it is the feast of
+Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will
+be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and
+foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia;
+and it is not Palestine; and it is not Spain. It is just plain,
+commonplace America out at Taos--white man's Taos, at the old Columbia
+Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns.
+
+As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and
+poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in
+adobe casement and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner
+patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the
+roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old
+Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been
+called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in
+the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and
+a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the
+Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to
+accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were
+diligently "skied" by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was
+deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself;
+and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they
+to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in
+Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that
+would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler.
+It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is
+sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in
+our own country.
+
+Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old Spanish mansions
+occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street
+entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit
+Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there
+does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine
+where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could
+brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four
+streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are
+alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as
+"alcalde," it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish
+dons lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and
+buckled shoes, and Spanish _conquistadores_ rode past armed cap-a-pie,
+and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the
+lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you
+will find the deep casement windows very high in the wall. I asked a
+descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. "For
+protection," she said.
+
+"Indians?" I asked.
+
+"No--Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside
+world."
+
+The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town.
+Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert--all lie on
+hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the
+exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley
+among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one
+on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the
+houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they
+are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are
+practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned
+to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two
+huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three
+to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire
+pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the
+village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and
+bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos
+after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You
+see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of
+Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to
+the roofs and can be drawn up--the pueblo way of bolting the door. The
+houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color
+outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly
+inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these
+ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the
+Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls
+over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing
+blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of
+ladders to the very top of a five storied house, and look out. You can
+see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in common. On the
+outskirts of the village, men and boys are threshing, that is--they are
+chasing ponies round and round inside a kraal, with a flag stuck up to
+show which way the wind blows, one man forking chaff with the wind,
+another scraping the grain outside the circle.
+
+Glance inside the houses. The upstairs is evidently the living-room; for
+the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn
+and meal bins, and you can see the _metate_ or stone on which the corn
+is ground by the women as in the days of Old Testament record. Though
+there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in the forties,
+and an old Mission church dating almost from 1540, you can see from the
+roof dozens of _estufas_, where the men are practicing for their dances
+and masked theatricals. Tony, the assistant governor, an educated man of
+about forty who has traveled with Wild West shows, acts as our guide,
+and tells us about the squatters trying to get the Indian land. How
+would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle of your farm and
+fence off 160 acres? The Indians didn't like it, and cut the fences.
+Then the troops were sent out. That was in 1910--a typical "uprising,"
+when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has
+gone to the courts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be settled very soon.
+In fact, Tony likes their own form of government better than the white
+man's. All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is
+not only assistant governor: he is constable to keep white men from
+bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own
+governor. That governor's word is absolutely supreme for his tenure of
+office. Is there a dispute over crops, or cattle? The governor's word
+settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers.
+
+"Supposing the guilty man doesn't obey the governor?" we ask.
+
+"Then we send our own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in
+the lock-up," and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and
+the lock-up. These stocks clamp down a man's head as well as his hands
+and feet. A man with his neck and hands anchored down between his feet
+in a black room naturally wouldn't remain disobedient long.
+
+The method of voting is older than the white man's ballot. The Indians
+enter the _estufa_. A mark is drawn across the sand. Two men are
+nominated. (No--women do not vote; the women rule the house absolutely.
+The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then
+signify their choice by marks on the sand.
+
+Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common;
+but the product of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own
+and not in common--the nearest approach to socialistic life that America
+has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other
+pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far back as the origin
+of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all
+other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact
+with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost
+unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as
+among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but
+the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.
+
+We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know
+him as a _cacique_. Associated with him are the old men--_mayores_, or
+council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the
+lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We
+have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who
+harangue from the housetops, or _estufas_. As women stoop over the
+_metates_ grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The
+chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the
+grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church,
+the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and
+in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never
+been able to learn the ceremonies of the _estufas_.
+
+Women never enter the _estufas_.
+
+Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but
+it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three
+companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez
+expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to
+Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the
+Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they
+reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast,
+undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition
+of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the
+Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de
+Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare
+the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One
+can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made
+between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in
+September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine
+the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When
+Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zuni, near the modern
+Gallup, he was met with the warning "Go back; or you will be put to
+death." His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zuni people promptly
+killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the
+lay brothers. Zuni was called "_cibola_" owing to the great number of
+buffalo skins (_cibolas_) in camp.
+
+Fray Marcos' report encouraged the Emperor of Spain to go on with
+Coronado's expedition. That trip need not be told here. It has been told
+and retold in half the languages of the world. The Spaniards set out
+from Old Mexico 300 strong, with 800 Indian escorts and four priests
+including Marcos and a lay brother. What did they expect? Probably a
+second Peru, temples with walls of gold and images draped in jewels of
+priceless worth. What did they find? In Zuni and the Three Mesas and
+Taos, small, sun-baked clay houses built tier on tier on top of each
+other like a child's block house, with neither precious stones, nor
+metals of any sort, but only an abundance of hides and woven cloth. When
+the soldiers saw Zuni, they broke out in jeers and curses at the priest.
+Poor Fray Marcos was thinking more of souls saved from perdition than of
+loot, and returned in shamed embarrassment to New Spain.
+
+Across the Desert to the Three Mesas and the Canyon of the Colorado, east
+again to Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, up to the pueblo town now known
+as the city of Santa Fe, into the Pecos, and north, yet north of Taos,
+Coronado's expedition practically made a circuit of all the Southwest
+from the Colorado River to East Kansas. The knightly adventurers did not
+find gold, and we may guess, as winter came on with heavy snows in the
+Upper Desert, they were in no very good mood; for now began that contest
+between white adventurers and Pueblos which lasted down to the middle of
+the Nineteenth Century. At the pueblo now known as Bernalillo, the
+soldiers demanded blankets to protect them from the cold. The Indians
+stripped their houses to help their visitors, but in the melee and no
+doubt in the ill humor of both sides there were attacks and insults by
+the white aggressors, and a state of siege lasted for two months.
+Practically from that date to 1840, the pueblo towns were a unit against
+the white man.
+
+[Illustration: A fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has
+not adhered to the native costume]
+
+The last great uprising was just after the American Occupation. Bent,
+the great trader of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, was governor. Kit
+Carson, who had run away from the saddler's trade at sixteen and for
+whom a reward of one cent was offered, had joined the Santa Fe caravans
+and was now living at Taos, an influential man among the Indians.
+According to Col. Twitchell, whose work is the most complete on New
+Mexico and who received the account direct from the governor's daughter,
+Governor Bent knew that danger was brewing. The Pueblos had witnessed
+Spanish power overthrown; then, the expulsion of Mexican rule. Why
+should they, themselves, not expel American domination?
+
+It was January 18, 1847. Governor Bent had come up from Santa Fe to
+visit Taos. He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a
+trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders' rum
+had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to
+the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to
+complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had
+harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion. Governor Bent
+and his family were in bed in the house you can see over to the left of
+the Plaza. In the kraal were plenty of horses for escape, but the
+family were awakened at daybreak by a rabble crowding into the central
+courtyard. Kit Carson's wife, Mrs. Bent, Mrs. Boggs and her children
+hurried into the shelter of an inner room. Young Alfredo Bent, only ten
+years old, pulled his gun from the rack with the words--"Papa, let us
+fight;" but Bent had gone to the door to parley with the leaders.
+
+Taking advantage of the check, the women and an Indian slave dug a hole
+with a poker and spoon under the adobe wall of the room into the next
+house. Through this the family crawled away from the besieged room to
+the next house, Mrs. Bent last, calling for her husband to come; but it
+was too late. Governor Bent was shot in the face as he expostulated;
+clubbed down and literally scalped alive. He dragged himself across the
+floor, to follow his wife; but Indians came up through the hole and down
+over the roof and in through the windows; and Bent fell dead at the feet
+of his family.
+
+The family were left prisoners in the room without food, or clothing
+except night dresses, all that day and the next night. At daybreak
+friendly Mexicans brought food, and the women were taken away disguised
+as squaws. Once, when searching Indians came to the house of the old
+Mexican who had sheltered the family, the rescuer threw the searchers
+off by setting his "squaws" to grinding meal on the kitchen floor. Kit
+Carson, at this time, unfortunately happened to be in California. He was
+the one man who could have restrained the Indians.
+
+The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo Hondo to catch some mule
+loads of whiskey and provisions, which were expected through the narrow
+canyon. The mill where the mules had been unharnessed was surrounded that
+night. The teamsters plugged up windows and loaded for the fray that
+must come with daylight. Seven times the Indians attempted to rush an
+assault. Each time, a rifle shot puffed from the mill and an Indian
+leaped into the air to fall back dead. Then the whole body of 500
+Indians poured a simultaneous volley into the mill. Two of the Americans
+inside fell dead. A third was severely wounded. By the afternoon of the
+second day, the Americans were without balls or powder. The Indians then
+crept up and set fire to the mill. The Americans hid themselves among
+the stampeding stock of the kraal. Night was coming on. The Pueblos were
+crowding round in a circle. The surviving Americans opened the gates and
+made a dash in the dark for the mountains. Two only escaped. The rest
+were lanced and scalped as they ran; and in the loot of the teams, the
+Indians are supposed to have secured some well-filled chests of gold
+specie.
+
+By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five
+companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and
+four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where
+the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait
+his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of a mesa at Santa
+Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of
+the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only
+one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and
+forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date;
+and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the
+narrowing canyons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred
+Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and pinon. The
+soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not
+withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here.
+Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands;
+and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been
+drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered
+great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could
+not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were
+completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the
+walls. A shell was fired--the church wall battered down, and the
+dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feb. 4th, old men,
+women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The
+ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew
+off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss
+was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to
+overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if
+the Indians had not been spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with
+counter plots of their own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in
+white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw
+off white rule--these Pueblos--but for four centuries they have
+withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent
+the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open
+revolt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA
+
+
+If you want to plunge into America's Egypt, there are as many ways to go
+as you have moods. You explain that the ocean voyage is half the
+attraction to European travel. There may be a difference of opinion on
+that, as I know people who would like to believe that the Atlantic could
+be bridged; but if you are keen on an ocean voyage, you can reach the
+Egypt of America by boat to Florida, then west by rail; or by boat
+straight to any of the Texas harbors. By way of Florida, you can take
+your fill of the historic and antique and the picturesque in St.
+Augustine and Pensacola and New Orleans; and if there are any yarns of
+rarer flavor in all the resorts of Europe than in the old quarters of
+these three places, I have never heard of them. You can drink of the
+spring of the elixir of life in St. Augustine, and lose yourself in the
+trenches of old Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, and wander at will in the
+old French town of New Orleans. Each place was once a pawn in the
+gambles of European statesmen. Each has heard the clang of armed
+knights, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other. Each has seen
+the pirate fleet with death's head on the flag at the masthead come
+tacking up the bays, sometimes to be shattered and sunk by cannon shot
+from the fort bastions. Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the
+buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at
+terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who
+was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight
+of her watching father.
+
+But whether you enter the Egypt of America by rail overland, or by sea,
+San Antonio is the gateway city from the south to the land of play and
+mystery. It is to the Middle West what Quebec is to Canada, what Cairo
+is to Egypt--the gateway, the meeting place of old and new, of Latin and
+Saxon, of East and West, of North and South. Atmosphere? Physically, the
+atmosphere is champagne: spiritually, you have not gone ten paces from
+the station before you feel a flavor as of old wine. There are the open
+Spanish plazas riotous with bloom flanked by Spanish-Moorish ruins flush
+on the pavement, with skyscraper hotels that are the last word in
+modernity. Live oaks heavy with Spanish moss hang over sleepy streams
+that come from everywhere and meander nowhere. You see a squad of
+soldiers from Fort Sam Houston wheeling in measured tread around a
+square (only there isn't anything absolutely square in all San Antonio)
+and they have hardly gone striding out of sight before you see a Mexican
+burro trotting to market with a load of hay tied on its back. A motor
+comes bumping over the roads--such roads as only the antique can
+boast--and if it is fiesta time, or cowboy celebration, you are apt to
+see cowboys cutting such figure eights in the air as a motor cannot
+execute on antique pavement.
+
+You enter a hotel and imagine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the
+Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the marble walls isn't gilt;
+and it isn't tapestry. The frieze is a long panel in bronze
+_alto-relievo_. I think it is a testimonial to San Antonio's sense of
+the fitness of things that that frieze is not of Roman gladiators, or
+French gardens with beringed ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of
+the cowboys taking a stampeding herd up the long trail--drifting and
+driving but held together by a rough fellow in top boots and sombrero;
+and the rotunda has a frieze of cowboys because that three
+million-dollar hotel was built out of "cow" money. Old and new, past and
+present, Saxon and Latin, North and South, East and West--that is San
+Antonio. You can never forget it for a minute. It is such a shifting
+panorama as you could only get from traveling thousands of miles
+elsewhere, or comparing a hundred Remington drawings. San Antonio is a
+curious combination of Remington and Alma Tadema in real life; and I
+don't know anywhere else in the world you can get it. There are three
+such huge hotels in San Antonio besides a score of lesser ones, to take
+care of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in
+San Antonio; but remember that while 30,000 seems a large number of
+tourists for one place, that is only one-tenth the number of Americans
+who yearly see Europe.
+
+And never for a moment can you forget that as Cairo is the gateway to
+Eastern travel, so San Antonio is on the road to Old Mexico and all the
+former Spanish possessions of the South. It was here that Madero's band
+of revolutionists lived and laid the plans that overthrew Diaz. Long
+ago, before the days of railway, it was here that the long caravans of
+mule trains used to come with, silver and gold from the mines of Old
+Mexico. It was here the highwaymen and roughs and toughs and scum of the
+earth used to lie in wait for the passing bullion; and it was here the
+Texas Rangers came with short, quick, sharp shrift for rustlers and
+robbers. There is one corner in San Antonio where you can see a Mission
+dating back to the early seventeen hundreds, and not a stone's throw
+away, one of the most famous gambling joints of the wildest days of the
+wild Southwest--the site of the old Silver King, where cowboys and
+miners from the South used to come in "to clean out" their earnings of a
+year, sometimes to ride horses over faro tables, or pot-shot rows of
+champagne. A man had "to smile" when he called his "pardner" pet names
+in the Silver King; or there would be crackle of more than champagne
+corks. Men would duck for hiding. A body would be dragged out, sand
+spread on the floor, and the games went on morning, noon and night. The
+Missions are crumbling ruins. So is the Silver King. Frontiersmen will
+tell you regretfully of the good old days forever gone, when the night
+passed but dully if the cowboys did not shoot up all the saloons and
+"hurdle" the gaming tables.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yesterday, it was cowboy and mines in San Antonio. To-day, it is polo
+and tourist; and the transition is a natural growth. One would hate to
+think of the risks of the Long Trail, for miners from Old Mexico to Fort
+Leavenworth, for cowboys from Fort Worth to Wyoming and St. Louis, and
+not see the risks rewarded in fortunes to these trail makers. The cowboy
+and miner of the olden days--the cowboy and miner who survived, that
+is--are the capitalists taking their pleasure in San Antonio to-day. It
+was natural that the cow pony bred to keeping its feet in mid-air, or on
+earth, should develop into the finest type of polo pony ever known. For
+years, the polo clubs of the North, Lenox, Long Island, Milbrook, have
+made a regular business of scouring Texas for polo ponies. Horses giving
+promise of good points would be picked up at $80, $100, $150. They would
+then be rounded on a ranch and trained. San Antonio is situated almost
+700 feet up on a high, clear plateau rimmed by blue ridges in the
+distance. Recently, a polo ground of 3,200 acres has been laid out; and
+the polo clubs of the North are to be invited to San Antonio for the
+winter fiestas. As Fort Sam Houston boasts one of the best polo clubs of
+the South, competition is likely to attract the sportsmen from far and
+near.
+
+You know how it is in all these new Western cities. They are feverish
+with a mania of progress. They have grown so fast they cannot keep track
+of their own hobble-de-hoy, sprawling limbs. They are drunk with
+prosperity. In real estate alone, fortunes have come, as it were,
+overnight. All this San Antonio has not escaped. They will tell you with
+pardonable pride how this little cow town, where land wasn't worth two
+cents an acre outside the Mission walls, has jumped to be a metropolitan
+city of over 100,000; how it is the center of the great truck and
+irrigation farm district. Fort Sam Houston always has 700 or 800
+soldiers in garrison, and sometimes has as many as 4,000; and when army
+maneuvers take place, there is an immense reservation outside the city
+where as many as 20,000 men can practice mimic war. The day of two cents
+or even $20 an acre land round San Antonio is forever past. Land under
+the ditch is too valuable for the rating of twenty acres to one steer.
+
+All this and more you will see of modern San Antonio; but still if at
+sundown you set out on a vagrant and solitary tour of the old Missions,
+I think you will feel as I felt that it was the dauntless spirit of the
+old regime that fired the blood of the moderns for the new day that is
+dawning. I don't know why it is, but anything in life that is worth
+having seems to demand service and sacrifice and, oftener than not, the
+martyrdom of heroic and terrible defeat. Then, when you think that the
+flag of the cause is trampled in a mire of bloodshed, phoenix-like
+the cause rises on eagles' wings to new height, new daring, new victory.
+It was so in Texas.
+
+When you visit the Missions of San Antonio, go alone; or go with a
+kindred spirit. Don't talk! Let the mysticism and wonder of it sink in
+your soul! Soak yourself in the traditions of the Past. Let the dead
+hand of the Past reach out and touch you. You will live over again the
+heroism of the Alamo, the heroism that preceded the Alamo--that of the
+Franciscans who tramped 300 leagues across the desert of Old Mexico to
+establish these Missions; the heroism that preceded the
+Franciscans--that of La Salle traveling thrice 300 leagues to establish
+the cross on the Gulf of Mexico, and perishing by assassin's hand as he
+turned on the backward march. You will see the iron cross to his memory
+at Levaca. It was because La Salle, the Frenchman, found his way to the
+Gulf, that Spain stirred up the viceroys of New Mexico to send sword and
+cross over the desert to establish forts in the country of the Tejas
+(Texans).
+
+Do you realize what that means? When I cross the arid hills of the Rio
+Grande, I travel in a car cooled by electric fans, with two or three
+iced drinks between meals. These men marched--most of them on foot, the
+cowled priests in sandals, the knights in armor plate from head to
+heel--over cactus sands. Do you wonder that they died on the way? Do you
+wonder that the marchers coming into the well-watered plains of the San
+Antonio with festooned live oaks overhanging the green waters, paused
+here and built their string of Missions of which the chief was the one
+now known as "The Alamo"--the Mission of the cottonwood trees?
+
+[Illustration: An excellent example of the entrance to an adobe house of
+the Southwest, embodying the best traditions of this kind of
+architecture]
+
+Six different flags have flown over the land of the Tejas: the French,
+the Spanish, the Mexican, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate, the
+Union. In such a struggle for ascendancy, needless to tell, much blood
+was shed righteously and unrighteously; but of the battle fought at the
+Alamo, no justification need be given. It is part of American history,
+but it is the kind of history that in other nations goes to make battle
+hymns. Details are in every school book. Santa Ana, the newly risen
+Mexican dictator, had ordered the 30,000 Americans who lived in Texas,
+to disarm. Sam Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis, had sprung to arms with
+a call that rings down to history yet:
+
+     "Fellow citizens and compatriots," wrote Travis from the
+     doomed Alamo Mission, to Houston and the other leaders
+     outside, "I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under
+     Santa Ana. I have sustained a continued bombardment for
+     twenty-four hours and have not lost a man.... The garrison
+     is to be put to the sword if the place is taken. I have
+     answered the summons with a cannon shot and our flag still
+     waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender, nor
+     retreat. I call on you in the name of liberty, and of
+     everything dear to the American character, to come to our
+     aid with all despatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements
+     daily, and will no doubt increase to 3,000 or 4,000 in four
+     or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am
+     determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die
+     like a soldier who forgets not what is due to his own honor
+     and that of his country--Victory or Death!
+
+                        W. Barrett Travis
+                            Lieut.-Col. Commanding."
+
+
+
+In the fort with Travis were 180 men under Bowie and Crockett. The siege
+began on Feb. 23, 1836, and ended on March 6th. Besides the frontiersmen
+in the fort were two women, two children and two slaves. The Mission was
+arranged in a great quadrangle fifty-four by 154 yards with _acequias_
+or irrigation ditches both to front and rear. The garrison had succeeded
+in getting inside the walls about thirty bushels of corn and eighty beef
+cattle; so there was no danger of famine. The big courtyard was in the
+rear. The convent projected out in front of the courtyard. To the left
+angle of the convent was the chapel or Mission of the Alamo. Santa Ana
+had come across the desert with 5,000 men. To the demand for surrender,
+Travis answered with a cannon shot. The Mexican leader then hung the red
+flag above his camp and ordered the band to play "no quarter." For eight
+days, shells came hurtling inside the walls incessantly, dawn to dark,
+dark to dawn. Just at sunset on March 3rd, there was a bell. Travis
+collected his men and gave them their choice of surrendering and being
+shot, or cutting their way out through the besieging line. The
+besiegers at this time consisted of 2,500 infantrymen bunched close to
+the walls of the Alamo--too close to be shot from above, and 2,500
+cavalry and infantry back on the Plaza and encircling the Mission to cut
+off all avenue of escape.
+
+Travis drew a line on the ground with his sword.
+
+"Every man who will die with me, come across that line! Who will be
+first? March!"
+
+Every man leaped over the line but Bowie, who was ill on a cot bed.
+
+"Boys, move my cot over the line," he said.
+
+At four o'clock next morning, the siege was resumed. The bugle blew a
+single blast. With picks, crowbars and ladders, the Mexicans closed in.
+The besieged waited breathlessly. The Mexicans placed the ladders and
+began scaling. The sharpshooters inside the walls waited till the heads
+appeared above the walls--then fired. As the top man fell back, the one
+beneath on the ladder stepped in the dead man's place. Then the
+Americans clubbed their guns and fought hand to hand. By that, the
+Mexicans knew that ammunition was exhausted and the defenders few. The
+walls were scaled and battered down first in a far corner of the convent
+yard. Behind the chapel door, piles of sand had been stacked. From the
+yard, the Texans were driven to the convent, from the convent to the
+chapel. Travis fell shot at the breach in the yard wall. Bowie was
+bayoneted on the cot where he lay. Crockett was clubbed to death just
+outside the chapel door to the left. By nine o'clock, no answering shot
+came from the Alamo. The doors were rammed and rushed. Not a Texan
+survived. Two women, two children and a couple of slaves were pulled out
+of hiding from chancel and stalls. These were sent across to the main
+camp. The bodies of the 182 heroes were piled in a pyramid with fagots;
+and fired. So ended the Battle of the Alamo, one of the most terrible
+defeats and heroic defenses in American history. It is unnecessary to
+relate that Sam Houston exacted from the Mexicans on the battlefield of
+San Jacinto a terrible punishment for this defeat. Captured and killed,
+his toll of defeated Mexicans down at Houston came to almost 1,700.
+
+Such is the story of one of San Antonio's Missions. One other has a tale
+equally tragic; but all but two are falling to utter ruin. I don't know
+whether it would be greater desecration to lay hand on them and save
+them, or let them fall to dust. It was nightfall when I went to the
+three on the outskirts of the city. Two have little left but the walls
+and the towers. A third is still used as place of worship by a little
+settlement of Mexicans. The slant light of sunset came through the
+darkened, vacant windows, the tiers of weathered stalls, the empty,
+twin-towered belfries. You could see where the well stood, the bake
+house, the school. Shrubbery planted by the monks has grown wild in the
+courtyards; but you can still call up the picture of the cowled priests
+chanting prayers. The Missions are ruins; but the hope that animated
+them, the fire, the heroism, the dauntless faith, still burn in Texas
+blood as the sunset flame shines through the dismantled windows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA
+
+
+If someone should tell you of a second Grand Canyon gashed through
+wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very
+high mountains--a second Grand Canyon, where lived a race of little men
+not three feet tall, where wild turkeys were domesticated as household
+birds and every man's door was in the roof and his doorstep a ladder
+that he carried up after him--you would think it pure imagination,
+wouldn't you? The Lilliputians away out in "Gulliver's Travels," or
+something like that? And if your narrator went on about magicians who
+danced with live rattlesnakes hanging from their teeth and belted about
+their waists, and played with live fire without being burned, and walked
+up the faces of precipices as a fly walks up a wall--you would think him
+rehearsing some Robinson Crusoe tale about two generations too late to
+be believed.
+
+Yet there is a second Grand Canyon not a stone's throw from everyday
+tourist travel, wilder in game life and rock formation if not so large,
+with prehistoric caves on its precipice walls where sleeps a race of
+little mummied men behind doors and windows barely large enough to admit
+a half-grown white child. Who were they? No one knows. When did they
+live? So long ago that they were cave men, stone age men; so long ago
+that neither history nor tradition has the faintest echo of their
+existence. Where did they live? No, it was not Europe, Asia, Africa or
+Australia. If it were, we would know about them. As it happens, this
+second Grand Canyon is only in plain, nearby, home-staying America; so
+when boys of the Forest Service pulled Little Zeke out of his gypsum and
+pumice stone dust and measured him up and found him only twenty-three
+inches long, though the hair sticking to the skull was gray and the
+teeth were those of an adult--as it happened in only matter-of-fact,
+commonplace America, poor Little Zeke couldn't get shelter. They
+trounced his little dry bones round Silver City, New Mexico, for a few
+months. Then they boxed him up and shipped him away to be stored out of
+sight in the cellars of the Smithsonian, at Washington. As Zeke has been
+asleep since the Ice Age, or about ten to eight thousand years B. C., it
+doesn't make very much difference to him; but one wonders what in the
+world New Mexico was doing allowing one of the most wonderful specimens
+of a prehistoric dwarf race ever found to be shipped out of the country.
+
+It was in the Gila Canyon that the Forestry Service boys found him. By
+some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy "Zeke." The Gila is a
+typical box-canyon, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the
+Grand Canyon, literally terraced and honeycombed with the cave dwellings
+of a prehistoric race. It lies some fifty miles as the crow flies from
+Silver City; but the way the crow flies and the way man travels are an
+altogether different story in the wild lands of the Gila Mountains.
+You'll have to make the most of the way on horseback with tents for
+hotels, or better still the stars for a roof. Besides, what does it
+matter when or how the little scrub of a twenty-three-inch man lived
+anyway? We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how
+cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave
+men--ask Jack London if you don't believe it--were hairy monsters, not
+quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal
+appendage--hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the
+hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
+That is the way they got their wives. (Perhaps, if Little Zeke could
+speak, he would think he ought to sue moderns for libel. He might think
+that our "blond-beast" theories are a reflex of our own civilization. He
+might smile through his grinning jaws.)
+
+Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements
+of fine woven cloth with fluffy-ruffles and fol-de-rols of woven blue
+jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck. Zeke's people
+understood weaving. Also Zeke wears on his feet sandals of yucca fiber
+and matting. I don't know what our ancestors wore--according to
+evolutionists, it may have been hair and monkey pads. So if you
+understood as much about Zeke's history as you do about the Pyramids,
+you'd settle some of the biggest disputes in theology and ethnology and
+anthropology and a lot of other "ologies," which have something more or
+less to do with the salvation and damnation of the soul.
+
+How is it known that Zeke is a type of a race, and not a freak specimen
+of a dwarf? Because other like specimens have been found in the same
+area in the last ten years; and because the windows and the doors of the
+cave dwellings of the Gila would not admit anything but a dwarf race.
+They may not all have been twenty-four and thirty-six and forty inches;
+but no specimens the size of the mummies in other prehistoric dwellings
+have been found in the Gila. For instance, down at Casa Grande, they
+found skeletons buried in the gypsum dust of back chambers; but these
+skeletons were six-footers, and the roofs of the Casa Grande chambers
+were for tall men. Up in the Frijoles cave dwellings, they have dug out
+of the _tufa_ dust of ten centuries bodies swathed in woven cloth; but
+these bodies are of a modern race five or six feet tall. You have only
+to look at Zeke to know that he is not, as we understand the word, an
+Indian. Was he an ancestor of the Aztecs or the Toltecs?
+
+Though you cannot go out to the Gila by motor to a luxurious hotel,
+there are compensations. You will see a type of life unique and
+picturesque as in the Old World--countless flocks of sheep herded by
+soft-voiced peons. It is the only section yet left in the West where
+freighters with double teams and riders with bull whips wind in and out
+of the narrow canyons with their long lines of tented wagons. It is still
+a land where game is plentiful as in the old days, trout and turkey and
+grouse and deer and bear and mountain lion, and even bighorn, though the
+last named are under protection of closed season just now. I'm always
+afraid to tell an Easterner or town dweller of the hunt of these old
+trappers of the box canyons; but as many as thirteen bear have been
+killed on the Gila in three weeks. The altitude of the trail from Silver
+City to the Gila runs from 6,000 to 9,150 feet. When you have told that
+to a Westerner, you don't need to tell anything else. It means burros
+for pack animals. In the Southwest it means forests of huge yellow
+pines, open upland like a park, warm, clear days, cool nights, and
+though in the desert, none of the heat nor the dust of the desert.
+
+It is the ideal land for tuberculosis, though all invalids should be
+examined as to heart action before attempting any altitude over 4,000
+feet. And the Southwest has worked out an ideal system of treatment for
+tuberculosis patients. They are no longer housed in stuffy hotels and
+air tight, super-heated sanitariums. Each sanitarium is now a tent
+city--portable houses or tents floored and boarded halfway up, with the
+upper half of the wall a curtain window, and a little stove in each
+tent. Each patient has, if he wants it, a little hospital all to
+himself. There is a central dining-room. There is also a dispensary. In
+some cases, there are church and amusement hall. Where means permit it,
+a family may have a little tent city all to itself; and they don't call
+the tent city a sanitarium. They call it "Sun Mount," or "Happy Canyon,"
+or some other such name. The percentage of recoveries is wonderful; but
+the point is, the invalids must come in time. Wherever you go along the
+borders of Old and New Mexico searching for prehistoric ruins, you come
+on these tent cities.
+
+[Illustration: The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras,
+and its top as flat as a billiard table]
+
+Where can one see these cliff and cave dwellings of a prehistoric dwarf?
+Please note the points. Cliff and cave dwellings are not the same. Cliff
+dwellings are houses made by building up the front of a natural arch.
+This front wall was either in stone or sun-baked adobe. Cave dwellings
+are houses hollowed out of the solid rock, a feat not so difficult as it
+sounds when you consider the rock is only soft pumice or tufa, that
+yields to scraping more readily than bath brick or soft lime. The cliff
+dwellings are usually only one story. The cave dwellings may run five
+stories up inside the rock, natural stone steps leading from tier to
+tier of the rooms, and tiny porthole windows looking down precipices 500
+to 1,000 feet. The cliff dwellings are mostly entered by narrow trails
+leading along the ledge of a precipice sheer as a wall. The first story
+of the cave dwellings was entered by a light ladder, which the owner
+could draw up after him. Remember it was the Stone Age: no metals, no
+firearms, no battering rams, nor devices for throwing projectiles. A
+man with a rock in his hand in the doorway of either type of dwelling
+could swiftly and deftly and politely speed the parting guest with a
+brickbat on his head. Similar types of pottery and shell ornament are
+found in both sorts of dwellings; but I have never seen any cliff
+dwellings with evidences of such religious ceremony as in the cave
+houses. Perhaps the difference between cliff folk and cave folk would be
+best expressed by saying that the cliff people were to ancient life what
+the East Side is to us: the cave people what upper Fifth Avenue
+represents. One the riff-raff, the weak, the poor, driven to the wall;
+the other, the strong, the secure and defended.
+
+You go to one section of ruins, and you come to certain definite
+conclusions. Then you go on to another group of ruins; and every one of
+your conclusions is reversed. For instance, what drove these races out?
+What utterly extinguished their civilization so that not a vestige, not
+an echo of a tradition exists of their history? Scientists go up to the
+Rio Grande in New Mexico, see evidence of ancient irrigation ditches, of
+receding springs and decreasing waters; and they at once
+pronounce--desiccation. The earth is burning up at the rate of an inch
+or two of water in a century; moisture is receding toward the Poles as
+it has in Mars, till Mars is mostly arid, sun-parched desert round its
+middle and ice round the Poles. Good! When you look down from the cliff
+dwellings of Walnut Canyon, near Flagstaff, that explanation seems to
+hold good. There certainly must have been water once at the bottom of
+this rocky box-canyon. When the water sank below the level of the
+springs, the people had to move out. Very well! You come on down to the
+cave dwellings of the Gila. The bottom falls out of your explanation,
+for there is a perpetual gush of water down these rock walls from
+unfailing mountain springs. Why, then, did the race of little people
+move out? What wiped them out? Why they moved in one can easily
+understand. The box canyons are so narrow that half a dozen pigmy boys
+deft with a sling and stones could keep out an army of enemies. The
+houses were so built that a child could defend the doorway with a club;
+and where the houses have long hallways and stairs as in Casa Grande,
+the passages are so narrow as to compel an enemy to wiggle sideways; and
+one can guess the inmates would not be idle while the venturesome
+intruder was wedging himself along. Also, the bottoms of these
+box-canyons afforded ideal corn fields. The central stream permitted easy
+irrigation on each side by tapping the waterfall higher up; and the wash
+of the silt of centuries ensured fertility to men, whose plowing must
+have been accomplished by the shoulder blade of a deer used as a hoe.
+
+Modern pueblo Indians claim to be descendants of these prehistoric dwarf
+races. So are we descendants of Adam; but we don't call him our uncle;
+and if he had a say, he might disown us. Anyway, how have modern
+descendants of the dwarf types developed into six-foot modern Pimas and
+Papagoes? It is said the Navajo and Apache came originally from
+Athabasca stock. Maybe; but the Pimas and Papagoes claim their Garden of
+Eden right in the Southwest. They call their Garden of Eden by the
+picturesque name of "Morning Glow."
+
+How reach the caves of the dwarf race?
+
+To the Gila group, you must go by way of Silver City; and better go in
+with Forest Service men, for this is the Gila National Forest and the
+men know the trails. You will find ranch houses near, where you can
+secure board and room for from $1.50 to $2 a day. The "room" may be a
+boarded up tent; but that is all the better. Or you may take your own
+blanket and sleep in the caves. Perfectly safe--believe me, I have fared
+all these ways--when you have nearly broken your neck climbing up a
+precipice to a sheltered cave room, you need not fear being followed.
+The caves are clean as if kalsomined from centuries and centuries of
+wash and wind. You may hear the wolves bark--bark--bark under your
+pillowed doorway all night; but wolves don't climb up 600-foot precipice
+walls. Also if it is cold in the caves, you will find in the corner of
+nearly all, a small, high fireplace, where the glow of a few burning
+juniper sticks will drive out the chill.
+
+What did they eat and how did they live, these ancient people, who wore
+fine woven cloth at an era when Aryan races wore skins? Like all desert
+races, they were not great meat eaters; and the probabilities are that
+fish were tabooed. You find remains of game in the caves, but these are
+chiefly feather decorations, prayer plumes to waft petitions to the
+gods, or bones used as tools. On the other hand, there is abundance of
+dried corn in the caves, of gourds and squash seeds; and every cave has
+a _metate_, or grinding stone. In many of the caves, there are alcoves
+in the solid wall, where meal was stored; and of water jars, urns,
+ollas, there are remnants and whole pieces galore. It is thought these
+people used not only yucca fiber for weaving, but some species of hemp
+and cotton; for there are tatters and strips of what might have been
+cotton or linen. You see it wrapped round the bodies of the mummies and
+come on it in the accumulation of volcanic ash.
+
+Near many of the ruins is a huge empty basin or pit, which must have
+been used as a reservoir in which waters were impounded during siege of
+war. Like conies of the rocks, or beehives of modern skyscrapers, these
+denizens lived. The most of the mummies have been found in sealed up
+chambers at the backs of the main houses; but these could hardly have
+been general burying places, for comparatively few mummies have yet been
+found. Who, then, were these dwarf mummies, placed in sealed vaults to
+the rear of the Gila caves? Perhaps a favorite father, brother, or
+sister; perhaps a governor of the tribe, who perished during siege and
+could not be taken out to the common burial ground.
+
+Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to 700 feet high,
+literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave
+doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-canyons in the Southwest are
+of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and
+gypsum white. Owing to the great altitude--some of the ruins are 9,000
+feet above sea level, 1,000 above valley bottom--the atmosphere has that
+curious quality of splitting white light into its seven prismatic hues.
+Artists of the Southwestern School account for this by the fact of
+desert dust being a silt fine as flour, which acts like crystal or glass
+in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this
+hardly explains these high box-canyons, for there is no dust here. My own
+theory (please note, it is only a theory and may be quite wrong) is that
+the air is so rare at altitudes above 6,000 feet, so rare and pure that
+it splits light up, if not in seven prismatic colors, then in elementary
+colors that give the reds and purples and fire tints predominance.
+Anyway, at sunset and sunrise, these box-canyons literally swim in a
+glory of lavender and purple and fiery reds. You almost fancy it is a
+fire where you can dip your hand and not be burned; a sea in which
+spirits, not bodies, swim and move and have their being; a sea of fiery
+rainbow colors.
+
+The sunset fades. The shadows come down like invisible wings. The
+twilight deepens. The stars prick through the indigo blue of a desert
+sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern
+window and door the deep red of juniper and cedar log glow in the
+fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his
+plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the
+big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a
+metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a
+bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing
+floors in the middle of the narrow canyon. You can see the dancing rings
+yet, where the feet of a thousand years have beaten the raw earth hard.
+Men only dance. These are not sex dances. They are dances of thanks to
+the gods for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases
+clapping. The campfires that scent the canyon with juniper smells,
+flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance
+ceases and fades in the darkness.
+
+That was ten thousand years agone. Where are the races that danced to
+the beat of the priest's clapper gong?
+
+I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail
+of the turtle dove; and there came back that old prophecy--it used to
+give me cold shivers down my spine as a child--that the habitat of the
+races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and
+bat and fox.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the
+Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the
+Morning Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions;
+the scene of their mythical "golden age," when there were no Apaches
+raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a
+perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all
+animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in
+pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water.
+
+Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in
+the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according
+to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the
+Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after
+the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was
+blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa
+Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods.
+The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give
+yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey,
+the Government Custodian of the ruins.
+
+The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive
+out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where
+the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone
+ages.
+
+"How old are they?" I asked my driver, as we passed a huge cactus high
+as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root,
+the great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by
+little desert birds for water.
+
+"Oh, centuries and centuries old," he said; "and the queer part is that
+in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their
+roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the
+bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep
+the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up
+all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that
+big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts;
+settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next
+time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards."
+
+Far as you could look were the little adobe houses and white tents of
+the pioneers, stretching barb wire lines round 160-acre patches of
+mesquite with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for
+a spring. These settlers have to bore down the sixty feet to water level
+with very inadequate tools; and you see little burros chasing homemade
+windlasses round and round, to pump up water. It looks like "the faith
+that lays it down and dies." Slow, hard sledding is this kind of
+farming, but it is this kind of dauntless faith that made Phoenix and
+made Yuma and made Imperial Valley. Twenty years ago, you could squat on
+Imperial Valley Land. To-day it costs $1,000 an acre and yields high
+percentage on that investment. To-day you can buy Casa Grande lands from
+$5 to $25 an acre. Wait till the water is turned in the ditch, and it
+will not seem such tedious work. If you want to know just how hard and
+lonely it is, drive past the homesteads just at nightfall as I did. The
+white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence strung along
+juniper poles and cedar shakes; no house, no stable, no buildings of any
+sort. The horses are staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the
+chip fire. A lantern hangs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles
+ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the
+outlines of another tent--the homesteader's nearest neighbor. Just now
+Casa Grande town boasts 400 people housed chiefly in one story adobe
+dwellings. Come in five years, and Casa Grande will be boasting her ten
+and twenty thousand people. Like mushrooms overnight, the little towns
+spring up on irrigation lands.
+
+You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen miles out--a red
+roof put on by the Government, then a huge, square, four story mass of
+ruins surrounded by broken walls, with remnants of big elevated
+courtyards, and four or five other compounds the size of this central
+house, like the bastions at the four corners of a large, old-fashioned
+walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness--six feet in
+the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade--a thickness
+that in an age of only stone weapons must have been impenetrable. The
+doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend
+almost double to enter; and the supposition is this was to prevent the
+entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome
+visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with _vigas_ of
+cedar strengthened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a
+horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house is laid out
+on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to
+compel passage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled
+scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course,
+open squares off the halls or other rooms; but in addition to these
+openings, you will find close to the floor of each room, little round
+"cat holes," one or two or three of them, big enough for a beam but
+without a beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through
+walls four or five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room
+opposite the fireplace. Fewkes and others think they may have been
+ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blowing back in the room, but
+in Casa Grande they are in rooms where there is no fireplace. Others
+think they were whispering tubes, for use in time of war or religious
+ceremony; but in a house of open doors, would it not have been as simple
+to call through the opening? Yet another explanation is that they were
+for drainage purpose, the cave man's first rude attempt at modern
+plumbing; but that explanation falls down, too; for these openings don't
+drain in any regular direction. Such a structure as Casa Grande must
+have housed a whole tribe in time of religious festival or war; so you
+come back to the explanation of ventilator shafts.
+
+The ceilings of Casa Grande are extraordinarily high; and bodies found
+buried in sealed up chambers behind the ruins of the other compounds are
+five or six feet long, showing this was no dwarf race. The rooms do not
+run off rectangular halls as our rooms do. You tumble down stone steps
+through a passage so narrow as to catch your shoulders into a room deep
+and narrow as a grave. Then you crack your head going up other steps off
+this room to another compartment. Bodies found at Casa Grande lie flat,
+headed to the east. Bodies found in the caves are trussed up knees to
+chin, but as usual the bodies found at Casa Grande have been shipped
+away East to be stored in cellars instead of being left carefully
+glassed over, where they were found.
+
+Lower altitude, or the great age, or the quality of the clays, may
+account for the peculiarly rich shades of the pottery found at Casa
+Grande. The purples and reds and browns are tinged an almost iridescent
+green. Running back from the Great House is a heavy wall as of a former
+courtyard. Backing and flanking the walls appear to have been other
+houses, smaller but built in the same fashion as Casa Grande. Stand on
+these ruined walls, or in the doorway of the Great House, and you can
+see that five such big houses have once existed in this compound. Two or
+three curious features mark Casa Grande. Inside what must have been the
+main court of the compound are elevated earthen stages or platforms
+three to six feet high, solid mounds. Were these the foundations of
+other Great Houses, or platforms for the religious theatricals and
+ceremonials which enter so largely into the lives of Southwestern
+Indians? At one place is the dry bed of a very ancient reservoir; but
+how was water conveyed to this big community well? The river is two
+miles away, and no spring is visible here. Though you can see the
+footpath of sandaled feet worn in the very rocks of eternity, an
+irrigation ditch has not yet been located. This, however, proves
+nothing; for the sand storms of a single year would bury the springs
+four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is
+the old tree growing up out of the center; and that brings up the
+question how we know the age of these ancient ruins--that is, the age
+within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is;
+and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face
+of things, Casa Grande must be thousands of years older than the other
+ruins of the Southwest.
+
+Why?
+
+First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when
+he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great
+House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who
+have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by
+1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great Jesuit, was
+the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he
+gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said mass there about 1694.
+What a weird scene it must have been--the Sacaton Mountains glimmering
+in the clear morning light; the shy Indians in gaudy tunics and yucca
+fiber pantaloons crowding sideways through the halls to watch what to
+them must have been the gorgeous vestments of the priest. Then followed
+the elevation of the host, the bowing of the heads, the raising of the
+standard of the Cross; and a new era, that has not boded well for the
+Pimas and Papagoes, was ushered in. Then the Indians scattered to their
+antelope plains and to the mountains; and the priest went on to the
+Mission of San Xavier del Bac.
+
+The Jesuits suffered expulsion, and Garcez, the Franciscan, came in
+1775, and also held mass in Casa Grande. Garcez says that it was a
+tradition among the Moki of the northern desert that they had originally
+come from the south, from the Morning Glow of Casa Grande, and that they
+had inhabited the box-canyons of the Gila in the days when they were "a
+little people." This establishes Casa Grande as prior to the cave
+dwellings of the Gila or Frijoles; and the cave dwellings were
+practically contemporaneous with the Stone Age and the last centuries of
+the Ice Age. Now, the cave dwellings had been abandoned for centuries
+before the Spaniards came. This puts the cave age contemporaneous with
+or prior to the Christian era.
+
+In the very center of the Casa Grande reservoir, across the doorways of
+caves in Frijoles Canyon, grew trees that have taken centuries to come to
+maturity.
+
+The Indian tradition is that soon after a very great flood of turbulent
+waters, in the days when the Desert was knee-deep in grass, the Indian
+Gods came from the Underworld to dwell in Casa Grande. (Not so very
+different from theories of evolution and transmigration, is it?) The
+people waxed so numerous that they split off in two great families. One
+migrated to the south--the Pimas, the Papagoes, the Maricopas; the
+others crossed the mountains to the north--the Zunis, the Mokis, the
+Hopis.
+
+Yet another proof of the great antiquity is in the language. Between
+Papago and Moki tongue is not the faintest resemblance. Now if you trace
+the English language back to the days of Chaucer, you know that it is
+still English. If you trace it back to 55 B. C. when the Roman and Saxon
+conquerors came, there are still words you recognize--thane, serf, Thor,
+Woden, moors, borough, etc. That is, you can trace resemblances in
+language back 1,900 years. You find no similarity in dialects between
+Pima and Moki, and very few similarities in physical conformation. The
+only likenesses are in types of structure in ancient houses, and in arts
+and crafts. Both people build tiered houses. Both people make wonderful
+pottery and are fine weavers, Moki of blankets and Pima of baskets; and
+both people ascribe the art of weaving to lessons learned from their
+goddess, the Spider Maid.
+
+There are few fireplaces among the ancient dwellings of the Pimas and
+Papagoes, but lots of fire pits--_sipapus_--where the spirits of the
+Gods came through from the Underworld. Dancing floors, may pole rings,
+abound among the cave dwellings: mounds and platforms and courts among
+the Casa Grande ruins. The sun and the serpent were favored symbols to
+both people, a fact which is easily understood in a cloudless land,
+where serpents signified nearness of water springs, the greatest need of
+the people. You can see among the cave dwellings where earthquakes have
+tumbled down whole masses of front rooms; and both Moki and Papago have
+traditions of "the heavens raining fire."
+
+It has been suggested by scientists that the cliffs were cities of
+refuge in times of war, the caves and Great Houses were permanent
+dwellings. This is inferred because there were no _kivas_ or temples
+among the cliff ruins, and many exist among the caves and Great Houses.
+Cushing and Hough and I think two or three others regard Casa Grande as
+a temple or great community house, where the tribes of the Southwest
+repaired semi-annually for their religious ceremonies and theatricals.
+
+We moderns express our emotions through the rhythm of song, of dance, of
+orchestra, of play, of opera, of art. The Indian had his pictographs on
+the rocks for art, and his pottery and weaving to express his
+craftsmanship; but the rest of his artistic nature was expressed chiefly
+by religious ceremonial or theatrical dance, similar to the old miracle
+plays of the Middle Ages. For instance, the Indians have not only a
+tradition of a great flood, but of a maiden who was drawn from the
+Underworld by her lover playing a flute; and the Flute Clans celebrate
+this by their flute dance. The yearly cleansing of the springs was as
+great a religious ceremony as the Israelites' cleansing of personal
+impurity. Each family belonged to a clan, and each clan had a religious
+lodge, secret as any modern fraternal order.
+
+[Illustration: It isn't America at all! It's Arabia, and the Bedouins of
+the Painted Desert are Navajo boys]
+
+The mask dances of the Southwest are much misunderstood by white people.
+We see in them only what is grotesque or perhaps obscene. Yet the
+spirits of evil and the spirits of goodness are represented under the
+Indian's masked dances, just as the old miracle plays represented Faith,
+Hope, Charity, Lust, Greed, etc. There is the Bird Dance representing
+the gyrations of hummingbird, mocking-bird, quail, eagle, vulture. There
+is the dance of the "mud-heads." Have we no "mud-heads" befuddling life
+at every turn of the way? There is the dance of the gluttons and the
+monsters. Have we no unaccountable monsters in modern life? Read the
+record of a single day's crime; and ask yourself what mad motive tempted
+humans to such certain disaster. We explain a whole rigmarole of motives
+and inheritance and environment. The Indian shows it up by his dance of
+the monsters.
+
+Perhaps one of the most beautiful ceremonials is the corn dance. Picture
+to yourself the _kivas_ crowded with spectators. The priests come down
+bearing blankets in a circle. The blanket circle surrounds the altar
+fire. The audience sits breathless in the dark. Musicians strike up a
+beating on the stone gong. A flute player trills his air. The blankets
+drop. In the flare of the altar fire is seen a field of corn, round
+which the actors dance. The priests rise. The blankets hide the fire. It
+is the Indian curtain drop. When you look again, there is neither
+pageant of dancers, nor field of corn. So the play goes on--a dozen acts
+typifying a dozen scenes in a single night.
+
+Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial
+dances. "If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the
+arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat." "When you go to the
+hunt, travel with a light blanket." We talk of getting back to Mother
+Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth
+Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part
+in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a
+dance.
+
+Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the
+Vandals of Europe--Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great
+Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the
+Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of
+extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such
+heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man
+stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the
+peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard to say; for the white man
+began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of
+slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when
+every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima
+and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What
+does the Indian know of "prior rights" in filing for water? Have not
+these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came
+with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-canyons of the Gila
+and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior
+rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of
+government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped
+the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.
+They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the
+overflow of the torrential rains--that only brings the alkali wash to
+the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no
+longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to
+starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has
+taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally
+protected as they crossed the continent to California.
+
+What are the American people going to do about it? Nothing, of course.
+When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by
+inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article
+about it, or some ethnologist a brochure about an exterminated people.
+Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat
+owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of
+"the Golden Age," "the Morning Glow."
+
+We drove back from Casa Grande by starlight over the antelope plains. I
+looked back to the crumbling ruins of the Great House, and its five
+compounds, where the men and women and children of the Morning Glow came
+to dance and worship according to all the light they had. Its falling
+walls and dim traditions and fading outlines seemed typical of the
+passing of the race. Why does one people pass and another come?
+
+Christians say that those who fear not God, shall pass away from the
+memory of men, forever.
+
+Evolutionists say that those who are not fit, shall not survive.
+
+The Spaniard of the Southwest shrugs his gay shoulders under a tilted
+sombrero hat, and says _Quien sabe?_ "Who knows?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA
+
+
+It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin
+of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise
+comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the
+mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled
+in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams--a mist shot with the
+gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the
+dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in
+the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying
+prone, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as
+the faces of god-like races ever are.
+
+You wind round a juniper grove--"cedars of Lebanon," the Old Testament
+would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come
+down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of
+Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds--only they call them "herders,"
+fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of
+Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms
+shade the ground. And the maidens are there, "drawing water from the
+well," carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of
+perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers,
+hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled.
+
+You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with
+the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,--and a winged horseman spurs
+past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of
+rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red
+chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick
+or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse--that is why
+the Oriental always called an enemy "a dog." Pottery makers look up from
+their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote passerby. The
+basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old
+woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her
+basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight
+strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye;
+and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools.
+
+Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.
+
+You have turned a spur of the Mountains, dipped into a valley, come up
+on the Mesa into the sunlight, and there It is--the eternal mountains
+with their eternal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats
+of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtain where you may paint
+your own pictures of fancy, and in the midst of the great amphitheater
+rises an island rock; and on the island rock is a grotto; and in the
+grotto is the figure of the Mother of Christ--in purplish blue, of
+course, as betokens eternal purity--and below the island of rock in the
+midst of the amphitheater something swims into your ken that is neither
+of Heaven nor earth. White, glaringly white as the very spotlessness of
+Heaven, twin-towered as befitting the dual nature of man, flesh and
+spirit; pointed in its towers and minarets and belfries, betokening the
+reaching of the spirit of Man up to God; lions between the arches of the
+roofed piazzas, as betokening the lion-hearted spirit of Man fighting
+his enemies of Flesh and Spirit up to God!
+
+Palms before arched white walls shut out the world--Peace and Seclusion
+and Purity!
+
+You dip into a valley, the scent of the cedars in your nostrils and
+lungs, the peace of God in your heart. Then you come up to a high mesa
+and you see the vision of the white symbol swimming between earth and
+sky but always pointing skyward.
+
+Where are you, anyway: in Persia amid floating palaces, on the Nile,
+approaching the palaces of Allahabad in India, or coming up to Moorish
+minarets and twin towns of the Alhambra in Spain?
+
+Believe me, you are in neither Europe, Asia, nor Africa. You are in a
+much despised land called "America," whence wealth and culture run off
+to Europe, Asia and Africa, to find what they call "art" and
+"antiquity."
+
+It is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old
+Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been
+falling in torrents. Rain is not supposed to fall in the Desert, but it
+has been coming down in slant torrents and the sky is reflected
+everywhere in the roadside pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for
+the altitude is only 2,000 feet; too high to be languid, too low for the
+sting of autumn frosts.
+
+We motor, first, through the old Spanish town--relics of a grandeur that
+America does not know to-day, a grandeur more of spirit than display.
+The old Spanish grandee never counted his dollars, nor measured up the
+value of a meal to a guest. But he counted honor dear as the Virgin
+Mary, and made a gamble of life, and hated tensely as he loved. The old
+mansion houses are fallen in disrepute, to-day. They are given over, for
+the most part to Chinese and Japanese merchants; but through the open
+windows you can still see plazas and patios of inner courtyards, where
+oleanders are in perpetual bloom and roses climb the trellis work, and
+the parrot calls out "swear words" of Spanish pirate and highwayman. St.
+Augustine Mission, where heroes shed martyr blood, is now a saloon and
+dance hall, but where rags and tatters flaunted from the clothes lines
+of negro and Japanese and Chinese tenant, I could not but think of the
+torn flags that mark the most heroic action of regiments.
+
+[Illustration: The Mission of the San Xavier at Tucson, Arizona, one of
+the most ancient in the New World, has an almost Oriental aspect]
+
+From the Spanish Town of Tucson, which any other nation would have
+treasured as a landmark and capitalized in dollars for the tourist, you
+pass modern mansions that wisely follow the Spanish-Moorish type of
+architecture, most suited to Desert atmosphere.
+
+Then you come on the Tucson Farms Company Irrigation project, now
+sagebrush and cactus land put under the ditch from Santa Cruz River and
+turned over to settlers from Old Mexico--who were driven out by the
+Revolution--for $25 an acre. You see the lonely eyed woman pioneer
+sitting at the door of the tent flap.
+
+Moisture steams up from the river like a morning incense to the sun. The
+Tucson Range of mountains shimmers. Giant cactus stand ghost-like,
+centuries old, amid the mesquite bush; and in the columnar hole of the
+cactus trees you see the holes where the little desert wren has pecked
+through for water in a waterless season.
+
+Then, before you know it, you are in the Papago Indian Reserve. The
+finest basket makers of the world, these Papagoes are. They make baskets
+of such close weave that they will hold water, and you see the Papago
+Indian women with jars--ollas--of water on their head going up and down
+from the water pools. Basket makers weave in front of the sun-baked
+adobe walls where hang the red strings of chile like garlands. On the
+whole, the Indian faces are very happy and good. They do not care for
+wealth, these children of the Desert. Give them "this day their daily
+bread," and they are content, and thank God.
+
+Then the mountains close in a cup round the shimmering valley. In the
+center of the valley rises an island of rock, the rock of the Grotto of
+the Virgin; and a white dome and twin towers show, glare white, almost
+unearthly, with arches pointing to Heaven, and lions in white all along
+the roof typifying the strength that is of God. There is a dome in the
+middle of the roof line--that is the Moorish influence brought in by
+Spain. There are twin towers on each side; and in the towers on the
+right hand side are three brass bells to call to work and matins and
+vespers. It may be said here that the French Mission may always be known
+by its single spire and cross; the Spanish Mission by its twin towers
+and bells. The French Mission rings its bell. The Spanish Mission
+strikes its bells with a hammer or gong. One utters cheer. The other
+sounds a rich, low, mellow call to worship. The walls and pillars and
+arches are all marble white; and you are looking on one of the most
+ancient Missions of the New World--San Xavier del Bac, of Tucson,
+Arizona.
+
+The whole effect is so oriental as to be startling. The white dome might
+be Indian or Persian, but the pointed arches and minarets are
+unmistakably Moorish--that is, Moorish brought across by Spain. The
+entrance is under an arched white wall, and the courtyard looks out
+behind through arched white gateway to the distant mountains.
+
+Here four sisters of St. Joseph conduct a school for the little
+Papagoes; and what a school it is! It might do honor to the Alhambra.
+Palms line the esplanade in front of the arched, walled entrance.
+Collie dogs rise lazily under the deep embrasures of the arched plazas.
+A parrot calls out some Spanish gibberish of bygone days. A snow-white
+Persian kitten frisks its plumy tail across the brick-paved walk of the
+inner patio; and across the courtyard I catch a glimpse of two Shetland
+ponies nosing for notice over a fence beside an ancient Don Quixote nag
+that evidently does duty for dignitaries above Shetland ponies. An air
+of repose, of antiquity, of apartness, rests on the marble white
+Mission, as of oriental dreams and splendor or European antiquity and
+culture.
+
+I ring the bell of the reception room to the right of the church
+entrance. Not a sound but the echo of my own ring! I enter, cross
+through the parlor and come on the Spanish patio or central courtyard.
+What a place for prayers and meditation and the soul's repose! Arched
+promenades line both sides of the inner court. Here Jesuit and
+Franciscan monks have walked and prayed and meditated since the
+Sixteenth Century. By the hum as of busy bees to the right, I locate the
+schoolrooms, and come on the office of the Mother Superior Aquinias.
+
+What a pity so many of us have an early impress of religion as of
+vinegar aspect and harsh duty hard as flint and unhuman as a block of
+wood. This Mother Superior is merry-faced and red-blooded and human and
+dear. She evidently believes that goodness should be warmer, dearer,
+truer, more attractive and kindly than evil; and all the little Indian
+wards of the four schoolrooms look happy and human and red-blooded as
+the Mother Superior.
+
+A collie pup flounders round us up and down the court walk where the old
+missionary monks suffered cruel martyrdom. Poll, the parrot, utters
+sententious comment; and the Shetland ponies whinny greetings to their
+mistress. All this does not sound like vinegar goodness, does it?
+
+But it is when you enter the church that you get the real surprise.
+Three times, the desertion of this Mission was forced by massacre and
+pillage. Twice it was abandoned owing to the expulsion of Jesuit and
+Franciscan by temporal power. For seventy years, the only inhabitants of
+a temple stately as the Alhambra were the night bats, the Indian
+herders, the border outlaws of the United States and Mexico. Yet, when
+you enter, the walls are covered with wonderful mural painting. Saints'
+statues stand about the altar, and grouped about the dome of the groined
+ceiling are such paintings as would do honor to a European Cathedral.
+
+The brick and adobe walls are from two to six feet thick. Not a nail has
+ever been driven in the adobe edifice. The doors are of old wood in huge
+panels mortised and dovetailed together. The latch is an iron bar carved
+like a Damascus sword. The altar is a mass of gilding and purple. To be
+sure, the saints' fingers have been hacked off by wandering cowboy and
+outlaw and Indian; but you find that sort of vandalism in the British
+Museum and Westminster Abbey. The British Museum had careful
+custodians. For over seventy years, this ancient Mission stood open to
+the winds of heaven and the torrential rains and the midnight bats. Only
+the faithfulness of an old Indian chief kept the sacred vessels from
+desecration. When the fathers were expelled for political reasons, old
+Jose, of the Papagoes, carried off the sacred chalices and candles till
+the _padres_ should return, when he brought them from hiding.
+
+Gothic temples are usually built in one long, clear arch. The roof of
+San Xavier del Bac is a series of the most perfect groined domes, with
+the deep embrasures of the windows on each side colored shell tints in
+wave-lines. Because of the height and depth of the windows, the light is
+wonderfully clear and soft. The church is used now only by Indian
+children; and did Indian children ever have such a magnificent temple in
+which to worship? To the left of the entrance is a wonderful old
+baptismal font of pure copper, which has been the envy of all
+collectors. One wonders looking at the ancient vessel whether it was
+baptized with the blood of all the martyrs who died for San
+Xavier--Francesca Garcez, for instance? There is a window in this
+baptistry, too, that is the envy of critics and collectors. It is set
+more deeply in the wall than any window in the Tower of London, with
+pointed Gothic top that sends shafts of sunlight clear across the
+earthen floor.
+
+From the baptistry I ascended to the upper towers. The stairs are old
+timber set in adobe and brick, through solid walls of a thickness of
+six feet. The view from the belfries above is wonderful. You see the
+mountains shimmering in the haze. You see the little square adobe
+matchbox houses of Papago Indians, with the red chile hanging against
+the wall, and the women coming from the spring, and the men husking the
+corn. You wonder if when San Xavier was besieged and besieged and
+besieged yet again by Apache and Navajo and Pima, the beleaguered
+priests took refuge in these towers, and came down to die, only to save
+their Mission. Against Indian arms, it may be said, San Xavier would be
+an impregnable fortress. Yet the priests of San Xavier were three times
+utterly destroyed by Indians.
+
+When you come to seek the history of San Xavier, you will find it as
+difficult to get, as a guide out to the Mission. As a purely tourist
+resort, leaving out all piety and history, it should be worth hundreds
+of thousands of dollars a year to Tucson. Yet it took me the better part
+of a day to find out that San Xavier is only nine miles and not eighteen
+from Tucson.
+
+And this is typical of the difficulty of getting the real history of the
+place. Jesuit Relations of New France have been published in every kind
+of edition, cheap and dear. Jesuit Relations of New Spain, who knows?
+The Franciscans succeeded the Jesuits; and the Franciscans do not read
+the history of the Jesuits. It comes as a shock to know that Spanish
+_padres_ were on the Colorado and Santa Cruz at the time Jacques
+Cartier was exploring the St. Lawrence. We have always believed that
+Spanish _conquistadores_ slaughtered the Indians most ruthlessly. Study
+the mission records and you get another impression, an impression of
+penniless, friendless, unprotected friars "footing" it 600, 700, 900
+miles from Old Mexico to the inmost recesses of the Desert canyons. In
+late days, when a friar set out on his journey, twenty mounted men acted
+as his escort; and that did not always save him from death; for there
+were stretches of the journey ninety miles without water, infested every
+mile of the way by Apaches; and these stretches were known as the
+Journeys of Death. When you think of the ruthless slaughter of the
+_conquistadores_, think also of the friars tramping the parched sand
+plains for 900 miles.
+
+While Fray Juan de la Asuncion and Pedro Nadol are the first
+missionaries known in Arizona about 1538, Father Kino was the great
+missionary of 1681 to 1690, officiating at the Arizona Missions of San
+Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori. There are reports of the Jesuits being
+among the Apaches as early as 1630--say early as the days of the Jesuits
+in Canada; but who the missionaries were, I am unable to learn.
+Rebellion and massacre devastated the Missions in 1680 and in 1727; but
+by 1754, the missionaries were back at San Xavier and had twenty-nine
+stations commanding seventy-three different pueblos. In 1767, for
+political reasons, the Jesuits suffered expulsion; and the Franciscans
+came in--tramping, as told before, 600 and 900 miles. It was under the
+Franciscans that the present structure of San Xavier was built. Garcez
+was the most famous of the Franciscans. He spent seven years among the
+Pimas and Papagoes and Yumas; but one hot midsummer Sunday--July 17,
+1781--during early mass, the Indians rose and slew four priests, all the
+Spanish soldiers and all the Spanish servants. Garcez was among the
+martyrs. San Xavier, as it at present stands, is supposed to have been
+completed in 1797; but in 1827-9, came another political turnover and
+all foreign missionaries were expelled. Tumacacori and San Xavier were
+always the most important of the Arizona Missions. Originally quite as
+magnificent a structure as San Xavier, Tumacacori has been allowed to go
+to ruin. Of late, it has been made a United States monument. It is a
+day's journey from Tucson.
+
+To describe San Xavier is quite impossible, except through canvas and
+photograph. There is something intangibly spiritual and unearthly in its
+very architecture; and this is the spirit in which it was originally
+built. At daybreak, a bell called the builders to prayers of
+consecration. At nightfall, vesper bells sent the laborer home with the
+blessing of the church. For the most part, the workers were Mexicans and
+Indians; and as far as can be gathered from the annals, voluntary
+workers. The Papagoes and Pimas at that time numbered 5,000, of whom 500
+lived round the Missions, the rest spending the summers hunting in the
+mountains.
+
+[Illustration: On top of the world--a Moki city on a Mesa in the Painted
+Desert. At the left are the ends of a ladder leading from an underground
+council chamber]
+
+When the American Government took over Arizona, San Xavier went under
+the diocese of New Mexico. From Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Tucson was 600
+miles across desert mountains and canyons, every foot of the way infested
+by Apache warriors; and the heroism of that trail was marked by the same
+courage and constancy as signalized the founding and maintenance of the
+other early Spanish Missions.
+
+It would be a mistake to say that San Xavier has been restored.
+Restoration implies innovation; and San Xavier stands to-day as it stood
+in the sixteen hundreds, when Father Kino, the famous mathematician and
+Jesuit from Bavaria, came wandering up from the Missions of Lower
+California, preaching to the Yumas and Pimas of the hot, smoking hot,
+Gila Desert, and held mass in Casa Grande, the Great House or Garden of
+Eden of the Indian's Morning Glow. A lucky thing it is that restoration
+did not imply change in San Xavier; for the Mission floats in the
+shimmering desert air, unearthly, eerie, unreal, a thing of beauty and
+dreams rather than latter day life, white as marble, twin-towered, roof
+domed and so dazzling in the sunlight to the unaccustomed eye that you
+somehow know why rows of restful, drowsy palms were planted in line
+along the front of the wall.
+
+Perhaps it is that it comes on you as such a complete surprise. Perhaps
+it is the desert atmosphere in this cup of the mountains; but all the
+other missions of the Southwest are adobe gray, or earth color showing
+through a veneer of drab whitewash.
+
+There is the giant, century-old desert cactus twisted and gnarled with
+age like the trees in Dante's Inferno, but with bird nests in the
+pillared trunks, where little wrens peck through the bark for water. You
+look again. A horseman has just dismounted beneath the shade of a fine
+old twisted oak; but beyond the oak the vision is there, glare,
+dazzling, white, twin-towered and arched, floating in mid-air, a vision
+of beauty and dreams.
+
+Life seems to sleep at San Xavier. The mountains hemming in the valley
+seem to sleep. The shimmering blue valley sleeps. The sunlight sleeps
+against the glare white walls. The huge old mortised door to the church
+stands open, all silent and asleep. The door of the Mission parlor
+stands open--sunlight asleep on a checkered floor. You enter. Your
+footsteps have an echo of startling impudence--modern life jumping back
+into past centuries! You ring the gong. The sound stabs the sleeping
+silence, and you almost expect to see ghosts of Franciscan friar and
+Jesuit priest come walking along the arcaded pavement of the inner
+courtyard to ask you what all this modern noise is about; but no ghosts
+come. In fact, no one comes. San Xavier is all asleep. You cross through
+the parlor to the inner patio or courtyard, arched all around three
+sides with the fourth side looking through a wonderfully high arched
+gateway out to the far mountains. Polly turns on her perch in her cage,
+and goes back to sleep. The white Persian kitten frisks his
+white-plumed tail; and also turns over and goes to sleep. Two collie
+dogs don't even emit a "woof." They arch their pointed noses with the
+fine old aristocratic air of the unspoken question: what are you of the
+Twenty Century doing wandering back into the mystery and mysticism and
+quietude of the religious sixteen hundred? But if you keep on going, you
+will find the gentle-voiced sisterhood teaching the little Pimas and
+Papagoes in the schoolrooms.
+
+San Xavier, architecturally, is sheer delight to the eye. The style is
+almost pure Moorish. The yard walls are arched in harmony with the
+arched outline of the roof; and in the inner courtyard you will notice
+the Spanish lion at the intersection of all the roof arches. In front of
+the Mission buildings is a walled space of some sixty by forty feet,
+where the Indians used to assemble for discussion of secular matters
+before worship. On the front wall in high relief are placed the arms of
+St. Francis of Assisi, and in the sacristry to the right of the altar
+you will find mural drawings and a painting of Saint Ignatius. Thus San
+Xavier claims as her founders and patrons both Franciscan and Jesuit.
+This is easily explained. The Franciscans came up overland across the
+Desert from the City of Mexico. The Jesuits came up inland from their
+Mission on the Gulf of California. Father Kino, the Jesuit, from a
+Bavarian university, was the first missionary to hold services among the
+Pimas and Papagoes, and if he did not lay the foundations of San
+Xavier, then they were laid by his immediate successors. The escutcheon
+of the Franciscans on the wall is a twisted cord and a cross on which
+are nailed the arms of the Christ and the arm of St. Francis. The Christ
+arm is bare. The Franciscan's arm is covered.
+
+Unlike other Missions built of adobe, San Xavier is of stone and brick.
+It is 100 by thirty feet. The transept on each side of the nave runs out
+twenty-one feet square. The roof above the nave is supported by groined
+arches from door to altar. The cupola above the altar is fifty feet to
+the dome. The other vaults are only thirty feet high. The windows are
+high in the clearstory and set so deeply in the casement that the light
+falling on the mural paintings and fresco work is sifted and softened.
+Practically all the walls, cupola, dome, transept, nave, are covered
+with mural paintings. There is the coming of the Spirit to the
+Disciples. There is the Last Supper. There is the Conception. There is
+the Rosary. There is the Hidden Life of the Lord.
+
+The main altar has evidently been constructed by the Jesuits; for the
+statue of St. Francis Xavier stands below the Virgin between figures of
+St. Peter and St. Paul and God, the Creator. On the groined arches of
+the dome are figures of the Wise Men, the Flight to Egypt, the
+Shepherds, the Annunciation. Gilded arabesques colored in Moorish shell
+tints adorn the main altar. Statues of the saints stand in the alcoves
+and niches of the pillars and vaults. Two small doors lead up to the
+towers from the main door. Look well at these doors and stairways. Not a
+nail has been driven. The doors are mortised of solid pieces. The first
+flight of stairs leads to the choir. Around the choir are more mural
+paintings. Two more twists of the winding stair; and you are in the
+belfry. Twenty-two more steps bring you to the summit of the tower--a
+galleried cupola, seventy-five feet above the ground, where you may look
+out on the whole world.
+
+Pause for a moment, and look out. The mountains shimmer in their pink
+mists. The sunlight sleeps against the adobe walls of the scattered
+Indian house. You can hear the drone of the children from the
+schoolrooms behind the Mission. You can see the mortuary chapel down to
+the right and the lions supporting the arches of the Mission roof.
+Father Kino was a famous European scholar and gentleman. He threw aside
+scholarship. He threw aside comfort. He threw aside fame; and he came to
+found a Mission amid arabs of the American Desert. The hands that
+wrought these paintings on the walls were not the hands of bunglers.
+They were the hands of artists, who wrought in love and devotion. Three
+times, San Xavier was dyed in martyr blood by Indian revolt.
+
+Priests, whose names even have been lost in the chronicles, were
+murdered on the altars here, thrown down the stairs, cut to pieces in
+their own Mission yard. Before a death which they coveted as glory, what
+a life they must have led. To Tucson Mission was nine miles; but to
+Tumacacori was eighty; to Old Mexico, 900. Occasionally, they had escort
+of twelve soldiers for these long trips; but the soldiers' vices made so
+much trouble for the holy fathers that the missionaries preferred to
+travel alone, or with only a lay brother. Sandaled missionaries tramped
+the cactus desert in June, when the heat was at its height; and they
+traversed the mountains when winter snows filled all the passes. They
+have not even left annals of their hardships. You know that in such a
+year, Father Kino tramped from the Gulf of California to the Gila, and
+from the Gila to the Rio Grande. You know in such another year, nineteen
+priests were slain in one day. On such another date, a missionary was
+thrown over a precipice; or slain on the high altar of San Xavier. And
+always, the priests opposed the outrages of the soldiery, the injustice
+of the ruling rings. Father Kino petitions the royal house of Spain in
+1686 that converts be not forcibly seized and "dragged off to slavery in
+the mines, where they were buried alive and seldom survived the abuse."
+He gets a respite from the King for all converts for twenty years. He
+does not permit converts to be taken as slaves in the mines or slaves in
+the pearl fisheries; so the ruling rings of Old Mexico obstruct his
+enterprises, lie about his Missions, slander him to the patrons who
+supply him with money, and often reduce his missions to desperate
+straits; but wherever there is a Mission, Father Kino sees to it that
+there are a few goats. The goats supply milk and meat.
+
+The fathers weave their own clothing, grow their own food, and hold the
+fort against the enemy as against the subtle designs of the Devil. These
+fathers mix their own mortar, make their own bricks, cut their own
+beams, lay the plaster with their own hands. Now, remember that the
+priests who did all this were men who had been artists, who had been
+scholars, who had been court favorites of Europe. Father Kino was,
+himself, of the royal house of Bavaria. But jealousy left the Missions
+unprotected by the soldiers. Soldier vices roused the Indians to fury;
+and the priests were the first to fall victims. Go across the Moki
+Desert. You will find peach orchards planted by the friars; but you
+cannot find the graves of the dead priests. We considered the Apaches a
+dangerous lot as late as 1880. In 1686, in 1687, in 1690, Father Kino
+crossed Apache land alone. I cannot find any record of the Spanish
+Missions at this period ever receiving more than $15,000 a year for
+their support. Ordinarily, a missionary's salary was about $150 a year.
+Out of that, if he employed soldiers, he must pay their wages and keep.
+
+Well, by and by, the jealousy of the governing ring, kept from abusing
+the Indians by the priests, brought about the expulsion of the Jesuits.
+The Franciscans took up the work where the Jesuits left off. Came
+another political upheaval. The Franciscans were driven out. San
+Xavier's broken windows blew to the rains and winds of the seven
+heavens. Cowboys, outlaws, sheep herders, housed beneath mural
+paintings and frescoes that would have been the pride of a European
+palace. Came American occupation; and San Xavier was--not restored--but
+redeemed. It was completely cleaned out and taken over by the church as
+a Mission for the Indians.
+
+To-day, no one worships in San Xavier but the little Indian scholars.
+Look at the drawings of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Wise Men! Look at
+the dreams of faith wrought into the aged and beautiful walls!
+Frankly--let us be brutally frank and truthful, was it all worth while?
+Wouldn't Kino have done better to have continued to grace the courts of
+Bavaria?
+
+In the old days, Pima and Papago roped their wives as in a hunt, and if
+the fancy prompted, abused them to death. On the walls of San Xavier is
+the Annunciation to the Virgin, another view of birth and womanhood. In
+the old days, the Indians killed a child at birth, if they didn't want
+it. On the walls of San Xavier are pictured the wise men adoring a
+Child. Spanish rings and trusts wanted little slaves of industry as
+American rings and trusts want them to-day. Behold a Christ upon the
+walls setting free the slaves! Was it all worth while? It depends on
+your point of view and what you want. Though the winds of the seven
+heavens blew through San Xavier for seventy years and bats habited the
+frescoed arches, it stands to-day as it stood two centuries ago, a thing
+unearthly, of visions and dreams; pointing the way, not to gain, but to
+goodness; making for a little space of time on a little space of Desert
+earth what a peaceful heaven life might be.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Through Our Unknown Southwest, by Agnes C. Laut
+
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