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UNKNO)VN SOUTHWEST AgPjes C-Laut ir'--«"TO-»'S*S5e53j!:: k\ L nip. ire \\ iili ii:;Mrr in 1' 'ii l;V' ini THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST THE WON'UKRLAND OF THE UNITED STATES- LITTLE KNOWN AND UNAPI'KECIATKD — THE HOME OF THE CLIFF DWELLER AND THE HOP!. THE FOREST HANGER AND THE NAVAJO. — THE LURE OF THE PAINTED DESERT BY AGNES C. LAUT Author of Till' Ciinijumt i>f th« ilrral Xnrthmeat, LurtU u/ lliH Xortli and Frtthoottrt uf th» Wildtrnts* NEW YOI McBRIDE, NAST & 1913 INY* f CorvRK.iiT. i«i». Br MillHIDl-. NASI' K Co J'uiluhtd May, 1'J13 CONTENTS 1 I i II III IV V VI 1 VII t VIII 1 IX i X XI XII 1 XIII XIV XV 1 PAOI Introduction i The National Forests i National Forests of the Southwest . . 22 Through the Pecos Forests .... 44 The City of the Dead (k) The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma ... 78 Across the Painted Desert irxj Across the Painted Desert {continunl) . 116 Grand Canon and the Petrified Forests 137 The Governor's Palace of Santa Fe . .153 The Governor's Palace (continutj) . .169 Taos, the Promised Land i8j Taos, the Most Anciewt City in America 196 San Antonio, the Cairo of America . . 214 Casa Grande and the Gila 226 San Xavier Del Bac Mission . . . .251 V-5- •%■: I r*^? *^ip^:'' ••'^•"■'•'' THE ILLUSTRATIONS Ancient cliff dwellings in the Jemez National Forest Frontispiece PAGE FACING Cliff dwellings in Manco's Canon, Colorado . . . ii Indian woman making pottery xii Indian girl of Isleta, N. M xx Ruins of a Hopi temple, Manzano Forest .... 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 Looking over the roofs of the adobe houses of the Zuni Indians 56 Entrance to a cliff dwelling 64 Front door view from a cave dwelling 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 ... I22 The Grand Canon 140 -^ - * t^'fiT^-^m^. -r w ^.mm 11 THE ILLUSTRATIONS. fAGE The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe 'T5I Plaza in front of the Palace ,5^ Street in Sante Fe . ^. 166 Ancient adobe gateway San Ildefonso . . o 180 '^'°' 188 Over the roofs of Taos g A metal worker of Taos j^g A mud house of the Southwest 330 Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park . . . .330 A part of Spruce Tree House 24.6 The Mission of San Xavier .... ,,, Church built by Indians ,5^ :i^im^'^m 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 stair- way 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 sons 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 stair- way 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 fire- place, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a flat metate stone with a round grind- 7> U INTRODUCTION ing 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 lad- ders 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 so.me 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 pres- ence always presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as the Glacial Age re- ceded, 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 feath- ers. Don't smile and be superior! It isn't a hun- dred years ago s-nce the common Christian idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone Peo- ple lived — well, when did they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that was when the period of :^ivv ; * - "V '^:if'"'» HT (Iwrllin^-, ;ii M;mLM'> (an. .11, (', ,1. ,r;iilM - a ,\^■:^,\ c]\\ .it Kirg.iniM iKojilc wii,, iiia\ have lu-i-ii CMiiniii]„,rarK'~ .;! aiK-ifiit l'"KViit • ''*. ^.j^mwL iWi^«ttaop^'?.ii ! INTRODLXTION ji; desiccation, or drought from the recession of the glacial waters, began. " The existence of man in the Glacial Period is cs- tablished," says VVinchell, the great western geolo- gist. ' that implies man during the period when flour- ished the large mammals now extinct. In short there is as much evidence pointing to A.nerica as to Asia as the primal birthplace of man." Now the •ce 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 day. amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; zchere you can lit- erally shake hands zvith 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. VVe 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 lW ' m^^- f V IV INTRODUCTION were skipping through Myrcanian 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. Vet 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 arch:rologists 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 canon again ! To right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow ttifa preci- pice 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 INTRODUCTION v 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 I Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the canon in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez Mountains; and one night from my camp in this canon, 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 rush- mg 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 'ising of the desert sun over cliffs of ocher and sa :>{ orange and a sky of tur- quoise blue, you can se the great Kiva or Ceremon ial Temple of the Stone Age people who dwelt in th, , canon. It is a great concave hollowed out of the white pumice rock almost at the cliff ip above the tops of the highest yellow pines. A darksome, cav- ernous thing it looks from this distance, but a won- derful 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 caiion walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal, for incense, for water urns, mark VI INTRODUCTION :-d /!. 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 pbcc with jipiipu — the holes in the floor — for the mystic Marth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his peo- ple. Don't smile at that idea of an l^arth 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 Farth Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people. Curious how geology and arch.rology 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. Archeology 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 Arche- ology. Sounds like an explanation of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life, doesn't it? :^.^^^^m . JK-Si 3>tmiiL'.^ . i^ INTRODUCTION VII Thc.i, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men were forced to come down from their dirt dwellings and to disperse. Here, too, is anotiicT story. There may have been a great cata- clysm; for thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the canon, and the rooms remain- ing are plainly only hack rooms. The Hopi and Moki and Zufii 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. I'aiarito 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 Petra?, 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 ail 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, $143 double; $1 to $2 a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing ancient civiliza- tion of our own American Southwest. This particu- lar ruin is in the Frijoles Canon; but there are hun- via IXTRODUCTION drcds, thousands, of such ruins all through the South- west in Colorado and L'tah and Arizona and New Mexico.^ By joining the Archsological 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 191 1, where 60,000 people bought round-trip tickets to our own West and back — pleasure, not busmess — over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I don't know whether his figures covered only the Nortliwest of which he was talking, or the wlinlc continental tra^c association; but the amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave — one to our own wonders, to tzio for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our ov.n Paciix Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to Europe spent from used to frequent IIorse-Thief Canon 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 descend- ants 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 be- tween a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palncp 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 Lives 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 Mex- ico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the XX INTRODUCTION 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 oi the antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins of a church — at t e Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters- - that was a pagan ruin a thousand years old wh. the Spaniards came to America. You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the Kensington Museum, Lon- don; but you will find the real skeleton of the gen- tleman 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 bailt for motors to the very snow tops. And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at Taos, you will find yourielf in such a maze of the picturesque and the legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in tlic wide world ill'j I A I'.i r i;,i INTRODUCTION XXI but America. This is a story by itsc'f — a beautiful one, also in spots a funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from Ox- ford, 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 or- derly 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 ..le pladto in her night- dress to her guardian protector in the person of an old Indian. Lie 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." " I'ah," said the old fellow coming back, " dat not'mg! Young man, he git marry an' dey — how you call? — chi\-:ir-ee-heem.'' "Then, what are ycu laughing at? " demanded the irate British dame; for she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in suffo- cated 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 v.-ould pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would pav 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 lecognired as "the foieign pose" comes foremost or hinder- XXll INTKODICTIOX most as a cause lis ncgU'Ct of the wonders of our own laud. \V1. i you go to our own Western Won- der Land, you can't say you lia\e been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is wonderful what a paying thing tliat 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. lie dropped his own name, as- sumed the pose of a grand dainc familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. I lis books have " gone oii '' 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 I'.urcpe to America is that " America lacks the picturescjuc, the human, the his- toric." A straightforward falsehood you can al- ways answer; but an implied falsehood masking be- hind 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 an- cient dwelling of the Stone .Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? T 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 yel- low tnfd for hundreds of feet — amid the Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds ex- INTRODUCTION XXI II aggcrated in luiac, grotesque niiraji;c against the lav- ender light, and Indian riders, brightly clad and pic- turesque 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 mountam table lands, ancient as the Aztecs, ovei'ooking 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 Canon de Chelly (Shay) forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you couJd 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 Spam set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling Amer- ica, 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 XXIV INTRODUCTIOX which bullets were found embedded in human hair. And if you want a little \'crsailles 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 ali\e 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 snoNvy 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 arc leg- ends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than true tales of robber dens in IIorse-Thief Canon and the cliff hnuses of Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to hide? Why arc the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Bel- gium more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of Xew ?»Iexico, 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 $;-,ooo of money which the young fellows had brought out from the Fast with them? Why are not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to American folklore hunters as Robin Mood or anv other legendary heroes of the Old World? Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America usually assumes the air of INTRODUCTION XXV 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 tlie transition period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle baronial splendor to smart Vankcedom invading the old ex- clusive domain in cowhide boots ! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of American feu- dalism — fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores march- mg 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 st'-o g 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 Lokl. Spirit of Evil, smiled XXVI INTRODUCTION with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade the Realm of Death. It was the a^e when puny men of the Stone Fra were alternately chasing south be- fore the glacial drift anil returning north as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia groves; and if man had domesticated crea- tures, they were three-toed horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough, rem- nants 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 Span- ish. 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, gib- bering apes spending half their time up trees throw- ing 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 sim- ian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony INIRODLCTION XXVtl Comstock's activities as to clothes. They had dec- orated pottery ware of which we have lost the pij,'- nients, and a knowledge of irrigation which would he unique in apes, and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some day, when tlie 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 I'ldwin Abbey declared that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the South- M-est. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Te, or Lungrun's wonderful desert pictures, or Mo- ran's or Gamble's, or I larmon'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. 3 3 How many of the two to one protagonists of Eu- rope 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 skytop 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. XXVlll IXTRODLC riON With the exception of a \ cry bad break in the White Mountains ot' \ri/ona, you can motor West i)ast tlie southern edge of the Painted Desert, past I.a^^aina and Aconia and tiie I'.nchanted Mesa, past tiie Petri- fied Forests, where a dekiye of sand and flood has buried a secjiioia forest and transmuted t!ie 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 oi) down to California, you can swerve into (irand Canon, where the gods of fire and flood have jumlilcd and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red into a swimming canon 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 be- hind the first ridge of mountains and motor along the edge of the Big Trees and the Vosemite and Tahoc. Vou can't take your car into these Parks; first, be- cause you are not allowed; second, because the risks of the road do not permit i<- even if you were allowed. I it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only from a life-iime knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of t!ie West — and that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of " shootin' irons " and " falntin' females " are for- ever 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 clif? "bird peo- ple," in the Painted Desert, among the Indians of INTRODUCTION XXIX the Navajo Reserve than you are in Broadway, New "^'ork, or I'iecadilly, London. I would trust a young friemi of mine — hoy or ^irl — (juicker to the West- ern environment than the l!astern. ^'ou can get into mischief iti the West if you hunt for it; hut the mis- chief doesn't come out and hunt you. .Also, ihmger 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 I'.ast. i i What about cost? Aye, tliere'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 lOO per cent, bigger com- mission on it than the agent who sells the railroad tickets; so the man who is an agent for Europe can ahord to advertise from forty to loo 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 v.orth one hundred to two hun- dred million dollars to them a year.) In the .Amer- ican 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 XXX INTRODLXTIOX thrust out to pick your pocket, or at least relieve it of any superfluous weis^lit. In our West, wlio cares a particle what you lio; or who will point you the way? The hotels arc expensive and for the most part lo- cateti in the most expensive zone — the commercial center. It is only when you pet out of the expense zone away from commercial centers and railway, that you can live at $i or $2 a day, or if you have your own tent at fifty cents a day; hut it isn't to the real es- tate agent's interests to have you po away from the commercial center or expense zone. Who is there to tell you what or where to see ofi' the line of heat anil tips? Outsulc the National Park wardens and National Forest Rangers, there isn't anyone. How, then, are you to manage? Frankly, I ne\er 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 Hanger, 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 com- mon-sense back in town. I'quippcd with those three, you can " See America First," and see it cheaply. cnAini:R r THK NAllONAL KOKKSIS, A blMMLK HLAVGKOLND ruR I hi: I'loi'i.L Ir'" a health resort ami national playground were discovered guaranteed to kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay list- lessness 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 discov- ered; and it isn't in luirope, where statisticiiiiis com- pute that Ajiicricans yearly spend from a quarter to half a billion dollars; and it isn't the Coast-to-Coast trip w-hich the president of a transcontinental told me at least a hundred thousand people a year tra- verse. A health resort guaranteed to banish care, to stab apathy, to enlarge littleness, to slay listlcss- ness, 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 1 2 THE xXATIONAL FORESTS the least, $400 at the most. It exists in that " twi- l.ght zone " of dispute and strong language and pea- nut politics known as the National Forests In America, we have foolishly come to regard National I- oresf- as solely allied with conservation and poht.cs. That is too narrow. National For- ests stand for much more. They stand for a national playground and all that means for national health and sanity ?nd 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 plavground exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful play- ground in the whole world - and the most acces- sible; 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 Chi- cago and Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went to see the Exposi- tion 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 ^1 THE NATIONAL rORF.STS :m of the purely West they saw, 1 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 lite 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 4 THE NATIONAL FORESTS from the excursion party was when a land boomster took us up the ri^•er tc see an irrigation project. That wasnt seeing the West. That was a buy-and- seJ. proposition same as we have at home. What 1 want to know is how to get away from that. That^ boomster fellow was an Easterner, any- Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not the duet that went round he cities m a sightseeing car and judged the West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the praine towns fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real estate pro- ject 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 canons, the mountain lakes, the nalural bridges. When I tried to explain to the New lorker 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 eo 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. AMmmm dimmMii.ma^: $ •-I THK NATIONAL FORESTS 5 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 arc 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 tents a day at the hotel, seventy-five cents '^or life in air that was almost constant sunshine, air as pure and life- giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That alti- tude 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. n: I 1 6 THE XATIOXAL FORESTS It h incrcdihle when yo„ come lo think of it the earth for a ph.y,,round; and there is an undis covered playground in its own hack yard, the most wonderful playground of mountain and orest an a e, „H.e whole world: a playground in actu" a." of ca^e and waterway and peak unknown to Ger- about? If three mdhon people visited an expositio^ National f"/' • "T '"^-"r ^^"'"'^ ^^^'^ ^^'^ ^'^' Xafonal Forests , the radroads granted facilities, and the nmety m.lhon Americans knew how? It i absurd to regard the National Forests purely as t.mber ; and timber for politics ! They are a natLn's Pl 'ground and health resort; and one of these times W.I1 come a Peary or an Abruzzi discovering them. Ihen we 11 g,vc h:m a prize and begin going. You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you wmII not find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of Hame m the upper alpine meadows. And you will not find gapmg on-lookers to break down fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirre' swearmg at you for coming too near his auhe of pine' cones atthe foot of some giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing In the National Forests'- but there ,s a great tinkling of waters; and there are many voices or nils with a roar of flood torrents at THE NATIONAL FORESTS 7 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 play- ground, 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 pur- poses 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 attrac- M 8 THE NATIONAL FORESTS tion in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all arc 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 diffi- culty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes pant- ing 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 oft". These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land. Come up to Utah ; and you may vary your camping m the National Forests there, by trips to the wonder- ful canons 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 THE NATIONAL FORESTS 9 northern mountains, arc the voices of the waters and the white, burnished, shining peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one summer by driving up m a tented wagon through the National Forests from Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and tnick bed were in the democrat wagon. An outfitter sui)pllcd 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? ^ ou must figure that out for yourself. There is, first of all, your rail- way 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 moun- tain village where the supervisor's office is usually located. At those hotels, you will board as a tran- sient 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 lO Tin- NATIONAL FORESTS cost you from $io to $30. You can get a yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more scr\iccahlc for $2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get thcni Fast, as I like an elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good ileal of cork in the sob to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too stift ! 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 1 Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for mc. 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 slacker on hem- lock 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 harden- ing 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. THE NATIONAL FORESTS II ■■1 I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge, even if you do like it, you arc 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 catiip 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. 12 Tin; NAIIONAL FORESTS buy a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will he windy days in fall and spring when an extra tent with .1 camp stove in it will prove usetul for the ni^ditly hot bath. What reward do you reap for all the bother? "\ou arc aw.iy from all dust irritating to weak lungs. "\ ou are away from all possibility of re-infecting your- self with your own disease. Ilxcept 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 hut literally perme- ate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. 1 nsteaii 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 invaliil, 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 sun- shine that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it is the sting of pulsing, super- abundant life, not the lethargy of a gradual decay. TIIF NATIONAL FORFSTS 13 ^ ^ At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest ducll the remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses near enough the train to be touched by your fuind, that run back in unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico or the Copts of i'gypt. When the pyramids were young, h)ng before the flood gates of the L'ral Mountains had broken before the inun- dating Aryan hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Furope 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 sihcr mines, and o,. 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 belo';v 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 cob- webs on the brain and weights on the wings of the spirit. I wonder if It wasn't? I wonder If the H THE NATIONAL FORESTS ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascrib- ing 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 dark- ness — 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 Cafion 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 I The road into Sundance Canon 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. Today, men make good by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road has been cork-screw- ing 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 mathe- matical acrobatics; and some capitalist behind the engineer — the man behind the modern gun of con- I I 'I I ^ilSOl^ 1 tri u l....k..iit p-iint ill llu- ( ..r.iinii.. I'.,vi'm nl' \ri/,,iia \ i / I rJlL^SjAtM^^^m THE NATIONAL FORESTS IS quest — 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 moun- tains across the desert towards the Pacific. 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 Caiion, 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 everla - ing rocks. Little mining hamlets composed of match- box houses cling to the face of the precipice like card- boards 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 Napo- leon's march to Moscow, or Alva's shambles of head- less victims in the Netherlands. You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of i6 THE NATIONAL FORESTS the Continental Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's chan f^agne. It isn't cham- pagne, it's the very elixir of lii'c. There can never be any shadows here; for & , 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 cKrysoprase 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. THE NATIONAL FORESTS 17 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 cin- namon 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 pri- mordial 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 coni- fers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed, whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviat- ing pixy parachutes, airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth, though the process may take the trifling seon 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 i8 TIIF NATIONAL FORESTS 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 tremu- lous 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 THE NATIONAL FORESTS 19 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 dis- appeared 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 z rasoin^^r blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, tb; soft t,mg 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 '€^ ' i^'IF^*-:! 20 THE NATIONAL FORESTS 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 ••^^^A d^V. THE NATIONAL FORESTS 21 Close round you w.th a chill loneliness unutterable. 1 ou are an ahen and an exile. They will have none of you and will reveal to you none of tneir joyous, dauntless life secrets. iliu 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 mid-day, 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 avail- able — 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. 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 moc- casins. I have never gene into the wilds for longer 33 1 I / i ■V..XK-J* imrnet/ 'jf.. -It- -I'Sifc , 'C ^ 1 / 1 ^;,^3|i!li I. -jf "i-aM THE FORESTS OF Tin: SOITIIWHST 23 than four months at a time \ot 1 1, -•ieh i„s „,a„ four s f„„ ;;, 7v;„t;:7 «"" «o« on y „hc„ .hey c„,„l,l„c ,„„ ,„„|„ic, _ c, n "r . '''1" '',>"" climb, hroa.l c„„u„l, „,|„ ,„„ ' passing trees and jars in the slirrup. |-„r ,he res^ snow lielci, a n ;? '■°" 'T''' "''^ '•''"^'■"' <"• add to comfL, V "'""' '"■• "'Kht "ear will spend ,"™'ey-:V"r' "" """', ' '"" '"'' '" .oesado„r;^^^;^^ ftn:--^-^^^ them .f you want to. It u ill not hurt you b^t a /. cowboy shckcr for rainy days and a Da^r' nfu .^ guaranteed to let the water ou T? ! ^ ^°''^' these -inr? fhn J ^ ^^ ^^^^ ^s 't comes in, par of th ^^^'-^--y ''"^!"g garments of any othe part of the world are the prime essentials Fndirh r"" "^u^"'^"" f^'-^P-'-^tion recalls a little ^^ngl, h uoman who determined to train her boys .nd g'rls to be resourceful and independent by t\k "^ R^cific Coar Th ' '-'''-- '■" '^^ ^-- ' o^'lh m le fro' - 7 '"""1 "" ' '"'"^^ ""^ ^^^^ twelve lost^th^ r ^"z: ^2 '"^' '' ■"• '■"' ^"^ ^^^^ consider the big tree counr; -^7'"'"". "'^^" ^°" bla..e mark the'bou ds of ?he sZ^^^P' ^"' °"^ notch and one bla.e. the t;:;f.tr:^J^:diro^^^ 24 IHE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST the trail trout fishing. " If they had been good pat! finders, they could have found the way out by fol- lowing the stream down, " remarked a critic of thib little group to r"e; 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 sun- light; 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 fall 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 litde Englishwoman lost her- self, 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 chil- dren'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 die morn- ing." ^■^T-f'^, — .-^-i_aj 'rl— JT-*-* <;~<^' C-"^''-'^' THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 25 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 oufit 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 vou 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 '»i in -■-;j^'--tr.j»ia^ S*cr>rJ!--'-i.s'«d--J 26 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST for a nation; or you can go in for records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most mar- velously 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, contemporane- ous 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. Tour- ist 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 De- partment; 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 in- vestigator, you will get that permission. The question isn't iihat is there to do. It is Khith of the countless things there are to do are you going to choose to do? When Mr. Roosevelt goes THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 27 to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross Mountain and hags 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 surpris- ing 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 Canon, 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 28 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTlIWi:ST 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 wiio 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 hang- ing 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 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 29 I '3 come out, it was on us. Man and wife and child were carried down in the house just as it stood witliout 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 acquaint- ance pointed to a peak. " That one caught my son last June," he said. " He was the company's doc- tor. He had been born and raised in these moun- tains; 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 " orly the fool who monkeys with a mountain," es- pecially 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 ' «*«r^snilk(kMh. 30 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST simply its lover of God's Great Outdoors and Peace and Biy Silence, living near to the God of tlie Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him. Wild creatures of woodland ways don't conic 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 rever- ence! I was driving in the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against the far skyline 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 mep.dows? " I asked. " Oh, dear no ! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It used to be an almost impossi- ble 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 any- body, 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 dwell- ers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the dust eaters, the insects of the city ant taf£. THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 31 heaps, the true troglodytes and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities ? Perhaps, by this, ynu think there are some things to do if you go out to the National P'orests. You have been told so often that the National For- ests 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 lum- berman, 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 lum- berman now watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely accidentally, you under- stand, the fire sprang ur and swept the entire slope of green forest away from his claim. Your home- steading lumberman then set up a -awmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high w n J did less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope f i^ 32 THE lOKl.STS OF THE SOUTHWEST would he 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 be- came millionaires by lumbering in this manner. That was the principle of Congress when it with- drew from public domain these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include grazing and woodland not properly administered under public do- main. The making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The rangers 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 cut- ting 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 homestead- ers 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 mak- ing 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 home- steader. 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 $4.0,000 in timber per THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 33 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 com- pany — 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 thou- sands of fictitious claims, then yearly turn over a (juarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to a big smelting trust — a merry game worked in one of tlic Western States for several years till the rang- ers put a stop to it. To build roads through an empire the size of Ger- many would require larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being tried of permit- ting 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. n 34 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You arc at the I uijjer's cabin, — picturesque to a degree, built of hewn ln;^'s or timbers, with slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood. Many an Eastern com 'ry 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 cal)in to the infinite Improvement of appear- ances, not to mention appropriateness. Appropriateness! That Is the word. It is a for- est world; and the rani^er tune« the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log partitions, log \eranda, 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, cinnamof -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 :, . '»'::^y:^:-4. MICROCOPY RESOIUTION TEST CHART ANSI and ISO TEST CHART No 2 1.0 I.I lii III 2.8 ;: m '- it 4 ||Z5 11 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.25 1.4 1.6 ^ ./IPPLIED INA^IGE Inc .'88 - b98vi - ri„ THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 35 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." What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven and earth on the lonely for- ested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. 1 hat is, over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber cruiser, sales agent. United States marshal, forester, gardener, nat- uralist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector, arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, sur- veyor, 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 Al- bany, or from St. Paul to Duluth, without any of ihe 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 regulauon somewhere in the Depart- ment that a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures enthusiasm, weeding out the mis- fits, 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 m u 36 THI- FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST taught in I'pc'tce cat — ce — cheesm." I am not sure that the \\ cathercd old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world, with lots of Iiard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the diuicul- ties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post- graduate from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on list, and the brain behind the fist. I am quite sure that mai./ of the blackguard tricks assailing the For- est Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, ge. dcmen always, but with some wise and weathered old uog of frontier life who wouldn't con- sult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would consult tiiem, 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 Police- man is a constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where the X.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest, try, con- vict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered by official red tape. For instance, rid- ing out with a ranger one day, we came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the pro- fanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast. "Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out! THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 37 I want to see for myself exactly what you men have to deal with I " 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 twen- ty-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 permis- sible. "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 Den- ver. 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 gov- ernment 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 ""espect 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 ' 'I m Mi 38 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST to them. Once, when I came hack 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 hack from Washington, the guilty party had left the State and hlame had heen 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 in- ducements 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 pri- vately owned timber limits; so the rangers remain for the most part young. Would the same difficul- ties 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 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 39 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 ordmarily 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 prac- tically 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 igog more rangers lost their lives than Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, zchen the force <:vas organ- ized. ■ < Mi ill ii 40 Tin: I OKI'S rs of the solthwest Was it Nietzsche, or llacckcl, or Maeterlinck, or all of thcru together, who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal king- dom; 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 sur- pass itself. The tree trying to encompass and over- come 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? Pre- cisely 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 THE FORESTS OF TIIL- SOUTHWEST 41 facts, not fictions, destroyinjr our weakness, strength- ening our flabbincss, making us prove our right to be ht to survive. \\'oe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy anchorage! Vnu 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 divide's the hfe of man in seven ages; and it needs no Maeter- linck, or Haeckcl, 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 nurs- ery of earth, air, moisture and in some cases the shade oT 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 weaklin^rrs up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living begins — it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for the sun- light and air and peace at the top; and many a grand i i .1 u III ii| m 4a THE FORESTS OF 11 IE SOUTHWEST 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 se- quoias, 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 al- most human craft, their instinct of will to live — corkscrewing sidewise for liglit, forking into two branches where one branch is broken or shaded, twist- ing and bending, ever seeking the light, and spread- ing out only when they reach room for shoulder swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping ma- chinery 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, boot- less waste. You see it in the bleached skeleton spars I THE FOKi:sTs 01' nil-: southwest 43 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 higli 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. Vet in the redwood and Douglas fir country stumps arc 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." I tj H CIIAPTFK III THRorr.ii Tin: Picos national iormsts of nfav MKXIfO TI IF, ordinary Easterner's idea of \c\v 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, ! put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in northernmost Canada and found them inadecjuate. 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 Morse-Thief Canon. There are several other ways in which the Na- 44 THROUGH Tin. 1»J:C0S lOkl.STS 45 tlonal Forests of New Mexico discount Fastcrn ex- pectation. Mrst of all, they are cheap; anil 'hat is not true of the majority of trips throu^,'h the West. Onlinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the wilds of the West than to go to luirope. What with enormous dis- tances to be traversed ant! extortionate hotel charj,'es, it is much cheaper to j^o to Paris than to San Fran- cisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New Mex- ico. 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 j^ave 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, leavinp you a good deal smaller than \\Ai 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 hind. As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can literally take a holiday cheaper in thf National Forests than you can stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the trrnscontinental 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 t.'Tm 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 H ») • ■ - ■> ,r ,«.CV 46 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 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 cen- ter, or from the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere alonj;, he 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 archi- tecture that doihinates 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 Mex- ico. 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 1 p3^.^.._,^^ ^ ' / ?.^'frv.:' "^'^tT * T>»^ .-'•' '' »' >i I I (I |) •* e ^^- - ■*■ 1 - — ~- 1 ■^-li- -- ^;:-i i i 1 L < * TT'^-Vli'' ^'.' THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 47 will not take tuberculous patients; so there is no dan- ger to ordinary comers seeking a holiday in the Na- tional Forests. On the other hand, there is no hard- ship 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 send- ing in meals. 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 soa level. One of the most marvelous roads in the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible canons, 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, go- ing up the canon from south to north. The great surprise in the National Forests of New N If if n i 48 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 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 s 1 be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pci-os more trout than your entire camp can eat in twi. Jays. 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 dear 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 canons forking off the Pecos at right angles, twenty- six were trapped and shot in three months. Lastly, the mountain canons 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 ^'egas, or by Glorieta, all on the T ■■■% V- i THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 49 main line of the railroad. I entered by way of Glori- eta 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 Engclmann spruce. Ten years ago, be- fore the Pecos was taken in the National Forests, goats and sheep ate these young p:ne 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 grow- ing 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 nat- ural 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 won- derfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a home- made system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish first came in the fifteen hun- dreds and found the same little checkerboard farm i i 50 THROLGri THE PECOS FORESTS patches under the same primitive ditch system. A glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms arc 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 Amer- ica 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 '•""■.' y^'^^r 7TV. ' ■^.:^:r^^r*^^^g^^'%^j^^M»^^'^^^^^^ -^|^^ THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 51 States — a mosaic m 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 common- place 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 am- bish! " 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 photo- graph 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 arc i si (f ill 52 THROUGH THi: PECOS FORESTS 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 frotn 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 re- member while you pay, you go as a ,^iicsl, 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 lit- tle 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 ( iids coming back in an L round the court, the main en- trance 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 caiion. Technically, this is not necessary; but it Is wise for a great many rea- J. -n ^- ;-i-,:,^ ., V'^F'"** :#* *!: THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 53 sons. I fc wiil tell you where to get, and what to pay tor, 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 mounfm lion — you need no permit; but if you arc an outsider, you need one to get ..-out and turkey and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are gomg mto a country as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that the forests in the upper caiions are very dense; and that you might get lost; and that it is a good thing to leave some- body 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 set- ting down his views. ^^"VVhat 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 cannut 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 I, 54 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 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 prepara- tions 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 Pe- cos 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 ha\e almost come to believe it. Does all this sound like lack of iiuman interest? Yet it is most of it 8,0(JO feet aho\c sea level, and much of it on the top of the snow peaks between ten and thirteen thou- sand feet up. At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the canon with a span of stout, heavy horses, an excep- tionally 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 Canon. 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 high- < ii 11 THROUGH Tlir. PFCOS FORFSTS 55 way cutting this at rlfiht angles will be when it is finished; ami it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedes- trian who jumps forward and then hack 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 abo\ e the brawling waters m l\cos Canon, now down on a level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer as a wall. Von 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 careless- ness — well, last summer a rig and span and four oc- cupants went ( .he edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slo^ is heavily wooded and you can't slide far. Ranch after ranch you pass with the little port, houses for " the tent dwellers; " ind let it be empha- sized 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 caiion widens to little fields, the Mexican farmer's * ». • 56 iiiRorciH rni: pi cos i oris is adobe hut stamis liy the roadside with an intake ditch to irrigate the firm. I he road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round rock Hank and rampart anil bat- tlement, where the canon forks to ri-^ht ami left up other forested canons, manv of which, sa\e for the luinter, have ne\er known huma?i tre'.d. Straij!;ht ahead north there, as you dodye round the rocky abutments crisscrossing; the stream at a do/en fords, loom walls ami ilomes of snow, IJaldy Tecos, a great rid^e of white, the two Truchas Peaks uoiny up in sharp summits. 'I'lie roail is called twenty miles as the crow flics; but this is n(>t a trail as the crow Hies. Vo., are /i^/aj.'i;in^ back on your own track a tlo/en places; and there is no lie as bi;.; as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the wheels go over stones half their own si/e. Where the snow peaks rear their summits is the heail of Pecos Canon — a sort of snow top to the sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the west, the Las \'egas or Sangre ile Christo Mountains walling in the right on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in .Xmcrica except the Rockies round Laggan in Canada. I had put on heaviest flannels in the morniiig, iind now^ donned in addition a cowboy slicker and was cold — this in a land where the l-'astcrner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on tb.e sand. An old Mex- ican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining cimn, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as wc ascend the canon. Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. i*-^ 'j c ^ ^m :-t '\ i.:i^. TJPIX w'*'' ,.^.:»,.; ^■■'■' THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 57 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 caiion 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 for- tunately he does not offer me a drink, Winsor's Ranch marks th>. end of the wagon road up the carion. From this point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks seem to wall in the north, they arc really fifteen miles away with a dozen canons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them. In fact, if you followed up any of these side -nons, 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 {eet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up an- other important feature of the " tent dwellers " in New Mexico. There is nothing worse for the con- sumptive than idle time to brood over his own depres- sion. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and out- door living and twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy occupation, conditions are 58 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 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 Canon, an^ the whole Pecos Valley below you. Not a fire can start up for a hun- dred miles but the mushroom cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the w^ork of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and hunt in Pecos Canon 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 c?nnot 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 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 59 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 Serv- ice, too, had iu struggle against spite and incendia- rism 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 Canon. Four feet of snow still clung to the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight preci- pice; 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 -^s Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since. CHAPTER IV THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CANON I AM sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction but fact. I am not specu- lating 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 volcar' rock by the moccasined tread of sons of ages, i Trough 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 C;csar was born, before — if Egyptian archsologists be correct — the dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commerr.orate 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 60 THE CITY OF THE DEAD 6i 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 can .• to America, vanished le:n In;r not the shadow of a record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to Eng- land, contemporaneous, perhaps — for all science knows to the contrary — with that 20,000 B.C. Egpytian desert runner lying in the British Museum. Eymg m my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow clift" wall, I fell to wondering on this puzzle of arch;eologist 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 Wdley 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 ha\e 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 alterna- tives of war, or captl\ity: and of either, not the ves- tige 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. 'i ) 62 THE CITY OF THE DEAD i; D. So there you are ! You have as good a right to a guess as the highest scientist of them all; and while I retrain from speculation, I want to put on record the detinitc, provable fact tliat 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 deni- zens. As Jack Dono\-an, a character working at Judge Abbott's in the N'alley 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 cere- ments 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 cultivat- ing corn on the Cpper and Lower Mesas. When Imperial Rome's common populace boasted few gar- ments but the ones in w'l'.ch 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 cliif 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 Jeme?. Forests; and the fine glaze of th.e 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 THE CITY OF THE DEAD 63 and fish. So you do to the Jtnijez ; but it is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of man you arc fishing for. As the Pecos F'orests ap- peal 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 Jcme/ appeals to tiie dreamer, the scholar, the scien- tist, 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 e\ery 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 ll'c contrary given to me both East and West, the trip to the Jemez is one of the ensiest 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. Fiut, 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 ro mar- ket loaded out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain 64 THE CITY OF THE DEAD and \c\v America; streets with less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's Board ol Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the sanitary scratch if ymi are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and chimes yet again of old Catholic churciies 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 pre- ceded him, and where the Arch;eolog!cal 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 l-'e; the .)nly bit of Europe set down in America ; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America, yet undisco\cred by the jaded globe-trotter. Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashpmed of itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask u Santa Fe man why in the world, with all its attr.'ction of the picturesque, the antique, the snowy mountains, and tho weak-lunged one's ideal climate, it has so few tourists; and he an- swers 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 hav^; never heard that the Nile and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the THE CITY OF THE DEAD ^S main line; yet foreigners yearly reap a fortune cater- ing to visiting Americans. Personally, it is a delight to nie to visit a place untrockicn by the jaded globe- trotter, for I an. one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa I\- 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 I'gypt 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 lind 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 dis- tance 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. 66 Tin: CIFY OF THF. OFAD (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 Archn-ology (Adtlrcss Santa Fc for particulars) your transportation will cost you still less, perhaps not .>2. Once out, in tlie canons of the Cave Dwellers, you can citlicr canip out with your own tenting and food; or put up at Judge Abbott's hospit- able rancli house; or quarter vourself free of charge in one of the thousands of ditt 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 cook- ing, they need not be $ i a day. One of tlie stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate? I dro\c out by Ii\ery because I was not sure how else to find the way. We left Santa Fc at six A. M., the clouds still tingcing the sand-hills. I have heard Edotjr. re critii.-, 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 oH a string of good-natured nonsense to en- tertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet to rc\el 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 THE CITY OF THF DEAD 67 time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted luml»cr 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-lme; but the seeming riskiness is en. 'rciv decep- tive. Travel wears the soft volcanic tufa hub deep in ash dust, so that the wheels could not slide oti if they tried; and once you are really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looV.s. In fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural ilame 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. 'i'hc 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 in*o 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 Canon 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 com- ing into this caiion at right angles are the caiions 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 i i 68 TUK CITY OF THI:: DEAD streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible canons, you must drive up over tiie 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 canon, which gashed the mesa side where a mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a J.-y 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 par- ticular canon 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 fol- lowed the trail at a rattling pace — the Archasological School had placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Canon — 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. Xor can the theory of drought explain the abandon- ment 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 THE CITY OF THE DEAD 69 caiions 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 slip' 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 Gre- goire expectantly. I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short ami 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 .\bbott 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 ! ii 70 THE CITY OF THE DEAD cliff under your feet, the sides of the massive ocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and bee. lives, pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched caves and windinjr recess and port- holes — a city of the dead, silent as the dead, old almost as time I The wind came soughing up the canon 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 canon 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, 1 would have sat down on the edge of the caiion wall and let the palpable past come touching me out of the silence. A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directlv 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 th.-ift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pur- sued like deer by the Apache and the Ute and the THE CITY OF THE DEAD 71 Navajo? Or were they march-^d out captives, weep- ing? 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 lire and the plumed serpent, guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of manhood anci instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and cleanliness and reticence. " If t'H)u art stricken, die like the deer with a silent thioat, " says the adage of the modern P'-eblo Indian. " When the foolish speak, keep thou silent. " " When thou goest on the trail, carry only a light blanker." 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 Hoor 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 grand- Stand 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 z ^zag against the Flatiron Build- ing and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it is, you'll have an idea of the appearance of the situ- ation; but it looked a great deal harder than it really was, jnd the trail has since been improved. The little 72 riTF CITY OF TIIF i^KAD steps cut in volcanic liifa or white pumice are soft and offer a ui'ip t" footliolil. I'hcy grit to your foot- step and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to make this wonderful Frijoles Canon accessible to the public, or if the Archx-ological School can raise the means and cooperate with the Forestry Ser\ ice trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the face of this canon, graded gradually enough for a nuitor. 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 T wandered up the valley two or three miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundre.ls of feet up the face of the precipice. The cave was lirst discovered by Jutlge and Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday after- noon \xalks. The Archaeological School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the debris and accumulated erosion of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber m 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 ha\c been originally plastered in a sort THE CITY OF' THh: DEAD 73 of terra cotta or ochcr stucco. When that is rcach<;ci 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 tl : 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 over- laid 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 cham- bers 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 half- way down the trail that first day, at the Frijoles Canon 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 I m ll 74 THE CITY OF THE DEAD pearls — Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the canon, 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 Archaeo- logical workers that he had found in the pumice Just 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 under- stood the art of ^\eaving long before the Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade. You could stay in the Rito Canon for a year and find a '-ave of fresh interest each day. F"or mstance, 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 !i ) ...I" ilir Kit.! clr 1 i~ l'rii'iU-~. N'cA Mi'\iii Ill t THE CITY OF THE DEAD 75 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. " 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 resto- ration can hardly take place inside a century. When you consider that the Rito is only one of many pre- historic areas uf 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 Archa?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 debris, but it would make the Canon accessible to the general public by easier, nearer roads. The inaccessi- bility of the Rito may be in harmony with its ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thou- sands of tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests. There are other things to do in the Canon 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 fl! 76 Tlir: CITY OF THE DEAD 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 com- pared to a Ilopi. There is the short-stemmed Eng- lish field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which Tennyson sings in " Maud." Presently, you notice the stream banks crushing together, the waters tum- bling, 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 canon 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 looniing rain, and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and darker g. w 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 — jown — 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 Tin; CUV oi Tin: i)i ad 77 ddi'^ht. No woiuKt dcir nM B;uulcHcr, the first of the great arch.iH)h)gists to study this re^i;ion, opens his (liiaint myth with the simple words — " The Rito is a beautiful place. " CHAPTER V Tin. FN'( nwirr) mi>.\ of acoma TIIl'lY call it "the Fnchantcd Mesa," this island of odicr rock set in a sea of linht. hi^'licr than Niagara, beveled and faced straifjht up and down as if srnootheil by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has said tliat it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted Mesa? 1 he whole region is an I^n- chantcd Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream Land where mingle past ami 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! Sh'.:t 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 cnranked old Spanish d'ns encased in armor-plate from visor to leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn. Back at 78 ENCHANTFD MFSA Of* ACOMA 79 Santa Fe, in (iovernor IVincc's fine collection, you can sec one of the old brcast})latcs 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 ignoniiniously before the fierce onslaught of the enraged Hopi. I confess it docs not make nuich difference to me whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa — ca'.letl l'',nchanted — or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip- top of the clift like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is — pagan hurled Christian down; and tor 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 \a\aio 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 trap- pings and harnessings and belts and necklaces and tur- quoise-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 con- quering 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 ill •■v^v^ .''S^' ■^l.^'' > ••V I I 80 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA minute before midday, or a second after nightfall. T can't see the po'nt to this breaking of historical heads over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and Spanish firearms, the Navajos be- came 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 Man- zano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and Laguna and Acom? 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 Ari- zona — would house a modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they: 'jouncil 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 wiiole 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? 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 hi If ii^"r^g^/^.>.''^.ig^>w-:- ^fc^v^^^v^^' iis^.v~'--y' ;! ENCHAXTFD MESA OF ACOMA 8i 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 Albu- querque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand Caiion 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 gen- eric 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 Anzona. 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 MM V' mi£-^' ws^'mMMmtmmm^ msm 1 \f i 11 82 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA '1 I 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 hun- dred 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 West- erner; and it didn't improve his temper to have butter served up mixed with flies to the tune of the land- lady'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 itl 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 ii -j ;/ ^■^ ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 83 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 ;, If 84 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA all — air pure wine, the red-winged blackbirds, thou- sands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes dose 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 t>'pe. 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 diamona 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 •It '^I- J> & Mm |>'''"jiir"'' i*'' V m^ ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 85 up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill You get off at Laguna, hut 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 gc 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 Her- bert Spencer school of sociology that among the Hop! the women not only rule but own the house and all that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch out- side 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 marr>', 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 k Idjfcv ' >'f -V-' M ( 86 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 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. Mar- mon, 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 usu- ally 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 influ- ence of the two Marmons and Pratt. " Coming West as surveyors in the early seventies the two Mar- mons 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 sub- ,>!)•'. \\\ ^ '4 :WM-iM . 3':. V h . I . f r I: -•>. ..JK. >,t^iai o FAXHwrrn Mr.s,\ of acoma 87 stitution of downstairs iloors for the ladders that for- merly led to entrance throu^^h the roof. Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hun- dreds 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 civili/ing influence of " Marmon and Pratt." The streets — ist, 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 car- ried 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 ta';es almost three generations to have any per- manent '•esults, " one teacher bewailed. " We doubt if it ever does much good." ! I |!^ 8 I 88 I NCI IAN ii:n MF.SA OF ACOMA " Doubt if It ever docs much good?" I should like t- take that teacher and every other discouraged worker aiiu.ng the Indians first to Acorna and then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Aconia. 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 dism- fected bv a bla/ing, cloudless sun. I could barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go. I'll take a large pocket iKin.lkcrchief heavily charged with a deodor- izer. At Acoma, vou feel you are among human beings like yourself ; of ditterent lineage and traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to rakmg your memory of Whitcchapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid and de- generate. Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma; and please remember, the dis- tance 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 liltmg and tossing theirliquid gold notes straight to heaven; the desert fiowers such a mass of gorgeous, voluptuous bloom as da/zle the eve — cactus, blood-red and gold and carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert gera- nium, little shy, dwarf, miniature English daisies over i FXCHAN'ri'I) MI'SA OF ACOMA 89 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 hcaury. Red-shawled women pattereii down the trail from the hillsitie pueblo of Laguna, or marched back up from tlic yellow pools of the San Jose River, jars of water on their heails; figures in bronze, they might have been, or women of the Cianges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of the twin-towered Spanish iriission on tlic crest of the hill; and the dull steeples ot the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the liij;ht broods over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy river Hows pure gold. .\nd the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls Ihit 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 shim- mering 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 East- ern conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. 7he wild poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars, they draw i 11 ' i'^^i^&^Mikn^m i f U!: *ti V': I 90 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 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 per- spective, 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 un ^ 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. in rjrp»"*;jiwi"i f^aL\:M:^^^2^ ■^'f{ i- jmM'iKMS*'' afc:f, ..li"! ifWf %•; ENXHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 91 Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when you l-ft your ey;;-, and there — straight ahead — lies an enchanted island in this lake of light, shim- mering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three Niagar:\s, tv.'ice 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, m.y 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? Lumniis 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 confiden- tially they " were very scare," when it came to throw- ing 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 ■ HI II I III I I iin Win I limn iiipiiiii iiwii 11 iiniiiim imii mm mi nm ii \ v^ m^^^Mm i .!, i ! a Y I: ' 92 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA Lummis and I lodge has Avaxcd 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 maybe partly right? Miss McLaIn, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports that once an Indian family told her of this iVcoma 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 blind- fold 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. The.:e jars explain the pres- ence of pottery, which Lummis describes. 1 hey would also give credence to at least periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of h.ouse ruins, on the other hand, would explain why Mcd-e scouted Lum- mis' 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. ,11 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 r 'imi':smasfsiBBSt:^ssmm^^^smBiimmima^^. %'%f^i^n. '■;jffi:..'3y'^; , ^^ A -In link- ImluMi iii;iicl in a II 'pi .:!'Ki!^t' "l" \ri/"ii:i '^^.f^W^^ t • If; If I tft IMI^' K>d.rAmii^':''rm. ..-ik^is^^.^imisj£^''m^ ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 93 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, 1 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 .l!_s^>miXHilK:.i^ ^^ i . 94 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 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 ^-ind — 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 vari- ous 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 tena- cious, conservative race? After all, you are better I i ■ -•i?-.-»<:i_^r~ EXCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 95 off, little kiddie, a tliousand fold, than if you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York. By this, what witii 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 hai Ihold 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 ist, 2nd, and 3rd streets, and its ist, 2nd, and 3rd story houses, (1 /" ■Vr»-.l>ff»' 1,1 96 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 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 for- ests and snowy peaks. Have generations — genera- tions 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 handi- craft 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 i:iM 'ffc -J-. A 1 1 h \ h] 1 ■'. / ■ lij i I w FXCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 97 have carried up on their backs sand and soil enough to till in a depression for a burying place. The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally u bank of human limestone. 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 k.ist four sizes smaller than mine, red skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a pro- fusion 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 Car- lisle. 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 $io d< .vn 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 cal 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 jom; and a cleaner room I have never HI'P*- ■'TJ^ ™ -:■■ ~^^_.,,,j- ~y,^^ .,^."!#-- '.rrj*^. 11 ;■ I M /■I 98 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 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 ca^lc mi)i;ht scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking water stand in niches in the wall. 'I'he adobe Hoor 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 ! Vou come out and stay a week with me, mebbce, 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 \isited 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 Ilopi 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 back- wards 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 tlie i,ame of a three hours' visit amid the gamins of New York, ' ,Bi ENCHAN n:D Mi:SA OK ACOMA 99 or London ? At the foot ot' the cliff, wc shook hands all round and saiil j^ood-by ; and when I looked back up the valley, the children were still waving ami waviiipi;. If this be hiirTible Indian life in its Simon pure state, with all freedom from our rules of cf)n- duct, 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 Indi- ans, 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 shaw-I and holding tight to a coin which I trust no old grimalkin pried out of her hand. i^ I ; ji^^rSfi^^/h^. ;i ' I. i CHAPTER VI ACROSS THE PAIXTKO DliSKRT 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 Zuiii 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 100 i i L»«t9t.ATIV« LIBWAirr. ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT loi by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit almost as wonderful pre- historic 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 preci- pice-face and reached only by ladders; the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yes- terday, though both antedate all records and tradi- tions 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 Kai- bab, round the Grand Carion 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 ' i m iL^niJtK I02 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 1/ 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 hi''^" mcsu from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world, a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled ram- part rocks and sand ridges as rod as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America at all ! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins ot 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, cross- ing 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 litde Navajo girls on J " ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 103 horseback, born to the saddle, as the Canadian Crec is born to the canoe. If you can't go to Zuiii Land and the White Moun- tain 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 dis- comfort. 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 an- tiquity; 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 Canon. 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 ethno- logical scholars of the world in the School of Archae- 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 " For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into Canon du Shay (spelled Chally), 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 s*:one, a prehistoric dwelling where you could hide and lose a I ^^ 104 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT dozen of cur 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 Flag- stati, or tlie Grand Canon; 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 horse- back, 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 — a i ACROSS THL: painted desert io? does rsot necessitate a tent. Y ou can spread your blankets and night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof, and the swing down so close in the rare, clear stars Desert will 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 mid- day 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 hospi- tality, have been open to all comers crossing the Des- ert — open without cost or price. In fact, if you of- fered money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an Insult. It is a type of the old-timc 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 abso- lutely 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 obli'^c 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 ■* i "fflT^T? io6 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT ( • 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 Ari- zona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see again, who come un- announced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In the old days, when your Spanish grandee enter- tained 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 lodyinfi; 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. Hubbcll's tradino; posts to have kitchen quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the suit; 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 in- stance, 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 ;ouse " to hustle the fodder." , 0%4 i ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 107 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." " 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 Euro- pean tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediter- ranean. When that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all visitors going into the Xavajo 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 locJly. Motors are avail- able 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. ) \*9 ! at If*',' l! 108 ACROSS THE PAINTED DFSFRT 1 ;ic trail rises and rises from the saruly levels of the railroad town till you are presently on the high northern mesa anionjj scrub juniper and ceilar, in a cool-scented, ozoiic atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost air of the North. The yellow ocher rucks 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 gor- geous 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 proto- type's skin. And the trail still climbs till you drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line ami 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 lesnlate, uninhabited waste, as you expected. You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zufil 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 »i i' ACROSS TlIF PAINTF.D DFSI RT 109 Zuiii or Ilopi, and so has not as firti muscles and strong lun}i;s. I hesc Zuni lads will set out from Oraibi at daybreak, ami run down to I loMirook, eighty miles in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and sec some little Navajo girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinkinjf pool. It all has a curiously I'.gyinian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering her tlocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and you sec 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, tcnt-shapcd tufa rocks to the right of the road, mark the apprfiach 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, etch jd in perfect outline against the face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain, but a knowl- edge 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 Mis- sion, 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. i < "^ i I ^ fili I .11 MICROCOPY RESOLUTION TEST CHART ANSI a"d ISO TEST CHAR" No ? 1.0 I.I ii^ «\M ;: m '- :|,4 12.5 IIM 2.2 2.0 .8 1.25 1.4 1.6 ^ x^PPLIEn INA/1EE Inc -iS - 5989 - Fa> no ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT and Mrs. Day, tu'o of the best known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the : rroyo is the convent school, Miss Drexel's Missi. 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 build- ings, is being lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother Mary of the Incar- nation 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, in- cluding Moki Land — and against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father Web- ber, 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. ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT iii Meanwhile, wc 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 $i,ooo 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 Fran- ciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a com- bined glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and crafts and legends vnd 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 draw- ings, which, for the last ten years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for their |j \' I , ^ ^m m V, I 112 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 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 crea- tures 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 mm 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 wonder- ful 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 i i ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 113 drawings are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman deity of the Navajos. Docs 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 East- ern 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 dis- guise, 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 >« UA^i^^^m^ ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 123 can los" 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. The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line altogether among the sage- bi-ush 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 scarcit}' 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 m .1 1 I ;■•, I 124 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 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 ranchr Women with children squatted on the ground, but he thing that struck you first as always in the Paintt ^ 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 com.manded prices of $10,000 and $25,000, where we as a na- tion grumble about paying our artists one thousand and two thousand. The Navajo driver nodded back to us that this m^^MiiK':j^:^^^£^^ i ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 125 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 out- side you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot winds are the enemies to comfort. Vou notice as you enter the front door that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a brealh. ^'ou 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 ex- ception of one) who has done a picture on the South- west In the last irty years is represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week study- ing 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 oflice, you find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of Moki and Navajo '^'-w^'-^'f^^^h^y^ i 1;. i i (I 126 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT blankets. On the walls of the office are more pic- tures; 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 quartcr-of-a- milllon-dollar business in wool, and yearly extends to the Xavajos credit for amounts running from t^venty-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 pa- tron 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 tlie courtly Spanish-AmcriL-an gjntleman with i / mm^^n^mM^'^ iy^jss^^^-:p^w* ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 127 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. Hub- bell 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 ag- gressive cattle crowd. They are all friends now, the oldtime 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 Re- serve and stampeded off 300 of the Indians' best horses; but they had reckoned without Lorenzo Hub- bell. In t\venty-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 canons 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 — power- fully soft spoken — alert, keen, relentless and versatile; but also a dreamer of dreams, a seer of .1; 1 % »« 1 4 •'« Mk ' !<;, ig;-i#i M2:m^ .jTJ^^, 128 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 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. 1 heir 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 blan- kets and baskets; among the Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The value f' • fmi TiTfltllgTff'iiifM ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 129 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 ma- chine can produce and everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wo'^l shades, I need scarcely say here, are in bought min- eral 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 $ 1 5 to $ 1 50. 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 sc. en 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 Canon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert travel you must carry your wa»er keg, " grub " box and horse feed with you. All these,' up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied passersby; but as travel increases through thj Painted Desert, it is a system that must surely be changed, I f I i\ * « V4 *\ '- ( ■■''■j'Tiii'"" ' ni' x\ \ y i 130 ACROSS Tin: i'ai\m:d I)l:si:rt 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 al- most Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through notches of the painted peaks, llogan after hogan, with sl.cp corrals in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys end girls were driving the sheep and goats up and down from tiie 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 liours you dri\c 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 Kailiab 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 drop- ping so gradually that you hardly realize it till you Tw-*;-^i9^v-'-j^' ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 131 slither down a sand bank and find yourself bcm-cen the yellow pumice walls of a blind cul-de-sac in the rock— nnoninp; pincc — 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 spriiig. 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 Ream's Canon; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the first: more lilac-colored mesas high r' ■ the top of the world, with the encircling peaks c the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue as the bluest tur- quoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of ever- greens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the louer world, and you are in Ream's Canon, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods, steep as a carved wall. You pass the ruins of the old govern- ment 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 be- ing taught by Federal appointees — schools as fine \W" tffg'j If 7^. 'f- 132 ACROSS rilF. PAINIID DFSERT in every respect as the best educational institutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must obtain a permit to ro on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas ami Oraibi and Hotoville are the Ultima Thule of the trail across the Painted Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civili- zation 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 influ- ence 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 Hub- bell, Jr., at Ream's Cnnon 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 pot- tery 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 con- ceals 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 com- mand of guests. The last lap of the drive across the Painted Deo- ert is by all odds the hardest stretch of the road, as well as the most interesting. It is here the Mokis, or Hopl, have their reservation in the very heart til < ■I" ■■*^.-ip.,iii(^""f>- •'.(7<^:;i.:i ' , (*ff ' ACROSS rilF, PAINTrn DKSI'RT 133 of Navajo Lane ; and there will be no quarrel over possession ot this land. It lies a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands — 600, 1,000, 1,500 feet above the Dlains — 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 atmos- pherc, on views of a painfd 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 ha/e hundreds of miles away, you would not wonder at their choosing these eerie eagle nests for their cities; for the color- ing below IS as gorgeous and brilliant as in the Grand Csnon. But you see their little farm patches among le sand billows below, the peach trees almost up. rooted by the violence of the wind, literally and truly, a stone placed where the corn has been planted to prevent seed and plantlet f -om being blown away. Or ,f the Navajo still raided the Moki, you could understand them toiling like beasts of burden carry, ing 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 earned 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 4 > 134 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT j^r reached the sandy plain below, such a hurricane had broken as I have seen only once before, and that was off the coast of Eabrador, when for six hours we could not see the sea for the foam. The billows of sand literally lifted. You could not sec 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 antl serene and high above the turmoil, stood the First Mesa village of Moki Eand. 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 wc 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 .-WS'*^ :.. „;* ' _V_ 7."-' r ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 135 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 hax-e 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 lou seem to be overlooking Almight^ God's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored inhmty; and nat- urally 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 i.coo feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that declivity with urns of water on their heads and photograplud naked urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood above cstnfas 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 in- describably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you can wander through adobe houses clean as your own home I 1 1 l'-\ f 136 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT quarters, the adobe hard as cement, the rooms di- vided into sleeping apartments, cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, bi 'ig nearer the formation of the Grand Canon, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as the Canon. 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 Canon. 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 dro\e down the winding trail that corkscrews from Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women ■- ^me running down the footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa. " We love you," exclaimed an old woman extend- ing 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." !'■ ^/ .■r.?**^" r)-'-^ CHAPTER VIII THE GRAND CANON AND PE. .IFIED FORESTS THE belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land comprises that strange area of onyx and agate ihan 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canon *nd 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 ' 1. THE GRAND CANON 139 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 Adam- ana or Holbrook. Adamana admits you to one sec- tion of the petrified area, Holbrook to another both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If yoi 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 Galler}', 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 Words- worth, "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. 4f fi Jl! '■;'> ^'; 1 4.0 THE GRAND CANON I i 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 hav- ing 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 a. both ends 1p 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 thnt many of these prone, pillarL-d 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 i THF. CiR AND C WON 141 sections of the trunks ami broken bits of small upper branches are \isiblo. Practically no excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sanJ. The depth and extent of the forest Itelow this ancient ocean bed are unknown. Only water — oceans and a-ons 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 seijuoia from six to ten thou- sand 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. But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a prehistoric, geolnirie one. Split one of the big or little pieces of petrilicd wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure a(,'ate, the colors of the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands, caught by a Master I land 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 bril- liant 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 dcHes man-ma- chinery 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 pci 'fied wood was exploited com- I 142 'II n-: GRAND CANON I l! '1 i-'i mercially and shipped away in carloads to be pol- ished. Von can sec some shafts of the polished specimens in any of the bi^ Kastern museums; but It was foimd that the pctritied wood required ma- chinery as expensive and tine as for diamonds to effect a hard polish, anil the thing was not com- mercially possible; so the Petrified Forests will never be vandalised. 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 stuiTip ends of a rare enough beauty for an emperor's throne; but always you conic 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, "^'et 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 F'orests, 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 GRAND CANON 143 the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert I'ottcr of the Forestry Department, Wash- ington, who rescued Sheriff Woods of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days. Stevenson can tell t'.at 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 sec 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 op- portunities. It is the gateway to many Aztec ruins — n.uch mjre 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 Canon. These differ from the Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken ad- vantage of natural arches high in the face of unscal- 4 (. m 144 rilF, CiRAND CANON t 1 able precipices aiul have bricked up the faces of these with aiiobc. As far as I ktiDW, not so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attemptetl in excavation. The debris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe brick in front is gradually crurTiblinjj anil r()llin<^ down the preci- pice into Wahnit Canon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery anil shard in the debris piles; and the day we went out, five niinutes' 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 ijuaril the old ruins; but the Government mi^ht 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 canons many hun- dreds 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 iias .t exploicd. At the bot- tom of the lonely, silent, dark canon 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 froni .'^4 to $6 a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle Tin: r.Rwn c.\5con >45 and the Well, where you can stay at very iriHing cost, inJceil. It comes as ,i surprise to sec here at Flagstaff, wed;:cil bet*«cen the I'ainteil Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped pcakj of the f-rancisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,- 000 feet hijjh, an easy chmh tc 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 canon where health and holiday seekers can stay all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from llast Verde that you go to the Natural Briuge. The centr.;! 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 Flagstart lived up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp out- fitters 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 Canon, you have come to ihc utttrmosL wonder of the Southwestern Won- der 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 Canon and gone away disap- pointed. If the Grand Canon 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 I 1 '!':!' 146 THE GRAND CANON As it is, only 30,000 people large proportion of them are i ^1 i'i Continental resorts. a year visit it: and foreigners. You can do tlie Canon cheaply, or you can do it extravagantly. You can go to it by driving across the Painted Desert, 200 miles; or motoring in from Flagstaft — a half-day trip: or by train from Wil- liams, return ticket something more than $5. Or you can take your own pack horses, and rWlc in your- self; or you can employ one of the well known local trail makers and guides, like John Bass, and go off up the Caiion on a camping trip of weeks or months. Once you reach the rim of the Canon, you can camp under your own tent roof and cater your ov.-n 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 — .^^^i a day, and whatevc 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 Iiorses and the size of your party. First of all, understand what the Grand Caiion is, and what it isn't. \Ve ordinarily think of a canon as a narrow cleft or trench in the rocks, seldom more than a few hundred feet deep and wide, and very sel- dom more than a few miles 'ong. The Grand Canon 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 ['lummet 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 ,1 ill '■ THE GRAND CANON 147 zigzags down. You think of a canon as a great trench between mountains. This one is a colossal trench with side canons going off laterally its full length, dozens of them to each mile, like ribs along a backbone. Ordinarily, to climb a 7,000 foot noimtain, you have to go up. At the Grand Canon, you e..-:e 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 an- other 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 Canon. 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 arc a robust walker down Bright Angel Trail to the bank of the Colo- rado 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 Caiion 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 Ger- i 1 / 1 1 1 j 1 1 ! '• j 1 K ft i 1 ( f 'I iil 148 THE GRAND CANON i f v!t' ^ trude Point and to Cataract Canon and by aerial tram across the Colorado River to the Kaibab Pla- teau on the other siuc. In fact, if you stayed at the Grand Canon a year and were not afraid of trail- less trips, you could find a new view, a new wonder place, new stamping grounds each day. Remember that the Canon itself is 217 miles long; and it has lateral canons uncounted. When you reach FJ 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 walk- ing, 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 THE GRAND CANON 149 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 Nep- tune or the forked lightnings of old loud-thundering Jove. You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the Canon; but unless your legs have a pair of very good bei ers 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 half-way 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 com- ing 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 roi,e 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 o'' 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 ii i^) IjO THE GRAND CANON the Petrified Forests, you can imagine what it doe to sunrise in a sea of blor ' d mountain peaks. Much of the trail is at ar ,de of forty-five de- grees; but it is wiile and wc. shored up at the outer edge. The fohage lining the trail was dripping wet; and the sunlight struck back from each leaf In spangles of gold. An inceiise as of morning wor- ship filled the air with the odor of cedars and cloves and wild nutmeg pinks and yucca bloom. There are many more birds below the Canon rim than above it; and the dawn was tilled 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 ri\er to peak, with walls smooth as if planed bv the Artificer of all Eternity. In any other place, the gorges between these peaks would be dignified by the names of canons. Here, they are mere wings to the main stage setting of the (irand Canon. 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 de- scended; but the grandeur grew more imposing from the stupendous height and sheer sides of the bril- liantly colored gorges and masses of shadows above. Then the Devil's Corkscrew fell into a sandy dell THE GRAND CANON 151 where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of the voice of many waters in the great silence. A cloudburst Avould 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, nillen and dark, filling the narrow canon with the \,ar 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 re- verberating back in some of the valleys of the Canon; 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 Sprin'rs out to Gertrude Point. I know a great m?.ny 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 arc on the tip top and outer edge of one of the highest mountains in the Canon. This is the trail of old Louis M 152 nil-: CUANU CANON ^ il Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first found his way into the center of the Canon 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 sensa- tions 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 \iew of the Canon; 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 Canon's 217 miles will be made as easily and safely accessible to the American public as Egypt. i!i y Jl CHAPTER IX TIIF. 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 pe- culiar to Spanish-Mviorish 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 <"( pueblo people who lived on the site of modern Santa Fe hundreds of years before the Spanish founded this capital here in 1605. For vears it has been a dispute among historians — Bandelier, Hodge, Twitchcll, Governor Prince, Mr. »53 Ill 154 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE Reed — whether any prehistoric race dwelt where Santa Fe nmv stands. Only in the summer of 191 2, when it wps necessary to replace some old beams and cut some arches through the six-foot walls was it discovered that the huye partitions cover d in their centers walls antedating the coming of the Span- iards — walls with the little conical fireplaces of In- dian pueblos, with such meal bins and corn shelves as you find in the prehistoric ca\e dwellings. We have such a passion for destroying the old and replacing it witli 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 witli tiieir mossed walls and low-beamed ceilings and dumb, majestic dignity. To this, the Gn\ernor's Palace of Santa Fe is the one and complete exception in America. It flanks the cottonwoods of the Pla/a, 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 vij^ns, or beams of the ceiling, yellowed and browned and mellowed with age. Those vi,^cis 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, heave out the hackneyed tale of General Lew Wallace •'^ = sr-! ■ I ■ Si Till': GOVl'KNOR'S PALACF- «55 writing " Ben Ilur" in :x back room of the Palace; or the fact that three dilterent lla^^s Hung their folds over old Santa le in a single century. lie who knt)ws anything at all about Santa I"e, knows that Spanish power (;;ne place to Mr\ican, and the Mex- ican regime to Aiiicrican rule. .Mso, that Cji .era! Lew Wallace wrcue " Ben Ilur" 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 Str.tes of America. The don- keys trotting to market under loads of wood, the ragged peon ritiers bestriding burros no higher than a saw horse, the natives stalking j^ast 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 I It is between 1680 and 1710. A hatless youth, swarthy from five years of terri- ble exposure, hair straight as a string, gabbling French but speaking no Spanish, a sla\e white traded from Indian tribe to Indian tribe, all t!ie 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'Archcveque, 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 156 Tin; (lOVl.RNOR'S PAI.ACi: u; has paid tlic tcnil.lc p-iiahy to;- tlic (.rime into which he was lu'traycd by lus youth. 1 !c is s^iirrcJ with wountis ain.1 ln.alin;^.. lie is too miilt-st/uken c\-i- to return to New I-'raiue. His intorniation may he useful to New Spain; so he is enrolled in tlie j.;i;ards of the Spanish \'iceroy of Santa Fe; and lie is sent t)Ut to San Ildefonso ami Santa Clara, where he foumls a family and where his records ma;, be seen to this day. !'"or those copv-!iook mor.dists wl'o like to know that l)i\ine retribution occasionally works out in ilaily life, it may be added that Jean l.'.\rche\e(iue finally catr.c to as \iolent a death as he hail brought t(» the <^re.it I'reneh exiilorer, La Salle. Or take a panorama of a later day. It is just before tlie fall of Si^anish rule, 'ihe (iovernor sits in his I'alace at Santa le, a ml^litier autocrat than the I'ope in Rome; for, as t!ie Russians say, " (iod is high in His Heavens," and the King is far away, and those who want justice in Santa I"e, must pay — pay — pay — pav in gold coin that can be put in the iron chest of the \Iceroy. (Vou can see speci- mens 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 wornan 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. THE GOVF.RNOK'S I'.M.ACi; 157 lie has beaten her as he would a slave. lie has treated her to ile iiulecencics of which only Hell keeps record. She had fled to her father; l)iit the father, fearing the power of the Viceroy, had sent her back to the man; anil the man has killed Iht with his brutalities. (I have this whole story from a lineal descendant of the family.) The woman throws back her rvbnzo, drops to her knees before the X'iccroy, and demands justice. l"he \'iccrny thinks and thinks. A wonian more or less! What iloes it matter? The woman's father had been afraiil to act, c\ idetuly. The husband is a member of the go\ernment rin;^. Interference might stir up an ugly mess — re\elations of extortion and so on! Besides, justice is worth so much per; and this woman — what has she to pay? This \'icen)y will do nothing. The woman rises slowlv, iiureiluhnis. Is this justice? S!ie denounces the \'iceroy in fiery, impassioned speech. The X'iceroy 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 thou- sand fold easier. S!ie went back to her home. It was just about where the pretty Spanish house of Mr. Morley of the Arch:i'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, f t «< i 158 THF GOVERNOR'S PALACE saddled Mm and rode out absolutely alone for the city of Old Mexico — 900 miles as the trail ran. Apaches, Comanchcs, Xavajos, beset the way. She rode at ni.'^ht and slept by day. The trail was a desert waste of waterless, bare, rocky hills and quick- sand rivers and blisterin;^ heat. God, or the Virgin to whom she constantly prayed, or I^.cr 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 sis- ter's death was avenged. The husband was tried and executed: and the Viceroy was deposed. Most of us know of almost similar cases. 1 think ot a man who has repeatedly tried for a federal judge- ship in New Mexico, who has literally been guilty of everv crime on the human calendar. Yet we don't at risk of life push tliese cases to retribution. Is that one of t'^.e lessons the past has for us? Span- ish power fell in Xew Mexico because there came a time when there was neither justice nor retribution In any of the courts. Otlier 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 pres- ence. 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 lead- THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 159 ing trader in marriage for the chief's son. The garrison was weak, in spite of fustian and rusty helmets and battered breastphncs and velvet doublets and boots half way to the waist — there were sel- dom more than 200 soldiers, and the pusillanimous Governor counseled deception. He told the Co- manche that the trader's daughter had died, and or- dered the girl to hide. The only peace that an Indian respects — or any other man, for that matter — is the peace th-*- 's a victory. The Indian sus- pected that the ans ■ r 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 tliese 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 Spnin. By re- ligion, by nationality, by tradition, the Spanish gi'-l was the purely convent product: womanhood pro- tected by a ten-foot wall. \Vhen 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 che 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 Garcta, a sort of com- m I I I I 1 60 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE bined 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 price- less silks or chewing tobacco — a duty of $500 was levied against each mule-team wagon of the Ameri- can 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 Garcta 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 par- ticipate in the humor of their riders. I doubt whether the first sight of Jerusalem brought the crusaders more tumultuous and soul-enrapturing joy." We talk of the picturesque fur trade of the North, li i ill r- ' 'Si,;' "-•••.., wy:* * I I ii ■ J ^' THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE i6i when brigades of birch canoes one and two hundred strong penetrated every river and lake of the wil- derness of the Northwest. Let us take a look at these caravan brigades of the traders of the South- west! 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 adven- turer from Virginia or Kentucky or Louisiana or Missouri; but each caravan had its captain to com- mand, 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 cara- van. 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 — " Stre'-ch 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 I i ;1: 1 '; v\ 162 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE travel. Camping places near good water and pas- turage were chosen ahead by the scouts. Wagons kept together in groups of four. In case of attack by Comanche or L'te, these wagons wheeled into a circle for defense with men and beasts inside the extemporized kraal. Camplires were kept away from wagons to avoid giving target to foes. Blan- kets consisted of buffalo robes, and the rations " hard tack," pork and such game as the scouts and sharp- shooters could bring down. A favorite trick of Indian raiders was to wait till all animals were teth- ered 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 jour- ney'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 regi- mentals. Very fair, very soft spoken, very pro- fuse 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 stag- gering advance. Plain broadcloth sold at $25 a yard, linen at $4 a yard, and the price on other i: k :*f. -^^;;Aj^5>Sfrf ..;s THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 163 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 hus- band'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 .i?*lN:r-*»^^r-'7t*«:^ 164 Tiir: (;ovi:rnok's palace 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 Span- ish don and American trader, who had taken over tens of thousaiuls in the barter of the cara\-an, 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 ac- knowledged, 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 ar- cades, 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 cham- ber on the left. What amazes you is the enormous thickness of these adobe walls. Each window case- ment is wider than a bench; and an open door laid back is not wider than the thickness of the wall. THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE i6s 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 ArchiToIopical 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 Coro- nado, of Don Diego de \'argas, who was the Frontenac of the Southwest, reconquering the prov- inces 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 i\Iis- sions of v.hich only ruins to-day mark the sites in the Jemez, at Sandia, and awav out in the Desert of Abo. To the left of the reception room is an excellent art gallery of Southwestern G'jbjpcts. 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. \n 1 66 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE These were done by Carl Eotavc of Paris out on the ground of the ancient races. In conception and execution, they are among the finest murals in Amer- ica. Long ago, the Governor's Palace had twin tow- ers and a chapel. Bells in the old Spanish churches were not tolled. They were struck gong fasiiion by an attendant, who ascended the towers. These bells were cast of a very line quality of old copper; and the tone was largely determined by the quality of the cast. Old Mission bells are scarce to-day in Xew 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. Ladles 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. No account of the Governor's Palace would be complete without some mention of the marvels of dress among the dons and dofias 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 v.'ould imagine ourselves in some play house of the FVench 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, ■^ "ff ' ^ " V ' ' "r1 'r^^'V; * #\» I ■ THE govi:rnor's palaci: 167 blankets with a slit In the center, over the shoul- ders. Women of position wore not hats but the silk rcbozn 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. Pre- sumably the purpose was to conceal chnrrns; but when you consider the combination of ilark eyes and wa\inp; hair and a scarf of the finest color ami tex- ture that could be bought in China or the Imlies, it is a question whether that scarf tlid 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 wIk.. tlie ves- sels of the traders of Mexico traflicked with China and Japan. These old shawls to-day bring prices varying all the way from $200 to $2,Oi)o. 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 or- namented 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 ill m i68 TUF ERNOR'S PALACE 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 gor- geous 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 1 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? ■J! '\' , -i >^^% CHAPTER X THE governor's PALACE OF SANTA FE {Continued) OF all the traditions clinging round the old Palace at S ii.ta 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 peoplfe 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 pro- cession 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 proces- sion 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 con- 169 fi ■M4jt 'mdis;jkm p 170 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE quering heroes. Costumes, march, religious cere- monies uf 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 un- natural 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 im- ... .■. W®»lA'..