A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and picturesque
"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this instant."
The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point, or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.
We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip, though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day we wanted them.
The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa—globe cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows—blue shadows, sure sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected. You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuñi 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 Zuñi or Hopi, and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuñi lads will set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.
The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped tufa rocks to the right of the road, mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all travelers—a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain, but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests another explanation.
Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St. Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white, green-shuttered building as silent as the grave—St. Michael's Mission, where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr. and Mrs. Day, two of the best known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.
And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad enough for them to expand—14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land—and against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers among the Navajos. Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are doing.
You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough, brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!