For instance, in the account of the Cave Dwellers of the Frijoles reference was made to the Indian legend of "the heavens raining fire" (volcanic action) and driving the prehistoric Pueblo peoples from their ancient dwelling. Mrs. Day of St. Michael's, who has forgotten more lore than the scientists will ever pick up, told me of a great chunk of lava found by Mr. Day in which were embedded some perfect specimens of corn—which seems to sustain the Indian legend of volcanic outburst having destroyed the ancient nations here. The slab was sent East to a museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a fusion of adobe.
As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of grass grows below the conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour; and there is an all-pervasive odor, not of burning, but of steaming resin, or pine sap heated to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs up to an altitude of almost 9,000 feet, with air so light that you feel a buoyant lift to your heart-beats and a clearing of the cobwebs from your brain. You can lose lots of sleep here and not feel it. All heaviness has gone out of body and soul. In fact, when you come back to lower levels, the air feels thick and hard to breathe. And you can go hard here and not tire, and stand on the crest of mesas that anywhere else would be considered mountains, and wave your arms above the top of the world. So high you are—you did not realize it—that the rim of encircling mountains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge of an inverted blue bowl.
The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona, stands on a mesa high above the plain
The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line altogether among the sagebrush shimmering in pure light; and you become aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is—life of bird or beast—at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life of any kind possible in the Desert.
Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cluster of adobe ranch houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that child's wealth for life. Navajo men rode up and down the arroyo bed as graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in the close-fitting plush shirts; color in the Germantown blankets—for the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy Lands equals in expressiveness and power Lungren's studies of the Desert; though the Pre-Raphaelites commanded prices of $10,000 and $25,000, where we as a nation grumble about paying our artists one thousand and two thousand.
The Navajo driver nodded back to us that this was Ganado; and in a few moments Mr. Hubbell had come from the trading post to welcome us under a roof that in thirty years has never permitted a stranger to pass its doors unwelcomed. As Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell has already entered history in the makings of Arizona and as he shuns the limelight quite as "mollycoddles" (his favorite term) seek the spotlights, a slight account of him may not be out of place. First, as to his house: from the outside you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot winds are the enemies to comfort. You notice as you enter the front door that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a breath. You had expected a bare ranch interior with benches and stiff chairs backed up against the wall. Instead, you see a huge living-room forty or fifty feet long, every square foot of the walls covered by paintings and drawings of Western life. Every artist of note (with the exception of one) who has done a picture on the Southwest in the last thirty years is represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week studying the paintings of the Hubbell Ranch. Including sepias, oils and watercolors, there must be almost 300 pictures. By chance, you look up to the raftered ceiling; a specimen of every kind of rare basketry made by the Indians hangs from the beams. On the floor lie Navajo rugs of priceless value and rarest weave. When you go over to Mr. Hubbell's office, you find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of Moki and Navajo blankets. On the walls of the office are more pictures; on the floors, more rugs; in the safes and cases, specimens of rare silver-work that somehow again remind you of the affinity between Hindoo and Navajo. Mr. Hubbell yearly does a quarter-of-a-million-dollar business in wool, and yearly extends to the Navajos credit for amounts running from twenty-five dollars to fifty thousand dollars—a trust which they have never yet betrayed.
Along the walls of the living-room are doors opening to the sleeping apartments; and in each of the many guest rooms are more pictures, more rugs. Behind the living-room is a placito flanked by the kitchen and cook's quarters.