In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain. Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the other still haunts the cañons defiant of repeater.
From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here.
The week I reached Frijoles Cañon, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front door.
The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff caves, we disturbed a herd of deer.
Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It is if you follow the beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look for it. Believe me—though it may sound a truism—you won't find big game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.
Or, if your quest is not hunting but studying game, what better ground for observation than the Wichita in Oklahoma? Here a National Forest has been constituted a perpetual breeding ground for native American game. Over twenty buffalo taken from original stock in the New York Park are there—back on their native heath; and there are two or three very touching things about those old furry fellows taken back to their own haunts. In New York's parks, they were gradually degenerating—getting heavier, less active, ceasing to shed their fur annually. When they were set loose in the Wichita Game Resort, they looked up, sniffed the air from all four quarters, and rambled off to their ancestral pasture grounds perfectly at home. When the Comanches heard that the buffalo had come back to the Wichita, the whole tribe moved in a body and camped outside the fourteen-foot fence. There they stayed for the better part of a week, the buffalo and the Comanches, silently viewing each other. It would have been worth Mr. Nature Faker's while to have known their mutual thoughts.
There is another lie about not holidaying West, which is not only persistent but cruel. When the worker is a health as well as rest seeker, he is told that the West does not want him, especially if he is what is locally called "a lung-er;" and there is just enough truth in that lie to make it persistent. It is true the consumptive is not wanted on the beaten trail, in the big general hotel, in the train where other people want draughts of air, but he can't stand them. On the beaten trail, he is a danger both to himself and to others—especially if he hasn't money and may fall a burden on the community; but that is only a half truth which is usually a lie. Let the other half be known! All through the West along the backbone of the Rockies, from Montana to Texas, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, are the tent cities—communities of health seekers living in half-boarded tents, or mosquito-wired cabins that can be steam-heated at night. There are literally thousands of such tent dwellers all through the Rocky Mountain States; and the cost is as you make it. If you go to a sanitarium tent city, you will have to pay all the way from $15 to $25 a week for house, board, nurse, medicine and doctor's attendance; but if you buy your own portable house and do your own catering, the cost will be just what you make it. A house will cost $50 to $100; a tent, $10 to $20.
Still another baneful lie that keeps the American from seeing America first is that our New World West lacks "human interest;" lacks "the picturesqueness of the shepherds in Spain and Switzerland," for instance; lacks "the historic marvels" of church and monument and relic.
If there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster of them all. Will you tell me why "the human interest" of a legend about Dick Turpin's head festering on Newgate, England, is any greater to Americans than the truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd, when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Cañon up the Pecos, or took possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins of a church—at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters—that was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to America.
You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks, and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who interviewed Eve—all right here in your own American Southwest, with the difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler, who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the springs.