And I think here is as good a place as any to say a word about the modern Southwestern mail stage. It is, of course, motor-driven in this mechanical age, and lacks the peculiar dash and picturesqueness of the 4- and 6-horse vehicles of other days. Nevertheless, much of the charm that enveloped western stage travel then clings to the modern auto-stage. There is the same immersion in glorious, wild scenery; the same thrill of excitement as you spin down mountain grades and around curves with a cañon yawning hungrily beside you; the same exhilaration of association with fellow passengers of types foreign to Broadway or La Salle Street; many times there is the same driver, who, surrendering the ribbon for a steering wheel, has not at all changed his nature. The seat beside him is still the premium place, and if he takes a fancy to you, he will exude information, anecdote and picturesque fiction as freely as a spring its refreshing waters. To travel a bit by stage, when occasion offers, gives a flavor to your Southwestern outing that you will be sorry to have missed. Besides, it sometimes saves you money and time.
From Camp Verde to Montezuma’s Castle is a pleasant 3 mile jaunt. Of course you may miss the trail, as I did, and walk six, but if you keep close to Beaver Creek, with a sharp eye ahead, you can detect the ruin from nearly a mile away, snugly ensconced high up in a niche of a pale cliff, overlooking the valley. It is a comparatively small ruin, but there is a charm in its very compactness. And there is the charm, too, of color, the general tone of the buildings being pink set in a framing of white. The base is about 75 feet above the level of the creek that flows at the foot of the cliff—flows, that is, when water happens to be in it, which is not always. The structure itself is perhaps 30 feet high, with substantial squared walls of masonry, and is in 5 stories, access from one to another being either by openings in the ceilings or by modern ladders fastened against the outside walls. How the ancients managed the ascent from the ground, there is none to tell us. An interesting feature is a bowed parapet or battlement (the height of one’s shoulder), which surmounts the fourth story, and from below hides the fifth story rooms which are placed well back against the innermost part of the cliff recess and roofed by its overhang. Be sure you climb to that battlemented upper story (it will be no easy job, for you have to swing yourself up to it through the ceiling of the fourth), and leaning upon the parapet, enjoy the solitude that stretches before you—from the sycamores lining Beaver Creek at the cliff’s foot, across the mesquite-dotted mesa, and the green bottomlands of the Verde to the long purple range of the Black Hills in the dim southwest. If any sound there be, it is the whisper of the wind in the trees far below, or the cooing of the wild doves, which haunt the place. So do bats, and a certain queer acidulous smell that pervades the rooms is attributable to them. As you walk about, your feet stir up the dust of ages. Here and there on the mud-plastered walls are human finger prints dried in the material when it was laid on by prehistoric hands. In some of the rooms, particularly in certain cave dwellings (which, following the natural ledges, you will find scooped out of the tufa cliff beside the Castle), the ceiling and walls are blackened still with soot from the smoke of pre-Columbian fires. You may pick up bits of pottery, as you stroll, corn-cobs wizened of the ages, broken metates, or malpais rubbing stones, mute reminders of the human drama once enacted here. The airy battlement is pierced with downward-pointing loopholes through which arrows were doubtless shot at foes below. It is this abounding and evident human touch, this mystery of a long vanished human life, that lends to Southwestern travel a unique fascination, reaching to something in us that is not awakened by purely natural aspects more sublime but disassociated from man. In spite of the fact that men will kill one another, mistreat, enslave and exploit one another, men never lose a supreme interest in men; stronger than all is the yearning of the human heart for other human hearts. Is it love outwearing love’s antithesis?
Montezuma’s Well is 8 miles further up Beaver Creek, and is reached by a public highway quite practicable for automobiles when the fords of the creek are not running high water. You pass a ranch every mile or so, and the Well itself is found to be situated inside the wire fences of one. After the hospitable and unexacting solitude of Montezuma’s Castle, you will experience a bit of a shock, perhaps, at the fences and in finding that a fee of half a dollar is imposed for entrance to the Well. Nevertheless the sight is worth the money. Proceeding from the ranch house across an eighth of a mile of open, treeless mesa, you come quite without warning, to a crater-like[84] opening 500 feet across, yawning at your feet. Its walls drop almost perpendicularly some 60 feet or more to a round pool of clear water steel blue, except around the margins, where accumulations of pondweed give it a brown tinge. There is a precipitous, stony trail down which you may pick your way to the water’s edge; and there, as in the bottom of a colossal mush-bowl, you are hid from the world and the world from you. Catclaw and wild grape, hackberry and wild walnut and salt-bush make a scrubby cover roundabout, with datura and cleome and blooming wild tobacco adding a flower-touch. There is here as at Montezuma’s Castle a peculiar sense of loneliness and silence—broken only by an occasional bird note, or the hum of vagabond bees. In the clear, still waters of the pool are reflections of the cliffs, and raising your eyes to them you recognize in the southern side a few squat little stone houses wedged in between the strata of the rock walls. You can, if you choose, easily climb to some of them, and stooping through the small doorways get a taste of what it was like to be a cliff dweller. At the north end of the pond there is a thicket of willows and cottonwoods, and there the waters find their exit by an underground passage that would lead them into Beaver Creek (which flows beyond the hill) were it not that they are diverted to irrigate the ranch lands. Near this place of disappearance, is a very interesting feature of the Well—a series of natural caverns reaching far back under the hill, forming an irregular dwelling of many rooms, with occasional bits of built-in wall of mud-plastered stone. Upon such a wall at the very entrance of the cavern is the tiny imprint of a child’s hand, left we must suppose, by some prehistoric toddler steadying itself—how many, many centuries ago, who can tell?—against the freshly plastered surface, just as a baby, uncertain of its feet, would do to-day. At the time Mr. Chas. F. Lummis wrote his fascinating volume, “Some Strange Corners of our Country,” and described Montezuma’s Castle and Well, the precious imprint was perfect; but some witless latter-day visitor has pecked out the palm with his vandal jack-knife, destroying in a moment what Time, the arch-destroyer, had respected for centuries. Still the marks of the baby fingers were left when I visited the place a year ago and I hope still are, to link the fancy tenderly with that ancient people, our elder brethren.
The proprietor of the Well, Mr. W. B. Back, will guide you about and light you into the cavern’s recesses, piloting you with a lantern through passages so low and narrow at times that you must go almost on hands and knees until he brings you, far within, into a spacious and utterly dark rock-chamber with a stream of living water coursing musically through it, where further investigation is barred. He will also transport you in an anachronous row-boat across the bosom of the Well. It seems the soundings deepen suddenly from 80 feet at the outer part to 500 feet and no bottom at the center. There the water rises as in a funnel from its unknown source. At the outlet beyond the hill the waters gush from beneath a high, darkling cliff in an impetuous stream that varies little in volume throughout the year, the measurement being about 112 miner’s inches. Your guide takes you there, too (passing on the way the ruins of an ancient pueblo that once occupied the mesa near the Well’s edge), and you will enjoy the sight of that brisk little torrent fringed with a riot of maiden-hair fern and columbine, and darkened by the shadows from huge sycamores that foregather about it. The ancient Well-dweller, knew perfectly the value of that water and led it by ditches, the remains of which you may yet see, to irrigate their corn- and bean-fields a mile away. Apaches, who within recent years have been the only Indians dwelling in the region, profess no knowledge of the people who built the houses here. Mr. Back (who, by the way, in 1889 filed as a homesteader on the land about the Well including the Well itself as a water right) informed me that the Apaches regard the place with disfavor. “Aqua no ’ueno,” one old man told him, “water no good. Long time ago, you sabe, three Indian mujeres all same women, you sabe, she swim out in water, and go round and round, you sabe, in the middle, and by ’em by, she go down, all three. Never come back. No, no—no ’ueno.” The water is warmish, but quite drinkable—if you can forget about those Apache ladies who are still in it.
It would seem reasonable that so remarkable a natural phenomenon as is the Well, situated in a region as populous with aborigines as the Verde Valley once was, would have a place in Indian folk lore; and as a matter of fact Dr. J. W. Fewkes[85] has learned that the Hopis know of its existence, and claim it as the home of some of their ancestors. Moreover, the tales of some of their old men indicate that they regard the place as the house of the Plumed Serpent, a divinity peculiarly dear to the desert dwelling Hopis of today, as the guardian of the waters and springs. Indeed, it is, perhaps, as a shrine of the divine that the Well is most truly to be considered; and in view of the extensive pueblo that once flourished on the rim, it may be that the houses of the Well walls were used in connection with religious observances rather than as a habitation of the common people.
CHAPTER XIV
SAN ANTONIO
If you are a Southwesterner, born or naturalized, returning from a visit “back East,” your spirits rise with a jump when the trainmen call out “San Antone!” For this is the frontier of your own dear country, and you feel the thrill that goes with getting home again and being among your own people. Dusty and a bit down at the heel in spots is San Antonio, you think? Yes, son, but it is picturesque; and there are adobes and Mexicans, Stetson hats and cart-wheel dollars once more, and it is where the Southwest begins, if you are westbound on the S. P.
San Antonio more than anywhere else in Texas has an Old World atmosphere. The former Spanish capital of the province, there are parts of it that impart to the visitor much the same feeling that Monterey, that other Spanish capital, gives him in California—the feeling that may be this is the United States, but it needs to be demonstrated. Of course, being a city of 100,000 people and commercially important, it has its well-groomed, American side, but unless you are in San Antonio merely in quest of health and comfort,[86] it is not that spick-and-span side that appeals to your traveler’s taste. You will prefer those streets, irregular and even unpaved (often their Spanish names still clinging to them), of the older quarters, where cracked one-storied adobes in open sunshine, elbow stately old tree-embowered mansions, whose tangled gardens seem to hide in their unkempt corners untold romances. You will like the Mexican quarter with its queer little shops, and the market square with its picturesque crowds of swarthy peones, donkeys and country teams of odd sorts, its squatting street venders of tortillas, cakes, dulces, songbooks, religious pictures and shoe-strings. You will like, too, the bridges over the little river that winds cosily about through the midst of the town, and the waterside lawns where trees cast a comfortable shade and summer houses invite to tea al fresco. There are literally dozens of those bridges, with railings at a convenient height to lean your elbows on and dream away an idle half-hour. Moreover, you will like the many charming parks and plazas, where you may sit under a palm tree and enjoy the passing tide of open-air life and make more acquaintances in half an hour than you would in New York in a year.
The Main Plaza is dominated by the cathedral of San Fernando, which dates from 1738, though little of the original structure remains—most of the present building having been constructed about half a century ago. What is left of the original church is in the rear, backing on another and larger square, the old Plaza de Armas, or Military Plaza as it is now called.
Modern San Antonio has risen out of the consolidation of the presidio of San Antonio de Béjar, the Mission of Antonio de Valero (both mission and presidio founded in 1718) and the villa—a form of Spanish municipality—of San Fernando, founded in 1730. The Mission, after abandonment as a religious institution, was turned into a fortress and barracks, and acquired the name of Alamo.[87] The Church of the Mission and what is left of the main building of the Fort are the most famous historical buildings in the city. They face on the Alamo Plaza, and are of such unique interest as to draw, in themselves, many visitors to San Antonio; for they are in a sense to Texas what Faneuil Hall is to New England, the cradle of its liberty. Late in 1835, when Texas was still a part of Mexico, San Antonio was stormed and captured by a band of insurgent American-Texans under the leadership of “Old Ben” Milam, who was killed in the fight. (You will see his statue in Milam Square, if you are interested enough to look it up). The Alamo, which was well outside the San Antonio of those days, was surrendered with the city. Here the Texans later entrenched themselves, and in February and March of the following year were besieged for 12 days by 4000 Mexicans under General Santa Ana. Of the Texans, there were less than 200, including some women and children. Refusing to surrender, every man of them was killed in the final assault upon the place, the only survivors (according to H. H. Bancroft) being 3 women, 2 children and one negro boy servant. “Remember the Alamo” became the war-cry of the Texans in the subsequent struggle that ended in the independence of the province.