In the Painted Desert Region we find peoples strange, peculiar, and interesting, whose mythology is more fascinating than that of ancient Greece, and, for aught we know to the contrary, may be equally ancient; whose ceremonies of to-day are more elaborate than those of a devout Catholic, more complex than those of a Hindoo pantheist, more weird than those of a howling dervish of Turkestan.
Peoples whose origin is as uncertain and mysterious as the ancients thought the source of the Nile; whose history is unknown except in the fantastic, though stirring and improbable stories told by the elders as they gather the young men around them at their mystic ceremonies, and in the traditional songs sung by their high priests during the performance of long and exhausting worship.
Peoples whose government is as simple, pure, and perfect as that of the patriarchs, and possibly as ancient, and yet more republican than the most modern government now in existence. Peoples whose women build and own the houses, and whose men weave the garments of the women, knit the stockings of their own wear, and are as expert with needle and thread as their ancestors were with bow and arrow, obsidian-tipped spear, or stone battle-axe.
Here live peoples of peace and peoples of war; wanderers and stay-at-homes; house-builders and those who scorn fixed dwelling-places; poets whose songs, like those of blind Homer and the early Troubadors, were never written, but enshrined only in the hearts of the race; artists whose paints are the brilliant sands of many-colored mountains, and whose brushes are their own deft fingers.
A Freak of Erosion in the Petrified Forest.
Journeying over the Painted Desert to the Hopi Snake Dance.