My brother came again in June and joyfully aided me in my esthetic pioneering. We amazed the town by seeding down a potato patch and laying out a tennis court thereon, the first play-ground of its kind in Hamilton township, and often as we played of an afternoon, farmers on their way to market with loads of grain or hogs, paused to watch our game and make audible comment on our folly. We also bought a lawn-mower, the second in the town, and shaved our front yard. We took down the old picket fence in front of the house and we planted trees and flowers, until at last some of the elderly folk disgustedly exclaimed, "What won't them Garland boys do next!"
Without doubt we "started something" in the sleepy village. Others following our example went so far as to take down their own fences and to buy lawn-mowers. That we were planning waterworks and a bath-room remained a secret—this was too revolutionary to be spoken of for the present. We were forced to make progress slowly.
Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, published during this year, was attacked quite as savagely as Main Traveled Roads had been, and this criticism saddened and depressed me. With a foolish notion that the Middle West should take a moderate degree of pride in me, I resented this condemnation. "Am I not making in my small way the same sort of historical record of the west that Whittier and Holmes secured for New England?" I asked my friends. "Am I not worthy of an occasional friendly word, a message of encouragement?"
Of course I should have risen superior to these local misjudgments, and in fact I did keep to my work although only a faint voice here and there was raised in my defence. Even after Rose had been introduced to London by William Stead, and Henry James and Israel Zangwill and James Barrie had all written in praise of her, the editors of the western papers still maintained a consistently militant attitude. Perhaps I should have taken comfort from the fact that they considered me worth assaulting, but that kind of comfort is rather bleak at its best, especially when the sales of your book are so small as to be confirmatory of the critic.
Without doubt this persistent antagonism, this almost universal depreciation of my stories of the plains had something to do with intensifying the joy with which I returned to the mountain world and its heroic types, at any rate I spent July and August of that year in Colorado and New Mexico, making many observations, which turned out to have incalculable value to me in later days. From a roundup in the Current Creek country I sauntered down through Salida, Ouray, Telluride, Durango and the Ute Reservation, a circuit which filled my mind with noble suggestions for stories and poems, a tour which profoundly influenced my life as well as my writing.
The little morocco-covered notebook in which I set down some of my impressions is before me as I write. It still vibrates with the ecstasy of that enthusiasm. Sentences like these are frequent. "From the dry hot plains, across the blazing purple of the mesa's edge, I look away to where the white clouds soar in majesty above the serrate crest of Uncomphagre. Oh, the splendor and mystery of those cloud-hid regions!... A coyote, brown and dry and hot as any tuft of desert grass drifts by.... Into the coolness and sweetness and cloud-glory of this marvelous land.... Gorgeous shadows are in motion on White House Peak.... Along the trail as though walking a taut wire, a caravan of burros streams, driven by a wide-hatted graceful horseman.... Twelve thousand feet! I am brother to the eagles now! The matchless streams, the vivid orange-colored meadows. The deep surf-like roar of the firs, the wailing sigh of the wind in the grass—a passionate longing wind." Such are my jottings.
In these pages I can now detect the beginnings of a dozen of my stories, a score of my poems. No other of my trips was ever so inspirational.
Not content with the wonders of Colorado I drifted down to Santa Fé and Isleta, with Charles Francis Browne and Hermon MacNeill, and got finally to Holbrook, where we outfitted and rode away across the desert, bound for the Snake Dance at Walpi. It would seem that we had decided to share all there was of romance in the South West. They were as insatiate as I.
For a week we lived on the mesa at Walpi in the house of Heli. Aided by Dr. Fewkes of Washington, we saw most of the phases of the snake ceremonies. The doctor and his own men were camped at the foot of the mesa, making a special study of the Hopi and their history. Remote, incredibly remote it all seemed even at that time, and some of that charm I put into an account of it which Harper's published—one of the earliest popular accounts of the Snake Dance.
One night as I was standing on the edge of the cliff looking out over the sand to the west, I saw a train of pack horses moving toward Walpi like a jointed, canvas-colored worm. It was the outfit of another party of "tourists" coming to the dance, and half an hour later a tall, lean, brown and smiling man of middle life rode up the eastern trail at the head of his train.