I remember the peculiar silvern radiance of one evening. [[45]]The light came through dust-screens and, filtering across brown levels, limned patches of greasewood in a lemon pallor. The sentry cottonwoods of the riverbank were picked out as brilliant etchings of gray trunks and lacy branches in a glow of apple-green. Night swarmed out of the east in great blue clouds. Flying before it were cottony puffballs, white and twisting into the sunset, like masses of fleece, newly washed. But in the northwest swung a dun-colored curtain, lighted by the afterglow, suspended from the higher sky, a drifting, heavy drapery, its ragged edges trailing the tops of the blunted buttes with filmy rain-tresses. Between this curtain and the middle distance the mesa barricades had not yet darkened, and they were sharply outlined as gaunt shapes of red and saffron sandstone.
Now the peaks cooled and the great mountain-range lived in silhouette, its backbone etched with a line of electric blue. Early night swept overhead, and a few timid stars peeked out, as if fearing the thunder-mutter that came on the night wind, sullen herald of a desert storm. Now pale red flames reflected in the far-away dun-colored curtain. The storm rushed eastward across the northern heavens, while above me the night rolled west, bringing its stars into a brighter glow.
But this storm was fifty miles away and had its prescribed circle to complete. Soon its gathering vanguard began blotting out the stars. Now came a dusty shrieking wind; now the purple belly of the sky was rent by a white-hot wire, and like the crash of a thousand cannon followed the voices of the storm; now fell a few drops of cold rain, fanned on the wind into spray; and then—the deluge—a silvery curtain in the half-light, like a river turned over a new brink, drenching the Desert, beating all weak things [[46]]into the sand. Parched as the ground was, the water could not be absorbed at once, and soon stood as lakes in the hollows.
It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming in the hot sunlight.
Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead; then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. But the observer had the advantage of a view embracing one hundred miles between the mountain range and the country of the buttes. The wonders of the heavens passed around him in full circle.
And where could one find such another place for the sight? Probably nowhere else in this hemisphere, save with a slight advantage in height and atmosphere at the Lowell Observatory, about sixty miles away, where the astronomer may have viewed the same spectacle from his study, perched on a shoulder of the San Francisco Range, having below him that mystic world of the Indians, the dim, illimitable stretches of the Painted Desert.
The New England States, all of them, could be gently eased into Arizona, and there would remain room for Pennsylvania and little Delaware without crowding. The one reservation that I had charge of from 1911 to 1919 embraced 3863 square miles, a trifle smaller than Connecticut, and it was a postage stamp on the broad yellow face of Arizona, which is in area one twenty-seventh of the entire United States. One hundred thousand persons, or [[47]]one fourth of the state’s estimated population, live in eight of its towns, leaving much less than three persons per square mile, including Indians and Mexicans, to inhabit the remaining emptiness. One tenth of the population is Indian, and one fourth of Arizona’s land area is “Indian country.” The reservations have 1.5 persons per square mile. The fastest train of the Santa Fe system requires ten hours to cross Arizona from its eastern boundary to the Colorado River, a distance of 386 miles. Arizona has mountains that lift their crests more than 12,000 feet above the sea; and to present a perfect contrast, it has Yuma and Parker, towns of the Mohave Desert, cozy places in summer, close to sea level, with temperatures of 116° to 120° in the shade. Yes, you can eat oranges from the Phœnix trees while listening to the story of the Yuma man who found Hell chilly; and you can find snow in June on the upper levels of the Apache Indian Reserve without scaling a mountain peak. In the northern Navajo country I have twice experienced thirty degrees below zero in February, while there is no doubt the American Beauty roses were blooming in Phœnix gardens. Once I nearly froze to death on the nineteenth of May in Arizona, the place of palms, and figs, and pomegranates!
I had expected to be sadly bored, but the steady routine of each reservation working-day ate up the hours. Time does not hang on one’s hands; a strange thing too, considering the silence and solitude and lack of action in the Desert. Some writer has sought to picture this bustling, speaking emptiness:—“It is a land where one always expects to find something just around the corner; and there is never anything around the corner.” Quite so. Therefore, it is a magic place, an Enchanted Empire, [[48]]filled ever with a wistful anticipation that lures without the bitterness of disappointment. There is always another corner, and another beautiful possibility.
A multitude of office duties caused the four morning-hours to seem as one. Lunch time, and a bit of gossip with a dozen strange beings, and the quaint humor that isolation creates. Then the afternoon, filled with the shrieking wind and the hiss of sand against the panes. A passing traveler would stop to ask about the river fords and roads to nowhere; and those employees coming to requisition supplies, whether engineer or school matron or farrier, would have their talk out. The warehouses always presented the fascinating search for something, just to learn if indeed it was there, as the account stated, and in the exact quantity as the Bureau minutely charged; and when not found, there would be ample time for the cursing-out of the fellow who had used it and failed to make the credit to protect the Chief.
“That fencing!” wrathfully declared the Boss. “That wire was issued five years ago. I remember old Becode Bega got the last spool of it. It has rusted out by now in the Corn Creek. Hawkins was clerk then, and damn his eyes, he never expended anything. He had rheumatism, and sang hymns, and was always telling me that Congressman Floyd Witherspoon, of Spokane Flats, had married his wife’s second cousin. Send a policeman up to Becode’s camp, and have that old sinner ride in thirty miles to sign for that wire. It’s a shame to do it, but who cares in Washington! They sent Hawkins out, and have him still, somewhere else, twisting somebody else’s accounts. What’s the next item?”