Cactus and pine: Songs of the Southwest

by Sharlot Mabridth Hall

When the world of waters was parted by the stroke of a mighty rod,
Her eyes were first of the lands of earth to look on the face of God;
The white mists robed and throned her, and the sun in his orbit wide
Bent down from his ultimate pathway and claimed her his chosen bride;
And he who had formed and dowered her with the dower of a royal queen,
Decreed her the strength of mighty hills, the peace of the plains between;
The silence of utmost desert, and cañons rifted and riven,
And the music of wide-flung forests were strong winds shout to heaven.
Then high and apart he set her and bade the gray seas guard,
And the lean sands clutching her garments’ hem keep stern and solemn ward.
What dreams she knew as she waited! What strange keels touched her shore!
And feet went into the stillness and returned to the sea no more.
They passed through her dream like shadows—till she woke one pregnant morn
And watched Magellan’s white-winged ships swing round the ice-bound Horn;
She thrilled to their masterful presage, those dauntless sails from afar,
And laughed as she leaned to the ocean till her face shone out like a star.
And men who toiled in the drudging hives of a world as flat as a floor
Thrilled in their souls to her laughter and turned with face to the door;
And creeds as hoary as Adam, and feuds as old as Cain,
Fell deaf on the ear that harkened and caught that far refrain;
Into dungeons by light forgotten, and prisons of grim despair,
Hope came with pale reflection of her star on the swooning air;
And the old, hedged, human whirlpool, with its seething misery,
Broke bound, as a pent-up river breaks through to the healing sea.
Calling, calling, calling; resistless, imperative, strong;
Soldier and priest and dreamer—she drew them, a mighty throng;
The unmapped seas took tribute of many a dauntless band,
And many a brave hope measured but bleaching bones in the sand;
Yet for one that fell a hundred sprang out to fill his place;
For death at her call was sweeter than life in a tamer race.
Sinew and bone she drew them; steel-thewed—and the weaklings shrank;
Grim-wrought of granite and iron were the men of her foremost rank.
Stern as the land before them, and strong as the waters crossed;
Men who had looked on the face of defeat nor counted the battle lost;
Uncrowned rulers and statesmen, shaping their daily need
To the law of brother with brother, till the world stood by to heed;
The sills of a greater empire they hewed and hammered and turned,
And the torch of a larger freedom from their blazing hilltops burned;
Till the old ideals that had led them grew dim as a childhood’s dream,
And Caste went down in the balance, and Manhood stood supreme.
The wanderers of earth turned to her, outcast of the older lands;
With a promise and hope in their pleading, and she reached them pitying hands;
And she cried to the Old World cities that drowse by the Eastern main:
“Send me your weary, house-worn broods, and I’ll send you Men again!
Lo, here in my wind-swept reaches, by my marshalled peaks of snow,
Is room for a larger reaping than your o’ertilled fields can grow;
Seed of the Man-Seed springing to stature and strength in my sun;
Free, with a limitless freedom no battles of men have won.”
For men, like the grain of the cornfields, grow small in the huddled crowd;
And weak for the breath of spaces where a soul may speak aloud;
For hills like stairways to heaven, shaming the level track;
And sick with the clang of pavements, and the marts of the trafficking pack;
Greatness is born of greatness, and breadth of a breadth profound;
The old Antaean fable of strength renewed from the ground
Was a human truth for the ages; since the hour of the Eden-birth,
That man among men was strongest who stood with his feet on the earth.

THE SANTA FE TRAIL

This way walked Fate; and as she went flung far the line of destiny
That bound an untracked continent to brotherhood from sea to sea;
That long gray trail of dream and hope, marked mile by mile with graves that keep
On every barren hill and slope some stout heart lost in dreamless sleep.
Patience and faith and fortitude were willed to it and justified;
Stern, homely virtues, plain and rude; eternal as the sky, and wide.
Nor ever sea king dared the sea in braver mood than those who went
Strong-armed to wrest from Mystery their birth-right, half a continent.
Gay, hawk-eyed, brown-faced voyageurs, tired of the river’s muddy tide,
Or drawn by whispered, golden lures, or beckoned by the prairies wide;
These first, and lightly down the wind their songs float backward as they pass;—
So light they go they leave behind scarce one dim footprint on the grass.
And after them, lean, rugged, grim,—one marked untrodden heights to scan;
The gray peak looking down on him knew something kindred in the man:
Prophetic his keen eyes could trace in those lone wastes that seemed to wait,
The larger promise of his race, the germ of many an unborn State.
Then Fremont, leading Empire’s way; beside him, silent, dim, unguessed,
Unheralded to claim her own, the Soul of the Awakening West:
Behind above the thundering flight of fear-swept bison vaguely beat
A murmur dominant with might, the trample of a million feet.
That long gray trail! That path of fate! For gain or loss, for life or death,
Driven by greed or hope or hate, it drew them to the latest breath;
It broke them to its giant mold; it seared their weakness to the bone;
It stripped them stark to sun and cold and mocked at whimperer and drone.
And they were Men that bore its mark; and they were Men its service made—
Strong-souled to face the utter dark, and watch with Fear still unafraid;
Stern school of heroes unconfessed; unweighed for meed of right or wrong;
By glib late-comers dispossessed of honors that to them belong;
As in the fire-tried furnace hour strange, warring elements will fuse
To purpose, unity, and power; to truer strength and nobler use—
Unconscious, save that here was life a man might live as manhood meant,
They wrought a nation from their strife and shaped it with their discontent.
No pulseless, still-born hope was theirs; each man a later Argonaut,
Who from great dreams and ceaseless cares outwove the golden fleece he sought;
And single-handed out of need made potent opportunity;
Nor shamed the hour with laggard deed; nor quailed at naked Destiny:
They touched the Wilderness to flower; they gave the unvoiced solitude
A tongue that spoke with master power the message of its iron mood:—
But ah! the coast! The hands that bled! The toll of heart-aches and of tears!
The stern, white faces of the dead that paved that highway through the years!
The long grass hides the rutted trail where tracked those mighty caravans
Whose far-lit camp fires low and pale, elude, howe’er the vision scans
That lost horizon, shrunk to fit the little roads that come and go,
By easy ways of greatness quit, that any chance-drawn foot may know;
Light trails and traffic o’er the dust of them that were a braver breed;
Forgotten in the careless lust for larger gain and lesser deed.—
Mother of all the Roads that hold that power o’er men that makes or mars!
These lead to cities, lands, and gold—this led to the eternal stars!

THE SONG OF THE COLORADO

From the heart of the mighty mountains strong-souled for my fate I came,
My far-drawn track to a nameless sea through a land without a name;
And the earth rose up to hold me, to bid me linger and stay;
And the brawn and bone of my mother’s race were set to bar my way.
Yet I stayed not, I could not linger; my soul was tense to the call
The wet winds sing when the long waves leap and beat on the far sea wall.
I stayed not, I could not linger; patient, resistless, alone,
I hewed the trail of my destiny deep in the hindering stone.
How narrow that first dim pathway—yet deepening hour by hour!
Years, ages, eons, spent and forgot, while I gathered me might and power
To answer the call that led me, to carve my road to the sea,
Till my flood swept out with that greater tide as tireless and tameless and free.
From the far, wild land that bore me, I drew my blood as wild—
I, born of the glacier’s glory, born of the uplands piled
Like stairs to the door of heaven, that the Maker of All might go
Down from His place with honor, to look on the world and know
That the sun and the wind and the waters, and the white ice cold and still,
Were moving aright in the plan He had made, shaping His wish and will.
When the spirit of worship was on me, turning alone, apart,
I stayed and carved me temples deep in the mountain’s heart,
Wide-domed and vast and silent, meet for the God I knew,
With shrines that were shadowed and solemn and altars of richest hue;
And out of my ceaseless striving I wrought a victor’s hymn,
Flung up to the stars in greeting from my far track deep and dim.
For the earth was put behind me; I reckoned no more with them
That come or go at her bidding, and cling to her garment’s hem.
Apart in my rock-hewn pathway, where the great cliffs shut me in,
The storm-swept clouds were my brethren, and the stars were my kind and kin.
Tireless, alone, unstaying, I went as one who goes
On some high and strong adventure that only his own heart knows.
Tireless, alone, unstaying, I went in my chosen road—
I trafficked with no man’s burden—I bent me to no man’s load.
On my tawny, sinuous shoulders no salt-gray ships swung in;
I washed no feet of cities, like a slave whipped out and in;
My will was the law of my moving in the land that my strife had made—
As a man in the house he has builded, master and unafraid.
O ye that would hedge and bind me—remembering whence I came!
I, that was, and was mighty, ere your race had breath or name!
Play with your dreams in the sunshine—delve and toil and plot—
Yet I keep the way of my will to the sea, when ye and your race are not!

TWO BITS

Two Bits was an old race horse well known from Texas to Arizona. He belonged at the time of his death to Lieut. Charles Curtis (now Capt. Curtis, Military Instructor at the University of Wisconsin), who built the first stockade on the site of the present Fort Whipple, Arizona. The incident is true; wounded to his death, the old horse out-ran the Apaches and after his rider, who was severely wounded, fell off, Two Bits went on to Fort Wingate where the sight of his wounds and the bloody pouches told the story. The old horse headed the relief party and led them back to his fallen rider and then dropped dead. The troops, to all of whom the old race horse was a familiar comrade, buried him under a heap of lava bowlders beside the old Government Trail a few miles west of Fort Wingate, New Mexico.

Where the shimmering sands of the desert beat
In waves to the foothills’ rugged line,
And cat-claw and cactus and brown mesquite
Elbow the cedar and mountain pine;
Under the dip of a wind-swept hill,
Like a little gray hawk Fort Whipple clung;
The fort was a pen of peeled pine logs
And forty troopers the army strong.
At the very gates when the darkness fell,
Prowling Mohave and Yavapai
Signalled with shrill coyote yell,
Or mocked the night owl’s piercing cry;
Till once when the guard turned shuddering
For a trace in the east of the welcome dawn,
Spent, wounded, a courier reeled to his feet:—
“Apaches—rising—Wingate—warn!”
“And half the troop at the Date Creek Camp!”
The Captain muttered; “Those devils heard!”
White-lipped he called for a volunteer
To ride Two Bits and carry the word.
“Alone; it’s a game of hide and seek;
One man may win where ten would fail.”
Himself the saddle and cinches set
And headed Two Bits for the Verde Trail.
Two Bits! How his still eyes woke to the chase!
The bravest soul of them all was he!
Hero of many a hard-won race,
With a hundred scars for his pedigree.
Wary of ambush, and keen of trail,
Old in wisdom of march and fray;
And the grizzled veteran seemed to know
The lives that hung on his hoofs that day.
“A week. God speed you and make it less!
Ride by night from the river on.”
Caps were swung in a silent cheer,
A quick salute, and the word was gone.
Sunrise, threading the Point of Rocks;
Dusk, in the cañons dark and grim,
Where coiled like a rope flung down the cliffs,
The trail crawls up to the frowning Rim.
A pebble turned, a spark out-struck
From steel-shod hoofs on the treacherous flint—
Ears strain, eyes wait, in the rocks above
For the faintest whisper, the farthest glint;
But shod with silence and robed with night
They pass untracked, and mile by mile
The hills divide for the flying feet,
And the stars lean low to guide the while.
Never a plumed quail hid her nest
With the stealthiest care that a mother may,
As crouched at dawn in the chaparral
These two, whom a heart-beat might betray.
So, hiding and riding, night by night;
Four days, and the end of the journey near;
The fort just hid in the distant hills—
But hist! A whisper—a breath of fear!
They wheel and turn—too late. Ping! Ping!
From their very feet a fiery jet.
A lurch, a plunge, and the brave old horse
Leaped out with his broad breast torn and wet.
Ping! Thud! On his neck the rider swayed;
Ten thousand deaths if he reeled and fell!
Behind, exultant, the painted horde
Poured down like a skirmish line from Hell.
Not yet! Not yet! Those ringing hoofs
Have scarred their triumph on many a course;
And the desperate, blood-trailed chase swept on,
Apache sinews ’gainst wounded horse.
Hour crowding hour till the yells died back,
Till the pat of the moccasined feet was gone;
And dumb to heeding of foe or fear
The rider dropped,—but the horse kept on.
Stiff and stumbling and spent and sore,
Plodding the long miles doggedly;
Till the daybreak bugles of Wingate rang
And a feint neigh answered the reveille.
Wide swung the gates—a wounded horse—
Red-dabbled pouches and riding gear;
A shout, a hurry, a quick-flung word—
And “Boots and Saddles” rang sharp and clear.
Like a stern commander the old horse turned
As the troop filed out, and straight to the head
He guided them back on that weary trail
Till he fell by his fallen rider—dead—
But the man and the message saved. And he
Whose brave heart carried the double load,
With his last trust kept and his last race won,
They buried him there on the Wingate road.

SPRING IN THE DESERT

Silence, and the heat lights shimmer like a mist of sifted silver,
Down across the wide, low washes where the strange sand rivers flow;
Brown and sun-baked, quiet, waveless, trailed with bleaching, flood-swept bowlders;
Rippled into mimic water where the restless whirlwinds go.
On the banks the gray mesquite trees droop their slender, lace-leafed branches;
Fill the lonely air with fragrance, as a beauty unconfessed;
Till the wild quail comes at sunset with her timorous, plumed covey,
And the iris-throated pigeon coos above her hidden nest.
Every shrub distills vague sweetness; every poorest leaf has gathered
Some rare breath to tell its gladness in a fitter way than speech;
Here the silken cactus blossoms flaunt their rose and gold and crimson,
And the proud zahuaro lifts its pearl-carved crown from careless reach.
Like to Lillith’s hair down-streaming, soft and shining, glorious, golden,
Sways the queenly palo verde robed and wreathed in golden flowers;
And the spirits of dead lovers might have joy again together
Where the honey-sweet acacia weaves its shadow-fretted bowers.
Velvet-soft and glad and tender goes the night wind down the cañons,
Touching lightly every petal, rocking leaf and bud and nest;
Whispering secrets to the black bees dozing in the tall wild lilies,
Till it hails the sudden sunrise trailing down the mountain’s crest.
Silence, sunshine, heat lights painting opal-tinted dream and vision
Down across the wide, low washes where the whirlwinds wheel and swing;—
What of dead hands, sun-dried, bleaching? What of heat and thirst and madness?
Death and life are lost, forgotten, in the wonder of the spring.