The Westward Movement

by Unknown

Though the Great Southwest is now the most sparsely inhabited region of its size in the United States, it was once the most populous and wealthy, probably more populous than it is to-day, with all its present American enterprise. Hundreds of years before the Spaniards first appeared in the New World, the valleys of Arizona and New Mexico contained a numerous population, supporting considerable cities, and irrigating extensive tracts of land with wonderful engineering skill. Frank H. Cushing, the anthropologist, who in 1882-83 wrote of the ruins of the Southwest, estimated that the irrigated valleys of Arizona were once the dwelling-place of two hundred and fifty thousand people, about twice the population of the entire Territory then. The remains of these ancient civilizations—the pueblo-dwellers, the cliff-and cave-dwellers—are found scattered everywhere throughout Arizona and New Mexico, and in such numbers that archæologists have only begun to explore them.

No part of the United States, indeed, has had a more thrilling and eventful history. While denominated a desert "not worth good blood,"—in the words of the historian,—it has been a center of contention for centuries, overwhelmed by one tide of conquest after another. From the time that the Spaniards first invaded the country, hunting for gold, down to the capture of Geronimo by American soldiers in the eighties, it has been the scene of many bloody Indian wars. It was the source of contention between the United States and Mexico in the war of 1846-48. Once a possession of Spain, and later of Mexico, the story of the struggle for independence by the Texans and for annexation by the Californians is full of fascinating interest. Its soil has developed some of the boldest and most picturesque characters in American history—Boone, Crockett, Kit Carson, Sam Houston, and many a pioneer cattleman and settler, to say nothing of the Crooks and the Lawtons of the Indian wars. The main trail of the El Dorado hunters of '49 on their way to California let through it, garnishing its history with many a story of bloodshed and hardship. No American fiction is more vital and characteristic than that which deals with the early lawless days of the miner, the buffalo-hunter, and the cow-boy; none is more richly colored, picturesque, or rudely powerful.

Mummy cave, Cañon del Muerto, Arizona.

In its material aspects it is equally full of contrasts. Here are the greatest deserts and waste places in America, and side by side with them, often with no more than a few strands of barbed wire to mark the division-line, are the richest farming-lands in America, lands more fertile, even, than the famed corn-fields of Illinois or the fruit-orchards of Michigan. The Southwest has been denominated, with reason, the treeless land, and yet it contains to-day the largest unbroken stretches of forest in the country, there being nothing to equal the timber-lands of the Colorado plateau in northern and central Arizona. No part of the United States possesses such an extent of grass-plain, Texas being the greatest of the plain States, and yet none has grander mountains. Only three States have higher peaks than the noble Sierra Blanca of New Mexico, fourteen thousand two hundred and sixty-nine feet in altitude, and there are few more magnificent elevations than San Francisco Mountain in Arizona.

Though the region, to the hurried railroad traveler, seems barren and desolate almost beyond comparison, it is yet richer in variety, if not in luxury, of vegetation than any other part of the country. Professor Merriam found many arctic types in the flora of the upper regions of the San Francisco Mountain. Within a radius of a few hundred miles grow the pines and firs found in northern Canada, and the figs and dates of the African semi-tropics; Southern oranges and olives grow side by side with Northern wheat; the cactus and the fir are often found within sight of each other. Nowhere are there so many strange and marvelous forms of life as here—of flowers, multitudinous cacti and the palms; of animals, the Gila monster, the horned toad, the hydrophobia skunk, and many other unique species. Besides the monotonous desert, with its apparent lack of interest to the traveler, the region contains the greatest natural wonder on the continent—the Grand Cañon of the Colorado River. It also possesses unnumbered other natural phenomena and some of the grandest mountain and forest scenery. With all its lack of rain, it is watered by two of the great rivers of the continent—the Colorado and the Rio Grande.

In its human life it is equally prolific in diversities. In few other places in the world is there such a commingling of dissimilar human elements. I doubt if even the cities of the Orient can present such contrasts of wholly unrelated races of people, as well as so great a variety of the white race. Here, in one small town, one may find representatives of several different tribes of the aboriginal Indians, in every state of civilization and savagery, picturesquely attired in bright-colored costumes, bearing their peculiar baskets and pottery. Here, also, is the next higher stratum, the Mexicans, in great numbers, and in all mixtures of blood from the nearly pure Indian peon upward. Here are African Negroes in considerable numbers, emigrants from the Southern States, and every town has its Chinese and usually its Japanese contingent, the overflow from California. Above all these, and in greatly superior numbers, rises the white man, usually American by birth, and yet generously intermixed with many of European nationalities. In most of the older towns, such as San Antonio in Texas and Tucson in Arizona, whole neighborhoods appear more foreign than American, presenting strange contrasts between modern store-buildings, banks, and churches, and ancient weather-worn adobe houses where the Mexicans live almost as primitively as did their forefathers a century ago.

The peopling of the country makes one of the most interesting and significant stories in the history of the nation. For many years it was the unknown land, the land of possibilities and wonders, as well as of danger and death. Therefore it attracted the hardy pioneer, and here, for lack of any other frontier on the continent, the pioneer, though with the germ of westward ho! still lingering in his blood, has been compelled at last to settle down. I shall not soon forget the sorrowful desert-dweller whom I met in what seemed the ends of the earth in Arizona. His nearest neighbor was fifteen miles away, his post-office twenty-five miles, and yet he was bemoaning the fact that the country was becoming crowded. "If there were any more frontier," he said, "I'd go to it."

It is hardy blood, that of the pioneer, good stock on which to found the development of a country. For years the West has been the lodestone for those adventurous spirits who love the outdoor and exciting life of the mining prospector, the cow-boy, the hunter—a healthy, rugged lot, virtually all pure Americans. The Rough Riders sprang from this element. But probably the most distinct single human invasion of the Southwest was made by the irreconcilables of the Confederate Army after the Civil War. They could not endure the Federal domination of the reconstruction period, or else they had lost all their property, and with it their hope of rising again in their old neighborhood, and so they set westward, remaining, as immigrants usually do, in the same latitude as that from which they came. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona all have a strong substratum of the Old South, still possessing many of the bitternesses left by the great conflict, and yet rising with the opportunities of the new land, and adding to its development peculiar pride, dignity and often culture. Owing to its wildernesses and its contiguity to Mexico, the Southwest was also for many years the refuge of outlaws from all parts of the country—an element which, though small, was so perniciously active that it earned an undue prominence in fiction and contemporary literature, giving the country a complexion of evil which it did not deserve. This element still effervesces in a train-robbery, but its effect on the Southwest has been inconsequential.

All these earlier sources of population, however, were small compared with the great inundation of the last few years, following the extension of the railroads, the crowding of other parts of the country, and the hard times of 1893, which, causing discontent among many Easterners and Northerners, tempted them to try new fields of enterprise. There are virtually no native-born Anglo-Saxons of voting age in New Mexico and Arizona—at least, they are so few as to be a wonder and a pride. In Texas there are many, for the changes in that part of the Southwest are a step older and possibly not quite so rapid, although Texas, too, is overrun with people from every part of the country. It is safe to ask any middle-aged man what part of the East he is from. Of this later influx of population there are representatives from every part of the United States, with a specially large number from Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Missouri—the Middle West. In many cases these settlers had first immigrated to the States just beyond the Mississippi, and had there taken up farms; but uncertain rain and crop-failures drove them onward to the irrigated valleys of the region, and there they are to-day.