“Boston.”
I pass over his next remark. The reader has heard it before, and so had we. The air was cleared, and so were we. To the sheriff of Pima County and his deputy, Boston meant only Susan B. Anthony and Frances E. Willard. They had evidently never heard of Ward Eight.
We passed on, amid apologies, to Tucson. Once more the spectres evoked by Mrs. Flanagan had been laid. Artistically, it was a pity. The canyon made a perfect setting for a hold-up. As such I recommend it to the outlaws of Pima County.
As we drove into the city, acquitted of boot-legging, a wonderful odor stole to our nostrils. We sniffed, looked at each other and sniffed again. We were entering Tucson on the historic afternoon when sixty thousand dollars worth of liquor had been poured relentlessly into the gutters of the old town,—a town which a generation ago had stood for wild drinking and picturesque lawlessness.
CHAPTER VIII
TUCSON
WHAT school child reading of the Pilgrim’s landing, of Montcalm’s Defeat, and the Revolutionary War, but thinks he is learning the whole of America’s colonial history? Studying from text-books eastern professors wrote about the time when the Mississippi held back the lurking savage, he skips over the brief mention of Coronado and Cortez as of sporadic explorers who kindly lessened home work by changing the map as little as possible. He reads of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and Faneuil Hall in Boston, and the Old South Church. Yet in the land of Coronado, the uncharted wilderness his mind pictures, rise the white turrets and dome of a Mission beside which the Old South is as ordinary as a country Audrey compared with a lady of St. James’ court. Who of his elders can blame him, who pride themselves on their familiarity with the cloisters of San Marcos and Bruges, Chartres and the ruined giant Rheims, and have heard vaguely or not at all, of the pearl set by devout Spaniards against the blue enamel sky of Arizona and dedicated to San Xavier?
As it lies relaxed on the tinted desert carpet, dome and tower so light that they seem great white balloons, kept from floating away into the vivid sky by substantial anchors of buttress and arch, compare it with the neat smugness of our Bulfinch and Georgian meeting-houses in New England. Even at its best, the latter style has the prim daintiness of an exquisite maiden lady, while the Mission is like the Sleeping Beauty, with white arm curved above her head, relaxed and dreaming. Without claiming to speak with authority, I consider San Xavier the loveliest ecclesiastical building in America. Certainly its obscurity should be broken more frequently than now by pilgrimages, its outlines as familiar in school histories as Independence Hall or Washington Crossing the Delaware.
In its fashion this mission personifies a sort of Independence Hall of the first Americans,—the Papagoes, who might be termed Red Quakers. Founded in 1687 by Father Kino, a Jesuit priest of the royal house of Bavaria, the original mission suffered from Indian rebellions, Apache massacres, and the expulsion of the Jesuits. Abandoned for awhile, it fell a century later to the Franciscans, who erected the present building, which represents the almost single-handed conquest by some eighteenth century padre of engineering difficulties which might well baffle a Technology graduate. It became the Rheims of the Papagoes, Christians, in their peculiarly pantheistic fashion, since the advent of Father Kino. Mildest of all Indians, in their whole history they went on the war-path but once,—after hostile Apaches had thrice desecrated their loved San Xavier and murdered its priests. The Apaches never returned.
Nine miles from Tucson, on a wide plain which the Santa Rita mountains guard, the Mission lies cloistered, exquisite souvenir of the Moors and Spaniards, its arched gateway a legacy from Arabia. Little Papago huts of wattled reeds and mud, scarcely different in construction from prehistoric cliff-dwellings, lie scattered over the plain. Out in the sunshine, Papagoes in blue overalls and brilliant bandas mended tools or drove a primitive plow, and the women caught the wind and the light in billowing scarves of purple, green and red. They smiled broadly and sheepishly at us, proudly exhibiting blinking, velvet-eyed progeny in wicker cradles, who bore such good Catholic names as Clara, Juan, Madelina. Some women were busy covering reeds with split yucca fiber, intertwined with the black of the devil’s claw, a vicious curving seed-pod which more than once had clamped about our feet in our desert travel. Others baked round loaves in rude outdoor ovens of mud. Across the plains, sheep grazed, and an occasional horse: the omnipresent mongrel beloved of the Indian snarled and yapped as we drove to the Mission doorway.