When we reported the incident at “Flag,” the Flagstaffians seemed wounded in their municipal pride. Nothing of that sort, they said, had happened for years, and asked if we had visited the Observatory. Flagstaff is no longer a frontier town. I bought a hat there which was afterward admired in Boston, if that signifies anything. The town is best known for its observatory, which we drove up a beautiful winding hill to view, and found it looked like any other observatory. There are some cliff dwellings overlooking a pretty little green ravine, called Walnut Canyon. Dominating all Flagstaff the crescent of cold San Francisco peaks looks benignly over half Arizona, lovely in their bold and serene silhouette.
On the road between Holbrook and St. Johns, as we journeyed toward Apacheland, we stopped a few hours in the petrified forests whose fallen trunks line the road for miles. Whatever turned them to stone, at the same time burned the heart out of the surrounding country. Leprous looking erosions, sulphur colored and sickly white, make the only break in an absolutely flat landscape. An unbending road stretches miles without a change in its monotony, choking in alkali dust and twisting sandstorms. Beyond is the painted desert—bad lands which, but for the ethereal sunset colors tinting butte and mesa with unearthly glory, would be as unspeakably desolate as the rest. The forest itself lies fallen in an alkali plain. Uncountable tons of these giant fragments, waist-high, perfect to the last detail in the grain of the wood, the roughness of the bark, knot-holes and little twigs, cover the ground. The strange stone, which polishes like glass and cuts like diamonds, is nearly semi-precious, yet in this vicinity houses are paved with the blocks. We passed over a bridge whose foundation was a giant petrified tree. It was depressing, these acres and acres of stone trees, frozen in the height of their glory by the cruel Medusa, Nature. I felt the same pensive kinship of mortality with these trees one feels at Pompeii with the huddled, lava-encrusted bodies clutching their treasures.
“I wonder what petrified these here trees?” exclaimed a voice behind us. We turned. If I had not known the trees were petrified before her arrival I might have held her responsible. As she stood, she might easily have turned a whole continent to stone. She might have posed for Avoirdupois, minus the poise. She wore, in addition to her figure, a gayly striped silk sweater, high-heeled French slippers, silk stockings, a jockey cap and overalls. Overalls, like boudoir caps and kimonos in Pullmans, are the approved hiking costume of the new West for both sexes. Unfortunately, there was more of her to wear overalls than there were overalls to wear.
We had seen many of her kind, always touring the country in a little rattly car, out for a good time, careless of looks, dressed in a motley of overalls, sunbonnets, middy blouses, regardless of age or former condition of dignity, sometimes driving, and sometimes delegating the task to a little man crowded up against the wheel;—there is never more than one man to a carful of women and children. We were now in the heart of the sage-brush tourist belt, where motoring is not the sport of the wealthy, but the necessity of the poor. With bedding rolls and battered suitcases strapped to running boards; canteens, tents, chuck-boxes and the children’s beds tied on with ropes wherever ropes will go; loaded inside with babies, dogs and Pater and Materfamilias, and outside with boastful, not to say sneering banners; these little cars serve for transportation, freight-van, restaurant and hotel. Bought second or third hand, they rattle the family off on vacations or business, and at the journey’s end are sold third or fourth-hand. At night no garage or hotel for them, but a corner, a secluded corner if they arrive early enough, in the municipal parking grounds. Here with frank gregariousness they exchange confidences with other sage-brush tourists, while Paterfamilias mends the dubious tires and tinkers with the weak spark plug, and Materfamilias cooks supper over an open fire. Then they drape a tent or a mere canvas over the car, take a lantern inside, and one by one undress, blissfully ignorant that their silhouettes are shamelessly outlined on the canvas. As these municipal camps were a bit too noisy for people who loved sleep as did Toby and I, we usually sought the open country, but we loved to walk through the grounds, and enjoy their sociability. The rich and haughty, we thought, would not be half so bored with travel if they earned their delights as these sage-brushers do. Fords have replaced prairie schooners, and Indians are less interested in one’s scalp than one’s pocketbook, yet overland travel still furnishes adventure, as any one of the tow-heads we met from El Paso to Gallup will tell their grandchildren fifty years hence. But you must leave behind limousine and liveried chauffeur, forswear palace hotels, and get out and rub elbows with folks. The real sage-brush tourists care nothing for “side.” Proudly flaunting their atrocious banners, they patch their tires to the last ribbon, and wash their dirty babies in public.
Occasionally there are exceptions to these happy-go-lucky pioneers. One such family we met at the very ebb of their fortunes. They were migrating to Texas, and midway, their hoodless ramshackle engine, tires, and pump had collapsed like the one horse shay. We filled their canteen, which had also leaked dry, pumped their tires with our engine, and offered what road advice we could, with the remains of our lunch. At last, after repeated cranking the man got the wheezy engine started, and the woman, like Despair in a calico wrapper, leaned forward and took up her task of holding down the engine with her hand, protected by a black stocking. Poor shiftless folk, wherever they settled eventually, it is fairly certain their luck did not improve.
We were bound by easy stages for a long-sought goal, a seductive and elusive province of which even native Arizonans knew little. Yet it was the little they told which enticed us.
“I’ve not been myself to the White Mountains,” one old-timer after another would say, “but I’ve always heard how they are the prettiest part of the state. Everything in the world you’d want,—mountains, rivers, a world of running water, trout that fight to get on your bare hook, big game, mountain lions and such. I’ve always aimed to go sometime.”
Our “sometime” had come, after long waiting for the twelve-foot snows to melt which covered the road till May. Through pretty, little irrigated towns high in the hills, we reached at sunset a district far different from the burnt aridity we passed at noon. Lakes were linked to each other under green hills like ours at home. We looked across ridges and long irrigated pastures, and rode through fields blue with iris, and groves of gummy pines and the hugest white birches I ever saw. The roads were next to impossible. We bumped violently over annoying thank-you-marms past Cooley’s ranch, former home of an officer who married an Apache woman, and whose sons now own half the beautiful valley, and have built a lumber camp that is fast converting these forests into history. At ten o’clock of a full and weary day, we reached the reservation of the White River Apaches, situated on the lovely river of that name. A few miles below, where the river forks between rolling hills, is a cavalry station, relic of the days when the Apache was the terror of Arizona.
We had to beg Uncle Sam once more to put us up for the night. Not too gracious—rather grumpily, in fact,—he granted permission, notwithstanding that in that remote and innless region, his is the only resort travelers have, and the one to which they are always directed. They pay a stipulated sum for lodging and for meals;—nevertheless the average government agency is not the most hospitable place in the world.
Only a few Indians were visible next morning on the reservation. A crowd of men hung round the village store at Fort Apache, or loafed under the trees in the square. A pretty girl on horseback smiled at us, conscious that her necklace of brass bells and celluloid mirrors made her the best dressed debutante in Apacheland. A very intelligent lad directed us to the trout stream where we hoped to see the trout fight for the privilege of landing on our bare hooks. The Apaches are round-headed Indians, rather sullen we were told, with staring round eyes, more stocky than the lithe Navajo, better able to account for themselves than the Papagoes; though in the past of ceaseless warfare, it has been give and take, the Apaches losing as often as the other tribes. In a land teeming with fish and game, they have become lazy, and the beautiful craftwork for which the tribe was formerly noted is seldom attempted by the younger generation. Their industry does not compare with that of the Hopis, who are constantly weaving baskets, baking pottery, or wresting meager crops from the land. Being the last tribe to take the warpath, not so many years ago, they are closely watched against another outbreak.