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INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

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Photo. by W. C. Wilson

ANNOUNCING THE SNAKE DANCE

Priest at sunset removing kiva signal

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INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

BY
LEO CRANE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1925

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Copyright, 1925,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published September, 1925

First Impression September, 1925

The Atlantic Monthly Press
Publications
are published by
Little, Brown, and Company
in association with
The Atlantic Monthly Company

Printed in the United States of America

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TO

those people of the Enchanted Desert who called me “Chief,”—Indians, employees, missioners, traders,—whose confidence, loyalty, and devotion made my work among the Hopi and Navajo tribes possible of success; and to humbler friends, my faithful horses, Dandy and Barney Murphy, Prince and Frank, that went with me so many weary miles, and were shot, by my order, to save them from the miseries of Governmental economy, this book is dedicated. [[vii]]

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CONTENTS

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ILLUSTRATIONS

[Announcing the Snake Dance] Frontispiece

[Walpi, the Pueblo of the Clouds] 12
[The Valley and Its Headlands]

[A Navajo Flock and Its Shepherds] 16
[Cañon de Chelly, Seen from the Rim]

[Crossing the Desert below Chimney Butte] 58
[The Oraibi Wash in Flood-Time]

[Navajo on Their Way to a Dance] 70
[A Navajo Hogan and Its Blanket Loom]

[Outfit of a Well-Digger, the Desert “Water-Witch”] 84
[Drying Bed of the Little Colorado River]

[The Hopi Ceremonial Corn-Planting] 92
[Hopi Gardens in a Spring-Fed Nook of the Desert]

[Hopi Indian Agency at Keams Cañon] 106
[Hopi Indian Hospital at Keams Cañon]

[A Busy Day at the Trading-Post, Keams Cañon] 118
[Ready for the 105-Mile Trek to the Railroad]

[Hostin Nez, Navajo Chief and Medicine Man] 124

[Judge Hooker Hongave of the Indian Court] 132

[Youkeoma, Antelope Priest and Prophet] 162

[A Mesa Road—Old Trail to Hotevilla] 170
[A Pretentious Home at Hotevilla]

[A Hopi Schoolgirl] 178
[A Hopi Youth Who Is Preparing for College]

[The Walpi Headland, Seen from the Orchards] 196

[The Walpi Stairway, A Rock-Ladder to the Sky] 202 [[x]]

[The Author, in the Enchanted Desert] 230
[Old Glory and the Bond Flag at the Agency]

[Albert Yava: Interpreter] 234
[Tom Pavatea: Hopi Merchant and Patriot]

[The Corn Rock, an Ancient Bartering-place] 238

[Opening the Walpi Snake Dance] 250
[Dramatic Entry of the Snake Priests]

[The Gatherer, Handling a Rattlesnake] 266
[A Patriarch of Snakes]

[The Chief Snake-Priest] 272

[The Enchanted Desert and the Moqui Buttes] 282

[In the Twin-Butte Country] 294
[Silversmith Jim: a Typical Navajo]

[Billa Chezzi: Chief of the Northern Navajo] 316
[Nelson Oyaping: Tewa Chief of Police]

[A Navajo Boy Who Has Never Been to Any School] 322

[A Hopi Range-Rider] 336
[Blue Cañon: A Study in Blue-and-White]

[A Hopi Shrine] 338
[A Hopi Weaver of Ceremonial Robes]
[A Katchina Dance]

[Hopi Mother in Gala Dress, with Her Child] 340
[Navajo Mother with Child in Cradle]

[A New Son of the Desert] 344
[Hopi Girls Arrayed for a Dance]

[Hopi Wedding Costume] 352

[A Hopi Beauty] 358 [[1]]

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INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

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I

NOLENS VOLENS

It is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves.—Charles Dickens

They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them.

Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things that weren’t done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they being from what an Easterner would term the “hinterland,” had he vision enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have tales to tell—a hope that never materialized.

When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if, seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their uncommon [[4]]experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath; that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that which distressed them, and to return whence they came—into the broader, franker places.

I knew that they were “out of the West,” and this meant—of course it did—beyond—well, beyond the Mississippi. “The West” is a general term, and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim past. Therefore I did not know that this one’s bailiwick contained five troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly four hundred years; that another’s domain included six thousand square miles of God’s most wonderful creation, having the Marble Cañon of the Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third’s territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times, breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one’s home; that still another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the silence of uncharted cañons.

No. I did not meet these men in the Smithsonian offices at Washington; nor were they lecturers before the National Geographic Society. They were Indian Agents.

They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important, establish [[5]]hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the frontiers.

Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in their efforts by the memory—fact and fiction—of the “ration” days. They might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for these officials’ existence has produced much sound and fury. The very title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists—and God knows the ignorance of them is astounding—take pen in hand to picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage, they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind. They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities of the “glorious past” would long since have engulfed the idealized protégé but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, measles, syphilis—scourges of the Indian people, whose long train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men have no [[6]]historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be unknown.

Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant notice; occasionally, too, one was killed.

These unromantic facts, having no camouflage of feathers and war paint, nothing in them of the beating of tom-toms or the chanting of legends, do not invite a sentimental record; and, it is true, few such things occur in the “dude season,” when sentimentality, accompanied by its handmaiden ignorance, takes its neurasthenic outing in the wild.

One of them, a man whose dress spoke rather of the club and office, invited me thus:—

“Come out with me for a leave. There are deer, and trout streams, and a hunting-lodge up in the hills.” He was the chap who claimed to have a census of the grizzlies. “It’ll do you good, and you look as if you needed a bit of the outside.”

I thanked him casually, and turned aside his invitation with—

“What’s this I hear about the Chief offering you an [[7]]inspectorship? That would give you some travel too, and—”

“An inspectorship! Travel!” he snorted. “Why, good God, man! I am the boss of the Switzerland of America. I wouldn’t trade my post for a seat in the Cabinet.”

That is the way they talked, and a few of them undoubtedly meant it.

A large bulky man, with a face like a piece of granite, twisted a crude silver ring on his finger as he extended a similar invitation in an entirely different way. He was a slow-speaking fellow, of few words and those of a definite, precise character.

“You’d like it,” he finished, sighing. “The Navajo country is a great place—a great place—”

He seemed at loss for words to picture his meaning, and I know now why language failed him.

Said a third, for whom I had unraveled the genealogy of a much intermarried Indian family, and who was grateful:—

“Why, you’re just the lad for me. All you’ll have to do is ride fences, armed with a hammer and a pocketful of staples” (I think he really said “steeples,”) “—and there’s quarters for you; twelve hundred a year too. You’ll get a lot of dope for stories. That place fairly drips ’em. What say? I can fix it with the Chief?”

After having had the courtesy to thank them one and all, I leaned back in the swivel-chair and laughed. While they were present I good-humoredly laughed with them, and later, at them. You see, in the Office I was known as the Scribe, ever since that time when the boss of Indian Territory had rushed in, mad as a hornet, waving a copy of Harper’s Weekly, and declaring that the essential guts of an article therein had been stolen from his confidential [[8]]files. And while I had purloined them with the Chief’s permission, I realized it was a fine thing for me not to have lived in the Indian Territory.

While I might spend odd time writing stories of heroic unwashed cowpunchers battling Dante-nosed cayuses across the vasty early-morning range, with the frost nipping down the alkali dust, and a pale-rose tone on the distant range of hills, I knew also that they did it for forty dollars the month and grub off the wheel. I was then and am to this day aware that cowmen give little thought to either the vasty sweep of the broad spaces or to the rose tones. And I was perfectly able to fake the western landscape, where a man’s a man an’ a’ that, without removing myself more than five blocks from a café and a steak à la Bordelaise. I had placed one hundred stories in New York, and a hundred more on the stocks, without smelling an Indian camp or subjecting myself to the grave and anxious possibility of getting—well, inhabited, to say the least of it. I assumed that the dapper fellow was more of a clerk than a ranger; that the slow-moving granite-faced individual truly reflected the somber aridity of his monotonous desert; and the fact that the third had said “steeples” proved to me that I could never respect him as chief.

“No!” I decided, with a grin. “The Borax mule-team couldn’t drag me into that life.” And I too meant it.

But—I was brutally launched out of this effete complacency and pitched into the great Navajo Desert country without disturbing a single mule. I scrapped for money to purchase the once-despised “critters” to enable my existence therein. And I have been proud of my mules since.

Without seeming to be missed by those to whom I had [[9]]thought my going would be tragedy, without causing a ripple among those few with whom I found myself, the Wheel turned over, and the vast immutable Desert received me with as much inscrutable kindness as it offers anyone. I had prepared the chute myself, and having greased it thoroughly, slipped and plunged down it, as has many a better man without sliding any further than his grave.

“See the Chief, and get a berth in the West. Live out o’ doors, rough it, live on milk and eggs, and don’t come home until I agree to it. You are two leaps ahead of the lion, and you’ll beat him yet.”

It was the cruel frankness of friendship. I had romped the city streets with the doctor, attended the same schools, appeared on the same stage as promoter of histrionic wares; in short, he had been the leader of my gang. I could recall the local excitement aroused by his first cane, and had carried his messages to his first girl. He knew how many times I had been thrashed, and had once turned the trick himself. There was no need for professional bluff between us.

Next day, perhaps a trifle groggy, I got to my feet in a more determined spirit, to prepare for the six-months’ battle. The Chief was very kind.

“Why not take a superintendency?” he suggested. “There’s one vacant, down in Rainbow Cañon. That’s the Grand Cañon country, you know. Wonderful place, one of the rarest spots on earth.”

I thanked him for the confidence, knowing that Rainbow Cañon was no place for an invalid. That Agency is nearly always vacant. New superintendents negotiate the trail but twice—ignorantly, going in, and wisely, [[10]]coming out for ever. Even sure-footed mules have been known to miscalculate at Suicide Corner, and it is claimed that the bones of one such beast, entangled in the wires of his last burden,—a cottage piano,—still furnish a mystic Æolian effect when the wind sweeps below the place where he faltered. The last superintendent had spent forty-eight hours in a tree, evading flood-waters that threatened to carry him on a personally conducted tour through the Grand Cañon itself. I had arranged his relief by telegraphing the nearest offices adjacent to his tree, a mere matter of miles, up and down; and I had no great confidence that anyone would so rapidly arrange mine in similar circumstances. No! Rainbow Cañon sounded good, quite poetical, indeed; but none of it for one who required rest and as little exercise as possible.

So, in accord with my request and at my own valuation, based on my inexperience, I was formally transferred as a clerk to an Indian Agency that sits astride the Santa Fe trail—the modern trail connecting the ancient city of Santa Fe with the Pacific, along which pioneers wended in the forties.

One week later I had left Washington to make the trek of two thousand five hundred miles to the Painted Desert and—to me—a most desolate siding on the banks of the Little Colorado River in Arizona. [[11]]

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II

ACROSS THE PLAINS

Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or encouragement; but, stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the mocking, fugitive horizon.—Stevenson: Across the Plains

In the early days, those adventurous times when men pulled out of St. Louis of an early morning, and the dust of a long train of wagons and outriders arose; when they followed the Arkansas across to the Cimarron and Wagon Mound; when they warily entered the Indian country and somehow existed through the long dusty days and the longer nervous nights before sighting Santa Fe and safety in a foreign land, I suppose most of them felt the extraordinary vastness of the West. Certainly they knew its sterile immensity after a few weeks on that perilous road. Later, when they began seeking the Coast and the Pacific, leaving Santa Fe to plunge down La Bajada trail to follow the valley of the Rio Grande, to skirt the fields of the mysterious Pueblos, to risk thirst and ambush in the arid lands of the Navajo and Apache, to dare the flooded rivers and that brazen furnace, the Mohave Desert, all to reach the painted paradise of golden California, they surely became alive to the wonderful expanse of [[12]]that southwestern empire first called New Spain—the Land of the Conquistadores!

A magic stage having magic scenes, bathed in glorious sunshine; a place of enchantment, where the rainbow colors linger on the cliffs and never leave the skies; an ancient garden of the gods, dreamily expecting that the gods will yet return; presenting ever its sphinx-like riddle; promising everything and yielding nothing but its lure. Once you have felt its sorcery, the spell is never broken.

Speaks the old-timer, “The Desert’ll get yeh”; and he doesn’t add anything about watching-out. The pioneers eluded or fought off wandering war-parties, but the Desert got them nevertheless.

WALPI, THE PUEBLO OF THE CLOUDS

THE VALLEY AND ITS HEADLANDS

There is one point in Arizona where, between the Santa Fe Railway and central Utah, three hundred miles as the crow flies and a weary five hundred by the trails, there is nothing of civilization other than a few isolated trading-posts and a solitary Indian Agency, set in a terraced cañon, eighty miles from a telegraph key. As my train passed this point in 1910, I did not dream that for more than eight years I should direct that Indian Agency and its chain of scattered desert stations, supplying all of progress that the country had, maintaining all of law and order that its half-wild people knew, isolated, lonely, well-nigh forgotten.

Only one who has lived thus removed from the turmoil and petty vanity of cities, apart from careless crowds, unreached by artificiality, can fully realize the brooding mystery, the savage beauty, the power and cruelty of the Desert. One must penetrate its solitudes, stand atop the world to view dead or enchanted cities, pause on the naked brink of chasms leaning over faery valleys, to know [[13]]the grandeur of this silent country. One must grow weary on its heavy trails, feel its hunger, shrink in its bitter cold, and thirst for the water of the precious hidden springs. Fairly to hear its ominous hush at blazing noon-time, to view the scarlet glory of its sunsets, to stand under its velvet dome at night, lighted by the burning stars, is to have caught a secret from the universe. To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness, carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark, and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. One must have known the sigh of the night wind in the brush, heard the chatter of jackals in the snow, felt the sandstorm’s acid lash, and stopped, spellbound, at the sibilant warning of its gliding Indian god. Then to have seen the drifting red-bellied rain-clouds that the Snake priests pray for, the crisp rending lightning at their pouches, the wild strength of arroyos after cloud-bursts, and the deluge of the swift midsummer rains, ending in the soft radiance of double rainbows! One must live as a hermit in the Desert to find its heart.

And only one who has done this may somehow feebly understand those bronzed people of whom the desert genii have made fatalists—the solemn, dreaming Indian of the waste lands, whether the Hopi of the mesa heights and kivas, the Pueblo in his mediæval towns, or the Navajo, chanting in his lonely, hidden camp. These know all the splendors, feel all the menace and the mystery, and call the Desert home. Timid, yet uncaring, ever bent on placating some unseen demon, trusting in songs [[14]]and sorceries, they go their Oriental ways on a vast Occidental stage. The desert spell has touched them, every one.

That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert. Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient, are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology, a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too.

One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars, mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their [[15]]head, the great Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma.

Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung, those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.

But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more. “Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids, carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still. [[16]]

To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will serve as a reason for this notebook.

Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian inhabitants and few indeed of other men.

For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation.

A NAVAJO FLOCK AND ITS SHEPHERDS

CAÑON DE CHELLY, SEEN FROM THE RIM

Where the Navajo retreated before Kit Carson in 1863. The earliest records mention it as a Navajo stronghold. The cliff-dwellers held it before them. There are places where its rock walls tower 1000 feet.

As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August 1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other troubles on the [[17]]Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would get no civil consolation.

Until then there had been a great show of tactful diplomacy between the two Governmental representatives; the one of war counseling peace, and the supposed civilian who had ventured close to war. The Colonel spoke, for the first time without regard to the gentle traditions of the Interior Department:—

“Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk!”

And there is another reason for the telling. Probably no other section of Indian country is more visited than is the Painted Desert, where the Snake gods have such influence. From June to October comes a host, packing cameras and notebooks and sketching-blocks, attired in weird garments, big with questions, and expecting to find hotels. Most of them wish to rough it smoothly, and are easily annoyed. They seek the natural wonders of the Empire, and especially the religious “dances” of the Indian people, chief of which is the annual Hopi Snake Dance. A strange crowd, having more of enthusiasm than sense, staggering under theories, swelled with importance and criticism, generously stuffed by guides.

A library has been written and vocabularies have been exhausted in their efforts to explain the beauties and the thrills. Canvas sufficient to tent a city has been spoiled by those who would capture the delicate and elusive Desert charm. Historians and ethnologists have recorded [[18]]and traced; antiquaries have uncovered and restored. The museums of the East are filled with looted treasure, while the files at Washington drip complaints. (“Oblige me by referring to the files.”) And the Indian as a savage—and a little-understood savage at that—has been idealized. And those who do not observe this view—berated.

But not a word has been printed, and few spoken without a sneer, regarding those of the United States Indian Service who keep watch and ward in the remote places: those who govern and protect, educate and guide; those who have kept the Indian living, that he may be sketched and analyzed and gaped at. This work extends beyond the dude season, through the lonely, bitter winters, embracing at times contagion-camps among an unreasoning, often unappreciative, and occasionally defiant population.

To further education among those who do not want it, to advance medication among fatalists, to attain some show of morals among an insensible and unmoral people, to demand respect and win affection from suspicious aliens, to rule absolutely without an army, and, above all, to keep sane and just without society, call for all of any man’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, and should arouse something other than blatant criticism from those who boast intelligence.

Having accomplished these things, every one, I am proud of the record; and I shall not fail to acknowledge my full indebtedness to those faithful men and women of the Service who made my efforts possible of success—employees, traders, missioners, not forgetting those few from among the heathen who gave their loyalty and confidence. They too have felt the sneers and insults of the multitude; and the grudging appreciation of an equally [[19]]insensible Bureau nearly three thousand miles away is small reward. Many valued employees have grown old in this Service without a syllable of commendation from Washington. And I have prompted at least one Commissioner of Indian Affairs to acknowledge his feeble debt to a dying physician—dying on his feet, still nobly making the rounds.

When I left Washington, in 1910, I had no idea that such a future work would extend my little vacation into the years. Six months out o’ doors, and either I should be reëstablished at the old stand, pounding the old typewriter, or I should have attended a ceremony that is final but not interesting to the subject thereof. A simple calendar; not the first, however, to stand revision.

Morning brought Chicago, to me a grim and sinister city, and a day spent in its galleries and clubs; then the train again, and its long crawl across level, heated Kansas. Excellent living on a diner, and came the thought that wherever this railroad wended would follow good food, which I required, and service of the best. Vain and soon-to-be-exploded vision! The railroad carries food and service; the West sees it go by. In the Desert one has desert fare.

The contrast was outside the windows; on the third morning this contrast became acute. Instead of hamlets, farms, and country lanes, there was now the grayish-green of the sage, broken by stunted cedars on the slopes, with an overtone of brown as the soil reflected light. There was no indication of complete aridity, so one could not think of this as a desert. Scant vegetation lived from the brush of the foreground to the timbered blue of the distant ranges. They did not appear as lofty mountains, although [[20]]many peaks lifted against a calm blue sky. Beyond the little telegraph points, the occasional adobes of section crews, and water tanks, the landscape held not a sign of habitation. In the middle distance were strange formations of crumbling shale, banded with the spectral white of gypsum: queer piles such as might have been designed by some sardonic humorist. Now straying cattle, gaunt as the hills, blanket Indians idling at a station, or a ranger on a shabby mount, were the only things of life. Over all the golden haze of New Mexico, moistened by the mists of the Rio Grande.

But later in the day this blue-toned view began to change. The sky grew clearer, the distance more intimate and revealing. Everything snapped into the brilliancy of sharp relief. Where had been isolated buttes, now ran barricades of rock, wind-worn, pinnacled, and domed, while the cold tones—blue and silver—of the river country warmed to the dry saffrons and parched reds of sun-baked Arizona, the Land of Little Rain. One could, as the old-timer sings, “see farther and see less” than on any other stage of the world.

Just at sunset the train slowed into a weather-browned, dust-covered town, its main street along the tracks and little else in sight. It was Sunday and the season of the wind. A swirling fog screened everything as the cars stopped. There is nothing more forlorn than a Southwest town of a Sunday in the windy season. A long rank of stores and saloons displayed false fronts, innocent of paint. A few starved trees waved crippled branches, and were most piteous. Flapping awnings, flying leaves, waste paper, sand, and cinders filled the air. When the wind ceased howling for a moment, there fell a deadly silence. It seemed to me as if that place must have been as it was [[21]]for a thousand years, drowsing in the red-gold sunset, abandoned, overlaid by the itinerant dust of all the ages. A clatter of hoofs, a shot, a crash of glass, and a man or two by Remington would have completed the picture.

A little to the north of it was Poverty Flat. To the east was the drying bed of the Little Colorado, a mile in width, lined by withered cottonwoods, and possessing scarcely enough liquid to demand a foot-bridge. In the west, a thing of splendor, reared the beautiful San Francisco range, snow-crowned, radiant, the sun searing down into its ancient craters. Elsewhere, everywhere, stretched the Desert, sterile, barren, robing now in the purplish-brown shades of early dusk. Its unlimited expanse, silent, desolate, suggested something of foreboding, something of waiting menace.

Thank God! there was one of those splendid railroad hotels at hand. I hurried into it, a little of civilization such as I knew, glad to shut out the night that advanced across that empty plain, swallowing as it came the masses of the Moqui Buttes and all the strange upland country that a year later I was to call home. [[22]]

[[Contents]]

III

INTO “INDIAN COUNTRY”

“Indian country” applies to all lands to which the Indian title has not been extinguished, even when not within a reservation expressly set apart for the exclusive occupancy of Indians. “Indian country” includes reservations set apart for Indian tribes by treaty, Executive order, or Act of Congress.—Meritt: The Legal Status of the Indian

The next morning was another day, as I have often heard remarked since; and whatever the terrors of the night, the crisp, cheerful Arizona morning brings with it renewed hope and assurance.

The town waked-up; the air held the tonic thrill that comes only from pine-clad peaks; the yellow dust of yesterday now kept its place. At this season in Arizona one may expect the wind to rise about noon and continue its nerve-racking tyranny until sunset. The blessed sunlight prevents one from remaining depressed, however, and there is always an end to the windy season, whatever the nerves meantime. When the last shriek has died away in early summer, it seems there lives a vacuum, a strange stillness, like that which follows the stopping of a clock.

I found the station platform quite busy that morning. Trains discharged their hungry freight, and the hotel kitchens fed them in battalions. A well-stocked news-stand promised that I would not lack for entertainment. The general spirit of moving life and activity caused one to forget that the Desert lurked beyond, that these rails [[23]]were simply a tiny causeway spanning it for many miles, desolation on either side.

Chance acquaintance is made easily in the Southwest, and it was not long before I answered the query of a young man as to where I headed. I replied that there was a long journey to make, out into the Desert, among the Indians perhaps. He seemed not to be aware that Indians were of the immediate locality, and asked: “How far?”

“Oh—about thirty miles.”

“Humph!” he commented, drily; “people in this country go that far to water a horse.”

The pastime and humor of Arizona is exaggeration. I know now that the ranchers of the Southwest, and the so-called nomadic Indians, for that matter, are people of definite localities. An Indian of the Desert will name and locate his hogan or home camp as specifically as the man of a city street. Indians are born, live, and frequently die within a very small area of the Desert. That is why Indians—and you may scoff—are likely to be lost at night during storms. Their distant travels are well planned, by daylight, much the same as anyone breaks monotony with a holiday or business trip. Only those of the most remote desert places make long journeys as a part of daily routine, and then when need compels. I have yet to see the man who lived miles from water. Water decides where any man may live in the Desert—and his animals too.

It was a different story when I aroused a very fat individual who dozed complacently with his chair propped back against a livery barn. I inquired about a team for the immense hike I had to make. There were no automobiles then to traverse the desert, and few were in the little towns. To-day gasoline and tires, coupled with much swearing, grease, and shoveling of sand, have conquered [[24]]most of the desert distances, and the last time I covered that road was in one of those striped metallic potato-bugs hatched by that Detroit genius who could not place Benedict Arnold in his country’s history, but who has made possible thirty miles the hour as against a former five. Then, or once upon a time, the horse—or his superior relative, the mule—was indispensable, and the keeper of a stable was a king of transportation, something akin to Jim Hill. This one acted just that way. Evidently he had not lost anything out back.

“Well—” he hummed, doubtfully, “that’s a longish trip, that is. I’ve made it—” giving me the impression that it had been an unusual effort, fraught with courage. “I went out there once, but it was two days’ hard travel, ’cause yeh have to rest the horses over night, returnin’ next day. That spoils two good days for me, and I have to charge yeh accordin’. It’ll be thirty dollars. When do yeh want to start?”

“Never, at that rate!” I declared very promptly.

So I went back to the hotel and sent a telegram up the line stating that I would there remain in comfort until some reasonable means of travel came in sight. The answer indicated that I had been heard from. Several days after a rather rough-looking individual called for me and introduced himself as the Boss.

“I was coming to town anyway,” he said, “but usually I don’t freight my employees.” Waiving this little matter of custom, I inquired: “How far is it to the Agency?”

“Twenty-five miles. We’ll make it in less than four hours.”

And we did, for he drove an excellent team of mares, and his reputation as a driver was like unto that of Jehu.

On the way I explained the purpose and definite length [[25]]of my visit. He seemed relieved, for it had been his original suspicion that I, being from Washington direct, came seeking his job. Having worked in a newspaper office long enough to learn that one must build absolute loyalty to the chief, I assured him that his interests were mine, and thereafter we got along famously. He was a lovable fellow when one had punctured the sun-dried skin of him, under which there was much to admire; and not the least was that he felt his tight little Agency to be the finest spot on earth. And why should he not?

Some few years before this he had drifted into that loop of the Little Colorado River, a place that for sterile barrenness could not be matched and that justified few visions. Armed with a single letter of authority, he had taken charge of the empty landscape. He pitched his tent beneath an old spreading cottonwood tree. I can imagine his lonely vigils and his planning under the brilliant desert stars. First, the well to tap the subcurrent of the river; then, one by one, the Government buildings, of rough rock quarried from the near-by mesas, meanwhile engaging and lodging and feeding rougher laborers, and disputing with contractors, and keeping them all from liquor, until a little town grew in this river-angle that for centuries had known only the withered trees, the cooing of many doves, and driftwood. The grounds were marked and leveled and drained. In springtime the river flooded the place, but he was not dismayed. An office, warehouses, shops, and barns were built. Then arose a well-appointed school, with dormitories for the Indian children, queer desert gamins that for a time were as frightened rabbits and wept for their smoky camps. There were kitchens, baths, a laundry, a plant to furnish light and ice and heat; for while the summer may be broiling, [[26]]the winter brings its snow and bitter wind in that unprotected waste. He saw the sick and built a hospital. There were quarters for his staff of employees. He planted trees along cement walks; he broke ground for a farm, and planned an irrigation system with its pumping-plant. His barns held feed against the winter, and his commissaries flour and clothing. A trader came for license, and then another; and a grant was made to a little mission church. Last, but not the least necessary to his desert kingdom, was a guardhouse for those who disputed his sage counsels. High above it all floated the Flag, stoutly whipping in the desert wind.

One day he folded up his tent and walked into his capital. The town was not finished—true; it was not perfect—true. Already he could see the mistakes of a pioneer hand, similar to those of the Mormons who had settled in that country generations before, and whose record was a graveyard. It is not finished to-day, and several successors have added their work to his. It may eventually be a folly and a failure in the sense of profits, for where the Mormons failed in those early days of zealotry who can hope to succeed? Ah! in the sense of material profits—Yes! But where had been nothing but the blind Desert and the savage river, nothing but the blow-sand and the horned toad, he had created an outpost of civilization to reach and serve and protect a helpless people who, theretofore, had only their desert demons.

As far as he could see to the north, where the red-toned mesas raised their twisted shoulders above the desert rim, where the dim blue crowns of monster lava-buttes loomed against the sky, to the edge of the world, it seemed, the domain was his kingdom. Twelve hundred human beings hailed him “Nahtahni,” which is Chief, and listened to [[27]]his advice. His was the only voice they heeded without suspicion, for had they not been driven from this land in midwinter, by armed men, packing their few possessions through the snow? And had it not required a fighting President of the United States to restore to them this pitiful inheritance? No less, indeed!

But to them, people of no contrasts, was it not a wonderful inheritance—that all-embracing stage, from the Red Mesa where the tumbled rocks stood in rings, “Children at Play”; from the Sapphire Lakes and the restless river to the country of the Moqui, guarded by the lava buttes, those somber blue-clad gods of the northern sky? And was it not the Desert!

Perhaps—no doubt of it—that Great White Father had sent this curious Nahtahni from his own household. The world has four corner-posts, one the Desert and one that is Washington. They could remember those nights when they first gathered around his tent under the gnarled old cottonwood, the surly river’s murmur in their ears, their glowing fires matching his against the stars. He had told them of his mission. And he was not afraid of white men—had sent some of them briskly about their business. His commission read—they knew it by his action—that all pertaining to their peace and welfare devolved on him; that he was responsible for their best interests. His mark upon a “nultsose” was the money of the land. His police wore the eagle button. Truly this was a man to be respected; and he was their Chief.

So at his command they brought children to the school, for it seemed he had a peculiar fondness for children; and yet he had no sheep to herd. A strange fellow! They came in from their corrals and patches to work for implements and livestock; they hauled the stores and coal from the [[28]]railroad, herding their wiry ponies with many a wild cry; they found that his queer blue papers could be exchanged for the hard silver dollars of the West.

And to this Chief they came too with foolish complaints and childish misfortunes; to him they came when ill and trembling, and him they sought when old and hungry, shivering against the desert wind, forsaken by their own cruel kindred, fearing that the jackals would pick their bones. In all that trading country they knew him as the one who would not barter.

His real title was—no matter; there must be tags and labels; actually, by law and practice, he was a desert czar, distributing his bounty, holding his courts of justice. Of course he was, and so are they all, each and every one. What came you out to see? A jurist splitting hairs and fearing to say too much, a ferret of accounts, a listening politician, a sutler and his bales? How many such can boast that they have constructed anything? This man had built a sanctuary, and he ruled a kingdom. He was the “Nahtahni!” That was enough, and what is needed, in the Desert.

When they did not call him that, affectionately they dubbed him “Sack-hair,” because he wore a wig, and since one day, to their general consternation, his scalp had blown off into a bush. From Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, to the blind old woman of the tribe, he was counselor and friend. The curious, animal-like children loved him. They would scramble down the walks to take his hand and toddle by his side. He was justly proud of his work and of his industrious alien people; perhaps, in their silent desert way, they were proud of him.

A little of this he told me modestly as we rolled over the road along the river. The greater part I learned in [[29]]my own time, as did the Indians before me. He enlivened the recital by a few choice Southwest legends, made for and kept alive by greenhorns like myself. He showed me where the last great flood had eaten away huge sections of the lower flat and spread all over. The river was now a wide desolation of sand, glowing, sullen in the sun. In flood time this was no plaything of a stream. Its mark was on the country, a mile wide. I could have walked across it dry-shod, and since that time I have crossed it swimming a horse, and wondering when I should go off to tow at his tail. Tangled masses of matted greasewood, like shingle of the beaches, and trunks of cottonwoods, picked clean of bark and twig, white as bleaching bones, were piled on the bars. Over at one side remained a shallow pool, holding dull fish as captives; and several lean ponies came to suck eagerly at the turgid water. Away off in the flat, he pointed out my first mirage: the pretty view of a marshy place bordered by reeds, cool, inviting—yet a dusty desert falsehood. Suddenly it faded, vanished in thin air, to reveal nothing but brilliant sunlight on a baking floor. Drifting clouds cast long shadows on the sand. A tiny whirlwind twirled its dust-spout higher and higher and glided across the plain.

Then, from a little rise, he waved his whip toward a distant object, black against the western sun. It was very far away, and looked like a bird-house on a pole.

“That’s the Agency,” he said.

And indeed it was, for without it existence there was impossible. It was the stand-tank, most necessary thing in that land of precious water. Just at dark we swung through the gates. I had reached my first desert camp, on the edge of the Enchanted Empire. [[30]]

[[Contents]]

IV

OLD TRAILS AND DESERT FARE

We may live without poetry, music and art;

We may live without conscience, and live without heart;

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized men cannot live without cooks.

—Meredith: Lucile

When I crossed the border of the Enchanted Empire, in the dusk of that entry to the Agency, I re-lived fancies caught out of Nicholas Nickleby, his winter journey into Yorkshire, coaching in company with the incomparable Squeers; his arrival at the bleak and cheerless Dotheboys Hall, and the atmosphere of that strange institution; and while there was something forlorn about them, there was also enough of their humor to keep me alive.

Considering what I have written concerning “the Boss,” who would have to be Squeers, this may seem a sorry and unkind reflection. But really, forgetting for the moment his generous heart and his earnest pride in the little desert kingdom, there was a superficial resemblance to old Squeers—the odd cock of the head, a certain quaint expression, a quizzical look after some solemn pronouncement, the rough exterior,—which in this case belied the man,—and that rare touch of the grotesque given by his wig: “Sack-hair.” The atmosphere of the Agency supported these impressions.

The ensemble of an Indian school, the cast of characters, their point of view, their quarters and customs—is [[31]]something unique and quite beyond comparison with normal things. One is often first conscious of odors; and the Navajo have many sheep. Once a desert station is given over to Indian school purposes, where a number of children and their mentors must be fed, it acquires the fragrance of boiled mutton for its very own. There is nothing else like it. Even an abandoned school retains this poignant atmosphere for years.

Bare—stark naked—calcimined walls, grim in their poverty and unashamed; bare pine floors; cheap pine trimmings covered with hideous varnish, the gloss of which seemed an uncaring grin; the whole sparsely strewn with Government-contract furniture, feeble in the beginning and now in the last stages of pathetic senility. This was the quarters for unmarried employees. And when you take such a scene and thoroughly impregnate it with the clinging atmosphere of yesterday’s, and last week’s, and last year’s boiled mutton; animate it with characters gathered by the grab-bag method from the forty-eight States, persons warped and narrowed by their monotonous duties, impressed by the savage rather than impressing him, fulsome with petty gossip and radiating a cheap evangelical virtue, you have the indescribable—and invariable—locale of an isolated desert school. Dickens would have made it immortal, and his gallery of portraits would have gained many varieties of Bumbles and Mr. Chucksters and Sairey Gamps. I have walked in the Desert with Dick Swiveller and Mr. Cheggs; Mark Tapley I have known intimately; and I have dined several times with Pecksniff in the flesh, he lacking only a large shirt-collar to complete the picture. Hugh Walpole has glimpsed something similar to this in The Gods and Mr. Perrin. “It will be all right next term” is the fiscal cry of the restless, [[32]]unsatisfied, and for the most part misfitted employees of the Indian Service. And the Indian stands mute, inarticulate, unable to express his confused amazement at this bizarre and ever-changing exhibition.

A strong sense of humor may keep one from going mad, but even the keenest humor grows blunted after a few months of such stolid association. If one has no relief in other mental pursuits, he succumbs finally to a moroseness that is not good in the unchanging, uncaring Desert.

We sat at a belated meal in the dining-hall. The drive of twenty odd miles and the tang of the desert air had given me an unusual appetite that promised the making of weight, when behold! in the doorway giving on to the kitchen appeared a vision, perhaps I should say an apparition, the cook! The expression turned on me was intended, I have no doubt, to be one of welcome; but whatever it was supposed to register, I have never forgotten the sardonic leer of that unkempt individual, promising worse to come. And it arrived. Leathery mutton, cold; baking-powder biscuit, lacking character; coffee, lukewarm, weakly concocted from the Arbuckle blend that retreated westward after the Civil War; milk, fresh from tin-plate Holsteins, mixed with water from an alkali pump; and last, but not least for a sick man’s stomach, the “bull butter,” innocent of ice, slimy, having the flavor of kerosene.

Farewell! a long farewell to Maryland cooking!

I remember having been snowed-in, on a time, back in the farthest Arizona hills, with a Government physician recently from the East. He had sought Arizona to stimulate a lagging constitution that threatened to initiate him as one of the Club. He had traveled westward, visioning the tropic palms, the date trees, the pomegranate [[33]]hedges of Phœnix; and there we were at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea-level, with the snow two feet deep, and a frigid blast coming straight off the range. He had been lost that night and nearly frozen on the desert where the roads were obliterated, and only the sense of his team had brought him to this haven. We tore the harness from them first, and an engineer helped me to warm him into amiability after the horses were cared for. The time came for retiring, and I recall his diving between dank sheets in an unheated room at this little hill station, his teeth chattering, his lips blue, and the fervid expression of him:—

“Blank! And blankety-double-blank the damned Philadelphia fool who told me Arizona was warm!”

And as I surveyed that tempting array of victuals, I had the same feeling toward those kindly disposed men of Washington who, out of a crass ignorance, had assured me that their desert stations possessed food.

Later, a couple of obliging employees carried my trunk upstairs to a room that would have been a credit to a penitentiary. It welcomed one with four walls and possessed a window. There were also a ceiling and a floor. These necessary ornaments, together with a bed and a decrepit chair, which had crashed under many disconsolate employees and had been skillfully and maliciously fitted together again to lure me, comprised the generous list of fittings. All and several extras thought to be necessary to comfort could be supplied by the employee from his salary, the proportions of which had been established during the administration of Carl Schurz, and have changed but little since, despite wars and rumors of wars and the coming of the income tax, “which includes the quarters as part of the compensation.” [[34]]

Next morning I was aroused about dawn, or a little before, by the business of breaking stove-wood, a bombardment of mishandled crockery, and the hiss of vicious cooking. A thick wave of reanimated mutton-grease fogged upward and invaded my boudoir, which I sought to vacate as quickly as possible. I encountered the cook at the foot of the stairs, and she had not improved during the night.

“Good morning,” I tried to say cheerfully, which caused her to notice me. “Who cares for the rooms?” I asked. She bent on me a sinister eye, as if divining my thought.

“You mean, who cleans ‘em, an’ all that?”

“Just so,” I admitted.

“Well—you’ll care for your own.”

And that was that. It was final, with the wall-eyed finality that had become unwritten law in all properly conducted Agencies.

At table I met an Irrigation Service man who had just returned from a survey of farther desert conditions. He expressed great joy in having accomplished his journey without accident or delay, and in successfully returning to this oasis. He said he was always sure of decent meals at this place, whereas, at that post from which he had arrived, life was unbearable because of the atrocious and altogether impossible menu. I requested that he repeat this statement. There could not be two such places. But he was certain of his facts, and his wife confirmed the story. They cautioned me never to go to that other post—an entirely superfluous piece of advice.

Then I learned that at each of the Government establishments was maintained a Thing (as Carlyle would have phrased it), a fixture, an Institution Horrible, that dominated the people and to which they suffered allegiance. [[35]]It was termed “a Mess.” And such had been its ascendancy and its acquired power, that they were more or less proud of its traditional horrors in due proportion to the misery produced. I learned that Washington recognized this thing, and actually advertised it to innocent incoming employees, suppressing with a cautious diplomacy its evils, and sounding aloud the one thing to be praised—the small cost per individual. The nomenclature is good. Never before was an hideous evil so briefly and so thoroughly described.

Having been deceived as to nearly everything concerning this Vale of Sharon, with the exception of the climate,—there it was before one, three hundred square miles of it in sight, unlimited, free and untaxed as yet; I learned of the altitude when I went to purchase a pair of shoes,—dispatched a telegram for a case of prepared food, the kind that has everything from soup to nuts in one bottle, and began to debate whether it would be braver to die unflinchingly silent or to carry my views to the chief. The bottled food came in, and I tightened my belt on it for seven days, learning meantime that there was no dairy herd other than the kind that comes nested forty-eight tin cows to the case; that only the chief was rich enough to afford poultry, and therefore there were no eggs; there was no fruit save the oranges that dried at the trading-post, and an occasional wagonload of melons sold by the pound. One could buy a very fair sample of undernourished watermelon for a dollar.

The refrigerator freights, however, booming east from California, carrying fish and vegetables and fruit, passed that place twice a week and within thirteen miles. One could see the railroad water-tank from the mess-kitchen window. But it required three things to procure food from [[36]]that refrigerator service, to wit: desire, energy and money; and they were all noticeably absent from these people. I decided to protest.

The Chief had wearied of such complaints, as indeed I did later when I faced the same problem. But it was his duty, nay his very safety, to settle everything. The skipper of this desert ship had no first-officer to take the deck with pride and responsibility, to smother complaints, and to avoid or crush mutinies. He must do it himself. Quelling revolts was one of his regular tasks; and he had become unusually—not to say cunningly—proficient in the various methods. Some he roared down, and others he trapped into submission.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked, sourly.

“Well, sir, I came here to keep alive, and aside from my natural intelligence, several physicians of the East urged me to absorb food—food—as little of it tinned as possible. Now I have been out to survey the can-pile, and have arrived at the conclusion that your employees must consume several tons of embalmed materials each year. And too, my food must be cooked. My ancestors quit eating acorns several centuries ago. The true state of your people is that of slow starvation. They have somehow got used to it. I shall not last that long. Their tradition has it that they can maintain life on a meal-bill of eleven dollars per month—”

“Give ’em credit,” he interrupted, darkly; “they got it down to nine once.”

“Which recalls your Mormon’s idea of luxury,” I hurried on. “Remember that story you told me coming in? Said the tourist—‘What would you do if you had a million dollars?’ ‘A million dollars!’ cried the Mormon, his eyes shining; ‘I’d buy a six-mule team, pull freight, an’ [[37]]eat nothing but canned goods!’ That Mormon was weaned at this mess.”

The Chief rubbed his wig reflectively, and from his rueful smile I knew that he possessed the remnant of a starved sense of humor. He glanced furtively about his office, and when he spoke it was in a low, cautious tone.

“True,” he said; “The mess would drive a goat to suicide. But what can I do? They like it. It is a dangerous thing, young man, to disturb anything the proletariat likes. Thank God! I am married and have separate quarters. It has been a mystery to me for years how they keep alive, and turn out each morning for work.”

And where Squeers’s face would have cracked into a malevolent leer, the countenance of the Boss suddenly bubbled over with a wholesome expression that announced the winning of my case. He slapped his hand on his knee. He had found a solution—a Machiavellian scheme calculated to strike down at one blow the system and its latest critic. He leveled his finger at me.

“I’ll make you manager of the mess!” he cried, triumphantly. “That’s the ticket. It’ll be up to you to provide real food, cooked, an’ all, an’—”

Evidently a very hopeful light came into my eyes. He paused, grinned somewhat shamefacedly, and hastened to advise me.

“Don’t accept too hastily.” He avoided my gaze. “At best it is a thankless job, this nourishing those who would rather starve that they may pay installments to California land-boosters. You’ll be no benefactor. You will find it depressing. You will be ostracized, and it may even be unsafe for you to stroll around unguarded at night.”

Notwithstanding these perils, I accepted.

The unwritten law, like most futile and messy things [[38]]requiring the democratic knowledge of all and the wisdom of none, demanded that a solemn conclave of those to be fed was necessary in any change of the routine of it, and that a vote be taken, after devious discussion and debate. Imagine convening a group of circus lions to inform them that hereafter, at feeding time—and so on!

The Chief knew that a popular vote would demonstrate the usual popular row. There are only two kinds of Indian Agents: those who compromise with everything and have interminable hell on their weakling hands, to the end that they are respected neither at home nor abroad, and those who compromise with nothing. The first sort is never defeated, and never resigns. He remains continually in service, shifted from point to point, cluttering it with his inefficiency and indecision. Neglected plants and chaotic systems are monuments, kept at national expense, to these amiable bench-warmers and trimmers. The second variety rides the waves for a season or two, and crashes down finally, as all tyrants, however benevolent, before the clamorous indignation of outraged and inefficient democracy.

The Chief being one of the last sort, the electorate was disfranchised. There was no session of Parliament. The whole thing was done in much the same fashion as had cost Charles the First his head.

Bulletin

Beginning with the first of the coming month, and until further orders, the Chief Clerk will administer the affairs of the Mess.

It was received in a grim, not to say stony, silence. Like a tenderfoot, I rushed in where an angel would [[39]]have sought the cyclone cellar. Cooks were employed monthly, and it was midway in the month. That night I gave the cook her time.

Now, having ended one dynasty, it behooved me to create another. I went to the Chief.

“When can I have the transportation necessary to my duties as maître d’hôtel hereabouts? I’ll drive in to the railroad town.”

“Do you know the road?” the Boss asked, doubtfully.

“That doesn’t bother me. When do I get a team?”

“To-morrow,” he replied, and left me to my fate.

Now I had traversed the road but once, when coming in a month before. The doubtful tone in his voice disturbed me. Perhaps the route-finding would not be so easy as a trick with cards. I sought out the pleasantest of the range men, and asked his advice concerning the matter.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he assured, and as this would have been very plain indeed, it heartened me. “Keep to the main-traveled road, and take all the turns to the right—going in.”

This seemed a very simple matter, and I gave no thought to the turns I might encounter coming out. I was then, of course,—and because of some mental defect am yet,—notoriously the worst road-finder in all the Southwest. And when I departed next day, with “the old woman’s team,” there was no one to crowd additional information on me.

In the city, to lose one’s way may be foolish without being unfortunate; but in the Desert one must arrive at his destination, or the results may be serious. And all the road directions from old-timers are similar. The Plains [[40]]Indian can be more definite. He may say, “Three hills and a look.” The Arizona guide is a despair.

“You can’t miss it,” they invariably prelude. “Take the main road until you reach that little cornfield just beyond the hogan of Benally Bega’s—remember that draw before you come to Black Mesa? That’s it. Then the left trail until you reach that scraggy cedar; then head down across for that old corral, where the sheriff caught Bob Peterson; then—you know where we nooned in 1913? It’s right east of that; and then, you can’t miss it—it’s right over from there—” the whole distance being sixty miles, and no water in the first five townships.

One plunges deeply on the optimism indicated by “you can’t miss it,” and starts. At midnight, with a tired team and no blankets, one suddenly realizes that he has missed it, and missed it bad. The sun sinks to rest, the desert grows black and threatening, he is off the main-traveled road, and no candle-lights are gleaming through the dark. There he remains until morning, when, cold and cramped, having kindled a fire to warm a can of beans that a more sensible man had slung under the seat, he finds that he has invited in the whole Navajo tribe. Five minutes after the wisp of smoke and the aroma of the burnt beans, comes an Indian, and another, and another, each looking earnestly for breakfast. It never fails. Between many signs and all the beans, not forgetting the passing of “thathli ibeso,” which is one dollar in hard, bitable silver, he finds that he is only five miles off the road, and that his original destination is “right over from there.”

On the cook-side of the board I played in luck. A row occurred in the short-order section of a Harvey House, and one first-class itinerant cook was flung headlong out [[41]]of a job on the morning I reached town. It might never happen again. And knowing nothing of the back-country, and especially being ignorant of an Indian Service mess, he embraced the opportunity to sign up for a desert cruise. It was necessary for him to pack his belongings, the most precious of which were a trick dog and a phonograph, together with one record entitled: “She Is the Ideal of My Dreams”; and this he insisted would occupy him several days. I arranged for him to meet a team at the Agency freight-station, and next day he assisted me in the purchase of supplies for the coming month. We bought nearly a ton of foodstuffs. My vehicle was one of those light spring wagons, a “desert hack,” rated to carry about one thousand pounds. Like an Indian freighter who loads pig lead, we never tallied the dead weight, but piled it in. The wagon groaned in its every joint under the load; and so I began the return trip.

One could not miss the right direction, for there were the distant mountains to point it, with the river as an eastern boundary. So long as one remained west of the river he must arrive somewhere. True. But for that river, and my sensible determination not to cross its half-dry bed, I might still be en route.

The roads of the desert are many, and all converge toward a settlement. Proceeding to town is very simple. But on leaving it the roads begin diverging in a most puzzling fashion, and there is a decision to be made at each departure. Of course the main-traveled road is usually plain and definite—usually. About half way to the Agency I was deceived by ten yards of bunch grass at a road juncture, and blithely accepted the branch leading to a river-ford. Nearing sunset, I had reached the river,—which was no place to be at that time. [[42]]

“If alone, always tie the horses to the wheel.”

There isn’t anything else in the Desert to tie them to. So I did it, and started on foot for the nearest rise to make a reconnaissance. The scene of empty desolation, blurring in the first grays of twilight, was not inspiring. The scarlet and gold of the sunset behind the ’Frisco Range did not awaken poetry within me. I was thinking about something else, and joyfully I hailed a faint gleam on the far middle-distance, the last rays gilding the Agency tank-roof.

Between my position on the river, and that haven of rest, as the crow would negotiate it, stretched at least five miles of the Desert. So short a distance caused me to snort at my former fears. I went back to the wagon and found that the impatient horses had wound the lines around that wheel until they resembled a chariot pair reined in at the finish of an exciting race. With some difficulty I managed to release them, and climbed in as they plunged off seeking their feed.

The shortest distance between two given points is a straight line, or so the books have it. I followed my early schooling, and headed straight for the tank.

The shortest distance between two points in the Desert is not a straight line. I there and then learned this lesson. Between that river-ford and the main road, meandering somewhere to the left, were at least a thousand different obstructions, skillfully concealed by Nature, deceptive in the half dark, and treacherous traps when night came on: sand dunes that were as bogs; wide, shallow arroyos; scrubby slopes cut by wicked little gullies, all flanked and faced by other sand-meshes. In and through all this the team tugged wearily, at times stopping of themselves for breath, at times plunging desperately. A dozen times I [[43]]lashed the horses to the wheel and went ahead to plot the way; a dozen times I returned to find them wound back on their haunches, in their efforts to free themselves from the overloaded wagon and the fool that had come out of the East. About midnight, after traveling to every point of the modern compass, I tried a last rise, determined, if this failed, to unharness and ride in, trusting to the horses to find their oats. And topping this little ridge was an old, half-hidden road. It angled away from the river toward the place where a real road ought to be. We swung down it, and an hour later, at an easy jog, the axles holding- and groaning-out to the last, we reached the Agency gate. The sleepy barn-man, an Indian, came out to meet me.

“Where you been?” he asked, with that innocent curiosity his tribe is noted for. “Have trouble findin’ the road?”

“No,” I told him, feeling a confidence born of relieved anxiety. “Nope! just started from town late.”

There is nothing like assurance after a distressing evening. And too, had I not landed a cook? I could not spoil such a triumph by admitting that I had been lost. [[44]]

[[Contents]]

V

DESERT LIFE AND LITERATURE

The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.—T. B. Macaulay: Johnson

Life in the little stone house to which I had now removed was filled with books and tobacco smoke and belated plans in futures—that time when I should be strong again. I had regretted the impossibility of my packing out a Washington library, but my old friend and bitter critic, the now astonishing Mr. Mencken, kept my intelligence alive by sending parcels of the latest publications, and these arrived fresh and unscorched, though having passed beneath his searing eye and ruthless pen. Later, my faithful typewriter, a relic of newspaper days, was sent forward in defiance of medical advice, and I wrote a few stories that, with their magazines and editors, are now forgotten.

Evenings, swung in a hammock, I studied sunsets and their glories, masked and reflected by the magnificent San Francisco Range, and gradually began to absorb the desert peace. To know its moods, those swift and unexpected changes, having in them often a dream’s stealthiness and unreality, one must live for a year in a little house built low against the brown bosom of the Desert.

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?”

And so it went. Because under the accounting system then in vogue—a relic of the War Department days, [[49]]and which ate up oodles of time and thousands of dollars in checking and balancing—everything from a quart of shoe pegs to a locomotive-type of stationary boiler had to be located and tested and receipted for by the Chief every three months, come Hades or come high-water!

Without this intense supervision by mail and blue pencil, through exceptions to accounts submitted, and silly questions, and equally silly answers, the Chief might have eaten either the shoe-pegs or the boiler during that odd time when he should have been making brick for lack of something to occupy him. The state of the Indians themselves, physically or mentally; the state of their holdings in stock, implements or gardens; the actual efficiency of the employee corps; the quality of supplies, and whether on hand or not in sufficient amount to insure a standard system—no one of these things particularly interested any Eastern authority to the point of correction; but the property accounts and the cash accounts were checked until the paper wore out, and until the Chief neglected everything else to satisfy them.

And dear old careful Uncle, who has wasted more cold cash in archaic systems than any other organization known to ancient or modern history, checked the spigot drainings every three months, unmindful of the bung, and scrupulously filed away the results in the catacombs of Washington, unaware of the negligence of Hawkins, the clerk, but always decidedly mindful of that worthy’s relationship to the elected genius of Spokane Flats. One may now remark that the accounting systems have changed. They have—after years of travail. But Hawkins and his benevolent influence have not changed; Uncle has not changed; and the Chief’s time is still spent checking inefficiency at home and reporting to ignorance abroad. [[50]]

Three times a week, in late afternoon, a solitary horseman, jouncing above his laden saddlebags, would appear over the slight rise beyond the trading-post, coming from the railroad; and a cry would go up from the campus:—

“The mail!”

That call would cause a stir. What a thing of interest is a newspaper five days old, a fresh magazine or catalogue, in those waste places! And a letter from a friend or loved one is a thing golden. Scarcely would the distribution have ended, with joy or disappointment, when it would be sunset, and the Desert cooling and browning into dusk as the red ball plunged downward into the caverns of the range, trailing behind it a glory that often compensated for the trials and little evils of the day.

Sunday brought a pause that seemed unreal, an enforced halt, a marking of time. For those who did not sing “Beulah Land,” it was a long-drawn-out monotony. A thousand miles from anywhere inviting a visit, often without the solace of a kindred spirit, the silence and loneliness settled into one. The clanking pump was hushed, the boiler no longer hissed steam, the whistle did not summon, the mail did not arrive. Everyone arrayed himself in latest fashion, as mail-order catalogues decreed, and sat around in great discomfort. Where to go? There was no hunting, fishing—nothing. One had photographed everything above ground five thousand times. The nearest town was twenty-six miles off, and on Sunday as dead as Julius Cæsar.

On such a day I became acquainted with the post trader, a half-breed Navajo, handsome and smiling. I found this lovable fellow in his quarters off the store. The place was bare enough of comforts, but along one wall ran shelves, piled with books and magazines—and such books and [[51]]magazines! There I found the famous five-foot shelf extended many feet. And old files of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, and Scribner’s. Among the books my hand touched Boswell’s Johnson, and I knew that the volumes I had left behind would be no longer missed. And Dickens, and Irving, and Macaulay, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Darwin.

“Why, I had not expected to find such books—here—”

He thanked me with a smile.

“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old guy, wasn’t he?”

Criticism, à la Navajo!

Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society, read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night, those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a gentle skepticism, and his armor was [[52]]not dented by snatches of the Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could be defeated by a quotation, and were.

His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in shreds.

As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all their skill as trackers and go-betweens. As an interpreter at trials, he was invaluable, and his knowledge of what a Navajo would do under given conditions was almost uncanny.

Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police, this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other was the abject parsimony of the United States Government.

I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s chanting[[53]]—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling on his tribal gods.

But I know that he met the answer with a smile. For so he would have joined the long shadowy line of weaving plumes and tossing lances as the tribe sought new and happier hunting-grounds; or would have entered the council ring of the chiefs, to advise in reviewing their material errors, when they saw the white man as a conqueror, rather than as a friend, and matched his evils with their savage ingenuity. [[54]]

[[Contents]]

VI

A NORTHERN WONDERLAND

“To those unaccustomed to desert lands the Navajo country presents in form and color and grouping of topographic features a surprising and fascinating variety; and those familiar with arid regions will find here erosion features of unusual grandeur and beauty.”—Gregory: The Navajo Country

The nearest place of change was the town, with a dinner at the Harvey House. I planned to make this trip each month, to have a food spree, quite as on a time rude gentlemen of the cattle days came in from the ranges, hungry for sights and pleasures, and devoted themselves to the swift consumption of raw liquors. But four hours of dragging through heated sand and sunlight, from one lonely landmark to another, with nothing of interest between, destroyed much of the anticipated satisfaction. I recall a bit of Washington advice.

“You will find that country,” said the well-meaning fellow, “covered with black gramma grass. Buy a pinto pony the very first thing you do. Its keep will be negligible. A saddle will cost but a few dollars. Thus you will have transportation at all times. It will be a pleasure to ride into town after office hours. You’ll enjoy riding above all things.”

Twenty-six miles—fifty-two miles there and back!

Now I had read Western stories, written by O. Henry and others who knew less about the subject. Playing the [[55]]sedulous ape, I had written a few myself. These epics all mentioned areas of black gramma grass, and made much of swift-footed cayuses that were camouflaged by Nature and possessed Dante-like noses and broom tails. There is a wondrous lot of this in the movies, too, and the joyous bounding of the aforesaid animals, from prairie rise to prairie rise, pressing the miles behind them, and the carefree demeanor of their riders, surrounded as they are by creaking leather, wide-barred shirts, and jingling spurs, appeals to one.

But when you learn that a cayuse-bronk in northern Arizona eats imported hay at forty and sometimes sixty dollars the ton, the black gramma grass and pastures all being three hundred miles to the south; and when you find that the devil is not to be trusted for an instant, and that he has to be flayed constantly to produce even an amble; and when you feel—“feel” is the word—the misery twitching completely throughout the human system from pounding on the wooden anatomy of the brute, a large part of this paper-and-film appeal vanishes. Moreover, dusty shirts, alkali-impregnated handkerchiefs, and the smell of a harness shop do not combine to flavor one’s meals delicately. Big Bill Hart may have my share of this, and he is welcome.

But there does come a longing “for to admire and for to see” what is actually out back. That adventure and romance are not to be found in the beautiful desert distances seems impossible. The dim blue buttes of the north, mysterious altars of the gods, promised to yield something from the land they guarded. And when an Agency mechanic told me that he had orders to visit the Castle Butte station, a far-away outpost, I recommended myself as a standard camp-cook, recalling the early mornings [[56]]of newspaper days when I fried eggs on a gas-stove. We did not go to the horse-corral and lay our ropes over two spirited steeds, but at an early hour wended to the barn and harnessed two sturdy old plugs to a twelve-hundred-pound farm wagon. They were capable of making four miles an hour, and the wagon had capacity for a grub-box, for blankets, shovels, rope, and all the things necessary—perhaps—to our getting there first, and to accomplishing something afterward.

Have you never wondered how those adventurous fellows of the yarns, outfitted with nothing but a handkerchief, a saddle, and a lariat, manage to cover leagues upon leagues with the one horse, and never stop overnight? A Navajo Indian can do with one blanket and a sheepskin lashed behind his saddle; but even he contrives to find the trading-posts of the Desert for his grub, and he always reaches a friendly camp at nightfall.

Smith cautioned me to take a heavy coat, which I would not have thought of. Right at the start I committed a serious blunder, one that caused me to suffer bitterly, and one that I have not repeated since. Expecting to return next day, I persuaded myself that two sacks of beck-a-shay nahto, or genuine “cattle” tobacco, would be sufficient for the trip. But desert plans are subject to change, and desert wisdom is painfully acquired. I now have drilled myself never to forget matches and a filled canteen, baling-wire,—otherwise “Arizona silk,”—repair parts for the lizard, a piece of rope, tools, and a heavy coat of sheepskin, plus a tobacco factory unless the route is marked by trading-posts every thirty miles. I arrange these things automatically, because on that trip I tried to smoke powdered alfalfa in a cob pipe.

Northward we wended all day, one rugged mesa slope [[57]]and huge flat succeeding another, always rising. After passing Lone Cottonwood Spring, where the water was an excellent imitation of thick gray pea-soup that the horses disdained, we lunched at a delightful place known as Coyote Springs, one of the ten thousand Southwest waterholes so named. In the naming of springs and precious water it would seem that the vocabulary of the pioneers was decidedly limited. But it would have been the same by any other name. A hole scooped in a soft rock and sand hill, fenced with crooked and cracking cottonwood branches, as the Navajo build their corrals, with not a vestige of relieving green within miles of it. All around the sand was packed hard by the flocks of sheep that came to water. Overhead was a broiling sun, and this barren area reflected every bit of the glare and heat that it did not hold as a stove. The air was heavy with the aroma of sheep, and alkali showed ghastly white in the spring’s overflow. Nevertheless, it was an oasis and held water. Here and there were picked and bleaching bones. The coyotes knew its name.

Many buttes not to be seen from the Agency were now in sight. One lumpy mound resembled a coiled snake—Rattlesnake Butte; another was shaped as a pyramid, although no one had heard of Cheops or Chephren; and a third, which had crumbled, was like a huge four-poster bed that some forgotten giant had wrecked.

A bite to eat, and on again, lumbering down the yielding banks of washes, and scrambling up and out of them. Truly a couple of sturdy plugs were required to drag the wagon up those heavy slopes. Providing the traveler has time and patience, and is built with a steel-riveted frame, the old-time farm wagon with three-inch tires is the surest method of making such a journey. It rolls [[58]]and pitches as a squat lugger in a choppy sea, but it gets there.

CROSSING THE DESERT BELOW CHIMNEY BUTTE

THE ORAIBI WASH IN FLOOD-TIME

Where quicksands are ready to engulf a stalled car

While the Desert appears as a level sward, one soon finds that there is no sward to speak of, and that one million tangled hummocks fast follow the first million, each bunch of sparse grass, each growth of greasewood or saltbush having its own protecting hillock of sand. A good road in those days was one that a stout wagon could get over without being wrecked.

It is quite an experience to travel for hours toward a given point marked by a solitary pinnacle, a veritable mountain having sheer sides, and fail to reduce the distance appreciably. The sun was nearly down when we crawled along a valley between two of these monsters. One, named Chimney Butte, a huge truncated cone resting on massive shoulders, was the highest in that country; and the other, Castle Butte, looked like a ruined mediæval stronghold, having a causeway flanked by towers, above which loomed dim embattlements and casements. In the brilliant daylight the height of Chimney Butte is dwarfed by desert distances; and Castle Butte is not always robed in fancy; but it was now twilight, the time when the Desert is most sombre and fanciful, and it was my entrance to that garden of the vanished gods. These two gigantic piles were as the awesome portals of a ruined gateway, the pass to an unknown, mysterious country; and the whole setting, fading into night, gloomy with the menace of silence, held something of the strange unreality of a dream. And came on suddenly the dark and cold.