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![]() | THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN , SOUTHWEST THE WONDERLAND OF TH·E UNITED STATES- LITTLE KNOWN AND UNAPPRECIATED-THE HOME OF THE CLIFF DWELLER AND THE • HOPI, THE FOREST RANGER AND THE NAVAJO, -THE LURE OF THE PAINTED DESERT[...]• Author of Tlie Oo1iquest of-the fh·eat N or th1oest,[...]• L01•ds of the N arth and F reeboot6¥s of the W ilde1'ness.[...] |
![]() | [...]1 I THE N -A TIONAL FORESTS • • • • • • I II NATIONAL F@RESTS O,F THE SOUTHWEST • . 22 III THROUGH THE PBCOS FORESTS • • • · 44 VII ACROSS, THE PAINT-ED DESERT ( continued) . 116 XII TAos, THE MosT ANCIENT CIT¥ IN AMERICA 196 XIV C .ASA GRAN-DE AND THE |
![]() | THE ILLUSTRATIONS Ancient cliff dwellings in the Jeme~ National Fo-rest[...]• • • 4v Looking over the roofs of the ad.obe houses of thethe water bole on theThe pueblo of W alpi . • • • • • • • • 122 V The Grand Canon • •[...] |
![]() | THE ILLUSTRATIONS·.[...]FACING Thethe Palace . . •[...]• ., . 188 ✓ Over the roofs of Tao$. . . .• •[...]• • [emailprotected] A mud house 0£ the Southwest . • •[...]• . ·246 ✓ |
![]() | [...]INTRODUCTION AM s.itting in the doorway of a house of tbe Stone Age - neol[...]troglodytic man - with a roofless city of the dead lying in the valley below and the eagJes circling with lonely cries along the yawning caverns of the cliff face above. My feet rest 011 the topmost step of a st0ne stair- way worn hip-deep in the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post--glacial reons when the advances and recessions of an ice i.nvasion from the Poles left seas where now are dese,r ts; wh·en giat1t sequoia forests were swept under the sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and t'he brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets[...]friend by hauljng him shoulders foremost through the entrance, or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stair- way with a rock on his head. Inside,[...]and .stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a flat metate stone witl1 a round[...] |
![]() | [...]INTRODUCTION ing stone on top. From the shape and from the remnants of pottery sl1ards lyin.g about, I suspect one of these hewn aleove·s in the inner wall was the place for the family water jar. On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by sto.n e step[...]which ·you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a 500-faot cliff by a series of interior lad- ders and stone stairs. Flush with the flo@r at the sides of these doors are the most curious little round '' cat holes '' thtough the walls - '' cat holes '' for a people who are not &uppo.sed to have had any cats; yet the litt.le round holes run from room to room through .all the walls. On some of the house fronts are ·painted emblems of the sµn. Ins-ide., round the wall of the otheI! houses, runs ~ 'd rawing of the plumed serJ?ent - ,,, Awanya,'' ,.guardian of the waters -whose pres- ence always ·p resaged go[...]er in a desert land growing drier and drier as the Glacial Age re- ceded, and whose ser_p ent emblem in the sky you could see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying -about in other cave houses a[...]e rior ! It isn't a hun- 'd red years ago since the common Christian idea of angels was fea[...] |
![]() | [...]1 ,g lacial a.t1ers,1b1eg·a,~. Ada a the prrmal b"rthp ace of maa '' .·. ow the ye,ars.; a. ,d the, imple · ent of S one ; ge man are 1 ,f ou ·. d co -~tetnporan o s · 1th the glacial ilt The.re is no,t anoth er ,- ,e,cti.on ·11 the "~hol world[...]here, · 0 u C:'a · · :a nder for da· s amid the house.s and ·d ead c1t· . ~,of the· Stone, - ge·; .<~k-er,e yc; i, ,can U,t 1 er.ally sl1ake .ha-nds iilh thethe dcy a,~ __ u~"t dead co.Iection.s[...]fe· -- d oors 1 a ay· from the c.a .,e•hou.s,e her,e I s·t lies a, lit[...] |
![]() | [...]pping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature gave them; H ·e rber,t Spencer wo[...]ws, clothed mostly in -apes' hair. Yet there lies the little lady iµ the cave to my left, the· long black hair shiny ~nd lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding · the finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all well preserved ow1ng to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in which the · corpse has lain. In my collection, I have[...]corn and potte_ry from water jars,• placed with the dead to sustain them on_the long journey to the Other World. For the last year, I have wotn a _pih of obs·idiah which[...]d not myself obtained it from tl1e ossuaries o·f the Cave Dwellers in the American Southw€st. • Com·e out now to the cave door and look up and down the canon again! To right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow tu/a preci- pice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of ~,he Stone Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofl.ess dwelling of hundreds of rooms - '' the cormora.nt an.d the bittern possess it; the O\Vl also an·d the tavefi dwell in it; stones of emptiness; tho.rns in the palaces; nettles and bra1nbles-in tl1e fortresses; and the scr.eecl;i owl s-hall rest there.'' ' Listen! You can almost hear it - the fulfillment |
![]() | [...]1 of Isaiah's old prophecy-the lonely ' hoo-hoo- hoo '' of the turtle dove; and the lonelier cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper cliffs I Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the canon in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez 'M0untains; and one nigl1t from my camp in this canon, I heatd the coyotes howling from the empty caves. Below are the roofless cities of the dead Sto.ne Age, and the dancing floors, and the irrigation canals used to this day, and the stream leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a r-qsh-[...]y only in modern men's cl-reams. Far off to the right, where the worshipers. must • alw,ays h~ve been in sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising 0£ the desert sun over cliffs of -ocher and sands of o[...]• quoise blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremon- ial Temple of the Stone Age people who dwelt in this canon. It is a great con-cave hollowed out of the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the highest yellow pines. A darksome, cav- ernous t[...]ul mid-air temple for worshipers when yoq climb the four or five hu-n.d red ladder steps th~t lead to it up the face of a white precipice sheer as a wall. What .sights the priests must have witnessed I I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first rays came over the cafi.on walls in a shield of fire. Alcov[...] |
![]() | vi INTRODUCTION the inner w,alls of this chamber, too. Where the ladd.e r projects up through the floor, you can descerrd to the hollowe,d underground chamber where tpe priests and the couneil rn.et; a darksome,. eerie place with s.ipapu - the holes in the floor - for the mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his peo- ple. Don't smile at tha.t id[...]iven his nerves too hard in town? - To go back to the Soil and let Dame Nature pour her invigorating energies in.to him:! That's wh-a t the Ear-th Spirit, the Great Earth Magi-eian, signified to these !)'eople. Curious how geology and archreology agree on the |
![]() | [...]DUCTION Vll Then, as the Glacial Age ha'd receded and drought What in the world am I. taJ'k ing about, and where? |
![]() | [...]TION dreds, thousands, of such ruins all through the South- • A general passenger agent for one of the largest •[...] |
![]() | [...]tty safe guess that not 100,000 Easterners out of the lot saw the real West. What did they see? They saw the Exposition, which was like any other exposition;[...]ction and Hood River fruit, which you ca11 buy in the, East for twenty-five ; and they rode in the rubberneck cars with the gramophone man who tells Western variations of the same old Eastern lies; and they came back thoroug[...]ding a good average of $r,ooo a,pi€Ce. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed, though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the nortl1 tc Clou,dcroft, New Mex- ico, witn hunclre[...]ks' holiday. ·we tr-amp tl1rough Spain for the picturesque, quite oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about 1 0,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right dowh in the heart of America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in Ki11g Alphons0's crown was[...] |
![]() | [...]otograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor boast of what it[...]ould take you a good half-day to count up the nt1r:nber of tour- •- ist and ste[...]i.n g excursions to go and apostrophiz·e the Sphinx, an.cl bark your shirts and swear and sw·e at on the Pyra~ mids. Yt!t it would, be a safe wager th.~t outside of- ficial scientific circles,[...]hat knows we have a Sphinx 0f ou.r own in the W e&t that antedates Egyptian archreology by 8,000 years 1 and stone lions older than the col- umns of Phrygia, and kings' pa.laces[...]same roo.rps :an.d shaktng hands with a corpse of the S·t one Age. A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set ottt on the around-the-world tour that was "to give h,im that wo[...]now him, asked in choppy English about '' the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties ih y'or S[...] |
![]() | [...]k at him again in Egypt. They were standing below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an English traveler turned to youhg[...]ddle, '' gu·essed they had.'' Then lookin,g over the old jewels taken from the ruins of Pompeii, he was asked, ' 1 how America was progressing excavating her ruins; '' and he heard for the first time in bis life that the finest crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from h.is own home State. The experience gave him something to think .about. The incident is typical of many of the I 20,000 people w·ho yearly trek to Europe for h[...]some European who has 11 a shootin' box'' out in the Pecos, who tells you about it. Of course,[...] |
![]() | [...]1 of the,m lies. . . White Mountains, A · 1z.on·a ; or the IndL- · Pu 'b lo |
![]() | [...]INTRODUCTION XIII of the Rio Grande, where the most important of the |
![]() | [...]rter your- self in one of these for n9thing; a11d the sole ex- pense will be '' the grub box; '' and my tin trunk for camp cooking ha[...]l ex- perience of all - along White Rock Canon of the Rio Grande, in Mesa Verde Parl,, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There i[...]or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook below happens to be good. Hundreds of archr[...]n't you? Or if you are not a good adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer sthool that goes out to the caves from Santa Fe every s11,mmer. Is it safe[...]any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White Moun- tains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on the Sas-katchewan; and I never locked a door, because there w.asn't any lock; and I n.ever at- teQ.1pted tb bar the door, because there wasn't any need. Ca11 you say as much of New York, or Chi- cago, or Washington? The question may be asked -Will tl1is kind of a holiday not be hot in summer? You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some mid-summer, when nearly eyerythin,g inside the pull1nan car melted into a jelly. Yes, it |
![]() | [...]xv will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a rail- |
![]() | • XVl INTRODUCTION I the string is longer than the height of a water bartel; and these were .fis[...]Last year, twenty-six beat wet·e shot in the Sangre de Christo Canbn in three months. Two ye,ars ago, mountain lions became so th-ick in the P ecos that hunters were hired to hunt 't hem for bounty; and the first thing that happened to one of th,e hunters, hi~ horse was throttled an.cl killed by[...]by 'treeing four lions a few weeks later, and the hun- ter got three out of the f9ur. Near Glori eta, you ca,_n ,m·e et a[...]ip, if he could have got it cashed. In the White Mountains last year, two of the larg- est bucks ever known in the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note[...]behind a burro; but tl1e other- still haunts the canons defiant of repeater. From the ca:ves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio G·rande, you can nightly he:ar the coy0te and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here. . The w,eek I reached Frijales Canon, a flock of wild[...]ge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front door. The morning I was d_riving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff caves., we· disturbed a herd of[...] |
![]() | [...]ION XVll is if you follow the beaten trail, just as depleted as |
![]() | [...]t 1s Ioc -lly c,~lle,d '' a lun,g ,• er; '' and th,e re i ,j ut en,o,u _,h truth in that lie to make[...]w .. nte d_ <Jin _:h"t:~ beaten t · ail, •'n the big en~r·a l bot .I, in t ,e ,r ,ai-n . h re ot[...]_.hich is u t1ally _ie~. 'L et the: other half be -,~nawn I · 11 'through ·-he West along th,e backbone of tb·e o,cki,,es., £r,o ·[...]- .nd·- ·· f s11ch tent d,w,ellers all through the 1 ijoc:k y '.,. ounta'in Stat~ ··• : nd the _o: .t is is you make it[...]_ium t-. nt city, y·ou will h._-,, e y.our o ,'.n catering- the cost w . 11 be j't1st hat you |
![]() | [...]XlX I f there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster |
![]() | [...]u find a church in England datin.g before William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins ,o f a church - at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters- that w·as a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to America. You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the l{ensington Museum, Lon- don; but you will find the real skeleton of the gen- tleman himself., with pictures of the three-toed horse • on the rocks, and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike th.e wary fellow who interviewed Eve - all right here in your own American Southwest, with the difference in favor of tl1e American legend; for the Satanic wriggler, who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the springs. To be sure,, there are 400,000 miles[...]ca by n1otor?. That is what you can do following the '' Camino Real '' from Texas to Wyoming, or crossing the mountains of New Mexico by the great Scenic High\vay built for motors to tl1e v[...]yourself in such a maze of tl1e picturesque and the legendary as you cann0t find a11y,vhere else in the wide world |
![]() | [...]from Ox- ford, En-gland, took quarters in one 0£ the pueblos at Santa Clara or theteabout to study Ind[...]f crime., She sprang out of bed and dashed across the placito in her night- dress to he,r guardian protector i,n the person of' an old Indian. He ran through the dark to see what the matter was, while she stood in hiding of the wall shadows curdling in horr_o r of '' bluggy de€ds.'' '' Pah, '' said the old fellow coming back, '' dat not'ing ! Young ma[...]British dame; for she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in suffo- cated[...]it? It "vould pay to let a little daylight ifl on the abysmal blank regarding the wonder-land of our own world-wouldn't it? I don't know whether the affectation recognized |
![]() | [...]ODUCTION most as a cat1se of this neglect of the wonders of our |
![]() | the lav- ende·r light, and Indian riders, brightly clad and pic- turesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. O r there are the three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or, th€re is the White H ouse, an ancient ruin of Canon de Chelly[...]European protagonist declares, '' I dol}'t tnean the ancient and the primeval. I mean the moclern peo_pled hamlet type.'' All right! What is the matter v;ith Santa Fe? D raw a circle from New Or[...]mosaic in hustling, bustling Amer- ica. There is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway; and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to tnl:!.rket under loads of wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange H otel, the end of the Santa F e T rail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in[...]At one end of a main thorough£ are, you can see the ~ite of the old Spanish Gareta prison, in the walls of |
![]() | [...]1.1 want a little Versailles of retreat away from the braying of the burros and of tl1e humans, away from the dust of street and of small talk- then of a 'M ay day wl1en the orchard is in bloo1n and the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of the late Bishop Lamy I Througl1 the cobwebby sprin:g foliage shi11es the gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of drean1s preciot1s as the apple bloom. Wh.a t was the other charge? Oh, yes - '' lacks the human,'' whatever that means. Why are leg- ends o[...]Flagstaff and tl1e Frijoles, ,vhere renegades of the Civil War used to hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Bel- gium more interesting tha11 the gayly 'dressed peons of New Mexico, or the Navajo boys scouring 1.1p and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of Jack Cade any more '' ht1man '' than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys, Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did not steal in o:r[...]r assassins might pocket $5,000 of money ,vl1ich the young fello,,1s had brought out fron1 tl1e East[...]ge11dary heroes of tl1e Old vVorld? Driven to the last redoubt, your r>rotagonist for Et1rope against America usually assumes the air 0£ |
![]() | [...]XXV superiority supposed to be the peculiar prerogative |
![]() | [...]ON with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade the |
![]() | [...]ad dec- orated pottery ware of which we have lost the pig- ments, and a knowledge of irrigation which w[...]I never knew a monkey to possess. Some day, when the evolutionary piffle has wassed, ·, ve'll study·[...]storic legends and their racial meaning. As to the '' lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared that the most hope,f ul school of art in Americ-a was the School of the South.- west. L ook up Lotave's mural drawings at[...], but don't talk abo11t '' lack of art.'' Why, in the ranch house ef Lorenzo Hubbel1, the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely Southwestern pictur·es. H ow many of the two to one protagonists of Eu- |
![]() | ••• XXVlll INTRODUCTION With the exce-p tioa of a very bad break in the White |
![]() | INTRODUCTION the N avajq Reserve than you are in Broadway, New glazed and paved to the edges over which youth What about cost? Aye, there's the rub! |
![]() | [...]particle, what you do; or who will point you the way? The hotels a-re expehsive and for the most part lo- cated in the most expehsive zene - the commercial cente.r. It is o.nly wh_e n you get out of the expense zone a1r,1 ay from commercial centers[...]own tent at fifty cents a day ; but it isn't to the real es- tate agent's interests to have y9u go away ftom the commercial center or expense z.one. Who is there to tell you what or where to see off the line of heat and tips? Outside the National Park wardens and National Forest Ran[...]Ch.oose what you want to see; and go there I The local railroad agent, the local Forest Ranger, the local ranch nguse, will tell you the rest; and naturally, when you go i11to the wildern€sS, don't leave all your cou[...] |
![]() | CHAPTER I THE NATIONAL FORESTS, A SUMMER PLAYGROUND F a health resort and national pla-yg[...]large littleness an,d slay list- |
![]() | 2 THE NATI.O NAL FORESTS the least, $400 at the most. It exists in that '' twi- Of the three or foqr million people who have •[...] |
![]() | THE NATIONAL FORESTS 3 of tl1e purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three travelers: '' Been a great trip[...]do at these places? '' '' Took a ta_xi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Sa,v all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the West is going ahead.'' '' It has been a d-etes[...]an, baggage, hotels, everything. And how' much of the vVest have we really seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these'\¥estern citie.s before. The,y are ne>t th.e West. They are bits of the East taken up and set do\vn in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeii:1g it to go flying through t[...]and real life and wild life are always back from thethe mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and sleep through most of them. Tel1 us h0w we are to get out and see and experience the real thing? '' '' H'm, talk abo1,1t seeing the West'' (This time from a T~xas banker). ''[...] |
![]() | 4 THE NATIONAL FORESTS from the excursion party was when a land boomster took us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't see-ing thethe playgroun'd each was seeki"n,g? Not the duet that went round the cities in :a sightst eing car and judged the West from hotel rotu,ndas. Not tl1e New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns fly past th·e car winclows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real estate pro- ject by an E>astern land boomster. And eacli wanted to find the real thing - had paid money to find a holiday pla[...]b apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the extortionate ch.arges on every side i:n the city life. And two out of three went baQ{ a little disappointed that they had not seen the fab.led w0nders of the West - the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famou,s canons., the mou.ntaip lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to e;xplain to the New :forker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain wester,n wilds., whether you are a man,[...]or group of ,all three - could go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees anrl mountain[...] |
![]() | • THE NATIONAL FORESTS 5 Sadder is the case of the invalid migrating West. He has come with high hopes looking for the national health resort. Does he find it? Not[...]kers have money, they take a private house in the eity, where the best of air is at its worst; but many invalids are scarce of. money, and come seeking the health resort at great pecuniary sacrifice. D[...]nfecting themselves with their own germs till the vety t~lephone booths. have to be guarded. At[...]I heard three invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room h.appen·e d to be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 artd $3[...]t of $Io for train fare, I went out to one of the National Forests - the pass over the Divide I I ,ooo feet, the village center of the Forest 8,000 feet ,above sea level, the charge with meals at the hotel $Io a week. Better still, $10 for a roo[...]much or as little as you like for a fur rug, and the cost of meals would have been seventy-five cents a day at the hotel, seventy-five cents for life in air that[...]ant sunshine, air as pure and life- giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That alti-[...] |
![]() | [...], 6 THE NATIONAL |
![]() | THE' NATIONAL FORESTS 7: rain time, or thunder of avalanche when the snows Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up |
![]() | [...]. 8 THE NATIONAL FORESTS tion in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all are from 8,00[...]ou will h.a ve no diffi- culty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes pant- ing up the divide. Wi11dfall, timber· sla.sh, stumps h-a lf as high as a horse, bru-shwood, the bare poles and black'ene'd logs of burnt area[...]n. Ttees with two notches ancl a .Blaf/e mark the Forest bounds; trees with one notch and orte bla,z-e, the trail; and across that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests. There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National Forests. Windfall, there is almost n[...]e trees, all hav1e been cnt o·r stamped with the U. S. hatchet .for logging off. These Colora'd 9[...]to Utah; and you m.ay vary· your camping in the National Forests therel by trips ·to the wonder- ful can,ons out from Ogden, or to the natural bridges in the Soutq_. In the N atio.nal Forests of California, you have pretty nearly the best that Amer.ica can off et you; views of t[...]and Monterey; cloudless skies ev·e rywhere; the B'ig trees in the Sequoia F9rest; the Yosemite ip the Stanislaus; forests in the. northern p a.r t of the State where you could dance oh the stump of a redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the |
![]() | [...]ar - 't he · 01c , s o:f ·}1,e w . t ~ rs ,a.nd the whi■te, bur 1ished., shini g pe·aks. I ,e t a[...]1 .in a tented wa,g on through the N'ation.al :F ,o.· est,s frer .- the, h.or1eos for a rent . I which I .have forgotten. The, tbitt out for yours~lf. The.__ e is, ,first of all, your r -·il-- ·w ay fa_re from the point yQu leave~ Then there is the, fare -ut t 0 the Fo,r est - U$t1ally not $ r. ·.. Go[...]st~a1ght ~o th e ·super· -~isor or forestf!r Df the disttict. He ·will r ecom 1en,d the best hotel Qf th e little monn-,[...]-: 1·or ~ 1ess~ I'.n |
![]() | IO THE N .Li \TIONAL FORESTS cost you from $10 to[...]ke an elk-skin leather whi~h |
![]() | [...]not a rubber hath) a $1.50 camp stove to heat the water in the tent while you are eating your supper out round the camp fire that burns with suclL a delicious, barky · smell. Besides, late in the season, there will be ra:ias and mist. Your camp stove will d.ry out the tent walls and keep your kit free of ta·in m[...]If ·you camp under direction and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.[...]tent- a miner's, preferable to a tepee because the walls lift ·the canvas roof high enough not to bump your head[...]u a tin trunk ot gruo box; $ 1. 50 will coyer the price of oilcloth to ·s pread over the boughs which you lay all ove,r the floor to keep you above the earth dam·p ; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove to keep the ins1de of your tent warm and dry tor the hot night bath; $IO•will cover cost of pail[...]If you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder,, by whipping the mountain streams for trout. If you nee[...] |
![]() | [...]' 12 THE NATIONAL FOREST'S What reward d.o you rea·p for all the bother? 'living far above the v.apors of sea level, in a region , |
![]() | THE NATIONAL FORESTS 13 At the sot1tl1ern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants af cities, stand houses near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back i[...]historic contint1ity to dyna-sties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico or the Copts of Egypt., When • the pyramids were you·ng, long before-the flood gates of the Ural 'M ountains had broken before the inun- dating Aryan hordes that overran the forests ancl. m0ti11tains of Europe to the edge of the Netherland seas, this race which you can see[...]eir wool, working their silver mines, and on the approa.ch of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on the mo1:1ntain tops which you can see, whete only a rope ladder led up to the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red sandstone. And besides the prehistoric in the Forests --- what will you find? The pla-ins below you like a scto11, the receding cities, a patch of smoke. ,y ou had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was pQre, buoyant champagne without dregs. N ovv the plains are vanishing in a haze of dust, and you - you are up irt that cloudless air, where the light hits the rocks in spangles of pare crystalt and the tang of the clearness of it pricks your sluggisl1 blood[...]r roofs h<1d been a life with cob .. webs on the brain and weights on the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the |
![]() | 14 THE NATIONAL FORESTS ancients, after all, didn't a(:cord with science in ascrib- ing to the sun, t0 the god of L ~ght, the source of all our strength ? Things are accomplished not in the thinking, but.in the clearness of the thinking; and here is the realm of pute light. Presently, the train cai:ryihg you up to the Forests of the Southwest gives a bump. You are in dark- ness -[...]u come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a ~ouple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance Canon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven mile.s. That's not as the crow flies. It is a-s the train climbs. But patience I The road into Suadance Canon takes you to the top of the world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet u[...]tty ne.arly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at r 1,600 you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Mo·ffat Road. Long ago, men proved their sup[...]have had a good 100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. Today, men make good by co-nquering the elements. For four ho~rs, this little Colorado road has b-een cork-screw- ing up the face of a moµntain pretty ,n early sheer as a w[...]and tt1rn and t\lnnel, some ·engineer fellow .on the job has performed mathe- matical acrobatics; and some capitalist behind the engineer - the man behind the modern gun of con-[...] |
![]() | [...]- Fron1 a lookout point 1n the Cecon i.no I:-~orest of Arizonn |
![]() | THE NATIONAL FORESTS 15 quest-has paid the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the clouds - a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the moun- tains across the desert towards the Pacific. You come through those uppBr tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer margin of this rock wall with slab and log and shingle cottages, built literally o.n the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in the whole world. In Sundance Canon, South Dakota, summer people have built ~n the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky. // Rugged pin€s cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but dauntlessly rooted in th.e everlast- ing rocks. Little mini11g hamlets composed of match- box houses cling to the face of the precipice like card- boards stutk on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds, and are above timb-er line; and a lake l[...]ke a pool of pure turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and there is a pair of green lakes below you - emerald jewels pendant from the neck of the old mountain god; and with a bump and a rattle of the wheels, clear ov,er the top of the Continental Divide you go - believe me, a greate[...]ow,, or Alva's shambles of head- less victims in the Netherlands. , "l!ou take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of |
![]() | 16 THE NATIONAL FORESTS the Continental Divide. I wish you could taste the |
![]() | THE ~ATIONAL FORESTS 17 Then, the train is literally racing down hill- with the trucks bumping heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggi,s h team; and a new tang comes to the ozone - the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cin- namon s[...]h., of spiced sunbeams an~ imprisoned fragrance - the fragrance of tl1ousands upon thousands of years of d ew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of Persian roses, but of the everlasting • pines. T he train takes a s[...]nd an escarpment of ~he mountain;- and you are in the Forests proper, ser ried rank upon rank of the blue spruce and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles o-f light hitting back frorn the rocks in sparks of fife I The light here is sifte-cl pollen dust - polle.Q- dust, the pri- mordial life principle 0f the tree - with the purple, cinnamon-sce·n ted co11es hang,i ng from th6 gree-n arms of the conifers like the chevrons, of an en.r anked army; and the cones tell you so-mew hat of the serv-ice as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some coni- fe rs hold their cones for a year before they send the seed, whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviat- ing pixy parachutes, airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growtl:i, thou.g h the process may take the trifli.hg reon of a thousand years or so. At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the yellow pollen o·f the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season - the season when l happe,n ed to be in the Colorado Forests - the[...] |
![]() | 18 THE NATIONAL FORESTS very atmosphere is alive with t[...]rships, coni·f er seeds sailing browdsitle to ·the wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb like a st,one, the ground would be seeded below the.hea,v.ily, shaded branches inches deep in self-·choking, sunless seeds; but when th€ broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the v·eering • wind, the seed. is -c.arried oat and away and far beyond The train has not gone very far in the National |
![]() | • THE NATIONAL FORESTS 19 burned or scant slopes, he rifles the cache o·f this little r,700 which French and Germ.an ~[...]ten times more its own accord up the bridle trail to the ranger's |
![]() | stuffy hotel toom of the g r: ~itt estecl town, ·sn't 'tl J. ' ti' If the:re is snow on tbe peaks aho ., -, you fe l it in all the t me, ·yo have - ,e most absurd S'en&e of being[...]en eye anr,J teJf1pJ e wher e our ·-f oreJf at -e s made_off~r'i .g, _ to the goas al ,old - the teRJp,Je w·hi eh our modern churc res,[...]lly· and phy·sitall : 1 f.rom hreath:1--g, the d.usty street s,weep,in'§. S of :tilth and, spirit of the ·.-_· oods ha fway? The -· , the wood ·_ will |
![]() | CHAPTER II AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST OU have not ridden far towards the ranger's |
![]() | [...]boots are 1 good onl , -hen the· · c·omb.-11e t o qual~,t ·e _ ,comf : t the and t o din -ry ou .i11 ·-. garments Q' any other -- o -~:s1 de the b ·g tre ou.n t . _ T -o no tch .:s and o e[...]re . ~J-. o.n,e1 .- no ch anti cine b . ·ze, the · ail; .· t · he · had g 0 e o,[...] |
![]() | 24 THE FORE'STS OI<"' THE SOUTHWEST the trail trout fishing. '' I f they had been good path- finders, they could nave found the way out by fol- lowing the stream d_own., '' remarked a critic of this littl[...]chair. How about it, i·f when you came to follow the stream down,, it cl).ahced to cut through ,a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fil,11 of rock at the sjdes and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high" that you were driven back trom the stream a r.rtile or two? You would ke€p yout di[...]gion is almost impervious to sun- light; and when the fog blows in or the cle>uds blow down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest sense of direttiot1. Co.m pass signs. of f otest-Iore fail here. There are few flowers under the dense roofing to give yo·u sense of east OJl west; and you look in v~in tor the moss sign 0'!'1 the notth bark of the tree. All four sides ate heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman lost her- sel f, they were in fer:ns to their necks. · '' Weren't the kiddies a.fraid? '' I asked. '' N0t a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son ma'd e a big fii;e. We curled ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the chil- dren's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the morning. It was like a sea. The youhgsters had never seen clouds take fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you,, too, that. we put out every s-p ark of that fire before we left in the morn- ing.'' |
![]() | [...]hie~ co,11 · ,ey.s i _s own r;noral for the catnp er 1 1n the ., at· on.al · ·a.rests at the -·a . g -r s h 0 -._ -e,. ·.• any of th e ra.[...]1 .m . rr·' d and h·a _, e a houseful o ; th.e·r o n.. Those. at th ._ station, where the tr- in sto ped1 was anot.h@r Fo,._ @s:-~· expec ~·~n.g the .railroads~ e the. r·a,nge :s,1, ,o.r |
![]() | ... 26 THE FORESTS OFT.PIE SOUTHWEST The question isn't what is there to d o. It is[...] |
![]() | [...]... THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 27 dvvellers, ·you will be d1·own·ecl in historic antiquity |
![]() | z8 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHvVEST with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you ai:e a trained climber, take a guicl·e with you, or the advice ot some local tnan who knows the tricks and the rnoods and the wiles and the w.ays of the upper mountain world. L0.oking from the valley -up to the pe-ak, a pateh of snow may seem no bigge-r to you[...]f it is steep b.eneath that '' table-cloth '' and the for est shows a slope cl'ean-&w,ept of trees as b[...]b e careful hQW you crGss an.cl recross following the zigzag trail that eo·tkscrews up below the, fat· patch of white I I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer i.n the West whe:n a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten miles up the mountain slope and asked if '~ tha.t '' were ''[...]very large snow field, inde.ed; that we saw only the forefoot of it hang~ ing over the eelge; that the upper part was supposed to besom€ tw·enty mil[...]anias. A month later, when I came back that way, the tr4in suddenly slowed up. The slide h,acl come down and lay in white heaps across the track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other si,de. The tracks were safe enough; for the snow sh,ed threw the slide over the track on d,own the ,slope; but it bad caught a cluster of lumbermeh[...]ternal sleep. '' We saw it coming,'' said one of the survivors, '' and w·e thought we had plenty of time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the•men went in to get his wife. Before he c[...] |
![]() | ' THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 29 come out, it was on us. Man and wife and child were |
![]() | jo THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST simply its lover of God's Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Si.lence, living near t@ the Gocl of thethe stars can bripg him. Wild creatµres of woodl[...]l. You have t0 hunt out their sec:ret haunts. The same with these Western mountaineers. Hunt them 9ut; but do it with rever- ence! I was driving in the Gunnison country with a local magnate two yea.r s ago. We s.a w again.st the far skyline a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only t his arcl1 led through the rock to thethe high country above these battlements and palisades. See that hole, in the mountain? '' '' Rough Upper Alpin€. mea[...]r no 1 Open parl{ cot1.ntry with lakes an·a th.e best of fishing. It t1secl to b,e an alm0st impos[...]has been a hermit • fellow there for the la$t ten yea·r$, living in his cabin and hu[...]oes it, h,e says it's to lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort o.f thing. O.f -course, the people in the valley think him crazy.'' Gf course., they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and its maniacal jabbei-[...], building trails to lead p€ople up to see the Glor-y of God? We call those hill~crest dwell- ers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the dust eaters, the insects of t he city ant[...] |
![]() | • THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 3r Y 6u have been told so often that the National For- of g.reen forctst awa[...]harm |
![]() | 32 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST would be left a sweep of des@late bu[...], |
![]() | THE FORESTS OF THE SOU·T HWEST 33 quarter section. Good I Hasn't the homesteader a ri,g ht to this profit? He cert.a.inly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he doesn't cl€ar more tha[...]ound his cabin, and hasn't a cent of money to pay the heavy expe,nse of clearing the rest, and sells out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars[...]or a grabbing o,f timber for a lumbe.r trust? The same spirit e~plains the furious outcry that miners ,a re driven off the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine m[...]g smelting trust - a merry game worked in one 0£ the vVestern States for several years till the rang- • ers pt1t a stop to 1t. To build roa"d s through an empire the size of Ger- many vvbt1ld require larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being tried of permit- ting lumbermen to take the timber free from the Sp.a ce occupied by a road for the building of the road. \i\Then yo11 consider that you can drive a span of horses throt1gh the width of a big conifer, or build a cottage[...] |
![]() | 34 THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST Presently, your pony tu1~ns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's cabin,- pic_turesque to a degree, built[...]or timbers, with slab sides scrap.ed down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood. l\!Iany an Eastern country house b[...]ion, or prairie home resembling nothi;_n g in the world so much as an ugly packing bo:X,. tni~ht imitate the arcl:1itecture of the ranger's cabin to the infinite imptove·m ent of appear-[...]ropriateness. Appropriate11ess I That is' the word. It is a for- est w9rld; and the ranger tun66· the style of his house to the trees arou11d him: log walls, log partitions, log[...]o.r en.tra11ce steps. In several cases, where the cabin had been built of square· hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of the loos·e bark had been nailed diagonally 011 the outside; and a tnpre suitable finish to a woo[...]1ld hardly be d-e vised- surely liletter than the weatl1ered br@wns and dirty drabs and peeling white-s that you see defacing the a v©rage fronti~r h9me. Na tu rally enough,[...]t1ildin.g c;ottages ets play places have been the first to in1itate this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, ci.nnamon,-barked cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of huntin,g clubs far East as the Great Lakes·. Personally I should Ii.k e to .see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are fleeing the cares of tow·n, '' back to tl1e ·1 and; '' but when there are taken to the country all the cares of[...] |
![]() | THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHvVEST 35 the city house, a regiment of servants or hostiles, a[...]n of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees '' back to the farm.'' What sort of men are these young fellows living halfv,ray between heaven and earth on the lonely for- ested ridges' whose nearest neighbors are the snow peaks? Each, as stated. previot1sly, patrols[...]ne i11spector, field man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman~ When you conside[...]bany, or from St. Paul to Duluth, witho11t ahy of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge the layman, you may say ·the ranger is a pre.tty busy man. What sort of tnan is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian Northwest l\'Iounted Policeman, witl1 th[...]er. I think there is a r·e gulation somewhere in the Depart- ment that a new man older th an forty'-fi[...]0 taken. This insures enthusiasm, weeding out the n1is- |
![]() | 36 THE FQRESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST taught in l'pe'tee cat- ee - cheesm.'' I am not sute |
![]() | THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 37 I want t[...]ldoze a young gov-ernment man int0 believing |
![]() | 38 THE FORESTS OF Tl-"IE SOUTHWEST to them. Once, when I earn~ back to the first Forest where I served, there was a whal[...]g& stamped U. S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could _g et word back from Washington, the. guilty party ha(! left the State and blame had been s.hu11ted round on[...]t1'1ose logs.'' It is a common saying in the.Northwest that it takes eigµt years to make a. go.-0d Mounted Policen1an - eight years to jou,nce' the·. cluff er out and the mah in; b-u t in the Forest Service, men ov.et fotty-fiv,e a:te not. taJ{e11. For meh vvho serve UI} to forty-fiv·e, the in- ducements 0£ sali.r·y· begin11irtg at[...]h&t suffi.eie.n t to retain tested veterans. The big lumbet cotnpa11ies w'ill pay ~ tra.i11ed f.o rester more for the $ame work on pri- va,tely owned timbe;r limits•; so the rangers remain f·o r the most p.art young. 'VVould the same difficul- ties ris.e if wise oltl dogs w[...]ardly tl1ink so. What manner of man i~ th.e ranger? As we .sat |
![]() | THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 39. ranger. In the group was h,is sister,. a teacher in the village school; and I fancy i:n.o st of the ranger homes present pretty much the same types, thou.g h one does not ordinarily expe[...]trains of grand opera above cloud-liae·. Picture the m~,n dressed in sage- green Norfolk suits; and yo[...]• Scott ever painted of the men i11 Lincoln green in Englamd's borderland for[...]e are traitors and spies an·d Judas Iscariots in the Service with lip loyalty to public wti!al and one[...]silver to betray self-gov,e rnment; b1..1t under the pres·ent regime, such men are not kept wl1e11 fo[...]rs 1 tl'ie world h as been ringing with praise of the Northwest Moupted Police; but tl1e red-coat men have serve'd their clay; ancl the extension of Provincial Governtnctnt will prac- tically disband the force in a few y€·ars. Right now, iI'l the. American West, is a similar picturesque body of[...]stant fire of slande;tous mendacity set g0i11g by the thieves and g.rafte,r s whose ga.me 0f spoliation has been stopped. L et spread- eagleism look at the figures an'd ponder them, ahd never f or,g et the[...]them, when charges are b€ing hurled a•g ainst the Forest rangers I In the single fire of I(J09 more rangers lost their lives •than M oit1ited Policemen have died .in the Ser-vice since I 870, when the force was orga1i~ i:zed.[...] |
![]() | ~o TI-IE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST vV~s it Nietzsc·he, or Haeckel,[...]ipping from vegetable to animal kil'lg- dom; the, animal gradin,g up to man; man stretch.ing his neck to become - what? - is it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs and . wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The flower flauntin.g its beauty to attract bee[...]e a species- that shall s,u r- pas.s itself. The tree tryjng to encompass and over- come the law of its own being - fixity ----- by sending its see·ds sailing, whivlin.g, aviating the seas of the air, with wintl fo_t pilot to far distant cl[...]un-washed morning in a ride or walk throug.h the Nati@nal Forests. You thought 'the tree was an inanimate thing, didrf'·t you? Yet you find John Muit ahd .D ante clasping hands across the centuries in agreement tha.t the tree is a living, sensate th.ing, se·nsate almost as you are; with its se.ven ages like the sev,en ages of man; with the same ceaseless 1 struggle to survive, t[...]s, drawing life and strength straig;ht from the sun. The storm wind ramps through its thrashing bran[...]do you suppose it is doing? Pre- ,cisely what the storm winds of adversity do to you ~ and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eter_nal rocks, teaching us to anchor on • |
![]() | • THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 41 |
![]() | 4z THE FORESTS OF THE SOUTI-IWEST old tree reache.s the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three scote years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines aud se- quoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning, the branches -shaded by their neighbors dying and dro[...]rms, of strength against ·strengtp., there is in the storm wind, every wr~nch tightening grip to the rocks, some trees €Ven sending dow.n extr.a roots like guy ropes for anchorhold, The tree unctowded by its fellows $hoots up straight[...]es spelling its years in a century c.ensus. It is the crowded trees that show their al- most human craf[...]or shaded , twist- ing and bending, ever seeking the lig_h t, and sp.r ead- ing 9ut only· wh:en they reach room £or shoulder swing at the toR, with su·ch a mecha.nism of pumpin,g 1na- c.[...]1oist barrels of water up £rom secret springs in the earth as man has not devised for his own use. Arid now, when the crown has widened out to stµi and air, it stpps[...]es' and canoes and s~ils, and wings, to overcome the law of its own fixity - life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the scientists s-ay, though ·symbolist and sci,e nt[...]'s hearls if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing. And a lost tree is like a lost lif·e ; utter l0ss, boot- less waste, You see it i11 the bleached skeleton spars |
![]() | THE FORESTS OJ:.· THE SOUTHWEST 43 of the dead forest where the burn has run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting half-growns[...]four feet high with piles o-f dry slash to carry the first chance spark. ·T he leaf 1itte.r here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened to m·ention the range·r ' s rule that stumps must be cut no higher than eighiteen inches, and. . the fact that. in the big tree region of the Rocky Mountains many stumps a-re left three and four feet high. Someone took smiling exc~ption to the height . of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and Douglas fir country stump,s are cut[...]s besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I thought of those h0tels back in the cities daily turning away health seekers. ,t How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care of all the people who come?'' |
![]() | CHAPTER III THROUGH THE PE.COS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW[...]re you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any day in the year., winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos National Forest, I put on the heaviest flan·nels I have ever worn in n.o rther[...]dequate~ We were blocked l?y four feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I bad to break the ice in my bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all right it you keep dow·n 011 the desert sands of the southern lowlands and mesas; but New Mexico isn't[...]'ll firrd your egg in cold storage if you go into the different National Forests, for mgst of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet; and at th·e headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 ancl 1,3,000 feet high, according as you catnp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or Gra.ss Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Canon. There are· several other. ways· in which the Na- , 44 |
![]() | THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 45 tional Fo[...]of all, they are cheap;, and that is not true of the majority of trips through the vVest. Ordinar.il'y, it costs more to take a trip to the wilds of the West than to go to Europe. ,v11at with enormous d[...]than to San Fran- cisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New Mex- ico. Prices have no t yet been jacked up to '' all the traffic will stand.'' The constant half-hour leak of tips at eveFy tur.n is unknown. I f yGu gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the National Forests of 'Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back, leaving you a good deal stnaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet of forty servitors lined up in a C-0ntin[...]·., In letters of gold, let it be written across th.e face of the heavens - There is still a no-tifJ, land. As pric[...]ico, you can literally take a holiday cheaper i11 the National Forests than you can stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the transcontinental railroad, it will cost you t.o go into the Forests $4 an hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast. I n fact, you can set do,vn the cost of going in and out at not less tha11[...] |
![]() | 46 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS weeks' holicl~y. To ·_ ent a hm -. s ·by the month w~ould probably not co t $,20. Set . our[...]at : ~ - ·. -. Jtere will you go? All ·_ hrough the _ atu:mal For,i,eSts of New Mexico ar,e ranch h[...]1 with :a w~sh bas·· - at the 'back doo·r · and a to le·r towel pas,. e,d i.n the ra ches o,f . · ew . ·. c•e ico. The c· ances[...]1 will loo · 0t1t either on the litt c co,u · tya.r d in the cen- ter, o· from th,c pia·~za ,out~j1d e do .n the , alleys; and water'. The d n:n.g- oom and ti _, 1,.ng-roo· · i]l be of room £0~ the health seeker . ho goes to • ew ··. ex- |
![]() | [...]- ger to ordinary comers seeking a holiday in the Na- tional Forests. On the .o ther hand, there is no hard- ship worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from •[...]p:1ade for send- ing in meals~ . The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the excellence of roads· and trails. You can go into the very heart of most of the Forests by motor, of all of the Forests by team (be sure to hire a strong wagon) ; and you can ride almost to the last lap of the highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner. In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of suel1 trails cut by the rangers as their p,atrol route; and New Mexit[...]een cuttin.g a graded wagon road clear acr9ss the ridges of two mountain ranges, a great scenic[...]to ten thousand feet above sea level.. One of the most marvelous roads in the world it will be when it is finished, slcirting inaccessible ca.iions, shy Alpfn€ lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. I t is not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May; but you can enter the P ecos at any season at right anglgs to this road, go- ing up the canon from south to north. T he great surprise in the National Forests of New • |
![]() | ~8 THROUGH THE PECOS FOR,ESTS Mexico is the gr-eat plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Me:xic0 and the vVhite Mountains of Arizona are the only seetions of America of which this c,a n still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trqut {,_cyan yo.u r entire cam·p can[...]ll so frequent that they constitute a pe.ril to the deer, and the Forest S~rv,ice actually needs hunters to clear them out for p,reservation ef the turkey and deer. As for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks oh the Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the canons forking o.ff the P0cos at right angles, twenty- six wer·e trappe[...]of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none in the world. l?eople here 'h ave not caught the climbing rna:n ia yet; that will come. But there[...]t 1 awaiting the conq,ueror, an·d the scenery of the Upper |
![]() | [...]• THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 49. |
![]() | r50 THROlJGH THE PECOS FORESTS • patches under the same primitive ditch system. N, glance tells you[...]·a re goat ranches,. Tlie goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley frelcls the fa:rm€r taises corn and oats en@ugh to support his family antl his stock. We, in the Ea.st, who pay from $17 5 to $250 for a hors·e,[...]€at at $a a sheep. To be sure, this mean-s that the peon Mexiea.n farmer does not wax opulent, but he[...]k€d up three centuries ago and set down here in the wiltl-erness' of New Mexico, with a s,prinkliv,g[...]ndescripts seeking doors in and out of .mischief. The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in tn.e frttsh-plowed furrows, the women with red s-hawls over heaqs, brighter skirt-s· tucked up, spra\vling round the ad0be house 'doorways, the goats bleatin,g on the red, sand hills - all complete the illusion th~t you have waked up in sorpe pictures[...]Spain. What Quebec is to Canada, New Mexico is to the United |
![]() | THROUGH THE PE,COS FORESTS 51 States - a mosaic in color; a bit of the Old World set down in the New; a relic of tl1e historic and the picture,Sgue nqt yet sa;ndpapered into the commo11- place by tpe friction o,f progress and d[...]folk ,a re happy just to be alive, undisturbed by the '' over-Weaning -a mbition that over-vaulteth its[...]n socia,l envy and class hate. '' Qur peop]e, h0, the,y are not am- bish r '' said an old 'M exican to[...],'' pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the Jittle whitewashed adobe room, '' and now I will[...]' Mighty goo'1, '' though I w,a s not thinking of the poem. I was. thinking of the 'spirit that is contented enough to see p.o etry i.n · the great white mountains th,r ough the door ol a little whitewashed adobe roo111 ; and i[...]donned an old milita,.ry cap€, and came out in the sunlight to have me ph,oto- graph him, so that hi[...]have decide'd whic'h of them.any ranch houses in the Pecos Fo rest you will[...]hl;\ve not decided, a fe:w words of inquiry with the station age,nt or a Forest Service man wil[...] |
![]() | [...]1 perh , s sh ·ul : .plain.. The custom o i ·a ing but luc .~.1.Iy for o ,_tsi de -, the ,c, _. s .om sur ~,-.. s,:: o,.- y re- ~[...]any disco d o,f ner· es u.ntun :: d b·_·,. the j'ar of to·wn[...]ing: th· : f .· r _st g 0 · h thick _._ . in . the lit- tl c·heckerb _· r . f , lrms takin_g n more a ;: d ~ore the .· oming b nck in an L roL1 · d the co·u,rt, the main e .~ trrance 0n the oth _r _- i de of' i . You expected to find[...]late· t mutic~II r,- e,qrd ., ranch b ell h _ng o the· ~1 - tz, . after h,- I _ .~ion of the · _- -~- ion -. |
![]() | S4 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of· the dev.otees whose ideals had been built into th·e stones of these qu.iet walls. Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built in - well, they tell you all the way from I 548 and I 600 to I 7-00. I dare say the middle date i's the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell of this old ru'in dated before 1700; and when prepara- tions were under way for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in demand that the prices went: up to $500; and the M -exicans of Pe- cos were so fearful of tl\e des[...]arried this ancient bell away and buri·e d it in the mountains - where, ao man knows: it has never since been found. You have been told so often that the mountai11s of America lack human artd historic in[...]abov@ sea level, ancl much of it o.n t:he top of the snow peaks between ten and thirteeh thou- sand fe[...]At eight o'clock Tuesday, April I 8, I set out up the canon with a span of stout, heavy horses, an exce[...]know mountain travel, I do not need to· describe the trails up Pecos Caiion. I conside,r it a safer ro[...]it so. It isn't a trail for a motor car., th0ugh the, scenic high- |
![]() | THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 55 way cutting[...]it is finished; and it is11't a trail for a fool. The pedes- trian who jumps forward ,and then back in[...]ersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the mou.ntain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Canon, now d©wn on a level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner ,side; and the driver keeps the brakes pretty well jamm.e d dow·n on sharp in-curves and the h·orses headed close in to the wall. vVith eare, there is no danger whatever. Lumber tean1s traverse the road every day~ With careless- ness - well, last summer .a rig and sp.a n and four oc- cup~nts went over the edge p.ead first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily wooded and you can't slide far. Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for '' the tent dwellers; '' and let it be empha- sized that[...]Cabins and camps of city people from Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout 'pools and miniature waterfalls. Wherever the canon widens to little fields, the Mexican farmer's |
![]() | 56 THROUGH THE PEco·s FORESTS adobe hut stands b-y the roadside \Vith an intake ditch to irrigate the farm. The road cor,k-screws up and up, in and out1, round rock flank and rampart and bat- tlement, where the cafion fork's to right and le-ft up other forested canons, many of wbJch, save for the hunter, have never known huma.n tread. Straight ahead north there, as you d·bclge re>und the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a doze·n fords, loom w_alls and dotnes of snaw, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge o.f white, the two Truchas Peaks, going up i.n sharp summits. The roacl is called twenty miles as the cr·o w flie..s; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You are zigzagging back on ybur own t[...]ere fs n0 lje as bi,g as t.he length of a mile in the mou.n tains, especially when th:e wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the sn@'W peaks re~tr their summits is the head of Pecos Caiion - a sort of snow top to the. sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe R.ange shutting off the left on the west, the Las Vegas or San,g re de Christo Mountains walling in the tight on th~ east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur i,n A.niei:ica except the Rockies round[...]n Canada. I had pt1t on heaviest flann·els in the n1orning; a11d no\v donned i11 addition a co·,vboy slicker and was cold - this ln a lflnd where the Ea.s terner thinks you can sizzJe eggs by laying them on the sand. An old Mex- ican jumps i11to the front seat with tl1e driv,er near a deserted mining camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as_we ascend the ca.n on. Promptly at twelv·e , Toma.s o turns back and asks me the time. |
![]() | [...]1 w -· ,iso.r 's Ran,ch marks the end of ·the Rg'O n ro· d f 00 t or horseb, ck; an.d though th.e s,iow p ; ,aks see;m to , all in the no rtb, ·the . are really fifteen ·. ile .-. away[...]1 · p to the r ·ght, above a grove of white aspens Gr·ass Mounta·n. We zigz.ag up the Iaby s itchback other impo r'• a; --t. f'eature of the '' ten.t ,dw 11 ._ r,s ,,, in 1[...]. _._ e ico. T.be ,,e i ·. _,othing wo.rs e for th.e Con- |
![]() | 58 THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS almost ideal for recovery; and tha[...]g light farming, ranching, or fruit growing with the s·ea.rch for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this ranch where'' brqnch[...]lookout station for fires on tl1e- Upper Pecos. The W?rld literally lies at your feet. Y oq have al.l the e;xaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and, labor; for the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; ancl • you stand with the snow wall o·f the peaks on y0ur north, the crumpled, purpling masses of the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Canon, and the whole Pecos Valley "below you. Not a fire c~n start u·p f OJ: a. hun- dred miles but the mushroom cone of smoke is visible from Grass MoiJ,ntain. and the rangers spur to the work of ptJfting the fire out. Tho~gh thou.s ands of outsiders· carn[...]ar, not $ 50 loss has occurred through fire; and the fire patrol costs less than $4 7 a year. The'' why'' of this compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply .a matter of trails. The. rangers have cut five or six hundre-d miles of trails all throug~ the Pecos, along which they can spur at brea~eck speed to put out fires. In Ida,ho and Washington, th,anks to the petty spites O't local congr-essmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of funcls t[...]eavy Northwest timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the fire w·hile it is small. So harslily has the small-minded policy of penuriousness reacted on the[...] |
![]() | [...]HRO .·GH Tf.lE PECOS FORES S l9 Service in the .· ·. . Orthwest th•· t la.st year the ra. gers ha d to take up a subscription amo.nrg them elv s to 1 bury the men who peri .· hed fighting fir~. Pe .os Serv-[...]e an·d in,c-endia- ristn in the old days·; bllt that 1s a sto y long_past; a:nd[...]4o to preven~ fires· his book of de tl iions.. The rose-.tinted .a f'te.rglow of' '' Praise b,e God,'' he. said; '' fo- .the Bl00,d. of· 1 Chri~·t ; .,, and al[...] |
![]() | [...],., THE CI'fY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CANON[...]. A'M silting in one of the caves of the StQne A_ge. This is- not fiction but[...]eolithic times lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses where they Ii·ved, sitting on the floor with my feet· resting on the steps of an eatrance stone stairway worn hip•de-ep through the volcanic rock by: the rnoccasined ·t read of reons of ages. Thi-ough the cave door, lookittg for all the world from the o,utside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor 0£ the valley a community house 0f hundreds of room[...]and women - - 'danced the May-pole before Julius Cre-sar was born, |
![]() | [...]1 d . d and.. @ne h.~foi-e the ._pan:i -rd: came to · mer~ ca ,: '"lent city of the y,dlo · cliff --all I fell to wondering I Jt~- 11n- ·a re the .s t1 s of the Je, : ~z .- ., m1nt,ains, - hic:-_1[...]1 an,d :masses th~ t m rk the p~tilential de .tfuction off - t .[...], , |
![]() | 62 Tt-I'.E CITY OF THE DEAD D. So there you are· I You have as good a right to a g,u ess as the highest sciehtist of them all; and while I refrain from speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that thes.e peop}e of the Stone Age WePe not the gibbering, monke·y -tailed maniacs of <?law finger n•ails and simian jaw which the half-baked pseudo-evolllt.i onist loves to p[...]a character working at Judge A.b·b 0tt's in the Valley said-'' Sur@, monkey men wud a' had a[...]thro' thim cliffs and makin' thi;m holes in the roek:s.'' Remnants .of sharcl. and pottery, s[...]d skins found wrapped a,s cere- ments rot1nd the dead all pr6¥e that these men were a s~dent[...]ing wild 1 boars through the forests, 'th€se pedple were cultivat- As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go |
![]() | • THE CITY OF THE DEAD and fish. So you do to the Jem.ez i but it is historic fact you are hunti~g and a reconstruction of the record of man you are lishing for. As, the Pecos Forests ap- peal to the strenuous holiday ht1nter - the man who considers he has not had his fun till he[...]inging fish 0n a line like beads on a string - so the Jemez ap,p eals to the dreamer, the s·cholar~ the scien- tist, the artist; and I can imagine no more ideal ( nor cheaper) holiday th-a n to join the Arherican School of Archa:1ology, about which I h[...]mes in here with scientists from evety quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and dig, and delve., and revel in the past of moonlight nights round . campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the face of the cliff, The School has been a going concern for only a few ye[...]ver I 50 scientists came in from every quarter of the globe. Spite of war-nings tio l}1e contrary given to me both East and West, the trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest yot,1 can make in America. Y[...]t and unpleasant about Santa Fe. First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not[...]l-hills engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor blending with the braying of a l\liexican burro trotting to[...] |
![]() | • 64 THE CITY OF THE DEAD |
![]() | [...].. ~, These tlta\.vin_gs above the. entrance to a cliff d ,veiling in the Jen1ez Forest look like p resent-day schoo[...] |
![]() | THE CITY OF THE DEAD 65_ , main line; ye[...]a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe- trotter, for I am one myself; but[...]that prevents Santa Fe blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed t0 it by the grand dons of Spain that is a verse to soundi11g the b.rass band, I love the appealing, picturesque, inert laz1ness of it all[...]tter to ask: '' Why go to Egypt, when you have the won'd ers of an Egypt unexp,lored in your- own land? Why sc0ur the crowdecl Alp1, when the snowy domes of the Santa Fe a·nd Jemez and Sa11gre de Christo li[...]hotel? '' If Santa Fe, as it is, were known to the big general public, 200,000 teiurists a year[...]delight within its purlieus; and while I like the places untrodden by travelers, still-being an outsider, myself,- I should like the outsiders to know the same delight Santa Fe has given me. To finish w·ith the things of the mundane, you strike in to Santa Fe from a desolate little junction called Lamy, where the railroad has b1,1ilt a picturesque little doll's hougoe of a hotel after the fashion of an old Spanish mansion. To reach the Jemez Forests where the ruins of the C'av:e Dwell€rs eJC;ist, you can drive or motor ( to certain sections only) or ride. As the dis- tance is forty miles plus, you will find[...]days, it will cost you from $ r o to $ r 4 for the round trip. If you go in on a burro, you can buy the burro eutright for $5 or $10. |
![]() | 66 THE CITY OF THE DEAD ·( Don't mind if your feet do d,rag on the ground. It will save bein.g pitched.) If you go out with the American School of Archre·ology (Address San[...]you ~till less, perhaps not $z. Once out, in th.e oanons of the Cave Dwell,ers, you can either camp out with[...]or quarter yourself fre0 of charge in one of the thousands o;f cliff caves anq cook your own food; or sleep in the eave.s and p.ay for your meals at the ranch. At most, your living expenses will not[...]ing, they need not be $ r a day.. One of the stock excuses for Americans .n ot seeing their own country is that the cost is s0 extortionate. Does this sound exto[...]ivery because I was not sure how else to find the way. We left Santa Fe at six A. M., the clouds still titigeirtg the sand-hills. I hav'e heartl Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid on ·their colors t00 strongly[...]that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoir·e Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew quite concern,e d at my[...]d-natured nonsense to en- tertain me; and all the while, I wa,nted n0thing but quiet to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or less, we rattled pv-er the sand- hilla before we began to climb i[...] |
![]() | • THE CITY OF THE DEAD time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande and left the railroad behind an'd passed a deserted lumber camp and met only two Mexican teams on the way. From below, the t:rail up looks app,alling. It seems to be a[...]back on itself, up and up, till it drops over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely decep- tive. Tra¥el wears the sott volcanic tJt/a hub deep in ash dust, ~o that th,e wheels could not slide off if they tried; and on.ce you are really on the elimb, the ascent is much more. gradual than it looks.[...]abit of looki,ng baQ{; but you will miss half the joy of .going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look back[...]• towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand- ·hills. The wreaths have gone off the mountain, and the great white d9mes ·stand out from the sky for a distance of eighty .miles plain as if at your fe.et, with the gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then your horses take their last turn[...]e plainly why you have to drive 40 -miles in order to go 20. Here, W 'hite Rock Canon Jines both sicles of the' Rio Grande - precipices steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square block; and com- ing into this canon at right angles are the canons where lived the anci€nt Cliff Dwellers - some of them hundre·ds of feet above the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain |
![]() | 68 THE CITY OF THE DEAD streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible canons, you must drive up over the mesa, though the driver take·s you ftorh eight to ten thou&and fe[...]We lunched in a little water canon, which gashed the mesa side where a mountai•n stream came down. S[...]two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the Southw,est many of tl1e streams are alkali; ancl a stream from the sn:ows is better than win,e. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for this par~ ticula:r aaiion being i[...]a W estetn horse can take. T hen, we em€rged 9n the high upper m esa - acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary[...]t snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We fol- lowed the trail at a rattling pace - the Archreological School had placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Canon - and presently, by great mounds of building stone coveted feet deep by the dust and debris ot a.ges, beca,me awar,e that we w·e re on historic ground. • Nor can the theory of d,r ought explain the abandon- |
![]() | THE CITY OF THE DEAD 69 canons both before[...]face; or see a mountain Ii.on slink away, or hear the |
![]() | 70 THE CITY OF THE DEAD cliff under your feet, the sides of the massive rocks eroded to the sha.r,es of tents and tepees and beehives, pi[...]d winding recess and port- holes - a cify o.f the dead,, silent as the dead, old -almost as time I The wind came soughing up the ca:iion with the sound of the sea. The note of a lonely song sparrow, , brek~ the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down among the tender green, lining the canon stream, a mourning dove uttered her sad threnody - thern, silence and the soughing winti; then, more silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on the edge of the cafio-n wall and let the palpable past come touching rne out of the silence. A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the floor of the v·_alley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a city o.f one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other, rea~hed by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep ih the stone. Where had the p.eo:gle gone; and wbiy? What swept their civiliz-ati.on away? When clicl the age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the ,ity of their building and choice, of their[...]- do not leave without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this p1ace of beauty and security .a nd thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did the dead race go? Did they Hee panie~stricken, pur- sued like deer by the Apache and the Ute and the • |
![]() | THE CI _y OF 'T HE DJi · .D[...]in-.e . B,u t 1 th,ere ~s the sacretl cerem.oni:al un ·_. ,rgitou-n d ch.a her[...]1 s,c·rpent, guardian. ie,f the springs; -he.re· t'h e young keep th0u silent. u "Wh-e , th0u g est on the trail, sta,n,d -. -~n th.,e •dancing ·o··ok 9lace ,~ .o ·· n ther,e.[...]:. Ji-e, the'-waaon· d·o ··n ,t;=he·r·e,i , ' 7 h1.C- sa[...]l ji; d,own slo · -nd I come with. the batses., one . y on.e '' ladders tmc,ed up zigzag a.gainst the Fb. iron Build· |
![]() | ·72 THE CITY OF THE DEAD steps cut in the volcanic tu/a or white pumice are so.ft I and[...]this wonderful Frijoles Cafion accessible to the public, or if th€ Archreological School can raise the means and cooperate with the Forestry Service trail ma:kers 1 a broad graded wagon road should be cut d0wn the face of this canon, graded gradually enough for a m6t9r. The day that is done, vis.itors will .number not[...]~n this na:rrow,, steep tier of 600 steps all the, building tn,ate-r ial, all the furnitt1re, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place; but tnere the m.atet:ials are and there is no other t rail[...]arched ceremonial cave hu11dreds of feet µp the face of the p.re.cipice. The cave was first discovered by Jt1dge and Mrs. Abbott on one of their S11nday a·fter'- noon walks. The Arch.reological School under Dr. 1-levvitt cleated 011t the debr is and accumulated erosio·n of ce11turies and put th,e ceremonial chamber in its original co11dition. '' Re.storing the ruins·'' does not mean '' m·anufacturing rt1ins. '' It means digging out • the erosion that has wash.e d and washed for thousands |
![]() | [...]1 and he, charr d oo,den 'b _ms. flf ·the , -oked, a ieh _· .· C'eili[...]1 1 On the ,8.oors 1s a S0 rt of .r ocl bottom of p aster 0[...], , .1g,. "''ng to·· ; ., 1 . 't is in the pro c. s of d·i,gging down to _h-s fl · o-r. .[...]1 in H . rva,rd and Yale and the Siniths,on'-an and th[...]·. Santa, Fe P'alace, a,n d the Field , . useu111 of Chic go~[...]eet of e.rosion ha·v,e o ,er la ·e:1 the original flo,oring. ·w h,en diggin: __~ do·w.n[...],o·tless cham,. 1 hers seen from the hilltop on the floor of the vaUe:y for their labors of r'eS toration.;_ and the £,a ct that Dr"[...]1 Hewitt was, a, loc:al man h.as added to the ·effectiven.es,: or R[...]lled, I met on an abrupt bend in the trail a .-u. blo ,_ n.dian f om :.'anta |
![]() | 74 THE CITY OF THE DEAD pearls - Juan Gonzales, one of the workers· in the canon, who knows e,very foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white pumice background, it was fot an instant as if one of the cave people had stepped from the past. Well, ,it was Wan, as we outsiders call him, who one day brought word to the Arckreo- logical workers that he had found in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was cleane.d out or restored., and proved to[...]ind other chambets, which had be·en worn away by the centuries' wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a, wov.~n cloth like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body ly,ing to-day, provi11g that these people uncler- stood the art of weaving lo~ befo.r e the Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade. You ceuld ·stay in the Rito Canon for a year and find a cave of fresh interest each day. Fot instance, there is the one where the form of a huge plumed serpent has been etched like a tp.olding rou.n d under the arched roof. The s-ertDent, it was, that guarded the p0ols· and the springs; and whe11 one considers where snakes are oftehest found, it is n0t surprising that the~se-rpent should have been taken as a toterri emblem. Many of the chambers show six o-r seven holes in the floor - places to connect with the Great Earth Magician bel9w. Little alcoves were carved in the a,rclJ.ed walls for the urns of meal and w-a ter; and a sacred fireplace was r,egarded with somewhat the same veneration as ancient Orientals prese[...] |
![]() | THE CITY OF THE DEAD 75 has come and carve[...]gan symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish regime; and there are other cave.s where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could speak they '' would a tale unfold. '' The aim of ·t he Archreological Society is year by year to restore portions till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial aid, complete resto,- r[...]ke place inside a century. When you consider that the Rito is only one of many pre- historic areas of N[...]me philanthropist would place a million or two at the disposal of the Archreological Society. If this were done, no place on e-arth could rival th,e Rito; for the funds would make possible not only the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of debris, but it.would mak:e the Canon accessible to the general public by easier, nearer roads. The inaccessi- bility of the Rito may be in harmony with its ancient character[...]ives thou.- sands of tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests. There are other things to do in the Canon besides explore the City· of the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through parks of stately[...]rs which no botanist has yet classified. There is the glo·be cactus high up • |
![]() | 76 THE .C ITY OF THE DEAD on the black basalt rocks, blood-reel an'd fiery as if dyed irt the very essence of the sun. There is the mountain pink, c:ompared to which our garden and[...]as white woman corn- pa-r e'd to a Hopi. There is the short-stemme·d Eng- lish field daisyJ white abov[...]n sings i.n '' ·M aud.; '' Presently, you notice the stream banks crushing together, th.e waters tum- bling, the pumice changing to granite and basalt; and you ar[...]as· • ;mist. Follow fa·r fher down I The canon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor bet[...]show only a slit of sky overhea,d; and to follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm day when a th,a;w of snow on the peaks might cau,se a sudd·en ftec$het; for if the waters rose l1ere, there would be no esc~pe ! The day we went aow,n a th.aw was not the clanger. It w;as cold; the clouds were loom.ing rain, and th·e re was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and darker _grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up w·ith a mist of spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which w·e w-a ded wete slippery[...]v e looked over I Down - down - down - tumbled the waters of the Rito, to one b1ack basin .in a waterfall, then over a ledge to another in spray, then down - down - down to the Rio G,r ande_, many feet belQw. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a s[...] |
![]() | • THE CITY OF THE DEAD 77 |
![]() | [...], CHAPTER V HEY call it '' the Enchanted Mesa,'' this |
![]() | [...]1 Hopi m -sas wit the bulJe.t holie - quare ab,ove the lea.;_ e · ri des the - r1cst. ·$,w ord an.d cross ~ode gra.n,dly[...]down ignomm"ou ly befo et e fie ce onslaught of the oifference to m-e whether the ·SJJianiards were hu. led that other ahead. th'efe,, w·itl1 :the villag _on t·he tip-top crimson sands. S_.[...]e d 1 f'oe to the H opi people a~rosa A · i:zona a.nd . "e:w the Hopi; and t e H ,- pi wives take revenge by con- |
![]() | [...]r a secomll a ·ter nightfall. · I can'' t see the· Potnt to this bre,aking of hiSitorical heads 1 ov,er; triftes. The point is that alter t,he inco,:ning of ·upp erm,ost t•p,.-top of ·th.,e .highest mesas th e.y co ~ld.fin ,. the tr,aditions o,f Egypt. Draw a line from the M a.,n- |
![]() | [...]n th t .a Incli · m· n h rul r f the 1ouseho . |
![]() | [...]TED MESA OF ACOMA 81 see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff ·Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from the Manzanos east of Albu. querque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand Canon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously known as Moki, Zuni, Pueblos[...]name; and as such, I shall refer to them, though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki L[...]toured '' by sight.seers, I pref erred to go to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can cr<;>ss the Navajo Res-erve, and so kill two birds with one stone. Up to the present, the inconveni.ence of reaching 'A coma will effe·ctu[...]n town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in the morning, or else take, a freight, which you reach[...]b wire fence ,-- there is no immed.iate danger of the objective point being rushed by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the traffic. If anything as unique ann wonderf[...] |
![]() | [...]Acoma's Enchanted Mesa in a year, and h.a lf thethe day betore I went out, a traveler ,all the way from Germany had dropped off th·e transcontinental and taken a local £neight f 0r the Hopi tow·ns. When a tourist wants to see th[...]dred willirtg palms out to collect a nd poi_n t the way; but whem a tourist leaves the beaten trail in Ametica, if he asks too many[...]wasn't in a good mood when he dropp·e d off the f teight train ~t Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the 'M armons, but there is no regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good Westerner,: you[...], or take cheerful pot luck as it comes; but the German wasn't a good West• erner; and it d[...]av.e butter served up mi:,(:ed with flies to the tune of the land- laqy's complaint that ' ' it didn't {?<[...]hey tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from tW~nty-five to thirty miles to Acoma[...]it I For once, Western miles are too short.. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as easy as on a paved city street; but the Getman had left most of his temper at Laguna. When he reached the fo0t of the steep acclivity leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart rock |
![]() | [...]he started up without one and, of course, missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is a wonder. The Indians show·ed me the way he had come an<l said they could nqt have don[...]d not left at Laguna he scattered sulphnrously on the rocks before h·e reached the -crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous w-ay, he was too fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically characteristic of our[...]als, another at Acoma, a good woman in charg_e at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $Io a month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the ctiff - and thousands of travelers would go i'n a[...]with satisfaction. Yet here i_s Acoma, literally the Enchanted_, unlike anything else in th.e whole wide world; and it is shut off from the sightse·er because enter,prise is lacking to put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round that way so you could se€ it by moo[...]five, and drive out from Alb.u querque a mile to the freight yards, where it was rieoessary to wet one[...]ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose. The desert sunrise atoned for |
![]() | 84 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA all - air pure wine, the red-winged blackbirds, thou- sands of them, whistling sheer joy of life alQng the overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone 'into th·e hack yards o·f the little a'd obe dwellings·; but Isleta at best is now a white-man edition of Hopi. type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in thij true pueblo; and the goFgeous sk:irts and shirts seen on the figures moving round the doors are nothin.g more nor less than store c[...]• dy·es. In the true Hop.i pueblo,. these ,garments would be sun-dyed brown skin, on the. youn,g er children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed fab·ric oh the grown-ui;>s. Th,e true Hopi skirt is nothing more n.o r less than a[...]hawl ov'e r nature's undergarments comp_letes the native costume; and the little monkey- shaped bare f e·e t cramped from lon.g scrambling over the tocks get better grip on ste·€p stone stairs than ciV'ilized boots, though rn~ny of the pueblo women are now affecting the latter. The freight trai.n climbs ancl. climbs irrto the gypsum country of terrible drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie dead of thirst, and the wind blows a ht1rricane of 'dus,t that a.Imost knocks you off your feet. The railroad passes almost thr0u,g h the lower streets of Laguna; so that when[...] |
![]() | [...]l\tIESA OF ACOMA 85 up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill.. You • |
![]() | [...]position has been one of absolute equality among the Hopi from the ~arliest traditi0ns of the, race. At Laguna, you ·can obtain rooms wit[...], as I said before, take chance luc_k outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr. Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the Southwest. Where white m_en have foregathered with Indians, it has usu- ally been f@r the higher race ·t o come down to the level of the lower people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt I If you ask how it is that the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma ~re so superior to c1ll oth€r Hopi communities of the Southwest, the ans·w·e r invariably is '' the influ- ence of the two l\1ar1nons and P ratt. '' Coming West as surveyors in the early seventies the two Mar- mons and Pratt opened a trading store, married Indian women and set themselves tei. civilize. the whole pueblo. After almost four years' pow:'"wow[...]hildren, two boys and a girl, to go to school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are•leading citizens ot the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce childten to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day, there I is a governmeht school here, and the two pueblos of |
![]() | [...]87 stitution of downstairs doo1·s for the ladders that for- merly led to entrance tl1rough the ro0f. Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers pe[...]un- dreds of feet straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of do,ors on one hand. Acoma is still pur[...]speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi unde·r the far-reaching a11d c_ivilizing in.flu@nce of '' Marmon and Pratt.'' The streets - rst, 2,ncl and 3rd, they call them - of the cloud-cliff town a.r e swept clean as a white housewife's floor. Inside, the three sto.r y h.ouses are all whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy th·e r.0of of the first story. Perhaps a butr<r may stand sleepily on the next roof.;· but then 1 the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling_, purpling, shi·mmering mesas for hundr,eds and hunclreds of miles, till the sky- line loses itself in heat haze and snow pe1l)ks. The inside of these thi1:d story rooms is spotlessly clea·n, big ewers of washing water on the floor, nr-eplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways ope[...]p.otles~ly ele~n where water must be car- ried on the women's heads and backs any distance up from 500 to r,500 feet. Yet I found some of the missionaries an'd government teachers and nuns arnong the Indians curiously discouraged about ·resu[...] |
![]() | [...]cher and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to A,coma and then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Mo.ki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not be afra.[...]et, and camp aad sleep and eat for a week. At the Second 'Mesa; where miijsion work has barely begun - well, though the crest of the pea,k is swept by the fo.u r winds of heaven and disin- fected by a[...]n, I could barely· stay • 0ut two hours; and the next time I _go, r i11 take a large pocket ha[...]ge and traditions and belief, but hum.a.n. At the Second Mesa_ , you fall to raking your memory of Whitechapel and the Bow-~ry for types as sodden and putrid and de[...]take you ou:t to Ac0m,a.; and please remembe:r, the dis- .tance is not twenty-five or fift,y mil[...]motor: if you have one. Set out early in the day, and you escape the hea.t. Sun up; the yellow::.t hFoated meadowlarks liltin,g and tossing their liquid g0ld notes straight to heaven; the d~sert flowers such a mass of gorgeous, voluptuous oloom as dazzle the eye - ca-ctus, blood-te·d and gold ·[...] |
![]() | [...]-:.c{l-- -h •,< -eld o,men att~r-e,d do wn the· tr i.l f.rom[...]1 from the , llow po l , o he . an Jose R:i er, jats of[...]I have en, or wo,me:n o,f th.e GangeJ. Then, the morn.1ng l-i< ght .· -.. t -es the. s,t e 1es of tb: t ,, i-. --tDI\Vered[...]1 .Spa 1is:h -issi on ~ n the c·rest ol the hill;, and d1e dull[...]1 -ello . S 11 Jose· and the tu gi.d, m.uddy river fi,o ~-S· 1e n conse:rv·atory·, be cius e. herl! is 0£ the ._ f?ry, es,s-enee[...]1 o:f the . un. Th ~- wi _d popp1e shme on the dese t |
![]() | 90 ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA their life from the sun. .And the blue ·forget-me-nots are lik·e bits of heaven, because their face,s shine with the light of an unclouded sky from dawn to dark. Y01.1 see the cQuntless herds of sheep at'ld goats and cattle a-n d horses b·elonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, pe·rhap,s, by· .a little girl on horseback, or a coupl'e of boys lying among the sage brush; but the figures come tQ your eye unreal and out of all per- spective, the ho.rse.s and cattle,. exaggerated by heat mirage, long an·d leggy like camels in Egypt, the boys and girls li(ted by the refraction of light cle-ar off earth altogether, un)::eal ghost figures, the bleating lambs ,a nd kids envel0ped i.n a purple,[...]ng and unreal as a. poet's vision. It adds to the glamour of th,e unreal as the sun mounts higher, 11n.d the planed ramnart mo·untain walls encirclimg the mesa begin to shimmer and ,shift and lift fr@m e.a rth in mirage altogether. You hear th.e bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of h&rds of thousand$ going cl.own to a wa,[...]ese Indians are not poor; not poor by any mt~ans. The-ir pottery and baskets bring them ready money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little c0rn patches suffice for m-ea.l. The_n the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; arfd you pass into a large saucer-shaped valley engirt as "before by the troweled yellow tufa walls; a lake of light, wher~ the flocks lift in mirage, lanky and unreal. |
![]() | [...]AC0iv1A 91 Alm9st the spell -a nd lure of a S2.I:iara ate upon y·ou,[...]b of towering granite in a purple sea. I, |
![]() | [...]d Hodg-e has w,axe'd hott'er and hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa w-itl1out any finale to the dispute; and far be it from an outsicler like myself to umpire w-arfare -a mid the gods of the antiqu.ariar1; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acom-a I ndians may explain the whole m11tter; and t:h.at both men may be partly rignt? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, rep.arts that once[...]structed in fh·e ,mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council roo,m or k:i'&a., i-t is[...]ne Acomas to blind- fold him and send hitn to the top of the En-ch-a.n.t~tl Mesa for a n,i ght's lonely vi[...]blation to th-e spirits. Tl1ese jars· e:i,cplain the pi:es- enc.e of potte$y,. which Lummis descri[...]tlenee to ·a t least periodic in.habiting of the Mesa,. The ab~ence ,o f house ruins, on the other, hand, would e.xplain why Hodge scouted Lum- mis' theory. The India11s e;x-plainecl to Miss McLain tha,t a.[...], $'ubstantia-te. |
![]() | [...]93 slab, is a human wall, the wall · of an adobe st 'eetful of houses, li tle wr.ndcr . · look1.ng out fl 1 · ·. :i h the 1 pr cip~ ce. line like the portholes of a ship. ·. he · . you looks fo · al the world like t e top story of a cat .e .t _ herf ot of the sa . d h·11, I as·k .Flill Ki, why, now and. arou.nd the ston e st'ep - i\Rd stone l ,,d'1ers, a_.d[...]p,. ha ·e. Th .· fe t gf all the Hopi are abnormalty small, |
![]() | [...]CHANTED MESA OF ACOM-I\ purely cause a,nd effect. The foot is not flat and broad, becauS'e it is constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the Hopi W'omen look at r.ny broad-soled, bo.x-to-ed 01,1tin:g boots in ama,zement. At hard spots in the climb, they would turn a.n,d point to my boots and ofter me help till I sh0w:ecl th€m that the sole, though thick, was pliable • as a moccas1n. The little girl signaled; did I want to ,go up? I nod.decl. Sht signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; _or the long, easy path by· the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well as foothold, and the saind promised to roll you back fast as you climbed up, I sigpal@d the hard way; antl off we set. I asked her how old sh[...]her eyes. She thot1ght a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winn:owed one hand -as of wincl-the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation[...]be bad boy,'' too, by a11d by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white civiti,zation. tl1at is encreaching[...] |
![]() | [...]- of k dale ~ . nd a puts .: , a~d the har - as.:ee ,t on e 0 f thethe La,gq; · a people if the a stone ·step 1 and we ·re O ' - top of the white lime::tone· Mesa, in the t.o .. ,ri Cl.f AC'oma,_with it& I st, 2:n[...] |
![]() | the .first root reached by a movable ladd r, the next two roofs b stone ,teps. 1 I sh,all n,o't -~ttetnpt to deac.ribe the view from ·above~ o~f s11 er on the yello, "- sa11ids. . ·he ffo·, ks of sh e .• the, 't'1p.S o _ ·the lar mesJts -ei1u.ld be se en scrub for-[...]e p,ass · .- r[...]~ d |
![]() | - ~1;;./J~---~~:--.rj .-\t the \i\~ h,oi],,e on ,.,, m..1 r;kji'r[...] |
![]() | [...]gugh to fill in a depression for a burying place. The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveya.rd is now literally a bank of human limes[...]asked my little guide to take me to Marie lteye, the only Acoma who speaks English; and I meet her now steppiqg smartly across the square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes[...]me of her seven years' life at Car- lisle. 1-t is the one wis'h of her heart that she may[...]ns hate white schools. She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the finest potte,ry makers of Acoma, are burning th:e[...]cost me $5 to $IO down at tl1e railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at the same price, which Marie has used in her own house[...]years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom. Her house we ascended by ladder to a[...]of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third story room ; and a cleaner[...] |
![]() | [...]TED MESA OF ACOMA seen in a white wom-an's house. The fire,place is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window between looking out of the precipice wall over such a vi·ew as ,a n ea.gle[...]ood and jars of drinking water stand in niches in the wall. The aGlohe floor is hard as cement, and clean. All wa11s and the ceiling ,are whitewashed. The place is spotless. '' Where do yot1 jleep, Ma[...]ee1 seme.time.'' Attd as she speaks, cotne up the stone .stairs from the r'oorn belpw, her father and br<;>ther, arnazed t[...]one through HopiandMokiandNavajoL~d. An.d all the other hoQses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact testimony to Carlisle, or the twiri-toweired church over there, o,r Marmon and[...]this I do know1. that Acoma is as different from the other I-Iopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the Bow@ry. All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting' wistfully at the bottom of the ladd~r; and the children uttt red shouts of glee to see me co:me down the ladder face out inste.ad of back- war·ds· as the Acemas descend. We descended 'ttorn the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock -ste.ps, preceded by an escort of romping c[...]d I ,say tl1e same of a three hours' visit amid the gan1ins of New .York, |
![]() | [...]COMA 99 or London? At the foot of the cliff, we shook hands all round and said good-by; afld when I looked b-ack up the valley, tl1e children were still waving and[...]all I have to say is it is infinitely superior to the hoodlum life of ot1r cities and towns.[...]your people ate Indi. ans, or Aztecs?'' and the answer came without a moment's hesitation -[...]like Navajo ancl. Apaches.'' Oppo-sfte the Ench.a nted Mesa, I looked back. My[...] |
![]() | · CHA;PTER VI ACROSS THE PAJNTED DESE'RT THRO UGH NAVAJO LAND HEN you leave the Enchanted Mesa at |
![]() | [...]01 by the hunter ·· ~o, on your ay into th White 1540 the- ,paniards hi!d no Emot 1t gle n.'ng of their _ .hit~ Mou.-[...]1 1 natural b _f~dg._ in the ·10 l~, a brid,g _ so hug.e tha~[...]s -ction f11,rB1s. can be- Gttlt.iv:at.ed abio.ve the c _ntral sp.an~- thro,ug· - th,e . _ ·bite Mountar·~_Js ----.... tw·o -e·el<.ij at the the Coconino Forests and h.e Tusayam aacl the l(ai- only for oile of the e tht ee trips,. ta . e the ast one ; |
![]() | 102 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT of gaudy-colored sand_, with the romance and the adventure and the movement of the most p.icturesque horsemen and her dsmen in Ameri[...]at all I You know that as soGn as you go up over the first high m€-sa from the beaten highway and ·d rop down over into ai1Qthe[...]saw. It isn't America at ·all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of ouf Painted Besert are these Navajo boys - a red sear£ biiadirig back the hair, the hair in a l1a,rcl-knottecl. c0il ( not a b.raid),[...]haki trousers or white cotton pantaloons slit te> the kne,e, and m:o·ceasins, with m0re silver-work, a[...]essings as would put an Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the r-eo sand knobs - you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their hogan houses amon:g the juniper g.roves, cr·oss- ing the yellow plain, scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color mo[...]ncl. Or else you see where a-t night a11d morning the water comes up through the arroyo heel in pools of stlv·e r; receding only durlng the heat of the day; an.d moving thro11gl1 the j uniper groves, 0ut from the oqb,er rocks that scre€n the des:ert like the wings Gf. a theater, d0wn the ·p anting sand bed or tl1e dead river, trot vast herds of sheep an.cl goats, the young bleat- bleating till the air -quivers - driven by little Navajo girls on |
![]() | h1ors b.ark , born to the s,a ddl , as the t:ana-a•·,.ail Cree 1s ·-.orn to the. canoe. Ii ·yo·u. n ·· ,go to Z ufii find an d th.,e · .hi te : - oun- 1~ , 1 ta in Forest an.d the P2rintetl Desttrt, then cheoise tl1e of a trip t:o the O ·i nt w~t . out thie @ -pense or dis- jumping ,off pla.c1e - in the Coconino ~ n . Tusa:" n. o ·,ests of th.e G a- cl Cafi6n. ·-_nd the lu -e of the rr· ruin ·f .· merica.," de la · . d one of the lead~ ,g eth jo• 019,g y at Rome,. c,l the mo.re undecided we bec1ome· Chal y) , and rn 0 ,ne of the rock wall . h-.gh ~hove the t,ream: y[...]d i · high pr,ehist[...] |
![]() | 104 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT , dozen of our national White House. Who built the aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What[...]to those questions. Your ·guess is as good as the. next; and you haven't to go all the Way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to 'do your guessing, but[...]and driver $ 14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a well-planned trip of six months; and a-t the end of your tri·p you will know, as, y,ou could not at the-beginning, that you have barely entered the m.argi11 of the wonclers in this Navajo Land,. To strike int·o the Painted Desert, you ~art leave tne beaten[...]on; but to cross it, you sh0u.ld enter at th.e extreme east and 'drive- west, 0r enter w[...]L0cal liver:y·men have drivers who know' the. w.ay ftorn point to point; and the charge, including driver, horses and ha:y[...]ake along, a white, or Inclian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve~ for water is as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools where you will b_e spending your no.oning and ca,mp fo·r the night. Camp in the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months - .July and August-[...] |
![]() | the v·el et blue. of p-an y for r-0,of., ,a .1d the sta.-s will 1 ~w1~ ·.~ d.0 n. so elos e i - th,e ar·~, cl€ar Des.e rt ·:air that[...]e Jae ·'. o'~la11terns.~. Because. y 0 ~. are in the 1 1 Desert, d , ·t i't del[...]d, y as a blast out 0 f a fur,·- acel though. the· heat is 1 n ·. _:r s -r6'"n:,~.; bu[...]e~t, and . .p to the pre.~, .nt,I tJ1e Missio,n a£ St. Michaet.'·s,.[...], ha. . - _b n ope·n t 0 all comers · ·r ouing the Des.[...]1 egarded as an .insult. It ls a type o: the old~time 'boa .- d, •~ nd if you[...]' . by th~ lor d of th~. ma. ,.io r with th.e s··mple ·and abso-[...]ake greec1ily ,and literally, with no sen ~ of the |
![]() | 106 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much a~ the Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern Ari- zona, has yearly spent thou[...]ced and stay uaurged and depart reluctantly. . In the old days, when y0ur, Spanish grandee enter'" tain[...]ell, it may work out in Goldsmith's comeey, whete the two travelers mistake a mansiori for an inn. But where the. arrivals came in r~lays of ttorn one to a dozen[...]e·a k out in patronizing prin,t, it is ti.me for the Mission and Da_y's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kit<i:hen qttarters for sueh as they. In the old days:, Quality s•a t above the salt; Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes .s pread 011 the floor. I ,vould respectfully off er a suggestion as to salti,t1g clown much of the freshness that weekly pesters the fine old baronial ho.spitality of fh·e Painted D[...]orm.e d his host that. he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his at such an ho•u.r. There was the drurnmer who ordered the gaughter of th~ hous~ '' to hustle; the fodder ,'~ - |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 107 There was the lady who stayed unasked for three known to Am-erican travelers as Algiers an@ the |
![]() | 1·08 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town till you are presently on the high north€rn mesa among scrub juniper and[...]mosphere, as life-giving as atty frost air of the North. The yt:llow ocher rocks close ori. each side in w[...], w·h ete they charge t en tents a glass for the privilege . of their sprin·g . There i$ the same pro fusion of gor- geous desert flowers, qyed in the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Ene~anted M ,e sa - globe eaetus and yellow p[...]pod rnottle·d as its vroto- type's skin. And the trail still climbs till you dro,p sheer over the eeige of the sky-line and se,e a. new world swimming below[...]henn lights are of hyperbo.r ean realm. It is the Painted Desert~ and it isn't a flat sand plain[...]purple anel red hills receding f t·.om you i.o. the waves of a -s ea to the beltedr misty mountains rising up sheer \ in[...]ow rock, and three Zuni boys are loping along the trail in f tont of you - red headband, hair in a brai,d, recl sash, velvet trousers - the n1ost famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite ot their short, squat st'ature. The Navajo trusts to his p9t1y, and so is a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 109 Zuni[...]Holbrook, |
![]() | 110 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT .a nd Mrs. Da.y, two of the best known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the co,n vent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive structure of brick and stone, equal to -a ny of the famotls Jesuit and Ursuline schools so famous in the history o_f Que·hec. And at this• litt[...]ozen build- ings, is being lived over agai'n the same heroic drama that Father Vim.a.qt and Mother Mary pf the Incar- nation opeped in New Franee three cen[...]elf-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work of M .iss Dre:X:e_l's missiona.ries prorni~.es to be more perm.anent.than that to the Huro·ns and Al,gonquins of Qu~bec. They are[...]mission. They are le-avimg them Indians with the leaven of a new grace wo.r king in their hearts. The Navajos are to.:day 22,0.@0 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins -alive to-day, ·you ca[...]m p'illar to post, they wer:e destroy.e.d by the civilization they had embraced; but the N.a vajos have a realm perfectly ~dapted to[...]hment on th.at R.eserve, Father Web- bet, of the Fr~nciscans, has set his face like adamant.[...]putting up mon-uments to these workers among the Navajos . • |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 111 Meanw[...]ow· nor care what they are |
![]() | 1-ifl ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT ' legends, of -all the a11thentic, known patterns of their |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 113 drawings are to Orie11tal work. Thent there is the their studies on the Indian's own account of himself, |
![]() | r 14 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT and when he has saved tn'1>ney[...]should probably have· been put up at eitherc the Fr·anciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch ,; but being w0tnen we were condu~ted a mile f arth.er 'd own the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mis- sion School for[...]graclt. There are in all fourteen members of the sisteihood here, much th·e same type o.f Wf>men ,in biFth an·d station and tra,inin,g as the polished no.bility ·t h.at fot1nded the first· r@ligious institutions. of New France. P erhaps, because thethe t empta-ti00 to be good shc;>uld be grea. te[...]si0n to be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indiarn girls in one yatd; laymen helper·s tearching Nav.ajo boys base,. ball on the ogen ~o.m mon; and f"rom o.ne of the t1pper halls comes the sou.n d of a brass band tuning up for future festiv·ities. We were presently ensconced in the quarters,· set aside for guests; roo[...] |
![]() | ACROSS THE PA1NTED DESERT 115 two gen[...]em.p tations |
![]() | CHAPTER VII ACROSS TH.E PAINTE]) DESERT TH'ROUGH NAVAJO[...]HERE ar e two ways to travtl evert off the beaten trail. One is to take a map, stake .- out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up t[...]n g,oing at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring of the Painted Desert, of the, light lying in shimmering heat layers split by the ref r.action of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an atmo·s phet~ with the tang of t1orther.n ozone and the resinous scent 0f incense and fratikincense and myrrh. Y oli can see the Desert flowers that vie with the sun in, brilliant coloring; and feel the Desert night sky come down so close to you that you want to reach up a hand and pJuck the jack•o'-lante,r n stars swinging $0 low through the pansy-velvet mist. You can even catch a flying glimpse of the most pictu·resque Indian race in Amer~ica, the Navajos. Their hogans or circt1lar, mud-wattled houses, are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and jt1st when you think you are most alone, · driving through the sagebrush and dwarf jurtiper,[...] |
![]() | ACRQ.SS THE PAINTED DESERT 117 the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attenti0n to[...]lls and vales, only your Easte1'n rivers flow all the |
![]() | [...]• • 118 ACROSS THE PAINTED DES'ER,_f |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 119 but the local agency provided him with an i.ntet- |
![]() | 120 ·ACRO·SS THE PAINTED DESERT was that of a few years ago, when the Indian agent peremptorily ordered a _Navajo to bri11g his c)iild in to th.e Agency School. Not -so did Marmon an·d Pratt sway the Incli·ans at Laguna, when the Pueblos there were persuaded to send their c:hild[...]mptory orders for children to come to sGhool; but the rna-rtinet mandate w·e.nt forth. Now, the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also stipulates that the school shall l5e placed within reach of tne child; and the Navajo kn.ew t'hat he was within his right i11 refusing to let the chili leave home when the Govern.ment h-ad failed to place the school within such distance of his li.ogan. He was thep. warned by the agent that un- le.ss the child were sent within a certain time, troops- w&[...]d they were still within their right in refusing. The·re eaIJ be no doubt bt1t that if Ca:p- tain Will[...]elf, had been in direct command ' of the cretachment, . the cowardly. murder would not have occurre<si; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops arrived o,n the scene in charg,e of a hopelessly incompetent subo[...]a bully bu.t a most arrant c0ward. Ac- cording to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of t[...] |
![]() | , ACROSS THE PAINTED D·E SERT 12r ers, who have talked witl1 the N avaj0s present, say |
![]() | [...]SERT great lone Reserve and do not take with you the A·s we had not yet lea:i'ne·d h0w to do the Painted to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs |
![]() | [...],eas. -·· ands 011, Q}esa t1igh above the plan1[...] |
![]() | [...]1 th.ick and hard to b - a-the. ·. · ·d you ca.n g'O hara a-n d. W ' · ve your arm:s ab ov-e th,e top of th~ wtr 1 ·. 1[...]So -1gh you a e - you did not eahz.e 1t - that the the :~carcity of· .wate~,, thou,gh n o r wa.y @u't: just Then the trail bega.n d,r o pJJi·ng dow •. , down itt[...].a ts .and. sheep s:eemed to be catnlng Gut.· |
![]() | ·124 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT men rode up and down the arroyo bed as graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store building s.m oking. Huge wool wagons loaded three lay'e rs de'ep with the season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. W Qin en with children squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in the Painted Decsert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in the clos-e-·f itting plush shir-ts; color in the Ger.man town blankets - for the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in t.he blood-red[...]he;r e riders or herds of sheep were scourin_g up the sandy arroyo. No wonder Burbank and Lungten afid Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land of mystery a11d half-to[...]sert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best work being dqne- in the art world to-day. If this work were done in Europ[...]us it comm-a nds only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pte- Ra_phaelites ever did in the Holy, Lands · equals in expressiveness and pow-er L1mgren's studies of the Desert; though th€ Pre-Raphae]ites commande-cl[...]our artists one thousand and tvv'o thousand. The Navajo dtiver nodded back to us that this |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTEB DESERT 125 was Ganado[...]r. |
![]() | 126 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT blankets. On the walls of the office are more pic- rures; on the Boors" more rugs; in the s.a f es and case-s., specimens of rare silver-work that somehqw again remind you of the. affinity between Hind00 and N a,rajo. Mr. Hu[...]r busi11esa in wool, and yearly e.xtel'1ds to the Navajos credit for amounts runnin,g from tw·[...]which they have never yet betrayed. Along the walls of the living-toon:i are doors opening to the sleeping apartments; and in e~ch of the many gue.s t rooms are more pictures, more ru-gs. Behind the livin,g-toom is a placito flanked ·by the • kitchen and cook's quarters. Now wh[...]-a1'1d; a m,an with friend'S, who would lil<e the privilege of ·d ying for him; also with enem[...]tl1e pr,i'Vilege of helping him to die. What the, chief factors of the Huds~n's Bay Cpmpany us.ed to b,e., to the Indians of tl1e North, Lorenzo Hubbell has been to the Indians of' the Desert --- frie-ncl, guard, counselor, with a[...]befriend when help was needed; always and to the l1ilt an enemy to ·the cheap-jack politician wbo came to exploit the Indian, though he might have to ·beat the rascal ~~t his 0wn ga,me ot putting ttp a bigger bl1rff. In appearance, a fine type of the cou rtly Spanish-American gentleman with[...] |
![]() | ACROSS THE PAINTED D,ESERT 127 Castilian[...]keeps you guessing |
![]() | [...]1 p o .es h:is lo . e , y uymg. of ra -sil~ver, bul ion f?": m the ,s-, anr rd.s; llut t~ , _. ay:, If yo _~buy th~~r thi11.~s-· n th,e 'big Western cities, he,y which th,ethe tutgu0··se happens t'0 b, ; and JOU ha e th,[...]1 bought 0 1. t Qn 'the Re~· ·rvJ!. Among, th,e , _av jos,, the •'a.men w -~ ve t , e 'bla,n• ,. the, · omen ar . th ,g:r eat potte y mak rs..[...] |
![]() | [...]1 to ·the, int: cac · of the . or ,,., the pla·n nati e w,ool s :a _e,s, situck up in. the gr011ntd r~t1tch - ~s - a:nd w- t _;cd[...]1 too h:-avy f _r the climl_-_ te., H e 't1Se,s th e c·heap and[...]1 driver who .kne · the. tr,a.·1, . _- e -·, · t out' ftt.orn ,G anadP[...]1 up -to the pres,e nt -._ ,_,_ . ubb e '1 b.as fr eely[...] |
![]() | ,n ot beca,u.se th,e pub:.li c t:rve _ , r., Hubbell less., but[...]'' - - 91 Th,e mornin,g air --~- --u, e i ine. The hi ls ---ere1 veiled i 1·1[...]p·ne -- 1,o ·• h -.. th,e r · d sunrise tam e[...], t'he sumrn·t- th Franci~co - ~ o.,u.n tain,s· 0 f Flagst ff 1 fa~ to the South· a.nd Y'O a "_ on. h•'. g · :_~-ge'brus[...]Ji en it to nothing hut t .e app,ea,rance of the sea th,e M as o ,·the _, oki ,a. >id · -avajo Lan,d lying Ji e[...]a edge be e -ft th s, tw.o belt . |
![]() | [...]r down a sand banl{ and find yourself between the yellow pumice walls of a blind citl-de-sac in the roclt. - r.iooning plaee - wl1ere a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out of the uppe1· angle of r~ck, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone. H ere cowboys of the long•ago days, when this ,vas a no-man's-la[...]from pollution and painted hands of blood on the walls of the cave roof abov,~ the ·spri·ng. Wfierev'e·r you find pools in the Des·ert, there the D½s~·r t silence is broken by life; 11nbrok[...]e Jays arid bltrebir,ds flashing phantoms in. the sunli,ght, th·e wild doves fluttering in flo[...]' J This spring is about 'half of the- fifty-five miles half of the trail is but a continuance of the first: |
![]() | 10 2 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT in every respect as the be·st educational institutions of the East. At the Agency- Otlie~ hef-e you must obtain a petmit to •g<:> bfi into Moki Land·; for the Three M€sas and Qraibi and. Hotoville are the Ultima Thule of the trail acr0ss the Painte<il Desert. Here you fincl tribes comjp1etely untouched by civili- zation and as hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) a:s when the Spa:ni();rd first came among them. 1n faet, the Gnly remnants of Spanish inHu- en€e·- left at some of these me'sas are the dwa-:rfed peach· orc·hards growing in the arid santls. These were planted centuries agq by the Spanish padres. The tr4ding post manai ecl by Mr. Lorenzo Hub- bell,[...]his father's establish,rnent at Ganado. Here is the same fiqe old Spani,sh hospitali.ty. Bere, too,[...]n paintings. There a:r.e rugs from every part of the Navajo Land, and specimens of p0ttery 'from the ThTee Mesas - especially f.r@m N am,paii1 the wonclerful w·ornan pot- tery maker of the First Mesa -- and fine silver-work gathered from the NaYajo ·silversmiths. And with it all is th,e graeious periection of tl1.e art th~t' con- ceals art, the air that you are <;:onf erring a favor on the host to a.ccept rest in a little rose-covered bower of two too.ms a-nd a parlor p}laced at the com- mand of gu'ests. · The last lap of the drive across the Painted Des- ert is by all odcls the hardest stretch of the r.oad, as well as the most intete6tin,g. It is here the Mokis, or H opi, have their reservation in the very heart |
![]() | [...]1, 1 ab,o,ve -the pla'ins - ·of y ll0w , ifa and hite , yp um[...]1 but f-0r ·the C e:st he perch the · oki village, . ·, ti[...]of · 12a"nted Oi. d at their ·feet in_g w· ~r up to th., - \e hi _ ltopJ;,.; bt1t th day oi r~id lea ned one good rea~ot'l why the dw •lltrs of thi and th.en it blew some. .o e~'' B· the ime we |
![]() | 134 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT reached the sandy plain b"elow, such a hurricane had broken a[...]of Labrador, when for six hours we could not see the sea: for the foam. Tl1e billov.rs of sand literally liftecd. Yoi1 could not see the sandy plain for ,a dust fine a,s flour that wiped[...]land.mark three feet ahead of your horses' noses. The w~eels sank hub cleep in sand. e>f trail, not a sign was left; and you he~rd the same angry roar a·s in a hurricane at sea. But like the eter.oa,._l roclrs, dim and serene a,n d high above the turmoil, stood the First M.esa village of M0ki L and. Perhaps after[...]they we re doing when they built .so. higl1 above the dust storms. Twice the rear wheels lif ted for a glori@us upset; but we veered and tacked a-n d whipped the ·fagged horses on. For three hours the hurricane lasted, an:d when finally it sank with an angry growl and we came ou~ of the fifteen miles of sand into sagebl:'ush .and looked back., the rosy tinge of an afterglow lays on the ,gr-ay pile of stone where the Moki town crests th,e top of the lofty mesa. In justice to travelers and D ese[...]c.ertain spring months. So mu€h in fairness to the Pain.ted Desert. Next, I haye cursorily g.iven slight details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers to think the Painted Desert can be cros·sed with the comfort of a Pullman car. You have to pay[...] |
![]() | ACROSS THE p ' I _--T, D DES[...]es ible t · lker ~. · ,,ell ·- e came to the p,o int wh-e,re not ,a soul in 1 the ca. rr•·a,ge c,ould utt ·r a. -,, ,o r d fo.r[...]~ old~timer we o: .g ht to ha ._. ti,: d et han · 'k,e r ch1e ,~-s[...]ros,s ou-.r mo ths. Glas e·s , c had to .k ·eep the cl , t[...]1 tn get rid of ,i ·• on the bak" nf( ha e rode ·1d stood above '£ · ufas,[...]Pueb1lo s li1ld th~ir reli~g1ous .rite - bef ore the c,oming of the Spamia.rds. a. d b,. tter tha · th,e T ·_ e ,_,_ esa . The mesas, are i :- descr~bably,[...] |
![]() | 136 ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT quarters,, the adobe hard as cement, tl1e rooms di- vided into s[...], cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the Grand Caiio11, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeot1s as the Can9,n. I£ it had not been that the season was ver:gir1g on the su.m m€t ta1ns, which floo'd the Little Colorado, we sqould ha-ve go1,1e on from Oraibi to the Grand Canon. But the Littl~ Colorado is ft1ll of quicks'cl,,nds, dan,g[...]n of a generous host's horses;· so we came bac1( the way we had entered. As we • drove down the win.ding trail that corkscrews from Oraibi to the sand plain, ,a grot1p of Moki women[...]nd met us just as we were tu'r ning out ba-cks on the Mesa. ''We love you,'' exclaimed an old woman extend- ing her hand ( the Gove,r nment d0cto.r interpreted for us),[...] |
![]() | [...]area 0 f on~ ·and g,:ate k ·lo· t1 1 as the Petrified Foi-ests, the upland pine parks of · he r'tory of the Grand Ca.~,on, a · d the - estern s op, be~ ~ 'eedless. to s[...]could spend a go, -d two weeks in each area, and the . n.i~gs of t'he - onder.s i.n each. Fo - instance, th[...]ri ed,. · lso, aft~,r y.,oq have v'~e,w·e,d the ca~o s an,d |
![]() | 138 THE GRAND CANON - in the Desert., you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of Montezuma's Castle and Monte- ~ijma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the Great Natural Bridge of ·s outhern Arizona, or[...]slow a great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge meteorite. Of the Grand Ca:iion little need be said here; not because there is nothin,g to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all the sc1entific explanations yo,u can give, are so utterly inadequate. You can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole length of the Grand Canon - 200 miles - and hundreds of the lesser caiio11s that strike off sidewise from Gr[...])Gplored and u.nexploitecl. Then, whe.n you cross the Continental Divide and come on down to the Angel~s Forests iri from Los Ang«les, a.nd the Clev·e- - land in from San Diego, you are in[...]e of 200 people a month go out to one ot other of the Petrified Forests. From Flagstaff, I oo people a month go in to see the eliff dwellings. Not less .~han 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canon tnd 100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the J\ngel€s and Cleveland Forests. And we are but at the be.ginning of tb,e discovery of our own Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National • |
![]() | ~ THE GRAND CANON 139 |
![]() | [...],-,J. ' THE GR,A ND CANON In fa,t t, you driv'e across tne southern rim of the Painted . . Dese,r t to reach the Petrified ForecSts. You ~ . are crossing the aromatic, s.a gey-sm,e1ling dry plain |
![]() | There is nothing else r en1otely re-<,_e111bli11g the Grand Cai'i@M in tbe known w0rld 1 a nd no[...] |
![]() | "'-J THE G RAND CA-WON |
![]() | 141. THE GRAND CANON - nre-rcially and shipped avv[...]s t0 be pol- ished. You ean see s·otne shafts of the polished specimens i11 ~ny of the big Easterµ museums; but it was found that the petrified wood requir-ed ma- chinery as expe·nsive and ,:fine as for diamoflds to effect a hard polish, ana the thJng was not com- merci-ally po.ss.ible; so the PetriEetl Ro rests will never be vandalized. You lunch uncler a natural bridge formed. by the huge shaft o.f a prone giant, artd ste,p o·ff mo[...]n emperor's thr@ne ;. bat always you come back to the first pleasures of a ch.ild- picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been[...]into coloted diarnon.ds. I said do·n 't g~ to the Petrified FoTests eocpecting a big th.rill. Yet if you have. ey,es that really see, and go th.e.r e a"fter a rain when every siAgle bit of to·ck is ashine with the colors of brokfn rainbows; or go there at high n_[...]back in spa.ngles of light - there is. something the matter with you if you don't have a big thrill wi[...]B.'' Thert is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests·, which you will get if you kn[...]letely miss if you cl@n·'t. All these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of th·e days wh<tn Arizona was a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevens9n, the custodian at Adamana, was one of |
![]() | [...]143 the: me,n alo:ng ith. Commo ,or e Owen o,f' S,a·n Di[...]1 and Be;r t Potter of' the o,testry De,_pa ·tm ,nt, Wa h• f~o,m a lyn.chi.ng art i.~ the old sh eep and cat ~[e[...]· it .· and doz , · ~ of of e.rs h can tell of the of the Sho,w Lo , Ra:n,eh and al ·t 'he . 50,0,0 0 wort[...]11 thre g th1 Pa"- t d Desen yon a e jus |
![]() | [...],_, 144 THE GRAND CANON able precipices ,a nd have bricked up the faces _of memory of the white race; and the cliff houses give |
![]() | THE GRAND CA.NON 145 and the Well, where you can stay at very trifling · When you reach the Grand Cafion, you have c.ome |
![]() | [...]A go o ff --· : op the C,;.iion Qn a campJng t ip of weeks or mont:hs. wide -as the city of ,, ew Tork is long; and as dee"p |
![]() | [...]THE GR[...]ll I°'ngt·h--. d-'- o·z-' /!:!J•'nS o·f· ·the-m- ·.m e-a-ch m-·11e 11' -e~· t,i!i·1'b- ·al[...]1 moµnt:ain, you have to _go up. At the Grand ,Canon In fact, if thethe h·eigh.: ,o f the1Se ma~sive _ , fourte,e~ mil .· s - and o · rlook the panorama of |
![]() | [...]1 tr: m across the Colorad,o River, t,o the · a·bab Pla- Don't!' Sa e you.r do .ars and wa · the.m. bo h. of this huge amp i.t'h,eater~ Th,e -. pace filling talker |
![]() | ,-, THE GRAND CANON 149 erosion '[...]ower '' for his next sermon. Personally, I prefer the old pagan way of expressing thes·e things in the ·s hort cut of a personifying god who d,id a smashing big business with th.e hammer of Thor, or the sea ~orses: of N ep- tune or the forked lightnings of old loud-thundering Jove. You can walk down Bright Angel Trail to the river at the bottom of the Canon; bt1t unless your legs have a pair of very good benders under the knees, you'll not be able to walk up that trail the same day, for the w-a y down is steep as ·a stair and the distance is sev·en miles. In that case, better spend the ni'ght at the camp known as the lndian Gardens, half-way do·w n in a beautifully watered dell; or else have the regt1lat daily party bring down the mules for you to the river. Or y·ou can join the regular tGurist party both g@iAg down and com- in[...], two of us rose at four A. M . and walketl down the trail dut-in.g sunrise, leavi~g order~ for a special guide to fetch mules down for us to the ·r iver. Spac_e forbids details· of the tramp, except to say it was worth the effort, twice over w0rth the effort in spite of knees that s,e nt up pangs a1[...]r a week. It had rained heavily all night and the path was very slippery; but if rain brings out the colors of •[...] |
![]() | [...],-..J • |
![]() | ,..., THE GRAND CANON 151 where a tiny waterfall trickled with the sound of |
![]() | 152 THE GRAND CANON Boucher, one of the beauty-loving souls who first fou_nd his way into the ceJ,lter of the Cafion ancl built his own trail to one o[...]rst ·haunts.. lJouis used to live under the arch f0r-med by the Dripping Sprin,g s; but Loqis has long since left, and the trail is falling away and is now one. for[...]th,at kiJ'ld of • a trarl,, take the trip; for it is the best and wildest •[...] |
![]() | CHAPTER I X THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE T lies to the left of the city Plaza-a long, low, |
![]() | 154 THE GOVERNOR''S PALACE Reed- whethe:r any prehistoric race d,velt where |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 155 writing '' Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace; or the fact that three different flags flung their folds[...]ows that Spanish power gave place to MexiGan, and the Mex- ican regime to American rule. Also, that General Lew v'\Tallace wrote '' Ben Hur '' in a back room of th,e Palace, w11i1e he was gover,n or of New Mexico. A[...]nta Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in the modern United St2tes of America. The don- keys trotting to market under loads of wood, the ragged peon riders bestriding burros no higher than a saw horse, the natives t talking _past in bright serape or blank[...]ite traded from Indian tribe to Indian tribe, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the interior of New Spain., is brought before the vic.e roy. Do you know who he is? He is Jean l,'Archeveque, the Fre-nch-Canadiar-1 lad who helped to murder La Sa[...]exas. • What are the Freach d.oi11g down on Trinity Bay? Do they in ten cl to explore and claim this part of America, too? In the abuses of slavery among the Indians for five years, the lad |
![]() | [...]• 156 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE |
![]() | THE GOVERNO·R'S PALACE 157 He has[...]ell keeps record. She had fled to her father; but the father, fearin.g the power of the Vieeroy, had sent her back to the man; and the man has killed her with his brutalities. (I have this whole story from a li11eal descendant of the family.) The woman throws back her rebozo, drops to her knees be-fere the Viceroy, and dema.nds justice. The Viceroy thin_ks and thinks. A woman more or less I What does it matter? .The woman's father had been , a·f raid to act, evidently. The husband is. a member |
![]() | [...]• 158 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE • saddled l1im a11cl rode out absolutely alone for the Ute was once struck dead in the Governor's pres- |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 159 ing tracler in marriage for the chief's son. The |
![]() | 160 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE bined custom house and prison. The combination was deeply· expressive of Spanish tule in those early days, for indepen·d ent of what the American's white- tented wazgon might co.nt~in -b[...]$500 was lev,i ed against each mule-team wagon of the Ameri- can trad~r. Did a trader protest, or hola[...]romptly clapped in irons. It w,,as eheaper to pay the duty than buy a release. The walls of both the Fonda and the Gareta were of tremendous thickne-ss-; four to S:[...]id adobe, which was hard as our modern cement. In the walls behind the Ga.r eta and on t'.he walls behind th·e Palace, pitted b·ulle.t holes have been found. Beneath the holes • was embeddetl Human hair. |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 1 61 whe[...]hundred |
![]() | [...]d water a·n d pas- turage were chosen ahead by the scouts. Wagons kept to.g ether in groups of fot[...]ctrcle for defense with nien and beasts inside thethe scouts and sharp-- shooters could bring down. A[...]pasturage; and then stampede mules and oxen. In the confusion, wa,gor,is would be o verturned and looted. As the lqng white caravans c.a me to their jour- ney's en.d a,t SAnta Fe, literally the whole Spanish and Indian population crowded to the Plaza in front of the Palace. ~' Los Americanos I Los Carros! La Caravana ! ' ' - were the shouts rmging througl1 tl1e streets; and Santa F[...]week's fair or barter. Wagons were lin.ed up at the custom house; and the trade'r pr~s,ented himself before fhe Spanish ,g[...]oft spolcen, very pro- ft1se of compliments w,as the in.tervi-e,v; but divested of profound bows and flowery cop:ipliments, it ended 'in the American paying $ 500 a- w:agon, or losi.ng his goods. The goods were then bartered at a stag- .gering advan[...]h sold at $2 5 a yard, linen at .$ 4 a yard, and the price on other[...] |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 163 goods[...]reciot1_s stones. Trav·e lers from Mexico to the outside world went by stage or private om.nibus w[...]of stories could be ,vtitten of adventures among the yot14g Spanish nobility going out to se·e the world. The stage fare ,rarie.d f.r om $ 160 to $2 50 far as the Mississippi. Though Stephen B. Elki11s went to Ne[...]ld bullion past ·t he highwaym·e11 who infested the .st.age route., was. always a probl€m. I knqw o[...]b.and's drafts and Elkins' gold rpund her waist. The w-ay grew hotter and hotter. The Gld lacly unstrapped the buckskin retitule - looking, for all the world, like a, woman's carry-all - and threw- it up on top of the stage. An hour larer, hig·hwaymen '' went through '' the passengers. Ri11gs, watches, jewels, coin w·ere take11 off the travelers; and the |
![]() | 164 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE mail bags were looted; but the bandits never thought |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 165 To-day the reception hall and, indeed, the rooms of the center Palace present some of the finest mural paintings in America. These have been placed on the walls by the Archreological School of America which with tl1e I-1ist@rical Society occupies' the main portions of the old building. You see drawings of the coming of the first Spanish caravels, of Coro- nado, of Don Diego de Vargas, who was the Frontenac of the So.uthwest, reconquetin.g the prov- inces in 1680-94, abot1t the same time that the greaf Frontenac was playing his part in French Canada. There are pictures, too, <Df the carava11s crossing the plaiFJs, of the coming of Amel'ican oc.ct1patio,n, of the Mo1{i and Hopi and Zt1ni ptreblos, of the Mis- sions of whicl1 or1ly rui11.s to-day m.arl~ the sites in the Jemez, at Sandia, and away ot1t- in the Desert of Abo. To the left of the reception roon1 is an excellent art gallery of Southwestern subjects. Here, artists of the growing Southweste111 ScJ;iool s.e nd their work[...]ition and sale. It is significant that within the last few yeais prices have gofle up frotn a fe:w[...]us;ands. N ausbaum's • photographic work of the modern Ind-i an is one of the striking features of the Palace. 0£ course, there are pictures by Curtis and Burbank and Sharpe and others of the Southwestern School; but perh,a ps the most interesting rooms to the newcome,r, to the visitor, who d0esn't know that we have an ancient Ametica1 are those where the fi1t1ral drawings are devoted to the cave dwellers and prehistoric races.[...] |
![]() | 166 THE. GOVERNOR'S PALACE These were done by Carl Lotave of Paris out on the ground of the ancient races. In conception and execution, they are among the finest murals in Amer- • 1ca. ' Long ago 1 the Governor's Palace had twin tow- ers and a chapel. Bells in the old Spanish churches were not tolled. They were struck gong fashion by an attendant, who ascended the towers. These bells weve cast of a very fine quality of old copper; and the to'ne was largely. de~ermined by the quality of the cast. Old Mission qells are ·scarce to-day in Ne[...]lectors offer .as high as $1 ,500 a,nd $3,000 for the genai.ne article. Vesper b·ells •[...]• play~d a great p.att ih the life of the glc:l Spanish r.eg,ime. Ladies might be p.romenad.ing the Plaza, wo rkmen busy over their tasks, gamblers hard at the w,heel and dice. At ves{i}er call, men;, wo,men a[...]nee,s; anq for a inOttl'ent silence fell, all but the calling of the vesper bells. Then the bells <;eased ringing, a.n d life went on in • • its no1sy stream. No account o·f the Governor's Palace ,vould be complete without s.orne mention of the ma,rvels of dress amof\g the. dons and donas 0f the old regime. Could we see them promenadin.g the Pla:za ancl the Palace a,s they paraded their gayety less than ha[...]we wot1ld imagine ourselves in some play house of th,e French Court in its most luxurious days. I[...] |
![]() | [...]liets with a .-_ it· in th··: Ce ._ te , ov,e. the _ho,ul[...]r . ·_ 'om.en of p os1tion wore·. not ha1 , but the 1 sil[...]I end back aicr·oss the left shoulder~. O n the str-eet, 1 the f'a te , as almc)' t co ered liy· this scar£.,[...]1 1 S1Um bly th.e purp ose _as t 0 conc l ch:_-, rm_,. ut[...]1 ·a 1ng hla ir and. a scar,f 0.f the finest cfil,.·, r an.d te.- -[...]tur,e t at c·ould 'bc boug:ht tn Cliina. o·- the Ind1 e.':, :,t in the .-pl n·sh f amili,es frotn th,c d._-; s- , he the ves~, .· arying all the way from .· ~oo to 2 1.000. and . . omen.; and the Gnest type of old jew. Ivy- in ·· h e. h-- t of the don wa th.e · id.~. .brimm.-d somb1. e.to. n · mented the seams of th , le.gs ·from hip to ·' ne.e. |
![]() | [...].ape. lined with bright-color(td silk com,pletetl the costume. Bridles and horse trappings were gor- geous with silver, the pommel and stirrups beiI1:g overlaid with it. The bridle was a barbacrous silver th,ing with a bit cruel enough to control tigers; and the rowels of the spurs were two or three inches long. No, thes[...]century ago; but thot1gh they were not people of the playhouse, as they almost seem to us, they are essentially a play-people. The Spaniard of the Southwest lived, not to work, bYt to play; and when he worked, it w~s only that he might play the h~rde_r. Los Americanos ·came and c'hanged all that. They tur-necl the Spanish play-world up side down ancl put work on top. Roam through the Governor's Palace 1 Call up the old ga,y life! We undoubtedly handle more money than 'th.e Spanish dons and donas of the old days; but frankly - which stand for the ·more joy out of life; those laughing phi[...] |
![]() | [...]a -1 'th e traditions. clingi~·n g rou.nd the old 1 1?.alace at Sa.nta Fe[...]1 Doa Diego de. VargaJ, the: r·econ,1,ueror of·[...],, ict ory by a proc~ss· on to the ch·u r ch whic·'h he built re:I-,gioi'U_ ce-· em ony·;· for the- ima,g:,e o.f the 'Virg~n,[...]-~'ch D e Va .g,as use . when h.~ pla:n ted the Croi.ss. on the Plaza in f ont of the 'P alace and sang the t·h e same im,age no . · u:s ·d 1n ·the theatri ca proc·es~ ion of t'he r'· ligi,ous ce·,·e:mony yearly celebrated by[...]1 in .· m _rica. The ery Indians · hose ancestors De the . ery officer·s ho marched . 1th De Var-g[...] |
![]() | 170 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE quering heroes. Co[...]sible. |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 171 potent and terrified forts. The same wave of |
![]() | 172 THE GOVERNOR''S PALACE There was a garrison of only 2 50 men at the Pal- ace; yet already the church boasted fifty friars, from eleven to seventeen missions, and convl:rts by the thousa·nds. But the 'Souls of the h.oly padres were sorely trietl by these estufa rites, '' platicas de no che,'' '' night conversations''- the priests called them. Well might all New Spain have been dis- turbed by these '' night conversatiohs.'' The sub- ject bound under fearful oath of secrecy wars nothing more nor less than the total extermination of' every white man, woman a·n d child north .o f the Rio Grande. Some unwise governor - Trevino, I think it WijS - had iss11ed an edict in r 67 5 forbidding the pueblos to hold their s€cret lodges in the estu/as. By way of enforcing his edict, he hi;!.d forty-seven of the wise men or Indian priests (he called them ''sorcerers'') imprisonoed; hanged three in the jail yard of the Falace as a warning., and after sev·ere whipping and enforced fasts, sent the other forty• four home. Picture the situatioa. to you.rself I The wise men or governors of the pueblos are always old men electe·d out of respe[...]ipped, sh,arn.ed, disgraced, they dispe.rsed from the Palace., down the Rio Grande to Isleta, west to the city on the impt'egnable rocks of Acoma, nor.th to that whole[...]os and Taos. What clo you think they did? Fill up the under- ground estufas and hang their heads[...] |
![]() | [...]• This adobe gate,,;ay is aJ11ong the la11dn1arks of |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 1 73 • men? Then, you don't know the Indian! You |
![]() | 174 THE GOVER,N OR'S PALACE incensed ·was an elderly I[...]it, |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 175 do with the foolish decrees that produced the revolt, happened to be Don Antonio de Otermin, wi[...]utenant. In spite of no· women being admitted to the secret, the secret leaked out. Pope's son-in-law, the governor of San Juan, was setting out to betray the whole plot to the Spaniards, when he was killed by Pope's own hand.[...]a Fe had been ordered to join a rebellion. He had the Indians brought before him. in the audience chamber on the r oth. They told him all they knew.; and they war[...]Here, as alwa·ys in tim€s of great confusion, the main thread of the story is lost in a multiplicity of detail. Warning had also come down from the alcalde at Taos. Otermiµ scarcely seems to have grasped the import of the news; for all he. did was to send his own secret scouts outi warning the settlers and friars to seek refuge in Isleta, or Santa Fe; but it was too late. The In- dians got word they had been betrayed and bro[...]lust of revenge and blood that very Saturday when the gov-ernor was -sending out his • spies. It would take a book to tell the story of all the heroism and martyrdom of the different Missions. Parkman has told the story of the martyrdom of the Jesuits in French Canada; arid many other books |
![]() | 176 'THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE have bee11 written on the subject. No Parkman has |
![]() | ' THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 177_ soldiers mounted the to9fs of houses guarding the |
![]() | 178 THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE then - red stood for ble>od. O[...]en he should have strucK • I the impudent fellow to earth, as De Vargas, or old F[...]one in like case. When Jt1an went back across the Plaza, the lne dians howled w,ith joy, danced dervish time all night, rang the bells of Saa Miguel, set fire to the church and houses, and cut the ,vater supply off f·rom the yard o.f the Palace. The valot of the Spaniards could not have been v{:ry great from August 14th to 20th, for only five of the 100 bearing arms were killed. At a council of war on the night of August 1.9th, it was de.eidee:l ta attempt to rush the foe, tramplin.g them with hor!res, and to beat a[...]ere killed in this rally;. but it is a que$tion. The Governor 'himse.lf came back with an a.rrow wound[...]-.whichever way you like to put, it-'' to g.o to the relief of Isleta,'' where he thought his lieutenant was; or '' to retreat ,,, so.uth of the Rio Grande. The Indians watche·d the retr-eat in grim silet:1ce. The Spanish consid- ered. their escape '' a miracle.[...]omfort .fr:om desperation. B·u t at Isleta, the Governor· found that his lieutenant hafd alread[...]aking r, 500 refugees in safety with him. It was the end of Septembe,r when Otetmin himself crossed th.e Rio Grande, at a point not far from modetri El Paso. At Isleta, the people will t·ell you to this day legends |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 179 of the friar's martyrdom. Every Mexir:an believes that the holy padre buried in a log hollowed out for coffin beneath the chapel rises eve·ry ten ye,a rs and walks through the streets of Isleta to see how his people. are doing. Once every ten years or so, the Rio Grande floods badly; and th·e year of the flood., the ghost of the friar rises to warn his people. Be that as it may[...]ars ago,. a: eleputation of investigators took up the body to examine the truth of the. legend. It lies in a state of p·e rfect preserva- tion in its log coffin. The pueblos had driven the Spanish south of the Rio Grande and practically l{ep,t them so.utq. of the Rio Grande for ten years. Churc1'ies W€.re burt[...]in Santa Fe River to cleanse them of baptism. Alt the records in the Govern.o r's Pal~ce we-re destr-oyed, a·nd the Palace itself given @v-er to wild orgies -a mong the victorious Indians_; but the victory brought little good to the tribes. They fell back to their former state of tribal raid and feud. Drought spoiled the crops;. and perhaps, after all, the consolation and the guidance of the Spanish priests were missed. When the Utes heard that the Spanish had retreated, these wild marauders of the I northern desert fell on the ;pueblo towns like wolves. |
![]() | 180 THE GOYERNOR'S PALACE iqly on the £rontier, crossing and rectossing the Rio The doors of fate open before the golden key. He |
![]() | THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE 181 December they closed all entrances to the Plaza and |
![]() | .. r8~ THE GOVERNOR'S P,ALA.CE 1 ' 'un.d er the 'high .a ·tar ·ben ath t . ~e pla.ce w·here the · priest _puts· his feet when he says mass." The body ci~[...]f tne qu,ainte -t ceremooie,s- of the old Governo.r''s: Palace.[...] |
![]() | [...], • CHAPTER XI ·S Quebec i~ the shrine of historical pilgrims |
![]() | 184 TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND which titl~s the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude soldie[...]t Bernalillo in Coro11ad,o's expedition of 15.40, the cro,vrt stood spo.nsor for the well-being and salvation of the In- d.ian1's sot1l. Wher ever the conqueror marched, the sandale.d and penniles,s Francisca,J1 remained and too often paicl th.e pe11alty o,f the soldier's ctimes·. In the Tusa·y an Desert, at Ta:0s, at Zuni, at Acotna, you will find Missio11s that date back to the expedi- tion of Coro11ad0; and cit eyery single ·M ,i-ssion the padres paid. fQr their eaurage and their faith wi[...]. But 'baos traditions date back farther than the com- ing of the white man. C.hristians have their Cl1rist, northern Indian,s their H iawatha, at1d the pueblo p·e@191e their B·ah-tah--ko, or grand ca[...]• their p·eople from the ravages of Apache and N avaj.o in the fa,r We$t to the [emailprotected] Land of ve.rdant p1ains and watered valleys below the mighty tnouh- 1 tai•ns of Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, |
![]() | TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND 185 much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the |
![]() | 180 TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND Don't leave the Southwest without s.eeing Taos. It might be part of TtJrkey, or ·Persia, or In<iia. It is the most t1n.,Arnetican thing in America; a.nd yeti it is the most typi<Zal of those aficient days in America, when there ,vas no white man. Just here, be.fore the eth.nologist arises to correct me, let it be •[...]rather fro,ni tl1e Ae.te:cs, o,r Toltecs o.f the South. While th,e Na:¥ajo and Apache and Ute legends are of a gteat migration from Athab~sca of the North, the pueblo legend is of a coming from the Great Under- world of the South. The ea-siest way to reach Taos is by the anci€.n t |
![]() | TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND 187 up from the pools vvith jars of water on their heads. |
![]() | 188 TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND Then., when you have reach.ed almost the top of the world a.n d see no more sheep he,tds, the trains ,pull tlf at an isolated, forsaken little station; and late in the afternoon you get o-ff at Servilleta. A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at t,his· point. Our group con- s,iste·d of three. The- driver of the stage - a f arnous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn - made[...]ted vehicle. It added piqt1ancy, if not sport, to the twilight drive to know that on€ of the two bronchos in harness had never been driven bef[...];g, abd stampede them into a p9und, or rope them. The captive is then .sold f op amounts vary- ing f,ro[...]rather than .strength. There is a ri.g·g ing to the bridle that throws a horse: if he kicks; and our[...]f- fered himself to be handled by a young girl of the p,a rty. Twilig·h t 0n the Upper Mesas is a thi_n g not to be told in words and only dimly tolcl, on canvas. There is the primrose a·fte1:glow, so famous in the Alps. The purple mountains drape them·selves in lav[...] |
![]() | [...]p1 ,e ~. eo ·, _e - • UJ~;,-,. i11 _ thr,ou_gh the jun p .hi.I -~ m.· ·G[...]· n r e. · rom the pi o t 1~ Il _• t -1 1n -[...]ng th at r foe . eo i .' out fo .- the nigb.t ru - -o the i , 1 o :l Or o· ,1~[...],. an·d -o ·__ n unc:la ~.- ,. -. · · nd. In the tw~er1ty,. .ile dri - ou 1l ee- peth -p[...]t:_ l _ ·hone line i1. _ 12c i t f.o · the tel -ph ne fr,_ . n the rou.&h . ai1 u miig ht be i11 a:1 l t ,[...]t e ea -,- th. - ,· Hl t[...] |
![]() | 190 TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND canons narrow -as a stone's toss have gashed de-ep trenches through the living rocks and with a whir of swift wate.r s co.me to.gether at the famous place known a·s the Brid.g e. You have come on ·y our old fr1end the Rio Grande again, .n arrow and deep and blue from the m,ountain snows, an altogether djf- • f e.r ent stream from. the muddy Rio of the low-e r |
![]() | TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND 191 Eastern horse would breal{ his neck and yot1rs, too. |
![]() | 192 TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND speci,mens of isolate@ humans as exist ,anywhere in the world · ·relics of the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle Ages - Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or[...]p·eople, w·ho yearly at Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the G:ross, and u.ntil very recent years even re- enacted the Crucifixion. After .s upper we strolled out down the canon. It is i·mpossible to e;xaggerate its bea·uty. Ea-ch gash is· only" the width of the river with sides• str·aight as wall~. The walls are yellow ancl black basalt, all spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the f rbsts. The tivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from the springs in the snows. ·snows and clear water and ·frost in the Desert? Yes: that is as the Desert is in rl~ality, not in geography books. Below the Brid.ge, y0u can follow the R'io Grande down to some f amoqs hot springs; ,a nd in this section,, the air is literally spi.cy with. the oil of sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the tapids, and you tnay catch the lilt of a mocking- bird,. or &ee a bluebL~d e[...]ome frost-touched berries. It is Octeber; but the goldfinch.es, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads here. The second day at the Bridge, we drove u:13 the Arroyo Hondo to see the Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally vi·sit a people who in every cha.ra,cteri$tic belong to the Twelfth Century. The ·houses of the Arroyo Hondo are • |
![]() | TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND 193 very small and very poor; for the Pe·nitente is think- ing not of this world but of the world to come. The orchards are amazingly old. These people and[...]been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if living back five centuri€s. The P€nitente is not an Indian; he is a peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the. secret lodge orders that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in the Twelfth Century. Ex- cept for the Lenten processions, rites are practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light - La Luz - and the Brothers of the Darkn·ess -Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as Mora- dos; and tho[...]or. Women meet in one lod,ge, men in another. The sign ma-nual of membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death occurs, the b.ody is taken to · the Morado, and a wake held. After Penitente rite[...]is called in for final services ; and ·up to the present, the priests have been unable to break the strength of these secret lodges. Members are[...]t is com- monly charged that politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get patients. Ea:ster and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a suc- cessi[...] |
![]() | • 194 TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND |
![]() | TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND 195[...]when you catch her, a double doze." " The cock flies out and the hen flies in - In fact, if you want to find the old True West, •[...] |
![]() | CHAPTER XII TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA AOS, Santa Fe and E l Pa,s o - these were to |
![]() | TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY 197 from the peaks more than half the year; and moun- tain torrents water the valley with a system of irriga- tion that never fails. Coming out of the mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the trail south to Old Mexico. Comin-g out of the Desert from the sot1th, Tao-s was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land 0f the north. '' Walled city,'' you say, t, before the com- ing of white men to the West? '' Yes, you carr see those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in r 540 by hundreds of years. No motor can climb up and down the ste½p switch- back to the Arroyo Hondo of the Bridge. Cars taken over that tra:il must be towed; but from the Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the river bed, you s~e the mountains ahead rise in black basalt li.ke castellated walls, with t0we.r and battlement jagged into the very· clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where frost has touched the foli- age; and you have.n't gone very many miles into the lilac mist of the morning light - shimmering as it always shimmers abov,e the sagebrush blue and sandy gold of the Uppet Mesas - before you hear the laughter of living water~ coming down from the mountain snows. One understands why the Indians chose the uplands; while the white man, who came after, had to choose the sh~dowy bottoms of th€ walled-in canons. Som~one, back im the good old '[...] |
![]() | 198 TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY something about '' t_rav'eling on the wings of the morning.'' I can't put in woPds what h-e meant;[...]adualJy that you dort;t realize that you ate 'in the lap,, not of mountains-,. but of m'ou-ntain pea[...]primrose, or gold, or ted as blood according to the hou-rs and the mood of hours; an€! if you want to carry the metap,h or still fatthe-r, you may truthfully add that the hours on these hi_g h uplands are dancing hours.[...]time to be a heavy, slow thing that op- ,presse$ the soul. As the streams laugh d@wn from the mou,ntains, ranch@s grow more and more frequ.ent. It is charac- teristic of the West that you don't cross the aceg_uias on briclg'es. You cr,©ss, them on two planks, with risk to your car if the driver· swerve at the st~eting wheel. All the houses are red earth adobe, thick of wall to shut out both heat and cold, with a smell of juniper wood in the £replaces of each 1·00.m. Mt1ch of this land -[...]w~s given by Spa;in four centu-· ties ago, and the same title holds to-day in spite of[...] |
![]() | [...]-·bite ~quatters'· att,~mp.t to bre.a k do ·:n the law by, cutting: the •.· ire o · the pastuf;e £e -c s an -~taking-the 1 ~a.s . to-the cgu . s. It ·· a.· ·.n th-:ts way that squatt[...]ica _ and cotnmis· 10n took e• idertG . on the$e titles,, |
![]() | 200 TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY the land-jockey ~eriod of N·ew Mexican history. Something of this sort is going on at Taos to-day among the pueblos for their land, and down at Saca- ton a:mong the Pimas for wate-r. Treaty guara.n- teed the I ndian his ·rights, bt1t at Tao.s the squatter cut the pueblo fences and carried the case to court. At Sacaton, t_he big sq1.1atter, the- irtigation company, took the Pimas' water; so that the I11dian can no longer raise crops. If you want to know what the courts do in these cases, ask the pueblo governC'.>r at T aos; or the Pima chief at Sac.a ton. It is late September. A parrot calls OlJlt in Span- look out on art .arcade running round the court i_n a |
![]() | TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY 201 Spain[...]onplace America out |
![]() | [...]'- 202 TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY Spa.nish mansions occupying almost the entire. side |
![]() | [...]w white·wa.-. ed _. ·:ssio church st,a.nd·s in the 1 1center of th,e illa1.'~e, but -you can still ,s.ee the old. hou ,-· s :r11,,n u··p t·h[...]rs1elf t.h at ashing blankets by beating them in the flowing |
![]() | 204 TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY top of a five storied hot1se, and look out. You can see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in com- mon. On the outskirts of the village, men and boys are threshing, that is[...]raal, with a flag stuck up to show which w-ay the wind blows, one man fork- ing chaff with tne wihd, another scraping th.e g,rain outside th,e circle. Glance ins-ide the houses. The upstairs is evi- dently the living-room; for the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn and meal bins-, and you can see the metate or stone on which the corn is ground by the women as in the days of Gld Testament record. Though there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in th.e forties,, and an old Mission church dating almost from I 540, you €an see from the roof d0zens of estufas, where the men are practicing for ·t heir dances and masked theatricals,. Tony, the assistant • governor, an educated man o·f ab[...]shows, acts .as our guide, and tells us about the squatters. trying to g,e t the Indian Ia·nd. How would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle ·o f your farm and fe-nce off 160 acres? The lndians didn't like it, and Gut the fences. Then the troops. were s€nt out. That was in 191 o _ , a typical '' uprising,'' when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has ,gone to the cou-rts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be set[...]ikes their own form of government better than the white man's. |
![]() | TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY zo5- All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is not only assi[...]to keep white men from bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own gov• e[...]office. Is there a d~spute over crops, or cattle? The governor's word settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers. '' Supposing the guilty map doesn't obey the gov- ernor? '' we ask. '' Then we send 011r own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in the lock-up,'' and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and the lock-up. These stocks clamp dow·n a man's head a[...]om naturally wouldn't remain disobedient long. The metl1od of voting is older than the white man's ballot. The Ir1diat1s enter the estufa. A mark is drawn across the s~and. Two men a.re nomi- nated. (No - women do not vote; the vvomen rule the house absolutely. The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then signify their choice by mar1,s on the sa11d. Hou~es are built and occupied commt:1nally, and ground is held in com1non; but the p;,-oduct of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own and not in common - the nearest approach to so- cialistic life tl1at America has yet known. The peo- ple here speak a language different fr·om the other pueblos, and this places their orig[...] |
![]() | -2 06 TAOS, THE MOST AN,CIENT CITY back as the origin of Anglo-$axon races. Another ' feature[...]as·sacredly guarded among Pu·eblos as among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but the bad admixtures of a mongrel race a·re unknown.. We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know ni.m as a ·c.a:ciq,ue. Associated with hitn ,a re the old men-·m.ayores, or council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the lives of the people tha,t it advises the young men: as to ma·rriage. We have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who harangue from the housetops", or estufas.. As women st_oop over 'the metates grinding the meal, m-en sing good ch.eer from the door. The chile, or .r ed pepper, is pulve;-ized betwee.n stones the same as ·the grain. Though openly Catholio and in at- tendance on the Mission church, the pueblo people still pra.ctice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and in all the course of ,four C'enturies of contact, white men have never been able to learn the ceremonies ot the estufas. Women never enter the estufas. Who were the first white men to see Taos r It is not certa[...]aca a-nd his three companions, shipwrecked on the ~oast of Florida in the N arvae·z[...] |
![]() | e;JJ.peditmn, ·. ·:ho wandered · est ard ac oss the con• tine:n'f fr·om Tao s to L ,-', gun __n.d Ac0ma. As the1 legend n1 1S th ey were: .· a ~-e slav . 8 by the Indian ,[...]0 ieon of r540. _Pr cedin the form«I m"litary ad• h,and _ to pr_p,a r e the w~ ay,. Ft,a y _.,,arc,os ,a dvan,e·d l om the Gulf of Ca.lifornra. e,astw, ,rd. One can[...]1 of 15·,J· ., G0, in 0 the Y1lm __ V _lley in Se.>temb·er,!. The heat· is cf· a d ~ ns·en~ss· yon can cyt ·w.[...]1 m,o,dern G·allup_, he . ,as met with the warning ,,, Go called. '' cil:;,ola '' oWt· ,g to the great nu.m-ber a·£ huf• told in half t I n g s of the world. The Spa .- |
![]() | [...]an abundance of hides .a nd woven cloth. When the- soldiers saw Zuni, they broke out in jeers and cu.rses at the priest. P0.o r Fray Marcos was think- in,g mo[...]ed embarrassment to New Spain. Across the Desert to the Three Mesas and the Canon of the Colorado, east again to A~oma and the Enchanted Mes.a, up to the pueblo town now .k nown as th.e city of Santa Fe, into the Pecos, and north, yet north of Taos·, Coronad·o 's expedition practically rnatle a c:ircuit of all the Southwest from the Colo- rado River to East Kansas. The knightly adven- turers did not find gold, ancl we may guess, as winter came on with heavy snows in the Upper Desert, they were in no very good mood;[...]dventurers and Pueb- , los which lasted down to the middle of the Nine- teenth Cetitury. At the pueblo now known as Be,t nalillo, the soldiers demanded blankets to protect them from the cold. The Indians stripped their houses to help their visitors., but in the melee and no |
![]() | TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY 209 doubt in the ill humor of both sides there were at- |
![]() | 210 TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY were plenty of horS'es for escape, but the family were |
![]() | TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY 211 The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo l |
![]() | ~12 TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY mesa at Santa Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rea.r of the artillery; but when an In'c{ian rabble meets artillery, there is only one possible issLte. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed ancl forty-five wou-nd·e d. No rail- way led up the Rio Grande at that early date; and i,t was a- more n·o ta,ble feat for the troops to advahce up the rtarro,ving canons than to defeat the foe. At • Embudo, six: or seven huntired Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and pifion. The soldiers had to climb to shoot; .and agaip the Indians CO\illd not withsta.n d trained fire. The[...]d and sixty wounded here. Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands; and it was February 3rd b.efore they re.[...]had been drawn up, every winclow barricacled, and the h.igh walls of· the tierecl. ~reat houses w·e r:e bristling with rifle b·a rrels; but rifle def ertse could 11ot withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were completely surrounded. A six pounder was brou.ght with-in ten yards of the walls. A shell was fired - the church. wall battered down, and the dragoons rushed through the br€ach. By, the night • of Feb. 4th, old men, women and children bearing the cross came suing _fot p{}ace. The ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew off with a loss of seven killed and forty• five wounded. The -Pueblos loss was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to oV'erthrow alien dominati9n; and this attempt would not have been made if the Indians had not |
![]() | TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY 213 been sp[...]n 'Swathed all in white came creeping |
![]() | [...]I ' SAN ANTONIO? THE CAIRO OF AMERICA F y.ou want to plunge[...]as you have mooas . |
![]() | SAN ANTONIO 215 the bays, sometimes to be -shattered and sunk by |
![]() | [...]t to see cow,boys cuttit1g such figµre eights in the air as a motor cann,o t execute on antique pave- ment. You enter a hotel and ima,g ine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the .m arble walls isn't gilt; ,a nd it isn't tapestry. The frie~e is a long panel in bronze all,o-reli~vo. I th.ink it is a testimonial to San An- tooio's sense of the fitness of things tha:t that frieze is hot of Rom[...]et'inged ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of the cowb,oys taking a stampeding herd up the long tra.i1 - dtifting and driving but held together by a· rough fellow· in top. boots and sombrero; and the rotun,d a has a frieze of cowboys because that th[...]n real life; and I don't know any- where els-e in the world you can get it. There are three such huge h[...]besides a score of lesser ones, to take ea.re of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in San Antonio; but[...] |
![]() | 011e•tenth the numb e· of 1[...]~l, ·so San __ .·. 1.- 1 ton10 ·s 0 n the oa-d t 0 Old . ·exiieQ an d a.11 the for-- Mission dating back to the early s:cven ten hund eds ffi 0US ,g a[...]I I Southwest the s· te of the old -ii e-r -:ICi'ng, ·. •here[...]" when h Clalled the game ent on morning, noon a.-d night. The |
![]() | [...]forever gone, whe~ th~ night passed but dully if the cowboys did n.o t shoot up all the saloons and '' hurdle '' the gaming tables. Yeste.raay, it was cowboy and[...]n- |
![]() | [...]a . 't worth tw·o cen.t s an acre, out-, :side the ,:·_ iss."on · alls., has ,j umped to b e a met[...]1 · an city of o . er 100,000; how it is- the center of the rat n,g ,o f t .,' ~pty a~res[...]- ,_, . y,clu wil feel a, I fe t th·a t it was. the. daantles, fe.,at. Th,en,, whe , y ou thin,k that the Bag· 0 f the |
![]() | SAN ANTONIO like the cause rises on eagles' wings to new height,[...]tory. It was so in Te:Kas. |
![]() | [...]t their string of Missions of which th~ chief was the one no-w known as '' The Alamo ' ' - the Mission of the cotton\vood trees? Six different flags have flown over the land of the Tejas: the French, the Spanish, the Me:x:ican, the Republic of Texas; the Con-f ederate, the Union. In such a struggle fo't ascendancy, needle[...]s sl:}.ed righteously a,nd. unrighteously; but of the battle fought at the Alamo, no justificll- tion need be given. It is part of American history, but it is the kin·d of histqry that in other nations goes to m[...]ns. Deta.ils ate in every school book. Santa Ana, the newly risen Mexican dictator, had ordered the 30,000 Ame.r icans who liv,e d in Texas, to disar[...]citizens and com,p_a triots,'' w.rote Travis from the doomed Alamo Mission, to 1-'Io-u ston and the other leadets outside, ,., I am besieged, by a th[...]twenty-four hours and have not lost a man. . . . The gar-risort • is to be put to the swo·td if the place is taken. I have answered the S'tlmmons with a Gannon shot and our flag still waves proudly fro.m the walls. I shall never surrender, nor retreat. I call on you in the name of liberty, and of everything dear to the Ameri- can character, to come to our aid with all despatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily, a[...] |
![]() | [...]Lieut.-Col. Commanding.'' In the fort with Travis were I So men under Bowie |
![]() | [...]SAN ANTONIO their way out through the besiegin,g li.ne. The be- siegers at this time consisted of 2,500 infantrymen bunched close to the walls of the Alamo - too close to be shot from above, and 2,500 cavalry and in- fantry back on the Plaza ahd encircling the Mission to cut off all avenue of escape. Travis drew a line on the ground with his svvord. '' Every man w[...]rst? March 1 '' Every man leaped over the line but Bowie, who was ill on a cot bed. '' Boys, move my cot over the line,'' he said. At four o'clock next morning, the siege was re,. sumed. The bugle blew a single blast. With picks, crowbars and ladders, the Mexicans closed jn. The besi~ged waited breathlessly. The Mexicans placed the ladders a,n d began scaling. The sharpshooters inside the walls waited till the heads appear€d above the walls - then fired. As the top man fell back, the one b.eneath o_n the ladder stepped in the dead man's place. Then the Americans clubbed their guns and fought hand to hand. B,y that, the Mexi- cans knew that ammunition was exhausted and the defenders few. The walls were. scaled and battered d0wn first in a far corner of the convent yatd. Be- hind the chapel door, piles of sa-nd had been stacked. From the yard, tho Texans were driven to the con- • vent, from the convent to the chapel. Travis fell shot at the breach in the yard wall. Bowie was bayoneted on the cot where he lay. Crocl{ett was clubbed to death just outside the chapel door to the • |
![]() | [...]y nirte o'clock, no ans"rering shot came from the Alamo. The doors were rammed and rushed. Not a Texan sur[...]hancel and stalls. These were se,qt across to the main camp. The bodies of the 18 2 heroes were piled in a pyramid with fa,gots; and fitecd. So ended the Battle of the Alamo, one of the most , terrible defeats and[...]ssary to relate that Sam Houston |
![]() | [...]NTONIO 125 are ruins; but the hope that animated them, the fire, • |
![]() | [...]CHAPTER XIV CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA F someone should tell you of a secon[...]Canon gashed through wine-colored rocks in the |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 227 child. Who were[...]ago that neither his- |
![]() | 228 CASA GRANDE AND iHE GILA and honeycombed with the cave dwellings of a pre- |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 229· pads. So if you understood as much about Zeke's |
![]() | z30 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA in th·e West where freighters with double teams and |
![]() | [...]1 thiey don''t c I the tent. c.1.ty s,anitar1um- Th.ey- precipices 500 to 1,000 feet. The cliff dwellings |
![]() | "•• 232 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA projectiles. A man with a rock in his hand in the |
![]() | the water: sank below the le ·el of the spri gs, tbe people .h ad to move out, · · er'f[...]o., 1 do, n to the cave d ·elling·s -_ the Gila.. The bot- 1[...]unfa.lin,g moe.ntain __pr:i.ng - Why, then, di d the[...]_e m.oved in one can e,asily under• built that a ·h.·1 . could de ·e- d th.e door :·2y.. ith ,a 1 club; and :,·- her'e ·the ho use~ ha _e lo,n g hallways a.n.d[...]1 C n guess the inmate W 0 uld not be idle ,. bile the 1 1 ~-enture ome· intrud er was we[...]1 Al o,, the bottoms of the~•e bo,c.-ca.iions, afforded tit"le I con1pl1Shed by the shou de·r blade of a dee~ ed as |
![]() | z34 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA oped into six-foot modern Pimas and PaIJagoes? It What did they eat[...]t • • |
![]() | • CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 235 probabilities are that fish were tabooed. Y"ou find |
![]() | [...]. 236 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 700 feet high, literally punctured wi[...]d doll house open cave doors. It is sun- |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 237 and cedar log glow in the fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his plain- tive wail. Y o.u hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rin.gs. (Gong? In a metal- less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a bo.ne clapper.) The· dancers come down out of the ca,,es to the dancing floors in the middle of the narrow canon. You can see the danc- ing rings yet, where the feet of a thousan.d years have beaten the raw earth hard. Men only dance. These are not seX: dances. They are dances of thanks to the gods for tne harvest home of corn; or for victory. T .he gon.g ceases clapping. The camp- fires that scent the canon with junipet smells, flicker and ~ade and die. Th·e rhythmic beat of the feet that dance ceases and fades in the darkness. That was ten thousand years agone,. Where are· the races that danced to the beat of the' priest's clap- p·e r gong? I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail of the turtle dove; an·o there came back that old prop'[...]me cold shivers down my spine as a child - that the habitat of the races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bitter,n and hoot owl and bat and fox. I don't know what reas0n there is for it, neither |
![]() | 238 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA i_ng Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 239 great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked |
![]() | 240 CASA GRANDE AN·D THE GILA the water· is turned in the ditch, and it will not ·seem such tedious wo[...]ust how h.a rd and lonely· it is, drive past the homesteads just at night£all as I did. The white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence strung along juni[...]use, no s- table, no build- ings of any sort. The ho.rses. a,r e staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the chip fire. A lan- tern h·angs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles ahead you see another lantern gleam and swihg, and dimly discern the outlines of atlothe.r tent - the ' homesteader's nearest neig. ..[...]y thousand people. Like mus-hrooms overnight, the little towns spring up on irrigation lands. You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen mile_s out- a red roof p[...]tyards, a.p d four or five other com- poutids the sr'Le of this central house, like the b,as- . tions at the four corners- of a larg~, old-fashioned walled fort. The walls are adoee of tremendous thickn,ess - six feet in the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade - ~ thickness that in an a.ge of only ·stone weapons must have been im- penetrable. The do0rs are so very low as to ~orttpel a[...] |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 241 enter; and the supposition is thi$ was to prevent the |
![]() | 242 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA must h-ave housed a whole tribe in ti.me of religious festival or war; so you come b-a ck to the explanation of ventilator shafts. The ceilitigs of Casa Grande are ex:traordinaTily high; and bodies found buried in se,a led up cham- b~rs b~hind the ruins of the other compounds are five or six: feet long, sh·owing this was no elwarf race. The rooms do -not run off rectangular halls as our ro[...]Bodies found at Casa Grande lie flat, h eaded to the east. Bod.ies found in the c:av·es are trussed up knees to chin, but as usual the bodies found at Casa Grande hav,e been shipped aw[...]where they were found. Lower alti't u,d,e, or the g,reat age, or' the quality of the clays, may account ·for the peculiarly rich sha.d'e s of the pottery found at Casa Gra·nde. The purples and reds and browns are tin,ged an almost iridescent gre.en,. R.un.ning back from the Great House is a hea:v·y wall as of a farmer courtyard. Backing and flanking the walls appear to have been othijr houses, smaller but built in the same fashion as Casa Grande. Stand on these ru.i ned w-alls, or in the doorway of the Great House, and you can see that five suc[...] |
![]() | • CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 243 been the main court of the com-pound are elevated |
![]() | 244 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA Jesuit, was the first w·h ite man known to have visited The J e-suits suffered expulsion, ~nd Garcez, th_e[...]Gar'cez says that it was a trad•ition |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 245 a.cross the doorways of caves in Frijoles Canon, grew • trees that have taken centuries to come to maturity. |
![]() | z46 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA There ,a re few fireplaces among the ancient dwell- |
![]() | [...].I\ part of Sprtiee TJ:ee If ons.e, aH1ong the cliff d\vellings of i\1Iesa \ Terde National Park, Col'Ora<l0. The ruin con-ta ins j J4 roon1s[...] |
![]() | o.£ the _ .-id.die ~ ,· g , · n.1 --ta[...]1 lo· 'er. p __ · l g a. _ute; and. the t - 1s. b· ·. :_h -i Bute dance. The. e I cl _a · of[...]~ s the The mas k dance - of the Sou.- ·h · es'. a.r _ .m ch mis-[...]t -· ·- ue ,o r ,p,erhap,s all c .·- e. Y · t th,ethe Eir·d Dance re· ·re,- I[...]llttl e. Th: re is . 1 ,d nee of the dl·ng li e at · - _y t rn o.f the w11 ? T ere is the danc . of the gl ,ttpns and th _ monsters Ha · . e - e |
![]() | [...]' 2481 CASA G.R ANDE AND THE GILA |
![]() | CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 249 to say; for the white man began to take the Indian's came with their families from the Morning Glow to little slip of government paper called a deed. The |
![]() | [...]• 250 CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA |
![]() | [...]XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA T is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, |
![]() | [...]SSION maidehs are there, <, drawing :water from the well,'' carrying water in ollas on their he~ds,[...]perfect :poise and _perfeet grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers, hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled. Y Oll turn but ~. spur in the mou.t1tains: you dip into a valley smokin·g with the dews of the morn- ing; or come up a mesa,- .a nd a winged ho[...]nen, sash of rain:bow colors; and you ate -a mid the dwellings of men.. Strings of red chile like ga·r lands of huge red corals ha.n g a.gainst the sun-baked brick 0 :t clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse - that i~ why t.he Oriental[...]om thei·t kiln fires of she.ep manure, at you, the rem.ote passerby. The basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. O,ne old woman is so a.g ed[...]t she mu·s t sit inside her basket to carry out the pattern of ·w hat life is to her; and the sunlight strikes back from tlie hea:t-baked walls in a glare that stabs t1:ie eye; and you hear the tinkle of the b.~lls from the water- ing po·ols. Th·efl, suddenly, fo[...]time, you see It. You have turned a spur of the Mountains·, dipped into a valley, come up on the Mesa into the sunlight, and ·there It is - the ete1°nal m<;>untains wit,h their etetnal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtaill. where[...] |
![]() | f:anc , an,d_ n th ~ _1 st of the ,g -eat a, ,l1.1t ,a t ,- r· ~ es , n 1slan1 d rock; -_ , d on the isl-an d rock ts a[...]1 g ot:o; · ,nd in th _gr,o t o is the fig,ure of -the, Mother c•te.rna p·u rity -and be ow the ·islan o·- rock in the m:1 st 0f th e am,ph . the,a ter :som et 'ing s ·,ms into - bite, glaringl . , hite as th,e e·ry splfotlessness of[...]o'~_,ers an,d the spi --t of -- an · .p to God; li ons b e'tw•een the. 1 1 archc . of' the r'OOfed piazzas, ,-JS betok ening .he .io.n-'[...]~ alms befo, _- arch ed, wh'i-~e : all Srhut. out the, in ·you.r n,o st ils and lung·s, the peace of God in. your |
![]() | [...]t is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been falling in tor• rents. Rain_ is not supposed to .fall in the Desert, but it has bee-n coming .down in slaat torreBts ancl the s~y is reflected everywfu,ere in the road-side pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for the altitude is[...],o'OO feet; too high to be langtiiid, tob low for the ,sting of autumn frosts. We motor, fir_st, through th,e old Spanish town - relies of a grandet1r that Ame[...]to-day, a grandeur more of spirit than dis_play. The old 5panisli grandee never counted his dollars, nor me~sured up the value of a meal to a gu.est. But he counted honor dear as the Virgin MaiJ,. and made a gamble of life, ancy hated tensely as he loved. The old ma,nsion houses are fallen in disr~p qte, to-day. They are givea o,v er, for the most part to Chinese and Japanese- merchants; but through the open win- dows you can still see pl.aa-a s and Ra[...]a nders are in perpetual bloom a:.n d roses climb th.e trellis work,, and the par-r ot calls out '' swear words ' 1 of ·Spanis[...]e hall, but where rags ancl tatters flaunted from the clothes lines of negro and Japanese and Chinese tenant, I cot1ld riot but think of the torn flags that mark the most heroic a.ction of regimel'ltS. From the Spanish Town of Tucson, which any other n[...] |
![]() | [...]255 and capitalized in dollars for the tourist, you pass modern mansions that wisely foll0w the Spanish- Moorish type of architecture, most suited to Desert atmosphere. Then you come on the Tucson Farms Company Irrigation project, now sagebrush and cactus land put under the ditch from Santa Cruz River and turned over to settlers from Old Mexico - who were driven out by the Revolution - for $2 5 an acre. You see the lonely eyed worn.an pioneer sitting at the door of the tent flap. Moisture steams up from the river like a morning incense to the sun. The Tucson Range of mountains shimmers. Giant cactus stand ghost-like, centuries old, amid the mesquite bush; and in the columnar bole of the cactus trees you see the holes where the little desert wren has pecked through for watet i[...]season. Then, btrfore you know it, you are in the Papago Indian Reserve. The finest basket makers of the world, these Papagoes are. They make baskets of such close weave that they will hold water, and you se·e the Papago Indian women with jars - ollas - of water on their head going up and down from the water pools. Basket makers weave in front of tfie sun-baked adobe walls where hang the red strings of chile like garlands. On the whole, the Indian faces are very happy and good. They do not care for wealth, these children of the Desert. Give them '' this day their daily[...] |
![]() | 256 SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION Then the mountains close in a cup round the shim.. influe.nce brought in by Spain. There are twin towers |
![]() | [...]257 • esplanade in front of the arched, walled entrance. Collie dog.s rise lazily 1111d er the deep embrasures of the arched plaiz.as. A parrot calls out some Spanish[...]e Persian kitten frisks its plumy tail across the brick-paved walk of the i11ner patio; and across the courtyard I catch a glimpse of two Shetland p[...]repose, of antiquity, of apartness, rests on the marble white Mission, as of oriental dreams a[...]ropean antiquity and cul- ture. I ring the bell of the reception room to the right of the church entrance. Not - a. sound but the echo of my own ring! I enter, cross through the parlor and come on th e Spanish patio or cent[...]. What a place for prayers an@ meditation and the soul's repose I Arched promenad'es line both sides of the inner court. Here J esuit and Franciscan monks have walked and prayed and meditated sin_ce the Sixteenth Century. By the hum as of busy bees to the right, I locate the schoolrooms, and come on the office of the Mother Superior Aquinias. What a pity so[...]e at- tractive and kindly than evil; and all the little In- |
![]() | 25·8 SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION dian wards of the four schoolrooms look happy and human and red-blooded as the Mother Superior. A collie pup flounders round us up and down the court walk where the old missiona111 monks suffered cruel martyrdom. Poll, the parrot, utters senten- tious comment; and the £hetland ponies, whinny greetings to their mistr[...]goodness, does, it? But it is when you enter the church that you get the real surprise. Three times, the desertion of this • Mission was f orce·d by massacre and pillage. Twice |
![]() | [...]years, this an- cient :tv1ission stood open to the winds of heaven and the torrential rains and the midnight bats. Only the faithfulness of an old Indian chief kept the sacred vessels from desecration. '\,Vhen the fathers were expelled for political reasons, old Jose, of the Papagoes, carried off the sacred chalices and candles till the padres should return, when he brought them from[...]ples are usually built in one long, clear arch. The roof of San Xavier del Bae is a series of the most perfect groined domes, with the deep embrasures of the windows on each side colored shell tints in wave-lines. Because of the height and depth of the windows, the light is wonde·rfully clear and soft. The church is used now only by Indian chil- dren; a[...]a mag- nificent temple in which to worship? To the left of the entrance is a wonderful old baptismal font . of pure copper, which has been the envy of all col- lectors. One wonders looking at the ancient vessel whether it was baptized with the blood of all the martyrs who died for San Xavier - Francesca Gar[...]is a window in this baptis- try, too, that is the envy of critics and collectors. It is set more deeply in the wall than any window in the Tower of London, with pointed Gothic top that sends shafts of sunlight clear across th.e earthen · floor. From the baptistry I ascended to the upper tow- ers. The stairs are old timber set in adobe and |
![]() | [...]gh solid w·alls of a thickness of sbt feet. The view from the belfries above is , wonderful. YQu see the mouqtains shimme,ring in the haze. You see the little square adobe matchbox houses o~f Papago Indians, with the red chile hanging against the wall, and the women coming from the spring, al'td th,e m·en husking the corn. You w·o,nd.er if when San Xavier was[...]r '\>Vould be an im.preg:nable fo.rtress. Yet the priests of San Xavrer were three times utterl[...]by Indians. Wh,en yot1 come to seek the history o,f San Xavier, you will find it as difficult to get, as a guide out to th,e Mission. As a pqrely tollrist resort, leaving[...]I took me the-bcttter pai-t of a day ·to nnd out that San[...]. th.is is typical of tl:1e difficulty of getting the real histgty of the place. Jesuit Relations of Ne"'· F·r a.nce[...]r. J esuit Relations of New Spain, who knows? The Franciscans succee·ded the J esuits; and the Franciscans do not read the history of· the Jesuits. It con1es as a shock to k11ow that Spanish padroes were on the Colorado and Santa Cruz at •[...] |
![]() | SAN XAVIER D E L BAC MISSI ON 2·6 1 the time J acques Cartier was exploring the St. Law- Xavier del Bae and Tumacacori. There are reports |
![]() | [...]s told before, 600 and 900 miles. It was under the Franciscans that the present struc- ture of San Xavier was built. Garcez was the most fa-mous of the Franciscans. He spent seven years amon.g the Pimas and Papagoes a11d Yumas; but one hot midsummer Sunday-July 17, 1781 - during early mass, the Ind-ians rose and ·slew four priests, all the 5panish soldiers and all the Spanish • servants. Garcez was amon·g the martyrs. San Xavier, as it at present stands·,[...]pelled. Tumacacori and San ~avier were :,.lways the m_ost important of the Arizona Missions. Originally quite as magnifice[...]h earthly in its very architecture; and this is the spirit in which it was originally built. At daybreak, a bell called the • builders to prayers of consecration. At nightfall, vesper bells sent the laborer home, with the blessing of the church. For the most part, the workers were Mexicans and Indians; and as far as can be gathered from the annals, voluntary workers. The Papagoes an.cl Pimas at that time numbered 5,000, of whom 500 lived rou.n d the Missions, the rest spending the sum• mers hunting in th,e mountain!. |
![]() | [...]IER DEL BAC MISSION z63 When the American Government took over Ari- zona, San Xavier went under the diocese of New Mexico. From Santa Fe, New Mexico,[...]across desert mountains and canons, every foot of the way infested by Apache warriors; and the heroism of that ttail was marked by the same courage and constancy as signalized the founding and maintenance of the other early Spanish Mis- • s1ons. It would[...]tion; and San Xavier stands to-day as it stood in the sixteen hundreds, when Father Kino, the famous mathe- matician and Jesuit from Bavaria, came wandering up from the Missions of Low·e.r California, preach- ing to the Yumas and Pimas of the hot, smoking hot, Gila Desert, and held mass in Casa Grande, the Great House or Garden of Eden of the Indian's l\forning Glow. A lucky thing it is that restoration did not imply change in San Xavier; for the Mis- sion floats in the shimmering desert air, unearthly, eerie, unreal,[...]rble, twin-towered, roof domed and so dazzling in the sunlight to the unaccustomed eye that you somehow know why rows of restful, drowsy palms were planted in line along the front of the wall. Perhaps it is that it comes on you as such a cor11- plete surprise. Perhaps it is the desert atmosphere in this cup of the mountains; but all the otner mis- sions of the Southwest are adobe $ray, or e~rth[...] |
![]() | [...]ven ~ er o'f drab ·Hite~ .ash, There is the g· a,nt, centur ·-old · •· es ert c,actu.[...]1 twis,ted and gnarleiti -- .ith ag,e like the tre es in. Dantes 1 I·n·f c.rno, but · ith b~ rd nests1 1._ . the pillared trunk's b·mn eath the shad.e of a fine old twisted t·)ak: but · -C·[...]1 tai1 s .h_.mn ·. ing ~n the vall ey s,ee - ~ ta ,slee·p. 1[...]y i-leep~-.. T·1. e sualight sl ~eps Yo u ·ing the gong., T~e soun.d stabs the sle,ep·.n-g sil~nce, a,n.d you a·· m[...]ri ·a r and _esu?t p, -iest cort1e alking a ong, th,e area ed .P•aveme · t of the in e, out 'tya.t,,d to ask y,ou with the four·tt, sid e lo,okin,g· thro·ugh_a w on de.r[...]1 1 h~,gh arched, gateway out to the far moun ·ains+ |
![]() | [...]BAC MISSION 265 to sleep. The white Persian kitten frisks his white- |
![]() | [...]_y his immediate success·o rs. 1 The escut.cheon of the --r~,ncisca.ns ,o·n the ·wall is arms of -th-e Christ a·nd the, .arm of .Sit. Fra.neis.. 'T he cupola above the altar is :.f ty fe . t to the dome. th.e Lor•d. Mea, the Flight. to E,gypt,l the Sh.ephe:rtls., tlie An.w |
![]() | [...]267 and vaults. Two small doors lead up to the towers from the main door. Look well at these doors and stairways. Not a nail has been driven. The doors are mortised· of solid pieces. The first flight of stairs leads to the choir. Around the choir are more mural paintings. Two more twists of the winding stair; and you are in the b'e lf ry. Twenty.two more steps bring you to the summit of the tower - a gal- I leried cupola, seventy-five feet above the ground, where you may look out on the whole world. . Pause for a moment, and look out. The moun- tains shimmer in their pink mists. The sunlight sleeps against the adobe walls of the sca:ttered In• dian house. You can hear the drone of the ch1l- dren from the schoolrooms behind th,e Mission. You can see the mortuary chap,el clown to the right and the lions supporting the arches of 'the Mission roof. Father Kino was a famous Europe[...]and he came to found a Mission amid arabs of the Ameri- can Desert. The hands that wrought these paint• ings_ on the walls were not the hands of bunglers. They were the hands 0f artists, who wrought in love and dev[...]Priests, whose names even have been lost in the chronicles, were murdered on the altars here, thrown down the stairs, cut to pieces in their own Mission[...] |
![]() | [...]of twelve soldiers for these long t ,ip$ ,; bu · the sol- die,rs,' v-ice·s made so mEch trouble f-0r the ho ly fath-[...]_y brothe~. S:aridaled mis:siqnatie.s. tramped the cactus de,ser· in Ju·n.e, whc.a the: he·at was 1 .h1t ~[...]Jo· trampe,tI from th·e Gulf Rio Ota:nd'e. You :[...]y was · hrown. ove · a precipice ; or m:[...]d ~ t·be abuse . '' He gets ~ .re,spite. from the King |
![]() | SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION z69 The fathers weave their own clothing, grow their own food, and hold the fort against the enemy as against the subtle designs of the Devil. These fathers mix their own mortar, make their own bricks, cut their own beams, lay the plaster with their own hands. Now, remember that the priests who did all this were men who had been ar[...]favorites of Europe. Father Kino was, himself, of the royal house of Bavaria. But jealousy left the Missions unprotected by the soldiers. Soldier vices roused the Indians to fury; and the priests were the first to fall victims. Go across the Moki Desert. You will find peach orchards planted by the friars; but you cannot find the graves of the dead priests. We considered the Apaches a dangerous lot as late .as 1880. In 1686[...]d Apache land alone. I canno't find any record of the Spanish Missions at this pe- riod ever receiving[...]st pay their wages and keep. Well, by and by, the jealousy of the governing ring, kept from abusing the Indians by the priests, brought about the expulsion of the Jesuits. The Franciscans took up the work where the Jesuits left off. Came another political upheaval. The Fran• ciscans were driven out. San Xavier's broken win• dows blew to the rains and winds of the seven heavens. Cowboys, outlaws~ sheep her[...] |
![]() | [...]It was completely cleaned out 'and taken over by the church as a Mission for the Indi,ans. To-day, no one worships in San Xavier but the little Indian scholars. Look at the drawings of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Wise M:en I Look at the dreams of faith wrought into the ·aged and beau- tiful walls J Frankly-let us @[...]ino have clone better to have continued to grace the courts of Bavaria? In the old da,ys, Pima and Papago roped their wives as[...]th-e fancy ·prompted, abused .them to death. On the walls of Sah Xavier is the· Annunciation to the Virgih, another view of birth ap.d womanhood. In the 0ld d·ay,s, the Indians killed a child at birth, if they didn't want it. On the walls of Sart Xavie-r are pictured the wise men ador- ing a Child. ~partish rings and t[...]trusts want them .to-day. Behold a Chri'st upon the walls set- ti.ng free the slaves I Was it all worth while? It depends on your point of view and what you want. Though the wi1;,1ds of the seven heavens blew through San Xavier for[...] |
![]() | [...]BAC MISSION 2r7 I dreams; pointing the way, not to gain, but to good- ness; making for a[...]ful heaven life might be. THE END • |
MD | |
NO COPYRIGHT - UNITED STATES. The organization that has made the Item available believes that the Item is in the Public Domain under the laws of the United States, but a determination was not made as to its copyright status under the copyright laws of other countries. The Item may not be in the Public Domain under the laws of other countries. Please refer to the organization that has made the Item available for more information. http:[...] | |
This book is about the many places visited by the author throughout Arizona, New Mexico, and[...] |
Agnes Christina Laut, Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States, Little Known and Unappreciated, the Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo, the Lure of the Painted Desert. Arizona Memory Project, accessed 10/06/2025, https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/nodes/view/165763