Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those
who passed by there in old days at the foot’s pace of oxen,
painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that
unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which
daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it
would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their
advance; no sight for repose or encouragement; but, stage
after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the
mocking, fugitive horizon.—Stevenson: Across the Plains
In the early days, those adventurous times when men pulled out of St.
Louis of an early morning, and the dust of a long train of wagons and
outriders arose; when they followed the Arkansas across to the Cimarron
and Wagon Mound; when they warily entered the Indian country and
somehow existed through the long dusty days and the longer nervous
nights before sighting Santa Fe and safety in a foreign land, I suppose
most of them felt the extraordinary vastness of the West. Certainly
they knew its sterile immensity after a few weeks on that perilous
road. Later, when they began seeking the Coast and the Pacific, leaving
Santa Fe to plunge down La Bajada trail to follow the valley of the Rio
Grande, to skirt the fields of the mysterious Pueblos, to risk thirst
and ambush in the arid lands of the Navajo and Apache, to dare the
flooded rivers and that brazen furnace, the Mohave Desert, all to reach
the painted paradise of golden California, they surely became alive to
the wonderful expanse of that southwestern empire first called New
Spain—the Land of the Conquistadores!
A magic stage having magic scenes, bathed in glorious sunshine; a place
of enchantment, where the rainbow colors linger on the cliffs and never
leave the skies; an ancient garden of the gods, dreamily expecting that
the gods will yet return; presenting ever its sphinx-like riddle;
promising everything and yielding nothing but its lure. Once you have
felt its sorcery, the spell is never broken.
Speaks the old-timer, “The Desert’ll get yeh”; and he doesn’t add
anything about watching-out. The pioneers eluded or fought off
wandering war-parties, but the Desert got them nevertheless.
There is one point in Arizona where, between the Santa Fe Railway and
central Utah, three hundred miles as the crow flies and a weary five
hundred by the trails, there is nothing of civilization other than a
few isolated trading-posts and a solitary Indian Agency, set in a
terraced cañon, eighty miles from a telegraph key. As my train passed
this point in 1910, I did not dream that for more than eight years I
should direct that Indian Agency and its chain of scattered desert
stations, supplying all of progress that the country had, maintaining
all of law and order that its half-wild people knew, isolated, lonely,
well-nigh forgotten.
Only one who has lived thus removed from the turmoil and petty vanity
of cities, apart from careless crowds, unreached by artificiality, can
fully realize the brooding mystery, the savage beauty, the power and
cruelty of the Desert. One must penetrate its solitudes, stand atop the
world to view dead or enchanted cities, pause on the naked brink of
chasms leaning over faery valleys, to know the grandeur of this silent
country. One must grow weary on its heavy trails, feel its hunger,
shrink in its bitter cold, and thirst for the water of the precious
hidden springs. Fairly to hear its ominous hush at blazing noon-time,
to view the scarlet glory of its sunsets, to stand under its velvet
dome at night, lighted by the burning stars, is to have caught a secret
from the universe. To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that
crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is
to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not
peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness,
carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark,
and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. One
must have known the sigh of the night wind in the brush, heard the
chatter of jackals in the snow, felt the sandstorm’s acid lash, and
stopped, spellbound, at the sibilant warning of its gliding Indian god.
Then to have seen the drifting red-bellied rain-clouds that the Snake
priests pray for, the crisp rending lightning at their pouches, the
wild strength of arroyos after cloud-bursts, and the deluge of the
swift midsummer rains, ending in the soft radiance of double rainbows!
One must live as a hermit in the Desert to find its heart.
And only one who has done this may somehow feebly understand those
bronzed people of whom the desert genii have made fatalists—the solemn,
dreaming Indian of the waste lands, whether the Hopi of the mesa
heights and kivas, the Pueblo in his mediæval towns, or the Navajo,
chanting in his lonely, hidden camp. These know all the splendors, feel
all the menace and the mystery, and call the Desert home. Timid, yet
uncaring, ever bent on placating some unseen demon, trusting in songs
and sorceries, they go their Oriental ways on a vast Occidental stage.
The desert spell has touched them, every one.
That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert.
Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who
enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient,
are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology,
a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of
the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like
its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one
thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious
half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed
its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as
their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization
still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little
changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their
Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to
sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too.
One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not
quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the
valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and
through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry
of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in
history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One
can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long
train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars,
mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their head, the great
Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert
shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their
gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the
Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet
were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert
gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty
desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the
West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving
their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma.
Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre
of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio
Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound
of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to
reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung,
those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.
But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty
with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray
touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three
hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand
and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later
civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building
of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more.
“Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great
Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids,
carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads
who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still.
To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to
have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert
people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had
in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will
serve as a reason for this notebook.
Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this
kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it
to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark
all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating
fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an
area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian
inhabitants and few indeed of other men.
For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage
customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but
quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation.
As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a
point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where
Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August
1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this
modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the
older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian
tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to
them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it
had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a
band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of
thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other
troubles on the Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a
pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark
that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward
proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had
departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would
get no civil consolation.
Until then there had been a great show of tactful diplomacy between the
two Governmental representatives; the one of war counseling peace, and
the supposed civilian who had ventured close to war. The Colonel spoke,
for the first time without regard to the gentle traditions of the
Interior Department:—
“Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your
trunk!”
And there is another reason for the telling. Probably no other section
of Indian country is more visited than is the Painted Desert, where the
Snake gods have such influence. From June to October comes a host,
packing cameras and notebooks and sketching-blocks, attired in weird
garments, big with questions, and expecting to find hotels. Most of
them wish to rough it smoothly, and are easily annoyed. They seek the
natural wonders of the Empire, and especially the religious “dances” of
the Indian people, chief of which is the annual Hopi Snake Dance. A
strange crowd, having more of enthusiasm than sense, staggering under
theories, swelled with importance and criticism, generously stuffed by
guides.
A library has been written and vocabularies have been exhausted in
their efforts to explain the beauties and the thrills. Canvas
sufficient to tent a city has been spoiled by those who would capture
the delicate and elusive Desert charm. Historians and ethnologists have
recorded and traced; antiquaries have uncovered and restored. The
museums of the East are filled with looted treasure, while the files at
Washington drip complaints. (“Oblige me by referring to the files.”)
And the Indian as a savage—and a little-understood savage at that—has
been idealized. And those who do not observe this view—berated.
But not a word has been printed, and few spoken without a sneer,
regarding those of the United States Indian Service who keep watch and
ward in the remote places: those who govern and protect, educate and
guide; those who have kept the Indian living, that he may be sketched
and analyzed and gaped at. This work extends beyond the dude season,
through the lonely, bitter winters, embracing at times contagion-camps
among an unreasoning, often unappreciative, and occasionally defiant
population.
To further education among those who do not want it, to advance
medication among fatalists, to attain some show of morals among an
insensible and unmoral people, to demand respect and win affection from
suspicious aliens, to rule absolutely without an army, and, above all,
to keep sane and just without society, call for all of any man’s
ingenuity and resourcefulness, and should arouse something other than
blatant criticism from those who boast intelligence.
Having accomplished these things, every one, I am proud of the record;
and I shall not fail to acknowledge my full indebtedness to those
faithful men and women of the Service who made my efforts possible of
success—employees, traders, missioners, not forgetting those few from
among the heathen who gave their loyalty and confidence. They too have
felt the sneers and insults of the multitude; and the grudging
appreciation of an equally insensible Bureau nearly three thousand
miles away is small reward. Many valued employees have grown old in
this Service without a syllable of commendation from Washington. And I
have prompted at least one Commissioner of Indian Affairs to
acknowledge his feeble debt to a dying physician—dying on his feet,
still nobly making the rounds.
When I left Washington, in 1910, I had no idea that such a future work
would extend my little vacation into the years. Six months out o’
doors, and either I should be reëstablished at the old stand, pounding
the old typewriter, or I should have attended a ceremony that is final
but not interesting to the subject thereof. A simple calendar; not the
first, however, to stand revision.
Morning brought Chicago, to me a grim and sinister city, and a day
spent in its galleries and clubs; then the train again, and its long
crawl across level, heated Kansas. Excellent living on a diner, and
came the thought that wherever this railroad wended would follow good
food, which I required, and service of the best. Vain and
soon-to-be-exploded vision! The railroad carries food and service; the
West sees it go by. In the Desert one has desert fare.
The contrast was outside the windows; on the third morning this
contrast became acute. Instead of hamlets, farms, and country lanes,
there was now the grayish-green of the sage, broken by stunted cedars
on the slopes, with an overtone of brown as the soil reflected light.
There was no indication of complete aridity, so one could not think of
this as a desert. Scant vegetation lived from the brush of the
foreground to the timbered blue of the distant ranges. They did not
appear as lofty mountains, although many peaks lifted against a calm
blue sky. Beyond the little telegraph points, the occasional adobes of
section crews, and water tanks, the landscape held not a sign of
habitation. In the middle distance were strange formations of crumbling
shale, banded with the spectral white of gypsum: queer piles such as
might have been designed by some sardonic humorist. Now straying
cattle, gaunt as the hills, blanket Indians idling at a station, or a
ranger on a shabby mount, were the only things of life. Over all the
golden haze of New Mexico, moistened by the mists of the Rio Grande.
But later in the day this blue-toned view began to change. The sky grew
clearer, the distance more intimate and revealing. Everything snapped
into the brilliancy of sharp relief. Where had been isolated buttes,
now ran barricades of rock, wind-worn, pinnacled, and domed, while the
cold tones—blue and silver—of the river country warmed to the dry
saffrons and parched reds of sun-baked Arizona, the Land of Little
Rain. One could, as the old-timer sings, “see farther and see less”
than on any other stage of the world.
Just at sunset the train slowed into a weather-browned, dust-covered
town, its main street along the tracks and little else in sight. It was
Sunday and the season of the wind. A swirling fog screened everything
as the cars stopped. There is nothing more forlorn than a Southwest
town of a Sunday in the windy season. A long rank of stores and saloons
displayed false fronts, innocent of paint. A few starved trees waved
crippled branches, and were most piteous. Flapping awnings, flying
leaves, waste paper, sand, and cinders filled the air. When the wind
ceased howling for a moment, there fell a deadly silence. It seemed to
me as if that place must have been as it was for a thousand years,
drowsing in the red-gold sunset, abandoned, overlaid by the itinerant
dust of all the ages. A clatter of hoofs, a shot, a crash of glass, and
a man or two by Remington would have completed the picture.
A little to the north of it was Poverty Flat. To the east was the
drying bed of the Little Colorado, a mile in width, lined by withered
cottonwoods, and possessing scarcely enough liquid to demand a
foot-bridge. In the west, a thing of splendor, reared the beautiful San
Francisco range, snow-crowned, radiant, the sun searing down into its
ancient craters. Elsewhere, everywhere, stretched the Desert, sterile,
barren, robing now in the purplish-brown shades of early dusk. Its
unlimited expanse, silent, desolate, suggested something of foreboding,
something of waiting menace.
Thank God! there was one of those splendid railroad hotels at hand. I
hurried into it, a little of civilization such as I knew, glad to shut
out the night that advanced across that empty plain, swallowing as it
came the masses of the Moqui Buttes and all the strange upland country
that a year later I was to call home.