The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected
to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities
of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he
probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be
remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any
quarter of the globe.—T. B. Macaulay: Johnson
Life in the little stone house to which I had now removed was filled
with books and tobacco smoke and belated plans in futures—that time
when I should be strong again. I had regretted the impossibility of my
packing out a Washington library, but my old friend and bitter critic,
the now astonishing Mr. Mencken, kept my intelligence alive by sending
parcels of the latest publications, and these arrived fresh and
unscorched, though having passed beneath his searing eye and ruthless
pen. Later, my faithful typewriter, a relic of newspaper days, was sent
forward in defiance of medical advice, and I wrote a few stories that,
with their magazines and editors, are now forgotten.
Evenings, swung in a hammock, I studied sunsets and their glories,
masked and reflected by the magnificent San Francisco Range, and
gradually began to absorb the desert peace. To know its moods, those
swift and unexpected changes, having in them often a dream’s
stealthiness and unreality, one must live for a year in a little house
built low against the brown bosom of the Desert.
I remember the peculiar silvern radiance of one evening. The light came
through dust-screens and, filtering across brown levels, limned patches
of greasewood in a lemon pallor. The sentry cottonwoods of the
riverbank were picked out as brilliant etchings of gray trunks and lacy
branches in a glow of apple-green. Night swarmed out of the east in
great blue clouds. Flying before it were cottony puffballs, white and
twisting into the sunset, like masses of fleece, newly washed. But in
the northwest swung a dun-colored curtain, lighted by the afterglow,
suspended from the higher sky, a drifting, heavy drapery, its ragged
edges trailing the tops of the blunted buttes with filmy rain-tresses.
Between this curtain and the middle distance the mesa barricades had
not yet darkened, and they were sharply outlined as gaunt shapes of red
and saffron sandstone.
Now the peaks cooled and the great mountain-range lived in silhouette,
its backbone etched with a line of electric blue. Early night swept
overhead, and a few timid stars peeked out, as if fearing the
thunder-mutter that came on the night wind, sullen herald of a desert
storm. Now pale red flames reflected in the far-away dun-colored
curtain. The storm rushed eastward across the northern heavens, while
above me the night rolled west, bringing its stars into a brighter
glow.
But this storm was fifty miles away and had its prescribed circle to
complete. Soon its gathering vanguard began blotting out the stars. Now
came a dusty shrieking wind; now the purple belly of the sky was rent
by a white-hot wire, and like the crash of a thousand cannon followed
the voices of the storm; now fell a few drops of cold rain, fanned on
the wind into spray; and then—the deluge—a silvery curtain in the
half-light, like a river turned over a new brink, drenching the Desert,
beating all weak things into the sand. Parched as the ground was, the
water could not be absorbed at once, and soon stood as lakes in the
hollows.
It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in
arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such
cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming
in the hot sunlight.
Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an
afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead;
then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and
bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the
stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. But the
observer had the advantage of a view embracing one hundred miles
between the mountain range and the country of the buttes. The wonders
of the heavens passed around him in full circle.
And where could one find such another place for the sight? Probably
nowhere else in this hemisphere, save with a slight advantage in height
and atmosphere at the Lowell Observatory, about sixty miles away, where
the astronomer may have viewed the same spectacle from his study,
perched on a shoulder of the San Francisco Range, having below him that
mystic world of the Indians, the dim, illimitable stretches of the
Painted Desert.
The New England States, all of them, could be gently eased into
Arizona, and there would remain room for Pennsylvania and little
Delaware without crowding. The one reservation that I had charge of
from 1911 to 1919 embraced 3863 square miles, a trifle smaller than
Connecticut, and it was a postage stamp on the broad yellow face of
Arizona, which is in area one twenty-seventh of the entire United
States. One hundred thousand persons, or one fourth of the state’s
estimated population, live in eight of its towns, leaving much less
than three persons per square mile, including Indians and Mexicans, to
inhabit the remaining emptiness. One tenth of the population is Indian,
and one fourth of Arizona’s land area is “Indian country.” The
reservations have 1.5 persons per square mile. The fastest train of the
Santa Fe system requires ten hours to cross Arizona from its eastern
boundary to the Colorado River, a distance of 386 miles. Arizona has
mountains that lift their crests more than 12,000 feet above the sea;
and to present a perfect contrast, it has Yuma and Parker, towns of the
Mohave Desert, cozy places in summer, close to sea level, with
temperatures of 116° to 120° in the shade. Yes, you can eat oranges
from the Phœnix trees while listening to the story of the Yuma man who
found Hell chilly; and you can find snow in June on the upper levels of
the Apache Indian Reserve without scaling a mountain peak. In the
northern Navajo country I have twice experienced thirty degrees below
zero in February, while there is no doubt the American Beauty roses
were blooming in Phœnix gardens. Once I nearly froze to death on the
nineteenth of May in Arizona, the place of palms, and figs, and
pomegranates!
I had expected to be sadly bored, but the steady routine of each
reservation working-day ate up the hours. Time does not hang on one’s
hands; a strange thing too, considering the silence and solitude and
lack of action in the Desert. Some writer has sought to picture this
bustling, speaking emptiness:—“It is a land where one always expects to
find something just around the corner; and there is never anything
around the corner.” Quite so. Therefore, it is a magic place, an
Enchanted Empire, filled ever with a wistful anticipation that lures
without the bitterness of disappointment. There is always another
corner, and another beautiful possibility.
A multitude of office duties caused the four morning-hours to seem as
one. Lunch time, and a bit of gossip with a dozen strange beings, and
the quaint humor that isolation creates. Then the afternoon, filled
with the shrieking wind and the hiss of sand against the panes. A
passing traveler would stop to ask about the river fords and roads to
nowhere; and those employees coming to requisition supplies, whether
engineer or school matron or farrier, would have their talk out. The
warehouses always presented the fascinating search for something, just
to learn if indeed it was there, as the account stated, and in the
exact quantity as the Bureau minutely charged; and when not found,
there would be ample time for the cursing-out of the fellow who had
used it and failed to make the credit to protect the Chief.
“That fencing!” wrathfully declared the Boss. “That wire was issued
five years ago. I remember old Becode Bega got the last spool of it. It
has rusted out by now in the Corn Creek. Hawkins was clerk then, and
damn his eyes, he never expended anything. He had rheumatism, and sang
hymns, and was always telling me that Congressman Floyd Witherspoon, of
Spokane Flats, had married his wife’s second cousin. Send a policeman
up to Becode’s camp, and have that old sinner ride in thirty miles to
sign for that wire. It’s a shame to do it, but who cares in Washington!
They sent Hawkins out, and have him still, somewhere else, twisting
somebody else’s accounts. What’s the next item?”
And so it went. Because under the accounting system then in vogue—a
relic of the War Department days, and which ate up oodles of time and
thousands of dollars in checking and balancing—everything from a quart
of shoe pegs to a locomotive-type of stationary boiler had to be
located and tested and receipted for by the Chief every three months,
come Hades or come high-water!
Without this intense supervision by mail and blue pencil, through
exceptions to accounts submitted, and silly questions, and equally
silly answers, the Chief might have eaten either the shoe-pegs or the
boiler during that odd time when he should have been making brick for
lack of something to occupy him. The state of the Indians themselves,
physically or mentally; the state of their holdings in stock,
implements or gardens; the actual efficiency of the employee corps; the
quality of supplies, and whether on hand or not in sufficient amount to
insure a standard system—no one of these things particularly interested
any Eastern authority to the point of correction; but the property
accounts and the cash accounts were checked until the paper wore out,
and until the Chief neglected everything else to satisfy them.
And dear old careful Uncle, who has wasted more cold cash in archaic
systems than any other organization known to ancient or modern history,
checked the spigot drainings every three months, unmindful of the bung,
and scrupulously filed away the results in the catacombs of Washington,
unaware of the negligence of Hawkins, the clerk, but always decidedly
mindful of that worthy’s relationship to the elected genius of Spokane
Flats. One may now remark that the accounting systems have changed.
They have—after years of travail. But Hawkins and his benevolent
influence have not changed; Uncle has not changed; and the Chief’s time
is still spent checking inefficiency at home and reporting to ignorance
abroad.
Three times a week, in late afternoon, a solitary horseman, jouncing
above his laden saddlebags, would appear over the slight rise beyond
the trading-post, coming from the railroad; and a cry would go up from
the campus:—
“The mail!”
That call would cause a stir. What a thing of interest is a newspaper
five days old, a fresh magazine or catalogue, in those waste places!
And a letter from a friend or loved one is a thing golden. Scarcely
would the distribution have ended, with joy or disappointment, when it
would be sunset, and the Desert cooling and browning into dusk as the
red ball plunged downward into the caverns of the range, trailing
behind it a glory that often compensated for the trials and little
evils of the day.
Sunday brought a pause that seemed unreal, an enforced halt, a marking
of time. For those who did not sing “Beulah Land,” it was a
long-drawn-out monotony. A thousand miles from anywhere inviting a
visit, often without the solace of a kindred spirit, the silence and
loneliness settled into one. The clanking pump was hushed, the boiler
no longer hissed steam, the whistle did not summon, the mail did not
arrive. Everyone arrayed himself in latest fashion, as mail-order
catalogues decreed, and sat around in great discomfort. Where to go?
There was no hunting, fishing—nothing. One had photographed everything
above ground five thousand times. The nearest town was twenty-six miles
off, and on Sunday as dead as Julius Cæsar.
On such a day I became acquainted with the post trader, a half-breed
Navajo, handsome and smiling. I found this lovable fellow in his
quarters off the store. The place was bare enough of comforts, but
along one wall ran shelves, piled with books and magazines—and such
books and magazines! There I found the famous five-foot shelf extended
many feet. And old files of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, and
Scribner’s. Among the books my hand touched Boswell’s Johnson, and I
knew that the volumes I had left behind would be no longer missed. And
Dickens, and Irving, and Macaulay, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Darwin.
“Why, I had not expected to find such books—here—”
He thanked me with a smile.
“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees
lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come
in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old
guy, wasn’t he?”
Criticism, à la Navajo!
Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that
excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were
trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they
had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he
could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society,
read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have
known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to
the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night,
those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could
talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay
down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and
sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew
the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a
gentle skepticism, and his armor was not dented by snatches of the
Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could
be defeated by a quotation, and were.
His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and
people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid
and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled
after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of
that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in
shreds.
As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an
equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical
to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our
own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native
policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all
their skill as trackers and go-betweens. As an interpreter at trials,
he was invaluable, and his knowledge of what a Navajo would do under
given conditions was almost uncanny.
Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police,
this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was
undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to
accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his
reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the
superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other
was the abject parsimony of the United States Government.
I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is
dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan
jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s
chanting—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling
on his tribal gods.
But I know that he met the answer with a smile. For so he would have
joined the long shadowy line of weaving plumes and tossing lances as
the tribe sought new and happier hunting-grounds; or would have entered
the council ring of the chiefs, to advise in reviewing their material
errors, when they saw the white man as a conqueror, rather than as a
friend, and matched his evils with their savage ingenuity.