I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual
flutter, on the heels, as it seems, of some adventure that
should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to
bed at night and called me up again at morning in one
unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me
in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come;
but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen’s
Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the
green shutters of the inn at Burford.
—Stevenson: A Gossip on Romance
Adventure! The Standard Dictionary divides it, like Gaul, into three
parts, peculiarly interrelated, yet thinly divisible from each
other:—(1) A remarkable or hazardous experience; an unexpected or
exciting occurrence. (2) A hazardous or uncertain undertaking; a daring
feat. (3) The encountering of risks; daring and hazardous enterprise.
And the writing of it has come to signify swift dramatic action, having
a spirited and triumphant finale.
But life in the Desert,—for that matter, life anywhere,—does not
advance to a whiplash conclusion. One may not dismiss unwelcome
characters simply because convenience or stark justice demands Finis.
Despite taut emotions and unsavory possibilities, they go on living and
muddling up the action; and the sun rises, and to-morrow is another
day. My personal experiences among the Indians in the lonely places
have not been exactly hazardous or desperately daring from my point of
view, indeed, not half so venturesome as nights I have spent in New
York. One will have to accept these reminiscences as simply unusual and
I hope not uninteresting happenings, with what of thrill they may
inspire. Would you insist that I lug in ghosts or bandits? Should I
stage a massacre? Perhaps I could contrive to have Youkeoma abduct the
trader’s daughter, and arrange a nick-of-time rescue by the cavalry.
But Youkeoma was interested in ceremonies only, as he told me, and the
trader had no daughter. I should therefore libel a sincere pagan and a
bachelor business-man.
Now it strikes me that there is more of nervous drama in Colonel
Scott’s going alone into a half-hostile camp, facing down a band of
sullen fellows, and coming out with obedience to his decisions. It
strikes me, too, that in these desert camps that have known so little
of discipline, with no force in the offing and no hope of one, is the
real drama of an Agent’s life. I can relate my kind of thrill, but
there will be little of dramatic conclusions. Nothing of wild rides,
and pursuits, and ambuscades; nothing of foiled villains, and certainly
nothing of beautiful maidens in distress. This last the Indian Service
does not invite, and if accidentally acquired does not long retain.
The nearest to that sort of adventure I ever came was in meeting the
mail-hack one cold sunset, far from the Agency. It was driven by a
half-frozen Mexican who could speak no English beyond: “Buenas dias,
señor. Mucho frio. No savvy.”
There was a pleasing young woman with him, who said she was a teacher,
ordered to report to the Agent at Keams Cañon. Our meeting-place was
about thirty miles from the last post-house, and quite ninety miles
from the railroad. I can imagine how strange and timid one feels under
such conditions. It had been a bleak day, and a keen night was coming
on. My auto would reach the Agency hours before those two weary bronks
could plod in; so I introduced myself, and said she would travel
quicker to the Agency with me. She looked me over: dingy hat, rusty
puttees, red nose, everything—and decided to remain with the voluble
Mexican.
I can remember leaving Chin Lee one winter’s night, black shadows on
the snow-covered desert and a razor-edged wind coming straight out of
that huge funnel, Cañon de Chelly, to go seventy-five miles to Kayenta,
the most isolated post-office and trading-post in the United States. I
had been bluffed into it by my friend, the Water-Witch, who wanted to
save the morrow’s daylight.
“Can you stand an all-night hike?” he asked, solicitously. “Sing out if
you can’t. There’s a good bed here, and—”
“I’m game for it, if you are,” I said, but without enthusiasm.
The engine of his emaciated Ford clucked, and the snow crunched under
its wheels. For the first hour a brisk conversation kept us illuminated
and fairly warm. Then it grew deadly cold, with that relentless,
piercing cold to be experienced only at night in those cruelly bleak,
windswept, desert wastes. I bit down on my pipe to prevent my teeth
castanetting. I felt of my face to be sure it had not cracked off. And
we rode on and on, paralleling the dim Black Mountain barricade.
Finally, with bitter exasperation, the Witch called out: “Dammit all!
ain’t you cold?”
“Froze,” I gasped.
“Well, there’s a trading-post hiding in this side cañon, if I can find
the road to it. You’ll never sing out. I give up. Let’s make for camp
before we both perish.”
I uttered choking sounds of thanksgiving. And it drearily seemed, for a
space, that he would not be able to find the trail. The snow was
unbroken in the hills. Then we caught a gleam from the black, gave a
hail, and found a cedar-fire welcome.
Those are Arizona adventures.
One may encounter them in boggy flats, or in blinding snowstorms; in
seeking to cross a river in springtime without too much knowledge of
the ford; in facing the hot sand’s lash that stings as powdered glass;
with exhausted horses and far from the town, on hearing the crunch of a
drive-pinion twenty miles the wrong side of home; at nightfall; at
midnight, noon, or dawn. The blush of morning on snow-encrusted cliffs,
the wistful mysteries of summer twilight, the burnished glories of an
autumn sunset, have no appeal then. Simple struggles with the elements
and distances of the lonely Desert, when tired out, cold, hungry. They
are the day’s work, hard, exhausting work. And one does not record such
things in Annual Reports.
But, since adventures are in demand, perhaps I can resurrect a thrill
or two from the notebook. Long ago I listed them as scenery for
stories, meaning to import a few interesting and even beautiful types
as characters, for the honest-to-God, on-the-ground people steadily
refused to become heroic. Relatively mild affairs these, with only two
persons killed, two crippled up a bit, some little blood spilled, and
lots of nervous imagining. My men were uneasy at the time, and I most
scared of all.
If I had thrust these episodes on a New York editor, out of their order
and true atmosphere, garnished with a picaresque dressing, he might
have praised them; but I was not among those killed, and reflection
urges that this would probably make a difference to him. Aside from
having a thumb sprained when an angry Indian tried to wrench it off my
hand, I was not physically hurt; but my nervous system was slightly
warped each time, and I have been reported on as an efficient, but very
profane man. Quite so. I will admit that I never took any saints along
on these trips.
And in every single one of these affairs, the enemy triumphed. “The man
or the hour had not yet come”; and while I have had mounted messengers
of both sexes come to me on both frosty and tepid nights, their
errands, after due investigation, and however irritating, could not be
classed as tragic; but there were times when “the feeling of it had me
to bed and up again” in a round of anticipation and some little
suspense, decidedly not so pleasurable as romantic Stevenson found his.
One undertaking began with Limping Joe paying attention to
Do-hahs-tahhe’s wife. This was not appreciated by either of them, and
the husband first warned, and then threw Limping Joe bodily out of his
neighborhood. This angered the potential home-wrecker, and he returned
with a light rifle. Do-hahs-tahhe was sacking corn in his field close
to his hogan. He saw Limping Joe approaching, and while .22’s are
rabbit-guns, they sometimes go off when least expected and injure
people. Again Do-hahs-tahhe flung himself on Limping Joe; he wrenched
the rifle away from him, threw out the single shell, and smashed the
stock over a stone. Observing then that he held only the barrel, he
whirled it around his head and let go of it. It winged off, end over
end, and down into the wash.
Limping Joe went down into the wash and found the gun. He examined the
lock and saw that a shell would go into it. Pointing it in the air, he
pulled the trigger. Bang! it was all right, even though it had no stock
for the shoulder. Then Limping Joe put in another shell, stalked up the
bank, and shot Do-hahs-tahhe through the lungs.
Therefore the Indian Agent had to forward one physician, one
stenographer, one notary public, and a few police, promptly, hurriedly,
to take the man’s dying statement: the doctor to tell him he was dying,
the stenographer to report him, and the notary to swear them all. The
police meantime grabbed Limping Joe. Do-hahs-tahhe died in a few hours
and Limping Joe sat in the guardhouse with gyves upon his wrists, also
shackles securing his ankles, and a log-chain connecting the two
contrivances. I did not intend that he should—and he did not—get away.
This was in Territorial days, and a Reservation criminal-case came,
strangely enough, within the jurisdiction of the Territorial courts. I
sent for the county sheriff, and he arrived with one huge deputy, both
of them heavily armed.
“Why the arsenal?” I asked of the officer, who had a reputation for
fearlessness.
“Well, I have had Indian prisoners taken from me before,” he said.
Now there had been some little rumor of dissatisfaction among the
relatives and friends of Limping Joe. They felt he should be tried by
the Agent, quite as one who had purloined a sheep, and they expected
that he would receive a mild type of punishment. Gossip had it that
they would oppose his being removed from the Desert.
“I’ll go with you to the Reservation line,” I said to the sheriff, “and
this side of it, they will have to take him away from me.”
“Very good,” replied the officer, “because I wouldn’t fight for him.”
And I made up my mind that neither would I.
We started with the stars still bright in the sky, three o’clock of a
morning, to cover the thirty-five miles to the line. The sheriff and
deputy rode in a buckboard, the prisoner with them. An Indian boy drove
my buggy, and I sat with a gun on the seat. Nothing happened. We did
not see a Navajo on the trip. After lunching at the line, we parted
with the officers, and prepared to return that same day. Seventy miles
for the team would be a hard drive and would bring us in late at night;
but this is in the day’s work too.
All that afternoon the horses jogged homeward. The prisoner off my
hands, I dropped the gun into a bag under the seat. It was getting on
to dark when the team began wearily climbing the last long rise that
separated us from the drop down into Keams Cañon. There was a fringe of
cedars at the top, black as spectres against a dull red sky. The horses
plodded nearer and nearer to the crest of the ridge. One could see the
branches of the old trees now, as if etched on the sky’s plate.
Then came a call, a Navajo cry. My boy pulled in the team with a sudden
wrench. He had been watching the edge of the hill. And from the trees
four or five men stepped quickly into the road. I made a swift clutch
on the seat for the gun, and then realized that it could not be there.
The bag had slipped back into the boot, and was mixed with halters,
nose-bags, and the clutter of a desert buggy. There was a moment—it
seemed a week—of tense chilliness, while they lingered in the dusk, as
if waiting for us. One cannot wheel a buggy in a desert road. It was
either stop or go on. Then they crossed into the cedars, and we heard
them moving off, talking in Navajo. One began to sing. My Indian boy
laughed as if relieved.
“The miners,” he said.
And sure enough, they were my own coal-working gang that had quit the
drift at five o’clock and had reached that point on their way home. But
I had thought, and so had my driver, that friends of Limping Joe were
about to greet us. It was just the right time in the evening, and just
the right color in the sombre landscape; and they had stepped from the
trees, half-waiting, in just that manner.
Limping Joe? The court treated him with customary severity. For this
deliberate, cold-blooded murder he received the terrible sentence of
three years in the penitentiary, and had quite six months off for good
behavior. During his protracted absence I issued rations to his aged
parents and, after quite a little correspondence, some of it acrid in
tone, convinced my Washington critics that I had not persecuted the
poor fellow.
The East contains very few officials having the courage of Roosevelt,
who wrote, with respect to the Navajo particularly:—
These are as a whole good Indians ... although some are very bad
and should be handled rigorously....
For the last quarter of a century the lawless individuals among
them have done much more wrong (including murder) to the whites
than has been done to them by lawless whites. The lawless Indians
are the worst menace to the others among the Navajo and Utes; and
very serious harm has been done by well-meaning Eastern
philanthropists who have encouraged and protected these criminals.
And Francis E. Leupp, one-time Commissioner of Indian Affairs, held
this view:—
Agents and other Government officials, when of the best type, have
done most good; and when not of the right type have done most evil;
and they have never done any good at all when they have been afraid
of the Indians or have hesitated relentlessly to punish Indian
wrongdoers.
Apart from the administration period of these two men, few Indian
Agents have expected to receive support in any effort thoroughly to
punish Indian criminals in the Desert. The tone of the Indian Bureau
this last decade has been largely one of compromise and apology: with
superiors in office; to sentimentalists; with and to discontented or
stupid or evil Indians who blocked progress. Annually, when seeking
appropriations, it has apologized to Congress for asking, and then
apologized most humbly when denied. Charged with the protection and
welfare of incompetent human beings, one would think it dealt in wooden
dolls. Inconsistent, and of little vision, wastefully parsimonious,
ignoring sage advice, ready to compromise, it has been a poor source
for justice and a sorry judge of men. Of timely intelligence it has
demonstrated little, and of sincerity, less. To manœuvre in the winds
of expediency, to trim sail for maintenance in office, to drift
hopefully, has been its course and policy. The distant field has viewed
such variable charts with suspicion and dismay.
Perhaps a parable may prove amusing.
“Colonel” Oldhouse, who had about reached the retirement age, suspected
all new-fangled methods. Behind his desk rested an old hand-made
army-chest, strapped and locked to withstand the strains and bruises of
frontier travel. The Colonel dated from those days when the stage ran
“to the States,” and Santa Fe was an outpost of progress. In that chest
reposed his warrants and accounts, neatly arranged, jacketed, and
briefed. He could go to it in the dark and instantly find Voucher 137
for the second quarter of 1889.
“Colonel,” said a very young man, “Why don’t you order some files for
your papers, with sliding drawers, and rods, and—”
The Colonel snorted.
“They’re no good,” he snapped; “the damned things are made by
machinery!”
Exactly, Colonel; you have accurately described the ineffectiveness of
a filing-case.