By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent
when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.
—Stevenson: Ordered South
“Keams Cañon!” A commonplace name, because a trading rover had made it
home. Tom Keams has gone roving into shadowy lands. “Lu-kah-des-chin,”
the place of the reeds, is the Navajo name. For nearly three hundred
days of the year it possesses the finest climate in the world, air like
wine, filtered clean and sweet through ten thousand square miles of
unpolluted wilderness.
In those few remaining days are the contrasts. An odd change, at the
close of a sunlit winter day, to have the sky suddenly go drab and
dull, promising a bleak night, and then the added silence of the
falling snow. Stealthily the storm would come upon us, whirling crisp
dry flakes, weaving a magic veil to drape white all the cliffs. A new
hush in the Desert. And at morning, a crystal landscape, glittering
like an old-time Christmas card.
Chattering birds in springtime, pausing for a little from their
travels, gossiping of Mexico and strange Southern lands. They rejoice
in this oasis. The filmy gray of the cottonwoods lends them a screen;
already the swelling buds are pale green against the colder tones of
the Cañon walls. A last patch of snow on a north ledge suddenly seems
to slip, and is gone; and where it was shows the newest bloom, a tiny
bit of desert scarlet.
Now the rains,—little showers and furious deluges,—the cliffs washing
clean as they soak as sponges. The arroyo roars and boils its sudden
surprising current, and each alcove of the high rocks springs its
miniature silvery waterfall. Then the rare aroma of wet cedars and a
thirsty soil, all parched things drinking as gluttons; while above, in
a twilight sky, appear rainbows, katchinas of the heavens.
Can you wonder that tramps and painters, cowpunchers and poets, return
to this Empire of Enchantment? It is one of those fanciful “other
places,” one of the last having an horizon.
The place we’re in is always here,
The other place is there.
I have had something more to say of my Navajo friends, their ways and
ceremonies; of the curious, shy, and altogether lovable Indian children
and their schools; of that strange medley from the Civil Service
grab-bag, the employees; of quarantines, and wars against disease; of
the curse of the medicine-men; of the baronial traders and their
frontier systems; of Indian art and industry; and too, something more
of the Desert itself, its great cañons and monster monuments, the
mammoth jewels of the Empire; and of those crumbling ruins in the
North, beyond the rim of the Black Mountain, long-lost cities of the
dead, picturing the futility of men and the vastness of desert time.
But the book closes. The story of an empire cannot be compressed into
one volume.
In August 1919 I received orders to take charge of the Pueblo Indians
of New Mexico, those dreamy towns along the Rio Grande, in the land of
the Spanish bells. My headquarters would be at Albuquerque, but a few
miles from where Coronado made his winter camp in 1540, on that long
hike to Quivera. It was not until I made this announcement that I fully
knew my host of desert friends. The staff gave me a farewell dinner, of
course, and there was speechmaking and a lot of neighborly merriment
that several times jangled off the key. You see, I had been there a
long time, and whatever my faults and deficiencies, they knew them. As
I have written earlier, it is hard to change czars.
The people of the Desert are seldom effusive or voluble. They rode in,
pairs and groups of them, to wish me good luck and to say good-bye. The
Hopi tried to express his regret; the Navajo stood about diffidently
for a little, and then shook hands without an effort at a word, and
rode away. Those who knew me best brought little presents of rare value
to one who knew their history—a basket, a painted piece of pottery, an
old ceremonial bow. One of them, who liked me well enough, could not
come; so he asked a missionary to write exactly as he dictated.