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[Illustration: Montezuma's Castle, the ruined cliff dwelling on Beaver
Creek between the Coconino and Prescott National Forests, Arizona]
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
BY
AGNES C. LAUT
Author of _The Conquest of the Great Northwest_, _Lords of the North_
and _Freebooters of the Wilderness_
NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.
_Second Printing
October, 1913_
_Published May, 1913_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION i
I THE NATIONAL FORESTS 1
II NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 22
III THROUGH THE PECOS FORESTS 44
IV THE CITY OF THE DEAD 60
V THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA 78
VI ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT 100
VII ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT (_continued_) 116
VIII GRAND CANYON AND THE PETRIFIED FORESTS 137
IX THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE OF SANTA FE 153
X THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE (_continued_) 169
XI TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND 183
XII TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA 196
XIII SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA 214
XIV CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA 226
XV SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION 251
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Cliff dwelling ruins, known as Montezuma Castle, _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
South House of Frijoles Canyon ii
Indian woman making pottery xii
Indian girl of Isleta, N. M. xx
One way of entering the desert 4
In the Coconino Forest of Arizona 14
Forest ranger fighting a ground fire with his blanket 22
Pueblo boys at play 34
Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling 46
Los Pueblos, Taos, N. M. 56
Entrance to a cliff dwelling 64
Ruins of Frijoles Canyon 74
A Hopi wooing 80
A Hopi weaver 86
A shy little Hopi maid 92
At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna 96
A handsome Navajo boy 106
The Pueblo of Walpi 122
The Grand Canyon 140
The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe 154
A pool in the Painted Desert 160
Street in Santa Fe 166
Ancient adobe gateway 172
San Ildefonso 180
Taos 188
Over the roofs of Taos 198
A metal worker of Taos 208
A mud house of the Southwest 220
The enchanted Mesa of Acoma 230
Navajo crossing mesa 246
At the Mission of San Xavier 254
A Moki City on a mesa 262
THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST
INTRODUCTION
I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age--neolithic,
paleolithic, troglodytic man--with a roofless city of the dead lying in
the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the
yawning caverns of the cliff face above.
My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway 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 aeons when the
advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas
where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the
sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the
brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.
Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to
welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance,
or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on
his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with
calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high
fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a
flat _metate_ stone with a round grinding stone on top. From the shape
and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of
these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water
jar.
On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to
apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley
floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a
500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush
with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little
round "cat holes" through the walls--"cat holes" for a people who are
not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from
room to room through all the walls.
On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside,
round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed
serpent--"Awanya," guardian of the waters--whose presence always
presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as
the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could
see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about
in other cave houses are stone "bells" to call to meals or prayers, and
cobs of corn, and prayer plumes--owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and
be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian
idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People
lived--well, when _did_ they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that
was when the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the
glacial waters, began.
[Illustration: Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings
of Frijoles Canyon, after excavation]
"The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established," says
Winchell, the great western geologist, "that implies man during the
period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is
as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace
of man." Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago;
and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the
implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial
silt.
* * * * *
There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for
days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; _where you can
literally shake hands with the Stone Age_.
Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound
like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it
strong; but it is also meticulously and simply--true. A few doors away
from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body--no, not a mummy! We
are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to
find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of
about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg
bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth
from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis
when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date were
skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature
gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with
simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair.
Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black
hair shiny and 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 owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in
which the corpse has lain.
In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which
archaeologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B.
C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead
to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last
year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an
Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of
the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.
Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the canyon again! To
right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow _tufa_
precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone
Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds
of rooms--"the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and
the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces;
nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest
there."
Listen! You can almost hear it--the fulfillment 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! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the canyon
in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez
Mountains; and one night from my camp in this canyon, I heard the coyotes
howling from the empty caves.
Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone 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 rushing
torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern
men's dreams.
Far off to the right, where the worshipers must always have been in
sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert
sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise
blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age
people who dwelt in this canyon. It is a great concave hollowed out of
the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the
highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this
distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for worshipers when you climb
the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a
white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have
witnessed! I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first
rays came over the canyon walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal,
for incense, for water urns, mark the inner walls of this chamber, too.
Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the
hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a
darksome, eerie place with _sipapu_--the holes in the floor--for the
mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't
smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has
driven his nerves too hard in town?--To go back to the Soil and let Dame
Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth
Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.
* * * * *
Curious how geology and archaeology agree on the rise and evanishment of
these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the
northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk
living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were
forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff.
That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Archaeology says as
the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache--Asthapascan stock--came ramping
from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the
inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. "It was not until the nomadic
robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the
crowded form of existence," says Archaeology. Sounds like an explanation
of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life,
doesn't it?
Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men
were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse.
Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for
thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the canyon, and
the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and
Zuni have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of
corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe.
Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region--"place of the bird
people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years
before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people
dispersed.
* * * * *
What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part
of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petrae, or amid the sand-covered columns
of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging
excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in
the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be--well,
just _au fait_, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is
in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular
line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2
a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing
ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin
is in the Frijoles Canyon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such
ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New
Mexico. By joining the Archaeological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out
to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.
* * * * *
A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines
in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought
round-trip tickets to our own West and back--pleasure, not
business--over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I
don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he
was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the
amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave--_one_ to our own wonders,
to _two_ for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He
thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific
Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to
Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500;
but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the
average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to
$2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous
discrepancy--thirty million dollars _versus_ one hundred and twenty
million. _The Statist_ of London places the total spent by Americans in
Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and
twenty million.
Of the 3,700,000 people who went to the Seattle Exposition, it is a
pretty 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; and they saw Western cities, that are imitations
of Eastern cities; and they patronized Western hotel rotundas and dining
places, where you pay forty cents for Grand Junction and Hood River
fruit, which you can 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 thoroughly convinced
that there was no more real West.
And so 120,000 Americans yearly go to Europe spending a good average of
$1,000 apiece. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed,
though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the
north to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, with hundreds of peaks which no one has
climbed and which you can visit for not more than fifty dollars for a
four weeks' holiday. We tramp through Spain for the picturesque, quite
oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about
10,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right down in the heart of
America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in King
Alphonso's crown was taken. We rent a "shootin' box in Scotland" at a
trifling cost of from $1,200 to $12,000 a season, because game is "so
scarce out West, y' know." Yet I can direct you to game haunts out West
where you can shoot a grizzly a week at no cost at all but your own
courage; and bag a dozen wild turkeys before breakfast; and catch
mountain trout faster than you can string them and pose for a
photograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor
boast of what it cost you; for you can do it at two dollars a day from
start to finish. It would take you a good half-day to count up the
number of tourist and steamboat agencies that organize sightseeing
excursions to go and apostrophize the Sphinx, and bark your shins and
swear and sweat on the Pyramids. Yet it would be a safe wager that
outside official scientific circles, there is not a single organization
in America that knows we have a Sphinx of our own in the West that
antedates Egyptian archaeology by 8,000 years, and stone lions older than
the columns of Phrygia, and kings' palaces of 700 and 1,000 rooms. Am I
yarning; or dreaming? Neither! Perfectly sober and sane and wide awake
and just in from spending two summers in those same rooms and shaking
hands with a corpse of the Stone Age.
A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set out on the
around-the-world tour that was to give him that world-weary feeling that
was to make him live happy ever afterwards. In Nagasaki, a little brown
Jappy-chappie of great learning, who was a prince or something or other
of that sort, which made it possible for Harvard to know him, asked in
choppy English about "the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties in y'or
Souf Wes'." When young Harvard got it through his head that
"anti-kwatties" meant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out
for a smoke; but it came back 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 young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom
beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus
in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't
you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed
they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of
Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her
ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest
crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own
home State. The experience gave him something to think about.
The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to
Europe for holiday. _We have to go abroad to learn how to come home._ We
go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you
are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino
Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming
to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos,
who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year
for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are
various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to
catch trout and not be a sucker.
Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on
going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of
them lies.
Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it--that it costs more to
go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means
staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza,
where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but
traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the
beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go
drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and
catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as
you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home.
From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over
$33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that,
unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the
backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now
comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a
good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not
see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your
holiday stamping ground, Sundance Canyon, South Dakota; or the New
Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona;
or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest; or the White Rock Canyon of
the Rio Grande, where the most important of the wonderful prehistoric
remains exist; and you can stay at a ranch house where food and
cleanliness will be quite as good as at the Waldorf for from $1.50 to $2
a day.
[Illustration: In the bright Arizona sunshine before their little square
adobe houses Indian women are fashioning pottery into curious shapes]
You can usually find the name of the ranch house by inquiries from the
station agent where you get off. The ranch house may be of adobe and
look squatty; but remember that adobe squattiness is the best protection
against wind and heat; and inside, you will find hot and cold water,
bathroom, and meals equal to the best hotels in Chicago and New York. In
New York or Chicago, that amount would afford you mighty chancy fare and
only a back hall room. I know of hundreds of such ranch houses all along
the backbone of the Rockies.
Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big
hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a
motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig
at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro outright for from $5
to $10. Even if the burro takes a prize for ugliness, remember he also
takes a prize for sure-footedness; and he doesn't take a prize for
bucking, which the broncho often does. Figure up now the cost of a
month's holiday; and I repeat--it will cost you less than staying at
home. But if this total is still too high, there are ways of reducing
the expense by half. Take your own tent; and $20 will not exceed "the
grub box" contents for a month. Or all through the Rockies are deserted
shacks, mining and lumber shanties, herders' cabins, horse camps. You
can quarter yourself in one of these for nothing; and the sole expense
will be "the grub box;" and my tin trunk for camp cooking has never cost
me more than $50 a month for four people. Or best and most novel
experience of all--along White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande, in Mesa
Verde Park, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the
cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There is no danger of wolves,
or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook
below happens to be good. Hundreds of archaeologists, who come from
Egypt, Greece, Italy, England, to visit these remains, spend their
summer holiday this way. Why can't you? Or if you are not a good
adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer school that goes
out to the caves from Santa Fe every summer.
Is it safe? That question to a Westerner is a joke. Safer, much safer,
than in any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White
Mountains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on
the Saskatchewan; and I never locked a door, because there wasn't any
lock; and I never attempted to bar the door, because there wasn't any
need. Can you say as much of New York, or Chicago, or Washington? The
question may be asked--Will this kind of a holiday not be hot in summer?
You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some
mid-summer, when nearly everything inside the pullman car melted into a
jelly. Yes, it will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a
railroad naturally follows the lowest grade. But if you go back to the
ranch houses of the Upper Mesas and of foothills and canyons, you will be
from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and will need winter wraps
each night, and may have to break the ice for your washing water in the
morning--I did.
Another reason why so many Americans do not see their own country is
that while one species of fool has scared away holiday seekers by tales
of extortionate cost, another sort of fool wisely promulgates the lie--a
lie worn shiny from repetition--that "game is scarce in the West." "No
more big game"--and your romancer leans back with wise-acre air to let
that lie sink in, while he clears his throat to utter another--"trout
streams all fished out." In the days when we had to swallow logic
undigested in college, we had it impressed upon us that one single
specific fact was sufficient to refute the broadest generality that was
ever put in the form of a syllogism. Well, then,--for a few facts as to
that "no-game" lie!
In one hour you can catch in the streams of the Pecos, or the Jemez, or
the White Mountains, or the Upper Sierras of California, or the New
Glacier Park of the North, more trout than you can put on a string. If
you want confirmation of that fact, write to the Texas Club that has its
hunting lodge opposite Grass Mountain, and they will send you the
picture of one hour's trout catch. By measurement, the string is longer
than the height of a water barrel; and these were fish that didn't get
away.
Last year, twenty-six bear were shot in the Sangre de Christo Canyon in
three months.
Two years ago, mountain lions became so thick in the Pecos that hunters
were hired to hunt them for bounty; and the first thing that happened to
one of the hunters, his horse was throttled and killed by a mountain
lion, though his little spaniel got revenge by treeing four lions a few
weeks later, and the hunter got three out of the four.
Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of
hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed.
In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in
the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain.
Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the
other still haunts the canyons defiant of repeater.
From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can
nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone
ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here.
The week I reached Frijoles Canyon, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in
front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front
door.
The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff
caves, we disturbed a herd of deer.
Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It is if you follow the
beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild
turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look
for it. Believe me--though it may sound a truism--you won't find big
game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.
Or, if your quest is not hunting but studying game, what better ground
for observation than the Wichita in Oklahoma? Here a National Forest has
been constituted a perpetual breeding ground for native American game.
Over twenty buffalo taken from original stock in the New York Park are
there--back on their native heath; and there are two or three very
touching things about those old furry fellows taken back to their own
haunts. In New York's parks, they were gradually degenerating--getting
heavier, less active, ceasing to shed their fur annually. When they were
set loose in the Wichita Game Resort, they looked up, sniffed the air
from all four quarters, and rambled off to their ancestral pasture
grounds perfectly at home. When the Comanches heard that the buffalo had
come back to the Wichita, the whole tribe moved in a body and camped
outside the fourteen-foot fence. There they stayed for the better part
of a week, the buffalo and the Comanches, silently viewing each other.
It would have been worth Mr. Nature Faker's while to have known their
mutual thoughts.
There is another lie about not holidaying West, which is not only
persistent but cruel. When the worker is a health as well as rest
seeker, he is told that the West does not want him, especially if he is
what is locally called "a lung-er;" and there is just enough truth in
that lie to make it persistent. It is true the consumptive is not wanted
on the beaten trail, in the big general hotel, in the train where other
people want draughts of air, but he can't stand them. On the beaten
trail, he is a danger both to himself and to others--especially if he
hasn't money and may fall a burden on the community; but that is only a
half truth which is usually a lie. Let the other half be known! All
through the West along the backbone of the Rockies, from Montana to
Texas, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, are the tent
cities--communities of health seekers living in half-boarded tents, or
mosquito-wired cabins that can be steam-heated at night. There are
literally thousands of such tent dwellers all through the Rocky Mountain
States; and the cost is as you make it. If you go to a sanitarium tent
city, you will have to pay all the way from $15 to $25 a week for house,
board, nurse, medicine and doctor's attendance; but if you buy your own
portable house and do your own catering, the cost will be just what you
make it. A house will cost $50 to $100; a tent, $10 to $20.
Still another baneful lie that keeps the American from seeing America
first is that our New World West lacks "human interest;" lacks "the
picturesqueness of the shepherds in Spain and Switzerland," for
instance; lacks "the historic marvels" of church and monument and
relic.
If there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster of them all. Will
you tell me why "the human interest" of a legend about Dick Turpin's
head festering on Newgate, England, is any greater to Americans than the
truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd,
when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New
Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train
robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between
England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of
outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Canyon up the Pecos, or took
possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the
Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than
descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on
our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in
quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro
in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled
eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons
and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled
bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long
before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful
to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near
Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone
lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions
carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating 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
of a church--at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters--that
was 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
Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the
gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks,
and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who
interviewed Eve--all right here in your own American Southwest, with the
difference in favor of the 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 of motor roads in Europe; but isn't
it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? 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 Highway built
for motors to the very snow tops.
[Illustration: An Indian girl of Isleta, New Mexico, carrying a water
jar.]
And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at
Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the
legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but
America. This is a story by itself--a beautiful one, also in spots a
funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from
Oxford, England, took quarters in one of the pueblos at Santa Clara or
thereabout to study Indian arts and crafts. One night in her adobe
quarters, her orderly British soul was aroused by such a dire din of
shouting, fighting, screams, as she thought could come only from some
inferno of crime. She sprang out of bed and dashed across the _placito_
in her nightdress to her guardian protector in 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 horror of "bluggy
deeds."
"Pah," said the old fellow coming back, "dat not'ing! Young man, he git
marry an' dey--how you call?--chiv-ar-ee-heem."
"Then, what are you laughing at?" demanded the irate British dame; for
she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in
suffocated laughter. "How dare you laugh?"
* * * * *
"I laugh, Mees," he sputtered out, "'cos you scare me so bad when you
call, I jomp in my coat mistake for my pants. Dat's all."
* * * * *
It would pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would
pay to let a little daylight in on the abysmal blank regarding the
wonder-land of our own world--wouldn't it?
I don't know whether the affectation recognized as "the foreign pose"
comes foremost or hindermost as a cause of this neglect of the wonders
of our own land. When you go to our own Western Wonder Land, you can't
say you have been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is
wonderful what a paying thing that pose is in a harvest of "fooleries."
There is a well-known case of an American author, who tried his hand on
delineating American life and was severely let alone because he was
too--not abroad, but broad. He dropped his own name, assumed the pose of
a grand dame familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of
the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. His books have
"gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are
abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.
The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of
Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the
historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an
implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and
superiority, which is pretense--is another matter. Let us take the dire
and damning deficiencies of America!
"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone
Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to
fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.
There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma--islands of
rock, sheer precipice of yellow _tufa_ for hundreds of feet--amid the
Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated
in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders,
brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all
this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or 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,
there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Canyon de Chelly (Shay)
forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses
of Washington.
"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and
the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is
the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through
Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions
galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered
Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a
bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There
is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway;
and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of
wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange
Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in
cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one
end of a main thoroughfare, you can see the site of the old Spanish
Gareta prison, in the walls of which bullets were found embedded in
human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the
braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street
and of small talk--then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and
the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of
the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the
gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the
apple bloom.
What was the other charge? Oh, yes--"lacks the human," whatever that
means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than
true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Canyon and the cliff houses of
Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to
hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium
more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the
Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of
Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys,
Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did
not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money
which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are
not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to
American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of
the Old World?
Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America
usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar
prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes--but America
lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."
"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition
period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle
baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain
in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of
American feudalism--fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area
of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat
clad _cap-a-pie_ in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at
Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet
hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years
back--and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing
of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism,
the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted
troops the big iron chest for the gold--iron chests that you can see to
this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial
in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by
secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver
of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of
New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's--an era
that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki,
Spirit of Evil, smiled with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade
the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were
alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north
as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia
groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed
horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough,
remnants of some sort of domesticated creatures are found in the cave
men's houses, centuries before the coming of horses and cattle and sheep
with the Spanish. The trouble is, up to the present when men like Curtis
and dear old Bandelier and Burbank, and the whole staff of the
Smithsonian and the School of Santa Fe have gone to work, we have not
taken the trouble in America to gather up the prehistoric legends and
ferret out their race meaning. We have fallen too completely in the last
century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave
races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending
half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes
below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in
gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. You
remember Kipling's poem on the neolithic man, and Jack London's fiction.
Now as a matter of fact--which is a bit disturbing to all these
accretions of pseudo-science--the remains of these cave people don't
show them to have been simian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing
when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony Comstock's activities
as to clothes. They had decorated pottery ware of which we have lost the
pigments, and a knowledge of irrigation which would be unique in apes,
and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some
day, when the evolutionary piffle has passed, we'll study out these
prehistoric legends and their racial meaning.
As to the "lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared
that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the
Southwest. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Fe, or Lungrun's
wonderful desert pictures, or Moran's or Gamble's, or Harmon's Spanish
scenes--then talk about "lack of _decadent_ art" if you will, but don't
talk about "lack of art." Why, in the ranch house of Lorenzo Hubbell,
the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely
Southwestern pictures.
* * * * *
How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance,
that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest
scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above
10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the
leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine
forests, past Cloudcroft--the sky-top resort--up through the orchard
lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over
the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all
the wonders of Colorado's National Park. With the exception of a very
bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the
southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the
Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and
flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the
tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars
of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down
to California, you can swerve into Grand Canyon, where the gods of fire
and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red
into a swimming canyon of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest
peaks of the Rockies.
In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old
Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor
along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't
take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed;
second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were
allowed.
* * * * *
Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only
from a life-time knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of the West--and
that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of "shootin'
irons" and "faintin' females" are forever past, except in the
undergraduate's salad dreams. You are safer in the cave dwellings of the
Stone Age, in the Pajarito Plateau of the cliff "bird people," in the
Painted Desert, among the Indians of the Navajo Reserve than you are in
Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London. I would trust a young friend
of mine--boy or girl--quicker to the Western environment than the
Eastern. You can get into mischief in the West if you hunt for it; but
the mischief doesn't come out and hunt you. Also, danger spots are
self-evident on precipices of the Western wilds. They aren't
self-evident; danger spots are glazed and paved to the edges over which
youth goes to smash in the East.
* * * * *
What about cost? Aye, there's the rub!
First, there's the steamboat ticket to Europe, about the same price as
or more than the average round trip ticket to the Coast and back;
but--please note, please note well--the agent who sells the steamboat
ticket gets from forty to 100 per cent. bigger commission on it than the
agent who sells the railroad tickets; so the man who is an agent for
Europe can afford to advertise from forty to 100 per cent. more than the
man who sells the purely American ticket.
Secondly, European hotel men are adepts at catering to the lure of the
American sightseer. (Of course they are: it's worth one hundred to two
hundred million dollars to them a year.) In the American West, everybody
is busy. Except for the real estate man, they don't care one iota
whether you come or stay.
Thirdly, when you go to Europe, a thousand hands are thrust out to point
you the way to the interesting places. Incidentally, also, a thousand
hands are thrust out to pick your pocket, or at least relieve it of any
superfluous weight. In our West, who cares a particle what you do; or
who will point you the way? The hotels are expensive and for the most
part located in the most expensive zone--the commercial center. It is
only when you get out of the expense zone away from commercial centers
and railway, that you can live at $1 or $2 a day, or if you have your
own tent at fifty cents a day; but it isn't to the real estate agent's
interests to have you go away from the commercial center or expense
zone. 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 Rangers,
there isn't anyone.
* * * * *
How, then, are you to manage? Frankly, I never knew of either monkeys or
men accomplishing anything except in one way--just going out and doing
it. Choose what you want to see; and go there! The local railroad agent,
the local Forest Ranger, the local ranch house, will tell you the rest;
and naturally, when you go into the wilderness, don't leave all your
courtesy and circumspection and common-sense back in town. Equipped with
those three, you can "See America First," and see it cheaply.
CHAPTER I
THE NATIONAL FORESTS, A SUMMER PLAYGROUND FOR THE PEOPLE
If a health resort and national playground were discovered guaranteed to
kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay
listlessness and set the human spirit free from the nagging worries and
toil-wear that make you feel like a washed-out rag at the end of a
humdrum year--imagine the stampede of the lame and the halt in body and
spirit; the railroad excursions and reduced fares; the disputations of
the physicians and the rage of the thought-ologists at present coining
money rejuvenating neurotic humanity!
Yet such a national playground has been discovered; and it isn't in
Europe, where statisticians compute that Americans yearly spend from a
quarter to half a billion dollars; and it isn't the Coast-to-Coast trip
which the president of a transcontinental told me at least a hundred
thousand people a year traverse. A health resort guaranteed to banish
care, to stab apathy, to enlarge littleness, to slay listlessness, would
pretty nearly put the thought-ologists out of commission. Yet such a
summer resort exists at the very doors of every American capable of
scraping together a few hundred dollars--$200 at the least, $400 at the
most. It exists in that "twilight zone" of dispute and strong language
and peanut politics known as the National Forests.
In America, we have foolishly come to regard National Forests as solely
allied with conservation and politics. That is too narrow. National
Forests stand for much more. They stand for a national playground and
all that means for national health and sanity and joy in the exuberant
life of the clean out-of-doors. In Germany, the forests are not only a
source of great revenue in cash; they are a source of greater revenue in
health. They are a holiday playground. In America, the playground
exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful playground in the whole
world--and the most accessible; but we haven't yet discovered it.
* * * * *
Of the three or four million people who have attended the Pacific Coast
Expositions of the past ten years, it is a safe wage that half went, not
to see the Exposition (for people from a radius round Chicago and
Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went
to see the Exposition as an exponent of the Great West. How much of the
Great West did they really see? They saw the Alaska Exhibit. Well--the
Alaska Exhibit was afterwards shown in New York. They saw the special
buildings assigned to the special Western States. Well--the special
Western States had special buildings at the other expositions. What
else of the purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three
travelers:
"Been a great trip" (Two Chicagoans talking in duet). "We've seen
everything and stopped off everywhere. We stopped at Denver and Salt
Lake and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Portland and Seattle!"
"What did you do at these places?"
"Took a taxi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Saw
all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the
West is going ahead."
"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged
feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman,
baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really
seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before.
They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down
in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to
go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and
wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and
see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it
_seeing_ the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and
sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and
experience the real thing?"
"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only
time we got away from the excursion party was when a land boomster took
us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the
West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What
I want to know is how to get away from that. That boomster fellow was an
Easterner, anyway."
Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not
the duet that went round the cities in a sightseeing car and judged the
West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns
fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real
estate project by an Eastern land boomster. And each wanted to find the
real thing--had paid money to find a holiday playground, to forget care
and stab apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the
extortionate charges on every side in the city life. And two out of
three went back a little disappointed that they had not seen the fabled
wonders of the West--the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famous
canyons, the mountain lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to explain
to the New Yorker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels
charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain western
wilds, whether you are a man, woman, child, or group of all three--could
go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees and mountain lakes
and snowy peaks--I was greeted with that peculiarly New Yorky look
suggestive of Ananias and De Rougement.
[Illustration: One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents,
but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary]
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 once
in a thousand cases. If health seekers have money, they take a private
house _in the city_, 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. Do they find it? Certainly not knocking from
boarding house to boarding house and hotel to hotel, re-infecting
themselves with their own germs till the very telephone booths have to
be guarded. At one famous "lung" city where I stayed, I heard three
invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room happened to
be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 and $3 and $5 a day without
meals. At a cost of $10 for train fare, I went out to one of the
National Forests--the pass over the Divide 11,000 feet, the village
center of the Forest 8,000 feet above sea level, the charge with meals
at the hotel $10 a week. Better still, $10 for a roomy tent, $1.50 for a
camp stove and as 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 was almost constant sunshine,
air as pure and life-giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That
altitude would probably not suit all invalids--that is for a doctor to
say; but certainly, whether one is out for health or play, that regimen
is cheaper and more life-giving than a stuffy hotel at $2, $3 and $5 a
day for a room alone.
It is incredible when you come to think of it. Here is a nation of
ninety million people scouring the earth for a playground; and there is
an undiscovered playground in its own back yard, the most wonderful
playground of mountain and forest and lake in the whole world; a
playground in actual area half the size of a Germany, or France, with
wonders of cave and waterway and peak unknown to Germany or France. What
are the railroads thinking about? If three million people visited an
exposition to see the West, how many would yearly visit the National
Forests if the railroads granted facilities, and the ninety million
Americans knew how? It is absurd to regard the National Forests purely
as timber; and timber for politics! They are a nation's playground and
health resort; and one of these times will come a Peary or an Abruzzi
discovering them. Then we'll give him a prize and begin going.
* * * * *
You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you will not
find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress
parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of flame in the upper
alpine meadows. And you will not find gaping on-lookers to break down
fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirrel swearing
at you for coming too near his _cache_ of pine cones at the foot of some
giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing in the National
Forests; but there is a great tinkling of waters; and there are many
voices of rills with a roar of flood torrents at rain time, or thunder
of avalanche when the snows come over a far ridge in spray fine as a
waterfall. In fair weather, you may spare yourself the trouble of a tent
and camp under a stretch of sky hung with stars, resinous of balsams,
spiced with the life of the cinnamon smells and the ozone tang. There
will be lakes of light as well as lakes of water, and an all-day diet of
condensed sunbeams every time you take a breath. Your bed will be
hemlock boughs--be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or
you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood
stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying
for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better
stay in Newport.
The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will
welcome you and help you to find camping ground.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of
the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man,
woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National
Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get
established?
Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National
Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and
playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New
Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me,
there is a peculiar attraction in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all
are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line--high, dry park-like
forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor.
You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes
panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a
horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie
on one side--Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the
Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, 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 none. It has been cleared out and
sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been
carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees,
all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off.
These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.
Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests
there, by trips to the wonderful canyons out from Ogden, or to the
natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you
have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the
ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big
trees in the Sequoia Forest; the Yosemite in the Stanislaus; forests in
the northern part of the State where you could dance on the stump of a
redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the
northern mountains, are the voices of the waters and the white,
burnished, shining peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one
summer by driving up in a tented wagon through the National Forests from
Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and truck bed were in the democrat
wagon. An outfitter supplied the horses for a rental which I have
forgotten. The borders of most of the National Forests may be reached by
wagon. The higher and more intimate trails may be essayed only on foot
or on horseback.
* * * * *
How much will the trip cost? You must figure that out for yourself.
There is, first of all, your railway fare from the point you leave. Then
there is the fare out to the Forest--usually not $10. Go straight to the
supervisor or forester of the district. He will recommend the best hotel
of the little mountain village where the supervisor's office is usually
located. At those hotels, you will board as a transient at $10 a week;
as a permanent, for less. In many of the mountain hamlets are outfitters
who will rent you a team of horses and tented wagon; and you can cater
for yourself. In fact, as to clothing, and outfit, you can buy cheaper
camp kit at these local stores than in your home town. Many Eastern
things are not suitable for Western use. For instance, it is foolish to
go into the thick, rough forests of heavy timber with an expensive
eastern riding suit for man or woman. Better buy a $4 or $6 or $8 khaki
suit that you can throw away when you have torn it to tatters. An
Eastern waterproof coat will cost you from $10 to $30. You can get a
yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more serviceable for
$2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get them East, as I like an
elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good deal of
cork in the sole to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in
the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too
stiff! I like an elk-skin that will let the water out fast as it comes
in if you ever have to wade, and which will not shrink in the drying. If
you forswear hotels and take to a sky tent, or canvas in misty weather,
better carry eatables in what the guides call a tin "grub box," in other
words a cheap $2 tin trunk. It keeps out ants and things; and you can
lock it when you go away on long excursions. As to beds, each to his own
taste! Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for me.
Besides, I am never comfortable on it. If you camp near the snow peaks,
a chill strikes up to the small of your back in the small of the
morning. I don't care to feel like using a derrick every time I roll
over. The most comfortable bed I know is a piece of twenty-five cent
oilcloth laid over the slicker on hemlock boughs, fur rug over that,
with suit case for pillow, and a plain gray blanket. The hardened
mountaineer will laugh at the next recommendation; but the town man or
woman going out for play or health is not hardened, and to attempt
sudden hardening entails the endurance of a lot of aches that are apt to
spoil the holiday. You may say you like the cold plunge in the icy water
coming off a snowy mountain. I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge,
even if you do like it, you are in such a hurry to come out of it that
you don't linger to scrub. I like my hot scrub; and you can have that
only by taking along (no, not a rubber bath) 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 such a delicious, barky smell. Besides, late
in the season, there will be rains and mist. Your camp stove will dry
out the tent walls and keep your kit free of rain mold. Do you need a
guide? That depends entirely on yourself. If you camp under direction
and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.
Whether you go out as a health seeker, or a pleasure seeker, $8 to $10
will buy you a miner's tent--a miner's, preferable to a tepee because
the walls lift the canvas roof high enough not to bump your head; $2
will buy you a tin trunk or grub box; $1.50 will cover the price of
oilcloth to spread over the boughs which you lay all over the floor to
keep you above the earth damp; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove
to keep the inside of your tent warm and dry for the hot night bath; $10
will cover cost of pail and cooking utensils. That leaves of what would
be your monthly expenses at even a moderate hotel, $125 for food--bacon,
flour, fresh fruit; and your food should not exceed $10 each a month. If
you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder, by whipping the
mountain streams for trout. If you need an attendant, that miner's tent
is big enough for two. Or if you will stand $5 or $6 more expense, buy
a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will be windy days in
fall and spring when an extra tent with a camp stove in it will prove
useful for the nightly hot bath.
* * * * *
What reward do you reap for all the bother? You are away from all dust
irritating to weak lungs. You are away from all possibility of
re-infecting yourself with your own disease. Except in late autumn and
early spring, you are living under almost cloudless skies, in an
atmosphere steeped in sunshine, spicy with the healing resin of the
pines and hemlocks and spruce, that not only scent the air but literally
permeate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far
above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. Instead of
the clang of street car bells and the jangle of nerves tangled from too
many humans in town, you hear the flow and the sing and the laughter and
the trebles of the glacial streams rejoicing in their race to the sea.
You climb the rough hills; and your town lungs blow like a whale as you
climb; and every beat pumps inertia out and the sun-healing air in. If
an invalid, you had better take a doctor's advice as to how high you
should camp and climb. In town, amid the draperies and the portieres and
the steam-heated rooms, an invalid is seeking health amid the habitat of
mummies. In the Forests, whether you will or not, you live in sunshine
that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it
is the sting of pulsing, superabundant life, not the lethargy of a
gradual decay.
At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the
remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses
near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in
unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico
or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the
flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan
hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of
the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New
Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines,
and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on
the mountain tops which you can see, where 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
plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.
You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was
pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a
haze of dust, and you--you are up in that cloudless air, where the light
hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the
clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing
life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns
and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on
the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the
ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun,
to the god of Light, 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 pure light.
Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest
gives a bump. You are in darkness--diving through some tunnel or other;
and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a
couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance
Canyon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven
miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But
patience! The road into Sundance Canyon takes you to the top of the
world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little
Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line,
pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600
you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.
Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each
other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good
100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good
by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road
has been cork-screwing up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as
a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on
the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist
behind the engineer--the man behind the modern gun of conquest--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 mountains
across the desert towards the Pacific.
[Illustration: From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona]
You come through those upper 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 on 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 Canyon, South Dakota, summer people have
built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.
Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but
dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets
composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like
cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds,
and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like 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 over the top of the Continental Divide you go--believe me,
a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's
shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.
You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental
Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It
isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any
shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must
wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of worship and
quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake
and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of
fire in the sunset, and the plain--there are no more plains--this is the
top of the world!
Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back
this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen
in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear grass tossed before it like the
waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below--you knew why
their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in
disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench
them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be
told are laid flat on the ground up here.
When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National
Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coarse upper grasses
provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the
National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all
the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big
rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of
intruding flocks and herds.
Then, the train is literally racing down hill--with the trucks bumping
heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang
comes to the ozone--the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon
smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and
imprisoned fragrance--the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years
of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of
Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.
The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and
you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce
and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from
the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen
dust--pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree--with the
purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the
conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you
somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some
conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed,
whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes,
airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth,
though the process may take the trifling aeon of a thousand years or so.
At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the
yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but
know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season--the season
when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests--the very atmosphere is
alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the
wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb
like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded
branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the
broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the veering wind,
the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded
branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled,
perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a
cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and
crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire
tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall
on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting
nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.
* * * * *
The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see
the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From
the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth,
you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?)
language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the
evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows
the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire
when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight
and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the burned or scant
slopes, he rifles the _cache_ of this little furred forester, who
suspects your noisy trainload of robbery--robbery--sc--scur--r--there!
Then, the train bumps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on
the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop
off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man
is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train
is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud
against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the
curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage
green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree--the ranger, absurdly
young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres
compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily
deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those
confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority
which backs that body of men.
You have mounted your pony--men and women alike ride astride in the
Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the
ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet
above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodpecker, the scur of a
rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft _thug_ of the
unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the
soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the
jangle of city cars in that stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested
town, isn't it?
If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of
the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills
of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are
hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have
the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when
eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine
needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles
like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of
these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods;
for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made
offerings to the gods of old, the temple which our modern churches
imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in
open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no
apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically
from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which
permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust
is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will
make you over, will these forest gods, if you will let them, if you will
lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the
chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.
And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods
halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness
unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you
and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.