ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND
When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail
on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or
all three courses if you have time.
You may strike up into Zuni Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the
White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated
that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of
the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found
under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain
cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man--and likely
to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and
forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock
declivity, an almost desert-forest growth--dwarf juniper and cedar and
giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off
intruders--and you can understand why some of the most magnificent
specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here
undisturbed by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains,
you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the
Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you
find Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, the former, a colossal
community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders;
the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in
almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate
all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came
in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric
occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the
second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that
quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.
Or you may skip the short trip out to Zuni off the main traveled
highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains--two weeks
at the very shortest, and you should make it six--and leave Gallup, just
at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve
and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab,
round the Grand Canyon up towards the State lines of California and Utah.
If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last
one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and
mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of
high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting
seas of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the
movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It
isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first
high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world,
a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks
and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America
at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these
Navajo boys--a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a
hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or
bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white
cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more
silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an
Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red
sand knobs--you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their
_hogan_ houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain,
scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving
at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night
and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of
silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the
juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the
wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot
vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat--bleating till the air
quivers--driven by little Navajo girls on horseback, born to the
saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.
If you can't go to Zuni Land and the White Mountain Forest and the
Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the
sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort.
Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own
Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in
antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of
the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place--in the Coconino
and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Canyon. And if the lure of the antique
still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent
lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is
emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me
there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the
antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric
ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of
the world in the School of Archaeology at Rome, "the more undecided we
become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America,
or that of America preceded the Orient."
For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into
Canyon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above
the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined
chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could
hide and lose a dozen of our national White House. Who built the
aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in
it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of
answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you
haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do
your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route--cost for
team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a
well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will
know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered
the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.
To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at
Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Canyon; but to cross it,
you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and
drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to
point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to
$7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack
animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price--$25 to
$40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a
white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is
as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools
where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in
the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months--July and
August--does not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and
night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof,
and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air
that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like
jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself
into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at
midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling;
but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000
to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in
the Canadian Northwest.
Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr.
Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers
crossing the Desert--open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered
money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult.
It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door
was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you
expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was
presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely
sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum
and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of
the _noblesse oblige_ which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code
of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but
vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write,
ill-suited to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the
Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows
that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern
Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining
passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see
again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In
the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this
was well; but to-day--well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where
the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals
come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to
hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a
dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and
sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the
Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kitchen
quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt;
Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would
respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness
that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted
Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived
unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host
that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his
at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the
house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for
three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very
roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly
ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His
host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his
own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through
the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after
all."
[Illustration: A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and
picturesque]
"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused
me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this
instant."
The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American
travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands
of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When
that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all
visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp
kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point,
or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three
Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.
We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team
locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip,
though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy
sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day
we wanted them.
The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town
till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and
cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost
air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled
ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch
house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their
spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in
the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa--globe
cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue
forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod
mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you
drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming
below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows--blue shadows, sure
sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is
the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but
a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in
the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a
sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected.
You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuni boys are loping along
the trail in front of you--red headband, hair in a braid, red sash,
velvet trousers--the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite
of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is
a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the Zuni or Hopi,
and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuni lads will
set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles
in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo
girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It
all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering
her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and
you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own
desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.
The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped _tufa_ rocks to the right of the road,
mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has
splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all
travelers--a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the
face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain,
but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects
struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests
another explanation.
Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St.
Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white,
green-shuttered building as silent as the grave--St. Michael's Mission,
where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway
to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the
mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off
beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr. and Mrs. Day, two of the best
known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the
convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive
structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and
Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.
And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being
lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother
Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only
we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine
quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work
of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to
the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians
into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians
with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are
to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins
alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to
post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the
Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad
enough for them to expand--14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land--and
against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father
Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or
three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers
among the Navajos. Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are
doing.
You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter
appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard
will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough,
brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine
yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There
is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated
scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit
missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do
you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay
helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his
share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and
issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!
Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School,
drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second
volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined
glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and
crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician
would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the
masterpiece of his life--hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten
years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for
their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets
and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the
heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the
names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures
instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and
other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone
sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal
dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he
has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels
anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum
of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky
way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white,
blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine
man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes
Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars--and puff, with one breath he
has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all
over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid"
teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi
deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who
taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the
Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn
stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up
to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian drawings
are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman
deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo
lore? If all ethnologists and archaeologists had founded their studies on
the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy
version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in
our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.
Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo
blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering
by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever
Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a
drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For
instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a
Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of "green" in it. Dressing in
disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the
alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the
benefit of gullible tourists.
"Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?" Father Berrard asked
the unsuspecting dealer.
"From frog ponds," answered the store man of a region where water is
scarce as hens' teeth.
Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the
medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars
are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished
and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his _nom de plume_ shall
be "Frog Pond Green."
If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at
either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were
conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School
for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not
to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside
and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all
fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in
birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the
first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit
relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other
associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous
cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never
saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced,
black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness
should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil;
that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to
be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one
yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common;
and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning
up for future festivities.
We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room,
parlor and refectory, where two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts
of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside
world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in
every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender,
understanding eyes.
Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell
sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know
this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on
the hill to the right--eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the
fading light.
Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in
vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces
bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from
the stalls--is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that
age-old, never-failing spring of Service?