collected there to govern us, I entered upon my holiday, glad that it
was to be passed in such a region of enchantment. For peaches it would
be too early, and with roses and jasmine I did not importantly concern
myself, thinking of them only as a pleasant sight by the way. But on my
gradual journey through Lexington, Bowling Green, Little Rock, and Forth
Worth I dwelt upon the shade of the valleys, and the pasture hills
dotted with the sheep of whose wool the Boy Orator had spoken; and I
wished that our cold Northwest could have been given such a bountiful
climate. Upon the final morning of railroad I looked out of the window
at an earth which during the night had collapsed into a vacuum, as I had
so often seen happen before upon more Northern parallels. The evenness
of this huge nothing was cut by our track's interminable scar, and
broken to the eye by the towns which now and again rose and littered the
horizon like boxes dumped by emigrants. We were still in Texas, not
distant from the Rio Grande, and I looked at the boxes drifting by, and
wondered from which of them the Boy Orator had been let loose. Twice or
three times upon this day of sand I saw green spots shining sudden and
bright and Biblical in the wilderness. Their isolated loveliness was
herald of the valley land I was nearing each hour. The wandering
Mexicans, too, bright in rags and swarthy in nakedness, put me somehow
in mind of the Old Testament.
In the evening I sat at whiskey with my first acquaintance, a Mr. Mowry,
one of several Arizona citizens whom my military friend at San Carlos
had written me to look out for on my way to visit him. My train had
trundled on to the Pacific, and I sat in a house once more--a saloon on
the platform, with an open door through which the night air came
pleasantly. This was now the long-expected Territory, and time for roses
and jasmine to begin. Early in our talk I naturally spoke to Mr. Mowry
of Arizona's resources and her chance of becoming a State.
"We'd have got there by now," said he, "only Luke Jenks ain't half that
interested in Arizona as he is in Luke Jenks."
I reminded Mr. Mowry that I was a stranger here and unacquainted with
the prominent people.
"Well, Luke's as near a hog as you kin be and wear pants. Be with you in
a minute," added Mr. Mowry, and shambled from the room. This was because
a shot had been fired in a house across the railroad tracks. "I run two
places," he explained, returning quite soon from the house and taking up
the thread of his whiskey where he had dropped it. "Two outfits. This
side for toorists. Th' other pays better. I come here in 'sixty-two."
"I trust no one has been--hurt?" said I, inclining my head towards the
farther side of the railroad.
"Hurt?" My question for the moment conveyed nothing to him, and he
repeated the word, blinking with red eyes at me over the rim of his
lifted glass. "No, nobody's hurt. I've been here a long while, and seen
them as was hurt, though." Here he nodded at me depreciatingly, and I
felt how short was the time that I had been here. "Th' other side pays
better," he resumed, "as toorists mostly go to bed early. Six bits is
about the figger you can reckon they'll spend, if you know anything." He
nodded again, more solemn over his whiskey. "That kind's no help to
business. I've been in this Territory from the start, and Arizona ain't
what it was. Them mountains are named from me." And he pointed out of
the door. "Mowry's Peak. On the map." With this last august statement
his mind seemed to fade from the conversation, and he struck a
succession of matches along the table and various parts of his person.
"Has Mr. Jenks been in the Territory long?" I suggested, feeling the
silence weigh upon me.
"Luke? He's a hog. Him the people's choice! But the people of Arizona
ain't what they was. Are you interested in silver?"
"Yes," I answered, meaning the political question. But before I could
say what I meant he had revived into a vigor of attitude and a
wakefulness of eye of which I had not hitherto supposed him capable.
"You come here," said he; and, catching my arm, he took me out of the
door and along the track in the night, and round the corner of the
railroad hotel into view of more mountains that lay to the south. "You
stay here to-morrow," he pursued, swiftly, "and I'll hitch up and drive
you over there. I'll show you some rock behind Helen's Dome that'll beat
any you've struck in the whole course of your life. It's on the wood
reservation, and when the government abandons the Post, as they're going
to do--"
There is no need for my entering at length into his urgence, or the
plans he put to me for our becoming partners, or for my buying him out
and employing him on a salary, or buying him out and employing some
other, or no one, according as I chose--the whole bright array of
costumes in which he presented to me the chance of making my fortune at
a stroke. I think that from my answers he gathered presently a
discouraging but perfectly false impression. My Eastern hat and
inexperienced face (I was certainly young enough to have been his
grandchild) had a little misled him; and although he did not in the
least believe the simple truth I told him, that I had come to Arizona on
no sort of business, but for the pleasure of seeing the country, he now
overrated my brains as greatly as he had in the beginning despised them,
quite persuaded I was playing some game deeper than common, and either
owned already or had my eye upon other silver mines.
"Pleasure of seeing the country, ye say?" His small wet eyes blinked as
he stood on the railroad track bareheaded, considering me from head to
foot. "All right. Did ye say ye're going to Globe?"
"No. To San Carlos to visit an army officer."
"Carlos is on the straight road to Globe," said Mr. Mowry, vindictively.
"But ye might as well drop any idea of Globe, if ye should get one. If
it's copper ye're after, there's parties in ahead of you."
Desiring, if possible, to shift his mind from its present unfavorable
turn, I asked him if Mr. Adams did not live between here and
Solomonsville, my route to Carlos. Mr. Adams was another character of
whom my host had written me, and at my mention of his name the face of
Mr. Mowry immediately soured into the same expression it had taken when
he spoke of the degraded Jenks.
"So you're acquainted with him! He's got mines. I've seen 'em. If you
represent any Eastern parties, tell 'em not to drop their dollars down
old Adams's hole in the ground. He ain't the inexperienced juniper he
looks. Him and me's been acquainted these thirty years. People claim it
was Cyclone Bill held up the Ehrenberg stage. Well, I guess I'll be
seeing how the boys are getting along."
With that he moved away. A loud disturbance of chairs and broken glass
had set up in the house across the railroad, and I watched the
proprietor shamble from me with his deliberate gait towards the
establishment that paid him best. He had left me possessor of much
incomplete knowledge, and I waited for him, pacing the platform; but he
did not return, and as I judged it inexpedient to follow him, I went to
my bed on the tourist side of the track.
In the morning the stage went early, and as our road seemed to promise
but little variety--I could see nothing but an empty plain--I was glad
to find my single fellow-passenger a man inclined to talk. I did not
like his mustache, which was too large for his face, nor his too careful
civility and arrangement of words; but he was genial to excess, and
thoughtful of my comfort.
"I beg you will not allow my valise to incommode you," was one of his
first remarks; and I liked this consideration better than any Mr. Mowry
had shown me. "I fear you will detect much initial primitiveness in our
methods of transportation," he said.
This again called for gracious assurances on my part, and for a while
our polite phrases balanced to corners until I was mentally winded
keeping up such a pace of manners. The train had just brought him from
Tucson, he told me, and would I indulge? On this we shared and
complimented each other's whiskey.
"From your flask I take it that you are a Gentile," said he, smiling.
"If you mean tenderfoot," said I, "let me confess at once that flask and
owner are from the East, and brand-new in Arizona."
"I mean you're not a Mormon. Most strangers to me up this way are. But
they carry their liquor in a plain flat bottle like this."
"Are you a--a--" Embarrassment took me as it would were I to check
myself on the verge of asking a courteously disposed stranger if he had
ever embezzled.
"Oh, I'm no Mormon," my new friend said, with a chuckle, and I was glad
to hear him come down to reasonable English. "But Gentiles are in the
minority in this valley."
"I didn't know we'd got to the valleys yet," said I, eagerly, connecting
Mormons with fertility and jasmine. And I lifted the flaps of the stage,
first one side and then the other, and saw the desert everywhere flat,
treeless, and staring like an eye without a lid.
"This is the San Simon Valley we've been in all the time," he replied.
"It goes from Mexico to the Gila, about a hundred and fifty miles."
"Like this?"
"South it's rockier. Better put the flap down."
"I don't see where people live," I said, as two smoky spouts of sand
jetted from the tires and strewed over our shoes and pervaded our
nostrils. "There's nothing--yes, there's one bush coming." I fastened
the flaps.
"That's Seven-Mile Mesquite. They held up the stage at this point last
October. But they made a mistake in the day. The money had gone down the
afternoon before, and they only got about a hundred."
"I suppose it was Mormons who robbed the stage?"
"Don't talk quite so loud," the stranger said, laughing. "The driver's
one of them."
"A Mormon or a robber?"
"Well, we only know he's a Mormon."
"He doesn't look twenty. Has he many wives yet?"
"Oh, they keep that thing very quiet in these days, if they do it at
all. The government made things too hot altogether. The Bishop here
knows what hiding for polygamy means."
"Bishop who?"
"Meakum," I thought he answered me, but was not sure in the rattle of
the stage, and twice made him repeat it, putting my hand to my ear at
last. "Meakum! Meakum!" he shouted.
"Yes, sir," said the driver.
"Have some whiskey?" said my friend, promptly; and when that was over
and the flat bottle passed back, he explained in a lower voice, "A son
of the Bishop's."
"Indeed!" I exclaimed.
"So was the young fellow who put in the mail-bags, and that
yellow-headed duck in the store this morning." My companion, in the
pleasure of teaching new things to a stranger, stretched his legs on the
front seat, lifted my coat out of his way, and left all formality of
speech and deportment. "And so's the driver you'll have to-morrow if
you're going beyond Thomas, and the stock-tender at the sub-agency where
you'll breakfast. He's a yellow-head too. The old man's postmaster, and
owns this stage-line. One of his boys has the mail contract. The old man
runs the hotel at Solomonsville and two stores at Bowie and Globe, and
the store and mill at Thacher. He supplies the military posts in this
district with hay and wood, and a lot of things on and off through the
year. Can't write his own name. Signs government contracts with his
mark. He's sixty-four, and he's had eight wives. Last summer he married
number nine--rest all dead, he says, and I guess that's so. He has
fifty-seven recorded children, not counting the twins born last week.
Any yellow-heads you'll see in the valley'll answer to the name of
Meakum as a rule, and the other type's curly black like this little
driver specimen."
"How interesting there should be only two varieties of Meakum!" said I.
"Yes, it's interesting. Of course the whole fifty-seven don't class up
yellow or black curly, but if you could take account of stock you'd find
the big half of 'em do. Mothers don't seem to have influenced the type
appreciably. His eight families, successive and simultaneous, cover a
period of forty-three years, and yellow and black keeps turning up right
along. Scientifically, the suppression of Mormonism is a loss to the
student of heredity. Some of the children are dead. Get killed now and
then, and die too--die from sickness. But you'll easily notice Meakums
as you go up the valley. Old man sees all get good jobs as soon as
they're old enough. Places 'em on the railroad, places 'em in town, all
over the lot. Some don't stay; you couldn't expect the whole fifty-seven
to be steady; but he starts 'em all fair. We have six in Tucson now, or
five, maybe. Old man's a good father."
"They're not all boys?"
"Certainly not; but more than half are."
"And you say he can't write?"
"Or read, except print, and he has to spell out that."
"But, my goodness, he's postmaster!"
"What's that got to do with it? Young Meakums all read like anything. He
don't do any drudgery."
"Well, you wouldn't catch me signing any contracts I couldn't read."
"Do you think you'd catch anybody reading a contract wrong to old
Meakum? Oh, momma! Why, he's king round here. Fixes the county elections
and the price of tomatoes. Do you suppose any Tucson jury'll convict any
of his Mormons if he says nay? No, sir! It's been tried. Why, that man
ought to be in Congress."
"If he's like that I don't consider him desirable," said I.
"Yes, he is desirable," said my friend, roughly. "Smart, can't be
fooled, and looks after his people's interests. I'd like to know if that
don't fill the bill?"
"If he defeats justice--"
"Oh, rats!" This interruption made me regret his earlier manner, and I
was sorry the polish had rubbed through so quickly and brought us to a
too precipitate familiarity. "We're Western out here," he continued,
"and we're practical. When we want a thing, we go after it. Bishop
Meakum worked his way down here from Utah through desert and starvation,
mostly afoot, for a thousand miles, and his flock to-day is about the
only class in the Territory that knows what prosperity feels like, and
his laws are about the only laws folks don't care to break. He's got a
brain. If he weren't against Arizona's being admitted--"
"He should know better than that," said I, wishing to be friendly. "With
your fruit exports and high grade of citizens you'll soon be another
California."
He gave me an odd look.
"I am surprised," I proceeded, amiably, "to hear you speak of Mormons
only as prosperous. They think better of you in Washington."
"Now, see here," said he, "I've been pleasant to you and I've enjoyed
this ride. But I like plain talk."
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"And I don't care for Eastern sarcasm."
"There was no intention--"
"I don't take offence where offence is not intended. As for high-grade
citizens, we don't claim to know as much as--I suppose it's New York you
come from? Gold-bugs and mugwumps--"
"If you can spare the time," said I, "and kindly explain what has
disturbed you in my remarks, we'll each be likely to find the rest of
these forty miles more supportable."
"I guess I can stand it," said he, swallowing a drink. He folded his
arms and resettled his legs; and the noisome hatefulness of his laugh
filled me with regret for the wet-eyed Mowry. I would now gladly have
taken any amount of Mowry in exchange for this; and it struck me afresh
how uncertainly one always reckons with those who suspect their own
standing.
"Till Solomonsville," said I, "let us veil our estimation of each other.
Once out of this stage and the world will be large enough for both of
us." I was wrong there; but presentiments do not come to me often. So I,
too, drank some of my own whiskey, lighted a cigar, and observed with
pleasure that my words had enraged him.
Before either of us had devised our next remark, the stage pulled up to
change horses at the first and last water in forty miles. This station
was kept by Mr. Adams, and I jumped out to see the man Mr. Mowry had
warned me was not an inexperienced juniper. His appearance would have
drawn few but missionaries to him, and I should think would have been
warning enough to any but an over-trustful child of six.
"Are you the geologist?" he said at once, coughing heavily; and when I
told him I was simply enjoying a holiday, he looked at me sharply and
spat against the corner of the stable. "There's one of them fellers
expected," he continued, in a tone as if I need not attempt to deny
that, and I felt his eye watching for signs of geology about me. I told
him that I imagined the geologist must do an active business in Arizona.
"I don't hire 'em!" he exclaimed. "They can't tell me nothing about
mineral."
"I suppose you have been here a long while, Mr. Adams?"
"There's just three living that come in ahead of--" The cough split his
last word in pieces.
"Mr. Mowry was saying last night--"
"You've seen that old scamp, have you? Buy his mine behind Helen's
Dome?"
My mirth at this turned him instantly confidential, and rooted his
conviction that I was a geologist. "That's right!" said he, tapping my
arm. "Don't you let 'em fool you. I guess you know your business. Now,
if you want to look at good paying rock, thousands in sight, in sight,
mind you--"
"Are you coming along with us?" called the little Meakum driver, and I
turned and saw the new team was harnessed and he ready on his box, with
the reins in his hands. So I was obliged to hasten from the disappointed
Adams and climb back in my seat. The last I saw of him he was standing
quite still in the welter of stable muck, stooping to his cough, the
desert sun beating on his old body, and the desert wind slowly turning
the windmill above the shadeless mud hovel in which he lived alone.
"Poor old devil!" said I to my enemy, half forgetting our terms in my
contemplation of Adams. "Is he a Mormon?"
My enemy's temper seemed a little improved. "He's tried most everything
except jail," he answered, his voice still harsh. "You needn't invest
your sentiment there. He used to hang out at Twenty Mile in Old Camp
Grant days, and he'd slit your throat for fifty cents."
But my sentiment was invested somehow. The years of the old-timers were
ending so gray. Their heyday, and carousals, and happy-go-luckiness all
gone, and in the remaining hours--what? Empty youth is such a grand easy
thing, and empty age so grim!
"Has Mowry tried everything, too?" I asked.
"Including jail," said my companion; and gave me many entertaining
incidents of Mowry's career with an ill-smelling saloon cleverness that
put him once more into favorable humor with me, while I retained my
opinion of him. "And that uneducated sot," he concluded, "that hobo with
his record of cattle-stealing and claim-jumping, and his acquittal from
jail through railroad influence, actually undertook to run against me
last elections. My name is Jenks; Luke Jenks, Territorial Delegate from
Arizona." He handed me his card.
"I'm just from Washington," said I.
"Well, I've not been there this session. Important law business has
detained me here. Yes, they backed Mowry in that election. The old
spittoon had quite a following, but he hadn't the cash. That gives you
some idea of the low standards I have to combat. But I hadn't to spend
much. This Territory's so poor they come cheap. Seventy-five cents a
head for all the votes I wanted in Bisbee, Nogales, and Yuma; and up
here the Bishop was my good friend. Holding office booms my business
some, and that's why I took it, of course. But I've had low standards to
fight."
The Territorial Delegate now talked freely of Arizona's frontier life.
"It's all dead," he said, forgetting in his fluency what he had told me
about Seven-Mile Mesquite and last October. "We have a community as high
toned as any in the land. Our monumental activity--" And here he went
off like a cuckoo clock, or the Boy Orator, reciting the glories of
Phoenix and Salt River, and the future of silver, in that special
dialect of platitudes which is spoken by our more talkative statesmen,
and is not quite Latin, quite grammar, or quite falsehood. "We're not
all Mowrys and Adamses," said he, landing from his flight.
"In a population of fifty-nine thousand," said I, heartily, "a stranger
is bound to meet decent people if he keeps on."
Again he misinterpreted me, but this time the other way, bowing like one
who acknowledges a compliment; and we came to Solomonsville in such
peace that he would have been astonished at my private thoughts. For I
had met no undisguised vagabond nor out-and-out tramp whom I did not
prefer to Luke Jenks, vote-buyer and politician. With his catch-penny
plausibility, his thin-spread good-fellowship, and his New York clothes,
he mistook himself for a respectable man, and I was glad to be done with
him.
I could have reached Thomas that evening, but after our noon dinner let
the stage go on, and delayed a night for the sake of seeing the Bishop
hold service next day, which was Sunday, some few miles down the
valley. I was curious to learn the Mormon ritual and what might be the
doctrines that such a man as the Bishop would expound. It dashed me a
little to find this would cost me forty-eight hours of Solomonsville, no
Sunday stage running. But one friendly English-speaking family--the town
was chiefly Mexican--made some of my hours pleasant, and others I spent
in walking. Though I went early to bed I slept so late that the ritual
was well advanced when I reached the Mormon gathering. From where I was
obliged to stand I could only hear the preacher, already in the middle
of his discourse.
"Don't empty your swill in the door-yard, but feed it to your hogs," he
was saying; and any one who knows how plainly a man is revealed in his
voice could have felt instantly, as I did, that here was undoubtedly a
leader of men. "Rotten meat, rotten corn, spoiled milk, the truck that
thoughtless folks throw away, should be used. Their usefulness has not
ceased because they're rotten. That's the error of the ignorant, who
know not that nothing is meant to be wasted in this world. The ignorant
stay poor because they break the law of the Lord. Waste not, want not.
The children of the Gentiles play in the door-yard and grow sickly and
die. The mother working in the house has a pale face and poison in her
blood. She cannot be a strong wife. She cannot bear strong sons to the
man. He stays healthy because he toils in the field. He does not breathe
the tainted air rising from the swill in the door-yard. Swill is bad for
us, but it is good for swine. Waste it by the threshold it becomes
deadly, and a curse falls upon the house. The mother and children are
sick because she has broken a law of the Lord. Do not let me see this
sin when I come among you in the valley. Fifty yards behind each house,
with clean air between, let me see the well-fed swine receiving each
day, as was intended, the garbage left by man. And let me see flowers in
the door-yard, and stout, blooming children. We will sing the
twenty-ninth hymn."
The scales had many hours ago dropped from my eyes, and I saw Arizona
clear, and felt no repining for roses and jasmine. They had been a
politician's way of foisting one more silver State upon our Senate, and
I willingly renounced them for the real thing I was getting; for my
holiday already far outspangled the motliest dream that ever visited me,
and I settled down to it as we settle down in our theatre chairs, well
pleased with the flying pantomime. And when, after the hymn and a
blessing--the hymn was poor stuff about wanting to be a Mormon and with
the Mormons stand--I saw the Bishop get into a wagon, put on a yellow
duster, and drive quickly away, no surprise struck me at all. I merely
said to myself: Certainly. How dull not to have foreseen that! And I
knew that we should speak together soon, and he would tell me why
California only held the record on stoves.