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_Roughing It De Luxe_
_By_
_Irvin S. Cobb_
[Illustration: BY COMMON CONSENT WE HAD NAMED THEM CLARENCE AND
CLARICE]
_Roughing It De Luxe_
_By_
_Irvin S. Cobb_
_Author of "Back Home,"_
_"The Escape of Mr. Trimm," "Cobb's Anatomy,"_
_"Cobb's Bill of Fare," etc._
_Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon_
[Illustration]
_New York_
_George H. Doran Company_
COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1914,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
TO GEORGE H. DORAN, ESQ.
MY FRIEND AND STILL MY PUBLISHER;
MY PUBLISHER AND STILL
MY FRIEND
_THE TIME TABLE_
PAGE
A PILGRIM CANONIZED 15
RABID AND HIS FRIENDS 55
HOW DO YOU LIKE THE CLIMATE? 97
IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON 135
LOOKING FOR LO 175
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
By common consent we had named them Clarence and Clarice Frontispiece
Evidently he believed the conspiracy against him was widespread 21
There was not a turkey trotter in the bunch 35
He'd garner in some fellows that wasn't sheep-herders 61
Because a man has a soul is no reason he shouldn't have an appetite 73
He was a regular moving picture cowboy and gave general satisfaction 87
The boy who sells you a paper and the youth who blackens your shoes
both show solicitude 101
Out from under a rock somewhere will crawl a real estate agent 115
He felt that he was properly dressed for the time, the place and the
occasion 127
Even the place where the turkey trot originated was trotless and quiet 143
The woman nearest the wall has on her furs--it is always cool in the
shade 155
It's a great thing out there to be a native son 169
Each Navajo squaw weaves on an average nine thousand blankets a year 179
As she leveled the lens a yell went up from somewhere 193
As the occupants spilled sprawlingly through the gap, a front tire
exploded with a loud report 207
_A PILGRIM CANONIZED_
[Illustration]
A Pilgrim Canonized
IT is generally conceded that the Grand Canon of Arizona beggars
description. I shall therefore endeavor to refrain from doing so. I
realize that this is going to be a considerable contract. Nearly
everybody, on taking a first look at the Grand Canon, comes right out
and admits its wonders are absolutely indescribable--and then proceeds
to write anywhere from two thousand to fifty thousand words, giving the
full details. Speaking personally, I wish to say that I do not know
anybody who has yet succeeded in getting away with the job.
In the old days when he was doing the literature for the Barnum show,
Tody Hamilton would have made the best nominee I can think of. Remember,
don't you, how when Tody started in to write about the elephant
quadrille you had to turn over to the next page to find the verb? And
almost any one of those young fellows who write advertising folders for
the railroads would gladly tackle the assignment; in fact, some of them
already have--but not with any tumultuous success.
In the presence of the Grand Canon, language just simply fails you and
all the parts of speech go dead lame. When the Creator made it He failed
to make a word to cover it. To that extent the thing is incomplete. If
ever I run across a person who can put down on paper what the Grand
Canon looks like, that party will be my choice to do the story when the
Crack of Doom occurs. I can close my eyes now and see the headlines:
Judgment Day a Complete Success! Replete with Incident and Abounding in
Surprises--Many Wealthy Families Disappointed--Full Particulars from our
Special Correspondent on the Spot!
Starting out from Chicago on the Santa Fe, we had a full trainload. We
came from everywhere: from peaceful New England towns full of elm trees
and oldline Republicans; from the Middle States; and from the land of
chewing tobacco, prominent Adam's apples and hot biscuits--down where
the r is silent, as in No'th Ca'lina. And all of us--Northerners,
Southerners, Easterners alike--were actuated by a common purpose--we
were going West to see the country and rough it--rough it on overland
trains better equipped and more luxurious than any to be found in the
East; rough it at ten-dollar-a-day hotels; rough it by touring car over
the most magnificent automobile roads to be found on this continent. We
were a daring lot and resolute; each and every one of us was brave and
blithe to endure the privations that such an expedition must inevitably
entail. Let the worst come; we were prepared! If there wasn't any of the
hothouse lamb, with imported green peas, left, we'd worry along on a
little bit of the fresh shad roe, and a few conservatory cucumbers on
the side. That's the kind of hardy adventurers we were!
Conspicuous among us was a distinguished surgeon of Chicago; in fact,
so distinguished that he has had a very rare and expensive disease
named for him, which is as distinguished as a physician ever gets to be
in this country. Abroad he would be decorated or knighted. Here we name
something painful after him and it seems to fill the bill just as well.
This surgeon was very distinguished and also very exclusive. After you
scaled down from him, riding in solitary splendor in his drawing room,
with kitbags full of symptoms and diagnoses scattered round, we became a
mixed tourist outfit. I would not want to say that any of the persons on
our train were impossible, because that sounds snobbish; but I will say
this--some of them were highly improbable.
There was the bride, who put on her automobile goggles and her
automobile veil as soon as we pulled out of the Chicago yards and never
took them off again--except possibly when sleeping. I presume she wanted
to show the rest of us that she was accustomed to traveling at a high
rate of speed. If the bridegroom had only bethought him to carry one of
those siren horns under his arm, and had tooted it whenever we went
around a curve, the illusion would have been complete.
There was also the middle-aged lady with the camera habit. Any time the
train stopped, or any time it behaved as though it thought of stopping,
out on the platform would pop this lady, armed with her little
accordion-plaited camera, with the lens focused and the little atomizer
bulb dangling down, all ready to take a few pictures. She snapshotted
watertanks, whistling posts, lunch stands, section houses, grade
crossings and holes in the snowshed--also scenery, people and climate. A
two-by-four photograph of a mountain that's a mile high must be a most
splendid reminder of the beauties of Nature to take home with you from a
trip.
There was the conversational youth in the Norfolk jacket, who was going
out West to fill an important vacancy in a large business house--he told
us so himself. It was a good selection, too. If I had a vacancy that I
wanted filled in such a way that other people would think the vacancy
was still there, this youth would have been my candidate.
[Illustration: EVIDENTLY HE BELIEVED THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST HIM WAS
WIDESPREAD]
And finally there was the corn-doctor from a town somewhere in Indiana,
who had the upper berth in Number Ten. It seemed to take a load off his
mind, on the second morning out, when he learned that he would not have
to spend the day up there, but could come down and mingle with the rest
of us on a common footing; but right up to the finish of the journey he
was uncertain on one or two other points. Every time a conductor came
through--Pullman conductor, train conductor or dining-car conductor--he
would hail him and ask him this question: "Do I or do I not have to
change at Williams for the Grand Canon?" The conductor--whichever
conductor it was--always said, Yes, he would have to change at Williams.
But he kept asking them--he seemed to regard a conductor as a
functionary who would deliberately go out of his way to mislead a
passenger in regard to an important matter of this kind. After a while
the conductors took to hiding out from him and then he began
cross-examining the porters, and the smoking-room attendant, and the
baggageman, and the flagmen, and the passengers who got aboard down the
line in Colorado and New Mexico.
At breakfast in the dining car you would hear his plaintive, patient
voice lifted. "Yes, waiter," he would say; "fry 'em on both sides,
please. And say, waiter, do you know for sure whether we change at
Williams for the Grand Canon?" He put a world of entreaty into it;
evidently he believed the conspiracy against him was widespread. At
Albuquerque I saw him leading off on one side a Pueblo Indian who was
peddling bows and arrows, and heard him ask the Indian, as man to man,
if he would have to change at Williams for the Grand Canon.
When he was not worrying about changing at Williams he showed anxiety
upon the subject of the proper clothes to be worn while looking at the
Grand Canon. Among others he asked me about it. I could not help him. I
had decided to drop in just as I was, and then to be governed by
circumstances as they might arise; but he was not organized that way. On
the morning of the last day, as we rolled up through the pine barrens of
Northern Arizona toward our destination, those of us who had risen early
became aware of a terrific struggle going on behind the shrouding
draperies of that upper berth of his. Convulsive spasms agitated the
green curtains. Muffled swear words uttered in a low but fervent tone
filtered down to us. Every few seconds a leg or an arm or a head, or the
butt-end of a suitcase, or the bulge of a valise, would show through the
curtains for a moment, only to be abruptly snatched back.
Speculation concerning the causes of these strange manifestations
ran--as the novelists say--rife. Some thought that, overcome with
disappointment by the discovery that we had changed at Williams in the
middle of the night, without his knowing anything about it, he was
having a fit all alone up there. Presently the excitement abated; and
then, after having first lowered his baggage, our friend descended to
the aisle and the mystery was explained. He had solved the question of
what to wear while gazing at the Grand Canon. He was dressed in a new
golf suit, complete--from the dinky cap to the Scotch plaid stockings.
If ever that man visits Niagara, I should dearly love to be on hand to
see him when he comes out to view the Falls, wearing his bathing suit.
Some of us aboard that train did not seem to care deeply for the desert;
the cactus possibly disappointed others; and the mesquit failed to give
general satisfaction, though at a conservative estimate we passed
through nine million miles of it. A few of the delegates from the
Eastern seaboard appeared to be irked by the tribal dancing of the Hopi
Indians, for there was not a turkey-trotter in the bunch, the Indian
settlements of Arizona being the only terpsichorean centers in this
country to which the Young Turk movement had not penetrated yet. Some
objected to the plains because they were so flat and plainlike, and some
to the mountains because of their exceedingly mountainous aspect; but on
one point we all agreed--on the uniform excellence of the dining-car
service.
It is a powerfully hard thing for a man to project his personality
across the grave. In making their wills and providing for the carrying
on of their pet enterprises a number of our richest men have endeavored
from time to time to disprove this; but, to date, the percentage of
successes has not been large. So far as most of us are concerned the
burden of proof shows that in this regard we are one with the famous
little dog whose name was Rover--when we die, we die all over. Every big
success represents the personality of a living man; rarely ever does it
represent the personality of a dead man.
The original Fred Harvey is dead--has been dead, in fact, for several
years; but his spirit goes marching on across the southwestern half of
this country. Two thousand miles from salt water, the oysters that are
served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness.
And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip.
There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I
ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they
might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If
there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car
during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with the
service, I think.
There is another detail of the Harvey system that makes you wonder. Out
on the desert, in a dead-gray expanse of silence and sagebrush, your
train halts at a junction point that you never even heard of before.
There is not much to be seen--a depot, a 'dobe cabin or so, a few frame
shacks, a few natives, a few Indians and a few incurably languid
Mexicans--and that is positively all there is except that, right out
there in the middle of nowhere, stands a hotel big enough and handsome
enough for Chicago or New York, built in the Spanish style, with wide
patios and pergolas--where a hundred persons might perg at one time--and
gay-striped awnings. It is flanked by flower-beds and refreshingly
green strips of lawn, with spouting fountains scattered about.
You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright dining room and get as good a
meal as you can get anywhere on earth--and served in as good style, too.
To the man fresh from the East, such an establishment reminds him
vividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch places to which he has been
accustomed back home--places where the doughnuts are dornicks and the
pickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed to
be there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a couple
of hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. It reminds him of
them because it is so different. Between Kansas City and the Coast there
are a dozen or more of these hotels scattered along the line.
And so, with real food to stay you and one of Tuskegee's bright,
straw-colored graduates to minister to your wants in the sleeper, you
come on the morning of the third day to the Grand Canon in northern
Arizona; you take one look--and instantly you lose all your former
standards of comparison. You stand there gazing down the raw, red gullet
of that great gosh-awful gorge, and you feel your self-importance
shriveling up to nothing inside of you. You haven't an adjective left to
your back. It makes you realize what the sensations would be of one
little microbe lost inside of Barnum's fat lady.
I think my preconceived conception of the Canon was the same conception
most people have before they come to see it for themselves--a straight
up-and-down slit in the earth, fabulously steep and fabulously deep;
nevertheless merely a slit. It is no such thing.
Imagine, if you can, a monster of a hollow approximately some hundreds
of miles long and a mile deep, and anywhere from ten to sixteen miles
wide, with a mountain range--the most wonderful mountain range in the
world--planted in it; so that, viewing the spectacle from above, you get
the illusion of being in a stationary airship, anchored up among the
clouds; imagine these mountain peaks--hundreds upon hundreds of
them--rising one behind the other, stretching away in endless, serried
rank until the eye swims and the mind staggers at the task of trying to
count them; imagine them splashed and splattered over with all the
earthly colors you ever saw and a lot of unearthly colors you never saw
before; imagine them carved and fretted and scrolled into all
shapes--tabernacles, pyramids, battleships, obelisks, Moorish
palaces--the Moorish suggestion is especially pronounced both in
colorings and in shapes--monuments, minarets, temples, turrets, castles,
spires, domes, tents, tepees, wigwams, shafts.
Imagine other ravines opening from the main one, all nuzzling their
mouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundreds
of these lesser canyons, and any one of them would be a marvel were they
not dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter. Imagine
walls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at their base
holes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the Olden World and
never know they were there--or miss them either. Imagine a trail that
winds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars like a bird, and
finally bores like a worm and is gone.
Imagine a great cloud-shadow cruising along from point to point, growing
smaller and smaller still, until it seems no more than a shifting purple
bruise upon the cheek of a mountain, and then, as you watch it, losing
itself in a tiny rift which at that distance looks like a wrinkle in the
seamed face of an old squaw, but which is probably a huge gash gored
into the solid rock for a thousand feet of depth and more than a
thousand feet of width.
Imagine, way down there at the bottom, a stream visible only at certain
favored points because of the mighty intervening ribs and chines of
rock--a stream that appears to you as a torpidly crawling yellow worm,
its wrinkling back spangled with tarnished white specks, but which is
really a wide, deep, brawling, rushing river--the Colorado--full of
torrents and rapids; and those white specks you see are the tops of
enormous rocks in its bed.
Imagine--if it be winter--snowdrifts above, with desert flowers blooming
alongside the drifts, and down below great stretches of green verdure;
imagine two or three separate snowstorms visibly raging at different
points, with clear, bright stretches of distance intervening between
them, and nearer maybe a splendid rainbow arching downward into the
great void; for these meteorological three-ring circuses are not
uncommon at certain seasons.
Imagine all this spread out beneath the unflawed turquoise of the
Arizona sky and washed in the liquid gold of the Arizona sunshine--and
if you imagine hard enough and keep it up long enough you may begin, in
the course of eight or ten years, to have a faint, a very faint and
shadowy conception of this spot where the shamed scheme of creation is
turned upside down and the very womb of the world is laid bare before
our impious eyes. Then go to Arizona and see it all for yourself, and
you will realize what an entirely inadequate and deficient thing the
human imagination is.
It is customary for the newly arrived visitor to take a ride along the
edge of the canyon--the rim-drive, it is called--with stops at Hopi Point
and Mohave Point and Pima Point, and other points where the views are
supposed to be particularly good. To do this you get into a smart coach
drawn by horses and driven by a competent young man in a khaki uniform.
Leaving behind you a clutter of hotel buildings and station buildings,
bungalows and tents, you go winding away through a Government forest
reserve containing much fine standing timber and plenty more that is not
so fine, it being mainly stunted pinon and gnarly desert growths.
Presently the road, which is a fine, wide, macadamized road, skirts out
of the trees and threads along the canyon until it comes to a rocky
flange that juts far over. You climb out there and, instinctively
treading lightly on your tiptoes and breathing in syncopated breaths,
you steal across the ledge, going slowly and carefully until you pause
finally upon the very eyelashes of eternity and look down into that
great inverted muffin-mold of a canyon.
You are at the absolute jumping-off place. There is nothing between you
and the undertaker except six-thousand feet, more or less, of dazzling
Arizona climate. Below you, beyond you, stretching both ways from you,
lie those buried mountains, the eternal herds of the Lord's cattlefold;
there are scars upon their sides, like the marks of a mighty branding
iron, and in the distance, viewed through the vapor-waves of melting
snow, their sides seem to heave up and down like the flanks of panting
cattle. Half a mile under you, straight as a man can spit, are gardens
of willows and grasses and flowers, looking like tiny green patches, and
the tents of a camp looking like scattered playing cards; and there is a
plateau down there that appears to be as flat as your hand and is
seemingly no larger, but actually is of a size sufficient for the
evolutions of a brigade of cavalry.
[Illustration: THERE WAS NOT A TURKEY TROTTER IN THE BUNCH]
When you have had your fill of this the guide takes you and leads
you--you still stepping lightly to avoid starting anything--to a spot
from which he points out to you, riven into the face of a vast
perpendicular chasm above a cave like a monstrous door, a tremendous
and perfect figure seven--the house number of the Almighty Himself. By
this I mean no irreverence. If ever Jehovah chose an earthly
abiding-place, surely this place of awful, unutterable majesty would be
it. You move a few yards farther along and instantly the seven is
gone--the shift of shadow upon the rock wall has wiped it out and
obliterated it--but you do not mourn the loss, because there are still
upward of a million things for you to look at.
And then, if you have timed wisely the hour of your coming, the sun
pretty soon goes down; and as it sinks lower and lower out of titanic
crannies come the thickening shades, making new plays and tricks of
painted colors upon the walls--purples and reds and golds and blues,
ambers and umbers and opals and ochres, yellows and tans and tawnys and
browns--and the canyon fills to its very brim with the silence of
oncoming night.
You stand there, stricken dumb, your whole being dwarfed yet
transfigured; and in the glory of that moment you can even forget the
gabble of the lady tourist alongside of you who, after searching her
soul for the right words, comes right out and gives the Grand Canon her
cordial indorsement. She pronounces it to be just perfectly lovely! But
I said at the outset I was not going to undertake to describe the Grand
Canon--and I'm not. These few remarks were practically jolted out of me
and should not be made to count in the total score.
Having seen the canyon--or a little bit of it--from the top, the next
thing to do is to go down into it and view it from the sides and the
bottom. Most of the visitors follow the Bright Angel Trail which is
handily near by and has an assuring name. There are only two ways to do
the inside of the Grand Canon--afoot and on mule-back. El Tovar hotel
provides the necessary regalia, if you have not come prepared--divided
skirts for the women and leggings for the men, a mule apiece and a guide
to every party of six or eight.
At the start there is always a lot of nervous chatter--airy persiflage
flies to and fro and much laughing is indulged in. But it has a forced,
strained sound, that laughter has; it does not come from the heart, the
heart being otherwise engaged for the moment. Down a winding footpath
moves the procession, with the guide in front, and behind him in single
file his string of pilgrims--all as nervous as cats and some holding to
their saddle-pommels with death-grips. Just under the first terrace a
halt is made while the official photographer takes a picture; and when
you get back he has your finished copy ready for you, so you can see for
yourself just how pale and haggard and wall-eyed and how much like a
typhoid patient you looked.
The parade moves on. All at once you notice that the person immediately
ahead of you has apparently ridden right over the wall of the canyon. A
moment ago his arched back loomed before you; now he is utterly gone. It
is at this point that some tourists tender their resignations--to take
effect immediately. To the credit of the sex, be it said, the
statistics show that fewer women quit here than men. But nearly always
there is some man who remembers where he left his umbrella or something,
and he goes back after it and forgets to return.
In our crowd there was one person who left us here. He was a circular
person; about forty per cent of him, I should say, rhymed with jelly. He
climbed right down off his mule. He said:
"I'm not scared myself, you understand, but I've just recalled that my
wife is a nervous woman. She'd have a fit if she knew I was taking this
trip! I love my wife, and for her sake I will not go down this canyon,
dearly as I would love to." And with that he headed for the hotel. I
wanted to go with him. I wanted to go along with him and comfort him and
help him have his chill, and if necessary send a telegram for him to his
wife--she was in Pittsburgh--telling her that all was well. But I did
not. I kept on. I have been trying to figure out ever since whether this
showed courage on my part, or cowardice.
Over the ridge and down the steep declivity beyond goes your mule,
slipping a little. He is reared back until his rump almost brushes the
trail; he grunts mild protests at every lurching step and grips his
shoecalks into the half-frozen path. You reflect that thousands of
persons have already done this thing; that thousands of others--men,
women and children--are going to do it, and that no serious accident has
yet occurred--which is some comfort, but not much. The thought comes to
you that, after all, it is a very bright and beautiful world you are
leaving behind. You turn your head to give it a long, lingering
farewell, and you try to put your mind on something cheerful--such as
your life insurance. Then something happens.
The trail, that has been slanting at a downward angle which is a trifle
steeper than a ship's ladder, but not quite so steep perhaps as a board
fence, takes an abrupt turn to the right. You duck your head and go
through a little tunnel in the rock, patterned on the same general
design of the needle's eye that is going to give so many of our
prominent captains of industry trouble in the hereafter. And as you
emerge on the lower side you forget all about your life-insurance papers
and freeze to your pommel with both hands, and cram your poor cold feet
into the stirrups--even in warm weather they'll be good and cold--and
all your vital organs come up in your throat, where you can taste them.
If anybody had shot me through the middle just about then he would have
inflicted only a flesh wound.
You have come out on a place where the trail clings to the sheer side of
the dizziest, deepest chasm in the known world. One of your legs is
scraping against the everlasting granite; the other is dangling over
half a mile of fresh mountain air. The mule's off hind hoof grates and
grinds on the flinty trail, dislodging a fair-sized stone that flops
over the verge. You try to look down and see where it is going and find
you haven't the nerve to do it--but you can hear it falling from one
narrow ledge to another, picking up other boulders as it goes until
there must be a fair-sized little avalanche of them cascading down. The
sound of their roaring, racketing passage grows fainter and fainter,
then dies almost out, and then there rises up to you from those
unutterable depths a dull, thuddy little sound--those stones have
reached the cellar! Then to you there comes the pleasing reflection that
if your mule slipped and you fell off and were dashed to fragments, they
would not be large, mussy, irregular fragments, but little teeny-weeny
fragments, such as would not bring the blush of modesty to the cheek of
the most fastidious.
Only your mule never slips off! It is contrary to a mule's religion and
politics, and all his traditions and precedents, to slip off. He may
slide a little and stumble once in a while, and he may, with malice
aforethought, try to scrape you off against the outjutting shoulders of
the trail; but he positively will not slip off. It is not because he is
interested in you. A tourist on the canyon's rim a simple tourist is to
him and nothing more; but he has no intention of getting himself hurt.
Instinct has taught that mule it would be to him a highly painful
experience to fall a couple of thousand feet or so and light on a pile
of rocks; and therefore, through motives that are purely selfish, he
studiously refrains from so doing. When the Prophet of old wrote, "How
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him," and so on, I judge he
had reference to a mule on a narrow trail.
My mule had one very disconcerting way about him--or, rather, about her,
for she was of the gentler sex. When she came to a particularly scary
spot, which was every minute or so, she would stop dead still. I
concurred in that part of it heartily. But then she would face outward
and crane her neck over the fathomless void of that bottomless pit, and
for a space of moments would gaze steadily downward, with a despondent
droop of her fiddle-shaped head and a suicidal gleam in her mournful
eyes. It worried me no little; and if I had known, at the time, that she
had a German name it would have worried me even more, I guess. But
either the time was not ripe for the rash act or else she abhorred the
thought of being found dead in the company of a mere tourist, so she did
not leap off into space, but restrained herself; and I was very grateful
to her for it. It made a bond of sympathy between us.
On you go, winding on down past the red limestone and the yellow
limestone and the blue sandstone, which is green generally; past huge
bat caves and the big nests of pack-rats, tucked under shelves of
Nature's making; past stratified millions of crumbling seashells that
tell to geologists the tale of the salt-water ocean that once on a time,
when the world was young and callow, filled this hole brim full; and
presently, when you have begun to piece together the tattered fringes of
your nerves, you realize that the canyon is even more wonderful when
viewed from within than it is when viewed from without. Also, you begin
to notice now that it is most extensively autographed.
Apparently about every other person who came this way remarked to
himself that this canyon was practically completed and only needed his
signature as collaborator to round it out--so he signed it and after
that it was a finished job. Some of them brought down colored chalk and
stencils, and marking pots, and paints and brushes, and cold chisels to
work with, which must have been a lot of trouble, but was worth it--it
does add so greatly to the beauty of the Grand Canon to find it spangled
over with such names as you could hear paged in almost any dollar-a-day
American-plan hotel. The guide pointed out a spot where one of these
inspired authors climbed high up the face of a white cliff and, clinging
there, carved out in letters a foot long his name; and it was one of
those names that, inscribed upon a register, would instinctively cause
any room clerk to reach for the key to an inside one, without bath. I
regret to state that nothing happened to this person. He got down safe
and sound; it was a great pity, too.
By the Bright Angel Trail it is three hours on a mule to the plateau,
where there are green summery things growing even in midwinter, and
where the temperature is almost sultry; and it is an hour or so more to
the riverbed, down at the very bottom. When you finally arrive there and
look up you do not see how you ever got down, for the trail has
magically disappeared; and you feel morally sure you are never going to
get back. If your mule were not under you pensively craning his head
rearward in an effort to bite your leg off, you would almost be ready to
swear the whole thing was an optical illusion, a wondrous dream. Under
these circumstances it is not so strange that some travelers who have
been game enough until now suddenly weaken. Their nerves capsize and the
grit runs out of them like sand out of an overturned pail.
All over this part of Arizona they tell you the story of the lady from
the southern part of the state--she was a school teacher and the story
has become an epic--who went down Bright Angel one morning and did not
get back until two o'clock the following morning; and then she came
against her will in a litter borne by two tired guides, while two
others walked beside her and held her hands; and she was protesting at
every step that she positively could not and would not go another inch;
and she was as hysterical as a treeful of chickadees; her hat was lost,
and her glasses were gone, and her hair hung down her back, and
altogether she was a mournful sight to see.
Likewise the natives will tell you the tale of a man who made the trip
by crawling round the more sensational corners upon his hands and knees;
and when he got down he took one look up to where, a sheer mile above
him, the rim of the canyon showed, with the tall pine trees along its
edge looking like the hairs upon a caterpillar's back, and he announced
firmly that he wished he might choke if he stirred another step. Through
the miraculous indulgence of a merciful providence he was down, and that
was sufficient for him; he wasn't going to trifle with his luck. He
would stay down until he felt good and rested, and then he would return
to his home in dear old Altoona by some other route. He was very
positive about it. There were two guides along, both of them patient and
forbearing cowpunchers, and they argued with him. They pointed that
there was only one suitable way for him to get out of the canyon, and
that was the way by which he had got into it.
"The trouble with you fellows," said the man, "is that you are too
dad-blamed technical. The point is that I'm here, and here I'm going to
stay."
"But," they told him, "you can't stay here. You'd starve to death like
that poor devil that some prospectors found in that gulch yonder--turned
to dusty bones, with a pack rat's nest in his chest and a rock under his
head. You'd just naturally starve to death."
"There you go again," he said, "importing these trivial foreign matters
into the discussion. Let us confine ourselves to the main issue, which
is that I am not going back. This rock shall fly from its firm base as
soon as I," he said, or words to that effect.
So insisting, he sat down, putting his own firm base against the said
rock, and prepared to become a permanent resident. He was a grown man
and the guides were less gentle with him than they had been with the
lady school teacher. They roped his arms at the elbows and hoisted him
upon a mule and tied his legs together under the mule's belly, and they
brought him out of there like a sack of bran--only he made more noise
than any sack of bran has ever been known to make.
Coming back up out of the Grand Canon is an even more inspiring and
amazing performance than going down. But by now--anyhow this was my
experience, and they tell me it is the common experience--you are
beginning to get used to the sensation of skirting along the raw and
ragged verge of nothing. Narrow turns where, going down, your hair
pushed your hat off, no longer affright you; you take them
jauntily--almost debonairly. You feel that you are now an old
mountain-scaler, and your soul begins to crave for a trip with a few
more thrills to the square inch in it. You get your wish. You go down
Hermit Trail, which its middle name is thrills; and there you make the
acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk.
The Hydrophobic Skunk is a creature of such surpassing accomplishments
and vivid personality that I feel he is entitled to a new chapter. The
Hydrophobic Skunk will be continued in our next.
_RABID AND HIS FRIENDS_
[Illustration]
_Rabid and His Friends_
THE Hydrophobic Skunk resides at the extreme bottom of the Grand Canon
and, next to a Southern Republican who never asked for a Federal office,
is the rarest of living creatures. He is so rare that nobody ever saw
him--that is, nobody except a native. I met plenty of tourists who had
seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him with
his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted.
I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary
skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with any
extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as
painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped
for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round; everybody
gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect--nay,
more than that, respect and veneration--wherever he goes. Joy-riders
never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner.
You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no--the
Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. Besides
carrying the traveling credentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid in
the most rabidissimus form. He is not mad just part of the time, like
one's relatives by marriage--and not mad most of the time, like the
old-fashioned railroad ticket agent--but mad all the time--incurably,
enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is mad and he is glad of it.
We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode down
Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Canon first of all takes
the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficiently
scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he grows
more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel of
corkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal wound
of a canyon to the very gizzard of the world.
Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same as
gathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked out
the scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for ordinary
folks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer side all
the way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of loose
stones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more than a
foot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped--which he
never does--or if you rolled off on your own hook--which has not
happened to date--that puny little wall would hardly stop you--might not
even cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you and a
thousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a tremendous
sense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I reckon.
As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take a
buckboard ride of ten miles--ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately the
road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off through
the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jays
that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern variety
weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there is
snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and
criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the
broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the
sunshine is a benediction.
Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone and
lofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeper
ravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at this
distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw;
and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on
a poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation
like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled
mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains were
in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written about
them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America would
come and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop up
romance through all their pores. But being in Arizona, dwarfed by the
heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south and
west, they have not even a Christian name to answer to.
Anon--that is to say, at the end of those ten miles--you come to the
head of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way station
and mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly on
a board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidly
succeeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. You
ride past little sunken gardens full of wild flowers and stunty fir
trees, like bits of Old Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned with
the tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you skirt bald, bare, blistered
vistas of desolation, like Old Perdition. You cross Horsethief's Trail,
which was first traced out by the moccasined feet of marauding Apaches
and later was used by white outlaws fleeing northward with their stolen
pony herds.
You pass above the gloomy shadows of Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath a
great box-shaped formation of red sandstone set on a spindle rock and
balancing there in dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and then, at the
end of a mile-long jog along a natural terrace stretching itself midway
between Heaven and the other place, you come to the residence of Shorty,
the official hermit of the Grand Canon.
[Illustration: HE'D GARNER IN SOME FELLOWS THAT WASN'T SHEEPHERDERS]
Shorty is a little, gentle old man, with warped legs and mild blue eyes
and a set of whiskers of such indeterminate aspect that you cannot tell
at first look whether they are just coming out or just going back in. He
belongs--or did belong--to the vast vanishing race of old-time gold
prospectors. Halfway down the trail he does light housekeeping under an
accommodating flat ledge that pouts out over the pathway like a
snuffdipper's under lip. He has a hole in the rock for his chimney, a
breadth of weathered gray canvas for his door and an eighty-mile stretch
of the most marvelous panorama on earth for his front yard. He minds the
trail and watches out for the big boulders that sometimes fall in the
night; and, except in the tourist season, he leads a reasonably quiet
existence.
Alongside of Shorty, Robinson Crusoe was a tenement-dweller, and Jonah,
weekending in the whale, had a perfectly uproarious time; but Shorty
thrives on a solitude that is too vast for imagining. He would not trade
jobs with the most potted potentate alive--only sometimes in mid-summer
he feels the need of a change stealing over him, and then he goes afoot
out into the middle of Death Valley and spends a happy vacation of five
or six weeks with the Gila monsters and the heat. He takes Toby with
him.
Toby is a gentlemanly little woolly dog built close to the earth like a
carpet sweeper, with legs patterned crookedly--after the model of his
master's. Toby has one settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You have
only to whisper the word "Injun" and instantly Toby is off, scuttling
away to the highest point that is handy. From there he peers all round
looking for red invaders. Not finding any he comes slowly back, crushed
to the earth with disappointment. Nobody has ever been able to decide
what Toby would do with the Indians if he found them; but he and Shorty
are in perfect accord. They have been associated together ever since
Toby was a pup and Shorty went into the hermit business, and that was
ten years ago. Sitting cross-legged on a flat rock like a little gnome,
with his puckered eyes squinting off at space, Shorty told us how once
upon a time he came near losing Toby.
"Me and Toby," he said, "was over to Flagstaff, and that was several
years ago. There was a saloon man over there owned a bulldog and he
wanted that his bulldog and Toby should fight. Toby can lick mighty nigh
any dog alive; but I didn't want that Toby should fight. But this here
saloon man wouldn't listen. He sicked his bulldog on to Toby and in
about a minute Toby was taking that bulldog all apart.
"This here saloon man he got mad then--he got awful mad. He wanted to
kill Toby and he pulled out his pistol. I begged him mighty hard please
not to shoot Toby--I did so! I stood in front of Toby to protect him and
I begged that man not to do it. Then some other fellows made him put up
his gun, and me and Toby came on away from there." His voice trailed
off. "I certainly would 'a' hated to lose Toby. We set a heap of store
by one another--don't we, dog?" And Toby testified that it was
so--testified with wriggling body and licking tongue and dancing eyes
and a madly wagging stump tail.
As we mounted and jogged away we looked back, and the pair of
them--Shorty and Toby--were sitting there side by side in perfect
harmony and perfect content; and I could not help wondering, in a
country where we sometimes hang a man for killing a man, what would
have been adequate punishment for a brute who would kill Toby and leave
Shorty without his partner! In another minute, though, we had rounded a
jagged sandstone shoulder and they were out of sight.
About that time Johnny, our guide, felt moved to speech, and we
hearkened to his words and hungered for more, for Johnny knows the
ranges of the Northwest as a city dweller knows his own little side
street. In the fall of the year Johnny comes down to the Canon and
serves as a guide a while; and then, when he gets so he just can't stand
associating with tourists any longer, he packs his warbags and journeys
back to the Northern Range and enjoys the company of cows a spell. Cows
are not exactly exciting, but they don't ask fool questions.
A highly competent young person is Johnny and a cowpuncher of parts.
Most of the Canon guides are cowpunchers--accomplished ones, too, and of
high standing in the profession. With a touch of reverence Johnny
pointed out to us Sam Scovel, the greatest bronco buster of his time,
now engaged in piloting tourists.
"Can he ride?" echoed Johnny in answer to our question. "Scovel could
ride an earthquake if she stood still long enough for him to mount! He
rode Steamboat--not Young Steamboat, but Old Steamboat! He rode Rocking
Chair, and he's the only man that ever did do that and not be called on
in a couple of days to attend his own funeral."
This day he told us about one Tom, who lived up in Wyoming, where Johnny
came from. It appeared that in an easier day Tom was hired by some
cattle men to thin out the sheep herders who insisted upon invading the
public ranges. By Johnny's account Tom did the thinning with
conscientious attention to detail and gave general satisfaction for a
while; but eventually he grew careless in his methods and took to
killing parties who were under the protection of the game laws. Likewise
his own private collection of yearlings began to increase with a
rapidity which was only to be accounted for on the theory that a large
number of calves were coming into the world with Tom's brand for a
birthmark. So he lost popularity. Several times his funeral was privily
arranged, but on each occasion was postponed owing to the failure of the
corpse to be present. Finally he killed a young boy and was caught and
convicted, and one morning they took him out and hanged him rather
extensively.
"Tom was mighty methodical," said Johnny. "He got five hundred a head
for killing sheep herders--that was the regular tariff. Every time he
bumped one off he'd put a stone under his head, which was his private
mark--a kind of a duebill, as you might say. And when they'd find that
dead herder with the rock under his head they'd know there was another
five hundred comin' to Tom on the books; they always paid it, too. Once
in a while, though, he'd cut loose in a saloon and garner in some
fellows that wasn't sheep herders. There was quite a number that thought
Tom acted kind of ungentlemanly when he was drinkin'."
We went on and on at a lazy mule-trot, hearing the unwritten annals of
the range from one who had seen them enacted at first hand. Pretty soon
we passed a herd of burros with mealy, dusty noses and spotty hides,
feeding on prickly pears and rock lichens; and just before sunset we
slid down the last declivity out upon the plateau and came to a camp as
was a camp!