Though we cannot tell the reason for the same;
We’re the fools that pick the lock that holds the door—
Play and lose and pay the candle for the game.
There’s no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go;
There’s no painted post to point the right-of-way,
But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves
To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”
III
CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW
They came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop, hat brims flapping, spurs
jingling, tie-down straps streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road
into a yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs and sheepskin
chaps they formed as vivid a group as one could find outside a Remington.
They pulled up with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden West
saloon and, leaving their panting mounts standing dejectedly, heads to
the ground and reins trailing, went stamping into the bar. Having had
previous experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them through
the swinging doors; for more unvarnished facts about a locality, its
people, politics, progress, and prospects, are to be had over a mahogany
bar than any place I know except a barber’s chair.
“What’ll it be, boys?” sang out one of them, as they sprawled
themselves over the polished mahogany. I expected to see the bartender
matter-of-coursely shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for,
according to all the accepted canons of the cow country, as I had known
it a dozen years before, there was only one kind of a drink ever ordered
at a bar. So, when two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale
and the other four allowed that they would take lemonade, I felt like
going to the door and taking another look at the straggling frontier town
and at the cactus-dotted desert which surrounded it, just to make sure I
really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New York.
It required scant finesse to engage one of the lemonade drinkers in
amicable and illuminating conversation.
“Round-up hereabouts?” I inquired, by way of making an opening.
“Nope,” said my questionee. “Leastways not as I knows of. You see,” he
continued confidentially, “we’ve quit cow-punching. We’ve tied up with
the movies.”
“With the what?” I queried.
“The movies—the moving-picture people, you know,” he explained. “You see,
the folks back East have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West picture
plays and we’re gratifying ’em at so much per. Wagon-train attacked by
Indians—good-lookin’ girl carried off by one of the bucks—cow-punchers
to the rescue, and all that sort of thing. It’s good pay and easy work,
and the grub’s first-rate. Yes, sirree, it’s got cow-punching beaten to a
frazzle. I reckon you’re from the East yourself, ain’t you?”
I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was labelled “New York.”
“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, regarding me with suddenly increased
respect. “From what I hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town.
Gambling joints runnin’ wide open, an’ every one packs a gun, I hear,
an’ shootin’ scraps so frequent no one thinks nothing about ’em. It
ain’t a safe place to live, I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is
different. We’re peaceable, we are. We don’t stand for no promisc’us
gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining towns, there ain’t a poker
palace left, and I wouldn’t be so blamed surprised if this State went dry
in a year or two. Well, s’long, friend,” he added, sweeping off his hat,
“I’m pleased to’ve made your acquaintance. The feller with the camera’s
waitin’ an’ we’ve got to get out an’ run off a few miles of film so’s to
amuse the people back East.”
[Illustration: THE PASSING OF THE PUNCHER.
“Cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling
cattle—that’s what civilisation has done for Arizona.”]
I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon and watched them as
they swung easily into their saddles and went tearing up the street
in a rolling cloud of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the
mutability of things. “That’s what civilisation does for a country,”
I said to myself. “Lemonade instead of liquor; policemen instead of
pistol fighters; cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead
of corralling cattle.” At first blush—I confess it frankly—I was as
disappointed as a boy who wakes up to find it raining on circus morning,
for I had revisited the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going,
devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys life so characteristic of that
country’s territorial days. Instead I found a busy, prosperous State,
still picturesque in many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as
Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning.
It wasn’t much of a country, was Arizona, the first time I set foot in
it, upward of a dozen years ago. A howling wilderness is what the Old
Testament prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they wouldn’t
have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses and his Israelites could
not have wandered through a region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush
and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple mountains in
the distance and, flaming in a cloudless sky, a sun pitiless as fate.
Cattlemen and sheepmen still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro
players still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and the
cow-towns; men’s coats screened but did not altogether conceal the
ominous outline of the six-shooter. As building materials adobe and
corrugated iron still predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire
fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come into their
own. In those days—and they were not so very long ago, if you
please—A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled Frontier with a capital F.
I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignificant enough
in itself but strangely prophetical of the changes which were to come.
Riding across the most desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen,
a roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ramshackle adobe
ranch-house standing solitary in the desert, riveted my attention. The
ill-formed letters, scrawled apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar,
read:
40 MILES FROM WOOD
40 MILES FROM WATER
40 FEET FROM HELL
GOD BLESS OUR HOME
As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim humour of the lines, the
rancher appeared in the doorway and, with the hospitality characteristic
of those who dwell in the earth’s waste places, bade me dismount and
rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been tanned by sun and
wind to the colour of a well-smoked brier; corduroy trousers belted over
lean hips and a flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as
iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-lion. About his eyes, puckered at the
outer corners into innumerable little wrinkles by much staring across
sun-scorched ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested the
Yankee or the Celt.
“I stopped to read your sign,” I explained. “If things are as
discouraging as all that I suppose you’ll pull out of here the first
chance you get?”
“Not by a jugful!” he exclaimed. “I’m here to stay. You mustn’t take that
sign too seriously; it’s just my brand of humour. This country don’t look
up to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few years, friend, and
you’ll need to be introduced to it all over again.”
“But you’ve no water,” I remarked sceptically.
“We’ll have that before long. You see,” he explained eagerly, “the
Colorado’s not so very far away and there’s considerable talk about the
government’s damming it and bringing the water down here in diversion
canals and irrigation ditches. If the government doesn’t help us, then
we’ll sink artesian wells and get the water that way. Once get water
on it and this soil’ll do the rest. Why, friend, this land’ll raise
anything—_anything!_ I’m going to put in alfalfa the first year or two,
until I get on my feet, and then I’m going to raise citrus fruits.
There’s never enough frost here to worry about, and all we need is water
to make this the finest soil for orange growing on God’s green earth.
Just remember what I’m telling you,” he concluded impressively, tapping
my knee with his forefinger to emphasise his words, “though things look
damned discouraging just now, this is going to be a great country some
day.”
As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle to wave him a
farewell, but he had already forgotten me. He was marking, in the
bone-dry, cactus-dotted soil, the places where he was going to set
out his orange-trees. Though our paths have not crossed again, I have
always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful, optimistic, self-reliant,
blessed with a sense of humour which jeers at obstacles and laughs
discouragements away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land
as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typified for me those
pioneers who, by their indomitable courage and unyielding tenacity, are
converting the arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden of
the Lord.
Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade, I passed that way
again. So amazing were the changes which had taken place in that brief
interim that, just as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second
introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert, arid, sun-baked,
forbidding, I found fields where sleek cattle grazed knee-deep in
alfalfa, and groves ablaze with golden fruit. Stretching away to the
foot-hills were roads which would have done credit to John Macadam, and
scattered along them at intervals were prosperous looking ranch-houses of
cement or wood; there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a
schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling cottonwoods marked
the courses of the irrigation streams and in the air was the cheerful
sound of running water. There were two things which had brought about
this miracle—pluck and water.
Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous fight or won a more
brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and
the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade; and the
enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all foes—the
hostile forces of Nature. The story of how the white man, within the
space of less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and mapped this
almost unknown region; of how he carried law and order and justice into a
section which had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with any
one of the three before; of how, realising the necessity for means of
communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east
to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness
of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed, and
rolled up his sleeves, and spat on his hands, and slashed the face of
the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those canals
and ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or high in the
mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil, he replaced
the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with cotton,
forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It is one of the
epics of civilisation, this reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes
are, thank God, Americans.
Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation; Egypt, for
example, and Mesopotamia, and parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of
all those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,
metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than
themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful
of the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help
themselves, spent their days wielding pick and shovel and their evenings
in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands. After a time
the government was prodded into action and the great dams at Laguna
and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organising themselves
into co-operative leagues and water-users’ associations, took up the
work of reclamation where the government left off, and it is to these
energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells and ploughed fields and
dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which
stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamorphosis of Arizona is due.
More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona than about any other
region on the continent. The reclamation phase of its development has
been so emphasised and advertised that among most of those who have not
seen it for themselves the impression exists that it is a flat, arid,
sandy, treeless country, a small portion of which has, miraculously
enough, proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has been confirmed
by various writers who, sacrificing accuracy for a phrase, have dubbed
Arizona “the American Egypt,” which, to one who is really familiar with
the physical characteristics of the Nile country and the agricultural
disabilities under which its people labour, seems a left-handed
compliment at best. Egypt—barring the swamp-lands of the Delta and a
fringe of cultivation along the Nile—is a country of sun-baked yellow
sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an expanse of asphalt pavement.
Arizona is nothing of the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small
growth of green even in the dry season, while after the rains the desert
bursts into a brilliancy and diversity of bloom incredible to one who has
not seen it. How many people who have not visited Arizona are aware that
within the borders of this “desert State” is the largest pine forest in
the United States—six thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other
hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtually treeless. In
Egypt there is not a hill worthy the name between Alexandria and Wady
Halfa; Arizona has range after range of mountains which rise two miles
and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man’s land and never will be.
Arizona will never be anything else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt
at all (save as concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the
Khedive’s country a real compliment by calling it “the African Arizona.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
WHERE THE ROADS RUN OUT AND THE TRAILS BEGIN.
The Arizona desert: “It is more or less rolling country, corrugated by
buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock, its surface covered
by a confused tangle of desert vegetation.”]
The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was the desert. An Arab would
not call it desert at all; a Bedouin would never feel at home upon it.
I had expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, plantless,
incapable of supporting anything—yellow as molten brass, sun-scorched,
unrelenting. That is the desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia.
The Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In the first
place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey; “driftwood”
is probably the term which an interior decorator would use to describe
its peculiarly soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has
it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On the contrary, it
is a more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and
unexpected outcroppings of rock and sometimes gashed by _arroyos_, its
surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation so whimsical
and fantastic in the forms it assumes that it looks for all the world
like a prim New England garden gone violently insane. There is the
_cholla_, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking at
a distance, might deceive the stranger into supposing that it was a sort
of wildcat cousin of the gentle pussy-willow; the towering _sajuaro_,
often forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance to those
mammoth candelabra which flank the altars of Spanish cathedrals; the
octopus-like _ocatilla_, whose slender, sinuous branches, tipped with
scarlet blossoms, seem to be for ever groping for something which they
cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not unlike a collection
of green pincushions, abristle with pins and glued together at the edges;
the sombre creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood,
the bright green _paloverde_. These, with the white blossoms of the
yucca and the pink, orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the
cacti, the brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and violets
and blues of the encircling mountains, the fleecy clouds drifting like
great flocks of unshorn sheep across an ultramarine sky, combine to form
a picture as far removed from the desert of our imagination as one could
well conceive. Less picturesque than these colour effects, the portrayal
of which would have taxed the genius of Whistler, but more interesting
to the farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring up over the
mesas after the summer rains (some of them being, indeed, extraordinarily
independent of the rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage
for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those California-bound
tourists who gather their impressions of Arizona from the observation
platform of a mail-train while streaking across the country at fifty
miles an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its possibilities
with a wave of the hand and the dictum: “Nothing to it but sun, sand,
and sage-brush.” Were those same people to see New York City from the
rear end of a train they would assert that it consisted of nothing but
tenements and tunnels. It is easy to magnify the barrenness of an arid
region, and, that being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people
of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) that they instruct
their legislators to enact a law banishing any one found guilty of
applying the defamatory misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.
Though it were not well to take too literally the panegyrics of the
soil and its potentialities which every board of trade and commercial
club in the State print and distribute by the ton, there is no playing
hide-and-seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of Arizona
is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration with which the
people of Yuma marked the completion of the Colorado River project,
prizes were awarded for _forty-three distinct products of the soil_. To
recount them would be to enumerate practically every fruit, vegetable,
and cereal native to the temperate zone and many of those ordinarily
found only in the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether
exceptional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. This not
being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to say that the list began
with alfalfa and ended with yams.
Everything considered, I am inclined to think that the shortest road
to agricultural prosperity lies through an Arizona alfalfa field, for
this proliferous crop, whose fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame,
possesses the admirable quality of making the land on which it is grown
richer with each cutting. They told me some prodigious alfalfa yarns in
Arizona, but, as each district goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to
the acre better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in certain
parts of the State, as many as _twelve crops of alfalfa have been cut in
a year_. I wonder what your Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if
he can get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life in a land
like this?
Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona have been unwisely
advertised as “frostless.” This is not true, for there is no place
within our borders which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true,
however, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand a better
chance of escaping the ravages of frost than those in any other part
of the country. The fruit ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the
Arizona growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and grapefruit
on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in advance of their Californian
competitors.
Unless I am very much mistaken, two products hitherto regarded as alien
to our soil—the Algerian date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove
important factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. There is no tree
which produces so large a quantity of fruit and at the same time requires
so little attention as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing,
date-palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very low, yielding
from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. They are, as it were, the
camels among trees, for they thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that
any other tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm has
long since passed the experimental stage in Arizona—the heavily laden
groves, which any one who cares to take the trouble can see for himself
at several places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular
evidence of the success with which this toothsome fruit can be grown
under American conditions. The other crop which has, I am convinced, a
rosy future in Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less
water than any crop grown under irrigation. The fibre of the Egyptian
cotton being about three times the length of the ordinary American-grown
staple, it can always find a profitable market among thread manufacturers
when our Southern cotton frequently goes unharvested because prices are
too low to pay for picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds
of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United States each year. With
the fertile soil, the warm, dry climate, and the water resources which
are being so rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the
traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look out of the window
of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape of fleecy white.
“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the porter, and that
grinning Ethiopian will answer:
“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”
* * * * *
This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries before the great
Genoese navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador, southern
Arizona was the home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled
in agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals which
they constructed, the ruins of which may still be seen, providing
object-lessons for the engineers of to-day. It is peculiarly interesting
to recall that when the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in
Palestine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height of its glory, when
the Battle of Hastings had yet to be fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled
in England, a remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this remote
corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean that the inhabitants of
this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers four, five, perhaps even six
stories in height, that they possessed an organised government, that they
had evolved a practical co-operative system not unlike the water-users’
associations of the Arizona of to-day, and that, by means of a system
of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs—the remains of which may still be
seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no means inconsiderable
region. So great became the agricultural prosperity of this early people
that it excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, who, in
a series of forays probably extending over decades, at last succeeded
in exterminating or driving out this agricultural population. Their
many-storied dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which they
constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again dried up for lack
of water and returned in time to its original state, the habitat of the
cactus and the mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.