visitors to this silent and deserted land. Then, trudging up from the
Spanish settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos de Niza in his
sandals and woollen robe. He, the first white man to set foot in Arizona,
after penetrating as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned to Mexico,
or New Spain, as it was then called, where he related what he had seen
to one of the Spanish officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who
promptly equipped an expedition and started northward on his own account.
Followed by half a thousand Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred
friendly Indians, and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound across
the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-clad mountains of Sonora,
through rivers swollen into torrents by the spring rains, and so into
Arizona, where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took possession
of all this country in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain.
This was in the year of grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still
disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman the Magnificent was
hammering at the gates of Budapest. By the beginning of the seventeenth
century the country now comprising the State of Arizona was dotted with
Spanish priests, who, in their missions of sun-dried bricks, devoted
themselves to the disheartening task of Christianising the Indians. In
1680, however, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were slain upon
their altars, their missions were ransacked and destroyed, and the work
of civilisation which they had begun was set back a hundred years.
The nineteenth century was approaching its quarter mark before the first
American frontiersmen, pushing southward from the Missouri in quest
of furs and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid succession
the Mexican War, which resulted in the cession to the United States
of New Mexico, which then included all that portion of Arizona lying
north of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California, which,
by drawing attention to the country south of the Gila as a desirable
transcontinental railway route, resulted in its purchase under the
terms of the Gadsden Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a
Confederate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its organisation
as a Territory of the Union. The early period of American rule was
extremely unsettled; Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which
composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers, adventurers, gamblers,
bandits, horse thieves—leading to one of the worst though one of the most
picturesque periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 1912,
the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the sisterhood of States, and
George W. P. Hunt, its first elected governor, standing on the steps of
the capitol, swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled crowd
for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the staff and broke out into
a flag with eight-and-forty stars.
Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona is greater than
that of Italy, there are only three communities in the State—Phœnix,
Tucson, and Prescott—which by any stretch of the census taker’s figures
are entitled to be called cities. They are, however, as far removed
from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher cow-towns which most
outlanders associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, and
well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and dishevelled, militant
suffragette. Phœnix, the capital, I had pictured as consisting of
a broad and very dusty main street bordered by houses of adobe and
unpainted wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded by wooden
awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings and with every other place
a temple to the goddesses of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with
shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium of apology. As
a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern and up-to-the-minute as a girl
just back from Paris. Its streets are paved so far into the country
that you wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to hold out.
Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised as those of Broadway,
and the head waiter in the Adams House café will hand you a menu which
contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare d’Astrachan to fromage
de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the
municipal regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs as
raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically prohibited, while
the charge for a liquor licence has been placed at such a prohibitive
figure that gentlemen with dry throats are compelled to walk several
blocks before they can find a place with swinging doors. Tucson, on the
other hand, still retains many of its Mexican characteristics. It is a
town of broad and sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many
buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along its principal
business thoroughfares being shaded by hospitable wooden awnings, which
are a godsend to the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer.
It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, as the
guide-book writers put it, will well repay a visit—provided the weather
is not too hot and the visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently
situated on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of an
incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to know that Arizona is
the greatest producer of copper in the world, its output exceeding
that of Montana or Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I
remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the Yavapai Club, an
architectural conceit which produces the effect of a stope, or gallery in
a mine—fitting tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry
which gives it being.
Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway,
which is the only north-and-south line in the State, forming a link
between the Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that you will
tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs Junction, which is the
station for Castle Hot Springs, which lie a score or so of miles beyond
the sound of the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the Bradshaw
Mountains. It is a _dolce far niente_ spot—a peaceful backwater of the
tumultuous stream of life. Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls
of rock is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and dotted with
palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties of cacti and clumps of
giant cane. A mountain stream meanders through it, and on the hillside
above the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and deep,
cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the subtropic vegetation,
vividly recall the dak-bungalows in the Indian hills, are three great
pools screened by hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in
midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as the temperature of
the water ranges from 115 to 122 degrees.
When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an acquaintance with an
old-time prospector who asserted that he was the original discoverer of
the place.
“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently. “I’d been
prospectin’ up on the headwaters of the Verde. One day, while I was
ridin’ through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of ’Paches struck
my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed the hull blamed bunch was after me
lickety-split as fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was
ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a rainstorm, and as
she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’
away from ’em, an’ I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar
with the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum, friend, if I
didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon! Yes, sirree, that’s just what I
went an’ done! Its walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a
house in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’ me—an’
behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’ like the red devils that
they were. I seen that it was all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t
no possible chanct to escape—not one!”
“And what happened to you?” interrupted an excited listener.
“What happened to me?” was the withering answer. “Hell, what could
happen? They killed me, damn ’em; _they killed me!_”
* * * * *
From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a tropic country modified in
the north by its elevation. It has no summer or winter in the generally
accepted sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and August and
a dry one the rest of the year. In the spring and fall dust-storms are
frequent—and if you have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you have
something to be thankful for—while in the summer it gets so hot that
I have seen them cover the skylight of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with
canvas and keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to sundown.
The warmest part of the State, and, in fact, the warmest place north of
the lowlands of the Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the
lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where the mercury in a shaded
thermometer not infrequently climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said,
however, that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation from
moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high temperatures of southern
Arizona are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a
humid atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the all-pervading
sunshine, Arizona has in recent years come to be looked upon as a
great natural sanitarium, and to it flock thousands of sufferers from
catarrhal and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however, I do
not believe that Arizona is by any means an ideal sick-man’s country;
for, particularly in advanced stages of tuberculosis, there is always the
danger of overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like
quality of the air, feeling well before he is well and overexerting
himself in consequence.
Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was never put to a
severer test than it was a few years ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then
at the height of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity afforded
by changing engines at Yuma to address a few remarks to the assembled
citizens of the place from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma,
as I have already remarked, has the reputation of being the red-hottest
spot north of Panama, and its residents are correspondingly touchy when
any illusion is made to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their
feelings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks, dragged
in the bewhiskered story of the soldier who died at Fort Yuma from a
combination of sunstroke and delirium tremens. The following night his
bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. “Dear Bill,” it ran,
“please send down my blankets.” Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I
have heard it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein at the
head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of the club in Zanzibar,
with its locale laid in each of those places, and I haven’t the least
doubt in the world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses when it
was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants of Yuma, with a politeness
truly Chesterfieldian, not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr.
Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but it is said that one
or two of them even laughed hoarsely. The Arizonian heat is not of the
sunstroke variety, however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it
all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, remember, is only
in the desert half of the State—the mountain half is as high and cool as
you could wish, with snow-capped mountains and green grass and running
water and fish and game everywhere.
Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities
aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In
the foot-hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost as common
as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience, perseverance, and a pack
of well-trained “b’ar dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an
opportunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a cinnamon on
the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards, or jaguars, frequently make their
way into the southern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome
rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though small herds of antelope
are still occasionally seen, the law has stepped in at the eleventh hour
and fifty-ninth minute and prevented their complete extermination. But
if you want an experience to relate over the coffee and cigars that will
make your friends’ stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose
hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as woodchuck shooting on
the farm, why don’t you run down to that portion of Arizona lying along
the Mexican border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there
_are_ wild camels there. They came about in this fashion: Along in the
late seventies, if I am not mistaken, the Department of Agriculture,
thinking to confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers of
the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head of camels from Egypt,
arguing that if they could carry heavy burdens over great stretches of
waterless and pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why they
could not do the same thing in Arizona, where almost identically the
same conditions prevailed. But the paternalistic officials in Washington
failed to take into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the camel
is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite different from the patient
and uncomplaining burro, but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it
were, make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition and get
along with him accordingly. Not so the Arizona packer. He took a hearty
dislike to the ship of the desert from the first and never let pass an
opportunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility and abuse, many
of the poor beasts died and the remainder were finally turned loose in
the desert to shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied they at
least have not decreased and are still to be found in those uninhabited
stretches of desert which lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not
protected by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to require some
hunting; so if you want to add to your collection of trophies a head
that, as a cowboy acquaintance of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,”
you can’t do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.
* * * * *
In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind that the State consists
of two distinct regions, as dissimilar in climate and physiography
as Florida and Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and
plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine and palm. If you will
take a pencil and ruler and draw a line diagonally across the map of
the State, from Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican
border, you will have a rough idea of the extent of these two zones.
That portion of the State lying to the north of this imaginary line is
a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested,
with green grass and running water and cold, dry winters, and an
annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty inches. To the south
of this quartering line lies a tremendous stretch of arid but fertile
land, broken at intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse
vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly in the vicinity
of the Colorado, often does not exceed three inches. It is in this
southern portion, however, that the future of Arizona lies, for the
success of the great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and
which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant future by similar
undertakings on the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde,
the Little Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing proof that
all that its arid soil requires is water to transform it into a land of
farms and orchards and gardens, in which the energetic man of modest
means—and it is such men who form the backbone of every country—can find
a generous living and a delightful home.
[Illustration: THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS.
The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and
hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently
pompadour.”]
A grave injustice has been done to the people of the State by those
fiction writers who have depicted Arizona society as consisting of
cow-punchers, faro dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist
in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of saloons and poker
palaces running at full blast, of stage-coaches and mail-trains held up
and robbed, are as much out of date, if the reading public only knew
it, as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter of fact,
Arizona claims the most law-abiding population in the United States, and
the claim is copper-riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and
the gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force of public
disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that picturesque body of constabulary
which policed the country in territorial days, have been disbanded
because there is no longer work for them to do. While it is not to be
denied that a large number of the citizens, particularly in the range
country, still carry firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is
winked at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance than
it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals of Arizona are famous as
“go-gitters” and a very large proportion of the gentry whom they have
gone for and gotten are promptly given free board and lodging in a large
stone building at Florence, on the outer walls of which men pace up and
down with Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State Penitentiary
at Florence is one of the most modern and humanely conducted penal
institutions in the United States, being under the direct supervision of
Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates of prison reform in
the country. When I visited the penitentiary with the governor, instead
of spending the night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on
occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment in introducing the
honour system in the Arizona prisons has met with such pronounced success
that roads and bridges are now being constructed throughout the State by
gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed wardens. In this connection they
tell an amusing story of an English tourist who was getting his first
view of Arizona from the observation platform of a Pullman. As the train
tore westward his attention was attracted by the conspicuous suits worn
by a force of men engaged in building a bridge.
“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his eye and addressing
himself to the Irish brakeman, “who are the johnnies in the striped
clothing?”
“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’ Sthate prison,” was the
answer. “Most av thim’s murtherers too.”
“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the harder. “Isn’t it jolly
dangerous to have murderers running loose about the country like that?
What?”
“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly; “yez see, sorr, in most
cases there was exterminating circumstances.”
* * * * *
The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s annual carnival wished
to obtain a stage-coach to use in the street pageants, they could not
find one in the State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture
concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from Phœnix to Globe,
driven by a gentleman who chews tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat,
but it has sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in which
the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured me that he went round them
on two wheels so as to save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’
hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back country, where the roads
run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher is still to be found,
but he, like the longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before
civilisation’s implacable advance.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.
“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier
is still to be found.”]
* * * * *
The history of Arizona divides itself into three epochs—the aboriginal,
the exploratory, and the reclamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian,
the Spanish, and the American—and each of these epochs is typified by
a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure: the ruins of Casa
Grande, the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa
Grande—“the Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its Aztec name,
which rises from the desert some sixty miles southeast of Phœnix, is the
most remarkable plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of
its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house of sun-dried
puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean walls, its low doorways so
designed that any enemy would have to enter on hands and knees, and
its labyrinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking and
significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a ruin when discovered,
in 1694, by the Jesuit Father Kino, how old it is or who built it even
the archæologists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins are
emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of grain and breeders of
cattle, whose energy and resource wrested this region from the desert,
and who were driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more warlike
people.
In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa Rita Mountains sweep
down to meet the desert half a dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the
white Mission of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that
chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the Spanish orders
stretched across Arizona in their campaign of proselytism three centuries
ago. I saw it for the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade
rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes and towers
and minarets silhouetted against the purple of the mountains as though
carved from ivory. Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as,
swinging sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes upon it
suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and
the sky, but I shall always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra,
and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most beautiful buildings I
have ever seen. If California had that mission she would advertise and
exploit it to the skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to
it in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with other and more
important things. In fact, I had to inquire of three people in the hotel
at Tucson before I could learn just where it was. Although the patter of
monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased these many years,
San Xavier is neither deserted nor run down, for the sonorous phrases
of the mass are still heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling
nuns conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts of its
white-walled cloisters, and at twilight the angelus-bell still booms
its brazen summons and the red men from the adjacent reservation come
trooping in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona missions, it
stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous _padres_ who first brought
Christianity to Arizona, many of them at the cost of their lives.