FROM WILLIAMS TO FORT APACHE
“Williams,” said the Old-Timer to us, as he directed us to that
progressive but uninteresting little town, “when I first came west was
a typical shoot-’em-up town, with thirty-six saloons;--thirty of them
in tents,” he added emphatically, as if this made a climax of iniquity,
I remarked later to Toby.
“The drinking, I suppose, was more intense,” she replied.
“Owing to more frequent drafts,” I retaliated.
Williams, set in a sea of white dust, looked both modern and harmless,
as if to make up for its youthful wild oats by a humdrum middle-age.
Numerous drug-stores had replaced its three dozen saloons, and a
Sabbath calm reigned on its dusty streets. We bought gasoline, and went
on, not over-pleased with Williams. We felt it did not live up to its
early rakishness. But appearances count for very little after all. Not
five minutes later, a small man driving a small car, with a large blond
woman beside him, approached and signaled us. We saw he was excited,
and she, though normally florid, was the color of an uncooked pie.
My prophetic soul caused me to say, “Shall we stop? It may be a
hold-up,” when he called, “Stop! stop! We’ve just been held up, a mile
back.”
“When?”
“Five minutes ago.” We had spent those same five minutes buying
gasoline at Williams. “Canst work in the ground so fast?” I
apostrophised our guardian angels. The woman broke in shrilly. “Two
masked men with revolvers stood by the road. They took everything we
had, then made for the woods.”
“Did you lose much?”
“Nine dollars,” said the little man. “If I’d had more they’d got it.”
When the shaken couple left, we debated whether to go ahead. Perhaps
the masked pair awaited us in the road beyond. Finally deciding
they would be no more anxious to meet us than we them, we hid our
valuables, I in my hat and Toby under the floor. Before we finished,
a Ford approached driven by two men of villainous appearance enhanced
by a week’s beard, and criminal looking red shirts. Seeing us they
wavered, slowed down and seemed about to stop beside us, then changed
their minds and dashed past, looking at us searchingly. Their peculiar
conduct and unprepossessing features made us certain that they were the
thieves. Our long expected bandits had come, and had passed us for a
little man in a flivver with nine dollars. We were to a certain extent
relieved, I must confess. Still, when you go west adventuring, your
friends expect you to be held up by outlaws, and you hate to disappoint
them with an anti-climax.
When we reported the incident at “Flag,” the Flagstaffians seemed
wounded in their municipal pride. Nothing of that sort, they said,
had happened for years, and asked if we had visited the Observatory.
Flagstaff is no longer a frontier town. I bought a hat there which was
afterward admired in Boston, if that signifies anything. The town is
best known for its observatory, which we drove up a beautiful winding
hill to view, and found it looked like any other observatory. There
are some cliff dwellings overlooking a pretty little green ravine,
called Walnut Canyon. Dominating all Flagstaff the crescent of cold San
Francisco peaks looks benignly over half Arizona, lovely in their bold
and serene silhouette.
On the road between Holbrook and St. Johns, as we journeyed toward
Apacheland, we stopped a few hours in the petrified forests whose
fallen trunks line the road for miles. Whatever turned them to stone,
at the same time burned the heart out of the surrounding country.
Leprous looking erosions, sulphur colored and sickly white, make
the only break in an absolutely flat landscape. An unbending road
stretches miles without a change in its monotony, choking in alkali
dust and twisting sandstorms. Beyond is the painted desert--bad lands
which, but for the ethereal sunset colors tinting butte and mesa with
unearthly glory, would be as unspeakably desolate as the rest. The
forest itself lies fallen in an alkali plain. Uncountable tons of these
giant fragments, waist-high, perfect to the last detail in the grain
of the wood, the roughness of the bark, knot-holes and little twigs,
cover the ground. The strange stone, which polishes like glass and cuts
like diamonds, is nearly semi-precious, yet in this vicinity houses are
paved with the blocks. We passed over a bridge whose foundation was a
giant petrified tree. It was depressing, these acres and acres of stone
trees, frozen in the height of their glory by the cruel Medusa, Nature.
I felt the same pensive kinship of mortality with these trees one feels
at Pompeii with the huddled, lava-encrusted bodies clutching their
treasures.
“I wonder what petrified these here trees?” exclaimed a voice behind
us. We turned. If I had not known the trees were petrified before her
arrival I might have held her responsible. As she stood, she might
easily have turned a whole continent to stone. She might have posed
for Avoirdupois, minus the poise. She wore, in addition to her figure,
a gayly striped silk sweater, high-heeled French slippers, silk
stockings, a jockey cap and overalls. Overalls, like boudoir caps and
kimonos in Pullmans, are the approved hiking costume of the new West
for both sexes. Unfortunately, there was more of her to wear overalls
than there were overalls to wear.
We had seen many of her kind, always touring the country in a little
rattly car, out for a good time, careless of looks, dressed in a motley
of overalls, sunbonnets, middy blouses, regardless of age or former
condition of dignity, sometimes driving, and sometimes delegating the
task to a little man crowded up against the wheel;--there is never
more than one man to a carful of women and children. We were now in
the heart of the sage-brush tourist belt, where motoring is not the
sport of the wealthy, but the necessity of the poor. With bedding rolls
and battered suitcases strapped to running boards; canteens, tents,
chuck-boxes and the children’s beds tied on with ropes wherever ropes
will go; loaded inside with babies, dogs and Pater and Materfamilias,
and outside with boastful, not to say sneering banners; these little
cars serve for transportation, freight-van, restaurant and hotel.
Bought second or third hand, they rattle the family off on vacations or
business, and at the journey’s end are sold third or fourth-hand. At
night no garage or hotel for them, but a corner, a secluded corner if
they arrive early enough, in the municipal parking grounds. Here with
frank gregariousness they exchange confidences with other sage-brush
tourists, while Paterfamilias mends the dubious tires and tinkers
with the weak spark plug, and Materfamilias cooks supper over an open
fire. Then they drape a tent or a mere canvas over the car, take a
lantern inside, and one by one undress, blissfully ignorant that their
silhouettes are shamelessly outlined on the canvas. As these municipal
camps were a bit too noisy for people who loved sleep as did Toby and
I, we usually sought the open country, but we loved to walk through the
grounds, and enjoy their sociability. The rich and haughty, we thought,
would not be half so bored with travel if they earned their delights
as these sage-brushers do. Fords have replaced prairie schooners, and
Indians are less interested in one’s scalp than one’s pocketbook, yet
overland travel still furnishes adventure, as any one of the tow-heads
we met from El Paso to Gallup will tell their grandchildren fifty years
hence. But you must leave behind limousine and liveried chauffeur,
forswear palace hotels, and get out and rub elbows with folks. The real
sage-brush tourists care nothing for “side.” Proudly flaunting their
atrocious banners, they patch their tires to the last ribbon, and wash
their dirty babies in public.
Occasionally there are exceptions to these happy-go-lucky pioneers.
One such family we met at the very ebb of their fortunes. They were
migrating to Texas, and midway, their hoodless ramshackle engine,
tires, and pump had collapsed like the one horse shay. We filled
their canteen, which had also leaked dry, pumped their tires with our
engine, and offered what road advice we could, with the remains of
our lunch. At last, after repeated cranking the man got the wheezy
engine started, and the woman, like Despair in a calico wrapper, leaned
forward and took up her task of holding down the engine with her hand,
protected by a black stocking. Poor shiftless folk, wherever they
settled eventually, it is fairly certain their luck did not improve.
We were bound by easy stages for a long-sought goal, a seductive and
elusive province of which even native Arizonans knew little. Yet it was
the little they told which enticed us.
“I’ve not been myself to the White Mountains,” one old-timer after
another would say, “but I’ve always heard how they are the prettiest
part of the state. Everything in the world you’d want,--mountains,
rivers, a world of running water, trout that fight to get on your
bare hook, big game, mountain lions and such. I’ve always aimed to go
sometime.”
Our “sometime” had come, after long waiting for the twelve-foot snows
to melt which covered the road till May. Through pretty, little
irrigated towns high in the hills, we reached at sunset a district
far different from the burnt aridity we passed at noon. Lakes were
linked to each other under green hills like ours at home. We looked
across ridges and long irrigated pastures, and rode through fields
blue with iris, and groves of gummy pines and the hugest white birches
I ever saw. The roads were next to impossible. We bumped violently
over annoying thank-you-marms past Cooley’s ranch, former home of an
officer who married an Apache woman, and whose sons now own half the
beautiful valley, and have built a lumber camp that is fast converting
these forests into history. At ten o’clock of a full and weary day, we
reached the reservation of the White River Apaches, situated on the
lovely river of that name. A few miles below, where the river forks
between rolling hills, is a cavalry station, relic of the days when the
Apache was the terror of Arizona.
We had to beg Uncle Sam once more to put us up for the night. Not
too gracious--rather grumpily, in fact,--he granted permission,
notwithstanding that in that remote and innless region, his is the only
resort travelers have, and the one to which they are always directed.
They pay a stipulated sum for lodging and for meals;--nevertheless the
average government agency is not the most hospitable place in the world.
Only a few Indians were visible next morning on the reservation. A
crowd of men hung round the village store at Fort Apache, or loafed
under the trees in the square. A pretty girl on horseback smiled at
us, conscious that her necklace of brass bells and celluloid mirrors
made her the best dressed debutante in Apacheland. A very intelligent
lad directed us to the trout stream where we hoped to see the trout
fight for the privilege of landing on our bare hooks. The Apaches are
round-headed Indians, rather sullen we were told, with staring round
eyes, more stocky than the lithe Navajo, better able to account for
themselves than the Papagoes; though in the past of ceaseless warfare,
it has been give and take, the Apaches losing as often as the other
tribes. In a land teeming with fish and game, they have become lazy,
and the beautiful craftwork for which the tribe was formerly noted is
seldom attempted by the younger generation. Their industry does not
compare with that of the Hopis, who are constantly weaving baskets,
baking pottery, or wresting meager crops from the land. Being the
last tribe to take the warpath, not so many years ago, they are closely
watched against another outbreak.
[Illustration: A TROUT STREAM IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS, ARIZONA.]
Bright and early we drove up the river fork, until what road there
was ceased, and became a flight of steps, and our progress was made
in standing jumps. The old lady outdid herself, and when her nose
bumped against rocks too abrupt to ride over, actually gathered herself
together like a hunter, and leaped over them. At last when the hilly
trail began to cave in on the outer side, we abandoned the car and
walked a mile farther to our camp, near a cottage whose owners were
away.
It was a beautiful glade we had selected for camp, so peaceful and
remote that we seemed at the earth’s end. The White Mountains were
indeed all they had been painted. Sunny fields leading to distant
peaks, a glade with dimpling brown brooks, fallen logs, tiny cascades,
baby whirlpools, sunlit shadows tempting to trout, a green tangle of
summer overhead, and the delicious tang of pine-sweetened mountain
air, ought to please the most exacting. We lacked only the trout, for,
relying on their abundance, we had traveled light for food. Flecks of
white in the brook showed this abundance no empty promise. Occasionally
a shining body leaped in the air and splashed back into the brown
water. Not the fourteen pound monsters of the northern lakes, these,
but little brook trout, of a hand’s length, meltingly sweet to the
taste. Our mouths already watered. Untangling our tackle, we started to
dig for worms. We had been presented with a pailful of bait, but in the
excitement of getting off had left it at the reservation.
The sun was just low enough to fleck the river with warm pools and
shady eddies. Soon Toby exclaimed with pleasure, the pleasure finding
a worm gives only when one intends to fish. She had bisected a fat,
tempting rascal, assuring one trout, at least. When the sun was an
hour lower, and it was getting a trifle chilly for fish to bite well,
I unearthed another, a long, anæmic, dyspeptic victim, which gave us
renewed courage. Either worms were scarce or trout fishers had dug them
all. We decided to give it up, and fish with what we had.
It took much less time to get rid of our worms than it did to find
them. Undoubtedly the trout fought to get on our hooks, but by the same
token they fought still faster to get off again. We doled out Mutt and
Jeff, as we dubbed our treasures, inchmeal to the rapacious brutes, but
we were not proof against their popularity.
“This is the last piece,” I said to Toby. And, of course, when she
dropped it into the water, there came a timid tug, and a rush.
Victorious Toby pulled out a trout, and threw him back in disgust. He
was all of two inches long.
It was four and after when we returned to our trenches and started
digging again. Then a splash, and through the speckled shade a cavalry
officer came riding. We called after him.
“Any worms in this place?”
“Any what?” His horse was carrying him further downstream.
“Wor-rums?”
His voice came faintly back,--“Dig near the water.” We dug near
the water for another half hour. Then we gave it up, and hot and
discouraged made for the empty cabin on the hill, hoping someone
might have returned and could advise us. The house, though open,
and invitingly adorned with beautiful Apache baskets, a rarity since
the Apaches became too lazy to make them, was as empty as before.
The tinkle of the telephone which suddenly sounded, emphasized its
loneliness.
Toby and I had the same idea, but always more active, she had the
receiver down while I was crossing the room.
A forest ranger twenty miles away was making his accustomed round by
’phone, tracing the spread of a forest fire whose smoke we could dimly
see.
“Hello!” he said, “Hello!”
“Hello,” replied a female voice, in cultured Cambridge tones. “Where do
you dig for worms?”
But a forest ranger learns to be surprised at nothing. Instantly his
reply came back, “Look under the stones at the river’s edge.”
“Thank you,” said Toby, hanging up the receiver.
Thanks to his advice, before sundown we caught a dozen dainty brook
trout, beauties all, which, when dipped in cracker crumbs and lemon
juice, and fried in butter over hot coals, were as good as they were
beautiful.
It was the first time I ever fished by telephone.