NORTH OF GALLUP
I can still, by shutting my eyes, see thousands of vistas,--little
twisting roads clinging tightly to cliffs, tangles of cactus, gray
cliff dwellings, pregnant with the haunting sense of life fled
recently, deserts ablaze overnight with golden poppies and blue lupin,
forests of giant pines backed by blue mountains, snow-peaked; long
views of green valleys with cottonwood-bordered streams, miles of
silver pampas grass, neat rows of ugly new bungalows in uncompromising
sunlight, older wooden shacks with false fronts, dry prairies white
with the skeletons of cattle, copper colored canyons dropping from
underfoot far into the depths of earth, water-holes with thousands of
moving sheep; spiky, waxen yuccas against a night sky;--all this is the
West, but inseparable from these mental visions come pungent odors so
sharp that I can almost smell them now.
I cannot hope to reproduce the charm and joy of our wanderings, despite
mishaps and disasters, because the freshness of mountain altitudes will
not drift from the leaves of this book, nor the perfume of sunshine on
resin, of miles of mountain flowers, nor the scent of desert dust, dry
and untainted by man, the sharp smell of camps,--bacon cooking, wet
canvas, horse blankets and leather;--bitter-sweet sage, sweet to the
nostril and keen to the tongue, nor the tang of new-cut lumber, frosty
nights, and fresh-water lakes, glacier cooled; the reek of an Indian
village, redolent of doeskin and dried meats hanging in the sun;--I
am homesick for them! And so is everyone who has found good hunting
northwest of the Rio Grande.
We again found ourselves on the old Spanish Trail, which leads into
Utah through Farmington and a bit of Colorado. Most of the way it was
desert, a wicked collection of chuck-holes, high centers, tree-roots,
gullies and sand drifts. This was a district once highly respected and
avoided, for a few miles further north lay the four state boundaries.
Men who find proximity to a state line convenient were twice as well
suited with the Four Corners, reckoning arithmetically,--or four times,
geometrically. Its convenience probably increased by the same ratio
their abandoned character over other abandoned characters who had only
two states in which to play hop-scotch with the sheriff. No doubt most
of these professional outlaws have disappeared, picked off by the law’s
revenge, or by private feud. We should have liked to explore this
region further, but sundown was too near for this to be a judicious
act, and while we were not always discreet, we were at times.
In late afternoon we looked ahead of us, and saw in this sea of sand
two schooners with purple sails full rigged, rosy lighted by the
setting sun. They tilted gracefully on a northerly course, the nearer
one seeming to loom as high above the other as a sloop above a little
catboat. No other landmark lifted above the long horizon save the low
hills on our west which at Canyon de Chelley had been east of us. Only
when we traveled five, ten, fifteen miles did we realize the magnitude
of these giant ships of rock, made so light by the reflection of sand
and sun that the sails seemed cut out of amethyst tissue rather than
carved of granite. When we passed the first rock, which had seemed
so high, it took its proper place, and it became the catboat, while
the real Shiprock, we saw, far excelled the other in size and in its
likeness to a ship. With the afterglow, the desert became gray and
the ship golden, with purple edged sails. At dark the desert became
blue-black, and the ship melted into a gossamer mist, looming higher
as we neared it. It must be five or six hundred feet high, and so
precipitous that nobody has ever scaled its outspread wings, though the
Human Fly came from New York for the purpose, and returned defeated.
As we went on in this intensely lonely country, out of the darkness
came an odor that a moment before had not been, resembling jasmine or
syringa, but fresher than either. We stopped the car, expecting to find
ourselves in the midst of a garden. But all around was only greasewood
and sage, sage and greasewood. The twigs we plucked to smell broke off
brittle in our hands. We drove on, much perplexed.
Just before we reached the town of Shiprock, the air lifted with a
new freshness. We sniffed, and raised our heads as horses do. We were
reminded of home. It was water! We had not smelled water for two dry
days. In an instant we were rolling down shady avenues, and saw lights
reflected on a river, and crossed into a town so dense with green grass
and arched trees and roses in bloom that it seemed like some old place
in New England. Then the mysterious odor, stronger and of unearthly
sweetness, came again. It blew from a field of alfalfa in bloom, with
the night dew distilling its heavenly freshness. We must have been
several miles away when its perfume first reached us in the desert.
A car halted in the road before the superintendent’s house,--for
Shiprock is a Navajo agency,--and as we stopped, a man and his wife
exchanged names and destinations with us in the darkness. They were
from California, going to Yellowstone. When we told them our home town
they said the usual thing. We discussed plans for the night. They had
none, neither had we. It was nearly midnight.
“That’s the agent’s house,” he said, pointing to the only light in
town, “but they won’t take you there. We just asked. The lady’s all
alone, but she might give you directions for a hotel.”
As we went toward the house, an Indian policeman in uniform shadowed
us, wearing the kind of helmet the police used to wear in Boston and
rural plays. He seemed to alternate between a desire to protect us
against Shiprock, and Shiprock against us, his grave manner signifying
he would do justice to both parties.
The agent’s wife directed us to a hotel, which she refused to indorse,
and when we left, she called after us,--“You aren’t alone?”
“Yes,” I answered, “all alone, ever since we left Boston.” And then, to
save time, “We’re a long ways from _home_.”
“I don’t know what accommodations you’d find at the hotel,” she said.
“You’d better stay here. Being alone, I didn’t want to take in any men,
but I’d be glad to have your company.”
“Did you find a hotel?” asked the kind man in the road, as we returned
for our baggage.
“Yes,--here,” we said, “not having a man with us.”
“You have the luck,” he answered, and his wife groaned, and asked him
as wives will, what good it did her to have him along.
Our kind hostess gave us a pleasant room, and carte blanche to the
icebox, for I believe we had no supper that night. It may have been
partly our kind reception, but not entirely so, that made Shiprock
seem, when we inspected it next day, one of the most attractive and
sensibly conducted agencies we had visited. It is beautifully situated
where our old friend the San Juan river joins another stream, and turns
the desert into the greenest of farm lands. Roses bloomed about each
neat, white-picketed house, big trees shaded the road, and the lawns
were like velvet. Happy looking Navajo children in middy blouses played
about the schoolyards or splashed in the big swimming pool devoted
exclusively to them. The teachers and agents whom we met lacked that
attitude of contempt for their charges we had sometimes observed in
other Indian schools. I have heard teachers who could hardly speak
without butchering the President’s English sneer at their Indian
charges for reverting to their own tongue.
[Illustration: NAVAJO SHEEP-DIPPING AT SHIPROCK. Fat Navajo squaws
pulled the unhappy beasts to the trough by the horns.]
The day of our stay on the reservation an interesting event took place.
Once a year the government requires all Navajos to bring in their
sheep to be dipped in a strong solution of lye and tobacco, to prevent
vermin and disease. In the early morning the air was filled with a
thousand bleatings. The dust rose thick from countless hoofs driven to
the sheep-dip. The dip was situated against great yellow buttes,
and in the distance the ship rock sailed in lilac light. Fat Navajo
squaws with their jewels tied to their belt for safe keeping pulled
the unhappy beasts to the trough by the horns, where they completely
submerged them, with the aid of an Indian wielding a two-pronged staff.
“Get in and help,” said an old squaw to me. Accordingly I grasped a
rough horn, and discovered it took strength and some skill to keep
the animals from being trampled, as they went down the trough. Once
a tremendous chatter arose, as a result of the squaws counting their
sheep and finding one missing. The poor creature was discovered,
crushed and bleeding at the bottom of the runway. Immediately he was
fished out, and borne off by two women whom I followed to watch. One
held the carcass, while the other pulled from her woven belt a long,
glittering knife. In twenty minutes the sheep was skinned, dressed and
cut into neat chops and loins, and the incident was closed. The women
are sole owners and custodians of the sheep-herds. The gathering that
day would have rejoiced the heart of any feminist. With one old hag I
noticed a beautiful little Navajo child dressed in the usual velvet
jacket, flowing skirt and silver ornaments. Two lumps of turquoise were
strung in her ears. Her eyes, like her skin, were golden brown and her
hair bright yellow. Her unusual complexion added to her beauty made her
a pet of the entire village, and the idol of her old grandmother. If
she was an Albino, the lack of pigment took a more becoming form than
among the Hopis.
Mesa Verde National Park is only a short day’s run from Shiprock.
It took us into the edge of Colorado, a beautiful, loveable state,
endowed with sense, mountains, good roads and every kind of natural
blessing. It has a flavor all its own; more mellow than the states of
the West coast, less prim than those on its eastern borders. Our way
led between two mountain ranges, one in Utah, the other in Colorado,
with a long sweep of prairies curling like waves at their base. We
passed a corner of the Ute country, and saw at a spring a group of
those gaily dressed, rather sullen people, ample bodied and round
headed. Each tribe differs from the others, and these bore a look more
like the Northern tribes than those we had already met.
As the Colorado mountains came nearer, I remembered the words of a
fellow traveler, spoken on the slippery drive to Taos, New Mexico,
which had haunted me ever since.
“This is steep enough, but wait till you climb Mesa Verde. The engineer
cut a road straight up the mountain to the top, with as few switchbacks
and as little grading as he could. It is so narrow that you have to
telephone your arrival when you reach the base of the hill, and they
shut off all downward traffic till you report at the Park.”
We were both by this time inured to horizontal fever, and could steer
quite debonairly within an inch of a thousand foot drop, but we
“figured,” as they say out West, that we had about reached our limit,
and if we were to encounter anything more vertiginous, something
_might_ happen. I don’t say we dreaded Mesa Verde, but I will admit we
speculated over our prospects.
“Heavens! Do they expect us to climb _that_?” exclaimed Toby when
we sighted the beginning of the twenty-six mile road to the Park.
A mountain stood on its hind legs before us, and pawed the air. The
white gash of road leading uncompromisingly up its side showed us
all too well what to expect. At the summit, a naked erosion rose
like Gibraltar for a hundred feet from its green setting. Whether we
should have to conquer that bit of masonry we did not know, but if we
had to, I knew our chances were not good. I clung to the story I had
heard of a one-armed girl who had driven a Ford to the top, and then
collapsed. We ought to do at least as well, we reasoned, reserving the
right to collapse on arrival. At the base of the hill I telephoned
the superintendent of the Park, at a switchboard by the roadside, as
commanded by placard.
“Come ahead, and ’phone at the top,” he said. His voice was most
matter-of-fact. From that moment, anticlimax reigned. Roads are
never as bad as report makes them, and this besides being far less
narrow than many mountain passes we had been through, was beautifully
graded on the turns, and in excellent condition. We passed several
steep ravines at curves,--one where a car had overturned the week
previous,--but none was as bad as we had been led to expect. Thanks
to the sane regulation making it a one way road we had nothing to
fear from traffic. Valleys, blue and red with a magnificent sweep of
flowers, dropped down, down, and new mountains rose from unexpected
coverts. We circled the one we were on, pausing at the summit for
the view over the emerald slopes far below. We reached the base of
our Gibraltar, but saw on nearer approach that we could no more have
climbed it then we could climb Washington Monument on the outside.
Instead we rounded it, and dipped up and down another hillside,
overlooking an eastern valley. Here the road was delightfully planned
so that we could look far ahead over our course, and coast or climb
without fearing the next turn. Well named is the Park, so surprisingly
green after the desert. In an hour and three-quarters we had covered
the twenty-six miles to the inn. This, we were told by the stage
drivers, was fairly near record time.
We met a man soon after our arrival, to whom we mentioned that we had
recently come from the Rainbow Bridge.
“Oh,” said he, “were you in the party where the mule threw the man off
into the cactus?”
News travels like that in the West.
Mesa Verde is what is called a three days’ park. One could easily spend
three weeks or three months there with profit or delight, camping
in its delicious forests and riding over its mountainsides. But in
three days all that is to be seen of cliff dwellings and prehistoric
ruins can be inspected without hurry, unless of course one is an
archaeologist. Here are most elaborate ruins, carefully restored,
whose many kivas indicate a prosperous and flourishing community. Long
canyons, thickly wooded and enameled with wild-flowers are lined on
both sides with these airy villages. A small museum of articles found
in excavating, displayed in the main house, greatly aids the mere
amateur.
[Illustration: CLIFF-DWELLINGS. MESA VERDE PARK, COLORADO. Here are
most elaborate ruins, carefully restored.]
We were fortunate in having a guide who knew his park like a book.
Forsaking routine paths and steps, he hoisted us up and down the
paths,--mere niches they were,--worn in the solid wall by those agile
Indians. It seems certain that at that time no cliff-mothers indulged
in the embonpoint affected by so many of their descendants. An inch
too much of girdle in the right,--or the wrong,--place, would have
sent them hurtling down into the canyon, as they climbed those sheer
walls. Being one of the oldest known cliff communities, Mesa Verde is
much more carefully restored than those we saw in the Canyon de Chelley
and in Segi Canyon. More accessible and compact than other ruins, Mesa
Verde combines the historic,--or prehistoric,--interest with the needs
of vacation seekers who wish a few luxuries with their cliff dwellings.
Although the hotel is of the simplest sort, it is well run. Those who
wish to camp may do so by obtaining a permit. Tent houses are provided
as a compromise between camping and hotel life for those who want to
feel they are roughing it, but prefer a floor and a mattress between
them and the insect world.
We entered the Mormon country not long after we left Mesa Verde and
turned north again into Utah. Here once more we had desert, villainous
prairie roads, utter loneliness, with vista of foothills of the Rockies
guarding our route. We drove hard and camped where midnight found us,
or, too weary to spread our tent, went still further to the next one of
the miserably equipped towns in rural Utah, where we had the benefit
of rickety bedsprings and stifling bedrooms. It was cherry time, and
each warm day we blessed Brigham Young for his foresight in encouraging
the growth of fruit trees. The Mormons were the earliest in the West
to understand the use of irrigation. Their villages, slatternly as to
buildings, nestle in lanes and avenues of poplar and cottonwood, and
their gardens bear all manner of fruit. They are good providers, too,
in this rural desert, and at noon sharp, when we stopped doubtfully
at some unpainted shack, bearing the sign Café, we were astonished at
the abundance of wholesome country food spread on the long table. We
sat among a group of overalled men, who ate in silence, except for the
sounds of mastication.
“Help yourself, Brother Smith. Brother Thacher, you aint eatin’ today,”
the ample goddess who presided over the stove in the corner of the
room would encourage her patrons. At the close of the meal, whether we
had consumed one or six helpings of the cheese, the meat pie, the ham,
the raspberries and stoned cherries with rich country cream in quart
pitchers, the apple pie and chocolate cake, we wiped our fingers on
napkins well used to such treatment, paid our “six bits” and departed,
our parting “Good-day” being answered with caution.
Through such country, uninhabited for long stretches, we were driving
one evening, hoping to reach Green River forty miles north. Though
with filial respect we often remembered the last injunction of Toby’s
parent, we were frequently obliged to postpone fulfilling it, till a
more convenient occasion. Tonight we had to choose between making a
barren camp in open prairie and pushing on to the nearest hotel. A dry
camp made after dark represents the height of discomfort, so we chose
the alternative. Our route lay over a waste of sand,--that portion of
the desert which claims central Utah. For several miles we followed
the wretched little prairie tracks, but finally, to our great joy, we
struck into a broad state road in perfect condition, raised above the
floor of the desert by several feet. We made marvelous speed. Who
would have expected to find a boulevard in the heart of rural Utah?
Whoever would, was doomed to speedy disappointment. Our boulevard
seemed to lack continuity; several times we were forced to forsake it
and make detours back over the trails. Soon our highway, which was
leveled an easy grade above the desert, began to rise in the air, until
in the pitch dark it assumed an alarmingly dizzy elevation. About
the same time the marks of traffic faded. We passed through a morass
of crushed stone, and thence into thick sand, over which we skidded
alarmingly toward the edge of the bank. Perhaps we were eighteen or
twenty feet above the desert, but when we veered for the edge, it
seemed like a hundred. The heavy sand clung to our wheels, making
progress hard and skidding easy. We passed through a cut with heavy
banks on both sides, and in front a black shadow.
“Why, where’s the road?” exclaimed Toby.
There was none. We were left high and dry, with a sandhill on both
sides, steep banks dropping down among rocks and gullies to the desert,
a yawning hole in front with a precipitous drop of twenty feet, and two
feet of leeway, in which to turn our car. We backed cautiously down the
side, and struck a boulder. We turned forward a few inches, and came
upon a heap of sand. Toby got out, and directed our maneuvers, inch by
inch. Finally we had the car broadside to the jumping-off place, and
there we stuck, tilted at a crazy angle, one headlight almost directly
above the other. In the heavy, untracked sand we could not move an inch.
“Well,” I said bitterly, “here we spend the night. Twelve miles from
nowhere!”
At that four men with a lantern sprang up from nowhere.
“How kind of you to come,” we said to the men, assuming they were there
to rescue, not to rob.
“We saw your headlights,” answered the one who held the lantern, “and
from the way they were slanted we concluded you was in trouble and we
might as well come over. We’re working on the new state road, and this
is as far as it’s got. Our camp’s just over there, and Green River’s
twelve miles further.”
Backing and filling, with their four brawny shoulders to the wheels,
we soon got the car out of the sand heap and turned about, but the
deep sand was crowned so high that for a stretch we skidded along at
so sharp an angle that only the tug of the sand kept us from turning
turtle. Our friends put us on our way, going a half mile out of their
own to do so.
The sleepy clerk at Green River was locking the hotel up for the night
as we stopped before his door.
“My, you’re in luck,” said he. “If the midnight train hadn’t been late
this hotel would have been closed up tight.”
Such incidents, happening almost daily, began to give us a reckless
faith in our luck, or our guardian angels, or the special Providence
said to look after certain types of people, whichever you may choose to
call it. Ministering angels of the first calibre had perfected their
system to give instant service day or night. They thought nothing of
letting us run dry of gasoline on a road where all morning we had
not passed a single car, and sending us within five minutes a truck
carrying a barrel of the useful fluid. They delighted in letting us
drive a bit too fast down a narrow canyon, where a blowout from
our ragged tires would have mingled our bones forever with the “old
lady’s,” arriving scatheless at the bottom simultaneously with a
blowout which dragged us, standing, across the road. Once a Ford,
driven by inexpert and slightly befuddled Elks, crashed into us on a
narrow bridge, with no results beyond a bent canteen. When we broke
four spring leaves at dusk in a lonesome hamlet, they placed across
the street an expert German blacksmith of the old school, who did not
object to night hours, and who forged us new springs which finally
outwore the car. By happy mistake, they took us down pleasant by-paths
less fortunate tourists who went by Bluebook never knew. Altogether,
they were a firm of remarkable reliability, and if I knew their address
I should publish it. But they preferred to do good anonymously.
I think it was they who directed us through the Shoshone reservation on
the very day of the year when the tribe held its important ceremony,
the Sun Dance. We reached Fort Hall, the Shoshone agency, one morning,
and were told casually of a dance being held on the reservation, not a
mile out of our way. When we reached it a magnificent Indian, the first
we had seen who could be called a red man, (for the Southern Indians
are brown and ochre colored), barred our path on horseback. He knew
his cerise sateen shirt was becoming, even without the purple necktie
he wore. It gave him confidence to demand an entrance fee of $2.00--an
entirely impromptu idea inspired by our eagerness. The more I see of Lo
the Poor Indian the more I am convinced that he is poor only for lack
of opportunity to exercise his talents. However, the dance was worth
the money,--far more than some other barefoot dances I have seen.
It had begun when we arrived on the scene, in fact, it had been
going on for two days. Crowds of women, some dressed in long plaid
shawls and high moccasins, others in starched muslins and straw hats;
bright-eyed papooses slung on their mother’s backs in beautiful white
doeskin cradles; majestic chiefs six feet tall and more in high pointed
Stetsons, with long robes of cotton sheeting, giddily dyed, wrapped
about them, circled about the dancers, who were partly screened from
spectators by the green branches seen in so many Indian dances. These
Shoshones are the Indians on the penny. Grave, surly giants with copper
skin, coarse jet hair and high cheek bones, powerful, with a hint of
ugliness, they were another race from the laughing brown tribes of the
south. They frowned upon our camera, and finally forbade us, in no
uncertain manner, to use it. Even the insouciant Toby paled and hastily
stuffed her camera in her coat as a big chief made a threatening lunge
at it. That is why all our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from
the rear.
[Illustration: SHOSHONES AT SUN DANCE, FORT HALL, IDAHO. All our
photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.]
Old women trotted to and fro constantly with bunches of sweet grass and
herbs, which they laid on the ground beside the resting dancers, who
used them to dry and refresh their exhausted bodies. A group of old men
in the corner beat the tom-tom, squatting to their task like gnomes.
The dancers, naked to the waist, wore a short apron-like garment of
calico or blanket below. Their bodies, old and young, were lithe and
stringy,--hardly a fat man among them. They showed much exhaustion,--as
much perhaps on this second day of the dance as white men not in
training would after half an hour of similar exercise. Many of them
were past middle age. One was white-haired and wrinkled, but with
magnificent muscles on his bare chest and arms. They alternately rested
and danced in groups, so that the dancing was continuous. Running at a
jog trot to a great tree in the center, decorated with elk horns and
a green branch, they touched this tree with reverent obeisances and a
wild upward movement of body and head, then carried their hand from it,
as if transferring its vitality to their knees, their breasts and their
heads. For the three days and nights the dance was to last, they would
neither eat nor drink.
“What does it mean?” I asked a very modern lady, dressed in flowered
organdy. She smiled a superior smile, evidently holding no longer with
the gods of her ancestors.
“It’s a dance they think will make well sick people. I do not
know,--some foolishness, I guess.”
A tall chief with a pipe in his mouth, wearing a scarlet shawl, fanned
himself with a lady’s fan of black spangles and gauze, and as he fanned
he frowned at us, muttering at our levity in talking during the sacred
ceremonies. He only needed a rose behind his ear to make a gaunt Carmen
of him, temper and all. His eyes fell menacingly on Toby’s camera,
which she had been fingering, and Toby-wise she turned and sauntered
off as if she hadn’t seen him, though I imagine her knees shook.
From the not too friendly Indians we could get no further information
of the meaning of the dance, but later I discovered we had been
fortunate enough to witness the Sun Dance. During the winter, when
sickness falls upon a relative, some Indian will vow to organize this
dance, if health should return to the sick one. The whole tribe comes
to take part or to witness the dance. The participants refrain from
food or drink for three days, sustained to their exertion by marvelous
nervous energy and real religious fervor. Before the government forbade
the practise it was their custom to cut slits in their breasts on the
third day of the dance, and insert rawhide ropes, which they tied to
the tree, throwing themselves back and forth regardless of the torture,
until the rawhide broke through the flesh.
After the adobe huts and hogans of the Pueblos and Navajos, we were
delighted by the symmetrical snowwhite tepee of the Shoshone, who have
made not only an art but a ceremony of tepee building. Two poles are
first placed on the ground, butts together. Then two poles of equal
length are placed in a reversed position. A rope of pine tree fibre
is then woven in and out, over and under the four poles near the top,
knotted securely, with long ends hanging. The old custom prescribed
laying out the camp in half moon shape, each doorway facing the point
where the sun first appears on the horizon, shifting with the season.
The camp’s location determined, the squaws raise the poles slowly,
singing the song of the tepee pole, so timed that it comes to an end
with the upright position of the pole. Two women then raise the tent
covering, lacing it with carved and polished twigs. Two smoke flaps
above the entrance, held in place by other poles, are moved as the wind
varies, to draw the smoke rising within the tent. No habitation is
more knowingly and simply devised than the tepees, which are both
warm and well ventilated even in winter. It is only when the Indians
are transplanted to the white man’s houses that they close doors and
windows, light great fires, and soon become soft, and fall easy victims
of the white plague.
[Illustration: A SHOSHONE TEPEE, FORT HALL, IDAHO. Each step in their
construction follows a well-ordered plan.]
The Shoshone chiefs made no objection as Toby snapped a beautiful tepee
with an Indian pony tethered near, but when she smoothly circled it
upon an interested group of gaudy giants, one of them, an Isaiah in a
white robe, touched her on the arm.
“Move on, damn quick,” he said.
So we did.