No part of the United States is less generally known than the
Southwest, and none is better worth knowing. Of no other part of
the United States is so large a proportion of the unpleasant and
unattractive features known so well, and so small a proportion of the
beauties, wonders and utilities known so little. To the Eastern and
Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare
mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage,
greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals
which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians,
of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle,
of desperate mining ventures, of frequent train-robberies. This
impression is based in part on the stray paragraphs from this unknown
land that occasionally creep into the metropolitan newspapers, but it
is chiefly founded upon the hasty observations and reports of dusty
transcontinental travelers, car-weary for three or four days, the edge
of their interest quite blunted with longing for the green wonders and
soft sunshine of California.
What is generally known as the Southwest may be said to comprise
all of Arizona and New Mexico, the greater portion of Texas,
perhaps best described as arid Texas, southern California east of
the Coast Range, and the western half of Oklahoma, including the
"Strip." Eastern Texas, with its plentiful rainfall, its forests,
and its fine plantations of cotton and corn, is quite a different
country from western Texas, and must be classed with the South. In
extent of territory the Southwest is an empire more than twice as
large as Germany, and greater in area than the thirteen original
States of the American Union. Its population is sparse and occupied
almost exclusively in cattle-and sheep-raising, mining, and
irrigation-farming, with a limited amount of lumbering. All its vast
territory contains only a little more than half as many inhabitants
as the city of Chicago. Its largest city, on the extreme eastern edge
of the arid land, is San Antonio, Texas. All of its other cities are
much smaller. It is traversed east and west by two, in Texas three,
great railroads, running generally parallel, having many branches, and
connected by several cross-cuts running north and south.
It is a land of amazing contrasts. It is both the oldest and the newest
part of the United States--oldest in history and newest in Anglo-Saxon
enterprise. Long before the Cavaliers set foot in Virginia or the first
Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, even before St. Augustine in Florida was
founded, the Spaniards had explored a considerable proportion of New
Mexico and Arizona, and the settlements made soon afterward at Santa
Fé and near Tucson were among the earliest on the American continent.
Indeed, for many years the region was better known to white men than
New England. Yet to-day there is no part of the United States so little
explored, many places, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, being
wholly unsurveyed. Probably the least-known spot in the country is the
mysterious wilderness, nearly as large as Switzerland, which lies in
the northwestern corner of Arizona beyond the Colorado River. It is
bounded on the south and east by the stupendous and almost impassable
chasm of the Grand Cañon, and on its other sides by difficult mountains
and little-explored deserts. Here, in this long-known land, if anywhere
on the continent, can be found the primeval wilderness of nature.
Though the Great Southwest is now the most sparsely inhabited region
of its size in the United States, it was once the most populous and
wealthy, probably more populous than it is to-day, with all its
present American enterprise. Hundreds of years before the Spaniards
first appeared in the New World, the valleys of Arizona and New Mexico
contained a numerous population, supporting considerable cities, and
irrigating extensive tracts of land with wonderful engineering skill.
Frank H. Cushing, the anthropologist, who in 1882-83 wrote of the ruins
of the Southwest, estimated that the irrigated valleys of Arizona were
once the dwelling-place of two hundred and fifty thousand people,
about twice the population of the entire Territory then. The remains
of these ancient civilizations--the pueblo-dwellers, the cliff-and
cave-dwellers--are found scattered everywhere throughout Arizona and
New Mexico, and in such numbers that archæologists have only begun to
explore them.
No part of the United States, indeed, has had a more thrilling
and eventful history. While denominated a desert "not worth good
blood,"--in the words of the historian,--it has been a center of
contention for centuries, overwhelmed by one tide of conquest after
another. From the time that the Spaniards first invaded the country,
hunting for gold, down to the capture of Geronimo by American soldiers
in the eighties, it has been the scene of many bloody Indian wars. It
was the source of contention between the United States and Mexico in
the war of 1846-48. Once a possession of Spain, and later of Mexico,
the story of the struggle for independence by the Texans and for
annexation by the Californians is full of fascinating interest. Its
soil has developed some of the boldest and most picturesque characters
in American history--Boone, Crockett, Kit Carson, Sam Houston, and many
a pioneer cattleman and settler, to say nothing of the Crooks and the
Lawtons of the Indian wars. The main trail of the El Dorado hunters of
'49 on their way to California let through it, garnishing its history
with many a story of bloodshed and hardship. No American fiction is
more vital and characteristic than that which deals with the early
lawless days of the miner, the buffalo-hunter, and the cow-boy; none is
more richly colored, picturesque, or rudely powerful.
[Illustration: Mummy cave, Cañon del Muerto, Arizona.]
In its material aspects it is equally full of contrasts. Here are the
greatest deserts and waste places in America, and side by side with
them, often with no more than a few strands of barbed wire to mark
the division-line, are the richest farming-lands in America, lands
more fertile, even, than the famed corn-fields of Illinois or the
fruit-orchards of Michigan. The Southwest has been denominated, with
reason, the treeless land, and yet it contains to-day the largest
unbroken stretches of forest in the country, there being nothing to
equal the timber-lands of the Colorado plateau in northern and central
Arizona. No part of the United States possesses such an extent of
grass-plain, Texas being the greatest of the plain States, and yet
none has grander mountains. Only three States have higher peaks than
the noble Sierra Blanca of New Mexico, fourteen thousand two hundred
and sixty-nine feet in altitude, and there are few more magnificent
elevations than San Francisco Mountain in Arizona.
Though the region, to the hurried railroad traveler, seems barren and
desolate almost beyond comparison, it is yet richer in variety, if not
in luxury, of vegetation than any other part of the country. Professor
Merriam found many arctic types in the flora of the upper regions of
the San Francisco Mountain. Within a radius of a few hundred miles grow
the pines and firs found in northern Canada, and the figs and dates
of the African semi-tropics; Southern oranges and olives grow side by
side with Northern wheat; the cactus and the fir are often found within
sight of each other. Nowhere are there so many strange and marvelous
forms of life as here--of flowers, multitudinous cacti and the palms;
of animals, the Gila monster, the horned toad, the hydrophobia skunk,
and many other unique species. Besides the monotonous desert, with
its apparent lack of interest to the traveler, the region contains
the greatest natural wonder on the continent--the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado River. It also possesses unnumbered other natural phenomena
and some of the grandest mountain and forest scenery. With all its lack
of rain, it is watered by two of the great rivers of the continent--the
Colorado and the Rio Grande.
In its human life it is equally prolific in diversities. In few other
places in the world is there such a commingling of dissimilar human
elements. I doubt if even the cities of the Orient can present such
contrasts of wholly unrelated races of people, as well as so great
a variety of the white race. Here, in one small town, one may find
representatives of several different tribes of the aboriginal Indians,
in every state of civilization and savagery, picturesquely attired in
bright-colored costumes, bearing their peculiar baskets and pottery.
Here, also, is the next higher stratum, the Mexicans, in great
numbers, and in all mixtures of blood from the nearly pure Indian peon
upward. Here are African Negroes in considerable numbers, emigrants
from the Southern States, and every town has its Chinese and usually
its Japanese contingent, the overflow from California. Above all
these, and in greatly superior numbers, rises the white man, usually
American by birth, and yet generously intermixed with many of European
nationalities. In most of the older towns, such as San Antonio in Texas
and Tucson in Arizona, whole neighborhoods appear more foreign than
American, presenting strange contrasts between modern store-buildings,
banks, and churches, and ancient weather-worn adobe houses where the
Mexicans live almost as primitively as did their forefathers a century
ago.
The peopling of the country makes one of the most interesting and
significant stories in the history of the nation. For many years it
was the unknown land, the land of possibilities and wonders, as well
as of danger and death. Therefore it attracted the hardy pioneer, and
here, for lack of any other frontier on the continent, the pioneer,
though with the germ of westward ho! still lingering in his blood, has
been compelled at last to settle down. I shall not soon forget the
sorrowful desert-dweller whom I met in what seemed the ends of the
earth in Arizona. His nearest neighbor was fifteen miles away, his
post-office twenty-five miles, and yet he was bemoaning the fact that
the country was becoming crowded. "If there were any more frontier," he
said, "I'd go to it."
It is hardy blood, that of the pioneer, good stock on which to found
the development of a country. For years the West has been the lodestone
for those adventurous spirits who love the outdoor and exciting life
of the mining prospector, the cow-boy, the hunter--a healthy, rugged
lot, virtually all pure Americans. The Rough Riders sprang from this
element. But probably the most distinct single human invasion of the
Southwest was made by the irreconcilables of the Confederate Army after
the Civil War. They could not endure the Federal domination of the
reconstruction period, or else they had lost all their property, and
with it their hope of rising again in their old neighborhood, and so
they set westward, remaining, as immigrants usually do, in the same
latitude as that from which they came. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona
all have a strong substratum of the Old South, still possessing many of
the bitternesses left by the great conflict, and yet rising with the
opportunities of the new land, and adding to its development peculiar
pride, dignity and often culture. Owing to its wildernesses and its
contiguity to Mexico, the Southwest was also for many years the refuge
of outlaws from all parts of the country--an element which, though
small, was so perniciously active that it earned an undue prominence in
fiction and contemporary literature, giving the country a complexion
of evil which it did not deserve. This element still effervesces in a
train-robbery, but its effect on the Southwest has been inconsequential.
All these earlier sources of population, however, were small
compared with the great inundation of the last few years, following
the extension of the railroads, the crowding of other parts of the
country, and the hard times of 1893, which, causing discontent among
many Easterners and Northerners, tempted them to try new fields of
enterprise. There are virtually no native-born Anglo-Saxons of voting
age in New Mexico and Arizona--at least, they are so few as to be a
wonder and a pride. In Texas there are many, for the changes in that
part of the Southwest are a step older and possibly not quite so rapid,
although Texas, too, is overrun with people from every part of the
country. It is safe to ask any middle-aged man what part of the East he
is from. Of this later influx of population there are representatives
from every part of the United States, with a specially large number
from Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Missouri--the Middle West.
In many cases these settlers had first immigrated to the States just
beyond the Mississippi, and had there taken up farms; but uncertain
rain and crop-failures drove them onward to the irrigated valleys of
the region, and there they are to-day.
Up to this point the population consisted of the strongest and most
enterprising American manhood, for the weaklings do not undertake the
chances and hardships of pioneering. With this drift of population,
however, there has appeared a large number of invalids, mostly with
pulmonary complaints, from every part of America. Many of them have
been promptly cured, and have engaged in business or taken up farms
in the valleys or ranches on the plains. A considerable proportion of
them are people of education, culture, refinement and often of wealth.
Much of the money of the region, as in Southern California, has been,
brought in and invested by health-seekers. This class has added much
to the social and religious development, and it includes some of
the leading spirits in politics. As yet there has been very little
immigration of Italians, Russians, or the lower class of Irish, most of
whom are by preference city-dwellers.
It will be seen, therefore, that the Southwest is peopled with the
very best Americans, segregated by the eternal law of evolutionary
selection, with almost no substratum of the low-caste European
foreigner to lower the level of civilization. With such a start, and
such a commingling of Americans from all parts of the Union, the man
from Boston rubbing elbows with the Atlanta man, and Kansas working
side by side with Mississippi, it would seem that, the region may one
day produce the standard American type. It has already manifested its
capacity for type-production in the cow-boy, now being rapidly merged
in the new Southwesterner, a type as distinct and as uniquely American
as the New England Yankee or the Virginia colonel.