THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY.
The Santa Cruz Valley--The Cactus--An ancient and honourable
Pueblo--A terrible Beverage--Are Cicadas deaf?--A floral
Catastrophe--The Secretary and the Peccaries.
YUMA marks the frontier between California and Arizona. But it might
just as well mark the frontier between India and Beluchistan, for it
reproduces with exact fidelity a portion of the town of Rohri, in
Sind. A broad, full-streamed river (the Colorado) seems to divide the
town into two; on the top of its steep bank stands a military post,
a group of bungalows, single-storied, white-walled, green-shuttered,
verandahed. On the opposite side cluster low, flat-roofed houses,
walled in with mud, while here and there a white-washed bungalow, with
broad projecting eaves, stands in its own compound. Brown-skinned
men with only a waistcloth round the loins loaf around, and in the
sandy spaces that separate the buildings lean pariah dogs lie about,
languid with the heat. The dreadful temperature assists to complete the
delusion, and finally the mosquitoes of the Colorado river have all the
ferocity of those that hatch on the banks of the Indus.
Against our will, too, these pernicious insects board our train and
refuse to be blown out again by all the draughts which we tax our
ingenuity to create. So we sit up sulkily in a cloud of tobacco smoke
far into the night and Arizona--watching the wonderful cactus-plants
passing our windows in gaunt procession, and here and there seeing a
fire flash past us, lit probably by Papajo Indians for the preparation
of their abominable "poolke" liquor. But the mosquitoes are satisfied
at last, and go to sleep, and so we go too.
We awake in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the preposterous cactus
poles and posts standing up as stiff and straight as sentries "at
attention," and looking as if they were doing it for a joke. There is
no unvegetable form that they will not take, for they mimic the shape
of gate posts, semaphores, bee-hives, and even mops--anything, in
fact, apparently that falls in with their humour, and makes them look
as unlike plants as possible. I am not sure that they ought not to
be punished, some of them. Such botanical lawlessness is deplorable.
But, after all, is not this America, where every cactus "may do as
he darned pleases"? These cacti, by the way--the gigantic columnar
species, which throws up one solid shaft of flesh, fluted on each side,
and studded closely with rosettes of spines--are the same that crowd
in multitudinous impis on the side of the hills which slope from the
massacre-field of Isandula in Zululand, down to the Buffalo River. How
well I remember them!
If it were not for the cactus it would be a miserably uninteresting
country, for the vegetation is only the lowest and poorest looking
scrub, and water as yet there is none. But now we are approaching what
the inhabitants call "the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson,"
pronouncing it Too son, and ancient and honourable we found it--For
does it not dispute with Santa Fe the title of the most ancient town in
the United States? and was not the breakfast which it gave us worthy of
all honour?
It takes, reader, as you will have guessed, a very long journey indeed
to knock into a traveller's head a complete conception of the size
of North America. Mere space could never do it, for human nature is
such that when trying to grasp in the mind any great lapse of time or
territory, the two ends are brought together as it were, and all the
great middle is forgotten. Nor does mere variety of scene emphasize
distance on the memory, for the more striking details here and there
crowd out the large monotonous intervals. Thus a mile of an Echo canyon
obliterates half a state's length of Platte Valley pastures, and a
single patch of Arkansas turtle-swamp whole prairies of Texan meadow.
But in America, even though many successive days of unbroken travel
may have run into one, or its many variations--from populous states to
desert ones, from timber states to pasture ones, from corn states to
mineral ones, from mountain to valley, river to lake, canyoned hills to
herd-supporting prairies, from pine forest to oak forest, from sodden
marsh to arid cactus-land--may have got blurred together, there grows
at the end of it all upon the mind a befitting sense of vastness which
neither linear measurement in miles nor variety in the panorama fully
explain. It is due, I think, to the size of the instalments in which
America puts forward her alternations of scene. She does not keep
shifting her suits, so as to spoil the effect of her really strong
hand, but goes on leading each till she has established it, and made
each equally impressive. You have a whole day at a time of one thing,
and then you go to sleep, and when you wake it is just the same, and
you cannot help saying to yourself: "Twenty-four successive hours of
meadowland is a considerable pasturage," and you do not forget it ever
afterwards. The next item is twenty-four hours of mountains, "all of
them rich in metals;" and by the time this has got indelibly fixed
on the memory, Nature changes the slide, and then there is rolling
corn-land on the screen for a day and night. And so, in a series of
majestic alternations, the continent passes in review, and eventually
all blends into one vast comprehensible whole.
Apart from physical, there are curious ethnological divisions which
mark off the continent into gigantic subnationalities. For though the
whole is of course "American," there is always an underlying race, a
subsidiary one so to speak, which allots the vast area into separate
compartments. Thus on the eastern coast we have the mulatto, who gives
place beyond Nebraska to the Indian, and he, beyond Nevada, to the
Chinaman. After California comes the Mexican, and after him the negro,
and so back to the East and the mulatto again.
Here in Arizona, at Tucson, the "Mexican" is in the ascendant, for
such is the name which this wonderful mixture of nationalities prefers
to be called by. He is really a kind of hash, made up of all sorts of
brown-skinnned odds and ends, an olla podrida. But he calls himself
"Mexican," and Tucson is his ancient and honourable pueblo. It is a
wretched-looking place from the train, with its slouching hybrid men,
and multitudinous pariah dogs. Indians go about with the possessive
air of those who know themselves to be at home; and it is not easy to
decide whether they, with their naked bodies and ropes of hair dangling
to the waist, or the half-breed Mexican with their villainous slouch
and ragged shabbiness, are the lower race of the two. And the dogs!
they are legion; having no homes, they are at home everywhere. I am
told there is a public garden, and some "elegant" buildings, but as
usual they are on "the other side of the town." All that we can see on
this side, are collections of squalid Arabic-looking huts and houses,
made of mud, low-roofed and stockaded with ragged-looking fences. The
heat is of course prodigious for eight months of the year, and the
dust and the flies and the mosquitoes are each and all as Asiatic as
the heat--or any other feature of this ancient and honourable It has
its interest, however, as an American pueblo. It has its interests,
however, as an American "antiquity;" while the river, the Santa Cruz,
which flows past the town, is one of those Arethusa streams, which
comes to the surface a few miles above the town and disappears again a
few miles below it.
For the student of hybrid life, Tucson must have exceptional
attractions; but for the ordinary traveller, it has positively none.
Kawai Indians have not many points very different from Papajo Indians,
and mud hovels are after all only mud hovels. But it is an ancient and
honourable pueblo.
The only people who look cool are the Mexican soldiers in blue and
white, and that other Mexican, a civilian, in a broad-brimmed, flimsy
hat, spangled with a tinsel braid and fringe. Have these men ever
got anything to do? and when they have, do they ever do it? It seems
impossible they could undertake any work more arduous than lolling
against a post, and smoking a yellow-papered cigarette. Yet only a few
days ago these Mexicans, perhaps those very soldiers there, destroyed a
tribe of Apaches, and then arrested a force of Arizona Rangers who had
pursued the Indians on to Mexican ground! These Apaches had kept the
State in a perpetual terror for a long time, but finding the Federal
soldiers closing in upon them, they crossed the frontier line close to
Tucson, and there fell in with the Mexicans, who must at any rate be
given the credit for promptitude and efficiency in all their Indian
conflicts. The Apaches were destroyed, and the force of Rangers who
had followed them were caught by the Mexican general, and under an old
agreement between the two Republics, they were made prisoners of war,
disarmed, and told to find their way back two hundred and fifty miles
into the States as best and as quickly as they could. Some thirty years
ago a Mexican general, who captured some American filibusters in a
similar way at the village of Cavorca, paraded his captives and shot
them all down. So the Arizona men were glad enough to get away.
The cactus country continues, and the plants play the mountebank more
audaciously than ever. There is no absurdity they will not commit, even
to pretending that they are broken fishing rods, or bundles of riding
whips. But the majority stand about in blunt, kerb-stone fashion, as
if they thought they were marking out streets and squares for the
cotton-tail rabbits that live amongst them. Under the hill on the left
is the old mission church of "San'avere" (San Xavier); and over those
mountains, the "Whetstones," lies the mining settlement of Tombstone,
where the cowboys rejoice to run their race, and the value of life
seldom rises to par in the market. Then we enter upon a plain of the
mezcal all in full bloom, and a "lodge" of brown men, partly Indian,
partly Mexican, waiting it may be for the plant to mature and the time
to come round for distilling its fiery liquor. I tasted mezcal at El
Paso for the first time in my life, and I think I may venture to say
the last, so whether it was good of its kind or not, I cannot tell. I
am no judge of mezcal. But I know that it was thick, of a dull sherry
colour, with a nasty vegetable smell, and infinitely more fiery than
anything I ever tasted before, not excepting the whisky which the
natives in parts of Central India brew from rye, the brandy which the
Boers of the Transvaal distil from rotten potatoes, or the "tarantula
juice" which you are often offered by the hearty miners of Colorado. It
is almost literally "fire-water;" but the red pepper, I suppose, has as
much to do with the effect upon the tongue and palate as the juice of
the mezcal.
On a sudden, in the midst of this desolate land, we come upon a ranche
with cattle wading about among the rich blue grass; but in a minute it
is gone, and lo! a Chinese village, smothered in a tangle of shrubs all
overgrown with creeping gourds, with the coolies lying in the shade
smoking long pipes of reed.
Have you ever smoked Chinese "tobacco"? If not, be careful how you do.
A single pipe of it (and Chinese pipes hold very little) will upset
even an old smoker. For myself, can hardly believe it is tobacco, for
in the hand it feels of a silky texture, utterly unlike any tobacco
I ever saw, while the smell of it, and the taste on the tongue, are
as different to the buena yerba as possible. It is imported by the
Chinese in America for their own consumption, and in spite of duties
is exceedingly cheap. A single sniff of it, by the way, completely
explains that heavy, stupefying odour which hangs about Chinese
quarters and Chinese persons.
But this glimpse of China has disappeared as rapidly as the ranche had
done, and in a few minutes later a collection of low mud-walled huts,
overshadowed by rank vegetation, an ox or two trying to chew the cud
in an uptilted cart, some brown-skinned children playing with magnolia
blossoms, and lo! a glimpse of Bengal.
And then as suddenly we are out again on to the cactus plains with
cotton-tail rabbits everywhere, and cicadas innumerable shrilling from
the muskeet trees. Above all the noise of the train we could hear the
incessant chorus filling the hot out-of-doors, and, stepping on to the
rear platform, I found that several had flown or been blown on to the
car. Poor helpless creatures, with their foolish big-eyed heads and
little brown bodies wrapped up in a pair of large transparent wings.
But fancy living in such a hideous din as these cicadas live in! Do
naturalists know whether they are deaf? One would suppose of course
that the voice was given them originally for calling to each other in
the desolate wastes in which they are sometimes found scattered about.
But in the lapse of countless generations that have spent their lives
crowded together in one bush, sitting often actually elbow to elbow and
screaming to each other at the tops of their voices, it is hardly less
rational to suppose that kindly Nature has encouraged them to develop a
comfortable deafness. At any rate it is impossible to suppose that even
a cicada can enjoy the ear-splitting clamour in which its neighbours
indulge, and which now keeps up with us all the way as we traverse the
San Pedro Valley, and mounting from plateau to plateau--some of them
fine grass land, others arid cactus beds--reach another "Great Divide,"
and then descend across an immense, desolate prairie, brightened here
and there with beautiful patches of flowers, into the San Simon Valley.
And all the time we eat our dinner (at the Bowie station) the cicadas
go on shrilling, on the hot and dusty ground, till the air is fairly
thrilling, with the waves of barren sound. That sounds like rhyme,--and
I do not wonder at it,--for even the cicadas themselves manage to drift
into a kind of metre in their arid aimless clamour, and the high noon,
as we sit on our cars again, looking out on the pink-flowered cactus
and the mezcal with its shafts of white blossoms, seems to throb with a
regular pulsation of strident sound.
What a desolate land it seems, this New Mexico into which we have
crossed! But not for long. We soon find ourselves out upon a vast
plain of grassland, upon which the sullen, egotistical cactus will not
grow. "You common vegetables may grow there if you like," it says.
"Any fool of a plant can grow where there is good soil; but it shows
genius to grow on no soil at all." So it will not stir a step on to
the grass-land, but stands there out on the barren sun-smitten sand,
throwing up its columns of juicy green flesh and bursting out all over
into flowers of vivid splendour, just to show perhaps that "Todgers's
can do it when it likes." There is about the cactus' conduct something
of the superciliousness of the camel, which wades through hay with
its nose up in the air as if it scorned the gross provender of vulgar
herds, and then nibbles its huge stomach full of the tiny tufts of
leaves which is found growing among--the topmost thorns of the scanty
mimosa.
Here, on this plain, is plenty of the "camel thorn," the muskeet, and
a whole wilderness of Spanish bayonet waiting till some one thinks it
worth while to turn it into paper, and there is not probably a finer
fibre in the world. Nor, because the cactus contemns the easy levels,
do other flowers refuse to grow. They are here in exquisite profusion,
a foretaste of the Texan "flower-prairies," and when the train stopped
for water I got out and from a yard of ground gathered a dozen
varieties. Nearly all of them were old familiar friends of English
gardens, and some were beautifully scented, notably one with a delicate
thyme perfume, and another that had all the fragrance of lemon verbena.
Both to north and south are mountains very rich in mineral wealth,
and at Lordsburg, where we halted, I could not resist the temptation
of buying some "specimens." I had often resisted the same temptation
before, but here somehow the beauty of the fragments was irresistible.
Outside the station, by the way, under a heap of rubbish, were lying a
score or so of bars of copper bullion, worth, perhaps, twenty pounds
apiece. Such bulky plunder probably suits nobody in a climate of
everlasting heat, but it is all pure copper nevertheless--pennies en
bloc.
The plain continues in a monotony of low muskeet scrub, broken here
and there by flowering mezcal. It is utterly waterless, and, except
for one fortnight's rain which it receives, gets no water all the
year round. Yet beautiful flowers are in blossom even now, and what
it must be just after the rain has fallen it is difficult to imagine.
To this great flower-grown chapparal succeeds a natural curiosity of
a very striking kind--a vast cemetery of dead yuccas. It looks as if
some terrific epidemic had swept in a wave of scorching death over the
immense savannah of stately plants. Not one has escaped. And there they
stand, thousand by thousand, mile after mile, each yucca in its place,
but brown and dead. And so through the graveyards of the dead things
into Deming--Deming of evil repute, and ill-favoured enough to justify
such a reputation. Even the cowboy fresh from Tombstone used to call
Deming "a hard place," and there is a dreadful legend that once upon
a time, that is to say, about ten years ago, every man in the den had
been a murderer! No one would go there except those who were conscious
that their lives were already forfeited to the law, and who preferred
the excitement of death in a saloon fight to the dull formalities of
hanging. However, tempora mutantur, and all that I remember Deming for
myself is its appearance of dejection and a very tolerable supper.
And then away again, across the same flower-grown meadow, with its
sprinkling of muskeet bushes, and its platoons of yucca, but now all
radiant in their bridal bravery of waxen white. The death-line of the
beautiful plant seems to have been mysteriously drawn at Deming. I got
out at a stoppage and cut two more of the yuccas. The temptation to
possess such splendour of blossom was too great to resist. But alas!
as before, the dainty thing in its virginal white was hideous with
clinging parasites, and so I fastened them into the brake-wheel on the
platform, and sitting in my car smoking, could look out at the great
mass of silver bells that thus completely filled the doorway, and in
the falling twilight they grew quite ghostly, the spectres of dead
flowers, and touching them we find the flowers all clammy and cold.
"How it chills one!" said a girl, holding a thick, white, damp petal
between her fingers. "It feels like a dead thing."
And sitting out in the moonlight--an exquisite change after the
hateful heat of the day thfit was past--we saw the muskeet growth
gradually dwindle away, and then great lengths of wind-swept sand-dunes
supervened. And every now and then a monstrous owl--the "great grey owl
of California," I think it must have been--tumbled up off the ground
and into the sky above us. Otherwise the desolation was utter. But I
sat on smoking into the night, and was abundantly repaid after awhile,
for the country, as if weary of its monotony, suddenly swells up into
billows and sinks into huge troughs, a land-Atlantic that beats upon
the rocks of the Colorado range to right and left; and as we cut our
way through the crests of its waves, the land broke away from before
us into bay--like recesses; crowned with galleries of pinnacled rock
and curved round into great amphitheatres of cliff. But away on the
left it seemed heaving with a more prodigious swell, and every now and
then down in the hollows I thought I could catch glimpses of moon-lit
water glittering. And the train sped on, winding in and out of the
upper ridges of the valley brim, and then, descending, plunged into
a dense growth of willows, and lo! the Rio Grande, and "the shining
levels of the mere." It was it then, this splendid stream, that had
been disturbing the land so, thrusting the valley this way and that,
shaping the hills to its pleasure, and that now rolled its flood along
the stately water-way which it had made, with groves of trees for reed
beds and a mountain range for banks!
We cross it soon, seeing the Santa Fe line pass underneath us with
the river flowing underneath it again--and then with the Rio Grande
gradually curving away from us, we reach El Paso. And it is well
perhaps for El Paso, that we see it under the gracious witchery of
moonlight, for it is a place to flee from. Without one of the merits
of Asia, it has all Asia's plagues of heat and insects and dust. And
no one plants trees or sows crops; and so, sun-smitten, and waterless,
it lies there blistering, with all its population of half-breeds
and pariah dogs, a place, as I said, to flee from. And yet on the
other side of the river, a rifle-shot off, is the Mexican town of El
Paso--for the river here separates the States from their neighbour
Republic--and there, there are shade trees and pleasant houses,
well-ordered streets, and all the adjuncts of a superior civilization.
A brawl alongside the station platform, with a horrible admixture of
polyglot oaths and the flash of knives, is the only incident of El Paso
life we travellers had experience of. But it may be characteristic.
One of the party who had been incidentally concerned in the
disagreement travelled with us. He knew both New and Old Mexico well,
and among other things which he told me I remember that he said that
he had seen peccaries in New Mexico, on the borders of Arizona. I had
thought till then that this very disagreeable member of the pig family
confined itself to more southern regions.
Treed by pigs is not exactly the position in which we should expect
to find a Colonial Secretary--at least, not often. But when one of
the Secretaries in Honduras was recently exploring the interior of
the country, he was overtaken by a drove of peccaries, and had only
time to take a snap shot at the first of them and scramble up a tree,
dropping his rifle in the performance, before the whole pack were
round his perch, gnashing their teeth at him, grunting, and sharpening
their tusks against his tree. Now the peccary is not only ferocious
but patient, and rather than let a meal escape it, it will wait about
for days, so that the Secretary had only two courses--either to remain
where he was till he dropped down among the swine from sheer exhaustion
and hunger, or else to commit suicide at once by coming down to be
killed there and then. While he was in this dilemma, however, what
should come along--and looking out for supper too--but a jaguar.
Never was beast of prey so opportune! For the jaguar has a particular
fondness for wild pork, and the peccaries know it, for no sooner did
they see the great ruddy head thrust out through the bushes than they
bolted helter-skelter, forgetting, in their anxiety to save their own
bacon, the meal they were themselves leaving up the tree. The jaguar
was off after the swine with admirable promptitude, and the Secretary,
finding the coast clear, came down--reflecting, as he walked towards
the camp, upon the admirable arrangements of Nature, who, having made
peccaries to eat Colonial Secretaries, provided also jaguars to eat the
peccaries.
And so to sleep, and sleeping, over the boundary into Texas.