It took some time for the ears of the “tenderfoot” just out from the States to become habituated to the chronology of that portion of our vast domain. One rarely heard months, days, or weeks mentioned. The narrator of a story had a far more convenient method of referring back to dates in which his auditory might be interested. “Jes’ about th’ time Pete Kitchen’s ranch was jumped”—which wasn’t very satisfactory, as Pete Kitchen’s ranch was always getting “jumped.” “Th’ night afore th’ Maricopa stage war tuck in.” “A week or two arter Winters made his last ’killin’’ in th’ Dragoons.” “Th’ last fight down to th’ Picach.” “Th’ year th’ Injuns run off Tully, Ochoa ’n’ DeLong bull teams.”
Or, under other aspects of the daily life of the place, there would be such references as, “Th’ night after Duffield drawed his gun on Jedge Titus”—a rather uncertain reference, since Duffield was always “drawin’ his gun” on somebody. “Th’ time of th’ feast (i.e., of Saint Augustine, the patron saint of the town), when Bob Crandall broke th’ ‘Chusas’ game fur six hundred dollars,” and other expressions of similar tenor, which replaced the recollections of “mowing time,” and “harvest,” and “sheep-shearing” of older communities.
Another strain upon the unduly excitable brain lay in the impossibility of learning exactly how many miles it was to a given point. It wasn’t “fifty miles,” or “sixty miles,” or “just a trifle beyond the Cienaga, and that’s twenty-five miles,” but rather, “Jes’ on th’ rise of the mesa as you git to th’ place whar Samaniego’s train stood off th’ Apaches;” or, “A little yan way from whar they took in Colonel Stone’s stage;” or, “Jes’ whar th’ big ‘killin’’ tuk place on th’ long mesa,” and much more of the same sort.
There were watches and clocks in the town, and some Americans went through the motions of consulting them at intervals.So far as influence upon the community went, they might just as well have been in the bottom of the Red Sea. The divisions of the day were regulated and determined by the bells which periodically clanged in front of the cathedral church. When they rang out their wild peal for early Mass, the little world by the Santa Cruz rubbed its eyes, threw off the slight covering of the night, and made ready for the labors of the day. The alarm clock of the Gringo might have been sounding for two hours earlier, but not one man, woman, or child would have paid the slightest attention to the cursed invention of Satan. When the Angelus tolled at meridian, all made ready for the noon-day meal and the post-prandial siesta; and when the hour of vespers sounded, adobes dropped from the palsied hands of listless workmen, and docile Papagoes, wrapping themselves in their pieces of “manta” or old “rebosos,” turned their faces southward, mindful of the curfew signal learned from the early missionaries.
They were a singular people, the Papagoes; honest, laborious, docile, sober, and pure—not an improper character among them. Only one white man had ever been allowed to marry into the tribe—Buckskin Aleck Stevens, of Cambridge, Mass., and that had to be a marriage with bell, book, and candle and every formality to protect the bride.
I do not know anything about the Papagoes of to-day, and am prepared to hear that they have sadly degenerated. The Americans have had twenty years in which to corrupt them, and the intimacy can hardly have been to the advantage of the red man.