At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the pueblos in New MexicoAt the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the pueblos in New Mexico
I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.
She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.
Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third story room; and a cleaner room I have neverseen in a white woman's house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement, and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is spotless.
"Where do you sleep, Marie?" I ask.
"Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime."
And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.
And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the Bowery.
All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as the Acomas descend.
We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps, preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours' visit amid the gamins of New York,or London? At the foot of the cliff, we shook hands all round and said good-by; and when I looked back up the valley, the children were still waving and waving. If this be humble Indian life in its Simon pure state, with all freedom from our rules of conduct, all I have to say is it is infinitely superior to the hoodlum life of our cities and towns.
One point more: I asked Marie as I had asked Mr. Marmon, "Do you think your people are Indians, or Aztecs?" and the answer came without a moment's hesitation—"Aztecs; we are not Indian like Navajo and Apaches."
Opposite the Enchanted Mesa, I looked back. My little guide was still gazing wistfully after us, waving her shawl and holding tight to a coin which I trust no old grimalkin pried out of her hand.
When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or all three courses if you have time.
You may strike up into Zuñi Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man—and likely to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock declivity, an almost desert-forest growth—dwarf juniper and cedar and giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off intruders—and you can understand why some of the most magnificent specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here undisturbedby the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you find Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, the former, a colossal community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders; the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.
Or you may skip the short trip out to Zuñi off the main traveled highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains—two weeks at the very shortest, and you should make it six—and leave Gallup, just at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab, round the Grand Cañon up towards the State lines of California and Utah. If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting seasof gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world, a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these Navajo boys—a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red sand knobs—you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of theirhoganhouses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain, scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat—bleating till the air quivers—driven by little Navajo girls onhorseback, born to the saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.
If you can't go to Zuñi Land and the White Mountain Forest and the Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort. Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place—in the Coconino and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Cañon. And if the lure of the antique still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of the world in the School of Archæology at Rome, "the more undecided we become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America, or that of America preceded the Orient."
For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into Cañon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could hide and lose adozen of our national White House. Who built the aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route—cost for team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.
To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Cañon; but to cross it, you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to $7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price—$25 to $40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months—July and August—doesnot necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof, and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling; but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000 to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in the Canadian Northwest.
Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr. Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers crossing the Desert—open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult. It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of thenoblesse obligewhich binds recipient as it binds donor to a code of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write, ill-suitedto an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this was well; but to-day—well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kitchen quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt; Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after all."
A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and picturesqueA Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and picturesque
"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this instant."
The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point, or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.
We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip, though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day we wanted them.
The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa—globe cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows—blue shadows, sure sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected. You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuñi boys are loping along the trail in front of you—red headband, hair in a braid, red sash, velvet trousers—the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as theZuñi or Hopi, and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuñi lads will set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.
The hay stacks, huge, tent-shapedtufarocks to the right of the road, mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all travelers—a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain, but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests another explanation.
Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St. Michael's loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white, green-shuttered building as silent as the grave—St. Michael's Mission, where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr.and Mrs. Day, two of the best known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the convent school, Miss Drexel's Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.
And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work of Miss Drexel's missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad enough for them to expand—14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land—and against any white man's greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers among the Navajos.Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are doing.
You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough, brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!
Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School, drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the masterpiece of his life—hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for theirlegends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white, blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars—and puff, with one breath he has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid" teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indiandrawings are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo lore? If all ethnologists and archæologists had founded their studies on the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.
Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of "green" in it. Dressing in disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the benefit of gullible tourists.
"Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?" Father Berrard asked the unsuspecting dealer.
"From frog ponds," answered the store man of a region where water is scarce as hens' teeth.
Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finishedand when he has saved money enough to issue it, hisnom de plumeshall be "Frog Pond Green."
If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced, black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil; that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common; and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning up for future festivities.
We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room, parlor and refectory, wheretwo gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender, understanding eyes.
Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on the hill to the right—eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the fading light.
Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from the stalls—is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that age-old, never-failing spring of Service?
There are two ways to travel even off the beaten trail. One is to take a map, stake out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up to them lightning-flier fashion. If you want to, and are prepared to kill your horses, you can cross Navajo Land in from three to four days. Even going at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring of the Painted Desert, of the light lying in shimmering heat layers split by the refraction of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an atmosphere with the tang of northern ozone and the resinous scent of incense and frankincense and myrrh. You can see the Desert flowers that vie with the sun in brilliant coloring; and feel the Desert night sky come down so close to you that you want to reach up a hand and pluck the jack-o'-lantern stars swinging so low through the pansy-velvet mist. You can even catch a flying glimpse of the most picturesque Indian race in America, the Navajos. Theirhogansor circular, mud-wattled houses, are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and just when you think you are most alone, driving through the sagebrush and dwarf juniper,the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attention to a flock of sheep and goats scattered almost invisibly up a blue-green hillside. Blue-green, did you say? Yes: that's another thing you can unlearn on a flying trip—the geography definition of a Desert is about as wrong as a definition could be made. A Desert isn't necessarily a vast sandy plain, stretching out in flat and arid waste. It's as variegated in its growth and landscape as your New England or Old England hills and vales, only your Eastern rivers flow all the time, and your Desert rivers are apt to disappear through evaporation and sink below the surface during the heat of the day, coming up again in floods during the rainy months, and in pools during the cool of morning and evening.
But on a flying trip, you can't learn the secret moods of the Painted Desert. You can't draw so much of its atmosphere into your soul that you can never think of it again without such dream-visions floating you away in its blue-gray-lilac mists as wrapped the seers of old in clairvoyant prophetic ecstasy. On a flying trip, you can learn little or nothing of the Arab life of our own Desert nomads. You have to depend on Blue Book reports of "the Navajos being a dangerous, warlike race" blasted into submission by the effulgent glory of this, that, and the other military martinet writing himself down a hero. Whereas, if you go out leisurely among the traders and missionaries and Indians themselves, who—more's the pity—have no hand in preparing official reports, you will learn another story of aquiet, pastoral race who have for three hundred years been the victims of white man greed and white man lust, of blundering incompetency and hysterical cowardice.
These are strong words. Let me give some instances. We were having luncheon in the priests' refectory of the Franciscan Mission; and for the benefit of those who imagine that missionaries to the Indians are fat and bloated on three hundred a year, I should like to set down the fact that the refectory was in a sort of back kitchen, that we ate off a red table-cloth with soup served in a basin and bath towels extemporized into serviettes. I had asked about a Navajo, who not long ago went locoed right in Cincinnati station and began stabbing murderously right and left.
"In the first place," answered the Franciscan, "that Indian ought not to have been in Cincinnati at all. In the second place, he ought not to have been there alone. In the third place, he had great provocation."
Here is the story, as I gathered it from traders and missionaries and Indians. The Navajo was having trouble over title to his land. That was wrong the first on the part of the white man. It was necessary for him to go to Washington to lay his grievance before the Government. Now for an Indian to go to Washington is as great an undertaking as it was for Stanley to go to Darkest Africa. The trip ought not to have been necessary if our Indian Office had more integrity and less red-tape;but the local agency provided him with an interpreter. The next great worry to the Navajo was that he could not get access to "The Great White Father." There were interminable red-tape and delay. Finally, when he got access to the Indian Office, he could get no definite, prompt settlement. With this accumulation of small worries, insignificant enough to a well-to-do white man but mighty harassing to a poor Indian, he set out for home; and at the station in Washington, the interpreter left him. The Navajo could not speak one word of English. Changing cars in Cincinnati, hustled and jostled by the crowds, he suddenly felt for his purse—he had been robbed. Now, the Navajo code is if another tribe injures his tribe, it is his duty to go forth instantly and strike that offender. Our own Saxon and Highland Scotch ancestors once had a code very similar. The Indian at once went locoed—lost his head, and began stabbing right and left. The white man newspaper told the story of the murderous assault in flare head lines; but it didn't tell the story of wrongs and procrastination. The Indian Office righted the land matter; but that didn't undo the damage. Through the efforts of the missionaries and the traders, the Indian was permitted to plead insanity. He was sent to an asylum, where he must have had some queer thoughts of white man justice. Just recently, he has been released under bonds.
The most notorious case of wrong and outrage and cowardice and murder known in Navajo Landwas that of a few years ago, when the Indian agent peremptorily ordered a Navajo to bring his child in to the Agency School. Not so did Marmon and Pratt sway the Indians at Laguna, when the Pueblos there were persuaded to send their children to Carlisle; and Miss Drexel's Mission has never yet issued peremptory orders for children to come to school; but the martinet mandate went forth. Now, the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also stipulates that the school shall be placed within reach of the child; and the Navajo knew that he was within his right in refusing to let the child leave home when the Government had failed to place the school within such distance of hishogan. He was then warned by the agent that unless the child were sent within a certain time, troops would be summoned from Ft. Wingate and Ft. Defiance. The Indians met, pow-wowed with one another, and decided they were still within their right in refusing. There can be no doubt but that if Captain Willard, himself, had been in direct command of the detachment, the cowardly murder would not have occurred; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops arrived on the scene in charge of a hopelessly incompetent subordinate, who proved himself not only a bully but a most arrant coward. According to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of them were in one of the mudhogans. They offered no resistance. They say they were not even summoned to surrender. Traders,who have talked with the Navajos present, say the troopers surrounded thehoganin the dark, a soldier's gun went off by mistake and the command was given in hysterical fright to "fire." The Indians were so terrified that they dashed out to hide in the sagebrush. "Bravery! Indian bravery—pah," one officer of the detachment was afterwards heard to exclaim. Two Navajos were killed, one wounded, eleven captured in as cold-blooded a murder as was ever perpetrated by thugs in a city street. Without lawyers, without any defense whatsoever, without the hearing of witnesses, without any fair trial whatsoever, the captives were sentenced to the penitentiary. It needed only a finishing touch to make this piece of Dreyfusism complete; and that came when a little missionary voiced the general sense of outrage by writing a letter to a Denver paper. President Roosevelt at once dispatched someone from Washington to investigate; and it was an easy matter to scare the wits out of the little preacher and declare the investigation closed. In fact, it was one of the things that would not bear investigation; but the evidence still exists in Navajo Land, with more, which space forbids here but which comes under the sixty-fifth Article of War. The officer guilty of this outrage has since been examined as to his sanity and brought himself under possibilities of a penitentiary term on another count. He is still at middle age a subordinate officer.
These are other secrets of the Painted Desert you will daily con if you go leisurely across thegreat lone Reserve and do not take with you the lightning-express habits of urban life.
For instance, in the account of the Cave Dwellers of the Frijoles reference was made to the Indian legend of "the heavens raining fire" (volcanic action) and driving the prehistoric Pueblo peoples from their ancient dwelling. Mrs. Day of St. Michael's, who has forgotten more lore than the scientists will ever pick up, told me of a great chunk of lava found by Mr. Day in which were embedded some perfect specimens of corn—which seems to sustain the Indian legend of volcanic outburst having destroyed the ancient nations here. The slab was sent East to a museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a fusion of adobe.
As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of grass grows below the conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour; and there is an all-pervasive odor, not of burning, but of steaming resin, or pine sap heated to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs up to an altitude of almost 9,000 feet, with air so light that you feel a buoyant lift to your heart-beats and a clearing of the cobwebs from your brain. You can lose lots of sleep here and not feel it. All heaviness has gone out of body and soul. In fact, when you come back to lower levels, the air feels thick and hard to breathe. And you can go hard here and not tire, and stand on the crest of mesas that anywhere else would be considered mountains, and wave your arms above the top of the world. So high you are—you did not realize it—that the rim of encircling mountains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge of an inverted blue bowl.
The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona, stands on a mesa high above the plainThe Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona, stands on a mesa high above the plain
The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line altogether among the sagebrush shimmering in pure light; and you become aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is—life of bird or beast—at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life of any kind possible in the Desert.
Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cluster of adobe ranch houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that child's wealth for life. Navajomen rode up and down the arroyo bed as graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in the close-fitting plush shirts; color in the Germantown blankets—for the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy Lands equals in expressiveness and power Lungren's studies of the Desert; though the Pre-Raphaelites commanded prices of $10,000 and $25,000, where we as a nation grumble about paying our artists one thousand and two thousand.
The Navajo driver nodded back to us that thiswas Ganado; and in a few moments Mr. Hubbell had come from the trading post to welcome us under a roof that in thirty years has never permitted a stranger to pass its doors unwelcomed. As Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell has already entered history in the makings of Arizona and as he shuns the limelight quite as "mollycoddles" (his favorite term) seek the spotlights, a slight account of him may not be out of place. First, as to his house: from the outside you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot winds are the enemies to comfort. You notice as you enter the front door that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a breath. You had expected a bare ranch interior with benches and stiff chairs backed up against the wall. Instead, you see a huge living-room forty or fifty feet long, every square foot of the walls covered by paintings and drawings of Western life. Every artist of note (with the exception of one) who has done a picture on the Southwest in the last thirty years is represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week studying the paintings of the Hubbell Ranch. Including sepias, oils and watercolors, there must be almost 300 pictures. By chance, you look up to the raftered ceiling; a specimen of every kind of rare basketry made by the Indians hangs from the beams. On the floor lie Navajo rugs of priceless value and rarest weave. When you go over to Mr. Hubbell's office, you find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of Moki and Navajoblankets. On the walls of the office are more pictures; on the floors, more rugs; in the safes and cases, specimens of rare silver-work that somehow again remind you of the affinity between Hindoo and Navajo. Mr. Hubbell yearly does a quarter-of-a-million-dollar business in wool, and yearly extends to the Navajos credit for amounts running from twenty-five dollars to fifty thousand dollars—a trust which they have never yet betrayed.
Along the walls of the living-room are doors opening to the sleeping apartments; and in each of the many guest rooms are more pictures, more rugs. Behind the living-room is aplacitoflanked by the kitchen and cook's quarters.
Now what manner of man is this so-called "King of Northern Arizona"? A lover of art and a patron of it; also the shrewdest politician and trader that ever dwelt in Navajo Land; a man with friends, who would like the privilege of dying for him; also with enemies who would keenly like the privilege of helping him to die. What the chief factors of the Hudson's Bay Company used to be to the Indians of the North, Lorenzo Hubbell has been to the Indians of the Desert—friend, guard, counselor, with a strong hand to punish when they required it, but a stronger hand to befriend when help was needed; always and to the hilt an enemy to the cheap-jack politician who came to exploit the Indian, though he might have to beat the rascal at his own game of putting up a bigger bluff. In appearance, a fine type of the courtly Spanish-American gentleman withCastilian blue eyes and black, beetling brows and gray hair; with a courtliness that keeps you guessing as to how much more gracious the next courtesy can be than the last, and a funny anecdote to cap every climax. You would not think to look at Mr. Hubbell that time was when he as nonchalantly cut the cards for $30,000 and as gracefully lost it all, as other men match dimes for cigars. And you can't make him talk about himself. It is from others you must learn that in the great cattle and sheep war, in which 150 men lost their lives, it was he who led the native Mexican sheep owners against the aggressive cattle crowd. They are all friends now, the old-time enemies, and have buried their feud; and dynamite will not force Mr. Hubbell to open his mouth on the subject. In fact, it was a pair of the "rustlers" themselves who told me of the time that the cowboys took a swoop into the Navajo Reserve and stampeded off 300 of the Indians' best horses; but they had reckoned without Lorenzo Hubbell. In twenty-four hours he had got together the swiftest riders of the Navajos; and in another twenty-four hours, he had pursued the thieves 125 miles into the wildest cañons of Arizona and had rescued every horse. One of the men, whom he had pursued, wiped the sweat from his brow in memory of it. He is more than a type of the Spanish-American gentleman. He is a type of the man that the Desert produces: quiet, soft spoken—powerfully soft spoken—alert, keen, relentless and versatile; but also a dreamer of dreams, a seer ofvisions, a passionate patriot, and a lover of art who proves his love by buying.
The Navajos are to-day by long odds the most prosperous Indians in America. Their vast Reserve offers ample pasturage for their sheep and ponies; and though their flocks are a scrub lot, yielding little more than fifty to seventy cents a head in wool on the average, still it costs nothing to keep sheep and goats. Both furnish a supply of meat. The hides fetch ready money. So does the wool, so do the blankets; and the Navajos are the finest silversmiths in America. Formerly, they obtained their supply of raw silver bullion from the Spaniards; but to-day, they melt and hammer down United States currency into butterfly brooches and snake bracelets and leather belts with the fifty-cent coins changed into flower blossoms with a turquoise center. Ten-cent pieces and quarters are transformed into necklaces of silver beads, or buttons for shirt and moccasins. If you buy these things in the big Western cities, they are costly as Chinese or Hindoo silver; but on the Reserve, there is a very simple way of computing the value. First, take the value of the coin from which the silver ornament is made. Add a dollar for the silversmith's labor; and also add whatever value the turquoise happens to be; and you have the price for which true Navajo silver-work can be bought out on the Reserve.
Among the Navajos, the women weave the blankets and baskets; among the Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The valueof these out on the Reserve is exactly in proportion to the intricacy of the work, the plain native wool colors—black, gray, white and brown—varying in price from seventy cents to $1.25 a pound; the fine bayetta or red weave, which is finer than any machine can produce and everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wool shades, I need scarcely say here, are in bought mineral dyes. True bayettas, which are almost a lost art, bring as high as $1,500 each from a connoisseur. Other native wools vary in price according to size and color from $15 to $150. Off the Reserve, these prices are simply doubled. From all of which, it should be evident that no thrifty Navajo need be poor. His house costs nothing. It is made of cedar shakes stuck up in the ground crutchwise and wattled with mud. Strangely enough, the Navajo no longer uses his own blankets. They are too valuable; also, too heavy for the climate. He uses the cheap and gaudy Germantown patterns.
At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from Ganado for Keam's Cañon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied passers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a system that must surely be changed,not because the public love Mr. Hubbell "less, but more."
The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac light—tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued glory—with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through notches of the painted peaks.Hoganafterhogan, with sheep corrals in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys and girls were driving the sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the summit—the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests. In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two belts.
Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you hardly realize it till youslither down a sand bank and find yourself between the yellow pumice walls of a blindcul-de-sacin the rock—nooning place—where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone. Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in the Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds flashing phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."
This spring is about half of the fifty-five miles between Ganado and Keam's Cañon; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the first: more lilac-colored mesas high above the top of the world, with the encircling peaks like the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue as the bluest turquoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of evergreens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the lower world, and you are in Keam's Cañon, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods, steep as a carved wall. You pass the ruins of the old government school, where the floods drove the scholars out, and see the big rock commemorating Kit Carson's famous fight long ago, and come on the new Indian schools where 150 little Navajos and Mokis are being taught by Federal appointees—schools as finein every respect as the best educational institutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must obtain a permit to go on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville are theUltima Thuleof the trail across the Painted Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civilization and as hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) as when the Spaniard first came among them. In fact, the only remnants of Spanish influence left at some of these mesas are the dwarfed peach orchards growing in the arid sands. These were planted centuries ago by the Spanishpadres.
The trading post managed by Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr., at Keam's Cañon is but a replica of his father's establishment at Ganado. Here is the same fine old Spanish hospitality. Here, too, is a rare though smaller collection of Western paintings. There are rugs from every part of the Navajo Land, and specimens of pottery from the Three Mesas—especially from Nampaii, the wonderful woman pottery maker of the First Mesa—and fine silver-work gathered from the Navajo silversmiths. And with it all is the gracious perfection of the art that conceals art, the air that you are conferring a favor on the host to accept rest in a little rose-covered bower of two rooms and a parlor placed at the command of guests.
The last lap of the drive across the Painted Desert is by all odds the hardest stretch of the road, as well as the most interesting. It is here the Mokis, or Hopi, have their reservation in the very heartof Navajo Land; and there will be no quarrel over possession of this land. It lies a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands—600, 1,000, 1,500 feet above the plains—of yellowtufaand white gypsum rock, sides as sheer as a wall, the top a flat plateau but for the crest where perch the Moki villages. Up the narrow acclivities leading to these mesa crests the Mokis must bring all provisions, all water, their ponies and donkeys. If they could live on atmosphere, on views of a painted world at their feet receding to the very drop over the sky-line, with tones and half-tones and subtle suggestions of opaline snow peaks swimming in the lilac haze hundreds of miles away, you would not wonder at their choosing these eerie eagle nests for their cities; for the coloring below is as gorgeous and brilliant as in the Grand Cañon. But you see their little farm patches among the sand billows below, the peach trees almost uprooted by the violence of the wind, literally and truly, a stone placed where the corn has been planted to prevent seed and plantlet from being blown away. Or if the Navajo still raided the Moki, you could understand them toiling like beasts of burden carrying water up to these hilltops; but the day of raid and foray is forever past.
It was on our way back over this trail that we learned one good reason why the dwellers of this land must keep to the high rock crests. Crossing the high mesa, we had felt the wind begin to blow, when like Drummond's Habitant Skipper, "it blew and then it blew some more." By the time wereached the sandy plain below, such a hurricane had broken as I have seen only once before, and that was off the coast of Labrador, when for six hours we could not see the sea for the foam. The billows of sand literally lifted. You could not see the sandy plain for a dust fine as flour that wiped out every landmark three feet ahead of your horses' noses. The wheels sank hub deep in sand. Of trail, not a sign was left; and you heard the same angry roar as in a hurricane at sea. But like the eternal rocks, dim and serene and high above the turmoil, stood the First Mesa village of Moki Land. Perhaps after all, these little squat Pueblo Indians knew what they were doing when they built so high above the dust storms. Twice the rear wheels lifted for a glorious upset; but we veered and tacked and whipped the fagged horses on. For three hours the hurricane lasted, and when finally it sank with an angry growl and we came out of the fifteen miles of sand into sagebrush and looked back, the rosy tinge of an afterglow lay on the gray pile of stone where the Moki town crests the top of the lofty mesa.
In justice to travelers and Desert dwellers, two or three facts should be added. Such dust storms occur only in certain spring months. So much in fairness to the Painted Desert. Next, I have cursorily given slight details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers to think the Painted Desert can be crossed with the comfort of a Pullman car. You have to pay for your fun. We paid in that blinding, stinging, smothering blastas from a furnace, from three to half past five. Women are supposed to be irrepressible talkers. Well—we came to the point where not a soul in the carriage could utter a word for the dust. Lastly, when we saw that the storm was to be such a genuine old-timer, we ought to have tied wet handkerchiefs across our mouths. Glasses we had to keep the dust out of our eyes; but that dust is alkali, and it took a good two weeks' sneezing and a very sore throat to get rid of it.
Of the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville, space forbids details except that they are higher than the village at Acoma. Overlooking the Painted Desert in every direction, they command a view that beggars all description and almost staggers thought. You seem to be overlooking Almighty God's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored infinity; and naturally you go dumb with joy of the beauty of it and lose your own personality and perspective utterly. We lunched on the brink of a white precipice 1,500 feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that declivity with urns of water on their heads, and photographed naked urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood aboveestufas, or sacred underground council chambers, where the Pueblos held their religious rites before the coming of the Spaniards.
Of the Moki towns, Oraibi is, perhaps, cleaner and better than the Three Mesas. The mesas are indescribably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you can wander through adobe houses clean as your own homequarters, the adobe hard as cement, the rooms divided into sleeping apartments, cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the Grand Cañon, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as the Cañon.
If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains, which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to the Grand Cañon. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands, dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa.
"We love you," exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government doctor interpreted for us), "we love you with all our hearts and have come down to wish you a good-by."
The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Cañon, and the western slope between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.
Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of 2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but with pictographs resembling the ancient Phœnician signs from which our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed the cañons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet highin the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge meteorite.
Of the Grand Cañon little need be said here; not because there is nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole length of the Grand Cañon—200 miles—and hundreds of the lesser cañons that strike off sidewise from Grand Cañon are still unexplored and unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Cañon and 100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the NationalForests are not the People's Playground ofallAmerica; that they do not belong to the East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned in maintaining and protecting them?
You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to another—both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from $1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made, with the greatest ease in a day.
Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big knock-you-down variety! To go from the spacious glories of the boundless Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is like passing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery, London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in the Painted Desert.
In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic, sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light, when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle. Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand. The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are unknown. Only water—oceans and æons of water—could have rolled and swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.