CHAPTER XIX
THE FOUR CORNERS
FORTY-SECOND street and Broadway is probably the most crowded spot in the United States. The least crowded is this region of the Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come together. Almost as primeval as when Adam and Eve were bride and groom, it fits no accepted standards; too vast and too lonely for the taste of many, too arid and glaring with sunshine to be called beautiful in a conventional sense, it differs from the ordinary “landscape” as Michelangelo from Meissonier. Here, in a radius of seventy-five miles are a collection of wonders strange enough to belong to another planet. The Navajo and Piute possess this land. Southeast is Zuni with its highly civilized people. Southwest are the Grand Canyon, the Havasupai Canyon, the desert promontories of the Hopis and the petrified forests. Northeast is Mesa Verde National Park. Silence-haunted Canyon du Chelley lies on the edge of Arizona, and just over the line in Utah is a land of weird and mighty freaks, monoliths, erosions, tip-tilted boulders a thousand feet high, and natural bridges, of which the greatest is the Rainbow Bridge.
It was the lure of the Rainbow Bridge that had gathered our party together in the immaculate dining-room of El Navajo at Gallup, one morning in late May. We alreadyfelt a certain distinction bestowed on us by our quest. Not eighty white people since the world began had viewed that massive arch, one among whom, named Theodore Roosevelt, had written most respectfully of the difficulties of the trail. There were six of us, who had originally met and planned our trip in Santa Fé; the guide, Toby, and I, a brother and sister from Ohio named Murray and Martha, and the Golfer, a man of indestructible good-nature.
“Did you get my balls?” inquired the last named, as he stepped from the train.
“Did you bring your clubs?” I asked, simultaneously.
The questions arose from a pact made in Santa Fé. Now few are free from the vanity of wishing to do some feat nobody has yet accomplished. Without it, Columbus would not have discovered America, Cook and Peary would not have raced to the North Pole, Blondin crossed Niagara on a tight-rope nor Wilson invented the League of Nations. Ours was a simpler ambition than any of these, having its origin in the Golfer’s passion for improving his drive at all times and places. We had hoped, at Santa Fé, to be the first white women to visit the Bridge, having heard a rumor that none had yet done so, but our guide disillusioned us; several women had forestalled us.
“I wish we might be the first to do something,” said Toby, who in fancy had seen herself in a Joan of Arc attitude planting the blue and white flag of Massachusetts on the pinnacle of the Bridge.
“We might put a golf ball over it,” I suggested, watching the Golfer polish his brassie. “I don’t believe that’s been done.”
“Guess it hasn’t,” laughed the guide. “Wait till you see the Bridge.”
“Won’t do any harm to try,” said the Golfer.
Then Murray and the Golfer and the guide began discussing whether a golf ball could or couldn’t be driven over the arch. The guide bet it couldn’t, and to make things interesting, we took him up. The Golfer modestly deprecated his skill, but thenceforth he was observed practising his drive on every occasion.
We were to drive to Kayenta, and take horses from that point to the Bridge, a hundred miles further on. While the guide packed the car, we took in the sights of Gallup. Thriving though unlovely, facing the dust of the desert, it has a stronger flavor of the old West than most railroad towns, for roads from remote regions converge into its Main Street. Old settlers from all four states rattle in over the dusty trails, no longer on horses, but in the row-boat of the desert, a Ford. They gather at the Harvey lunch-room, and see the latest movies. The Santa Fé thunders by with its load of eastern tourists. Gentle-eyed Zunis wander in from their reservation to the south. Occasionally cowboys in blue shirts and stitched boots ride in, or a soldier in khaki from the Fort. The shops are hung with the silver every Navajo knows how to fashion from Mexican dollars. We saw a group of fat chiefs decked in their best, their henna faces etched with canny lines, fingering and appraising the chunks of solid turquoise and wampum chains on each other’s necks as a group of dowagers would compare their diamonds.
We started at noon, our faithful car sagging like a dachshund under a thousand pounds of bedding, tents,food and suitcases, in addition to six passengers,—a load which was a terrific test on these roads. As we left Gallup, passing the “Haystacks” and other oddly shaped landmarks, the road became an apology, and later an insult. High centres scraped the bottom of the weighted car, so that our spare tires acted as a brake, and had to be removed and placed inside, to form an uncomfortable tangle with our legs, wraps and baggage. But in spite of cramped positions we were hilarious, knowing we had actually started on this long-planned adventure, and that before us were eighteen days of companionship, with unknown tests of our endurance, our tempers and possibly our courage, riding hard, sleeping hard, living a roofless existence, without benefit of laundry.
An arid place in the scorching sunlight of lunch-time, the desert toward late afternoon became a dream of pastels, isolated mesas floating above its surface in rosy lilac, its floor golden, washed with warm rose and henna tones, with shadows of a misty blue, under a radiance of reflected sunset light.
When the color faded, mesas and buttes stood out sharp and black. The desert was no longer a pastel but a charcoal sketch. As vision disappeared our sense of smell was heightened. Freshened in night dew after a parched day, a million tiny flowers seemed concentrated into a penetrating essence, with the aromatic sage strongest of all. Our headlights pierced a gloom miles long. It was ten hours before we reached the twinkle of Chin Lee lights, where we were glad to find shelter and beds.
On the next day we averaged exactly nine miles an hour in the eighty miles to Kayenta. In a jolty handwriting I find my auto-log for that day, “Rotten road.High centres, deep arroyos, many ditches. Sand. Part of road like painted desert.”
It was a treacherous country to drive in. There were no maps, no sign-posts. Most of the day we met only Navajos, speaking no English. From the few white men we met, we would get some such instructions: “Bear northwest a ways, follow the creek till it forks; a way down on the lower fork you pass a mesa, then bear east, then west.” This over a distance of eighty miles! It was worse than Texas, where we were expected to get our bearings by Uncle Henry!
Sometimes our course was deflected by a swollen river, or the wind had buried our tracks with sand. Sometimes the settlement we sought to guide us would be completely hidden by a dip in conformation of the country. Sometimes a mirage brought under our very noses a group of buildings really miles away, with a river between us. Occasionally a vicious chuck-hole jarred our engine to a standstill. Once our guide lost his bearings, and for nearly thirty miles we skipped lightly cross-country, taking pot-luck with the mesas and washes and sage thickets we encountered, finding our way only by a range of hills on our west.
I have always wondered what would have happened if Toby and I had attempted that journey alone, as we first intended. This Navajo desert was the wildest, most unfrequented district we saw from Galveston to Boston. Only a Dunsany could give an idea of its loneliness, its menace, its weird beauty. Our guide had the western sense for general direction, and had been to Kayenta before, yet even he lost his bearings once. To us, it was a tiny spot easily obscured by the tremendous wasteson all sides. Yet I should like to know if Toby and I could have managed it alone.
Something about the country, and in the swart faces of the supple Navajos on horseback, their flowing locks banded with scarlet, reminded me of old pictures of Thibetan plains and the fierce Mongolian horsemen with broad cheek-bones, slant eyes and piercing gaze. Kayenta is a gateway, like Thibet, to the Unknown. It is a frontier, perhaps the last real frontier in the States. Only Piutes and Navajos brave the stupendous Beyond.
Backed up against oddly-shaped monoliths and orange buttes are half a dozen small adobe houses, among them the vine-covered house and store of John Wetherell, the most famous citizen of Four Corners. A thousand sheep fill the air with bleatings like the tin horns of a thousand picnickers, as they are driven in from pasture by a little Navajo maid on a painted pony, her rope around her saddle horn. A stocky Indian in leather chaps gallops down to the corral, driving two score horses before him. Wagons come creaking in, laden with great bags of wool. A trader from the Hopi country or Chin Le rattles in to spend a few days on business, or stay the night in the hospitable adobe house. Government officials, visiting or stationed here, saunter in to chat or get information. Groups of Navajos bask in the sun. Every passing, every stir of life on the great expanse, is an event to be talked over from many angles.
At the Wetherell’s, we found homeliness, a bountiful table, and marvel of marvel, the bath-tub furthest from an express office in the States. A few miles further north, all traces of civilization drop out of sight, and you are living the Day after Creation.
John Wetherell, though supple as a lank cowpuncher and fifty years young, is already an “old-timer.” Henry Ford put him and his kind, as fine as this country ever bred, into the past generation, overnight. In this youth, he and his brothers rode down an unknown canyon hunting strayed cattle, and discovered the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, now the best known of all. From that moment, discovering cliff dwellings became a passion with the Wetherells. Shard heaps yielded up their treasures to them, and lonely canyons disclosed human swallow’s nests hitherto uncharted by the government. From Colorado, John Wetherell moved to Kayenta, where he gained the confidence of the Navajo as few white men have ever done.
In this achievement—and a difficult one, for the Navajo is a wary soul,—he was greatly helped by Mrs. Wetherell, who possesses an almost uncanny understanding and sympathy for the Navajo that make her a more trustworthy Indian student than many an ethnologist learned in the past, but little versed in Indian nature. She speaks their tongue like a native, and has their confidence as they seldom give it to any of the white race. They have entrusted to her secrets of their tribe, and because she keeps their secrets, they reveal others to her.
When the “flu” swept across the desert, it was particularly virulent among the Southwest Indians. They died like flies in their hogans, in carts on the road, and beside their flocks. Babies hardly able to talk were found, the only living members of their family. An appalling number of the tribe was lost. Government medical aid, never too adequate on an Indian reservation, could not cope with the overwhelming attack. Missionariesforgot creeds and dogma, and fought with lysol and antiseptic gauze. The “medicine men” shut the doors of the hogans, built fires to smoke out the bad spirits, filled the air with noises and generally made medicine more deadly to the patient than to the devils that possessed them. Mrs. Wetherell and her family hardly slept, but rode back and forth through the reservation, nursing, substituting disinfectants and fresh air for “medicine,” took filthy and dying patients to her own home till it became a hospital, and prepared the dead for burial.
Parenthetically, from this epidemic comes a piquant example of the way fact can always be bent to substantiate creed. Soon after the “flu” had reaped its harvest, a fatal distemper struck the horses and cattle on the reservation. Following the human epidemic, it was cumulatively disastrous. But the Navajo could explain it. In the old days, when a chief or warrior died, his favorite horse was buried beside him, so that he might ride properly mounted into the happy hunting ground. To the Indian mind it was only logical that when the influenza swept away hundreds of men, as many horses should go with them to Paradise.
When the United States entered the world war, Mrs. Wetherell saddled her horse, put food and a bedding roll on a pack-mule, and went far into the interior of the reservation, wherever a settlement of Navajos could be found. Most of them had never heard of the war. She told them of the government’s need for their help, till she aroused them from indifference to a patriotism the more touching because as a race they had little reason for gratitude toward a too-paternal government. Out of their flocks they promised each a sheep,—no mean giftat the war price. When the “flu” epidemic interrupted her work, she had already raised $3000 among a people as far from the Hindenburg line, psychologically, as the Eskimos or Patagonians.
To this lady of snapping black eyes and animated laugh came rumors from her friends the Navajos of an arch, so sacred that no religious Indian dared ride under it without first uttering the prayer specially designed for that occasion, handed down from one generation to the next. No white man, presumably, had reached the Rainbow Arch, a day and a half beyond the sacred Navajo mountain, whose thunder peak dominates the country even to the Great Canyon. The location was told her by a Navajo, and the first expedition, led by a Navajo, with Mr. Wetherell as guide, reached Nonnezosche Boco (Bridge Canyon) in August, 1909. The party consisted of Prof. Byron Cummings, then of Utah, now of Arizona University, Mr. Douglas, of the government Federal Survey, James Rogerson, and Neil Judd, of the Smithsonian Institute, the restorer of the cliff ruins of Beta-Takin.
Already a controversy over who really “discovered” the Rainbow Bridge has been waged, and zestfully contested. To Douglas went the official recognition, with the privilege of naming the arch, upon his own claim. Prof. Cummings, while giving Douglas the official right as discoverer, is the first white man who saw the bridge.
Our own party, the sixteenth to visit the Bridge since its discovery, waited a day at Kayenta while we equipped. Our letters had not arrived in time to announce our coming, and the horses were still at Oljeto, at winter pasturage, and had to be driven down. Saddles neededmending and food and bedding had to be collected. While the guides worked, we lay in the cool of the Wetherell’s grassy lawn,—the only grass in a hundred miles,—or bargained for Navajo “dead pawn” silver in the trading store. The Navajo is a thriftless spender, and against the day when he can liquidate his debts by selling his flocks, he pawns his cherished turquoises and wampum. By a government law, he is given a period of grace to redeem his heirlooms, after which time they go to the trader, who may not sell them for more than he paid the Indian, plus a small percentage.
We took clandestine snapshots of the timid Indians, who lost their timidity when we were the focus of their curious eyes and guttural comments. Indian speech is always called guttural; the Navajo tongue really deserves the adjective. The Navajo not only swallows his words, but sounds as if he did not like the taste of them. They had a favorite trick of looking our party over, while one of them expressed in a few well chosen consonants a category of our defects, which set the observers into guffaws and shrieks of laughter. Yet they say the Indian has no sense of humor.
One old crone in a garnet velvet jacket sat in the doorway of the store, and with contempt looked us three women over in our khaki riding breeches and coats. Then she sneered in Navajo through her missing front teeth, “Do these women think they are men?”
We had forgotten the warning given us at Chin Le to wear skirts, so as not to outrage the Navajo sense of modesty. This in a land where suffrage never needed an Anthony amendment,—where the son, from antiquity, has taken his mother’s name, where the man does theindoor task of weaving while the woman devotes herself to the larger business of tending flocks, and property becomes the woman’s at marriage, so that when she divorces her husband, as she may for any or no reason at a moment’s warning, he is obliged to walk out of his—I mean her—hogan, wearing only what he had on his wedding morn. So far as I could learn, the man has only one privilege,—that after marriage, he must never see his mother-in-law. “Nas-ja!” they cry (“Become an owl;” i. e., look blind) when the two are in danger of meeting.
Yet this old crone, who had so many privileges, gave us and our outrageous costumes such a look as Queen Victoria might have given Salome at the close of her dance of the seven veils. Wearing the breeks in spirit, she could make a point of forswearing them in the flesh.
The handsome Navajo lads who slouched over the huge bags of wool before the trading store were more tolerant. The boldest let us photograph them, giggling as they posed, and were pleased when we admired the exquisite turquoise and silver bracelets on their brown arms. They were lithe and full of sinewy strength and steely grace, lounging in their gay velvet jackets and chaparrals.
And all through the day, regardless of the burning-glass heat of the sun, Murray and the Golfer, to the delight and amusement of the whole post, red and white, patiently improved their drive by lofting over the windmill which Roosevelt had instituted for the Navajos. Three brown children on horseback acted as caddies. Mr. Wetherell quizzically watched a shot go wild over the seventy foot windmill.
“Think you’re going to put a ball over the Bridge?”
“I’m going to try to,” said the Golfer modestly.
He chuckled. “Wait till you see it, young fellow.”
In answer, the Golfer sent up a ball that clove the heavens in twain. And then the entire population of Kayenta spent the rest of the day on their knees, hunting in the sage-brush.