CHAPTER XXII
NORTH OF GALLUP
ICAN still, by shutting my eyes, see thousands of vistas,—little twisting roads clinging tightly to cliffs, tangles of cactus, gray cliff dwellings, pregnant with the haunting sense of life fled recently, deserts ablaze overnight with golden poppies and blue lupin, forests of giant pines backed by blue mountains, snow-peaked; long views of green valleys with cottonwood-bordered streams, miles of silver pampas grass, neat rows of ugly new bungalows in uncompromising sunlight, older wooden shacks with false fronts, dry prairies white with the skeletons of cattle, copper colored canyons dropping from underfoot far into the depths of earth, water-holes with thousands of moving sheep; spiky, waxen yuccas against a night sky;—all this is the West, but inseparable from these mental visions come pungent odors so sharp that I can almost smell them now.
I cannot hope to reproduce the charm and joy of our wanderings, despite mishaps and disasters, because the freshness of mountain altitudes will not drift from the leaves of this book, nor the perfume of sunshine on resin, of miles of mountain flowers, nor the scent of desert dust, dry and untainted by man, the sharp smell of camps,—bacon cooking, wet canvas, horse blankets and leather;—bitter-sweet sage, sweet to the nostril and keen to the tongue, nor the tang of new-cutlumber, frosty nights, and fresh-water lakes, glacier cooled; the reek of an Indian village, redolent of doeskin and dried meats hanging in the sun;—I am homesick for them! And so is everyone who has found good hunting northwest of the Rio Grande.
We again found ourselves on the old Spanish Trail, which leads into Utah through Farmington and a bit of Colorado. Most of the way it was desert, a wicked collection of chuck-holes, high centers, tree-roots, gullies and sand drifts. This was a district once highly respected and avoided, for a few miles further north lay the four state boundaries. Men who find proximity to a state line convenient were twice as well suited with the Four Corners, reckoning arithmetically,—or four times, geometrically. Its convenience probably increased by the same ratio their abandoned character over other abandoned characters who had only two states in which to play hop-scotch with the sheriff. No doubt most of these professional outlaws have disappeared, picked off by the law’s revenge, or by private feud. We should have liked to explore this region further, but sundown was too near for this to be a judicious act, and while we were not always discreet, we were at times.
In late afternoon we looked ahead of us, and saw in this sea of sand two schooners with purple sails full rigged, rosy lighted by the setting sun. They tilted gracefully on a northerly course, the nearer one seeming to loom as high above the other as a sloop above a little catboat. No other landmark lifted above the long horizon save the low hills on our west which at Canyon de Chelley had been east of us. Only when we traveled five, ten, fifteen miles did we realize the magnitude ofthese giant ships of rock, made so light by the reflection of sand and sun that the sails seemed cut out of amethyst tissue rather than carved of granite. When we passed the first rock, which had seemed so high, it took its proper place, and it became the catboat, while the real Shiprock, we saw, far excelled the other in size and in its likeness to a ship. With the afterglow, the desert became gray and the ship golden, with purple edged sails. At dark the desert became blue-black, and the ship melted into a gossamer mist, looming higher as we neared it. It must be five or six hundred feet high, and so precipitous that nobody has ever scaled its outspread wings, though the Human Fly came from New York for the purpose, and returned defeated.
As we went on in this intensely lonely country, out of the darkness came an odor that a moment before had not been, resembling jasmine or syringa, but fresher than either. We stopped the car, expecting to find ourselves in the midst of a garden. But all around was only greasewood and sage, sage and greasewood. The twigs we plucked to smell broke off brittle in our hands. We drove on, much perplexed.
Just before we reached the town of Shiprock, the air lifted with a new freshness. We sniffed, and raised our heads as horses do. We were reminded of home. It was water! We had not smelled water for two dry days. In an instant we were rolling down shady avenues, and saw lights reflected on a river, and crossed into a town so dense with green grass and arched trees and roses in bloom that it seemed like some old place in New England. Then the mysterious odor, stronger and of unearthly sweetness, came again. It blew from a field ofalfalfa in bloom, with the night dew distilling its heavenly freshness. We must have been several miles away when its perfume first reached us in the desert.
A car halted in the road before the superintendent’s house,—for Shiprock is a Navajo agency,—and as we stopped, a man and his wife exchanged names and destinations with us in the darkness. They were from California, going to Yellowstone. When we told them our home town they said the usual thing. We discussed plans for the night. They had none, neither had we. It was nearly midnight.
“That’s the agent’s house,” he said, pointing to the only light in town, “but they won’t take you there. We just asked. The lady’s all alone, but she might give you directions for a hotel.”
As we went toward the house, an Indian policeman in uniform shadowed us, wearing the kind of helmet the police used to wear in Boston and rural plays. He seemed to alternate between a desire to protect us against Shiprock, and Shiprock against us, his grave manner signifying he would do justice to both parties.
The agent’s wife directed us to a hotel, which she refused to indorse, and when we left, she called after us,—“You aren’t alone?”
“Yes,” I answered, “all alone, ever since we left Boston.” And then, to save time, “We’re a long ways fromhome.”
“I don’t know what accommodations you’d find at the hotel,” she said. “You’d better stay here. Being alone, I didn’t want to take in any men, but I’d be glad to have your company.”
“Did you find a hotel?” asked the kind man in the road, as we returned for our baggage.
“Yes,—here,” we said, “not having a man with us.”
“You have the luck,” he answered, and his wife groaned, and asked him as wives will, what good it did her to have him along.
Our kind hostess gave us a pleasant room, and carte blanche to the icebox, for I believe we had no supper that night. It may have been partly our kind reception, but not entirely so, that made Shiprock seem, when we inspected it next day, one of the most attractive and sensibly conducted agencies we had visited. It is beautifully situated where our old friend the San Juan river joins another stream, and turns the desert into the greenest of farm lands. Roses bloomed about each neat, white-picketed house, big trees shaded the road, and the lawns were like velvet. Happy looking Navajo children in middy blouses played about the schoolyards or splashed in the big swimming pool devoted exclusively to them. The teachers and agents whom we met lacked that attitude of contempt for their charges we had sometimes observed in other Indian schools. I have heard teachers who could hardly speak without butchering the President’s English sneer at their Indian charges for reverting to their own tongue.
sheepNAVAJO SHEEP-DIPPING AT SHIPROCK.Fat Navajo squaws pulled the unhappy beasts to the trough by the horns.
NAVAJO SHEEP-DIPPING AT SHIPROCK.
Fat Navajo squaws pulled the unhappy beasts to the trough by the horns.
The day of our stay on the reservation an interesting event took place. Once a year the government requires all Navajos to bring in their sheep to be dipped in a strong solution of lye and tobacco, to prevent vermin and disease. In the early morning the air was filled with a thousand bleatings. The dust rose thick from countless hoofs driven to the sheep-dip. The dip was situatedagainst great yellow buttes, and in the distance the ship rock sailed in lilac light. Fat Navajo squaws with their jewels tied to their belt for safe keeping pulled the unhappy beasts to the trough by the horns, where they completely submerged them, with the aid of an Indian wielding a two-pronged staff.
“Get in and help,” said an old squaw to me. Accordingly I grasped a rough horn, and discovered it took strength and some skill to keep the animals from being trampled, as they went down the trough. Once a tremendous chatter arose, as a result of the squaws counting their sheep and finding one missing. The poor creature was discovered, crushed and bleeding at the bottom of the runway. Immediately he was fished out, and borne off by two women whom I followed to watch. One held the carcass, while the other pulled from her woven belt a long, glittering knife. In twenty minutes the sheep was skinned, dressed and cut into neat chops and loins, and the incident was closed. The women are sole owners and custodians of the sheep-herds. The gathering that day would have rejoiced the heart of any feminist. With one old hag I noticed a beautiful little Navajo child dressed in the usual velvet jacket, flowing skirt and silver ornaments. Two lumps of turquoise were strung in her ears. Her eyes, like her skin, were golden brown and her hair bright yellow. Her unusual complexion added to her beauty made her a pet of the entire village, and the idol of her old grandmother. If she was an Albino, the lack of pigment took a more becoming form than among the Hopis.
Mesa Verde National Park is only a short day’s run from Shiprock. It took us into the edge of Colorado, abeautiful, loveable state, endowed with sense, mountains, good roads and every kind of natural blessing. It has a flavor all its own; more mellow than the states of the West coast, less prim than those on its eastern borders. Our way led between two mountain ranges, one in Utah, the other in Colorado, with a long sweep of prairies curling like waves at their base. We passed a corner of the Ute country, and saw at a spring a group of those gaily dressed, rather sullen people, ample bodied and round headed. Each tribe differs from the others, and these bore a look more like the Northern tribes than those we had already met.
As the Colorado mountains came nearer, I remembered the words of a fellow traveler, spoken on the slippery drive to Taos, New Mexico, which had haunted me ever since.
“This is steep enough, but wait till you climb Mesa Verde. The engineer cut a road straight up the mountain to the top, with as few switchbacks and as little grading as he could. It is so narrow that you have to telephone your arrival when you reach the base of the hill, and they shut off all downward traffic till you report at the Park.”
We were both by this time inured to horizontal fever, and could steer quite debonairly within an inch of a thousand foot drop, but we “figured,” as they say out West, that we had about reached our limit, and if we were to encounter anything more vertiginous, somethingmighthappen. I don’t say we dreaded Mesa Verde, but I will admit we speculated over our prospects.
“Heavens! Do they expect us to climbthat?” exclaimed Toby when we sighted the beginning of thetwenty-six mile road to the Park. A mountain stood on its hind legs before us, and pawed the air. The white gash of road leading uncompromisingly up its side showed us all too well what to expect. At the summit, a naked erosion rose like Gibraltar for a hundred feet from its green setting. Whether we should have to conquer that bit of masonry we did not know, but if we had to, I knew our chances were not good. I clung to the story I had heard of a one-armed girl who had driven a Ford to the top, and then collapsed. We ought to do at least as well, we reasoned, reserving the right to collapse on arrival. At the base of the hill I telephoned the superintendent of the Park, at a switchboard by the roadside, as commanded by placard.
“Come ahead, and ’phone at the top,” he said. His voice was most matter-of-fact. From that moment, anticlimax reigned. Roads are never as bad as report makes them, and this besides being far less narrow than many mountain passes we had been through, was beautifully graded on the turns, and in excellent condition. We passed several steep ravines at curves,—one where a car had overturned the week previous,—but none was as bad as we had been led to expect. Thanks to the sane regulation making it a one way road we had nothing to fear from traffic. Valleys, blue and red with a magnificent sweep of flowers, dropped down, down, and new mountains rose from unexpected coverts. We circled the one we were on, pausing at the summit for the view over the emerald slopes far below. We reached the base of our Gibraltar, but saw on nearer approach that we could no more have climbed it then we could climb Washington Monument on the outside. Instead we roundedit, and dipped up and down another hillside, overlooking an eastern valley. Here the road was delightfully planned so that we could look far ahead over our course, and coast or climb without fearing the next turn. Well named is the Park, so surprisingly green after the desert. In an hour and three-quarters we had covered the twenty-six miles to the inn. This, we were told by the stage drivers, was fairly near record time.
We met a man soon after our arrival, to whom we mentioned that we had recently come from the Rainbow Bridge.
“Oh,” said he, “were you in the party where the mule threw the man off into the cactus?”
News travels like that in the West.
Mesa Verde is what is called a three days’ park. One could easily spend three weeks or three months there with profit or delight, camping in its delicious forests and riding over its mountainsides. But in three days all that is to be seen of cliff dwellings and prehistoric ruins can be inspected without hurry, unless of course one is an archaeologist. Here are most elaborate ruins, carefully restored, whose many kivas indicate a prosperous and flourishing community. Long canyons, thickly wooded and enameled with wild-flowers are lined on both sides with these airy villages. A small museum of articles found in excavating, displayed in the main house, greatly aids the mere amateur.
ruinsCLIFF-DWELLINGS. MESA VERDE PARK, COLORADO.Here are most elaborate ruins, carefully restored.
CLIFF-DWELLINGS. MESA VERDE PARK, COLORADO.
Here are most elaborate ruins, carefully restored.
We were fortunate in having a guide who knew his park like a book. Forsaking routine paths and steps, he hoisted us up and down the paths,—mere niches they were,—worn in the solid wall by those agile Indians. It seems certain that at that time no cliff-mothers indulgedin the embonpoint affected by so many of their descendants. An inch too much of girdle in the right,—or the wrong,—place, would have sent them hurtling down into the canyon, as they climbed those sheer walls. Being one of the oldest known cliff communities, Mesa Verde is much more carefully restored than those we saw in the Canyon de Chelley and in Segi Canyon. More accessible and compact than other ruins, Mesa Verde combines the historic,—or prehistoric,—interest with the needs of vacation seekers who wish a few luxuries with their cliff dwellings. Although the hotel is of the simplest sort, it is well run. Those who wish to camp may do so by obtaining a permit. Tent houses are provided as a compromise between camping and hotel life for those who want to feel they are roughing it, but prefer a floor and a mattress between them and the insect world.
We entered the Mormon country not long after we left Mesa Verde and turned north again into Utah. Here once more we had desert, villainous prairie roads, utter loneliness, with vista of foothills of the Rockies guarding our route. We drove hard and camped where midnight found us, or, too weary to spread our tent, went still further to the next one of the miserably equipped towns in rural Utah, where we had the benefit of rickety bedsprings and stifling bedrooms. It was cherry time, and each warm day we blessed Brigham Young for his foresight in encouraging the growth of fruit trees. The Mormons were the earliest in the West to understand the use of irrigation. Their villages, slatternly as to buildings, nestle in lanes and avenues of poplar and cottonwood, and their gardens bear all manner of fruit. They aregood providers, too, in this rural desert, and at noon sharp, when we stopped doubtfully at some unpainted shack, bearing the sign Café, we were astonished at the abundance of wholesome country food spread on the long table. We sat among a group of overalled men, who ate in silence, except for the sounds of mastication.
“Help yourself, Brother Smith. Brother Thacher, you aint eatin’ today,” the ample goddess who presided over the stove in the corner of the room would encourage her patrons. At the close of the meal, whether we had consumed one or six helpings of the cheese, the meat pie, the ham, the raspberries and stoned cherries with rich country cream in quart pitchers, the apple pie and chocolate cake, we wiped our fingers on napkins well used to such treatment, paid our “six bits” and departed, our parting “Good-day” being answered with caution.
Through such country, uninhabited for long stretches, we were driving one evening, hoping to reach Green River forty miles north. Though with filial respect we often remembered the last injunction of Toby’s parent, we were frequently obliged to postpone fulfilling it, till a more convenient occasion. Tonight we had to choose between making a barren camp in open prairie and pushing on to the nearest hotel. A dry camp made after dark represents the height of discomfort, so we chose the alternative. Our route lay over a waste of sand,—that portion of the desert which claims central Utah. For several miles we followed the wretched little prairie tracks, but finally, to our great joy, we struck into a broad state road in perfect condition, raised above the floor of the desert by several feet. We made marvelous speed.Who would have expected to find a boulevard in the heart of rural Utah?
Whoever would, was doomed to speedy disappointment. Our boulevard seemed to lack continuity; several times we were forced to forsake it and make detours back over the trails. Soon our highway, which was leveled an easy grade above the desert, began to rise in the air, until in the pitch dark it assumed an alarmingly dizzy elevation. About the same time the marks of traffic faded. We passed through a morass of crushed stone, and thence into thick sand, over which we skidded alarmingly toward the edge of the bank. Perhaps we were eighteen or twenty feet above the desert, but when we veered for the edge, it seemed like a hundred. The heavy sand clung to our wheels, making progress hard and skidding easy. We passed through a cut with heavy banks on both sides, and in front a black shadow.
“Why, where’s the road?” exclaimed Toby.
There was none. We were left high and dry, with a sandhill on both sides, steep banks dropping down among rocks and gullies to the desert, a yawning hole in front with a precipitous drop of twenty feet, and two feet of leeway, in which to turn our car. We backed cautiously down the side, and struck a boulder. We turned forward a few inches, and came upon a heap of sand. Toby got out, and directed our maneuvers, inch by inch. Finally we had the car broadside to the jumping-off place, and there we stuck, tilted at a crazy angle, one headlight almost directly above the other. In the heavy, untracked sand we could not move an inch.
“Well,” I said bitterly, “here we spend the night. Twelve miles from nowhere!”
At that four men with a lantern sprang up from nowhere.
“How kind of you to come,” we said to the men, assuming they were there to rescue, not to rob.
“We saw your headlights,” answered the one who held the lantern, “and from the way they were slanted we concluded you was in trouble and we might as well come over. We’re working on the new state road, and this is as far as it’s got. Our camp’s just over there, and Green River’s twelve miles further.”
Backing and filling, with their four brawny shoulders to the wheels, we soon got the car out of the sand heap and turned about, but the deep sand was crowned so high that for a stretch we skidded along at so sharp an angle that only the tug of the sand kept us from turning turtle. Our friends put us on our way, going a half mile out of their own to do so.
The sleepy clerk at Green River was locking the hotel up for the night as we stopped before his door.
“My, you’re in luck,” said he. “If the midnight train hadn’t been late this hotel would have been closed up tight.”
Such incidents, happening almost daily, began to give us a reckless faith in our luck, or our guardian angels, or the special Providence said to look after certain types of people, whichever you may choose to call it. Ministering angels of the first calibre had perfected their system to give instant service day or night. They thought nothing of letting us run dry of gasoline on a road where all morning we had not passed a single car, and sending us within five minutes a truck carrying a barrel of the useful fluid. They delighted in letting us drive a bit too fastdown a narrow canyon, where a blowout from our ragged tires would have mingled our bones forever with the “old lady’s,” arriving scatheless at the bottom simultaneously with a blowout which dragged us, standing, across the road. Once a Ford, driven by inexpert and slightly befuddled Elks, crashed into us on a narrow bridge, with no results beyond a bent canteen. When we broke four spring leaves at dusk in a lonesome hamlet, they placed across the street an expert German blacksmith of the old school, who did not object to night hours, and who forged us new springs which finally outwore the car. By happy mistake, they took us down pleasant by-paths less fortunate tourists who went by Bluebook never knew. Altogether, they were a firm of remarkable reliability, and if I knew their address I should publish it. But they preferred to do good anonymously.
I think it was they who directed us through the Shoshone reservation on the very day of the year when the tribe held its important ceremony, the Sun Dance. We reached Fort Hall, the Shoshone agency, one morning, and were told casually of a dance being held on the reservation, not a mile out of our way. When we reached it a magnificent Indian, the first we had seen who could be called a red man, (for the Southern Indians are brown and ochre colored), barred our path on horseback. He knew his cerise sateen shirt was becoming, even without the purple necktie he wore. It gave him confidence to demand an entrance fee of $2.00—an entirely impromptu idea inspired by our eagerness. The more I see of Lo the Poor Indian the more I am convinced that he is poor only for lack of opportunity to exercise his talents. However,the dance was worth the money,—far more than some other barefoot dances I have seen.
It had begun when we arrived on the scene, in fact, it had been going on for two days. Crowds of women, some dressed in long plaid shawls and high moccasins, others in starched muslins and straw hats; bright-eyed papooses slung on their mother’s backs in beautiful white doeskin cradles; majestic chiefs six feet tall and more in high pointed Stetsons, with long robes of cotton sheeting, giddily dyed, wrapped about them, circled about the dancers, who were partly screened from spectators by the green branches seen in so many Indian dances. These Shoshones are the Indians on the penny. Grave, surly giants with copper skin, coarse jet hair and high cheek bones, powerful, with a hint of ugliness, they were another race from the laughing brown tribes of the south. They frowned upon our camera, and finally forbade us, in no uncertain manner, to use it. Even the insouciant Toby paled and hastily stuffed her camera in her coat as a big chief made a threatening lunge at it. That is why all our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.
danceSHOSHONES AT SUN DANCE, FORT HALL, IDAHO.All our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.
SHOSHONES AT SUN DANCE, FORT HALL, IDAHO.
All our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.
Old women trotted to and fro constantly with bunches of sweet grass and herbs, which they laid on the ground beside the resting dancers, who used them to dry and refresh their exhausted bodies. A group of old men in the corner beat the tom-tom, squatting to their task like gnomes. The dancers, naked to the waist, wore a short apron-like garment of calico or blanket below. Their bodies, old and young, were lithe and stringy,—hardly a fat man among them. They showed much exhaustion,—asmuch perhaps on this second day of the dance as white men not in training would after half an hour of similar exercise. Many of them were past middle age. One was white-haired and wrinkled, but with magnificent muscles on his bare chest and arms. They alternately rested and danced in groups, so that the dancing was continuous. Running at a jog trot to a great tree in the center, decorated with elk horns and a green branch, they touched this tree with reverent obeisances and a wild upward movement of body and head, then carried their hand from it, as if transferring its vitality to their knees, their breasts and their heads. For the three days and nights the dance was to last, they would neither eat nor drink.
“What does it mean?” I asked a very modern lady, dressed in flowered organdy. She smiled a superior smile, evidently holding no longer with the gods of her ancestors.
“It’s a dance they think will make well sick people. I do not know,—some foolishness, I guess.”
A tall chief with a pipe in his mouth, wearing a scarlet shawl, fanned himself with a lady’s fan of black spangles and gauze, and as he fanned he frowned at us, muttering at our levity in talking during the sacred ceremonies. He only needed a rose behind his ear to make a gaunt Carmen of him, temper and all. His eyes fell menacingly on Toby’s camera, which she had been fingering, and Toby-wise she turned and sauntered off as if she hadn’t seen him, though I imagine her knees shook.
From the not too friendly Indians we could get no further information of the meaning of the dance, but later I discovered we had been fortunate enough to witness theSun Dance. During the winter, when sickness falls upon a relative, some Indian will vow to organize this dance, if health should return to the sick one. The whole tribe comes to take part or to witness the dance. The participants refrain from food or drink for three days, sustained to their exertion by marvelous nervous energy and real religious fervor. Before the government forbade the practise it was their custom to cut slits in their breasts on the third day of the dance, and insert rawhide ropes, which they tied to the tree, throwing themselves back and forth regardless of the torture, until the rawhide broke through the flesh.
After the adobe huts and hogans of the Pueblos and Navajos, we were delighted by the symmetrical snowwhite tepee of the Shoshone, who have made not only an art but a ceremony of tepee building. Two poles are first placed on the ground, butts together. Then two poles of equal length are placed in a reversed position. A rope of pine tree fibre is then woven in and out, over and under the four poles near the top, knotted securely, with long ends hanging. The old custom prescribed laying out the camp in half moon shape, each doorway facing the point where the sun first appears on the horizon, shifting with the season. The camp’s location determined, the squaws raise the poles slowly, singing the song of the tepee pole, so timed that it comes to an end with the upright position of the pole. Two women then raise the tent covering, lacing it with carved and polished twigs. Two smoke flaps above the entrance, held in place by other poles, are moved as the wind varies, to draw the smoke rising within the tent. No habitation is more knowingly and simply devised than the tepees,which are both warm and well ventilated even in winter. It is only when the Indians are transplanted to the white man’s houses that they close doors and windows, light great fires, and soon become soft, and fall easy victims of the white plague.
teepeeA SHOSHONE TEPEE, FORT HALL, IDAHO.Each step in their construction follows a well-ordered plan.
A SHOSHONE TEPEE, FORT HALL, IDAHO.
Each step in their construction follows a well-ordered plan.
The Shoshone chiefs made no objection as Toby snapped a beautiful tepee with an Indian pony tethered near, but when she smoothly circled it upon an interested group of gaudy giants, one of them, an Isaiah in a white robe, touched her on the arm.
“Move on, damn quick,” he said.
So we did.