Part 7

The next day’s, Tuesday’s, march was one that dwells delightfully in memory—not for any element of excitement, but for the simple joy of it. All day we descended by a trail that wound through cañon after cañon, crossing and recrossing the streams whose waters were flowing toward the Pacific, as those of the day before were to find a final outlet in the Atlantic. It was cold, but it seemed like spring in contrast with the day before, for the sun shone bright, and birds were in the trees, and here and there the snow had melted, giving to the soil the suggestion of returning life.

The burros plainly shared the feeling of relief in reaching a more passable region, and the art of burro-punching began, consequently, to disclose its difficulties. From one side and then the other of the trail they would break away in all directions, exploring the surrounding country, never with an air of mischief, but always with a sober, dogged perversity that was the more exasperating because it wore a mask of reason. Once back into the trail, they might keep it faultlessly for miles on end, and then, from no apparent cause, begin once more to wander. They were most difficult to manage at the fords. Generally they scattered to the four winds at the first approach to water, and when we had corralled them again and forced them down to the brink, they would stand calmly, planted ankle-deep in the stream, resolutely determined not to move. It was then that Price gave vent to real profanity, and I am bound to own that it was effective. When beating and prodding and the milder invective failed to urge the burros forward, Price would stand back, pale with rage, and begin to swear, calling upon all his gods and blasting the reputations of his beasts unto the third and fourth generation of their ancestors. By some subtle perception they seemed to understand that this meant business, and slowly at first, but presently, as though they rather enjoyed the water, they waded through and started down the trail beyond.

We camped that night in a narrow cañon whose level bed was well grown with trees and walled by scarped cliffs, which rose sheer above it. Price said that it formed a miniature Yosemite, and certainly it made good camping-ground; for with plenty of wood and water, it was well protected from the wind, and we slept there in great comfort. But our fare was growing monotonous. We soon exhausted the supply of beef and had since been living upon bacon and bread, so that we heartily welcomed the sight of a ranchman’s cabin near the end of the next day’s march, for there we purchased a peck of potatoes and thus enlarged our bill of fare to bacon and “spuds” and bread and gravy.

Thanksgiving-day was celebrated by faring sumptuously in the evening and sleeping under cover. And it was the more delightful celebration for being wholly unpremeditated. There was no prospect through the day of anything but the usual march and camp in the open at night. We were plainly in a more populous region, for we had struck a wagon trail again, and repeatedly, in the morning, we met farm wagons laden with solemn families in Sunday dress. As the afternoon wore on we grew hungrier for thinking of Thanksgiving dinners. At dusk we were passing a ranch upon which the hay presses had just ceased working for the day. A little farther down the road we overtook two men who were about to enter a wooden building, which proved to be a deserted school-house. Price hailed them and they turned, standing in the open door. Practised as he was in the amenities of the frontier, it took him no time to strike up an acquaintance, and soon we were bade welcome to share the school-house as a camping-place.

Our hosts were a young American frontiersman and his “partner,” an Indian, who together had a contract for pressing hay on the neighboring ranch, and who were living meanwhile in this deserted building. Having admitted us, they completed their welcome by doing everything in their power for our comfort. They arranged with the owner to pasture our animals on the ranch for the night, and showed us where to find wood for a fire and where on the floor to spread our bed. And when the evening meal was ready, they proposed that we should club together, giving us of their fresh meat and roasted Indian corn and steaming hot bread in exchange for our “spuds” and bacon. But we had some chance of making return, for they had no tobacco to compare with ours, and far into the night we sat talking, over pipes fragrant of good weed.

Price and I were making progress in acquaintance, and every day I had fresh cause for self-congratulation at my extraordinary luck in having fallen in with so good a guide. Of excellent Irish family, Price was not without education and a taste for letters, although he had chosen, almost as a boy, the career of an adventurer on the frontier. And now at middle life, having ranged the Southwest as few men have done, and having seen all phases of its life and shared most of them, he was looking forward to further casual living, perfectly content so long as he had a camping outfit and could wander as he pleased over the face of nature. That some day he would “strike it rich” he never doubted—and may his faith come true. Meanwhile he was getting a good deal out of life. Nature in her milder moods was a constant solace and a joy to him. In long marches through golden Indian summer days, he sang and spouted verses of his own, and told me veritable Ulysses’s tales of men and their strange ways. The few books which he had read he had made his own, for his memory was retentive, and he never forgot, apparently, a face or a name, so that his progress through the country was like a walk about his own neighborhood.

With the instinctive, gentlemanlike reserve of the Western frontiersman, he never questioned me about myself; he was far more interested in what knowledge I might have gathered, which he could add to his own. Oddly enough, it was the little reading that I had done in philosophy that seemed to attract him most. Many a night when it was mild enough to sleep with our heads uncovered we lay side by side, “overarched by gorgeous night,” gazing into the starry firmament, and I would tell him what I could of theories of the universe from Thales to Herbert Spencer, feeling all the while the tension of his mind as he reached out eagerly for these guesses at the mystery of things.

It happened that I had been reading “Coningsby,” at Creede, and Prince slipped the copy into his pocket as we left the camp. He devoured it by our camp-fires at night. The story held him, but most of all he was spellbound by its literary charm, and he added a quaint reason for his liking in the remark:

“You know,” he said to me, “Lord Beaconsfield was always square with the Irish.”

His national partisanship was of the stanchest, and he had always given to the Irish fund when he could; but the outcome of the fight in Committee Boom No. 15 had been too much for him, and he would stoutly maintain that never again, so long as the “traitors” who had turned against Parnell were in the ascendant, would he interest himself in furthering Home Rule—threads of vital connection which were a little strange, I thought, between points so widely severed as St. Stephen’s and the deserts of Arizona.

Elsewhere I have already sketched in outline our trip as we walked south together from Durango to the San Juan, then through the Navajo Reservation to the high plateau of northern New Mexico, where, utterly deserted by fair weather, we camped for a week, while a cold wave swept over us, forcing the thermometer down to ten and twelve degrees below zero, and nearly freezing us and our animals in the still cold of the winter nights.

Even after we got under way again and were making progress southward in the direction of the “rimrock” of the Mogollon Mountains, persistent ill-luck followed us in the shape of almost nightly falls of snow and rain, which added nothing to the comfort of sleeping on the ground or walking across an almost trackless waste. But if we were disappointed here, Price’s promise of Indian summer was abundantly fulfilled when once we had waded through the snow in the great primeval forests that cover the northern slopes of the Mogollons, and made the abrupt descent of the “rimrock.” It was like the contrast of Florida with our Northern winter. The live-oak and budding cottonwood and the warm sun and sprouting grass gave us royal welcome from the cold and snow beyond; and, at the end of the first day’s journey in this region, we came out upon a ranch. It was thirty miles to the nearest neighbor, and the ranchman and his wife were glad to see anyone, even casual “burro-punchers,” like Price and me. There chanced to be a considerable company at the ranch that night. An outfit of three men who were hunting mountain lion through the range for the sake of the bounty on their scalps had come there to camp, bringing with them the carcass of a bear. And the postman, whose beat took him from the Santa Fé line southward through some Mormon settlements and on to scattered ranches north of the Tonto Basin, was also quartered there. So that we sat down more than a dozen strong to dine on bear steak and potatoes and bread and coffee; and when dinner was over, Price and I again had the good fortune to find that our tobacco suited well the taste of the company. We were gathered now in the living-room of the cabin. Some of the men were seated on the floor and others in rough, hand-made chairs about a wood fire in a large, open fireplace. The talk ranged at random over phases of hard living known to such men as these. It was varied and rich and sometimes racy. In it Price shone as a bright, particular star. None had travelled the Southwest so thoroughly as he, or experienced so much of its characteristic life. Then his native readiness at narrative stood him in good stead, and, penniless prospector that he was, he held unchallenged the centre of the stage.

The door of the dining-room stood open, and, when I had finished my pipe, I joined the ranchman’s wife, who sat beside the table in a rocking-chair, holding in her arms her oldest child, a boy of five or six. She seemed glad to have someone to talk to. The conversation at table had swept from end to end in a manner diverting to her, but in which she as little dreamed of joining as a bird would venture with untried wings into a high wind. She was too delicately reared to be at home in the thickening tobacco-smoke of the living-room and so she was alone with the child, the hired woman being in the kitchen. I praised the country side which she and her husband had chosen as their home, and told her how well it contrasted with a region only a few miles to the north; but, if I found a way to her heart at all, it was in genuine admiration of the boy, whose light hair rested in moist curls about his glowing face, as he lay sleeping in his mother’s arms. She was not a discontented woman—far from it; she was young, and her eyes shone with health and with vital interest in the things about her. But it was rarely that she saw anyone from the world outside, and I was a stranger, and when I owned to having been in the Northwest, she told me eagerly that her own people and her husband’s lived “back east in Minnesota,” where they both were born and bred.

How can I suggest the pathos of it? She was not complaining and yet, as she went on telling me of an earlier time, it was almost as a captive might have spoken of the wide range of living when he was free. Life in constant contact with her friends and the breadth of their many interests was in such striking contrast to existence on a ranch, with the nearest neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with never a look from year to year over the rugged hills that formed the horizon.

One could see at a glance the opposite effects of the change upon the two natures. Her husband, native-born and country-bred, like herself, and schooled as a man must be whose bringing up is in a community which draws its blood and traditions pure from New England, yet had become more a frontiersman every year, in whom the memories of earlier things faded fast before the dominant realities of his new surroundings. She, on the contrary, cherished these memories of her own—her home and friends and church associations and Chautauqua circle (she told me particularly of that) until they were enshrined within her, and one could but see that, however loneliness might oppress her, she had an escape which must have furnished at times an enjoyment keener, perhaps, than any which real experience would have brought.

I have forgotten its name, but I think that it was known as “Young’s Valley,” a region some distance south of the “rimrock” and north of the hills which hem in the Tonto Basin. There were several ranches there, and a well-defined trail led on, by way of San Reno Pass, to Phœnix. When we entered the valley Price was all for veering off to the southwest and reaching Phœnix by the Natural Bridge, which he wished me to see. We left the trail near the first cabin which we passed in the valley, a deserted cabin for the time, and struck across the grass-grown hills in search of another way. Soon we were in a maze of trails; they were leading in every direction, but they were cattle-paths, and we came upon herds feeding over the winter-brown hills. It was a gently rolling country at the first, where Price had not the smallest difficulty in steering a course; for, although he had never been there before, yet the way had been described to him and he had no fear of losing it. Our only danger lay, apparently, in exhausting our provisions before reaching an inhabited region beyond. But we thought little of that, and entered light-heartedly enough upon an exploration that was new and attractive to us both.

Trouble began with the weakening of our burros. We had very little grain when we left the Tonto trail, and we counted upon fodder enough from a grazing country. But the grass grew thinner as we went, and the leanness of the cattle attested the leanness of the land, until we began to fear that our beasts would not have strength enough to pull through. Moreover, the country became increasingly rough, so that the effort of travel was the greater. Soon there came a day when our animals were weak and tottering under their loads, and we ourselves had to begin the march on a breakfast of tea and a few boiled beans, which exhausted our store. Still Price was confident of getting through, and, if the burros could hold out, there was prospect of plenty by night.

In the middle of the morning we found lying beside the trail a cow that was plainly dying. For an hour we worked over her, trying to discover evidences of a wound or of a broken leg, and trying, too, to ease her pain. I left her alive regretfully, but Price advised against shooting her.

Matters grew serious that afternoon. The trail became hopelessly lost, so that not even Price, with his developed instinct, could find it again. We were in the heart of the hills now, with cañons opening in strange confusion about us. One after another we explored them, only to find each a “box-cañon” at the end. Price was sure that our desired country lay just beyond, and it was maddening, late in the day, to acknowledge that he could find no way out but the one by which we entered. It was a sorry retreat; hungry and worn we went supperless into camp. By rare good luck, however, we hit upon camping-ground where there was more grass than we had seen for some time, and in the morning our burros and the pony were comparatively revived, fit again for a hard journey. And we gave it them.

Price and I had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and very little then. Meanwhile we had been working hard in keen mountain air, and I was so hungry by the time that we got back to the cow, now dead beside the trail, that I proposed our eating some of her. Price quickly put an end to the plan, however, not on hygienic grounds, but by explaining that the cattlemen, if they found her mutilated, would conclude that she had been killed, and would make matters lively for us in consequence, hanging being the not uncommon penalty for this offence.

One does not keep close count of days in wandering over a frontier, and it was only an aggravation of our plight to remember that it was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as well. But if Christmas heightened the sense of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the afternoon upon open hills, from which we not only saw a section of Young’s Valley, but, rising clear from the middle of it, a column of blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s cabin. We wasted no time in covering the intervening miles and then we lifted, light-heartedly, the latch of the road-gate and, with the easy assurance of the frontier, drove our animals into the yard beside the corral. For some reason we had not been seen from the cabin, so Price walked on to the door, while I mounted guard over the burros. From a seat in the sun on an old hen-coop I could watch them as they nibbled the short grass, while from the cabin came peals of laughter, denoting that Price had fallen among friends who were keeping Christmas festival.

I was willing enough to rest outside, knowing that we had reached a hospitable roof and that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for some time, I presently began to question what was keeping Price, when the cabin-door opened and two women appeared. As they walked down the footpath to the gate, I gathered that they were neighbors returning from a Christmas call. But this was the least interesting inference, and I was totally at a loss for others. The wonder grew as they came nearer. They were young and faultlessly dressed, and one of them was beautiful. Their dress was of the kind that charms with its perfect simplicity and the air of natural distinction with which it is worn. They rested frank eyes on me for a moment as they passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking their thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding open the gate. Who they were remained a mystery, and I was content to have it so, for they left me not without a sense of Christmas visitation, which stirred again the memories of my own “God’s country.”

The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed, and soft of speech, and when he and Price came out together they were stanch friends on the strength of an earlier acquaintance, and we had the freedom of the ranch. We unpacked and corralled the animals and then made ready for dinner. Not for two days had we tasted food, and now we were seated with our host and hostess and their two sons at a table which groaned under sweet potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and great dishes full of steaming “hog and hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas cheer. For two days we stayed at the Virginian’s ranch and then, having purchased from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the march by way of the Tonto Basin and Fort McDowell to Phœnix.

On New-year’s-day we were camped at Fort McDowell; and, when we set out early on the next morning, there remained but about thirty miles to Phœnix, so we resolved to cover it in a single march. Night found us still some miles from the city, but the night was clear and flooded with moonlight. The moon made plain the way, yet played fantastically over the face of the country. Long reaches of white sand were converted into Arabian deserts, with pilgrim caravans moving across them; the irrigated ranches were transformed into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was heightened by the exquisite softness of the night, and then there were stretches of uncompromising Arizona desert, dusty and cactus-grown and redolent of alkali.

It was nearing midnight when we entered the town. Price directed the way to a corral where he was known, and where we left the animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we fared forth to see his friends. It was precisely as though Price had invited me around to his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as we entered it, I saw at once its typical character. At the left of the entrance was a bar, gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while down the deep recesses of the room were faro and roulette tables and tables for poker. The groups about them were formed of “cow-punchers,” and prospectors and “Greasers” and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling and intermingling with a freedom that suggested that in gambling there is a touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.

But more immediately interesting to us was a group which stood beside the bar. It was made up, as I found, of politicians, high in territorial office, all of whom knew Price and hailed him cordially while asking after his luck. For some time we stood talking with them, then one of their number, himself not a politician but a business man, proposed our joining him at supper. We accepted, I the more delightedly because he, of all the group, had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome, he had the bearing of a gentleman, and what he told me of himself confirmed my own impression of a richly varied past. Far into the night we talked, and I could well believe him when he said that the fascination of the life which he had led on the frontier had so far grown upon him that, while he was glad to go back at times to his former home in New York, he could no longer remain contented there, hearing as he always did after a few months, at most, the call back to the wild freedom of the plains. It was under the spell of what he said, enforced by my little experience as a “burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and when I wakened in the morning and found letters urging my return to the East, I was conscious of an indifference to the idea which was wholly new to my experience.

INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS

INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS

If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through regions west of that city. I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered San Francisco in February of the following year, having gone on foot, in the meantime, through Illinois and southern Minnesota and western Iowa, and almost from end to end of Nebraska and Colorado and through some of New Mexico and much of Arizona and California. It was not in the character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. Yet, as one result of personal contact, I cannot help seeing much of the misery of the mass in the light of individuals suffering wretchedly for want of knowledge of a better chance.