CHAPTER X

THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF ARIZONA

Everybody enjoys his stop off at the Petrified Forest. For one thing, this sight is as easy of achievement as falling off a log, and that counts heavily with your average American tourist. Even if your train drops you at Adamana[62] in the middle of the night, as some trains do, there will be somebody there to carry your bag and pilot you the couple of hundred yards to the lone hotel which, with the railroad station and the water tank, is practically all there is of Adamana. Then you are put comfortably to bed in a room that awaits you. In the morning you are given a leisurely breakfast at your own hour, and packed in an automobile to see one part of the Forest; brought home to luncheon; and in the afternoon motored off to another part. If you are an invalid or just naturally lazy, you need not even leave your seat in the conveyance. After that it is your choice to proceed on your travels, or stay over another day and visit more distant parts of the Forest. In seeing the Forest, you incidentally have several miles of reasonably easy driving over the vast northern Arizona plateau with its wide views to the edge of a world hemmed in with many a dreamy mountain range and long, colorful, flat-topped mesas breaking away in terraces and steps to the plains. You will quite possibly see coyotes and jackrabbits and prairie dogs, cattle grazing the wild grasses, a Navajo Indian or two, cowboys on their loping ponies, perhaps a round-up with its trailing chuckwagon. You will steep yourself in the delicious Arizona sunshine, and be humbled before the majesty of the glorious Arizona sky, blue as sapphire and piled high at times with colossal masses of cumulus clouds that forevermore will mean Arizona to you.

The Forest is unfortunately mis-named, for it is not a forest. There is not a single standing trunk, such as you may see occasionally in Utah or the Yellowstone. In the midst of a treeless plain the broken logs litter the ground in sections rarely over 25 feet long, oftenest in short chunks as if sawn apart, and in chips and splinters innumerable. Trunk diameters of 2 or 3 feet are common, and as high as 6 feet has been reported. It seems likely that the trees did not grow where they now lie but have been washed hither in some prehistoric swirl of waters, (as logs are carried down stream in our latter-day puny freshets,) becoming stranded in certain depressions of the land where we now find them, often having had their woody tissue gradually replaced by silica and agatized. Whence they came nobody knows, nor when. The guess of the unlettered guide who shows you about, may be as near right as the trained geologist’s, who locates the time of their fall as the Triassic Age, and their old home as perhaps beside some inland sea; but whether that was one million years ago or twenty, who can say, further than that they surely antedate the appearance of man upon this planet. The trees are evidently of different sorts, but mostly conifers apparently related to our present day araucarias, of which the Norfolk Island pine is a familiar example. Mr. F. H. Knowlton, botanist of the Smithsonian Institution, identifies then as _Araucarioxylon Arizonicum_, an extinct tree once existing also in the east-central United States.[63] Limbs and branches in anything approaching entirety are not found—only the trunks and infinite fragments are here. The coloration due to the presence of iron oxides in the soil at the time of silicification is often exquisite, in shades of pink, yellow, blue, brown, crimson—a never failing source of delight to visitors. Dr. L. F. Ward, of the United States Geological Survey, has said that “there is no other petrified forest in which the wood assumes so many varied and interesting forms and colors.... The state of mineralization in which much of this wood exists almost places it among the gems or precious stones. Not only are chalcedony, opals and agates found among them, but many approach the condition of jasper and onyx.”[64]

The parts of the Forest that tourists usually visit are the so-called First Forest, about 6 miles south of Adamana (which contains the huge trunk that spans a picturesque chasm 45 feet wide, and is known as the Natural Bridge[65]); the Second Forest, 2½ miles further south; and the North Forest. The last is 9 miles due north from Adamana, at the edge of such a chaotic, burned-out bit of volcanic waste, as is in itself worth seeing, breaking away gradually into the Painted Desert. If for any reason, your time is too limited to admit of your visiting more than one section of the Forest, by all means, let that section be this North Forest. The trees are less numerous and the fragments are less strikingly colored than in the parts to the south, but that background of color and mystery given by the desert, lends a fascination and gives to the picture a composition that is unique and unforgettable.

There is, moreover, the so-called Third or Rainbow Forest,[66] 13 miles southwest of Adamana. This region contains the most numerous and the largest trunks, some of them (partially underground) measuring upwards of 200 feet in length. The especially rich coloring of the wood here has given rise to the local name “Rainbow.”

In several parts of the Petrified Forest (a large portion of which is now, by the way, a National Monument), are the ruins of many small prehistoric Indian villages. The relics found indicate that four different stocks of Indians have lived among these shattered trees, one clearly Hopi, another probably Zuñian, the others undetermined (one apparently of cannibalistic habits). Dr. Walter Hough has written very entertainingly of this human interest of the Petrified Forest in Harpers’ Magazine for November, 1902. The houses of the Rainbow Forest were unique in aboriginal architecture in that they were constructed of petrified logs. To quote Dr. Hough: “It is probable that prehistoric builders never chose more beautiful stones for the construction of their habitations than the trunks of the trees which flourished ages before man appeared on the earth. This wood agate also furnished material for stone hammers, arrowheads and knives, which are often found in ruins hundreds of miles from the Forest.”[67]

IN THE NORTH PETRIFIED FOREST

Near Adamana, Arizona. A glimpse of the famous Painted Desert in the background.

A CORNER IN SANTA FE, N. M.

The New Mexican capital retains to this day many picturesque features of the Spanish and Mexican dominance.