CHAPTER XV

IN THE COUNTRY OF THE GIANT CACTUS

There are two Arizonas. There is that wide, breezy plateau region of the north, a mile and more above sea level, where our travels so far have been; and there is the much lower desert region of the south slanting downward from the Gila River to Sonoran Mexico, from which country there is little to distinguish it physically. This desert region, known to the Spaniards as Pimería Alta (that is, the upper country of the Pima Indians), was the only portion of what was afterwards called Arizona to possess a white population until several years after our Mexican War. The tourist to-day penetrates it in two general ways. Near the Mexican frontier the Southern Pacific transcontinental line traverses it, passing through Yuma and Tucson and reaching up to Phoenix by a branch from Maricopa. From the north a branch of the Santa Fe system runs southward from Ash Fork through Prescott directly to Phoenix.

Phoenix is the State capital, a very modern little city dating from 1817, with a population of perhaps 20,000. There is a touch of poetry in the name, which was given to symbolize the rising of a new civilization from the ashes of that prehistoric culture the evidences of whose existence cover so much of Southern Arizona. Here, where 50 years ago was pure desert lorded over by the giant Sahuaro—that huge tree-cactus which is Arizona’s State emblem—we find today surrounding Phoenix a pleasant land of ranches watered by full irrigation canals flowing in the shade of palms and cottonwoods, where besides the common staples of potatoes, corn and alfalfa, there is the exotic grace of the orange and the fig, the olive, the date and the apricot. This is the valley of the Salt River, whose waters are impounded by the huge Roosevelt Dam, some 80 miles east of Phoenix. Travelers desirous of studying desert reclamation will find Phoenix a good center for their observations.

If you value your personal comfort, the time to visit Phoenix is between November and May. During the rest of the year the weather normally is remorselessly hot to the unacclimated. My own acquaintance with the city began in August. In a hazy way I had noticed something unaccustomed about the look of the population, the men particularly, but failed to analyze it until a sociable street car conductor remarked to me, “Stranger here?” “Yes,” said I, “my first day.” “We always know strangers right away,” he continued. “You see, they wear their coats.” Then I took a fresh look around and though it was a fairly crowded street, I failed to see a man who was not in his shirt sleeves. The winter and early spring, however, are delicious with the peculiar purity and dryness of the desert air to which a touch of frost at night may give added vitality.

That interesting 120 mile automobile highway called the Apache Trail finds at Phoenix its western terminus. Its eastern end is at Globe, a mining town on modern lines in the center of a rich copper district.[90] This point is connected by rail with Bowie, 124 miles distant, on the Southern Pacific Railway. Transcontinental travelers by this route, either east- or west-bound, are now given the opportunity of varying their trip by taking this motor drive over the Apache Trail, linking up with the train again at the point of ending. The feature of the motor trip, which consumed 9 to 12 hours, is the chance it yields the traveler to get a more intimate acquaintance with the Arizona countryside than is possible from a car window. Mines and cattle ranges, stupendous cañons, strange rock-sculpturings in glowing colors, the desert with its entrancing vistas, its grotesque and often beautiful plant-life, even a glimpse of prehistoric ruins—all this the drive affords; and to it is added the impressive sight of the Roosevelt Dam with its beautiful, winding driveway upon the breast and its exhibition of man-made waterfalls and 30-mile lake, an unoffended Nature looking indulgently down from surrounding precipices and mountain crests and seeming to say, “Son, not so bad.” There is a hotel at the Dam, on a promontory overlooking the water—and in the water bass and “salmon” are said to be. A stop-over here is necessary if you wish to visit the Cliff Dwellings, 5 miles to the eastward, officially known as the Tonto National Monument.

The Apache Trail detour cuts the traveler out of stopping off at one of the most interesting little cities of the Southwest—Tucson.[91] It may be that not all will find this oasis town, lapped in the desert and girt about with low mountains, as much to their liking as I do, but I believe it possesses features worth going back on one’s tracks to see; for it has a decided character of its own. With an out-and-out modern American side, there is the grace of an historic past, whose outward and visible sign is a picturesque Spanish quarter in adobe, pink, blue and glaring white, clustering about a sleepy old plaza and trailing off through a fringe of Indian _ranchería_ to the blazing desert. The region roundabout is associated with pretty much all the history that Arizona had until it became part of the United States. The Santa Cruz Valley, in which Tucson lies, was a highway of travel during three centuries between Old Mexico and the Spanish settlements and Missions of Pimería Alta. Through this valley or the neighboring one of San Pedro (there is a difference of opinion on this point), Brother Marcos de Niza, the first white man to put foot in Arizona, must have passed in 1539 on his way to Zuñi’s Seven Cities; and this way, the following year, came Coronado upon the expedition that made of New Mexico a province of Spain. A century later the region was the scene of the spiritual labors of Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, a devoted Jesuit missionary to the Indians—a man of mark in his time, to whom is credited the founding of the Spanish Mission San Francisco Xavier del Bac, about 9 miles south of Tucson. The present beautiful structure, however (Tucson’s crack sight for tourists), was not erected until long after Padre Kino’s day.

San Xavier is, in itself, worth a stop-over at Tucson. You may make the round trip from the railway station in a couple of hours by automobile, getting en route a taste of genuine desert scenery, with its scattered covering of creosote bush, mesquite, cat’s claw, ocotillo and sahuaro. The Mission building is one of the most beautiful examples of Spanish ecclesiastical architecture in our country; and the pure white structure, lonely in the desert, its glistening walls and stately towers and dome silhouetted against a sapphire sky, makes a striking sight, oriental in its suggestion. The church part is still used for religious services, and other portions form the residence of Sisters of a Catholic order who conduct a school for the children of the Papago Indians. The primitive habitations of the latter, scattered about within easy access of the Mission, are the Mission’s only near neighbors. A small fee admits one to the church. A feature of interest at the front is the coat-of-arms in relief of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi.[92] This is evidence enough that the present structure, which was begun in 1783 and finished in 1797, was erected by Franciscans, although, as already stated, the Mission itself was founded about a century previously by Jesuits. In 1768 and for ten succeeding years, the resident missionary at San Xavier was Padre Francisco Garcés, one of the most remarkable characters in the Southwest’s history. An enthusiastic young priest in his early thirties when he came to San Xavier, and possessed of a powerful physique, he journeyed on foot up and down the valleys of the Gila and the Colorado (even penetrating into California and to the Hopi village of Oraibi), tirelessly searching out Indians, and preaching to them Christ and the gospel of reconciliation. He was indeed the original Christian Pacifist of the Southwest, urging upon the Indian tribes everywhere that they should settle their differences peaceably and live together as brothers. To prove his faith he would never suffer a military escort to accompany him in his wilderness pioneering, but took only an Indian companion or two as interpreter, and a mule to carry his ecclesiastical impedimenta. Neither would he bear any weapon for defense, but went “equipped only with charity and apostolic zeal.”[93] His kindly, joyous character, so endeared him to the aborigines, that, as he himself records, a village would often refuse to supply him a guide to the next tribe, wanting to keep him for themselves. Under such circumstances, he would set out alone. He was a rare puzzle to those barbarians, both because they found it difficult to decide whether in his long gown and clean-shaven face he was man or woman, and because he strangely wanted nothing of them but the chance to give them a free passport to Heaven—an inexplicable sort of white man, indeed!

While on your Mission pilgrimage, it will be worth while to continue southward some 50 miles more to Mission San José de Tumacácori. The road is fairly good and about 7 hours will suffice for the round from Tucson by automobile; or the train may be taken on the Nogales branch of the Southern Pacific to Tubac station, whence a walk southward a couple of miles brings you to the Mission.[94] The buildings, mostly of adobe, are in ruins and very picturesque with a domed sanctuary and a huge square belfry, now broken and dismantled. They and a few acres surrounding them now form the Tumacácori National Monument, under the care of the United States Government. This Mission in the wilderness was once, next to San Xavier, the most important in what is now Arizona. It was established by Jesuits in 1754, though the present church building is of Franciscan structure of much later date, having been completed in 1822, replacing one destroyed by the ceaselessly raiding Apaches.[95] Of interest, too, in this vicinity, is the ancient village of Tubac, 2 miles north of Tumacácori. Here in the 18th century was a Spanish presidio thought needful for supplementing the preaching of the friars by the argument of the sword. To Californians and those interested in the history of the Golden State, the place has an appeal because here during several years Don Juan Bautista Anza was commandant—the sturdy soldier who conceived the idea of a practicable overland route from Mexico across the deserts to the Spanish settlements on the California coast, and in 1775-6 convoyed over this route the colonists who founded San Francisco. Today Tubac is an unpretentious little adobe hamlet sprawling about a gravelly, sunny knoll, and looking across the Santa Cruz River with its fringe of billowy cottonwoods to the blue line of the Santa Rita and San Gaetano ranges. At Rosy’s Café I got a modest but comforting luncheon, and on your way to Tumacácori you, too, might do worse.

West of Tucson 65 miles is the little town of Casa Grande, which takes its name from one of the most famous prehistoric ruins in the United States, standing about 18 miles to the northeast, near the Gila River. If you have a taste for prehistoric architecture, you will enjoy Casa Grande, for it is _sui generis_ among our country’s antiquities. If, on the other hand, you are just an ordinary tourist, you must decide for yourself whether a half day’s motor trip across the desert to see a ruinous, cubical mud house topped with a corrugated iron roof, in the midst of a sunburnt wilderness, will or will not be worth your while. What touches the fancy is that here, centuries doubtless before Columbus (perhaps before the time of the Cliff Dwellers) dwelt and toiled an unknown people whose remains are of a type that possesses important points of difference from those found elsewhere within the limits of the United States, though similar ruins exist in Mexico. Casa Grande is Spanish for Great House, and is given to this ruin because its outstanding feature is a huge block of a building of three or four stories in height, and thick walls of _caliche_—a mixture of mud, lime and pebbles molded into form and dried, somewhat as modern concrete walls are built up. The unique character of the Casa Grande caused it to be set aside 25 years ago as a National Monument, and important work has since been done there by Government ethnologists, in the way of strengthening and repairing the crumbling walls and cleaning up the rooms. Extensive excavations have also been made close by, resulting in uncovering the foundations of a numerous aggregation of houses plazas, enclosing walls, etc. These reveal the fact that in some age the place was a walled city of importance, even if it was of mud—a sort of American Lutetia, to which Fate denied the glory of becoming a Paris. The huge building in the center—the Casa Grande—probably served partly as a religious temple, but principally as a citadel where in time of attack by enemies the people took refuge. Access to the upper stories was doubtless by ladders outside, as in modern pueblos. Indeed, this is but one of several walled-in compounds of buildings that formerly existed in the Gila Valley, and are now but shapeless heaps of earth. Some of these close to the main Casa Grande ruin have been excavated and their plan laid bare. The remains of an extensive irrigation system are still in evidence, water having been drawn from the Gila.

The first white man of unimpeachable record to see Casa Grande was that Padre Eusebio Kino, of whom we heard at San Xavier and who gave the ruin its Spanish name. He learned of it from his Indians, and in 1694 visited the place, saying mass in one of its rooms. There is some reason to identify the spot with Chichiticale, or Red House, a ruin noted in the reports of Fray Marcos de Niza and of Coronado, both of whom probably passed not far from Casa Grande on their way to Zuñi, but most scholars now reject this theory of identity. After Kino the ruin was frequently examined by explorers and written about up to the American occupation. Anza and his San Francisco colonists camped a few miles distant, and the commandant with his two friars, Padres Garcés and Font, inspected the place with great interest on October 31, 1775. Font in his diary gives a circumstantial account of it, calling it _La Casa de Moctezuma_ (Montezuma’s House), and narrates a tradition of the neighboring Pima Indians as to its origin. It seems[96] that long ago, nobody knows how long, there came to that neighborhood an old man of so harsh and crabbed a disposition that he was called Bitter Man (_el Hombre ’Amargo_, in Padre Font’s version). With him were his daughter and son-in-law, and for servants he had the Storm Cloud and the Wind. Until then the land had been barren, but Bitter Man had with him seeds which he sowed, and with the help of the two servants abundant crops grew year after year, and were harvested. It was these people who built the Great House, and they dwelt there, though not without quarrels because of Bitter Man’s character, so that even Storm Cloud and Wind left him at times, but they came back. After many years, however, all went away—whither, who knows—and were heard of no more forever.

Casa Grande may also be reached by conveyance from Florence on the Arizona Eastern Railway, from which point it is distant a dozen miles or so. Owing to the extreme summer heat of this desert country, the trip to the ruin is most comfortably made in the late autumn, winter or early spring. There is a resident care-taker who acts as guide.