Part 2

That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert. Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient, are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology, a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too.

One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars, mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their head, the great Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma.

Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung, those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.

But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more. “Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids, carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still.

To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will serve as a reason for this notebook.

Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian inhabitants and few indeed of other men.

For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation.

As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August 1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other troubles on the Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would get no civil consolation.

Until then there had been a great show of tactful diplomacy between the two Governmental representatives; the one of war counseling peace, and the supposed civilian who had ventured close to war. The Colonel spoke, for the first time without regard to the gentle traditions of the Interior Department:—

“Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk!”

And there is another reason for the telling. Probably no other section of Indian country is more visited than is the Painted Desert, where the Snake gods have such influence. From June to October comes a host, packing cameras and notebooks and sketching-blocks, attired in weird garments, big with questions, and expecting to find hotels. Most of them wish to rough it smoothly, and are easily annoyed. They seek the natural wonders of the Empire, and especially the religious “dances” of the Indian people, chief of which is the annual Hopi Snake Dance. A strange crowd, having more of enthusiasm than sense, staggering under theories, swelled with importance and criticism, generously stuffed by guides.

A library has been written and vocabularies have been exhausted in their efforts to explain the beauties and the thrills. Canvas sufficient to tent a city has been spoiled by those who would capture the delicate and elusive Desert charm. Historians and ethnologists have recorded and traced; antiquaries have uncovered and restored. The museums of the East are filled with looted treasure, while the files at Washington drip complaints. (“Oblige me by referring to the files.”) And the Indian as a savage—and a little-understood savage at that—has been idealized. And those who do not observe this view—berated.

But not a word has been printed, and few spoken without a sneer, regarding those of the United States Indian Service who keep watch and ward in the remote places: those who govern and protect, educate and guide; those who have kept the Indian living, that he may be sketched and analyzed and gaped at. This work extends beyond the dude season, through the lonely, bitter winters, embracing at times contagion-camps among an unreasoning, often unappreciative, and occasionally defiant population.

To further education among those who do not want it, to advance medication among fatalists, to attain some show of morals among an insensible and unmoral people, to demand respect and win affection from suspicious aliens, to rule absolutely without an army, and, above all, to keep sane and just without society, call for all of any man’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, and should arouse something other than blatant criticism from those who boast intelligence.

Having accomplished these things, every one, I am proud of the record; and I shall not fail to acknowledge my full indebtedness to those faithful men and women of the Service who made my efforts possible of success—employees, traders, missioners, not forgetting those few from among the heathen who gave their loyalty and confidence. They too have felt the sneers and insults of the multitude; and the grudging appreciation of an equally insensible Bureau nearly three thousand miles away is small reward. Many valued employees have grown old in this Service without a syllable of commendation from Washington. And I have prompted at least one Commissioner of Indian Affairs to acknowledge his feeble debt to a dying physician—dying on his feet, still nobly making the rounds.

When I left Washington, in 1910, I had no idea that such a future work would extend my little vacation into the years. Six months out o’ doors, and either I should be reëstablished at the old stand, pounding the old typewriter, or I should have attended a ceremony that is final but not interesting to the subject thereof. A simple calendar; not the first, however, to stand revision.

Morning brought Chicago, to me a grim and sinister city, and a day spent in its galleries and clubs; then the train again, and its long crawl across level, heated Kansas. Excellent living on a diner, and came the thought that wherever this railroad wended would follow good food, which I required, and service of the best. Vain and soon-to-be-exploded vision! The railroad carries food and service; the West sees it go by. In the Desert one has desert fare.

The contrast was outside the windows; on the third morning this contrast became acute. Instead of hamlets, farms, and country lanes, there was now the grayish-green of the sage, broken by stunted cedars on the slopes, with an overtone of brown as the soil reflected light. There was no indication of complete aridity, so one could not think of this as a desert. Scant vegetation lived from the brush of the foreground to the timbered blue of the distant ranges. They did not appear as lofty mountains, although many peaks lifted against a calm blue sky. Beyond the little telegraph points, the occasional adobes of section crews, and water tanks, the landscape held not a sign of habitation. In the middle distance were strange formations of crumbling shale, banded with the spectral white of gypsum: queer piles such as might have been designed by some sardonic humorist. Now straying cattle, gaunt as the hills, blanket Indians idling at a station, or a ranger on a shabby mount, were the only things of life. Over all the golden haze of New Mexico, moistened by the mists of the Rio Grande.

But later in the day this blue-toned view began to change. The sky grew clearer, the distance more intimate and revealing. Everything snapped into the brilliancy of sharp relief. Where had been isolated buttes, now ran barricades of rock, wind-worn, pinnacled, and domed, while the cold tones—blue and silver—of the river country warmed to the dry saffrons and parched reds of sun-baked Arizona, the Land of Little Rain. One could, as the old-timer sings, “see farther and see less” than on any other stage of the world.

Just at sunset the train slowed into a weather-browned, dust-covered town, its main street along the tracks and little else in sight. It was Sunday and the season of the wind. A swirling fog screened everything as the cars stopped. There is nothing more forlorn than a Southwest town of a Sunday in the windy season. A long rank of stores and saloons displayed false fronts, innocent of paint. A few starved trees waved crippled branches, and were most piteous. Flapping awnings, flying leaves, waste paper, sand, and cinders filled the air. When the wind ceased howling for a moment, there fell a deadly silence. It seemed to me as if that place must have been as it was for a thousand years, drowsing in the red-gold sunset, abandoned, overlaid by the itinerant dust of all the ages. A clatter of hoofs, a shot, a crash of glass, and a man or two by Remington would have completed the picture.

A little to the north of it was Poverty Flat. To the east was the drying bed of the Little Colorado, a mile in width, lined by withered cottonwoods, and possessing scarcely enough liquid to demand a foot-bridge. In the west, a thing of splendor, reared the beautiful San Francisco range, snow-crowned, radiant, the sun searing down into its ancient craters. Elsewhere, everywhere, stretched the Desert, sterile, barren, robing now in the purplish-brown shades of early dusk. Its unlimited expanse, silent, desolate, suggested something of foreboding, something of waiting menace.

Thank God! there was one of those splendid railroad hotels at hand. I hurried into it, a little of civilization such as I knew, glad to shut out the night that advanced across that empty plain, swallowing as it came the masses of the Moqui Buttes and all the strange upland country that a year later I was to call home.

III

INTO “INDIAN COUNTRY”

“Indian country” applies to all lands to which the Indian title has not been extinguished, even when not within a reservation expressly set apart for the exclusive occupancy of Indians. “Indian country” includes reservations set apart for Indian tribes by treaty, Executive order, or Act of Congress.—Meritt: The Legal Status of the Indian

The next morning was another day, as I have often heard remarked since; and whatever the terrors of the night, the crisp, cheerful Arizona morning brings with it renewed hope and assurance.

The town waked-up; the air held the tonic thrill that comes only from pine-clad peaks; the yellow dust of yesterday now kept its place. At this season in Arizona one may expect the wind to rise about noon and continue its nerve-racking tyranny until sunset. The blessed sunlight prevents one from remaining depressed, however, and there is always an end to the windy season, whatever the nerves meantime. When the last shriek has died away in early summer, it seems there lives a vacuum, a strange stillness, like that which follows the stopping of a clock.

I found the station platform quite busy that morning. Trains discharged their hungry freight, and the hotel kitchens fed them in battalions. A well-stocked news-stand promised that I would not lack for entertainment. The general spirit of moving life and activity caused one to forget that the Desert lurked beyond, that these rails were simply a tiny causeway spanning it for many miles, desolation on either side.

Chance acquaintance is made easily in the Southwest, and it was not long before I answered the query of a young man as to where I headed. I replied that there was a long journey to make, out into the Desert, among the Indians perhaps. He seemed not to be aware that Indians were of the immediate locality, and asked: “How far?”

“Oh—about thirty miles.”

“Humph!” he commented, drily; “people in this country go that far to water a horse.”

The pastime and humor of Arizona is exaggeration. I know now that the ranchers of the Southwest, and the so-called nomadic Indians, for that matter, are people of definite localities. An Indian of the Desert will name and locate his hogan or home camp as specifically as the man of a city street. Indians are born, live, and frequently die within a very small area of the Desert. That is why Indians—and you may scoff—are likely to be lost at night during storms. Their distant travels are well planned, by daylight, much the same as anyone breaks monotony with a holiday or business trip. Only those of the most remote desert places make long journeys as a part of daily routine, and then when need compels. I have yet to see the man who lived miles from water. Water decides where any man may live in the Desert—and his animals too.

It was a different story when I aroused a very fat individual who dozed complacently with his chair propped back against a livery barn. I inquired about a team for the immense hike I had to make. There were no automobiles then to traverse the desert, and few were in the little towns. To-day gasoline and tires, coupled with much swearing, grease, and shoveling of sand, have conquered most of the desert distances, and the last time I covered that road was in one of those striped metallic potato-bugs hatched by that Detroit genius who could not place Benedict Arnold in his country’s history, but who has made possible thirty miles the hour as against a former five. Then, or once upon a time, the horse—or his superior relative, the mule—was indispensable, and the keeper of a stable was a king of transportation, something akin to Jim Hill. This one acted just that way. Evidently he had not lost anything out back.

“Well—” he hummed, doubtfully, “that’s a longish trip, that is. I’ve made it—” giving me the impression that it had been an unusual effort, fraught with courage. “I went out there once, but it was two days’ hard travel, ’cause yeh have to rest the horses over night, returnin’ next day. That spoils two good days for me, and I have to charge yeh accordin’. It’ll be thirty dollars. When do yeh want to start?”

“Never, at that rate!” I declared very promptly.

So I went back to the hotel and sent a telegram up the line stating that I would there remain in comfort until some reasonable means of travel came in sight. The answer indicated that I had been heard from. Several days after a rather rough-looking individual called for me and introduced himself as the Boss.

“I was coming to town anyway,” he said, “but usually I don’t freight my employees.” Waiving this little matter of custom, I inquired: “How far is it to the Agency?”

“Twenty-five miles. We’ll make it in less than four hours.”

And we did, for he drove an excellent team of mares, and his reputation as a driver was like unto that of Jehu.

On the way I explained the purpose and definite length of my visit. He seemed relieved, for it had been his original suspicion that I, being from Washington direct, came seeking his job. Having worked in a newspaper office long enough to learn that one must build absolute loyalty to the chief, I assured him that his interests were mine, and thereafter we got along famously. He was a lovable fellow when one had punctured the sun-dried skin of him, under which there was much to admire; and not the least was that he felt his tight little Agency to be the finest spot on earth. And why should he not?

Some few years before this he had drifted into that loop of the Little Colorado River, a place that for sterile barrenness could not be matched and that justified few visions. Armed with a single letter of authority, he had taken charge of the empty landscape. He pitched his tent beneath an old spreading cottonwood tree. I can imagine his lonely vigils and his planning under the brilliant desert stars. First, the well to tap the subcurrent of the river; then, one by one, the Government buildings, of rough rock quarried from the near-by mesas, meanwhile engaging and lodging and feeding rougher laborers, and disputing with contractors, and keeping them all from liquor, until a little town grew in this river-angle that for centuries had known only the withered trees, the cooing of many doves, and driftwood. The grounds were marked and leveled and drained. In springtime the river flooded the place, but he was not dismayed. An office, warehouses, shops, and barns were built. Then arose a well-appointed school, with dormitories for the Indian children, queer desert gamins that for a time were as frightened rabbits and wept for their smoky camps. There were kitchens, baths, a laundry, a plant to furnish light and ice and heat; for while the summer may be broiling, the winter brings its snow and bitter wind in that unprotected waste. He saw the sick and built a hospital. There were quarters for his staff of employees. He planted trees along cement walks; he broke ground for a farm, and planned an irrigation system with its pumping-plant. His barns held feed against the winter, and his commissaries flour and clothing. A trader came for license, and then another; and a grant was made to a little mission church. Last, but not the least necessary to his desert kingdom, was a guardhouse for those who disputed his sage counsels. High above it all floated the Flag, stoutly whipping in the desert wind.

One day he folded up his tent and walked into his capital. The town was not finished—true; it was not perfect—true. Already he could see the mistakes of a pioneer hand, similar to those of the Mormons who had settled in that country generations before, and whose record was a graveyard. It is not finished to-day, and several successors have added their work to his. It may eventually be a folly and a failure in the sense of profits, for where the Mormons failed in those early days of zealotry who can hope to succeed? Ah! in the sense of material profits—Yes! But where had been nothing but the blind Desert and the savage river, nothing but the blow-sand and the horned toad, he had created an outpost of civilization to reach and serve and protect a helpless people who, theretofore, had only their desert demons.

As far as he could see to the north, where the red-toned mesas raised their twisted shoulders above the desert rim, where the dim blue crowns of monster lava-buttes loomed against the sky, to the edge of the world, it seemed, the domain was his kingdom. Twelve hundred human beings hailed him “Nahtahni,” which is Chief, and listened to his advice. His was the only voice they heeded without suspicion, for had they not been driven from this land in midwinter, by armed men, packing their few possessions through the snow? And had it not required a fighting President of the United States to restore to them this pitiful inheritance? No less, indeed!

But to them, people of no contrasts, was it not a wonderful inheritance—that all-embracing stage, from the Red Mesa where the tumbled rocks stood in rings, “Children at Play”; from the Sapphire Lakes and the restless river to the country of the Moqui, guarded by the lava buttes, those somber blue-clad gods of the northern sky? And was it not the Desert!

Perhaps—no doubt of it—that Great White Father had sent this curious Nahtahni from his own household. The world has four corner-posts, one the Desert and one that is Washington. They could remember those nights when they first gathered around his tent under the gnarled old cottonwood, the surly river’s murmur in their ears, their glowing fires matching his against the stars. He had told them of his mission. And he was not afraid of white men—had sent some of them briskly about their business. His commission read—they knew it by his action—that all pertaining to their peace and welfare devolved on him; that he was responsible for their best interests. His mark upon a “nultsose” was the money of the land. His police wore the eagle button. Truly this was a man to be respected; and he was their Chief.

So at his command they brought children to the school, for it seemed he had a peculiar fondness for children; and yet he had no sheep to herd. A strange fellow! They came in from their corrals and patches to work for implements and livestock; they hauled the stores and coal from the railroad, herding their wiry ponies with many a wild cry; they found that his queer blue papers could be exchanged for the hard silver dollars of the West.