Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

We sat at a belated meal in the dining-hall. The drive of twenty odd miles and the tang of the desert air had given me an unusual appetite that promised the making of weight, when behold! in the doorway giving on to the kitchen appeared a vision, perhaps I should say an apparition, the cook! The expression turned on me was intended, I have no doubt, to be one of welcome; but whatever it was supposed to register, I have never forgotten the sardonic leer of that unkempt individual, promising worse to come. And it arrived. Leathery mutton, cold; baking-powder biscuit, lacking character; coffee, lukewarm, weakly concocted from the Arbuckle blend that retreated westward after the Civil War; milk, fresh from tin-plate Holsteins, mixed with water from an alkali pump; and last, but not least for a sick man’s stomach, the “bull butter,” innocent of ice, slimy, having the flavor of kerosene.

Farewell! a long farewell to Maryland cooking!

I remember having been snowed-in, on a time, back in the farthest Arizona hills, with a Government physician recently from the East. He had sought Arizona to stimulate a lagging constitution that threatened to initiate him as one of the Club. He had traveled westward, visioning the tropic palms, the date trees, the pomegranate hedges of Phœnix; and there we were at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea-level, with the snow two feet deep, and a frigid blast coming straight off the range. He had been lost that night and nearly frozen on the desert where the roads were obliterated, and only the sense of his team had brought him to this haven. We tore the harness from them first, and an engineer helped me to warm him into amiability after the horses were cared for. The time came for retiring, and I recall his diving between dank sheets in an unheated room at this little hill station, his teeth chattering, his lips blue, and the fervid expression of him:—

“Blank! And blankety-double-blank the damned Philadelphia fool who told me Arizona was warm!”

And as I surveyed that tempting array of victuals, I had the same feeling toward those kindly disposed men of Washington who, out of a crass ignorance, had assured me that their desert stations possessed food.

Later, a couple of obliging employees carried my trunk upstairs to a room that would have been a credit to a penitentiary. It welcomed one with four walls and possessed a window. There were also a ceiling and a floor. These necessary ornaments, together with a bed and a decrepit chair, which had crashed under many disconsolate employees and had been skillfully and maliciously fitted together again to lure me, comprised the generous list of fittings. All and several extras thought to be necessary to comfort could be supplied by the employee from his salary, the proportions of which had been established during the administration of Carl Schurz, and have changed but little since, despite wars and rumors of wars and the coming of the income tax, “which includes the quarters as part of the compensation.”

Next morning I was aroused about dawn, or a little before, by the business of breaking stove-wood, a bombardment of mishandled crockery, and the hiss of vicious cooking. A thick wave of reanimated mutton-grease fogged upward and invaded my boudoir, which I sought to vacate as quickly as possible. I encountered the cook at the foot of the stairs, and she had not improved during the night.

“Good morning,” I tried to say cheerfully, which caused her to notice me. “Who cares for the rooms?” I asked. She bent on me a sinister eye, as if divining my thought.

“You mean, who cleans ‘em, an’ all that?”

“Just so,” I admitted.

“Well—you’ll care for your own.”

And that was that. It was final, with the wall-eyed finality that had become unwritten law in all properly conducted Agencies.

At table I met an Irrigation Service man who had just returned from a survey of farther desert conditions. He expressed great joy in having accomplished his journey without accident or delay, and in successfully returning to this oasis. He said he was always sure of decent meals at this place, whereas, at that post from which he had arrived, life was unbearable because of the atrocious and altogether impossible menu. I requested that he repeat this statement. There could not be two such places. But he was certain of his facts, and his wife confirmed the story. They cautioned me never to go to that other post—an entirely superfluous piece of advice.

Then I learned that at each of the Government establishments was maintained a Thing (as Carlyle would have phrased it), a fixture, an Institution Horrible, that dominated the people and to which they suffered allegiance. It was termed “a Mess.” And such had been its ascendancy and its acquired power, that they were more or less proud of its traditional horrors in due proportion to the misery produced. I learned that Washington recognized this thing, and actually advertised it to innocent incoming employees, suppressing with a cautious diplomacy its evils, and sounding aloud the one thing to be praised—the small cost per individual. The nomenclature is good. Never before was an hideous evil so briefly and so thoroughly described.

Having been deceived as to nearly everything concerning this Vale of Sharon, with the exception of the climate,—there it was before one, three hundred square miles of it in sight, unlimited, free and untaxed as yet; I learned of the altitude when I went to purchase a pair of shoes,—dispatched a telegram for a case of prepared food, the kind that has everything from soup to nuts in one bottle, and began to debate whether it would be braver to die unflinchingly silent or to carry my views to the chief. The bottled food came in, and I tightened my belt on it for seven days, learning meantime that there was no dairy herd other than the kind that comes nested forty-eight tin cows to the case; that only the chief was rich enough to afford poultry, and therefore there were no eggs; there was no fruit save the oranges that dried at the trading-post, and an occasional wagonload of melons sold by the pound. One could buy a very fair sample of undernourished watermelon for a dollar.

The refrigerator freights, however, booming east from California, carrying fish and vegetables and fruit, passed that place twice a week and within thirteen miles. One could see the railroad water-tank from the mess-kitchen window. But it required three things to procure food from that refrigerator service, to wit: desire, energy and money; and they were all noticeably absent from these people. I decided to protest.

The Chief had wearied of such complaints, as indeed I did later when I faced the same problem. But it was his duty, nay his very safety, to settle everything. The skipper of this desert ship had no first-officer to take the deck with pride and responsibility, to smother complaints, and to avoid or crush mutinies. He must do it himself. Quelling revolts was one of his regular tasks; and he had become unusually—not to say cunningly—proficient in the various methods. Some he roared down, and others he trapped into submission.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked, sourly.

“Well, sir, I came here to keep alive, and aside from my natural intelligence, several physicians of the East urged me to absorb food—food—as little of it tinned as possible. Now I have been out to survey the can-pile, and have arrived at the conclusion that your employees must consume several tons of embalmed materials each year. And too, my food must be cooked. My ancestors quit eating acorns several centuries ago. The true state of your people is that of slow starvation. They have somehow got used to it. I shall not last that long. Their tradition has it that they can maintain life on a meal-bill of eleven dollars per month—”

“Give ’em credit,” he interrupted, darkly; “they got it down to nine once.”

“Which recalls your Mormon’s idea of luxury,” I hurried on. “Remember that story you told me coming in? Said the tourist—‘What would you do if you had a million dollars?’ ‘A million dollars!’ cried the Mormon, his eyes shining; ‘I’d buy a six-mule team, pull freight, an’ eat nothing but canned goods!’ That Mormon was weaned at this mess.”

The Chief rubbed his wig reflectively, and from his rueful smile I knew that he possessed the remnant of a starved sense of humor. He glanced furtively about his office, and when he spoke it was in a low, cautious tone.

“True,” he said; “The mess would drive a goat to suicide. But what can I do? They like it. It is a dangerous thing, young man, to disturb anything the proletariat likes. Thank God! I am married and have separate quarters. It has been a mystery to me for years how they keep alive, and turn out each morning for work.”

And where Squeers’s face would have cracked into a malevolent leer, the countenance of the Boss suddenly bubbled over with a wholesome expression that announced the winning of my case. He slapped his hand on his knee. He had found a solution—a Machiavellian scheme calculated to strike down at one blow the system and its latest critic. He leveled his finger at me.

“I’ll make you manager of the mess!” he cried, triumphantly. “That’s the ticket. It’ll be up to you to provide real food, cooked, an’ all, an’—”

Evidently a very hopeful light came into my eyes. He paused, grinned somewhat shamefacedly, and hastened to advise me.

“Don’t accept too hastily.” He avoided my gaze. “At best it is a thankless job, this nourishing those who would rather starve that they may pay installments to California land-boosters. You’ll be no benefactor. You will find it depressing. You will be ostracized, and it may even be unsafe for you to stroll around unguarded at night.”

Notwithstanding these perils, I accepted.

The unwritten law, like most futile and messy things requiring the democratic knowledge of all and the wisdom of none, demanded that a solemn conclave of those to be fed was necessary in any change of the routine of it, and that a vote be taken, after devious discussion and debate. Imagine convening a group of circus lions to inform them that hereafter, at feeding time—and so on!

The Chief knew that a popular vote would demonstrate the usual popular row. There are only two kinds of Indian Agents: those who compromise with everything and have interminable hell on their weakling hands, to the end that they are respected neither at home nor abroad, and those who compromise with nothing. The first sort is never defeated, and never resigns. He remains continually in service, shifted from point to point, cluttering it with his inefficiency and indecision. Neglected plants and chaotic systems are monuments, kept at national expense, to these amiable bench-warmers and trimmers. The second variety rides the waves for a season or two, and crashes down finally, as all tyrants, however benevolent, before the clamorous indignation of outraged and inefficient democracy.

The Chief being one of the last sort, the electorate was disfranchised. There was no session of Parliament. The whole thing was done in much the same fashion as had cost Charles the First his head.

Bulletin

Beginning with the first of the coming month, and until further
orders, the Chief Clerk will administer the affairs of the Mess.

It was received in a grim, not to say stony, silence. Like a tenderfoot, I rushed in where an angel would have sought the cyclone cellar. Cooks were employed monthly, and it was midway in the month. That night I gave the cook her time.

Now, having ended one dynasty, it behooved me to create another. I went to the Chief.

“When can I have the transportation necessary to my duties as maître d’hôtel hereabouts? I’ll drive in to the railroad town.”

“Do you know the road?” the Boss asked, doubtfully.

“That doesn’t bother me. When do I get a team?”

“To-morrow,” he replied, and left me to my fate.

Now I had traversed the road but once, when coming in a month before. The doubtful tone in his voice disturbed me. Perhaps the route-finding would not be so easy as a trick with cards. I sought out the pleasantest of the range men, and asked his advice concerning the matter.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he assured, and as this would have been very plain indeed, it heartened me. “Keep to the main-traveled road, and take all the turns to the right—going in.”

This seemed a very simple matter, and I gave no thought to the turns I might encounter coming out. I was then, of course,—and because of some mental defect am yet,—notoriously the worst road-finder in all the Southwest. And when I departed next day, with “the old woman’s team,” there was no one to crowd additional information on me.

In the city, to lose one’s way may be foolish without being unfortunate; but in the Desert one must arrive at his destination, or the results may be serious. And all the road directions from old-timers are similar. The Plains Indian can be more definite. He may say, “Three hills and a look.” The Arizona guide is a despair.

“You can’t miss it,” they invariably prelude. “Take the main road until you reach that little cornfield just beyond the hogan of Benally Bega’s—remember that draw before you come to Black Mesa? That’s it. Then the left trail until you reach that scraggy cedar; then head down across for that old corral, where the sheriff caught Bob Peterson; then—you know where we nooned in 1913? It’s right east of that; and then, you can’t miss it—it’s right over from there—” the whole distance being sixty miles, and no water in the first five townships.

One plunges deeply on the optimism indicated by “you can’t miss it,” and starts. At midnight, with a tired team and no blankets, one suddenly realizes that he has missed it, and missed it bad. The sun sinks to rest, the desert grows black and threatening, he is off the main-traveled road, and no candle-lights are gleaming through the dark. There he remains until morning, when, cold and cramped, having kindled a fire to warm a can of beans that a more sensible man had slung under the seat, he finds that he has invited in the whole Navajo tribe. Five minutes after the wisp of smoke and the aroma of the burnt beans, comes an Indian, and another, and another, each looking earnestly for breakfast. It never fails. Between many signs and all the beans, not forgetting the passing of “thathli ibeso,” which is one dollar in hard, bitable silver, he finds that he is only five miles off the road, and that his original destination is “right over from there.”

On the cook-side of the board I played in luck. A row occurred in the short-order section of a Harvey House, and one first-class itinerant cook was flung headlong out of a job on the morning I reached town. It might never happen again. And knowing nothing of the back-country, and especially being ignorant of an Indian Service mess, he embraced the opportunity to sign up for a desert cruise. It was necessary for him to pack his belongings, the most precious of which were a trick dog and a phonograph, together with one record entitled: “She Is the Ideal of My Dreams”; and this he insisted would occupy him several days. I arranged for him to meet a team at the Agency freight-station, and next day he assisted me in the purchase of supplies for the coming month. We bought nearly a ton of foodstuffs. My vehicle was one of those light spring wagons, a “desert hack,” rated to carry about one thousand pounds. Like an Indian freighter who loads pig lead, we never tallied the dead weight, but piled it in. The wagon groaned in its every joint under the load; and so I began the return trip.

One could not miss the right direction, for there were the distant mountains to point it, with the river as an eastern boundary. So long as one remained west of the river he must arrive somewhere. True. But for that river, and my sensible determination not to cross its half-dry bed, I might still be en route.

The roads of the desert are many, and all converge toward a settlement. Proceeding to town is very simple. But on leaving it the roads begin diverging in a most puzzling fashion, and there is a decision to be made at each departure. Of course the main-traveled road is usually plain and definite—usually. About half way to the Agency I was deceived by ten yards of bunch grass at a road juncture, and blithely accepted the branch leading to a river-ford. Nearing sunset, I had reached the river,—which was no place to be at that time.

“If alone, always tie the horses to the wheel.”

There isn’t anything else in the Desert to tie them to. So I did it, and started on foot for the nearest rise to make a reconnaissance. The scene of empty desolation, blurring in the first grays of twilight, was not inspiring. The scarlet and gold of the sunset behind the ’Frisco Range did not awaken poetry within me. I was thinking about something else, and joyfully I hailed a faint gleam on the far middle-distance, the last rays gilding the Agency tank-roof.

Between my position on the river, and that haven of rest, as the crow would negotiate it, stretched at least five miles of the Desert. So short a distance caused me to snort at my former fears. I went back to the wagon and found that the impatient horses had wound the lines around that wheel until they resembled a chariot pair reined in at the finish of an exciting race. With some difficulty I managed to release them, and climbed in as they plunged off seeking their feed.

The shortest distance between two given points is a straight line, or so the books have it. I followed my early schooling, and headed straight for the tank.

The shortest distance between two points in the Desert is not a straight line. I there and then learned this lesson. Between that river-ford and the main road, meandering somewhere to the left, were at least a thousand different obstructions, skillfully concealed by Nature, deceptive in the half dark, and treacherous traps when night came on: sand dunes that were as bogs; wide, shallow arroyos; scrubby slopes cut by wicked little gullies, all flanked and faced by other sand-meshes. In and through all this the team tugged wearily, at times stopping of themselves for breath, at times plunging desperately. A dozen times I lashed the horses to the wheel and went ahead to plot the way; a dozen times I returned to find them wound back on their haunches, in their efforts to free themselves from the overloaded wagon and the fool that had come out of the East. About midnight, after traveling to every point of the modern compass, I tried a last rise, determined, if this failed, to unharness and ride in, trusting to the horses to find their oats. And topping this little ridge was an old, half-hidden road. It angled away from the river toward the place where a real road ought to be. We swung down it, and an hour later, at an easy jog, the axles holding- and groaning-out to the last, we reached the Agency gate. The sleepy barn-man, an Indian, came out to meet me.

“Where you been?” he asked, with that innocent curiosity his tribe is noted for. “Have trouble findin’ the road?”

“No,” I told him, feeling a confidence born of relieved anxiety. “Nope! just started from town late.”

There is nothing like assurance after a distressing evening. And too, had I not landed a cook? I could not spoil such a triumph by admitting that I had been lost.

V

DESERT LIFE AND LITERATURE

The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected
to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities
of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he
probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be
remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any
quarter of the globe.—T. B. Macaulay: Johnson

Life in the little stone house to which I had now removed was filled with books and tobacco smoke and belated plans in futures—that time when I should be strong again. I had regretted the impossibility of my packing out a Washington library, but my old friend and bitter critic, the now astonishing Mr. Mencken, kept my intelligence alive by sending parcels of the latest publications, and these arrived fresh and unscorched, though having passed beneath his searing eye and ruthless pen. Later, my faithful typewriter, a relic of newspaper days, was sent forward in defiance of medical advice, and I wrote a few stories that, with their magazines and editors, are now forgotten.

Evenings, swung in a hammock, I studied sunsets and their glories, masked and reflected by the magnificent San Francisco Range, and gradually began to absorb the desert peace. To know its moods, those swift and unexpected changes, having in them often a dream’s stealthiness and unreality, one must live for a year in a little house built low against the brown bosom of the Desert.

I remember the peculiar silvern radiance of one evening. The light came through dust-screens and, filtering across brown levels, limned patches of greasewood in a lemon pallor. The sentry cottonwoods of the riverbank were picked out as brilliant etchings of gray trunks and lacy branches in a glow of apple-green. Night swarmed out of the east in great blue clouds. Flying before it were cottony puffballs, white and twisting into the sunset, like masses of fleece, newly washed. But in the northwest swung a dun-colored curtain, lighted by the afterglow, suspended from the higher sky, a drifting, heavy drapery, its ragged edges trailing the tops of the blunted buttes with filmy rain-tresses. Between this curtain and the middle distance the mesa barricades had not yet darkened, and they were sharply outlined as gaunt shapes of red and saffron sandstone.

Now the peaks cooled and the great mountain-range lived in silhouette, its backbone etched with a line of electric blue. Early night swept overhead, and a few timid stars peeked out, as if fearing the thunder-mutter that came on the night wind, sullen herald of a desert storm. Now pale red flames reflected in the far-away dun-colored curtain. The storm rushed eastward across the northern heavens, while above me the night rolled west, bringing its stars into a brighter glow.

But this storm was fifty miles away and had its prescribed circle to complete. Soon its gathering vanguard began blotting out the stars. Now came a dusty shrieking wind; now the purple belly of the sky was rent by a white-hot wire, and like the crash of a thousand cannon followed the voices of the storm; now fell a few drops of cold rain, fanned on the wind into spray; and then—the deluge—a silvery curtain in the half-light, like a river turned over a new brink, drenching the Desert, beating all weak things into the sand. Parched as the ground was, the water could not be absorbed at once, and soon stood as lakes in the hollows.

It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming in the hot sunlight.

Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead; then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. But the observer had the advantage of a view embracing one hundred miles between the mountain range and the country of the buttes. The wonders of the heavens passed around him in full circle.

And where could one find such another place for the sight? Probably nowhere else in this hemisphere, save with a slight advantage in height and atmosphere at the Lowell Observatory, about sixty miles away, where the astronomer may have viewed the same spectacle from his study, perched on a shoulder of the San Francisco Range, having below him that mystic world of the Indians, the dim, illimitable stretches of the Painted Desert.

The New England States, all of them, could be gently eased into Arizona, and there would remain room for Pennsylvania and little Delaware without crowding. The one reservation that I had charge of from 1911 to 1919 embraced 3863 square miles, a trifle smaller than Connecticut, and it was a postage stamp on the broad yellow face of Arizona, which is in area one twenty-seventh of the entire United States. One hundred thousand persons, or one fourth of the state’s estimated population, live in eight of its towns, leaving much less than three persons per square mile, including Indians and Mexicans, to inhabit the remaining emptiness. One tenth of the population is Indian, and one fourth of Arizona’s land area is “Indian country.” The reservations have 1.5 persons per square mile. The fastest train of the Santa Fe system requires ten hours to cross Arizona from its eastern boundary to the Colorado River, a distance of 386 miles. Arizona has mountains that lift their crests more than 12,000 feet above the sea; and to present a perfect contrast, it has Yuma and Parker, towns of the Mohave Desert, cozy places in summer, close to sea level, with temperatures of 116° to 120° in the shade. Yes, you can eat oranges from the Phœnix trees while listening to the story of the Yuma man who found Hell chilly; and you can find snow in June on the upper levels of the Apache Indian Reserve without scaling a mountain peak. In the northern Navajo country I have twice experienced thirty degrees below zero in February, while there is no doubt the American Beauty roses were blooming in Phœnix gardens. Once I nearly froze to death on the nineteenth of May in Arizona, the place of palms, and figs, and pomegranates!

I had expected to be sadly bored, but the steady routine of each reservation working-day ate up the hours. Time does not hang on one’s hands; a strange thing too, considering the silence and solitude and lack of action in the Desert. Some writer has sought to picture this bustling, speaking emptiness:—“It is a land where one always expects to find something just around the corner; and there is never anything around the corner.” Quite so. Therefore, it is a magic place, an Enchanted Empire, filled ever with a wistful anticipation that lures without the bitterness of disappointment. There is always another corner, and another beautiful possibility.

A multitude of office duties caused the four morning-hours to seem as one. Lunch time, and a bit of gossip with a dozen strange beings, and the quaint humor that isolation creates. Then the afternoon, filled with the shrieking wind and the hiss of sand against the panes. A passing traveler would stop to ask about the river fords and roads to nowhere; and those employees coming to requisition supplies, whether engineer or school matron or farrier, would have their talk out. The warehouses always presented the fascinating search for something, just to learn if indeed it was there, as the account stated, and in the exact quantity as the Bureau minutely charged; and when not found, there would be ample time for the cursing-out of the fellow who had used it and failed to make the credit to protect the Chief.

“That fencing!” wrathfully declared the Boss. “That wire was issued five years ago. I remember old Becode Bega got the last spool of it. It has rusted out by now in the Corn Creek. Hawkins was clerk then, and damn his eyes, he never expended anything. He had rheumatism, and sang hymns, and was always telling me that Congressman Floyd Witherspoon, of Spokane Flats, had married his wife’s second cousin. Send a policeman up to Becode’s camp, and have that old sinner ride in thirty miles to sign for that wire. It’s a shame to do it, but who cares in Washington! They sent Hawkins out, and have him still, somewhere else, twisting somebody else’s accounts. What’s the next item?”

And so it went. Because under the accounting system then in vogue—a relic of the War Department days, and which ate up oodles of time and thousands of dollars in checking and balancing—everything from a quart of shoe pegs to a locomotive-type of stationary boiler had to be located and tested and receipted for by the Chief every three months, come Hades or come high-water!

Without this intense supervision by mail and blue pencil, through exceptions to accounts submitted, and silly questions, and equally silly answers, the Chief might have eaten either the shoe-pegs or the boiler during that odd time when he should have been making brick for lack of something to occupy him. The state of the Indians themselves, physically or mentally; the state of their holdings in stock, implements or gardens; the actual efficiency of the employee corps; the quality of supplies, and whether on hand or not in sufficient amount to insure a standard system—no one of these things particularly interested any Eastern authority to the point of correction; but the property accounts and the cash accounts were checked until the paper wore out, and until the Chief neglected everything else to satisfy them.

And dear old careful Uncle, who has wasted more cold cash in archaic systems than any other organization known to ancient or modern history, checked the spigot drainings every three months, unmindful of the bung, and scrupulously filed away the results in the catacombs of Washington, unaware of the negligence of Hawkins, the clerk, but always decidedly mindful of that worthy’s relationship to the elected genius of Spokane Flats. One may now remark that the accounting systems have changed. They have—after years of travail. But Hawkins and his benevolent influence have not changed; Uncle has not changed; and the Chief’s time is still spent checking inefficiency at home and reporting to ignorance abroad.

Three times a week, in late afternoon, a solitary horseman, jouncing above his laden saddlebags, would appear over the slight rise beyond the trading-post, coming from the railroad; and a cry would go up from the campus:—

“The mail!”

That call would cause a stir. What a thing of interest is a newspaper five days old, a fresh magazine or catalogue, in those waste places! And a letter from a friend or loved one is a thing golden. Scarcely would the distribution have ended, with joy or disappointment, when it would be sunset, and the Desert cooling and browning into dusk as the red ball plunged downward into the caverns of the range, trailing behind it a glory that often compensated for the trials and little evils of the day.

Sunday brought a pause that seemed unreal, an enforced halt, a marking of time. For those who did not sing “Beulah Land,” it was a long-drawn-out monotony. A thousand miles from anywhere inviting a visit, often without the solace of a kindred spirit, the silence and loneliness settled into one. The clanking pump was hushed, the boiler no longer hissed steam, the whistle did not summon, the mail did not arrive. Everyone arrayed himself in latest fashion, as mail-order catalogues decreed, and sat around in great discomfort. Where to go? There was no hunting, fishing—nothing. One had photographed everything above ground five thousand times. The nearest town was twenty-six miles off, and on Sunday as dead as Julius Cæsar.

On such a day I became acquainted with the post trader, a half-breed Navajo, handsome and smiling. I found this lovable fellow in his quarters off the store. The place was bare enough of comforts, but along one wall ran shelves, piled with books and magazines—and such books and magazines! There I found the famous five-foot shelf extended many feet. And old files of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, and Scribner’s. Among the books my hand touched Boswell’s Johnson, and I knew that the volumes I had left behind would be no longer missed. And Dickens, and Irving, and Macaulay, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Darwin.

“Why, I had not expected to find such books—here—”

He thanked me with a smile.

“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old guy, wasn’t he?”

Criticism, à la Navajo!

Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society, read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night, those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a gentle skepticism, and his armor was not dented by snatches of the Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could be defeated by a quotation, and were.

His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in shreds.

As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all their skill as trackers and go-betweens. As an interpreter at trials, he was invaluable, and his knowledge of what a Navajo would do under given conditions was almost uncanny.

Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police, this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other was the abject parsimony of the United States Government.

I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s chanting—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling on his tribal gods.

But I know that he met the answer with a smile. For so he would have joined the long shadowy line of weaving plumes and tossing lances as the tribe sought new and happier hunting-grounds; or would have entered the council ring of the chiefs, to advise in reviewing their material errors, when they saw the white man as a conqueror, rather than as a friend, and matched his evils with their savage ingenuity.

VI

A NORTHERN WONDERLAND

“To those unaccustomed to desert lands the Navajo country
presents in form and color and grouping of topographic
features a surprising and fascinating variety; and those
familiar with arid regions will find here erosion features
of unusual grandeur and beauty.”—Gregory: The Navajo Country

The nearest place of change was the town, with a dinner at the Harvey House. I planned to make this trip each month, to have a food spree, quite as on a time rude gentlemen of the cattle days came in from the ranges, hungry for sights and pleasures, and devoted themselves to the swift consumption of raw liquors. But four hours of dragging through heated sand and sunlight, from one lonely landmark to another, with nothing of interest between, destroyed much of the anticipated satisfaction. I recall a bit of Washington advice.

“You will find that country,” said the well-meaning fellow, “covered with black gramma grass. Buy a pinto pony the very first thing you do. Its keep will be negligible. A saddle will cost but a few dollars. Thus you will have transportation at all times. It will be a pleasure to ride into town after office hours. You’ll enjoy riding above all things.”

Twenty-six miles—fifty-two miles there and back!

Now I had read Western stories, written by O. Henry and others who knew less about the subject. Playing the sedulous ape, I had written a few myself. These epics all mentioned areas of black gramma grass, and made much of swift-footed cayuses that were camouflaged by Nature and possessed Dante-like noses and broom tails. There is a wondrous lot of this in the movies, too, and the joyous bounding of the aforesaid animals, from prairie rise to prairie rise, pressing the miles behind them, and the carefree demeanor of their riders, surrounded as they are by creaking leather, wide-barred shirts, and jingling spurs, appeals to one.

But when you learn that a cayuse-bronk in northern Arizona eats imported hay at forty and sometimes sixty dollars the ton, the black gramma grass and pastures all being three hundred miles to the south; and when you find that the devil is not to be trusted for an instant, and that he has to be flayed constantly to produce even an amble; and when you feel—“feel” is the word—the misery twitching completely throughout the human system from pounding on the wooden anatomy of the brute, a large part of this paper-and-film appeal vanishes. Moreover, dusty shirts, alkali-impregnated handkerchiefs, and the smell of a harness shop do not combine to flavor one’s meals delicately. Big Bill Hart may have my share of this, and he is welcome.

But there does come a longing “for to admire and for to see” what is actually out back. That adventure and romance are not to be found in the beautiful desert distances seems impossible. The dim blue buttes of the north, mysterious altars of the gods, promised to yield something from the land they guarded. And when an Agency mechanic told me that he had orders to visit the Castle Butte station, a far-away outpost, I recommended myself as a standard camp-cook, recalling the early mornings of newspaper days when I fried eggs on a gas-stove. We did not go to the horse-corral and lay our ropes over two spirited steeds, but at an early hour wended to the barn and harnessed two sturdy old plugs to a twelve-hundred-pound farm wagon. They were capable of making four miles an hour, and the wagon had capacity for a grub-box, for blankets, shovels, rope, and all the things necessary—perhaps—to our getting there first, and to accomplishing something afterward.

Have you never wondered how those adventurous fellows of the yarns, outfitted with nothing but a handkerchief, a saddle, and a lariat, manage to cover leagues upon leagues with the one horse, and never stop overnight? A Navajo Indian can do with one blanket and a sheepskin lashed behind his saddle; but even he contrives to find the trading-posts of the Desert for his grub, and he always reaches a friendly camp at nightfall.

Smith cautioned me to take a heavy coat, which I would not have thought of. Right at the start I committed a serious blunder, one that caused me to suffer bitterly, and one that I have not repeated since. Expecting to return next day, I persuaded myself that two sacks of beck-a-shay nahto, or genuine “cattle” tobacco, would be sufficient for the trip. But desert plans are subject to change, and desert wisdom is painfully acquired. I now have drilled myself never to forget matches and a filled canteen, baling-wire,—otherwise “Arizona silk,”—repair parts for the lizard, a piece of rope, tools, and a heavy coat of sheepskin, plus a tobacco factory unless the route is marked by trading-posts every thirty miles. I arrange these things automatically, because on that trip I tried to smoke powdered alfalfa in a cob pipe.

Northward we wended all day, one rugged mesa slope and huge flat succeeding another, always rising. After passing Lone Cottonwood Spring, where the water was an excellent imitation of thick gray pea-soup that the horses disdained, we lunched at a delightful place known as Coyote Springs, one of the ten thousand Southwest waterholes so named. In the naming of springs and precious water it would seem that the vocabulary of the pioneers was decidedly limited. But it would have been the same by any other name. A hole scooped in a soft rock and sand hill, fenced with crooked and cracking cottonwood branches, as the Navajo build their corrals, with not a vestige of relieving green within miles of it. All around the sand was packed hard by the flocks of sheep that came to water. Overhead was a broiling sun, and this barren area reflected every bit of the glare and heat that it did not hold as a stove. The air was heavy with the aroma of sheep, and alkali showed ghastly white in the spring’s overflow. Nevertheless, it was an oasis and held water. Here and there were picked and bleaching bones. The coyotes knew its name.

Many buttes not to be seen from the Agency were now in sight. One lumpy mound resembled a coiled snake—Rattlesnake Butte; another was shaped as a pyramid, although no one had heard of Cheops or Chephren; and a third, which had crumbled, was like a huge four-poster bed that some forgotten giant had wrecked.

A bite to eat, and on again, lumbering down the yielding banks of washes, and scrambling up and out of them. Truly a couple of sturdy plugs were required to drag the wagon up those heavy slopes. Providing the traveler has time and patience, and is built with a steel-riveted frame, the old-time farm wagon with three-inch tires is the surest method of making such a journey. It rolls and pitches as a squat lugger in a choppy sea, but it gets there.

While the Desert appears as a level sward, one soon finds that there is no sward to speak of, and that one million tangled hummocks fast follow the first million, each bunch of sparse grass, each growth of greasewood or saltbush having its own protecting hillock of sand. A good road in those days was one that a stout wagon could get over without being wrecked.

It is quite an experience to travel for hours toward a given point marked by a solitary pinnacle, a veritable mountain having sheer sides, and fail to reduce the distance appreciably. The sun was nearly down when we crawled along a valley between two of these monsters. One, named Chimney Butte, a huge truncated cone resting on massive shoulders, was the highest in that country; and the other, Castle Butte, looked like a ruined mediæval stronghold, having a causeway flanked by towers, above which loomed dim embattlements and casements. In the brilliant daylight the height of Chimney Butte is dwarfed by desert distances; and Castle Butte is not always robed in fancy; but it was now twilight, the time when the Desert is most sombre and fanciful, and it was my entrance to that garden of the vanished gods. These two gigantic piles were as the awesome portals of a ruined gateway, the pass to an unknown, mysterious country; and the whole setting, fading into night, gloomy with the menace of silence, held something of the strange unreality of a dream. And came on suddenly the dark and cold.

How did Smith manage to follow the road? I could no longer see it, and had more than enough to do to cling to the pitching seat of the wagon. We headed straight into the blackness. What yawning precipices might be awaiting us! I became chilled and cramped, and was thankful for that greatcoat, though it did not pad me against the rude shocks of the going.

“How much farther is it to this Agency?” I asked.

“Oh! over in the hills a bit—‘bout three miles furder to go yit. It ain’t an agency, yeh know—nothin’ but a missionary and a log hut.”

And we plunged into another of the dark defiles. Then out of the black, on a bit of cold wind, came a desert welcome that one never forgets, a promise of rare comfort when one is hungry and cramped with cold, the pungent incense of burning cedar. Now from the deep shadow of a hillside arose a thin column of sparks, glinting, flying jewels of the night.

“There’s it,” he announced, as if somewhat relieved, himself.

It was a little house, built of boards, having but two rooms, one large enough for a bed and dresser, the other containing a cookstove, table, and two chairs. Its outside dimensions could not have been more than twelve by twenty feet. And when the stove was filled with dry cedar one was tempted, after a complete toasting on one side, to dispense with the table. But there was no complaint to make of this on our arrival. The fire had the cheering crackle of Yuletide, and soon coffee and bacon added their aroma. The hospitality of the good missionary and his wife was like all those welcomes extended in the solitary places, when the visitor is not touring with a notebook and a nose. The meal ended, and all news exchanged, we said good night and opened the door.

“’Ere’s a go!” one might have exclaimed, without hurting the feelings of a preacher. It was snowing! And even a preacher would have remarked further, probably with adjectives, on seeing that Government house in which we were to spend the night. It was a log hut in truth, built corral-fashion, the poles set on end, the chinks originally plastered with adobe. There was but one room, containing a single bunk made of boards, an old cookstove, and a collection of broken tools and empty canned-goods cases. The floor was of packed earth. Without exaggeration, I may say that the roof and the floor were intact; but practically all the caulking had escaped from the log walls, and the wind felt its way inside with long icy fingers. The mechanic dropped into the bunk and was asleep almost instantly; and, after building a rushing fire in the stove, I rolled myself in Government blankets, and rolled again, this time under the stove, to pass the night.

But I did not rest in the poetry of the wild. The refulgent moon did not come up to spill its splendor through the open door, nor even through the extensive openings of the wall; the perfume of the growing pines did not soothe with healing balsam, the cry of the loon did not sound from across the lake, and so forth. The floor, however, was under that stove; and the floor had not been constructed along those scientific lines followed in the building of Ostermoor mattresses. Plastic as is my figure, it refused to conform.

And to add to my distress, someone in all that vast and lonely country owned an old gray horse. I know he was old, and I know he was gray, for he acted just like a silly old gray horse. And he was hobbled, and he was out in the snow, and he had a bell tied to his neck.

Clankety-clank-clank, clang, claaangngng—clankety, clang, clank!

Around and around and around the house he voyaged all that night, proceeding by hops and plunges as a hobbled horse must, his gait just enough hampered by the lashings of his two front feet to impart a syncopated tempo to the discords and jangles of that flat metallic bell. At times he would pause, as if for breath, and there would be quiet—deep silence—just sufficient for a doze; then—clankety, clang, clang, clank! he would break out again.

I have listened to jazz orchestras of various colors and degrees of crime, and other peace-destroying nuisances meriting death; but I have never heard anything equal to the nocturnal pilgrimage of that old gray horse. I would drop off to sleep, and suddenly wake as if feeling his hobbled feet squarely in the centre of my contracted chest; but he would be ten yards off, miserably clanking his way to another sector of the snow-covered terrain. And confused, I would lift my head to listen, knocking it of course against the bottom of the stove, when a long icicle would stab through a wall chink and take me fairly in the ear. Perhaps it was a pleasant night for Smith, who faithfully and harmoniously snored away the hours.

With the dawn I struggled up. No! I did not bound out joyously to gambol in the pure air of the stunted cedar-forest. It was a cold gray dawn with a foot of snow, and there was a dank rheumatic caress in it. With all speed I began smashing a packing case for kindling. Crash! down came the axe, and splinters flew wide, when Smith stirred in his bunk, awakening to duty and the dangers thereof. He blinked his eyes and spluttered:—

“Watch out for that dynamite.”

“Dynamite?”

“Yes; it’s right under my bunk. Chop your wood furder off.”

I followed these directions to the letter. In fact, I gently carried all the wood outside and chopped it.

The getting of breakfast, a complete demonstration of my culinary ignorance, occupied me fully in the half-dark. I walked to and fro gingerly, fearing to wake the dynamite; and I wondered how that stupid fellow could have slept and have snored as he did, superimposed above a quiescent earthquake. Dynamite is a great friend to man in the rocky gorges of the West, but it should not be permitted to join the family circle.

When next I opened the door, what a transformation! I had come to this place in the cold grim darkness, heartened only by the perfume of burning cedar. Occupied with the wood and the wet-handled axe, I was dimly aware of a drowsy landscape in the clammy mist of dawn. But now the sun had lifted, and the scene was a snowy fairyland. The gnarled cedars of the foreground were laden with dripping snow, their branches picked out with gems. And where the snow lay in unbroken sheets, pure white, glistening, the shadows of the dwarfed trees formed rare patterns. Behind the house were cliffs, and each gaunt angle held its draping of snow. The time-worn bastions of those lava ledges stood as gaping at the winter’s cheery Good-morning. It was a stage scene under the great amber light.

A long valley stretched away to the Bidahoche Plains and the Bad Lands with their honeycombed hills. Its dim recesses were now painted by the first plashes of sunshine. To left and right, overhanging the snowy meadows, reared great buttresses and crags of lava, and all down the valley ancient promontories loomed amid the fading veils of mist. Prehistoric ages had seen these as the shelving inner walls of some vast crater, when they had seared and glazed and baked and colored to form Nature’s pottery. Now, broken and rent apart, they stood as fantastic separate monuments, lining that sunlit corridor to the outer plains.

Dominating the foreground was Squash Blossom Butte, an inverted bloom that the storms of æons had carved and a million rare sunsets tinted. The Indians reverence the squash blossom as a symbol of fruition, and perhaps—who knows—in its delicate bell-shaped flower they see more than the mere promise of a harvest. It is found in Navajo silver-work, strung into those massive necklaces of which they are so proud; and when one goes into Hopi land he finds it imitated in the dressing of their maidens’ hair. So they named this altar.