Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (3)

The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was the desert. An Arab would not call it desert at all; a Bedouin would never feel at home upon it. I had expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, plantless, incapable of supporting anything—yellow as molten brass, sun-scorched, unrelenting. That is the desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia. The Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In the first place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey; “driftwood” is probably the term which an interior decorator would use to describe its peculiarly soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On the contrary, it is a more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock and sometimes gashed by _arroyos_, its surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation so whimsical and fantastic in the forms it assumes that it looks for all the world like a prim New England garden gone violently insane. There is the _cholla_, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking at a distance, might deceive the stranger into supposing that it was a sort of wildcat cousin of the gentle pussy-willow; the towering _sajuaro_, often forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance to those mammoth candelabra which flank the altars of Spanish cathedrals; the octopus-like _ocatilla_, whose slender, sinuous branches, tipped with scarlet blossoms, seem to be for ever groping for something which they cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not unlike a collection of green pincushions, abristle with pins and glued together at the edges; the sombre creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood, the bright green _paloverde_. These, with the white blossoms of the yucca and the pink, orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the cacti, the brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and violets and blues of the encircling mountains, the fleecy clouds drifting like great flocks of unshorn sheep across an ultramarine sky, combine to form a picture as far removed from the desert of our imagination as one could well conceive. Less picturesque than these colour effects, the portrayal of which would have taxed the genius of Whistler, but more interesting to the farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring up over the mesas after the summer rains (some of them being, indeed, extraordinarily independent of the rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those California-bound tourists who gather their impressions of Arizona from the observation platform of a mail-train while streaking across the country at fifty miles an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its possibilities with a wave of the hand and the dictum: “Nothing to it but sun, sand, and sage-brush.” Were those same people to see New York City from the rear end of a train they would assert that it consisted of nothing but tenements and tunnels. It is easy to magnify the barrenness of an arid region, and, that being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) that they instruct their legislators to enact a law banishing any one found guilty of applying the defamatory misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.

Though it were not well to take too literally the panegyrics of the soil and its potentialities which every board of trade and commercial club in the State print and distribute by the ton, there is no playing hide-and-seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of Arizona is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration with which the people of Yuma marked the completion of the Colorado River project, prizes were awarded for _forty-three distinct products of the soil_. To recount them would be to enumerate practically every fruit, vegetable, and cereal native to the temperate zone and many of those ordinarily found only in the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether exceptional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. This not being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to say that the list began with alfalfa and ended with yams.

Everything considered, I am inclined to think that the shortest road to agricultural prosperity lies through an Arizona alfalfa field, for this proliferous crop, whose fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame, possesses the admirable quality of making the land on which it is grown richer with each cutting. They told me some prodigious alfalfa yarns in Arizona, but, as each district goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to the acre better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in certain parts of the State, as many as _twelve crops of alfalfa have been cut in a year_. I wonder what your Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if he can get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life in a land like this?

Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona have been unwisely advertised as “frostless.” This is not true, for there is no place within our borders which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true, however, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand a better chance of escaping the ravages of frost than those in any other part of the country. The fruit ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the Arizona growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and grapefruit on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in advance of their Californian competitors.

Unless I am very much mistaken, two products hitherto regarded as alien to our soil—the Algerian date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove important factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. There is no tree which produces so large a quantity of fruit and at the same time requires so little attention as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing, date-palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very low, yielding from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. They are, as it were, the camels among trees, for they thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that any other tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm has long since passed the experimental stage in Arizona—the heavily laden groves, which any one who cares to take the trouble can see for himself at several places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular evidence of the success with which this toothsome fruit can be grown under American conditions. The other crop which has, I am convinced, a rosy future in Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less water than any crop grown under irrigation. The fibre of the Egyptian cotton being about three times the length of the ordinary American-grown staple, it can always find a profitable market among thread manufacturers when our Southern cotton frequently goes unharvested because prices are too low to pay for picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United States each year. With the fertile soil, the warm, dry climate, and the water resources which are being so rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look out of the window of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape of fleecy white.

“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the porter, and that grinning Ethiopian will answer:

“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”

* * * * *

This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries before the great Genoese navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador, southern Arizona was the home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled in agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals which they constructed, the ruins of which may still be seen, providing object-lessons for the engineers of to-day. It is peculiarly interesting to recall that when the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in Palestine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height of its glory, when the Battle of Hastings had yet to be fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled in England, a remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this remote corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean that the inhabitants of this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers four, five, perhaps even six stories in height, that they possessed an organised government, that they had evolved a practical co-operative system not unlike the water-users’ associations of the Arizona of to-day, and that, by means of a system of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs—the remains of which may still be seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no means inconsiderable region. So great became the agricultural prosperity of this early people that it excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, who, in a series of forays probably extending over decades, at last succeeded in exterminating or driving out this agricultural population. Their many-storied dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which they constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again dried up for lack of water and returned in time to its original state, the habitat of the cactus and the mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.

Centuries passed, during which migratory bands of Indians were the only visitors to this silent and deserted land. Then, trudging up from the Spanish settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos de Niza in his sandals and woollen robe. He, the first white man to set foot in Arizona, after penetrating as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned to Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, where he related what he had seen to one of the Spanish officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who promptly equipped an expedition and started northward on his own account. Followed by half a thousand Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred friendly Indians, and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound across the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-clad mountains of Sonora, through rivers swollen into torrents by the spring rains, and so into Arizona, where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took possession of all this country in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. This was in the year of grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman the Magnificent was hammering at the gates of Budapest. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the country now comprising the State of Arizona was dotted with Spanish priests, who, in their missions of sun-dried bricks, devoted themselves to the disheartening task of Christianising the Indians. In 1680, however, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were slain upon their altars, their missions were ransacked and destroyed, and the work of civilisation which they had begun was set back a hundred years.

The nineteenth century was approaching its quarter mark before the first American frontiersmen, pushing southward from the Missouri in quest of furs and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid succession the Mexican War, which resulted in the cession to the United States of New Mexico, which then included all that portion of Arizona lying north of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California, which, by drawing attention to the country south of the Gila as a desirable transcontinental railway route, resulted in its purchase under the terms of the Gadsden Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a Confederate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its organisation as a Territory of the Union. The early period of American rule was extremely unsettled; Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers, adventurers, gamblers, bandits, horse thieves—leading to one of the worst though one of the most picturesque periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 1912, the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the sisterhood of States, and George W. P. Hunt, its first elected governor, standing on the steps of the capitol, swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled crowd for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the staff and broke out into a flag with eight-and-forty stars.

Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona is greater than that of Italy, there are only three communities in the State—Phœnix, Tucson, and Prescott—which by any stretch of the census taker’s figures are entitled to be called cities. They are, however, as far removed from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher cow-towns which most outlanders associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, and well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and dishevelled, militant suffragette. Phœnix, the capital, I had pictured as consisting of a broad and very dusty main street bordered by houses of adobe and unpainted wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded by wooden awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings and with every other place a temple to the goddesses of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium of apology. As a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern and up-to-the-minute as a girl just back from Paris. Its streets are paved so far into the country that you wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to hold out. Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised as those of Broadway, and the head waiter in the Adams House café will hand you a menu which contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare d’Astrachan to fromage de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the municipal regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs as raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically prohibited, while the charge for a liquor licence has been placed at such a prohibitive figure that gentlemen with dry throats are compelled to walk several blocks before they can find a place with swinging doors. Tucson, on the other hand, still retains many of its Mexican characteristics. It is a town of broad and sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along its principal business thoroughfares being shaded by hospitable wooden awnings, which are a godsend to the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer. It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, as the guide-book writers put it, will well repay a visit—provided the weather is not too hot and the visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently situated on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of an incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to know that Arizona is the greatest producer of copper in the world, its output exceeding that of Montana or Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the Yavapai Club, an architectural conceit which produces the effect of a stope, or gallery in a mine—fitting tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry which gives it being.

Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway, which is the only north-and-south line in the State, forming a link between the Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that you will tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs Junction, which is the station for Castle Hot Springs, which lie a score or so of miles beyond the sound of the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the Bradshaw Mountains. It is a _dolce far niente_ spot—a peaceful backwater of the tumultuous stream of life. Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls of rock is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and dotted with palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties of cacti and clumps of giant cane. A mountain stream meanders through it, and on the hillside above the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and deep, cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the subtropic vegetation, vividly recall the dak-bungalows in the Indian hills, are three great pools screened by hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as the temperature of the water ranges from 115 to 122 degrees.

When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an acquaintance with an old-time prospector who asserted that he was the original discoverer of the place.

“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently. “I’d been prospectin’ up on the headwaters of the Verde. One day, while I was ridin’ through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of ’Paches struck my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed the hull blamed bunch was after me lickety-split as fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a rainstorm, and as she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’ away from ’em, an’ I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar with the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum, friend, if I didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon! Yes, sirree, that’s just what I went an’ done! Its walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a house in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’ me—an’ behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’ like the red devils that they were. I seen that it was all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t no possible chanct to escape—not one!”

“And what happened to you?” interrupted an excited listener.

“What happened to me?” was the withering answer. “Hell, what could happen? They killed me, damn ’em; _they killed me!_”

* * * * *

From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a tropic country modified in the north by its elevation. It has no summer or winter in the generally accepted sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and August and a dry one the rest of the year. In the spring and fall dust-storms are frequent—and if you have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you have something to be thankful for—while in the summer it gets so hot that I have seen them cover the skylight of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with canvas and keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to sundown. The warmest part of the State, and, in fact, the warmest place north of the lowlands of the Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where the mercury in a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said, however, that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation from moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high temperatures of southern Arizona are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a humid atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the all-pervading sunshine, Arizona has in recent years come to be looked upon as a great natural sanitarium, and to it flock thousands of sufferers from catarrhal and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however, I do not believe that Arizona is by any means an ideal sick-man’s country; for, particularly in advanced stages of tuberculosis, there is always the danger of overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like quality of the air, feeling well before he is well and overexerting himself in consequence.

Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was never put to a severer test than it was a few years ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then at the height of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity afforded by changing engines at Yuma to address a few remarks to the assembled citizens of the place from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma, as I have already remarked, has the reputation of being the red-hottest spot north of Panama, and its residents are correspondingly touchy when any illusion is made to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their feelings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks, dragged in the bewhiskered story of the soldier who died at Fort Yuma from a combination of sunstroke and delirium tremens. The following night his bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. “Dear Bill,” it ran, “please send down my blankets.” Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I have heard it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein at the head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of the club in Zanzibar, with its locale laid in each of those places, and I haven’t the least doubt in the world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses when it was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants of Yuma, with a politeness truly Chesterfieldian, not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr. Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but it is said that one or two of them even laughed hoarsely. The Arizonian heat is not of the sunstroke variety, however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, remember, is only in the desert half of the State—the mountain half is as high and cool as you could wish, with snow-capped mountains and green grass and running water and fish and game everywhere.

Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In the foot-hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost as common as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience, perseverance, and a pack of well-trained “b’ar dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an opportunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a cinnamon on the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards, or jaguars, frequently make their way into the southern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though small herds of antelope are still occasionally seen, the law has stepped in at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and prevented their complete extermination. But if you want an experience to relate over the coffee and cigars that will make your friends’ stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as woodchuck shooting on the farm, why don’t you run down to that portion of Arizona lying along the Mexican border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there _are_ wild camels there. They came about in this fashion: Along in the late seventies, if I am not mistaken, the Department of Agriculture, thinking to confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers of the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head of camels from Egypt, arguing that if they could carry heavy burdens over great stretches of waterless and pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why they could not do the same thing in Arizona, where almost identically the same conditions prevailed. But the paternalistic officials in Washington failed to take into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the camel is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite different from the patient and uncomplaining burro, but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it were, make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition and get along with him accordingly. Not so the Arizona packer. He took a hearty dislike to the ship of the desert from the first and never let pass an opportunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility and abuse, many of the poor beasts died and the remainder were finally turned loose in the desert to shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied they at least have not decreased and are still to be found in those uninhabited stretches of desert which lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not protected by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to require some hunting; so if you want to add to your collection of trophies a head that, as a cowboy acquaintance of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,” you can’t do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.

* * * * *

In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind that the State consists of two distinct regions, as dissimilar in climate and physiography as Florida and Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine and palm. If you will take a pencil and ruler and draw a line diagonally across the map of the State, from Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican border, you will have a rough idea of the extent of these two zones. That portion of the State lying to the north of this imaginary line is a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested, with green grass and running water and cold, dry winters, and an annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty inches. To the south of this quartering line lies a tremendous stretch of arid but fertile land, broken at intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly in the vicinity of the Colorado, often does not exceed three inches. It is in this southern portion, however, that the future of Arizona lies, for the success of the great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant future by similar undertakings on the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde, the Little Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing proof that all that its arid soil requires is water to transform it into a land of farms and orchards and gardens, in which the energetic man of modest means—and it is such men who form the backbone of every country—can find a generous living and a delightful home.

The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently pompadour.”]

A grave injustice has been done to the people of the State by those fiction writers who have depicted Arizona society as consisting of cow-punchers, faro dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of saloons and poker palaces running at full blast, of stage-coaches and mail-trains held up and robbed, are as much out of date, if the reading public only knew it, as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter of fact, Arizona claims the most law-abiding population in the United States, and the claim is copper-riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and the gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force of public disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that picturesque body of constabulary which policed the country in territorial days, have been disbanded because there is no longer work for them to do. While it is not to be denied that a large number of the citizens, particularly in the range country, still carry firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is winked at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance than it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals of Arizona are famous as “go-gitters” and a very large proportion of the gentry whom they have gone for and gotten are promptly given free board and lodging in a large stone building at Florence, on the outer walls of which men pace up and down with Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State Penitentiary at Florence is one of the most modern and humanely conducted penal institutions in the United States, being under the direct supervision of Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates of prison reform in the country. When I visited the penitentiary with the governor, instead of spending the night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment in introducing the honour system in the Arizona prisons has met with such pronounced success that roads and bridges are now being constructed throughout the State by gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed wardens. In this connection they tell an amusing story of an English tourist who was getting his first view of Arizona from the observation platform of a Pullman. As the train tore westward his attention was attracted by the conspicuous suits worn by a force of men engaged in building a bridge.

“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his eye and addressing himself to the Irish brakeman, “who are the johnnies in the striped clothing?”

“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’ Sthate prison,” was the answer. “Most av thim’s murtherers too.”

“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the harder. “Isn’t it jolly dangerous to have murderers running loose about the country like that? What?”

“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly; “yez see, sorr, in most cases there was exterminating circumstances.”

* * * * *

The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s annual carnival wished to obtain a stage-coach to use in the street pageants, they could not find one in the State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from Phœnix to Globe, driven by a gentleman who chews tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it has sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in which the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured me that he went round them on two wheels so as to save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’ hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher is still to be found, but he, like the longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before civilisation’s implacable advance.

THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.

“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier is still to be found.”]

* * * * *

The history of Arizona divides itself into three epochs—the aboriginal, the exploratory, and the reclamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian, the Spanish, and the American—and each of these epochs is typified by a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure: the ruins of Casa Grande, the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa Grande—“the Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its Aztec name, which rises from the desert some sixty miles southeast of Phœnix, is the most remarkable plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house of sun-dried puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean walls, its low doorways so designed that any enemy would have to enter on hands and knees, and its labyrinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking and significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a ruin when discovered, in 1694, by the Jesuit Father Kino, how old it is or who built it even the archæologists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins are emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of grain and breeders of cattle, whose energy and resource wrested this region from the desert, and who were driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more warlike people.

In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa Rita Mountains sweep down to meet the desert half a dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the white Mission of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the Spanish orders stretched across Arizona in their campaign of proselytism three centuries ago. I saw it for the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes and towers and minarets silhouetted against the purple of the mountains as though carved from ivory. Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as, swinging sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and the sky, but I shall always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. If California had that mission she would advertise and exploit it to the skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to it in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with other and more important things. In fact, I had to inquire of three people in the hotel at Tucson before I could learn just where it was. Although the patter of monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased these many years, San Xavier is neither deserted nor run down, for the sonorous phrases of the mass are still heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling nuns conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts of its white-walled cloisters, and at twilight the angelus-bell still booms its brazen summons and the red men from the adjacent reservation come trooping in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona missions, it stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous _padres_ who first brought Christianity to Arizona, many of them at the cost of their lives.

Eighty miles north of Phœnix, at the back of the Superstition Mountains and almost under the shadow of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt Dam—the last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s history. Those who know whereof they speak have estimated that four fifths of the State is fitted, so far as the potentialities of the soil is concerned, for agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has reduced the available area to that which lay within the capabilities of the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate. This was particularly true of the region of which Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men who proceeded to perform a modern version of the miracle of Moses, for, behold, they smote the rock and where there had been no water before there was now water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the mountains they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone and cement to hold in check and to conserve for use in the dry season the waters of the river which swirled through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square miles in area, thus created, holds water enough to cover more than a million and a quarter acres with a foot of water and assures a permanent supply to the two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the project. The farmers of the Salt River valley, which comprises the territory under irrigation, forming themselves into an association, entered into a contract with the government to repay the cost of the dam in ten years, whereupon it will become the property of the landowners themselves; the water, under the terms of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the land. Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a reminder of a race long since dead and gone, and as the white mission at Tucson is a memorial to the Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam at Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity, a monument to the courage, daring, and resource of the American. It is a very wonderful work that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the toil-hardened, sun-tanned men who are doing it I am proud to raise my hat. Such men are pioneers of progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping a path for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”

IV

THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

“It lies where God hath spread it,
In the gladness of His eyes,
Like a flame of jewelled tapestry
Beneath His shining skies;
With the green of woven meadows,
And the hills in golden chains,
The light of leaping rivers,
And the flash of poppied plains.

...

Sun and dews that kiss it,
Balmy winds that blow,
The stars in clustered diadems
Upon its peaks of snow;
The mighty mountains o’er it,
Below, the white seas swirled—
Just California stretching down
The middle of the world.”

IV

THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster. But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as you please.

Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, freighting across the Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either. Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land.... The remainder of the level land contains too much alkali to be safe, except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River, with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (_selling_, mind you, not merely being offered) for _just a thousand times that sum_.

“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and the sky.”

SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.]

Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre. Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus; their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.

Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns which are now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre, Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every building has its _portales_, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk, thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for, though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is like a blast from an open furnace door.

When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside. Amid the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful lights of many bungalows.

“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush. Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”

And I agreed with him that it was.

* * * * *

From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks, bearing seeds and harness and farming implements and phonographs and pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches, and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself with interest.

To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined, flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of the world, is Coronado.

Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing quite like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving, asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo, caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast as well. Every afternoon during the polo season _tout le monde_ goes pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary, as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is all over and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry, whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves, black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.

There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions, rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey, and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere” and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant scene for which its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers, explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible. They come here for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.