Winifred Hawkridge Dixon

“ A bit of a surprise it was to find, dozing in the sun like a New England village, a town important enough to have given its name to a railroad; to mark the end of one trail, and be a station on another; to have been the capital of an ancient Empire of the New World; and now to be the capital of a state. Yet the world passes it by, leaving it on a railroad spur high and dry from transcontinental traffic. So much the worse, then, for the world; so much the better for Santa Fé. The town does not owe its personality to its railroad stations and Chambers of Commerce. ”

“ Copper canyon, following soon after, a gorgeous blaze of rich red and deep blue tones. Then came a succession of three smaller canyons each turned a different hue by the sun, the distance and the substance of the rock. We ascended and descended in the blazing heat, until it seemed as if all life had been a going up and a coming down. Toward sunset on the ninth day, a trail overlooking a long narrow valley ended abruptly in a pass cut through solid boulders which we could barely ride through. Beyond, unexpectedly, a broad vista of the Monument country spread like a vision of the promised land. ”

“ For the desert below is not a waste of sand, arid and monotonous, but a filtered radiance of light broken into pure color. Those who know only the beauty of green fields and blue waters cannot vision the unreal and heavenly splendor we saw from the Acoma churchyard, as convincing to the inner self as if Earth, that old and dusty thought of God, dissolved before our eyes and crystallized again into a song of light and color, as it was at the beginning. ”

“ Driving a few rods along the open road, we had our first sight of the Canyon at Grand View Point, with the sun setting over its amethyst chasm.
Years before, stepping directly from an eastern train, like most tourists I had seen the Canyon as my first stunned inkling of the extraordinary scale on which an extravagant Creator planned the West. This time, Toby and I had the disadvantage of coming newly to it after being sated with the heaped magnificence of the Rockies. Would its vastness shrink? Would it still take our breath away? I don’t know why people want their breath taken away. ”

“ Fuzzy white-topped Indian plumes border the snow. Icebergs float on lakes just beyond them. Mountain goats make white specks far up a wall of granite, and deer cross one’s path in the lowlands, which are a tangle of vines and flowers in the midst of pine forests. Over a narrow ridge dividing two valleys, each linking lakes till they fade into the blue of hill and sky, we ride to an idyllic pasture surrounded by mountain peaks, for nowhere in the Park, again unlike Yellowstone, can you go without being in the shadow of some benign giant. ”

“ There are so many ways to “do” the Canyon, that vast labyrinth that could not be “done” in a thousand years! The best way of all is to take a guide and disappear beneath the rim, following new trails and old down to the level of the pyramidal peaks, to the plateau midway between rim and river, then wind in and out of the myriad of small hilly formations clustering about these great promontories which spread out from the mainland like fingers from a hand. ”

“ It is so great a pity that most of those who “see” the Canyon do not see it at all. They arrive one morning, and depart the next. They walk a few rods along its edge at El Tovar, visit the Hopi house, and hear the Kolb Brothers lecture. If adventurous, they don overalls or divided skirts, mount a velvet-faced burro who seems afflicted with a melancholy desire to end his tourist-harassed existence by a side-step over Bright Angel. They speak afterward with bated breath—the tourists, not the burros—of the terrors of a trail which is a boulevard compared to some in the Canyon. ”

“ The cattlegates and rocky road made going slow, and as Venus, frosty and brilliant, came out, we were imprisoned in this weirdly gloomy spot, on the top of the world. A quaver in Toby’s usually stalwart voice made me wonder if she were remembering her mother’s last words,—“Don’t drive at night.” This is no reflection on Toby’s staunchness; the immensity of the West, after dark, when first it looms above one used to the coziness of ordered streets, must always seem portentous and awful. We hastened on, winding down through one enchanting glade after another, till we met the highway again. ”

“ The shifting hills of shimmering sand, moonlight silver in the frosted air of morning, and golden at noon, turn from rose to violet. Above the village rise pencilled lines of smoke from ancient fireplaces. Towering above everything stands the white mass of the old mission, with a gleaming cross of gold cutting sharply against the glory of the west.
Laguna owns no hotel, so Toby and I sought out the missionary, whose ruddy, white-haired countenance and stalwart frame bespoke his Vermont origin, and whose hospitality bore the hearty flavor of Green Mountain farmhouses. ”

“ Spiky mesquite caught and tore our hair nets. Texas’ millions of untenanted acres brooded over our human unimportance, till a charred stick or empty tin can, stumbled over in the dark, became as welcome a signal as Friday’s footprint to Crusoe. Jointing our useless little spade, we dug a trench in the soft sand for our hips to rest in, hoisted our tent-rope over a thorny branch, folded blanket-wise our auto robes, undressed and crept inside our house. The lamps of the car gave us light to stow away our belongings, and its lumbering sides screened us from the road. ”

“ It is hard to believe this peacefully remote valley ever echoed the noise of playing children, of gossiping women and barking dogs. The dark-skinned Jamshyd who ruled here left speechless stone walls to crumble under the tread of the wild ass, and whether drought, pestilence or murder drove him and his race forth, forsaking their habitations to the eternal echoes, nobody knows. He was timid, or he would not have plastered his houses like swallows’ nests in the cliff, or huddled them together in this remote canyon, walled in against more aggressive tribes. ”

“ A green New England farm with running brooks and [Pg 68] blossoming orchards would have spelled Paradise to them, as this Persian pattern of desert did to us; beauty to the parched native of Arizona is an irrigation ditch, bordered by emerald cottonwoods.
If I tint these pages with too many sunsets, it is not from unawareness of my weakness, but because without them a description of Arizona does not describe. In the afternoon hours, between four and eight, the country wakes and glows, and has its moment, like a woman whose youth was plain but whom middle age has touched with charm and mystery. ”

“ We thought we had almost earned the freedom of the town by our toilsome climb, first over a young mountain of pure sea sand in which we sank ankle deep, and then hand over hand up a steep ledge of rock, where ancient grooves were worn for fingers and toes to cling to. Centuries of soft shod feet had hollowed these footholds, and centuries of women and men had carried food and water and building materials over this wearisome trail. ”

“ We would follow the old trails, immigrant trails, cattle trails, traders’ routes,—mountain roads which a long procession of cliff dwellers, Spanish friars, gold seekers, Apache marauders, prospectors, Mormons and scouts had trod in five centuries, and left as they found them, mere footprints in the dust. The Southwest has been explored afoot and on horse, by prairie schooners, burro, and locomotive; the modern pioneer rattles his weather beaten flivver on business between Gallup and Santa Fe, Tucson and El Paso, and thinks nothing of it, but the country is still new to the motoring tourist. ”

“ Rain, rain, is always the prayer on every desert Indian’s lips. When the spring freshets are finished, and the land lies exhausted under the metallic glow of an August sun, life itself hinges on breaking the drought. Because the eagle is the bird which reaches nearest to Heaven, and hence is most apt to carry his prayer to the gods, the Hopis make excursions to that distant mesa where eagle’s nests are still found, and bring back a young eagle. ”

“ Having spent the winter away from humans, they had forgotten our self-willed ways, and developed wills of their own. Though bony from a hard winter, they had plenty of fight left in their mud-caked hides. We all sat on the corral fence and joyfully watched a Navajo herder tobogganned over rocks and cactus, at the end of a taut rope, while an old white horse, pink from a bath in the creek, looked over his shoulder and laughed, as he kept the rope humming. ”

“ I have had experience both ways, once as a personally conducted tourist and once as a human being. With our own car we covered the sight-seeing far more easily and quickly than by bus, with the advantage of being able to linger as long as we pleased over the fascinating mudholes blub-blubbing restfully by a tardily performing geyser, or in some out-of-the-way forest where the tripper never drags his dusty feet. Cars herd together in enticing groves, and their owners exchange destinations and food and confidences about their offspring with an unsuspiciousness lacking at the big hotels. ”

“ As nothing exceeds the weariness of the desert at noon, so nothing compares with its freshness, its revelation of beauty, at dawn. Each mesa was outlined in gold. Waves of color, each melting into the next, flushed the prairie and sky. We forgot the tedium of the night in this splendor of morning.
We motored slowly through all this glory,—our car having started on the first trial,—through seven miles of mud, but Chin Le had apparently been swallowed up by the deluge. ”

“ Solitary meadows with bands of horses grazing upon them, a gleam of light from an adobe inn at a crossroad, a stretch of darkness, strange to our desert-accustomed senses because of the damp breath from the river and snow-capped peaks beyond—then the barking and yelping of many mongrel dogs, and we were at once precipitated into the winding, barnyard-cluttered alleys of Isleta, feeling our way through blind twists and turns, blocked by square, squat gray walls of incredible repose and antiquity, caught in the mesh of a sleeping town. ”

“ Then on again to overlook a magnificence of blue and ochre canyons, down which we swooped and circled into Bisbee.
Many-terraced as a Cornish village, Bisbee straddles a canyon and climbs two mountains in its effort to accommodate the workers who swarm its tortuous streets, and spend their days in its huge copper mines. When Bisbee finds a mountain in its way, down goes the mountain, carried off by great steam shovels working day and night. But always beyond, another ring of hills holds her prisoner. In the town’s center lies a tiny, shut-in square into which streets of various levels trickle. ”

“ I said.
“Let’s,” said Toby, gladly.
And on all that beauty of pure woods and clear sunset we turned and fled to civilization. Fifth-rate civilization it might be, in a province as crude and unlovely as was any part of our own West in the roaring eighties. For the first time in six months we had our backs to the setting sun, the sun which had dazzled our eyes every afternoon since we left the boat at Galveston. We were leaving the great, free West, “where a man can be a man, and a woman can be a woman,” and we were going—home! ”

“ Within a short radius of Santa Fé, one can trace all the successive steps in the history of the Pueblo Indian. We go furthest back at Rito de los Frijoles, where a glance half way up a perpendicular cliff reveals black spots of pin-head size. An arduous climb up rough ladders and steps notched in crumbling yellow tufa shows these holes as large caverns hollowed by water under the shelving roof of the soft rock, and built up with a masonry which today would easily command ten dollars a day and a forty-eight hour week. ”

“ To hear it chanted in a wide and lonely desert scene, to watch its savage, untamed vigor move feet and bodies to a climax of ecstatic emotion, until it breaks all bounds and produces the passion it is supposed to symbolize is to understand what music meant to the world, before it was tamed and harnessed and had its teeth extracted. To wean the Indian of this means of self-expression, and nurse him on puerile, anaemic melodies,—it is stupid beyond words, and unfortunately, it is of a piece with the follies and stupidities our government usually exhibits in its dealings with its hapless wards. ”

“ The gray sage turned at sun-down to lavender; mauve shadows lengthened on the desert floor; gorges of angry orange and red cliffs gave savage contrast to the delicate Alpine glow lighting white peaks; a cold, pastel sky framed a solitary star, and frosty air, thinned in its half-mile height to a stimulating sharpness, woke us keenly to life. We felt the enchantment that Arizona weaves from her gray cocoon toward sunset, and wondered at eyes which could look on it all, and see only sand and cactus. ”

“ The Golfer was new to horses, but anyone could ride a mule. Just then, as he bent to adjust a stirrup, the familiar jingle of the departing pack and the music of Hostein Chee’s alien profanity came to those long ears. Forgetting his recent rise in station, the mule leaped eagerly forward to join his mates. Briar and bush did not stop the pair; they tore downhill over boulders and through thickets. Young alders slapped the Golfer in the face, but he hung on until the mule, in despair at seeing demure Annie trot out of his vision, took the stream at a leap. ”