ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND

When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or all three courses if you have time.

You may strike up into Zuni Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man-and likely to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock declivity, an almost desert-forest growth-dwarf juniper and cedar and giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off intruders-and you can understand why some of the most magnificent specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here undisturbed by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you find Montezuma’s Castle and Montezuma’s Well, the former, a colossal community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders; the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.

Or you may skip the short trip out to Zuni off the main traveled highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains-two weeks at the very shortest, and you should make it six-and leave Gallup, just at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab, round the Grand Canyon up towards the State lines of California and Utah. If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting seas of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It isn’t America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world, a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn’t America at all! It’s Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these Navajo boys-a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an Arab’s Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red sand knobs-you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their hogan houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain, scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat-bleating till the air quivers-driven by little Navajo girls on horseback, born to the saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.

If you can’t go to Zuni Land and the White Mountain Forest and the Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort. Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place-in the Coconino and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Canyon. And if the lure of the antique still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is emptiest), “that America lacks the picturesque and historic,” believe me there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. “The more we study the prehistoric ruins of America,” declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of the world in the School of Archaeology at Rome, “the more undecided we become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America, or that of America preceded the Orient.”

For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into Canyon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could hide and lose a dozen of our national White House. Who built the aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you haven’t to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do your guessing, but only a day’s drive from a continental route-cost for team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.

To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Canyon; but to cross it, you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to $7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price-$25 to $40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months-July and August-does not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof, and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like jack-o’-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don’t delude yourself into thinking you’ll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling; but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000 to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in the Canadian Northwest.

Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael’s, Day’s Ranch, and Mr. Hubbell’s almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers crossing the Desert-open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult. It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely sincere words, “It is yours,” which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of the noblesse oblige which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write, ill-suited to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this was well; but to-day-well, it may work out in Goldsmith’s comedy, where the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the Mission and Day’s Ranch and Mr. Hubbell’s trading posts to have kitchen quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt; Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host that he didn’t care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the house “to hustle the fodder.” There was the lady who stayed unasked for three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through the window and seeing a storm brewing “thought he’d not mind going after all.”

“What?” demanded his entertainer. “You will not go after you have roused me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this instant.”

The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point, or bought outright. At St. Michael’s Mission, and Ganado, and the Three Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.

We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip, though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day we wanted them.

The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa-globe cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod mottled as its prototype’s skin. And the trail still climbs till you drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows-blue shadows, sure sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is the Painted Desert; and it isn’t a flat sand plain as you expected, but a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a sky wall. And it isn’t a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected. You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuni boys are loping along the trail in front of you-red headband, hair in a braid, red sash, velvet trousers-the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the Zuni or Hopi, and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuni lads will set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.

The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped tufa rocks to the right of the road, mark the approach to St. Michael’s Mission. Where one great rock has splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all travelers-a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain, but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests another explanation.

Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-tiled roofs of St. Michael’s loom above the hill, and you drive up to an oblong, white, green-shuttered building as silent as the grave-St. Michael’s Mission, where the Franciscans for seventeen years have been holding the gateway to the Navajo Reserve. Below the hill is a little square log shack, the mission printing press. Behind, another shack, the post-office; and off beyond the hill, the ranch house of Mr. and Mrs. Day, two of the best known characters on the Arizona frontier. A mile down the arroyo is the convent school, Miss Drexel’s Mission for the Indians; a fine, massive structure of brick and stone, equal to any of the famous Jesuit and Ursuline schools so famous in the history of Quebec.

And at this little mission, with its half-dozen buildings, is being lived over again the same heroic drama that Father Vimont and Mother Mary of the Incarnation opened in New France three centuries ago; only we are a little too close to this modern drama to realize its fine quality of joyous self-abnegation and practical religion. Also, the work of Miss Drexel’s missionaries promises to be more permanent than that to the Hurons and Algonquins of Quebec. They are not trying to turn Indians into white men and women at this mission. They are leaving them Indians with the leaven of a new grace working in their hearts. The Navajos are to-day 22,000 strong, and on the increase. The Hurons and Algonquins alive to-day, you can almost count on your hands. Driven from pillar to post, they were destroyed by the civilization they had embraced; but the Navajos have a realm perfectly adapted to sustain their herds and broad enough for them to expand-14,000,000 acres, including Moki Land-and against any white man’s greedy encroachment on that Reserve, Father Webber, of the Franciscans, has set his face like adamant. In two or three generations, we shall be putting up monuments to these workers among the Navajos. Meanwhile, we neither know nor care what they are doing.

You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough, brown cassock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated scholarship, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!

Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel’s Mission School, drove us back to the Franciscan’s house, we saw proofs of a second volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the masterpiece of his life-hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white, blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the “great medicine man” putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars-and puff, with one breath he has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all over the face of heaven. There is the legend of “the spider maid” teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul’s travail up to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian drawings are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo lore? If all ethnologists and archaeologists had founded their studies on the Indian’s own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.

Father Berrard’s drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a drawing of it; and on many a fool’s errand his quest has taken him. For instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of “green” in it. Dressing in disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the benefit of gullible tourists.

“Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?” Father Berrard asked the unsuspecting dealer.

“From frog ponds,” answered the store man of a region where water is scarce as hens’ teeth.

Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his nom de plume shall be “Frog Pond Green.”

If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at either the Franciscan Mission, or Day’s Ranch; but being women we were conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel’s Mission School for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced, black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil; that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common; and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning up for future festivities.

We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room, parlor and refectory, where two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender, understanding eyes.

Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on the hill to the right-eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the fading light.

Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from the stalls-is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that age-old, never-failing spring of Service?