Writing (and Lying) About the West

A HARRY-WEBB

His blue wings, is like a bauble made of precious stones flickering along the ground."

An art critic, Van Dyke viewed nature with the same keen aesthetic as he did paintings. He was among the first to move away from Victorian hyperbole and depict the desert in concrete terms. As far as a few piddling facts are concerned, well, he wasn't the only writer to play fast with the truth while spinning a good tale about Arizona's wonders.

By the time Arizona gained Territorial status in 1863, scores of adventurers had, in the slang of the day, “seen the elephant.” Many shared their journals and reports with a public hungry for information about this strange new land where fortunes — and men's reputations — could be made. Americans avidly followed the exploits of John Wesley Powell, who serialized a narrative of his Colorado voyage through the Grand Canyon in Scribner's Monthly. Less reliable accounts dazzled Eastern readers with dreams of gold mines, verdant valleys and exotic cultures.

But not everyone back East waited with breathless anticipation for the next flash from the frontier. The Nation peevishly complained that interest in the West “has not been elevating or refining, and it would have been vastly better for the country had circumstances made the growth of these communities slower.” Indeed, Arizona grew from “the worst class of gamblers, renegades, and cutthroats . . . gathered together from the four quarters of the globe. . . .” So said Samuel Cozzens, and as Territorial judge, he knew the truth of it. But Cozzens snared readers with his 1876 book, The Marvelous Country: Three Years in Arizona and New Mexico, the Apaches' Home. Reading it is akin to riding blindfolded on a runaway horse, both time and place a dizzying blur. His “strange events and adventures” during 1858 and 1860 include shoot-outs, scalp-tingling stories about white captives and conversations with Cochise himself.

Similar in subject but more grounded in reality is the work of footloose Irish immigrant J. Ross Browne, who visited Yuma, Gila Bend, Tubac and other settlements in 1864 and wrote six articles for Harper's Monthly, later combined into the book Adventures in the Apache Country. He warned readers Arizona was “not a jolly country. The graves of murdered men . . . and scenes of ruin and desolation are profoundly interesting; but they are not subjects for the indulgence of rollicking humor.” Indeed, Browne's humor is sly, his exaggerations intentional. He arrived via Yuma, in those days the usual gateway from “inside” (the local lingo for California and the States). The dusty journey primed him for the civilized comforts he expected to find in Tucson, the Territory's largest city. Instead, he beheld “the most wonderful scatteration of human habitations . . . a city of mud-boxes, dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth; littered about with broken corrals, sheds, bake-ovens, carcasses of dead animals, and broken pottery. . . .” The best view of this “Sodom and Gomorrah,” he insisted, was looking backward on the trail out of town.

He judged the desert's winter climate superior to Italy's, but warned that “fastidious people might object to the temperature in summer,” sharing a tale about a “wicked” soldier who died and went to hell, then sent back to Arizona for his blankets. As for Arizona's infamous dry heat: “The carcasses of cattle rattle inside their hides,” chickens hatch already cooked, “bacon is eaten with a spoon, and butter must stand an hour in the sun before the flies become dry enough for use.” Browne's indefatigable humor permeates his writing, as do signs of the time. “Rude sketches of Jeff Davis hung by the neck and President Lincoln fleeing from the vengeance of the Chivalry” marred the walls of ancient Casa Grande ruins. War left the Territory vulnerable to the Apaches, who didn't welcome newcomers: “I was compelled to pursue the fine arts with a revolver strapped around my body, a double-barreled shotgun lying across my knees, and a half a dozen soldiers armed with Sharpe's carbines keeping guard in the distance.”Readers thrilled to such passages, but not Arizona's leadingcitizens, who knew the best way to civilize a land was to populate it. They backed boosterish guidebooks offering advice to would-be settlers. Richard J. Hinton's 1877 The Handbook to Arizona detailed mining districts, wages, stage schedules and local flora and fauna. His helpful suggestions to erstwhile immigrants included how to prepare for a long stage journey. (He recommended riding on the roof, or failing that, a rear seat next to the window, with a "stout strap" as makeshift seatbelt.) Less helpful assurances: Wood rats made good eating and the "Gila monster is an overgrown, variegated, perfectly harmless lizard. . . ."

George H. Tinker's slim volume on northern Arizona, The Land of Sunshine, probably didn't overwhelm him with royalties (he first published only 50 copies), but the Flagstaff newspaperman provided a valuable service by touting Arizona's charms. And though he admitted that describing the Grand Canyon was a waste of adjectives, he offered a page about the abyss, where "stars glisten in all their nocturnal beauty at midday, while not even a stray gleam of sunshine has ever penetrated."

Journalist Hiram C. Hodge joined hordes of other "lungers" (persons afflicted with tuberculosis) relocating to Arizona and financed his recovery with more than 500 articles, later gathered into a book, Arizona As It Is, Or the Coming Country. He encouraged females to emigrate, assuring them Arizona needed "large numbers of the true, the pure, the good... and would give them a welcome such as goddesses might envy."

Whether by guidebooks or goddesses, Arizona's wilderness was gradually tamed into communities of (mostly) lawful citizens. Railroads crossed the Territory, comfortable hotels beckoned and Easterners longed to journey "where the Apache used to ride in wildest abandon." A flurry of new magazines about the West enticed them. So did the travel lecture, a grand event in Eastern cities at the turn of the last century.

"The acme of sublimity in natural scenery is reached in Arizona," world-traveler Burton Holmes told his audiences - gentlemen and ladies in evening dress who paid as much as $1.25 for his "travel-ogues." Holmes packed them in with his slides of the Grand Canyon, hand-painted in ethereal colors by Japanese artists. Viewing the Canyon, he theorized, spurred the brain to create new cells. Even then, the initiated might "tremble at the thought of grander chapters and long for their former ignorance... ere they approach a climax too overwhelming to be borne by the human mind."

Corseted matrons and proper young misses gasped as John Stoddard, another lecturer, described the Canyon: "Nature wounded unto death, and lying stiff and ghastly with a gash, two hundred miles in length and a mile in depth, in her bared breast, from which is flowing fast a stream of lifeblood called the Colorado."

"Trivial," sniffed Charles Lummis, magazine editor and author. He preferred a shorter, but no less lofty tag for the Grand Canyon - "Cosmic Intaglio."

Similar adjectives flowed from dozens of pens. Among the most prolific writers was George Wharton James, a defrocked Methodist minister accused of committing dastardly deeds by his ex-wife. Fleeing the resulting gossip, James tramped through Arizona and New Mexico, eventually returning to California, where he found his niche writing and publishing travel guides. Reborn as author and editor of Out West magazine, James did "more to make the wonders of the Southwest known to the world than any other 10 men," according to fellow outdoorsman Teddy Roosevelt.

From the late 1800s through the first couple decades of the new century, James wrote more than 70 books and articles with the aid of two anonymous assistants a torrent of words untouched by an editor's red pen. In Arizona, the Wonderland (1917), he opened with a fantasy tour on a "magic sky-steed," then described the ultimate tour, the "Wonder Circuit," covering 1,000 to 1,300 miles, featuring "such a veritable revelation of marvels" that American travelers will "feel that they were in a new, utterly foreign, and altogether strange and marvelous land."

He judged Phoenix one of the most "exquisitely embowered... cities of the world." Douglas, he predicted, "will see a great influx of transcontinental travelers, for it is a city that no one will desire to pass by." On the Grand Canyon: "The most delicate of transcontinental travelers may take her Pullman drawing-room in Chicago... and without a moment's weariness, ennui or deprivation of any accustomed luxury, gaze upon this wonderland of form, color and mystery."

Eschewing luxury himself, James worked in a Grand Canyon cave with a boulder as desk. He rode a mule, hiked and even floated part of the Colorado, a voyage he made into a metaphor for life, likely thinking of his own: "Friends have forsaken him, loved ones gone, perhaps even God seems to have left him to himself, but as he looks up, even here he sees the sun of grace shining upon the Lighthouse Rocks that raise their heads above the Canyon walls, and new hope, new faith, new encouragement are the result...."

Through writing, James simply re-created himself. John Van Dyke re-created the desert. His book's dedication declared: "The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover. But I trust that you, and the nature-loving public you represent, will accept this record... as at least truthful."

Although ADDITIONAL READING: Rattlesnake Blues: Dispatches from a Snakebit Territory, by Leo W. Banks, No. 8 in Arizona Highways' Wild West Collection, gathers anecdotes and stories from newspapers published in the era when "Arizona" still defined the unknown for most folks. Order the softcover book ($7.95 plus shipping and handling) by calling (800) 543-5432 or visit arizonahighways.com.

Not so many years ago, I stood on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon staring into its eroded depths when, suddenly, I was jerked out of my reverie by a voice with a Texas drawl.

"What's up on top o' them babies, anyhow?" I turned and inquired, "Which babies are those?" "Them pinnaclelike things out there."

Ah, yes, the buttes. That's what he's referring to. Those immense upthrusting formations of stone that rise thousands of feet from the Canyon floor. They bear exotic names like Wotans Throne, Zoroaster Temple, Tower of Ra. Virtually all of them are ringed by soaring cliffs so precipitous the average person would judge them unscalable. Their summits, sometimes extending across hundreds of acres, appear as islands in the sky.

"What's up there?" he wants to know. I haven't the foggiest idea, I thought.

After returning home, I go to the library and leave with an armload of books. I call people who are in the know. Eventually, I'm surprised to learn that not until 1937 did a serious scientific expedition climb to the top of a Grand Canyon butte to seek an answer to the question, "What's up there?"

When the American Museum of Natural History announced it would send scientists to the top of Shiva Temple, the nation was still in the throes of the Great Depression. People needed diversion from their economic woes, and the newspapers did their best to deliver. Journalists speculated on the possibility that the daring expedition, headed by Dr. Harold Anthony, might find dinosaurs on the top of Shiva, a 7,618-foot Grand Canyon butte that had been cut off from the rest of the world for as many as 100,000 years.

The belief that no human had ever ascended to the summit of a Grand Canyon butte aroused the public's interest even further. Anthony and his team decided to climb "where no man had ever climbed before" because other modes of transportation were considered either too dangerous or impractical. The "sky island" was too densely forested for a landing by autogiro, and unpredictable canyon winds ruled out an approach by blimp.

Assisted by professional mountaineers, the Anthony party successfully scaled Shiva, pulling themselves up and over cliffs where the best approaches were no less than 20 to

WHO KNOWS WHAT LURKS ON THOSE GRAND CANYON BUTTES? WE DO