HEAD OVER HEELS AT THE GRAND CANYON

SOMEWHERE DEEP WITHIN the seven layers of hell that is the internet, I stumbled upon the name White Mountain Smith. The name sounded like something out of one of those 1930s true-life adventure books for boys, and it took hold in my imagination. I wrote it down in block letters on a note I affixed to my computer monitor, an analog ping for further online investigation. That note ended up embedded in the strata of papers on my desk, but one day, it resurfaced, and I began to examine the life and times of one Charles Jerrod "White Mountain" Smith - chief ranger at Grand Canyon National Park in the early 1920s, and later superintendent at Petrified Forest National Monument (now a national park). His esteemed career also included superintendent posts at Zion, Bryce Canyon and Grand Teton national parks. While White Mountain was a remarkable figure, so too was his wife, Dama Margaret Smith, who in 1921 became the Grand Canyon's first female federal employee and later wrote books about the Southwest during a career that spanned decades. She boasted that she never received a rejection slip, and her 1930 work, I Married a Ranger, recounted the couple's time at the Canyon and their travels toI was smitten by the Smiths - the stolid-as-a-rock park ranger and his smart, sometimes sassy wife, living epic lives against the widescreen grandeur of a still-untamed Arizona, like some rom-com directed by John Ford. The Smiths were remarkable people, but as easy as it was to idealize the couple, their lives were as complicated as anyone's. And there would be no "happily ever after" for Mr. and Mrs. White Mountain Smith.

I assumed from his nickname that White Mountain was a son of the Arizona high country, maybe from a sawmill family in McNary. But his father worked as a blacksmith, and White Mountain, born in Connecticut in 1882, earned the nickname as a guide in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In winter, he migrated south to Florida to lead Everglades trips.When "1900 and seven," as White Mountain spoke it, he inquired about working at Yellowstone. The following winter, he heard of an opening for a stagecoach driver, a skill he had learned in the White Mountains. But he needed to get from Florida to Yellowstone, so he went first to St. Augustine, where he became a wagon driver with the Sun Bros. Circus. "One of the duties was to drive the lion's cage, which was quite a little stunt itself," he said. "But that's another story."

WHEN White Mountain was a boy, he heard the local school superintendent deliver a talk about traveling to Yellowstone National Park. The American West captured his imagination. "We never know what's going to start us off on our life's career. ... I begun to think that I'd go to the Yellowstone park someday," he said in a recording of his 1952 retirement talk to the staff at Zion. By then, White Mountain was 70 and spoke slowly in a timbre that evoked the frontier, not New England as he described the characters he met, men with names such as Geyser Bob, Society Red, Doc Wilson and Cracker Johnson. Creeks were "cricks," and the Tetons became the Tee-tonns, the accent hard on the second syllable.

White Mountain made it as far as Minneapolis, then boarded a train for Montana. During his first season at Yellowstone, he survived a holdup by a bandit brandishing a .30-30 Winchester rifle. He spent six years driving stages before becoming a government scout in the fall of 1914. The National Park Service wouldn't be established for another two years, and scouts were the predecessors to rangers. White Mountain took pride in his first Department of the Interior position and set out for the back-country. "That evening," he recalled, "as I lay back on the slope of the hill, with the grass knee-deep and plenty of water, and watched my horse and mule grazing along the crick, the elk bugling in the distance and the grasshoppers hopping around, I thought truly that I was the lord of all creation. I guess I was."

White Mountain eventually became one of the original park rangers at Yellowstone and served there until December 1920, when he won a promotion to chief ranger at Grand Canyon National Park - a position that paid $1,500 a year (the equivalent of about $20,000 today).

Dama also grew up back East, as Dama Margaret Brown. She came from a pioneer family in West Virginia, where her father was a prominent lawyer before being appointed the state's first Prohibition commissioner. In 1918, while working in Washington, D.C., she married Roy F. Stahlberg, a sergeant in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. Dama was 26, relatively old for a new bride in that era, and the marriage didn't last long. In 1921, she walked into the office of Arno B. Cammerer, then the assistant director of the Park Service, and applied for a clerical job at the Canyon. Dama had to ask where it was, later confessing, "I knew just that little about the most spectacular chasm in the world."

On the train ride west, she read up on the Canyon in a booklet compiled by the Park Service. She arrived before dawn at the South Rim, where she saw the Canyon by moonlight and remained transfixed until daybreak. The superintendent greeted his first woman employee coldly, and their meeting didn't go well that is, until "a tall blond man in park uniform entered the office."

Dama recalled: "In the Washington office I had often heard of 'White Mountain' Smith. ... I looked him over rather curiously and decided that I liked him very well. His keen blue eyes were the friendliest I had seen since I left West Virginia.... Sparks flew then, and I forgot to be homesick."

At 39, WHITE MOUNTAIN was a decade older than his bride. Dama wrote little about a courtship but said their wedding day was moved up because the ranger chosen as best man was due for vacation. In September 1921, the tiny wedding party headed to Flagstaff, took care of the paperwork at the clerk's office and then went to the minister's house. The minister's wife dried her hands on her apron, then served as the second witness.

"And the wedding was over," Dama wrote. "So we were married. No wedding march, no flower girls, no veil, no rice, no wedding breakfast. Just a solemn promise to respect each other and be faithful. Perhaps the promise meant just a little more to us because it was not smothered in pomp." The couple visited the cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon before returning to their cabin to celebrate with the park's close-knit community of rangers.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Smith planned a North Rim honeymoon, but when the superintendent said he needed Dama in the office, White Mountain made the trip alone. He would travel with Park Service Director Stephen T. Mather and Western novelist Emerson Hough from the North Rim into Southern Utah, while Dama met a slew of VIPs touring the Canyon from cowboy movie star Tom Mix to General Armando Diaz, the Italian Army's chief of staff and a World War I hero.

Dama delighted in visiting with the general and his entourage, writing, "That few of them spoke English and none of us understood Italian made no difference. Smiles and flirtatious glances speak a universal language, and many a wife kept her wedding ring out of the limelight."

The Smiths would eventually ride to the North Rim. Along the way, White Mountain shot a rattlesnake with his .45 and presented Dama with the rattle to adorn her hatband. Ever the righteous steward, White Mountain noted an unauthorized sign that Canyon legend James "Uncle Jim" Owens had posted along the trail to advertise his guide service. The couple then arrived at the mountain man's cabin, which was gruesomely adorned with hundreds of pelts and severed mountain lion paws.

Dama struggled with her horse, including one incident when the saddle girth slipped and she found herself upside down along the horse's belly. But she marveled at the Canyon: "As we neared the North Rim, now and then along the trail a wild rose blossomed, and as we climbed higher we threaded a maze of sweet locust, fern and bracken. It was a fairyland. And then the trail topped out at an elevation of eight thousand feet into the forest primeval. Towering yellow pines, with feet planted in masses of flowers, pushed toward heaven. Scattered among the rugged pines were thousands of slender aspen trees, swaying and quivering, their white trunks giving an artificial effect to the scene as if the gods had set a stage for some pagan drama."

The couple also ventured deep into Arizona's Indian country, experiences that formed the foundation for Dama's magazine articles and the books she would eventually write for the prestigious Stanford University Press: the 1931 novel Hopi Girl and

1933's Indian Tribes of the Southwest.

I Married a Ranger is a lighter work in which Dama cast herself as a tenderfoot on the rugged frontier. At times, she writes lovingly of White Mountain, whether in describing the care he took in preparing his "famous biscuits" or the chickadee he nursed back to health after it fluttered into their cabin during a storm: "From that day on it belonged, brave soul and wee body, to him. As the days grew warmer it spent its time somewhere in the forest, but at mealtime when the Chief came home all he had to do was step outside the door and whistle. Out of the sky a diminutive atom would hurl itself downward to light on his outstretched palm."

She also cast White Mountain, in all his probity, as her comic foil, raging about the predicaments the couple found themselves in. Describing the challenging ride to the Havasupai Tribe's land at the bottom of the Canyon, she wrote, "I hadn't anticipated Arizona trails when I so blithely announced to White Mountain, 'Whither thou goest, I will go.' Neither had I slept in an Indian village when I added, 'And where thou lodgest, I will lodge.'"

Sections of the book had previously appeared in the popular women's magazine Good Housekeeping, and Dama sought to deliver on her readers' preconceptions of the Wild West and Indians. She wrote with curiosity and insight about such rituals as the Hopi Snake Dance but also used terminology that, although consistent with attitudes of her time, sounds insensitive and dehumanizing now.

She dismissed the Havasupais, writing, "And at the end of the trail one stumbles upon the tiny, hidden village where the last handful of a once-powerful nation has sought refuge. Halfclad, half-fed, half-wild, one might say, they hide away there in their poverty, ignorance and superstition." She gazed upon Navajo men who "were clad mostly in atmosphere helped out with a gee-string of calico" before adding, "I fell to dreaming of what it would have meant to be captured by such demons only a few years ago."

But she also expressed a more enlightened perspective, writing of Indian schools, "To take an Indian child away from its own free, wild life, teach it to dress in white man's clothes, eat our food, sleep in our beds, bathe in white-tiled bathtubs, think our thoughts, learn our vices, and then, having led them to despise their own way of living, send them back to their people who have not changed while their children were being literally reborn - what does this accomplish? Doesn't Aesop tell us something of a crow that would be a dove and found himself an outcast everywhere? We are replacing the beautiful symbolism of the Indian by our materialism and leaving him bewildered and discouraged."

WHEN WHITE MOUNTAIN ARRIVED, the Grand Canyon had been a national park for not even two years. A ranger's job was far less specialized than today, and, as a 1938 profile of White Mountain characterized the role, rangers were historians, naturalists and geologists all in one. "He also had to have a working knowledge of woodcraft, camping, cooking and horsemanship," Adrian Howard wrote. "He must be able to set a broken leg, or build a coffin, should death overtake some unfortunate far from headquarters. All of these things White Mountain Smith can do and has done."

Dama wrote that White Mountain dealt with mountain lions, recalcitrant bulls and reckless tourists as necessary. Fools he did not suffer gladly, and a 1921 National Geographic article about the original Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge said White Mountain was "of the opinion that all of those caught carving their names on rocks or trees should be lined up and shot at sunrise."

When the original bridge was under construction, White Mountain worked on the team of men and mules that hauled huge steel cables from rim to rapids. And, as Howard suggested, White Mountain dealt with tragedy, too.

In February 1922, Rees Griffith, a trail foreman working on the North Kaibab Trail, was badly injured by a falling rock loosened by dynamite. Hearing the news and accompanied by a nurse he called "Miss Catti," White Mountain set out from El Tovar after dark to cover the icy 11-mile trek to aid Griffith. In his report, White Mountain wrote, "Had we been engaged upon another errand, the ethereal beauty of the Canyon bathed in mystical moonlight would have been greatly enjoyed.... Miss Catti never uttered a word of complaint or fear but continually urged me to go as fast as I deemed safe."

They crossed the bridge White Mountain helped build and arrived four and a half hours after leaving the South Rim. Miss Catti tried to revive Griffith, but he was already gone. In his account, White Mountain combined a detailed description of the accident with specifics of the handling of Griffith's body. White sheets from El Tovar lined the coffin, which a carpenter fashioned from available materials, and a burial site was carefully selected.

Presiding over the funeral, White Mountain read from a Bible that Dama had sent from the rim. "I said a few words to the effect that it seemed right," he recalled, "that this man should be laid to rest near the spot where he fell and where he had spent a great part of his life; that it was fitting and proper that we who had known him, worked with him and loved him should perform this last duty."

White Mountain's Grand Canyon time was brief - less than three years. He left the Park Service until 1928, when Horace M. Albright (who became the agency's director the following year) found him teaching junior high in San Bernardino, California. They discussed several positions, but White Mountain didn't return to the agency until he took the top job at Petrified Forest National Monument in 1929.

When he and Dama arrived, the main park road was little more than a trail, and sometimes-shabby tourist attractions selling petrified wood siphoned off visitors. His tenure spanned a critical period in the monument's history, as it expanded into the Painted Desert. Infrastructure improvements, supported by New Deal funding, transformed the monument into a major tourist destination.

White Mountain and Dama remained at the Petrified Forest until 1940. They hosted Albert Einstein and his wife, Elsa, in 1931, during a planned hourlong visit that turned into an allday affair; Einstein later sent an autographed photo and said petrified wood was the single most interesting thing he saw in America. White Mountain even went Hollywood, if briefly, when he traveled to California to talk about the Petrified Forest on film director Cecil B. DeMille's national radio show.

Dama wrote a monument guide (she's credited with naming the landmark “Old Faithful” log) and her books while at Petrified Forest. If she occasionally still slipped into the worst clichés about Indians, Hopi Girl and Indian Tribes of the Southwest reflect a deeper understanding. The New York Times praised Dama as “a vivacious and colorful writer who has the faculty of putting into her pages the look and feeling of the life she writes about.” Until around 1940, the Smiths' lives followed a straightforward course. But that year's census contained a surprise. Margie Sombrano, a 2-year-old born in New Mexico, was listed as a resident in their household and described as “Hospital Daughter.” It's possible the Smiths were fostering the girl, although in her book National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History, Polly Welts Kaufman wrote that the couple had adopted an American Indian daughter. But no other mentions of the girl exist in connection with the Smiths.

A January 1940 Arizona Republic article announced that White Mountain would move to Wyoming and become superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, where he remained until accepting the superintendent post for Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks in July 1943. But around that time, something happened between the couple. The December 1942 issue of The Desert Magazine, where Dama frequently contributed, referred to writer “Margaret Stone (formerly Mrs. White Mountain Smith).” That byline appeared in the magazine until 1945, when her articles carried a new byline: Dama Langley.

A 1979 interview with veteran Zion employees yielded some clues. The conversation briefly turned to Harry Langley - a celebrated national park landscape architect, and the designer of the Emerald Pools Trail, among other noteworthy Zion features. Kathryn Schram, who arrived at Zion in 1937, casually mentioned that when she met the architect, he was single.

“You didn't know White Mountain Smith, I guess,” replied J.L. Crawford, a Zion ranger who grew up in the area. He talked about White Mountain before declaring, “But this Langley took his wife away from him, left him alone. So, they had adopted a baby girl.... Actually, as the story goes, Charles Smith's wife just didn't like life out here in the West. She was used to a different type of living, and she just left him and later married Harry Langley. So, they moved back to Washington, D.C., and lived happily.” At the end of I Married a Ranger, Dama hinted she was homesick for West Virginia. White Mountain responded, “Why go now? You've escaped death from fire, flood and fools. Might as well stay and see it through.” But relocating to Wyoming and the prospect of moving away from the region Dama had come to love might have triggered a crisis from which the Smiths never recovered.

The Smiths apparently knew Langley as far back as their time at the Petrified Forest. In his monthly report from August 1932, White Mountain mentioned that Langley spent time at the monument, working on the Painted Desert road extension. I couldn't find any marriage records for Langley and Dama, but newspaper accounts show that by 1950 at the latest, the couple were living in suburban Washington, where Langley had transferred.

Dama continued to write about Indian cultures and seemed especially focused on tensions between tradition and modernization, including the fate of the Snake Dance. She occasionally traveled back to the Southwest, including for a major 1968 Arizona Highways piece on the Navajo people. She relied on the deep connections she had cultivated during a career that spanned five decades. One article said Dama “probably knows more about the Indian of the Southwest than any other White woman.” She died in 1973, back home in West Virginia, at age 81.

White Mountain eventually remarried; he died in California in 1962, at age 80. During his farewell talk at Zion, he made no reference to Dama. He spoke of summiting 13,766-foot Grand Teton at age 59 and said that although his official time of service added up to a little more than 29 years, “I've been a national-park man ever since that June day I stepped into Yellowstone park 44 years ago.” White Mountain rhapsodized about his experiences: “In solitude I have watched the moon rise over the forest and over the desert. I've seen the sun cast its early light on the shining mountains, and I have heard the wind coming from distant places, bringing the sound of waterfowl. ... I have heard the bugling of the majestic elk and seen 1,000-pound grizzlies fight to the death. ... I can see in my mind's eye the sun set behind the shining mountains when they turn red from their tips to the blanket of evergreen below. And with this fading, a cold, brilliant star comes into being, in the middle of a purple sky.” He confessed to being a sentimentalist. Then, the stoic old Yankee briefly shed his reserve and told the audience, “But if any of you ever say that you heard me talk like this, I'll say you're crazy in the head.”