Arizona in 1900

ARIZONA THE MAGIC name of a land bright and mysterious, of sun and sand, of tragedy and stark endeavor. So long had I dreamed of it that when I came there it was not strange to me. Its sun was my sun, its ground was my ground. That was in 1900-only thirteen years after Geronimo and his Apaches had surrendered to our ever-pursuing cavalry. Arizona was still "ARIZONA." Cow ranches still raised cattle, cowpunchers were not yet picturesque" and worked steers instead of dudes. Indians were still Injuns, and you could read in the pitiless eyes of Apaches the memory of burning buildings in the gray dawn and the long shuddering screams of torture. The prickly silent desert was still a place where you could get lost and die the terrible death of thirst; where 125-inthe-shade was still 125-in-the-shade, and a red earthen olla, swung under the ramada, was more essential than the most gadgety frigidaire can ever hope to be.

Arizona was still "frontier." Yes-men were few and not well thought of, and the citizens generally adhered to the precept: "So live that you can look every damn man in the eye and tell him to go to hell" which they frequently did.

The business district of Prescott had been burned flat and upon my arrival the place was humming like a new mining camp. Stores, banks, saloons, and gambling places were doing business under pine boards and canvas. One citizen was pointed out to me as a good man not to monkey with. He was tall and wore a wide hat, his grey eyes were mild and sad, his moustache had a despondent droop and he sagged a little at the knees and shoulders. He wore a deputy's badge. It seemed that recently some enthusiastic lad had done a bank hold-up and was making a galloping getaway when the sad eyed man, at long range, nailed him with one shot. When complimented, he remarked, "I seldom miss." I glanced down the long pine bar. A dazzle of glassware and bottles showed you could buy any drink to be had in the most rococo thirst parlors of New York or San Francisco. From behind it, spaced at intervals in pairs, protruded the butts of sixshooters.

In those days in Arizona being an artist was something you just had to endure or be smart enough to explain why. It was incomprehensible that you were just out "seeing the country." If you were not working for the railroad, con sidering real estate or scouting for a mining company what the hell were you? The draw ings I made were no excuse; and I was regarded as a wandering lunatic.

In Phoenix at the Hassayampa Club I met some of the old timers. "Well, son," said one of them, "if you want to see Arizona, just put a box o'soda crackers and a jug o'whiskey in the back o' the wagon and you can travel from one end of the place to the other and never spend a dollar." Anyhow, it was then safe manners in the Territory to "set 'em up" and ask no per sonal questions.

Torrid in its irrigated valley, Phoenix was no great city. Many of the build ings were adobe; wagons, bug gies and saddled horses were tied before the wide awnings; Pima, Papago and Maricopa, ar rayed in gay silks and calicos,squatted along the sidewalk; and "Chihuahua Town" was sizeable if not important.

The brown-skinned people fascinated me. In Tempe, then nine-tenths Mexican, I made many drawings of them; enjoyed their simple hospitality, and in starlit evenings learned to sing, in paisano style.

"Mujer, mujer, mi corazon pierdese, Mi triste pecho se encuentra apasionado."

Something muy simpatica in all this and to be long treasured in the memory.

My first desert camp was near Sacaton on the Reservation, and here I first met the saguaro. Close to my bed stood the tall shaft of one devoid of branches. All that long sleepless night it dominated me, a dark finger of doubt pointing ominously forever upward into an un knowable universe of stars. In the pale yellow light of sunrise a saguaro is only a giant cactus but through all my longer acquaintance with them that night remains my strongest memory. Nor shall I ever forget a giant Pima who came at sunset riding a roan pony down a little slope, gazing straight into the sun, clad only in an undershirt stretched thin over the great arch of his chest, his long gray hair hanging straight down his back. Not a glance my way. He was all "injun."

The Agua Fria Valley (really a high plateau) was my first look at mesa and bench land country, and the terrific drama of dark thunderstorm and cloudburst. It was then grass land, but at the end of the fourth dry year the plain was dotted with mummified carcasses of cattle. Here was a new world, full of great imaginings. And here I first saw cowboys of the Texas type: "rim-fire" saddle, tied rope, batwing chaps, very different from the old Miller and Lux vaqueros of the San Joaquin.

Out of all this I made a large drawing of a cowpuncher on a starved-looking pony gazing ruefully down at a mummied steer, named it "Drouth" and sent it to Harper's Weekly. It came back with the comment "Not serious enough."

If the editor could have heard the Arizona comments on that drawing But that was forty-one years ago.

There were Apache Tontos at old Camp Verde; fierce hawk-faced people from the chaparral. It was not wise, the storekeeper told me, for a stranger to visit their camp alone. I made some sketches of them though; but quickly, and from safe concealment. How much of the cruelty I saw in those grim visages was of my own imagining? But they were the nearest thing to the wild fighting Injun I shall ever see.

Crawling through tiny rooms cut in the cream colored cliff of Montezuma's Castle (silly name)-picking up bits of pottery, dreaming of a far and forgotten past; the enchantment of moonlight on Montezuma's Well-and dreams, more dreams. Those dim Indian ghosts that I induced have ever since befriended me.

I knew them again at old Oraibi, at Walpi, at Mishongnovi, at Shipaulovi and at silent Betatakin and through them I have reached to something I cannot name, yet more than half believe. Somehow, it seems, you may not understand Indians until you make friends with the ghosts.

The Hopi-we called them Moqui thenin their prehistoric villages atop the mesaswere, it seemed to me, the living incarnation of those ghosts. The light, the color, the dusky interiors, the quiet murmur of their voices, the surrounding silence, all confirmed it. Four months at Walpi in lone association with this living past. I knew time no more; only sea sons, and the world suspended in eternity. A little feathered Katchina and bits of turquoise hung against a pearl-white wall and my friend Namoki telling stories to his little naked son,Basket Dance, and deep chant of the Neman Katchina, the moving sunlit poetry of the Flute Dance at Toreva, all this and Broadway were under the same sky! I never worked at higher levels.

Thirty-three thousand Navajo they told me, in a vast remote country of mesas, plains and canyons, the all of which no white man knew. To a man on horseback, remember, or in a wagon, the world was on a scale unknown to motorists, and roads then were trails or wagon tracks.

Ganado trading post, sixty-five miles from the railroad, was two days by horseback, one day with a good buggy team, and four days for the freight wagons in good weather. Now two hours by motor car. Chinlee, twenty-five miles further, at the mouth of Canyon de