Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

As usual, put up a fight, but the boys had no idea of wrangling the big pasture afoot. They forefooted Shimmy, choked him down and had him saddled when Bill appeared on the scene. Since the pony was in Carl's mount Bill made them turn him loose. A little later Carl appeared, saddled his oneman horse and wrangled the pasture for them.

I had one experience with the horse myself. Carl and I were camped on Sycamore; we held our horses up in a little wire trap. In some way Shimmy got tangled up in some loose barb wire and the horse was down when I discovered him. Carl was away at the time. We had no wire cutters and it was necessary for me to lay myself wide open for any move he might make as I untangled the wire that hung him. Shimmy hadn't struggled or cut himself to pieces as most ponies would, and he lay quietly as I worked-but watching me like a hawk. The mess unscrambled, he got to his feet when I told him to get up.

We were feeding grain. From the way the pony acted in the wire I thought, perhaps, we understood each other now. But when I attempted to hang a morral of grain on Shimmy that evening he struck with both forefeet, to the amusement of my friend. "He knows I wasn't here this afternoon but he knows I'll feed him tonight."

Shimmy was as well reined as any pony I ever saw. Carl could turn him on a dime. There wasn't a horse in the remuda that could outrun the little black and Shimmy savvied the cow. While Carl wasn't in the same class with some of the other boys as roper he always caught his share when he occasionally occasionally was range branding calves. Shimmy would lay alongside any critter's rump and give Carl as many throws as he liked.

On one sashay Carl caught more mavericks than Johnnie Jackson, who was a top roper on any range. Johnnie laughed when he told me of it, "If I had a pony like Shimmy in my string I'd never lose any race." During the drought Carl carried in more than eighty dogie calves on his oneMan horse. When someone spoke of the money he had saved the outfit Carl made it quite plain that it was not for any money involved, he had felt sorry for the dogies.

If Shimmy hadn't turned out to be a one-man horse Carl wouldn't have had him long. Shimmy would have been in some top hand's mount and a top cow horse himself. A one-man horse is never worth a dime to an outfit. So Bill gave the little black to Carl for keeps, and Carl and the little black were together as long as Shimmy lived. It was always amusing to watch the pony follow Carl, in a way he was more like a dog than a horse. And Carl treated the pony that way too, even out on the open range Carl would pull both saddle and bridle and turn his little horse loose. There was one occasion when Carl almost lost him.

Carl had gone up on Slash M to cut some cedar posts; as usual, Carl not only pulled his saddle but the bridle as well and turned the little horse loose. There were many wild horses up on Slash M and Carl, busy with his work, did not miss his horse at first-but Shimmy had gone to the wild bunch. When Carl located his pony Shimmy was playing with three wild ones on a ridge, striking, biting and squealing-just trying to get acquainted.

The main bunch of wild ones was grazing further up the ridge. Right then any other cowboy would have kissed his pet pony adieu; but Carl slipped back and got the 30-40 he carried on his saddle. Carl figgered if he could get between Shimmy and the main bunch he might cut his pony off since he had the wind on the bunch. Carl made a good sneak, too, but the wild ones finally winded him and took off down the main ridge with Shimmy in the bunch, running like the wind. That was when Carl opened up with the ol' 30-40. It was when he killed three wild ones running just ahead of Shimmy that his little black horse stopped. "For Shimmy, he was pretty scared for all that shootin'; he yoos stand an' shake all over. When the wild bunch pass, I whistle; then Shimmy come to me."

PHOTOGRAPHS by ANSEL ADAMS TEXT by NANCY NEWHALL From the copper town of Ajo, the highway runs to Sonoyta and the Gulf of California. It is a fast road, soaring up through mountain notches and down across wide valleys where chollas glimmer and saguaros stipple the slopes. Ahead, the mountains of Mexico are rising. Fishermen bound for the bright waters and big fish of the Gulf, and tourists intent on a strange land, flash down the highway, hardly seeing the sign that reads Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, or the flag fluttering over a small building some fifteen miles further. Then, from the desert horizons, a few low adobes close in: Sonoita and the border. If asked, the tourists and fishermen would say they had seen nothing but another large cactus patch, and why all the shouting about a National Monument? But there are other travellers, often with a dusty, sunfaded and delighted look, whose cars are laden with sleeping bags, water bags and cookstoves, and who move downthis highway like snails. These are desert lovers and they are about to enter paradise. They turn off onto little roads, almost imperceptible among the saguaro colonnades, and vanish.

Morning glitters in the desert. Sunlight is under everything, and shadows stretch ankle deep behind. Seen against the east, everything is a sparkling shadow, even the low fuzzy thorns and the gravel in the washes.

Beside the highway, a few yards back in the low forest, stand two crosses. Paper wreaths hang on them. Bottles that once held holy water lie empty; from other bottles the flowers have blown out and dried. These are not graves, but places where the souls of a young Indian and his wife departed, and still sacred to their relatives. Faithfully, to these remote crosses, every year on All Souls, new paper wreaths, new bottles of holy water and real flowers, new candles to burn

The stubborn miracle of the arboreal desert begins to engross you. In the dry mountains of Mexico, under the tropic sun, not only water but the breath of water had to be conserved. Leaves exhale moisture; plants learned to drop their leaves in the searing heat and even to live without leaves. The ancestor of what, in lands of rainfall, became the rose, here spread a net of roots to catch the most fleeting shower, swelled its stalk into a reservoir, and coated itself with spines. The desert forest took forms unique to the center of this hemisphere, and slowly marched up the mountain slopes into Arizona.

A strange and exquisite community, the thorns and cacti live in silence. The ocotillos shoot up shimmering wands tipped in the spring with flames of flowers. In the heats they drop their leaves and wait with naked thorns for rain. The palo verdes, grey-green glimmering little trees, also drop their leaves. In the droughts, they are mists of thorns; in April they blossom into clouds of gold.

Austere, uncanny among the delicate thorns, the cacti are curiously diverse and individual. The sluggish barrels, lying huge along the earth, point mostly to the hottest part of noon. The prickly pears, their paddles evolving and balancing one from another like acrobats, seem from a distance to twinkle. The chollas are a peculiar kindred, hiding their flowers in spiky calyxes; the staghorns branching into chill red, pale jade, ripe yellow; the jumping chollas frosted with sharp bright spines, their pods ready to catch at a hair or a thread. The organ pipe and the senita grow like families, in clumps of fluted columns often twice as tall as a man and more. Nowhere else north of Mexico will you find them. Down the wash, among the scrubby thorns, you may find if you search diligently, a woody stalk that looks like a dead serpent dried by the sun. From that dead twig, in a matter of hours, a living tip shoots up. Indians and Mexicans gather with fireworks and music. With the last sunlight, the swelling bud will open into a glow of satin around pistils and stamens like a jewelled monstrance-flower worth a fiesta, the night-blooming cereus, Queen of the Night, filling the darkness with perfume and dying with the morning. And overhead, always on the slopes and hilltops, loom the saguaros, the giant symbols of this land.

Walking in this silent fantasy, you learn to keep a sharp eye on the ground. The brown burrs dropped by the chollas can pierce a boot sole. And in the shade and light, seldom seen but never impossible, there may be the living pattern of a snake.

Noon in the desert is a vast blaze overhead and a hard glare below. You are shut in by distances of light. You walk in the focus of the sun's rays. You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones are incandescent.

Thorn and spine glisten around you. Crowned by glittering spikes, the saguaros stand in pools of shadow that might cool a mouse or a lizard but no larger living thing. The palo verdes glimmer like a glacier water, but their mists of thorns do not so much cut off the light as enmesh and soften it. The gold of the flowering brittlebush sears your eyes.

You feel in your own body why the desert wears grey, and why it blooms with such vital brilliance. Nor do you any longer need a scientific explanation of desert varnish: a few centuries more in this sun and the blondest of us will be copper dark as the Papagos.

You pass through groves of chollas spectral as the illusion of an orchard blossoming in hell. The near mountains are shapes of opalescent coral without depth or substance; the far peaks of Ajo and Mexico pierce the sky with turquoise. There is no shade; there is no place to look.

Then the little road runs down a hollow in the hills and dumps you into Quitobaquito. You can take in all of Quitobaquito in a single glance a pool, a few trees, a shack, a tent, some mouldering adobes and a barbed wire fence. It is just a desert water hole and it has never been much more. But here, eighty years before the Pilgrims rowed to the cold autumnal shores of Plymouth, Diaz may have passed on the exploration that took him to the Colorado River. Here, at the end of the 17th Century, the Jesuit FatherEusebio Kino came riding west from the chain of missions he had founded; excited by a string of twenty blue seashells, he came to ask the Indians if there were not passage to California by land as well as by sea. Here in 1776, while along the Atlantic thirteen colonies fought for independence, De Anza rested on his return from the Pacific; in California, on the shores of a great bay, he had founded a mission dedicated to San Francisco. Here the fortyniners slaked their thirst and pushed on over the torturous mountains and the vast dry plains, and died until by their skeletons you could follow El Camino del Diablo-the Devil's Highway. And here wagon loads of ore from these mountains halted on their creaking journey down to the sea and the waiting ships.

Two mongrel dogs bark at you briefly, but at first you hardly see the tent or the dark Papago faces in the shade. Like all the white men who have come here thirsty and half-blinded, you see only the water and the green, hear only the water and the leaves.

The pool is cloudy, like many springs here. But it reflects the sky, it rocks the rushes growing in it, and laps sparkling among its water weeds. That louder rippling comes from the rivulet rushing past the ruined adobes from the springs above. A huge old cottonwood leans over the water; others push up the sky of noon to let you walk under heights of rustling coolness. And in April the gnarled dead-looking mesquites around such pools are hanging out fronds of a green like fire.Gradually you begin to see in the shade. The dogs are quiet, but a turkey cock still gobbles and swells as you approach. A rooster

Eyes you acridly and his hen clucks a warning to her chicks. A fat white duck waggles disapprovingly towards the water. No fence is needed; the desert sun herds living things towards shade and water.

A half-grown Papago boy darts out of the tent, snatches up the protesting duck and wears her upsidedown on his head as he runs and dances, looking to see if you think he is funny too. A woman, vast and maternal, comes out to empty a washtub. A lean old man in a wide hat shakes his head when you ask to photograph his family. A photograph is magic; it takes from a man his shadow and could be used to work him evil.

Across the brook, through the ruined wall of one of the adobes, you can see a rusted bed. A man died there. His family pierced the wall to let his spirit pass, and then, in fear of his envious returning ghost, abandoned the house.

You remember how these squat, tenacious, peaceful Papagos could live in deserts where no other race dared linger. How they hoarded water in pools like this through the thunderous summer, and planted their corn and beans where floods had soaked the earth. How in the bright winter they moved up beside the mountain springs and went hunting. How each family had a grove of saguaros and in the July blaze knocked from their tips the split red fruit, to grind the black seeds into meal and make from the scarlet pulp both jam and wine for the rainmaking cere-mony; how from the mescal they took huge buds to roast like giant artichokes, and fibre to twirl into string; from devil's claw a black strand to weave with yucca in their baskets. You think of the long incantations to bring rain and ward off evil, of the constant charms and prayers to ensure the narrow margin between life and famine, and you no longer wonder that by remote and lonely pools the Papagos still believe in magic.

Springs in the desert are where you find them, and earth soaked by the floods lies where the floods sink. Why should a pool be separated by a fence from the field it waters, and one be called America and the other Mexico? Yet those four strands of barbed wire down there, a fence for cattle, not men, mark the boundary not only between two nations, the United States and Mexico, but between two philosophies. The Mexicans do not believe in killing diseased cattle; plague may infect whole herds and from the herds whole economies. But to the Mexicans, death is fated; it comes to all creatures and mortals should neither hasten nor delay it. Horrified, the Americans have put barbed wire between themselves and contamination. And the Papagos, inhabitants with a tenure older than nations, continue to live by the pool and plant in the field as they did for numberless generations before the first white men came like comets across the blazing hills.Grazing is harmful to desert ecology, and no cattle should be allowed within the Monument. But beside a deserted shack and withered ramada a windmill still creaks in the hot light, pumping gushes of cool water into a trough; wildflowers grow in the overflow. Through the unbarred gate, the cattle wander in to drink wild and shy, with rough red coats and white furred faces.

Suddenly, as if a bell sounded in the desert silence, you look up. The air has changed; it is cooler. The sun once more is infinite light, instead of a burning star overhead. Shadows are sculptural again, and a man may stand in them. Once more the mountains recede. To the west, they stand steel cut against the afternoon, and towards them undulates a marvelous glimmer - the feathery bells and grasses that were almost invisible at noon are now illuminated by the sun.Up in the hills, the flowers are now pure light and color the silken primroses, the spires of lupin, the bright poppies, the winged wild hyacinths. Over them the chollas glow and the saguaros loom aureoled. On cactus tips, flowers more brilliant than the rose are opening. Among the red cliffs of the Puerto Blancos, the Dripping Spring moistens a hillside now in shadow. From its cave in rock like blown sea foam, you descend through ferns and starlike clouds of daisies.

Shadows stretch longer and longer from the peaks. From the twilight, you watch the eastern crests turn gold, then scarlet, rose and amethyst. Over their jagged edge, in the clear night, the moon is seen to be a pallid sphere.

If you are wise, you have already made camp, and not in a grove of jumping chollas. Easy to avoid by day, at night they crowd close, invisible and eager torturers. The desert in darkness seems lifted up. The cookfire gleams. The moon becomes a presence, then a glittering power in the night. If clouds veil the moon, a luminous softness covers you. In the moon's dark phases, the immense universe seems to wheel close to the earth's rim and all night long the bright stars pierce your sleep. Then light on your eyelids presses you awake. The winged clouds are on fire from the unrisen sun. Under their light the desert becomes visible, unearthly in the transparent cool. Then through a low notch among the peaks breaks the first blaze. The red crags glow. Night clings, paling, to your back, until once more day is limitless, and you are walking on the desert in the sky.