With Books in My Baggage

A good bookman regards books as part of his essential traveling equipment. When Lawrence of Arabia was in the desert during World War I, two books-The Oxford Book of English Verse and Malory's Morte d'Arthur -stayed in his baggage with bread and water, when all else was abandoned. A good book speaks to one in these words, "Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side." And the wise man listens.

I began early to take books with me on my travels. When I was the youngest son, with two brothers considerably older, I was made to go on long Sunday rides with my parents, assigned to the back seat of the Marmon touring car, allowed however to take books along, the way girls took dolls.

In those far-off days of Southern California B.S.S. (Before Subdivision and Smog) the landscape was still beautiful, but instead of reading books about it, my taste ran to stories about distant parts of the world. Now that I am grown to manhood, there are plenty of books about Southern California, but there is no Southern California, at least of the beauty I knew as a boy. Arizona has yet to experience the blight of over-population and industrialization. The files of Arizona Highways do not exaggerate in presenting thousands of pages of evidence that the youngest state has few peers for beauty of earth and sky.

This beauty becomes more meaningful and lasting in memory, if it is seen with a reader's double vision. "Books are magic casements" Richard Le Gallienne wrote, and through the windows of books I have looked deeper into Arizona than would have been possible if I had to depend upon my vision alone, without the added sight of Arizona writers, from Father Garces to Ross Santee. Whether by train or plane or car, I would no more think of traversing Arizona without books in my baggage than I would of entering Death Valley without a water bag. The route would determine the books I would take. One book, however, is essential to all itineraries. It is the Arizona Guide, prepared originally by the WPA Writers' Project, under Ross Santee's editorship, and revised in 1953 by Joseph Miller of the State Library in Phoenix. Together with the New Mexico Guide, also revised by Miller, the Arizona book is one of the best of the entire national series. In fact if the enemy were on my heels, I would chuck everything else before this book went overboard. It contains more facts of past and present about Arizona than any other single source, and yet most newsstands fail to display it. Arizona might well subsidize an edition for popular sale. Knowledge increases understanding and love, and the best citizens have all three.

I said that I would let the route determine the books in my baggage. This could just as well be reversed by planning an itinerary with a book as guide. The greatest modern historian of the Southwest, the late Herbert E. Bolton, Director of the Bancroft Library, founded his reputation by following the trails of Coronado, Escalante, Anza, Kino and Garces through the region, using ancient journals and maps as his guides. When he came to publish their manuscripts, he knew the weary miles of their entradas from having traversed them by car and horse and on foot. This makes for both enriched traveling and reading; it allows life to confirm reading and books to intensify living. Then a vacation in the field becomes a many-dimensioned experience, in which one is not confined to the present, but moves back and forth easily on the time stream, present with Kino at the founding of San Xavier, with Garces on his descent to the Havasupai Falls, or with Martha Summerhayes, as she followed her soldier husband over the landscape nearly a century ago, up the Colorado by steamboat and back and forth across the desert and mountains. It was in her old age, back in New England, that she wrote her reminiscences of army life with her young lieutenant in Arizona Territory in the wild 70's, called Vanished Arizona. Those who know better than I say that this is the way it ever is the world over for army wives on frontier posts. By some unfathomable magic she was able to recapture the essences of the experience, and with deep nostalgia, as in these closing words of her book: "Sometimes I hear the still voices of the Desert; they seem to be calling me through the echoes of the Past. I hear, in fancy, the wheels of the ambulance crunching the small broken stones of the malpais, or grating swiftly over the gravel of the smooth white roads of the river bottoms. I hear the rattle of the ivory rings on the harness of the six-mule team; I see the soldiers marching on ahead; I see my white tent, so inviting after a long day's journey.

"But how vain these fancies! Railroad and automobile have annihilated distance, the army life of those years is past and gone, and Arizona, as we knew it, has vanished from the face of the earth.

Vanished Arizona should be reprinted, I hope by Arizona Silhouettes, that excellent publishing project founded by George Chambers of Tucson. It is one of the best books of all time about Arizona.

One is never lonely even when alone, if he will let his imagination people the landscape with our historical forebears. Escapism? Of course. Not from life, however, but from the superfluities and distractions of modern existence, deeper into the timeless realities of life itself.

Throughout the arid lands water determines where man goes and what he does. The movements of man, primitive and modern, follow the flow of water, whether or not the water runs on beneath the earth's surface. An Arizona bookman today could devise many itineraries with river books as companions.

The latest of these is Douglas Martin's Yuma Crossing, a popular history of the key role played by this superficially unimpressive point of dwelling on the Colorado, where it divides Arizona and California in more ways than one. Every book of this kind should be read thrice, once before going to the place described, once while there, and the third time in retrospect. With Yuma Crossing on the seat beside him, the traveler should drive up river from the ancient ford-site to the dams at Laguna and Imperial, or to the mouth of the Gila, where Father Garces was martyred by the Yumas in 1781, or cross the river into California and see the remains of the plank road over the dunes to San Diego.

Garces' journal is another Arizona classic that should be reprinted. In the 1770's he ranged far and wide from his base at San Xavier, and on the fourth day of July in 1776, when the Atlantic colonists were signing the Declaration of Independence, this hardy Franciscan was being rebuffed by the Hopis at Oraibi in his effort to Christianize them. His field journals were translated by Coues in 1900 under the title On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer, and a reprint of its essential matter would be a superb Arizona traveler. Garces was no polished stylist. He wrote a Spanish

As rough as his brown robe, and Coues renders it into English without any fancy paraphrasing. The Franciscan father got right down to business in the matter of converting the heathen, as this excerpt shows: “I talked to them, and exhibited the linen print of Maria Santisima and the lost soul. They told me she was a nice lady, that señora, that the lost soul was very bad; that they were not such fools as not to know that up in heaven above are the good people, and down under the ground are the bad ones, the dogs, and the very ugly beasts; and that this they know to be a fact because the Pimas had told them so. I laid before them the proposition, whether they wished that Españoles and padres should come to live in their land, and they answered ‘Yes,’ that they should be well content, for then they would have meat and clothing. I gave them some tobacco and glass beads, with which they were much pleased.” A few years later, due to gross abuses by the Spanish soldiers, the Indians butchered the mission colony, including good Father Garces. Helen C. White's Dust on the King's Highway is a powerful novel, based on Garces' journal. East of Yuma the Papaguería begins, immemorial home of the Papago Indians known as the Bean People, gentlest of the Arizona tribes, who lived in peace for the reason that no one coveted the desert lands they inhabited. In 1938 Ruth M. Underhill published a beautiful little book about the Papagos called Singing for Power, the Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona, in which she translated many of their ceremonial songs. Here is a passage from her preface: “Other Indians have migrated here and there, but the Bean People were found by the first Spaniards just where they are now. They were found, and they were left again. The conquistadores, pushing through flood and forest up from Mexico City, found this barren northern land too much for even them to handle. The missionaries came and, at last, went. Even the Americans, stampeding westward after gold, steered clear of the rainless desert. “So the Papagos wandered, calm and smiling, back and forth across the waste of brilliant bareness which Elder Brother, their god, had given them. They shot the ground squirrels and the rats and birds. They picked the caterpillars from the bushes. They shook the seeds from every blade of wild grass. They brushed the spines from cactus stems and roasted them for hours in a pit with a fire over it. “I have never heard one of them object to this plan of life. Rather, an old woman telling me of it sighed and said: ‘To you Whites, Elder Brother gave wheat and peaches and grapes. To us, he gave the wild seeds and the cactus. Those are the good foods.’” This is another Arizona classic, crying to be reprinted. Three modern river books make good traveling companions. Frank Waters' The Colorado and Edwin Corle's The Gila are two of the best volumes in the Rivers of America series, actually histories of the entire watersheds of these two Arizona streams. Ross Calvin's River of the Sun is another book about the Gila, whose headwaters lie in the wilderness area over the border into New Mexico. It is a book to read with Calvin's earlier New Mexican classic called Sky Determines, sometimes incandescing into lyric prose, as in the following passage about the range grasses of the Gila basin: "Prince of the family is the regal blue grama, which bears regularly on each side of its stalks two purple spikes, which in autumn ripen and curl into graceful golden sickles. The graceful grama, as its name implies, is a thing of beauty, and though it extends in an unbroken plantation miles across, each plant still seems a rarity. And where a savannah of them, nodding in the breeze and dotted with well-spaced junipers, stretches far into the distance to overlap the flank of a blue mountain, only a dolt can remain insensitive. Grasslands have always and everywhere been wealth, but they are also beauty. Such scenes, oftentimes enriched with added interest by a herd of antelope, everywhere met the eye of the early traveler in the Southwest. The sea of grass, then, rather than the desert, is the picture of the grazing country which history holds up. The Verde, the Virgin, the Hassayampa, and the Salt, the Bill Williams, the Little Colorado, the San Juan and the San Pedro, the Aravaipa, and the Santa Cruz which ends up nowhere, have not been favored with separate books, and yet each watercourse, no matter how scant its flow, is an artery in the body of the state's history, rich with nourishment for those who can assimilate it.

The ascent of streams to their headwaters can be an enthralling vacation pastime, and if there are books to give one clearer vision of the landscape, then what is exciting for topography alone becomes richer for the added dimension only books can give.

All of these volumes I have mentioned, and many more, were in my mind if not in my baggage, when last year after a trip to Europe I drove west from New York and bisected Arizona from Sanders to Yuma, seeing the state in autumn raiment, with senses starved for what only the Southwest provides-coloration, configuration, and kaleidoscopic weather.

I left Albuquerque before dawn, after giving my car a clean set of spark plugs for breakfast, eager to quit the main street of U.S. 66 for less traveled roads across the mountains to my destination in the Verde Valley. Ahead in the west, the weather was piling up between earth and sky; I knew it meant rain, and I feared snow. Sight of Mt. Taylor, great landmark of Western New Mexico, recalled Martha Summerhayes' description of Bill Williams Mountain, another noble landmark farther west, on whose aspened shoulder the Verde rises: "Our road was gradually turning southward, but for some days Bill Williams was the predominating feature of the landscape; turn whichever way we might, still this purple mountain was before us. It seemed to pervade the entire country, and took on such wonderful pink colors at sunset. Bill Williams held me in thrall, until the hills and valley in the vicinity of Fort Whipple shut him out from my sight. But he seemed to have come into my life somehow, and in spite of his name, I love him for the companionship he had given me during those long, hot, weary, and interminable days."

South from Sanders the lonely road unrolled like a red carpet over rising range land to the golden cottonwoods of St. Johns, where my first meal of the day was brunch. Then climbing higher to ponderosas and sawmills at Show Low and the fleeting sight of a girl reading in a hammock, through the White Mountains, in and out of rain and down and out of the Salt River Canyon, with a thrilling glimpse of Mt. Graham in the cloudy south, I drove with ease in grace, enjoying a traffic-free road at the time of year when vacationers are all back home, dreaming of next summer's trip. And no snow.

Although I had not a single Arizona book with me, my mind was on fire with memories of all those I had ever read-history, biography, travel, archaeology, anthropology, novels, and stories and I experienced the exaltation of infinite richness, as the experience of each writer was magically mine. He who travels and reads not is poor indeed, and he who reads and travels not is only half alive.

The next day in the Verde Valley it was again Vanished Arizona that was uppermost in my mind. In the 1870's the author was at Camp Verde with her Lieutenant Jack. Some of the buildings still stand-those beautiful territorials which are vanishing as the population increases and some of the cathedral cottonwoods, hectic with dying leaves, stood there even before Martha Summerhayes' time.

Clarkdale, Jerome, Prescott, Ash Fork, and the northwest corner where the Virgin flows, that colored canyon country beloved of novelists Zane Grey and Jonreed Lauritzen, all live doubly for the traveler who is also a reader. The same is true of the Navajo country, and of the southern part of the state, celebrated earlier by the books of J. Ross Browne and Carl Lumholtz, and in our time by those of Ross Santee and Joseph Wood Krutch, and is true of everywhere that man has been and left books as memorials to his love of the good earth.

Have I persuaded you, traveler, to include books in your baggage? Then see your nearest library and bookstore. "Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side."