ARTISTS IN EQUITATION

San Miguel de Allende, the first Spanish settlement in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. A national monument famed for the wealth of its colonial facade and its attractive social and cultural ambience.

Whether it's "follow the leader," as in the photo below, weekly competition as pictured at the right, or work in the dressage ring, bottom right, both horse and rider become expert through this intensive six day a week schedule.

El Greco, Veronese, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Giotto, Van Gogh... An unlikely assortment of names outside of a museum? Not at all. Come any weekday morning to a riding school in a small colonial city in the heart of Mexico and you will find all these equine personages assembled, with thirty odd less celebrated horses. You will find also Otelo, El Cid, and Ce Malinalli, more familiarly known as La Malinche. The riding school is the Escuela Ecuestre of San Miguel Allende, and the names are clues to a riding school with a difference. In the ten years since its founding, riders from all over the world, from some twenty countries and every continent, have discovered a new kind of riding holiday in Mexico. The enchantment of it is that besides the riding school and its notably effective intensive course given by the week, there is a total environment that is profoundly and widely appealing. The splendid climate, the beauty and architectural distinction of the historic city of San Miguel, its reputation as an arts, crafts and tourist center, and even the charming Rancho Hotel El Atascadero where most of the riders stay all contribute to a memorable experience.

When Harold Black, artist and enamelist and erstwhile designer of medical and scientific exhibits, left Greenwich Village and a rewarding career, he made his home with his family of wife and son in San Miguel with the expectation of leading a quiet life of painting, writing, and learning to ride horse-back. He had no idea of making horsemanship a career, especially since he had never ridden before. Not many men of 44 care to tackle a strenuous new sport, particularly not a man whose previous idea of exercise was lifting a gesso board to an easel or rearranging paintings in a rack or on walls. But after some introductory months of riding cross country on charro saddles with the typical small hardy horses of the country, Harold Black had the good fortune first to meet Margaret Cabell Self, the experienced teacher and author of many books on horsemanship, who became a close friend, and then to be invited to ride at a Mexican cavalry unit with the officers. That first ride was almost a disaster, but

Artists in Equitation in Mexico

It left the chief instructor, now General Francisco Gallegos L., so impressed with the sheer nerve of a middle-aged man eager to learn horsemanship, that he invited Mr. Black to ride and train regularly with his officers. So he soon found himself competing with young officers twenty years and more his junior in jumping meets and had the satisfaction of frequently outriding them. For the next four years he was schooled by colonels, generals and international riders who made him into a proficient rider. And being a man of many parts (which included playing a catalytic role in organizing an annual art exhibition in San Miguel, establishing a successful art gallery, and writing), he decided that one additional project was in order and imagined that after founding it he could run it for a year or so and then turn over the administration to someone else. Because wasn't San Miguel the ideal place to start a riding school? It was, but the time schedule was all off. The consumption of time, energy, and money demanded was beyond expectation, and gradually the Escuela Ecuestre crowded out writing and paint-ing altogether. Somehow the quirks of animals and of humans resulted in a 15 hour a day program with its full complement of headaches and problems. But the school grew and its reputation thrived, though the bank account was a long time catching up, as is the way with riding schools.

The riding program, given year round in weekly units, is intensive, three hours daily except Sunday. Each morning begins with theory class in the class-room conducted by Mr. Black. Afterwards the students mount up in the dressage rings a block away. There are limbering up exercises for horse and rider; there is work on the longe and over cavelleeti; there is work in formation riding; there is jumping; and on Fridays there are usually Game Days or jumping competitions which draw many spectators and pho-tographers. Saturday ends the week with three hours of cross country riding, followed by a most welcome stirrup cup of champagne.

Instruction is excellent in all phases. Mr. Black is chief instructor and has an admirable staff of instructors for basic and intermediate riders. Students come from all levels and backgrounds, including professionals who run their own schools, jockeys, steeplechasers, hunters, saddle seat and western riders, up to Olympic dressage riders. There are also students who are not certain of the difference between the fore and the aft of the horse. They are children, teen-agers, college students (Lindenwood College of St. Charles, Mo., regularly sends classes for three weeks every other year for college credit under the supervision of riding mistress Fern Bittner), professors, writers (Patrick Dennis for one), ditch-diggers, stewardesses, top business executives, lawyers and judges, pilots and ambassadors, actresses and directors.

The well schooled horses range from docile mounts suitable for novices to more spirited and often highly accomplished animals for intermediates and skilled riders, and they are kept in fine fettle by constant retraining by grooms who ride well and know their horses. Each student has his favorite mount, but by all odds the best known is the aforementioned El Greco, a black part Arabian gelding who can be ridden over jumps and through dressage maneuvers without reins and bridle. But El Greco is now a horse emeritus and used primarily for demonstrations.

Somehow Harold Black found time for busman's holidays by leading annual springtime equestrian tours of Europe. He and his groups have ridden in Ireland, Germany, France, England, Spain, Hungary, and Italy. This year there will be a two week tour (Austria and Hungary) and a three week tour (Mallorca, Barcelona, Avignon, Paris, Dublin and County Limerick) or five weeks together. He has also man-aged time to write THE ESCUELA ECUESTRE MANUAL OF HORSEMANSHIP, soon to be published by Dodd Mead, and based on his popular lectures.

In 1974 the key word for the Escuela Ecuestre is EXPANSION.

Two years ago a young lawyer and investment banker, Alan Danson, attended the Escuela Ecuestre with his wife. They became so interested that they returned for another visit, and six months later moved to San Miguel, and Mr. Danson abandoned a successful career as vice-president of Wertheim & Company, investment brokers in New York, to become an associate and business manager of the Escuela Ecuestre. His excellent background, Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, and experience now are helping the Escuela Ecuestre move into a new phase long in the planning stage.

It started with the acquisition of 35 acres above San Miguel a few years ago. A corral and stables have been built already. Envisaged for the near future are the transplantation of the installation complete with 3 dressage rings, stadium jumping field and rustic obstacles to the new land with more ample stabling.

But in addition there will be a bar-restaurant and sidewalk cafe overlooking the main dressage ring, with classroom and offices and tennis courts and condominiums!

Designer and architectural consultant is the distinguished architect, Benjamin Gingold, of Los Angeles and Minneapolis. The condominiums are designed in the colonial San Miguel style with many such features as scalloped walls, double height living rooms with overlooking balconies and barrel ceilings, clover-leaf colonial windows, and telephone wires, TV antennae, and other eyesores will be underground. Each unit will consist of three bedrooms (one or two of which can be used for den, studio, family room, or dining room), two bathrooms, kitchen, sala-dining room, terraces, carport, service area, storage room, and patio with fountain. Owners will have the privilege of stabling horses at the Escuela Ecuestre and of receiving special rates for riding instructions. But non-riders are not discriminated against.

The Escuela Ecuestre is buzzing with action, and its future looks even brighter than its past.

THE DESERT from page 3

provided more than 4000 public library buildings in North America and Great Britain. Van Dyke became friends with Carnegie and fished with him in Scotland for trout and salmon. After the Laird of Skibo's death his widow commissioned Van Dyke to edit her husband's unfinished memoirs. Thus the published Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie bears an introduction by John C. Van Dyke.

Throughout a half century his publisher was Charles Scribner's Sons. In their archives at Princeton University I found over two hundred letters between author and publisher, written during that span of time. They came to me in the form of a roll of microfilm. In a darkened room I scanned the film on a lighted reader, learning more about a tireless, genial and generous man of letters who was ever motivated by a desire to write better. His correspondents were Scribner's senior editors, W. C. Brownell and later Maxwell E. Perkins. In 1893 when his Art for Art's Sake was in press, he wrote to Brownell, “It is the first time that anything of mine has been under critical fire and like the man kicked by the mule, it may be that I'm not as handsome as formerly but 'I know a darned sight more.'” His was a rich life on levels both physical and intellectual, in settings of Midwest, Northwest, Far West, and Southwest, a vigorous life of canoeing, riverboating, fishing, hunting, cowpunching, backpacking, and desert trailing.

Here lay the answer Edwin Corle had asked for. Now I knew how it was that an academic man from back east had been able to write with such authority about a land so different from his native Raritan. It was clear that the word tenderfoot did not apply to him.

John Van Dyke first came to Southern California in the summer of 1897, seeking relief from respiratory illness, and drawn there by the presence of his brother, Theodore, fourteen years his senior, who was already established as an authority on the ecology of the region. He too had come for his health, recovered, and remained for the rest of his life. His books, Southern California, The Still-Hunter, and Flirtation Camp, were celebrations of the pastoral land he had loved in the 1870's and which was disappearing under the impact of railroad-spawned immigration and subdivision. The mad boom of the '80's had been Theodore's target in the satirical Millionaires of a Day.

“I was already ill,” John wrote in The Open Spaces, “and I went into the open of the desert to get well. Many of my days in there were ill days. But I kept busy making notes and studying vegetation and animals. I had determined to write a book about the desert, and it was necessary that I should know my subject.

“The book was written during that first summer at odd intervals when I lay with my back against a rock or propped up in the sand. That was a summer of strange wanderings. The memory of them comes back to me now mingled with halfobliterated impressions of white light, lilac air, heliotrope mountains, and blue sky. I cannot well remember the exact route of the Odyssey, for I kept no records of my movements. I was not travelling by map. I was wandering for health and desert information.” His companions were a horse and a large fox terrier named Cappy to whom he talked continually, so that they came to understand his language. Although he was finally to leave the horse at a ranch near Hermosillo, Cappy went all the way with Van Dyke and eventually back together to New Jersey. Water supply was a constant problem, especially for the animals. Although Van Dyke toughened, his health remained precarious as malaria replaced asthma as a chronic ailment. Van Dyke went first from Hemet through the Pass of San Gorgonio down the Coachella Valley into the Salton basin (eight years before the Colorado breakthrough that formed the Sea) to Yuma. Lower down river he made a reed raft to ferry his supplies across, not trusting them to the back of his horse, then swam back and rode the horse over to the Arizona side. A long dry trek brought him to Casa Grande from where he followed the Santa Cruz upstream to Tucson. There he rested and gained information on geology and botany from University of Arizona professors Blake and Forbes. On he travelled into Sonora, past Baboquívari and Arivaca down toward Tiburon Island. As he ranged much farther than his two successors, Wharton James and Smeaton Chase, his The Desert goes beyond their Mojave and Colorado desert books to include the Sonora. Van Dyke was at home in Mexico. In the chapter "Desert Days" in The Open Spaces appear tributes to the hospitality of Sonoran ranchers and Yaquis. He spent two winters in Guaymas and one far south in Oaxaca.

We can only marvel at the courage and adaptability of this creative man in facing the desert before it was subdued by the automobile, electricity, and air conditioning. During one sixweek period he encountered no other living soul. He shocked the old-timers by not wearing the customary mining costume of flannel shirt, heavy pants, boots, and felt hat. Instead he dressed in the Mexican-Indian way of thin cotton shirt and pants, straw hat, and moccasins. He carried a rifle and pistol for shooting small game, a shovel, hatchet, blankets, tin pan and cups for cooking, a gallon of water, and several shot-sacks of dehydrated food. In those days before such food could be bought, he made his own by powdering parched corn and beans, coffee, chocolate, and dried venison. His whole outfit weighed less than fifty pounds.

He thought his provisioning was meager until later he met John Muir at Theodore's Silver Valley Ranch and learned that he trod the Sierra Nevada with only tea, dry bread, and no blanket. "But Muir was Scotch and tough as a bit of heather," Van Dyke explained, "with all the beauty of character and fine colortone belonging to that shrub."

When Van Dyke did encounter prospectors or Indians, he could not persuade them that he was in the desert only for his health and for beauty's sake. Going on foot and leading his horse, as Smeaton Chase was wont to do, he perceived details of desert life he would otherwise have missed; and thus his book is microscopic as well as cosmic in its vision.

As for the automobile, here is how he viewed it in 1922: ". . . these wonderful places are now being desecrated, if not destroyed, by the automobilist the same genius that has invaded the Yosemite and made that beautiful spot almost a byword and a cursing. No landscape can stand up against the tramp automobile that dispenses old newspapers, empty cans and bottles, with fire and destruction in its wake. The crew of that craft burn the timber and grasses, muddy up the streams and kill the trout, tear up the flowers, and paint their names on the face-walls of the mountains. They are worse than the plagues of Egypt because their destruction is mere wantonness." If his shade wanders the West today, it is not a happy one.

After spending the winter of 1900-1901 again in Guaymas and bringing The Desert nearly to completion, Van Dyke started north. His Preface-Dedication was dated February 1901 at La Noria Verde, a ranchería thirty miles beyond Hermosillo (where he had been wont to leave his horse) watered by a noria, a mule-drawn, bucketed water-wheel. Back in Arizona he explored the Santa Ritas, tarried not in Tucson but pushed on through New Mexico to El Paso and south again to Del Rio on the border of Chihuahua. It was from there that he posted his manuscript by registered mail to Scribner's, confident that they would publish it as the second in the series begun three years earlier with Nature for its Own Sake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lawrence Clark Powell is a long-time friend and contributor to ARIZONA HIGHWAYS Magazine. The September 1972 edition featuring Dr. Powell's "Exploring Arizona's Literary Trails" is now a collectors' choice. In that issue we printed a résumé extracted from "Who's Who In America" measuring one full page one column deep by 14 picas wide. This is no mere man. During his 28 year tenure at UCLA he founded a library school and administered a great research library. He divides his time between Malibu, California and Arizona where he is Professor in Residence as a member of the President's staff at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Duly published in September, The Desert was reprinted year after year. The appearance in 1918 of the illustrated edition gave it renewed life. The story of how it came to include Smeaton Chase's photographs is also told in the Scribner archives. It was Chase who wrote to the publisher from El Monte, California, on April 20, 1915, offering (because of "the well known pecuniary disabilities of authors as a class") a selection of his desert photographs to illustrate "Dr Van Dyke's classic work." His price was $100. He was on an extended horseback journey on the Colorado Desert, he said, preparing a book of travel and description to succeed his California Coast Trails and Yosemite Trails, and would be taking enough photographs so that duplication need not occur.

The result was that Chase and Van Dyke met two years later at the Century Club in New York and selected the photographs that were to illustrate The Desert in 1918 and California Desert Trails in 1919. Common to several of the photos in both books is Chase's horse Kaweah (named in honor of Clarence King) which he sometimes posed in order to show the relative sizes of desert objects. That Van Dyke never intended The Desert as a guidebook accounts for its not having contained a map.

Reprints of The Desert culminated in 1930, two years before Van Dyke's death, with the edition bearing twenty pages of "Desert Notes" by Theodore's son, Dixon called Dix, who had inherited the Mojave ranch and lived thereon until his death in 1954. These notes were meant to clarify and supplement his uncle's text, particularly in the developments that had occurred in the three decades since the first edition, notably the breakthrough and containment of the Colorado River, the reclamation of the Imperial Valley, and the proposed dam in Boulder Canyon.

Van Dyke's text was never altered. What he wrote with such brilliance about the desert's coloration had not changed - and will not change as long as the sun continues to rise and set and the wind to blow. The book ends on high, with the distant view from San Jacinto, westward over the coastal plain to the Pacific and eastward to "the faint forms of the Arizona mountains melting and mingling with the sky; and in between . . . the long pink rifts of the desert valleys and the lilac tracery of the desert ranges."

Color, always color, intoxicated him and fired his prose to rainbow hues. If a modern reader should find Van Dyke's book excessive in its chromatic exuberance, it would surely not be when reading it at sunrise or sunset on the desert Conceived in passion, written with precision, and created in the wilderness "with my back against a rock or propped up in the sand," The Desert is the enduring work of one who truly saw it first and said it best.