The Later Years

(ABOVE AND BELOW) January, 1974, was the best-selling issue of Highways ever produced - more than one million copies. That year the country temporarily ran short of fuel. Arts and crafts issues bridged months when readers had to restrict their travel.

One summer's day in 1966, I got tired of town and headed for the mountains. Where I stopped was Lake Mountain, between Vernon and McNary. Just above McCormick Spring, where watercress grows crisp in the cool water, a dirt road wound steeply up the mountain. At the end of the road was a sixty-foot steel tower. Beside it was a oneroom cabin.

A tall, slim man with a wrinkled smile came out of the door of the cabin. I saw that he had been a cowboy. The man squinted at me and spoke. It was good to have someone really see you when he looked at you.

"Got tired of town," I said.

"Well, I don't blame you for that," he said. "Come on in have some coffee. Some of the people that come up here are too scared to get out of the car."

A window of the tower opened and a woman smiled out of it. The man and woman had the kind of faces that I appreciated. I thought, "They've worked hard all their lives, don't have much, never will, and don't give a damn."

Wilkerson was their name. They had lived around Clifton most of their lives. Clark was a retired cattleman and smoke-chaser. His wife, Billie, worked on the tower. It was their first summer at Lake Mountain, but they had worked in other forests for many years.

Clark warmed the coffee on the wood stove. We talked without explanations, with the ease you have with some people and cannot acquire with others. We talked about trading for corriente cattle in Mexico, his border days, and of trailing cattle up over the Coronado Trail before roads and trucks. I listened and learned. He asked me if I had ever heard the song, "The Crooked Trail to Holbrook," and I said no, but I wished I had. His father had once been captain of the Texas Rangers. He and his brothers had all been cowpunchers.

He was tough and true, with a tough, true person's impatience with superfluity.

I climbed sixty-three steps to the top of the tower. On the upper landing the wind reached out and grabbed at me. Billie opened the trapdoor and let me in. "Did you get spooked climbing up?" she asked.

"No, but I can't say that I enjoyed it," I said.

The room was about seven feet square. In the center was a pedestal screwed to the floor for the fire-finder. Billie showed me how it worked. You could spot a smoke through a rotating sight and get the degrees from the reading on the azimuth circle around it. We sat on rickety chairs and talked about Indian ruins, ranching, Arizona history, animals, and fire-watching.

While we talked, Billie glanced out over the mountains, picking up her binoculars now and then. Before we knew it, a couple of hours had passed. I told her I sometimes wrote stories for Arizona Highways.

"Why don't you do one on lookouts?" she asked.

Starting up the trail for Abilene with a large herd of trail-branded longhorns, one cowboy summed it up this way: "If we don't make Abilene, it's because there ain't no Abilene. Here we come, forty-five hundred cows and, if you don't mind callin' em that, sixteen more or less human cowhands, nineteen kinds of rifles and six-shooters, and a hundred and fifteen saddle ponies."

The variety of weapons mentioned makes a point many writers and picture-makers blissfully ignore, choosing to employ in immediate post-bellum periods a model of Colt pistols and Winchester rifles not manufactured until years later. It was not until well into the 1870s that any substantial number of arms using metallic cartridges found their way into the holsters and scabbards of the Western man on horseback.... After the war, many surplus war weapons found their way westward and consequently, for a time, the cowboy's arms reflected this trend. The pistols, regardless of whether they might be the cap and ball muzzle-loaders or the metallic cartridge breech-loaders, presented no problem in portability. The Westerner buckled on his six-shooter with the same measure of habit as he pulled on his boots. But bulky rifles or carbines such as the Sharps and other thick-breech, side-hammer guns were awkward to carry on the saddle. The Spencer repeater was one of the first with a relatively flat breech, but it was quite heavy and used large rimfire cartridges of dubious ballistic quality. The Henry rifle of 1860 and Winchester's Model 1866 were lighter and flatter, and their magazines held more cartridges. But they employed a relatively impotent .44 rimfire cartridge. Winchester's Model 1873, with more potent reloadable .44-40 center-fire cartridges, gained such quick popularity that the manufacturer has rather broadly publicized it as "The Gun that Won the West." In 1873 also, Colt introduced its famous "Single Action Army" six-shooter, sometimes called "The Peacemaker." Although Smith & Wesson, Remington, Merwin & Hulbert, and some other manufacturers made big competitive single-action revolvers, the Colt, because of its rugged, simple construction, has long been the most popular in the West. Thus the lever action Winchester, with its flat frame, center-hung hammer and solid construction (easy to carry for the horseman), and the Colt "single-action" became cowboy favorites.

The Hopi Tricentennial, a revisiting of the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1540, was celebrated in a special September, 1980, issue of Highways. Well versed in Indian anthropology, photographer Jerry Jacka brought to readers a closeup look at Hopi life today: the people, the land, and their heritage. (BELOW) Three Hopi portraits from that issue. (OPPOSITE PAGE) The high desert country of Hopiland by Jerry Jacka.

In the winter the Hopi Mesas are gray. Since the So Yalangwu in December, the Sun has stopped its backward motion and is now moving to stay with longer hours in Hopiland. It is too cold yet (there are still patches of snow) to plant beans or corn. Tawa, the Sun, is growing warmer every day, and the sky is becoming a true turquoise color. Through this night of February, one moves from kiva to kiva - early in the evening at First Mesa, later at some, well past midnight at the others. The Powamui (beans) Dances and the Kachinam, by their first appearance, bring blessings; the impossibility of an early crop of beans or corn is made reality by the extra power of the messengers of the Gods.

Built-in benches are all around the overheated room. On three sides of the kiva sprouts the green forest of premature life. We hear a noise from the hatch, and soon we see her coming down the ladder: Ha Hai-i Wu-Hiti, the Mother of Them All. Happy looking with a falsetto voice, she reassures the people of the coming spring. During the Powamui powa-muya, the Moon of purification, in all the Hopi villages kivas start filling with sacred activities. "Have a good heart, and things will come to you. Believe and respect. Follow your clan's leaders, and listen to the elders. The other Moons will follow. Life will come to you. Food will come to you. Children will come to you, for happiness is here."

I am an Indian. My mother was of the Mission tribe and my father is a Hopi. I was raised in the Hopi tradition. I believe in its explanations of the beginnings of life and the prophecies of the future handed down by the elders. I believe there is meaning in the sincere practice of its religion through the various kivas. I accept the power of the gods it recognizes.

I cannot specifically explain it, but I believe there is an element in our national life that can be called Indianism. I am convinced that it is essential to my life, has meaning to many people of the various Indian tribes throughout the western hemisphere. In its life-style, its practices, and its reverence for all human life and the Earth we live on, I believe it has a lesson to teach to others....

Whatever Indianism is, it lies at the roots of all civilizations. It survives strongest today among the native peoples of our country because, to a greater extent, we continue to live in the manner that gives it best expression. The changes that thousands of years have brought in the life-styles of other peoples of our country have separated them from its experience.

That is why Indianism is so important to an American society which has evolved from every race and every nationality but whose emphasis on technological advances has estranged them even further from their beginnings. Indianism reminds them of a vital element of their own nature they have forgotten.

In the desert of Arizona, civilization rudely intruded in 1860 after the disappearance 500 years earlier of the Hohokam Indian tribe. The new white settlers named their first important settlement Phoenix.

"Today," flatly states a magazine, "the irrigated desert is a lush oasis with vast green fields and olive groves. Championship golf courses are warmed by dry desert air. Dude ranches and posh resorts flourish under an amber sun. For a desert vacation in a cool oasis, try an Arizona getaway....This is great country. All the children are lean, brown, and happy. Their mothers look like their older sisters. Their fathers and grandfathers look like a cross between Barry Goldwater and the horsemen from Marlboro Country. And some cowhand is there ready to hoist you into a saddle so you can ride Old Pete into one of those catastrophic Arizona sunsets nobody can quite believe, not even the editors of the purtiest picture magazine in America, Arizona Highways.