A Foundling in the Wilderness

This story was first published by Arizona Highways in February, 1936.

It was Christmas Day sometime in the 1870s. The westbound mail stage swung around the point of a ridge 100 yards east of Horse Head Crossing, Arizona. There, about two miles east of Holbrook, was an earlyday stage station and Navajo trading post on the line of the overland mail route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Prescott, Arizona. As soon as the dust from the stage was seen, the station awakened. The handful of loafers in the saloon sauntered out onto the brush-and-dirt-covered porch to watch the arrival of the stage, which was, in fact, the event of the day, and everybody about the place, even the dogs, came to life. The station was on the north side of the Little Colorado River just below the point where the Rio Puerco Spanish for "dirty river" - joined it from the east. It was made up of a general store, the inevitable frontier saloon, the stage station, a post office, corrals, together with half a dozen rough adobe dwellings scattered around in a grove of grand old cottonwood trees. Off to one side were a few Navajo hogans, used by the Indians when they came in from their reservation to trade with the storekeeper and sell their wool and blankets. The so-called "stage" actually was a rickety yellow buckboard drawn by a couple of broncos. It was piled high with mail sacks and baggage. A single weary, dust-covered passenger climbed down from its seat. The driver tossed the reins to a Mexican who, having unhitched the animals from the buckboard, led them off to a