The Great and Ancient Order of the Cacti

FEBRUARY, 1933 ARIZONA HIGHWAYS 15 The GREAT and ANCIENT ORDER of the CACTI RECOUNTED BY TERENCE HEALY; OVERHEARD AND WRITTEN DOWN BY L. C. BOLLES ILLUSTRATED BY H. S. CEDERBLOM

Foreword: Terence Healy, otherwise "Ted" is an old newspaper man who has lived long in Arizona. He has at one time or another started a number of newspapers in this state. But more than a mere newsmonger, he is a born raconteur, and never tires of entertain ing tourists with his own versions of Arizona's history. At times he seems a romanticist, and if the news seems vapid, he embellishes it with touches from his glorious imagination. This, when he is entertaining tourists or, as he calls them: "pilgrims".

"Did you never hear of the Great and Ancient Order of the Cacti?" inquired Terence. "I am sorry that we haven't the old days of the saloons, so that you might be initiated correctly and fit tingly. It was a gambler, 'Studehorse George,' a man well known all over the state, who promoted this order and promulgated its ritual, and used to initiate stranger.

"George was an educated man, with fine manners, who loved to drink and to gamble. He would bet on anything, and was a fine mixer, and the saloon men would take care of him at such times as his finances were low, because he was a great en tertainer. When some prosperous stranger showed up, looking to buy a mine or engage in some business, George would get ac quainted with him, casually. Then, after he had been around town a couple of days, George would say: 'Boys, this man has been around here long enough so we feel we know him, and he should be eligible to join the Great and Ancient Order of the Cacti, shouldn't he? Didn't I see the Royal Zacatecas go into the back room a while ago?' "Then they would bring out some old stiff who was onto the joke, and he would shake hands, and say that George would explain the Order and later present the ritual of the first degree. They had three or four degrees, by the way, if a man seemed flush and willing to keep on buying."

"I will have to go into the history of this order,' says George; 'It goes further back than there is any recorded history we know, and may be the oldest secret order in the world. It explains a number of things, and may be how our custom of buying drinks originated." (Looking hopefully at the pilgrim out of the corner of his eye). "You may have heard about the hiero glyphics cut into the rocks all over Ari zona, in all sorts of out of the way places? You can study these hiero glyphics as long as you want to, and you'll never decipher them. Along about 1890, scientists from all over the U. S. and all over the world began to be interested in our hieroglyphics, to study them, and not one of them could solve them. They got more and more interested, and then some one stumbled onto the great Petrified Forest, that they are going to make a national park out of, and then what happened but some rider discovered under a cut bank a number of tablets inscribed in hiero glyphics in a regular order, like Egyp tian writing, and evidently telling a story.

"Now, when this got out, they had a big conference of archaeologists up at Flagstaff, and they took these tablets of petrified wood there. and for three days they argued whether the hiero glyphics had been cut into the wood after it was petrified, or whether the marks had been merely whittled into the wood and then the whole thing petrified afterwards. No one knows how the whole forest ever came to be petrified in the first place, any way, though I have a theory that I will tell you about sometime.

"Then some big bug from back East said that there was an old man in London, England, who had deciphered more ancient in scriptions and knew more about Hieroglyphics than any one else on earth, and they would have to call him in. But he was too old and feeble and set in his ways to ever come clear out to Arizona, so they would have to take the tablets to him, and that is what they fin ally did, so they are in a museum in London, England, and few people in Arizona have ever seen them, or ever will, because when the old man told (Continued on Page 19)