Montezuma's Castle, the ruined cliff dwelling on Beaver Creek between the Coconino and Prescott National Forests, Arizona

THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST

THE WONDERLAND OF THE UNITED STATES—LITTLE
KNOWN AND UNAPPRECIATED—THE
HOME OF THE CLIFF DWELLER AND THE
HOPI, THE FOREST RANGER AND THE NAVAJO,—THE
LURE OF THE PAINTED DESERT

BY

AGNES C. LAUT

Author of The Conquest of the Great Northwest, Lords of the North and Freebooters of the Wilderness
NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1913
Copyright, 1913, By
McBRIDE, NAST & CO.
Second Printing
October, 1913
Published May, 1913

CONTENTS

PAGE
Introduction [i]
I The National Forests [1]
II National Forests of the Southwest [22]
III Through the Pecos Forests [44]
IV The City of the Dead [60]
V The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma [78]
VI Across the Painted Desert [100]
VII Across the Painted Desert (continued) [116]
VIII Grand Cañon and the Petrified Forests [137]
IX The Governor's Palace of Santa Fe [153]
X The Governor's Palace (continued) [169]
XI Taos, the Promised Land [183]
XII Taos, the Most Ancient City in America [196]
XIII San Antonio, the Cairo of America [214]
XIV Casa Grande and the Gila [226]
XV San Xavier Del Bac Mission [251]

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Cliff dwelling ruins, known as Montezuma Castle, [Frontispiece]
FACING PAGE
South House of Frijoles Cañon [ii]
Indian woman making pottery [xii]
Indian girl of Isleta, N. M. [xx]
One way of entering the desert [4]
In the Coconino Forest of Arizona [14]
Forest ranger fighting a ground fire with his blanket [22]
Pueblo boys at play [34]
Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling [46]
Los Pueblos, Taos, N. M. [56]
Entrance to a cliff dwelling [64]
Ruins of Frijoles Cañon [74]
A Hopi wooing [80]
A Hopi weaver [86]
A shy little Hopi maid [92]
At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna [96]
A handsome Navajo boy [106]
The Pueblo of Walpi [122]
The Grand Cañon [140]
The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe [154]
A pool in the Painted Desert [160]
Street in Santa Fe [166]
Ancient adobe gateway [172]
San Ildefonso [180]
Taos [188]
Over the roofs of Taos [198]
A metal worker of Taos [208]
A mud house of the Southwest [220]
The enchanted Mesa of Acoma [230]
Navajo crossing mesa [246]
At the Mission of San Xavier [254]
A Moki City on a mesa [262]

THROUGH OUR UNKNOWN SOUTHWEST

INTRODUCTION

I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age—neolithic, paleolithic, troglodytic man—with a roofless city of the dead lying in the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the yawning caverns of the cliff face above.

My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial æons when the advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.

Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance, or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a flat metate stone with a round grinding stone on top. From the shape and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water jar.

On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a 500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little round "cat holes" through the walls—"cat holes" for a people who are not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from room to room through all the walls.

On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside, round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed serpent—"Awanya," guardian of the waters—whose presence always presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about in other cave houses are stone "bells" to call to meals or prayers, and cobs of corn, and prayer plumes—owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People lived—well, when did they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that was when the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the glacial waters, began.

Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings of Frijoles Cañon, after excavation

"The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established," says Winchell, the great western geologist, "that implies man during the period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace of man." Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago; and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial silt.

There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; where you can literally shake hands with the Stone Age.

Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it strong; but it is also meticulously and simply—true. A few doors away from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body—no, not a mummy! We are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date were skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair. Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black hair shiny and lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in which the corpse has lain.

In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which archæologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B. C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.

Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the cañon again! To right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow tufa precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds of rooms—"the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces; nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest there."

Listen! You can almost hear it—the fulfillment of Isaiah's old prophecy—the lonely "hoo-hoo-hoo" of the turtle dove; and the lonelier cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper cliffs! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the cañon in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez Mountains; and one night from my camp in this cañon, I heard the coyotes howling from the empty caves.

Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone Age, and the dancing floors, and the irrigation canals used to this day, and the stream leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a rushing torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern men's dreams.

Far off to the right, where the worshipers must always have been in sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age people who dwelt in this cañon. It is a great concave hollowed out of the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for worshipers when you climb the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have witnessed! I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first rays came over the cañon walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal, for incense, for water urns, mark the inner walls of this chamber, too. Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a darksome, eerie place with sipapu—the holes in the floor—for the mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has driven his nerves too hard in town?—To go back to the Soil and let Dame Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.

Curious how geology and archæology agree on the rise and evanishment of these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff. That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Archæology says as the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache—Asthapascan stock—came ramping from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. "It was not until the nomadic robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the crowded form of existence," says Archæology. Sounds like an explanation of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life, doesn't it?

Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse. Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the cañon, and the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and Zuñi have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe. Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region—"place of the bird people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people dispersed.

What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petræ, or amid the sand-covered columns of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be—well, just au fait, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2 a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin is in the Frijoles Cañon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New Mexico. By joining the Archæological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.

A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought round-trip tickets to our own West and back—pleasure, not business—over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave—one to our own wonders, to two for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500; but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to $2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous discrepancy—thirty million dollars versus one hundred and twenty million. The Statist of London places the total spent by Americans in Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and twenty million.

Of the 3,700,000 people who went to the Seattle Exposition, it is a pretty safe guess that not 100,000 Easterners out of the lot saw the real West. What did they see? They saw the Exposition, which was like any other exposition; and they saw Western cities, that are imitations of Eastern cities; and they patronized Western hotel rotundas and dining places, where you pay forty cents for Grand Junction and Hood River fruit, which you can buy in the East for twenty-five; and they rode in the rubberneck cars with the gramophone man who tells Western variations of the same old Eastern lies; and they came back thoroughly convinced that there was no more real West.

And so 120,000 Americans yearly go to Europe spending a good average of $1,000 apiece. We scour the Alps for peaks that everybody has climbed, though there are half a dozen Switzerlands from Glacier Park in the north to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, with hundreds of peaks which no one has climbed and which you can visit for not more than fifty dollars for a four weeks' holiday. We tramp through Spain for the picturesque, quite oblivious of the fact that the most picturesque bit of Spain, about 10,000 years older than Old Spain, is set right down in the heart of America with turquoise mines from which the finest jewel in King Alphonso's crown was taken. We rent a "shootin' box in Scotland" at a trifling cost of from $1,200 to $12,000 a season, because game is "so scarce out West, y' know." Yet I can direct you to game haunts out West where you can shoot a grizzly a week at no cost at all but your own courage; and bag a dozen wild turkeys before breakfast; and catch mountain trout faster than you can string them and pose for a photograph; and you won't need to lie about the ones that got away, nor boast of what it cost you; for you can do it at two dollars a day from start to finish. It would take you a good half-day to count up the number of tourist and steamboat agencies that organize sightseeing excursions to go and apostrophize the Sphinx, and bark your shins and swear and sweat on the Pyramids. Yet it would be a safe wager that outside official scientific circles, there is not a single organization in America that knows we have a Sphinx of our own in the West that antedates Egyptian archæology by 8,000 years, and stone lions older than the columns of Phrygia, and kings' palaces of 700 and 1,000 rooms. Am I yarning; or dreaming? Neither! Perfectly sober and sane and wide awake and just in from spending two summers in those same rooms and shaking hands with a corpse of the Stone Age.

A young Westerner, who had graduated from Harvard, set out on the around-the-world tour that was to give him that world-weary feeling that was to make him live happy ever afterwards. In Nagasaki, a little brown Jappy-chappie of great learning, who was a prince or something or other of that sort, which made it possible for Harvard to know him, asked in choppy English about "the gweat, the vely gweat anti-kwatties in y'or Souf Wes'." When young Harvard got it through his head that "anti-kwatties" meant antiquities, he rolled a cigarette and went out for a smoke; but it came back at him again in Egypt. They were standing below the chin of an ancient lady commonly called the Sphinx, when an English traveler turned to young America. "I say," he said; "Yankeedom beats us all out on this old dame, doesn't it? You've a carved colossus in your own West a few trifling billion years older than this, haven't you?" Young America, with a weakness somewhere in his middle, "guessed they had." Then looking over the old jewels taken from the ruins of Pompeii, he was asked, "how America was progressing excavating her ruins;" and he heard for the first time in his life that the finest crown jewel in Europe came from a mine just across the line from his own home State. The experience gave him something to think about.

The incident is typical of many of the 120,000 people who yearly trek to Europe for holiday. We have to go abroad to learn how to come home. We go to Europe and find how little we have seen of America. It is when you are motoring in France that you first find out there is a great "Camino Real" almost 1,000 miles long, much of it above cloud line, from Wyoming to Texas. It's some European who has "a shootin' box" out in the Pecos, who tells you about it. Of course, if you like spending $12,000 a year for "a shootin' box" in Scotland, that is another matter. There are various ways of having a good time; but when I go fishing I like to catch trout and not be a sucker.

Spite of the legend, "Why go to Europe? See America first," we keep on going to Europe to see America. Why? For a lot of reasons; and most of them lies.

Some fool once said, and we keep on repeating it—that it costs more to go West than it does to go to Europe. So it does, if "going West" means staying at hotels that are weak imitations of the Waldorf and the Plaza, where you never get a sniff of the real West, nor meet anyone but traveling Easterners like yourself; but if you strike away from the beaten trail, you can see the real West, and have your holiday, and go drunk on the picturesque, and break your neck mountain climbing, and catch more trout than you can lie about, and kill as much bear meat as you have courage, at less expense than it will cost you to stay at home. From Chicago to the backbone of the Rockies will cost you something over $33 or $50 one way. You can't go halfway across the Atlantic for that, unless you go steerage; and if you go West "colonist," you can go to the backbone of the Rockies for a good deal less than thirty dollars. Now comes the crucial point! If you land in a Western city and stay at a good hotel, expenses are going to out-sprint Europe; and you will not see any more of the West than if you had gone to Europe. Choose your holiday stamping ground, Sundance Cañon, South Dakota; or the New Glacier Park; or the Pecos, New Mexico; or the White Mountains, Arizona; or the Indian Pueblo towns of the Southwest; or the White Rock Cañon of the Rio Grande, where the most important of the wonderful prehistoric remains exist; and you can stay at a ranch house where food and cleanliness will be quite as good as at the Waldorf for from $1.50 to $2 a day.

In the bright Arizona sunshine before their little square adobe houses Indian women are fashioning pottery into curious shapes

You can usually find the name of the ranch house by inquiries from the station agent where you get off. The ranch house may be of adobe and look squatty; but remember that adobe squattiness is the best protection against wind and heat; and inside, you will find hot and cold water, bathroom, and meals equal to the best hotels in Chicago and New York. In New York or Chicago, that amount would afford you mighty chancy fare and only a back hall room. I know of hundreds of such ranch houses all along the backbone of the Rockies.

Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro outright for from $5 to $10. Even if the burro takes a prize for ugliness, remember he also takes a prize for sure-footedness; and he doesn't take a prize for bucking, which the broncho often does. Figure up now the cost of a month's holiday; and I repeat—it will cost you less than staying at home. But if this total is still too high, there are ways of reducing the expense by half. Take your own tent; and $20 will not exceed "the grub box" contents for a month. Or all through the Rockies are deserted shacks, mining and lumber shanties, herders' cabins, horse camps. You can quarter yourself in one of these for nothing; and the sole expense will be "the grub box;" and my tin trunk for camp cooking has never cost me more than $50 a month for four people. Or best and most novel experience of all—along White Rock Cañon of the Rio Grande, in Mesa Verde Park, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There is no danger of wolves, or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook below happens to be good. Hundreds of archæologists, who come from Egypt, Greece, Italy, England, to visit these remains, spend their summer holiday this way. Why can't you? Or if you are not a good adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer school that goes out to the caves from Santa Fe every summer.

Is it safe? That question to a Westerner is a joke. Safer, much safer, than in any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White Mountains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on the Saskatchewan; and I never locked a door, because there wasn't any lock; and I never attempted to bar the door, because there wasn't any need. Can you say as much of New York, or Chicago, or Washington? The question may be asked—Will this kind of a holiday not be hot in summer? You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some mid-summer, when nearly everything inside the pullman car melted into a jelly. Yes, it will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a railroad naturally follows the lowest grade. But if you go back to the ranch houses of the Upper Mesas and of foothills and cañons, you will be from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and will need winter wraps each night, and may have to break the ice for your washing water in the morning—I did.

Another reason why so many Americans do not see their own country is that while one species of fool has scared away holiday seekers by tales of extortionate cost, another sort of fool wisely promulgates the lie—a lie worn shiny from repetition—that "game is scarce in the West." "No more big game"—and your romancer leans back with wise-acre air to let that lie sink in, while he clears his throat to utter another—"trout streams all fished out." In the days when we had to swallow logic undigested in college, we had it impressed upon us that one single specific fact was sufficient to refute the broadest generality that was ever put in the form of a syllogism. Well, then,—for a few facts as to that "no-game" lie!

In one hour you can catch in the streams of the Pecos, or the Jemez, or the White Mountains, or the Upper Sierras of California, or the New Glacier Park of the North, more trout than you can put on a string. If you want confirmation of that fact, write to the Texas Club that has its hunting lodge opposite Grass Mountain, and they will send you the picture of one hour's trout catch. By measurement, the string is longer than the height of a water barrel; and these were fish that didn't get away.

Last year, twenty-six bear were shot in the Sangre de Christo Cañon in three months.

Two years ago, mountain lions became so thick in the Pecos that hunters were hired to hunt them for bounty; and the first thing that happened to one of the hunters, his horse was throttled and killed by a mountain lion, though his little spaniel got revenge by treeing four lions a few weeks later, and the hunter got three out of the four.

Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed.

In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain. Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the other still haunts the cañons defiant of repeater.

From the caves of the cliff-dwellers along the Rio Grande, you can nightly hear the coyote and the fox bark as they barked those dim stone ages when the people of these silent caves hunted here.

The week I reached Frijoles Cañon, a flock of wild turkeys strutted in front of Judge Abbott's Ranch House not a gun length from the front door.

The morning I was driving over the Pajarito Mesa home from the cliff caves, we disturbed a herd of deer.

Does all this sound as if game was depleted? It is if you follow the beaten trail, just as depleted as it would be if you tried to hunt wild turkey down Broadway, New York; but it isn't if you know where to look for it. Believe me—though it may sound a truism—you won't find big game in hotel rotundas or pullman cars.

Or, if your quest is not hunting but studying game, what better ground for observation than the Wichita in Oklahoma? Here a National Forest has been constituted a perpetual breeding ground for native American game. Over twenty buffalo taken from original stock in the New York Park are there—back on their native heath; and there are two or three very touching things about those old furry fellows taken back to their own haunts. In New York's parks, they were gradually degenerating—getting heavier, less active, ceasing to shed their fur annually. When they were set loose in the Wichita Game Resort, they looked up, sniffed the air from all four quarters, and rambled off to their ancestral pasture grounds perfectly at home. When the Comanches heard that the buffalo had come back to the Wichita, the whole tribe moved in a body and camped outside the fourteen-foot fence. There they stayed for the better part of a week, the buffalo and the Comanches, silently viewing each other. It would have been worth Mr. Nature Faker's while to have known their mutual thoughts.

There is another lie about not holidaying West, which is not only persistent but cruel. When the worker is a health as well as rest seeker, he is told that the West does not want him, especially if he is what is locally called "a lung-er;" and there is just enough truth in that lie to make it persistent. It is true the consumptive is not wanted on the beaten trail, in the big general hotel, in the train where other people want draughts of air, but he can't stand them. On the beaten trail, he is a danger both to himself and to others—especially if he hasn't money and may fall a burden on the community; but that is only a half truth which is usually a lie. Let the other half be known! All through the West along the backbone of the Rockies, from Montana to Texas, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, are the tent cities—communities of health seekers living in half-boarded tents, or mosquito-wired cabins that can be steam-heated at night. There are literally thousands of such tent dwellers all through the Rocky Mountain States; and the cost is as you make it. If you go to a sanitarium tent city, you will have to pay all the way from $15 to $25 a week for house, board, nurse, medicine and doctor's attendance; but if you buy your own portable house and do your own catering, the cost will be just what you make it. A house will cost $50 to $100; a tent, $10 to $20.

Still another baneful lie that keeps the American from seeing America first is that our New World West lacks "human interest;" lacks "the picturesqueness of the shepherds in Spain and Switzerland," for instance; lacks "the historic marvels" of church and monument and relic.

If there be any degree in lies, this is the pastmaster of them all. Will you tell me why "the human interest" of a legend about Dick Turpin's head festering on Newgate, England, is any greater to Americans than the truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd, when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Cañon up the Pecos, or took possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins of a church—at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters—that was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to America.

You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks, and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who interviewed Eve—all right here in your own American Southwest, with the difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler, who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the springs.

To be sure, there are 400,000 miles of motor roads in Europe; but isn't it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? That is what you can do following the "Camino Real" from Texas to Wyoming, or crossing the mountains of New Mexico by the great Scenic Highway built for motors to the very snow tops.

An Indian girl of Isleta, New Mexico, carrying a water jar.

And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but America. This is a story by itself—a beautiful one, also in spots a funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from Oxford, England, took quarters in one of the pueblos at Santa Clara or thereabout to study Indian arts and crafts. One night in her adobe quarters, her orderly British soul was aroused by such a dire din of shouting, fighting, screams, as she thought could come only from some inferno of crime. She sprang out of bed and dashed across the placito in her nightdress to her guardian protector in the person of an old Indian. He ran through the dark to see what the matter was, while she stood in hiding of the wall shadows curdling in horror of "bluggy deeds."

"Pah," said the old fellow coming back, "dat not'ing! Young man, he git marry an' dey—how you call?—chiv-ar-ee-heem."

"Then, what are you laughing at?" demanded the irate British dame; for she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in suffocated laughter. "How dare you laugh?"

"I laugh, Mees," he sputtered out, "'cos you scare me so bad when you call, I jomp in my coat mistake for my pants. Dat's all."

It would pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would pay to let a little daylight in on the abysmal blank regarding the wonder-land of our own world—wouldn't it?

I don't know whether the affectation recognized as "the foreign pose" comes foremost or hindermost as a cause of this neglect of the wonders of our own land. When you go to our own Western Wonder Land, you can't say you have been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is wonderful what a paying thing that pose is in a harvest of "fooleries." There is a well-known case of an American author, who tried his hand on delineating American life and was severely let alone because he was too—not abroad, but broad. He dropped his own name, assumed the pose of a grand dame familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. His books have "gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.

The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and superiority, which is pretense—is another matter. Let us take the dire and damning deficiencies of America!

"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.

There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma—islands of rock, sheer precipice of yellow tufa for hundreds of feet—amid the Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders, brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or there are the three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or, there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Cañon de Chelly (Shay) forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses of Washington.

"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway; and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one end of a main thoroughfare, you can see the site of the old Spanish Gareta prison, in the walls of which bullets were found embedded in human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street and of small talk—then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the apple bloom.

What was the other charge? Oh, yes—"lacks the human," whatever that means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Cañon and the cliff houses of Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys, Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of the Old World?

Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes—but America lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."

"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of American feudalism—fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat clad cap-à-pie in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years back—and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted troops the big iron chest for the gold—iron chests that you can see to this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's—an era that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki, Spirit of Evil, smiled with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough, remnants of some sort of domesticated creatures are found in the cave men's houses, centuries before the coming of horses and cattle and sheep with the Spanish. The trouble is, up to the present when men like Curtis and dear old Bandelier and Burbank, and the whole staff of the Smithsonian and the School of Santa Fe have gone to work, we have not taken the trouble in America to gather up the prehistoric legends and ferret out their race meaning. We have fallen too completely in the last century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. You remember Kipling's poem on the neolithic man, and Jack London's fiction. Now as a matter of fact—which is a bit disturbing to all these accretions of pseudo-science—the remains of these cave people don't show them to have been simian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony Comstock's activities as to clothes. They had decorated pottery ware of which we have lost the pigments, and a knowledge of irrigation which would be unique in apes, and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some day, when the evolutionary piffle has passed, we'll study out these prehistoric legends and their racial meaning.

As to the "lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the Southwest. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Fe, or Lungrun's wonderful desert pictures, or Moran's or Gamble's, or Harmon's Spanish scenes—then talk about "lack of decadent art" if you will, but don't talk about "lack of art." Why, in the ranch house of Lorenzo Hubbell, the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely Southwestern pictures.

How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance, that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above 10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine forests, past Cloudcroft—the sky-top resort—up through the orchard lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all the wonders of Colorado's National Park. With the exception of a very bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down to California, you can swerve into Grand Cañon, where the gods of fire and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red into a swimming cañon of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest peaks of the Rockies.

In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed; second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were allowed.

Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only from a life-time knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of the West—and that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of "shootin' irons" and "faintin' females" are forever past, except in the undergraduate's salad dreams. You are safer in the cave dwellings of the Stone Age, in the Pajarito Plateau of the cliff "bird people," in the Painted Desert, among the Indians of the Navajo Reserve than you are in Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London. I would trust a young friend of mine—boy or girl—quicker to the Western environment than the Eastern. You can get into mischief in the West if you hunt for it; but the mischief doesn't come out and hunt you. Also, danger spots are self-evident on precipices of the Western wilds. They aren't self-evident; danger spots are glazed and paved to the edges over which youth goes to smash in the East.

What about cost? Aye, there's the rub!

First, there's the steamboat ticket to Europe, about the same price as or more than the average round trip ticket to the Coast and back; but—please note, please note well—the agent who sells the steamboat ticket gets from forty to 100 per cent. bigger commission on it than the agent who sells the railroad tickets; so the man who is an agent for Europe can afford to advertise from forty to 100 per cent. more than the man who sells the purely American ticket.

Secondly, European hotel men are adepts at catering to the lure of the American sightseer. (Of course they are: it's worth one hundred to two hundred million dollars to them a year.) In the American West, everybody is busy. Except for the real estate man, they don't care one iota whether you come or stay.

Thirdly, when you go to Europe, a thousand hands are thrust out to point you the way to the interesting places. Incidentally, also, a thousand hands are thrust out to pick your pocket, or at least relieve it of any superfluous weight. In our West, who cares a particle what you do; or who will point you the way? The hotels are expensive and for the most part located in the most expensive zone—the commercial center. It is only when you get out of the expense zone away from commercial centers and railway, that you can live at $1 or $2 a day, or if you have your own tent at fifty cents a day; but it isn't to the real estate agent's interests to have you go away from the commercial center or expense zone. Who is there to tell you what or where to see off the line of heat and tips? Outside the National Park wardens and National Forest Rangers, there isn't anyone.

How, then, are you to manage? Frankly, I never knew of either monkeys or men accomplishing anything except in one way—just going out and doing it. Choose what you want to see; and go there! The local railroad agent, the local Forest Ranger, the local ranch house, will tell you the rest; and naturally, when you go into the wilderness, don't leave all your courtesy and circumspection and common-sense back in town. Equipped with those three, you can "See America First," and see it cheaply.

CHAPTER I

THE NATIONAL FORESTS, A SUMMER PLAYGROUND FOR THE PEOPLE

If a health resort and national playground were discovered guaranteed to kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay listlessness and set the human spirit free from the nagging worries and toil-wear that make you feel like a washed-out rag at the end of a humdrum year—imagine the stampede of the lame and the halt in body and spirit; the railroad excursions and reduced fares; the disputations of the physicians and the rage of the thought-ologists at present coining money rejuvenating neurotic humanity!

Yet such a national playground has been discovered; and it isn't in Europe, where statisticians compute that Americans yearly spend from a quarter to half a billion dollars; and it isn't the Coast-to-Coast trip which the president of a transcontinental told me at least a hundred thousand people a year traverse. A health resort guaranteed to banish care, to stab apathy, to enlarge littleness, to slay listlessness, would pretty nearly put the thought-ologists out of commission. Yet such a summer resort exists at the very doors of every American capable of scraping together a few hundred dollars—$200 at the least, $400 at the most. It exists in that "twilight zone" of dispute and strong language and peanut politics known as the National Forests.

In America, we have foolishly come to regard National Forests as solely allied with conservation and politics. That is too narrow. National Forests stand for much more. They stand for a national playground and all that means for national health and sanity and joy in the exuberant life of the clean out-of-doors. In Germany, the forests are not only a source of great revenue in cash; they are a source of greater revenue in health. They are a holiday playground. In America, the playground exists, the most wonderful, the most beautiful playground in the whole world—and the most accessible; but we haven't yet discovered it.

Of the three or four million people who have attended the Pacific Coast Expositions of the past ten years, it is a safe wage that half went, not to see the Exposition (for people from a radius round Chicago and Jamestown and Buffalo had already seen a great Exposition) but they went to see the Exposition as an exponent of the Great West. How much of the Great West did they really see? They saw the Alaska Exhibit. Well—the Alaska Exhibit was afterwards shown in New York. They saw the special buildings assigned to the special Western States. Well—the special Western States had special buildings at the other expositions. What else of the purely West they saw, I shall give in the words of three travelers:

"Been a great trip" (Two Chicagoans talking in duet). "We've seen everything and stopped off everywhere. We stopped at Denver and Salt Lake and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Portland and Seattle!"

"What did you do at these places?"

"Took a taxi and saw the sights, drove through the parks and so on. Saw all the residences and public buildings. Been a great trip. Tell you the West is going ahead."

"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman, baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before. They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it seeing the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest passes and sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and experience the real thing?"

"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only time we got away from the excursion party was when a land boomster took us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What I want to know is how to get away from that. That boomster fellow was an Easterner, anyway."

Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not the duet that went round the cities in a sightseeing car and judged the West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real estate project by an Eastern land boomster. And each wanted to find the real thing—had paid money to find a holiday playground, to forget care and stab apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the extortionate charges on every side in the city life. And two out of three went back a little disappointed that they had not seen the fabled wonders of the West—the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famous cañons, the mountain lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to explain to the New Yorker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain western wilds, whether you are a man, woman, child, or group of all three—could go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees and mountain lakes and snowy peaks—I was greeted with that peculiarly New Yorky look suggestive of Ananias and De Rougement.

One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents, but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary

Sadder is the case of the invalid migrating West. He has come with high hopes looking for the national health resort. Does he find it? Not once in a thousand cases. If health seekers have money, they take a private house in the city, where the best of air is at its worst; but many invalids are scarce of money, and come seeking the health resort at great pecuniary sacrifice. Do they find it? Certainly not knocking from boarding house to boarding house and hotel to hotel, re-infecting themselves with their own germs till the very telephone booths have to be guarded. At one famous "lung" city where I stayed, I heard three invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room happened to be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 and $3 and $5 a day without meals. At a cost of $10 for train fare, I went out to one of the National Forests—the pass over the Divide 11,000 feet, the village center of the Forest 8,000 feet above sea level, the charge with meals at the hotel $10 a week. Better still, $10 for a roomy tent, $1.50 for a camp stove and as much or as little as you like for a fur rug, and the cost of meals would have been seventy-five cents a day at the hotel, seventy-five cents for life in air that was almost constant sunshine, air as pure and life-giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That altitude would probably not suit all invalids—that is for a doctor to say; but certainly, whether one is out for health or play, that regimen is cheaper and more life-giving than a stuffy hotel at $2, $3 and $5 a day for a room alone.

It is incredible when you come to think of it. Here is a nation of ninety million people scouring the earth for a playground; and there is an undiscovered playground in its own back yard, the most wonderful playground of mountain and forest and lake in the whole world; a playground in actual area half the size of a Germany, or France, with wonders of cave and waterway and peak unknown to Germany or France. What are the railroads thinking about? If three million people visited an exposition to see the West, how many would yearly visit the National Forests if the railroads granted facilities, and the ninety million Americans knew how? It is absurd to regard the National Forests purely as timber; and timber for politics! They are a nation's playground and health resort; and one of these times will come a Peary or an Abruzzi discovering them. Then we'll give him a prize and begin going.

You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you will not find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of flame in the upper alpine meadows. And you will not find gaping on-lookers to break down fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirrel swearing at you for coming too near his cache of pine cones at the foot of some giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing in the National Forests; but there is a great tinkling of waters; and there are many voices of rills with a roar of flood torrents at rain time, or thunder of avalanche when the snows come over a far ridge in spray fine as a waterfall. In fair weather, you may spare yourself the trouble of a tent and camp under a stretch of sky hung with stars, resinous of balsams, spiced with the life of the cinnamon smells and the ozone tang. There will be lakes of light as well as lakes of water, and an all-day diet of condensed sunbeams every time you take a breath. Your bed will be hemlock boughs—be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better stay in Newport.

The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will welcome you and help you to find camping ground.

Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man, woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get established?

Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me, there is a peculiar attraction in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line—high, dry park-like forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor. You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie on one side—Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, the trail; and across that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests. There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National Forests. Windfall, there is almost none. It has been cleared out and sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees, all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off. These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.

Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests there, by trips to the wonderful cañons out from Ogden, or to the natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big trees in the Sequoia Forest; the Yosemite in the Stanislaus; forests in the northern part of the State where you could dance on the stump of a redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the northern mountains, are the voices of the waters and the white, burnished, shining peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one summer by driving up in a tented wagon through the National Forests from Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and truck bed were in the democrat wagon. An outfitter supplied the horses for a rental which I have forgotten. The borders of most of the National Forests may be reached by wagon. The higher and more intimate trails may be essayed only on foot or on horseback.

How much will the trip cost? You must figure that out for yourself. There is, first of all, your railway fare from the point you leave. Then there is the fare out to the Forest—usually not $10. Go straight to the supervisor or forester of the district. He will recommend the best hotel of the little mountain village where the supervisor's office is usually located. At those hotels, you will board as a transient at $10 a week; as a permanent, for less. In many of the mountain hamlets are outfitters who will rent you a team of horses and tented wagon; and you can cater for yourself. In fact, as to clothing, and outfit, you can buy cheaper camp kit at these local stores than in your home town. Many Eastern things are not suitable for Western use. For instance, it is foolish to go into the thick, rough forests of heavy timber with an expensive eastern riding suit for man or woman. Better buy a $4 or $6 or $8 khaki suit that you can throw away when you have torn it to tatters. An Eastern waterproof coat will cost you from $10 to $30. You can get a yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more serviceable for $2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get them East, as I like an elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good deal of cork in the sole to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too stiff! I like an elk-skin that will let the water out fast as it comes in if you ever have to wade, and which will not shrink in the drying. If you forswear hotels and take to a sky tent, or canvas in misty weather, better carry eatables in what the guides call a tin "grub box," in other words a cheap $2 tin trunk. It keeps out ants and things; and you can lock it when you go away on long excursions. As to beds, each to his own taste! Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for me. Besides, I am never comfortable on it. If you camp near the snow peaks, a chill strikes up to the small of your back in the small of the morning. I don't care to feel like using a derrick every time I roll over. The most comfortable bed I know is a piece of twenty-five cent oilcloth laid over the slicker on hemlock boughs, fur rug over that, with suit case for pillow, and a plain gray blanket. The hardened mountaineer will laugh at the next recommendation; but the town man or woman going out for play or health is not hardened, and to attempt sudden hardening entails the endurance of a lot of aches that are apt to spoil the holiday. You may say you like the cold plunge in the icy water coming off a snowy mountain. I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge, even if you do like it, you are in such a hurry to come out of it that you don't linger to scrub. I like my hot scrub; and you can have that only by taking along (no, not a rubber bath) a $1.50 camp stove to heat the water in the tent while you are eating your supper out round the camp fire that burns with such a delicious, barky smell. Besides, late in the season, there will be rains and mist. Your camp stove will dry out the tent walls and keep your kit free of rain mold. Do you need a guide? That depends entirely on yourself. If you camp under direction and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.

Whether you go out as a health seeker, or a pleasure seeker, $8 to $10 will buy you a miner's tent—a miner's, preferable to a tepee because the walls lift the canvas roof high enough not to bump your head; $2 will buy you a tin trunk or grub box; $1.50 will cover the price of oilcloth to spread over the boughs which you lay all over the floor to keep you above the earth damp; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove to keep the inside of your tent warm and dry for the hot night bath; $10 will cover cost of pail and cooking utensils. That leaves of what would be your monthly expenses at even a moderate hotel, $125 for food—bacon, flour, fresh fruit; and your food should not exceed $10 each a month. If you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder, by whipping the mountain streams for trout. If you need an attendant, that miner's tent is big enough for two. Or if you will stand $5 or $6 more expense, buy a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will be windy days in fall and spring when an extra tent with a camp stove in it will prove useful for the nightly hot bath.

What reward do you reap for all the bother? You are away from all dust irritating to weak lungs. You are away from all possibility of re-infecting yourself with your own disease. Except in late autumn and early spring, you are living under almost cloudless skies, in an atmosphere steeped in sunshine, spicy with the healing resin of the pines and hemlocks and spruce, that not only scent the air but literally permeate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. Instead of the clang of street car bells and the jangle of nerves tangled from too many humans in town, you hear the flow and the sing and the laughter and the trebles of the glacial streams rejoicing in their race to the sea. You climb the rough hills; and your town lungs blow like a whale as you climb; and every beat pumps inertia out and the sun-healing air in. If an invalid, you had better take a doctor's advice as to how high you should camp and climb. In town, amid the draperies and the portières and the steam-heated rooms, an invalid is seeking health amid the habitat of mummies. In the Forests, whether you will or not, you live in sunshine that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it is the sting of pulsing, superabundant life, not the lethargy of a gradual decay.

At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines, and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red sandstone.

And besides the prehistoric in the Forests—what will you find? The plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke. You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a haze of dust, and you—you are up in that cloudless air, where the light hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun, to the god of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking; and here is the realm of pure light.

Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest gives a bump. You are in darkness—diving through some tunnel or other; and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance Cañon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But patience! The road into Sundance Cañon takes you to the top of the world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line, pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600 you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.

Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good 100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road has been cork-screwing up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist behind the engineer—the man behind the modern gun of conquest—has paid the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the clouds—a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the mountains across the desert towards the Pacific.

From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona

You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer margin of this rock wall with slab and log and shingle cottages, built literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in the whole world. In Sundance Cañon, South Dakota, summer people have built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky. Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds, and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and there is a pair of green lakes below you—emerald jewels pendant from the neck of the old mountain god; and with a bump and a rattle of the wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go—believe me, a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.

You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of worship and quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of fire in the sunset, and the plain—there are no more plains—this is the top of the world!

Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear grass tossed before it like the waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below—you knew why their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be told are laid flat on the ground up here.

When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coarse upper grasses provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of intruding flocks and herds.

Then, the train is literally racing down hill—with the trucks bumping heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang comes to the ozone—the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and imprisoned fragrance—the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.

The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen dust—pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree—with the purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed, whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes, airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth, though the process may take the trifling æon of a thousand years or so. At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season—the season when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests—the very atmosphere is alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the veering wind, the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled, perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.

The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth, you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?) language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the burned or scant slopes, he rifles the cache of this little furred forester, who suspects your noisy trainload of robbery—robbery—sc—scur—r—there!

Then, the train bumps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree—the ranger, absurdly young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority which backs that body of men.

You have mounted your pony—men and women alike ride astride in the Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodpecker, the scur of a rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft thug of the unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the jangle of city cars in that stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested town, isn't it?

If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods; for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made offerings to the gods of old, the temple which our modern churches imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will make you over, will these forest gods, if you will let them, if you will lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.

And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.

CHAPTER II

AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST

You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds. No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available—never farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger and yeggman, that stalks the town.

The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West

To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress. Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when they combine two qualities—comfort and thick enough soles to protect your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too, to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from passing trees and jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You may get them if you like to spend the money—$8 leggings and $8 horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a $3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.

This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast. They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they had gone off the trail trout fishing. "If they had been good path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest sense of direction. Compass signs of forest-lore fail here. There are few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west; and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree. All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.

"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.

"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."

All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National Forests.

It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married, have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might put a New York dinner to shame—all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in mind—do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are prepared to look after yourself.

And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do? You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God has landscaped the playground for a nation; or you can go in for records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities, contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in the British Museum marked 20,000 B. C. It isn't every day you can wander through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River, Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier houses literally on the tip-top of the world?

The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if you go in the spirit of an investigator, you will get that permission.

The question isn't what is there to do. It is which of the countless things there are to do are you going to choose to do? When Mr. Roosevelt goes to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got their names from old Spanish padres riding their burros into the wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.

Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests—bear, mountain sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Cañon, above Ouray, at Pike's Peak—a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out! If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs. Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side. The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a timber. It must have been the concussion of the air—they weren't even bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but they were dead, all three."

And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak. "That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain; and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It came—quick—" with a snap of his fingers—"as that; and he was gone."

It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch above a clean-swept slope.

And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been told so often that you have come to believe it—that our mountains in America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him. Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.

"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here. We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades. See that hole in the mountain?"

"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.

"Oh, dear no! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It used to be an almost impossible trail to get up there; but there has been a hermit fellow there for the last ten years, living in his cabin and hunting; and year after year, never paid by anybody, he has been building that trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course, the people in the valley think him crazy."

Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the dust eaters, the insects of the city ant heaps, the true troglodytes and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.

You have been told so often that the National Forests lock up timber from use that it comes as a surprise as you ride up the woodland trail to hear the song of the crosscut saw and the buzzing hum of a mill—perhaps a dozen mills—running full blast here in this National Forest. Heaps of sawdust emit the odors of imprisoned flowers. Piles of logs lie on all sides stamped at the end U. S.—timber sold on the stump to any lumberman and scaled as inspected by the ranger and paid by the buyer. To be sure, the lumberman cannot have the lumber for nothing; and it was for nothing that the Forests were seized and cut under the old régime.

How was the spoliation effected? Two or three ways. The law of the public domain used to permit burn and windfall to be taken out free. Your lumberman, then, homesteaded 160 acres on a slope of forest affording good timber skids and chutes. So far, no wrong! Was not public domain open to homesteading? Good; but your homesteading lumberman now watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely accidentally, you understand, the fire sprang up and swept the entire slope of green forest away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope would be left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this manner.

That was the principle of Congress when it withdrew from public domain these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include grazing and woodland not properly administered under public domain. The making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The ranger's job is to prevent fires. Also he permits the cutting of only ripe, full-grown trees, or dead tops, or growth stunted by crowding; and all timber sold off the forests must be marked for cutting and stamped by the ranger.

But the old spirit assumes protean forms. The latest way of working the old trick is through the homestead law. You have been told that homesteaders cannot go in on the National Forests. Yet there, as you ride along the trail, is a cleared space of 160 acres where a Swedish woman and her boys are making hay; and inquiry elicits the fact that millions of acres are yearly homesteaded in the National Forests. Just as fast as they can be surveyed, all farming lands in the National Forests are opened to the homesteader. Where, then, is the trick? Your farmer man comes in for a homestead and he picks out 160 acres where the growth of big trees is so dense they will yield from $10,000 to $40,000 in timber per quarter section. Good! Hasn't the homesteader a right to this profit? He certainly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he doesn't clear more than a few hundred feet round his cabin, and hasn't a cent of money to pay the heavy expense of clearing the rest, and sells out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars? Supposing such farmer men are brought in by excursion loads by a certain big lumber company, and all sell out at a few hundred dollars, claims worth millions, to that certain big lumber company—is this true homesteading of free land; or a grabbing of timber for a lumber trust?

The same spirit explains the furious outcry that miners are driven off the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to a big smelting trust—a merry game worked in one of the Western States for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.

To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road building is not so paltry as it sounds.

Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's cabin,—picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood. Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention appropriateness.

Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs, natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised—surely better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken to the country all the cares of the city house, a regiment of servants or hostiles, and a mansion of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees "back to the farm."

Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zuñi, New Mexico. The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens

What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven and earth on the lonely forested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. That is, over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber cruiser, sales agent, United States marshal, forester, gardener, naturalist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector, arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, surveyor, mine inspector, field man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman. When you consider that each man's patrol stretched out in a straight line would reach from New York past Albany, or from St. Paul to Duluth, without any of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge the layman, you may say the ranger is a pretty busy man.

What sort of man is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian Northwest Mounted Policeman, with these differences: He is very much younger. I think there is a regulation somewhere in the Department that a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures enthusiasm, weeding out the misfits, the formation of a body of men trained to the work; but I am not sure that it is not a mistake. There is a saying among the men of the North that "it takes a wise old dog to catch a wary old wolf;" and "there are more things in the woods than ever taught in l'pe'tee cat—ee—cheesm." I am not sure that the weathered old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world, with lots of hard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the difficulties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post-graduate from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on fist, and the brain behind the fist. I am quite sure that many of the blackguard tricks assailing the Forest Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, gentlemen always, but with some wise and weathered old dog of frontier life who wouldn't consult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would consult them, you know; but it would be afterwards. Just now, while the rangers are consulting the red tape, the trickster gets away with the goods.

In the next place, your Forest ranger is not clothed with the authority to back up his fight which the N.W.M.P. man possesses. In theory, your ranger is a United States marshal, just as your Mounted Policeman is a constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where the N.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest, try, convict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered by official red tape. For instance, riding out with a ranger one day, we came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the profanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast.

"Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out! I want to see for myself exactly what you men have to deal with!"

Now, if that mill man had used such language to a Mounted Policeman, he would have been arrested, sentenced to thirty days and a fine, all inside of twenty-four hours. What was it all about? An attempt to bulldoze a young government man into believing that the taking of logs without payment was permissible.

"What will you do to straighten it all out?" I asked.

"Lay a statement of the facts before the District Supervisor. The Supervisor will forward all to Denver. Denver will communicate with Washington. Then, soon as the thing has been investigated, word will come back from Washington."

Investigated? If you know anything about government investigations, you will not stop the clock, as Joshua played tricks with the sun dial, to prevent speed.

"Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect for law in that gentleman's heart?" I asked.

"Perhaps longer," said the college man without a suspicion of irony, "and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the Forests."

"And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good."

"Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away with logs that didn't belong to them. Once, when I came back to the first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U. S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from Washington, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was doing; but we forced pay for those logs."

It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make a good Mounted Policeman—eight years to jounce the duffer out and the man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken. For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.

What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland forests.

Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present régime, such men are not kept when found out, nor shielded when caught. For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day; and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest rangers! In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force was organized.

Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together, who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become—what?—is it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and butterfly that it may perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species that shall surpass itself. The tree trying to encompass and overcome the law of its own being—fixity—by sending its seeds sailing, whirling, aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.

You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing life and strength straight from the sun.

The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that can't stand fast against the shocks of life!

You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet, not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard and set—marking the ages of the trees—all have their prototypes in the human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth, air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much shade, fire, drought, passing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living begins—it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning, the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will to live—cork-screwing sidewise for light, forking into two branches where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds—seeds shaped like parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its own fixity—life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing.

And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high, leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second growth of such trees.

Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health seekers.

"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.

"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."

CHAPTER III

THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO

The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless, sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas. You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet; and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000 feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or Grass Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Cañon.

There are several other ways in which the National Forests of New Mexico discount Eastern expectation.

First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back, leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens—There is still a no-tip land. As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast. In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than $2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have your own horse for a six weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2—where will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized, where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel that has been too popular; that day has been long passed in the ranches of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture of the Southwest—conical arches opening from one room into another, shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made for sending in meals.

Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its feathers, which are used in religious rites

The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of most of the Forests by motor, of all of the Forests by team (be sure to hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner. In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible cañons, shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May; but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road, going up the cañon from south to north.

The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the cañons forking off the Pecos at right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.

Lastly, the mountain cañons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to remember—with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation, excellent trails and abundance of game—these National Forests of New Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago, only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the West.

You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests—trees eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval state.

The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2 a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.

Then suddenly, it dawns on you—this is not America at all. It is a bit of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health, and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief. The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats bleating on the red sand hills—all complete the illusion that you have waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to Canada, New Mexico is to the United States—a mosaic in color; a bit of the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive, undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and falls back in social envy and class hate. "Our people, no, they are not ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth—no—we have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"

"Mighty good," though I was not thinking of the poem. I was thinking of the spirit that is contented enough to see poetry in the great white mountains through the door of a little whitewashed adobe room; and in this case, it was a sick room. Presently, he got up out of his bed, and donned an old military cape, and came out in the sunlight to have me photograph him, so that his friends would have it after.

Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you. Any normal traveler does not need to be told that these ranch houses are not regular boarding houses as you understand that term; but as a great many travelers are not normal, perhaps I should explain. The custom of taking strangers has arisen from those old days when there were no inns and all passers-by were given beds and meals as a matter of course. Those days are past, but luckily for outsiders, the custom survives; only remember while you pay, you go as a guest, and must not expect a valet to clean your boots and to quake at any discord of nerves untuned by the jar of town.

In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling, earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse. Presently, at an elevation of 8,000 feet; we pulled up in Pecos Town before the long, low, whitewashed ranch house, the two ends coming back in an L round the court, the main entrance on the other side of it. You expected to find wilderness. Well, there is an upright piano, and there is a gramophone with latest musical records, and close by the davenport where hangs a grizzly bear pelt, stands a banjo. You have scarcely got travel togs off before dinner is sounded by the big copper ranch bell hung on the piazza after the fashion of the Missions.

After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going up the cañon. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a great many reasons. He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for, your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt predatory animals—bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion—you need no permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that the forests in the upper cañons are very dense; and that you might get lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge who knows where you have gone?

On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican, has been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and is somewhat of a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views.

"What is going to happen in Old Mexico?"

"Ah, only one t'ing possible—los Americanos must go in."

"Why?"

"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot—cannot control. Madero, he cannot control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."

It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet walls.

Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built in—well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell away and buried it in the mountains—where, no man knows: it has never since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.

At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the cañon with a span of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not need to describe the trails up Pecos Cañon. I consider it a safer road than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor car, though the scenic highway cutting this at right angles will be when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Cañon, now down on a level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With carelessness—well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went over the edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily wooded and you can't slide far.

Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for "the tent dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and miniature waterfalls. Wherever the cañon widens to little fields, the Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the cañon forks to right and left up other forested cañons, many of which, save for the hunter, have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords, loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear their summits is the head of Pecos Cañon—a sort of snow top to the sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.

The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically communal dwellings five stories in height

I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in addition a cowboy slicker and was cold—this in a land where the Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the cañon. Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my collapsible drinking cup to go down to the cañon for some water. Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.

Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the cañon. From this point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a dozen cañons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them. In fact, if you followed up any of these side cañons, you would find them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet untrod.

Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this 10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what thousands are doing—combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.

Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Cañon, and the whole Pecos Valley below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and hunt in Pecos Cañon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire; and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making will do to prevent fires.

We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down the east side into the Las Vegas Cañon. Four feet of snow still clung to the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though it is so very old. The holy padre was jogging along on his mule one night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an Ave Maria; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.

CHAPTER IV

THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CAÑON

I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction but fact. I am not speculating as to how those folk of neolithic times lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses where they lived, sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined tread of æons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred kiva or ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before Julius Cæsar was born, before—if Egyptian archæologists be correct—the dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their own oblivion. To my right and left for miles—for twelve miles, to be correct—are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England, contemporaneous, perhaps—for all science knows to the contrary—with that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.

Lying in my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow cliff wall, I fell to wondering on this puzzle of archæologist and historian—what desolated these bygone nations? The theory of desiccation, or drought, so plausible elsewhere, doesn't hold for one minute when you are here on the spot; for there is the mountain brook brawling through the Valley not five minutes' scramble from any one of these caves; and there on the far western sky-line are the snows of the Jemez Mountains, which must have fed this brook since this part of the earth began. Was it war, or pestilence, or captivity, that made of the populous city a den of wolves, a resort for hoot owl and bittern and fox? If pestilence, then why are the skeletons not found in the great ossuaries and masses that mark the pestilential destruction of other Indian races? There remain only the alternatives of war, or captivity; and of either, not the vestige of a shadow of a tradition remains. One man's guess is as good as another's; and the scientist's guesses vary all the way from 8,000 B. C. to 400 A. D. So there you are! You have as good a right to a guess as the highest scientist of them all; and while I refrain from speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that these people of the Stone Age were not the gibbering, monkey-tailed maniacs of claw finger nails and simian jaw which the half-baked pseudo-evolutionist loves to picture of Stone Age denizens. As Jack Donovan, a character working at Judge Abbott's in the Valley said—"Sure, monkey men wud a' had a haard time scratchin' thro' thim cliffs and makin' thim holes in the rocks." Remnants of shard and pottery, structure of houses, decorations and woven cloths and skins found wrapped as cerements round the dead all prove that these men were a sedentary and for that age civilized people. When our Celt and Saxon ancestors were still chasing wild boars through the forests, these people were cultivating corn on the Upper and Lower Mesas. When Imperial Rome's common populace boasted few garments but the ones in which they had been born, these people were wearing a cloth woven of fiber and rushes. When European courts trod the stately over floors of filthy rushes, these cliff dwellers had flooring of plaster and cement, and rugs of beaver and wolf and bear. All this you can see with your own eyes by examining the caves and skeletons of the Jemez Forests; and the fine glaze of the beautiful pottery work is as lost an art as the pigments of old Italy.

As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go into the Jemez to dream. You go to Pecos to hunt and fish. So you do to the Jemez; but it is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of man you are fishing for. As the Pecos Forests appeal to the strenuous holiday hunter—the man who considers he has not had his fun till he has broken a leg killing a bear, or stood mid-waist in snow-water stringing fish on a line like beads on a string—so the Jemez appeals to the dreamer, the scholar, the scientist, the artist; and I can imagine no more ideal (nor cheaper) holiday than to join the American School of Archæology, about which I have already spoken, that comes in here with scientists from every quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and dig, and delve, and revel in the past of moonlight nights round campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the face of the cliff. The School has been a going concern for only a few years. Yet last year over 150 scientists came in from every quarter of the globe.

Spite of warnings to the contrary given to me both East and West, the trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest you can make in America. You strike in from Santa Fe; and right here, let me set down as emphatically as possible, two or three things pleasant and unpleasant about Santa Fe.

First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not excepting Quebec. Color, age, leisure; a medley of races; sand-hills engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor blending with the braying of a Mexican burro trotting to market loaded out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain and New America; streets with less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's Board of Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the Archæological Society has its rooms with Lotave's beautiful mural paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America, yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.

Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants

Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashamed of itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask a Santa Fe man why in the world, with all its attraction of the picturesque, the antique, the snowy mountains, and the weak-lunged one's ideal climate, it has so few tourists; and he answers you with a depreciatory shrug that "it's off the main line." "Off the main line?" So is Quebec off the main line; yet 200,000 Americans a year see it. So is Yosemite off the main line; and 10,000 people go out to it every year. I have never heard that the Nile and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the main line; yet foreigners yearly reap a fortune catering to visiting Americans. Personally, it is a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe-trotter, for I am one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa Fe blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed to it by the grand dons of Spain that is averse to sounding the brass band, I love the appealing, picturesque, inert laziness of it all; but I love better to ask: "Why go to Egypt, when you have the wonders of an Egypt unexplored in your own land? Why scour the crowded Alps when the snowy domes of the Santa Fe and Jemez and Sangre de Christo lie unexplored only an easy motor ride from your hotel?" If Santa Fe, as it is, were known to the big general public, 200,000 tourists a year would find delight within its purlieus; and while I like the places untrodden by travelers, still—being an outsider, myself,—I should like the outsiders to know the same delight Santa Fe has given me.

To finish with the things of the mundane, you strike in to Santa Fe from a desolate little junction called Lamy, where the railroad has built a picturesque little doll's house of a hotel after the fashion of an old Spanish mansion. To reach the Jemez Forests where the ruins of the Cave Dwellers exist, you can drive or motor (to certain sections only) or ride. As the distance is forty miles plus, you will find it safer and more comfortable to drive. If you take a driver and a team, and keep both over two days, it will cost you from $10 to $14 for the round trip. If you go in on a burro, you can buy the burro outright for $5 or $10. (Don't mind if your feet do drag on the ground. It will save being pitched.) If you go out with the American School of Archæology (Address Santa Fe for particulars) your transportation will cost you still less, perhaps not $2. Once out, in the cañons of the Cave Dwellers, you can either camp out with your own tenting and food; or put up at Judge Abbott's hospitable ranch house; or quarter yourself free of charge in one of the thousands of cliff caves and cook your own food; or sleep in the caves and pay for your meals at the ranch. At most, your living expenses will not exceed $2 a day. If you do your own cooking, they need not be $1 a day.

One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate?

I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way. We left Santa Fe at six a. m., the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills. I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met only two Mexican teams on the way.

From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic tufa hub deep in ash dust, so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20. Here, White Rock Cañon lines both sides of the Rio Grande—precipices steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square block; and coming into this cañon at right angles are the cañons where lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers—some of them hundreds of feet above the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible cañons, you must drive up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.

We lunched in a little water cañon, which gashed the mesa side where a mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for this particular cañon being inaccessible to motors—a climb steep as a stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper mesa—acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary cloud-line, still girt by that snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We followed the trail at a rattling pace—the Archæological School had placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Cañon—and presently, by great mounds of building stone covered feet deep by the dust and débris of ages, became aware that we were on historic ground. Nor can the theory of drought explain the abandonment of this mesa. While it rains heavily only two months in the year—July and August—the mesa is so high that it is subject to sprinkling rains all months of the year; to be sure not enough for springs, but ample to provide forage and grow corn; and for water, these sky-top dwellers had access to the water cañons both before and behind. What hunting ground it must have been in those old days! Even yet you are likely to meet a flock of wild turkey face to face; or see a mountain lion slink away, or hear the bark of coyote and fox.

"Is this it, Gregoire?" I asked. The mound seemed irregularly to cover several acres—pretty extensive remains, I thought.

"Ah, no—no Señorita—wait," warned Gregoire expectantly.

I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short and plumb as if you tossed a biscuit over the edge of the Flatiron roof. I got out and looked down and then—went dumb! Afterwards, Mrs. Judge Abbott told me they thought I was afraid to come down. It wasn't that! The thing so far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed or seen; and the color—well—those artists accused of over-coloration could not have over-colored if they had tried. Pigments have not been invented that could do it!

Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara, three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red. And picture the face of the cliff under your feet, the sides of the massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives, pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched caves and winding recess and portholes—a city of the dead, silent as the dead, old almost as time!

The wind came soughing up the cañon with the sound of the sea. The note of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down among the tender green, lining the cañon stream, a mourning dove uttered her sad threnody—then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on the edge of the cañon wall and let the palpable past come touching me out of the silence.

A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the floor of the valley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a city of one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other, reached by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep in the stone. Where had the people gone; and why? What swept their civilization away? When did the age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the city of their building and choice, of their loves and their hates, and their wooing and their weddings, of their birth and their deaths—do not leave without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this place of beauty and security and thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pursued like deer by the Apache and the Ute and the Navajo? Or were they marched out captives, weeping? Or did they fall by the pestilence? Answer who can! Your guess is as good as mine! But there is the sacred ceremonial underground chamber where they worshiped the sacred fire and the plumed serpent, guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of manhood and instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and cleanliness and reticence. "If thou art stricken, die like the deer with a silent throat," says the adage of the modern Pueblo Indian. "When the foolish speak, keep thou silent." "When thou goest on the trail, carry only a light blanket." Good talk, all of it, for young boys coming to realize themselves and life! And there farther down the valley is the stone circle or dancing floor where the people came down from their cliff to make merry and express in rhythm the emotions which other nations express in poetry and music. The whole city must have been the grandstand when the dancing took place down there.

It was Gregoire who called me to myself.

"We cannot take the wagon down there," he said. "No wagon has ever gone down here. You walk down slow and I come with the horses, one by one."

It sounded a good deal easier than it looked. I haven't seen a steeper stair; and if you imagine five ladders trucked up zigzag against the Flatiron Building and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it is, you'll have an idea of the appearance of the situation; but it looked a great deal harder than it really was, and the trail has since been improved. The little steps cut in the volcanic tufa or white pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold. They grit to your footstep and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to make this wonderful Frijoles Cañon accessible to the public, or if the Archæological School can raise the means and coöperate with the Forestry Service trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the face of this cañon, graded gradually enough for a motor. The day that is done, visitors will number not 150 a year but 150,000; for nothing more exquisitely beautiful and wonderful exists in America.

It seems almost incredible that Judge and Mrs. Abbott have brought down this narrow, steep tier of 600 steps all the building material, all the furniture, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place; but there the materials are and there is no other trail in but one still less accessible.

That afternoon, Mrs. Abbott and I wandered up the valley two or three miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundreds of feet up the face of the precipice. The cave was first discovered by Judge and Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday afternoon walks. The Archæological School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the débris and accumulated erosion of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber in its original condition. "Restoring the ruins" does not mean "manufacturing ruins." It means digging out the erosion that has washed and washed for thousands of years down the hillsides during the annual rains. All the caves have been originally plastered in a sort of terra cotta or ocher stucco. When that is reached and the charred wooden beams of the smoked, arched ceilings, restoration stops. The aim is to put the caves as they were when the people abandoned them. On the floors is a sort of rock bottom of plaster or rude cement. When this is reached, digging stops. It is in the process of digging down to these floors that the beautiful specimens of prehistoric pottery have been rescued. Some of these specimens may be seen in Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum in New York, and in the Santa Fe Palace, and the Field Museum of Chicago. Sometimes as many as four feet of erosion have overlaid the original flooring. When digging down to the flooring of the ceremonial cave, an estufa or sacred secret underground council chamber was found; and this, too, was restored. The pueblo of roofless chambers seen from the hilltop on the floor of the valley was dug from a mound of débris. In fact, too great praise cannot be given Dr. Hewitt and his co-workers for their labors of restoration; and the fact that Dr. Hewitt was a local man has added to the effectiveness of the work, for he has been in a position to learn from New Mexican Indians of any discoveries and rumors of discoveries in any of the numerous caves up the Rio Grande. For instance, when about halfway down the trail that first day, at the Frijoles Cañon or Rito de los Frijoles, as it is called, I met on an abrupt bend in the trail a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara—blue jean suit, red handkerchief around neck, felt hat, huge silver earrings and teeth white as pearls—Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the cañon, who knows every foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white pumice background, it was for an instant as if one of the cave people had stepped from the past. Well, it was Wan, as we outsiders call him, who one day brought word to the Archæological workers that he had found in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was cleaned out or restored, and proved to be a back apartment or burial chamber behind other chambers, which had been worn away by the centuries' wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a woven cloth like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body lying to-day, proving that these people understood the art of weaving long before the Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade.

You could stay in the Rito Cañon for a year and find a cave of fresh interest each day. For instance, there is the one where the form of a huge plumed serpent has been etched like a molding round under the arched roof. The serpent, it was, that guarded the pools and the springs; and when one considers where snakes are oftenest found, it is not surprising that the serpent should have been taken as a totem emblem. Many of the chambers show six or seven holes in the floor—places to connect with the Great Earth Magician below. Little alcoves were carved in the arched walls for the urns of meal and water; and a sacred fireplace was regarded with somewhat the same veneration as ancient Orientals preserved their altar fires. In one cave, some old Spanish padre has come and carved a huge cross, in rebuke to pagan symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish régime; and there are other caves where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could speak they "would a tale unfold."

Looking down on the ruins of a prehistoric dwelling from one of the upper caves in the Rito de las Frijoles, New Mexico

The aim of the Archæological Society is year by year to restore portions till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial aid, complete restoration can hardly take place inside a century. When you consider that the Rito is only one of many prehistoric areas of New Mexico, of Utah, of Colorado, awaiting restoration, you are constrained to wish that some philanthropist would place a million or two at the disposal of the Archæological Society. If this were done, no place on earth could rival the Rito; for the funds would make possible not only the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of débris, but it would make the Cañon accessible to the general public by easier, nearer roads. The inaccessibility of the Rito may be in harmony with its ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thousands of tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests.

There are other things to do in the Cañon besides explore the City of the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet classified. There is the globe cactus high up on the black basalt rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun. There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which Tennyson sings in "Maud." Presently, you notice the stream banks crushing together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as mist.

Follow farther down! The cañon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain, and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down—down—down—tumbled the waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge to another in spray, then down—down—down to the Rio Grande, many feet below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a shiver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the great archæologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the simple words—"The Rito is a beautiful place."

CHAPTER V

THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA

They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart business tricks of modern Yankeedom.

Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish, present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn. Back at Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish dons are followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700, sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa—called Enchanted—or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is—pagan hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.

Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and necklaces and turquoise-set buttons down trouser leg, scouring below these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts and crafts of the Hopi people—silver work, weaving, basketry—into the Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether the raid took place a minute before midday, or a second after nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find. There you can see their cities and towns to this day.