Transcriber's note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer errors have been changed, and they are indicated with a [mouse-hover] and listed at the [end of this book]. All other inconsistencies are as in the original.

A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS IN THE OPEN

BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS IN THE OPEN.
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LIFE-HISTORIES OF AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS.
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HISTORY AS LITERATURE and Other Essays.
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From a painting by Theodore B. Pitman in possession of Colonel Roosevelt. On the brink of the Grand Canyon.

A BOOK-LOVER'S
HOLIDAYS IN THE OPEN

BY

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1916

Copyright, 1916, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published March, 1916

To
ARCHIE AND QUENTIN

FOREWORD

The man should have youth and strength who seeks adventure in the wide, waste spaces of the earth, in the marshes, and among the vast mountain masses, in the northern forests, amid the steaming jungles of the tropics, or on the deserts of sand or of snow. He must long greatly for the lonely winds that blow across the wilderness, and for sunrise and sunset over the rim of the empty world. His heart must thrill for the saddle and not for the hearthstone. He must be helmsman and chief, the cragsman, the rifleman, the boat steerer. He must be the wielder of axe and of paddle, the rider of fiery horses, the master of the craft that leaps through white water. His eye must be true and quick, his hand steady and strong. His heart must never fail nor his head grow bewildered, whether he face brute and human foes, or the frowning strength of hostile nature, or the awful fear that grips those who are lost in trackless lands. Wearing toil and hardship shall be his; thirst and famine he shall face, and burning fever. Death shall come to greet him with poison-fang or poison-arrow, in shape of charging beast or of scaly things that lurk in lake and river; it shall lie in wait for him among untrodden forests, in the swirl of wild waters, and in the blast of snow blizzard or thunder-shattered hurricane.

Not many men can with wisdom make such a life their permanent and serious occupation. Those whose tasks lie along other lines can lead it for but a few years. For them it must normally come in the hardy vigor of their youth, before the beat of the blood has grown sluggish in their veins.

Nevertheless, older men also can find joy in such a life, although in their case it must be led only on the outskirts of adventure, and although the part they play therein must be that of the onlooker rather than that of the doer. The feats of prowess are for others. It is for other men to face the peril of unknown lands, to master unbroken horses, and to hold their own among their fellows with bodies of supple strength. But much, very much, remains for the man who has "warmed both hands before the fire of life," and who, although he loves the great cities, loves even more the fenceless grass-land, and the forest-clad hills.

The grandest scenery of the world is his to look at if he chooses; and he can witness the strange ways of tribes who have survived into an alien age from an immemorial past, tribes whose priests dance in honor of the serpent and worship the spirits of the wolf and the bear. Far and wide, all the continents are open to him as they never were to any of his forefathers; the Nile and the Paraguay are easy of access, and the borderland between savagery and civilization; and the veil of the past has been lifted so that he can dimly see how, in time immeasurably remote, his ancestors—no less remote—led furtive lives among uncouth and terrible beasts, whose kind has perished utterly from the face of the earth. He will take books with him as he journeys; for the keenest enjoyment of the wilderness is reserved for him who enjoys also the garnered wisdom of the present and the past. He will take pleasure in the companionship of the men of the open; in South America, the daring and reckless horsemen who guard the herds of the grazing country, and the dark-skinned paddlers who guide their clumsy dugouts down the dangerous equatorial rivers; the white and red and half-breed hunters of the Rockies, and of the Canadian woodland; and in Africa the faithful black gun-bearers who have stood steadily at his elbow when the lion came on with coughing grunts, or when the huge mass of the charging elephant burst asunder the vine-tangled branches.

The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking, for the edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of present travel. He can see the red splendor of desert sunsets, and the unearthly glory of the afterglow on the battlements of desolate mountains. In sapphire gulfs of ocean he can visit islets, above which the wings of myriads of sea-fowl make a kind of shifting cuneiform script in the air. He can ride along the brink of the stupendous cliff-walled canyon, where eagles soar below him, and cougars make their lairs on the ledges and harry the big-horned sheep. He can journey through the northern forests, the home of the giant moose, the forests of fragrant and murmuring life in summer, the iron-bound and melancholy forests of winter.

The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Sagamore Hill, January 1, 1916.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

From a painting by Theodore B. Pitman, reproduced in color.

From a photograph by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

Come away! Come away! There's a frost along the marshes,
And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;
There's a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
Of a dirge that seeks to send us back to the arms of those that love us.

Come away! come away!—or the roving fiend will hold us,
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring.

Edwin Arlington Robinson.

CHAPTER I

A COUGAR HUNT ON THE RIM OF THE GRAND CANYON

On July 14, 1913, our party gathered at the comfortable El Tovar Hotel, on the edge of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and therefore overlooking the most wonderful scenery in the world. The moon was full. Dim, vast, mysterious, the canyon lay in the shimmering radiance. To all else that is strange and beautiful in nature the Canyon stands as Karnak and Baalbec, seen by moonlight, stand to all other ruined temples and palaces of the bygone ages.

With me were my two younger sons, Archie and Quentin, aged nineteen and fifteen respectively, and a cousin of theirs, Nicholas, aged twenty. The cousin had driven our horses, and what outfit we did not ourselves carry, from southern Arizona to the north side of the canyon, and had then crossed the canyon to meet us. The youngest one of the three had not before been on such a trip as that we intended to take; but the two elder boys, for their good fortune, had formerly been at the Evans School in Mesa, Arizona, and among the by-products of their education was a practical and working familiarity with ranch life, with the round-up, and with travelling through the desert and on the mountains. Jesse Cummings, of Mesa, was along to act as cook, packer, and horse-wrangler, helped in all three branches by the two elder boys; he was a Kentuckian by birth, and a better man for our trip and a stancher friend could not have been found.

On the 15th we went down to the bottom of the canyon. There we were to have been met by our outfit with two men whom we had engaged; but they never turned up, and we should have been in a bad way had not Mr. Stevenson, of the Bar Z Cattle Company, come down the trail behind us, while the foreman of the Bar Z, Mr. Mansfield, appeared to meet him, on the opposite side of the rushing, muddy torrent of the Colorado. Mansfield worked us across on the trolley which spans the river; and then we joined in and worked Stevenson, and some friends he had with him, across. Among us all we had food enough for dinner and for a light breakfast, and we had our bedding. With characteristic cattleman's generosity, our new friends turned over to us two pack-mules, which could carry our bedding and the like, and two spare saddle-horses—both the mules and the spare saddle-horses having been brought down by Mansfield because of a lucky mistake as to the number of men he was to meet.

Mansfield was a representative of the best type of old-style ranch foreman. It is a hard climb out of the canyon on the north side, and Mansfield was bound that we should have an early start. He was up at half-past one in the morning; we breakfasted on a few spoonfuls of mush; packed the mules and saddled the horses; and then in the sultry darkness, which in spite of the moon filled the bottom of the stupendous gorge, we started up the Bright Angel trail. Cummings and the two elder boys walked; the rest of us were on horseback. The trail crossed and recrossed the rapid brook, and for rods at a time went up its bowlder-filled bed; groping and stumbling, we made our blind way along it; and over an hour passed before the first grayness of the dawn faintly lighted our footsteps.

At last we left the stream bed, and the trail climbed the sheer slopes and zigzagged upward through the breaks in the cliff walls. At one place the Bar Z men showed us where one of their pack-animals had lost his footing and fallen down the mountainside a year previously. It was eight hours before we topped the rim and came out on the high, wooded, broken plateau which at this part of its course forms the northern barrier of the deep-sunk Colorado River. Three or four miles farther on we found the men who were to have met us; they were two days behindhand, so we told them we would not need them, and reclaimed what horses, provisions, and other outfit were ours. With Cummings and the two elder boys we were quite competent to take care of ourselves under all circumstances, and extra men, tents, and provisions merely represented a slight, and dispensable, increase in convenience and comfort.

As it turned out, there was no loss even of comfort. We went straight to the cabin of the game warden, Uncle Jim Owens; and he instantly accepted us as his guests, treated us as such, and accompanied us throughout our fortnight's stay north of the river. A kinder host and better companion in a wild country could not be found. Through him we hired a very good fellow, a mining prospector, who stayed with us until we crossed the Colorado at Lee's Ferry. He was originally a New York State man, who had grown up in Montana, and had prospected through the mountains from the Athabaska River to the Mexican boundary. Uncle Jim was a Texan, born at San Antonio, and raised in the Panhandle, on the Goodnight ranch. In his youth he had seen the thronging myriads of bison, and taken part in the rough life of the border, the life of the cow-men, the buffalo-hunters, and the Indian-fighters. He was by instinct a man of the right kind in all relations; and he early hailed with delight the growth of the movement among our people to put a stop to the senseless and wanton destruction of our wild life. Together with his—and my—friend Buffalo Jones he had worked for the preservation of the scattered bands of bison; he was keenly interested not only in the preservation of the forests but in the preservation of the game. He had been two years buffalo warden in the Yellowstone National Park. Then he had come to the Colorado National Forest Reserve and Game Reserve, where he had been game warden for over six years at the time of our trip. He has given zealous and efficient service to the people as a whole; for which, by the way, his salary has been an inadequate return. One important feature of his work is to keep down the larger beasts and birds of prey, the arch-enemies of the deer, mountain-sheep, and grouse; and the most formidable among these foes of the harmless wild life are the cougars. At the time of our visit he owned five hounds, which he had trained especially, as far as his manifold duties gave him the time, to the chase of cougars and bobcats. Coyotes were plentiful, and he shot these wherever the chance offered; but coyotes are best kept down by poison, and poison cannot be used where any man is keeping the hounds with which alone it is possible effectively to handle the cougars.

At this point the Colorado, in its deep gulf, bends south, then west, then north, and incloses on three sides the high plateau which is the heart of the forest and game reserve. It was on this plateau, locally known as Buckskin Mountain, that we spent the next fortnight. The altitude is from eight thousand to nearly ten thousand feet, and the climate is that of the far north. Spring does not come until June; the snow lies deep for seven months. We were there in midsummer, but the thermometer went down at night to 36, 34, and once to 33 degrees Fahrenheit; there was hoarfrost in the mornings. Sound was our sleep under our blankets, in the open, or under a shelf of rock, or beneath a tent, or most often under a thickly leaved tree. Throughout the day the air was cool and bracing.

Although we reached the plateau in mid-July, the spring was but just coming to an end. Silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit-thrushes chanted divinely from the deep woods. There were multitudes of flowers, of which, alas! I know only a very few, and these by their vernacular names; for as yet there is no such handbook for the flowers of the southern Rocky Mountains as, thanks to Mrs. Frances Dana, we have for those of the Eastern States, and, thanks to Miss Mary Elizabeth Parsons, for those of California. The sego lilies, looking like very handsome Eastern trilliums, were as plentiful as they were beautiful; and there were the striking Indian paint-brushes, fragrant purple locust blooms, the blossoms of that strange bush the plumed acacia, delicately beautiful white columbines, bluebells, great sheets of blue lupin, and the tall, crowded spikes of the brilliant red bell—and innumerable others. The rainfall is light and the ground porous; springs are few, and brooks wanting; but the trees are handsome. In a few places the forest is dense; in most places it is sufficiently open to allow a mountain-horse to twist in and out among the tree trunks at a smart canter. The tall yellow pines are everywhere; the erect spires of the mountain-spruce and of the blue-tipped Western balsam shoot up around their taller cousins, and the quaking asps, the aspens with their ever-quivering leaves and glimmering white boles, are scattered among and beneath the conifers, or stand in groves by themselves. Blue grouse were plentiful—having increased greatly, partly because of the war waged by Uncle Jim against their foes the great horned owls; and among the numerous birds were long-crested, dark-blue jays, pinyon-jays, doves, band-tailed pigeons, golden-winged flickers, chickadees, juncos, mountain-bluebirds, thistle-finches, and Louisiana tanagers. A very handsome cock tanager, the orange yellow of its plumage dashed with red on the head and throat, flew familiarly round Uncle Jim's cabin, and spent most of its time foraging in the grass. Once three birds flew by which I am convinced were the strange and interesting evening grosbeaks. Chipmunks and white-footed mice lived in the cabin, the former very bold and friendly; in fact, the chipmunks, of several species, were everywhere; and there were gophers or rock-squirrels, and small tree-squirrels, like the Eastern chickarees, and big tree-squirrels—the handsomest squirrels I have ever seen—with black bodies and bushy white tails. These last lived in the pines, were diurnal in their habits, and often foraged among the fallen cones on the ground; and they were strikingly conspicuous.

We met, and were most favorably impressed by, the forest supervisor, and some of his rangers. This forest and game reserve is thrown open to grazing, as with all similar reserves. Among the real settlers, the home-makers of sense and farsightedness, there is a growing belief in the wisdom of the policy of the preservation of the national resources by the National Government. On small, permanent farms, the owner, if reasonably intelligent, will himself preserve his own patrimony; but everywhere the uncontrolled use in common of the public domain has meant reckless, and usually wanton, destruction. All the public domain that is used should be used under strictly supervised governmental lease; that is, the lease system should be applied everywhere substantially as it is now applied in the forest. In every case the small neighboring settlers, the actual home-makers, should be given priority of chance to lease the land in reasonable sized tracts. Continual efforts are made by demagogues and by unscrupulous agitators to excite hostility to the forest policy of the government; and needy men who are short-sighted and unscrupulous join in the cry, and play into the hands of the corrupt politicians who do the bidding of the big and selfish exploiters of the public domain. One device of these politicians is through their representatives in Congress to cut down the appropriation for the forest service; and in consequence the administrative heads of the service, in the effort to be economical, are sometimes driven to the expedient of trying to replace the permanently employed experts by short-term men, picked up at haphazard, and hired only for the summer season. This is all wrong: first, because the men thus hired give very inferior service; and, second, because the government should be a model employer, and should not set a vicious example in hiring men under conditions that tend to create a shifting class of laborers who suffer from all the evils of unsteady employment, varied by long seasons of idleness. At this time the best and most thoughtful farmers are endeavoring to devise means for doing away with the system of employing farm-hands in mass for a few months and then discharging them; and the government should not itself have recourse to this thoroughly pernicious system.

The preservation of game and of wild life generally—aside from the noxious species—on these reserves is of incalculable benefit to the people as a whole. As the game increases in these national refuges and nurseries it overflows into the surrounding country. Very wealthy men can have private game-preserves of their own. But the average man of small or moderate means can enjoy the vigorous pastime of the chase, and indeed can enjoy wild nature, only if there are good general laws, properly enforced, for the preservation of the game and wild life, and if, furthermore, there are big parks or reserves provided for the use of all our people, like those of the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, and the Colorado.

A small herd of bison has been brought to the reserve; it is slowly increasing. It is privately owned, one-third of the ownership being in Uncle Jim, who handles the herd. The government should immediately buy this herd. Everything should be done to increase the number of bison on the public reservations.

The chief game animal of the Colorado Canyon reserve is the Rocky Mountain blacktail, or mule, deer. The deer have increased greatly in numbers since the reserve was created, partly because of the stopping of hunting by men, and even more because of the killing off of the cougars. The high plateau is their summer range; in the winter the bitter cold and driving snow send them and the cattle, as well as the bands of wild horses, to the lower desert country. For some cause, perhaps the limestone soil, their antlers are unusually stout and large. We found the deer tame and plentiful, and as we rode or walked through the forest we continually came across them—now a doe with her fawn, now a party of does and fawns, or a single buck, or a party of bucks. The antlers were still in the velvet. Does would stand and watch us go by within fifty or a hundred yards, their big ears thrown forward; while the fawns stayed hid near by. Sometimes we roused the pretty spotted fawns, and watched them dart away, the embodiments of delicate grace. One buck, when a hound chased it, refused to run and promptly stood at bay; another buck jumped and capered, and also refused to run, as we passed at but a few yards' distance. One of the most beautiful sights I ever saw was on this trip. We were slowly riding through the open pine forest when we came on a party of seven bucks. Four were yearlings or two-year-olds; but three were mighty master bucks, and their velvet-clad antlers made them look as if they had rocking-chairs on their heads. Stately of port and bearing, they walked a few steps at a time, or stood at gaze on the carpet of brown needles strewn with cones; on their red coats the flecked and broken sun-rays played; and as we watched them, down the aisles of tall tree trunks the odorous breath of the pines blew in our faces.

The deadly enemies of the deer are the cougars. They had been very plentiful all over the table-land until Uncle Jim thinned them out, killing between two and three hundred. Usually their lairs are made in the well-nigh inaccessible ruggedness of the canyon itself. Those which dwelt in the open forest were soon killed off. Along the part of the canyon where we hunted there was usually an upper wall of sheer white cliffs; then came a very steep slope covered by a thick scrub of dwarf oak and locust, with an occasional pinyon or pine; and then another and deeper wall of vermilion cliffs. It was along this intermediate slope that the cougars usually passed the day. At night they came up through some gorge or break in the cliff and rambled through the forests and along the rim after the deer. They are the most successful of all still-hunters, killing deer much more easily than a wolf can; and those we killed were very fat.

Cougars are strange and interesting creatures. They are among the most successful and to their prey the most formidable beasts of rapine in the world. Yet when themselves attacked they are the least dangerous of all beasts of prey, except hyenas. Their every movement is so lithe and stealthy, they move with such sinuous and noiseless caution, and are such past masters in the art of concealment, that they are hardly ever seen unless roused by dogs. In the wilds they occasionally kill wapiti, and often bighorn sheep and white goats; but their favorite prey is the deer.

Among domestic animals, while they at times kill all, including, occasionally, horned cattle, they are especially destructive to horses. Among the first bands of horses brought to this plateau there were some of which the cougars killed every foal. The big males attacked full-grown horses. Uncle Jim had killed one big male which had killed a large draft-horse, and another which had killed two saddle-horses and a pack-mule, although the mule had a bell on its neck, which it was mistakenly supposed would keep the cougar away. We saw the skeleton of one of the saddle-horses. It was killed when snow was on the ground, and when Uncle Jim first saw the carcass the marks of the struggle were plain. The cougar sprang on its neck, holding the face with the claws of one paw, while his fangs tore at the back of the neck, just at the base of the skull; the other fore paw was on the other side of the neck, and the hind claws tore the withers and one shoulder and flank. The horse struggled thirty yards or so before he fell, and never rose again. The draft-horse was seized in similar fashion. It went but twenty yards before falling; then in the snow could be seen the marks where it had struggled madly on its side, plunging in a circle, and the marks of the hind feet of the cougar in an outside circle, while the fangs and fore talons of the great cat never ceased tearing the prey. In this case the fore claws so ripped and tore the neck and throat that it was doubtful whether they, and not the teeth, had not given the fatal wounds.

We came across the bodies of a number of deer that had been killed by cougars. Generally the remains were in such condition that we could not see how the killing had been done. In one or two cases the carcasses were sufficiently fresh for us to examine them carefully. One doe had claw marks on her face, but no fang marks on the head or neck; apparently the neck had been broken by her own plunging fall; then the cougar had bitten a hole in the flank and eaten part of one haunch; but it had not disembowelled its prey, as an African lion would have done. Another deer, a buck, was seized in similar manner; but the death-wound was inflicted with the teeth, in singular fashion, a great hole being torn into the chest, where the neck joins the shoulder. Evidently there is no settled and invariable method of killing. We saw no signs of any cougar being injured in the struggle; the prey was always seized suddenly and by surprise, and in such fashion that it could make no counter-attack.

Few African leopards would attack such quarry as the big male cougars do. Yet the leopard sometimes preys on man, and it is the boldest and most formidable of fighters when brought to bay. The cougar, on the contrary, is the least dangerous to man of all the big cats. There are authentic instances of its attacking man; but they are not merely rare but so wholly exceptional that in practise they can be entirely disregarded. There is no more need of being frightened when sleeping in, or wandering after nightfall through, a forest infested by cougars than if they were so many tom-cats. Moreover, when itself assailed by either dogs or men the cougar makes no aggressive fight. It will stay in a tree for hours, kept there by a single dog which it could kill at once if it had the heart—and this although if hungry it will itself attack and kill any dog, and on occasions even a big wolf. If the dogs—or men—come within a few feet, it will inflict formidable wounds with its claws and teeth, the former being used to hold the assailant while the latter inflict the fatal bite. But it fights purely on the defensive, whereas the leopard readily assumes the offensive and often charges, at headlong, racing speed, from a distance of fifty or sixty yards. It is absolutely safe to walk up to within ten yards of a cougar at bay, whether wounded or unwounded, and to shoot it at leisure.

Cougars are solitary beasts. When full-grown the females outnumber the males about three to one; and the sexes stay together for only a few days at mating-time. The female rears her kittens alone, usually in some cave; the male would be apt to kill them if he could get at them. The young are playful. Uncle Jim once brought back to his cabin a young cougar, two or three months old. At the time he had a hound puppy named Pot—he was an old dog, the most dependable in the pack, when we made our hunt. Pot had lost his mother; Uncle Jim was raising him on canned milk, and, as it was winter, kept him at night in a German sock. The young cougar speedily accepted Pot as a playmate, to be enjoyed and tyrannized over. The two would lap out of the same dish; but when the milk was nearly lapped up, the cougar would put one paw on Pot's face, and hold him firmly while it finished the dish itself. Then it would seize Pot in its fore paws and toss him up, catching him again; while Pot would occasionally howl dismally, for the young cougar had sharp little claws. Finally the cougar would tire of the play, and then it would take Pot by the back of the neck, carry him off, and put him down in his box by the German sock.

When we started on our cougar hunt there were seven of us, with six pack-animals. The latter included one mule, three donkeys—two of them, Ted and Possum, very wise donkeys—and two horses. The saddle-animals included two mules and five horses, one of which solemnly carried a cow-bell. It was a characteristic old-time Western outfit. We met with the customary misadventures of such a trip, chiefly in connection with our animals. At night they were turned loose to feed, most of them with hobbles, some of them with bells. Before dawn, two or three of the party—usually including one, and sometimes both, of the elder boys—were off on foot, through the chilly dew, to bring them in. Usually this was a matter of an hour or two; but once it took a day, and twice it took a half-day. Both breaking camp and making camp, with a pack-outfit, take time; and in our case each of the packers, including the two elder boys, used his own hitch—single-diamond, squaw hitch, cow-man's hitch, miner's hitch, Navajo hitch, as the case might be. As for cooking and washing dishes—why, I wish that the average tourist-sportsman, the city-hunter-with-a-guide, would once in a while have to cook and wash dishes for himself; it would enable him to grasp the reality of things. We were sometimes nearly drowned out by heavy rain-storms. We had good food; but the only fresh meat we had was the cougar meat. This was delicious; quite as good as venison. Yet men rarely eat cougar flesh.

Cougars should be hunted when snow is on the ground. It is difficult for hounds to trail them in hot weather, when there is no water and the ground is dry and hard. However, we had to do the best we could; and the frequent rains helped us. On most of the hunting days we rode along the rim of the canyon and through the woods, hour after hour, until the dogs grew tired, or their feet sore, so that we deemed it best to turn toward camp; having either struck no trail or else a trail so old that the hounds could not puzzle it out. I did not have a rifle, wishing the boys to do the shooting. The two elder boys had tossed up for the first shot, Nick winning. In cougar hunting the shot is usually much the least interesting and important part of the performance. The credit belongs to the hounds, and to the man who hunts the hounds. Uncle Jim hunted his hounds excellently. He had neither horn nor whip; instead, he threw pebbles, with much accuracy of aim, at any recalcitrant dog—and several showed a tendency to hunt deer or coyote. "They think they know best and needn't obey me unless I have a nose-bag full of rocks," observed Uncle Jim.

Twice we had lucky days. On the first occasion we all seven left camp by sunrise with the hounds. We began with an hour's chase after a bobcat, which dodged back and forth over and under the rim rock, and finally escaped along a ledge in the cliff wall. At about eleven we struck a cougar trail of the night before. It was a fine sight to see the hounds running it through the woods in full cry, while we loped after them. After one or two checks, they finally roused the cougar, a big male, from a grove of aspens at the head of a great gorge which broke through the cliffs into the canyon. Down the gorge went the cougar, and then along the slope between the white cliffs and the red; and after some delay in taking the wrong trail, the hounds followed him. The gorge was impassable for horses, and we rode along the rim, looking down into the depths, from which rose the chiming of the hounds. At last a change in the sound showed that they had him treed; and after a while we saw them far below under a pine, across the gorge, and on the upper edge of the vermilion cliff wall. Down we went to them, scrambling and sliding; down a break in the cliffs, round the head of the gorge just before it broke off into a side-canyon, through the thorny scrub which tore our hands and faces, along the slope where, if a man started rolling, he never would stop until life had left his body. Before we reached him the cougar leaped from the tree and tore off, with his big tail stretched straight as a bar behind him; but a cougar is a short-winded beast, and a couple of hundred yards on, the hounds put him up another tree. Thither we went.

It was a wild sight. The maddened hounds bayed at the foot of the pine. Above them, in the lower branches, stood the big horse-killing cat, the destroyer of the deer, the lord of stealthy murder, facing his doom with a heart both craven and cruel. Almost beneath him the vermilion cliffs fell sheer a thousand feet without a break. Behind him lay the Grand Canyon in its awful and desolate majesty.

Nicholas shot true. With his neck broken, the cougar fell from the tree, and the body was clutched by Uncle Jim and Archie before it could roll over the cliff—while I experienced a moment's lively doubt as to whether all three might not waltz into the abyss together. Cautiously we dragged him along the rim to another tree, where we skinned him. Then, after a hard pull out of the canyon, we rejoined the horses; rain came on; and, while the storm pelted against our slickers and down-drawn slouch-hats, we rode back to our water-drenched camp.

On our second day of success only three of us went out—Uncle Jim, Archie, and I. Unfortunately, Quentin's horse went lame, that morning, and he had to stay with the pack-train. For two or three hours we rode through the woods and along the rim of the canyon. Then the hounds struck a cold trail and began to puzzle it out. They went slowly along to one of the deep, precipice-hemmed gorges which from time to time break the upper cliff wall of the canyon; and after some busy nose-work they plunged into its depths. We led our horses to the bottom, slipping, sliding, and pitching, and clambered, panting and gasping, up the other side. Then we galloped along the rim. Far below us we could at times hear the hounds. One of them was a bitch, with a squealing voice. The other dogs were under the first cliffs, working out a trail, which was evidently growing fresher. Much farther down we could hear the squealing of the bitch, apparently on another trail. However, the trails came together, and the shrill yelps of the bitch were drowned in the deeper-toned chorus of the other hounds, as the fierce intensity of the cry told that the game was at last roused. Soon they had the cougar treed. Like the first, it was in a pine at the foot of the steep slope, just above the vermilion cliff wall. We scrambled down to the beast, a big male, and Archie broke its neck; in such a position it was advisable to kill it outright, as, if it struggled at all, it was likely to slide over the edge of the cliff and fall a thousand feet sheer.

It was a long way down the slope, with its jungle of dwarf oak and locust, and the climb back, with the skin and flesh of the cougar, would be heart-breaking. So, as there was a break in the cliff line above, Uncle Jim suggested to Archie to try to lead down our riding animals while he, Uncle Jim, skinned the cougar. By the time the skin was off, Archie turned up with our two horses and Uncle Jim's mule—an animal which galloped as freely as a horse. Then the skin and flesh were packed behind his and Uncle Jim's saddles, and we started to lead the three animals up the steep, nearly sheer mountainside. We had our hands full. The horses and mule could barely make it. Finally the saddles of both the laden animals slipped, and Archie's horse in his fright nearly went over the cliff—it was a favorite horse of his, a black horse from the plains below, with good blood in it, but less at home climbing cliffs than were the mountain horses. On that slope anything that started rolling never stopped unless it went against one of the rare pine or pinyon trees. The horse plunged and reared; Archie clung to its head for dear life, trying to prevent it from turning down-hill, while Uncle Jim sought to undo the saddle and I clutched the bridle of his mule and of my horse and kept them quiet. Finally the frightened black horse sank on his knees with his head on Archie's lap; the saddle was taken off—and promptly rolled down-hill fifty or sixty yards before it fetched up against a pinyon; we repacked, and finally reached the top of the rim.

Meanwhile the hounds had again started, and we concluded that the bitch must have been on the trail of a different animal, after all. By the time we were ready to proceed they were out of hearing, and we completely lost track of them. So Uncle Jim started in the direction he deemed it probable they would take, and after a while we were joined by Pot. Evidently the dogs were tired and thirsty and had scattered. In about an hour, as we rode through the open pine forest across hills and valleys, Archie and I caught, very faintly, a far-off baying note. Uncle Jim could not hear it, but we rode toward the spot, and after a time caught the note again. Soon Pot heard it and trotted toward the sound. Then we came over a low hill crest, and when half-way down we saw a cougar crouched in a pine on the opposite slope, while one of the hounds, named Ranger, uttered at short intervals a husky bay as he kept his solitary vigil at the foot of the tree. Archie insisted that I should shoot, and thrust the rifle into my hand as we galloped down the incline. The cougar, a young and active female, leaped out of the tree and rushed off at a gait that for a moment left both dogs behind; and after her we tore at full speed through the woods and over rocks and logs. A few hundred yards farther on her bolt was shot, and the dogs, and we also, were at her heels. She went up a pine which had no branches for the lower thirty or forty feet. It was interesting to see her climb. Her two fore paws were placed on each side of the stem, and her hind paws against it, all the claws digging into the wood; her body was held as clear of the tree as if she had been walking on the ground, the legs being straight, and she walked or ran up the perpendicular stem with as much daylight between her body and the trunk as there was between her body and the earth when she was on the ground. As she faced us among the branches I could only get a clear shot into her chest where the neck joins the shoulder; down she came, but on the ground she jumped to her feet, ran fifty yards with the dogs at her heels, turned to bay in some fallen timber, and dropped dead.

The last days before we left this beautiful holiday region we spent on the table-land called Greenland, which projects into the canyon east of Bright Angel. We were camped by the Dripping Springs, in singular and striking surroundings. A long valley leads south through the table-land; and just as it breaks into a sheer walled chasm which opens into one of the side loops of the great canyon, the trail turns into a natural gallery along the face of the cliff. For a couple of hundred yards a rock shelf a dozen feet wide runs under a rock overhang which often projects beyond it. The gallery is in some places twenty feet high; in other places a man on horseback must stoop his head as he rides. Then, at a point where the shelf broadens, the clear spring pools of living water, fed by constant dripping from above, lie on the inner side next to and under the rock wall. A little beyond these pools, with the chasm at our feet, and its opposite wall towering immediately in front of us, we threw down our bedding and made camp. Darkness fell; the stars were brilliant overhead; the fire of pitchy pine stumps flared; and in the light of the wavering flames the cliff walls and jutting rocks momentarily shone with ghastly clearness, and as instantly vanished in utter gloom.

From the southernmost point of this table-land the view of the canyon left the beholder solemn with the sense of awe. At high noon, under the unveiled sun, every tremendous detail leaped in glory to the sight; yet in hue and shape the change was unceasing from moment to moment. When clouds swept the heavens, vast shadows were cast; but so vast was the canyon that these shadows seemed but patches of gray and purple and umber. The dawn and the evening twilight were brooding mysteries over the dusk of the abyss; night shrouded its immensity, but did not hide it; and to none of the sons of men is it given to tell of the wonder and splendor of sunrise and sunset in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

CHAPTER II

ACROSS THE NAVAJO DESERT

We dropped down from Buckskin Mountain, from the land of the pine and spruce and of cold, clear springs, into the grim desolation of the desert. We drove the pack-animals and loose horses, usually one of us taking the lead to keep the trail. The foreman of the Bar Z had lent us two horses for our trip, in true cattleman's spirit; another Bar Z man, who with his wife lived at Lee's Ferry, showed us every hospitality, and gave us fruit from his garden, and chickens; and two of the Bar Z riders helped Archie and Nick shoe one of our horses. It was a land of wide spaces and few people, but those few we met were so friendly and helpful that we shall not soon forget them.

At noon of the first day we had come down the mountainside, from the tall northern forest trees at the summit, through the scattered, sprawling pinyons and cedars of the side slopes, to the barren, treeless plain of sand and sage-brush and greasewood. At the foot of the mountain we stopped for a few minutes at an outlying cow-ranch. There was not a tree, not a bush more than knee-high, on the whole plain round about. The bare little ranch-house, of stone and timber, lay in the full glare of the sun; through the open door we saw the cluttered cooking-utensils and the rolls of untidy bedding. The foreman, rough and kindly, greeted us from the door; spare and lean, his eyes bloodshot and his face like roughened oak from the pitiless sun, wind, and sand of the desert. After we had dismounted, our shabby ponies moped at the hitching-post as we stood talking. In the big corral a mob of half-broken horses were gathered, and two dust-grimed, hard-faced cowpunchers, lithe as panthers, were engaged in breaking a couple of wild ones. All around, dotted with stunted sage-brush and greasewood, the desert stretched, blinding white in the sunlight; across its surface the dust clouds moved in pillars, and in the distance the heat-waves danced and wavered.

During the afternoon we shogged steadily across the plain. At one place, far off to one side, we saw a band of buffalo, and between them and us a herd of wild donkeys. Otherwise the only living things were snakes and lizards. On the other side of the plain, two or three miles from a high wall of vermilion cliffs, we stopped for the night at a little stone rest-house, built as a station by a cow outfit. Here there were big corrals, and a pool of water piped down by the cow-men from a spring many miles distant. On the sand grew the usual desert plants, and on some of the ridges a sparse growth of grass, sufficient for the night feed of the hardy horses. The little stone house and the corrals stood bare and desolate on the empty plain. Soon after we reached them a sand-storm rose and blew so violently that we took refuge inside the house. Then the wind died down; and as the sun sank toward the horizon we sauntered off through the hot, still evening. There were many sidewinder rattlesnakes. We killed several of the gray, flat-headed, venomous things; as we slept on the ground outside the house, under the open sky, we were glad to kill as many as possible, for they sometimes crawl into a sleeper's blankets. Except this baleful life, there was little save the sand and the harsh, scanty vegetation. Across the lonely wastes the sun went down. The sharply channelled cliffs turned crimson in the dying light; all the heavens flamed ruby red, and faded to a hundred dim hues of opal, beryl and amber, pale turquoise and delicate emerald; and then night fell and darkness shrouded the desert.

Next morning the horse-wranglers, Nick and Quentin, were off before dawn to bring in the saddle and pack animals; the sun rose in burning glory, and through the breathless heat we drove the pack-train before us toward the crossing of the Colorado. Hour after hour we plodded ahead. The cliff line bent back at an angle, and we followed into the valley of the Colorado. The trail edged in toward the high cliffs as they gradually drew toward the river. At last it followed along the base of the frowning rock masses. Far off on our right lay the Colorado; on its opposite side the broad river valley was hemmed in by another line of cliffs, at whose foot we were to travel for two days after crossing the river.

The landscape had become one of incredible wildness, of tremendous and desolate majesty. No one could paint or describe it save one of the great masters of imaginative art or literature—a Turner or Browning or Poe. The sullen rock walls towered hundreds of feet aloft, with something about their grim savagery that suggested both the terrible and the grotesque. All life was absent, both from them and from the fantastic barrenness of the bowlder-strewn land at their bases. The ground was burned out or washed bare. In one place a little stream trickled forth at the bottom of a ravine, but even here no grass grew—only little clusters of a coarse weed with flaring white flowers that looked as if it throve on poisoned soil. In the still heat "we saw the silences move by and beckon." The cliffs were channelled into myriad forms—battlements, spires, pillars, buttressed towers, flying arches; they looked like the ruined castles and temples of the monstrous devil-deities of some vanished race. All were ruins—ruins vaster than those of any structures ever reared by the hands of men—as if some magic city, built by warlocks and sorcerers, had been wrecked by the wrath of the elder gods. Evil dwelt in the silent places; from battlement to lonely battlement fiends' voices might have raved; in the utter desolation of each empty valley the squat blind tower might have stood, and giants lolled at length to see the death of a soul at bay.

As the afternoon wore on, storm boded in the south. The day grew sombre; to the desolation of the blinding light succeeded the desolation of utter gloom. The echoes of the thunder rolled among the crags, and lightning jagged the darkness. The heavens burst, and the downpour drove in our faces; then through cloud rifts the sun's beams shone again and we looked on "the shining race of rain whose hair a great wind scattereth."

At Lee's Ferry, once the home of the dark leader of the Danites, the cliffs, a medley of bold colors and striking forms, come close to the river's brink on either side; but at this one point there is a break in the canyon walls and a ferry can be run. A stream flows into the river from the north. By it there is a house, and the miracle of water has done its work. Under irrigation, there are fields of corn and alfalfa, groves of fruit-trees, and gardens; a splash of fresh, cool green in the harsh waste.

South of the ferry we found two mule-wagons, sent for us by Mr. Hubbell, of Ganado, to whose thoughtful kindness we owed much. One was driven by a Mexican, Francisco Marquez; the other, the smaller one, by a Navajo Indian, Loko, who acted as cook; both were capital men, and we lived in much comfort while with them. A Navajo policeman accompanied us as guide, for we were now in the great Navajo reservation. A Navajo brought us a sheep for sale, and we held a feast.

For two days we drove southward through the desert country, along the foot of a range of red cliffs. In places the sand was heavy; in others the ground was hard, and the teams made good progress. There were little water-holes, usually more or less alkaline, ten or fifteen miles apart. At these the Navajos were watering their big flocks of sheep and goats, their horses and donkeys, and their few cattle. They are very interesting Indians. They live scattered out, each family by itself, or two or three families together; not in villages, like their neighbors the Hopis. They are pastoral Indians, but they are agriculturists also, as far as the desert permits. Here and there, where there was a little seepage of water, we saw their meagre fields of corn, beans, squashes, and melons. All were mounted; the men usually on horses, the women and children often on donkeys. They were clad in white man's garb; at least the men wore shirts and trousers and the women bodices and skirts; but the shirts were often green or red or saffron or bright blue; their long hair was knotted at the back of the head, and they usually wore moccasins. The well-to-do carried much jewelry of their own make. They wore earrings and necklaces of turquoise; turquoises were set in their many silver ornaments; and they wore buttons and bangles of silver, for they are cunning silversmiths, as well as weavers of the famous Navajo blankets. Although they practise polygamy, and divorce is easy, their women are usually well treated; and we saw evidences of courtesy and consideration not too common even among civilized people. At one halt a woman on a donkey, with a little boy behind her, rode up to the wagon. We gave her and the boy food. Later when a Navajo man came up, she quietly handed him a couple of delicacies. So far there was nothing of note; but the man equally quietly and with a slight smile of evident gratitude and appreciation stretched out his hand; and for a moment they stood with clasped hands, both pleased, one with the courtesy, and the other with the way the courtesy had been received. Both were tattered beings on donkeys; but it made a pleasant picture.

These are as a whole good Indians—although some are very bad, and should be handled rigorously. Most of them work hard, and wring a reluctant living from the desert; often their houses are miles from water, and they use it sparingly. They live on a reservation in which many acres are necessary to support life; I do not believe that at present they ought to be allotted land in severalty, and their whole reservation should be kept for them, if only they can be brought forward fast enough in stock-raising and agriculture to use it; for with Indians and white men alike it is use which should determine occupancy of the soil. The Navajos have made progress of a real type, and stand far above mere savagery; and everything possible should be done to help them help themselves, to teach them English, and, above all, to teach them how to be better stock-raisers and food-growers—as well as smiths and weavers—in their desert home. The whites have treated these Indians well. They benefited by the coming of the Spaniards; they have benefited more by the coming of our own people. For the last quarter of a century the lawless individuals among them have done much more wrong (including murder) to the whites than has been done to them by lawless whites. The lawless Indians are the worst menace to the others among the Navajos and Utes; and very serious harm has been done by well-meaning Eastern philanthropists who have encouraged and protected these criminals. I have known some startling cases of this kind.

During the second day of our southward journey the Painted Desert, in gaudy desolation, lay far to our right; and we crossed tongues and patches of the queer formation, with its hard, bright colors. Red and purple, green and bluish, orange and gray and umber brown, the streaked and splashed clays and marls had been carved by wind and weather into a thousand outlandish forms. Funnel-shaped sandstorms moved across the waste. We climbed gradually upward to the top of the mesa. The yellow sand grew heavier and deeper. There were occasional short streams from springs; but they ran in deep gullies, with nothing to tell of their presence; never a tree near by and hardly a bush or a tuft of grass, unless planted and tended by man. We passed the stone walls of an abandoned trading-post. The desert had claimed its own. The ruins lay close to a low range of cliffs; the white sand, dazzling under the sun, had drifted everywhere; there was not a plant, not a green thing in sight—nothing but the parched and burning lifelessness of rock and sand. This northern Arizona desert was less attractive than the southern desert along the road to the Roosevelt Dam and near Mesa, for instance; for in the south the cactus growth is infinitely varied in size and in fantastic shape.

In the late afternoon we reached Tuba, with its Indian school and its trader's store. Tuba was once a Mormon settlement, the Mormons having been invited thither by the people of a near-by Hopi village—which we visited—because the Hopis wished protection from hostile Indian foes. As usual, the Mormon settlers had planted and cared for many trees—cotton-woods, poplars, almond-trees, and flowering acacias—and the green shade was doubly attractive in that sandy desert. We were most hospitably received, especially by the school superintendent, and also by the trader. They showed us every courtesy. Mentioning the abandoned trading-post in the desert to the wife of the trader, she told us that it was there she had gone as a bride. The women who live in the outposts of civilization have brave souls!

We rested the horses for a day, and then started northward, toward the trading-station of John Wetherill, near Navajo Mountain and the Natural Bridge. The first day's travel was through heavy sand and very tiring to the teams. Late in the afternoon we came to an outlying trader's store, on a sandy hillside. In the plain below, where not a blade of grass grew, were two or three permanent pools; and toward these the flocks of the Navajos were hurrying, from every quarter, with their herdsmen. The sight was curiously suggestive of the sights I so often saw in Africa, when the Masai and Samburu herdsmen brought their flocks to water. On we went, not halting until nine in the evening.

All next day we travelled through a parched, monotonous landscape, now and then meeting Navajos with their flocks and herds, and passing by an occasional Navajo "hogan," or hovel-like house, with its rough corral near by. Toward evening we struck into Marsh Pass, and camped at the summit. Here we were again among the mountains; and the great gorge was wonderfully picturesque—well worth a visit from any landscape-lover, were there not so many sights still more wonderful in the immediate neighborhood. The lower rock masses were orange-hued, and above them rose red battlements of cliff; where the former broke into sheer sides there were old houses of the cliff-dwellers, carved in the living rock. The half-moon hung high overhead; the scene was wild and lovely, when we strolled away from the camp-fire among the scattered cedars and pinyons through the cool, still night.

Next morning we journeyed on, and in the forenoon we reached Kayentay, where John Wetherill, the guide and Indian trader, lives. We had been travelling over a bare table-land, through surroundings utterly desolate; and with startling suddenness, as we dropped over the edge, we came on the group of houses—the store, the attractive house of Mr. and Mrs. Wetherill, and several other buildings. Our new friends were the kindest and most hospitable of hosts, and their house was a delight to every sense: clean, comfortable, with its bath and running water, its rugs and books, its desks, cupboards, couches and chairs, and the excellent taste of its Navajo ornamentation. Here we parted with our two wagons, and again took to pack-trains; we had already grown attached to Francisco and Loko, and felt sorry to say good-by to them.

On August 10, under Wetherill's guidance, we started for the Natural Bridge, seven of us, all told, with five pack-horses. We travelled light, with no tentage, and when it rained at night we curled up in our bedding under our slickers. I was treated as "the Colonel," and did nothing but look after my own horse and bedding, and usually not even this much; but every one else in the outfit worked! On the two days spent in actually getting into and out of the very difficult country around the Bridge itself we cut down our luggage still further, taking the necessary food in the most portable form, and, as regards bedding, trusting, in cowboy fashion, to our slickers and horse blankets. But we were comfortable, and the work was just hard enough to keep us in fine trim.

We began by retracing our steps to the head of Marsh Pass and turning westward up Laguna Canyon. This was so named because it contained pools of water when, half a century ago, Kit Carson, the type of all that was best among the old-style mountain man and plainsman, traversed it during one of his successful Indian campaigns. The story of the American advance through the Southwest is filled with feats of heroism. Yet, taking into account the means of doing the work, even greater dangers were fronted, even more severe hardships endured, and even more striking triumphs achieved by the soldiers and priests who three centuries previously, during Spain's brief sunburst of glory, first broke through the portals of the thirst-guarded, Indian-haunted desert.

At noon we halted in a side-canyon, at the foot of a mighty cliff, where there were ruins of a big village of cliff-dwellers. The cliff was of the form so common in this type of rock formation. It was not merely sheer, but reentrant, making a huge, arched, shallow cave, several hundred feet high, and at least a hundred—perhaps a hundred and fifty—feet deep, the overhang being enormous. The stone houses of the village, which in all essentials was like a Hopi village of to-day, were plastered against the wall in stories, each resting on a narrow ledge. Long poles permitted one to climb from ledge to ledge, and gave access, through the roofs, to the more inaccessible houses. The immense size of the cave—or overhanging, reentrant cliff, whichever one chooses to call it—dwarfed the houses, so that they looked like toy houses.

There were many similar, although smaller, villages and little clusters of houses among the cliffs of this tangle of canyons. Once the cliff-dwellers had lived in numbers in this neighborhood, sleeping in their rock aeries, and venturing into the valleys only to cultivate their small patches of irrigated land. Generations had passed since these old cliff-dwellers had been killed or expelled. Compared with the neighboring Indians, they had already made a long stride in cultural advance when the Spaniards arrived; but they were shrinking back before the advance of the more savage tribes. Their history should teach the lesson—taught by all history in thousands of cases, and now being taught before our eyes by the experience of China, but being taught to no purpose so far as concerns those ultra peace advocates whose heads are even softer than their hearts—that the industrious race of advanced culture and peaceful ideals is lost unless it retains the power not merely for defensive but for offensive action, when itself menaced by vigorous and aggressive foes.

That night, having ridden only some twenty-five miles, we camped in Bubbling Spring Valley. It would be hard to imagine a wilder or more beautiful spot; if in the Old World, the valley would surely be celebrated in song and story; here it is one among many others, all equally unknown. We camped by the bubbling spring of pure cold water from which it derives its name. The long, winding valley was carpeted with emerald green, varied by wide bands and ribbons of lilac, where the tall ranks of bee-blossoms, haunted by humming-birds, grew thickly, often for a quarter of a mile at a stretch. The valley was walled in by towering cliffs, a few of them sloping, most of them sheer-sided or with the tops overhanging; and there were isolated rock domes and pinnacles. As everywhere round about, the rocks were of many colors, and the colors varied from hour to hour, so that the hues of sunrise differed from those of noonday, and yet again from the long lights of sunset. The cliffs seemed orange and purple; and again they seemed vermilion and umber; or in the white glare they were white and yellow and light red.

Our routine was that usual when travelling with a pack-train. By earliest dawn the men whose duties were to wrangle the horses and cook had scrambled out of their bedding; and the others soon followed suit. There is always much work with a pack-outfit, and there are almost always some animals which cause trouble when being packed. The sun was well up before we started; then we travelled until sunset, taking out a couple of hours to let the hobbled horses and mules rest and feed at noon.

On the second day out we camped not far from the foot of Navajo Mountain. We came across several Indians, both Navajos and Utes, guarding their flocks and herds; and we passed by several of their flimsy branch-built summer houses, and their mud, stone, and log winter houses; and by their roughly fenced fields of corn and melons watered by irrigation ditches. Wetherill hired two Indians, a Ute and a Navajo, to go with us, chiefly to relieve us of the labor of looking after our horses at night. They were pleasant-faced, silent men. They wore broad hats, shirts and waistcoats, trousers, and red handkerchiefs loosely knotted round their necks; except for their moccasins, a feather in each hat, and two or three silver ornaments, they were dressed like cowboys, and both picturesquely and appropriately. Their ornamented saddles were of Navajo make.

The second day's march was long. At one point we dropped into and climbed out of a sheer-sided canyon some twelve hundred feet deep. The trail, which zigzagged up and down the rocky walls, had been made by the Navajos. After we had led our horses down into the canyon, and were lunching by a spring, we were followed by several Indians driving large flocks of goats and sheep. They came down the trail at a good rate, many of them riding instead of leading their horses. One rather comely squaw attracted our attention. She was riding a weedy, limber-legged brood-mare, followed by a foal. The mare did not look as if it would be particularly strong even on the level; yet the well-dressed squaw, holding before her both her baby and her long sticks for blanket-weaving, and with behind her another child and a small roll of things which included a black umbrella, ambled down among the broken rocks with entire unconcern, and joked cheerily with us as she passed.

The night was lovely, and the moon, nearly full, softened the dry harshness of the land, while Navajo Mountain loomed up under it. When we rose, we saw the pale dawn turn blood-red; and shortly after sunrise we started for our third and final day's journey to the Bridge. For some ten miles the track was an ordinary rough mountain trail. Then we left all our pack-animals except two little mules, and began the hard part of our trip. From this point on the trail was that followed by Wetherill on his various trips to the Bridge, and it can perhaps fairly be called dangerous in two or three places, at least for horses. Wetherill has been with every party that has visited the Bridge from the time of its discovery by white men four years ago. On that occasion he was with two parties, their guide being the Ute who was at this time with us. Mrs. Wetherill has made an extraordinarily sympathetic study of the Navajos and to a less extent of the Utes; she knows, and feelingly understands, their traditions and ways of thought, and speaks their tongue fluently; and it was she who first got from the Indians full knowledge of the Bridge.

The hard trail began with a twenty minutes' crossing of a big mountain dome of bare sheet rock. Over this we led our horses, up, down, and along the sloping sides, which fell away into cliffs that were scores and even hundreds of feet deep. One spot was rather ticklish. We led the horses down the rounded slope to where a crack or shelf six or eight inches broad appeared and went off level to the right for some fifty feet. For half a dozen feet before we dropped down to this shelf the slope was steep enough to make it difficult for both horses and men to keep their footing on the smooth rock; there was nothing whatever to hold on to, and a precipice lay underneath.

On we went, under the pitiless sun, through a contorted wilderness of scalped peaks and ranges, barren passes, and twisted valleys of sun-baked clay. We worked up and down steep hill slopes, and along tilted masses of sheet-rock ending in cliffs. At the foot of one of these lay the bleached skeleton of a horse. It was one which Wetherill had ridden on one of his trips to the Bridge. The horse lost his footing on the slippery slide rock, and went to his death over the cliff; Wetherill threw himself out of the saddle and just managed to escape. The last four miles were the worst of all for the horses. They led along the bottom of the Bridge canyon. It was covered with a torrent-strewn mass of smooth rocks, from pebbles to bowlders of a ton's weight. It was a marvel that the horses got down without breaking their legs; and the poor beasts were nearly worn out.

Huge and bare the immense cliffs towered, on either hand, and in front and behind as the canyon turned right and left. They lifted straight above us for many hundreds of feet. The sunlight lingered on their tops; far below, we made our way like pygmies through the gloom of the great gorge. As we neared the Bridge the horse trail led up to one side, and along it the Indians drove the horses; we walked at the bottom of the canyon so as to see the Bridge first from below and realize its true size; for from above it is dwarfed by the immense mountain masses surrounding it.

At last we turned a corner, and the tremendous arch of the Bridge rose in front of us. It is surely one of the wonders of the world. It is a triumphal arch rather than a bridge, and spans the torrent bed in a majesty never shared by any arch ever reared by the mightiest conquerors among the nations of mankind. At this point there were deep pools in the rock bed of the canyon, with overhanging shelves under which grew beautiful ferns and hanging plants. Hot and tired, we greeted the chance for a bath, and as I floated on my back in the water the Bridge towered above me. Then we made camp. We built a blazing fire under one of the giant buttresses of the arch, and the leaping flame brought it momentarily into sudden relief. We white men talked and laughed by the fire, and the two silent Indians sat by and listened to us. The night was cloudless. The round moon rose under the arch and flooded the cliffs behind us with her radiance. After she passed behind the mountains the heavens were still brilliant with starlight, and whenever I waked I turned and gazed at the loom of the mighty arch against the clear night sky.

Next morning early we started on our toilsome return trip. The pony trail led under the arch. Along this the Ute drove our pack-mules, and as I followed him I noticed that the Navajo rode around outside. His creed bade him never pass under an arch, for the arch is the sign of the rainbow, the sign of the sun's course over the earth, and to the Navajo it is sacred. This great natural bridge, so recently "discovered" by white men, has for ages been known to the Indians. Near it, against the rock walls of the canyon, we saw the crumbling remains of some cliff-dwellings, and almost under it there is what appears to be the ruin of a very ancient shrine.

We travelled steadily at a good gait, and we feasted on a sheep we bought from a band of Utes. Early on the afternoon of the sixth day of our absence we again rode our weary horses over the hill slope down to the store at Kayentay, and glad we were to see the comfortable ranch buildings.

Many Navajos were continually visiting the store. It seems a queer thing to say, but I really believe Kayentay would be an excellent place for a summer school of archæology and ethnology. There are many old cliff-dwellings, some of large size and peculiar interest, in the neighborhood; and the Navajos of this region themselves, not to mention the village-dwelling Hopis, are Indians who will repay the most careful study, whether of language, religion, or ordinary customs and culture. As always when I have seen Indians in their homes, in mass, I was struck by the wide cultural and intellectual difference among the different tribes, as well as among the different individuals of each tribe, and both by the great possibilities for their improvement and by the need of showing common sense even more than good intentions if this improvement is to be achieved. Some Indians can hardly be moved forward at all. Some can be moved forward both fast and far. To let them entirely alone usually means their ruin. To interfere with them foolishly, with whatever good intentions, and to try to move all of them forward in a mass, with a jump, means their ruin. A few individuals in every tribe, and most of the individuals in some tribes, can move very far forward at once; the non-reservation schools do excellently for these. Most of them need to be advanced by degrees; there must be a half-way house at which they can halt, or they may never reach their final destination and stand on a level with the white man.

The Navajos have made long strides in advance during the last fifty years, thanks to the presence of the white men in their neighborhood. Many decent men have helped them—soldiers, agents, missionaries, traders; and the help has quite as often been given unconsciously as consciously; and some of the most conscientious efforts to help them have flatly failed. The missionaries have made comparatively few converts; but many of the missionaries have added much to the influences telling for the gradual uplift of the tribe. Outside benevolent societies have done some good work at times, but have been mischievous influences when guided by ignorance and sentimentality—a notable instance on this Navajo reservation is given by Mr. Leupp in his book "The Indian and His Problem." Agents and other government officials, when of the best type, have done most good, and when not of the right type have done most evil; and they have never done any good at all when they have been afraid of the Indians or have hesitated relentlessly to punish Indian wrong-doers, even if these wrong-doers were supported by some unwise missionaries or ill-advised Eastern benevolent societies. The traders of the right type have rendered genuine, and ill-appreciated, service, and their stores and houses are centres of civilizing influence.

Good work can be done, and has been done, at the schools. Wherever the effort is to jump the ordinary Indian too far ahead and yet send him back to the reservation, the result is usually failure. To be useful the steps for the ordinary boy or girl, in any save the most advanced tribes, must normally be gradual. Enough English should be taught to enable such a boy or girl to read, write, and cipher so as not to be cheated in ordinary commercial transactions. Outside of this the training should be industrial, and, among the Navajos, it should be the kind of industrial training which shall avail in the home cabins and in tending flocks and herds and irrigated fields. The Indian should be encouraged to build a better house; but the house must not be too different from his present dwelling, or he will, as a rule, neither build it nor live in it. The boy should be taught what will be of actual use to him among his fellows, and not what might be of use to a skilled mechanic in a big city, who can work only with first-class appliances; and the agency farmer should strive steadily to teach the young men out in the field how to better their stock and practically to increase the yield of their rough agriculture. The girl should be taught domestic science, not as it would be practised in a first-class hotel or a wealthy private home, but as she must practise it in a hut with no conveniences, and with intervals of sheep-herding. If the boy and girl are not so taught, their after lives will normally be worthless both to themselves and to others. If they are so taught, they will normally themselves rise and will be the most effective of home missionaries for their tribe.

In Horace Greeley's "Overland Journey," published more than half a century ago, there are words of sound wisdom on this subject. Said Greeley (I condense): "In future efforts to improve the condition of the Indians the women should be specially regarded and appealed to. A conscientious, humane, capable Christian trader, with a wife thoroughly skilled in household manufactures and handicrafts, each speaking the language of the tribe with whom they take up their residence, can do [incalculable] good. Let them keep and sell whatever articles are adapted to the Indians' needs ... and maintain an industrial school for Indian women and children, which, though primarily industrial, should impart intellectual and religious instruction also, wisely adapted in character and season to the needs of the pupils.... Such an enterprise would gradually" [the italics here are mine] "mould a generation after its own spirit.... The Indian likes bread as well as the white; he must be taught to prefer the toil of producing it to the privation of lacking it." Mrs. Wetherill is doing, and striving to do, much more than Horace Greeley held up as an ideal. One of her hopes is to establish a "model hogan," an Indian home, both advanced and possible for the Navajos now to live up to—a half-way house on the road to higher civilization, a house in which, for instance, the Indian girl will be taught to wash in a tub with a pail of water heated at the fire; it is utterly useless to teach her to wash in a laundry with steam and cement bathtubs and expect her to apply this knowledge on a reservation. I wish some admirer of Horace Greeley and friend of the Indian would help Mrs. Wetherill establish her half-way house.

Mrs. Wetherill was not only versed in archæological lore concerning ruins and the like, she was also versed in the yet stranger and more interesting archæology of the Indian's own mind and soul. There have of recent years been some admirable books published on the phase of Indian life which is now, after so many tens of thousands of years, rapidly drawing to a close. There is the extraordinary, the monumental work of Mr. E.S. Curtis, whose photographs are not merely photographs, but pictures of the highest value; the capital volume by Miss Natalie Curtis; and others. If Mrs. Wetherill could be persuaded to write on the mythology of the Navajos, and also on their present-day psychology—by which somewhat magniloquent term I mean their present ways and habits of thought—she would render an invaluable service. She not only knows their language; she knows their minds; she has the keenest sympathy not only with their bodily needs, but with their mental and spiritual processes; and she is not in the least afraid of them or sentimental about them when they do wrong. They trust her so fully that they will speak to her without reserve about those intimate things of the soul which they will never even hint at if they suspect want of sympathy or fear ridicule. She has collected some absorbingly interesting reproductions of the Navajo sand drawings, picture representations of the old mythological tales; they would be almost worthless unless she wrote out the interpretation, told her by the medicine-man, for the hieroglyphics themselves would be meaningless without such translation. According to their own creed, the Navajos are very devout, and pray continually to the gods of their belief. Some of these prayers are very beautiful; others differ but little from forms of mere devil-worship, of propitiation of the powers of possible evil. Mrs. Wetherill was good enough to write out for me, in the original and in English translation, a prayer of each type—a prayer to the God of the Dawn and the Goddess of Evening Light, and a prayer to the great Spirit Bear. They run as follows:

Prayer to the Dawn

"Hi-yol-cank sil-kin Natany,
Tee gee hozhone nas-shad,
Sit-sigie hozhone nas-shad
She-kayge hozhone nas-shad,
She-yage hozhone nas-shad,
She-kigee hozhone nas-shad,
She-now also hozhone nas-shad.

"San-naga, Toddetenie Huskie be-kay, hozhone nas-shad
Na-da-cleas, gekin, Natany,
Tes-gee hozhone nas-shad
She-kayge hozhone nas-shad,
[She-kigee hozhone] nas-shad
She-yage hozhone nas-shad
She-now also hozhone nas-shad,

"Hozhone nas clee, hozhone nas clee,
Hozhone nas clee, hozhone nas clee."

Prayer to the Dawn (Translation)

"Dawn, beautiful dawn, the Chief,
This day, let it be well with me as I go;
Let it be well before me as I go;
Let it be well behind me as I go;
Let it be well beneath me as I go;
Let it be well above me as I go;
Let all I see be well as I go.

"Everlasting, like unto the Pollen Boy;
Goddess of the Evening, the beautiful Chieftess,
This day, let it be well with me as I go;
Let it be well before me as I go;
Let it be well behind me as I go;
Let it be well beneath me as I go;
Let it be well above me as I go;
Let all I see be well as I go.

"Now all is well, now all is well,
Now all is well, now all is well."

(The Navajos believe in repeating a prayer, both in anticipatory and in realized form, four times, being firm in the faith that an adjuration four times repeated will bring the results they desire; the Pollen Boy is the God of Fertilization of the Flowers.)

Prayer to the Big Black Bear

"Shush-et-so-dilth-kilth
Pash dilth-kilth ne-kay ba-she-che-un-de-de-talth;
Pash dilth-kilth ne-escla ba she chee un-de-de-talth;
Pash dilth-kilth ne-ea ba she chee un-de-de-talth;
Pash dilth-kilth ne-cha ba she chee un-de-de-talth;
Ba ne un-ne-ga ut-sen-el-clish; net saw now-o-tilth a
Sit saw now-o-tilth go-ud-dish-nilth;
Ba sit saw ne-egay go-ud-dish-nilth;
Ne change nis-salth dodo ne;
Ne change nis-salth do-ut-saw-daw;
Ne change nis-salth ta-de-tenie nus-cleango-ud-is-nilth;
es-ze, es-ze, es-ze, es-ze."

Prayer to the Big Black Bear (Translation)

"Big Black Bear,
With your black moccasins, like unto a knife, stand between me and danger;
With your black leggins, like unto a knife, stand between me and danger;
With your black shirt, like unto a knife, stand between me and danger,
With your black hat, like unto a knife, stand between me and danger;
With your charm send the lightning around you and around me;
By my charm tell the evil dream to leave me;
Let the evil dream not come true;
Give me medicine to dispel the evil dream;
The evil has missed me, the evil has missed me, the evil has missed me, the evil has missed me."

(The fourfold repetition of "the evil has missed me" is held to insure the accomplishment in the future of what the prayer asserts of the past. Instead of "hat" we could say "helmet," as the Navajos once wore a black buckskin helmet; and the knife was of black flint. Black was the war color. This prayer was to ward off the effect of a bad dream.)

On August 17, we left Wetherill's with our pack-train, for a three days' trip across the Black Mesa to Walpi, where we were to witness the snake-dance of the Hopis. The desert valley where Kayentay stands is bounded on the south by a high wall of cliffs, extending for scores of miles. Our first day's march took us up this; we led the saddle-horses and drove the pack-animals up a very rough Navajo trail which zigzagged to the top through a partial break in the continuous rock wall. From the summit we looked back over the desert, barren, desolate, and yet with a curious fascination of its own. In the middle distance rose a line of low cliffs, deep red, well-nigh blood-red, in color. In the far distance isolated buttes lifted daringly against the horizon; prominent among them was the abrupt pinnacle known as El Capitan, a landmark for the whole region.

On the summit we were once more among pines, and we saw again the beautiful wild flowers and birds we had left on Buckskin Mountain. There were redbells and bluebells and the showy Indian paint-brushes; delicate white flowers and beautiful purple ones; rabbit-brush tipped with pale yellow, and the brighter yellow of the Navajo gorse; and innumerable others. I saw a Louisiana tanager; the pinyon jays were everywhere; ravens, true birds of the wilderness, croaked hoarsely.

From the cliff crest we travelled south through a wild and picturesque pass. The table-land was rugged and mountainous; but it sloped gradually to the south, and the mountains changed to rounded hills. It was a dry region, but with plenty of grama-grass, and much of it covered with an open forest of pinyon and cedar. After eight hours' steady jogging along Indian trails, and across country where there was no trail, we camped by some muddy pools of rain-water which lay at the bottom of a deep washout. Soon afterward a Navajo family passed camp; they were travelling in a wagon drawn by a mule and a horse, and the boys of the family were driving a big herd of sheep and goats. The incident merely illustrated the real progress the Indians are making, and how far they already are from pure savagery.

Next morning the red dawn and the flushed clouds that heralded the sunrise were very lovely. Only those who live and sleep in the open fully realize the beauty of dawn and moonlight and starlight. As we journeyed southward the land grew more arid; and the water was scarce and bad. In the afternoon we camped on a dry mud-flat, not far from a Navajo sheep-farmer, who soon visited us. Two Navajos were travelling with us; merry, pleasant fellows. One of them had a .22 Winchester rifle, with which he shot a couple of prairie-dogs—which he and his friend roasted whole for their supper, having previously shared ours.

Next day at noon we climbed the steep, narrow rock ridge on whose summit rise the three Hopi towns at one of which, Walpi, the snake-dance was to be held. The clustered rock villages stood in bold outline, on the cliff top, against the blue sky. In all America there is no more strikingly picturesque sight.

CHAPTER III

THE HOPI SNAKE-DANCE

On our trip we not only traversed the domains of two totally different and very interesting and advanced Indian tribes, but we also met all sorts and conditions of white men. One of the latter, by the way, related an anecdote which delighted me because of its unexpected racial implications. The narrator was a Mormon, the son of an English immigrant. He had visited Belgium as a missionary. While there he went to a theatre to hear an American Negro minstrel troupe; and, happening to meet one of the minstrels in the street, he hailed him with "Halloo, Sam!" to which the pleased and astonished minstrel cordially responded: "Well, for de Lawd's sake! Who'd expect to see a white man in this country?"

I did not happen to run across any Mormons at the snake-dance; but it seemed to me that almost every other class of Americans was represented—tourists, traders, cattlemen, farmers, government officials, politicians, cowboys, scientists, philanthropists, all kinds of men and women. We were especially glad to meet the assistant commissioner of Indian affairs, Mr. Abbot, one of the most useful public servants in Uncle Sam's employ. Mr. Hubbell, whose courtesy toward us was unwearied, met us; and we owed our comfortable quarters to the kindness of the Indian agent and his assistant. As I rode in I was accosted by Miss Natalie Curtis, who has done so very much to give to Indian culture its proper position. Miss Curtis's purpose has been to preserve and perpetuate all the cultural development to which the Indian has already attained—in art, music, poetry, or manufacture—and, moreover, to endeavor to secure the further development and adaptation of this Indian culture so as to make it, what it can undoubtedly be made, an important constituent element in our national cultural development.

Among the others at the snake-dance was Geoffrey O'Hara, whom Secretary of the Interior Lane has wisely appointed instructor of native Indian music. Mr. O'Hara's purpose is to perpetuate and develop the wealth of Indian music and poetry—and ultimately the rhythmical dancing that goes with the music and poetry. The Indian children already know most of the poetry, with its peculiarly baffling rhythm. Mr. O'Hara wishes to appoint special Indian instructors of this music, carefully chosen, in the schools; as he said: "If the Navajo can bring with him into civilization the ability to preserve his striking and bewildering rhythm, he will have done in music what Thorpe, the Olympic champion, did in athletics." Miss Curtis and Mr. O'Hara represent the effort to perpetuate Indian art in the life of the Indian to-day, not only for his sake, but for our own. This side of Indian life is entirely unrevealed to most white men; and there is urgent need from the standpoint of the white man himself of a proper appreciation of native art. Such appreciation may mean much toward helping the development of an original American art for our whole people.

No white visitor to Walpi was quite as interesting as an Indian visitor, a Navajo who was the owner and chauffeur of the motor in which Mr. Hubbell had driven to Walpi. He was an excellent example of the Indian who ought to be given the chance to go to a non-reservation school—a class not perhaps as yet relatively very large, but which will grow steadily larger. He had gone to such a school; and at the close of his course had entered the machine-shops of the Santa Fé and Northeastern Railway—I think that was the name of the road—staying there four years, joining the local union, going out with the other men when they struck, and having in all ways precisely the experience of the average skilled mechanic. Then he returned to the reservation, where he is now a prosperous merchant, running two stores; and he purchased his automobile as a matter of convenience and of economy in time, so as to get quickly from one store to the other, as they are far apart. He is not a Christian, nor is his wife; but his children have been baptized in the Catholic Church. Of course, such a prosperous career is exceptional for an Indian, as it would be exceptional for a white man; but there were Hopi Indians whom we met at the dance, both storekeepers and farmers, whose success had been almost as great. Among both the Navajos and Hopis the progress has been marked during the last thirty or forty years, and is more rapid now than ever before, and careers such as those just mentioned will in their essence be repeated again and again by members of both tribes in the near future. The Hopis are so far advanced that most of them can now fully profit by non-reservation schools. For large sections of the Navajos the advance must be slower. For these the agency school is the best school, and their industrial training should primarily be such as will fit them for work in their own homes, and for making these homes cleaner and better.

Of course, the advance in any given case is apt to be both fitful and one-sided—the marvel is that it is not more so. Moreover, the advance is sometimes taking place when there seems dishearteningly little evidence of it. I have never respected any men or women more than some of the missionaries and their wives—there were examples on the Navajo reservation—who bravely and uncomplainingly labor for righteousness, although knowing that the visible fruits of their labor will probably be gathered by others in a later generation. These missionaries may fail to make many converts at the moment, and yet they may unconsciously produce such an effect that the men and women who themselves remain heathen are rather pleased to have their children become Christians. I have in mind, as illustrating just what I mean, one missionary family on the Navajo reservation whom it was an inspiration to meet; and, by the way, the Christian Navajo interpreter at their mission, with his pretty wife and children, gave fine proof of what the right education can do for the Indian.

Among those at the snake-dance was a Franciscan priest, who has done much good work on the Navajo reservation. He has attained great influence with the Navajos because of his work for their practical betterment. He doesn't try to convert the adults; but he has worked with much success among the children. Like every competent judge I met, he strongly protested against opening or cutting down the Navajo reservation. I heartily agree with him. Such an act would be a cruel wrong, and would benefit only a few wealthy cattle and sheep men.

There has apparently been more missionary success among the adult Hopis than among the adult Navajos; at any rate, I came across a Baptist congregation of some thirty members, and from information given me I am convinced that these converts stood in all ways ahead of their heathen brethren. Exceptional qualities of courage, hard-headed common sense, sympathy, and understanding are needed by the missionary who is to do really first-class work; even more exceptional than are the qualities needed by the head of a white congregation under present conditions. The most marked successes have been won by men, themselves of lofty and broad-minded spirituality, who have respected the advances already made by the Indian toward a higher spiritual life, and instead of condemning these advances have made use of them in bringing his soul to a loftier level. One very important service rendered by the missionaries is their warfare on what is evil among the white men on the reservations; they are most potent allies in warring against drink and sexual immorality, two of the greatest curses with which the Indian has to contend. The missionary is always the foe of the white man of loose life, and of the white man who sells whiskey. Many of the missionaries, including all who do most good, are active in protecting the rights of each Indian to his land. Like the rest of us, the missionary needs to keep in mind the fact that the Indian criminal is on the whole more dangerous to the well-meaning Indian than any outsider can at present be; for there are as wide differences of character and conduct among Indians as among whites, and there is the same need in the one case as in the other of treating each individual according to his conduct—and of persuading the people of his own class and color thus to treat him.

Several times we walked up the precipitous cliff trails to the mesa top, and visited the three villages thereon. We were received with friendly courtesy—perhaps partly because we endeavored to show good manners ourselves, which, I am sorry to say, is not invariably the case with tourists. The houses were colored red or white; and the houses individually, and the villages as villages, compared favorably with the average dwelling or village in many of the southern portions of Mediterranean Europe. Contrary to what we had seen in the Hopi village near Tuba, most of the houses were scrupulously clean; although the condition of the streets—while not worse than in the Mediterranean villages above referred to—showed urgent need of a crusade for sanitation and elementary hygiene. The men and women were well dressed, in clothes quite as picturesque and quite as near our own garb as the dress of many European peasants of a good type; aside, of course, from the priests and young men who were preparing for the ceremonial dance, and who were clad, or unclad, according to the ancient ritual. There were several rooms in each house; and the furniture included stoves, sewing-machines, chairs, window-panes of glass, and sometimes window-curtains. There were wagons in one or two of the squares, for a wagon road has been built to one end of the mesa; and we saw donkeys laden with fagots or water—another south European analogy.

Altogether, the predominant impression made by the sight of the ordinary life—not the strange heathen ceremonies—was that of a reasonably advanced, and still advancing, semicivilization; not savagery at all. There is big room for improvement; but so there is among whites; and while the improvement should be along the lines of gradual assimilation to the life of the best whites, it should unquestionably be so shaped as to preserve and develop the very real element of native culture possessed by these Indians—which, as I have already said, if thus preserved and developed, may in the end become an important contribution to American cultural life. Ultimately I hope the Indian will be absorbed into the white population, on a full equality; as was true, for instance, of the Indians who served in my own regiment, the Rough Riders; as is true on the Navajo reservation itself of two of the best men thereon, both in government employ, both partly of northern Indian blood, and both indistinguishable from the most upright and efficient of the men of pure white blood.

A visiting clergyman from the Episcopal Cathedral at Fond du Lac took me into one of the houses to look at the pottery. The grandmother of the house was the pottery-maker, and, entirely unhelped from without and with no incentive of material reward, but purely to gratify her own innate artistic feeling, she had developed the art of pottery-making to a very unusual degree; it was really beautiful pottery. On the walls, as in most of the other houses, were picture-cards and photographs, including those of her children and grandchildren, singly and grouped with their schoolmates. Two of her daughters and half a dozen grandchildren were present, and it was evident that the family life was gentle and attractive. The grandfather was not a Christian, but "he is one of the best old men I ever knew, and I must say that I admire and owe him much, if I am a parson," said my companion. The Hopis are monogamous, and the women are well treated; the man tills the fields and weaves, and may often be seen bringing in fire-wood; and the fondness of both father and mother for their children is very evident.

Many well-informed and well-meaning men are apt to protest against the effort to keep and develop what is best in the Indian's own historic life as incompatible with making him an American citizen, and speak of those of opposite views as wishing to preserve the Indians only as national bric-à-brac. This is not so. We believe in fitting him for citizenship as rapidly as possible. But where he cannot be pushed ahead rapidly we believe in making progress slowly, and in all cases where it is possible we hope to keep for him and for us what was best in his old culture. As eminently practical men as Mr. Frissell, the head of Hampton Institute (an educational model for white, red, and black men alike), and Mr. Valentine, the late commissioner of Indian affairs, have agreed with Miss Curtis in drawing up a scheme for the payment from private sources of a number of high-grade, specially fitted educational experts, whose duty it should be to correlate all the agencies, public and private, that are working for Indian education, and also to make this education, not a mechanical impress from without, but a drawing out of the qualities that are within. The Indians themselves must be used in such education; many of their old men can speak as sincerely, as fervently, and as eloquently of duty as any white teacher, and these old men are the very teachers best fitted to perpetuate the Indian poetry and music. The effort should be to develop the existing art—whether in silver-making, pottery-making, blanket and basket weaving, or lace-knitting—and not to replace it by servile and mechanical copying. This is only to apply to the Indian a principle which ought to be recognized among all our people. A great art must be living, must spring from the soul of the people; if it represents merely a copying, an imitation, and if it is confined to a small caste, it cannot be great.

Of course all Indians should not be forced into the same mould. Some can be made farmers; others mechanics; yet others have the soul of the artist. Let us try to give each his chance to develop what is best in him. Moreover, let us be wary of interfering overmuch with either his work or his play. It is mere tyranny, for instance, to stop all Indian dances. Some which are obscene, or which are dangerous on other grounds, must be prohibited. Others should be permitted, and many of them encouraged. Nothing that tells for the joy of life, in any community, should be lightly touched.

A few Indians may be able to turn themselves into ordinary citizens in a dozen years. Give these exceptional Indians every chance; but remember that the majority must change gradually, and that it will take generations to make the change complete. Help them to make it in such fashion that when the change is accomplished we shall find that the original and valuable elements in the Indian culture have been retained, so that the new citizens come with full hands into the great field of American life, and contribute to that life something of marked value to all of us, something which it would be a misfortune to all of us to have destroyed.

As an example, take the case of these Hopi mesa towns, perched in such boldly picturesque fashion on high, sheer-walled rock ridges. Many good people wish to force the Hopis to desert these towns, and live in isolated families in nice tin-roofed houses on the plains below. I believe that this would be a mistake from the standpoint of the Indians—not to mention depriving our country of something as notable and as attractive as the castles that have helped make the Rhine beautiful and famous. Let the effort be to insist on cleanliness and sanitation in the villages as they are, and especially to train the Indians themselves to insist thereon; and to make it easier for them to get water. In insisting on cleanliness, remember that we preach a realizable ideal; our own ancestors lived in villages as filthy not three centuries ago. The breezy coolness of the rocky mesa top and the magnificent outlook would make it to me personally a far more attractive dwelling-place than the hot, dusty plains. Moreover, the present Hopi house, with its thick roof, is cooler and pleasanter than a tin-roofed house. I believe it would be far wiser gradually to develop the Hopi house itself, making it more commodious and convenient, rather than to abandon it and plant the Indian in a brand-new government-built house, precisely like some ten million other cheap houses. The Hopi architecture is a product of its own environment; it is as picturesque as anything of the kind which our art students travel to Spain in order to study. Therefore let us keep it. The Hopi architecture can be kept, adapted, and developed just as we have kept, adapted, and developed the Mission architecture of the Southwest—with the results seen in beautiful Leland Stanford University. The University of New Mexico is, most wisely, modelled on these pueblo buildings; and the architect has done admirable work of the kind by adapting Indian architectural ideas in some of his California houses. The Hopi is himself already thus developing his house; as I have said, he has put in glass windows and larger doors; he is furnishing it; he is making it continually more livable. Give him a chance to utilize his own inherent sense of beauty in making over his own village for himself. Give him a chance to lead his own life as he ought to; and realize that he has something to teach us as well as to learn from us. The Hopi of the younger generation, at least in some of the towns, is changing rapidly; and it is safe to leave it to him to decide where he will build and keep his house.

I cannot so much as touch on the absorbingly interesting questions of the Hopi spiritual and religious life, and of the amount of deference that can properly be paid to one side of this life. The snake-dance and antelope-dance, which we had come to see, are not only interesting as relics of an almost inconceivably remote and savage past—analogous to the past wherein our own ancestors once dwelt—but also represent a mystic symbolism which has in it elements that are ennobling and not debasing. These dances are prayers or invocations for rain, the crowning blessing in this dry land. The rain is adored and invoked both as male and female; the gentle steady downpour is the female, the storm with lightning the male. The lightning-stick is "strong medicine," and is used in all these religious ceremonies. The snakes, the brothers of men, as are all living things in the Hopi creed, are besought to tell the beings of the underworld man's need of water.

As a former great chief at Washington I was admitted to the sacred room, or one-roomed house, the kiva, in which the chosen snake priests had for a fortnight been getting ready for the sacred dance. Very few white men have been thus admitted, and never unless it is known that they will treat with courtesy and respect what the Indians revere. Entrance to the house, which was sunk in the rock, was through a hole in the roof, down a ladder across whose top hung a cord from which fluttered three eagle plumes and dangled three small animal skins. Below was a room perhaps fifteen feet by twenty-five. One end of it, occupying perhaps a third of its length, was raised a foot above the rest, and the ladder led down to this raised part. Against the rear wall of this raised part or dais lay thirty odd rattlesnakes, most of them in a twined heap in one corner, but a dozen by themselves scattered along the wall. There was also a pot containing several striped ribbon-snakes, too lively to be left at large. Eight or ten priests, some old, some young, sat on the floor in the lower and larger two-thirds of the room, and greeted me with grave courtesy; they spread a blanket on the edge of the dais, and I sat down, with my back to the snakes and about eight feet from them; a little behind and to one side of me sat a priest with a kind of fan or brush made of two or three wing-plumes of an eagle, who kept quiet guard over his serpent wards. At the farther end of the room was the altar; the rude picture of a coyote was painted on the floor, and on the four sides of this coyote picture were paintings of snakes; on three sides it was hemmed in by lightning-sticks, or thunder-sticks, standing upright in little clay cups, and on the fourth side by eagle plumes held similarly erect. Some of the priests were smoking—for pleasure, not ceremonially—and they were working at parts of the ceremonial dress. One had a cast rattlesnake skin which he was chewing, to limber it up, just as Sioux squaws used to chew buckskin. Another was fixing a leather apron with pendent thongs; he stood up and tried it on. All were scantily clad, in breech-clouts or short kilts or loin flaps; their naked, copper-red bodies, lithe and sinewy, shone, and each had been splashed in two or three places with a blotch or streak of white paint. One spoke English and translated freely; I was careful not to betray too much curiosity or touch on any matter which they might be reluctant to discuss. The snakes behind me never rattled or showed any signs of anger; the translator volunteered the remark that they were peaceable because they had been given medicine—whatever that might mean, supposing the statement to be true according to the sense in which the words are accepted by plainsmen. But several of them were active in the sluggish rattlesnake fashion. One glided sinuously toward me; when he was a yard away, I pointed him out to the watcher with the eagle feathers; the watcher quietly extended the feathers and stroked and pushed the snake's head back, until it finally turned and crawled back to the wall. Half a dozen times different snakes thus crawled out toward me and were turned back, without their ever displaying a symptom of irritation. One snake got past the watcher and moved slowly past me about six inches away, whereupon the priest on my left leaned across me and checked its advance by throwing pinches of dust in its face until the watcher turned round with his feather sceptre. Every move was made without hurry and with quiet unconcern; neither snake nor man, at any time, showed a trace of worry or anger; all, human beings and reptiles, were in an atmosphere of quiet peacefulness. When I rose to say good-by, I thanked my hosts for their courtesy; they were pleased, and two or three shook hands with me.

On the afternoon of the following day, August 20, the antelope priests—the men of the antelope clan—held their dance. The snake priests took part. It was held in the middle of Walpi village, round a big, rugged column of rock, a dozen feet high, which juts out of the smooth surface. The antelope-dancers came in first, clad in kilts, with fox skins behind; otherwise naked, painted with white splashes and streaks, and their hair washed with the juice of the yucca root. Their leader's kilt was white; he wore a garland and anklets of cottonwood leaves, and sprinkled water from a sacred vessel to the four corners of heaven. Another leader carried the sacred bow and a bull-roarer, and they moved to its loud moaning sound. The snake priests were similarly clad, but their kirtles were of leather; eagle plumes were in their long hair, and under their knees they carried rattles made of tortoise-shell. In two lines they danced opposite each other, keeping time to the rhythm of their monotonous chanting.

On the top of the column were half a dozen Hopi young men, clad in ordinary white man's clothing. Archie joined these, and entered into conversation with them. They spoke English; they had been at non-reservation schools; they were doing well as farmers and citizens. One and all they asserted that, in order to prosper in after life, it was necessary for the Indian to get away to a non-reservation school; that merely to go to an agency school was not enough in any community which was on the highroad of progress; and that they intended to send their own children for a couple of years to an agency school and then to a non-reservation school. They looked at the ceremonial religious dances of their fathers precisely as the whites did; they were in effect Christians, although not connected with any specific church. They represented substantial success in the effort to raise the Indian to the level of the white man. In their case it was not necessary to push them toward forgetfulness of their past. They were travelling away from it naturally, and of their own accord. As their type becomes dominant the snake-dance and antelope-dance will disappear, the Hopi religious myths will become memories, and the Hopis will live in villages on the mesa tops, or scattered out on the plains, as their several inclinations point, just as if they were so many white men. It is to be hoped that the art, the music, the poetry of their elders will be preserved during the change coming over the younger generation.

On my return from this dance I met two of the best Indian agents in the entire service. The first was Mr. Parquette, a Wisconsin man, himself part Indian by blood. The other was Mr. Shelton, who has done more for the Navajos than any other living man. He has sternly put down the criminal element exactly as he has toiled for and raised the decent Indians and protected them against criminal whites; moreover, he has actually reformed these Indian criminals, so that they are now themselves decent people and his fast friends; while the mass of the Indians recognize him as their leader who has rendered them incalculable services. He has got the Indians themselves to put an absolute stop to gambling, whiskey-drinking, and sexual immorality. His annual agricultural fair is one of the features of Navajo life, and is of far-reaching educational value. Yet this exceptionally upright and efficient public servant, who has done such great and lasting good to the Indians, was for years the object of attack by certain Eastern philanthropic associations, simply because he warred against Indian criminals who were no more entitled to sympathy than the members of the Whyo gang in New York City. Messrs. Shelton and Parquette explained to me the cruel wrong that would be done to the Navajos if their reservation was thrown open or cut down. It is desert country. It cannot be utilized in small tracts, for in many parts the water is so scanty that hundreds, and in places even thousands, of acres must go to the support of any family. The Indians need it all; they are steadily improving as agriculturists and stock-growers; few small settlers could come in even if the reservation were thrown open; the movement to open it, and to ruin the Indians, is merely in the interest of a few needy adventurers and of a few wealthy men who wish to increase their already large fortunes, and who have much political influence.

Mr. Robinson, the superintendent of irrigation, in protesting against opening the reservation, dwelt upon the vital need of getting from Congress sufficient money to enable the engineers to develop water by digging wells, preserving springs, and making flood reservoirs. The lack of water is the curse of this desert reservation. The welfare of the Indians depends on the further development of the water-supply.

That night fires flared from the villages on the top of the mesa. Before there was a hint of dawn we heard the voice of the crier summoning the runners to get ready for the snake-dance; and we rose and made our way to the mesa top. The "yellow line," as the Hopis call it, was in the east, and dawn was beautiful, as we stood on the summit and watched the women and children in their ceremonial finery, looking from the housetops and cliff edges for the return of the racers. On this occasion they dropped their civilized clothes. The children were painted and naked save for kilts; and they wore feathers and green corn leaves in their hair. The women wore the old-style clothing; many of them were in their white bridal dresses, which in this queer tribe are woven by the bridegroom and his male kinsfolk for the bride's trousseau. The returning racers ran at speed up the precipitous paths to the mesa, although it was the close of a six-mile run. Most of them, including the winner, wore only a breech-clout and were decked with feathers. I should like to have entered that easy-breathing winner in a Marathon contest! Many of the little boys ran the concluding mile or so with them; and the little girls made a pretty spectacle as they received the little boys much as the women and elder girls greeted the men. Then came the corn-scramble, or mock-fight over the corn; and then in each house a feast was set, especially for the children.

At noon, thanks to Mr. Hubbell, and to the fact that I was an ex-President, we were admitted to the sacred kiva—the one-roomed temple-house which I had already visited—while the snake priests performed the ceremony of washing the snakes. Very few white men have ever seen this ceremony. The sight was the most interesting of our entire trip.

There were twenty Indians in the kiva, all stripped to their breech-clouts; only about ten actually took part in handling the snakes, or in any of the ceremonies except the rhythmic chant, in which all joined. Eighty or a hundred snakes, half of them rattlers, the others bull-snakes or ribbon-snakes, lay singly or in tangled groups against the wall at the raised end of the room. They were quiet and in no way nervous or excited. Two men stood at this end of the room. Two more stood at the other end, where the altar was; there was some sand about the altar, and the eagle feathers we had previously seen there had been removed, but the upright thunder-sticks remained. The other Indians were squatted in the middle of the room, and half a dozen of them were in the immediate neighborhood of a very big, ornamented wooden bowl of water, placed on certain white-painted symbols on the floor. Two of these Indians held sacred rattles, and there was a small bowl of sacred meal beside them. There was some seemingly ceremonial pipe-smoking.

After some minutes of silence, one of the squatting priests, who seemed to be the leader, and who had already puffed smoke toward the bowl, began a low prayer, at the same time holding and manipulating in his fingers a pinch of the sacred meal. The others once and again during this prayer uttered in unison a single word or exclamation—a kind of selah or amen. At the end he threw the meal into the bowl of water; he had already put some in at the outset of the prayer. Then he began a rhythmic chant, in which all the others joined, the rattles being shaken and the hands moved in harmony with the rhythm. The chant consisted seemingly of a few words repeated over and over again. It was a strange scene, in the half-light of the ancient temple-room. The copper-red bodies of the priests swayed, and their strongly marked faces, hitherto changeless, gained a certain quiet intensity of emotion. The chanting grew in fervor; yet it remained curiously calm throughout (except for a moment at a time, about which I shall speak later). Then the two men who stood near the snakes stooped over, and each picked up a handful of them, these first handfuls being all rattlesnakes. It was done in tranquil, matter-of-fact fashion, and the snakes behaved with equally tranquil unconcern. All was quiet save for the chanting. The snakes were handed to two of the men squatting round the bowl, who received them as if they had been harmless, holding them by the middle of the body, or at least well away from the head. This was repeated until half a dozen of the squatting priests held each three or four poisonous serpents in his hands. The chanting continued, in strongly accented but monotonous rhythm, while the rattles were shaken, and the snakes moved up and down or shaken, in unison with it. Then suddenly the chant quickened and rose to a scream, and the snakes were all plunged into the great bowl of water, a writhing tangle of snakes and hands. Immediately afterward they were withdrawn, as suddenly as they had been plunged in, and were hurled half across the room, to the floor, on and around the altar. They were hurled from a distance of a dozen feet, with sufficient violence to overturn the erect thunder-sticks. That the snakes should have been quiet and inoffensive under the influence of the slow movements and atmosphere of calm that had hitherto obtained was understandable; but the unexpected violence of the bathing, and then of the way in which they were hurled to the floor, together with the sudden screaming intensity of the chant, ought to have upset the nerves of every snake there. However, it did not. The snakes woke to an interest in life, it is true, writhed themselves free of one another and of the upset lightning-sticks, and began to glide rapidly in every direction. But only one showed symptoms of anger, and these were not marked. The two standing Indians at this end of the room herded the snakes with their eagle feathers, gently brushing and stroking them back as they squirmed toward us, or toward the singing, sitting priests.

The process was repeated until all the snakes, venomous and non-venomous alike, had been suddenly bathed and then hurled on the floor, filling the other end of the room with a wriggling, somewhat excited serpent population, which was actively, but not in any way nervously, shepherded by the two Indians stationed for that purpose. These men were, like the others, clad only in a breech-clout, but they moved about among the snakes, barelegged and barefooted, with no touch of concern. One or two of the rattlers became vicious under the strain, and coiled and struck. I thought I saw one of the two shepherding watchers struck in the hand by a recalcitrant sidewinder which refused to be soothed by the feathers, and which he finally picked up; but, if so, the man gave no sign and his placidity remained unruffled. Most of the snakes showed no anger at all; it seemed to me extraordinary that they were not all of them maddened.

When the snakes had all been washed, the leading priest again prayed. Afterward he once more scattered meal in the bowl, in lines east, west, north, and south, and twice diagonally. The chant was renewed; it grew slower; the rattles were rattled more slowly; then the singing stopped and all was over.

At the end of the ceremony I thanked my hosts and asked if there was anything I could do to show my appreciation of the courtesy they had shown me. They asked if I could send them some cowry shells, which they use as decorations for the dance. I told them I would send them a sackful. They shook hands cordially with all of us, and we left. I have never seen a wilder or, in its way, more impressive spectacle than that of these chanting, swaying, red-skinned medicine-men, their lithe bodies naked, unconcernedly handling the death that glides and strikes, while they held their mystic worship in the gray twilight of the kiva. The ritual and the soul-needs it met, and the symbolism and the dark savagery, were all relics of an ages-vanished past, survivals of an elder world.

The snake-dance itself took place in the afternoon at five o'clock. There were many hundreds of onlookers, almost as many whites as Indians, and most of the Indian spectators were in white man's dress, in strong contrast to the dancers. The antelope priests entered first and ranged themselves by a tree-like bundle of cottonwood branches against the wall of buildings to one side of the open place where the dance takes place; the other side is the cliff edge. The snakes, in a bag, were stowed by the bundle of cottonwood branches. Young girls stood near the big pillar of stone with sacred meal to scatter at the foot of the pillar after the snakes had been thrown down there and taken away. Then the snake priests entered in their fringed leather kilts and eagle-plume head-dresses; fox skins hung at the backs of their girdles, their bodies were splashed and streaked with white, and on each of them the upper part of the face was painted black and the lower part white. Chanting, and stepping in rhythm to the chant, and on one particular stone slab stamping hard as a signal to the underworld, they circled the empty space and for some minutes danced opposite the line of antelope priests. Then, in couples, one of each couple seizing and carrying in his mouth a snake, they began to circle the space again. The leading couple consisted of one man who had his arm across the shoulder of another, while this second man held in his teeth, by the upper middle of its body, a rattlesnake four feet long, the flat, ace-of-clubs-shaped head and curving neck of the snake being almost against the man's face. Rattlesnakes, bull-snakes, ribbon-snakes, all were carried in the same way. One man carried at the same time two small sidewinder rattlesnakes in his mouth. After a while each snake was thrown on the rock and soon again picked up and held in the hand, while a new snake was held in the mouth. Finally, each man carried a bundle of snakes in his hand, all so held as to leave the head free, so that the snake could strike if it wished. Most of the snakes showed no anger or resentment. But occasionally one, usually a small sidewinder, half coiled or rattled when thrown down; and in picking these up much caution was shown, the Indian stroking the snake with his eagle feathers and trying to soothe it and get it to straighten out; and if it refused to be soothed, he did his best to grasp it just back of the head; and when he had it in his hand, he continued to stroke the body with the feathers, obviously to quiet it. But whether it were angry or not, he always in the end grasped and lifted it—besides keeping it from crawling among the spectators. Several times I saw the snakes strike at the men who were carrying them, and twice I was sure they struck home—once a man's wrist, once his finger. Neither man paid any attention or seemed to suffer in any way. I saw no man struck in the face; but several of my friends had at previous dances seen men so struck. In one case the man soon showed that he was in much pain, although he continued to dance, and he was badly sick for days; in the other cases no bad result whatever followed.

At last all the snakes were in the hands of the dancers. Then all were thrown at the foot of the natural stone pillar, and immediately, with a yell, the dancers leaped in, seized, each of them, several snakes, and rushed away, east, west, north, and south, dashing over the edge of the cliff and jumping like goats down the precipitous trails. At the foot of the cliff, or on the plain, they dropped the snakes, and then returned to purify themselves by drinking and washing from pails of dark sacred water—medicine water—brought by the women. It was a strange and most interesting ceremony all through.

I do not think any adequate explanation of the immunity of the dancers has been advanced. Perhaps there are several explanations. These desert rattlesnakes are not nearly as poisonous as the huge diamond-backs of Florida and Texas; their poison is rarely fatal. The dancers are sometimes bitten; usually they show no effects, but, as above said, in one instance the bitten man was very sick for several days. It has been said that the fangs are extracted; but even in this case the poison would be loose in the snake's mouth and might get in the skin through the wounds made by the other teeth; and I noticed that when any snake, usually a small sidewinder, showed anger and either rattled or coiled, much caution was shown in handling it, and every effort made to avoid being bitten. It is also asserted that the snakes show the quiet and placid indifference they do because they are drugged, and one priest told me they are given "medicine"; but I have no idea whether this is true. Nor do I know whether the priests themselves take medicine. I believe that one element in the matter is that the snake priests either naturally possess or develop the same calm power over these serpents that certain men have over bees; the latter power, the existence of which is so well known, has never received the attention and study it deserves. An occasional white man has such power with snakes. There was near my ranch on the Little Missouri, twenty-five years ago, a man who had this power. He was a rather shiftless, ignorant man, of a common frontier type, who failed at about everything, and I think he was himself surprised when he found that he could pick up and handle rattlesnakes with impunity. There was no deception about it. I would take him off on horseback, and when I found a rattler he would quietly pick it up by the thick part of the body and put it in a sack. He sometimes made movements with his hands before picking up a coiled rattler; but when he had several in a bag he would simply put his hand in, take hold of a snake anywhere, and draw it out. I can understand the snakes being soothed and quieted by the matter-of-fact calm and fearlessness of the priests for most of the time; but why the rattlers were not all maddened by the treatment they received at the washing in the kiva, and again when thrown on the dance rock, I cannot understand.

That night we motored across the desert with Mr. Hubbell to his house and store at Ganado, sixty miles away, and from Ganado we motored to Gallup, and our holiday was at an end. Mr. Hubbell is an Indian trader. His Ganado house, right out in the bare desert, is very comfortable and very attractive, and he treats all comers with an open-handed hospitality inherited from pioneer days. He has great influence among the Navajos, and his services to them have been of much value. Every ounce of his influence has been successfully exerted to put a stop to gambling and drinking; his business has been so managed as to be an important factor in the material and moral betterment of the Indians with whom he has dealt. And he has been the able champion of their rights wherever these rights have been menaced from any outside source.

Arizona and New Mexico hold a wealth of attraction for the archæologist, the anthropologist, and the lover of what is strange and striking and beautiful in nature. More and more they will attract visitors and students and holiday-makers. That part of northern Arizona which we traversed is of such extraordinary interest that it should be made more accessible by means of a government-built motor road from Gallup to the Grand Canyon; a road from which branch roads, as good as those of Switzerland, would gradually be built to such points as the Hopi villages and the neighborhood of the Natural Bridge.

CHAPTER IV

THE RANCHLAND OF ARGENTINA AND SOUTHERN BRAZIL

In the fall of 1913 I enjoyed a glimpse of the ranch country of southern Brazil and of Argentina. It was only a glimpse; for I was bent on going northward into the vast wilderness of tropical South America. I had no time to halt in the grazing country of temperate South America, which is no longer a wilderness, but a land already feeling the sweep of the modern movement. It is a civilized land, already fairly well settled, which by leaps and bounds is becoming thickly settled; a region which at the present day is in essentials far more closely kin to the plains country, which in temperate North America stretches from Hudson Bay to the Gulf, than either land is kin to what each was even half a century ago. The main difference is that the great cow country, the plains country, of North America was peopled only by savages when the white pioneers entered it in the nineteenth century; whereas throughout temperate South America there were here and there oases of thin settlement, including even small, stagnant cities, already two or three centuries old. In these oases people wholly or partly of European blood had gradually developed a peculiar and backward, but real, semicivilization of their own. This quaint, distinctive social culture has been, or is now being, engulfed by the rising tide of intensely modern internationalized material development.

Among the many pleasant memories of my visit to Argentina, one of the most pleasant is that of a dinner at the house of the governor of the old provincial capital of Mendoza. Our distinguished host came of an old country family which for many centuries led the life of the great cattle-breeding ranch-owners, although his people were more and more turning their attention to agriculture, he himself being a successful farmer, as well as an invaluable public servant of advanced views. His father was at the dinner. He had retired as a general after forty-nine years' service in the Argentine army. The fine old fellow represented what was best in the Argentine type before the days of modern industrialism. A very vigorous and manly best it was, too. He wore the old Argentine uniform, which for his rank was the same as the uniform once worn by Napoleon's officers. He had served in the bloody Paraguayan War, when Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay joined to overthrow the inconceivably murderous dictatorship of Lopez, and when the Paraguayans rallied with savage valor under the banner of the dictator, who tyrannized over them, but who nevertheless represented in their eyes the nation. This old general had served in many Indian wars, both in Patagonia and in the Grand Chaco, and had seen desperate fighting in the civil wars. He wore medals commemorating his services in the Paraguayan and Indian campaigns, but he would not wear any medals commemorating his services in the civil wars. Yet the only time he was wounded was in one of the battles in one of these civil wars. He was then shot twice and received a bayonet thrust, and was also stabbed with a lance. If he had not possessed a constitution of iron he would never have survived. Our people in the United States often speak of these South American wars with the same ignorant lack of appreciation that used to be shown by European military men in speaking of our own Civil War and other contests. This attitude is as foolish on our part in the one case as it was foolish on the part of the Europeans in question in the other case. The South American Indian fighting was of the same hazardous character, and the Indian campaigns were fraught with the same wearing fatigue, and marked by the same risk and wild adventure, as in the case of our own Indian campaigns. In the Argentine civil wars, and in the Paraguayan War, as in the wars which the Chileans have waged, the fighting was, on the whole, rather more desperate than in any contest between the civilized nations of Europe from the close of the Napoleonic struggles to the opening of the present gigantic contest. There is no more formidable fighting material in the world than is afforded by certain elements in the populations of some of these Latin-American countries. The general of whom I am speaking was himself a most interesting example of a vanishing type. Lovers of good literature should read the sketches of old-time Argentine life in Hudson's "El Ombu." When they have done so, they will understand the strength and the ruthlessness which produced leaders of the stamp of the scarred and war-hardened veteran who in full general's uniform met us at dinner at the house of his son, the governor of Mendoza.

The old-time conditions of gaucho civilization that produced these wild and formidable fighting men, who fought as they lived, on the backs of their horses, have vanished as utterly as our own Far West of the days of Kit Carson. The Argentine country life has changed as completely as the Argentine city life. They are gone, those long years during which the gaucho rode over unfenced plains after gaunt cattle, and warred against the scarcely wilder Indians with whom he vied in horsemanship and plainscraft and hardihood and from whom he borrowed that strange weapon, the bolas. Even the southern Andes of what was once Patagonia are unexplored only in the sense that the Rockies of Alberta are not yet completely explored. Much of the former ranch country is now wheatland, where the workmen of foreign, especially Italian, origin far outnumber the men of old Hispano-Indian stock. Great cattle-ranches remain; but they are handled substantially like great modern ranches in our own Southwest, and the blooded horses and high-grade cattle are kept in large, fenced pastures. In most places the gaucho has changed as our own cowboy has changed. He is as bold and good a horseman as ever; but it is only in out-of-the-way places that he retains all his old-time wild and individual picturesqueness. Elsewhere he is now merely an unusually capable ranch-hand. His employer has changed even more. The big handsome ranch-houses are fitted with every modern comfort and luxury, and the owners belong in all ways to the internationalized upper class of the world of to-day. The interest attaching to a visit to one of these civilized ranches is that which attaches to a visit to a fine modern stock-farm anywhere, whether in Hungary or Kentucky or Victoria.

But there is one vital point—the vital point—in which the men and women of these ranch-houses, like those of the South America that I visited generally, are striking examples to us of the English-speaking countries both of North America and Australia. The families are large. The women, charming and attractive, are good and fertile mothers in all classes of society. There are no symptoms of that artificially self-produced dwindling of population which is by far the most threatening symptom in the social life of the United States, Canada, and the Australian commonwealths. The nineteenth century saw a prodigious growth of the English-speaking, relative to the Spanish-speaking, population of the new worlds west of the Atlantic and in the Southern Pacific. The end of the twentieth century will see this completely reversed unless the present ominous tendencies as regards the birth-rate are reversed. A race is worthless and contemptible if its men cease to be willing and able to work hard and, at need, to fight hard, and if its women cease to breed freely. I am not speaking of pauper families with excessive numbers of ill-nourished and badly brought up children; I am well aware that, like most wise and good principles, this which I advocate can be carried to a mischievous excess; but it nevertheless remains true that voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life is, even more than military or physical cowardice in the ordinary man, the capital sin of civilization, whether in France or Scandinavia, New England or New Zealand. If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down; for the real question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging the unfit, to survive. When the ordinary decent man does not understand that to marry the woman he loves, as early as he can, is the most desirable of all goals, the most successful of all forms of life entitled to be called really successful; when the ordinary woman does not understand that all other forms of life are but makeshift and starveling substitutes for the life of the happy wife, the mother of a fair-sized family of healthy children; then the state is rotten at heart. The loss of a healthy, vigorous, natural sexual instinct is fatal; and just as much so if the loss is by disuse and atrophy as if it is by abuse and perversion. Whether the man, in the exercise of one form of selfishness, leads a life of easy self-indulgence and celibate profligacy; or whether in the exercise of a colder but no less repulsive selfishness, he sacrifices what is highest to some form of mere material achievement in accord with the base proverb that "he travels farthest who travels alone"; or whether the sacrifice is made in the name of the warped and diseased conscience of asceticism; the result is equally evil. So, likewise, with the woman. In many modern novels there is portrayed a type of cold, selfish, sexless woman who plumes herself on being "respectable," but who is really a rather less desirable member of society than a prostitute. Unfortunately the portrayal is true to life. The woman who shrinks from motherhood is as low a creature as a man of the professional pacificist, or poltroon, type, who shirks his duty as a soldier. The only full life for man or woman is led by those men and women who together, with hearts both gentle and valiant, face lives of love and duty, who see their children rise up to call them blessed and who leave behind them their seed to inherit the earth. Dealing with averages, it is the bare truth to say that no celibate life approaches such a life in point of usefulness, no matter what the motive for the celibacy—religious, philanthropic, political, or professional. The mother comes ahead of the nun—and also of the settlement or hospital worker; and if either man or woman must treat a profession as a substitute for, instead of as an addition to or basis for, marriage, then by all means the profession or other "career" should be abandoned. It is of course not possible to lay down universal rules. There must be exceptions. But the rule must be as above given. In a community which is at peace there may be a few women or a few men who for good reasons do not marry, and who do excellent work nevertheless; just as in a community which is at war, there may be a few men who for good reasons do not go out as soldiers. But if the average woman does not marry and become the mother of enough healthy children to permit the increase of the race; and if the average man does not, above all other things, wish to marry in time of peace, and to do his full duty in war if the need arises, then the race is decadent, and should be swept aside to make room for one that is better. Only that nation has a future whose sons and daughters recognize and obey the primary laws of their racial being.

In these essentials Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil have far more to teach than to learn from the English-speaking countries which are so proud of their abounding material prosperity and of their wide-spread, but superficial, popular education and intelligence. In this same material prosperity, and in many other matters, Argentina much resembles our own country. Brazil is travelling a similar path, although much more slowly; and although its climate is not so good, its natural resources are vaster and will in the present century undergo an extraordinary development. Very much of the Brazilian country from São Paulo to the Uruguayan frontier is essentially like Argentina. The city life and the ranch life are advancing in much the same fashion; although of course there are sharp differences in culture and habits of thought and life between the great Spanish-speaking and great Portuguese-speaking republics which are such close, and not wholly friendly, neighbors.

One point of similarity is the number of immigrants in each country. In our journey southward from São Paulo we found both towns and stretches of ranchland in which Germans, Italians, and Catholic, Orthodox, or Uniate Slavs, were important, and sometimes preponderant, elements of the population. There were German Lutheran churches and also congregations of native Protestants started by American missionaries; for Brazil, like Argentina and the United States, enjoys genuine religious liberty.

This rich and beautiful country of southern Brazil is part of the last great stretch of country—south-temperate America—which remains in either temperate zone open to white settlement on a large scale; the last great stretch of scantily peopled land with a good climate and fertile soil to which white immigration can go in mass.

Of part of tropical Brazil I have written elsewhere, and I allude to it elsewhere in this book. Here I am speaking not of the tropical but of the temperate country.

Portions of temperate Brazil are open prairie, portions are forest. The climate is never very hot, nor is there ever severe cold. The colonists with whom I conversed had not found the insects specially troublesome; not much more, and in places rather less, troublesome than in Louisiana and Texas. There was no more sickness than in the early days in the West. The general effect in the forest country, while of course the species of plants are entirely different, reminds the observer of the Louisiana and Mississippi cane-brake lands and the country along the Nueces. The activities of the settlers in the open country are substantially those with which I was familiar thirty years ago in the cattle country of the West. In the forests one is reminded more of early days on the Ohio, the Yazoo, and the Red River of the South.

Certainly this is a country with a wonderful future. It offers fine opportunities for settlers who desire with the labor of their own hands to make homes for themselves and their children. This does not mean that all people who go there will prosper, or that success will come save at the price of labor and effort, of risk and hardship. If any Americans have forgotten how our own West in the pioneer days appealed to an observer who was friendly, but who had not the faintest glimmering of the pioneer spirit, let them read "Martin Chuzzlewit." Dickens represented the numerous men who foolishly hope to enjoy pioneer triumphs and yet escape pioneer risks and hardships and the unlovely and wearing toil which is the essential prerequisite to the triumph; and every one should remember that in a new country, which opens a chance of success to the settler, there always goes with this the chance of heart-breaking failure. Brazil offers remarkable openings for settlers who have the toughness of the born pioneer, and for certain business men and engineers who have the mixture of daring enterprise and sound common sense needed by those who push the industrial development of new countries. Both classes have great opportunities, and both need to be perpetually on their guard against the swindlers and the crack-brained enthusiasts who are always sure to turn up in connection with any country of large developmental possibilities. On the frontier, more than anywhere else, a man needs to be able to rely on himself and to remember that on every frontier there are innumerable failures.

No man can be guaranteed success. Men who are not prepared for labor and effort and rough living, for persistence and self-denial, are out of place in a new country; and foolish people who will probably fail anywhere are more certain to fail badly in a new country than anywhere else. During the whole period of the marvellous growth of the United States there has been a constant and uninterrupted stream of failure going side by side with the larger stream of success. Unless there is revolutionary disorder and anarchy, the future holds for southern Brazil much what half a century ago the future held for large portions of our country lying west of the Mississippi.

In southern Brazil the forest landscape through which we passed was very beautiful. The most conspicuous tree in the forest was the flat-topped pine, the shaft of which rose like that of a royal palm. The branches spread out at the top just where the palm-leaves spread out on the palm, only instead of drooping they curved upward like the branches of a candelabra. There were many other trees in the forests which I could not recognize or place. Some of them looked like our Southern live-oaks. Then there were palms, and multitudes of big tree-ferns. In places where these tree-ferns grew thickly among the tall, strange candelabra pines, with palms scattered here and there, and other queer ancient tropical plants, the landscape looked as if it had come out of the carboniferous period—at least as the carboniferous period was represented in the attractive popular geologies of my youth. There were flowers in the woods, of brilliant and varied hue, although we saw but few orchids; and in the glades or spots of open prairie there were immense patches of lilac and blue blossoms. The flowering trees were wonderful. On some the blooms were blue, on others yellow. The most beautiful of all flamed brilliant scarlet. The trees that bore them, when scattered over hillsides that sloped steeply to the brink of some rushing river, made splashes of burning red against the wet and vivid green of the subtropical foliage. As we got farther south I was told that there were occasional sharp frosts, but that the low temperature never lasted for more than an hour or so. In answer to a question as to how these rare, short frosts affected such plants as palms and tree-ferns, it was explained to me that the frosts prevented coffee being grown, but that they had no effect on the palms, and, rather curiously, no effect on the tree-ferns if they were under big forest trees, but that if they were in the open the fronds were killed, the trees themselves not being injured, and new fronds taking the place of the old ones.

In the open prairie country of the state of Parana we stopped at Morungava to visit the ranch of the Brazil Land, Cattle, and Packing Company. Our host, the head of this company, Murdo Mackenzie, for many years one of the best-known cattlemen in our own Western cow country, was an old friend of mine. During my term as President he was, on the whole, the most influential of the Western cattle-growers. He was a leader of the far-seeing and enlightened element. He was a most powerful supporter of the government in the fight for the conservation of our natural resources, for the utilization without waste of our forests and pastures, for honest treatment of everybody, and for the shaping of governmental policy primarily in the interest of the small settler, the home-maker.

We rode first to Mackenzie's home ranch, about a mile from the railway, and then to an outlying set of ranch buildings ten miles off. At the home ranch were the American foreman and his American wife and their children. The buildings and the food and the whole life were typical of all that was best in the old-time "Far West," in the days when I knew it as a cattle country. We were given a most delicious and purely American lunch, including all the fresh milk we could drink; and the foreman himself piloted us over the immense stretches of rolling country, and in every action showed himself the born cattleman, the born and trained stockman. Half of the employees were men from the Western ranches, from Montana, Colorado, Texas, or elsewhere; and they and the stock and the vast, pleasant, open-air country were enough to make any man feel at home who had ever lived in the West. The children round the ranch-house were already speaking fluent Portuguese!

There were Indians in the neighborhood; but we saw none, for they are very shy and dwell in the timber. Although nominally Christian, and somewhat under the influence of the priests, they are otherwise entirely outside of governmental control. At first Mackenzie's cattle were sometimes killed by the wild, furtive creatures; but he stopped this by a mixture of firmness and fair treatment.

It was a beautiful country, well watered, with good grass and much timber. I was assured by both the men on the ranch and their wives that the climate was better than that of our own Western cattle country, for the heat is not as extreme as during summer in the southern part of our country, and the winters are mild, with only occasional touches of frost. Much care has to be shown in dealing with the ticks and certain other insect plagues, but not materially more than in some of our own Southern regions. While we were at the outlying ranch we saw the cattle being dipped in familiar ranch fashion.

Cattle, horses, and hogs all thrive. All the native stock offers material on which to improve. The company is carefully breeding upward, following precisely the same course which in Texas, for instance, has effected a complete substitution of graded beef and dairy cattle for the old longhorns. The native cattle are very distinctly better than the old Texan cattle—the native Mexican cattle. The Durham and Hereford bulls introduced from the States will in a very few years completely change the character of the herds. Good cows are kept in sufficient numbers to insure a constant supply of the breeding bulls. In the same way Berkshire boars are being crossed with the native pigs, and blooded stallions with the native mares. In short, everything is being done exactly as on our advanced and successful ranches at home. The country is still largely vacant, and opportunities for development will be almost limitless for at least another generation.

Aside from the extreme interest of seeing the ranch itself, the twenty-mile ride was most enjoyable. The country was like our own plains near the foothills of the Rockies, except that there was more water and a greater variety of timber. The most striking trees were the occasional peculiar flat-top pines, and there were also other and very beautiful pines through which the wind sang mournfully; and there were many flowers. In one place we saw a small prairie deer, and in galloping we had to keep a lookout for armadillo burrows, just as we keep a lookout for prairie-dog holes in the West. The birds were strange and interesting, some of them with beautiful voices. Out on the plains were screamers, noisy birds, as big as African bustards. One sparrow sang loudly, at midday, round the corrals where we dismounted for lunch. He was a confiding, pretty little fellow, with head markings somewhat like those of our white-crowned and white-throated sparrows. He sang better than the former, and not as well as the latter.

The horses were good, and we thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon canter back to the home ranch, when the shadows had begun to lengthen. We loped across the rolling grass-land and by the groves of strange trees, through the brilliant weather. Under us the horses thrilled with life; it was a country of vast horizons; we felt the promise of the future of the land across which we rode.

CHAPTER V

A CHILEAN RONDEO

On November 21, 1913, we crossed the Andes into Chile by rail. The railway led up the pass which, used from time immemorial by the Indians, afterward marked the course of traffic for their Spanish successors, and was traversed by the army of San Martin in the hazardous march that enabled him to strike the decisive blows in the war for South American independence. The valleys were gray and barren, the sides of the towering mountains were bare, the landscape was one of desolate grandeur. To the north the stupendous peak of Aconquija rose in its snows.

On the Chilean side, as we descended, we passed a lovely lake, and went through wonderful narrow gorges; and farther down were trees, and huge cactus, and flowers of many colors. Then we reached the lower valleys and the plains; and the change was like magic. Suddenly we were in a rich fairy-land of teeming plenty and beauty, a land of fertile fields and shady groves, a land of grain and, above all, of many kinds of luscious fruits.

As in the Argentine and Brazil, every courtesy and hospitality was shown us in Chile. We enjoyed every experience throughout our stay. One of the pleasantest and most interesting days we passed was at a great ranch, a great cattle-farm and country place twenty-five or thirty miles from Santiago. It was some fifteen miles from the railway station. The road led through a rich, fertile country largely under tillage, but also largely consisting of great fenced pastures.

The owners of the ranch, our kind and courteous hosts, had summoned all the riders of the neighborhood to attend the rondeo (round-up and sports), and several hundred, perhaps a thousand, came. With the growth of cultivation of the soil and the introduction of improved methods of stock-breeding in Chile, the old rude life of the wild cow-herders is passing rapidly away. But in many places it remains in modified form, and the country folk whose business is pastoral form a striking and distinctive class. These countrymen live their lives in the saddle. All these men, whose industries are connected with cattle, are known as huasos. They are kin to the Argentine gauchos, and more remotely to our own cowboys.

As we neared the ranch, slipping down broad, dusty, tree-bordered roads beside which irrigation streams ran, we began to come across the huasos gathering for the sports. They rode singly and by twos and threes, or in parties of fifteen or twenty. They were on native Chilean horses—stocky, well-built beasts, hardy and enduring, and on the whole docile. Almost all the men wore the light manta, less heavy than the serapi, but like it in shape, the head of the rider being thrust through a hole in the middle. It would seem as though it might interfere with the free use of their arms, but it does not, and at the subsequent cattle sports many of the participants never took off their mantas. The riders wore straw hats of various types, but none of them with the sugar-loaf cones of the Mexicans. Their long spurs bore huge rowels. The mantas were not only picturesque, but gave the company a look of diversified and gaudy brilliancy, for they were of all possible colors, green, red, brown, and blue, solid and patterned. The saddles were far forward, and the shoe-shaped wooden stirrups were elaborately carved.

The men were fine-looking fellows, some with smooth faces or mustaches, some with beards, some of them light, most of them dark. They rode their horses with the utter ease found only in those who are born to the saddle. Now and then there were family parties, mother and children, all, down to the smallest, riding their own horses or perhaps all going in a wagon. Once or twice we passed horsemen who were coming out of the yards of their tumble-down houses, women and children crowding round. Generally the women had something in the dress that reminded one more or less of our Southwestern semicivilized Indians, and the strain of Indian blood in both men and women was evident. Some of the men were poorly clad, others had paid much attention to their get-up and looked like very efficient dandies; but in its essentials the dress was always the same.

When we reached the ranch we first drove to a mass of buildings, which included the barns, branding-pens, corrals, and the like. It was here that the horsemen had gathered, and one of the pens was filled with an uneasy mass of cattle. Not far from this pen was a big hitching rail or bar, very stout, consisting of tree trunks at least a foot in diameter, the total length of the rail being forty or fifty feet. Beside it was a very large and stout corral. The inside of this corral was well padded with poles, making a somewhat springy wall, a feature I have never seen in any corrals in our own ranch country, but essential where the horses are trained to jam the cattle against the corral side.

Most of the sports took place inside this big corral. Gates led into it from opposite ends. Some thirty or forty feet in front of one of the gates, and just about that distance from the middle of the corral, was a short, crescent-shaped fence which served to keep the stock that had yet to be worked separate from those that had been worked. Proceedings were begun by some thirty riders and a mob of cattle coming through one of the doors of the corral. A glance at the cattle was enough to show that the old days of the wild ranches had passed. These were not longhorns, staring, vicious creatures, shy and fleet as deer; they were graded stock, domestic in their ways, and rather reluctant to run. Among the riders, however, there was not the slightest falling off from the old dash and skill, and their very air, as they rode quietly in, and the way they sat every sudden, quick move of their horses showed their complete ease and self-confidence.

In addition to the huasos, the peasants-on-horseback, the riders included several of the gentry, the great landed proprietors. These took part in the sports, precisely as in our own land men of the corresponding class follow the hounds or play polo. Two of the most skilful and daring riders, who always worked together, were a wealthy neighboring ranchman and his son.

The first feat began by two of the horsemen, acting together, cutting out an animal from the bunch. This was done with skill and precision, but differed in no way from the work I used formerly to see and take part in on the Little Missouri. What followed, however, was totally different. The animal was raced by the two men out from the herd and from behind the little semicircular fence, and was taken at full speed round the edge of the great corral past the closed gate on the other side, and almost back to the starting-point. One horseman rode behind the animal, a little on its inner side. The other rode outside it, the horse's head abreast of the steer's flank. As they galloped the riders uttered strange, long-drawn cries, evidently of Indian origin. Round the corral rushed the steer, and, after it passed the door on the opposite-side and began to return toward its starting-point and saw the other cattle ahead, it put on speed. Then the outside rider raced forward and at the same moment wheeled inward, pinning the steer behind the horns and either by the neck or shoulder against the rough, yielding boughs with which the corral was lined. Instantly the other horseman pressed the steer's hind quarters outward, so that it found itself not only checked, but turned in the opposite direction. Again it was urged into a gallop, the calling horsemen following and repeating their performance. The steer was thus turned three times. After the third turning the gate which it had passed was opened and it trotted out.

A dozen times different pairs of riders performed the feat with different steers. It was a fine exhibition of daring prowess and of good training in both the horses and the riders. Of course, if it had not been for the lining of the inner fence with limber poles the steer would have been killed or crippled—we saw one of them injured, as it was. The horse, which entered heartily into the spirit of the chase, had to crash straight into the fence, nailing the steer and bringing it to a standstill in the midst of its headlong gallop. Once or twice at the critical moment the rider was not able to charge quickly enough; and when the steer was caught too far back it usually made its escape and rejoined the huddle of cattle from which it had been cut out. The men were riders of such skill that shaking them in their seats was impossible, no matter how quickly the horse turned or how violent the shocks were; nor was a single horse hurt in the rough play. It was a wild scene, and an exhibition of prowess well worth witnessing.

Other exhibitions of horsemanship followed, including the old feat of riding a bull. The bull, a vicious one, was left alone in the ring, and his temper soon showed signs of extreme shortness as he pawed the dirt, tossing it above his shoulders. Watching the chance when the bull's attention was fixed elsewhere, a man ran in and got to the little fence before the bull could charge him. Then, while the bull was still angrily endeavoring to get at the man, the corral gate opposite was thrown open and six or eight horsemen entered, riding with quiet unconcern. The bull was obviously not in the least afraid of the footman, whereas he had a certain feeling of respect for the horsemen. Two of the latter approached him. One got his rope over the bull's horns, and the other then dexterously roped the hind legs. The footman rushed in and seized the tail, and the bull was speedily on his side. Then a lean, slab-sided, rather frowzy-looking man, outwardly differing in no essential respect from the professional bronco-buster of the Southwest, slipped from the spectators' seats into the ring. A saddle was girthed tight on the bull, and a rope ring placed round his broad chest so as to give the rider something by which to hang. The lassos upon him were cast loose, and he rose, snorting with rage and terror. If he had thrown the man, the horsemen would have had to work with instantaneous swiftness to save his life. But all the bull's furious bucking and jumping could not unseat the rider. The horsemen began to tease the animal, flapping red blankets in his face, and luring him to charges which they easily evaded. Finally they threw him again, took off his saddle and turned him loose, and at the same time some steers were driven into the corral to serve as company for him. A couple of the horsemen took him out of the bunch and raced him round the corral, turning him when they wished by pressing him against the pole corral lining, thus repeating the game that had already been played with so many of the steers. In his case it was, of course, more dangerous. But they showed complete mastery, and the horses had not the slightest fear, nailing him flat against the wall with their chests, and spinning him round when they struck him on occasions when he was trying to make up his mind to resist.

Meanwhile the bull-rider passed his hat among the spectators, who tossed silver pieces into it—thus marking the fundamental difference between the life we were witnessing and our own Western ranch life. In Chile, with its aristocratic social structure, there is a wide gulf between the gentry and the ranch-hands; whereas in the democratic life of our own cow country the ranch-owner has, more often than not, at one time been himself a ranch-hand.

After the sports in the corral were finished eight or ten of the huasos appeared on big horses at the bar of which I have spoken, and took part in a sport which was entirely new to me. Two champions would appear side by side or half-facing each other, at the bar. Each would turn his horse's head until it hung over the bar as they half-fronted each other, on the same side of the bar. The object was for each man to try to push his opponent away from the bar and then shove past him, usually carrying his opponent with him. Sometimes it was a contest of man against man. Sometimes each would have two or three backers. No one could touch any other man's horse, and each drove his animal right against his opponent. The two men fronting each other at the bar kept their horses head-on against the bar; the others strove each to get his horse's head between the body of one of his opponents and the head of that opponent's horse. They then remained in a knot for some minutes, the riders cheering the horses with their strange, wild, Indian-like cries, while the horses pushed and strained. Usually there was almost no progress on either side at first. It would look as though not an inch was gained. Gradually, however, the horses on one side or the other got an inch or two or three inches advantage of position by straining and shoving. Suddenly the right vantage-point was attained. There was an outburst of furious shouting from the riders. The horses of one side with straining quarters thrust their way through the press, whirling round or half upsetting their opponents, and rushed down alongside the bar. Why the men's legs were not broken I could not say. On this occasion all the men were good-natured. But it was a rough sport, and I could well credit the statement that, if there were bad blood to gratify, the chances were excellent for a fight.

After the sports we motored down to a great pasture on one side of a lake, beyond which rose lofty mountains. Then we returned to the ranch-house itself—a huge, white, single-storied house with a great courtyard in the middle and wings extending toward the stable, the saddle-rooms, and the like. It was a house of charm and distinction; the low building—or rather group of buildings, with galleries and colonnades connecting them—being in the old native style, an outgrowth of the life and the land. After a siesta our hosts led us out across a wide garden brilliant and fragrant with flowers, to the deep, cool shade of a row of lofty trees, where stood a long table spread with white linen and laden with silver and glass; and here, we were served with a delicious and elaborate breakfast—the Chilean breakfast, that of Latin Europe, for in most ways the life of South America is a development of that of Latin Europe, and much more closely kin to it than it is to the life of the English-speaking peoples north of the Rio Grande.

In the afternoon we drove back to the railroad. At one point of our drive we were joined by a rider who had taken part in the morning's sports. He galloped at full speed beside the rushing motor-car, waving his hat to us and shouting good-by. He was a tall, powerfully built, middle-aged man, with fine, clean-cut features; his brightly colored mantle streamed in the wind, and he sat in the saddle with utter ease while his horse tore over the ground alongside us. He was a noble figure, and his farewell to us was our last glimpse of the wild, old-time huaso life.

CHAPTER VI

ACROSS THE ANDES AND NORTHERN PATAGONIA

As the great chain of the Andes stretches southward its altitude grows less, and the mountain wall is here and there broken by passes. When the time came for me to leave Chile I determined to cross the Andes by the easiest and most accessible and one of the most beautiful of these comparatively low passes. At the other end of the pass, on the Argentine or Patagonian side, we were to be met by motor-cars, sent thither by my considerate hosts, the governmental authorities of Argentina.

From Santiago we went south by rail to Puerto Varas. The railway passed through the wide, rolling agricultural country of central Chile, a country of farms and prosperous towns. As we went southward we found ourselves in a land which was new in the sense that our own West is new. Middle and southern Chile were in the hands of the Indians but a short while since. We were met by fine-looking representatives of these Araucanian Indians, all of them now peaceable farmers and stock-growers, at a town of twenty or thirty thousand people where there was not a single white man to be found a quarter of a century ago. Our party included, among others, Major Shipton, U.S.A., the military aide to our legation at Buenos Ayres, my son Kermit, and several kind Chilean friends.

We reached our destination, Puerto Varas, early in the morning. It stands on the shore of a lovely lake. There has been a considerable German settlement in middle and southern Chile, and, as everywhere, the Germans have made capital colonists. At Puerto Varas there are two villages, mainly of Germans, one Protestant and the other Catholic. We were made welcome and given breakfast in an inn which, with its signs and pictures, might have come from the Fatherland. Among the guests at the breakfast, in addition to the native Chilean Intendente, were three or four normal-school teachers, all of them Germans—and evidently uncommonly good teachers, too. There were school-children, there were citizens of every kind. Many of the Germans born abroad could speak nothing but German. The children, however, spoke Spanish, and in some cases nothing but Spanish. Here, as so often in the addresses made to me, special stress was laid upon the fact that my country represented the cause of civil and religious liberty, of the absolute equality of treatment of all men without regard to creed, and of social and industrial justice; in short, the cause of orderly liberty in body, soul, and mind, in things intellectual and spiritual no less than in things industrial and political; the liberty that guarantees to each free, bold spirit the right to search for truth without any check from political or ecclesiastical tyranny, and that also guarantees to the weak their bodily rights as against any man who would exploit or oppress them.

We left Puerto Varas by steamer on the lake to begin our four days' trip across the Andes and through northern Patagonia, which was to end when we struck the Argentine Railway at Neuquen. This break in the Andes makes an easy road, for the pass at its summit is but three thousand feet high. The route followed leads between high mountains and across lake after lake, and the scenery is as beautiful as any in the world.

The first lake was surrounded by a rugged, forest-clad mountain wilderness, broken here and there by settlers' clearings. Wonderful mountains rose near by; one was a snow-clad volcano with a broken cone which not many years ago was in violent eruption. Another, even more beautiful, was a lofty peak of virginal snow. At the farther end of the lake we lunched at a clean little hotel. Then we took horses and rode for a dozen miles to another lake, called Esmeralda or Los Santos. Surely there can be no more beautiful lake anywhere than this! All around it are high mountains, many of them volcanoes. One of these mountains to the north, Punti Agudo, rises in sheer cliffs to its soaring summit, so steep that snow will hardly lie on its sides. Another to the southwest, called Tronador, the Thunderer, is capped with vast fields of perpetual snow, from which the glaciers creep down to the valleys. It gains its name of thunderer from the tremendous roaring of the shattered ice masses when they fall. Out of a huge cave in one of its glaciers a river rushes, full grown at birth. At the eastern end of this lake stands a thoroughly comfortable hotel, which we reached at sunset. Behind us in the evening lights, against the sunset, under the still air, the lake was very beautiful. The peaks were golden in the dying sunlight, and over them hung the crescent moon.

Next morning, before sunrise, we were riding eastward through the valley. For two or three miles the ride suggested that through the Yosemite, because of the abruptness with which the high mountain walls rose on either hand, while the valley was flat, with glades and woods alternating on its surface. Then we got into thick forest. The trees were for the most part giant beeches, but with some conifers, including a rather small species of sequoia. Here and there, in the glades and open spaces, there were masses of many-hued wild flowers; conspicuous among them were the fuchsias.

A dozen miles on we stopped at another little inn. Here we said good-by to the kind Chilean friends who had accompanied us thus far, and were greeted by no less kind Argentine friends, including Colonel Reybaud of the Argentine army, and Doctor Moreno, the noted Argentine scientist, explorer, and educator. Then we climbed through a wooded pass between two mountains. Its summit, near which lies the boundary-line between Chile and Argentina, is somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand feet high; and this is the extreme height over which at this point it is necessary to go in traversing what is elsewhere the mighty mountain wall of the Andes. Here we met a tame guanaco (a kind of llama) in the road; it strolled up to us, smelled the noses of the horses, which were rather afraid of it, and then walked on by us. From the summit of the pass the ground fell rapidly to a wonderfully beautiful little lake of lovely green water. This little gem is hemmed in by sheer-sided mountains, densely timbered save where the cliffs rise too boldly for even the hardiest trees to take root. As with all these lakes, there are many beautiful waterfalls. The rapid mountain brooks fling themselves over precipices which are sometimes so high that the water reaches the foot in sheets of wavering mist. Everywhere in the background rise the snow peaks.

We crossed this little lake in a steam-launch, and on the other side found the quaintest wooden railway, with a couple of rough handcars, each dragged by an ox. In going down-hill the ox is put behind the car, which he holds back with a rope tied to his horns. We piled our baggage on one car, three or four members of the party got on the other, and the rest of us walked for the two miles or so before we reached the last lake we were to traverse—Nahuel Huapi. Here there happened one of those incidents which show how the world is shrinking. Three travellers, evidently Englishmen, were at the landing. One of them came up to me and introduced himself, saying: "You won't remember me; when I last saw you, you were romping with little Prince Sigurd, in Buckingham Palace at the time of the King's funeral; I was in attendance on (naming an august lady); my name is Herschel, Lord Herschel." I recalled the incident at once. On returning from my African trip I had passed through western Europe, and had been most courteously received. In one palace the son and heir—whom I have called Sigurd, which was not his name—was a dear little fellow, very manly and also very friendly; and he reminded me so of my own children when they were small that I was unable to resist the temptation of romping with him, just as I had romped with them. A month later, when as special ambassador I was attending King Edward's funeral, I called at Buckingham Palace to pay my respects, and was taken in to see the august lady above alluded to. The visit lasted nearly an hour, and toward the end I heard little squeaks and sounds in the hall outside, for which I could not account. Finally I was dismissed, and, on opening the door, there was little Sigurd, with his nurse, waiting for me. He had heard that I was in the palace, and had refused to go down to dinner until he had had a play with me; and he was patiently and expectantly waiting outside the door for me to appear. I seized him, tossed him up, while he shouted gleefully, caught him, and rolled him on the floor, quite forgetting that any one was looking on; and then, in the midst of the romp, happening to look up, I saw the lady on whom I had been calling, watching the play with much interest, with her equally interested two brothers, both of them sovereigns, and her lords-in-waiting; she had come out to see what the little boy's laughter meant. I straightened up, whereupon the little boy's face fell, and he anxiously inquired: "But you're not going to stop the play, are you?" Of all this my newfound friend reminded me. [It] was a far cry in space and in surroundings, from where he and I had first met to the Andes that border Patagonia. He was a man of knowledge and experience, and the half-hour I spent with him was most pleasant.

At Nahuel Huapi we were met by a little lake steamer, on which we spent the next four hours. The lake is of bold and irregular outline, with many deep bays, and with mountain walls standing as promontories between the bays. For a couple of hours the scenery was as beautiful as it had been during any part of the two days, especially when we looked back at the mass of snow-shrouded peaks. Then the lake opened, the shores became clear of woods, the mountains lower, and near the eastern end, where there were only low rolling hills, we came to the little village of Bariloche.

Bariloche is a real frontier village. Forty years previously Doctor Moreno had been captured by Indians at this very spot, had escaped from them, and after days of extraordinary hardship had reached safety. He showed us a strange, giant pine-tree, of a kind different from any of our northern cone-bearers, near which the Indians had camped while he was prisoner with them. He had persuaded the settlers to have this tree preserved, and it is still protected, though slowly dying of old age. The town is nearly four hundred miles from a railway, and the people are of the vigorous, enterprising frontier type. It was like one of our frontier towns in the old-time West as regards the diversity in ethnic type and nationality among the citizens. The little houses stood well away from one another on the broad, rough, faintly marked streets. In one we might see a Spanish family, in another blond Germans or Swiss, in yet another a family of gaucho stock looking more Indian than white. All worked and lived on a footing of equality, and all showed the effect of the wide-spread educational effort of the Argentine Government; an effort as marked as in our own country, although in the Argentine it is made by the nation instead of by the several states. We visited the little public school. The two women teachers were, one of Argentine descent, the other the daughter of an English father and an Argentine mother—the girl herself spoke English only with difficulty. They told us that the Germans had a school of their own, but that the Swiss and the other immigrants sent their children to the government school with the children of the native Argentines. Afterward I visited the German school, where I was welcomed by a dozen of the German immigrants—men of the same stamp as those whom I had so often seen, and whom I so much admired and liked, in our own Western country. I was rather amused to see in this school, together with a picture of the Kaiser, a very large picture of Martin Luther, although about a third of the Germans were Catholics; their feelings as Germans seemed in this instance to have overcome any religious differences, and Martin Luther was simply accepted as one of the great Germans whose memory they wished to impress on the minds of their children. In this school there was a good little library, all the books being, of course, German; it was the only library in the town.

That night we had a very pleasant dinner. Our host was a German. Of the two ladies who did the honors of the table, one was a Belgian, the wife of the only doctor in Bariloche, and the other a Russian. In our own party, aside from the four of us from the United States, there were Colonel Reybaud, of the Argentine army, my aide, and a first-class soldier; Doctor Moreno, who was as devoted a friend as if he had been my aide; and three other Argentine gentlemen—the head of the Interior Department, the governor of Neuquen, and the head of the Indian Service. Among the other guests was a man originally from County Meath, and a tall, blond, red-bearded Venetian, a carpenter by trade. After a while we got talking of books, and it was fairly startling to see the way that polyglot assemblage brightened when the subject was introduced, and the extraordinary variety of its taste in good literature. The men began eagerly to speak about and quote from their favorite authors—Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Camoëns, Molière, Shakespeare, Virgil, and the Greek dramatists. Our host quoted from the "Nibelungenlied" and from Homer, and at least two-thirds of the men at the table seemed to have dozens of authors at their tongues' ends. But it was the Italian carpenter who capped the climax, for when we touched on Dante he became almost inspired and repeated passage after passage, the majesty and sonorous cadence of the lines thrilling him so that his listeners were almost as much moved as he was. We sat thus for an hour—an unexpected type of Kaffee Klatsch for such an outpost of civilization.

Next morning at five we were off for our four-hundred-mile drive across the Patagonian wastes to the railway at Neuquen. We had been through a stretch of scenery as lovely as can be found anywhere in the world—a stretch that in parts suggested the Swiss lakes and mountains, and in other parts Yellowstone Park or the Yosemite or the mountains near Puget Sound. In a couple of years the Argentines will have pushed their railway system to Bariloche, and then all tourists who come to South America should make a point of visiting this wonderfully beautiful region. Doubtless in the end it will be developed for travellers much as other regions of great scenic attraction are developed. Thanks to Doctor Moreno, the Argentine end of it is already a national park; I trust the Chilean end soon will be.

We left Bariloche in three motor-cars, knowing that we had a couple of hard days ahead of us. After skirting the lake for a mile or two we struck inland over flats and through valleys. We had to cross a rapid river at a riffle where the motor-cars were just able to make it. The road consisted only of the ruts made by the passage of the great bullock carts, and often we had to go alongside it, or leave it entirely where at some crossing of a small stream the ground looked too boggy for us to venture in with the motor-cars. Three times in making such a crossing one of the cars bogged down, and we had hard work in getting out. In one case it caused us two hours' labor in building a stone causeway under and in front of the wheels—repeating what I had helped do not many months before in Arizona, when we struck a place where a cloudburst had taken away the bridge across a stream and a good part of the road that led up to it on either side.

In another place the leading car got into heavy sand and was unable to move. A party of gauchos came loping up, and two of them tied their ropes to the car and pulled it backward onto firm ground. These gauchos were a most picturesque set. They were riding good horses, strong and hardy and wild, and the men were consummate horsemen, utterly indifferent to the sudden leaps and twists of the nervous beasts they rode. Each wore a broad, silver-studded belt, with a long knife thrust into it. Some had their trousers in boots, others wore baggy breeches gathered in at the ankle. The saddles, unlike our cow saddles, had no horns, and the rope when in use was attached to the girth ring. The stirrups were the queerest of all. Often they were heavy flat disks, the terminal part of the stirrup-leather being represented by a narrow metal, or stiff leather, bar a foot in length. A slit was cut in the heavy flat disk big enough to admit the toe of the foot, and with this type of stirrup, which to me would have been almost as unsatisfactory as no stirrup at all, they sat their bucking or jumping horses with complete indifference.

It was gaucho land through which we were travelling. Every man in it was born to the saddle. We saw tiny boys not only riding but performing all the duties of full-grown men in guiding loose herds or pack-animals. No less characteristic than these daredevil horsemen were the lines of great two-wheeled carts, each dragged by five mules, three in the lead, with two wheelers, or else perhaps drawn by four or six oxen. For the most part these carts were carrying wool or hides. Occasionally we came on great pastures surrounded by wire fences. Elsewhere the stony, desolate land lay as it had lain from time immemorial. We saw many flocks of sheep, and many herds of horses, among which piebald horses were unusually plentiful. There were a good many cattle, too, and on two or three occasions we saw flocks of goats. It was a wild, rough country, and in such a country life is hard for both man and beast. Everywhere along the trail were the skeletons and dried carcasses of cattle, and occasionally horses. Yet there were almost no carrion birds, no ravens or crows, no small vultures, although once very high up in the air we saw a great condor. Indeed, wild life was not plentiful, although we saw ostriches—the South American rhea—and there was an occasional guanaco, or wild llama. Foxes were certainly abundant, because at the squalid little country stores there were hundreds of their skins and also many skunk skins.

Now and then we passed ranch-houses. There might be two or three fairly close together, then again we might travel for twenty miles without a sign of a habitation or a human being. In one place there was a cluster of buildings and a little schoolhouse. We stopped to shake hands with the teacher. Some of the ranch-houses were cleanly built and neatly kept, shade-trees being planted round about—the only trees we saw during the entire motor journey. Other houses were slovenly huts of mud and thatch, with a brush corral near by. Around the houses of this type the bare dirt surface was filthy and unkempt, and covered with a litter of the skulls and bones of sheep and oxen, fragments of skin and hide, and odds and ends of all kinds, foul to every sense.

Every now and then along the road we came to a solitary little store. If it was very poor and squalid, it was called a pulpería; if it was large, it was called an almacén. Inside there was a rough floor of dirt or boards, and a counter ran round it. At one end of the counter was the bar, at which drinks were sold. Over the rest of the counter the business of the store proper was done. Hats, blankets, horse-gear, rude articles of clothing, and the like were on the shelves or hung from rings in the ceiling. Sometimes we saw gauchos drinking at these bars—rough, wild-looking men, some of them more than three parts Indian, others blond, hairy creatures with the northern blood showing obviously. Although they are dangerous men when angered, they are generally polite, and we, of course, had no trouble with them. Hides, fox skins, and the like are brought by them for sale or for barter.

Order is kept by the mounted territorial police, an excellent body, much like the Canadian mounted police and the Pennsylvania constabulary. These men are alert and soldierly, with fine horses, well-kept arms, and smart uniforms. Many of them were obviously mainly, and most of them were partly, of Indian blood. I think that Indian blood is on the whole a distinct addition to the race stock when the ancestral Indian tribe is of the right kind. The acting president of the Argentine during my visit, the vice-president, a very able and forceful man, wealthy, well educated, a thorough statesman and man of the world, and a delightful companion, had a strong strain of Indian blood in him.

The ordinary people we met used "Indian" and "Christian" as opposite terms, having cultural rather than theological or racial significance, this being customary in the border regions of temperate South America. In one place where we stopped four Indians came in to see us. The chief or head man looked like a thorough Indian. He might have been a Sioux or a Comanche. One of his companions was apparently a half-breed, showing strong Indian features, however. A third had a full beard, and, though he certainly did not look quite like a white man, no less certainly he did not look like an Indian. The fourth was considerably more white than Indian. He had a long beard, being dressed, as were the others, in shabby white man's garb. He looked much more like one of the poorer class of Boers than like any Indian I have ever seen. I noticed this man talking to two of the mounted police. They were smart, well-set-up men, thoroughly identified with the rest of the population, and regarding themselves and being regarded by others as on the same level with their fellow citizens. Yet they were obviously far more Indian in blood than was the unkempt, bearded white man to whom they were talking, and whom they and their fellows spoke of as an Indian, while they spoke of themselves, and were spoken of by others, as "Christians." "Indian" was the term reserved for the Indians who were still pagans and who still kept up a certain tribal relation. Whenever an Indian adopted Christianity in the excessively primitive form known to the gauchos, came out to live with the whites, and followed the ordinary occupations, he seemed to be promptly accepted as a white man, no different from any one else. The Indians, by the way, now have property, and are well treated. Nevertheless, the pure stock is dying out, and those that survive are being absorbed in the rest of the population.

The various accidents we met with during the forenoon delayed us, and we did not take breakfast—or, as we at home would call it, lunch—until about three o'clock in the afternoon. We had then halted at a big group of buildings which included a store and a government telegraph office. The store was a long, whitewashed, one-story house, the bedrooms in the rear, and all kinds of outbuildings round about. In some corrals near by a thousand sheep were being sheared. Breakfast had been long deferred, and we were hungry. But it was a feast when it did come, for two young sheep or big lambs were roasted whole before a fire in the open, and were then set before us; the open-air cook was evidently of almost pure Indian blood.

On we went with the cars, with no further accidents and no trouble except once in crossing a sand belt. The landscape was parched and barren. Yet its look of almost inconceivable desolation was not entirely warranted, for in the flats and valleys water could evidently be obtained a few feet below the surface, and where it was pumped up anything could be grown on the soil.

But, unless thus artificially supplied, water was too scarce to permit any luxuriance of growth. Here and there were stretches of fairly good grass, but on the whole the country was covered with dry scrub a foot or two high, rising in clumps out of the earth or gravel or sand. The hills were stony and bare, sometimes with flat, sheer-sided tops, and the herds of half-wild horses and of cattle and sheep, and the even wilder riders we met, and the squalid little ranch-houses, all combined to give the landscape a peculiar touch.

As evening drew on, the harsh, raw sunlight softened. The hills assumed a myriad tints as the sun sank. The long gleaming followed. The young moon hung overhead, well toward the west, and just on the edge of the horizon the Southern Cross stood upside down. Then clouds gathered, boding a storm. The night grew black, and on we went through the darkness, the motormen clutching the steering-wheels and peering anxiously forward as they strove to make out the ruts and faint road-marks in the shifting glare of the headlights. The play of the lightning and the rolling of the thunder came near and nearer. We were evidently in for a storm, which would probably have brought us to a complete halt, and we looked out for a house to stop at. At 10.15 we caught a glimpse of a long white building on one side of the road. It was one of the stores of which I have spoken. With some effort we roused the people, and after arranging the motor-cars we went inside. They were good people. They got us eggs and coffee, and, as we had a cold pig, we fared well. Then we lay down on the floor of the store and on the counters and slept for four hours.

At three I waked the sleepers with the cry that in bygone days on the Western cattle plains had so often roused me from the heavy slumber of the men of the round-up. It was the short November night of high southern latitudes. Dawn came early. We started as soon as the faint gray enabled us to see the road. The stars paled and vanished. The sunrise was glorious. We came out from among the hills on to vast barren plains. Hour after hour, all day long, we drove at speed over them. The sun set in red and angry splendor amid gathering clouds. When we reached the Rio Negro the light was dying from the sky, and a heavy storm was rolling toward us. The guardians of the rope ferry feared to try the river, with the storm rising through the black night; but we forced them to put off, and we reached the other shore just before the wind smote us, and the rushing rain drove in our faces.

CHAPTER VII

WILD HUNTING COMPANIONS

In the days when I lived and worked on a cattle-ranch, on the Little Missouri, I usually hunted alone; and, if not, my companion was one of the cow-hands, unless I was taking out a guest from the East. On some of my regular hunting trips in the Rockies I went with one or more of my ranch-hands—who were valued friends and fellow workers. On others of these trips I went with men who were either temporarily, like John Willis, or permanently, like Tazewell Woody and John Goff, professional guides and hunters. In Africa I sometimes hunted with some of the settlers, and often alone or with my son Kermit; but even more frequently with either Cunningham or Tarlton, the former for many years a professional elephant hunter, and the latter by choice and preference a lion hunter. Both of them, I think I may say, became permanently my friends as the result of the trip.

Often, however, my companions were not white men, but either half-breeds and people of mixed blood or else wild natives of the wild lands over which the great game roamed. To some of these men I became really attached. Not a few of them showed a courage and loyalty and devotion to duty which would have put to shame very many civilized men. Almost all of them at times did or said things that were very interesting because of the glimpses they gave into souls that really belong to a totally different age from that in which I and my friends of civilized lands are living.

December, 1913, and January, 1914, I spent in the remote interior of Brazil, on and near various rivers which form the headwaters of the mighty Paraguay. It is still a frontier country; the province is known as the Matto Grosso, the province of the great wooded wilderness. Yet it has a civilized and Christian history which runs back for over a century. It is on the eve of striking material development, and, nevertheless, it is still primitive with a primitiveness half that of a belated Europe, half that of a savagery struggling over the border-line into an exceedingly simple civilization. Out of these diverse and conflicting elements, and with a century of comparative isolation behind it, the land has produced a far more distinctive and peculiar life than our own frontier communities ever had the chance to develop. It would be difficult to find in any country more charming and better-bred men than some of the gentlemen, the great ranchmen and the political and social leaders in city life, whose generous hospitality made me their debtor. But the ordinary folk, and especially the Caboclos, the peasantry, although with many sterling qualities, were of a type wholly different from anything to be found either in Europe or in temperate North America.

The land is largely composed of the pantanals, the flat, wide-stretching marshes through which the Paraguay and its affluents wind. Where the land is low it is covered with papyrus and water-grass; if a few feet higher, with open palm forest. It offers fine pasturage for the herds of cattle. In addition there are mountains and belts of tropic jungle and forest, and to the north rises the sandy central table-land of Brazil. There are no railroads, and no highroads of any length for wheeled vehicles. The rivers are the highways. Native boats, with palm-thatch houses and cooking-ovens of red earth on the decks, drift down them and are poled or towed up them. A few light-draft steamers, running every week or fortnight, connect the widely scattered little cities. They are quaint, picturesque little cities, without a wheeled vehicle except the water-carts. The one-story houses enclose open courtyards. The walls are thick, and the windows and doors very high, so as to let whatever coolness the night air carries fan the sleepers in their hammocks. In the bigger houses there are beds in the guest-chambers; but the hammock is really the bed; and in the inns the bedrooms have rings in the walls from which the traveller hangs the hammock he has brought with him. After nightfall the men sit at little tables under the trees in the public squares or outside the taverns, and through the open doors and windows of the houses, in the mysterious darkness, are the half-seen figures of girls and women; and stringed instruments tinkle in the still tropic night.

When Portugal still ruled Brazil, the first of these cities was founded, toward the end of the eighteenth century. At that time it could only be reached by a long voyage of peril and hardship up the Amazon and the Madeira, and then by mule back. No place in the world is now so remote from civilization as this little capital of the "Great Wilderness" then was; but its life was fervent under the torrid sky. Governors, generals, priests were there, slaveowners and gold seekers; killers of men and lovers of women. There was a palace and a cathedral and a fort, adorned with paintings and carvings. All are in ruins now; the rank vegetation of the tropics, beautiful and lethal, has covered them and twisted them asunder; for the strange little one-time capital city is dead, and those that dwelt therein have left it.

The next comers followed a route that led from the opposite direction, the south. These were the Paolistas. At São Paulo, almost under the Tropic of Cancer, the Portuguese conquerors married with the women of the native Indians, and made, first slaves, and then soldiers, of men from many Indian tribes. They all became welded together into one people, speaking Portuguese, but largely, and probably mainly, Indian by blood; and being of various martial stocks, with the morals of the viking age, they grew into a community of freebooters whose raiding expeditions, carried on with the utmost energy, daring, and ruthlessness, spread terror far and wide. Early in the nineteenth century these hardy horsemen and boatmen, searching for gold, land, and slaves, penetrated to the headwaters of the Paraguay, and with their advent began the first rude change from mere savagery to that which held within it the germ of civilization.

Two or three of the ranches at which we stopped were provided with elaborate and even handsome ranch-houses and other buildings. One of them was owned by a wealthy and cultivated native proprietor. It was fitted with much stately luxury, and some comfort. Two others were owned by foreign corporations. Among the higher employees were men from Europe and the United States, and also "orientáls," as the men of Uruguay are always called—Uruguay being the "banda orientál," or eastern shore, of the Plate. These orientáls were as pure white as the Europeans and North Americans, and were of a high grade. The ordinary cow-hands on these two ranches were mostly Paraguayans, men of almost pure Indian blood, speaking the Guarani tongue, which is the real home language of the peculiar and interesting little republic which takes its name from the great river. These particular ranches were on the borders of the Bolivian country, and along this frontier the conditions as regards order and international law are much what they were on the border between England and Scotland in the sixteenth century. The man who cannot protect his own life by his own fierce and wary prowess cannot exist under such conditions, and the cow-hands must be men recklessly ready to fight for their cattle. The Paraguayans of the class who sought employment in the western interior of Brazil bore a fighting, and somewhat murderous, reputation. They were a daredevil set, and under men of masterful type they did hard and dangerous work for their employers.

The ordinary ranches where we stopped were of a different type. The houses were of one story, with thick, white walls. The few rooms were furnished only with rough tables and benches and rings for the hammocks. The unglazed windows were fitted with solid wooden shutters. Outbuildings stood near by; one perhaps for a kitchen; sheds for skinning or for the few stores; cabins in which the ranch-hands lived with their families. Palm-trees, or bananas with huge, ragged leaves, or trees unlike any familiar to our experience, might stand near by, close to the big cow corrals. On the poorer ranches the houses were nothing but log skeletons thatched with palm-leaves.

On these ranches the "camaradas," the cow-hands, in whose company we hunted, were all native Brazilians, of the same type as the men whom subsequently we took with us on our voyage of exploration down the Rio da Dúvida to the Amazon. It was a simple, primitive existence. All the industry was connected with the cattle or with cultivating the tropical vegetables and fruits of the garden. Two-wheeled ox-carts, each wheel taller than a man, carried hides and smoked flesh to the river landing where native boats, or now and then light-draft steamers, were moored. After sunset the life went on outdoors, unless it rained, until bedtime. As it grew dusk the doorways and the unglazed windows, standing open, showed only empty darkness within. The cooking was done in pots, at small fires outside. Now and then some one played a guitar or banjo; or sang strange songs, light-hearted songs of dances, melancholy songs of love or of death, songs about the feats of men and of bulls, and of famous horses; but always with something queer and barbaric as if they came from a time and a life immeasurably remote. Always the darkness shrouded from us the hot, furtive life we knew it held.

These poor country folk were on the whole a kindly, courteous race; it was pleasant to have them known as "camaradas" by the men of the upper class. They represented every shade of mixture among the three strains of Portuguese, Indian, and negro, and no color-line was drawn by the pure bloods of any of the three races. Whatever their blood, they lived alike and dressed alike. There were very curious customs among many of them, customs which were probably dying out, but which must surely have been imported from utter savagery, although they were all Christians and all spoke Portuguese. As an instance, a number of them, from out-of-the-way places, but including at least one man who was of practically pure white blood, had the edges of their front teeth filed so as to make them semicircular.

When we hunted we would leave our camp, or the ranch-house where we had slept, before dawn. The hot sun flamed red above the marshes or sent long shafts of crimson light between the palm trunks. It might be evening before we returned. The heat of the day would be spent in the shade near a pond, and often our dusky companions would then get into long conversations with us. These camaradas usually rode little stallions, but sometimes one would be mounted on a trotting ox, which was guided by a string through the nostrils. Half-starved dogs followed behind. The men carried spears, rarely firearms. Their hats and clothes, their saddles and bridles seemed on the point of falling to pieces. On their bare feet they wore rusty spurs, and the stirrups were iron rings, in which they thrust the big toe, and the toe next it. But no antic of the half-broken horse and no difficulty in the jungle trail made the slightest impression on them. They were only fairly good hunters and trailers, and when in thick forest Kermit with his compass could find his way better than they could. A few of them hunted the jaguar and also the cashada, the big peccary which goes in herds and is aggressive and truculent; but most of them let the dangerous big cat and the dangerous little hogs severely alone, and hunted only the tapir, deer, and capybara. The rare jaguars that become man-eaters, the occasional giant anacondas, the deadly poisonous snakes, and the cashadas, were all the subjects of superstitious tales. They were shy about telling these stories to persons who might laugh, but if assured of sympathy would occasionally unbend. Then they would describe how man-eating jaguars were warlocks, able to enslave the souls of those they slew; so that each murdered man thenceforth served the dreadful beast that had eaten him, guarded him from danger, and guided him to fresh victims; or they would tell a ghost-story I never quite understood, about a seemingly harmless ghost, white and without any arms, which in the night-time rode the biggest peccary of the herd. In these tales the giant ant-eater always appeared as a comic character, a figure of fun, although with a somewhat grim ability to take care of himself; it was he who would meet drunken men and embrace them with his unpleasant claws and then hurry them home.

The camaradas whom we took with us on our exploring trip were mostly drawn from among these country folk of the ranches, although two or three came from the coast towns. The two best hunters were Antonio the Pareçis, a full-blood Pareçis Indian, and Antonio Correa, an intelligent, daredevil mulatto, probably with also a dash of Indian blood. The latter, like several other of our men, had lived among the wild Indians and had adopted some of their traits, including one exceedingly odd matter of dress. Antonio the Pareçis, a kindly, faithful, stupid soul, had abandoned his tribe, come into the settlements, and married a dark mulattress—the queer result being that according to the custom of the country their children would be regarded as civilized and therefore white. Antonio Correa was one of the two best and most trustworthy men on the trip; uncomplaining, hardworking, and undaunted in time of peril.

When, during our descent of the unknown river, we reached the first rubber man's house he expressed with curious eloquence the feeling we all had at hearing around us again the voices of men and women, and knowing that the chance of utter disaster was over; instead of camping at night in the midst of dangerous rapids, while every hour of the day carried its menace, and there always loomed ahead the danger of death in any one of a dozen possible ways, from famine to fever and dysentery, and from drowning to battle with Indians. When we reached the first rubber-gatherer's store the delicacy which all our men most eagerly coveted was condensed milk, and to my amused horror they solemnly proceeded each to eat a canful of the sweet and sticky luxury.

Of all my wilder hunting companions those to whom I became most attached—although some of them were the wildest of all—were those Kermit and I had with us in Africa for eleven months. Disregarding a very problematical Christian, these were either Mohammedans or heathens. However, after having been in our employ a little while, and after having adopted the fez, jersey, and short trousers—and, as a matter of pure pride and symbolism, boots—they all regarded themselves as of an elevated social status, and openly looked down on the unregenerated "shenzis" or natives who were still in the kirtle-of-banana-leaves cultural stage. They represented many different tribes. Some of them were file-toothed cannibals. Many of them had come from long distances; for—as philanthropists will do well to note—being even a porter in a white man's service in British East Africa or Uganda or the Soudan, meant an amount of pay and a comfort of living and (although this, I think, was subordinate in their minds) a justness of treatment which they could by no possibility achieve in their own homes under native conditions. As for the personal attendants, the gun-bearers, tent-boys, and saises, as well as the head men and askaris, or soldiers, they felt as far above the porters as the latter did above the shenzis. The common tongue was Swahili, a negro-Arab dialect, originally spoken by the descendants, mainly negro in blood, of the Arab conquerors, traders, and slave-raiders of Zanzibar. This is a lingo found over much of central Africa. But only a few of our men were Swahilis by blood.

Of course, most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization of the future. They would often act with an inconsequence that was really puzzling. Dog-like fidelity, persevered in for months, would be ended by a fit of resentment at something unknown, or by a sheer volatility which made them abandon their jobs when it was even more to their detriment than to ours. But they had certain fixed standards of honor; the porter would not abandon his load, the gun-bearer would not abandon his master when in danger from a charging beast—although, unless a first-class man, he might at that critical moment need discipline to restrain his nervous excitability. They appreciated justice, but they were neither happy nor well behaved unless they were under authority; weakness toward them was even more ruinous than harshness and overseverity.

The personal attendants of Kermit and myself established a kind of "chief petty officers' mess" in the caravan. Not only his own boys, but mine, really cared more for Kermit than they did for me. This was partly because he spoke Swahili; partly because he could see game, follow its tracks, and walk as I could not; and partly because he exercised more strict control over his men and yet more thought and care in giving them their pleasures and rewards. I was apt to become amused and therefore too lenient in dealing with grasshopper-like failings—which was bad for the grasshoppers themselves; and, moreover, I was apt to announce to a man who had deserved well that he should receive so many rupees at the end of the trip, which to him seemed a prophecy about the somewhat remote future, whereas Kermit gave less, but gave it in more immediate form, such as sugar or tea, and rupees to be expended in the first Indian or Swahili trader's store we met; on which occasions I would see Kermit head a solemn procession of both his followers and mine to the store, where he would superintend their purchases, not only helping them to make up vacillating minds but seeing that they were not cheated.

An exception was my head tent-boy, Ali. He had a good deal of Arab blood in him, he spoke a little English, he was really intelligent, he was an innately loyal soul, and he was keenly alive to the honor of being the foremost attendant of the head of the expedition. He was distinctly an autocrat to the second tent-boy, whose tenure was apt to be short, and he regarded Somalis with professional rivalry and distrust. He always did his work excellently, and during the eleven months he was with me I never had to correct or rebuke him, and whenever I had a bout of fever he was devotion itself. Once, while at a friend's house, his Somali stole some silver from me, after which Ali always kept my silver himself with scrupulous honesty. I still now and then get a letter from him, but as the letters are sent through some professional Hindoo scribe they are of value chiefly as tokens of affection. The last one, written in acknowledgment of a gift sent him, contained a rather long letter in Swahili, a translation into Arabic, and then a would-be translation into English, which, however, went no further than the cumulative repetition of all the expressions of ceremonious regard known to the scribe.

My head gun-bearer, named Hartebeest—Kongoni—also did his work so well that I never had to reprove him; he was cool and game, a good tracker and tireless walker. But the second gun-bearer, Gouvimali, although a cheerful and willing soul, tended to get rattled when near dangerous animals. Unless his master is really in the grip of an animal, the worst sin a gun-bearer can commit, next to running away, is to shoot the gun he is carrying; for, if the master is fit to hunt dangerous game at all, it is he who must do the killing, and, if in a tight place, he must be able to count with absolute certainty on the gun-bearer's handing him a loaded rifle when his own has been fired. On one occasion I was covering a rhino which Kermit was trying to photograph. The beast was very close and seemed about to begin hostilities. Gouvimali became very much excited and raised his rifle to shoot. I overheard Kongoni chide him, and I spoke to him sharply, but he still kept the rifle at his shoulder; whereupon I slapped his face just before shooting the rhino. This prevented his firing and brought him to his senses, but was not a sufficient punishment. The really dreadful punishment would have been to send him back to the ranks of the porters. But I wished to give him another chance; so next morning I instructed Ali that he was to be my interpreter, and that Gouvimali was to be brought up for justice before my tent. To make it impressive, Kongoni and the second tent-boy were summoned to attend, which they did with pleased anticipation. But they were not alone. All of Kermit's attendants rushed gleefully over, including his two first-class gun-bearers, his camera-bearer, the wild 'Nmwezi ex-cannibal whom he had turned into a devoted and excellent tent-boy, and the cheerful Kikuyu savage who had taken naturally to being sais for his and my little mules. The sympathies of all of them were ostentatiously against the culprit, and they were prepared for the virtuous enjoyment characteristic of the orthodox sure-of-their-salvation at a heresy trial.

Court opened with me in my camp-chair in front of the tent. Ali stood beside me, erect with gratified horror, and eager to show that he was not merely an interpreter but a prosecutor and assistant judge. Abject Gouvimali stood in front, with head hanging. The others ranged themselves in a semicircle, and filled the function of a Greek chorus. The proceedings were as follows:

I (with frowning majesty): "Tell Gouvimali he knows that I have treated him very, very well; besides his wages, I have given him tea and sugar and tobacco and a red blanket."

Ali translates with the thunderous eloquence of Cicero against Verres; Verres writhes.

Chorus (with hands raised at the thought of such magnificent generosity): "Oh, what a good Bwana!"

I (reproachfully): "Whenever I shot a lion or an elephant I gave him some silver rupees."

Ali translates this with a voice shaken by emotion over the human baseness that could forget such gifts.

Chorus (in ecstatic contemplation of my virtue): "Oh, what a generous Bwana!"

I (leaning forward toward the accused): "And yet he started to shoot at a rhinoceros the Bwana Merodadi [Dandy Master, the Master who was a dandy to shoot and ride and get game] was photographing."

Ali fairly hisses this statement; malefactor shudders.

Chorus (almost bereft of speech at the revelation of a depravity of which they had never hitherto dreamed): "Hau! W-a-u!!"

I (severe, but melancholy): "You didn't stop until I had to slap your face."

Chorus (with unctuous relish): "The Bwana ought to have beaten you!"

I: "Do you wish to become a porter again? There's a Kavirondo porter very anxious to get your job!" (Deceitfully concealing a vagueness of recollection about this aspirant, who had been pronounced worthless.)

Malefactor (overcome by suggestion of the semimythical Kavirondo rival): "Oh, Bwana, have me beaten, but keep me as gun-bearer!"

I (with regal beneficence): "Well, I'll fine you ten rupees; and if you make another break, out you go; and you're to do all Kongoni's gun-cleaning for a week." (Kongoni, endeavoring to look both austere and disinterested, pokes malefactor in back.)

Chorus (disappointed of a tragedy, but fundamentally kind-hearted): "What a merciful Bwana! And now Gouvimali will always be careful! Good Gouvimali!"

On another occasion, on the White Nile, I one day took with me, to show me game, two natives of a village near our camp. I shot a roan antelope. It was mortally wounded; one of the natives, the "shenzis," saw it fall but said nothing and slipped away to get the horns and meat for himself. Later, Kongoni became suspicious, and very acutely—for he was not only a master of hunting craft but also possessed a sympathetic insight into the shenzi mind—led us to the spot and caught the offender, and a party of the villagers, red-handed. Kongoni and Gouvimali pounced on the faithless guide, while the others scattered; and the sais, unable to resist having something to do with the fray, handed the led mule to a small naked boy, rushed forward, gave the captive a thump, and then returned to his mule. The offender was brought to camp and put under guard—evidently horribly afraid we would eat him instead of the now far-gone roan. Next day Kermit got home from his hunt before I did. When I reached camp I found Kermit sitting with a book and his pipe under a great tree, in his camp-chair. The captive was tied with a string to the huge tree trunk. He sat on the ground and uttered hollow groans whenever he thought they would be effective. At nightfall we released him, keeping his knife, which we required him to redeem with a chicken; and when he returned with the chicken we bade him give it to Kongoni, to whom we owed the discovery of the roan.

In some of the wilder and more lonely camps these body-servants were my only companions, together with some shenzi porters; at others Kermit was with me, also with his tail of devoted personal attendants. Where the game swarmed and no human beings existed for many leagues round about we built circular fences of thorns to keep out beasts of prey. The porters, chanting a monotonous refrain, brought in wood to keep the watch-fires going all night. Supper was cooked and eaten. Then we sat and listened to the fierce and eager life that went on in the darkness outside. Hoofs thundered now and then, there were snortings and gruntings, occasional bellowings or roarings, or angry whinings, of fear or of cruel hunger or of savage love-making; ever there was a skipping and running of beasts unseen; for out there in the darkness a game as old as the world was being played, a game without any rules, where the forfeit was death.

Generally the wild creatures were not so close even at these lonely camps, and we did not have to guard against attack, although there were always sentries and watch-fires, and we always slept with our loaded rifles beside us. After dinner the tent-boys and gun-bearers would talk and laugh, or tell stories, or listen while one of their number, Kermit's first gun-bearer, a huge, absolutely honest, coal-black negro from south of the Victorian Lake, strummed on an odd little native harp; and one of them might improvise a song. It was usually a very simple song; perhaps about something Kermit or I had done during the day, and of how we lived far away in an unknown land across vast oceans but had come to Africa with wonderful rifles to kill lions and elephants. Once the song was merely an expression of gratified approval of the quality of the meat of an eland I had shot during the day. Once we listened to a really humorous song describing the disapproval of the women about something their husbands had done, the shrill scolding of the women being mimicked with much effect. Some of the songs dealt with traditions and experiences which I did not understand, and which were probably far more interesting than any that I did understand.

My gun-bearers accompanied me whenever I visited the native villages of the different tribes. These tribes differed widely from one another in almost every respect. In Uganda my men stood behind me when some dignified and formally polite chief or great noble came to visit me; clothed in white, and perhaps dragged in a rickshaw or riding a mule with silver trappings, while his drummer beat on the huge native drum the distinctive clan tune which, when he walked abroad, bade all take notice just who the noble was, distinguishing him from all the other great lords, each of whom also had his own especial tune. My men strode at my back when I approached the rest-houses that were made ready for me, as we walked from one to the other of the two Nyanzas; palm-thatched rest-houses before which the musicians of the local chiefs received me with drum-beat, and the hollow booming of bamboos, and rattling of gourds, and the clashing of metal on metal, and the twanging of instruments of many strings. They accompanied me to the rings of square huts, plastered with cow-dung, where the Masai herdsmen dwelt, guarding their cattle, goats, and wire-haired sheep; and to the nomad camps of the camel-owning Samburu, on thorn-covered flats from which we looked southward toward the mighty equatorial snow peak of Kenia. They stood with me to gaze at the midnight dances of the Kikuyu. They followed me among the villages of beehive huts in the lands of the naked savages along the upper Nile.

Ali always, no matter how untoward the surroundings, had things ready and comfortable for me at night when I came in. My gun-bearers trudged behind me all day long over the plains where the heat haze danced, or through the marshes, or in the twilight of the tropic forests. After dark they always guided me back to camp if there were any landmarks; but, curiously enough, if we had to steer by the stars, I had to do the guiding. They were always alert for game. They were fine trackers. They never complained. They were always at my elbows when we had to deal with some dangerous beast. It is small wonder I became attached to them. All of Kermit's and my personal attendants went with us to Cairo, whence we shipped them back to Zanzibar. They earnestly besought us to take them to America. Cairo, of course, both enchanted and cowed them. What they most enjoyed while there was when Kermit took them all out in taxis to the zoo. They were children of the wilderness; their brains were in a whirl because of the big city; it made them feel at home to see the wild things they knew, and it interested them greatly to see the other wild things which were so different from what they knew.

In the old days, on the great plains and in the Rockies, I went out occasionally with Indians or half-breeds; Kermit went after mountain-sheep in the desert with a couple of Mexican packers; and Archie, Quentin, and I, while in Arizona, travelled on one occasion with a Mexican wagon-driver and a Navajo cook (both good men), and once or twice for a day or two at a time with Navajos or Utes to act as guides or horse-herders. On a hunting trip after white goat and deer in the Canadian Rockies Archie went with a guide who turned out to be from Arizona, and who almost fell on Archie's neck with joy at meeting a compatriot from the Southwest. He was the son of a Texas ranger and a Cherokee mother, was one of a family of twenty-four children—all native American families are not dying out, thank heaven!—and was a first-class rifle-shot and hunter.

The Indians with whom I hunted were hardy, quick to see game, and good at approaching it, but were not good shots, and as trackers and readers of sign did not compare with the 'Ndorobo of the east African forests. I always became good friends with them, and when they became assured that I was sympathetic and would not laugh at them they finally grew to talk freely to me, and tell me stories and legends of goblins and ghost-beasts and of the ancient days when animals talked like men. Most of what they said I could not understand, for I did not speak their tongues; and they talked without restraint only when I sat quiet and did not interrupt them. Occasionally one who spoke English, or a half-breed, and in one case a French-Canadian who had lived long with them, translated the stories to me. They were fairy-tales and folk-tales—I do not know the proper terminology. Where they dealt with the action of either men or gods they were as free from moral implication as if they came out of the Book of Judges; and throughout there was a certain inconsequence, an apparent absence of motive in what was done, and an equal absence of any feeling for the need of explanation. They were people still in the hunting stage, to whom hunting lore meant much, and many of the tales were of supernatural beasts. On the actions of these unearthly creatures might depend the success of the chase of their earthly relatives; or it might be necessary to placate them to avoid evil; or their deeds might be either beneficent or menacing without reference to what men did, whether in praise or prayer. Such beings of the other world were the spirit-bear of the Navajos; and the ghost-wolf of the Pawnees, to whom one of my troopers before Santiago, an educated, full-blood Pawnee, once suddenly alluded; and the spirit-buffaloes of whom the Sioux and the Mandans told endless stories, who came up from somewhere underground in the far north, who at night played games like those of human warriors in the daytime, who were malicious and might steal men and women, but who might also bring to the Indians the vast herds whose presence meant plenty and whose absence starvation. Almost everywhere the coyote appeared as a sharp, tricky hero, in adventures having to do with beasts and men and magic things. He played the part of Br' Rabbit in Uncle Remus.

Now and then a ghost-tale would have in it an element of horror. The northern Indians dwell in or on the borders of the vast and melancholy boreal forests, where the winter-time always brings with it the threat of famine, where any accident to the solitary wanderer may mean his death, and may mean also that his body will never be found. In the awful loneliness of that forest there are stretches as wide as many a kingdom of Europe to which for decades at a time no man ever goes. In the summer there is sunlit life in the forest; flowers bloom, birds sing, and the wind sighs through the budding branches. In the winter there is iron desolation; the bitter blasts sweep from the north, the driven ice dust sears the face, the snow lies far above a tall man's height, in their icy beds the rivers lie fixed like shining steel. It is a sombre land, where death ever lurks behind the traveller. To the Indian its recesses are haunted by dread beings malevolent to man. Around the camp-fires, when the frosts of fall were heavy, I have heard the Indians talk of the oncoming winter and of things seen at twilight and sensed after nightfall by the trapper or belated wayfarer when the cold that gripped the body began also to grip the heart. They told of the windigoes which leaped and flew through the frozen air, and left huge footprints on the snow, and drove to madness and death men by lonely camp-fires. They told of the snow-walkers; how once a moose hunter, on webbed snow-shoes, bound campward in the late afternoon saw a dim figure walking afar off on the crust of the snow parallel to him among the tree trunks; how as the afternoon waned the figure came gradually nearer, until he saw that it was shrouded in some garment which wrapped even its head; how in the gray dusk that followed the sunset it came always closer, until he could see that what should have been its face was like the snout of a wolf, and that through a crack left bare by the shroud its eyes burned evil, baleful; how his heart was palsied with the awful terror of the unknown, of the dead that was not dead; and how suddenly he came on two other men, and the thing that had dogged him turned and vanished, and they could find no footprints on the snow.

More often the story would be nothing but a story, perhaps about birds or beasts. Once I heard a Kootenai tell such a story; but he said he had heard it very far north, and that it was not a Kootenai story. It explained why the loon has small wings and why the partridges in the north turn white in winter.

It happened very long ago. In those days there was no winter and the loon had ordinary wings and flew around like a raven. One midday the partridges were having tea on a sand-point in a lake where there were small willows and blueberry bushes. The loon wished to take tea with them, but they crowed and chuckled and they would not let him. So he began to call in a very loud voice a long call, almost like the baying of a wolf; you can hear it now on the lakes. He called and he called, longer and louder. He was calling the spirit who dwells in the north, so far that no man has ever known where it is. The spirit was asleep. But the loon's medicine was very strong and he called until the spirit woke up. The spirit sent the North Wind down—he was the North Wind—and the snow came, and summer passed away. The partridges no longer crowed and chuckled. Some of them flew away south. The others turned white; you can see them now very far north, but in the south only on the mountains. Then the loon began to laugh, for he was very glad and proud. He laughed louder and louder; you can hear him now on the lakes. But the spirit was very angry because the loon had called him. He began to blow on the lake and he began to blow on the loon. The lake began to freeze and the loon began to dive, longer and longer. But his wings began to grow smaller. So with great difficulty, before his wings were too small, he rose and his wings beat very rapidly and he flew away south. That is why winter came and why the loon dives so well and does not fly if he can help it.

In the cane-brakes on both sides of the lower Mississippi I have hunted bear in company with the hard-riding, straight-shooting planters of the country lying behind the levees—and a gamer, more open-handedly hospitable set of men can nowhere be found. What would, abroad, be called the hunt servants were all negroes from the Black Belt, in which we were doing our hunting. These negroes of the Black Belt have never had the opportunity to develop beyond a low cultural stage. Most of those with us were kindly, hard-working men, expert in their profession. One, who handled the hounds of two Mississippi planters, was a man in many respects of really high and fine character; although in certain other respects his moral standards were too nearly those of some of the Old Testament patriarchs to be quite suitable for the present century. These black hunters possessed an extensive and on the whole accurate knowledge of the habits of the wild creatures, and yet mingled with this knowledge was a mass of firmly held nonsense about hoop-snakes, snakes with poisonous stings in their tails, and the like. Most, although not all, of them were very superstitious and easily frightened if alone at night. Their ghost-stories were sometimes to me quite senseless; I did not know enough of the workings of their minds to understand what they meant. Those stories that were understandable usually had in them something of the grotesque and the inadequate. By daylight the black hunters would themselves laugh at their own fears; and even at night, when fully believing what they were telling, they would seriously insert details that struck us as too comic for grave acceptance. The story that most insistently lingers in my mind will explain my meaning.

Back in the swamp among cypress ponds was an abandoned plantation which had the reputation of being haunted. The "big house," the planter's house, had been dismantled but was still standing in fair condition. In the neighborhood there was a powerful negro scapegrace much given to boasting that he feared no ghost; and the local judge finally offered him five dollars if he would go alone after nightfall to the house in question and stay there until sunrise. The negro accepted with the stipulation that he was to be allowed to light a lamp that had been left in the house. The storyteller, who was as black as a shoe and a good man in the swamp after bear, told the tale as follows. I cannot pretend, however, to give his exact expressions.

"Jake started after sunset. The moon was a little more than half full, and it was a sure-enough lonely walk through the cypress woods along the abandoned, overgrown road. The branches kept waving and the moonlight flickered on the ground, and Jake couldn't see anything clearly and yet could see a good deal, and strange noises came from the swamp on both sides. He was glad to get to the clearing, but it was overgrown, too. The house shone white in the moonlight, but the staring, open windows were black, and all inside was coal-black beyond the moonlight, and he didn't know whether it was empty or whether he most wished it was or wasn't empty. But he went inside and lit the lamp and put it on a table and sat down beside it. Nothing happened for a long time except that he kept hearing queer things in the swamp and sometimes something went across the clearing. At last a clock struck twelve, but he knew there wasn't any clock in the house. Just as soon as it had finished striking, a monstrous big black cat walked into the room and jumped on the table and wropped his tail three times round the lamp-chimney and said: 'Nigger, you and I is the onliest things in this house!' And Jake said: 'Mr. Black Cat, in one second you'll be the onliest thing in this house,' and he went through the window. He run hard down the road, and pretty soon there was a crashing in the underbrush and a big buck, with horns on him like a rocking-chair, came up alongside and said: 'Well, nigger, you must be losing your wind,' and he answered mighty polite: 'Mr. Buck, I ain't even begun to catch my wind,' and he sure left that buck behind. And he ran and he ran until he did lose his wind, and he sat down on a log. And there was a patter of footsteps behind and somebody came up the road and sat down on the log too. It was a white man, and he carried his head in his hand. The head spoke: 'Well, nigger, you surely can run!' and Jake he answered: 'Mr. White Man, you ain't never seen me run,' and then he did run. And he came to the judge's and he beat on the door and called out: 'Judge, I'se come back; and, Judge, I don't want that five dollars!'"

The planter in connection with whose hounds the negro worked told me that this was a ghost-story that for a year had been told everywhere among the colored folk, but about all kinds of houses and people, and that the narrator didn't really believe it; but that, nevertheless, he believed enough of it to be afraid of empty houses after dark, and moreover that he had been frightened into leaving a swamp planter's pigs entirely alone by the planter's playing ghost and calling out to him at nightfall as he, the negro, was travelling a lonely road with possible innocence of motive.

Strongly contrasted with such more than half comic or grotesque ghost-stories was one told me once, not by a hunting companion but by a polished and cultivated Tahitian gentleman, a guest of Henry Adams in Washington. His creed was the creed of his present surroundings; but back of the beyond in his mind lurked old tales, and old faiths glowed with a moment's flame at certain hours under certain conditions. One evening some of those present were talking of inexplicable things that had happened on the shifting borders between life and death, between the known and the unknown; and of vampires and werewolves and the ghosts of things long gone. Suddenly the Tahitian told of an experience of his mother's when she was an imperious queen in the far-off Polynesian island. She had directed her people to build a bridge across the mouth of a stream. After dark something came out of the water and killed one of the men, and the others returned to her, saying that the spirit which dwelt in the stream was evil and would kill all of them if they persevered in their work. She answered that her own family spirit, the familiar or ghost of the family, was very strong and would protect her people if she were present. Next day, accordingly, she went down in person to superintend the building of the bridge. She took with her two little tame pigs—pet pigs. All went well until evening came. Then suddenly a chill gust of wind blew from the river mouth, and in a moment the workmen fled, screaming that the spirit of the water was upon them. Almost immediately afterward there was a hubbub of a totally different kind; and after listening a moment the queen spoke, telling that her spirit had arrived, had overcome the other spirit, and was chasing him. In another moment one of her girls called out that the little pigs were dead. The queen put out her hand and touched them; they were quite cold. The defeated spirit was hiding in them! But as she felt them they began to grow warm and come to life. Her familiar had followed the evil ghost into his hiding-place in the pigs, had chased him out, and slew him as he fled to the water. There was no further interruption to the building of the bridge.

The touch about the defeated spirit hiding in the pet pigs, which thereupon grew cold, and being chased out by his antagonist was thoroughly Polynesian. It was most interesting to see the cultivated man of the world suddenly go back to superstitions that marked the childhood of the race; and then he told tales of the shark god, and of many other gods, and of devils and magicians.

However, there is no lack of similar beliefs among our own people. Long ago I knew an old market gunner of eastern Long Island who shot ducks and bay-birds for a living. There was a deserted farmhouse on the edge of the marsh, handy to the shooting-grounds, which he would not enter. He insisted that once he had gone there on a gray, bitter November afternoon to escape the rain which was driving in sheets. He lit a fire in the kitchen and started to dry his soaked clothes. Suddenly, out of the storm, somebody fumbled at the latch of the door. It opened and a little old woman in gray entered. She did not look at him, and yet a chill seemed to fall on him. Nevertheless he rose and followed her as she went out into the hall. She went up the steep, narrow stairway. He went after her. She went up the still steeper little flight that went to the garret. But when he followed there was no one there. He came downstairs, put on his clothes, took up his heavy fowling-gun, and just as evening fell he started for the mainland along a road which at one point became a causeway. When he reached the causeway the light was dim; but a figure walked alongside the road on the reeds, not bending the tops; and it was a man with his throat cut from ear to ear.

However, to tell of the crooked beliefs of the men of our own race, who dwell beside the great waters or journey across the world's waste spaces, is aside from what I have to say of the wild hunting companions whose world was peopled by ghosts as real to their minds as the men and beasts with whom they were brought in touch during their daily lives.

CHAPTER VIII

[PRIMITIVE] MAN; AND THE HORSE, THE LION, AND THE ELEPHANT

To say that progress goes on and has gone on at unequal speed in different continents, so far as human society is concerned, is so self-evident as to be trite. Yet, after all, we hardly visualize even this fact to ourselves; and we laymen, at least, often either disregard or else frankly forget the further fact that this statement is equally true as regards the prehistory of mankind and as regards the paleontological history of the great beasts with which he has been associated on the different continents during the last two or three hundred thousand years. In history, a given century may on one continent mean what on another continent was meant by a century that came a thousand years before or a thousand years later. In prehistory and paleontology there is the same geographical difference as regards the rapidity of development in time.

The Soudan under the Mahdi at the end of the nineteenth century was in religious, industrial, and social life, in fact in everything except mere time, part of the evil Mohammedan world of the seventh century. It had no relation to the contemporary body politic of humanity except that of being a plague-spot. The Tasmanians, Bushmen, and Esquimaux of the eighteenth century had nothing in common with the Europeans of their day. Their kinship, physical and cultural, was with certain races of Palæolithic Europeans and Asiatics fifty or a hundred thousand years back.