Part 1
THE END OF THE TRAIL
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
THE PROMISED LAND.
Looking southward to the Gulf of California—and Mexico.]
BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
THE LAST FRONTIER: THE WHITE MAN’S WAR FOR CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $3.00
THE END OF THE TRAIL
THE FAR WEST FROM NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA
BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S. AUTHOR OF “THE LAST FRONTIER,” “GENTLEMEN ROVERS,” ETC., ETC.
_WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP_
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published November, 1914
[Illustration]
TO MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER ALBERT C. KUHN OF RANCHO YERBA BUENA IN “THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT”
FOREWORD
In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus and peopled Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring Europeans crossed the western ocean and established a fringe of settlements along this continent’s eastern rim. The American pioneers, taking up the historic march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from the Hudson to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, from the Mississippi across the plains, across the Rockies, until athwart the line of their advance they found another ocean. They could go no farther, for beyond that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of the yellow race. The white man had completed his age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his march was finished; in the golden lands which look upon the Pacific he had come to the End of the Trail.
In the great march which substituted the wheat-field for the desert, the orchard for the forest, the work was done by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the Pioneers. And the pioneer has always lived on the frontier. Most people believe that there is no longer any quarter of this continent that can properly be called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct as the buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have written this book. Though the gambler and the gun-fighter have vanished before the storm of public disapproval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; though the express rider has given way to the express-train; in the hinterland of that vast region which sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, frontier conditions still endure and the frontiersman is still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie schooners—full sisters of those which crossed the plains in ’49—creak into the wilderness in the wake of the home seeker; the settler chops his little farmstead from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from the trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains wend their way into the northern wild; six-horse Concord coaches tear along the roads amid rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying drunkenly upon their leathern springs; out in the back country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his picturesque panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps and vivid shirt. But this is the last call. It is the last chance to see a nation in the primeval stage of its existence. In a few more years, a very few, there will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, that can truthfully be called the frontier, and with it will disappear, never to return, those stern and hardy figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the packer, the puncher—who won for us the West.
The _real_ West—and by the term I do not mean that sun-kissed, flower-carpeted coast zone, with its orange groves and apple orchards, its palatial mansions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts and teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from San Diego to Vancouver and which to the Eastern visitor represents “the West”—cannot be seen from the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished to visit those portions of the West which cannot be viewed from a car-window and because I wished to acquaint myself with the characteristics and problems and ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled from Mexico to the borders of Alaska by motor-car—the only time, I believe, that a car has made that journey on its own wheels and under its own power. Because that journey was so crowded with incident and obstacle and adventure, and because the incidents and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in “the Last West,” is my excuse for having to a certain extent made a personal narrative of the following chapters.
Without entering into a tedious recital of distances and road conditions, I have outlined certain routes which the motorist who contemplates turning the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit and pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s place, I have deemed it as important to describe that enchanted littoral which has become the nation’s winter playground as to depict that back country which the tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no brief for boards of trade and kindred organisations, I have incorporated the more significant facts and figures as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources which every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. But, more than anything else, I have tried to convey something of the spell of that big, open, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination which animates the kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell there. They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day Pioneers. To them, across the miles, I lift my glass.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 1
II. THE SKYLANDERS 33
III. CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 61
IV. THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 95
V. WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 123
VI. THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 155
VII. THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT 187
VIII. THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 211
IX. THE INLAND EMPIRE 237
X. “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON” 271
XI. A FRONTIER ARCADY 305
XII. BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 329
XIII. CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 351
XIV. BACK OF BEYOND 387
XV. THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 419
INDEX 455
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Promised Land _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
A Desert Dawn in New Mexico 4
Santa Fé: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans 18
Remains of an Ancient Civilisation 24
The Land of the Turquoise Sky 38
Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site 40
Acoma as It is To-Day 44
Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt 48
Acoma Artisans 50
“Dance Mad!” 52
Young Acomans 54
The Education of a Young Hopi 56
The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos 58
The Passing of the Puncher 64
Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin 72
The Trail of a Thousand Thrills 88
Throwing the Diamond Hitch 90
Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona 98
Not in Catalonia but in California 120
A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount 130
Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts 168
The Mission of Santa Barbara 170
Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras 232
The Yosemite—and a Lady Who Didn’t Know Fear 250
Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red 252
The Greatest Oil Fields in the World 260
Over the Tehachapis 262
The Overland Mail 274
In the Oregon Hinterland 284
“Where Rolls the Oregon” 300
Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r 324
What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington 332
The Unexplored Olympics 344
Where the Salmon Come from 348
Outposts of Civilisation 354
Breaking the Wilderness 356
Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog 358
In the Great, Still Land 362
Sport on Vancouver Island 376
Life at the Back of Beyond 380
Transport on America’s Last Frontier 382
Transport on America’s Last Frontier 384
Scenes on the Cariboo Trail 400
Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena 422
Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of Mr. Powell’s Journey Through the British Columbian Wilderness 428
Some Siwash Cemeteries 448
Heraldry in the Hinterland 450
A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of Gloom and Loneliness and Dread 452
Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia, Showing the Route Followed by the Author _at end of volume_
THE END OF THE TRAIL
I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
“The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand; Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land. While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain; And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race, Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place; And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood, Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”
I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the Sunset Limited to a lounger on a station platform as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear air of New Mexico.
“No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a native filled with civic pride; “this is Deming.”
The story _may_ be true, of course; but if it isn’t it ought to be, for it is wholly typical of the attitude of the citizens of the youngest-but-one of our national family. Indeed, I had not spent twenty-four hours within the borders of the State before I had discovered that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its inhabitants are their pride and faith in the land wherein they dwell. And this despite the fact that their neighbours across the line in Arizona refer to New Mexico slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State “where they dig for water and plough for wood.”
Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in the United States, has changed so remarkably in the space of a single decade. Ten years ago the only things suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys, Hopi snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses. Five years ago Deming was as typical a cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos. Gin-palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four hours a day; cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on every corner.
All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste. Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators, racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as to forget the water, settled back to their magazines and their cigars. So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses, were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to themselves.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
A DESERT DAWN IN NEW MEXICO.]
One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, instead of leaning back regretfully, descended from the train, hired a horse, and rode out into the mesquite-dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. Being, incidentally, the manager of one of the largest and most profitable ranches in California, he was as familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a cowboy is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he understood the science of irrigation from I to N. After a few days of quiet investigation he dropped into the commissioner’s office in Deming one morning and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. Most of those who heard about it said that he was merely a fool of a tenderfoot who was throwing away his time and money and who ought to have a guardian appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise old cattlemen looked worried. Within a fortnight he had erected his machinery and was drilling for water. And wherever his wells went down, there water came up: fine, clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of it. It soused the thirsty desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into good-for-anything loam. The seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted, sprouted, and the sprouts became blades, and the blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and corn and cane—and the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.
The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres valley and of the miracles that had been performed through its agency spread over the country as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed men from half the States in the Union began to pile into Deming by every train, eager to take up the land while it was still to be had under the hospitable terms of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 1910 that the Californian, John Hund, sunk his first well; when I was in the office of the United States commissioner in Deming four years later I found that the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from the city limits.
Should you ever have occasion to fly over New Mexico in an aeroplane you will have no difficulty whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley; viewed from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug spread across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most of the valley holdings were, I noticed, of but ten or twenty acres, comparatively few of them being more than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found that his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates ten acres thoroughly rather than a hundred superficially. This lesson they have had hammered into them not alone from experience but from observing the operations of a couple of almond-eyed brethren named Wah, hailing originally, I believe, from Canton, who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near Deming. Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, seem but crude and amateurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts to which these Chinese brothers have carried their intensive farming. Though watered only by a small and primitive well, their farm graphically illustrates what can be accomplished by paying attention to those little things which the American farmer is accustomed contemptuously to disregard, as well as being an object-lesson in the remarkable variety of fruits and vegetables which the valley is capable of producing. These Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three crops of vegetables a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. They even begrudge the narrow strips which are used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and tomatoes are grown between melon rows. A drove of corpulent porkers attend voraciously to the garden refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness doubled by being stocked with fish. Were the New Mexicans notoriously _not_ lotus-eaters, the Brothers Wah would doubtless find still another use for their reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It is paying attention to such relatively insignificant details as these which makes J. Chinaman, Esquire, the best gardener in the world. It pays, too, for they told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre holding, are increasing their bank-account at the rate of eight thousand dollars a year. After noting the cordiality with which they were greeted by the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I should like to have a bank president greet me the way he did them.
I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in Rhodesia, for example, and the hinterland of Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces of Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial valleys of California—but I can recall none where soil and climate seemed to have combined so effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do your farming in a region where you will never have to worry about how long it will be before it rains, nor to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual rainfall in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed eight inches, there is a generous margin left for sunshine. Instead of praying for rain, and then cursing his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes too heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his artesian well and throws over an electric switch which sets the pump agoing. When his fields are sufficiently irrigated he throws the switch back again. From the view-point of health it would be hard to improve upon the climate of the Mimbres valley, or, for that matter, of any other portion of New Mexico, its elevation of four thousand three hundred feet, taken with the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and Japan and southernmost California, giving it summers which are hot without being humid or oppressive and winters which are never uncomfortably cold.
Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest, the farmers of southern New Mexico have gone daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well admit it frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another, and they all look extremely uninteresting, but I suppose that if they were netting me from fifty to seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they are their owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. I never arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry, and tired, but that there was a group of eager boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me at the station.
“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an alfalfa field over here that we want to show you. It’s only about thirty miles across the desert and we’ll get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”
They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa in New Mexico as the Esquimaux of Labrador are about a stranded whale.
If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in that region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it were well to disabuse yourself of several erroneous impressions which seem to prevail about life in the Southwest. In the first place, you can dress just as much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted in the magazines as you wish—fleecy _chaparejos_ and a horsehair hat band and a pair of spurs that jingle like an approaching four-in-hand when the wearer walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have become accustomed to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers. In many respects they are the politest people that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer must not imagine that he can gallop madly across the ranges, at least in the vicinity of the towns, for he is more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s alfalfa field or cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though painfully prosaic, are about the most profitable crop you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as three hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the intending rancher must make up his mind that he must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no place for the agriculturist _de luxe_ who expects to sit on the piazza of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do the work. No, sirree! It is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where every one works and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do, goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and first of all it has to be cleared of the _piñon_ and mesquite and chaparral which cover it. This clearing and grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood in return—and there’s nothing that makes a cheerier blaze on a winter’s night than a hearth heaped with the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it up with a hoe. Then there is the matter of well digging, which, including the cost of boring, machinery, and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five dollars an acre. Since the construction of several large power-plants, the cost of pumping has been greatly reduced by the use of electricity. It is quite possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure tracts close to town with all the preliminary work done for him, water being provided from a central pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the capitalised cost added to the price of his land, which may be purchased, like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the instalment plan. That will be about all, I think, for facts and figures.