Part 5

Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst’s dream come true. From time beyond reckoning the women have possessed the privileges and power for which their pale-faced sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is Mrs. Acoma the ruler of her household but she is absolute owner of the house and all that is in it. In fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all, and if his wife wishes to put him out of her house she may. Instead of a woman taking her husband’s name after marriage, he takes hers, and the children that they have also take the name of their mother. In other words, if Mr. Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes Mr. Jones and their children are the little Joneses. And the men accept their feminine rôles even to playing nursemaid while the women do the work, it being not the exception but the rule to see even the governors and war captains dandling squalling papooses on their knees or toting them up and down the main street on their backs. A comic artist couldn’t raise a smile in Acoma, for he would find that all his pet jokes are there accepted facts.

[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.

His first riding lesson.

_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.

The dancing lesson.

_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.

The history lesson.

THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI.]

Even more interesting than Acoma, from an architectural standpoint, is the pyramid pueblo of Taos (pronounced as though it were spelled “_tous_,” if you please). This strange town—in many respects the most extraordinary in the world—is built on the floor of a mountain-girdled valley, some seventy miles due north from Santa Fé, and can best be reached by leaving the main line of the railway at Barrancas or Servilleta and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage. Though it is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa Fé in a single day, the journey is a very fatiguing one, it being much better to spend the night at the ranch-house at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in comfort the next morning. There are really two towns—the white man’s and the Indian’s—four miles apart. White man’s Taos consists of little more than a sun-swept plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican houses of adobe, while running off from the plaza are numerous dim and narrow alleys, likewise lined by humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of which that immortal hero of American boyhood, Kit Carson, lived and died. For Taos, you must understand, was long the terminus of that historic trail by which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Missouri went down into the Southwest. Here, then, came such famous frontiersmen as Carson and Jim Bridger, and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter beads and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and furs. Save for a few greybeards who dwell in their memories of the exciting past, the frontiersmen have all passed round that dark turning from which no man returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their spurs and the clatter of their high-heeled boots no more. In their stead have come another breed of men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who confront the Indian with brushes instead of bowie-knives; for Taos, because of its extraordinary wealth of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become the rendezvous for a group of brilliant painters who are perpetuating on canvas the red men of the terraced houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low, squat pyramids at Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of two huge pyramidal structures, one six the other seven stories high, with a stream meandering between. In their general construction the houses of Taos are like those of Acoma, but instead of being terraced only on the front, they are built in two huge squares which are terraced on all four sides, looking from a little distance like the pyramids which children erect with stone building-blocks. These two huge apartment houses together accommodate upward of eight hundred souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder after him being the Pueblo’s way of bolting his door. Though it needs iron muscles and leathern lungs to reach the apartments at the top, the view over the surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos presents, I suppose, the nearest approach to socialistic life that this country has yet known, for the houses are built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens, grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and if there is a surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the community.

The communal form of government existing among the Hopi has proven so successful in practice that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Although these Indians of the terraced houses are wards of the nation, to use a term which has become almost ironic, the white man’s law stops short at the boundaries of their pueblos, for they make their own laws, enforce them with their own police, maintain their own courts of justice, and inflict their own peculiar punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are still used as a punishment for misdemeanours, though the Indians go the Puritans one better by clamping down the culprit’s head as well as his hands and feet. At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an elected governor, known as the _cacique_, whose word is law with a capital L. Associated with him is a council of wise men called _mayores_, whose powers are a sort of cross between those of a board of aldermen and a college faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council frequently assume an almost parental character, it being customary for it to advise the young men of the pueblo when to marry—and whom. If an Indian gets into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in the county court, but differences between themselves are settled according to their own time-honoured customs. Though the police force of Acoma consists of but a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord around the crown of his sombrero, he takes himself quite as seriously as a member of the Broadway traffic squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique and the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from his hip, I doubt not that he would prove quite as efficient in an emergency.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._

THE PYRAMID-PUEBLO OF TAOS.

“At Taos the novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by building the houses five and even six stories high and terracing them on all four sides, so that they form a sort of pyramid.”]

The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the administration of those laws regulating the conduct of the community as were the Old Testament prophets. When a member of the tribe plays football with the public morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is tried by the _mayores_ and, if found guilty, is expelled from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The system is as efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had an opportunity to see this novel form of punishment in operation. I was descending from the mesa at Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the absence of Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter. He was a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my memory serves me faithfully, was Kill Hi. It should have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the precipitous path my attention was attracted by a crowd, composed of the major portion of the pueblo’s population, which was stolidly watching four Indians—the constable and three others—loading a woman whose hands and feet were bound with ropes into a wagon. Despite her screams and struggles, they tossed her in as indifferently as they would a sack of meal.

“Who is she? What’s the matter?” I asked Kill Hi.

“Oh, nothin’ much,” was the indifferent answer. “She damn bad woman. They no want her here. They tell her to get out quick—vamoose. She no go. So they take her off in wagon like you see.”

“But what are they going to do with her?”

“Oh, I don’ know. Dump her out in desert, mebbe.”

“But what will happen to her?” I persisted. “Won’t she starve to death?”

“Oh, I don’ know,” said Kill Hi carelessly, cramping the buckboard so that I could get in. “Mebbe. P’raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like other people.”

He was quite right—they certainly are _not_.

III

CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW

“We’re the men that always march a bit before Though we cannot tell the reason for the same; We’re the fools that pick the lock that holds the door— Play and lose and pay the candle for the game. There’s no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go; There’s no painted post to point the right-of-way, But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”

III

CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW

They came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop, hat brims flapping, spurs jingling, tie-down straps streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road into a yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs and sheepskin chaps they formed as vivid a group as one could find outside a Remington. They pulled up with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden West saloon and, leaving their panting mounts standing dejectedly, heads to the ground and reins trailing, went stamping into the bar. Having had previous experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them through the swinging doors; for more unvarnished facts about a locality, its people, politics, progress, and prospects, are to be had over a mahogany bar than any place I know except a barber’s chair.

“What’ll it be, boys?” sang out one of them, as they sprawled themselves over the polished mahogany. I expected to see the bartender matter-of-coursely shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for, according to all the accepted canons of the cow country, as I had known it a dozen years before, there was only one kind of a drink ever ordered at a bar. So, when two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale and the other four allowed that they would take lemonade, I felt like going to the door and taking another look at the straggling frontier town and at the cactus-dotted desert which surrounded it, just to make sure I really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New York.

It required scant finesse to engage one of the lemonade drinkers in amicable and illuminating conversation.

“Round-up hereabouts?” I inquired, by way of making an opening.

“Nope,” said my questionee. “Leastways not as I knows of. You see,” he continued confidentially, “we’ve quit cow-punching. We’ve tied up with the movies.”

“With the what?” I queried.

“The movies—the moving-picture people, you know,” he explained. “You see, the folks back East have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West picture plays and we’re gratifying ’em at so much per. Wagon-train attacked by Indians—good-lookin’ girl carried off by one of the bucks—cow-punchers to the rescue, and all that sort of thing. It’s good pay and easy work, and the grub’s first-rate. Yes, sirree, it’s got cow-punching beaten to a frazzle. I reckon you’re from the East yourself, ain’t you?”

I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was labelled “New York.”

“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, regarding me with suddenly increased respect. “From what I hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town. Gambling joints runnin’ wide open, an’ every one packs a gun, I hear, an’ shootin’ scraps so frequent no one thinks nothing about ’em. It ain’t a safe place to live, I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is different. We’re peaceable, we are. We don’t stand for no promisc’us gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining towns, there ain’t a poker palace left, and I wouldn’t be so blamed surprised if this State went dry in a year or two. Well, s’long, friend,” he added, sweeping off his hat, “I’m pleased to’ve made your acquaintance. The feller with the camera’s waitin’ an’ we’ve got to get out an’ run off a few miles of film so’s to amuse the people back East.”

[Illustration: THE PASSING OF THE PUNCHER.

“Cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling cattle—that’s what civilisation has done for Arizona.”]

I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon and watched them as they swung easily into their saddles and went tearing up the street in a rolling cloud of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the mutability of things. “That’s what civilisation does for a country,” I said to myself. “Lemonade instead of liquor; policemen instead of pistol fighters; cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling cattle.” At first blush—I confess it frankly—I was as disappointed as a boy who wakes up to find it raining on circus morning, for I had revisited the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going, devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys life so characteristic of that country’s territorial days. Instead I found a busy, prosperous State, still picturesque in many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning.

It wasn’t much of a country, was Arizona, the first time I set foot in it, upward of a dozen years ago. A howling wilderness is what the Old Testament prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they wouldn’t have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses and his Israelites could not have wandered through a region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple mountains in the distance and, flaming in a cloudless sky, a sun pitiless as fate. Cattlemen and sheepmen still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro players still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and the cow-towns; men’s coats screened but did not altogether conceal the ominous outline of the six-shooter. As building materials adobe and corrugated iron still predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come into their own. In those days—and they were not so very long ago, if you please—A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled Frontier with a capital F.

I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignificant enough in itself but strangely prophetical of the changes which were to come. Riding across the most desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen, a roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ramshackle adobe ranch-house standing solitary in the desert, riveted my attention. The ill-formed letters, scrawled apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar, read:

40 MILES FROM WOOD 40 MILES FROM WATER 40 FEET FROM HELL GOD BLESS OUR HOME

As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim humour of the lines, the rancher appeared in the doorway and, with the hospitality characteristic of those who dwell in the earth’s waste places, bade me dismount and rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been tanned by sun and wind to the colour of a well-smoked brier; corduroy trousers belted over lean hips and a flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-lion. About his eyes, puckered at the outer corners into innumerable little wrinkles by much staring across sun-scorched ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested the Yankee or the Celt.

“I stopped to read your sign,” I explained. “If things are as discouraging as all that I suppose you’ll pull out of here the first chance you get?”

“Not by a jugful!” he exclaimed. “I’m here to stay. You mustn’t take that sign too seriously; it’s just my brand of humour. This country don’t look up to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few years, friend, and you’ll need to be introduced to it all over again.”

“But you’ve no water,” I remarked sceptically.

“We’ll have that before long. You see,” he explained eagerly, “the Colorado’s not so very far away and there’s considerable talk about the government’s damming it and bringing the water down here in diversion canals and irrigation ditches. If the government doesn’t help us, then we’ll sink artesian wells and get the water that way. Once get water on it and this soil’ll do the rest. Why, friend, this land’ll raise anything—_anything!_ I’m going to put in alfalfa the first year or two, until I get on my feet, and then I’m going to raise citrus fruits. There’s never enough frost here to worry about, and all we need is water to make this the finest soil for orange growing on God’s green earth. Just remember what I’m telling you,” he concluded impressively, tapping my knee with his forefinger to emphasise his words, “though things look damned discouraging just now, this is going to be a great country some day.”

As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle to wave him a farewell, but he had already forgotten me. He was marking, in the bone-dry, cactus-dotted soil, the places where he was going to set out his orange-trees. Though our paths have not crossed again, I have always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful, optimistic, self-reliant, blessed with a sense of humour which jeers at obstacles and laughs discouragements away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typified for me those pioneers who, by their indomitable courage and unyielding tenacity, are converting the arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden of the Lord.

Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade, I passed that way again. So amazing were the changes which had taken place in that brief interim that, just as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert, arid, sun-baked, forbidding, I found fields where sleek cattle grazed knee-deep in alfalfa, and groves ablaze with golden fruit. Stretching away to the foot-hills were roads which would have done credit to John Macadam, and scattered along them at intervals were prosperous looking ranch-houses of cement or wood; there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling cottonwoods marked the courses of the irrigation streams and in the air was the cheerful sound of running water. There were two things which had brought about this miracle—pluck and water.

Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous fight or won a more brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade; and the enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all foes—the hostile forces of Nature. The story of how the white man, within the space of less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and mapped this almost unknown region; of how he carried law and order and justice into a section which had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realising the necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed, and rolled up his sleeves, and spat on his hands, and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those canals and ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or high in the mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil, he replaced the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It is one of the epics of civilisation, this reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes are, thank God, Americans.

Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation; Egypt, for example, and Mesopotamia, and parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of all those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm, metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help themselves, spent their days wielding pick and shovel and their evenings in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands. After a time the government was prodded into action and the great dams at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organising themselves into co-operative leagues and water-users’ associations, took up the work of reclamation where the government left off, and it is to these energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells and ploughed fields and dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamorphosis of Arizona is due.

More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona than about any other region on the continent. The reclamation phase of its development has been so emphasised and advertised that among most of those who have not seen it for themselves the impression exists that it is a flat, arid, sandy, treeless country, a small portion of which has, miraculously enough, proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has been confirmed by various writers who, sacrificing accuracy for a phrase, have dubbed Arizona “the American Egypt,” which, to one who is really familiar with the physical characteristics of the Nile country and the agricultural disabilities under which its people labour, seems a left-handed compliment at best. Egypt—barring the swamp-lands of the Delta and a fringe of cultivation along the Nile—is a country of sun-baked yellow sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an expanse of asphalt pavement. Arizona is nothing of the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small growth of green even in the dry season, while after the rains the desert bursts into a brilliancy and diversity of bloom incredible to one who has not seen it. How many people who have not visited Arizona are aware that within the borders of this “desert State” is the largest pine forest in the United States—six thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtually treeless. In Egypt there is not a hill worthy the name between Alexandria and Wady Halfa; Arizona has range after range of mountains which rise two miles and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man’s land and never will be. Arizona will never be anything else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt at all (save as concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the Khedive’s country a real compliment by calling it “the African Arizona.”

[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._

WHERE THE ROADS RUN OUT AND THE TRAILS BEGIN.

The Arizona desert: “It is more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock, its surface covered by a confused tangle of desert vegetation.”]