Part 6

The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was the desert. An Arab would not call it desert at all; a Bedouin would never feel at home upon it. I had expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, plantless, incapable of supporting anything—yellow as molten brass, sun-scorched, unrelenting. That is the desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia. The Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In the first place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey; “driftwood” is probably the term which an interior decorator would use to describe its peculiarly soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On the contrary, it is a more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock and sometimes gashed by _arroyos_, its surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation so whimsical and fantastic in the forms it assumes that it looks for all the world like a prim New England garden gone violently insane. There is the _cholla_, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking at a distance, might deceive the stranger into supposing that it was a sort of wildcat cousin of the gentle pussy-willow; the towering _sajuaro_, often forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance to those mammoth candelabra which flank the altars of Spanish cathedrals; the octopus-like _ocatilla_, whose slender, sinuous branches, tipped with scarlet blossoms, seem to be for ever groping for something which they cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not unlike a collection of green pincushions, abristle with pins and glued together at the edges; the sombre creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood, the bright green _paloverde_. These, with the white blossoms of the yucca and the pink, orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the cacti, the brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and violets and blues of the encircling mountains, the fleecy clouds drifting like great flocks of unshorn sheep across an ultramarine sky, combine to form a picture as far removed from the desert of our imagination as one could well conceive. Less picturesque than these colour effects, the portrayal of which would have taxed the genius of Whistler, but more interesting to the farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring up over the mesas after the summer rains (some of them being, indeed, extraordinarily independent of the rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those California-bound tourists who gather their impressions of Arizona from the observation platform of a mail-train while streaking across the country at fifty miles an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its possibilities with a wave of the hand and the dictum: “Nothing to it but sun, sand, and sage-brush.” Were those same people to see New York City from the rear end of a train they would assert that it consisted of nothing but tenements and tunnels. It is easy to magnify the barrenness of an arid region, and, that being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) that they instruct their legislators to enact a law banishing any one found guilty of applying the defamatory misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.

Though it were not well to take too literally the panegyrics of the soil and its potentialities which every board of trade and commercial club in the State print and distribute by the ton, there is no playing hide-and-seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of Arizona is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration with which the people of Yuma marked the completion of the Colorado River project, prizes were awarded for _forty-three distinct products of the soil_. To recount them would be to enumerate practically every fruit, vegetable, and cereal native to the temperate zone and many of those ordinarily found only in the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether exceptional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. This not being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to say that the list began with alfalfa and ended with yams.

Everything considered, I am inclined to think that the shortest road to agricultural prosperity lies through an Arizona alfalfa field, for this proliferous crop, whose fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame, possesses the admirable quality of making the land on which it is grown richer with each cutting. They told me some prodigious alfalfa yarns in Arizona, but, as each district goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to the acre better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in certain parts of the State, as many as _twelve crops of alfalfa have been cut in a year_. I wonder what your Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if he can get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life in a land like this?

Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona have been unwisely advertised as “frostless.” This is not true, for there is no place within our borders which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true, however, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand a better chance of escaping the ravages of frost than those in any other part of the country. The fruit ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the Arizona growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and grapefruit on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in advance of their Californian competitors.

Unless I am very much mistaken, two products hitherto regarded as alien to our soil—the Algerian date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove important factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. There is no tree which produces so large a quantity of fruit and at the same time requires so little attention as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing, date-palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very low, yielding from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. They are, as it were, the camels among trees, for they thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that any other tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm has long since passed the experimental stage in Arizona—the heavily laden groves, which any one who cares to take the trouble can see for himself at several places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular evidence of the success with which this toothsome fruit can be grown under American conditions. The other crop which has, I am convinced, a rosy future in Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less water than any crop grown under irrigation. The fibre of the Egyptian cotton being about three times the length of the ordinary American-grown staple, it can always find a profitable market among thread manufacturers when our Southern cotton frequently goes unharvested because prices are too low to pay for picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United States each year. With the fertile soil, the warm, dry climate, and the water resources which are being so rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look out of the window of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape of fleecy white.

“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the porter, and that grinning Ethiopian will answer:

“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”

* * * * *

This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries before the great Genoese navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador, southern Arizona was the home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled in agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals which they constructed, the ruins of which may still be seen, providing object-lessons for the engineers of to-day. It is peculiarly interesting to recall that when the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in Palestine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height of its glory, when the Battle of Hastings had yet to be fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled in England, a remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this remote corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean that the inhabitants of this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers four, five, perhaps even six stories in height, that they possessed an organised government, that they had evolved a practical co-operative system not unlike the water-users’ associations of the Arizona of to-day, and that, by means of a system of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs—the remains of which may still be seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no means inconsiderable region. So great became the agricultural prosperity of this early people that it excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, who, in a series of forays probably extending over decades, at last succeeded in exterminating or driving out this agricultural population. Their many-storied dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which they constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again dried up for lack of water and returned in time to its original state, the habitat of the cactus and the mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.

Centuries passed, during which migratory bands of Indians were the only visitors to this silent and deserted land. Then, trudging up from the Spanish settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos de Niza in his sandals and woollen robe. He, the first white man to set foot in Arizona, after penetrating as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned to Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, where he related what he had seen to one of the Spanish officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who promptly equipped an expedition and started northward on his own account. Followed by half a thousand Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred friendly Indians, and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound across the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-clad mountains of Sonora, through rivers swollen into torrents by the spring rains, and so into Arizona, where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took possession of all this country in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. This was in the year of grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman the Magnificent was hammering at the gates of Budapest. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the country now comprising the State of Arizona was dotted with Spanish priests, who, in their missions of sun-dried bricks, devoted themselves to the disheartening task of Christianising the Indians. In 1680, however, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were slain upon their altars, their missions were ransacked and destroyed, and the work of civilisation which they had begun was set back a hundred years.

The nineteenth century was approaching its quarter mark before the first American frontiersmen, pushing southward from the Missouri in quest of furs and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid succession the Mexican War, which resulted in the cession to the United States of New Mexico, which then included all that portion of Arizona lying north of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California, which, by drawing attention to the country south of the Gila as a desirable transcontinental railway route, resulted in its purchase under the terms of the Gadsden Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a Confederate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its organisation as a Territory of the Union. The early period of American rule was extremely unsettled; Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers, adventurers, gamblers, bandits, horse thieves—leading to one of the worst though one of the most picturesque periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 1912, the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the sisterhood of States, and George W. P. Hunt, its first elected governor, standing on the steps of the capitol, swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled crowd for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the staff and broke out into a flag with eight-and-forty stars.

Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona is greater than that of Italy, there are only three communities in the State—Phœnix, Tucson, and Prescott—which by any stretch of the census taker’s figures are entitled to be called cities. They are, however, as far removed from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher cow-towns which most outlanders associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, and well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and dishevelled, militant suffragette. Phœnix, the capital, I had pictured as consisting of a broad and very dusty main street bordered by houses of adobe and unpainted wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded by wooden awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings and with every other place a temple to the goddesses of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium of apology. As a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern and up-to-the-minute as a girl just back from Paris. Its streets are paved so far into the country that you wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to hold out. Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised as those of Broadway, and the head waiter in the Adams House café will hand you a menu which contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare d’Astrachan to fromage de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the municipal regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs as raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically prohibited, while the charge for a liquor licence has been placed at such a prohibitive figure that gentlemen with dry throats are compelled to walk several blocks before they can find a place with swinging doors. Tucson, on the other hand, still retains many of its Mexican characteristics. It is a town of broad and sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along its principal business thoroughfares being shaded by hospitable wooden awnings, which are a godsend to the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer. It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, as the guide-book writers put it, will well repay a visit—provided the weather is not too hot and the visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently situated on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of an incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to know that Arizona is the greatest producer of copper in the world, its output exceeding that of Montana or Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the Yavapai Club, an architectural conceit which produces the effect of a stope, or gallery in a mine—fitting tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry which gives it being.

Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway, which is the only north-and-south line in the State, forming a link between the Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that you will tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs Junction, which is the station for Castle Hot Springs, which lie a score or so of miles beyond the sound of the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the Bradshaw Mountains. It is a _dolce far niente_ spot—a peaceful backwater of the tumultuous stream of life. Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls of rock is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and dotted with palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties of cacti and clumps of giant cane. A mountain stream meanders through it, and on the hillside above the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and deep, cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the subtropic vegetation, vividly recall the dak-bungalows in the Indian hills, are three great pools screened by hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as the temperature of the water ranges from 115 to 122 degrees.

When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an acquaintance with an old-time prospector who asserted that he was the original discoverer of the place.

“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently. “I’d been prospectin’ up on the headwaters of the Verde. One day, while I was ridin’ through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of ’Paches struck my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed the hull blamed bunch was after me lickety-split as fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a rainstorm, and as she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’ away from ’em, an’ I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar with the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum, friend, if I didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon! Yes, sirree, that’s just what I went an’ done! Its walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a house in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’ me—an’ behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’ like the red devils that they were. I seen that it was all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t no possible chanct to escape—not one!”

“And what happened to you?” interrupted an excited listener.

“What happened to me?” was the withering answer. “Hell, what could happen? They killed me, damn ’em; _they killed me!_”

* * * * *

From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a tropic country modified in the north by its elevation. It has no summer or winter in the generally accepted sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and August and a dry one the rest of the year. In the spring and fall dust-storms are frequent—and if you have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you have something to be thankful for—while in the summer it gets so hot that I have seen them cover the skylight of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with canvas and keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to sundown. The warmest part of the State, and, in fact, the warmest place north of the lowlands of the Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where the mercury in a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said, however, that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation from moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high temperatures of southern Arizona are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a humid atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the all-pervading sunshine, Arizona has in recent years come to be looked upon as a great natural sanitarium, and to it flock thousands of sufferers from catarrhal and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however, I do not believe that Arizona is by any means an ideal sick-man’s country; for, particularly in advanced stages of tuberculosis, there is always the danger of overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like quality of the air, feeling well before he is well and overexerting himself in consequence.

Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was never put to a severer test than it was a few years ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then at the height of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity afforded by changing engines at Yuma to address a few remarks to the assembled citizens of the place from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma, as I have already remarked, has the reputation of being the red-hottest spot north of Panama, and its residents are correspondingly touchy when any illusion is made to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their feelings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks, dragged in the bewhiskered story of the soldier who died at Fort Yuma from a combination of sunstroke and delirium tremens. The following night his bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. “Dear Bill,” it ran, “please send down my blankets.” Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I have heard it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein at the head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of the club in Zanzibar, with its locale laid in each of those places, and I haven’t the least doubt in the world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses when it was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants of Yuma, with a politeness truly Chesterfieldian, not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr. Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but it is said that one or two of them even laughed hoarsely. The Arizonian heat is not of the sunstroke variety, however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, remember, is only in the desert half of the State—the mountain half is as high and cool as you could wish, with snow-capped mountains and green grass and running water and fish and game everywhere.