Part 7

Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In the foot-hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost as common as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience, perseverance, and a pack of well-trained “b’ar dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an opportunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a cinnamon on the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards, or jaguars, frequently make their way into the southern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though small herds of antelope are still occasionally seen, the law has stepped in at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and prevented their complete extermination. But if you want an experience to relate over the coffee and cigars that will make your friends’ stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as woodchuck shooting on the farm, why don’t you run down to that portion of Arizona lying along the Mexican border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there _are_ wild camels there. They came about in this fashion: Along in the late seventies, if I am not mistaken, the Department of Agriculture, thinking to confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers of the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head of camels from Egypt, arguing that if they could carry heavy burdens over great stretches of waterless and pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why they could not do the same thing in Arizona, where almost identically the same conditions prevailed. But the paternalistic officials in Washington failed to take into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the camel is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite different from the patient and uncomplaining burro, but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it were, make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition and get along with him accordingly. Not so the Arizona packer. He took a hearty dislike to the ship of the desert from the first and never let pass an opportunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility and abuse, many of the poor beasts died and the remainder were finally turned loose in the desert to shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied they at least have not decreased and are still to be found in those uninhabited stretches of desert which lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not protected by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to require some hunting; so if you want to add to your collection of trophies a head that, as a cowboy acquaintance of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,” you can’t do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.

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In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind that the State consists of two distinct regions, as dissimilar in climate and physiography as Florida and Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine and palm. If you will take a pencil and ruler and draw a line diagonally across the map of the State, from Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican border, you will have a rough idea of the extent of these two zones. That portion of the State lying to the north of this imaginary line is a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested, with green grass and running water and cold, dry winters, and an annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty inches. To the south of this quartering line lies a tremendous stretch of arid but fertile land, broken at intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly in the vicinity of the Colorado, often does not exceed three inches. It is in this southern portion, however, that the future of Arizona lies, for the success of the great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant future by similar undertakings on the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde, the Little Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing proof that all that its arid soil requires is water to transform it into a land of farms and orchards and gardens, in which the energetic man of modest means—and it is such men who form the backbone of every country—can find a generous living and a delightful home.

[Illustration: THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS.

The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently pompadour.”]

A grave injustice has been done to the people of the State by those fiction writers who have depicted Arizona society as consisting of cow-punchers, faro dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of saloons and poker palaces running at full blast, of stage-coaches and mail-trains held up and robbed, are as much out of date, if the reading public only knew it, as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter of fact, Arizona claims the most law-abiding population in the United States, and the claim is copper-riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and the gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force of public disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that picturesque body of constabulary which policed the country in territorial days, have been disbanded because there is no longer work for them to do. While it is not to be denied that a large number of the citizens, particularly in the range country, still carry firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is winked at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance than it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals of Arizona are famous as “go-gitters” and a very large proportion of the gentry whom they have gone for and gotten are promptly given free board and lodging in a large stone building at Florence, on the outer walls of which men pace up and down with Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State Penitentiary at Florence is one of the most modern and humanely conducted penal institutions in the United States, being under the direct supervision of Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates of prison reform in the country. When I visited the penitentiary with the governor, instead of spending the night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment in introducing the honour system in the Arizona prisons has met with such pronounced success that roads and bridges are now being constructed throughout the State by gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed wardens. In this connection they tell an amusing story of an English tourist who was getting his first view of Arizona from the observation platform of a Pullman. As the train tore westward his attention was attracted by the conspicuous suits worn by a force of men engaged in building a bridge.

“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his eye and addressing himself to the Irish brakeman, “who are the johnnies in the striped clothing?”

“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’ Sthate prison,” was the answer. “Most av thim’s murtherers too.”

“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the harder. “Isn’t it jolly dangerous to have murderers running loose about the country like that? What?”

“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly; “yez see, sorr, in most cases there was exterminating circumstances.”

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The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s annual carnival wished to obtain a stage-coach to use in the street pageants, they could not find one in the State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from Phœnix to Globe, driven by a gentleman who chews tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it has sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in which the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured me that he went round them on two wheels so as to save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’ hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher is still to be found, but he, like the longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before civilisation’s implacable advance.

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

THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.

“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier is still to be found.”]

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The history of Arizona divides itself into three epochs—the aboriginal, the exploratory, and the reclamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian, the Spanish, and the American—and each of these epochs is typified by a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure: the ruins of Casa Grande, the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa Grande—“the Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its Aztec name, which rises from the desert some sixty miles southeast of Phœnix, is the most remarkable plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house of sun-dried puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean walls, its low doorways so designed that any enemy would have to enter on hands and knees, and its labyrinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking and significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a ruin when discovered, in 1694, by the Jesuit Father Kino, how old it is or who built it even the archæologists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins are emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of grain and breeders of cattle, whose energy and resource wrested this region from the desert, and who were driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more warlike people.

In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa Rita Mountains sweep down to meet the desert half a dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the white Mission of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the Spanish orders stretched across Arizona in their campaign of proselytism three centuries ago. I saw it for the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes and towers and minarets silhouetted against the purple of the mountains as though carved from ivory. Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as, swinging sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and the sky, but I shall always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. If California had that mission she would advertise and exploit it to the skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to it in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with other and more important things. In fact, I had to inquire of three people in the hotel at Tucson before I could learn just where it was. Although the patter of monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased these many years, San Xavier is neither deserted nor run down, for the sonorous phrases of the mass are still heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling nuns conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts of its white-walled cloisters, and at twilight the angelus-bell still booms its brazen summons and the red men from the adjacent reservation come trooping in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona missions, it stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous _padres_ who first brought Christianity to Arizona, many of them at the cost of their lives.

Eighty miles north of Phœnix, at the back of the Superstition Mountains and almost under the shadow of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt Dam—the last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s history. Those who know whereof they speak have estimated that four fifths of the State is fitted, so far as the potentialities of the soil is concerned, for agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has reduced the available area to that which lay within the capabilities of the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate. This was particularly true of the region of which Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men who proceeded to perform a modern version of the miracle of Moses, for, behold, they smote the rock and where there had been no water before there was now water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the mountains they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone and cement to hold in check and to conserve for use in the dry season the waters of the river which swirled through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square miles in area, thus created, holds water enough to cover more than a million and a quarter acres with a foot of water and assures a permanent supply to the two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the project. The farmers of the Salt River valley, which comprises the territory under irrigation, forming themselves into an association, entered into a contract with the government to repay the cost of the dam in ten years, whereupon it will become the property of the landowners themselves; the water, under the terms of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the land. Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a reminder of a race long since dead and gone, and as the white mission at Tucson is a memorial to the Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam at Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity, a monument to the courage, daring, and resource of the American. It is a very wonderful work that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the toil-hardened, sun-tanned men who are doing it I am proud to raise my hat. Such men are pioneers of progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping a path for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”

IV

THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

“It lies where God hath spread it, In the gladness of His eyes, Like a flame of jewelled tapestry Beneath His shining skies; With the green of woven meadows, And the hills in golden chains, The light of leaping rivers, And the flash of poppied plains.

...

Sun and dews that kiss it, Balmy winds that blow, The stars in clustered diadems Upon its peaks of snow; The mighty mountains o’er it, Below, the white seas swirled— Just California stretching down The middle of the world.”

IV

THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster. But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as you please.

Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, freighting across the Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either. Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land.... The remainder of the level land contains too much alkali to be safe, except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River, with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (_selling_, mind you, not merely being offered) for _just a thousand times that sum_.

[Illustration: How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona.

“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and the sky.”

SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.]

Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre. Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus; their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.

Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns which are now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre, Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every building has its _portales_, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk, thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for, though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is like a blast from an open furnace door.

When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside. Amid the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful lights of many bungalows.

“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush. Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”

And I agreed with him that it was.

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