Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

CHAPTER X
THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF ARIZONA

Everybody enjoys his stop off at the Petrified Forest. For one thing, this sight is as easy of achievement as falling off a log, and that counts heavily with your average American tourist. Even if your train drops you at Adamana[62] in the middle of the night, as some trains do, there will be somebody there to carry your bag and pilot you the couple of hundred yards to the lone hotel which, with the railroad station and the water tank, is practically all there is of Adamana. Then you are put comfortably to bed in a room that awaits you. In the morning you are given a leisurely breakfast at your own hour, and packed in an automobile to see one part of the Forest; brought home to luncheon; and in the afternoon motored off to another part. If you are an invalid or just naturally lazy, you need not even leave your seat in the conveyance. After that it is your choice to proceed on your travels, or stay over another day and visit more distant parts of the Forest. In seeing the Forest, you incidentally have several miles of reasonably easy driving over the vast northern Arizona plateau with its wide views to the edge of a world hemmed in with many a dreamy mountain range and long, colorful, flat-topped mesas breaking away in terraces and steps to the plains. You will quite possibly see coyotes and jackrabbits and prairie dogs, cattle grazing the wild grasses, a Navajo Indian or two, cowboys on their loping ponies, perhaps a round-up with its trailing chuckwagon. You will steep yourself in the delicious Arizona sunshine, and be humbled before the majesty of the glorious Arizona sky, blue as sapphire and piled high at times with colossal masses of cumulus clouds that forevermore will mean Arizona to you.

The Forest is unfortunately mis-named, for it is not a forest. There is not a single standing trunk, such as you may see occasionally in Utah or the Yellowstone. In the midst of a treeless plain the broken logs litter the ground in sections rarely over 25 feet long, oftenest in short chunks as if sawn apart, and in chips and splinters innumerable. Trunk diameters of 2 or 3 feet are common, and as high as 6 feet has been reported. It seems likely that the trees did not grow where they now lie but have been washed hither in some prehistoric swirl of waters, (as logs are carried down stream in our latter-day puny freshets,) becoming stranded in certain depressions of the land where we now find them, often having had their woody tissue gradually replaced by silica and agatized. Whence they came nobody knows, nor when. The guess of the unlettered guide who shows you about, may be as near right as the trained geologist’s, who locates the time of their fall as the Triassic Age, and their old home as perhaps beside some inland sea; but whether that was one million years ago or twenty, who can say, further than that they surely antedate the appearance of man upon this planet. The trees are evidently of different sorts, but mostly conifers apparently related to our present day araucarias, of which the Norfolk Island pine is a familiar example. Mr. F. H. Knowlton, botanist of the Smithsonian Institution, identifies then as Araucarioxylon Arizonicum, an extinct tree once existing also in the east-central United States.[63] Limbs and branches in anything approaching entirety are not found—only the trunks and infinite fragments are here. The coloration due to the presence of iron oxides in the soil at the time of silicification is often exquisite, in shades of pink, yellow, blue, brown, crimson—a never failing source of delight to visitors. Dr. L. F. Ward, of the United States Geological Survey, has said that “there is no other petrified forest in which the wood assumes so many varied and interesting forms and colors.... The state of mineralization in which much of this wood exists almost places it among the gems or precious stones. Not only are chalcedony, opals and agates found among them, but many approach the condition of jasper and onyx.”[64]

The parts of the Forest that tourists usually visit are the so-called First Forest, about 6 miles south of Adamana (which contains the huge trunk that spans a picturesque chasm 45 feet wide, and is known as the Natural Bridge[65]); the Second Forest, 2½ miles further south; and the North Forest. The last is 9 miles due north from Adamana, at the edge of such a chaotic, burned-out bit of volcanic waste, as is in itself worth seeing, breaking away gradually into the Painted Desert. If for any reason, your time is too limited to admit of your visiting more than one section of the Forest, by all means, let that section be this North Forest. The trees are less numerous and the fragments are less strikingly colored than in the parts to the south, but that background of color and mystery given by the desert, lends a fascination and gives to the picture a composition that is unique and unforgettable.

There is, moreover, the so-called Third or Rainbow Forest,[66] 13 miles southwest of Adamana. This region contains the most numerous and the largest trunks, some of them (partially underground) measuring upwards of 200 feet in length. The especially rich coloring of the wood here has given rise to the local name “Rainbow.”

In several parts of the Petrified Forest (a large portion of which is now, by the way, a National Monument), are the ruins of many small prehistoric Indian villages. The relics found indicate that four different stocks of Indians have lived among these shattered trees, one clearly Hopi, another probably Zuñian, the others undetermined (one apparently of cannibalistic habits). Dr. Walter Hough has written very entertainingly of this human interest of the Petrified Forest in Harpers’ Magazine for November, 1902. The houses of the Rainbow Forest were unique in aboriginal architecture in that they were constructed of petrified logs. To quote Dr. Hough: “It is probable that prehistoric builders never chose more beautiful stones for the construction of their habitations than the trunks of the trees which flourished ages before man appeared on the earth. This wood agate also furnished material for stone hammers, arrowheads and knives, which are often found in ruins hundreds of miles from the Forest.”[67]

CHAPTER XI
FLAGSTAFF AS A BASE

A score of years ago Flagstaff[68] was chiefly known to the traveler as the gateway to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, 70 miles to the northwest. One may still reach that marvelous chasm by automobile from Flagstaff, arriving at Grand View after 5 or 6 hours’ driving, now through a park-like forest of yellow pine, now across an open plateau region with alluring views of far-off mountain ranges and of the Painted Desert. The completion of the railroad spur from Williams to the Grand Cañon, however, put a quietus upon the operation of the horse stages from Flagstaff; and since the passing of the Grand Cañon business the town has cut small figure in tourist itineraries, its energies since being concentrated on the less precarious profits from lumber, cattle and wool. Nevertheless, its situation in a clearing of the beautiful Coconino National Forest, 7000 feet above the sea makes it a convenient base for visiting certain attractions of a remarkable nature thereabout, as lava beds, ice caves, extinct volcanoes, prehistoric cliff[69] and cinder-cone dwellings, the Painted Desert, and the famous San Francisco Peaks, fabled home of the Hopi Katchinas and the scene of many an Indian legend. The town has several hotels of a modest sort, and is on the line of the National Old Trails transcontinental motor highway; and if you have your own car or the wherewithal to rent one in Flagstaff, you can be very happy in this neighborhood for a week or two. The town itself, with a population of a couple of thousand, has a certain picturesqueness of an up-to-date frontier fashion, in which automobiles and soda-pop largely take the place of ponies, pistols and “forty-rod,” for at this writing the hand of “bone dry” Prohibition rests paternally upon Arizona. Especially interesting are Saturday nights, when the streets are likely to be thronged with lumberjacks, cowpunchers and ranchers—American and Mexican—come to town to swap news and trade, to see the “shows,” play pool and listen to the “rag” of blatant gramophones. A Navajo or two, standing in the glare of the electric lights, may add a touch of aboriginal color to the scene—teamsters for some desert trading post.

Dominating Flagstaff, as Mont Blanc dominates Chamonix, is the isolated mountain mass, the highest in Arizona, called the San Francisco Peaks, snow-crowned seven or eight months in the year and familiar to every traveler by the Santa Fe’s transcontinental trains. Their clustered half-dozen summits in the form of graceful cones attain a maximum elevation of 12,611 feet above the sea (5600 feet above Flagstaff) and have been a famous landmark from the time of the Spanish conquistadores, who named them, to the present day. The Navajos, as has been told in a previous chapter, assign to the great mountain a divine construction from earth brought up in the Emergence from the underworld, the gods who built it pinning it down poetically with a sunbeam. Matter-of-fact geologists, however, consider the mass as merely an extinct volcano with its top blown off, and find its flanks covered with the congealed lava streams of successive eruptions. The disintegrated surfaces of lava make a fertile bed for the abundant forests, gardens of wild flowers, and natural fields of indigenous grasses that clothe the base and sides up to within a few hundred feet of the craggy top. If you have a taste for mountain climbing and fine outlooks, by all means give a day or two to the San Francisco Mountain. It is of easiest ascent, and the views, full of delight from the moment you leave Flagstaff, attain at the summit a climax that is nothing short of dramatic. The whole of the northern and central Arizona plateau is spread below and about you in such glory of color (if the atmospheric conditions be right) as you have never dreamt of. You can pick out the farther wall of the Grand Cañon and the Buckskin Mountains beyond; the companion volcanic cones of Kendrick, Bill Williams,[70] and Sitgreaves to the westward; the Mogollon Mesa stretching south towards Phoenix; the Verde Valley; the Red Rock Country and Oak Creek Cañon; Sunset Peak;[71] and most striking of all, the glory of the Painted Desert stretching illimitably to the northeast, with the Little Colorado River winding across it to join the Big Colorado 60 miles due north of you. The opportunity to enjoy that unobscured outlook upon the desert from a point over a mile above it, is alone a sufficient reward for the trip. It is like looking on another world, so unearthly are the tones in which that marvelous waste is dyed—indefinite shades of yellow, pink, crimson, brown, cream, green; so striking the sculpturing of its mesas and promontories. Then, too, if you have a spark of romance in your make-up, will it not be an event to tread the very pathways of the gods with whom the Indian fancy has peopled the glades and gorges of this hoary old volcano, as the Greeks peopled Ida—to know that somewhere in these sunny, piny slopes is the fabled house of the Sun God, who, when he would travel, summons a rainbow, as you or I would ring for a taxicab, and to whom, it is said, the Hopis still send prayer plumes by a messenger who trots the 70 miles from the pueblos hither between sunrise and sunset of a summer day?

Would it not give you a thrill to feel when passing through the aspen groves that dot the upper heights, that in such a rustling wood here upon this very mountain, when the world was young, the Hero-Children of the Spider Woman slew the wicked Giant Elk who ravaged the land of the Hopi—those Hero-Children of whom one was Youth, begotten of the Light, and the other Echo, begotten of the Raindrop?[72]

From Flagstaff to the tip of Humphrey’s Peak, the highest of all, is 10 miles in a bee-line, or about 15 as pedestrians and horses go. Of this distance about 5 miles are by a good road practicable for automobiles, now winding through open forest, now skirting some ranch—a pleasant, old-fashioned highway bordered with worm fences and thickets of wild rose and goldenrod. From a certain point on the road to the Peaks, which are always in view, an easy trail leads through a charming forest to which the absence of underbrush gives a park-like character, open and sunny and carpeted in places with wild flowers. The prevailing trees for a couple of thousand feet of the ascent are yellow pines, rising at their best to a height of over 100 feet and probably of an age of 300 to 500 years. Above this yellow pine belt the trail steepens and zigzags sharply bringing you out at last amid broken stone and volcanic scoriae where no trees are, only shy sub-alpine plants clinging by their toes to the crevices of the rocks. Here a hog-back joins Humphrey’s Peak (12,611 feet) and Agassiz (12,330 feet), and you have the choice of mounting to either or both. Under the eastern slopes of these peaks a glacier 2 miles long once headed, whose bed is now a large valley within the mountain’s folds dropping downward to the northeast. To the geological, this valley with its moraine and glaciated rocks is a source of especial interest, since it constitutes one of the southernmost instances of ice action within the United States.[73]

A good walker used to high altitudes can do the round trip from Flagstaff to the summit and back in a day of 12 hours, but he should be sure to carry water. For the average tourist, however, horseback is recommended with a guide (procurable at Flagstaff). Added interest will be secured by arranging to camp over night upon the mountain, for in this way the superb light effects of early morning and evening may be enjoyed at leisure. Owing to snow on the peaks most of the year, the ascent must usually be made between mid-June and mid-October. June is probably the best month, if snow is absent, as the atmosphere is then apt to be at its clearest; after that, September or early October is the choice. July and August are months of frequent, almost daily, thunderstorms, which, of course, are disturbing factors in more ways than one. Flagstaff, by the way, is credited by the United States’ Geological Survey with a greater rainfall than any other station in Arizona, and this is attributed to its nearness to the San Francisco Mountain.

Should you desire a closer acquaintance with that harlequin of wastes, the Painted Desert, there are from Flagstaff two trips you can take across an end of it with reasonable success in a motor car. One is to the Hopi village of Oraibi by way of Tolcheco, and the other to Tuba. The distance in each case is about 70 miles. To Tuba there is a semi-weekly automobile stage (with shovel and water bags strapped to it), making the round trip usually inside of one day. It is an interesting excursion, taking you close to Sunset Peak, with its remarkable rosy crest, and over the Little Colorado River by a bridge that makes the traveler independent of the sudden rises of that erratic stream. You will pass here and there mounds that are the crumbled remains of prehistoric pueblos, and again stone chips and bits of trunks of petrified trees, the scattered fragments of vanished forests of which the Petrified Forest of Adamana is our most perfect remnant. Sometimes we pass beneath ruddy cliffs eroded and weathered into such grotesqueness of face and figure as would make Alice out of Wonderland feel at home, squat toads and humped camels and ogres with thick grinning lips. Farther away, mesas jutting into the desert present the semblance of cities with towers and ramparts in ghostly tones of pink and yellow and cream.[74] Occasionally an auto-truck, hauling goods to or from some desert trade-post, passes you, and sometimes a wagon train of wool, horse-drawn, in charge of Navajo teamsters. Approaching Tuba, you cross the Moenkopi Wash, and are refreshed with the greenery of the farms of the Hopis, who from time immemorial have occupied this haunt of moisture. If you have time to visit the little pueblo of Moenkopi, 2 miles from Tuba and perched on the mesa edge overlooking the farms, it will interest you. It is the westernmost of all the Hopi villages, its population of a couple of hundred enjoying life in Indian fashion with abounding dances and thanksgiving. At Tuba itself, there is not much for the casual visitor, except a couple of Indian trading establishments and a Government Boarding School with its concomitant buildings connected with the Agency of the Western Navajo Reservation. The region roundabout, however, includes enough points of local interest to occupy a two or three weeks’ vacation very pleasantly. Accommodations are obtainable at a trader’s or one of the Government houses, and saddle horses may be hired from the Indians. Some 65 miles to the north are certain remarkably fine pueblo- or Cliff dwelling-ruins, known as Betata Kin and Keet Seel, in Marsh Pass.[75]

Twenty or thirty miles south of Flagstaff is a region of unique interest, known as the Oak Creek Valley, whither Flagstaffians motor in season to fish for trout and enjoy a bit of Arcady. There are a public resort or two and a number of ranches in the valley, tributary to which is some of the wildest scenery in the Southwest. In adjacent cañons, whose sides often rise an almost sheer 800 to 1000 feet, are the ruined habitations of a prehistoric people (probably ancestors of certain existing Hopi clans)—cliff houses, cavate dwellings and fortified eminences, the last advantageously adopted by the Apaches in the wars of half a century ago. The dominant color of the rock is bright red, frequently in horizontal bands, and has gained the region the popular appellation of “The Red Rock Country.” The cañon walls and outstanding rock masses have been worn by the elements into columns, minarets, steeples, temples and other architectural semblances such as are shown surpassingly in the Grand Cañon. Indian pictographs abound—some prehistoric, some evidently of modern Apache doing. Dr. J. W. Fewkes, the scientific discoverer of the region a quarter of a century ago, thought himself justified in comparing it to the Garden of the Gods, than which it is much more extended.[76]

CHAPTER XII
THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO RIVER IN ARIZONA

From Williams, on the Santa Fe’s transcontinental line, a branch runs due north across 65 miles of the great Colorado Plateau and lands the traveler at the very rim of the Grand Cañon—one of the most enjoyable, most novel, most awakening sights among the Southwest’s marvels. Even if your arrival be at darkest midnight, you will feel the nearness of that awful void in the unseen—a strange and humbling experience. For accommodations you have the choice of American plan and what passes in the wilderness for luxury at the big El Továr Hotel,[77] or of lodging yourself more economically but comfortably enough in cabin or tent at the nearby Bright Angel Camp with meals á la carte at the Harvey Café. Then you will want to know what to see.

The Grand Cañon is among those stupendous natural wonders that the traveler needs time to adjust himself to; and I am inclined to believe that his first act in wisdom is to sit down at the rim with a comprehensive map before him and spend a leisurely hour studying geography. Fortunately a very good practical map is included in the Santa Fe’s folder that describes the Cañon, and this may be had of any agent for the asking. The names, taken from all sorts of mythologies and philosophies—Hindu, Chinese, Norse, British, Greek, Egyptian, with a dash of Aztec and latter day American—and given to the various prominent shapes simulating temples, pagodas, castles, towers, colonnades and what not, are rather bewildering and indeed seem out of place in mid-Arizona. In better taste, I think, are the more simply named spots that commemorate adjacent native tribes as Hopi, Walapai, Zuñi; old white dwellers by the rim like Bass, Rowe and Hance; and explorers associated with the Cañon, such as Powell, Escalante and Cárdenas. Cárdenas, it may not be amiss to state, was the officer dispatched by Coronado from Zuñi to learn the truth about the great gorge and river, the report of which Tovar had brought him from the Hopis. It was Cárdenas and his little company of a dozen soldiers, who, one autumn day of 1540, were the first white men to look into the mighty chasm. At the bottom they could detect the great river flowing, seemingly a mere thread of a rivulet; but their attempts to reach it were fruitless, so precipitous they found the Cañon walls.[78] The stream that first received the name of Colorado, is the one we now call Little Colorado. Oñate dubbed it so—Spanish for red—because of the color of its turbid waters. The greater river in Cárdenas’s day was known as el Rio del Tizón, the river of the Fire-brand—a name given it by explorers of its lower waters because of certain Indians on its bank whom the Spaniards saw warming themselves with brands taken from the fire. The Colorado River as we now know it, and including its tributaries the Grand and the Green, drains a region only secondary to the basin of the Mississippi. Its length from the headwaters of the Green in Wyoming to the outlet into the Gulf of California is about 2000 miles. The Grand Cañon (including 65 miles above the junction with the Little Colorado and known as Marble Cañon) is 283 miles in length, the walls varying from 3000 to nearly 6000 feet high and rising from the river in a series of huge steps or terraces, so that the width, which at the river is from about 100 to 600 feet, increases to several miles at the rim. The deepest part of the chasm is near the hotels, and the river there flows over a mile below them.[79] The Cañon walls are the delight of geologists, who find there in orderly arrangement (stratum upon stratum in banded colors) the deposits of the successive ages of the earth from the archaean granite to the lava flows of recent geologic time. A succinct and readable account of the geological features of the Cañon will be found in the United States Geological Survey’s admirable Guide Book of the Western United States, Part C—a book of especial value to the car-window observer on the Santa Fe route.

Trains to the Cañon are arranged so that travelers may reach it in the early morning and leave the same evening. In a way this is unfortunate, for it offers a temptation, almost irresistible to an American tourist, to “do” the place in a day and go on to some other sight. Of course no one can do it in a day, but he can do certain things, and he can get a notion of the general scheme. Three days at least would best be planned for, and of course more still would be better. The principal features that should not be missed, may be summed up as follows: A horseback trip down into the Cañon by either Bright Angel Trail or the Hermit Trail; the drive (15 miles the round) over the Hermit Rim road; the auto trip (26 miles the round) to Grand View Point. There are, moreover, several short drives of four or five miles by public coach to vantage points along the rim, costing a dollar or two per passenger; and of course walks innumerable, among which that to Hopi Point, about 2 miles northwest from the railway terminus, is particularly to be recommended for its sunset view of the Cañon. Another pleasant short rim walk is to Yavapai Point, 1½ miles to the eastward. From both these points the view is superb.

The trip down the Bright Angel[80] trail to the river and back is an all day jaunt. To the tenderfoot it is a somewhat harrowing experience to be borne downward at an angle of 45 degrees more or less on the back of a wobbling animal, whose head at times hangs over eternity, and whose only footing is on a narrow shelf scratched out of a precipitous wall of the Cañon. However, as nothing tragical happens, and as there is no escape once you are started on the descensus Averni, you soon find enjoyment in the novel trip, zigzagging ever downward through successive geologic ages marked by rock strata in white, red, brown and blue.

Something over half way down there is a grateful let-up, when the trail runs out upon a plateau watered by a musical little brook. This place is known as “The Indian Garden.” It is enclosed on three sides by lofty reddish walls, and here some Havasupai Indians are said to have had in comparatively recent times a village, and to have cultivated the land. Long before them, however, en el tiempo de cuanto ha, as the Pueblo story tellers say in poetic Spanish (“in the time of how long ago”), another race must have tilled the same soil, as the near-by cliffs maintain numerous remains of rock dwellings and other evidences of human occupancy. It is a pleasant, flowery, romantic spot, this Indian Garden, in the Cañon’s crimson heart, with its fascinating environment of rock sculpturings that seem the towers, palaces and temples of an enchanted city awaiting the lifting of a spell. At the plateau’s outer edge you have a stupendous view of the colossal gorge and the muddy torrent of the river, leaping and roaring 1300 feet below. You may make the Indian Garden the limit of your descent, or you may continue to the river itself, corkscrewing down among the crevices and rockbound ways and echoes of the inexorable wall until you come out upon a little beach, past which, more terrible than beautiful, the savage torrent thunders and cascades and tears its course to freedom. You will be glad to get into the blessed upper world again, but you would not have missed the experience for a greater cost of clambering.

The Hermit Rim road is a first-class modern highway (so far barred, thank heaven, to automobiles), extending about 7½ miles westward from El Tovar by way of Hopi Point to the Hermit Basin. Part of it passes through beautiful stretches of park-like forest, emerging upon the dizzy brink of the Cañon with magnificent outlooks over chasm and river to distant mountains and cloud-piled sky. If you enjoy walking, it is pleasant to do this trip one way in the public coach and the other afoot by way of Rowe’s Well. The Hermit Rim Road ends at the head of a comparatively new trail to the river, a sort of trail de luxe, 4 feet wide and protected by a stone wall very reassuring to the apprehensive. As on the Bright Angel trail, there is a plateau midway. Here a public camp is maintained, where accommodations for an over-night stay may be had. From this camp to the river must be done afoot—an easy grade, it is said, but I cannot speak from personal knowledge. There is a trail connecting the lower portions of Hermit and Bright Angel trails, so that one may go to the river by one route and return by the other. This consumes 3 days ordinarily, and must be taken as a camping trip with its concomitant ups and downs. It is hardly to be recommended to any but the reasonably robust—and good natured!

Grand View Point, 13 miles east of El Tovar—a beautiful drive that may be done by motor car through the Coconino Forest—is the terminus of the old-time stage route from Flagstaff. The view at the point is perhaps the finest of all—quite different from that at El Tovar and more extended: owing to the greater width between the main walls of the Cañon; to the fact that the river here makes a sharp turn to the north; and the further fact that the relative lowness of the eastern wall of the bend opens up a vista towards the desert, which at El Tovar is hidden. The Grand View round trip with a look-around at Grand View Point may be done in half a day from El Tovar, but if one can afford to give a day or two to it, the material is here to be worth the extra time. Here is a hotel to care for you. Particularly of interest is the trail to Moran Point, some half dozen miles to the east, an exquisite outlook and the view point of Thomas Moran’s famous picture of the Cañon which occupies a place in the Capitol at Washington. There is a trail down to the river from Grand View Point, and another by way of Red Cañon, heading a little to the west of Moran Point. A connecting trail at the bottom of the Cañon makes it possible to descend by one trail and return by the other, if one goes prepared to camp by the river. There are, by the way, several varieties of fish in the Colorado, one, the so-called Colorado salmon,[81] being a good table fish, though the catching involves no sport, as it is not gamey.

The Grand Cañon may be visited at any season, though in winter there is often snow upon the rim and upper levels. Usually there is not enough to interfere seriously with reaching the various points of interest; and as one descends into the gorge, one soon passes out of wintry into warmer and still warmer conditions. Even in December some flowers will be blooming in the bottom of the Cañon. July and August constitute the usual summer rainy season, when frequent thunderstorms are to be expected, particularly in the afternoons. They are usually of short duration. The atmospheric effects accompanying and succeeding them are often magnificent.[82]

CHAPTER XIII
MONTEZUMA’S CASTLE AND WELL, WHICH MONTEZUMA NEVER SAW

If you happen never to have speculated in copper or archaeology and are not a Southwesterner, it is quite likely that you have not heard of the Verde Valley. It is a somewhat sinuous cleft up and down the very center of Arizona, holding in its heart the Verde River (el Rio Verde, or Green River, of the Spaniards) which has its source under the San Francisco Peaks, and after 150 miles or so through cramped cañons and sunny bottomlands of more or less fertility, joins the Salt River about 50 miles east of the latter’s junction with the Gila. On the western edge of its upper reaches are the smelter towns of Clarkdale and Jerome,[83] and the famous copper mines of the United Verde Company. Across the valley from these, to the eastward and bordering the great Mogollon Mesa that divides the basin of the Little Colorado and the Gila, is that Red Rock country referred to in a previous chapter, together with the Verde’s beautiful tributary, Oak Creek; while some 30 miles to the south there enters the Verde another stream called Beaver Creek. It is upon the latter the scene of this present chapter is laid.

Today the valley of the Verde maintains but a sparse population. Here and there is a white man’s hamlet; here and there are wickiups of the now peaceable Apaches; and where, between the cliffs that wall in much of the valley, there is level land enough to make farming operations possible, there are scattering ranches strung along. Time was, however, when the valley was the home of an abounding aboriginal population. How long ago that was no one knows, further than that it was before—and probably long before—the 16th century Spaniards discovered the Upper Verde and reported silver outcroppings there. The bordering cliffs and hilltops are dotted and honeycombed with the ruins of pueblos, stone fortresses and cave dwellings to an extent that has made the region unusually attractive to the archaeologists. Two of these prehistoric remains on Beaver Creek hold especial interest also for the lay traveler. They are the so-called Casa Montezuma, or Montezuma’s Castle, and Montezuma’s Well. The former, a strikingly fine example of a cliff ruin as imposing in its way as a castle on the Rhine, has been made a National Monument and is under such protection of the United States government as goes with a printed notice tacked upon a tree nearby, for there is no resident guardian. The Well is upon a private ranch 8 miles north of the Castle. It need hardly be said that Montezuma, whose name is popularly joined to both, had nothing whatever to do with either; nor indeed had any Aztec, though people who get their ancient history from newspapers, will tell you that the ruins are of Aztec construction. Both Castle and Well are close to the Arizona State Highway, and may be reached by a 50 or 60 mile drive from Flagstaff, or half that from Jerome. Another way to reach them is from Prescott by automobile livery. Yet another is by rail from Prescott to Cherry Creek (Dewey Postoffice) on the Crown King branch of the Santa Fe, and then by auto-stage through the picturesque Cherry Creek Cañon 32 miles to Campe Verde on the Verde River. Campe Verde was formerly an army post of importance during the Apache wars, but is now peaceful enough for the most pacific, maintaining a hotel, a garage, a barber shop, an ice-cream and soda-pop saloon, a store or two, and similar amenities of 20th century living as delightful as unexpected in this out-of-the-way corner of our country.

And I think here is as good a place as any to say a word about the modern Southwestern mail stage. It is, of course, motor-driven in this mechanical age, and lacks the peculiar dash and picturesqueness of the 4- and 6-horse vehicles of other days. Nevertheless, much of the charm that enveloped western stage travel then clings to the modern auto-stage. There is the same immersion in glorious, wild scenery; the same thrill of excitement as you spin down mountain grades and around curves with a cañon yawning hungrily beside you; the same exhilaration of association with fellow passengers of types foreign to Broadway or La Salle Street; many times there is the same driver, who, surrendering the ribbon for a steering wheel, has not at all changed his nature. The seat beside him is still the premium place, and if he takes a fancy to you, he will exude information, anecdote and picturesque fiction as freely as a spring its refreshing waters. To travel a bit by stage, when occasion offers, gives a flavor to your Southwestern outing that you will be sorry to have missed. Besides, it sometimes saves you money and time.

From Camp Verde to Montezuma’s Castle is a pleasant 3 mile jaunt. Of course you may miss the trail, as I did, and walk six, but if you keep close to Beaver Creek, with a sharp eye ahead, you can detect the ruin from nearly a mile away, snugly ensconced high up in a niche of a pale cliff, overlooking the valley. It is a comparatively small ruin, but there is a charm in its very compactness. And there is the charm, too, of color, the general tone of the buildings being pink set in a framing of white. The base is about 75 feet above the level of the creek that flows at the foot of the cliff—flows, that is, when water happens to be in it, which is not always. The structure itself is perhaps 30 feet high, with substantial squared walls of masonry, and is in 5 stories, access from one to another being either by openings in the ceilings or by modern ladders fastened against the outside walls. How the ancients managed the ascent from the ground, there is none to tell us. An interesting feature is a bowed parapet or battlement (the height of one’s shoulder), which surmounts the fourth story, and from below hides the fifth story rooms which are placed well back against the innermost part of the cliff recess and roofed by its overhang. Be sure you climb to that battlemented upper story (it will be no easy job, for you have to swing yourself up to it through the ceiling of the fourth), and leaning upon the parapet, enjoy the solitude that stretches before you—from the sycamores lining Beaver Creek at the cliff’s foot, across the mesquite-dotted mesa, and the green bottomlands of the Verde to the long purple range of the Black Hills in the dim southwest. If any sound there be, it is the whisper of the wind in the trees far below, or the cooing of the wild doves, which haunt the place. So do bats, and a certain queer acidulous smell that pervades the rooms is attributable to them. As you walk about, your feet stir up the dust of ages. Here and there on the mud-plastered walls are human finger prints dried in the material when it was laid on by prehistoric hands. In some of the rooms, particularly in certain cave dwellings (which, following the natural ledges, you will find scooped out of the tufa cliff beside the Castle), the ceiling and walls are blackened still with soot from the smoke of pre-Columbian fires. You may pick up bits of pottery, as you stroll, corn-cobs wizened of the ages, broken metates, or malpais rubbing stones, mute reminders of the human drama once enacted here. The airy battlement is pierced with downward-pointing loopholes through which arrows were doubtless shot at foes below. It is this abounding and evident human touch, this mystery of a long vanished human life, that lends to Southwestern travel a unique fascination, reaching to something in us that is not awakened by purely natural aspects more sublime but disassociated from man. In spite of the fact that men will kill one another, mistreat, enslave and exploit one another, men never lose a supreme interest in men; stronger than all is the yearning of the human heart for other human hearts. Is it love outwearing love’s antithesis?

Montezuma’s Well is 8 miles further up Beaver Creek, and is reached by a public highway quite practicable for automobiles when the fords of the creek are not running high water. You pass a ranch every mile or so, and the Well itself is found to be situated inside the wire fences of one. After the hospitable and unexacting solitude of Montezuma’s Castle, you will experience a bit of a shock, perhaps, at the fences and in finding that a fee of half a dollar is imposed for entrance to the Well. Nevertheless the sight is worth the money. Proceeding from the ranch house across an eighth of a mile of open, treeless mesa, you come quite without warning, to a crater-like[84] opening 500 feet across, yawning at your feet. Its walls drop almost perpendicularly some 60 feet or more to a round pool of clear water steel blue, except around the margins, where accumulations of pondweed give it a brown tinge. There is a precipitous, stony trail down which you may pick your way to the water’s edge; and there, as in the bottom of a colossal mush-bowl, you are hid from the world and the world from you. Catclaw and wild grape, hackberry and wild walnut and salt-bush make a scrubby cover roundabout, with datura and cleome and blooming wild tobacco adding a flower-touch. There is here as at Montezuma’s Castle a peculiar sense of loneliness and silence—broken only by an occasional bird note, or the hum of vagabond bees. In the clear, still waters of the pool are reflections of the cliffs, and raising your eyes to them you recognize in the southern side a few squat little stone houses wedged in between the strata of the rock walls. You can, if you choose, easily climb to some of them, and stooping through the small doorways get a taste of what it was like to be a cliff dweller. At the north end of the pond there is a thicket of willows and cottonwoods, and there the waters find their exit by an underground passage that would lead them into Beaver Creek (which flows beyond the hill) were it not that they are diverted to irrigate the ranch lands. Near this place of disappearance, is a very interesting feature of the Well—a series of natural caverns reaching far back under the hill, forming an irregular dwelling of many rooms, with occasional bits of built-in wall of mud-plastered stone. Upon such a wall at the very entrance of the cavern is the tiny imprint of a child’s hand, left we must suppose, by some prehistoric toddler steadying itself—how many, many centuries ago, who can tell?—against the freshly plastered surface, just as a baby, uncertain of its feet, would do to-day. At the time Mr. Chas. F. Lummis wrote his fascinating volume, “Some Strange Corners of our Country,” and described Montezuma’s Castle and Well, the precious imprint was perfect; but some witless latter-day visitor has pecked out the palm with his vandal jack-knife, destroying in a moment what Time, the arch-destroyer, had respected for centuries. Still the marks of the baby fingers were left when I visited the place a year ago and I hope still are, to link the fancy tenderly with that ancient people, our elder brethren.

The proprietor of the Well, Mr. W. B. Back, will guide you about and light you into the cavern’s recesses, piloting you with a lantern through passages so low and narrow at times that you must go almost on hands and knees until he brings you, far within, into a spacious and utterly dark rock-chamber with a stream of living water coursing musically through it, where further investigation is barred. He will also transport you in an anachronous row-boat across the bosom of the Well. It seems the soundings deepen suddenly from 80 feet at the outer part to 500 feet and no bottom at the center. There the water rises as in a funnel from its unknown source. At the outlet beyond the hill the waters gush from beneath a high, darkling cliff in an impetuous stream that varies little in volume throughout the year, the measurement being about 112 miner’s inches. Your guide takes you there, too (passing on the way the ruins of an ancient pueblo that once occupied the mesa near the Well’s edge), and you will enjoy the sight of that brisk little torrent fringed with a riot of maiden-hair fern and columbine, and darkened by the shadows from huge sycamores that foregather about it. The ancient Well-dweller, knew perfectly the value of that water and led it by ditches, the remains of which you may yet see, to irrigate their corn- and bean-fields a mile away. Apaches, who within recent years have been the only Indians dwelling in the region, profess no knowledge of the people who built the houses here. Mr. Back (who, by the way, in 1889 filed as a homesteader on the land about the Well including the Well itself as a water right) informed me that the Apaches regard the place with disfavor. “Aqua no ’ueno,” one old man told him, “water no good. Long time ago, you sabe, three Indian mujeres all same women, you sabe, she swim out in water, and go round and round, you sabe, in the middle, and by ’em by, she go down, all three. Never come back. No, no—no ’ueno.” The water is warmish, but quite drinkable—if you can forget about those Apache ladies who are still in it.

It would seem reasonable that so remarkable a natural phenomenon as is the Well, situated in a region as populous with aborigines as the Verde Valley once was, would have a place in Indian folk lore; and as a matter of fact Dr. J. W. Fewkes[85] has learned that the Hopis know of its existence, and claim it as the home of some of their ancestors. Moreover, the tales of some of their old men indicate that they regard the place as the house of the Plumed Serpent, a divinity peculiarly dear to the desert dwelling Hopis of today, as the guardian of the waters and springs. Indeed, it is, perhaps, as a shrine of the divine that the Well is most truly to be considered; and in view of the extensive pueblo that once flourished on the rim, it may be that the houses of the Well walls were used in connection with religious observances rather than as a habitation of the common people.