Adventure! The Standard Dictionary divides it, like Gaul, into three parts, peculiarly interrelated, yet thinly divisible from each other:—(1) A remarkable or hazardous experience; an unexpected or exciting occurrence. (2) A hazardous or uncertain undertaking; a daring feat. (3) The encountering of risks; daring and hazardous enterprise.

And the writing of it has come to signify swift dramatic action, having a spirited and triumphant finale.

But life in the Desert,—for that matter, life anywhere,—does not advance to a whiplash conclusion. One may not dismiss unwelcome characters simply because convenience or stark justice demands Finis. Despite taut emotions and unsavory possibilities, they go on living and muddling up the action; and the sun rises, and to-morrow is another day. My personal experiences among the Indians in the lonely places have not been [288]exactly hazardous or desperately daring from my point of view, indeed, not half so venturesome as nights I have spent in New York. One will have to accept these reminiscences as simply unusual and I hope not uninteresting happenings, with what of thrill they may inspire. Would you insist that I lug in ghosts or bandits? Should I stage a massacre? Perhaps I could contrive to have Youkeoma abduct the trader’s daughter, and arrange a nick-of-time rescue by the cavalry. But Youkeoma was interested in ceremonies only, as he told me, and the trader had no daughter. I should therefore libel a sincere pagan and a bachelor business-man.

Now it strikes me that there is more of nervous drama in Colonel Scott’s going alone into a half-hostile camp, facing down a band of sullen fellows, and coming out with obedience to his decisions. It strikes me, too, that in these desert camps that have known so little of discipline, with no force in the offing and no hope of one, is the real drama of an Agent’s life. I can relate my kind of thrill, but there will be little of dramatic conclusions. Nothing of wild rides, and pursuits, and ambuscades; nothing of foiled villains, and certainly nothing of beautiful maidens in distress. This last the Indian Service does not invite, and if accidentally acquired does not long retain.

The nearest to that sort of adventure I ever came was in meeting the mail-hack one cold sunset, far from the Agency. It was driven by a half-frozen Mexican who could speak no English beyond: “Buenas dias, señor. Mucho frio. No savvy.”

There was a pleasing young woman with him, who said she was a teacher, ordered to report to the Agent at Keams Cañon. Our meeting-place was about thirty miles from the last post-house, and quite ninety miles from the [289]railroad. I can imagine how strange and timid one feels under such conditions. It had been a bleak day, and a keen night was coming on. My auto would reach the Agency hours before those two weary bronks could plod in; so I introduced myself, and said she would travel quicker to the Agency with me. She looked me over: dingy hat, rusty puttees, red nose, everything—and decided to remain with the voluble Mexican.

I can remember leaving Chin Lee one winter’s night, black shadows on the snow-covered desert and a razor-edged wind coming straight out of that huge funnel, Cañon de Chelly, to go seventy-five miles to Kayenta, the most isolated post-office and trading-post in the United States. I had been bluffed into it by my friend, the Water-Witch, who wanted to save the morrow’s daylight.

“Can you stand an all-night hike?” he asked, solicitously. “Sing out if you can’t. There’s a good bed here, and—”

“I’m game for it, if you are,” I said, but without enthusiasm.

The engine of his emaciated Ford clucked, and the snow crunched under its wheels. For the first hour a brisk conversation kept us illuminated and fairly warm. Then it grew deadly cold, with that relentless, piercing cold to be experienced only at night in those cruelly bleak, windswept, desert wastes. I bit down on my pipe to prevent my teeth castanetting. I felt of my face to be sure it had not cracked off. And we rode on and on, paralleling the dim Black Mountain barricade. Finally, with bitter exasperation, the Witch called out: “Dammit all! ain’t you cold?”

“Froze,” I gasped.

“Well, there’s a trading-post hiding in this side cañon, [290]if I can find the road to it. You’ll never sing out. I give up. Let’s make for camp before we both perish.”

I uttered choking sounds of thanksgiving. And it drearily seemed, for a space, that he would not be able to find the trail. The snow was unbroken in the hills. Then we caught a gleam from the black, gave a hail, and found a cedar-fire welcome.

Those are Arizona adventures.

One may encounter them in boggy flats, or in blinding snowstorms; in seeking to cross a river in springtime without too much knowledge of the ford; in facing the hot sand’s lash that stings as powdered glass; with exhausted horses and far from the town, on hearing the crunch of a drive-pinion twenty miles the wrong side of home; at nightfall; at midnight, noon, or dawn. The blush of morning on snow-encrusted cliffs, the wistful mysteries of summer twilight, the burnished glories of an autumn sunset, have no appeal then. Simple struggles with the elements and distances of the lonely Desert, when tired out, cold, hungry. They are the day’s work, hard, exhausting work. And one does not record such things in Annual Reports.

But, since adventures are in demand, perhaps I can resurrect a thrill or two from the notebook. Long ago I listed them as scenery for stories, meaning to import a few interesting and even beautiful types as characters, for the honest-to-God, on-the-ground people steadily refused to become heroic. Relatively mild affairs these, with only two persons killed, two crippled up a bit, some little blood spilled, and lots of nervous imagining. My men were uneasy at the time, and I most scared of all.

If I had thrust these episodes on a New York editor, out of their order and true atmosphere, garnished with a [291]picaresque dressing, he might have praised them; but I was not among those killed, and reflection urges that this would probably make a difference to him. Aside from having a thumb sprained when an angry Indian tried to wrench it off my hand, I was not physically hurt; but my nervous system was slightly warped each time, and I have been reported on as an efficient, but very profane man. Quite so. I will admit that I never took any saints along on these trips.

And in every single one of these affairs, the enemy triumphed. “The man or the hour had not yet come”; and while I have had mounted messengers of both sexes come to me on both frosty and tepid nights, their errands, after due investigation, and however irritating, could not be classed as tragic; but there were times when “the feeling of it had me to bed and up again” in a round of anticipation and some little suspense, decidedly not so pleasurable as romantic Stevenson found his.

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One undertaking began with Limping Joe paying attention to Do-hahs-tahhe’s wife. This was not appreciated by either of them, and the husband first warned, and then threw Limping Joe bodily out of his neighborhood. This angered the potential home-wrecker, and he returned with a light rifle. Do-hahs-tahhe was sacking corn in his field close to his hogan. He saw Limping Joe approaching, and while .22’s are rabbit-guns, they sometimes go off when least expected and injure people. Again Do-hahs-tahhe flung himself on Limping Joe; he wrenched the rifle away from him, threw out the single shell, and smashed the stock over a stone. Observing then that he held only the barrel, he whirled it around his head and let go of it. It winged off, end over end, and down into the wash. [292]

Limping Joe went down into the wash and found the gun. He examined the lock and saw that a shell would go into it. Pointing it in the air, he pulled the trigger. Bang! it was all right, even though it had no stock for the shoulder. Then Limping Joe put in another shell, stalked up the bank, and shot Do-hahs-tahhe through the lungs.

Therefore the Indian Agent had to forward one physician, one stenographer, one notary public, and a few police, promptly, hurriedly, to take the man’s dying statement: the doctor to tell him he was dying, the stenographer to report him, and the notary to swear them all. The police meantime grabbed Limping Joe. Do-hahs-tahhe died in a few hours and Limping Joe sat in the guardhouse with gyves upon his wrists, also shackles securing his ankles, and a log-chain connecting the two contrivances. I did not intend that he should—and he did not—get away.

This was in Territorial days, and a Reservation criminal-case came, strangely enough, within the jurisdiction of the Territorial courts. I sent for the county sheriff, and he arrived with one huge deputy, both of them heavily armed.

“Why the arsenal?” I asked of the officer, who had a reputation for fearlessness.

“Well, I have had Indian prisoners taken from me before,” he said.

Now there had been some little rumor of dissatisfaction among the relatives and friends of Limping Joe. They felt he should be tried by the Agent, quite as one who had purloined a sheep, and they expected that he would receive a mild type of punishment. Gossip had it that they would oppose his being removed from the Desert.

“I’ll go with you to the Reservation line,” I said to the [293]sheriff, “and this side of it, they will have to take him away from me.”

“Very good,” replied the officer, “because I wouldn’t fight for him.”

And I made up my mind that neither would I.

We started with the stars still bright in the sky, three o’clock of a morning, to cover the thirty-five miles to the line. The sheriff and deputy rode in a buckboard, the prisoner with them. An Indian boy drove my buggy, and I sat with a gun on the seat. Nothing happened. We did not see a Navajo on the trip. After lunching at the line, we parted with the officers, and prepared to return that same day. Seventy miles for the team would be a hard drive and would bring us in late at night; but this is in the day’s work too.

All that afternoon the horses jogged homeward. The prisoner off my hands, I dropped the gun into a bag under the seat. It was getting on to dark when the team began wearily climbing the last long rise that separated us from the drop down into Keams Cañon. There was a fringe of cedars at the top, black as spectres against a dull red sky. The horses plodded nearer and nearer to the crest of the ridge. One could see the branches of the old trees now, as if etched on the sky’s plate.

Then came a call, a Navajo cry. My boy pulled in the team with a sudden wrench. He had been watching the edge of the hill. And from the trees four or five men stepped quickly into the road. I made a swift clutch on the seat for the gun, and then realized that it could not be there. The bag had slipped back into the boot, and was mixed with halters, nose-bags, and the clutter of a desert buggy. There was a moment—it seemed a week—of tense chilliness, while they lingered in the dusk, as if [294]waiting for us. One cannot wheel a buggy in a desert road. It was either stop or go on. Then they crossed into the cedars, and we heard them moving off, talking in Navajo. One began to sing. My Indian boy laughed as if relieved.

“The miners,” he said.

And sure enough, they were my own coal-working gang that had quit the drift at five o’clock and had reached that point on their way home. But I had thought, and so had my driver, that friends of Limping Joe were about to greet us. It was just the right time in the evening, and just the right color in the sombre landscape; and they had stepped from the trees, half-waiting, in just that manner.

Limping Joe? The court treated him with customary severity. For this deliberate, cold-blooded murder he received the terrible sentence of three years in the penitentiary, and had quite six months off for good behavior. During his protracted absence I issued rations to his aged parents and, after quite a little correspondence, some of it acrid in tone, convinced my Washington critics that I had not persecuted the poor fellow.

The East contains very few officials having the courage of Roosevelt, who wrote, with respect to the Navajo particularly:—

These are as a whole good Indians … although some are very bad and should be handled rigorously.…

For the last quarter of a century the lawless individuals among them have done much more wrong (including murder) to the whites than has been done to them by lawless whites. The lawless Indians are the worst menace to the others among the Navajo and Utes; and very serious harm has been done by well-meaning Eastern philanthropists who have encouraged and protected these criminals.

[295]

And Francis E. Leupp, one-time Commissioner of Indian Affairs, held this view:—

Agents and other Government officials, when of the best type, have done most good; and when not of the right type have done most evil; and they have never done any good at all when they have been afraid of the Indians or have hesitated relentlessly to punish Indian wrongdoers.

Apart from the administration period of these two men, few Indian Agents have expected to receive support in any effort thoroughly to punish Indian criminals in the Desert. The tone of the Indian Bureau this last decade has been largely one of compromise and apology: with superiors in office; to sentimentalists; with and to discontented or stupid or evil Indians who blocked progress. Annually, when seeking appropriations, it has apologized to Congress for asking, and then apologized most humbly when denied. Charged with the protection and welfare of incompetent human beings, one would think it dealt in wooden dolls. Inconsistent, and of little vision, wastefully parsimonious, ignoring sage advice, ready to compromise, it has been a poor source for justice and a sorry judge of men. Of timely intelligence it has demonstrated little, and of sincerity, less. To manœuvre in the winds of expediency, to trim sail for maintenance in office, to drift hopefully, has been its course and policy. The distant field has viewed such variable charts with suspicion and dismay.

Perhaps a parable may prove amusing.

“Colonel” Oldhouse, who had about reached the retirement age, suspected all new-fangled methods. Behind his desk rested an old hand-made army-chest, strapped and locked to withstand the strains and bruises of frontier [296]travel. The Colonel dated from those days when the stage ran “to the States,” and Santa Fe was an outpost of progress. In that chest reposed his warrants and accounts, neatly arranged, jacketed, and briefed. He could go to it in the dark and instantly find Voucher 137 for the second quarter of 1889.

“Colonel,” said a very young man, “Why don’t you order some files for your papers, with sliding drawers, and rods, and—”

The Colonel snorted.

“They’re no good,” he snapped; “the damned things are made by machinery!”

Exactly, Colonel; you have accurately described the ineffectiveness of a filing-case. [297]