href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@44627@[email protected]#daughter" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Waluthanca's Daughter, with Esuwa, going for Water.

INTRODUCTORY

Wild, weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the mind by the very name—the Painted Desert. The sound itself suggests a fabled rather than a real land. Surely it must be akin to Atlantis or the Island of Circe or the place where the Cyclops lived. Is it not a land of enchantment and dreams, not a place for living men and women, Indians though they be?

It is a land of enchantment, but also of stern reality, as those who have marched, unprepared, across its waterless wastes can testify. No fabled land ever surpassed it in its wondrousness, yet a railway runs directly over it, and it is not on some far-away continent, but is close at hand; a portion, indeed, of our own United States.

In our schoolboy days we used to read of the Great American Desert. The march of civilization has marched that "desert" out of existence. Is the Painted Desert a fiction of early geographers, like unto the Great American Desert, to be wiped from the map when we have more knowledge?

No! It is in actual existence as it was when first seen by the white men, about three hundred and fifty years ago, and as it doubtless will be for untold centuries yet to come.

Coronado and his band of daring conquistadors, preceded by Marcos de Niza and Stephen the Negro, reaching out with gold-lustful hands, came into the region from northern Mexico, conquered Cibola—Zuni—and from there sent out a small band to investigate the stories told by the Zunis of a people who lived about one hundred miles to the northwest, whom they called A-mo-ke-vi. The Navaho Indians said the home of the A-mo-ke-vi was a Ta-sa-ûn´—a country of isolated buttes—so the Spaniards called the people Moki (Moqui) and their land "the province of Tusayan," and by those names they have ever since been known.

Yet these names are not the ones by which they designate themselves and their land. They are the Hopituh, which Stephen says means "the wise people," and Fewkes, "the people of peace."

It was in marching to the land of the Hopituh that the Spaniards designated the region "el pintado desierto." And a painted desert it truly is. Elsewhere I have described some of its horrors,[1] for I have been familiar with them, more or less, for upwards of twenty years. I do not write of that of which I have merely heard, but "mine eyes have seen," again and again, that which I describe. I have been almost frozen in its piercing snow-storms; choked with sand in its whirling sand-storms; wet through ere I could dismount from my horse in its fierce rain-storms; terrified and temporarily blinded by the brilliancy of its lightning-storms; and almost sunstruck by the scorching power of the sun in its desolate confines. I have seen the sluggish waters of the Little Colorado River rise several feet in the night and place an impassable barrier temporarily before us. With my horses I have camped, again and again, waterless, on its arid and inhospitable rocks and sands, and prayed for morning, only to resume our exhausting journey in the fiercely beating rays of the burning sun; longing for some pool of water, no matter how dirty, how stagnant, that our parched tongues and throats might feel the delights of swallowing something fluid. And last year (1902), in a journey to the home of the Hopi, my friends and I saw a part of this desert covered with the waters of a fierce rain-storm as if it were an ocean, and the "dry wash" of the Oraibi the scene of a flood that, for hours, equalled the rapids of the Colorado River. We were almost engulfed in a quicksand, and a few days later covered with a sand-storm; all these experiences, and others, in the course of a few days.

Stand with me on the summit of one of the towering mountains that guard the region and you will see such a landscape of color as exists nowhere else in the world. It suggests the thought of God's original palette—where He experimented in color ere He decided how to paint the sunset, tint the sun-kissed hills at dawn, give red to the rose, green to the leaves, yellow to the sunflowers, and the varied colors of baby blue-eyes, violets, portulacas, poppies, and cacti; where He concluded to distribute color throughout His world instead of making it all sombre in grays or black.

Look! here is a vast flat of alkali, pure, dazzling white, shining like a vivid and horrible leprosy in the noon-day sun; close by is an area of volcanic action where a veritable "tintaro"—inkstand—has overflowed in devastating blackness over miles and miles. There are pits of six hundred feet depth full of black gunpowder-like substance, gardens of hellish cauliflowers and cabbages of forbidding black lava, and tunnels arched and square of pure blackness. Yonder is a mural face a half thousand feet high and two hundred or more miles long. It is nearly a hundred miles away, yet it reveals the rich glowing red of its walls, and between it and us are large "blotches" of pinks, grays, greens, reds, chocolates, carmines, crimsons, browns, yellows, olives, in every conceivable shade, and all blending in a strange and grotesque yet attractive manner, and fascinating while it awes. It is seldom one can see a rainbow lengthened out into flatness and then petrified; yet you can see it here. Few eyes have ever beheld a sunset painted on a desert's sands, yet all may see it here.

It is a desert, surely, yet throughout its entire width flows a monster river; a fiendish, evil-souled river; a thievish, murderous river; a giant vampire, sucking the life-blood from thousands of square miles of territory and making it all barren, desolate, desert. And this vampire river has vampire children which emulate their mother in their insatiable thirst. Remorselessly they suck up and carry away all the moisture that would make the land "blossom as the rose," and thus add misery to desolation, devastation to barrenness.

It is a desert, surely, yet planted in its dreary wastes are verdant-clad mountains, on whose summits winter's snows fall and accumulate, and in whose bosoms springs of life are harbored.

It is a desert, surely, yet it is fringed here and there with dense forests, and in the very heart of its direst desolation threads of silvery streams lined with greenish verdure seem to give the lie to the name.

It is desert, barren, inhospitable, dangerous, yet thousands of people make it their chosen home. Over its surface roam the Bedouins of the United States, fearless horsemen, daring travellers, who rival in picturesqueness, if not in evil, their compeers of the deserts by the Nile. Down in the deep canyon water-ways of the desert-streams dwell other peoples whose life is as strange, weird, wild, and fascinating as that of any people of earth.