A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open. Theodore Roosevelt

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ melons. All were mounted; the men usually on horses, the women and children often on donkeys. They were clad in white man's garb; at least the men wore shirts and trousers and the women bodices and skirts; but the shirts were often green or red or saffron or bright blue; their long hair was knotted at the back of the head, and they usually wore moccasins. The well-to-do carried much jewelry of their own make. They wore earrings and necklaces of turquoise; turquoises were set in their many silver ornaments; and they wore buttons and bangles of silver, for they are cunning silversmiths, as well as weavers of the famous Navajo blankets. Although they practise polygamy, and divorce is easy, their women are usually well treated; and we saw evidences of courtesy and consideration not too common even among civilized people. At one halt a woman on a donkey, with a little boy behind her, rode up to the wagon. We gave her and the boy food. Later when a Navajo man came up, she quietly handed him a couple of delicacies. So far there was nothing of note; but the man equally quietly and with a slight smile of evident gratitude and appreciation stretched out his hand; and for a moment they stood with clasped hands, both pleased, one with the courtesy, and the other with the way the courtesy had been received. Both were tattered beings on donkeys; but it made a pleasant picture.

      These are as a whole good Indians—although some are very bad, and should be handled rigorously. Most of them work hard, and wring a reluctant living from the desert; often their houses are miles from water, and they use it sparingly. They live on a reservation in which many acres are necessary to support life; I do not believe that at present they ought to be allotted land in severalty, and their whole reservation should be kept for them, if only they can be brought forward fast enough in stock-raising and agriculture to use it; for with Indians and white men alike it is use which should determine occupancy of the soil. The Navajos have made progress of a real type, and stand far above mere savagery; and everything possible should be done to help them help themselves, to teach them English, and, above all, to teach them how to be better stock-raisers and food-growers—as well as smiths and weavers—in their desert home. The whites have treated these Indians well. They benefited by the coming of the Spaniards; they have benefited more by the coming of our own people. 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 Navajos and Utes; and very serious harm has been done by well-meaning Eastern philanthropists who have encouraged and protected these criminals. I have known some startling cases of this kind.

      During the second day of our southward journey the Painted Desert, in gaudy desolation, lay far to our right; and we crossed tongues and patches of the queer formation, with its hard, bright colors. Red and purple, green and bluish, orange and gray and umber brown, the streaked and splashed clays and marls had been carved by wind and weather into a thousand outlandish forms. Funnel-shaped sandstorms moved across the waste. We climbed gradually upward to the top of the mesa. The yellow sand grew heavier and deeper. There were occasional short streams from springs; but they ran in deep gullies, with nothing to tell of their presence; never a tree near by and hardly a bush or a tuft of grass, unless planted and tended by man. We passed the stone walls of an abandoned trading-post. The desert had claimed its own. The ruins lay close to a low range of cliffs; the white sand, dazzling under the sun, had drifted everywhere; there was not a plant, not a green thing in sight—nothing but the parched and burning lifelessness of rock and sand. This northern Arizona desert was less attractive than the southern desert along the road to the Roosevelt Dam and near Mesa, for instance; for in the south the cactus growth is infinitely varied in size and in fantastic shape.

      In the late afternoon we reached Tuba, with its Indian school and its trader's store. Tuba was once a Mormon settlement, the Mormons having been invited thither by the people of a near-by Hopi village—which we visited—because the Hopis wished protection from hostile Indian foes. As usual, the Mormon settlers had planted and cared for many trees—cotton-woods, poplars, almond-trees, and flowering acacias—and the green shade was doubly attractive in that sandy desert. We were most hospitably received, especially by the school superintendent, and also by the trader. They showed us every courtesy. Mentioning the abandoned trading-post in the desert to the wife of the trader, she told us that it was there she had gone as a bride. The women who live in the outposts of civilization have brave souls!

      We rested the horses for a day, and then started northward, toward the trading-station of John Wetherill, near Navajo Mountain and the Natural Bridge. The first day's travel was through heavy sand and very tiring to the teams. Late in the afternoon we came to an outlying trader's store, on a sandy hillside. In the plain below, where not a blade of grass grew, were two or three permanent pools; and toward these the flocks of the Navajos were hurrying, from every quarter, with their herdsmen. The sight was curiously suggestive of the sights I so often saw in Africa, when the Masai and Samburu herdsmen brought their flocks to water. On we went, not halting until nine in the evening.

      All next day we travelled through a parched, monotonous landscape, now and then meeting Navajos with their flocks and herds, and passing by an occasional Navajo "hogan," or hovel-like house, with its rough corral near by. Toward evening we struck into Marsh Pass, and camped at the summit. Here we were again among the mountains; and the great gorge was wonderfully picturesque—well worth a visit from any landscape-lover, were there not so many sights still more wonderful in the immediate neighborhood. The lower rock masses were orange-hued, and above them rose red battlements of cliff; where the former broke into sheer sides there were old houses of the cliff-dwellers, carved in the living rock. The half-moon hung high overhead; the scene was wild and lovely, when we strolled away from the camp-fire among the scattered cedars and pinyons through the cool, still night.

      Next morning we journeyed on, and in the forenoon we reached Kayentay, where John Wetherill, the guide and Indian trader, lives. We had been travelling over a bare table-land, through surroundings utterly desolate; and with startling suddenness, as we dropped over the edge, we came on the group of houses—the store, the attractive house of Mr. and Mrs. Wetherill, and several other buildings. Our new friends were the kindest and most hospitable of hosts, and their house was a delight to every sense: clean, comfortable, with its bath and running water, its rugs and books, its desks, cupboards, couches and chairs, and the excellent taste of its Navajo ornamentation. Here we parted with our two wagons, and again took to pack-trains; we had already grown attached to Francisco and Loko, and felt sorry to say good-by to them.

      On August 10, under Wetherill's guidance, we started for the Natural Bridge, seven of us, all told, with five pack-horses. We travelled light, with no tentage, and when it rained at night we curled up in our bedding under our slickers. I was treated as "the Colonel," and did nothing but look after my own horse and bedding, and usually not even this much; but every one else in the outfit worked! On the two days spent in actually getting into and out of the very difficult country around the Bridge itself we cut down our luggage still further, taking the necessary food in the most portable form, and, as regards bedding, trusting, in cowboy fashion, to our slickers and horse blankets. But we were comfortable, and the work was just hard enough to keep us in fine trim.

      We began by retracing our steps to the head of Marsh Pass and turning westward up Laguna Canyon. This was so named because it contained pools of water when, half a century ago, Kit Carson, the type of all that was best among the old-style mountain man and plainsman, traversed it during one of his successful Indian campaigns. The story of the American advance through the Southwest is filled with feats of heroism. Yet, taking into account the means of doing the work, even greater dangers were fronted, even more severe hardships endured, and even more striking triumphs achieved by the soldiers and priests who three centuries previously, during Spain's brief sunburst of glory, first broke through the portals of the thirst-guarded, Indian-haunted desert.

      At noon we halted in a side-canyon, at the foot of a mighty cliff, where there were ruins of a big village of cliff-dwellers. The cliff was of the form so common in this type of rock formation. It was not merely sheer, but reentrant, making a huge, arched, shallow cave, several hundred feet high, and at least a hundred—perhaps a hundred and fifty—feet deep, the overhang being enormous. СКАЧАТЬ