Through Our Unknown Southwest. Agnes C. Laut
the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins of a church—at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters—that was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to America.
You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks, and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who interviewed Eve—all right here in your own American Southwest, with the difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler, who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the springs.
To be sure, there are 400,000 miles of motor roads in Europe; but isn't it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? That is what you can do following the "Camino Real" from Texas to Wyoming, or crossing the mountains of New Mexico by the great Scenic Highway built for motors to the very snow tops.
And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but America. This is a story by itself—a beautiful one, also in spots a funny one. For instance, one summer a woman of international fame from Oxford, England, took quarters in one of the pueblos at Santa Clara or thereabout to study Indian arts and crafts. One night in her adobe quarters, her orderly British soul was aroused by such a dire din of shouting, fighting, screams, as she thought could come only from some inferno of crime. She sprang out of bed and dashed across the placito in her nightdress to her guardian protector in the person of an old Indian. He ran through the dark to see what the matter was, while she stood in hiding of the wall shadows curdling in horror of "bluggy deeds."
"Pah," said the old fellow coming back, "dat not'ing! Young man, he git marry an' dey—how you call?—chiv-ar-ee-heem."
"Then, what are you laughing at?" demanded the irate British dame; for she could not help seeing that the old fellow was literally doubling in suffocated laughter. "How dare you laugh?"
"I laugh, Mees," he sputtered out, "'cos you scare me so bad when you call, I jomp in my coat mistake for my pants. Dat's all."
It would pay to cultivate a little home sentiment, wouldn't it? It would pay to let a little daylight in on the abysmal blank regarding the wonder-land of our own world—wouldn't it?
I don't know whether the affectation recognized as "the foreign pose" comes foremost or hindermost as a cause of this neglect of the wonders of our own land. When you go to our own Western Wonder Land, you can't say you have been abroad with a great long capital A; and it is wonderful what a paying thing that pose is in a harvest of "fooleries." There is a well-known case of an American author, who tried his hand on delineating American life and was severely let alone because he was too—not abroad, but broad. He dropped his own name, assumed the pose of a grand dame familiar with the inner penetralia and sacred secrets of the exclusive circle of the American Colony in Paris. His books have "gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.
The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and superiority, which is pretense—is another matter. Let us take the dire and damning deficiencies of America!
"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.
There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma—islands of rock, sheer precipice of yellow tufa for hundreds of feet—amid the Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders, brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or there are the three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or, there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Cañon de Chelly (Shay) forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses of Washington.
"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway; and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one end of a main thoroughfare, you can see the site of the old Spanish Gareta prison, in the walls of which bullets were found embedded in human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street and of small talk—then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the apple bloom.
What was the other charge? Oh, yes—"lacks the human," whatever that means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Cañon and the cliff houses of Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys, Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of the Old World?
Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes—but America lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."
"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of American feudalism—fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat clad cap-à-pie in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years back—and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted troops the big iron chest for the gold—iron chests that you can see to this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all