residence or business. Every building has a neat and thrifty aspect,
and the art of architecture has been especially studied, for almost
without exception every house, whether large or small, is tasteful and
attractive. A bay window is thrown out here, a little balcony there,
a piazza, a loggia, an oriel window, and the eye is gratified. But,
besides this dainty and tasteful architecture, the one great feature
of Greeley is her beautiful streets. These are due directly to the
taste and the direction of the founder, Mr. Meeker. The streets are one
hundred feet wide, lined invariably--every street in the town--with a
double row of shade trees, giving coolness, beauty, and contributing
much to the modification of the temperature. Every deed granted in
Greeley forbids the sale of any intoxicating liquor. There is not a
saloon in the place. There is not a loafer or a criminal, nor are there
any poor in the unfortunate sense of the large cities. No police are
needed. The jail is locally known as a mere ornamental appendage to the
fine forty thousand dollar courthouse.

For many years it has been felt that some expression should be made in
honor of the memory of the founder of Greeley, and this has now taken
form in the project for the "Meeker Memorial Library," which is in
preparation. The beautiful young city is itself, however, the best
memorial of its noble founder. It is a living monument of perpetually
increasing greatness and beauty; and who to-day can wander under the
shade of the beautiful trees which in a double row line every street
and boulevard--trees planted in 1870 under Mr. Meeker's personal
superintendence--without hearing amid the rustle of their whispering
leaves the poet's words, that fall like a benediction:

  "Be of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly
  Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for know,
  God hath a select family of sons
  Now scattered wide thro' earth, and each alone,
  Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one
  By constant service to that inward law,
  Is weaving the sublime proportions
  Of a true monarch's soul. Beauty and strength,
  The riches of a spotless memory,
  The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got
  By searching of a clear and loving eye
  That seeth as God seeth. These are their gifts,
  And Time, who keeps God's word, brings on the day
  To seal the marriage of these minds with thine,
  Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be
  The salt of all the elements, world of the world."

The glamour of romance can never fade from Colorado, whose entire
history is one of heroic deeds and splendid energy; but the primitive
stage of the state is already left far behind with the nineteenth
century. In its intellectual and scientific development the years of
the twentieth century have almost exceeded its twenty-four years
of life as a state in the nineteenth. The tide of immigration still
continues, but from being the objective point of mining activities
where fortune hunters rushed to find a royal road to riches, it is
now a state of agriculture and of commerce. Social conditions are
thus altered; and though some of these conditions are those of mining
regions, as in the Cripple Creek district, they have altered from the
typical Bret Harte mining-camp life to those of orderly progress,--to
the life dominated by twentieth-century ideals of humanity; the
life whose framework is seen in public-school systems, in religious
observance, in the liberal reading of periodical and other literature,
and in the maintenance of public libraries as a necessity in every
community.

The dawn of literary and artistic development in Colorado is very
evident,--a dawn that is already of such radiant promise as to forecast
the day when this state shall contribute to our greatest national
literature. A large number of individual writers could already be named
whose work in books, magazine articles, and excellent journalism might
well be held as typical of the best culture of the entire country. The
first wild turmoil of a new and richly varied state has given way to
a prosperous, progressive commonwealth. Material progress must still
always precede the higher growth, yet the air is vital with ideas,
and the vision of Colorado is always toward the stars. The beauty
and majesty of the environment cannot but react upon the people. The
growth of women's clubs has been one steady factor of progress, with
most favorable effect on all the general life of intellectual and moral
advancement. The public libraries in every centre establish and develop
the reading habit. While a love for beauty is an element in human life,
the influence of the transcendent majesty and incomparable sublimity
of the Colorado scenery will continue to prove a source of inspiration
to the mental and moral life of the people. The changing colors of
the mountains are a constant delight. Colorado offers a perpetual
feast of beauty. Her resources are infinite. Colorado combines all
the exaltation of the untried with an abundance of the conveniences
and luxuries of the older civilization; and of this Centennial State
it is difficult to record facts and statistics that do not seem to
suggest the tales of a thousand nights. With resources and with scenic
loveliness which no language could exaggerate, it is still only to
those who themselves know and appreciate the grandeur of this state
that any interpretation of it will appear as rather within than as
at all beyond the limits of the most statistical and demonstrable
facts. The East has already outgrown the tradition that the entire
trans-Mississippi region is a howling wilderness. Colorado is no longer
as vague as is Calcutta to the average mind. Dr. Edward Everett Hale
exclaimed that he desired his sons to know that there was something in
the world besides Beacon Street, and this ambition has of late years
become too prevalent to leave even the extreme East in any absolute and
total ignorance of the wonderful West. Still it may be true that the
flying visions from Pullman-car windows are marvellously extended and
intensified by increasing familiarity with the almost incredibly swift
progress of this region.

A typical illustration of the fallibility of human judgment is seen in
the attitude taken in 1838 by the great Daniel Webster on the floor of
the United States Senate against an appropriation for a post route west
of the Missouri River.

"What do we want," said he, "of this vast worthless area,--this region
of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, shifting sands, and whirlwinds
of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to
put these great deserts, or these endless mountain ranges, impregnable
and covered to their base with eternal snow? What use have we for such
a country? Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public
treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer Boston than it is
to-day."

It is a far cry from this "vast worthless area," as Mr. Webster termed
it in 1838, to the grand and richly promising state of to-day, with its
splendid young cities where art and science unite with literature and
ethics in the rapid development of social progress; with its mountain
ranges climbed in palace cars; its electric transit and electric
lighting; its vivid and forceful achievements, that even in each
decade concentrate the progress of a century, as seen in the past.

It is not a mere vagary, but rather a practical and momentous fact,
that Colorado is peculiarly the realm receptive to invisible potencies
and mental impressions. Science is now confronted with the question
as to whether thought and electricity may be identified as the same
force under different degrees of manifestation. "There is an elemental
essence--a strange living force--which surrounds us on every side, and
which is singularly susceptible to the influence of human thought,"
says an English scientist, and he continues: "This essence responds
with the most wonderful delicacy to the faintest action of our minds
or desires; and this being so, it is interesting to note how it is
affected when the human mind formulates a definite thought or desire."
All the significance of a thousand years may be concentrated in an
instant's thought, as all the heat stored up in all the forests of the
world is concentrated in a small quantity of radium. Emerson embodies
this truth in the stanza:

  "His instant thought a poet spoke,
    And filled the age his fame;
  An inch of ground the lightning strook
    But lit the sky with flame."

It is intensity, not duration, that is of consequence, and that
determines results. To state that there is something in the Colorado
air that incites active and lofty thought; that uplifts the soul and
enables one to discern the practical processes for identifying the
most marvellous scenic grandeur of the civilized world with the most
advanced processes of applied industries, is to state a simple fact.
Phillips Brooks once said:

    "I know no ideal humanity that is not filled and pervaded with
    the superhuman. God in man is not unnatural, but the absolutely
    natural. That is what the incarnation makes us know.... The truths
    of heaven and the truths of earth are in perfect sympathy.... The
    needs of human nature are supreme, and have a right to the divinest
    help."

The early explorers and pioneers in Colorado felt this truth, so
finely stated by Bishop Brooks, even if they did not formulate it in
words. The apparently insuperable obstacles of a land where the desert
disputed the space with the Titanic mountain ranges piled against the
sky, incited them to effort rather than paralyzed their energy. It
is fitting that this most ideal state, rich in resources of almost
undreamed-of variety and importance, should present a significant
object lesson in the working out of the problem involved in the higher
civilization of the twentieth century. The future of Denver, of Pueblo,
Colorado Springs, Greeley, and other important centres, is a most
important part of the future of the nations. The Star of high destiny
shines on the Centennial State.

CHAPTER VI

THE SURPRISES OF NEW MEXICO

  "_But my minstrel knows and tells
  The counsel of the gods,
  Knows of Holy Book the spells,
  Knows the law of Night and Day,_

  _What sea and land discoursing say
  In sidereal years._"

                             EMERSON

New Mexico is the scene of surprises. Traditionally supposed to be
a country that is as remote as possible from the accepted canons of
polite society; that is also an arid waste whose temperature exceeds
the limits of any well-regulated thermometer,--it reveals itself
instead as a region whose temperature is most delightful, whose
coloring of sky and atmosphere is often indescribably beautiful, and
whose inhabitants include their fair proportion of those who represent
the best culture and intelligence of our country. New Mexico has a
mixed population. To a hundred and sixty thousand Americans there are a
hundred and twenty-five thousand of Spanish or Mexican descent; a few
hundred Chinese and Japanese, and some thirteen thousand Indians, who
are, however, peaceful and industrious, and a proportion of whom
have been educated in the Government schools for the Indians.

[Illustration: ACOMA, NEW MEXICO]

The altitude of New Mexico seldom falls to less than five thousand
feet, so that the air is cool and exhilarating. The rock formations
partake of the same rich hue that characterizes those in Colorado and
in Arizona, and as the soil is rich there is a continual play of color.
The scenery is one changeful, picturesque panorama of mountains, rock,
or walled cañons, vast mesas, uncanny buttes, and lava fields left by
some vanished volcanic fires. The ancient Indian pueblos are still
largely inhabited, and strange ruins of unknown civilizations add
their atmosphere of mystery. The mouldering remains of the old Pecos
church and the strange communistic dwellings in the old Pueblo de Taos;
the ruins of the fortress and the seven circular mounds, which were
the council-chambers and halls for mystic rites of the prehistoric
civilization; and the fabled site of the ancient Aztec city where
tradition says Montezuma was born,--all contribute to a unique interest
in this "land of the turquoise sky," as New Mexico is called.

Acoma, the ancient pueblo perched on a perpendicular precipice four
hundred feet high, with its terraced dwellings of adobe, its gigantic
church, its reservoir cut out of solid rock, and its inhabitants with
their strange customs, is fairly accessible to the traveller from
Albuquerque by a drive of some twenty miles. Mr. Lummis calls it "the
most wonderful pueblo," and "the most remarkable city in the world,"
as compared, of course, with other pueblos and ruined cities. Acoma has
a present population of some four hundred Indians, and its romantic
beauty of location is unparalleled. There are scientists who incline
to believe that the original Acoma was built on the top of the _Mesa
Encantada_,--the "Enchanted Mesa,"--a sheer, precipitous rock seven
hundred feet high which is now practically unscalable; although Mr.
F. W. Hodge, of the Bureau of Ethnology, achieved this apparently
impossible feat, and found what is, in his convictions, unmistakable
evidence of human habitation, supporting the traditions regarding this
colossal rock. Some mighty cataclasm of nature swept the approach away;
but if ever there were human habitations on the "Enchanted Mesa," the
period is lost in prehistoric ages.

[Illustration: THE ENCHANTED MESA, NEW MEXICO]

The colossal church in Acoma is a striking feature. Its walls are ten
feet in thickness and sixty feet high, and the church and yard in
which it stands consumed forty years in their construction. It was
only reached by rude stairs cut in the rock. Dim traditions, which are
perhaps hardly more than speculative theory, suggest that these steps
of approach were suddenly swept away by some convulsion of nature at
a time when the men of this prehistoric pueblo were away hunting, or
otherwise engaged in procuring means of sustenance, and that the women
and children were thus cut off from all supplies and aid and left to
starve. Mr. Lummis has a theory that seems to him possible, if not
probable, that there was a ledge of neighboring rocks which served as
ladders to the _Mesa Encantada_, and that these rocks were swept away
by some frightful storm, or some sudden convulsion of nature, during
the absence of the men; and that a new city--the present Acoma--was
then built on the lesser rock on which it now stands. Acoma was old
even when Coronado, in 1540, made his expedition through the country,
from which period the authentic history of New Mexico begins with the
meagre records of the heroic friars and the memorials of the Spanish
conquerors. Laguna, a pueblo founded in 1699, lies twenty miles from
Acoma on the Santa Fé route, of which it is one of the interesting
features. All these old Spanish missions, which are found in more or
less degrees of preservation in all this chain of pueblos in the valley
of the Rio Grande, contain ancient paintings and statues of saints.
Largely, the paintings are crude and worthless, but there exist those
that have legitimate claim to art as the work of Spanish artists not
unknown to fame. Among these is the painting of San José in the mission
at Acoma, a painting presented by Charles II of Spain. This mission
was founded by Friar Ramirez, who dedicated it "To God, to the Roman
Catholic Church, and to St. Joseph,"--who was the patron saint of this
pueblo.

There is an amusing legend that Laguna, submerged in all manner of
disasters, looked on the prosperity of Acoma and ascribed it wholly to
the influence of this picture of the saint before which the people made
their daily adorations and laid their votive offerings. Laguna believed
that San José would invest it with the same felicities enjoyed by the
neighboring city, could they only secure the portrait, and their urgent
plea to borrow it for a time was granted by Acoma. Their confidence in
the saint was justified; peace and plenty again smiled on Laguna, and
they made their daily devotions before the great picture. At length, so
runs the legend, Acoma reminded Laguna that a loan was not a gift,--to
be held in perpetual fee, and demanded its return. The faithless people
of Laguna declared it was their own,--and the case actually went into
litigation and was tried in Court. Judge Kirby Benedict, after hearing
all the evidence, decided in favor of Acoma, but the picture had
mysteriously disappeared. The messengers sent from Acoma to bring the
sacred treasure at last discovered it under a tree half-way between
the two pueblos. They instantly recognized that the saint, rejoiced
at the righteous decision, had started on his homeward journey of his
own volition. The last one of the Franciscan friars to minister in New
Mexico was Padre Mariano de Jesus Lopez, whose work was in Acoma, the
"city in the sky." Of all the cliff-built cities, Acoma is the most
marvellous. Its terraced dwellings seem, as Mr. Lummis so graphically
says, to be "the castles of giants," for "the lapse of ages has carved
the rocks into battlements, buttresses, walls, columns, and towers,
and the view from this cloud-swept city is one never to be forgotten.
On this cliff the sand rises and falls like the billows of the sea."

[Illustration: LAGUNA, NEW MEXICO, ON THE SANTA FÉ RAILROAD]

No latter-day interest of contemporary life, either in the romantic
scenery or the potential development of New Mexico, can exceed the
richness of its prehistoric past and the marvels of this ancient
civilization that yet remain. Alluding to these wonderful monumental
remains, Colonel Max Frost, of Santa Fé, who knows his territory in
every aspect of its life and its attractions, says:

    "The Pajarito Cliff-dwellers' Park, the Chaco Cañon, the Gila
    Cañon, western Valencia and Socorro counties abound in cliff and
    communal buildings, the age of which has puzzled scientists, but
    which are older than any other ruins on the American continent, and
    probably in the world. The most accessible cliff-dwellers' region
    is the Pajarito Park, only one day's overland trip from Santa Fé or
    Española, in which twenty thousand cliff-dwellings and caves are
    situated within a comparatively small area. The scenery of this
    natural park is superb; 'wonderful' is the only adjective that
    will do justice to the caves in the cliffs, high and inaccessible
    almost as eagles' nests, but showing many other signs of occupation
    besides the peculiar picture writings in the soft volcanic tufa of
    which the cliffs are composed. In addition to the cliffs, there are
    remains of communal buildings of later occupation, some of them
    containing as high as twelve hundred rooms. There are also burial
    mounds with remains of ancient pottery. Along the eastern foot of
    this steep plateau flows the Rio Grande and lie the villages of
    San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and San Juan, while to the west rise
    the stupendous mountain masses of the Valles, the Cochiti and
    Jemez ranges, with their deep forests and cañons, their famous hot
    springs, their Indian villages, and their mines. Where else on
    earth is there so much of the beautiful in scenery, of romance,
    of historic monuments, of prehistoric remains, of the ancient,
    the unique, the picturesque, the sublime, to be found as within a
    radius of fifty miles of Santa Fé? One day's trip will take the
    wanderer from the historic Old Palace and San Miguel Church in the
    City of the Holy Faith, over the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo
    range, from which rise in full view mountain peaks almost thirteen
    thousand feet high, into the picturesque Tesuque Valley and by the
    ancient Indian pueblo of Tesuque. The road winds through sandhills
    that the air and the rain have cut into grotesque shapes, huge as
    Titans and weird as the rock formations in the Garden of the Gods.
    Then come once more fertile fields and the village of Cuymungue,
    formerly an Indian pueblo, now a native settlement. Along the
    Nambe River, with its grand falls, close by the Indian pueblo of
    Nambe to the pueblo of San Ildefonso on the Rio Grande; then along
    that river through the laughing Española Valley, past the Black
    Mesa, a famous Indian battleground, into the large Indian pueblo
    of Santa Clara and its mission church to Santa Cruz, also with a
    quaint and ancient church building, threads the wagon road across
    the river into Española. From there the road ascends the wildly
    beautiful Santa Clara Cañon, along a rippling trout stream up to
    the steep cliffs of the Puye and the Shufinne, with their hundreds
    and thousands of prehistoric caves and communal buildings. And
    all that in one day's journey overland! If the trip be prolonged
    another day or two, the remarkable hot springs at Ojo Caliente and
    the hot springs in the deep chasm of the Rio Grande at Wamsley's,
    the Indian pueblos of Picuris and Taos, the finest trout streams
    and best haunts of wild game, or the Jicarilla Indian Reservation,
    as well as busy lumber and mining camps, can be visited. And that
    is only in one direction from Santa Fé! Going south, one day's trip
    will pass through the quaint settlements of Agua Fria, Cienega,
    and Cieneguilla, by the Tiffany turquoise mines, the old mining
    camp of Bonanza, the smelter at Cerrillos, the Ortiz gold placers,
    worked a hundred years before gold was discovered in California and
    still yielding gold dust and nuggets, the coal mines at Madrid,
    where bituminous and anthracite coal have been mined from the same
    hillside, the placer and gold mines of Golden and San Pedro, not to
    speak of sheep and cattle ranches and the beautiful scenery of the
    Cerrillos, Ortiz, San Pedro, and Sandia mountains.

    "Another trip of one day from Santa Fé will take the traveller
    by the pueblo ruins of Arroyo Hondo over Apache hill, the
    battlegrounds of Apache Springs, the interesting native settlement
    of Cañoncito, over Glorieta Pass and the battlefield of Glorieta,
    to the upper Pecos River, by the ancient and historic Pecos church
    ruins, the village of Pecos, and through the most beautiful
    summer-resort country in the Southwest, where trout streams babble
    in every cañon and where from one summit can be surveyed the hoary
    heads of eleven of the twelve highest peaks in New Mexico.

    "Another day's trip out of Santa Fé will take the visitor up the
    rugged Santa Fé Cañon, by the large reservoir and the Aztec mineral
    springs to the Scenic Highway, which crosses the Santa Fé range
    into the upper Pecos Valley and unfolds at every step new mountain
    views and panoramas magnificent beyond description. Nor do these
    trips exhaust the interesting points in and about Santa Fé. Almost
    every other town in the territory offers sights and scenes of equal
    interest to the tourist and sightseer.

    "The prehistoric ruin of the Chaco Cañon and Pueblo Bonito, in
    southeastern San Juan County, as well as those at Aztec, in the
    same county, are more fully excavated than those of the Pajarito
    Park, and in some respects are more palatial and more impressive.
    They can best be reached from Gallup or Thoreau on the Santa Fé
    Railway in McKinley County.

    "The prehistoric ruins on the Gila Forest Reserve, as well as those
    in western Valencia and Socorro counties, have not been thoroughly
    explored thus far, being distant from the highways of travel;
    but on this very account they should have a special charm and
    attraction for the student of archæology.

[Illustration: CLIFF DWELLER RUINS, NEAR SANTA FÉ, NEW MEXICO]

[Illustration: STONE TENT, CLIFF DWELLERS, NEW MEXICO]

    "Coming to more recent, although still ancient days, the ruins
    of the Gran Quivira and of nearby abandoned pueblo villages,
    between the Jumanes Mesa and the Mal Pais and Jornado del Muerto,
    are of great historic interest. They are best reached from the
    station of Willard at the junction of the Santa Fé Central and
    Eastern Railway of New Mexico. Similar ruins are found in western
    Valencia, Socorro, and other counties, and divide the interest of
    the tourist with the many present-day Indian pueblos and Spanish
    settlements boasting of considerable antiquity. The Zuñi, Navaho,
    Jicarilla, and Mescalero Indian reservations are well worthy a
    visit, and upon the first two named are many prehistoric ruins.

    "Foremost in interest and value in historic archæology are the
    old mission churches of the Franciscans. In every occupied Indian
    pueblo and at the site of almost every abandoned pueblo, there
    is one of the monuments of those pioneers of Christianity and
    civilization, the Franciscan Fathers. Many of these are in a good
    state of preservation, while others are in ruins, but every one is
    an object of historic interest.

    "The old mission church of San Diego, which is the oldest of the
    California missions, was founded in 1769. It is almost a total
    ruin; only the front remains in a good state of preservation. The
    side walls are still standing, but no portions of the roof or
    interior remain. This is the most venerable and venerated historic
    monument in the state of California, and is annually visited by
    thousands of tourists. It has stood for one hundred and sixty-four
    years. It marks the beginning of civilization and Christianity
    in California. And yet, in New Mexico, on the upper Pecos,
    thirty-five miles west of Las Vegas, at the site of the abandoned
    Pueblo of Cicuye, are the ruins of the old Pecos church. The church
    is three hundred years old. It was nearly one hundred and fifty
    years old when the San Diego mission was founded. It was projected
    before the Spanish Armada was destroyed and antedates the coming of
    the Mayflower and the settlement of Jamestown. All that is said of
    the old Pecos church may be said of that of Jemez. They were built
    at the same time. The one at Gran Quivira was founded in 1630, and
    is a fairly well-preserved ruin. The churches at San Ildefonso and
    Santa Clara are in a complete state of preservation. They are nine
    years older than the oldest of the California ruins. The old San
    Miguel mission in Santa Fé has been rebuilt. Its walls date from
    1650, the roof from 1694, or possibly a few years later. From the
    old church at Algodones was taken a bell, cast in Spain in 1356,
    and at the Cathedral at Santa Fé and other churches are ancient
    relics and art treasures of old Spanish and Italian masters. These
    are only a few examples selected at random from the large number
    of ancient churches of equally great interest scattered over New
    Mexico. Inscription Rock, on the old road to Zuñi, and every one of
    the pueblos from Taos on the north to Isleta on the south, and from
    the Rio Grande pueblos in the central part to Zuñi in the west, are
    worthy of a visit, both for historic and present-day interest.

    "Nor is there any other building in this country to compare in
    historic interest with the Old Palace at Santa Fé, which has been
    more to New Mexico than Faneuil Hall to Massachusetts or Liberty
    Hall to Pennsylvania, nor is there any other town in the United
    States which offers so much of interest to the tourist as the city
    of St. Francis d'Assisi."

It is no exaggeration to say that in many respects the archæological
interest of New Mexico, its atmosphere, its historic color, is as
distinctive as that of Egypt or of Greece, Italy, or Spain. When,
on December 15, 1905, the first long-distance telephone in Santa Fé
established communication _viva voce_ with Denver, while within a
radius of fifty miles, ruins of prehistoric civilization fascinated
the tourist,--surely the remote past and the latest developments of
the present met and mingled after the fashion of "blue spirits and
gray." Very curiously mixed is the civilization of New Mexico. It can
almost be said to lie in strata, like geologic testimony. The ancient
peoples whose very name is lost,--shrouded in antiquity that has closed
the chapters and refuses to turn the pages for the twentieth-century
reader; the Indian population; the Spanish, whose explorers--Alvar
Nuñez, Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, Juan de Oñate, and others--and whose
missionaries, from the ranks of the Franciscan friars, brought to the
savage land the first message of modern civilization; and the American,
which within almost the past half-century has established itself since
that August day of 1846 when General Kearny floated the stars and
stripes from the "Old Palace" in Santa Fé. The American civilization
and high enlightenment has poured itself into this "Land of the Sun
King,"--the "Land of the Turquoise Sky." For now, as Colonel Frost
has so ably and comprehensively noted, "New Mexico is strictly up to
date in its government, in its hotels, its railroad accommodations, in
the protection the law affords, in its universities, colleges, public
schools, sanitariums, charitable institutions, its progress, and in
its prosperity. Churches are found in every settlement, newspapers in
every town, together with fine stores, banking institutions, and every
safety, comfort, and luxury that the centres of civilization of the
East afford." If that vivid and inspiring group of the Muses,--the
muse of History, of Science, of Philosophy, and others,--painted by
Puvis de Chavannes to adorn the court of the grand stairway of rich
Siena marble in the Public Library of Boston,--an achievement in modern
art that alone would immortalize the great painter of France,--if
these Muses could visit New Mexico, the specialty of each would be
found. The richly historic past that has left its various records; the
present, that has impressed into its service every power of science,
of engineering, of architectural construction, of agriculture, and of
social progress, would furnish to each a vast field in its own especial
domain.

A work published in Paris somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth
century, entitled "_Memoires Historiques sur La Louisiane_,"--a
book that has never been translated,--gives an account of a French
expedition in New Mexico in search of a mine of emeralds and their
encounter with the Spanish forces; but although in this engagement
the Spanish troops suffered disaster, the Spanish civilization still
continues, while there is little permanent trace of the French in New
Mexico. It is a curious fact, however, that the present continues this
varied and strangely assorted grouping of races which characterized the
country in its earliest days.

New Mexico reminds one of Algiers. There is the same Oriental
suggestion of intense coloring, of dazzling brilliancy of sky, of
gleaming pearl, of floating clouds.

There is one feature of this trans-Continental trip which is of the
first importance to the tourist, and this is the line of artistic and
beautiful hotels built after the old mission design, the architecture
felicitously harmonizing with the landscape,--those Harvey hotels
built in connection with the Santa Fé stations at principal points, as
at Trinidad, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and others, all christened with
Spanish names,--the "Cardenas," the "Castañeda," the "Alvarado,"--all
of which are conducted with a perfection of cuisine and service
that is rarely equalled. The social and the picturesque charm of
the long journey is singularly enhanced by the leisurely stops made
for refreshment; the leaving the long train--with its two engines,
one at either end--for the little exercise in fresh air gained by
going into the dining-rooms; being able to procure papers at the news
stands, fruit, or other delicacies, and enjoying the scenery and
gaining some knowledge of the place. In connection with the Alvarado,
at Albuquerque, are two buildings: one that offers a most interesting
museum of Indian archæological and ethnological collections, and
the other showing native goods from Africa and the Pacific islands.
Salesrooms connected with these enable the traveller to purchase any
souvenir from a trifle, to the costly baskets, richly colored Navajo
blankets, the strange symbolic pottery, or the objects of religious
rites.

A day's delay at Albuquerque enables the traveller to visit four
interesting pueblos,--Santa Ana, Sandia, Zia, and Jemez,--in a day's
stage ride between Jemez and Albuquerque. At all these important
stations on the route the Santa Fé has established free reading-rooms
for its employés, fitted up with every comfort.

New Mexico, while partaking in the general fascination that invests all
the great Southwest, is especially not only a land of enchantment, but
a land of opportunities. It is a country of untold latent wealth, of
uncalculated resources. There are vast tracts of soil that are ready
for the cultivation they will so bountifully repay; there are over
three hundred mining districts, few of which are developed. Six million
sheep are grazing upon its thousand hills, which would furnish raw
material for a large number of woollen mills. The land is favorable for
the culture of the sugar beet, and manufactories for this product are
needed. A local authority states that "the rubber plant is indigenous
and mineral products are of such extent and variety that industries
that need them for raw material, or incidentally in the process of
manufacture, will find in this part of the United States a location
much more favorable than most of the Eastern manufacturing centres.
There exist large deposits of iron ore, fluxing material and fuel for
furnaces, steel mills and smelters, and there are but few branches
of manufacture which could not be established with profit in this
part of the Southwest. Besides the raw material there are offered the
water-power, the fuel, the cheap labor, special inducements, such as
exemption from taxation for the first five years and a low assessment
thereafter, favorable legislation, cheap building sites, railroad
facilities, freedom from excessive competition, the increasing home
demand of a growing commonwealth of vast resources, and proximity to
the markets of Mexico and the Orient....

"Farmers are urged to come to till the fertile soil under the most
favorable conditions, and with home markets that pay better prices
than can be obtained anywhere else. Only a quarter of a million of
acres are under cultivation, and most of these only in forage plants
or in products that demand little attention; four times that area is
immediately available for agricultural purposes. Not one-half of the
flowing water is utilized, and not one-fiftieth of the flood water is
stored. There are undeveloped possibilities of farming by the Campbell
or dry-soil method. New Mexico raises the finest fruit in the world,
and every other crop that can be produced anywhere in the temperate
zone. Yet it imports annually millions of dollars' worth of flour,
alfalfa, hay, potatoes, fruit, garden produce, poultry, eggs, butter,
cheese, honey, beef, pork, and other products of the farm and dairy
that it can and should raise at home. Free lands, the finest climate
in the world, irrigation, churches, schools, railroad facilities, home
markets, good prices, and extensive range, are all factors which help
to make the life of the farmer and stock grower in New Mexico pleasant
and prosperous."

The visitor from the East enters New Mexico through a long tunnel;
and in Raton, a prosperous city of some eight thousand people located
in the Raton Mountains, is found the centre of an enormous coal belt,
and also a promising oil field. Raton is called the "Gate City." It
exports ice of a very pure quality, the water being from a reservoir
of a capacity of over fifty million gallons. The streets of Raton are
graded and have electric lighting; there is a fine park, long-distance
telephonic connection with Colorado and New Mexican cities, and its
schools and churches are numerous. A new Raton tunnel is now in
process of construction by the Santa Fé line that will enter New
Mexico through the mountains at a lower point. The work is being done
by electric drills that offer a most interesting spectacle in their
process. The tunnel will cost a million dollars. Most beautiful is
the landscape and the coloring of air and sky between Raton and Las
Vegas. The Cimarron range is silhouetted against the western sky;
picturesque points on the old Santa Fé trail are seen; and Mora Cañon,
through which the journey lies, has its romantic attractions. From
the lofty plateau of Raton's Peak the deep, dark valley of Rio Las
Animas Perdidas is disclosed; the matchless Spanish Peaks, "Las Cumbres
Españolas," lift their heads into the blue sky; Pike's Peak gleams like
a monumental shaft in the clouds, and the Snowy Range, for more than
two hundred miles, is within the luminous landscape.

Las Vegas, the second city in importance in New Mexico, is a
fascinating place. There are really three towns of Las Vegas--the old
Spanish town, still retaining its ancient convent and missions; the
new, up-to-date Las Vegas, with its Castañeda Hotel--beautiful in the
old Moorish architecture, with spacious piazzas and balconies; and
Las Vegas Hot Springs, connected by trolley cars. Thus there is the
particular paradise of the invalid, or of those who take prevention
rather than cure and a sunny winter in order not to be invalids; for at
Las Vegas Hot Springs, to which a branch railroad of this omnipresent
Santa Fé conveys the traveller--only six miles--the Hot Springs boil
and bubble like the witches' caldron. Here the guests may immerse
themselves in boiling mineral water, or lie all day in the sunshine,
or whatever else they prefer; and the medicinal waters, internally
and externally administered, are said to make one over altogether.
Rheumatic and tubercular affections flee, it is said, before this
treatment and the wonderful air; and apparently if Ponce de Leon had
only chanced upon Las Vegas he would not have searched in vain for his
fabled fountain.

Albuquerque is an exceedingly "smart" town. Its residents are almost
entirely Eastern capitalists, who are living here that they may keep
an eye on their possessions, mines, ranches, and the things of this
world in general. However largely they have laid up their treasures
in heaven, they have a goodly amount also on earth, over which they
perhaps keep closer watch and ward than over their more immaterial
possessions. At all events, Albuquerque is a sort of Newport of the
West, where people drive and dance and dine from one week to another,
and the women are so stylish as to suggest some occult affinities with
the Rue de la Paix.

In this brilliant and thoroughly up-to-date young city of Albuquerque,
the metropolis of New Mexico; in Las Vegas, one of the fascinating
towns of the continent; in Raton and Gallup, and in its capital, Santa
Fé, the territory has a galaxy of exceedingly interesting towns.

Albuquerque is the trade centre of a region exceeding in area all New
England. With a population estimated at some eighteen thousand; the
seat of the University of New Mexico, whose buildings occupy a plateau
two hundred feet above the town, commanding a beautiful view; with a
scenic background of the Sandia and the Jemez mountains; with the most
extensive free Public Library in the territory; two daily journals and
a number of weekly papers in both Spanish and English, and several
monthly publications; with its splendid railway facilities both to
the North and the South, as well as on the great trans-continental
line from the East to the Pacific; with the shops of the Santa Fé road
employing over seven hundred men, as the junction point of three lines
of this superb system; and with the beautiful Alvarado hotel, in the
old Spanish mission architecture, from whose wide piazzas the view
comprises a host of mountain peaks piercing the turquoise sky, and
whose beauty and comfort is a masterpiece of the magician of the Land
of Enchantment; with the Musée of Indian relics and souvenirs of the
Moki, the Navajo, the Zuñi, Pima, and Apache; the fine Mexican filigree
work; the model of an Indian pueblo, and other curios,--with all these
and many other interesting aspects, Albuquerque fascinates the tourist.
In the "Commercial Club" it has a unique institution representing the
combination of business and social life. The broad streets are well
lighted by electricity; there is electric transit and a fine water
system. Albuquerque has also extensive manufacturing interests, in
foundry, lumber, and other directions, which aggregate an investment of
over two millions of capital with an annual productive value of more
than four millions.

Returning to Las Vegas; with its ten thousand inhabitants, its large
floating population drawn by the medicinal hot springs, and the seat
of the territorial Normal School. As a noted wool centre, and with its
daily papers, good schools, and many churches, it is another alluring
point. One feature of important interest is the new "Scenic Highway"
that is in process of completion between Las Vegas and Santa Fé, across
the Pecos Forest Reserve, which will offer some of the grandest views
in any of the mountain regions of the West. It will be to Santa Fé
and Las Vegas what the beautiful drive between Naples, Sorrento, and
Amalfi is to Southern Italy. This scenic road will wind up to the
Dalton Divide, nine thousand five hundred feet high, where Lake Peak,
glittering with snow, Santa Fé Cañon, and other peaks and precipices
and cañons, are all about, and the Pecos River is seen far below as a
thread of silver. This drive will be one of the famous features of the
entire West when completed. New Mexico monopolizes the greatest belt of
coal deposits west of the Missouri, while Arizona has the monopoly in
pine forests.

The reclamation work in the southern part of the Rio Grande Valley is
now in successful process, and near Engle a reservoir forty miles in
length will be established, having a capacity of two million acre-feet.
It is estimated that a hundred and ten thousand acres of land will thus
be put under irrigated agriculture which will yield marvellous returns
in alfalfa, cereals, vegetables, and fruits.

The government has also purchased the system of the Pecos Irrigation
Company, which is now transferred to the Reclamation Service of the
United States. This is the largest irrigation scheme in New Mexico. It
is located on the Pecos River, which is fed from springs many of which
gush forth from the earth with such force as to indicate that their
source must be in high, snow-crowned hills.

New Mexico's railroad facilities may be estimated from the fact that
not a county in the territory is without a railroad, while many have
the benefit of three lines. With twenty-five hundred miles of railroads
within the territorial limits already in operation, it is confidently
expected that this number will be increased to four thousand miles
within two years, as much of this anticipated increase is already under
construction. Of the present railways eleven hundred miles belong to
the Santa Fé system alone. The matchless scenery of the Denver and
Rio Grande route between Ontonito and Santa Fé offers the tourist one
of the most enjoyable of trips through Española, Caliente, and other
points of beauty with the mountain peaks of San Antonio, Taos, Ute, and
others within the horizon, often appearing like islands swimming in a
faint blue haze.

There is space and to spare in New Mexico. There are almost unlimited
possibilities, with much to get and as much to give, and the latter is
by no means less important in life than the former. Out of a total area
of over seventy-eight million acres only about a quarter of a million
are under irrigation agriculture, and the field for reclamation is as
unlimited as it is promising. The land is fertile and the productions
are abundant. The sky is a dream of color and of luminous beauty, and
the climate is one of the most delightful in the entire world. Nor
does New Mexico suffer from that which is the greatest deprivation of
Arizona,--the lack of water. There is an abundance of the mountain
flood waters that now go to waste which would store vast reservoirs;
there is the flow of copious streams and large river systems, and
there are artesian belts of water all ready for mechanical appliances.
The Campbell dry culture, which is increasingly in use in the eastern
part of Colorado, has been successfully introduced into New Mexico.
Fruit-growing is already becoming an important industry, and the
apple orchard, of all other varieties of horticulture, is the most
successful. At the Paris Exposition in 1900 New Mexico made an exhibit
of apples, and also at Buffalo in 1901, receiving from the former the
award to rank with those of the best apple-growing regions in any part
of the United States, and from the latter the first prize. Peaches,
pears, and apricots grow well; the cherry does not thrive in New
Mexico, but grapes are grown with conspicuous success.

The mineral resources of New Mexico are varied, and include gold,
silver, copper, lead, and other minerals. In precious stones there is
promise of untold development. The Tiffanys own large turquoise mines,
whose supply, thus far, has proved inexhaustible; and the opal and
the moonstone are found in many places. But it is as an agricultural
commonwealth, and as the repository of vast coal belts, that New Mexico
is chiefly distinguished.

It was early in February, 1880, that the first train over the Santa
Fé railroad entered the territorial capital and initiated its
transformation from the mediæval Spanish town to that which is, in
part, the theatre of the progressive American life. In Santa Fé one
of the landmarks pointed out to-day to the visitor is the old Santa
Fé Trail, whose story was told so vividly, some years ago, by Colonel
Henry Inman,[2] who has described the majestic solitude of this highway
and has narrated the mingled experiences of the early pioneers and the
soldiers who thus marched through the wilderness. History and romance
mingle in the wonderful past of New Mexico, and it needs no sibyl of
old to proclaim from the _Mesa Encantada_ the promise of the future to
this beautiful Land of the Turquoise Sky.

CHAPTER VII

THE STORY OF SANTA FÉ

  "_From scheme and creed the light goes out,
    The saintly fact survives,
  The Blessed Master none can doubt
    Revealed in holy lives._"

  "_Oh, more than sacred relic, more
  Than solemn rite or sacred lore,
  The holy life of one who trod
  The footmarks of the Christ of God._"

In the place once occupied by those whose lives were consecrated to
the divine ideal, some influence, as potent as it is unseen, binds
the soul to maintain the honor that they left; to hold the same noble
standard of life. The spell is felt even while it eludes analysis. Few
to-day can tread the narrow, primitive little streets of old Santa Fé
without some consciousness of this mystic influence. It was here, in
the centuries gone from all save memory, that

                  "there trod
  The whitest of the saints of God,"

and "The True City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis" (_La Ciudad Real
de la Santa Fé de San Francisco_) is forever consecrated by the memory
of these holy men, and vital with the tragic interest, the heroic and
pathetic story of their lives. As early as 1539 Friar Marcos de Nizza
and other Fathers of the Church pressed on into this country--then an
unknown wilderness--to extend the domain of the Holy Cross and carry
onward "the true faith of St. Francis." They encountered every hardship
possible to a savage land; sacrifice and martyrdom were their reward.
They left a land of learning and refinement to carry the light into
regions of barbarism. They gave their lives to teaching and prayer,
and they sowed without reaping their harvest. Yet who shall dare think
of their brilliant, consecrated lives as wasted? for the lesson they
taught of absolute faith in God is the most important in life. Faith
provides the atmosphere through which alone the divine aid can be
manifested, and the divine aid is sent through and by means of our
friends and helpers and counsellors in the unseen world. It is man's
business, his chief business, now and here, to co-operate with God in
the carrying out of His plans and purposes. It was this literal and
practical faith in divine aid that the Franciscan Fathers taught in the
wilderness through all hardship and disaster.

  "Say not the struggle naught availeth."

It must always avail.

  "Yet do thy work; it shall succeed
    In thine or in another's day,
  And if denied the victor's meed
    Thou shalt not lack the toiler's pay."

This Spanish mission work planted itself over the entire vast region
which is now known as New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California.
The friars set out on long, lonely journeys, wholly without ways and
means to reach a given destination save as they were guided by unseen
hands and companioned by unseen guides. The cloud by day and the pillar
of fire by night led them on. They went forth to meet desolation and
sacrifice and often martyrdom; yet their gentle zeal and cheerful
courage never failed. They traversed hundreds of miles of desert
wastes; they encountered the cruel treatment of the Apaches and the
Navajos; but these experiences were simply to them the incidents of
the hour, and had no relation to the ultimate issue of their work. In
1598 the first church was founded, by a band of ten missionaries who
accompanied Juan de Oñate, the colonizer, and was called the chapel
of San Gabriel de los Españoles, but it was deserted when, in 1605,
the city of Santa Fé was founded by Oñate, and in 1630 the church of
San Miguel was built. The original wall was partly destroyed in the
rebellion of a half-century later, but it was restored in 1710, and the
new cathedral was built on the site where the present one now stands.
As early as 1617 there were eleven Spanish mission churches within
the limits of what is now New Mexico,--at Pecos, Jemez, and Taos; at
Santa Clara, San Felipe, and other places, mostly within the valley
of the Rio Grande. In six of the historic "seven cities of Cibola,"
all Zuñi towns, these missions were established; and in the ancient
pueblo of San Antonio de Senecú, Antonio de Arteaga founded a church
in 1629; in Picuries, in 1632, Friar Ascencion de Zárate established
the mission, and in 1635 one also in Isleta. In passing Glorieta, from
the train windows, to-day, can be seen the ruins of the early mission
church established there. Before the close of the seventeenth century
the churches in Acoma, Alameda, Santa Cruz, Cuaray, and Tabirá had been
founded, the ruins of all of which are still standing. These Franciscan
Fathers penetrated the desert and made their habitations in solitary
wastes so desolate that no colonizers would follow; but to the Indians
they preached and taught them the elements of civilized life.

"Not the wildest conceptions of the mission founders could have
foreseen the results of their California enterprises," says Professor
George Wharton James in his interesting work on these old missions.[3]
"To see the land they found in the possession of thousands of savages
converted in one short century, to the home of tens of thousands of
happy, contented people, would have been a wild vision indeed. God
surely does work mysteriously, marvellously, His wonders to perform."

Santa Fé is the centre of the archdiocese whose other diocesean
cities are Denver and Tucson. The archbishop, the Most Reverend J. B.
Salpointe, D.D., whose presence exalts the city of his residence, is
one who follows reverently in the footsteps of Him whose kingdom on
earth the early Franciscans labored to establish.

[Illustration: SAN MIGUEL CHURCH, SANTA FÉ]

In 1708 San Miguel was restored by Governor José Chacon Medina
Salazar y Villaseñor, Marqués de Peñuela, and two years later these
restorations were completed. An inscription that can be traced to-day
on the gallery bears this legend:

    El Señor Marqués de la Peñuela Hizo Esta Fábrica: El Alférez real
    Don Augustin Flores Vergara su criado. Año de 1710.

Not only is this "City of the Holy Faith" consecrated by that
sacrificial devotion of the Franciscan Fathers; the heroic explorers
and pioneers, the brave and dauntless soldiers, from the time of
Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado to that of the gallant and noble General
Kearny, have left on Santa Fé the impress of their brave purpose and
high endeavor. The old Cathedral of San Francisco, the ancient church
of San Miguel, and the Rosario Chapel, all interest the stranger. In
1692 Diego de Vargas marched up from the south with two hundred men and
looked sadly at the little town of Santa Fé, from which his countrymen
had been driven. It would seem that de Vargas was a romantic figure of
his time. He was evidently endowed with the characteristic vehemence of
temperament, intense energy, and the genius for effective action that
marked the Spanish pioneers. He was rich in resources and manifested
a power of swift decision regarding all the perplexities into which
his adventurous life led, ever beckoning him on. The little town he
had entered appealed to him in its impressive beauty. Surrounded with
majestic mountains, with their deep and mysterious cañons, it was then,
as now, a region of entrancing sublimity.

Adjoining San Miguel is the old house where Coronado is said to have
lodged in 1540. The "Old Palace," always used by the Governors of
New Mexico, is partly given over to a museum of Indian and Mexican
curiosities. There is a little library, open only every other
afternoon; there are many mountain peaks around, which are not
difficult to climb, and which offer charming views. The new State House
is a fine modern building, and Governor Hagerman, formerly an attaché
of the American Embassy at St. Petersburg, is alert and progressive in
his methods.

More than half the residents of Santa Fé speak no English, and these
Spanish and Mexican residents have their papers in their own language,
their separate schools, and their worship in the old Cathedral. In
the early afternoon women in black, with black mantillas over their
heads, are seen passing up San Francisco Street and entering the
Cathedral, where they fall on their knees and tell their beads in the
silent church. Often one may see in the streets a funeral procession.
The casket is carried in a cart, and the family sit around it, on
the bottom of the wagon. A few friends follow on foot, and thus the
pathetic and grotesque little procession winds on its way.

The history lying in the dim background of this ancient Spanish city is
one that impresses the imagination. It is a part of all that wonderful
early exploration by the Spanish pioneers of the vast region of country
that is now known as Arizona and New Mexico.

In 1538 Cabeza de Vaca, after following the disastrous expedition of
Pánfilo de Narvaez to Florida, set forth with four men to penetrate
the vast unknown wastes to the west, and without compass or provisions
they made their way, crossing the Mississippi two years before its
discovery by De Soto, reached the Moqui country, and finally arrived in
Sinolao with glowing tales that excited the enterprise of the Spanish
conquerors and led to the founding of another expedition authorized
by the viceroy, Mendoza. It fared forth under the leadership of Padre
Marcos de Nizza, who (in 1539) entered the country of the Pimas, passed
up the valley of the Santa Ana, and set up the cross, giving the
country the name of the New Kingdom of San Francisco.

Padre de Nizza's men were all massacred by the Moquis, but he returned,
as if bearing a charmed life, and set all New Spain aflame with his
tales of gold and of glory, and the great opportunity to extend the
work of the Holy Cross.

Mendoza then proceeded to organize two other expeditions, one under
the intrepid Vasquez de Coronado and the other under Fernando Alarçon.
Coronado visited the ruins of Casa Grande and at last reached the
"Seven Cities," but their fabled wealth had shrunk to the sordid
actualities of insignificant huts, and Coronado returned to New Spain
in 1542, disappointed and dejected.

In the meantime the expedition of Alarçon had sailed up the Gulf of
California (then known as the Sea of Cortez), and he discovered the
Colorado and the Gila rivers, ascending the Colorado in boats up to
the foot of the Grand Cañon. Then for nearly half a century no further
efforts to explore this region were made. But it is interesting to note
that some eighty years before the landing of the Pilgrims a Spanish
expedition had penetrated into the country which is now Arizona, and
have left definite record of their discoveries.

In 1582 Antonio de Espejio explored the pueblos of the Zuñi and Moqui
tribes, visiting seventy-four in all, and discovering a mountain rich
in silver ore. From this time New Mexico was under the rule of the
Spanish conquerors.

Juan de Oñate, who married Isabel, a daughter of Cortez and a
great-granddaughter of Montezuma, assumed the leadership, and about
1605 the town of Santa Fé was founded, and within the succeeding decade
the Mission Fathers had built a dozen churches and their converts
composed over fourteen thousand. A prominent padre in this movement was
Eusebio Francisco Kino.

Santa Fé has the distinction of being the oldest town in the United
States, having been established fifteen years before the landing of the
Pilgrims.

[Illustration: "WATCH TOWER." CLIFF DWELLERS, NEW MEXICO]

[Illustration: CLIFF DWELLERS. WITHIN TWENTY-FIVE MILES OF SANTA FÉ,
NEW MEXICO]

The mission church of San Xavier del Bac was established at so early
a date that it was in ruins in 1768, and on its site was built the
present one, in the valley of Santa Cruz, some ten miles south of
Tucson. This mission is a rare mingling of Ionic and Byzantine
architecture, with a dome, two minarets, and castellated exterior. The
front bears the coat-of-arms of the Franciscan monks--a cross with a
coil of rope and two arms below--one of Cohant and the other of St.
Francis d'Assisi. There are four fresco paintings, and there are more
than fifty pieces of sculpture around the high altar.

The missions of Guevara, Zumacacori, and San Xavier were peculiarly
fruitful in good results. The ruins of Zumacacori still cover a large
space. The church is partially unroofed; the form is seen to have been
that of a plain Greek cross with a basilica, and a roofless chapel
is standing. The basilica is still crowned by the cross, and the
vital influence of this sign and seal of faith in the Christ, this
commemoration of the sacrificial zeal that animated the Mission Fathers
is still felt by all who gaze upon this sacred emblem silhouetted
against a blue sky.

Santa Fé is, indeed, alive with the most profound and arresting
interest. The work of the early Spanish missionary priests effected
a great work among the Indians in creating conditions of peace and
industry; for faith in God, taught in any form, is not merely nor even
mostly an attitude of spirit: it is the instinctive action of life.
It permeates every motive inspiring it with power; it vitalizes every
effort with creative energy. Faith in God may well be described as the
highest possible form of potency. He who is receptive to the Divine
Spirit moves onward like a ship whose sails are set to the favoring
winds. He who is unreceptive to the Divine Spirit is like the ship
before the wind with all her sails furled. "The merit of power for
moral victory on the earth," said Phillips Brooks, "is not man and is
not God. It is God and man, not two, but one, not meeting accidentally,
not running together in emergencies only to separate again when
the emergency is over; it is God and man belonging essentially
together,--God filling man, man opening his life by faith to be a part
of God's, as the gulf opens itself and is part of the great ocean."

The unfaltering devotion of the Franciscan Fathers to the work of
bringing civilization and Christianity to these Indian pueblos and
their martyrdom in their efforts to establish "the true faith of St.
Francis" invests Santa Fé with an atmosphere of holy tradition.

  "All souls that struggle and aspire,
    All hearts of prayer by Thee are lit;
  And, dim or clear, Thy tongues of fire
    On dusky tribes and twilight centuries sit."

These early Church Fathers taught a pure and high order of faith in the
most practical way. They acquired the Indian language in sufficient
measure to speak to the tribes. They taught them the rudiments of
arithmetic, history, and geography--in the imperfect way then known;
but they gave their best. They inculcated industry and honesty. Their
faith is largely told in the poet's words,--

  "That to be saved is only this:
  Salvation from our selfishness."

The missions through all the Southwest were peculiarly fruitful in
good results. The ruins of many still exist, revealing them to have
usually been in the general design of a nave and basilica crowned by
the cross--this sign and seal of faith in the Christ.

  "O Love Divine! whose constant beam
    Shines on the eyes that will not see,
  And waits to bless us; while we dream
    Thou leavest, because we turn from Thee!

  "Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed thou know'st;
    Wide as our need Thy favors fall;
  The white wings of the Holy Ghost,
    Brood, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all."

Three Spanish documents still exist in the territorial records of
New Mexico dated 1693-1694, which give a full account of the Spanish
conquest; of the re-conquest by the Indians, and the final conquest
again by the Spaniards. There is ample evidence that a city existed on
the present site of Santa Fé four hundred years before the settlement
at St. Augustine. The final Spanish conquest took place in 1692, but
all the records prior to 1680 were unfortunately destroyed in the
Pueblo Rebellion. New Mexico's historian, Hon. L. Bradford Prince, who
has more than once served as Governor of the territory and who is one
of the most distinguished men of the West, has finely said that the
people of his territory, although threefold in origin and language
(Spanish, Mexican, and American), are one in nationality, purpose, and
destiny. In Governor Prince's history of New Mexico he notes its three
determining epochs,--the Pueblo, the Spanish, and the American,--and
he refers to it as "an isolated, unique civilization in the midst of
encircling deserts and nomadic tribes."

On August 18, 1846, General Stephen W. Kearny took possession of the
capital of New Mexico in the name of the United States; and on that
date, for the first time, the national colors floated from the Old
Palace and the acting Spanish Governor, Don Juan Baptista Vigil y
Alvarid resigned his authority.

On the historic plaza where now a memorial to this brave officer
stands, placed there by the "Daughters of the Revolution," General
Kearny proclaimed the peaceful annexation of the territory of the
United States.

    "We come as friends to make you a part of the representative
    government," he said. "In our government all men are equal. Every
    man has a right to serve God according to his conscience and his
    heart."

General Kearny assured the people of the protection of every
civil and religious right, and this forcible and noble speech--so
characteristically representing the generous and noble spirit of one
of the ablest among the leaders and the heroes of the nineteenth
century--made a profound impression on the minds of all who listened
to the words. When on August 18 of 1946 New Mexico shall celebrate her
centenary of union with the United States, this memorable address of
General Kearny's should be read to the assembled populace. Not even
Lincoln's noble speech at Gettysburg exceeds in simple eloquence and
magnanimity the lofty words of General Kearny. They were worthy to be
spoken in "The City of the Holy Faith."

It was thus that New Mexico entered the United States, _Esto Perpetua_.
To-day, after a territorial novitiate of more than sixty years, she is
ardently urging her claim for statehood.

In old Santa Fé the past and the present meet. Governor Hagerman
receives his guests in the same room in the Old Palace that was used
by the first viceroy; and seventy-six Spanish and Mexican and eighteen
American rulers have preceded him, among whom was General Lew. Wallace,
who, while serving as territorial Governor, wrote his immortal "Ben
Hur" in one room of the palace, which is still pointed out to the
visitor. During this period Mrs. Wallace wrote many interesting
articles on the history, the life, and the resources of the territory,
in which are embalmed valuable information delightfully recorded. Mrs.
Prince, the wife of ex-Governor Prince, a lady distinguished throughout
all the country for her gracious sweetness and refined dignity of
manner, is much interested in the New Mexico Historical Association;
and the ex-Governor and Mrs. Prince, His Honor, Mayor Cotrell, and Mrs.
Cotrell, Colonel and Mrs. Max Frost, and others of the choice society
of Santa Fé, are preserving the history of this territory "that has
survived all those strange modulations by which a Spanish province has
become a territory of the Union bordering on statehood." Santa Fé is
the home of some of the ablest lawyers in the United States, and one
private law library is said to be the largest legal library west of
Chicago.

The Old Palace has been identified with the times of the Inquisition;
with the zealous work of Friar Marcos de Nizza, Friar Augustino Ruiz,
and with Coronado and his band of warriors. On the Plaza, Juan de
Oñate unfurled the banner of Spain; here de Vargas gave thanks for his
victory, and here to-day is a simple monumental memorial of General
Kearny placed there by the Daughters of the Revolution. The revered
memory of Archbishop Lamy is closely associated with the place. In the
Old Palace is a musée where a great array of unique curios is gathered;
pictures of saints rudely painted on skins; crucifixes rudely carved
in wood or moulded in native silver; gods carved in stone, and
primitive domestic utensils.

There is a very charming and cultivated society in Santa Fé of the
small circle of American residents,--a circle that is of late rapidly
increasing. The country around is rich in gems,--the turquoise, opal,
onyx, garnet, and bloodstone being found in liberal deposits; and in
the town is a manufactory of Mexican filigree work that employs the
natives only who are very skilful in this delicate art. The Plaza is a
curiously fascinating place to saunter around, and the visitor finds
himself loitering and lingering as he is wont to loiter and linger on
the old Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The nomenclature of Santa Fé is
sufficiently foreign to enable one to fancy himself in Andalusia, as
such names as Padilla, Quintona, Lopez, Gutierrez, Vaca, and others
recur.

The Rosario Chapel, built by Señor Diego de Vargas, stands on a height
overlooking Santa Fé a mile distant from the Plaza and the Old Palace.
Near it is now located the Ramona School for the children of the
Apaches. The legend of the founding of San Rosario is still on the
air. When, in 1692, Señor de Vargas, marching from the south with his
band of two hundred men, gazed upon the city from which, in 1680, his
compatriots had been so tragically driven, he prostrated himself on the
ground and implored in prayer the protection and aid of "Our Lady of
the Rosary," and recorded his purpose that, would she but lead him on
to victory, he would build, on the very site where he was kneeling, a
chapel to her name. Arising, he led his band on to assault, and after
a tragic struggle of eleven hours' duration he was victorious. Did the
"Lady of the Rosary" shield and strengthen him? Who shall venture to
deny it?

  "More things are wrought by prayer
  Than this world dreams of."

De Vargas had promised that, in case the victory was granted to him, he
would have the statue of the Virgin carried from the cathedral to the
Rosario Chapel, as already noted. To this day the custom is fulfilled;
and each year, on the Sunday following _Corpus Christi_, this sacred
drama is enacted, with sometimes two thousand people, drawn from all
the country around, forming the procession. The statue is kept in the
chapel a week, with solemn masses celebrated every morning, after which
it is returned to the cathedral and the chapel is closed, not to be
opened again until the octave of the Feast of _Corpus Christi_ the next
year.

The "City of the Holy Faith" is very quiet in these days, and one
finds little trace of the turbulent past when it was the storm centre
of tragic wars and revolutions. The incessant warfare between the
Spaniards and the Indians, the sublime courage and devotion of Bishop
Lamy and other Fathers of the Church, constitute a wonderful chapter in
the history of our country.

Santa Fé antedates the landing of the Pilgrims by more than twenty
years. Its history is an unbroken record of thrilling and romantic
events, from its capture by the Pueblos in 1680; the terrible massacre
of the Mission Fathers, and the flight of the Governor to El Paso;
its conquest again by de Vargas in 1692; the change from Spanish to
Mexican rule; then the splendid entrance of General Kearny and his
troops (in the summer of 1846) in the name of the United States, down
to the scenes and the incidents of the old Santa Fé Trail and thence to
the present day, when three railroads have brought the city into close
touch with the modern life of which it still refuses to become a part.
Still, Santa Fé has nine mails a day, a free-delivery postal system,
electric lights, and local and long-distance telephonic connection.
The Capitol, where Governor Hagerman presides over the councils of
state, is a fine modern building with a beautiful view from the dome.
There is a new Federal Building of stone in classic design, in front
of which is placed a monument to Kit Carson. St. Michael's College,
the residence of the Archbishop, and the Government Indian School
attract the eye. But it is the old Santa Fé of haunting historic
memories that one dreams of in the narrow streets, or in looking down
on the town from a mountain-side. The quaint little Plaza dreams in
the sunshine, which lingers, as if with a _Benedicite_, on the Kearny
memorial, while through the unshuttered and uncurtained windows of the
Old Palace, forming one side of the Plaza, the antique débris may be
dimly seen. Should the ghost of any of the old Spanish warriors peer
forth, the apparition would hardly produce a ripple of surprise. The
long colonnade may be the favorite promenade of phantoms for aught one
knows,--phantoms, that come and go,--

  "With feet that make no sound upon the floor."

The twentieth-century sunshine lights up the dusky corners wherein are
stored the relics of the Spanish conquerors and the followers of St.
Francis. Perchance Francis d'Assisi himself, "revisiting the glimpses
of the moon," glides along the shadows, drawn to the spot where, at
so fearful a cost of life and treasure, his "holy faith" was guarded;
or it may be the warrior in his armor who for an instant is dimly
discerned through the dust-covered windows. Coronado, too, may haunt
this scene. Many are those in the historic ranks who have contributed
to the making of Santa Fé. It is the most composite city in American
history. The very air is vocal with tradition and legend.

The little shops around the Plaza bear their signs mostly in Spanish.
Yet mingling with these is the office of Mr. Lutz of the Santa Fé
transcontinental line, with which the New Mexican capital is connected
by a branch to Lamy, on the main line, where one may stand and converse
with Denver,--a feat which may surprise the ghost of Coronado or of
Juan de Oñate were it looking on; and Colonel Frost's daily journal,
with its news of the world, is just at the corner. Not far away, too,
is Mr. Linney, who represents the United States Signal Service, and
regards Santa Fé as a most opportune town in which to pursue his most
up-to-date study of atmospheric phenomena.

A remarkable personality in Santa Fé is Colonel Max Frost, the editor
of "The New Mexican," the political leader of the Republican party and
a man who, though blind and paralyzed, is simply a living encyclopædia
of historic and contemporary events. At eight o'clock every morning
Colonel Frost is in his office, at his desk, dictating to three expert
stenographers, carrying on three different subjects simultaneously.
Instead of his blindness being a hindrance to his work, he has, by the
sheer force of his remarkable energy, transformed the obstacle into a
stepping-stone. "I can do more work in ten minutes than most men can
in an hour," he said, in reply to a question, "as, being blind, I have
nothing to distract my attention. I put my mind on my work and keep it
there."

Colonel Frost's experience is the most convincing testimony to the
phenomenal power that lies in mental concentration. He cannot move
without assistance,--physically he is a wreck; yet he dictates columns
of work daily; he is the most influential leader of the political
party, and he is one of the makers of New Mexico. Every line of copy
in his daily paper is read to him before it goes to press, and the
vigorous and brilliant editorial page is largely his own work. For four
hours, every evening, Mrs. Frost reads to him from the great Eastern
dailies, the periodicals, and new books. It is said in New Mexico that
Colonel Frost has been the power behind the throne in territorial
legislation since the time that General Lew. Wallace served as chief
executive in 1879.

Colonel Frost went to Santa Fé from Washington in 1876 as a brilliant
young officer, commissioned to build a military telegraph line from
Santa Fé to Phoenix, Arizona,--a distance of five hundred miles.
This commission attracted great attention, and Colonel Frost became
at once a power among the Spanish-American citizens of the territory.
His great ability was widely recognized by leading men all over the
Southwest. He was urged to remain and become a citizen of Santa Fé. As
if to further prepare him for his remarkable life, he was commissioned
by the government to serve at several points in New Mexico on a variety
of important matters, and he thus became singularly identified with the
general progress of the country.

With all his extraordinary work in conducting his paper and devoting
himself to party political measures, Colonel Frost is serving his
territory as Secretary of the Bureau of Immigration with the most
conspicuous ability. Under his electric touch and irresistible
energy there is constantly prepared and sent out some of the finest
transcriptions of the entire status of the country, in climate,
resources, and opportunities; in achievements already realized and in
the potential developments of the future. Thousands of residents have
been drawn to New Mexico through the data so ably set forth by Colonel
Frost, the matter being, each year, revised to date. He knows, from
personal observation and intimate contact, every part of the territory;
he is personally acquainted with all the leading people; and no visitor
in the territory can feel his trip in any sense complete without
meeting Colonel Max Frost. If every state and territory in the Far West
could command such efficient service in the literature of immigration
as is rendered by Colonel Frost, there would be an appreciable increase
of their settlers.

There are many eminent men in Santa Fé,--government officers, political
leaders, gifted lawyers,--whom the stranger within the gates must
recognize as among the ablest leaders and makers of the nation. A
newspaper recently established, "The Eagle," ably edited by Mr. A.
J. Loomis, adds another attraction and source of inspiration to the
wonderful old city, whose life still continues to illustrate and exalt
the "Holy Faith of St. Francis."

CHAPTER VIII

MAGIC AND MYSTERY OF ARIZONA

  "_... The stars are glowing wheels,
  Giddy with motion Nature reels;
  Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream,
  The mountains flow, the solids seem,
  Change acts, reacts; back, forward hurled,
  And pause were palsy to the world.--
  The morn is come: the starry crowds
  Are hid behind the thrice-piled clouds;
  The new day lowers, and equal odds
  Have changed not less the guest of gods._"

                                     EMERSON

Arizona is the Land of Magic and of Mystery. It is the land of the yet
undreamed-of future, and it is also the region of brooding mystery,
of strange surprise. Besides its stupendous Grand Cañon, here are the
cañons of Chiquito, Marble, Desolation, and Limestone; the Montezuma
Well, Castle Dome, the Four Peaks--rising to the height of several
thousand feet, for hundreds of miles; the Thumb Buttes, San Francisco
Peak, the Tonto Basin, and the Twin Lake--all of these phenomenal
marvels of scenery telling their tale of the action of water and of
fire thousands of ages ago; convulsions of nature which have rent
the mountains asunder, opened chasms thousands of feet deep in the
earth, and projected the bottom of a sea into the air as a mountain
peak,--

  "What time the gods kept carnival."

[Illustration: PETRIFIED GIANTS, THIRD FOREST, ARIZONA]

The gods have, indeed, kept high carnival in Arizona. Every aspect of
nature is on a scale of Titanic magnificence. The cañon systems of its
mountain ranges; the indescribable grandeur which reaches its supreme
majesty in the Grand Cañon; the wonders of extinct volcanic action;
the colossal channels cut by rushing waters; the unearthly splendor of
the atmospheric effects, and the coloring of the skies,--all combine
to render Arizona an expression of magical wonder. All manner of
phenomenal conditions are encountered. The land is a red sandy desert,
whose leading productions are loose stones (lying so thickly in the
sand as to make walking or driving all but impossible) and pine trees,
petrified forests, and cacti. The riotous growth of the cactus is,
indeed, a terror to the unwary. But it is in sunsets and enchantment
of views and richness of mines, and in marvellous curiosities--as the
Petrified Forest, Meteorite Mountain, and the Grand Cañon--that Arizona
distinguishes herself. She cannot irrigate her soil because there
is no available water. But the pine forests--some of them--produce
lumber; the mines are rich, and the features of nature unequalled in
the entire world; while the exhilaration of the electric air and the
wonderful beauty of coloring quite make up to Arizona resources that
are unsurpassed if not unrivalled.

Arizona is not an agricultural country by nature, nor hardly by grace.
The resources are mining and timber. Still there are probably some
twenty million acres capable of rich productiveness, on which wheat,
barley, corn, vegetables of all kinds, and also rice and cotton,
could be successfully cultivated if irrigation could be sufficiently
effected. The largest area of agricultural land lies in the regions
adjacent to Prescott and Phoenix. This Salt River Valley is rich in
alluvial soil. The Gila Valley also offers, though in lesser area,
the same fertile land, and the valleys of the Colorado, Chiquito, of
Pueblo Viejo, the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Sulphur Springs,
and the great mesa between Florence and Phoenix, offer the same
possibilities. The great problem of Arizona is that of irrigation, as
most of the rivers lie at the bottom of inaccessible cañons and present
difficulties of access which no engineer can as yet clearly see a way
to overcome. The conditions are, however, materially assisted by the
rainy seasons, occurring usually in February or March and in July
or August, when water can be stored. The rain itself is as peculiar
in Arizona as are other conditions of this wonderland. It rains in
sections; it may rain in torrents in a man's front yard while the sun
shines in his back yard; or if this statement has something of the
flavor of "travellers'" tales, it is at least typical of actual facts.
Five minutes' walking is often all that is required to carry one into,
or out of, a severe downpour of rain. The clouds follow the mountain
spurs as invariably as a needle follows the magnet and a torrent may
fall on the mountains above, flashing down in a hundred improvised
raging cataracts and waterfalls, while in the valley below the sun
shines out of the bluest of skies. No panoramic pictures of the stage
ever equalled the pictorial effects of a thunderstorm in the mountains,
when the forked lightning leaps from peak to peak in a blaze, through
the air; when it dashes like a meteoric shower from rock to crag, and
the thunder reverberates with the mighty roar of a thousand oceans
beating their surf on the shore.

In Maricopa County, in the Salt River Valley, new and important
conditions have been initiated by the government system of irrigation
which has transformed arid lands into fertile gardens. The government
has expended three million dollars in constructing the Salt River dam
(sixty miles north of Phoenix), which is the largest artificial
lake in the world. This reservoir will store one and a half million
acres-feet of water, drawing it from the mountain cañons miles away.
Not only does this project mean an abundant water supply for a region
heretofore useless, but rich returns as well.

There are few regions which so attract and reward the researches of
the scientist as does Arizona. The geologist, the mineralogist, the
ethnologist, the archæologist, finds here the most amazing field for
apparently unending investigation and study. Nor is the botanist
excluded. The flora of Arizona offers the same strange and unique
developments that characterize the region in so many other directions.
The cacti flourish in riotous growth. The saguaro, a giant species,
frequently attains a height of forty feet. A strange spectacle it is,
with its pale green body, fluted like a Corinthian column, and its
colossal arms outstretched, covered with immense prickly thorns and
bearing purple blossoms. The century plant flourishes in Arizona.
There is a curious scarlet flower, blooming in clusters, at the top
of straight pole-like stumps ten to fifteen feet in height, which
terminate in luxuriant masses of scarlet blossoms and green leaves,
and grow in groups of from a dozen to fifty together, producing the
most fascinating color effects in the landscape. This plant is called
the ocotilla. There are plants which produce a fibrous textile leaf
which the native Mexicans used as paper; there are others whose roots
are used as a substitute for soap. The trees are largely pine, cedar,
and juniper, though in many parts of the state the rolling foothills
bear forests of oak, and the sycamore, ash, elder, walnut, and the
swift-growing cottonwood are found along the watercourses.

[Illustration: COLLECTION OF CACTI MADE BY OFFICERS AT FORT McDOWELL,
ARIZONA, FOR THIS PICTURE]

"The echinocactus, or bisnaga, is also called 'The Well of the
Desert,'" says Dr. Joseph A. Munk in some interesting sketches of
Arizona.[4] "It has a large barrel-shaped body, which is covered with
long spikes that are curved like fishhooks. It is full of sap that is
sometimes used to quench thirst. By cutting off the top and scooping
out a hollow, the cup-shaped hole soon fills with a sap that is not
exactly nectar, but can be drunk in an emergency. Men who have been in
danger of perishing from thirst on the desert have sometimes been saved
by this unique method of well-digging."

Of the palo verde Dr. Munk notes that it is "a true child of the
desert," and he adds:

    "No matter how hot and dry the weather, the palo verde is always
    green and flourishing. At a distance it resembles a weeping willow
    tree stripped of its leaves. Its numerous long, slender, drooping
    branches gracefully crisscross and interlace in an intricate figure
    of filigree work. It has no commercial value, but if it could be
    successfully transplanted and transported it would make a desirable
    addition to greenhouse collections in the higher latitudes.

    "The romantic mistletoe, that is world-renowned for its magic
    influence in love affairs, grows to perfection in Southern Arizona.
    There are several varieties of this parasitic plant that are very
    unlike in appearance. Each kind partakes more or less of the
    characteristics of the tree upon which it grows, but all have the
    glossy leaf and waxen berry."

The grasses of Arizona, are, in some places, very beautiful, of a rich
velvety green; and the infinite varieties of wild clover, the gramma,
the buffalo, the sacatone, and other grasses, are richly nutritive and
offer good facilities for grazing. As a wool-producing country Arizona
has no rival, the climate giving the best of protection to sheep
with the minimum of care, and the grazing offering adequate means of
support; and stock raising of all kinds, indeed, is destined to become
a great industry in Southern Arizona.

The climate of Arizona can only be alluded to in the plural, as in the
expressive phrase of one of Mr. George W. Cable's creole characters,
"dose climates," for Arizona has all the climates of the known world.
The range of choice almost exceeds the range of the Fahrenheit
registration. From the mountain summit, covered with snow for at least
ten months out of the year, to the heat in Yuma, which has scored up to
one hundred and twenty-eight degrees or more, there are all varieties
and every conceivable quality of atmosphere. In the main, however, the
climate of Arizona is inexpressibly delightful.

Dr. Munk, who is one of the distinguished physicians in Los Angeles,
has made a study of Arizona as a health resort, and of its conditions
he says:

    "The atmosphere of Arizona is not only dry, but also very
    electrical; so much so, indeed, that at times it becomes almost
    painful. Whenever the experiment is tried, sparks can be produced
    by friction or the handling of metal, hair, or wool. It affects
    animals as well as man, and literally causes 'the hair to stand on
    end.' The writer has on various occasions seen a string of horses
    standing close together at a watering-trough, drinking, so full of
    electricity that their manes and tails were spread out and floated
    in the air, and the long hairs drawn by magnetic attraction from
    one animal to the other all down the line in a spontaneous effort
    to complete a circuit. There are times when the free electricity
    in the air is so abundant that every object becomes charged with
    the fluid, and it cannot escape fast enough or find 'a way out' by
    any adequate conductor. The effect of such an excess of electricity
    is decidedly unpleasant on the nerves, and causes annoying
    irritability and nervousness.

    "The hot sun sometimes blisters the skin and burns the complexion
    to a rich nut-brown color, but the air always feels soft and balmy,
    and usually blows only in gentle zephyrs. The air has a pungent
    fragrance which is peculiar to the desert, that is the mingled
    product of a variety of resinous plants. The weather is uniformly
    pleasant, and the elements are rarely violently disturbed.

    "In the older settled sections of our country, whenever there is
    any sudden or extreme change of either heat or cold, wet or dry, it
    is always followed by an increase of sickness and death. The aged
    and invalid, who are sensitive and weak, suffer most, as they feel
    every change in the weather. There is, perhaps, no place on earth
    that can boast of a perfect climate, but the country that can show
    the fewest and mildest extremes approaches nearest to the ideal.
    The Southwest is exceptionally favored in its climatic conditions."

There is a legend that the poetic, musical name, Arizona, was derived
from "Ari," a maiden queen who once ruled the destinies of the Primas,
and "Zon," a valley, from the romantic configuration of the state,
the two combining into the melodious "Arizona." The tradition is
sufficiently romantic to be in keeping with the country it designates,
and nothing tends more to simplify the too complex processes of life,
not to say history, than to apply the rule of believing those things
that appeal to one's sense of the "eternal fitness" and rejecting
those which do not. The apostles of the simple life might well include
this contribution toward simplicity as an axiom of their faith. At all
events, as no other origin of Arizona's pretty name is on record, one
may indulge himself in accepting this one with a clear conscience.

The authentic Spanish history of Arizona dates to the exploration of
Mendoza in 1540. For nearly three hundred years--until the treaty of
Guadaloupe-Hidalgo in 1866, when all the region north of the Gila
and Mesilla valleys was incorporated into the area of the United
States--the Spanish explorers and the Indian natives were in perpetual
conflict, and it was as late as 1863 that Arizona received its name
and individual domain as separate from New Mexico, with which it had
been incorporated. At the time of the Guadaloupe-Hidalgo treaty Arizona
did not contain a single white settlement in the north and west. Near
Tucson and Tuba were a few hundred whites, but all the other portions
were the domain of the Apaches and the Moquis. In 1856 the Hon. James
Gadsden, then United States Minister to Mexico, negotiated for the
purchase of this territory at a price of ten million dollars, and the
Mexican colors in Tucson were replaced by the Stars and Stripes. On
December 1, 1854, a memorial was presented to the legislature of New
Mexico for a separate territorial organization and name of the new
acquirement.

Although the Spanish civilization has long since receded into the dim
historic past, its spirit is impressed in the very air; its zeal and
fervor still, in some mysterious way, permeate the atmosphere.

Until 1863 Arizona remained a portion of New Mexico, the separate
territorial government of each being inaugurated at Fort Whipple, near
Prescott,--a thriving town of some six thousand people, named for the
historian whose works are the unquestionable authority on matters of
the Aztec and Spanish civilizations. Prescott is one of the young
Western cities that has a great future. Its altitude insures it a
delightful climate, the railroad facilities are good, and it is in a
region of almost fabulous mineral wealth. The "United Verde" mine, one
of the possessions of Senator Clark of Montana, is some thirty-five
miles from Prescott and yields vast revenues. Within thirty miles of
the town there are very large beds of onyx, one of which covers over
one hundred acres. This onyx is found in all colors,--the translucent
old gold, green, red, black, and white, with much in richly varied
combinations of color. Prescott has an altitude of a mile above the
sea and is a summer resort of itself for Phoenix and other Southern
Arizona towns. It is a distance of some three hundred miles from
Ash Fork to Winhelman, and Prescott and Phoenix are one hundred
miles apart, Prescott being only a hundred miles from Ash Fork and
Phoenix about the same distance from Winhelman. Near Prescott there
is a curious spot which is not less worthy of world-wide fame than is
the "Garden of the Gods" at Colorado Springs; although the "Point of
Rocks," as this grotesque system of formation near Prescott is called,
is little known to travellers. It is of that same unique sandstone
formation that is found in the "Garden of the Gods." Ruskin declared
that he could not visit America on the ground that it contained no
castles; but had his vision included Colorado and Arizona, with their
wonderful sandstone formations, he would have found castles galore so
far as scenic effect goes. It is not alone the "Garden of the Gods"
and the "Point of Rocks" that are marvellous spectacles, but all over
the states, here and there, on foothill and mountain and mesa, these
strange, fantastic, colossal rock formations arise, that have all the
landscape effect of the castles and towers in Italy.

All the country around Prescott is alluring. On the branch road from
Ash Fork of the main transcontinental line to Winhelman some three
hundred miles south, there is an assortment of scenery which might be
described as warranted to please every taste. There are lofty mountains
pine-clad and green with verdure; others are seen barren and bleak,
whose sides and foothills are only decorated with the débris of mines.
There are vast desert solitudes where only the misshapen cacti grow,
looming up like giant skeletons in the air; and again there are glades
carpeted with a profusion of flowers in brilliant hues. There are
river-beds (arroyos) without any water and there are streams that go
wandering about, in aimless fashion, devoid of regulation river-beds.
Some of the arroyos, indeed, have streams running in strong currents,
but they hide these streams under the river-bed, as something too
valuable perhaps for common view. The clairvoyance of the scientific
vision, however, detects this fraud on the part of the arroyo at once,
so that of late years it is of little use for any well-regulated river
to hide its current under its bed. It may just as well relinquish the
attempt and let the stream run in an honest Eastern fashion, like the
Connecticut River, for instance, which is staid and steady, like its
state, and never undertakes to play pranks with its current. Since the
scientist has fixed his glittering eye on Colorado and Arizona, all the
gnomes and nixies have the time of their life to elude this vigilance,
and they seldom succeed. The scientist relentlessly harnesses them to
his use; and though a river may think to conceal its course by taking
refuge under its bed instead of running honestly along above it, the
effort is hopeless in an age when the scientist is abroad. It is said
that there are no secrets in heaven, and apparently nature is very like
paradise in this respect at least, for it is quite useless for her to
pretend to keep her operations to herself. The specialist, the expert,
surprises every secret she may treasure.

Of all the rivers in Arizona no one has more entirely defied all the
accepted traditions of staying in its place and keeping within its own
limits than has the Colorado, which, not content with the extraordinary
part it plays at the bottom of that Titanic chasm, the Grand Cañon,
is now creating an inland sea, named the Salton Sea, in Southern
California. Prof. N. H. Newell, the government expert hydrographer of
the United States Geological Survey, has given close attention to the
Colorado of late, and of it he says:

    "... The Colorado cuts in its course the deepest cañons on the
    face of the earth. From the solid rocks where it has made them,
    through hundreds of miles, it has taken material down to the Gulf
    of California, and by slight but regular annual overflows gradually
    built banks on each side out into that gulf. These, in time, cut
    off the head of the gulf, leaving dry a depression in Southern
    California, considerably below sea level, known as 'the Salton
    Sink.' For miles of its journey the Southern Pacific runs below
    sea level. Ten thousand people, approximately, in what is known as
    the Imperial Valley, live below the sea level. A privately owned
    irrigation enterprise, on the Mexican side of the line, cut a gash
    into this bank of the Colorado which nature had been forming. The
    high waters came and man lost control of his artificial channel,
    with the result that the river thought best to pour its waters
    back into the depression which had once been a part of the Gulf of
    California. To get the river to resume its own course is no small
    task, and with it the Southern Pacific railroad evidently purposes
    to grapple heroically.

[Illustration: LOOKING THROUGH A PART OF THE RIVER GORGE, FOOT OF BAD
TRAIL, GRAND CAÑON]

    "The river is now pouring down a steep declivity into this basin,
    which is two hundred feet or more below the sea level. If this were
    allowed to continue, it would make a great salt lake in Southern
    California. This water has already risen to the point where it
    has submerged big salt works and fifteen miles of the Southern
    Pacific's overland track, forcing that company to build around
    the rising sea, and, unless its engineers succeed in routing the
    Colorado for its old destination, it will be necessary to rebuild a
    much longer piece of that road. Some people have argued that such
    a sea would affect favorably the climate of Southern California,
    but they forget that the great Gulf of California, jutting into
    the most barren regions of the United States and Mexico, seemingly
    has had no good effect on the climate of either. The Salton Sea
    would add only two per cent of water surface to that part of the
    country, and so hardly would do what the Gulf of California has
    not accomplished. Unless the break is restored, the river will
    pour into this basin, forming a very shallow lake, which would
    be almost a frying-pan under that semi-tropical sun. This would
    continue to rise until evaporation balanced the river flow, and
    then would fluctuate with the seasons of the year, shrinking in
    area during the months of the heaviest evaporation and slightest
    inflow.

    "The gash in the river bank was cut by a Mexican corporation on
    that side of the international line, but the water is delivered
    to a number of American corporations, so that to-day several
    are concerned in the affair. It is understood that the Southern
    Pacific, when the river reaches its lowest stage, will put in
    a great force of men in an endeavor to get the river back to
    its former course. One great difficulty comes in the sugar-like
    material which has been eroded, in which it is extremely hard to
    insert any permanent structure. A pile one hundred feet deep will
    be driven into it, and almost as soon the water, working in under
    it, will lift it out."

The Salton Sea, at this writing, covers an area of over four hundred
square miles, and is constantly increasing. The Southern Pacific
Railway that traversed its border has been driven twice from its line
and forced to lay new roadbeds and tracks. It is also creating great
confusion as to irrigation facilities, both in the United States and
in Mexico, within the region where it lies; and as a scientific event
it is one of the first magnitude,--an act in the drama of nature made
visible to all.

The Salton Sink has long been known to the explorers and visitors
of this region. It was a vast basin of some one hundred and forty
miles in length and sixty-five or seventy in width; the evident
bed of a former sea, which had become a desolate and barren waste.
Sometimes a mirage--a not unfrequent phenomenon in Arizona and Southern
California,--would transform this long deserted basin into a phantom
sea, wonderful in aspect. To what extent this transformation will
continue defies prophecy.

Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, is in Maricopa County,--a county
as large as the entire state of Massachusetts. The journey of two
hundred miles between Ash Fork and Phoenix is one of the most
uncanny and unearthly sort of trips, with mountains resembling a
witches' dance,--full of grotesque wonder and romantic charm,--but the
experience is almost like visiting another planet and coming under
totally different conditions of life. Phoenix is both the capital
and the metropolis of Arizona, and no city west of the Mississippi is
more popular among tourists or is able to inspire a stronger sentiment
of attachment among its residents. To some twelve or thirteen thousand
inhabitants are added, every winter, from four to five thousand
tourists. The city lies in the centre of the Salt River Valley,--that
marvel of the Southwest. The most important and valuable agricultural
region in Colorado lies in Maricopa County, of which Phoenix is the
pet and pride. In this locality the visitor to Arizona returns to the
normal day and daylight world again. The forest trees are not stone
quarries, nor have meteors, wandering through space, buried themselves
in its soil. There is no need of colossal magnetic appliances to seek
to discover and extricate some submerged star. Nor has the earth opened
and disclosed an Inferno, "bathed in celestial fires," as that of the
Grand Cañon far away to the northwest. The streams "stay put" within
their legitimate borders, and are apparently as firm in "standing pat"
as is the Republican party over a (new) tariff revision. Maricopa
County pursues a way of peaceful prosperity, with no lapse into the
vaudeville of petrified forests and buried stars. Her stars make their
appointed rounds in the skies, and shine nightly upon the just and the
unjust. In the northern part of Maricopa there are mineral districts
of rich ores, gold and copper as well as silver, lead, and others, but
chiefly the county holds her way as an agricultural region, indulging
in no freaks. Canals radiate in every direction from the Salt and
the Verde rivers. The Salt River Valley is so level that a theory
prevails that in some prehistoric ages it was smoothed by the Toltec
civilization, which even preceded that of the Aztec. Fields of alfalfa,
miles in extent, smile in the sunshine, while cattle graze knee-deep in
luxurious clover. Orange groves alternate with the apple and apricot
orchards. The date-palm, the fig, and the olive trees abound. Beautiful
homes stand in spacious grounds shaded by the dark foliage of the
umbrella tree, through which gleams the scarlet of the oleander and
the brilliant gold of the pomegranate.

Phoenix offers to the resident or the visitor a good proportion
of the best that life can give: in good society, that which is
intelligent, moral, cultured, and sympathetic; in an admirable school
system; in churches of many denominations,--Catholic, Episcopal,
Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Christian Science, and others,--all
having their fine houses of worship and earnest congregations. There
is an excellent and a constantly growing public library, and there are
four daily and several weekly newspapers, business blocks that would
do no discredit to any large Eastern city, a circuit telephone system
completely equipped, gas and water works, free city and rural mail
delivery, good hotels, a theatre, and an opera house. There are banks
and a Board of Trade. There are clubs both of men and women. The State
Normal School of Arizona is nine miles distant--in Tempe.

There are three railroads that centre in Phoenix which transport
the traveller with the usual accepted ease and luxury of modern
railroading; and a new road to form a link in a second Santa Fé
transcontinental line will then place Phoenix on a trunk road over
which the Santa Fé traffic will largely pass.

The winters in Phoenix are most attractive. From October till May
there is a climate all balm and sunshine without the enervating quality
felt in the tropics. The region all around has good roads, and driving
and riding are most enjoyable.

Seventy-five miles east from Phoenix, in the Tonto Basin, the
government is building a vast water storage dam which it is expected
will liberally irrigate two hundred thousand acres of land which,
under reclamation, will produce in rich abundance both agricultural
and horticultural products. The climate and conditions combine those
of the temperate and the semi-tropical zones and favor products grown
in both. The Tonto dam will be, with the possible exception of the
Assouan dam in Egypt, the greatest storage enterprise in the world. It
will be constructed of hard sandstone imbedded in cement, making it as
permanent as the mountains. It will be two hundred and eighty-five feet
above foundations and only two hundred feet wide at the bottom. Above
will be a lake about twenty-five miles long, with storage capacity for
one and a half millions acre-feet, which means enough water to cover
that number of acres a foot deep. Even to the best of cement, Nature
has provided on the ground every necessity for construction. Along the
hillsides above is being dug a power canal, to discharge above the dam,
there to generate not less than five thousand horsepower,--more than
enough for the demands of construction. When the dam is finished this
power will be transmitted electrically to the vicinity of Phoenix,
here to be used for pumping. The government engineers have made plans
for eventually developing eighteen thousand horsepower, by harnessing
the falls of the river and the canals.

The Salt River Valley has more than fifty thousand acres devoted to
alfalfa, which sometimes yields six crops in a year. Wheat, barley, and
corn are also grown, and the orange groves produce the finest fruit
known in the Eastern markets, antedating by a month the California
oranges. Grapes, apricots, and dates abound; and if Maricopa County
does not literally as well as figuratively find that her land is
flowing in milk and honey, it is certainly not for lack of the most
favorable conditions.

The Arizona strawberries, too, are a feature of importance in the fruit
market, as for both size and flavor they absolutely exceed almost any
other in the United States.

All this sunny prosperity of conditions and loveliness of climate
reacts on life. There is a poise, a serene confidence, and a charm of
good-will and joyous companionship felt in Phoenix that give to this
delightful young city an individuality of its own.

The great dam now being built in the Tonto Basin has made it necessary
to destroy the town of Roosevelt,--a village of two thousand
inhabitants, with its churches, schools, water-works, electric lights,
and other appliances of modern civilization. "Roosevelt must perish,"
writes a press correspondent, "that a desert may be made to bloom.
Already the marvellous engineering work is well under way. The walls
of the narrow cañon through which Salt River rushes on edge are being
locked by a massive monolith of solid masonry, the highest arch dam in
the world."

The writer continues:

    "This wonderful structure of sandstone and cement will be two
    hundred and eighty feet in height from foundation to parapet.
    Placed by the side of an eighteen-story skyscraper, this dam would
    rise ten feet above it, while its length on top would be more than
    two city blocks. A turbulent stream, with its enormous floods, will
    beat itself into stillness against the masonry monster, its foam
    and spume lost in a deep lake twenty-five miles long and two miles
    wide.

    "By day and by night the dull roar of dynamite breaks the desert
    stillness, and the cañon walls go crashing down to furnish material
    for this structure. On the hill far above, the rock crushers never
    stop grinding the limestone, and great kilns, white hot, are
    burning daily hundreds of barrels of cement.

    "When night comes, myriads of electric lights burst forth, weirdly
    illuminating a busy army of toilers working gnome-like in a shadowy
    cañon. A star-gemmed heaven looks down upon a wondrous scene,
    unreal, awesome, and inspiring.

    "This great work of the government possesses unusual attractions
    for the engineer and the layman. It is located in a valley which
    has been the abode of three races, one of which lived here when
    Cæsar sat upon his throne. In an age forgotten the cliff-dwellers
    built their eyrie-like homes along the cañons of this stream, and
    in the narrow valleys the lines of their irrigation canals may yet
    be traced. Centuries later the Apaches came, and for many years
    their tepees dotted the basin. Then came the white man, who sought
    to reconquer the desert, which had resumed its sway after the
    cliff-dwellers vanished.

    "The battle with unfriendly nature proved too much for the pioneer,
    and Uncle Sam took a hand in the fight. No problems could daunt
    his engineers. They laughed at floods and mocked at desolation. A
    dam site was discovered sixty-two miles from a railroad, and they
    proceeded to connect it with civilization by a marvellous road
    which winds its way for forty miles through deep cañons, along the
    face of frowning precipices, over foaming cataracts, and across
    broad areas of treeless desert. It opens up to the transcontinental
    traveller a new region of compelling interest and of splendid
    scenery. Better than that, it provides an easy thoroughfare for the
    transportation of heavy machinery of all kinds and the supplies for
    the new community which sprang into life almost at a word.

    "... Every stone that is laid in the narrow arch, which is to
    retain the foaming river now rushing through the cañon, brings
    nearer and nearer the day when Roosevelt shall vanish beneath an
    inland sea. When the great dam is completed, in 1908, and its
    massive gates of steel, weighing eight hundred thousand pounds, are
    shut down, a rising flood will cover the site of the city with two
    hundred feet of water.

    "The ingenuity of man has been taxed in this work. Its isolated
    position, the difficult physical conditions, the tremendous and
    unexpected floods, have tried the mettle of the engineers. The
    enormous amount of cement required was in itself a problem which
    forced Uncle Sam to turn manufacturer in order to solve it. Nature,
    having kindly furnished an ideal site for a dam, was thoughtful
    enough to provide materials near at hand for making cement. A
    cement mill was quickly erected at a cost of one hundred thousand
    dollars. The downward rush of the river was utilized for electric
    power to operate the mill, and many thousand barrels of first-class
    cement have already been used in the works.

    "But while the city of Roosevelt, with the homes of its two
    thousand inhabitants, is doomed, a fair valley is to be redeemed in
    which the agricultural possibilities are not exceeded anywhere in
    the world. Under almost tropical skies, with a soil of wonderful
    fertility, the farmer in Salt River Valley will cultivate his
    orange groves, his fig trees, his vines, while his broad meadows
    will yield him heavy harvests of alfalfa six and seven times a year.

    "The great lake which will be created by the Roosevelt dam is to be
    tapped by canals hundreds of miles long and extending all over the
    broad valley around Phoenix. Vast areas now absolutely worthless
    will be transformed quickly into blossoming orchards and purpling
    vineyards, and hundreds of happy homes will dot a plain where now
    the giant saguaro rears its spiny head and the Gila monster roams
    at will."

Life in the Far West is a continual series of the occurrence of such
events as these. Its problems are largely solved by the civil engineer
and the irrigation expert, who transform vast deserts to regions of
blossoming beauty, change the course of a river, send railroad trains
climbing the mountain peaks or penetrating beneath the range, and who
are, in short, the modern magicians who work their will with the forces
of nature. The National Reclamation Act is fairly recreating the entire
Southwest.

The Gila River, which is the largest tributary of the Colorado, flows
through the regions south of Florence, Arizona, and affords water to
many fertile and beautiful valleys; and Florence, with the towns of
Yuma, Tucson, Glendale, Bisbee, Winslow, and others, is fully abreast
in modern life. Large department stores, public libraries, schools and
churches, women's clubs, daily newspapers, good railroad facilities,
free postal delivery,--all these make up the environment of a splendid
and progressive citizenship. As the Governor of Arizona, Hon. Joseph H.
Kirley, has recently said:

    "Nowhere can a man who respects his neighbor's rights, with
    reasonably strict attention to his own business, go about with more
    freedom and with greater confidence of personal safety than in
    Arizona. Locked and barricaded doors are in most parts of Arizona a
    novelty. The professional thief is almost unknown in the territory."

The East--at least the portion of it that has not personally visited
the magic land of Arizona--can form little idea of its marvellous
resources and its potent achievements.

The statehood problem looms up on the social and political horizon,
and there is a strong feeling that to force Arizona and New Mexico
into union would do violence to the judgment and the feeling of the
citizens of Arizona. For several years past the incipient possibility
of statehood on these terms has aroused widespread opposition.

The local press voices almost daily the editorial convictions that such
a union would be most disastrous to the interests of Arizona--a country
which is simply a wonderland of treasure and rich and varied resources.
Arizona is settled chiefly by people from the great South and from New
England, the Middle West being hardly represented; its citizens are of
the best quality of our national life, and to unite them with those of
New Mexico--a large proportion of whom can hardly speak or understand
the English language even, to say nothing of their divergence in race,
requirements, and habits from the population of Arizona--would be
imposing upon them a century's delay in realizing the grand ideals of
education, moral progress, and economic development now prevailing in
Arizona.

Phoenix has to-day a better public-school system than Boston, and
other surprising degrees of progress might be related of many of the
towns.

Hon. N. O. Murphy, twice a Governor of Arizona, has recently made
an eloquent plea against forcing these two territories into union as
a state. Ex-Governor Murphy was appointed by President Harrison (in
1889) Secretary of Arizona. Under President Cleveland he was elected
the Delegate to Congress representing the territorial interests; and
on the expiration of this term he was appointed by President McKinley
the Governor of the territory. His experience has given him the most
intimate knowledge and wide grasp of territorial conditions, and in
a letter of three columns over his own signature to the "Washington
Post," appearing under date of February 25, 1906, ex-Governor Murphy
does not hesitate to say that were the Bill for united statehood
then pending before Congress passed, it would be one of the greatest
legislative outrages ever perpetrated in this country. "I refer
particularly to the proposed merger of the territories of Arizona and
New Mexico into a single state against the protests of the people of
those territories," he added.

The ex-Governor points out these statistical facts:

    "The area of New England, comprising six states, with twelve
    senators, is 66,465 square miles; the area of the territory of
    Arizona is nearly twice as great, being 113,916 square miles.

    "The area of the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, now
    proposed to be merged, is 235,600 square miles, or greater than
    Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island,
    Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New
    Jersey, represented in the Upper House now by twenty-two senators."

The fact that the population of New Mexico is largely Mexican, and that
of Arizona is mostly American, suggests a potent reason for the strong
feeling in Arizona against this proposition. Their racial instincts and
their business interests alike conflict. If they are joined as a single
state, there will be continual jealousy and friction, and legislation
to promote the interests of one-half the state will necessarily be at
the expense of the other.

To the traveller sensitive to the spell of a strange, unearthly beauty,
Arizona prefigures itself as the country God remembered rather than as
"the country God forgot." It is at once the oldest and the newest of
the states. Its authentic and historic past antedates the coming of the
Mayflower to the rocky and desolate December shores of Massachusetts,
while its future flashes before one like an electric panorama
outspeeding wireless telegraphy. It is the Land of Magic and Mystery.
The light is a perpetual radiance, as if proceeding from some alchemy
of distilled sunshine. While Colorado is the Land of Perpetual Dawn,
of an heroic and poetic achievement, Arizona is the region of brooding
mystery, of strange surprise.

There are the music and pictures of Arizona in her fertile valleys,
her wide rolling mesas; and the very melody of the wind harps meet and
mingle with the organ strains of sweeping orchestral effects of the
winds in the cañons and in wild, desolate gorges where impenetrable
twilight renders them a veritable No Man's Land. Mr. Aldrich's "Two
Shapes" might have met in that uncanny region of the Petrified Forest.
The very dance of the Brocken may nightly be seen in the midnight
fissures and steep precipices of the Grand Cañon.

It is, however, essentially the land of mirage and mystery, this
wonderful Arizona! As one journeys about he half fancies that he hears
on the air those magic lines:

  "O birds of ether without wings!
  O heavenly ships without a sail!"

Every incredible thing is possible in this miracle country, where
purple mountain peaks quiver in the shimmering golden light, where
ruins of remote ages stand side by side with the primitive mechanism
of pioneer living, where snow-capped mountain peaks are watched from
valleys that have the temperature and the productions of the tropics.
Arizona contains unknown and undreamed-of resources of gold, copper,
and silver. The state has the richest possibilities in mineral wealth;
there are thousands of square miles of range lands; there is wealth of
forests, although it is a part of the miracle character of this state
of color and dream life that its forests are almost as much concealed
from casual view as are its minerals hidden in the depths of the
earth, for they are secluded in deep cañons or they are high out of
sight on the mountain summits. In fruits and flowers Arizona has the
luxurious growth and lavish abundance of the tropics, producing grapes,
figs, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, pineapples, and peaches,--almost
everything, indeed, unless it be the apples of Hesperides.

Although Arizona has not the electric exhilaration and infinite energy
of Colorado, it has a delicious quality, as if the very air were a
caress. Though warm in the south, the heat has none of the enervating
effect of the heat where humidity combines with it. The heat here is
so dry, the air so pure, that there is little extreme discomfort even
when the mercury soars to legendary altitudes. In winter all Southern
Arizona is a paradise of loveliness. At this season the towns of
Florence, Phoenix, Tucson, Yuma, and other points invite one to the
balmy air, the luminous brilliant skies, and the nights, which are a
glory of starry illumination. Northern Arizona has a perfection of
summer climate, and the Grand Cañon is destined in the near future to
become one of the great summer resorts of the world. With the splendid
facilities for comfort offered by the arrangements, the traveller
finds all his accustomed conveniences, and the cañon has literally all
seasons for its own. There is one glory of July and another glory of
January; there is a transcendent loveliness of June, and an equally
indescribable charm of October. No month is without its special reasons
for visiting at that time this most marvellous scenic wonder of the
entire earth.

In remote ages Arizona was evidently an inland sea.

Montezuma Well, on the Verde River, some fifty miles from Prescott, is
one of the strange spectacles of Arizona. The well is on an elevated
mesa of solid limestone. It has a circular opening some six hundred
feet in diameter, as perfect as if carved by a skilled workman. From
the surface opening down to the water is a distance of some seventy
feet, and the water itself is over one hundred feet deep. It is
perfectly clear and pure. Near the well are several cave dwellings, and
fragments of pottery abound in the vicinity. There are beds of lava,
also revealing that the well is the crater of an extinct volcano.

There can be no question but that Arizona is one of the most marvellous
regions of the world. Its interest to the tourist is not exceeded
by that of the Yellowstone, whose mountains and geysers and strange
color effects enchant poet and painter. For the cañon system of the
Arizona mountain ranges, the stupendous majesty of scenic grandeur
which reaches its supreme aspect in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado,
the wonders of extinct volcanic action, the colossal channels cut by
the action of water, the unearthly splendor of the coloring in sky and
atmospheric effects, all combine to make this state the very embodiment
and visible expression of magic and mystery.

In the broken mountain ranges the detached peaks extend, with
narrow, fertile valleys lying between; while deep cañons and wild
gorges, with rushing mountain torrents, still further diversify the
grandeur of the panorama. Five great rivers add another impressive
feature,--the Colorado, the San Juan, the Salinas, the Verde, and the
San Francisco,--this system of rivers completing the most extraordinary
combination of mountain, valley, mesa, and cañon to be found in the
entire world. Numberless extinct volcanoes and vast lava beds add their
fantastic imagery; and the metamorphic rock strata, recording the most
violent volcanic upheavals, tell the prehistoric story of the fiery
molten flood which swept over all this region when the earth was new.

As has perhaps been suggested in the preceding pages, life in Arizona
is by no means without its features of entertainment. These include
various aspects, not to mention one that is by no means to be enjoyed
in any of the great Eastern centres,--that of the exclusive annual
festivity of the "Snake Dance." Chicago and Paris, New York and London,
may find social entertainment in balls and opera, dancing and dining,
but in Arizona one goes to this entertainment on the Painted Desert;
and if in some happy summer of life one's horoscope has deflected his
course into Arizona and Colorado, one comes to regard those fascinating
localities with the devotion of a native of their sunny climes.

After all, it is not length of time in any experience of life that is
significant, but intensity of feeling, and one finds himself really
living more intensely in a few weeks in the Far West, in all its wonder
world, than in years or decades of his accustomed rounds in Eastern
cities.

This entertainment of the Snake Dance is furnished by the Moki Indians
at their camp some seventy miles over the desert from Flagstaff. There
is no means of conveyance save by wagons. The journey is over sagebrush
and sand, enlivened by stones and cacti. The horses can make only slow
progress. But the air is simply delightful and full of exhilaration,
and the particular desert over which those who fare forth for this
æsthetic spectacle must pass is the "Painted Desert," whose walls of
rocks and mountains, brilliant in a dream of color, recede as they are
approached, and thus the entire two days consumed in the journey are
a perpetual delight to the eye. The wayfarers camp out overnight, and
during the five days' journey--two days to go, two to return, and one
to stay--their wants are, perforce, reduced to the most primitive.
As the festivity lasts only twenty-eight minutes, it is certainly
spending a good deal of time and energy in order to behold so brief a
spectacle. But one is told it is worth all the fatigue and the time. It
is a religious rite of the Moki Indians, and is a prayer for rain. The
description of it is a literal one, for the dancers hold from one to
three snakes--and rattlesnakes at that--in the mouth as they perform
their strange gyrations. The dancers are the "braves," while the squaws
chant a crooning accompaniment.

One student of this Indian rite has said:

    "With the first glow in the east the priests hasten to the shrine
    of the Sun God with their offerings, the luminary himself being
    greeted with a prayer or with songs as he slowly emerges from
    behind the mesa in the Far East. Later the priests repair to their
    homes, and return to the kiva, bearing the ceremonial paraphernalia
    with which, early in the afternoon, they robe themselves in
    gorgeous array preparatory to the dance, which is given usually
    before the sun sets behind the San Francisco Peaks.

    "As the priests emerge from the kiva, where they wait in line until
    all have appeared, there is the hush of expectancy throughout the
    village; the inhabitants now line the terraces, house-tops and
    every available spot around the dance plaza, all being attired
    in their gayest and brightest costumes. In single file and with
    measured tread comes the line of priests. Entering the plaza, they
    wheel about and begin a slow, short dance, the time of the step
    being accompanied by the shaking of rattles and by the singing of
    sacred songs. The dance is over all too soon, when the spectators
    return to their camps and the priests to the kiva, where great
    quantities of food have been brought for them. Finally, in a
    great feast, they break the fast, which, on the part of the chief
    priests, has been maintained for many days."

It is quite by way of being love's labor lost to visit Arizona during
that period of time devoted to the Moqui Festival. Apparently the
entire population betake themselves to this entertainment, journeying
over the desert in their wagons, carrying with them their beds,
their food, and every necessity, for except what they take with them
they must do without. But as all the world, alas, cannot or does not
dwell in Arizona,--a region in which any one sunset alone is worth
the journey there,--and is thus deprived of the unique privilege of
assisting at the Snake Dance, the next best thing, as a substitute,
is to read the new work of George Wharton James (the author of "In
and Around the Grand Canyon") called "Indians of the Painted Desert
Region." It is the very gateway to a wide and deeply interesting
knowledge of Indian life in Arizona and its relation to advancing
civilization. It is the presentation of a series of wonderful
landscapes in a vivid manner of word-picturing.

"Wild, weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the mind by the very
name--Painted Desert," writes Mr. James. "The sound 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 seems that the Spaniards gave the name "El Pintado Deserto"--the
Painted Desert.

"Stand with me," writes Mr. James, "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,