But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more. “Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids, carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still. To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will serve as a reason for this notebook. Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian inhabitants and few indeed of other men. For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation. As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August 1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other troubles on the Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would get no civil consolation.