I am now glad that I went to the Painted Desert and entered Hopi-land before the advent of the automobile. The going then was a picturesque if toilsome journey. After two days in a farm-wagon loaded with my plunder, I reached the first back-country trading-post, and met the official I was to succeed. That old store at Indian Wells, with its back against the hills, seemed a fanciful place in the twilight of a summer’s day. Across a wide plain lifted purple mesas gashed with red clays, and Rabbit-ear Butte stuck its two inquisitive peaks into the evening sky. There was something far removed in the atmosphere and setting of Indian Wells, something of true desert solitude. Next day we wended northward across Hauke Mesa, passing the White Cone, a solitary bleached-out pyramid that marks the southeast corner of the Hopi Reservation. Two huge white horses drew us; not a very fast pace, but decidedly a sure one. The vehicle was a mountain spring-wagon, and its one wide seat served three of us, the driver and I simple figures in comparison with the gentleman I was to relieve. He was a large, pompous man, who had sought the Southwest for his health and had not found all of it, principally because he had not arrived soon enough, and also because he was continually fretted by the vision of his former importance. He had come from the East from a much larger Governmental position. In fact, he had been quite within the shadow of the Cabinet, and was bulwarked with political tradition. He knew the President personally, and immediately told one so; and when he came into the Desert he wore—Suffering Pioneers!—a top hat. It takes a long time to make forty miles in a wagon of that type, whatever the entertainment of political conventions and presidential anecdotes. In late afternoon we crossed the sandy waste of the Jedito Wash, and passed out of it by a steep rocky road that ascended a high mesa. A short distance to the left were the ruins of Awatobi, that once important pueblo of Tusayan, where Tovar had his first view of and encounter with the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” of the Spanish chronicles. This meeting occurred twenty-five years before the settlement of St. Augustine, and eighty years before the gentlemen from Plymouth reached the historic New England Rock. He was accompanied by that intrepid soldier-priest, Fray Juan de Padilla, who later retraced Coronado’s trail into the mysterious and legendary country of Quivira, there to be martyred, the first white man to meet death in the present State of Kansas.