It is desert, barren, inhospitable, dangerous, yet thousands of people make it their chosen home. Over its surface roam the Bedouins of the United States, fearless horsemen, daring travellers, who rival in picturesqueness, if not in evil, their compeers of the deserts by the Nile. Down in the deep canyon water-ways of the desert-streams dwell other peoples whose life is as strange, weird, wild, and fascinating as that of any people of earth. [Illustration: IN THE HEART OF THE PETRIFIED FOREST.] This is the region and these the people I would make the American reader more familiar with. Other books have been written on the Painted Desert. One was published a few years ago, written by a clever American novelist, and published by one of America's leading firms, and I read it with mingled feelings of delight and half anger. It was so beautifully and charmingly written that one familiar with the scenes depicted could not fail to enjoy it, although indignant--because of the errors that might have been avoided. It claims only to be fiction. Yet the youth of the land reading it necessarily gain distinct impressions of fact from its pages. These "facts" are, unfortunately, so far from true that they mislead the reader. It would have been a comparatively slight task for the author to have consulted government records and thus have made his references to geography and ethnology correct. It is needless, I hope, for me to say I have honestly endeavored to avoid the method here criticised. The bibliography incorporated as part of this book will enable the diligent student to consult authorities about this fascinating region. But now comes an important question. What are the boundaries of the Painted Desert? I am free to confess I do not know, nor do I think any one else does. The Spaniards never attempted to bound it, and no one since has ever had the temerity to do so. In Ives's map of the region he endeavored to explore, and of which he wrote so hopelessly, he places the Painted Desert in that ill-defined way that geographers used to follow in suggesting the location of the Great American Desert.