Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted DesertLaut, Agnes C.
History
Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert
Laut, Agnes C.
Hopi Indians; Navajo Indians; Southwest, New -- Description and travel
Next comes the matter of horses and rigs. If you stay at one of the big
hotels, you will pay from $5 to $10 a day for a rig, and $20 for a
motor. Out at the ranch house, you can rent team, driver and double rig
at $4; or a pony at $20 for a month, or buy a burro outright for from $5
to $10. Even if the burro takes a prize for ugliness, remember he also
takes a prize for sure-footedness; and he doesn't take a prize for
bucking, which the broncho often does. Figure up now the cost of a
month's holiday; and I repeat--it will cost you less than staying at
home. But if this total is still too high, there are ways of reducing
the expense by half. Take your own tent; and $20 will not exceed "the
grub box" contents for a month. Or all through the Rockies are deserted
shacks, mining and lumber shanties, herders' cabins, horse camps. You
can quarter yourself in one of these for nothing; and the sole expense
will be "the grub box;" and my tin trunk for camp cooking has never cost
me more than $50 a month for four people. Or best and most novel
experience of all--along White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande, in Mesa
Verde Park, Colorado, are thousands of plastered caves, the homes of the
cliff dwellers. You reach them by ladder. There is no danger of wolves,
or damp. Camp in one of them for nothing wherever the water in the brook
below happens to be good. Hundreds of archaeologists, who come from
Egypt, Greece, Italy, England, to visit these remains, spend their
summer holiday this way. Why can't you? Or if you are not a good
adventurer into the Unknown alone, then join the summer school that goes
out to the caves from Santa Fe every summer.
Is it safe? That question to a Westerner is a joke. Safer, much safer,
than in any Eastern city! I have slept in ranch cabins of the White
Mountains, in caves of the cliff dwellers on the Rio Grande, in tents on
the Saskatchewan; and I never locked a door, because there wasn't any
lock; and I never attempted to bar the door, because there wasn't any
need. Can you say as much of New York, or Chicago, or Washington? The
question may be asked--Will this kind of a holiday not be hot in summer?
You remember, perhaps, crossing the backbone of the Rockies some
mid-summer, when nearly everything inside the pullman car melted into a
jelly. Yes, it will be hot if you follow the beaten trail; for a
railroad naturally follows the lowest grade. But if you go back to the
ranch houses of the Upper Mesas and of foothills and canyons, you will be
from 7,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, and will need winter wraps
each night, and may have to break the ice for your washing water in the
morning--I did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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