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
What was the other charge? Oh, yes--"lacks the human," whatever that
means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than
true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Canyon and the cliff houses of
Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to
hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium
more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the
Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of
Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys,
Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did
not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money
which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are
not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to
American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of
the Old World?
Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America
usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar
prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes--but America
lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."
"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition
period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle
baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain
in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of
American feudalism--fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area
of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat
clad _cap-a-pie_ in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at
Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet
hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years
back--and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing
of the old civilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism,
the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted
troops the big iron chest for the gold--iron chests that you can see to
this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial
in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by
secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver
of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of
New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's--an era
that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki,
Spirit of Evil, smiled with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade
the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were
alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north
as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia
groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed
horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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