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
As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go into the Jemez to
dream. You go to Pecos to hunt and fish. So you do to the Jemez; but it
is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of
man you are fishing for. As the Pecos Forests appeal to the strenuous
holiday hunter--the man who considers he has not had his fun till he has
broken a leg killing a bear, or stood mid-waist in snow-water stringing
fish on a line like beads on a string--so the Jemez appeals to the
dreamer, the scholar, the scientist, the artist; and I can imagine no
more ideal (nor cheaper) holiday than to join the American School of
Archaeology, about which I have already spoken, that comes in here with
scientists from every quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and
dig, and delve, and revel in the past of moonlight nights round
campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the
face of the cliff. The School has been a going concern for only a few
years. Yet last year over 150 scientists came in from every quarter of
the globe.
Spite of warnings to the contrary given to me both East and West, the
trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest you can make in
America. You strike in from Santa Fe; and right here, let me set down as
emphatically as possible, two or three things pleasant and unpleasant
about Santa Fe.
First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not
excepting Quebec. Color, age, leisure; a medley of races; sand-hills
engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor
blending with the braying of a Mexican burro trotting to market loaded
out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain and New America; streets with
less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's
Board of Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the
sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and
chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West
Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe
houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door
or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty
governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the
Archaeological Society has its rooms with Lotave's beautiful mural
paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has
neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is
such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set
down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America,
yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.
[Illustration: Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez
Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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