Occasionally there are exceptions to these happy-go-lucky pioneers. One such family we met at the very ebb of their fortunes. They were migrating to Texas, and midway, their hoodless ramshackle engine, tires, and pump had collapsed like the one horse shay. We filled their canteen, which had also leaked dry, pumped their tires with our engine, and offered what road advice we could, with the remains of our lunch. At last, after repeated cranking the man got the wheezy engine started, and the woman, like Despair in a calico wrapper, leaned forward and took up her task of holding down the engine with her hand, protected by a black stocking. Poor shiftless folk, wherever they settled eventually, it is fairly certain their luck did not improve. We were bound by easy stages for a long-sought goal, a seductive and elusive province of which even native Arizonans knew little. Yet it was the little they told which enticed us. “I’ve not been myself to the White Mountains,” one old-timer after another would say, “but I’ve always heard how they are the prettiest part of the state. Everything in the world you’d want,--mountains, rivers, a world of running water, trout that fight to get on your bare hook, big game, mountain lions and such. I’ve always aimed to go sometime.” Our “sometime” had come, after long waiting for the twelve-foot snows to melt which covered the road till May. Through pretty, little irrigated towns high in the hills, we reached at sunset a district far different from the burnt aridity we passed at noon. Lakes were linked to each other under green hills like ours at home. We looked across ridges and long irrigated pastures, and rode through fields blue with iris, and groves of gummy pines and the hugest white birches I ever saw. The roads were next to impossible. We bumped violently over annoying thank-you-marms past Cooley’s ranch, former home of an officer who married an Apache woman, and whose sons now own half the beautiful valley, and have built a lumber camp that is fast converting these forests into history. At ten o’clock of a full and weary day, we reached the reservation of the White River Apaches, situated on the lovely river of that name. A few miles below, where the river forks between rolling hills, is a cavalry station, relic of the days when the Apache was the terror of Arizona. We had to beg Uncle Sam once more to put us up for the night. Not too gracious--rather grumpily, in fact,--he granted permission, notwithstanding that in that remote and innless region, his is the only resort travelers have, and the one to which they are always directed. They pay a stipulated sum for lodging and for meals;--nevertheless the average government agency is not the most hospitable place in the world.