To this lady of snapping black eyes and animated laugh came rumors from her friends the Navajos of an arch, so sacred that no religious Indian dared ride under it without first uttering the prayer specially designed for that occasion, handed down from one generation to the next. No white man, presumably, had reached the Rainbow Arch, a day and a half beyond the sacred Navajo mountain, whose thunder peak dominates the country even to the Great Canyon. The location was told her by a Navajo, and the first expedition, led by a Navajo, with Mr. Wetherell as guide, reached Nonnezosche Boco (Bridge Canyon) in August, 1909. The party consisted of Prof. Byron Cummings, then of Utah, now of Arizona University, Mr. Douglas, of the government Federal Survey, James Rogerson, and Neil Judd, of the Smithsonian Institute, the restorer of the cliff ruins of Beta-Takin. Already a controversy over who really “discovered” the Rainbow Bridge has been waged, and zestfully contested. To Douglas went the official recognition, with the privilege of naming the arch, upon his own claim. Prof. Cummings, while giving Douglas the official right as discoverer, is the first white man who saw the bridge. Our own party, the sixteenth to visit the Bridge since its discovery, waited a day at Kayenta while we equipped. Our letters had not arrived in time to announce our coming, and the horses were still at Oljeto, at winter pasturage, and had to be driven down. Saddles needed mending and food and bedding had to be collected. While the guides worked, we lay in the cool of the Wetherell’s grassy lawn,--the only grass in a hundred miles,--or bargained for Navajo “dead pawn” silver in the trading store. The Navajo is a thriftless spender, and against the day when he can liquidate his debts by selling his flocks, he pawns his cherished turquoises and wampum. By a government law, he is given a period of grace to redeem his heirlooms, after which time they go to the trader, who may not sell them for more than he paid the Indian, plus a small percentage. We took clandestine snapshots of the timid Indians, who lost their timidity when we were the focus of their curious eyes and guttural comments. Indian speech is always called guttural; the Navajo tongue really deserves the adjective. The Navajo not only swallows his words, but sounds as if he did not like the taste of them. They had a favorite trick of looking our party over, while one of them expressed in a few well chosen consonants a category of our defects, which set the observers into guffaws and shrieks of laughter. Yet they say the Indian has no sense of humor. One old crone in a garnet velvet jacket sat in the doorway of the store, and with contempt looked us three women over in our khaki riding breeches and coats. Then she sneered in Navajo through her missing front teeth, “Do these women think they are men?”