We followed these shady canals into Phoenix, bumping over dismally paved roads, and making wide detours where some irrigator greedy for water had flooded the street. After leaving our friends at the station, we returned, sand blowing in our faces, to the San Marcos Hotel at Chandler. Neither town nor hotel has geographic or commercial reasons for existing, but both are examples of one man’s patient persistence in a fight with stubborn Nature. Chandler is typical of the whole Valley. Sand-besieged from the north, it sets a flame of verdure to meet the devastating onslaught of the desert, blossoming defiantly till the air is saturated with perfume. A contrast to the uncompromising shoe-box fronts of most Western hotels, the San Marcos displayed low plaster arcades hung with swinging plants inviting all the song birds of the valley, cool corridors and carefully planned interiors, and gardens framed by distant lilac mountains. Across from the hotel little shops repeated its design of reposeful Mission. Only on the outskirts of this little town did we meet with the crude unsophistication of the Rockies. Yet before a week passed all this artificial fertility and prettiness palled. It was not Arizona. Beyond the orange and olive groves of the Valley, beyond the blooming roses and the song of the nightingale, and all the daintiness of eastern standards inlaid upon the west we felt the threat of the arid waste circling this little island of fruitfulness. The dam, beneficent as it is, harnesses but does not destroy the desert. We found ourselves making excursions back to the untrammeled wastes of sand beyond. Once we made a day’s excursion to Casa Grande, forty miles away, over the Maricopa reservation. No spot could look more untouched by human life than this wind-ribbed and desolate palimpsest of sand on which layer on layer of history has been scratched. The old Santa Fe Trail, from armored Spaniard to Wells-Fargo days, ran directly over a corner of ruins since excavated. Before 1700 Father Kino came upon this remote house of the Morning Glow, as the Indians called it, and held mass in its empty rooms for the tribes of the region. Coronado the ubiquitous may have seen it since he speaks of a Great House built by Indians. Even then, the place lay in ruins, and for how much further back? Nobody knows, and guesses are a millennium apart. It is America’s oldest ruin.