Wild, weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the mind by the very name—the Painted Desert. The sound itself suggests a fabled rather than a real land. Surely it must be akin to Atlantis or the Island of Circe or the place where the Cyclops lived. Is it not a land of enchantment and dreams, not a place for living men and women, Indians though they be?

It is a land of enchantment, but also of stern reality, as those who have marched, unprepared, across its waterless wastes can testify. No fabled land ever surpassed it in its wondrousness, yet a railway runs directly over it, and it is not on some far-away continent, but is close at hand; a portion, indeed, of our own United States.

In our schoolboy days we used to read of the Great American Desert. The march of civilization has marched that "desert" out of existence. Is the Painted Desert a fiction of early geographers, like unto the Great American Desert, to be wiped from the map when we have more knowledge?

No! It is in actual existence as it was when first seen by the white men, about three hundred and fifty years ago, and as it doubtless will be for untold centuries yet to come.

Coronado and his band of daring conquistadors, preceded by Marcos de Niza and Stephen the Negro, reaching out with gold-lustful hands, came into the region from northern Mexico, conquered Cibola—Zuni—and from there sent out a small band to investigate the stories told by the Zunis of a people who lived about one hundred miles to the northwest, whom they called A-mo-ke-vi. The Navaho Indians said the home of the A-mo-ke-vi was a Ta-sa-Ûn´—a country of isolated buttes—so the Spaniards called the people Moki (Moqui) and their land "the province of Tusayan," and by those names they have ever since been known.

Yet these names are not the ones by which they designate themselves and their land. They are the Hopituh, which Stephen says means "the wise people," and Fewkes, "the people of peace."

It was in marching to the land of the Hopituh that the Spaniards designated the region "el pintado desierto." And a painted desert it truly is. Elsewhere I have described some of its horrors,[1] for I have been familiar with them, more or less, for upwards of twenty years. I do not write of that of which I have merely heard, but "mine eyes have seen," again and again, that which I describe. I have been almost frozen in its piercing snow-storms; choked with sand in its whirling sand-storms; wet through ere I could dismount from my horse in its fierce rain-storms; terrified and temporarily blinded by the brilliancy of its lightning-storms; and almost sunstruck by the scorching power of the sun in its desolate confines. I have seen the sluggish waters of the Little Colorado River rise several feet in the night and place an impassable barrier temporarily before us. With my horses I have camped, again and again, waterless, on its arid and inhospitable rocks and sands, and prayed for morning, only to resume our exhausting journey in the fiercely beating rays of the burning sun; longing for some pool of water, no matter how dirty, how stagnant, that our parched tongues and throats might feel the delights of swallowing something fluid. And last year (1902), in a journey to the home of the Hopi, my friends and I saw a part of this desert covered with the waters of a fierce rain-storm as if it were an ocean, and the "dry wash" of the Oraibi the scene of a flood that, for hours, equalled the rapids of the Colorado River. We were almost engulfed in a quicksand, and a few days later covered with a sand-storm; all these experiences, and others, in the course of a few days.

Stand with me on the summit of one of the towering mountains that guard the region and you will see such a landscape of color as exists nowhere else in the world. It suggests the thought of God's original palette—where He experimented in color ere He decided how to paint the sunset, tint the sun-kissed hills at dawn, give red to the rose, green to the leaves, yellow to the sunflowers, and the varied colors of baby blue-eyes, violets, portulacas, poppies, and cacti; where He concluded to distribute color throughout His world instead of making it all sombre in grays or black.

Look! here is a vast flat of alkali, pure, dazzling white, shining like a vivid and horrible leprosy in the noon-day sun; close by is an area of volcanic action where a veritable "tintaro"—inkstand—has overflowed in devastating blackness over miles and miles. There are pits of six hundred feet depth full of black gunpowder-like substance, gardens of hellish cauliflowers and cabbages of forbidding black lava, and tunnels arched and square of pure blackness. Yonder is a mural face a half thousand feet high and two hundred or more miles long. It is nearly a hundred miles away, yet it reveals the rich glowing red of its walls, and between it and us are large "blotches" of pinks, grays, greens, reds, chocolates, carmines, crimsons, browns, yellows, olives, in every conceivable shade, and all blending in a strange and grotesque yet attractive manner, and fascinating while it awes. It is seldom one can see a rainbow lengthened out into flatness and then petrified; yet you can see it here. Few eyes have ever beheld a sunset painted on a desert's sands, yet all may see it here.

It is a desert, surely, yet throughout its entire width flows a monster river; a fiendish, evil-souled river; a thievish, murderous river; a giant vampire, sucking the life-blood from thousands of square miles of territory and making it all barren, desolate, desert. And this vampire river has vampire children which emulate their mother in their insatiable thirst. Remorselessly they suck up and carry away all the moisture that would make the land "blossom as the rose," and thus add misery to desolation, devastation to barrenness.

It is a desert, surely, yet planted in its dreary wastes are verdant-clad mountains, on whose summits winter's snows fall and accumulate, and in whose bosoms springs of life are harbored.

It is a desert, surely, yet it is fringed here and there with dense forests, and in the very heart of its direst desolation threads of silvery streams lined with greenish verdure seem to give the lie to the name.

It is desert, barren, inhospitable, dangerous, yet thousands of people make it their chosen home. Over its surface roam the Bedouins of the United States, fearless horsemen, daring travellers, who rival in picturesqueness, if not in evil, their compeers of the deserts by the Nile. Down in the deep canyon water-ways of the desert-streams dwell other peoples whose life is as strange, weird, wild, and fascinating as that of any people of earth.

In the Heart of the Petrified Forest.

This is the region and these the people I would make the American reader more familiar with. Other books have been written on the Painted Desert. One was published a few years ago, written by a clever American novelist, and published by one of America's leading firms, and I read it with mingled feelings of delight and half anger. It was so beautifully and charmingly written that one familiar with the scenes depicted could not fail to enjoy it, although indignant—because of the errors that might have been avoided. It claims only to be fiction. Yet the youth of the land reading it necessarily gain distinct impressions of fact from its pages. These "facts" are, unfortunately, so far from true that they mislead the reader. It would have been a comparatively slight task for the author to have consulted government records and thus have made his references to geography and ethnology correct.

It is needless, I hope, for me to say I have honestly endeavored to avoid the method here criticised. The bibliography incorporated as part of this book will enable the diligent student to consult authorities about this fascinating region.

But now comes an important question. What are the boundaries of the Painted Desert? I am free to confess I do not know, nor do I think any one else does. The Spaniards never attempted to bound it, and no one since has ever had the temerity to do so. In Ives's map of the region he endeavored to explore, and of which he wrote so hopelessly, he places the Painted Desert in that ill-defined way that geographers used to follow in suggesting the location of the Great American Desert.

The conditions of color and barrenness that first suggested the name exist over a large area; you find them in the plateaus of southern Utah and the wild wastes of southern Nevada; they exist in much of New Mexico and southwestern Colorado. In Arizona if you sweep around north, west, south, and east, they are there. Northward—in the cliffs and ravines of the Grand Canyon country, in Blue Canyon, in the red mesas, the coal deposits, and in the lava flows around the San Francisco Mountains; westward—in the wild mountains and wilder deserts that lead to the crossings of the Colorado River, past the craters, lava flows, Calico Mountains, and Mohave Desert of the country adjoining the Santa FÉ Route, and the Salton Sea, mud volcanoes, purple cliffs, and tawny sands of the Colorado Desert of the Sunset Route of the Southern Pacific; southward—in the Red Rock country, Sunset Pass, the meteorite beds of Canyon Diablo, the great cliffs of the Mogollon Plateau, the Tonto Basin, the Verdi Valley, and away down, over the Hassayampa, through the Salt River Valley, past the Superstition and other purple and variegated mountains, into the heart of northern Mexico itself; eastward—to the Petrified Forest, across into New Mexico to Mount San Mateo, by the cliffs, craters, lava flows, alkali flats, gorges and ravines of the Zuni Mountain country and as far as the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, where the basalt is scattered about in an irregular way, as if the molten stuff had been washed over the country from some titanic bucket, and left to lie in great inky blots over the bright-colored soils and clays.

To me, all this is Painted Desert region, for much of it is painted and much is desert. Indeed, if one Painted Desert were to be staked off in any one of the above named States, ten others, equally large, could be found in the remaining ones.

It is a wonderful region viewed from any standpoint. Scenic! It is unrivalled for uniqueness, contrasts, variety, grandeur, desolateness, and majesty. Geologic! The student may here find in a few months what a lifetime elsewhere cannot reveal. Artistic! The artist will find it his rapture and his despair. ArchÆologic! Ruins everywhere, cavate, cliff, and pueblo dwellings, waiting for investigation, and, doubtless, scores as yet undiscovered. Ethnologic! Hopi, Wallapai, Havasupai, Navaho, Apache, and the rest; with mythologies as fascinating and complex as those of old Greece; with histories that lose themselves in dim legend and tradition, and that tell of feuds and wars, massacres and conflicts, that extend over centuries.

In the first chapter I have briefly named some of the wonders and marvels of this fascinating land, and though in barest outline, "the half has not been told."

It will be noticed that I have not rigidly adhered to the subjects as indicated by the heads of the chapters. I have preferred a discursive rather than a rigid style, for I deem it will prove itself the more interesting to the generality of my readers, and I merely call attention to it so that my critics may know it is not done without intent.

Of the Indians of this region I have room to write of four tribes only, viz., the Hopi, the Navaho, the Wallapai, and the Havasupai. Of the former much has been written in late years, owing to the interest centred in their thrilling religious ceremony, the Snake Dance. Of the Navaho considerable is known, but of the Wallapai and Havasupai there is little known and less written. Indeed, of the Wallapai there is nothing in print except the brief and cursory remarks of travellers, and the reports of the teachers of the recently established schools to the Indian Department. No one is better aware than myself of the incomplete and fragmentary character of what I have written, but this book is issued, as others that have preceded it from my pen, in accord with my desire to place in compact form for the general reader reliable accounts of places and peoples in the United States hitherto known only to the explorer and scientist.

To all the writers of the United States Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as those of other departments of the Government who have written on the region, I gratefully acknowledge many indebtednesses, especially to Powell, Fewkes, Matthews, Stephen, Hodge, Hough, Hrdlicka, Cushing, and Shufeldt.

To those who know the persistency and conscientiousness of my labors in my chosen field, and the pains I take both by observation and from the works of authorities to gain accurate knowledge, and my over-willingness to acknowledge by pen and voice those to whom I am indebted, it will not be necessary to state that I have endeavored to make this book a standard. If I have failed to give credit where it was due, I do so now with an open heart.

For the kindly reception my work in the printed page and on the platform has received in the past I hereby express my grateful acknowledgments.

George Wharton James.

Author Amphitheatre,

Bass Camp,

Grand Canyon, Arizona.

THE INDIANS OF THE
Painted Desert Region