Author of The Conquest of the Great Northwest , Lords of the North and Freebooters of the Wilderness NEW YORK McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 1913 Copyright, 1913, By McBRIDE, NAST & CO. Second Printing October, 1913 Published May, 1913 PAGE Introduction i I The National Forests 1 II National Forests of the Southwest 22 III Through the Pecos Forests 44 IV The City of the Dead 60 V The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma 78 VI Across the Painted Desert 100 VII Across the Painted Desert ( continued )

I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age—neolithic, paleolithic, troglodytic man—with a roofless city of the dead lying in the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the yawning caverns of the cliff face above. My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial æons when the advances and recessions of an ice invasion

If a health resort and national playground were discovered guaranteed to kill care, to stab apathy into new life, to enlarge littleness and slay listlessness and set the human spirit free from the nagging worries and toil-wear that make you feel like a washed-out rag at the end of a humdrum year—imagine the stampede of the lame and the halt in body and spirit; the railroad excursions and reduced fares; the disputations of the physicians and the rage of the thought-ologists at present coining mon

You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds. No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available—never farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of matches

The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless, sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in New Mexico at all

I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction but fact. I am not speculating as to how those folk of neolithic times lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses where they lived, sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined tread of æons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley a com

They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and deviltry, the

When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or all three courses if you have time. You may strike up into Zuñi Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found under the snows of the Continent

There are two ways to travel even off the beaten trail. One is to take a map, stake out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up to them lightning-flier fashion. If you want to, and are prepared to kill your horses, you can cross Navajo Land in from three to four days. Even going at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring of the Painted Desert, of the light lying in shimmering heat layers split by the refraction of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an atmosphere

The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Cañon, and the western slope between the Continental Divide and the Pacific. Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and then come away conscious that y

It lies to the left of the city Plaza—a long, low, one-story building flanking the whole length of one side of the Plaza, with big yellow pine pillars supporting the arcade above the public walk, each pillar surmounted by the fluted architrave peculiar to Spanish-Moorish architecture. It is yellow adobe in the sunlight—very old, very sleepy, very remote from latter-day life, the most un-American thing in all America, the only governor's palace from Athabasca to the Gulf of Mexico, from Sitka to

Of all the traditions clinging round the old Palace at Santa Fe, those connected with Don Diego de Vargas, the reconqueror of New Mexico, are best known and most picturesque. Yearly, for two and a quarter centuries, the people of New Mexico have commemorated De Vargas' victory by a procession to the church which he built in gratitude to Heaven for his success. This procession is at once a great public festival and a sacred religious ceremony; for the image of the Virgin, which De Vargas used whe

As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the quicksands. To

Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso—these were to the Southwest what Port Royal, Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish territory in the wilderness land of the New World. Before Santa Fe became the terminus of th

If you want to plunge into America's Egypt, there are as many ways to go as you have moods. You explain that the ocean voyage is half the attraction to European travel. There may be a difference of opinion on that, as I know people who would like to believe that the Atlantic could be bridged; but if you are keen on an ocean voyage, you can reach the Egypt of America by boat to Florida, then west by rail; or by boat straight to any of the Texas harbors. By way of Florida, you can take your fill o

If someone should tell you of a second Grand Cañon gashed through wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very high mountains—a second Grand Cañon, where lived a race of little men not three feet tall, where wild turkeys were domesticated as household birds and every man's door was in the roof and his doorstep a ladder that he carried up after him—you would think it pure imagination, wouldn't you? The Lilliputians away out in "Gulliver's Travels," or something like that

It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams—a mist shot with the gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in the o