BY CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS Author of “Finding the Worth While in California,” “The Indians of the Terraced Houses,” etc. WITH MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS “The Sun goes West, Why should not I?” Old Song. NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1918 Copyright, 1918, by Robert M. McBride & Co. Published May, 1918 TO M. H. R. Kinswoman most dear This little volume is affectionately inscribed....

No part of the United States is so foreign of aspect as our great Southwest. The broad, lonely plains, the deserts with their mystery and color, the dry water courses, the long, low mountain chains seemingly bare of vegetation, the oases of cultivation where the fruits of the Orient flourish, the brilliant sunshine, the deliciousness of the pure, dry air—all this suggests Syria or northern Africa or Spain. Added to this are the remains everywhere of an old, old civilization that once lived out i

Someone—I think it was that picturesque historian of our Southwest, Mr. Charles F. Lummis—has summed up New Mexico as “sun, silence and adobe;” and of these three components the one that is apt to strike the Eastern newcomer most forcibly is adobe. This homely gift of nature—hard as brick in dry weather, plastic as putty and sticky as glue in wet—is the bulwark of the New Mexican’s well-being. His crops are raised in it; he fences in his cattle with it; he himself lives in it; for of it are buil

Of course you must make the trip—a half day will suffice for it—from Santa Fe to Tesuque, a village of the Pueblo Indians 9 miles to the north, and you should pronounce it Te-soo´kay . If your knowledge of Indians has been limited to the variety seen in Wild West Shows and historical pictures, you will be surprised at those you find at Tesuque. This is a quaint adobe village around a spacious plaza upon which an ancient, whitewashed Catholic church faces. The houses when of more than one story a

Albuquerque is the metropolis and trade heart of central New Mexico, and the talk of its solid citizens runs naturally on cattle and wool, mines and lumber, grapes and apples and the agricultural glories of the Rio Grande valley. The average tourist gives it only the half-hour during which the train stops there, and remembers it mainly for the noteworthy Harvey Indian collection at the station (a liberal education, by the way, in the handicraft of the Southwestern aborigines) and for the snap-sh

Southeasterly from Albuquerque some 20 miles the Manzano Mountains lift their piny crests and drift southward to the Gallinas. From their feet eastward stretches the wide treeless Estancia Valley, and in the lap of it lies a noteworthy cluster of saline ponds and lagoons, whose bitter waters, shining in the blistering sun, are a mockery to the thirsty. These are “the accursed lakes” [23] of Pueblo tradition—originally fresh and abounding in fish, they say, but now lifeless and undrinkable, curse

The oldest occupied town in the United States, and in point of situation perhaps the most poetic, is Acoma ( ah´co-ma ), occupying the flat summit of a huge rock mass whose perpendicular sides rise 350 feet out of a solitary New Mexican plain. [31] It is situated 15 miles southwest of the Santa Fe Railway station of Laguna, where modest accommodations are provided for travelers who stop over. The inhabitants of Acoma, numbering about 700, are Pueblo Indians, whose ancestors founded this rockborn

Gallup, New Mexico, has never made much of a stir as a tourist center, but like many a spot of modest pretensions, it is deserving beyond its gettings. As an example of the “city beautiful” it is not, in my judgment, a success; but as a base and a fitting-out point for some of the most interesting parts of the Southwest, it is to be heartily commended. [38] Particularly is this so now that the motor car has so largely supplanted the horse-drawn vehicle for excursions afield. There are comfortabl

Thirty-five miles eastward from Zuñi (2 hours by automobile, if the roads are dry) is a huge rock mass of pale pink sandstone whose sides rise sheer a couple of hundred feet against a turquoise sky. It stands in the midst of a lonely plain whose wild grasses are nibbled by the passing flocks of wandering Navajos, and so far as I know, there is no nearer human habitation than the little Mormon settlement of Ramah, through which you pass to reach the rock. This cliff has a story to tell of such un

The Navajos are the Bedouins of our Southwest, and there are about 22,000 of them—a fine, independent tribe of Indians occupying a semi-desert, mountainous reservation in northwestern New Mexico, northeastern Arizona and a small corner of Utah. Indeed they occupy somewhat more, for they are confirmed rovers and are frequently found setting up their hogans , shepherding their sheep, and weaving their blankets, well across their government-fixed borders. One is sure to see some of them in Gallup,

Now that the automobile has become a common mode of travel even in the desert, you may reach the pueblos of the Hopi Indians quite comfortably from Gallup. [55] The distance is about 130 miles to the first of the villages. The road is via St. Michael’s (where the Franciscan Brothers maintain a Mission for the Navajos); Ganado, where Mr. J. L. Hubbell’s trading post stands; and Keam’s Cañon, where Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, hospitable son of a hospitable father, has another trading post. As far as Gana

Everybody enjoys his stop off at the Petrified Forest. For one thing, this sight is as easy of achievement as falling off a log, and that counts heavily with your average American tourist. Even if your train drops you at Adamana [62] in the middle of the night, as some trains do, there will be somebody there to carry your bag and pilot you the couple of hundred yards to the lone hotel which, with the railroad station and the water tank, is practically all there is of Adamana. Then you are put co

A score of years ago Flagstaff [68] was chiefly known to the traveler as the gateway to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, 70 miles to the northwest. One may still reach that marvelous chasm by automobile from Flagstaff, arriving at Grand View after 5 or 6 hours’ driving, now through a park-like forest of yellow pine, now across an open plateau region with alluring views of far-off mountain ranges and of the Painted Desert. The completion of the railroad spur from Williams to the Grand Cañon, howe

From Williams, on the Santa Fe’s transcontinental line, a branch runs due north across 65 miles of the great Colorado Plateau and lands the traveler at the very rim of the Grand Cañon—one of the most enjoyable, most novel, most awakening sights among the Southwest’s marvels. Even if your arrival be at darkest midnight, you will feel the nearness of that awful void in the unseen—a strange and humbling experience. For accommodations you have the choice of American plan and what passes in the wilde

If you happen never to have speculated in copper or archaeology and are not a Southwesterner, it is quite likely that you have not heard of the Verde Valley. It is a somewhat sinuous cleft up and down the very center of Arizona, holding in its heart the Verde River ( el Rio Verde , or Green River, of the Spaniards) which has its source under the San Francisco Peaks, and after 150 miles or so through cramped cañons and sunny bottomlands of more or less fertility, joins the Salt River about 50 mil

If you are a Southwesterner, born or naturalized, returning from a visit “back East,” your spirits rise with a jump when the trainmen call out “San Antone!” For this is the frontier of your own dear country, and you feel the thrill that goes with getting home again and being among your own people. Dusty and a bit down at the heel in spots is San Antonio, you think? Yes, son, but it is picturesque; and there are adobes and Mexicans, Stetson hats and cart-wheel dollars once more, and it is where t

There are two Arizonas. There is that wide, breezy plateau region of the north, a mile and more above sea level, where our travels so far have been; and there is the much lower desert region of the south slanting downward from the Gila River to Sonoran Mexico, from which country there is little to distinguish it physically. This desert region, known to the Spaniards as Pimería Alta (that is, the upper country of the Pima Indians), was the only portion of what was afterwards called Arizona to pos

“Shall they say of you, you have been to Rome and not seen the Pope?” Yet that is what will be said if you turn back at the Colorado River and leave Southern California out of your Southwestern travels. However, few people do that. The fear is that in their haste to reach that tourist playground, they may neglect too much of what the preceding chapters have dwelt upon. Intent upon seeing the Pope, they may do scant justice to Rome. By Southern California is meant California south of the Teháchap

While the climate of the Southwest is characterized by abundant sunshine and a low degree of relative humidity, it has periods of considerable moisture precipitation. In winter this takes the form of snow in the northern and central portions of New Mexico and Arizona (which lie at an elevation of 5000 feet and more above sea level). The snow, however, except upon the mountains, disappears rather rapidly under the hot sunshine of midday, so that the traveler has a fair chance to sandwich his trip

Every day brings a new experience—crowded with scenic delight—at Glacier National Park—Uncle Sam’s playground in the Montana Rockies. Maybe you are going over the “Notch”—sky-high Gunsight Pass—on a surefooted horse—a real mountaineer experience. Perhaps you’re gliding amid tremendous scenes over a modern motor trail through the thick of the wilds. Another day, you pow-wow with the picturesque Blackfeet Indians. Send for descriptive literature with maps and photographic views of the Park’s beaut

Ask for new booklet “Off the beaten Path” of Maps and Pictures W. J. Black, Pass. Traf. Mgr. AT&SF Ry—1118 Ry. Exch. Chi·...