In Arizona 
II.—Traveling into Turkeyland—The Salt River 
Dam—Cliff Dwellings—Wild Life in 
the Sierra Anches 
By J. W. SCHULTZ 
Authorj ofj“Ny Life as an Indian,” “Life Among the Blackfeet,” “Floating Down the Missouri,” e’c. 
L ike most of the things I do, I began this 
tale of my Arizona wanderings not at 
the point of my commencing them, but 
along in the second chapter, so to speak. 
Before coming here, Rnminator and I went 
away up in the Sierra Anches Mountains in 
search of America’s grandest game bird, the 
wild turkey. I have beard sportsmen claim that 
distinction for the ruffed grouse; for the pin¬ 
nated grouse; for the woodcock. I am quite 
sure ti at none of these men ever hunted and 
killed the turkeys of this Southwest land. 
It was away over on the California coast-—a 
bit of conversation overheard on the veranda 
of one of those big resorts where people sit 
around and pretend they are happy, that de¬ 
termined me to make an attempt to at least 
see these birds. I was sitting there very for¬ 
lorn and lonely, very much out of place in that 
crowd of hundreds of fashionably attired, chat¬ 
tering women and their male appendages, when 
I heard one man say to another, “Got quite a 
number of wild turkeys. They are plentiful 
in some parts of Arizona.” I asked the speaker 
a few questions, and the very next day I was 
off for turkey land, happy in my decision. What 
business, anyway, has a man who loves the 
silent places to loiter around' summer and 
winter resorts? 
It was in Mesa, a hamlet of Mormon canta¬ 
loupe growers, that I descended from the train 
and met Ruminator, who was standing lonely 
and dejected in a big corral. 
“How much for him?” I asked. 
“Who—that there burro Bawley? Why you 
kin have him for twenty dollars. Yes, I named 
him Bawley because he bawls so much,” said 
the livery man. 
Within the hour Bawley and I hit the trail; 
ere another hour elapsed I had discovered cer¬ 
tain traits of character in the fuzzy creature that 
caused me to rename him. I have found no 
occasion to name him again. Sometimes I wish 
I could think all the wise thoughts that are 
surging in the brain below those long and 
fuzzy ears. 
I have traveled some trails in my time; there 
are few indeed between British Columbia and 
Old Mexico that I have not wandered over, but 
never anywhere have I seen such an one as 
that connecting Mesa and Roosevelt, sixty miles 
in length. It cost two hundred and fifty thou¬ 
sand dollars, I understand, and is worth the 
money. It is a veritable boulevard; Riverside 
Drive itself is .no finer, and after leaving the 
desert it takes the mountains in such easy 
grades that the freighters are able to haul 
something like a ton to the horse up to the 
dam site. 
Ruminator was heavily laden, carrying a 
small tent, my bedding, war bag, a few provis¬ 
ions and a couple of cooking utensils, all lashed 
to my heavy riding saddle and double lashed 
with the diamond hitch. But he murmured not 
and trudged valiantly along, sometimes leading, 
sometimes by my side, seldom behind. Finally 
I tucked the lead rope into the diamond and 
drove him ahead of me. In this' manner we 
would have made the entire trip had I not fortu¬ 
nately run across an outfit of cholos the first 
day out, from whom I purchased a second 
burro and a pack saddle. I'hereafter I rode 
Ruminator. 
There is a lot of travel over the Roosevelt 
road besides the freighting. A four-horse stage 
with frequent change of animals makes the sixty 
miles in nine hours. Then there is a constant 
stream of sightseers going and coming by 
private conveyance, and frequently automobiles 
whizzed by, the fashionably dressed women oc¬ 
cupants gazijig down at poor Ruminator and 
me with supercilious disdain. But W'e did not 
mind that at all, for we w'ere very much con¬ 
tent riding slowly along, observing the quail 
and the rabbits and taking in the wonderful 
panorama of desert and mountains which be¬ 
came more and more interesting at every turn. 
In one never-to-be-forgotten place the road 
winds for a mile along the bottom of a box 
canon to its head and then out again, the red 
rock cliffs rising a thousand feet .sheer abttve 
the grade, and at the upper end projecting out- 
w^ard several hundred feet. It is an awesome, 
grim, forbidding abode of echoes. 
I was three days getting to the dam site, and 
there I spent an hour sitting on the edge of 
the cliff overlooking it and viewing the stu¬ 
pendous undertaking. The dam, curving up¬ 
ward to the stream and let into deep cuts on 
either side, is in a narrow mountain gorge of 
the Salt River, just below the mouth of Tonto 
Creek, and is so wide, so solid, so rhoroughly 
keyed into each w'all of the canon, that nothing 
less than an earthquake that would destroy the 
mountains can ever overthrow it. Electricity 
is doing the work. Huge heavy cables criss¬ 
cross the gorge, and suspended from them 
strings of cars are going day and night with 
loads of rock to the cement mill for ready mixed 
cement filling, and for blocks of chiseled stone 
which are swiftly lowered to the exact place 
they are wanted on the dam. It is a great sight. 
And what a big lake of water this dam will 
hold; sixteen miles up Salt River, the same up 
Tonto Basin, and two hundred and forty feet 
deep. Lucky indeed are the ranchers of the 
desert and valley whose ditches shall tap this 
never-failing source of supply. 
Leaving the dam, I traveled up the Salt River, 
passing an interesting cliff dwelling that is 
perched a mile or more from the stream and 
six or eight hundred feet above it. The Tonto 
Basin has a great many of them; some, I hear 
it whispered, that the white man has never ex¬ 
plored. I live in hope that I may be fortunate 
enough to be the first to enter one or two of 
the centuries’ silent, dusty rooms. Who were 
these people of the cliffs—who was the enemy 
they so feared—and when and how did they dis¬ 
appear? It seems that those who have made 
a study of the matter have agreed to disagree. 
Personally, I believe that the cliff dwellers 
originally occupied the Gila and Salt river 
valleys; that thej^ built those ancient pueblos 
of which that of Casa Grande is the best ex¬ 
ample. and that they were driven from their 
fertile irrigated fields by no less a foe than the 
warriors of that semi-civilized race which built 
temples to the sun on the shores of the lakes 
of Mexico. We know that the Tvlayas—so- 
called Aztecs—annually sacrificed thousands of 
human beings to their gods—in a year of the 
eleventh century seventy thousand at the dedi¬ 
cation of a temple—and that each year they were 
obliged to go farther and farther for prisoners 
for these sacrifices. It is reasonable to believe 
that they eventually came into this Southern 
Arizona land and devastated it, the people flee¬ 
ing from them to the only possible refuge, the 
cliffs. 
It is found that the archaeological and other 
remains of both valley and cliff people are the 
same, and it seems that there could have been 
no other foe; for this all took place long be¬ 
fore the nomadic Navajos and Apaches invaded 
the country from the far North. Lastly, the 
Hopi—so called Moqui—Indians say that their 
ancestors lived in the south land, “the red 
