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By M. J. Brown 
WW O"°™'hlEEl 
INS 
Chin Lee at the opening of the Can- 
yon de Chelley, was originally a trad- 
ing post, Years ago a Chinaman gath- 
ered a few canned goods and some 
calico fixings and went up there to 
get rich off the Navajos. Chin lasted 
just about long enough to get his 
name on the Arizona map. One cold 
day, when the Indians were not feel- 
ing any too good, a bunch of them 
came to the store and wanted match- 
es. (By the way to this day an In- 
dian will never buy a match.) John 
told them there was a_ shortage in 
market, but they wouldn’t take his 
word for it. They found a stock hid- 
den away, and then they butchered 
the Celestial, carried off his stock of 
goods and burned his little old store. 
And that is how the place became 
named—an Indian country with a pig- 
tail handle. There’s a government 
Indian school there now. 
We arrived there after dark and 
the superintendent gave us good ac- 
The next morning an 
Indian hiked out to get a couple of 
ponies for our trip up the canyon to 
the cliff ruins. It was three hours be- 
fore he returned, riding one and lead- 
ing one. The sand is so deep up the 
canyon one cannot walk it or drive 
it—the only means is on the back of a 
pony, 
I never was a rider. A lady’s sad- 
dle pony or a broke down old camp 
horse even gave me heart failure. The 
pony for me was a black, shaggy- 
looking ranger, but the driver said he 
was safe as a burro. He was outfit- 
ted with blankets, gunny sacks, ropes 
and such a bunch of stuff I could 
hardly see the saddle. The teachers 
and a hundred Indian boys and girls 
were standing around to see us start 
—go there was nothing to do but to 
go to it. It was a moment when | 
would rather have been alone, but I 
slipped my shoe in the stirrup with a 
bluff as if I had been brought up in 
the saddle, and swing up in the saddle, 
and swing on deck. The minute I 
cleared the ground that black fellow 
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started. I jerked on the reins and 
he quit it, but then I could not do 
anything with him. The Indians 
break them to start with a jump, and 
the slightest touch of the rein on the 
neck will then turn them like a flash. 
In my desperation to stick and to 
make the spectators think that I was 
not a tenderfoot, I kept that pony 
whirling around until he and I were 
both dizzy, and then I swung off in 
humiliation and told the Indian to 
bring the cliff ruins down to the 
school or let them stay where they 
were—that I wasn’t caring for them. 
They gave me the real laugh. Then 
a young Indian mounted the horse 
and showed me. I tried it again, and 
the only way I ever got started was by 
throwing the reins to my partner and 
he towing me out. After a few min- 
utes I became somewhat accustomed 
to the steering geer and was able to 
run it alone—but never off a walk. 
Canyon de Chelley they say is for- 
ty miles long, and that there are but 
two or three places in its entire 
length where a man or horse can find 
an ascent of its walls onto the open 
country on either side. It is a minia- 
ture grand canyon. It is a great dry 
river bed, but no doubt a great tor- 
rent in the dim ages of the past. It’s 
great red walls of glass-like hardness 
rise from 500 to 1,000 feet on either 
side and the awful heat from the sun 
floods down into that gorge—stifling, 
awful. 
But the cliff ruins. 
IT had expected to see something 
similar to the Puje cliffs. There the 
walls are tufa rock, soft, and the an- 
cient dwellers dug out their homes 
with pieces of volcanic glass, thous- 
ands of them adjoining, but on these 
walls it would take a diamond drill to 
make a dent. 
The first ruin I almost passed with- 
out noting, until the Indian grunted 
and pointed. 
And there up the side of the cliffs, 
in an oval spot, like a saucer stood on 
edge, I saw the long abandoned homes 
Avenue, Magnolia 
of the men history tells us not of— 
or not much of. There half way up 
the wall, where nature had left a 
great oval-shaped dent, where the 
crumbling walls of the homes of a 
people that once lived, flourished and 
silently disappeared off the face of 
the earth. 
These homes were not cut into the 
rock. They were built with stones 
and mortar, some little, some big, 
square, round, all shapes and sizes and 
wedged in because the room was con- 
tracted. They were built with hu- 
man hands, hands—far back in the 
stone age, | 
I lay in the shade of the opposite 
wall, across the canyon, for an hour 
and looked up at these prehistoric 
homes. The rains had brought a 
small stream of water down the 
gorge and the quicksand did not make 
it safe to cross over. I lay there and 
speculated, wondered and tried to 
think back to the days when men liv- 
ed there, how they got up there, and 
how they prevented the babies from 
falling over. 
And then the Indian grunted, 
pointed to the water and the ponies 
he was holding. I diédi’t savvy, but 
T nodded and we mounted. 
I knew five miles up was the 
“White House,” and that that was 
the big show, and I was anxious to 
get to it. 
I had a circus getting 
horse and getting the carburetor 
working again. Afar off I could hear 
thunder, and I wished that it would 
draw near, that it would rain, hail, 
pour, burst some clouds, or do some- 
thing to relieve from the awful heat. 
I made the Indian sign I wanted 
some drink. The Navajo looked at 
ime as if he thought I was about seven 
kinds of a fool, then dismounted, and 
from the loose sand of the river bed 
he went to digging with his hands as 
a farmer’s dog digs for a woodchuck. 
As fast as he dug out the sand, it 
caved in, and he had to scoop out a 
hole a yard wide before he had a well 
that would stay a well, and then we 
had to wait full fifteen minutes be- 
fore the sand settled enough so the 
moisture wasn’t thick. Then he hand- 
ed me about a half a dozen cups of 
the muddy-looking stuff, and, strange 
to say, it was good—rain water, self 
filtered through the sand. 
We went on up the canyon, and 
about an hour of the hottest living | 
ever suffered, then around a bend in 
the canyon I saw the “White House,” 
capitol of the 
onto that 
the real permanent 
cliff dwellers. 
(Continued to next page.) 
