NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
ter 
Y, e © WY 
Yj Y 
_ A Trip Through the Navajo Land © 
Y . ° 
7 The American Indian as Seen at Close Range ] 
Z By M. J. Brown ZY 
] 
ON 
WS 
(Note—This letter was written and 
mailed before the visit to the cliff 
ruins, but was sidetracked some- 
where in the mails and was over three 
weeks in finding its way out. It 
therefore has its wrong place in the 
series. ) 
Chin Lee, Arizona, Sept. 20, 1913. 
Theodore Roosevelt was up in this 
country last month, and while the As- 
sociated Press gave hima lot of Out- 
look advertising, and will pass me up 
entirely, I'll bet I beat him an Arizo- 
na section on the finish. 
Roosevelt had with him his two 
sons, a nephew, and every newspa- 
per man who could dig up the price, 
or form a trip party. : 
I had with me (on the finish) a 
Navajo Indian who couldn’t speak a 
word of English and who would not 
even grunt for companionship, only 
when he wanted a match. 
Roosevelt went to the snake dance 
and I went to the cliff ruins. I simply 
make this connection for advertising 
purposes, but I guess he gets the best 
end of it. 
One of the places I had down on 
this trip was the Moqui pueblo and 
the weird and ancient snake dance. I 
had long supposed this ancient rite 
was held in September of each year, 
but what was my disappointment to 
find August was the date. I had con- 
fused the rites with the Chalico festi- 
vities of the Zunis. 
So I got an outfit at Gallup and 
rade a trip of four days through the 
weirdest and strangest country that 
ever laid out under the sun, and 
when I had finished it this little mis- 
sion station (with a Chinese name) I 
felt pretty well satisfied that I was 
thirty days ahead of hundreds of 
thousands of Amercian who call 
themselves tourists, and who think 
they have “seen America.” 2 
But before I tell you about the cliff 
dwellers, (my hobby) and that ride 
up the canyon on an Indian pony (my 
back aches yet,) I want to write of 
some of the interesting little things 
that too many never see, because of 
the discomforts of the trip, and of 
which too many of the writers sit in 
a Pullman car and write. 
Out of Gallop, as soon as you cross 
the Arizona line and get into that 
sun-baked, waterless Navajo country, 
there is fascinating interest and wild- 
day history in almost every mile— 
G 
VG HH’ (0j 6  e ve. ee ev  °¥° °° °° v ° eek eeé°e °eFWvF~'”°° Y°~C ° °*®™°””"=”"l''" 
providing you don’t stub your toe on 
them and fall down without ever 
seeing them, 
I had a driver who had for thirty 
years been a freighter and Indian 
trader in this country. He sized me 
up as the ordinary tourist, and I knew 
it. My clothes looked too dustless 
and hands too soft. I wanted to lim- 
ber up to the old scout for I knew he 
could make every mile interesting to 
me if he would. The night before he 
asked me to tell him just what I 
wanted for an outfit and chick. And 
there was where I got next. I told 
him I could stand anything any white 
man could; to get what he wanted 
and that was good enough; that I 
could eat bacon and frijole beans 
week in and out and a blanket was 
good enough for a rain, snow or sand 
storm. 
And then he limbered. 
For hours he reeled off stuff and 
pointed out old wild day historic 
spots. 
For instance, about the first inter- 
esting spot he showed me was a 
mound of dirt with yellow looking 
pieces of soft stone all over it. He 
explained how a tourist went out 
with him last year, and when the 
cross bar broke near this mound, and 
it took a half hour to make one from 
a cedar scrub, this fellow came back 
with his shoes covered with the ocre 
(it was raining) and damning the 
Navajo country for its monotony and 
the soil because it had daubed his pa- 
tent leathers. 
This mound, Indians have come to 
for hundreds of years. They take 
this ore or clay, mix it with sheep tal- 
low and paint their faces, not to make 
themselves look fierce and to scare 
New Yorkers, but simply as a pro- 
tection against the fearful rays and 
heat of the Arizona sun, which in 
midsummer will glister, crack open 
and peel off the skin of even an In- 
dian. The squaws use it especially, 
and more especially when they have a 
long ride in the saddle. 
On the point of a mesa I saw a pile 
of rocks, and while we stopped for 
lunch I climbed it for inspection, for 
I saw it was one of the few curious 
formations that the volcano did not 
make, 
Two piles of stone, built up pyra- 
mid shape. That was all, so far as I 
saw, but Dan told me they had stood 
there since before the white man, 
and that they were ancient Indian 
water signs; that near was an arroya 
where water could be found for dig- 
ging in the quick sand; a spring or 
Indian well. 
A most interesting natural forma- 
tion is Kit Carson’s monument -near 
the opening of the Boneita Canyon, 
and by the way, Kit Carson has a 
bunch of monuments scattered over 
the southwest. At Taos he is really 
buried. There he died, there his 
bones have crumbled and there is his 
real monument; pretty much chipped 
off and carried away by the vandals 
and relic hunters. At Santa Fe, 
capitol of New Mexico, is another 
monument of Kit, the first Mason in 
the southwest ,and out here in the 
Arizona desert I find another. And 
I am told there are about a dozen 
more scattered around. 
On this mesa Carson and a little 
bunch of white men stood off the 
Navajos for a week, so the Indian 
legend goes. As to standing them off 
he certainly had a cinch, for he was 
on top of a rocky hill that simply 
stood up in the air, and how the In- 
dians could ever have gotten to him 
-as more than my military eye could 
see. They say he and his band killed 
hundreds of them, but finally exhaus- 
tion of amunition and lack of water 
weakened the white men, and at 
night the Indians scaled the mesa and 
killed them all. 
It is no doubt true that Carson had 
a great fight at this rock. On one 
side the most easily accessible, are 
plain evidences of barricades. Tt is 
also history that the Indians won out. 
But it is also plain U. S. history that 
Carson didn’t die on that desert rock. 
He must have made a get away that 
night while Lo was raising the hair 
off his comrades. 
But the Indians thought they had 
him canned and his scalp is stowed 
away with the “sacred hair.” Soon 
after (mind you I take this on trust) 
a great chunk of the red flint rock 
parted from the main mass, slid down 
a hundred feet, and there it stands 
today, in form like a gigantic monu- 
ment and in workmanship far ahead 
of anything puny sculptures can do. 
And when I sized it up, and the 
history surrounding, I thought it had — 
Toas and Santa Fee skinned a thous- 
and ways in memory of “The Man 
Who Blazed the Trail,” and that I 
was content to let Lo and his legend 
stand as southwest history. 
Caught in a cold rain, at eating 
time, we saw (and smelled) a smoke, 
and nearby we found a Navajo ho- 
gan—a house. ‘The brush was wet 
and we wanted some wood to boil our 
(Continued to page 24) 
= 
é 
a 
