Through Our Unknown Southwest Part 4

Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together, who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpa.s.s herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become--what?--is it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and b.u.t.terfly that it may perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species that shall surpa.s.s itself. The tree trying to encompa.s.s and overcome the law of its own being--fixity--by sending its seeds sailing, whirling, aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.

You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing life and strength straight from the sun.

The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that can't stand fast against the shocks of life!

You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet, not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard and set--marking the ages of the trees--all have their prototypes in the human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth, air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much shade, fire, drought, pa.s.sing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living begins--it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning, the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will to live--cork-s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g sidewise for light, forking into two branches where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds--seeds shaped like parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its own fixity--life striving to surpa.s.s itself, as the symbolists and the scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing.

And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high, leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second growth of such trees.

Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health seekers.

"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.

"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."

CHAPTER III

THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO

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 seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas.

You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different National Forests, for most of them lie above an alt.i.tude of 8,000 feet; and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000 feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or Gra.s.s Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Canon.

There are several other ways in which the National Forests of New Mexico discount Eastern expectation.

First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back, leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens--_There is still a no-tip land._ As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast.

In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than $2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have your own horse for a six weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2--where will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized, where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel that has been too popular; that day has been long pa.s.sed in the ranches of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture of the Southwest--conical arches opening from one room into another, shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made for sending in meals.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its feathers, which are used in religious rites]

The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of _most_ of the Forests by motor, of _all_ of the Forests by team (be sure to hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner.

In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible canons, shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May; but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road, going up the canon from south to north.

The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they const.i.tute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the canons forking off the Pecos at right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.

Lastly, the mountain canons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to remember--with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation, excellent trails and abundance of game--these National Forests of New Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago, only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the West.

You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests--trees eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval state.

The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2 a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.

Then suddenly, it dawns on you--this is not America at all. It is a bit of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health, and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief.

The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats bleating on the red sand hills--all complete the illusion that you have waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to Canada, New Mexico is to the United States--a mosaic in color; a bit of the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive, undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and falls back in social envy and cla.s.s hate. "Our people, no, they are not ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth--no--we have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"

"Mighty good," though I was not thinking of the poem. I was thinking of the spirit that is contented enough to _see_ poetry in the great white mountains through the door of a little whitewashed adobe room; and in this case, it was a sick room. Presently, he got up out of his bed, and donned an old military cape, and came out in the sunlight to have me photograph him, so that his friends would have it _after_.

Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you. Any normal traveler does not need to be told that these ranch houses are not regular boarding houses as you understand that term; but as a great many travelers are not normal, perhaps I should explain. The custom of taking strangers has arisen from those old days when there were no inns and all pa.s.sers-by were given beds and meals as a matter of course.

Those days are past, but luckily for outsiders, the custom survives; only remember while you pay, you go as a _guest_, and must not expect a valet to clean your boots and to quake at any discord of nerves untuned by the jar of town.

In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling, earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse. Presently, at an elevation of 8,000 feet; we pulled up in Pecos Town before the long, low, whitewashed ranch house, the two ends coming back in an L round the court, the main entrance on the other side of it. You expected to find wilderness. Well, there is an upright piano, and there is a gramophone with latest musical records, and close by the davenport where hangs a grizzly bear pelt, stands a banjo. You have scarcely got travel togs off before dinner is sounded by the big copper ranch bell hung on the piazza after the fashion of the Missions.

After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going up the canon. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a great many reasons. He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for, your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt predatory animals--bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion--you need no permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that the forests in the upper canons are very dense; and that you might get lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge who knows where you have gone?

On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican, has been a delegate to the Const.i.tutional Convention and is somewhat of a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views.

"What is going to happen in Old Mexico?"

"Ah, only one t'ing possible--los Americanos must go in."

"Why?"

"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot--cannot control. Madero, he cannot control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."

It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained gla.s.s windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet walls.

Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built in--well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell away and buried it in the mountains--where, no man knows: it has never since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.

At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the canon with a span of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not need to describe the trails up Pecos Canon. I consider it a safer road than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor car, though the scenic highway cutting this at right angles will be when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Canon, now down on a level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With carelessness--well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went over the edge head first: n.o.body hurt, as the steep slope is heavily wooded and you can't slide far.

Ranch after ranch you pa.s.s with the little portable houses for "the tent dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and miniature waterfalls. Wherever the canon widens to little fields, the Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the canon forks to right and left up other forested canons, many of which, save for the hunter, have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords, loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear their summits is the head of Pecos Canon--a sort of snow top to the sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically communal dwellings five stories in height]

I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in addition a cowboy slicker and was cold--this in a land where the Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining camp, and the two sing s.n.a.t.c.hes of Spanish songs as we ascend the canon.

Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my collapsible drinking cup to go down to the canon for some water.

Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.

Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the canon. From this point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a dozen canons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them.

In fact, if you followed up any of these side canons, you would find them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet untrod.

Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high known as Gra.s.s Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this 10,000 feet alt.i.tude horse ranching; and that brings up another important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what thousands are doing--combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing with the search for health. We pa.s.sed the invalid's camp chair on this ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.

Gra.s.s Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling ma.s.ses of the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Canon, and the whole Pecos Valley below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom cone of smoke is visible from Gra.s.s Mountain and the rangers spur to the work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and hunt in Pecos Canon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire; and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making will do to prevent fires.

We walked across the almost flat table of Gra.s.s Mountain and looked down the east side into the Las Vegas Canon. Four feet of snow still clung to the east side of Gra.s.s Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though it is so very old. The holy _padre_ was jogging along on his mule one night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an _Ave Maria_; "Praise be G.o.d," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.

CHAPTER IV