At the outset of The Heritage of the Desert, Hare is near death from his desert trek, due in part to a “soreness of his lungs” and “one sensitive spot” that made breathing difficult. This physical ailment is accompanied by an “old settled bitterness” that erodes his wish to live. This vague illness conflated Grey’s own discontents, disappointments, and depressions into ones commonplace in the East and already associated with its formality, development, and crowding. Conversely, Hare’s experience out West was sufficiently connected to emergent assumptions about the Southwest’s climate, awesome scenery, and lack of development to make his transformation into a manly, adventurous outdoorsman both engaging and believable.
4
Pursuit of the Dream: 1911–14
The tourist, the leisurely traveler, the comfort-loving motorist would never behold it. Only by toil, sweat, endurance and pain could any man ever look at Nonnezoshe. It seemed well to realize that the great things of life had to be earned.
—“Nonnezoshe”
In March 1911, four months after the publication of The Heritage of the Desert, Field and Stream presented the first installment of “Down an Unknown Jungle River.” For this issue, the editors prepared a special, bright-red cover with a huge Z slashing from top to bottom of the page, like the famous mark of Zorro. A photograph of Zane appeared center left of the Z, with his name completed in block letters to the right. Although Warner, the magazine’s owner, shrewdly calculated the benefit of this promotion to his magazine, his backing came when Grey badly needed it, and earned Warner his gratitude and loyalty. At the time, few editors were so accepting of his work. Grey’s articles for Field and Stream financed trips that alleviated his crippling depressions, and these trips furnished material that enabled him to move beyond his Ohio novels, solidifying his stature as an outdoorsman and endowing his Westerns with authenticity.
“Down an Unknown Jungle River” appeared almost two years after the trip that it described, and Grey felt so pressured to write over this period that his travel was restricted to overnights in New York City and other places nearby. The Heritage of the Desert, completed between early November 1909 and late January 1910, was a product of his first complete winter in Lackawaxen. Snow came early that year and Grey wrote in a small cottage that had only a small stove and no insulation. The penetrating cold necessitated heavy clothing and every few minutes he had to hold his hand near the fire in order to continue writing.1 In June, when Dan Beard invited him to Connecticut for a visit, he had to decline because he was straining to meet an August deadline on a book for young people.2 The Young Lion Hunter, published in October 1911, appeared six months after The Young Pitcher. This was a simplification of “Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon” and Grey speedily followed with a conversion of “Down an Unknown Jungle River” into Ken Ward in the Jungle (1912), his last book for juveniles. Although Grey did his five boys’ books for money and as insurance against failure with his novels, they were invaluable training in the development of a simple, accessible style that complemented his Westerns and appealed to adolescents, who would be a significant component in his later readership.
Grey’s self-imposed confinement in Lackawaxen enabled him to complete these diverse projects, and it stimulated a compensatory daydreaming that he recorded in the pages of his journal. On March 10, 1911, he wrote:
I seem to live so much in the future. I am always anticipating something, looking forward to this trip, or planning that one. I am haunted by a yearning to go afar, into the wilds mostly, and yet I know that when I do go, I never find content. Then I long for my home, my books, my family. It is a strange thing, this unrest, this insatiate desire to find the place and the happiness that seem forever just beyond the horizon. But they never are. They are in the depths of my own soul, and I never yet mined that deep.3
Frequently this daydreaming involved women and his powerful attraction to them. In an entry from two years before, he reflected, “For many years it has been my way to look at women, judge them, know them from the side which affected me personally.”4 Women were on his mind when he described the actress Lina Cavalieri, whose photograph he kept on his desk:
Cover of Field and Stream, March 1911.
Of all the lovely women whose pictures have fascinated me this one is the most perfect. She is dark, sweet, passionate; her face is oval and pure, her lips exquisite, her eyes like night. She is slender, svelte, voluptuous; her arms are round, her breast is full, her hips are swelling. … Are the laws of natural selection alone responsible for those eyes of fire, those lips of love, those breasts of pearl, those arms of Aphrodite?5
He penned another, much longer reflection on how women stimulated his thinking and inspired stories:
I like to climb the mountains with a girl, and picture her on mossy stones, in lichen-covered cliffs, or rugged trunk of twisted pine or oak. … I feel all the phases of the sex sense in man. I love youth and beauty free and wild in the mountain tops. The flush of cheek, the flash of eye, the peal of real laughter, the waving of hair, the action, the reality, the charm—these I feel with all the power there is in me.
Then there is more, infinitely more. The wonder of it all will never cease to hold me. The thousand thousand changes of mood, of feeling! To walk alone in the solitude under the pines with a girl with all life before her or a woman already beginning to look backward! That is what I hold as a wonderful privilege of life. … I do not deny the sweetness of clasped hands or the fragrance of wind-blown hair. But these things, the physical and the sensual, are not in any sense as memorable as the spiritual. I walk the mountain tops in dreams. … By women men live! A man is drawn unto a woman. What [is] more portent, intelligible, appalling than these two simple facts? So at the bottom of all the great stories lies the power of a woman.6
A reader of these entries cannot help wondering about affairs that might have contributed to these musings. In addition to the passage above, his journals mention two meetings with women other than Dolly.7 The likelihood of extramarital involvements is increased by bizarre admissions to Dolly like this one from his first trip to Arizona: “I am quite sure if Helen herself should come back from the shadows and unveil herself to me, that while I might, I suppose I would, rave over her beauty and perhaps yield to it, but she could never hold me, nor any other woman. You see I cannot wash out that taint in me.”8
Whether or not Grey did have liaisons at this time, his isolation in Lackawaxen and his immersion in his writing left little time for them, and made the absence of other women a more powerful influence upon his musings. Moreover, his strong commitment to his family also helped to confine his wanderings to daydreaming. Finances pressured his mother and sister to live with him and Dolly, but having these family members nearby fulfilled deep-seated emotional and psychological needs. When he and Dolly stayed with his brother for several months in Middletown, Grey wrote in his journal, “Just now the only bitter drop in my cup is the separation from mother and the rest of the family.”9 The birth of his first child deepened his attachment to his family. On one occasion when he found himself “fighting again and again the old battle,” he went to the room of baby Romer, lay down next to the crib, and happily watched him play.10 Six months later, the proud father elaborated upon his deep love for his young son:
My boy was nine months old yesterday. He is beautiful, sturdy, unusually strong and active, a picture of health and wonderful life. … Day by day I learn wisdom from this baby, and something else I cannot name. I watch him sometimes when he lies asleep, in some cozy natural position, half on his face perhaps, with little hands outspread and little pink heels pointed up. … So I am to learn through a child. To feel the pride and the life, the fear and the dread, the ambition and the longing, the sorrow and the love that come to those who are blessed with the blood of their blood, and the love of their love. It is the way of life. Through him, perhaps, I shall feel the bond between men, and understand the mother-longing of women, and see the scroll of humanity unrolled.1
1
These competing attractions to family and to other women would profoundly influence Riders of the Purple Sage, his next novel, but he did not begin it until after two more trips that were brief but significant.
In the fall of 1910, Grey estimated his earnings for the year at $3,500. This represented a substantial improvement over his $439 for 1909. He received only $150 for The Last Trail, but he got the same amount more for two articles. Warner paid him $340 (and a rifle) for “Down an Unknown Jungle River” and published a notice in Field and Stream informing readers that the twelve-part serial “cost us no small penny to get all this for our readers.”12 Popular Magazine paid $1,800 for serial rights to The Heritage of the Desert. The novel came out in September 1910 and ensured Grey more royalties during the next year. In order to avoid the miserable winter of the previous year, Grey rented a house large enough for his family, mother, and sister at 103 Albion Place in Atlantic City from Thanksgiving until the end of March 1911.
Next, he organized a third trip to Tampico for himself and R. C. Over the summer, George Allen sought his opinion about a second boat trip down the Panuco River. “I would advise you not to, strictly not,” Grey responded. “I can see where we had more luck than sense. And if I had not known how to pick out channels and guide the boat, we would be still there; and your little wife would be wearing black. It was a d—fool trip.” Along with more advice about tarpon fishing, Grey mentioned that he would be returning to Tampico that winter. In mid-January 1911, he wrote that he and R. C. would be arriving on February 5 and requested that Allen scout locations for them to hunt jaguar, deer, and turkey.13
When their ship reached Cuba, Zane and R. C. learned about an outbreak of smallpox in Tampico and immediately altered their plans. During several days of poor fishing in Nassau, they heard about a new resort in Long Key, Florida, where the fishing was supposed to be outstanding.14 The camp’s collection of bungalows and central dining room originally housed workers during the construction of Henry Flagler’s railroad from Miami to Key West. When the line finished in 1909, the facility was transformed into a camp for fishermen.15 Zane and R. C. only had a week left when they reached Long Key, and it did not go very well. Initially, the weather was perfect, and their hopes were high. Their first day out, no one on their boat got a strike, but another boat returned with 350 pounds of fish. The next day, they had a better guide and located fish, but their lack of experience and deficient equipment kept them from landing any. The third day the wind kicked up and prevented boats from going out. “Rome is plainly discouraged, and as for me, I’m simply steeped in gloom,” Zane related to Dolly. “After all my talk about trips and years of waiting to get Rome to come with me, and at last planning for months on this one, to have it turn out this way is simply heart-sickening. … There is absolutely nothing to do here when you can’t fish. It is only a barren strip of island, and the ceaseless wind and shallow roar of the reef remind me of Alacanes.”16
Zane converted this experience into “The Sea-Tigers of the Florida Keys,” which ran in the December 1911 issue of Field and Stream. Beneath a photograph of a large display of freshly caught fish and following a prefatory characterization of his article as “a vivid account of great fishing,” the piece opened: “The greatest places to fish are those where the watery denizens are most powerful and savage, surest to baffle the fisherman, and leave him with a broken line or a ruined rod—and a story.”17 Although Grey mentions tangled lines, broken equipment, and “fish-hog” anglers, he uses these incidents to make the camp appear to be both a fishing mecca and a Shangri-la. He captures the beauty and allure of Long Key in a sprightly conclusion that is cleverly cryptic:
Suffice it to add that Long Key is a place to thrill and to invite one’s soul. At night, if no breeze blows, there is not a quieter place on earth. The sun burns white all day and the stars burn white all night. The spell of the south is upon this white strip of coral. The mystery of the place is the same as that of the little hermit-crab, which trails across the coral-sand in a stolen shell, and holds to his lonely course, and loves his life so well. And that secret no man knows.18
Both Dolly and R. C. knew that the secret of this inscrutable crab was the veiled truth of his account: Zane’s first visit to Long Key was a crushing disappointment.
Two months before this trip, Grey approached David Rust about serving as his guide and outfitter for a late spring trip to southeastern Utah. He hoped that this alternative to Jones and Emett would help him find new material for a book. “I shall not write anything about the Mormons that would hurt anybody’s feelings,” he explained. “I simply want to tell of the wonder and beauty of their desert struggle as I see it.” Originally, Grey’s plans called for a return to Powell’s Plateau, Kanab, and Fredonia, and a search for a route down into the Thunder River valley. Rust intrigued Grey with a proposal that they also visit “the Navajo Natural Bridge.” Stating that R. C. and his wife would be accompanying him, Zane asked that Rust find him “a dandy horse to ride, one that will look good in pictures and that can run & climb.”19
Unexpected developments altered these plans as well. When he returned to Atlantic City from Long Key, Grey and the rest of his family were devastated by a virulent strain of flu. Next, the fiasco of the Long Key outing turned R. C. against the Utah trip. Grey replaced his brother with Charles MacLean, the editor of Popular Magazine, who had purchased the serial rights to The Heritage of the Desert. Since MacLean could spare only three weeks, Grey had to scale back the three-month visit he had in mind. His quibbling over Rust’s rate of $10 per day caused him to be greeted in Flagstaff not by Rust, but by a letter in which Rust claimed that spring runoff had made Lee’s Ferry impassable and prevented him from reaching Flagstaff, their agreed-upon starting point.20 Determined to salvage his investment of time and money, Grey located a local guide named Al Doyle who proposed a trip to northeastern Arizona that did not necessitate fording the Colorado.
These hastily amended plans left Zane nervous and uneasy. In a hasty letter to Rust, he complained about his alternative guide,21 but Doyle quickly put these doubts to rest. Prior to establishing a guide service for tourists, he had worked on the transcontinental railroad, hunted buffalo, mined, and ranched. Doyle possessed a wealth of knowledge about local history and area residents, and he knew almost as much about its topography and geography. Grey soon realized that Doyle could find him promising subject matter.
Sensitive to Grey’s expectations, Doyle took him and MacLean on a week-long journey toward Kayenta. According to a Flagstaff newspaper, their objective was “Marsh Pass, Navajo mountain, the natural bridges and other points of interest on the Navajo reservation.”22 Back in 1909, Byron Cummings, the dean of the School of Letters and Science at the University of Utah and a scholar of Indian culture, recruited John Wetherill, the knowledgeable owner of a trading post on the western edge of Monument Valley, to guide him on an ambitious quest for an enormous natural arch known only by rumor and called Nonnezoshe by the Navajos. The interest of Wetherill’s wife in Navajo culture and her command of their language led to a conversation with One Eyed Man that furnished her husband and Cummings valuable information about the arch. Over most of the summer of 1909, Cummings conducted research on the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Keet Seel. Two days before his scheduled departure for Nonnezoshe, he discovered the equally impressive ruins of Betatakin.23
Armed with a crude map and an instinctive understanding of the land-scape’s twisting hills, washes, and canyons, Wetherill set out with Cummings and his party on August 11 to locate the fabled Navajo shrine. Meanwhile, W. B. Douglass from the U.S. Land Office had also heard about the bridge and was mounting a search of his own. To prevent these investigations from becoming a competition, the leaders agreed to join forces.
Though Wetherill led most of the way, a Piute named Nasjah Begay24 caught up with the group at a critical moment of need and guided it through the final and most difficult leg. On August 14, they reached Nonnezoshe, subsequentl
y renamed Rainbow Bridge.25 Their measurements established the arch to be 308 feet high and 275 feet between the two base supports, making it the largest of all the known natural arches. Following the group’s return, Cummings wrote an account of it and two other natural bridges for the January 1910 issue of National Geographic. Five months later, President Taft signed a bill designating Rainbow Bridge a national monument, as the Navajo Mountain had been on November 20, 1909. That summer, Wetherill and Nasjah Begay went to the Bridge again with a party from the U.S. Geological Survey consisting of H. E. Gregory, the leader, and Joseph Pogue from the National Museum. Pogue published an account about the Bridge itself in the National Geographic, which included five impressive photographs of the arch.26 Rust’s reference to “the Navajo Natural Bridge” in his letter to Grey may have been prompted by this burst of publicity.
Grey and Nasjah Begay, 1913. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
Grey remembered the Bridge when Rust failed to show and he had to amend his North Rim itinerary. On April 16, 1911, Grey, MacLean, and Doyle left Flagstaff for the barren, desolate terrain of northwestern Arizona. Three days later, they arrived at the Tuba Trading Post, which Sam Preston and the Babbitt brothers had controlled since 1902. Preston informed them that Wetherill was away from the trading post that he had recently opened at Kayenta, and showed them photographs of the Rainbow Bridge, Keet Seel, and Batatakin. This was the first time that Grey distinguished the Rainbow Bridge from the other natural bridges of Utah and Arizona, and he judged it to be large enough that “the flatiron building could easily stand under the arch.”27 Efforts to find a local Indian to guide them to the site were unsuccessful, and they had to abandon their hopes of getting there. At the time, Grey was sufficiently impressed with his journey and the desolate landscape, but back in Lackawaxen, he concluded that he had “missed the grandest sight in the world” and vowed to return and see it.28
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