After Zane canceled his spring trip out West and following his summer return to Lackawaxen, he invited Lillian to visit. When she arrived, Zane was so energized that Dolly noticed, fretted, and in her journal wrote:
Poor vain Lillian! She is so absolutely obsessed with her looks that she’s painful and silly. It’s partly Doc’s fault, too, greatly, perhaps. He’s flattering her till she thinks she’s a beauty. When I remonstrate with him, he says, “But what harm is there; it makes her happy.” Of course there is no harm, but the argument rather stumps me.
In this same entry, Dolly mentions that Lillian was accompanied by their mutual cousin Elma Schwarz. This was either the first time that Dolly met Elma or the first time that she had seen her in years because she refers to rumors about Elma’s beauty and confesses an eagerness to judge for herself. After scrutinizing Elma’s appearance and manner, Dolly is “disappointed,” not just with Elma but also with Zane, who spends the whole day photographing the pair. Dolly is eerily reluctant to acknowledge the threat these women pose, but her avoidance and its consequences creep into her discussion of her children that follows:
The more I feel, the deeper down I bury it. I wish I could bring some of my emotions more to the surface. I think I would be better liked. There is very little that is spontaneous about me and of late I have been fearing that that will militate against the friendship and companionship between me and my children. … The mother in me is satisfied, but then, I’m not all mother. Perhaps the loneliness was due to illness and nervousness. It is not good to be alone too much when one is not well.65
Obviously the children were not her only worries, but she was unwilling to investigate the others.
Several months later, in late February 1913, Zane left for a third visit to Long Key and took Lillian and Elma with him. They remained with him for the duration of his six-week stay, and then accompanied him on the second leg of the trip that produced his momentous first visit to the Rainbow Bridge. Zane would justify his decision to take these two women as a professional opportunity for both Lillian and himself. He would develop his experience into a novel, and Lillian would paint promising scenes and provide illustrations for the novel. This professional justification glossed more personal reasons. During his trips with Jones, Grey felt like an outsider and struggled to gain acceptance. His instinctive wariness of strangers and need for companionship increased the importance of his family and spurred him to include R. C. in his recent trips. However, Grey’s compulsive trips were also motivated by an equally strong need to get away from the claustrophobia of his family circle. Even more pertinent to his invitation of Lillian and Elma were his two years of dreaming of beautiful women; now he had two willing companions who were attractive, interested in the outdoors, and responsive to his needs.
Whatever the justification, Dolly was presented a final decision and left to accept it. Her first letter to Long Key reminded her willful husband of the risk he was taking. “This is my first letter to you,” she observed. “Whether it will be the last is still a matter of conjecture on my part.” Deep down she still loved Zane and certainly did not want to end their marriage. However hard it was to believe that he loved her in return, she dared to trust that he did. Thus her initial challenge was blunted with an ensuing account of her conscientious dealings with his publisher.66 The long letters that followed were peppered with more complaints and criticism, and then similarly diluted with news about her efforts on his behalf and reassurances of her loyalty. Although he was a derelict father, she remained a devoted wife and conscientious mother. “I am sorry to be compelled to intrude upon your dream of bliss,” she opened another letter filled with news about her negotiations and their children.67 Both directly and indirectly, she kept reminding him that his companions would never understand him as well or ever do as much for him.
Elma Schwarz and Lillian Wilhelm (reclining) in Lackawaxen, 1912. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
Since Zane was not available for important decisions, Dolly went ahead and made them on her own. Concluding that New York City was a poor place to raise children, she broke the lease on their apartment and relocated to a comfortable rental on Main Street in Middletown, New York, where R. C. and Reba had been residing for more than a year. Meanwhile, she shopped for a house to buy. When an imposing residence at 101 South Street became available and Zane was out of touch, she went ahead and arranged the purchase.68
Meanwhile Dolly hid her wounds. She would vent her anger, but not her anguish—she would be industrious and resourceful, never weak and incapacitated. These vulnerabilities she reserved for the privacy of her journal. In a year-end reflection on the strains of 1913, she wrote:
This last hour of the old year I shall devote to a brief retrospect or whatever it may meander into. … Several times I have thought myself at the breaking point, always to discover that we are not given more than we can bear. Human nature is elastic.
The great bitterness, the great hardening came when my husband announced to me that he would take the latest—what shall I call her—in-amorata?—and her cousin (also my cousin) on a long and unusual trip through the south and southwest with him. It began with the statement that I was unable to go with him now, and therefore the other arrangements. The bottom fell out of the world for me then. Stupidly I said, “But I will go with you”: to be told, “But I don’t want you.” Those words burned themselves on my brain.
After this admission of the pain that she had been suppressing and denying, Dolly proceeds to worry that her estimate has been too harsh. Later, she doubles back and decides that Zane deserves more compassion and a broader understanding:
Oh, why write all this miserable stuff? After all, to be absolutely fair, I would have to get on all sides of the question, take up all points of view and that is impossible. A mere statement of cold fact makes a bad case for my husband. But he can’t be looked at from that angle. Doc is a dreamer, a smiler, an intense egotist. In the same breath he can tell me that it’s agony for him to leave me and the children and then that he can’t keep from the things in N.Y. Very frankly he tells me that when he’s miserable or sick or needs help, he comes home, but his good times he likes with the others. … I am getting deeper and deeper, and I feel it’s all wrong—what I’m writing. If anyone should read this, ever, it wouldn’t be fair to Doc. After all, he can’t help it, he was born so, and for better or worse, I must stick to him.
Dolly wraps up her reflection with several resolutions for the upcoming new year, the chief of which is “Keep your mouth shut.”69
In early April 1913, Zane, Elma, and Lillian left Long Key for Arizona. En route, they stopped in El Paso several days for Zane to gather information about the Texas Rangers for a future novel. There he interviewed the former Ranger Captain John Hughes who provided important historical background for the The Lone Star Ranger (1915).70 When they arrived in Flagstaff, they were met by Al Doyle and his son, who had horses and provisions for the ride to Kayenta. Prior to their departure on April 26, Doyle told a Flagstaff newspaper that the Indians around there were “the most isolated and remote from civilization and railroads than any other tribes on the continent. They are nearly 200 miles from any white civilization, and are indeed pioneers on the last real frontier of the American continent.”71 In a reflection years later, Grey related that at the time of his initial visits, Kayenta was “in the heyday of its existence, colorful, bustling, primitive, beautiful, [and] dominated by the splendid spirit of the pioneer Wetherill.”72
Both John and Louisa Wetherill came from pioneers who settled the Mancos River area in the southwest corner of Colorado. During a search for stray cattle up a canyon near the family’s Alamo Ranch in 1888, John’s brother, Richard, discovered the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. The whole family participated in the excavation of the site and researched its mysterious occupants, but their findings went unnoticed until the discovery of a mummified child became big news in Denver and brought visitors. In 1893, their collection of artifacts was in
cluded in the Colorado exhibition at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Afterward, scientists, geologists, and archeologists sought out the Wetherills and agreed to pay for information and guiding, but not enough to provide them a livelihood. In 1900, after four years of marriage, John was weary of his struggles with ranching and agreed to manage a trading post in Ojo Alamo, near Navajo Mountain and the Arizona-Utah border. To make ends meet and allow him to pursue his passion for Indian sites, John drove freight wagons, and left Louisa to manage the post. Her quick acceptance by the local Utes and Navajos and her facility with their language yielded valuable information and facilitated their opening a new post in Olajato at the western edge of Monument Valley in 1906. In 1910, following his trip with Cummings to the Rainbow Bridge, John Wetherill relocated his trading post from Olajato to near Kayenta.73
Wetherill’s trading post was a low-lying outpost surrounded by desert waste, but Louisa had worked hard to make the interior attractive and accommodating. She had a long-standing interest in Indian arts and crafts and utilized them in her decoration. Lillian’s fascination with them quickly made them fast friends, and they remained so over the next thirty years that Lillian lived and painted in Arizona. A surviving photograph from this trip of her and Louisa, along with Elma and Louisa’s daughter, shows the interior of the trading post and a band of Yei figures on the wall near the ceiling that Lillian would later replicate in three of Zane’s residences.
The Grey party’s weeklong journey from Kayenta to the Rainbow Bridge commenced with a nervous crossing through the quicksand of Laguna Creek and a long day’s ride northward through blowing sand and blistering heat. The first night, they camped on the edge of Monument Valley, which was illuminated first by lightning during a twilight thunderstorm and then by a glorious sunrise the next morning. In “Nonnezoshe,” his account of this trip, Grey describes his ride around Mittens and the other spires as though it were his first encounter with Monument Valley. From there, the group looped to the southwest and entered the mazelike branches of Tsegi Canyon that affirmed Wetherill’s guiding skills and brought them to Keet Seel, “the place of broken pot shards.” The following day, Zane went to Betatakin, which inspired him with a “strange feeling that Riders of the Purple Sage was true” and “my dream people of romance had really lived there once upon a time.”74 His description of this visit makes it difficult to tell whether this encounter was a return that confirmed the accuracy of his recollection, or a first meeting that validated what he imagined from photographs and his memories of Thunder River, but he had an eerie sensation that his fiction was true and that he was now living it. While the others were off investigating the site, he sat and recalled Bess and Venters, “who had lived for me their imagined lives of loneliness here in this wild spot” (5–6). Though he had brought Lillian along to be his Bess and she was as enthusiastic about this outing as Madeline Hammond would have been, he preferred to be by himself reflecting on “my past, my dreams, my very self” (6).
Leaving behind the shelter and vegetation of Keet Seel, Betatakin, and Surprise Valley, the group worked its way around the great bulge of Navajo Mountain and came to a panoramic overlook of the washboard configuration of the landscape ahead. The views from inside the canyons proved even more awesome. As the challenges increased and the scenery grew stranger, the trip shaded into a reckoning with primal elements and cosmic forces. Grey writes:
I imagined there was no scene in all the world to equal this. The tranquility of lesser spaces was here not manifest. This happened to be a place where so much of the desert could be seen and the effect was stupendous. Sound, movement, life seemed to have no fitness here. Ruin was there and desolation and decay. The meaning of the ages was flung at me. A man became nothing (8–9).
Interior of Wetherill Trading Post, 1913. Right to left: Elma Schwarz, Louisa Wetherill, her daughter, and Lillian Wilhelm (kneeling). (Courtesy of Pat Friese.)
Wetherill, Lillian, and Elma at Betatakin, 1913. (Courtesy of Pat Friese.)
Cautiously, they picked their way over great expanses of slick rock with little secure footing. One of the horses slipped and was saved from plunging over a precipice by a heroic exertion from one of the wranglers. The canyons turned monotonous, treacherous, mesmerizing, and exhausting, and time became meaningless. Grey wore down, and other members dropped even further behind. Finally, Wetherill, with Nasjah Begay alongside him, announced, “Nonnezoshe,” and, in his account, Grey provides this eloquent description of the sight:
This rainbow bridge was the one great natural phenomenon, the one grand spectacle which I had ever seen that did not at first give vague disappointment, a confounding of reality, a disenchantment of contrast with what the mind had conceived.
But this thing was glorious. It absolutely silenced me. My body and brain, weary and dull from the toil of travel, received a singular and revivifying freshness. I had a strange, mystic perception that this rosy-hued, tremendous arch of stone was a goal I had failed to reach in some former life, but had now found. Here was a rainbow magnified even beyond dreams, a thing not transparent and ethereal, but solidified, a work of ages, sweeping up majestically from the red walls, its iris-hued arch against the blue sky (14–15).
Earlier in the same account, Grey states proudly and inaccurately that “my party was the second one, not scientific” (3) to visit the arch. Even though he may not have been aware of them at the time, at least four other parties had already visited the Rainbow Bridge between the first visit of the Cummings-Douglas group and that of his group.75 However, Grey did know that, three months after his trip, from mid-July to the end of August 1913, Theodore Roosevelt hired Jim Owens to take him hunting for mountain lions in the Grand Canyon, and afterward had Wetherill guide him to the Rainbow Bridge.76 By specifically mentioning Roosevelt’s trip at the outset of his article, Grey lets his reader know that the venturesome ex-president was following his tracks, but carefully avoids any mention of the two women who completed the arduous trip with him.
In late May 1913, after an absence of almost five months, Grey returned to Lackawaxen and immersed himself in writing. Eager to make headway with his fiction, he postponed writing about his experience; his uncharacteristically brief account, “Nonnezoshe,” did not even appear until February 1915, eighteen months after his return and five months after completion of his novel.77 The Rainbow Trail (1915) was the closest of all Grey’s Westerns to his actual experience. Not only did he present actual places like Red Lake, Moencopie, Tuba, and Kayenta, but the names of Preston and Wetherill were amended only slightly and that of Nas Ta Bega was only a variant spelling. The conclusion of the novel recycles his own trip to the Bridge. His location of the “sealed wives” of the Mormons in Fredonia causes more than a little confusion since it is north of the Colorado River and many miles away from these other places.78 This disparity is telltale evidence of the contrived connection between the two novels. The Rainbow Trail was supposed to be a sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage, but the two works were inspired by different trips to opposite sides of the Colorado River.
In “Nonnezoshe,” Grey explains that during his visit to a Surprise Valley just beyond Betatakin he “climbed high upon the huge stones, and along the smooth red walls where Fay Larkin once had glided” (65). This nimble, daring Fay Larkin resembles the young woman in Rainbow more than the child in Riders. Ever since this inspirational visit, Grey conceived of Rainbow as a sequel exploring what became of Fay after Lassiter closed the access and sealed himself, Jane, and Fay in Surprise Valley of Riders. The protagonist of Rainbow, John Shefford, is a clergyman from Illinois and a friend of Bess and Venters, who have married and lived nearby for the past twelve years. They have told him about Lassiter, Jane, and Surprise Valley, and he is so captivated by Fay, who would be seventeen or eighteen by this point, that he leaves to find out about this alluring woman of his dreams.
Grey provides this quest another impetus that is equally important. Initially, Sheffield wanted to be an artist, but was
pressured by his father to become a minister instead. This has caused mounting unhappiness and led to disaster. His narrow-minded congregation has eroded his belief in religion and God, and finally forced him to leave Illinois. During his trip from Red Lake to Kayenta, which opens the story, this earlier background emerges as a set of fragmented recollections he prefers to forget. Unlike Grey’s previous protagonists who were ailing or wounded, Sheffield is sound physically but emotionally troubled, and his distressed state of mind influences his response to his new surroundings. He is willfully seeking “some wild life” to escape the “easy, safe, crowded, bound lives” of preachers.79 By focusing his description upon what Shefford sees, smells, and hears, Grey implies that his character is living by sensory responses in order to avoid festering thoughts and emotions from his haunted past. Shefford’s immersion of himself in his experience functions as both therapy and defense against inner demons.
Following a mishap along the way, Shefford is told that the desert is a place for wanderers, not missionaries. By the time he reaches Kayenta, this advice has become self-definition. He tells the owner of the trading post there, “My thoughts put in words would seem so like dreams. Maybe they are dreams. Perhaps I’m only chasing a phantom—perhaps I’m only hunting the treasure at the foot of the rainbow” (45). Shefford’s “foot of the rainbow,” Grey’s original title, is at this point only a figurative definition of his directionless wandering and vague, undefined hopes.
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