Southwestern Homelands

by William Kittredge

  After four years of confinement, after many had died, the six thousand Navajo who remained were marched back to a reservation in northwestern New Mexico. During this suffering, ironically, various bands began to understand that they together constituted the Navajo Nation, which would have the political power to protect the welfare of their people. Their reservation today is the size of West Virginia; 250,000 Navajo live there, the most populous tribe in the United States. Many are pastoral and most pursue an elaborate spiritual and ceremonial life. While many Navajo live in poverty, their beliefs and identity endure.

  Change accelerated. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company opened a stage line from Missouri to San Francisco by way of El Paso, Tucson, and Los Angeles—a tough 26-day trip that cost two hundred dollars and passed through the territory of the Chiricahua Apache, who were led by a warrior named Cochise. Despite the deaths of drivers and passengers (the source of endless movie mythology), the line only once in its history missed coming in on schedule.

  In the early 1860s a legendary prospector, Joseph Walker, found gold in the Bradshaw Mountains of Arizona, and mining towns sprang into being. Prescott and Jerome lasted; Bumble Bee and Vulture vanished. The remaining wild tribes were corralled onto reservations in the 1870s. They had to be fed, as did the miners. Cattlemen fought wars over the free range, the right to raise beef where they pleased. Gunfighters like Billy the Kid made their appearance in American mythology (another part of that history, of course, is a legacy of overgrazing, grasslands gone to cactus, cheatgrass, and brush).

  In 1877 a loner named Edward Schieffelin discovered silver in southeastern Arizona. Tombstone was born. By 1881 it was the largest town in the Arizona Territory, four thousand citizens and two churches, a school, dance halls, brothels, saloons, gambling dens, mills and mines, thieves and more thieves. After a decade (more fodder for movies—Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the OK Corral), the mines began closing. Tombstone presently seems to subsist on the tourist business. It’s said the longest shot that hit anybody at the OK Corral was twelve feet, with a shotgun. But you won’t hear that story in Tombstone, where commercial interests live off six-gun legends.

  In this overview of invasions it feels, as the nineteenth century ends, like one movement is over and the modern has not quite begun. So one more legendary story of a lost cause, that of the Chiricahua Apache, defeated and placed on the San Carlos Reservation, north of their ancestral lands, and their last outbreak, and the warrior named Geronimo.

  The Chiricahua were capable of prodigious feats. They traveled fifty miles a day, found water, and then disappeared, only to strike again, days later, far away. Geronimo’s last outbreak, in late 1885, was not so much dedicated to escaping the American military as to inflicting vengeance. By mid-1886, five thousand American soldiers were pursuing Geronimo and his band of thirty-four, a count which includes women and children. In September he surrendered, having been promised that after a few years in a Florida prison he would be returned to his people. But all the Chiricahua were sent to prison camps in Florida, and it was 1913 before any of them were allowed back into the Southwest. Geronimo, having spent decades as a tourist attraction at international expositions, died in 1909. There is today no culture known as Chiricahua Apache.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Timeless in Our Time

  One winter night in Las Vegas, in the Mirage Hotel parking lot, Annick and I witnessed the fabulous spitting of a faux-volcano. Inside, white tigers prowled a glassed-off cage. We sipped martinis with living orchids draped just over our heads. I honored my birth date (August 14) by playing a few dollars into the Leo machine in the row of horoscope slots (these people think of everything), and, abruptly, I won enough to buy a pair of first-rate sushi dinners with perhaps too much hot top-notch sake.

  So it was with some dullness that Annick and I headed south into dark storms the next morning, crossing the Colorado at Hoover Dam, setting sail onto the flatlands of northern Arizona, intent on visiting native sites written up in our guidebooks. I was hungover but excited, a fragile state; over fifty years of age, I hadn’t traveled much of anywhere; seeing the sights was still a new thing.

  What I wasn’t prepared to hunt out was much contact with living people. People in our southeastern Oregon outback didn’t intrude into the lives of others, particularly strangers, an absolute respect for privacy which seems misguided to me now. It cuts off contact and contributes to the cloistered, xenophobic frigidity encountered in so many rural communities.

  Native people, I told Annick, had talked to plenty of outsiders. I intended to leave them alone. She said I was nuts. “People love it if you’re interested in their lives.”

  We had it in mind, first-off, to visit the Havasupai Indians, a tiny culture of maybe two hundred whose name means “People of the Blue-Green Water” in a paradise of deep canyons which descend to the Grand Canyon. But by midmorning it was raining steadily. We had no idea about the realities of what we were proposing. I must have read, in Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water, of his trip to Havasu with Mary, and remembered “gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree.” But I also must have repressed the part about riding down fourteen miles of rough trail as they descended thousands of feet, and that they’d brought their own food, and that the trip in and out each took a day. I’d forgotten that Stegner said “even Shangri-La has its imperfections.” He told of tuberculosis, dysentery, and warned of “fatalistic apathy,” and the way it can invade a society based on “repetition of simple routine” when that routine is “confounded and destroyed by contact with the civilization of white America.” He hoped they survived.

  In Legends of the American Desert, Alex Shoumatoff tells of a trip to Havasu when the Havasupai were growing marijuana and into Rastafarianism and reggae music to a degree that led Navajo to nickname the canyon Little Jamaica. Shoumatoff describes it as a “spoiled Eden” and “part paradise, part ghetto.”

  But most of all I’d neglected to notice that those trips had been taken in the summertime. Our rain was turning to spitting snow. So, reluctantly, we decided to put the miss on the Havasupai. Which was our good luck. We’d never have gotten in, and might have had trouble just getting back to the highway. Disappointing but I could live with it, that’s what I thought, there were more down the road. Years later Annick finally got to Havasu Canyon in company with a group of women writers who were traveling the Grand Canyon by dory boat. She tells of a bright morning and waterfalls encased in travertine, and doesn’t like hearing about an increasingly degraded, commodified paradise, tourists coming in for the day by helicopter.

  Traveling the native Southwest we expect to encounter the nineteenth-century look we’ve seen in black-and-white photos, but there are contrails in the skies and plastic bags dangling from the cactuses. Which doesn’t mean the native cultures have dissolved. They are, as we are, evolving.

  Snow was falling heavily in late afternoon when Annick and I got to the tourist community at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We were luckier than we knew; some traveler canceled at the elegant old El Tovar Hotel. Instead of huddling in the car, stuck in a snowbank and freezing on the high rim of the canyon above Havasupai, where nobody lives, we were sampling desserts before a big fireplace, and then bundled in for the night.

  Morning broke to perfect blue skies and eighteen inches of snow, which reached into the canyon in streaks for thousands of feet, into the reddish maze of towers and precipices above the river. We shuffled along on the edge of more distance to fall than I liked. Annick hung over the guardrail, a woman who loves heights. She says she knew at thirteen the West was home, a girl from Chicago at the head of a chairlift in Colorado on a clear morning, bright snowfields falling away on all sides, blessing her family for having brought her, breathing out wisps of mist.

  But I was still dedicated to rushing. That afternoon we gazed across Tesigi Canyon and into the enormous overhanging, sheltering alcove of red stone under which ancient
people built the cliff house called Betatakin. But we didn’t take the five-hour hike to see the ruin close up—or consider an overnight camp out at Keet Seel, miles away. Not in midwinter (not ever in our lives so far as it turns out). We’d planned to see this cliff house as it faced into the warming winter sun and we were there, having done it.

  What we didn’t see were the aspen and oak in the canyon below where Douglas-fir and horsetail fern grow and where those people grew food. What we didn’t take away was any sense of the difficulties overcome by the people who’d lived there so long ago. We’d tipped our hats but felt no real intimacy with what it had been like to be human there.

  Content to think that I would get around to reflecting on these sights in tranquillity (which I only now, all these years later, as I write this book, seem to be getting around to), I was happy. And seriously wrongheaded. Intimacy with otherness is close to impossible without taking some time to stop playing the game of anthropologist.

  By late afternoon we’d checked out the Navajo jewelry in hock to the trading-post grocery stores in the wind-blown town of Kayenta and were whirling along on the 17-mile loop road through Monument Valley. We saw red-rock spires and buttes rising four or five or six hundred or so feet above the valley and silhouetted against a sunset coloring thin clouds that turned from faint yellow to deep orange striped with red. We smiled at formations called the Mittens (fingers pointing to the sky), and walked out from the North Window and stood in the luminous twilight, moved by the sight of mesas towering into evening without fathoming why.

  Surprised by ordinary life, we saw a boy galloping along on a bareback bay horse. He paid us no attention, and went off into a dark arroyo. Another way to live was going on nearby, but I had no idea what it might be like, or how to find out.

  After driving an hour or so into the falling night, across empty flatlands, to Chinle and the mouth of Canyon de Chelly, we made our stand in Thunderbird Lodge, and had a beer and some authentic Navajo cafeteria cooking. But we didn’t know that we should have put up at Gouldings Lodge, out behind a six-hundred-foot red-rock tower in Monument Valley. We could have spent the next morning on a guided tour, we could have known enough to make reservations, we could have tried making conversation with the deeply traditional people who’d lived in Monument Valley all their lives, we could have gone there knowing something of what they believe about the place where they’ve lived. Instead, I at least was semi-emptyheaded.

  Sitting in the cafeteria at Thunderbird Lodge, Annick eyed me with distance in her eyes. “Get ready for some hiking,” she said, “tomorrow is going to be different.”

  Find the good books, that’s my idea, not just the guidebooks. Read them, mark them up, use them as tools, carry them with you. No place can be real emotionally unless we’ve imagined the life there, and our imagining is not likely to be very substantive if not informed.

  So, some history. In 1880, Benjamin Wetherill and his Quaker family moved to ranchlands along the Mancos River, nearby to an unexplored southern Colorado highland called Mesa Verde. Richard Wetherill, the eldest of five sons, became famous in archaeological circles.

  Gathering cattle in the Mesa Verde canyons on a cold December afternoon in 1888, Richard and a brother-in-law came on a concentration of cliff dwellings—Square Tower House, Spruce Tree House, and the Cliff Palace—now centerpiece exhibits in Mesa Verde National Park. Richard and his brothers eventually found 182 sites on Mesa Verde. Richard led academic expeditions not only to Mesa Verde but off into the Grand Gulch area of Utah and to Chaco Canyon. He found Keet Seel but missed Betatakin (his brother John found it years later), and was the first to discover that a people we call Basketmakers had lived in the Southwest two thousand years before the Anasazi (the vivid enigmatic pictographs at Green Mask Springs and Jailhouse Ruin and Horseshoe Canyon were done by Basketmakers). One of the ways the Wetherill brothers made a living was by selling artifacts they found, and their findings anchor Southwestern collections at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

  While he’s been criticized for being a commercial pot-hunter, Richard Wetherill knew his way around the country where he lived with unequaled intimacy, and in his way revered the archaeological treasures he found. Like anyone, he aspired to significance. Eventually he lived at Chaco Canyon and promoted himself as a responsible archaeologist, proposing to excavate and reconstruct Pueblo Bonito. But Richard was killed from ambush, either by angry natives or his wife’s cowboy lover, before that dream could be realized. This story is told in detail in a good book: Richard Wetherill: Anasazi by Frank McNitt.

  In Search of the Old Ones by David Roberts tells of retracing Richard Wetherill’s explorations, and of Roberts’s own discoveries, bowls, and baskets, which he left where he found them, deep in hidden crevices in hidden canyons. Outraged by heedless desecrations at Lake Powell, Roberts says the sporting life there is equivalent to “water-skiing in a cathedral.” Beauty drowned in order that golf courses and lawns in urban metroplexes can be overwatered, economic development overshadowing all else. And Roberts is simply correct. His anger led me to daydreaming about hidden mysteries in Grand Gulch and Cedar Mesa, difficult canyonland territories I’ve driven by, where I might have gone if I’d been tough and ambitious enough. But which “hidden mysteries” would those be? Why would they seem significant? What do I (we) want from the deep past?

  The answer, I think, is simple enough. We want to understand the story of how we became what we are, and another even more important story, about how all the people who exist and have existed are irrevocably alike in their fragilities, a story in which it becomes obvious that we need to cherish one another because we are alone otherwise, which might incite some of us to take care of one another and glories and ecologies. A story of people just like ourselves, who were also intent on survival. We see ourselves mirrored in them, and our own situation in the long isolations and happy enclosures they inhabited. We seek stories to use as weight to anchor our minds when we begin to drift.

  In 1910 John and Louisa Wetherill (Hosteen John and Slim Woman as they were know to the Navajo) set up a tent in the snow at Kayenta when Kayenta was farther from a railroad than any other “white” settlement in the United States. They established a post to trade with the Indians, and made a life of it. John discovered Betatakin, and like Richard he guided archaeologists. In 1913, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt came to Kayenta on an expedition to Rainbow Bridge. He stayed with the Wetherills, and wrote them up in an article published in Outlook magazine. Cartoonist George Herriman read the article, and went to Kayenta. Eagerly, it might be said, since he’d traveled through northern Arizona on the railroad years earlier and found the look and speed of things there to his liking. Herriman took an interest in the Navajo, loafed through long working vacations, and eventually returned twenty-some times.

  Herriman’s classical comic strip, “Krazy Kat”—modernist and whimsical, affectionate and satiric, about a brickthrowing love affair between a cat and a mouse—is set in what Umberto Eco called “surrealist inventions, especially in the improbable lunar landscape.” Eco meant the desert around Kayenta and in Monument Valley, lonesome metaphoric towers reaching to the empty sky, and the unlikely romance enacted nearby.

  “Krazy Kat” is about life as play, in mysterious playing fields given us by the mysterious universe. And about love. In one of the brilliant essays in Great Topics of the World, Albert Goldbarth quotes the Kat as saying, “In my Kosmos, there will be no feeva of discord.” George Herriman was a genius I’d like to have known. “Krazy Kat” is a true mudhead comic strip, given to undermining our gone-dead status quo; it’s high and sprightly and spirited reinventive storytelling.

  In 1921 a tall man named Harry Goulding moved to Monument Valley. Except for the Wetherills in Kayenta, twenty-five miles to the south, Goulding and his wife, Leona, nicknamed Mike, were the only whites in permanent residence for hundreds of miles. The next fou
r years they lived in tents. They tended sheep, traded with the Navajo, and accumulated the money, by 1936, to buy their land. In 1938, hearing that a movie was going to be shot near Flagstaff, Harry went to Los Angeles, saw the director, and sold him on the idea of filming in Monument Valley.

  The director was John Ford, and his movie, which established Ford’s reputation as a first-string director, was Stagecoach, a quintessentially western American drama about strangers out to reestablish themselves in a lost land, red stone fingers pointing to the heavens like signposts above a paradise.

  John Ford liked Monument Valley, despite the rough accommodations, and he liked the Gouldings. He returned time after time, film after film. There’s a famous sequence in My Darling Clementine, the floor of a half-built church in a movie version of Tombstone put to use as a communal dance hall, in which I see the essence of what Ford was trying for, gunfighters and good country people celebrating the chance that they might possibly be able to invent a good and decent life for themselves—even with those stone fingers pointing heavenward as if to indicate that paradise is always elsewhere. Even if hero, Henry Fonda playing Wyatt Earp, rides off unflinching and alone into the usual hero’s stoic emotional isolations.

  I might have thought about those conjunctions in and around Monument Valley if I’d read books, as travelers should. I’d have known walking to Havasu in midwinter was a ridiculous notion, and that we’d need days if we hoped to grow into any feel for Monument Valley and the Navajo people who live there, if we wanted to converse there in some other than a turista capacity, if I had any hope of enlarging my blundering life. Three or four hours, stopping by on the run (as we did), a man with any wit should have known, wouldn’t start to cut it.