Daughter of Middle Border

by Garland, Hamlin

  For nearly ten years I had been going to the Rocky Mountains at least once during the summer season, and it is probable that I felt the need of something to offset the impressions of my tour in England and France—to lose touch with my material even for twelve months was to be cheated—then, too, I hoped in this way to shorten the weeks of waiting. Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a horror to my bride-elect.

  One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to the north.

  In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant, dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high, treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf piñon trees and surrounded by naked children and savage dogs.

  At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home.

  Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us, riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out, cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco.

  There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs were about to pass. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on.

  Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set forth a few days later, attended by a young Navajo whose hogan was in that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail.

  He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful.

  Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, sparsely set with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the grass and shrubs had long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of Navajo girls gathering piñon nuts, laughing and singing in happy abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the dust of the trail.

  "Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine," and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot.

  At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley—stream. On left white man's house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words.

  As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power. Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds, like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool spring.

  Late in the afternoon (I loitered luxuriously) I came to the summit of a long ridge which overlooked a broad, curving valley, at the far-away western rim of which a slender line of water gleamed. How beautiful it all was, but how empty! No furrow, no hut, no hint of human habitation appeared, a land which must ever be lonely, for it is without rains, and barren of streams for irrigation.

  An hour later I rode up to the door of a long, low, mud-walled building, and was met by the trader, a bush-bearded, middle-aged man with piercing gray eyes and sturdy, upright figure. This was Lorenzo Hubbell, one of the best-known citizens of New Mexico, living here alone, a day's ride from a white settler.

  Though hairy and spectacled he was a comparatively young man, but his mixed blood had already given him a singular power over his dark-skinned neighbors of the territory.

  His wife and children were spending the summer in Albuquerque, and in the intimacy of our long days together I spoke of my approaching marriage. "I want to buy some native blankets and some Navajo silver for our new home."

  His interest was quick. "Let me send your wife a wedding present. How would she like some Hopi jars?"

  The off-hand way in which he used the words, "your wife," startled me—reminded me that in less than two weeks I was due at Professor Taft's home to claim my bride. I accepted his offer of the vases and began to collect silver and turquoise ornaments, in order that I might carry back to Zulime some part of the poetry of this land and its people.

  "The more I think about it," I wrote to her, "the more I want you to share my knowledge of 'the High Country.' Why not put our wedding a week earlier and let me take you into the mountains? If you will advance the date to the eighteenth of November, we can have an eight-day trip in Colorado and still reach mother and the Homestead in time for Thanksgiving. I want to show you my best beloved valleys and peaks."

  Though addressing the letter to her Chicago home, I knew that she was about to leave for Kansas; therefore I added a postscript: "I am planning to meet you in your father's house about the eighteenth of the month, and I hope you will approve my scheme."

  In the glow of my plan for a splendid Colorado wedding journey, I lost interest in Ganado and its Indians. Making arrangements for the shipment of my treasures, I saddled my horse one morning, waved Hubbell a joyous farewell, and started back toward the Agency in the hope of finding there a letter from my girl.

  In this I was not disappointed. She wrote: "I shall leave for Kansas on the Burlington, Sunday night. You can write me at Hanover." It was plain she had not received my latest word.

  I began to figure. "If I leave here to-morrow forenoon, and catch the express at Gallup to-morrow night, I can make the close connection at Topeka, and arrive in St. Joseph just half an hour before Zulime's train comes in on Monday morning. I shall surprise her—and delight myself—by having breakfast with her!"

  However, I could not get away till morning, and with an evening to wear away I accepted the Agent's invitation to witness a native dance which had been announced to him by one of the young Navajo policemen. I had never seen a Navajo dance, and gladly accepted the opportunity to do so.

  It was a clear, crisp November evening as we started out, the clerk, his sister, one of the teachers and myself riding in a two-seated open wagon, drawn by a pair of spirited horses. The native village was some ten miles to the north, and all the way up hill, so that before we came in sight of it darkness had fallen, and in the light of a bonfire the dancers were assembling.

  Of the village, if there was a village, I could see little, but a tall old man (the town crier) was chanting an invitatio
n or command of some sort, and dark forms were moving to and fro among the shadows of the piñon trees. How remote it all was from the white man's world, how self-sufficing and peaceful—how idyllic!

  The master of ceremonies met us and gave us seats, and for three hours we sat in the glow of the fire, watching the youthful, tireless dancers circle and leap in monotonous yet graceful evolutions. Here was love and courtship, and jealousy and faithful friendship, just as among the white dancers of Neshonoc. Roguish black eyes gleamed in the light of the fire, small feet beat the earth in joyous rhythm, and the calm faces of the old men lent dignity and a kind of religious significance to the scene. They were dreaming of the past, when no white man had entered their world.

  The young people were almost equally indifferent to us, and as the night deepened we who were white merged more and more indistinguishably with the crowd of dusky onlookers. It was easy to imagine ourselves back in the sixteenth century, looking upon this scene from the wondering viewpoint of the Spanish explorers. Whence came these people, these dances, these ceremonials?

  At last the time came for us to set forth upon our long ride back to the Agency, and so, silently, we rose and slipped away into the darkness, leaving the dancers to end their immemorial festival without the aliens' presence. They had no need of us, no care for us. At a little distance I turned and looked back. The songs, interrupted by shrill, wolfish howlings and owl-like hootings, rang through the night with singular savage charm, a chant out of the past, a chorus which was carrying forward into an individualistic white man's world the voices of the indeterminate tribal past.

  The sky was moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the narrow cañon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk, who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, trusting mainly to the horses to find their way. It was bitter cold in the cañon, and my cramped right leg became lame—so lame that I could hardly get out of the wagon after we reached the Agency. Excruciating pain developed in the sciatic nerve, and though I passed a sleepless night I was determined to leave next morning. "I shall go if I have to be carried to my horse," I said grimly to the clerk, who begged me to stay in bed.

  Fortunately, the trader was going to the railway and kindly offered to take me with him; and so, laden with Navajo silver (bracelets, buckles and rings), I started out, so lame that I dragged one leg with a groan, hoping that with the warmth of the sun my pain would pass away.

  Reaching Gallup at noon, I spent the afternoon sitting in the sun, waiting for the train. At six o'clock it came, and soon I was washed and shaved and eating dinner on the dining-car of the Continental Limited.

  All that night and all the next day and far into the second night I rode, my fear of missing connection at Topeka uniting with my rheumatism to make the hours seem of interminable length. It seemed at times a long, long "shot"—but I made it! I reached the station at Topeka just in time to catch the connecting train, and I was on the platform at St. Joseph at sun-rise a full half-hour before the Burlington coaches from Chicago were due.

  As I walked up and down, I smiled with anticipation of the surprise I had in store. "If she keeps her schedule I shall see her step from the Pullman car without the slightest suspicion that I am within six hundred miles of her," I thought, doing my best to walk the kink out of my leg, which was still painful. "She is coming! My wife is coming!" I repeated, incredulous of the fact.

  At eight o'clock the engine came nosing in, and while watching the line of passengers descend, I lost hope. It was too much to expect!

  She was there! I saw her as she stepped down from the rear Pullman, and just as she was about to take her valise from the porter, I touched her on the shoulder and said, "I'll take charge of that."

  She started and turned with a look of alarm, a look which changed to amazement, to delight. "Oh!" she gasped. "Where did you come from?"

  "From the Navajo reservation," I replied calmly.

  "But how did you get here?"

  "By train, like yourself."

  "But when—how long ago?"

  "About thirty minutes," I laughed. "I'm a wizard at making close connections." Then, seeing that she must know all about it at once, I added, "Come into the station restaurant, and while we are eating breakfast I will tell you where I have been and what brought me back so soon."

  While waiting for our coffee I took from my valise a bracelet of silver, a broad band shaped and ornamented by some Navajo silversmith. "Hold out your arm," I commanded. She obeyed, and I clasped the barbaric gyve about her wrist. "That is a sign of your slavery," I said gravely.

  Smilingly, meditatively, she fingered it, realizing dimly the grim truth which ran beneath my jesting. She was about to take on a relationship which must inevitably bring work and worry as well as joy.

  (That silver band has never left her wrist for a moment. For twenty-two years she has worn it, keeping it bright with service for me, for her children and for her friends. There is something symbolic in the fact that it has never lost its clear luster and that it has never tarnished the arm it adorns.)

  Her joy in this present, her astonishment at my unexpected appearance on the railway platform, amused and delighted me. I could scarcely convince her that at six o'clock on Saturday night I was in a New Mexico town, waiting for the eastern express. It was all a piece of miraculous adventure on my part, but her evident pleasure in its successful working out made me rich—and very humble. "What did you do it for?" she asked; then, with a look of dismay, she added, "What am I going to do with you in Hanover?"

  "I think I can find something to do," I answered, and entered upon a detailed statement of my plan. "I want you to see the mountains. We'll set our wedding day for the eighteenth—that will give us a week in Colorado, and enable us to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the old folks at the homestead. You say you have never seen a real mountain—well, here's your chance! Say the word, and I'll take you into the heart of the San Juan Range. I'll show you the splendors of Ouray and the Uncompagre."

  Holding the floor, in order that she might not have a chance to protest, I spread an alluring panorama of peaks and valleys before her eyes, with an eloquence which I intended should overcome every objection. That she was giving way to my appeal was evident. Her negatives, when they came, were rather feeble. "I can't do it. It would be lovely, but—oh, it is impossible!"

  "It is done—it is arranged!" I replied. "I have already sent for the railway tickets. They will be at your home to-morrow night. All is settled. We are to be married on the eighteenth, and——"

  "But our cards are all in Chicago and printed for the twenty-third!"

  "What of that? Get some more—or, better still, forget 'em! We don't need cards."

  "But—my sewing?"

  "Never mind your sewing. Would you let a gown come between you and a chance to see the Needle Peak? I am determined that you shall see Ouray, Red Mountain, and the San Juan Divide."

  At last she said, "I'll think about it."

  She was obliged to think about it. All the forenoon, as the train ambled over the plain toward the village in which Professor Taft had established his bank, I kept it in her mind. "It may be a long time before we have another chance to visit Colorado. It will be glorious winter up there. Think of Marshall Pass, think of Uncompagre, think of the Toltec Gorge!" My enthusiasm mounted. "Ouray will be like a town in the Andes. We must plan to stay there at least two days."

  She fell into silence, a dazed yet smiling silence, but when at last I said, "Every hour in the low country is a loss—let's be married to-morrow," she shook her head. I had gone too far.

  She confessed that a stay in Hanover was in the nature of a punishment. "I never liked it here, and neither did my little mother," she said, and then she described her mother's life in Hanover. "I was called home to nurse her in the last days of her illness," she explained. "Poor little mamma! She came out here unwillingly in the first place,
and I always resented her living so far away from the city. After her death I seldom came here. Father does not care. He is so absorbed in his business and in his books that it doesn't matter where he lives."

  Professor Taft and his son, Florizel, were both at the train to meet Zulime, and both were properly amazed when I appeared. As a totally unexpected guest I was a calamity—but they greeted me cordially. What Zulime said in explanation of my presence I do not know, but the family accepted me as an inevitable complication.

  My lameness, which dated from that ride down the Navajo cañon, persisted, which was another worriment; for Zulime was too busy with sewing-women to give much time to me and walking was very painful, hence I spent most of my day down at the bank, talking with my prospective father-in-law, who interested me much more than the sordid little village and its empty landscape. He was a sturdy, slow-moving man with long, gray beard, a powerful and strongly individual thinker, almost as alien to his surroundings as a Hindoo Yoghi would have been. With the bland air of a kindly teacher he met his customers in the outer office and genially discoursed to them of whatever happened to be in his own mind—what they were thinking about was of small account to him.

  As a deeply-studied philosopher of the old-fashioned sort, his words, even when addressed to a German farmer, were deliberately chosen, and his sentences stately, sonorous and precise. Regarding me as a man of books, he permitted himself to roam widely over the fields of medieval history, and to wander amid the gardens of ancient faiths and dimly remembered thrones.

  Although enormously learned, his knowledge was expressed in terms of the past. His quotations, I soon discovered, were almost entirely confined to books whose covers were of a faded brown. His scientists, his historians were all of the Victorian age or antecedent thereto. Breasted and Ferrero did not concern him. His biologists were of the time of Darwin, his poets of an age still earlier, and yet, in spite of his musty citations, he was a master mind. He knew what he knew (he guessed at nothing), and, sitting there in that bare little bank, I listened in silence what time he marched from Zoroaster down to Charlemagne, and from Rome to Paris. He quoted from Buckle and Bacon and Macaulay till I marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than so many Comanches.