Part 4 (2/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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
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