The end of the trail — Themes and Context

twenty-four hours a day; cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on every corner.

All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste. Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators, racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as to forget the water, settled back to their magazines and their cigars. So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses, were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to themselves.

One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, instead of leaning back regretfully, descended from the train, hired a horse, and rode out into the mesquite-dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. Being, incidentally, the manager of one of the largest and most profitable ranches in California, he was as familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a cowboy is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he understood the science of irrigation from I to N. After a few days of quiet investigation he dropped into the commissioner’s office in Deming one morning and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. Most of those who heard about it said that he was merely a fool of a tenderfoot who was throwing away his time and money and who ought to have a guardian appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise old cattlemen looked worried. Within a fortnight he had erected his machinery and was drilling for water. And wherever his wells went down, there water came up: fine, clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of it. It soused the thirsty desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into good-for-anything loam. The seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted, sprouted, and the sprouts became blades, and the blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and corn and cane—and the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.

The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres valley and of the miracles that had been performed through its agency spread over the country as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed men from half the States in the Union began to pile into Deming by every train, eager to take up the land while it was still to be had under the hospitable terms of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 1910 that the Californian, John Hund, sunk his first well; when I was in the office of the United States commissioner in Deming four years later I found that the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from the city limits.

Should you ever have occasion to fly over New Mexico in an aeroplane you will have no difficulty whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley; viewed from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug spread across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most of the valley holdings were, I noticed, of but ten or twenty acres, comparatively few of them being more than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found that his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates ten acres thoroughly rather than a hundred superficially. This lesson they have had hammered into them not alone from experience but from observing the operations of a couple of almond-eyed brethren named Wah, hailing originally, I believe, from Canton, who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near Deming. Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, seem but crude and amateurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts to which these Chinese brothers have carried their intensive farming. Though watered only by a small and primitive well, their farm graphically illustrates what can be accomplished by paying attention to those little things which the American farmer is accustomed contemptuously to disregard, as well as being an object-lesson in the remarkable variety of fruits and vegetables which the valley is capable of producing. These Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three crops of vegetables a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. They even begrudge the narrow strips which are used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and tomatoes are grown between melon rows. A drove of corpulent porkers attend voraciously to the garden refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness doubled by being stocked with fish. Were the New Mexicans notoriously _not_ lotus-eaters, the Brothers Wah would doubtless find still another use for their reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It is paying attention to such relatively insignificant details as these which makes J. Chinaman, Esquire, the best gardener in the world. It pays, too, for they told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre holding, are increasing their bank-account at the rate of eight thousand dollars a year. After noting the cordiality with which they were greeted by the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I should like to have a bank president greet me the way he did them.

I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in Rhodesia, for example, and the hinterland of Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces of Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial valleys of California—but I can recall none where soil and climate seemed to have combined so effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do your farming in a region where you will never have to worry about how long it will be before it rains, nor to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual rainfall in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed eight inches, there is a generous margin left for sunshine. Instead of praying for rain, and then cursing his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes too heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his artesian well and throws over an electric switch which sets the pump agoing. When his fields are sufficiently irrigated he throws the switch back again. From the view-point of health it would be hard to improve upon the climate of the Mimbres valley, or, for that matter, of any other portion of New Mexico, its elevation of four thousand three hundred feet, taken with the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and Japan and southernmost California, giving it summers which are hot without being humid or oppressive and winters which are never uncomfortably cold.

Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest, the farmers of southern New Mexico have gone daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well admit it frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another, and they all look extremely uninteresting, but I suppose that if they were netting me from fifty to seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they are their owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. I never arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry, and tired, but that there was a group of eager boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me at the station.

“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an alfalfa field over here that we want to show you. It’s only about thirty miles across the desert and we’ll get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”

They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa in New Mexico as the Esquimaux of Labrador are about a stranded whale.

If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in that region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it were well to disabuse yourself of several erroneous impressions which seem to prevail about life in the Southwest. In the first place, you can dress just as much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted in the magazines as you wish—fleecy _chaparejos_ and a horsehair hat band and a pair of spurs that jingle like an approaching four-in-hand when the wearer walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have become accustomed to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers. In many respects they are the politest people that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer must not imagine that he can gallop madly across the ranges, at least in the vicinity of the towns, for he is more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s alfalfa field or cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though painfully prosaic, are about the most profitable crop you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as three hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the intending rancher must make up his mind that he must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no place for the agriculturist _de luxe_ who expects to sit on the piazza of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do the work. No, sirree! It is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where every one works and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do, goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and first of all it has to be cleared of the _piñon_ and mesquite and chaparral which cover it. This clearing and grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood in return—and there’s nothing that makes a cheerier blaze on a winter’s night than a hearth heaped with the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it up with a hoe. Then there is the matter of well digging, which, including the cost of boring, machinery, and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five dollars an acre. Since the construction of several large power-plants, the cost of pumping has been greatly reduced by the use of electricity. It is quite possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure tracts close to town with all the preliminary work done for him, water being provided from a central pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the capitalised cost added to the price of his land, which may be purchased, like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the instalment plan. That will be about all, I think, for facts and figures.

One of the most interesting things about the settlers with whom I talked in southern New Mexico is that, so far as any previous knowledge of agriculture was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs. One man whom I met had taught school in Iowa for a quarter of a century, but along in middle life he decided that there was more money to be made in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there was in teaching the same thing to the young idea. Another was a Methodist clergyman from Kentucky who told me that he had never had a real conception of the hell-fire he preached about until he started in one scorching July morning to sink an artesian well in the desert. Still a third successful settler had been a physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number of “long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are called, who have moved over into New Mexico and become farmers. Scattered through the country are a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing, remittance-man type so common in Canada and Australia, but energetic, hard-working youngsters who are earnestly engaged in building homes for themselves in a new country and under an adopted flag. Not all of the Englishmen who have come out to New Mexico have proven so steady or successful, however, for a few years ago an English syndicate purchased a Spanish land grant of some two million acres in the vicinity of Raton and sent out a complete equipment of British managers, superintendents, foremen, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners, coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention coaches, tandem carts, a pack of foxhounds, and other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man who witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it was more fun than watching the unloading of the Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great life those Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every afternoon, evening clothes for dinner, and then a few rubbers of bridge—but it ended in the property being taken over at forced sale by a group of hard-headed Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, used the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds to churning butter, and are making the big place pay dividends regularly.

Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the mail-train goes is Albuquerque, the metropolis of the State—if the term metropolis can properly be applied to a place with not much over twelve thousand inhabitants—set squarely in the centre of the one hundred and twenty-two thousand square mile parallelogram which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is a railway centre of considerable importance, for from there one can get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south to the borders of Mexico and its revolutions, and west to the Golden Gate. One of the things that struck me most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is that instead of having weather they enjoy climate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where the moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but never in your bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s most valuable asset, and she trades on it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities that I know of where they want and welcome invalids and say so frankly. They could not do otherwise with any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging desperately to life, and were lifted out of the car window on a stretcher. These one-time invalids are to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you will find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been much too busy catering to the wants of the thousands of tourists and invalids who step onto its station platform each year to pay much attention to agricultural development; but bordering on the town are several thousand acres of as fine, healthy desert as you will find anywhere outside of the Sahara. They are enclosed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me across the billiard-table surface of the desert in his motor-car told me that the government now has an irrigation project under consideration which, by damming the waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward of four hundred thousand acres of this arid land. And the great government irrigation projects now in operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown that water can produce as many things from a desert as the late Monsieur Hermann could from a gentleman’s hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country around Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant foot-hills, will be as green with alfalfa as Ireland is with shamrock.

They have a commercial club in Albuquerque that _is_ a club. At first I thought I had wandered into a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious lobby, its busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, and the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind it, it is about as distantly related to the usual commercial club as one could well imagine. It gives those men in the community who are doing things, and the others who want to be doing things or ought to be doing things, a place where they can meet and discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation, crops, fishing, house building, automobiles, and the climate. I would suggest to the club’s board of governors, however, that it take steps to remove the undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance. When one drops into a place to get some facts regarding the desirability of settling there, it is not exactly reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.

Whoever was responsible for the architecture of the University of New Mexico buildings, which stand in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves a metaphorical slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young State and not yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so that if, with their limited resources, they had attempted to erect collegiate buildings along the usual hackneyed lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all that sort of thing, the result would probably have looked more like a third-rate normal school than like a State university. But they did nothing of the sort. Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the ancient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of the native adobe, which is durable, inexpensive, warm in winter and in summer cool. All the decorations, inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures painted in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, at a moderate cost, they have a group of buildings which typify the history of New Mexico and are in harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; which are admirably suited to the climate; and which are unique among collegiate institutions in that they are modelled after those great houses in which the Hopi lived and worked before the dawn of history on the American continent.

Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way of thinking, the quaintest and most fascinating city between the oceans. Very old, very sleepy, very picturesque, it presents more neglected opportunities than any place I know. I should like to have a chance to stage-manage Santa Fé, for the scenery, which ranks among the best efforts of the Great Scene Painter, is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves and the curtain could be rung up to a capacity house. Where else within our borders is there a three-hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican, and American? (In a back room of the palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace, while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”) Where else are Indians in scarlet blankets and beaded moccasins, their braided hair hanging in front of their shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else can you see groups of cow-punchers on sweating, dancing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in high-crowned hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with their patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, and diminutive burros trotting to market under burdens so enormous that nothing can be seen of the burro but his ears and tail?