Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTORY WILD, weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the mind by the very name the Painted Desert. The sound itself suggests a fabled rather than a real land. Surely it must be akin to Atlantis or the Island of Circe or the place where the Cyclops lived. Is it not a land of enchantment and dreams, not a place for living men and women, Indians though they be? It is a land of enchantment, but also of stern reality, as those who have marched, unprepared, across its waterless wastes can testify. No fabled land ever surpassed it in its wondrousness, yet a railway runs directly over it, and it is not on some far-away continent, but is close at hand; a portion, indeed, of our own United States. In our schoolboy days we used to read of the Great American Desert. The march of civilization has marched that " desert" out of existence. Is the Painted Desert a fiction of early geographers, like unto the Great American Desert, to be wiped from the map when we have more knowledge? No! It is in actual existence as it was when first seen by the white men, about three hundred and fifty years ago, and as it doubtless will be for untold centuries yet to come. Coronado and his band of daring conquistadors, preceded by Marcos de Niza and Stephen the Negro,reaching out with gold-lustful hands, came into the region from northern Mexico, conquered Cibola Zuni and from there sent out a small band to investigate the stories told by the Zunis of a people who lived about one hundred miles to the northwest, whom they called A-mo-ke-vi. The Navaho Indians said the home of the A-mo-ke-vi was a Ta-sa-un' a country of isolated buttes so the Spaniards called the people Moki (Moqui) and their land " theprovince of Tusayan," and by those names they have ever since been known. Yet the...
