Indians of the Enchanted Desert

They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them.

Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things that weren’t done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they being from what an Easterner would term the “hinterland,” had he vision enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have tales to tell—a hope that never materialized.

When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if, seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their uncommon experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath; that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that which distressed them, and to return whence they came—into the broader, franker places.

I knew that they were “out of the West,” and this meant—of course it did—beyond—well, beyond the Mississippi. “The West” is a general term, and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim past. Therefore I did not know that this one’s bailiwick contained five troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly four hundred years; that another’s domain included six thousand square miles of God’s most wonderful creation, having the Marble Cañon of the Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third’s territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times, breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one’s home; that still another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the silence of uncharted cañons.