Red Men and White

“How interesting there should be only two varieties of Meakum!” said I.

“Yes, it’s interesting. Of course the whole fifty-seven don’t class up yellow or black curly, but if you could take account of stock you’d find the big half of ’em do. Mothers don’t seem to have influenced the type appreciably. His eight families, successive and simultaneous, cover a period of forty-three years, and yellow and black keeps turning up right along. Scientifically, the suppression of Mormonism is a loss to the student of heredity. Some of the children are dead. Get killed now and then, and die too – die from sickness. But you’ll easily notice Meakums as you go up the valley. Old man sees all get good jobs as soon as they’re old enough. Places ’em on the railroad, places ’em in town, all over the lot. Some don’t stay; you couldn’t expect the whole fifty-seven to be steady; but he starts ’em all fair. We have six in Tucson now, or five, maybe. Old man’s a good father.”

“They’re not all boys?”

“Certainly not; but more than half are.”

“And you say he can’t write?”

“Or read, except print, and he has to spell out that.”

“But, my goodness, he’s postmaster!”

“What’s that got to do with it? Young Meakums all read like anything. He don’t do any drudgery.”

“Well, you wouldn’t catch me signing any contracts I couldn’t read.”

“Do you think you’d catch anybody reading a contract wrong to old Meakum? Oh, momma! Why, he’s king round here. Fixes the county elections and the price of tomatoes. Do you suppose any Tucson jury’ll convict any of his Mormons if he says nay? No, sir! It’s been tried. Why, that man ought to be in Congress.”

“If he’s like that I don’t consider him desirable,” said I.

“Yes, he is desirable,” said my friend, roughly. “Smart, can’t be fooled, and looks after his people’s interests. I’d like to know if that don’t fill the bill?”

“If he defeats justice – ”

“Oh, rats!” This interruption made me regret his earlier manner, and I was sorry the polish had rubbed through so quickly and brought us to a too precipitate familiarity. “We’re Western out here,” he continued, “and we’re practical. When we want a thing, we go after it. Bishop Meakum worked his way down here from Utah through desert and starvation, mostly afoot, for a thousand miles, and his flock to-day is about the only class in the Territory that knows what prosperity feels like, and his laws are about the only laws folks don’t care to break. He’s got a brain. If he weren’t against Arizona’s being admitted – ”

“He should know better than that,” said I, wishing to be friendly. “With your fruit exports and high grade of citizens you’ll soon be another California.”

He gave me an odd look.

“I am surprised,” I proceeded, amiably, “to hear you speak of Mormons only as prosperous. They think better of you in Washington.”

“Now, see here,” said he, “I’ve been pleasant to you and I’ve enjoyed this ride. But I like plain talk.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“And I don’t care for Eastern sarcasm.”

“There was no intention – ”

“I don’t take offence where offence is not intended. As for high-grade citizens, we don’t claim to know as much as – I suppose it’s New York you come from? Gold-bugs and mugwumps – ”

“If you can spare the time,” said I, “and kindly explain what has disturbed you in my remarks, we’ll each be likely to find the rest of these forty miles more supportable.”

“I guess I can stand it,” said he, swallowing a drink. He folded his arms and resettled his legs; and the noisome hatefulness of his laugh filled me with regret for the wet-eyed Mowry. I would now gladly have taken any amount of Mowry in exchange for this; and it struck me afresh how uncertainly one always reckons with those who suspect their own standing.

“Till Solomonsville,” said I, “let us veil our estimation of each other. Once out of this stage and the world will be large enough for both of us.” I was wrong there; but presentiments do not come to me often. So I, too, drank some of my own whiskey, lighted a cigar, and observed with pleasure that my words had enraged him.

Before either of us had devised our next remark, the stage pulled up to change horses at the first and last water in forty miles. This station was kept by Mr. Adams, and I jumped out to see the man Mr. Mowry had warned me was not an inexperienced juniper. His appearance would have drawn few but missionaries to him, and I should think would have been warning enough to any but an over-trustful child of six.

“Are you the geologist?” he said at once, coughing heavily; and when I told him I was simply enjoying a holiday, he looked at me sharply and spat against the corner of the stable. “There’s one of them fellers expected,” he continued, in a tone as if I need not attempt to deny that, and I felt his eye watching for signs of geology about me. I told him that I imagined the geologist must do an active business in Arizona.

“I don’t hire ’em!” he exclaimed. “They can’t tell me nothing about mineral.”

“I suppose you have been here a long while, Mr. Adams?”

“There’s just three living that come in ahead of – ” The cough split his last word in pieces.

“Mr. Mowry was saying last night – ”

“You’ve seen that old scamp, have you? Buy his mine behind Helen’s Dome?”

My mirth at this turned him instantly confidential, and rooted his conviction that I was a geologist. “That’s right!” said he, tapping my arm. “Don’t you let ’em fool you. I guess you know your business. Now, if you want to look at good paying rock, thousands in sight, in sight, mind you – ”

“Are you coming along with us?” called the little Meakum driver, and I turned and saw the new team was harnessed and he ready on his box, with the reins in his hands. So I was obliged to hasten from the disappointed Adams and climb back in my seat. The last I saw of him he was standing quite still in the welter of stable muck, stooping to his cough, the desert sun beating on his old body, and the desert wind slowly turning the windmill above the shadeless mud hovel in which he lived alone.

“Poor old devil!” said I to my enemy, half forgetting our terms in my contemplation of Adams. “Is he a Mormon?”

My enemy’s temper seemed a little improved. “He’s tried most everything except jail,” he answered, his voice still harsh. “You needn’t invest your sentiment there. He used to hang out at Twenty Mile in Old Camp Grant days, and he’d slit your throat for fifty cents.”

But my sentiment was invested somehow. The years of the old-timers were ending so gray. Their heyday, and carousals, and happy-go-luckiness all gone, and in the remaining hours – what? Empty youth is such a grand easy thing, and empty age so grim!

“Has Mowry tried everything, too?” I asked.

“Including jail,” said my companion; and gave me many entertaining incidents of Mowry’s career with an ill-smelling saloon cleverness that put him once more into favorable humor with me, while I retained my opinion of him. “And that uneducated sot,” he concluded, “that hobo with his record of cattle-stealing and claim-jumping, and his acquittal from jail through railroad influence, actually undertook to run against me last elections. My name is Jenks; Luke Jenks, Territorial Delegate from Arizona.” He handed me his card.

“I’m just from Washington,” said I.

“Well, I’ve not been there this session. Important law business has detained me here. Yes, they backed Mowry in that election. The old spittoon had quite a following, but he hadn’t the cash. That gives you some idea of the low standards I have to combat. But I hadn’t to spend much. This Territory’s so poor they come cheap. Seventy-five cents a head for all the votes I wanted in Bisbee, Nogales, and Yuma; and up here the Bishop was my good friend. Holding office booms my business some, and that’s why I took it, of course. But I’ve had low standards to fight.”

The Territorial Delegate now talked freely of Arizona’s frontier life. “It’s all dead,” he said, forgetting in his fluency what he had told me about Seven-Mile Mesquite and last October. “We have a community as high toned as any in the land. Our monumental activity – ” And here he went off like a cuckoo clock, or the Boy Orator, reciting the glories of Phœnix and Salt River, and the future of silver, in that special dialect of platitudes which is spoken by our more talkative statesmen, and is not quite Latin, quite grammar, or quite falsehood. “We’re not all Mowrys and Adamses,” said he, landing from his flight.

“In a population of fifty-nine thousand,” said I, heartily, “a stranger is bound to meet decent people if he keeps on.”

Again he misinterpreted me, but this time the other way, bowing like one who acknowledges a compliment; and we came to Solomonsville in such peace that he would have been astonished at my private thoughts. For I had met no undisguised vagabond nor out-and-out tramp whom I did not prefer to Luke Jenks, vote-buyer and politician. With his catch-penny plausibility, his thin-spread good-fellowship, and his New York clothes, he mistook himself for a respectable man, and I was glad to be done with him.

I could have reached Thomas that evening, but after our noon dinner let the stage go on, and delayed a night for the sake of seeing the Bishop hold service next day, which was Sunday, some few miles down the valley. I was curious to learn the Mormon ritual and what might be the doctrines that such a man as the Bishop would expound. It dashed me a little to find this would cost me forty-eight hours of Solomonsville, no Sunday stage running. But one friendly English-speaking family – the town was chiefly Mexican – made some of my hours pleasant, and others I spent in walking. Though I went early to bed I slept so late that the ritual was well advanced when I reached the Mormon gathering. From where I was obliged to stand I could only hear the preacher, already in the middle of his discourse.

“Don’t empty your swill in the door-yard, but feed it to your hogs,” he was saying; and any one who knows how plainly a man is revealed in his voice could have felt instantly, as I did, that here was undoubtedly a leader of men. “Rotten meat, rotten corn, spoiled milk, the truck that thoughtless folks throw away, should be used. Their usefulness has not ceased because they’re rotten. That’s the error of the ignorant, who know not that nothing is meant to be wasted in this world. The ignorant stay poor because they break the law of the Lord. Waste not, want not. The children of the Gentiles play in the door-yard and grow sickly and die. The mother working in the house has a pale face and poison in her blood. She cannot be a strong wife. She cannot bear strong sons to the man. He stays healthy because he toils in the field. He does not breathe the tainted air rising from the swill in the door-yard. Swill is bad for us, but it is good for swine. Waste it by the threshold it becomes deadly, and a curse falls upon the house. The mother and children are sick because she has broken a law of the Lord. Do not let me see this sin when I come among you in the valley. Fifty yards behind each house, with clean air between, let me see the well-fed swine receiving each day, as was intended, the garbage left by man. And let me see flowers in the door-yard, and stout, blooming children. We will sing the twenty-ninth hymn.”

The scales had many hours ago dropped from my eyes, and I saw Arizona clear, and felt no repining for roses and jasmine. They had been a politician’s way of foisting one more silver State upon our Senate, and I willingly renounced them for the real thing I was getting; for my holiday already far outspangled the motliest dream that ever visited me, and I settled down to it as we settle down in our theatre chairs, well pleased with the flying pantomime. And when, after the hymn and a blessing – the hymn was poor stuff about wanting to be a Mormon and with the Mormons stand – I saw the Bishop get into a wagon, put on a yellow duster, and drive quickly away, no surprise struck me at all. I merely said to myself: Certainly. How dull not to have foreseen that! And I knew that we should speak together soon, and he would tell me why California only held the record on stoves.

But oh, my friends, what a country we live in, and what an age, that the same stars and stripes should simultaneously wave over this and over Delmonico’s! This too I kept thinking as I killed more hours in walking the neighborhood of Solomonsville, an object of more false hope to natives whom I did not then observe. I avoided Jenks, who had business clients in the town. I went among the ditches and the fields thus turned green by the channelled Gila; and though it was scarce a paradise surpassing the Nile, it was grassy and full of sweet smells until after a few miles each way, when the desert suddenly met the pleasant verdure full in the face and corroded it to death like vitriol. The sermon came back to me as I passed the little Mormon homes, and the bishop rose and rose in my esteem, though not as one of the children of light. That sagacious patriarch told his flock the things of week-day wisdom down to their level, the cleanly things next to godliness, to keep them from the million squalors that stain our Gentile poor; and if he did not sound much like the Gospel, he and Deuteronomy were alike as two peas. With him and Moses thus in my thoughts, I came back after sunset, and was gratified to be late for supper. Jenks had left the dining-room, and I ate in my own company, which had become lively and full of intelligent impressions. These I sat recording later in my journal, when a hesitating knock came at my bedroom, and two young men in cowboy costume entered like shy children, endeavoring to step without creaking.

“Meakums!” my delighted mind exclaimed, inwardly; but the yellow one introduced the black curly one as Mr. Follet, who, in turn, made his friend Mr. Cunningham known to me, and at my cordial suggestion they sat down with increasing awkwardness, first leaving their hats outside the door.

“We seen you walking around,” said one.

“Lookin’ the country over,” said the other.

“Fine weather for travelling,” said the first.

“Dusty though,” said the second.

Perceiving them to need my help in coming to their point, I said, “And now about your silver mine.”

“You’ve called the turn on us!” exclaimed yellow, and black curly slapped his knee. Both of them sat looking at me, laughing enthusiastically, and I gathered they had been having whiskey this Sunday night. I confess that I offered them some more, and when they realized my mildness they told me with length and confidence about the claims they had staked out on Mount Turnbull. “And there’s lots of lead, too,” said yellow.

“I do not smelt,” said I, “or deal in any way with ore. I have come here without the intention of buying anything.”

“You ain’t the paymaster?” burst out black curly, wrinkling his forehead like a pleasant dog.

Yellow touched his foot.

“Course he ain’t!” said curly, with a swerve of his eye. “He ain’t due. What a while it always is waitin’!”

Now the paymaster was nothing to me, nor whom he paid. For all I knew, my visitors were on his roll; and why yellow should shy at the mention of him and closely watch his tipsy mate I did not try to guess. Like every one I had met so far in Arizona, these two evidently doubted I was here for my pleasure merely; but it was with entire good-humor that they remarked a man had the right to mind his own business; and so, with a little more whiskey, we made a friendly parting. They recommended me to travel with a pistol in this country, and I explained that I should do myself more harm than good with a weapon that any one handled more rapidly than I, with my inexperience.

“Good-night, Mr. Meakum,” I said.

“Follet,” corrected black curly.

“Cunningham,” said yellow, and they picked up their hats in the hall and withdrew.

I think now those were their names – the time was coming when I should hear them take oath on it – yet I do not know. I heard many curious oaths taken.

I was glad to see black curly in the stage next day, not alone for his company, but to give him a right notion of what ready money I had about me. Thinking him over, and his absence of visible means of support, and his interest in me, I took opportunity to mention, quite by the way, that five or six dollars was all that I ever carried on my person, the rest being in New York drafts, worthless in any hands but mine. And I looked at the time once or twice for him to perceive the cheapness of my nickel watch. That the Bishop was not his father I had indirect evidence when we stopped at Thacher to change horses and drop a mail-sack, and the Mormon divine suddenly lifted the flap and inspected us. He nodded to me and gave Follet a message.

“Tell your brother” (wouldn’t a father have said Tom or Dick?) “that I’ve given him chances enough and he don’t take ’em. He don’t feed my horses, and my passengers complain he don’t feed them – though that’s not so serious!” said he to me, with a jovial wink. “But I won’t have my stock starved. You’ll skip the station and go through to Thomas with this pair,” he added to the driver in his voice of lusty command. “You’ll get supper at Thomas. Everything’s moved on there from to-day. That’s the rule now.” Then he returned to black curly, who, like the driver, had remained cowed and respectful throughout the short harangue. “Your brother could have treated me square and made money by that station. Tell him that, and to see me by Thursday. If he’s thinking of peddling vegetables this season I’ll let him sell to Fort Bowie. Safford takes Carlos, and I won’t have two compete in the same market, or we’ll be sinking low as Eastern prices,” said he to me, with another wink. “Drive on now. You’re late.”

He shut the flap, and we were off quickly – too quickly. In the next few moments I could feel that something all wrong went on; there was a jingle and snapping of harness, and such a voice from the Bishop behind us that I looked out to see him. We had stopped, and he was running after us at a wonderful pace for a man of sixty-four.

“If you don’t drive better than that,” said the grizzled athlete, arriving cool and competent, “you’ll saw wood for another year. Look how you’ve got them trembling.”

It was a young pair, and they stood and steamed while the broken gear was mended.

“What did California hold the record in before the Boy Orator broke it?” said I, getting out.

He shot at me the same sinister look I had seen in the Capitol, the look he must always wear, I suppose, when taken aback. Then he laughed broadly and heartily, a strong pleasant laugh that nearly made me like him. “So you’re that fellow! Ho, ho! Away down here now. Oh, ho, ho! What’s your business?”

“You wouldn’t believe if I told you,” said I, to his sudden sharp question.

“Me? Why, I believe everything I’m told. What’s your name?”

“Will you believe I haven’t come to buy anybody’s silver mine?”

“Silver! I don’t keep it. Unloaded ten years ago before the rabbit died.”

“Then you’re the first anti-silver man I’ve met.”

“I’m anti anything I can’t sell, young man. Here’s all there is to silver: Once upon a time it was hard to get, and we had to have it. Now it’s easy. When it gets as common as dirt it’ll be as cheap as dirt. Same as watermelons when it’s a big crop. D’you follow me? That’s silver for you, and I don’t want it. So you’ve come away down here. Well, well! What did you say your name was?”

I told him.

“Politician?”

“God forbid!”

“Oh, ho, ho! Well, yes. I took a look at those buzzards there in Washington. Our Senate and Representatives. They were screeching a heap. All about ratios. You’ll be sawing wood yet!” he shouted to the driver, and strode up to help him back a horse. “Now ratio is a good-sounding word too, and I guess that’s why they chew on it so constant. Better line of language that they get at home. I’ll tell you about Congress. Here’s all there is to it: You can divide them birds in two lots. Those who know better and those who don’t. D’you follow me?”

“And which kind is the Boy Orator?”

“Limber Jim? Oh, he knows better. I know Jim. You see, we used to have a saying in Salt Lake that California had the smallest stoves and the biggest liars in the world. Now Jim – well, there’s an old saying busted. But you’ll see Arizona’ll go back on the Democrats. If they put wool on the free list she’ll stay Republican, and they won’t want her admitted, which suits me first-rate. My people here are better off as they stand.”

“But your friend Mr. Jenks favors admission!” I exclaimed.

“Luke? He’s been talking to you, has he? Well now, Luke. Here’s all there is to him: Natural gas. That’s why I support him, you see. If we sent a real smart man to Washington he might get us made a State. Ho, ho! But Luke stays here most of the time, and he’s no good anyway. Oh, ho, ho! So you’re buying no mines this season?”

Once more I found myself narrating the insignificance of my visit to Arizona – the Bishop must have been a hard inquisitor for even the deeply skilful to elude – and for the first time my word was believed. He quickly took my measure, saw that I had nothing to hide, and after telling me I could find good hunting and scenery in the mountains north, paid me no further attention, but masterfully laid some final commands on the intimidated driver. Then I bade good-bye to the Bishop, and watched that old locomotive moving vigorously back along the road to his manifold business.

The driver was ill pleased to go hungry for his supper until Thomas, but he did not dare complain much over the new rule, even to black curly and me. This and one other thing impressed me. Some miles farther on we had passed out of the dust for a while, and rolled up the flaps.

“She’s waiting for you,” said the driver to black curly, and that many-sided youth instantly dived to the bottom of the stage, his boots and pistol among my legs.

“Throw your coat over me,” he urged.

I concealed him with that and a mail-sack, and stretched my head out to see what lioness stood in his path. But it was only a homelike little cabin, and at the door a woman, comely and mature, eying the stage expectantly. Possibly wife, I thought, more likely mother, and I asked, “Is Mrs. Follet strict?” choosing a name to fit either.

The driver choked and chirruped, but no sound came from under the mail-sack until we had passed the good-day to the momentous female, whose response was harsh with displeasure as she wheeled into her door. A sulky voice then said, “Tell me when she’s gone, Bill.” But we were a safe two hundred yards on the road before he would lift his head, and his spirits were darkened during the remainder of the journey.

“Come and live East,” said I, inviting him to some whiskey at the same time. “Back there they don’t begin sitting up for you so early in the evening.”

This did not enliven him, although upon our driver it seemed to bring another fit as much beyond the proportion of my joke as his first had been. “She tires a man’s spirit,” said black curly, and with this rueful utterance he abandoned the subject; so that when we reached Thomas in the dim night my curiosity was strong, and I paid little heed to this new place where I had come or to my supper. Black curly had taken himself off, and the driver sat at the table with me, still occasionally snickering in his plate. He would explain nothing that I asked him until the gaunt woman who waited on us left us for the kitchen, when he said, with a nervous, hasty relish, “The Widow Sproud is slick,” and departed.

Consoled by no better clew than this I went to bed in a down-stairs room, and in my strange rising next day I did not see the driver again. Callings in the air awaked me, and a wandering sound of wheels. The gaunt woman stood with a lamp in my room saying the stage was ready, and disappeared. I sprang up blindly, and again the callings passed in the blackness outside – long cries, inarticulate to me. Wheels heavily rolled to my door, and a whip was struck against it, and there loomed the stage, and I made out the calling. It was the three drivers, about to separate before the dawn on their three diverging ways, and they were wailing their departure through the town that travellers might hear, in whatever place they lay sleeping. “Boo-wie! All aboa-rd!” came from somewhere, dreary and wavering, met at farther distance by the floating antiphonal, “Aboa-rd, aboa-rd for Grant!” and in the chill black air my driver lifted his portion of the strain, chanting, “Car-los! Car-los!” One last time he circled in the nearer darkness with his stage to let me dress. Mostly unbuttoned, and with not even a half minute to splash cold water in my eyes, I clambered solitary into the vehicle and sat among the leather mail-bags, some boxes, and a sack of grain, having four hours yet till breakfast for my contemplation. I heard the faint reveille at Camp Thomas, but to me it was a call for more bed, and I pushed and pulled the grain-sack until I was able to distribute myself and in a manner doze, shivering in my overcoat. Not the rising of the sun upon this blight of sand, nor the appearance of a cattle herd, and both black curly and yellow driving it among its dust clouds, warmed my frozen attention as I lay in a sort of spell. I saw with apathy the mountains, extraordinary in the crystal prism of the air, and soon after the strangest scene I have ever looked on by the light of day. For as we went along the driver would give a cry, and when an answering cry came from the thorn-bush we stopped, and a naked Indian would appear, running, to receive a little parcel of salt or sugar or tobacco he had yesterday given the driver some humble coin to buy for him in Thomas. With changeless pagan eyes staring a moment at me on my sack of grain, and a grunt when his purchase was set in his hands, each black-haired desert figure turned away, the bare feet moving silent, and the copper body, stark naked except the breech-clout, receding to dimness in the thorn-bush. But I lay incurious at this new vision of what our wide continent holds in fee under the single title United States, until breakfast came. This helped me, and I livened somewhat at finding the driver and the breakfast man were both genuine Meakums, as Jenks had told me they would be.