Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/263

 part, and I do not believe that they have since been guilty of any misdemeanor of the same nature.

Of this trip among the Moquis, and of the Moquis themselves, volumes might be written. There is no tribe of aborigines on the face of the earth, there is no region in the world, better deserving of examination and description than the Moquis and the country they inhabit. It is unaccountable to me that so many of our own countrymen seem desirous of taking a flying trip to Europe when at their feet, as it were, lies a land as full of wonders as any depicted in the fairy tales of childhood. Here, at the village of Hualpi, on the middle mesa, is where I saw the repulsive rite of the Snake Dance, in which the chief "Medicine Men" prance about among women and children, holding live and venomous rattlesnakes in their mouths. Here, one sees the "Painted Desert," with its fantastic coloring of all varieties of marls and ochreous earths, equalling the tints so lavishly scattered about in the Cañon of the Yellowstone. Here, one begins his journey through the petrified forests, wherein are to be seen the trunks of giant trees, over one hundred feet long, turned into precious jasper, carnelian, and banded agate. Here, one is within stone's throw of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado and the equally deep lateral cañons of the Cataract and the Colorado Chiquito, on whose edge he may stand in perfect security and gaze upon the rushing torrent of the mighty Colorado, over a mile beneath. Here is the great Cohonino Forest, through which one may ride for five days without finding a drop of water except during the rainy season. Truly, it is a wonderland, and in the Grand Cañon one can think of nothing but the Abomination of Desolation.

There is a trail descending the Cataract Cañon so narrow and dangerous that pack trains rarely get to the bottom without accidents. When I went down there with General Crook, we could hear the tinkling of the pack-train bell far up in the cliffs above us, while the mules looked like mice, then like rats, then like jack-rabbits, and finally like dogs in size. One of our mules was pushed off the trail by another mule crowding up against it, and was hurled over the precipice and dashed into a pulp on the rocks a thousand feet below. There is no place in the world at present so accessible, and at the same time so full of the most romantic interest, as are the territories