Page:Sunset Magazine vol. 31.pdf/446

 VOLUME 31

''Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous fight or won a more brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade, and the enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all foes: the hostile forces of Nature. Twelve years ago, E. Alexander Powell, F. R. G. S., went into Arizona and observed a region of sand and sage-brush and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; fighting cattlemen and sheepmen. The other day he went through the new state and found, where before he had seen sunbaked forbidding desert, sleek dairy cattle grazing knee-deep in alfalfa and groves ablaze with golden fruit. Mr. Powell has lived in reclaimed regions of Egypt, Mesopotamia and parts of the Sudan, and he has the world-view of the wonders which have been wrought by Americans in the Arizona country. His article, which leads the October number, is illustrated, in color, with paintings representing the three periods of Arizona history—the aboriginal or Indian, the exploratory or Spanish, and the reclamatory or American.''

''Eleanor Gates, in the course of an auto-hike along El Camino Real, in California, steered off that historic pathway proper and came to the little reservation town of Pala. The Palatingwa Indians had gathered for a fiesta and the motor car of the author of "The Poor Little Rich Girl" was given scant attention in the midst of constantly arriving wagon loads of tribal celebrants. A night of savage ceremonies and tribal games was followed by a service of Christian worship, as in the days of the Mission fathers. Eleanor Gates' sympathetic pen sketches the quaint scene in the October number.''

''A fine bunch of stories on the October vine! Charles G. D. Roberts begins the prehistoric history of Grôm and A-ya, who found fire and brought it to their tribe. Illustrated by Paul Bransom. To console us for the absence of Mr. Hennage and the closing of "The Long Chance," Peter B. Kyne has brought in Captain Scraggs again and shows us that worthy as a buccaneer in "Under the Jolly Roger." Herman Whitaker tells a colorful story of the padres entitled "A Healthy Conversion," the heroine of which is a Rosalind of the Monterey coast. And Billy Fortune returns to report in his own peculiar way his experiences with some foreigners in the northwest cow country.''