# Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 32

XXXII.
CAMP LOWELL, TUCSON, AND SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.
I.
The night journey returning by stage to Benson was enlivened by more shooting stones. I heard, among others, of the doings of the late Brazelton of Tucson, and at Tucson I bought his photograph, taken, after death, in his mask and other paraphernalia of his craft. He robbed stages for years while apparently working quietly as a hostler in a corral. He was finally tracked to his fate through some peculiar marks of the horse he rode.
One of our passengers had just recovered from wounds received in a fight over cards with a Mexican, whom he had killed, and was now able, with the aid of morphine, to pursue his journey toward his home in New Mexico, The train men at Benson were chary of carrying their lanterns about the depot yard, a habit having arisen, it seemed, among the cow-boys of trying to snuff out these moving targets with revolvers from a distance.
There seemed a certain tameness even in the Apaches after this wild product of the higher civilization of the whites. The principal group of prisoners taken after the attempted massacre of General Carr's command was found in confinement at Camp Lowell, nine miles north of Tucson. There were forty-two of them, with Sanchez, their chief. They were of fairly regular features, and their expression, with the war-paint washed off, not unamiable,

## ​They were handcuffed together in couples, their legs also Manacled, and now wore gray array under-shirts and cotton drawers, the rags in which they had come having been taken from them. Their long black hair hung about their ears, not frowzy, like that of the Yumas, but smoothly parted in the middle, and brushed back. A number wore red bands or kerchiefs around their heads.

APACHE PRISONERS AT CAMP LOWELL.
They were taken out for an airing in the mornings, and allowed to squat in the sun at the edge of the pleasant parade-ground, flanked by its well-shaded row of officers' dwellings. The recent rising had been the result of a fanatical delusion. A medicine-man persuaded them that he had received a revelation to drive all the whites from the land. As soon as the corn was ripe, he said, their dead brethren would arise and take arms to aid them in carrying out the decree of Heaven. He had, as many prophets have not, the courage of his convictions. Though taken in charge himself by the troops, he gave a signal agreed upon for the massacre of these to begin, calling to his people not to be concerned about his fate, as he would come to life and join them again in three days.
The bluff Arizonians are apt to indulge in a derisive way of talking of the army and its relation to the savages. They would make but short work of these latter, they say, if they took the matter into their own hands. They imply that the army does not wish to kill off, or even wholly put down, the Indians, but rather to preserve them, as a gentle stimulus to public dread, to hasten promotions, and also to furnish occasion for profitable supply-contracts. However this may be, it would seem that after the repression of this revolt, and the rapid penetration of railroads into the Territory, Indians need no longer be a deterring influence of great moment with the intending settler. This old historic source of apprehension seems as good as abolished from its last stronghold.
Eight miles to the north brings us to a ranch called

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AN ARIZONA WATERING-PLACE.
Fuller's Hot Springs. This is one of the few places where a beginning of systematic cultivation has been made, and interesting besides as a typical Arizona summer resort. There was a young orchard of twenty-five acres, sheltered by a wind-break of three rows of ash-trees, doing very well in an alkali soil. The buildings consisted of a number of un-painted adobe houses, each of a single large, comfortable room, roofed with strips of cactus, ​There was a "summer dining-room" made of ocotilla sticks, the intervals open; and a "winter dining-room," with tight walls, and a fireplace, in which a wood-fire was burned mornings and evenings. The hot spring, a clear, pleasant water, said to resemble English Harrogate, ran out from below a bath-house, consisting of a patched canvas tent. It became, below, a pretty brook, a pond for the cattle, and source of supply for irrigating the orchard. The mountains behind the place, the Santa Catalinas, are like the Sierra Madres behind Los Angeles. They are of the same sharp fracture, but higher and grander, jutting up here and there into as perfect castles as those of Harlech, the Trostberg, or Rheinstein. Forests of pine of large dimensions crown a part of their summits. South and south-west, across the wide plain, appear the Rincons and silver-bearing Santa Ritas.
There was a fascination in being able to examine at leisure the strange growths of the plain, and not merely to know them in glimpses from the car-windows. I made haste especially to cut down for inspection an example of the enormous saguara, the organ-cactus. Taller than that on the hill-sides of Guerrero along the Acapulco trail, it often rises to a height of sixty feet, bristles over the landscape like masts or columns, or, again, like the seven-branched candlestick of the Mosaic law. Inside it consists of a white, juicy pulp, imbedding a bundle of fibres in the form of long wands, which, when dried, serve a number of useful purposes. It has a palatable fruit, which the Indians collect from its top in August with forked sticks.
The ocotilla is simply a shrub growing as a wattle of sticks, fifteen or twenty together, only waiting to be cut down and turned into palings. The bisnaga is a thorny cactus like an immense watermelon growing on end. One ​need never die of thirst where it is found. The cholla is a mass of spines, which are even barbed, on the fish-hook principle. It is considered funny to hear of somebody's falling into a cholla, and nothing could better represent the traditional "bramble-bush" in which the man who was so wondrous wise met with the famous adventure of scratching out his eyes. The "deer-brush" somewhat resembles the horns of the animal. The palo verde—green stick grows—as large as an apple-tree, with the texture of a
CACTUS GROWTHS OF THE DESERT.
chlorophyll and the tenderness of structure seem equally distributed throughout.
There are homely legends and superstitions about these plants of the desert. A certain one, for instance, poisons any white spot on a horse, but not one of any other color. Another, eaten by horses, makes them lazy and imbecile. The loco, or rattle-weed, on the other hand, drives them raving crazy, and they try to run themselves to death. I do not know whether this last be wholly a superstition, for I rode in California a horse whose eccentric proceedings could hardly be accounted for on any other basis.
Tucson, from a distance, in early morning or late afternoon, is level, low, square, and brown, with a mellow light upon it and the castellated mountains behind it. In the foreground you see lazy ox-wains, a prospector, perhaps, with his pots and kettles, and a mounted Mexican towing by a lariat a bull, which ducks its head in vain resistance. From a distance it is thoroughly foreign, and of attractive promise. There is something of the Dead Sea apple in the realization of this promise. If Ruskin be right in holding that a house should be of the general color of the soil on which it stands, Tucson may lay claim to great artistic merit. It is entirely of adobe brick of the natural mud-color. Violent rain-storms occur, to the detriment of paint and kalsomine, on such a friable surface, and their use becomes a serious question of economy.
STREET VIEW IN TUCSON
of Cibola," but retains no visible trace of age. If there were ever any monuments of importance, they have effectually vanished. Even the church is new. Such foreignness as there is consists of a very provincial Mexican squalor.
The considerations of interest about it are of a purely utilitarian character, as: how it is to be paved, drained, lighted, provided with an adequate water supply, so as not to have to pay four cents a bucket for it, as at present; and how it is to get rid of its malarial fevers and shabby rookeries.
A writer in one of the papers one day paid a glowing eulogy to its peculiar situation, in the desert. He held that this was a matter not only of those material products which I have mentioned, but also of the highest moral and intellectual advantages. It was apropos of the establishment of a public library. No great idea has ever been evolved in the usual scenes of human habitation (so the argument ran), and there is no place for true study and contemplation like the desert. Christ, Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Confucius all formulated their creeds in the desert. I gather that we are to expect from Arizona, at the proper time, some new prophet or sage, to sway again the destinies of men in their way.
The correspondent was satisfied, at any rate, that, with a public library, Tucson could shortly become another Alexandria of the desert, "a seat of learning and fountain-head of ideas, to be sought by students from Mexico, from the Pacific Islands, from China and Japan, and the mountains and valleys of the Rio Grande," and I for one shall be very glad to see it so.
EXTERIOR OF MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.
cactus-grown, arid Sonora.
The traders at Tucson, again, are largely Jewish. A certain kind of "life" prevails freely, as at Tombstone. Roulette, faro, and other games of chance are played in a large way in the leading saloons, while the poor Mexicans gamble for small stakes at fondas of their own, where some wretched lithograph of Hidalgo or Zaragoza looks down on them from the walls. There is lacking, however, the choleric and dangerous air of Tombstone. People make way for you to pass if you wish, and do not seem exclusively occupied with looking about for somebody to tread on the tails of their coats.
If Tucson be without historic remains of its own, it has one of the loveliest possible in its vicinity, the old mission church of San Xavier del Bac.
San Xavier is on the reservation of the Christianized Papago Indians, in the Santa Cruz Valley, ten miles to the southward. It is a new sensation even for one from Mexico who may have flattered himself that he knew the style completely. This ancient landmark of a frontier civilization which, since its destruction, has not been even faintly approached in its kind, is not surpassed either in Mexico or out of it for the quaintness, the qualities of form and color, and the gentle sentiment of melancholy that appeal to the artistic sense. Old Father Time has trodden with heavy step on green wooden balconies in its front, broken out their floors, and left parts of them dangling free. The original sweet-toned bronze bells

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INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DE BAC.
escutcheons and rampant lions, wreathed in foliage. Niches hold grotesque broken statues, and complicated pilasters flank the entrance doorway, the whole formed in stucco upon a basis of moulded bricks. Where a portion has fallen away it can be seen that the pilasters are constructed upon or held together by a centre consisting of a stick of timber.
The designer, whoever he may have been, was inspired by Venetian-Byzantine traditions. It is roofed with numerous simple domes and half-domes. The interior of these, frescoed with angels and evangelists, the chancel walls, almost covered with gilding, but stained and battered, and the painted and gilded lions on the chancel rails, recall to the least observant Saint Mark's at Venice. The style is not quite consistently carried out, however. A later rococo decoration, as exuberant as the vagaries of East Indian work, mingles with and at places overrides it. A Henri II. candlestick will give a certain idea of the pattern of the columns.
The date has disappeared from the façade, but it is believed to be about 1768, and the present edifice was built on the ruins of a former one, going back much nearer to 1654, when the mission to the Papagos was first begun. Large angels, with bannerets, their draperies formed of papier-maché or gummed muslin, are attached to the main chancel piers; and a painted and gilded Virgin, with a long face, and hair brushed up from a high forehead, as in the sculptures of Jean Goujon, looks down from a high altar niche.
All within is of a mediæval richness and obscurity. All without is broad sunshine falling upon the peaceful Papago village. A few old men trudge about, concern​ing themselves with their bake-ovens and some water-jars and strings of dried squashes, and women pass by with tall loads of hay and other produce carried in the kijo, a singular hamper of sticks and netting, on their backs. Nobody concerns himself about visitors, except a foolishly smiling boy, one Domingo, who has brought us the key.
To have come from that spasm of aggressive modernism, Tombstone, and to be at ancient San Xavier del Bac—it seemed to me that contrast could little farther go.