The rains and before the
strength of the sun had come upon us from the south, the
medicine-man went apart on the mountains to gather herbs, and when
he came again I knew by the new fortitude of his countenance and
the new color of his reminiscences that he had been alone and
unspied upon in Shoshone Land.
To reach that country from the campoodie, one goes south and
south, within hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great tideless
lake, and south by east over a high rolling district, miles and
miles of sage and nothing else. So one comes to the country of the
painted hills,--old red cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral
earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets issuing from a leprous
soil. After the hills the black rock, after the craters the spewed
lava, ash strewn, of incredible thickness, and full of sharp,
winding rifts. There are picture writings carved deep in the face
of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do not know it. On the
very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in a wide
sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone Land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly
wooded with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the
border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken
ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted
to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf,
nesting place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild
things that live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the
creosote and the mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in
all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky,
close grown, and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the draughty
valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches,
piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs
flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift, where it
seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining
often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak. In Shoshone Land one
digs for large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures.
Higher on the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon
stand each apart, rounded and spreading heaps of greenness.
Between them, but each to itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of
tall feathered grass.
This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is
room enough and time enough. Trees grow to consummate domes; every
plant has its perfect work. Noxious weeds such as come up thickly
in crowded fields do not flourish in the free spaces. Live long
enough with an Indian, and he or the wild things will show you a
use for everything that grows in these borders.
The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and
the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion. The
Shoshones live like their trees, with great spaces between, and in
pairs and in family groups they set up wattled huts by the
infrequent springs. More wickiups than two make a very great
number. Their shelters are lightly built, for they travel much and
far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but they are not
more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.
The year's round is somewhat in this fashion. After the pinon
harvest the clans foregather on a warm southward slope for the
annual adjustment of tribal difficulties and the medicine dance,
for marriage and mourning and vengeance, and the exchange of
serviceable information; if, for example, the deer have shifted
their feeding ground, if the wild sheep have come back to Waban, or
certain springs run full or dry. Here the Shoshones winter
flockwise, weaving baskets and hunting big game driven down from
the country of the deep snow. And this brief intercourse is all
the use they have of their kind, for now there are no wars,
and many of their ancient crafts have fallen into disuse. The
solitariness of the life breeds in the men, as in the plants, a
certain well-roundedness and sufficiency to its own ends. Any
Shoshone family has in itself the man-seed, power to multiply and
replenish, potentialities for food and clothing and shelter, for
healing and beautifying.
When the rain is over and gone they are stirred by the
instinct of those that journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up each
with his mate and young brood, like birds to old nesting places.
The beginning of spring in Shoshone Land--oh the soft wonder of
it!--is a mistiness as of incense smoke, a veil of greenness over
the whitish stubby shrubs, a web of color on the silver sanded
soil. No counting covers the multitude of rayed blossoms that
break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the winter rains,
with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage at all.
They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong seeders.
Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed sands,
so that some species appear to be extinct. Years of long storms
they break so thickly into bloom that no horse treads without
crushing them. These years the gullies of the hills are rank with
fern and a great tangle of climbing vines.
Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the
love call of the burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by
the mourning doves. Welcome and sweet they sound in the smoky
mornings before breeding time, and where they frequent in any great
numbers water is confidently looked for.
