Indians of the Enchanted Desert
THIS excellent book belongs to a species that is too seldom met with in American literature. The English produce almost innumerable examples, and many good ones. There is no place in the Empire so remote that it has n’t its illuminating volume, soberly documented and bemapped, and with all in it that is worth knowing about the politics, sorceries, and table manners of the local brown brothers. Our own agents of the enlightenment seem to be far less literate than their British colleagues. Most of them, I dare say, can read and write after a fashion, but what they write is buried in government files. Thus we know less about the Indians within our own borders than the average curious Englishman knows about the Tibetans, the Marquesas Islanders, and the Swahili. The cheap magazines and the movies simply caricature them; what one hears about them in the newspapers is only to the effect that they have sold more oil-lands and are drinking again.
Mr. Crane, when he became an Indian agent, brought a novel equipment to his office. He was by occupation an attaché of the Indian Bureau in Washington, but he was by vocation a literary gentleman, and one of very considerable skill. His short stories were in all the magazines; he was a rising young man. It was ill health that took him into the field, and when he got there it combined with a burden of harsh and unaccustomed duties to paralyze his pen. For a decade he wrote scarcely anything. But then, restored to health and with an immense stock of fresh and vivid impressions, he took to writing again, and here are the first fruits of his new activity. They take the form of a book that is at once a valuable record and a sort of poem. It describes one Indian people, the Hopis, at length, realistically and without sentimentalizing, but it throws about them a glow that reflects the author’s delight in them, and in the gorgeous desert that is their home.
No better picture of that desert is to be found in American literature. Tourists whirl through it on express-trains; the plain people see it only in the monotone of the movies. Mr. Crane, for years on years, battled for life with its eternal rocks and sands. He makes it brilliantly real, and he somehow makes it romantic. Its blinding colors are in his narrative, and its immense silences, and its baking heats and bitter colds. Here, for the first Lime, Thither Arizona begins
to exist. The book is charmingly written. It avoids laborious details. It is a panorama of beautiful things, and a narrative of hard and useful work done in a lonely place, without thanks and against depressing difficulties. H. L. MENCKEN