Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [172]
Kayenta was a trading post run by John Wetherill, a member of the posse of white men that had “discovered” the Bridge only four years before. He had agreed to serve as the Roosevelt party’s local host and guide, and had guest rooms ready in his cedar-pole-and-rock house, surrounded by trees and lawns. It was well supplied with books and running water. Roosevelt admired Mrs. Wetherill’s taste in Navajo domestic design—she had decorated the walls of her parlor with delicate tei-bichai figures—and found her an impressively learned woman, versed in the lore of tribal ruins. It had been she, not her husband, who had first divined the existence of a rock buttress north of Navajo Mountain, from Indians protective of it as a sacrosanct place.
On 10 August the excursion across the Utah border began, with Wetherill acting as guide and five pack horses carrying a minimum of supplies. Three days of the roughest possible riding ensued. At times the train had to pick its way along paths only six or eight inches wide, notched out of slickrock cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to stony bottoms. The boys learned to keep free of their stirrups when Wetherill pointed out the skeleton, far below, of a horse from which he had once parted company.
The immense arch eventually disclosed itself, bathed in late-afternoon sunlight while the gorge below filled up with shadow. There were pools of clear water beneath it, enticing to hot and dirty travelers. Roosevelt was soon floating on his back, amid ferns and hanging plants, looking up at the darkening sky and still darker bar holding apart the cliffs. Later, the leaping flames of a campfire threw it into relief against the stars, and whenever he awoke during the night he was conscious of its overhanging majesty.
He noted the next morning that one of Wetherill’s two Indian helpers would not ride beneath the Bridge. The man was a Navajo, and took the long way around, rather than follow the rest of the party down the canyon. “His creed bade him never pass under an arch, for the arch is the sign of the rainbow, the sign of the sun’s course over the earth, and to the Navajo it is sacred.”
SO FAR IN ARIZONA, Roosevelt had gazed with little pity at the dark, dirt-poor sheepherders who crossed his trail, emerging like Africans from the most inhospitable crooks of the landscape. The blankets they wove might be superior to the designs of Duchamp, yet they seemed to have no desire to better themselves economically or socially. It was clear to him that until they forgot about their nomadic past, and listened to what the white man could teach them about ranching and stock-raising, they would languish in primitive poverty. He knew that a debate was dragging out in Congress over proposals to cut up and sell parts of the overpopulated Navajo reservation, for the benefit of white stockmen and railroad land grabbers. Although he held no brief for outside developers, his belief in a social “Square Deal” (first offered, ironically, to the Southwestern tribes, when he spoke at the Grand Canyon on 6 May 1903) persuaded him that aboriginals clinging to an antiquated way of life had no power to resist the facts of economics. “With Indians and white men alike it is use which should determine occupancy of the soil.”
Roosevelt’s attitude toward “red” Americans differed from that of most of his kind only in that he had been