an the
truth about Black Jack of Texas, whose head flew off into the crowd,
when the support was removed from his feet and he was hanged down in New
Mexico? Dick Turpin was a highwayman. Black Jack was a lone-hand train
robber. Will you tell me why the outlaws of the borderland between
England and Scotland are more interesting to Americans than the bands of
outlaws who used to frequent Horse-Thief Canyon up the Pecos, or took
possession of the cliff-dwellers' caves on the Rio Grande after the
Civil War? Why are Copt shepherds in Egypt more picturesque than
descendants of the Aztecs herding countless moving masses of sheep on
our own sky-line, lilac-misty, Upper Mesas? What is the difference in
quality value between a donkey in Spain trotting to market and a burro
in New Mexico standing on the plaza before a palace where have ruled
eighty different governors, three different nations? Why are skeletons
and relics taken from Pompeii more interesting than the dust-crumbled
bodies lying in the caves of our own cliffs wrapped in cloth woven long
before Europe knew the art of weaving? Why is the Sphinx more wonderful
to us than the Great Stone Face carved on the rock of a cliff near
Cochiti, New Mexico, carved before the Pharaohs reigned; or the stone
lions of an Assyrian ruin more marvelous than the two great stone lions
carved at Cochiti? When you find a church in England dating before
William the Conqueror, you may smack your lips with the zest of the
antiquarian; but you'll find in New Mexico not far from Santa Fe ruins
of a church--at the Gates of the Waters, Guardian of the Waters--that
was a pagan ruin a thousand years old when the Spaniards came to
America.

You may hunt up plaster cast reproduction of reptilian monsters in the
Kensington Museum, London; but you will find the real skeleton of the
gentleman himself, with pictures of the three-toed horse on the rocks,
and legends of a Plumed Serpent not unlike the wary fellow who
interviewed Eve--all right here in your own American Southwest, with the
difference in favor of the American legend; for the Satanic wriggler,
who walked into the Garden on his tail, went to deceive; whereas the
Plumed Serpent of New Mexican legend came to guard the pools and the
springs.

To be sure, there are 400,000 miles of motor roads in Europe; but isn't
it worth while to climb a few mountains in America by motor? That is
what you can do following the "Camino Real" from Texas to Wyoming,