"We arrived here in the rain; the pack train with the lunch miles behind and a waste of thistles to sit on, but it cleared up soon after and everything got settled. There are two very nice dogs along--Kobis and Terry. Terry belongs to Mr. S. and has his ears cut to the roots. I need not insist upon what I feel for both the dog and the man."
"This country is too wonderful for words. It is the place--the only way to live. I wish you could see it and I wish you loved it as I do. Won't you bring Tibi and the boys and stay here? Oh, Oh, there is nothing to say."
"I get up at 5 and see the sunrise and generally take the things in before everything gets astir. We have breakfast at 6, 6:30 and start our marches at 7. It was so cold one night I got up at 4:30 and made up the camp fire. My face is dark brick and painful but I think I had too much cold cream fry and I have stopped. The heat of the sun is great. Wednesday we crossed the 'Painted Desert' which was even more beautiful than the canion and camped at a kind of oasis on a little lake and were able to have a swim--though the desert was full of rattle snakes and the lake full of lizards."
"I walked off and got lost almost 4 hours. They had the whole troop out looking for me, and the trumpeters blowing for over an hour. There was no moon and I had decided to spend the night where I was by a cactus, when I saw a light in the dim distance and finally Captain McCoy found me. It gave me a vivid sense of how misleading the flatness of the desert can be. When Captain McCoy found me he could not see me ten feet away and I think it was chiefly the white dog he had with him that found me. I had had to take off both shoes and stockings about two hours before as the mud was so heavy I could not raise my feet and it was raining part of the time. Every place where the Indians live in their natural mud huts it is clean and inoffensive. As soon as there is a sign of a real house, or what you call civilization, there is dirt, smells, refuse heaps and flies--and of all the sights in my life, bar none, the washstand in Mr. Hubble's store, with wet newspaper, stagnant slop jar, dirty tooth brush, filthy basin, sloppy soap--all humming with flies--is the worst I have ever seen and the most stomach turning. There is some freak from Boston in a checkered suit and goggles who walks around with some ideas for Indian betterment. I think they have reached the highest pitch in the fact that they do not scalp him! I had coffee, oatmeal and bacon all out of one bowl. I drink water that looks like bean soup and never use a fork and a spoon at the same meal. Sand and cinders or charcoal flavor everything, and I have fished olives out of the sand where they had fallen and eaten them with perfect satisfaction. Materially this certainly is the way to live. Spiritually some shifting might improve it."