RED ROCK COUNTRY

[Music] found over America's most awinspiring of the Colorado vast and in its grandeur with the history of vanished ages written on its towering walls. Gateway to the Grand Canyon for those who come by air is Flagstaff. Nestled tight against the towering San Francisco Peaks, sight of the Arizona Snowball in a forested area dotted with lakes and breathtaking scenery. [Music] [Music] And it was in Flagstaff that Blessing and I started a trip which was to take us back across many centuries where we would witness strange rights performed before the dawn of history and handed down through generations by a people who still believe in and practice those rights. It is at the famous allindian pow-wow held each year in Flagstaff that you come closest to those ancient mysteries or perhaps in the Museum of Northern Arizona where the fascinating history of a thousand years is here to thrill you. Flagstaff is a beautiful modern town of more than 12,000 residents. Yet here you sense the mingling of the culture of today with those mysterious civilizations many centuries lost. It is also the home of Arizona State College. This was my school and our first afternoon in Flagstaff, I spent showing blessing scenes on the beautiful campus I knew so well. [Applause] Early next morning, we set out on a sightseeing trip which started with the world famous Lel Observatory through whose telescope astronomes discovered the planet Pluto and the observatory is still one of the leading scientific posts in its field. Then a pleasant drive through the forest of Ponderosa Pine brought us to Walnut Canyon, a deep gash in the Great Plain, where centuries ago people of the Stone Age had built their homes in caves weathered into the 400 ft high limestone cliffs. For more than a hundred years, these great forests have been a source of lumber for our civilization. And here and there, a picturesque sawmill with its pond full of floating giants brings you back to the present from the fancful dreaming about ancient peoples. Always fascinating, lumber and the west seem to go hand in hand. It's a major industry in the middle of a great vacation land. And then a short drive brought us to one of the many national monuments in the Flagstaff area, Sunset Crater, a massive thousand ft high volcanic cinder cone where just 900 years ago the Earth opened and spouted flame and smoke and lava. The last active crater in a great volcanic field. Some 3,000 square miles in size, the Hopi Indians believe the crater to be the home of a friendly race of spirits called Kana Akachinas, probably because of its fiery origin. Sunset Crater is often compared to Arizona's great meteor crater, where ages ago a giant meteor splattered into the Earth. Though they were formed differently, both of these weird sites testify to the power and fury of nature. Our trip to include the famous Indian pawo, of course, a week. Once a year, the past takes over in Flagstaff when Indians from all over the West come together for a great encampment and to show their dances and customs to the pale faces who come from all over the world. It was the old west all over again. Except that in the old days that many Indians near a wagon train station. The tribes meet July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of each year, and the city is transformed into a blaze of color and ceremony, and the tomtoms are heard again in the Arizona mountains. [Applause] But colorful and exciting as the parade through town is, the real pageantry is to be seen at the encampment. As when the Taos Indians thrill you with their ancient war dance, the eagle dance. [Music] Blessing made friends with some of the Navajo men who told her of their medicine dance, the Ybechai, the oldest Indian dance in the memory of man. Performed as a ritual to cure a desperately ill member of the tribe with haunting music sung exactly as it was when the Romans claimed to rule the world. A ritual with its origins lost in time. Woo! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! [Applause] [Applause] Possibly the most impressive and colorful of all was the haunting buffalo dance of the Hopi Indians for which the young dancers are trained for months. Incidentally, this dance had not been photographed since 1913. when the Hopi Chiefs had banned cameras from the reservation. But so strong has grown the bond between the Chiefs and the people of Flagstaff across the past few years that when the men of Flagstaff asked it, the hopes agreed to dance for our camera. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. [Music] [Music] Oh, [Music] this is a religious ceremony with the hopes. A prayer. [Music] [Music] [Music] We got heat. Early next morning, we started the next part of our trip through beautiful Oak Creek Canyon on our way to Prescuit. Oak Creek Canyon is known by every tourist for its unusual scenery and for its fishing, too, in a crystal clearar mountain stream. The road winds along the canyon floor for miles past fantastic rocks and cliffs, and then suddenly it spills across the high arch of a bridge into the red rock country. Here the wind and rain with giant hands have carved weirdly beautiful figures from great blocks of colored rock. And here man has built the most beautiful town in America. Sedona claims that title because of the scenery that surrounds it. Such spectacular beauty that countless motion pictures are filmed here. And it's easy to see why. We lunched in Sedona and then sent our Plymouth skimming over the modern highway on down the valley through everchanging Scenes of breathtaking beauty. And then a sign caught our eye that meant still another thrill. And a short side road brought us to Montazuma Castle, one of the first American apartment houses. How many centuries have passed since those early Americans laboriously built this massive structure, carrying each rock up the face of the cliff to that gigantic cave. [Music] When someone gave Blessing a booklet about Montazuma, well, we had to see that, too. And it was only just a short drive down the road. And when we had climbed to the edge of the pit, we found a gigantic spring around which a village had been built a thousand years before by a community of farmers. From this great hole, water flows at a thousand gallons a minute, a million and a half gallons a day, and it is used today for irrigation as it was by those earliest farmers. As a matter of fact, the ancient tribes of Indians who settled in this great valley called the Verde Valley, which in Spanish means green valley, were all mostly farmers, peaceful folk who built their homes in cliffs or on high hilltops for protection from other warlike tribes. Tusigoot monument is one of those hilltop apartment houses which showed amazing architectural development when you consider that the builders were prehistoric stone age men. Here were the ruins of an ancient pblo that had contained over a 100 rooms. And here where we stood and looked across the now peaceful valley, city dwellers had stood and looked at this same view hundreds of years before Columbus discovered America. But the Indians aren't the only ones who left ruins behind them in Arizona. This is Jerome, once one of the richest mining towns in the West. But today, well, Jerome tells her own story. And when blessing discovered the bank, it reminded me that Jerome was maimed for the New York financier who invested the money to build the town and whose grandson became prime minister of England, Winston Churchill. The town clung precariously to a steep hill, so steep its jail has slid 225 ft downhill in the last few years. Yet I remember Jerome as a busy town where I had come as a boy to play high school basketball. Today the streets are almost deserted. The open pit mine empty and still a famous landmark of the Old West sleeping now forever. Continuing on toward Prescat, we soon were driving through granite dells, a fantastic pile of jumbled granite boulders, and then we turned in to visit the old swimming hole of my younger days, a beautiful small lagoon that has been a favorite recreation spot for half a century. Then at last we approached Prescat, nestled in a wooded valley a mile high in the pines. A valley I knew well as a boy, for this was the town I grew up in. A town of wide streets, friendly people, and a tangy smell of the pines in the mountain air that made us glad to reach our hotel in anticipation of a restful night's sleep. [Music] time in Prescat, the world's oldest regularly held rodeo. In fact, Prescat's wild and woolly frontier days, and the cowboys and the flags were everywhere. The smoke eye cachas were reminders of the smoke eye ceremonials staged in August each year by the businessmen of Prescat painted and garved as Indians to perpetuate the dances of the Indian tribes and whose yearround activities center in this intriguing museum. And in the old governor's mansion, also a museum, we were reminded that Prescuit was the first capital of territorial Arizona. And the rude log houses are in sharp contrast to the modern beauty of the country club and the many beautiful homes that you see everywhere in Presc. [Applause] Our day at the rodeo started early with the blare of bands and the parade through the streets to the fairgrounds. [Music] and Blessing and I joined the crowds of course with a Mexican taco for refreshment instead of a hot dog. [Music] Prescott's Frontier Days is one of the great festivals of the American West and the western color here is authentic. [Music] Of [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] course, Davy Crockett was bound to be on hand. Wasn't he king of the Wild Frontier? [Music] and the costumes are sometimes dazzling as well as authentic. With flags flying and the blare of the bands setting your pulse tingling, the parade passes by and it's time to fall in behind and follow it to the big show. Rodeo, the most American of all sporting events. And the Prescuit Frontier Days gets the best contestants in the world. This flag bearer was a riding contestant to the very first Prescuit Rodeo 68 years ago, and he's still going strong. Contestants line up for opening ceremonies, and everybody's on edge waiting for the first signal. Well, most everybody. And then the state's number one writer is introduced. Honorable Ernest W. McFarland, Governor of Arizona. All Arizona governors have to know how to ride or they'd never get elected. The governor looks toward the shoots and the rodeo is underway. You can't show me a harder way to make a living. [Music] If that right hand touches the horse or anything, they're disqualified. Of course, they can touch the ground with it if they want to. There's nothing like a rodeo if you're a spectator. Next event is the calf roping and this is regular range work performed by the cowboys every day during roundup time. [Music] [Applause] [Music] That's what's known as coming to the end of your rope the hard way. These contestants are real cow hands. They know what they're doing and they have to. Competition runs high. The Prescat Rodeo is a great prestige contest, not to mention the valuable prizes the winners take home. These fellows seem unconcerned, but how can they be with a steer wrestling coming up somehow? This looks like the same sort of pastime as Russian roulette, and it is a pastime. This is one part of the rodeo that is all show, not a part of everyday working life on a cattle ranch. The object is to catch the steer on the run with your bare hands. Stop him and then throw him onto his side with all four feet in the air. Next, a couple of especially wild prompts and one rider stays on. The judges announce the feature of the day. Riding the wild Brahma bulls. This is what separates the men from the boys or the bulls. Those clowns aren't in there just for comic relief, either. They divert the attention of the infuriated bull from riders who can't quite stay aboard. [Applause] Brahma bull riding is unquestionably the respect but pity the poor rider. [Music] Pity the poor Finn. Yes, here at the Prescuit Frontier Days, Blessing and I found an exciting climax to our trip from Flagstaff through the incomparable red rock country to the cowboy capital of the world. A trip that took us through but a small part of the great holiday land of the Grand Canyon State, Arizona. [Music]