In this month’s Canyon Commentary, author Scott Thybony travels to the Navajo country with a friend, who was a working cowboy for many years, to get his take on a spectacular rock art panel. It shows a band of Native Americans, probably Ute, riding horseback on a raid. Men and horses, it's the story Hollywood turned into the mythic West.
It begins with a false start and a couple of wrong turns which, come to think of it, is how rez road trips often begin. Crossing the Navajo country, we eventually reach the edge of an obscure canyon. Four of us are on our way to a rock art panel depicting horseman in full gallop across a cliff face. We pick our way down a washed-out trail to the dry streambed.
“I’d have to lead my mule down this,” says E.T. Collinsworth. While planning the trip I told him the dress code would be rez casual, so he showed up wearing a pair of Kaibab moccasins, jeans cinched with a hand-tooled belt, and a cowboy hat.
Soon we reach a sandstone wall flaring smoothly upward, and I recognize the pictograph site from my first trip here more than a dozen years before. We climb a cutbank and stand before the tumultuous scene. Horsemen surge up the cliff face with quirts outstretched behind them. The sweeping grain of rock sets the horses in motion as dozens of painted figures ride across the wind-laid sandstone.
Mounted on red, white, and yellow horses, many of the riders have eagle feathers stuck in their broad-brimmed hats and most use high-cantled Spanish saddles. Only the leader carries a weapon, a feathered lance held upright. The panel appears to depict a Ute raiding party escaping with the spoils. Two captive Navajo women ride a single horse, and the raiders drive a cow and longhorn steer before them.
“All of them ride with just the toes in the stirrups,” E.T. says. Having cowboyed throughout the American West and down into old Mexico, he notices these details. During his saddle tramping days, E.T. earned $50 a day and all the beans and tortillas he could eat. “Times between the riding and roping gigs,” he says, “it got down to one week of smooth peanut butter, the next week crunchy, and rolling out my bed wherever I was let in.” Later he hired on with the U.S. Forest Service as a mule packer. His job was to provide “long-eared logistical support” for crews fighting wildfires in wilderness areas. Now he works as a fireline EMT and helicopter manager during the wildfire season and in addition to writing poetry. E.T. has read his work at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and his habit of packing serious literature on roundups earned him the nickname, “The Professor.”
The first time I saw the panel of horsemen, William Eastlake’s novel, Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-six Horses, came to mind. “Up there on the rocks,” he wrote, “is a picture of an artist with twenty-six horses. But mine is someplace too. Everyone paints a portrait of himself someplace – every place – an unfinished picture.” On this cliff a Navajo has painted twenty-six horses, plus a handful. Men on horses, the old restless story.
Moving along the cliff face, I find a few handprints painted by Puebloan people centuries before any riders entered the canyon. And many years after a Navajo recorded the Ute raid, another came along, probably a young sheepherder learning to spell. Using mud he wrote the words, “Cows” and “Horse,” a stiff commentary on such a kinetic scene. How long does it take writing as a new form of expression to match the richness of painting? The force of words, I suspect, lies in opening a new dimension of experience instead of replicating the old.
Back at the truck we reverse course toward Canyon de Chelly where E.T. once taught the local guides how to pack a horse. He was surprised no one knew the basic techniques and asked why. A Navajo smiled and told him, “We have pickups.”
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
