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The 1922 filming of "Call of The Canyon" on location in Oak Creek Canyon forever changed Northern Arizona.
Below is a verbatim excerpt from Zane Grey's writing that provides the earliest known description of what became US 89A. |
"Not until
reaching Winslow did she realize how near she was to her journey's
end and that she would arrive at Flagstaff after dark. She grew
conscious of nervousness. Suppose Flagstaff were like these other
queer little towns!
Not only once, but several times before the train
slowed down for her destination did Carley wish she had sent Glenn
word to meet her. And when, presently, she found herself standing out
in the dark, cold, windy night before a dim-lit railroad station she
more than regretted her decision to surprise Glenn. But that was too
late and she must make the best of her poor judgment.
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| This would have been the train depot that Carley arrived to in Flagstaff. |
Men were
passing to and fro on the platform, some of whom appeared to be very
dark of skin and eye, and were probably Mexicans. At length an
expressman approached Carley, soliciting patronage. He took her bags
and, depositing them in a wagon, he pointed up the wide street: "One
block up an' turn. Hotel Wetherford." Then he drove off. Carley
followed, carrying her small satchel.
A cold wind, driving the dust,
stung her face as she crossed the street to a high sidewalk that
extended along the block. There were lights in the stores and on the
corners, yet she seemed impressed by a dark, cold, windy bigness.
Many people, mostly men, were passing up and down, and there were
motor cars everywhere. No one paid any attention to her. Gaining the
corner of the block, she turned, and was relieved to see the hotel
sign.
As she entered the lobby a clicking of pool balls and the
discordant rasp of a phonograph assailed her ears. The expressman set
down her bags and left Carley standing there. The clerk or proprietor
was talking from behind his desk to several men, and there were
loungers in the lobby. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. No one
paid any attention to Carley until at length she stepped up to the
desk and interrupted the conversation there. "Is this a hotel?"
she queried, brusquely.
The shirt-sleeved individual leisurely turned
and replied, "Yes, ma'am." And Carley said: "No one
would recognize it by the courtesy shown. I have been standing here
waiting to register." With the same leisurely case and a cool,
laconic stare the clerk turned the book toward her. "Reckon
people round here ask for what they want." Carley made no
further comment. She assuredly recognized that what she had been
accustomed to could not be expected out here.
 |
When Carley hiked a few blocks to The Weatherford, Flagstaff was still a rough and tumble town.
Horses were still on equal footing with the early automobiles that soon changed the landscape forever. |
What she most wished to
do at the moment was to get close to the big open grate where a
cheery red-and-gold fire cracked. It was necessary, however, to
follow the clerk. He assigned her to a small drab room which
contained a bed, a bureau, and a stationary washstand with one
spigot. There was also a chair. While Carley removed her coat and hat
the clerk went downstairs for the rest of her luggage. Upon his
return Carley learned that a stage left the hotel for Oak Creek
Canyon at nine o'clock next morning. And this cheered her so much
that she faced the strange sense of loneliness and discomfort with
something of fortitude.
There was no heat in the room, and no hot
water. When Carley squeezed the spigot handle there burst forth a
torrent of water that spouted up out of the washbasin to deluge her.
It was colder than any ice water she had ever felt. It was piercingly
cold. Hard upon the surprise and shock Carley suffered a flash of
temper. But then the humor of it struck her and she had to laugh.
"Serves you right—you spoiled doll of luxury!" she
mocked. "This is out West. Shiver and wait on yourself!"
Never before had she undressed so swiftly nor felt grateful for thick
woollen blankets on a hard bed. Gradually she grew warm. The
blackness, too, seemed rather comforting. "I'm only twenty miles
from Glenn," she whispered. "How strange! I wonder will he
be glad." She felt a sweet, glowing assurance of that. Sleep did
not come readily. Excitement had laid hold of her nerves, and for a
long time she lay awake. After a while the chug of motor cars, the
click of pool balls, the murmur of low voices all ceased. Then she
heard a sound of wind outside, an intermittent, low moaning, new to
her ears, and somehow pleasant. Another sound greeted her—the
musical clanging of a clock that struck the quarters of the hour.
Some time late sleep claimed her.
Upon awakening she found she had
overslept, necessitating haste upon her part. As to that, the
temperature of the room did not admit of leisurely dressing. She had
no adequate name for the feeling of the water. And her fingers grew
so numb that she made what she considered a disgraceful matter of her
attire. Downstairs in the lobby another cheerful red fire burned in
the grate. How perfectly satisfying was an open fireplace! She thrust
her numb hands almost into the blaze, and simply shook with the
tingling pain that slowly warmed out of them.
The lobby was deserted.
A sign directed her to a dining room in the basement, where of the
ham and eggs and strong coffee she managed to partake a little. Then
she went upstairs into the lobby and out into the street. A cold,
piercing air seemed to blow right through her. Walking to the near
corner, she paused to look around. Down the main street flowed a
leisurely stream of pedestrians, horses, cars, extending between two
blocks of low buildings. Across from where she stood lay a vacant
lot, beyond which began a line of neat, oddly constructed houses,
evidently residences of the town.
And then lifting her gaze,
instinctively drawn by something obstructing the sky line, she was
suddenly struck with surprise and delight. "Oh! how perfectly
splendid!" she burst out. Two magnificent mountains loomed right
over her, sloping up with majestic sweep of green and black timber,
to a ragged tree-fringed snow area that swept up cleaner and whiter,
at last to lift pure glistening peaks, noble and sharp, and
sunrise-flushed against the blue. Carley had climbed Mont Blanc and
she had seen the Matterhorn, but they had never struck such amaze and
admiration from her as these twin peaks of her native land.
"What
mountains are those?" she asked a passer-by. "San Francisco
Peaks, ma'am," replied the man. "Why, they can't be over a
mile away!" she said. "Eighteen miles, ma'am," he
returned, with a grin. "Shore this Arizonie air is deceivin'."
"How strange," murmured Carley. "It's not that way in
the Adirondacks."
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This is a pretty good depiction of the buggy Carley rode to The West Fork.
A buggy of this sort could carry people and ample freight, too. |
She was still gazing upward when a man
approached her and said the stage for Oak Creek Canyon would soon be
ready to start, and he wanted to know if her baggage was ready.
Carley hurried back to her room to pack. She had expected the stage
would be a motor bus, or at least a large touring car, but it turned
out to be a two-seated vehicle drawn by a team of ragged horses.
The
driver was a little wizen-faced man of doubtful years, and he did not
appear obviously susceptible to the importance of his passenger.
There was considerable freight to be hauled, besides Carley's
luggage, but evidently she was the only passenger. "Reckon it's
goin' to be a bad day," said the driver. "These April days
high up on the desert are windy an' cold. Mebbe it'll snow, too. Them
clouds hangin' around the peaks ain't very promisin'. Now, miss,
haven't you a heavier coat or somethin'?" "No, I have not,"
replied Carley. "I'll have to stand it. Did you say this was
desert?" "I shore did. Wal, there's a hoss blanket under
the seat, an' you can have that," he replied, and, climbing to
the seat in front of Carley, he took up the reins and started the
horses off at a trot.
At the first turning Carley became specifically
acquainted with the driver's meaning of a bad day. A gust of wind,
raw and penetrating, laden with dust and stinging sand, swept full in
her face. It came so suddenly that she was scarcely quick enough to
close her eyes. It took considerable clumsy effort on her part with a
handkerchief, aided by relieving tears, to clear her sight again.
Thus uncomfortably Carley found herself launched on the last lap of
her journey.
All before her and alongside lay the squalid environs of
the town. Looked back at, with the peaks rising behind, it was not
unpicturesque. But the hard road with its sheets of flying dust, the
bleak railroad yards, the round pens she took for cattle corrals, and
the sordid debris littering the approach to a huge sawmill,—these
were offensive in Carley's sight. From a tall dome-like stack rose a
yellowish smoke that spread overhead, adding to the lowering aspect
of the sky.
Beyond the sawmill extended the open country sloping
somewhat roughly, and evidently once a forest, but now a hideous bare
slash, with ghastly burned stems of trees still standing, and myriads
of stumps attesting to denudation. The bleak road wound away to the
southwest, and from this direction came the gusty wind. It did not
blow regularly so that Carley could be on her guard. It lulled now
and then, permitting her to look about, and then suddenly again
whipping dust into her face.
The smell of the dust was as unpleasant
as the sting. It made her nostrils smart. It was penetrating, and a
little more of it would have been suffocating. And as a leaden gray
bank of broken clouds rolled up the wind grew stronger and the air
colder. Chilled before, Carley now became thoroughly cold. There
appeared to be no end to the devastated forest land, and the farther
she rode the more barren and sordid grew the landscape. Carley forgot
about the impressive mountains behind her.
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The movie exposed The Red Rocks
for all the world to see and envy. |
And as the ride wore into
hours, such was her discomfort and disillusion that she forgot about
Glenn Kilbourne. She did not reach the point of regretting her
adventure, but she grew mightily unhappy. Now and then she espied
dilapidated log cabins and surroundings even more squalid than the
ruined forest. What wretched abodes! Could it be possible that people
had lived in them? She imagined men had but hardly women and
children. Somewhere she had forgotten an idea that women and children
were extremely scarce in the West.
Straggling bits of forest—yellow
pines, the driver called the trees—began to encroach upon the
burned-over and arid barren land. To Carley these groves, by reason
of contrast and proof of what once was, only rendered the landscape
more forlorn and dreary. Why had these miles and miles of forest been
cut? By money grubbers, she supposed, the same as were devastating
the Adirondacks.
Presently, when the driver had to halt to repair or
adjust something wrong with the harness, Carley was grateful for a
respite from cold inaction. She got out and walked. Sleet began to
fall, and when she resumed her seat in the vehicle she asked the
driver for the blanket to cover her. The smell of this horse blanket
was less endurable than the cold. Carley huddled down into a state of
apathetic misery. Already she had enough of the West. But the sleet
storm passed, the clouds broke, the sun shone through, greatly
mitigating her discomfort.
By and by the road led into a section of
real forest, unspoiled in any degree. Carley saw large gray squirrels
with tufted ears and white bushy tails. Presently the driver pointed
out a flock of huge birds, which Carley, on second glance, recognized
as turkeys, only these were sleek and glossy, with flecks of bronze
and black and white, quite different from turkeys back East. "There
must be a farm near," said Carley, gazing about. "No,
ma'am. Them's wild turkeys," replied the driver, "an' shore
the best eatin' you ever had in your life."
A little while
afterwards, as they were emerging from the woodland into more denuded
country, he pointed out to Carley a herd of gray white-rumped animals
that she took to be sheep. "An' them's antelope," he said.
"Once this desert was overrun by antelope. Then they nearly
disappeared. An' now they're increasin' again." More barren
country, more bad weather, and especially an exceedingly rough road
reduced Carley to her former state of dejection. The jolting over
roots and rocks and ruts was worse than uncomfortable.
She had to
hold on to the seat to keep from being thrown out. The horses did not
appreciably change their gait for rough sections of the road. Then a
more severe jolt brought Carley's Carley's knee in violent contact
with an iron bolt on the forward seat, and it hurt her so acutely
that she had to bite her lips to keep from screaming. A smoother
stretch of road did not come any too soon for her. It led into forest
again.
And Carley soon became aware that they had at last left the
cut and burned-over district of timberland behind. A cold wind moaned
through the treetops and set the drops of water pattering down upon
her. It lashed her wet face. Carley closed her eyes and sagged in her
seat, mostly oblivious to the passing scenery. "The girls will
never believe this of me," she soliloquized. And indeed she was
amazed at herself.
Then thought of Glenn strengthened her. It did not
really matter what she suffered on the way to him. Only she was
disgusted at her lack of stamina, and her appalling sensitiveness to
discomfort. "Wal, hyar's Oak Creek Canyon," called the
driver. Carley, rousing out of her weary preoccupation, opened her
eyes to see that the driver had halted at a turn of the road, where
apparently it descended a fearful declivity.
The very forest-fringed
earth seemed to have opened into a deep abyss, ribbed by red rock
walls and choked by steep mats of green timber. The chasm was a
V-shaped split and so deep that looking downward sent at once a chill
and a shudder over Carley. At that point it appeared narrow and ended
in a box. In the other direction, it widened and deepened, and
stretched farther on between tremendous walls of red, and split its
winding floor of green with glimpses of a gleaming creek,
bowlder-strewn and ridged by white rapids.
A low mellow roar of
rushing waters floated up to Carley's ears. What a wild, lonely,
terrible place! Could Glenn possibly live down there in that ragged
rent in the earth? It frightened her—the sheer sudden plunge of it
from the heights. Far down the gorge a purple light shone on the
forested floor. And on the moment the sun burst through the clouds
and sent a golden blaze down into the depths, transforming them
incalculably.
The great cliffs turned gold, the creek changed to
glancing silver, the green of trees vividly freshened, and in the
clefts rays of sunlight burned into the blue shadows. Carley had
never gazed upon a scene like this. Hostile and prejudiced, she yet
felt wrung from her an acknowledgment of beauty and grandeur. But
wild, violent, savage! Not livable! This insulated rift in the crust
of the earth was a gigantic burrow for beasts, perhaps for outlawed
men—not for a civilized person—not for Glenn Kilbourne.
"Don't
be scart, ma'am," spoke up the driver. "It's safe if you're
careful. An' I've druv this manys the time." Carley's heartbeats
thumped at her side, rather denying her taunted assurance of
fearlessness. Then the rickety vehicle started down at an angle that
forced her to cling to her seat. Carley, clutching her
support, with abated breath and prickling skin, gazed in fascinated
suspense over the rim of the gorge.
Sometimes the wheels on that side
of the vehicle passed within a few inches of the edge. The brakes
squeaked, the wheels slid; and she could hear the scrape of the
iron-shod hoofs of the horses as they held back stiff legged,
obedient to the wary call of the driver. The first hundred yards of
that steep road cut out of the cliff appeared to be the worst. It
began to widen, with descents less precipitous. Tips of trees rose
level with her gaze, obstructing sight of the blue depths.
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Call Of The Canyon captured the
American imagination forever. |
Then brush
appeared on each side of the road. Gradually Carley's strain relaxed,
and also the muscular contraction by which she had braced herself in
the seat. The horses began to trot again. The wheels rattled. The
road wound around abrupt corners, and soon the green and red wall of
the opposite side of the canyon loomed close. Low roar of running
water rose to Carley's ears. When at length she looked out instead of
down she could see nothing but a mass of green foliage crossed by
tree trunks and branches of brown and gray.
Then the vehicle bowled
under dark cool shade, into a tunnel with mossy wet cliff on one
side, and close-standing trees on the other. "Reckon we're all
right now, onless we meet somebody comin' up," declared the
driver. Carley relaxed. She drew a deep breath of relief. She had her
first faint intimation that perhaps her extensive experience of motor
cars, express trains, transatlantic liners, and even a little of
airplanes, did not range over the whole of adventurous life. She was
likely to meet something, entirely new and striking out here in the
West.
The murmur of falling water sounded closer. Presently Carley
saw that the road turned at the notch in the canyon, and crossed a
clear swift stream. Here were huge mossy boulders, and red walls
covered by lichens, and the air appeared dim and moist, and full of
mellow, hollow roar. Beyond this crossing the road descended the west
side of the canyon, drawing away and higher from the creek. Huge
trees, the like of which Carley had never seen, began to stand
majestically up out of the gorge, dwarfing the maples and
white-spotted sycamores.
The driver called these great trees yellow
pines. At last the road led down from the steep slope to the floor of
the canyon. What from far above had appeared only a green
timber-choked cleft proved from close relation to be a wide winding
valley, tip and down, densely forested for the most part, yet having
open glades and bisected from wall to wall by the creek. Every
quarter of a mile or so the road crossed the stream; and at these
fords Carley again held on desperately and gazed out dubiously, for
the creek was deep, swift, and full of bowlders.
Neither driver nor
horses appeared to mind obstacles. Carley was splashed and jolted not
inconsiderably. They passed through groves of oak trees, from which
the creek manifestly derived its name; and under gleaming walls,
cold, wet, gloomy, and silent; and between lines of solemn
wide-spreading pines. Carley saw deep, still green pools eddying
under huge massed jumble of cliffs, and stretches of white water, and
then, high above the treetops, a wild line of canyon rim, cold
against the sky. She felt shut in from the world, lost in an
unscalable rut of the earth.
Again the sunlight had failed, and the
gray gloom of the canyon oppressed her. It struck Carley as singular
that she could not help being affected by mere weather, mere heights
and depths, mere rock walls and pine trees, and rushing water. For
really, what had these to do with her? These were only physical
things that she was passing. Nevertheless, although she resisted
sensation, she was more and more shot through and through with the
wildness and savageness savageness of this canyon.
A sharp turn of
the road to the right disclosed a slope down the creek, across which
showed orchards and fields, and a cottage nestling at the base of the
wall. The ford at this crossing gave Carley more concern than any
that had been passed, for there was greater volume and depth of
water. One of the horses slipped on the rocks, plunged up and on with
great splash. They crossed, however, without more mishap to Carley
than further acquaintance with this iciest of waters.
From this point
the driver turned back along the creek, passed between orchards and
fields, and drove along the base of the red wall to come suddenly
upon a large rustic house that had been hidden from Carley's sight.
It sat almost against the stone cliff, from which poured a white
foamy sheet of water. The house was built of slabs with the bark on,
and it had a lower and upper porch running all around, at least as
far as the cliff. Green growths from the rock wall overhung the upper
porch. A column of blue smoke curled lazily upward from a stone
chimney. On one of the porch posts hung a sign with rude lettering:
"Lolomi Lodge."
"Hey, Josh, did you fetch the flour?"
called a woman's voice from inside. "Hullo I Reckon I didn't
forgit nothin'," replied the man, as he got down. "An' say,
Mrs. Hutter, hyar's a young lady from Noo Yorrk." That latter
speech of the driver's brought Mrs. Hutter out on the porch. "Flo,
come here," she called to some one evidently near at hand. And
then she smilingly greeted Carley. "Get down an' come in, miss,"
she said. "I'm sure glad to see you."
Carley, being stiff
and cold, did not very gracefully disengage herself from the high
muddy wheel and step. When she mounted to the porch she saw that Mrs.
Hutter was a woman of middle age, rather stout, with strong face full
of fine wavy lines, and kind dark eyes. "I'm Miss Burch,"
said Carley. "You're the girl whose picture Glenn Kilbourne has
over his fireplace," declared the woman, heartily. "I'm
sure glad to meet you, an' my daughter Flo will be, too." That
about her picture pleased and warmed Carley. "Yes, I'm Glenn
Kilbourne's fiancee. I've come West to surprise him."
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| The graphic above is one of the early edition's dust jacket for the book. |
Zane Grey was a prolific writer of outlandish Western Fiction. It's ironic that Call Of The Canyon set the stage for Sedona-Red Rock Fame. Whatever else you might think of Zane Grey's novels, we will be forever indebted to him for describing the very first incarnation of what would become US 89A.
(Editor's Note: Zane Grey's books are ubiquitous and you can probably find "Call Of The Canyon" in any library or even yard sale, for that matter. We used the Kindle ebook for our excerpts above. We believe our excerpts are allowable under the "Fair Use" provisions of US Copyright law, if indeed the book is still protected by copyright.)
