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The annual Fourth of
July All-Indian Pow-Wow and Rodeo was a big event in the Flagstaff of my
youth. The parade in 1953 is a memory highlight. That year the city
borrowed my fathers’ new fire-engine red Pontiac Catalina Chieftain to
lead the parade, carrying the mayor and other dignitaries. My sister rode
a float, the Apache, Aztec and Hopi dancers were highlights as usual, but
it was also the first year for the Bill Williams Mountain Men.
I asked my friend, Arthur, who
Bill Williams was. Arthur was the straight-A guy in our group but didn’t
have an answer until that evening. We were sitting behind his house on
Mars Hill, where his dad was the director of Lowell Observatory. We
watched the campfires of the many thousands of Indians to the left, the
smoke drifting to blend with the dust of the carnival in the mid-ground
and the dances in the City Park Arena to the right. He told me what he had
found out about Old Bill, or Old Solitaire, as they sometimes called him,
the explorer, trapper and trader after whom the nearby town of Williams
was named.
William S. Williams was a
descendent of Celtic mountain men of Wales that immigrated to the
mountains of western North Carolina where he was born 1787. At 16, he
left home to live with the Osage for two-and-a-half decades before moving
farther west. He helped open the Santa Fe Trail, lived with the Zuni in
New Mexico, the Ute’s in Utah, and wandered extensively in Northern
Arizona. Old Solitaire was known as a kind, honest and brave man.
I chose
Old Bill as a metaphor for the exploration of the ‘high country’ of one’s
own consciousness, that high ground where ultimately no guide, teacher or
trail applies. It is done alone. |
