SOURCE: "Frank Waters," in A Literary History of the American West, Texas Christian University Press, 1987, pp. 935-57.

[An American educator, Adams is the founder of the Frank Waters Society and the editor of the series "Studies in Frank Waters." Acquainted with Waters since 1971, he coedited Waters's 1982 edition of W. Y. Evans-Wentz's Cuchama and Sacred Mountains and was the editor of Frank Waters: A Retrospective Anthology (1984). In the following essay, he provides an overview of Waters's literary career.]

… a primary concern of all peoples everywhere is their relationship to their land. This has been the basic source of conflict between the White and Red races on this continent…. This theme of their conflicting relationships to their earth has provided something of a thematic continuity in all my books, novels and nonfiction. [Frank Waters, "The Western Novel: A Symposium," South Dakota Review (Autumn 1964)]

Frank Waters was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on July 25, 1902. His mother was descended from an aristocratic southern family; his father was part Indian. A major theme in his work, the reconciliation of dualities, resulted, in all probability, from the early necessity of reconciling the opposing forces inherent in his own heritage. The family tradition of mining—the "family folly," he calls it—directed that young Waters enter Colorado College as an engineering student. But after three years, he left formal education, supporting himself with a series of jobs ranging from ditch-digging in the Wyoming oil fields to being traffic chief and engineer for the Southern California Telephone Company.

In 1925, while working on the Mexican border, Waters wrote his first book, which he subsequently referred to as "a stumbling, bumbling, immature, first attempt." Originally titled The Lizard Woman and published as Fever Pitch, this novel, as Thomas Lyon has pointed out [in his Frank Waters, 1973], "… foreshadows, in embryo, important preoccupations of the later novels." The primary theme of all Waters's work, the relationship between people and place, is at the heart of Fever Pitch, functioning both to determine the story line and to establish the basis for characterization. Told Conrad-fashion by Eric Dane to a group of men lounging on the porch of a bordertown cabaret, it is a story of the physiological, psychological, and spiritual effect of one of the world's most desolate environments on Lee Marston, a young American engineer. He has been asked by Arvilla, a mestizo bar-girl, to accompany her deep into the desert of Baja California to assay what is hoped to be a huge deposit of gold. Another American, Jim Horne, guards the strike while awaiting their arrival. After terrible hardships, Arvilla and Marston reach the cursed, wasteland heart, a desert valley enclosed by a circular wall of mountains around whose rim lies coiled the semblance of a serpentine body called the Lizard Woman by the local Indians. The story recounts the effect of this hostile place upon the characters. Quite readable in its own right and highly significant for its relationship to the later works, this novel has been reissued (1983) under its original title.

In 1927, while working on the Mexican border, Waters completed his first draft of The Yogi of Cockroach Court, perhaps his most misunderstood book. Rewritten in 1937 and again in 1945, it was first published in 1947—and was a total failure. The British agent to whom it was offered refused to present it to "any reputable publisher in England" because of its "salacious" nature. There was perhaps a legitimate reason for that initial reaction, for nowhere in his fiction does Waters deal as nakedly with the dualities of human nature as he does in Yogi. But despite the presence of an endnote calling attention to his source for the yogic doctrines in the book, most readers, until its successful reissue in 1972, seem to have focused on the physical action of the lesser characters in the novel, missing the point of the title character—and of the whole book.

In this story, the fascination with place continues. Here, in a typical Mexican-American bordertown, Barby, a young half-breed orphan, is taken in by an old Chinese shopkeeper, Tai Ling, whose primary effort in life is to achieve liberation through his yogic practices. Barby falls in love with Guadalupe, a mixed-breed dancer in one of the local cantinas. The interaction of these two characters is observed by the philosophical Tai Ling on the one hand and on the other by Guadalupe's American friend, Sal, a "percentage girl." The backgrounds of the characters, combined with the bordertown environment which includes open prostitution, gambling, and the sale of drugs, result in the destruction of them all, in one way or another. In spite of their pitiful hopes and ambitions, life for all of them is a downhill slide.

In later Frank Waters novels, a benevolent spirit of place provides the constant with which the characters can attune themselves, thus not only making possible a harmonious relationship with their environment but also resolving the conflicting dualities of their nature. But here, the bordertown's negative spirit of place prevents such attunement and actually militates against it. The point of the book, however, lies not in the degeneration of Barby, Guadalupe, and Sal, but in Tai Ling's failure, until the very end, to realize the impossibility of separating the principles that guide life from life itself. For while Barby, Guadalupe, and Sal lack the strength and discipline which might have saved them, Tai Ling, who possesses the requisite strength and discipline, fails to see that his personal salvation cannot be effected without recognition of the common humanity which occupies even the negative Cockroach Court—that is, without a relationship with his environment.

In 1932 Waters wrote The Wild Earth's Nobility, the first volume of his Colorado trilogy. The trilogy, rewritten in 1971 as the one-volume Pike's Peak, is the fictionalized story of Waters's grandfather, who came to Colorado in 1872 and made a fortune in contracting and building; then lost it through a series of bad mining ventures. More significantly, however, it is the story of grandfather Joseph Rogier versus Pike's Peak, their conflict taking place on two levels: "Rogier's practical mining ventures to reach its [Pike's Peak's] gold deposits and his gradual projection of the physical peak into a symbol of his own unconscious" [as Waters stated during a 1978 reading from the novel]. It is worth noting that in this third novel, place has not yet become beneficent: in Fever Pitch place is aggressively hostile; in Yogi it is negative; and in The Wild Earth's Nobility it becomes the focus of Joseph Rogier's projected psychic search. This latter work tells of a first-comer to a strange and alien land and of his inability to come to terms with it. Unlike the final Pike's Peak, the first version of the story concluded with the sixty-year-old Rogier, financially ruined, still contemplating the Peak.

Between 1934 and 1938, Waters wrote the first drafts of Tombstone Travesty, finally published in 1960 as The Earp Brothers of Tombstone. While this work is significant as exposé, history, and biography, another value lies in the development of a theme to be fully expressed several years later in The Colorado: the failure of all of the conquering European-Americans to make a satisfactory adjustment to the land itself, to the spirit of that land. The Earp Brothers of Tombstone is not just an exposé of a band of itinerant card sharks, gunmen, saloon-keepers, and con men, but an indictment of a whole culture based on exploitation, materialism, and violence. Waters suggests convincingly that the psychic insecurities caused by the conqueror's inability to come to grips with the physical and psychical heartland of the new continent were projected outward in huge acts of destruction against the animals, the native peoples, and even the land itself.

The towering mountain ranges bulked up inside them. The mysterious rivers ran in their blood. The empty deserts ate into them. And finally loneliness engulfed them, even more vacuous than the spaces between the stars above. And as the fear and tension kept mounting within them, they struck out at everything,… with a blind compulsion to dominate and destroy.

Against this background, Waters shows us, through the reminiscences of "Aunt Allie," Virgil Earp's widow, a true portrait of the western gunman:

Appearance and action, both added up to the fear of his fellowmen. The fear of the immeasurable, inimical landscape dwarfing him to an infinitesimal speck, and its haunting timelessness, which over-emphasized the brief and dangerous span of his own life. And the fear of his own fears. A man forever self-conscious, tense and inhibited, he epitomizes more than any other the compulsion of his time and place.

And, Waters suggests, it is our own unconscious understanding of such a man that has caused us to make of him a cultural hero—to "sanctify his role." He suggests that our failure to understand consciously, or even want to understand, this elevation of our own insecurities has resulted in the falsification of past history. He reminds us that the Earp brothers were real people and that "… all they were and did is a measure of the forces that made them. It is this deeper truth, rather than the fictitious legend grown up around them, that belongs eventually to the great American Myth."

In Midas of the Rockies (1936), the life of Winfield Scott Stratton provided Waters with the material with which to develop, from a different point of view, his major theme of the effect of land on psyche. It also provided the opportunity for the development of one of his primary skills—the ability to locate his characters clearly in time and space.

With painstaking scholarship and an ability to handle immense physical detail, Waters depicts the society of the time and a solitary prospector outside of that society, "who for seventeen years had plodded the Rockies with his burro." Waters also shows that prospector after his great discovery, when he has become "mining king, multimillionaire, man of affairs, financier, philanthropist, eccentric, neurotic, hermit." And with the same compassion he had shown earlier toward Tai Ling in The Yogi of Cockroach Court, he also reveals Stratton as a human being whose wealth isolated him from human interaction and communion and whose joy in the search had terminated with discovery—with what Waters calls "… his one moment of utter disillusionment, and his one great moment of fulfillment."

The success of this biography is attested by its publication history: 1937, 1949, and 1972. In an introduction for the 1972 edition, Waters himself ponders its success, modestly suggesting,

Perhaps … it is the story itself that supersedes the manner in which it is told. For it is more than a regional history and the tale of a carpenter who made good in his own home town. It is at once the story of a mountain, a mine, and a man. A story so fabulously impossible and yet so excruciatingly true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people who could have created it.

At the same time that Waters was writing Midas of the Rockies, he was working on Below Grass Roots—the second volume of the Colorado trilogy. Written at this time, it is no wonder that Below Grass Roots reveals what Lyon has called "the documentary urge." But the wealth of detail in this book is more tightly structured than in the preceding novel of the trilogy, and there is an additional depth and richness in the development of its characters.

While in Midas Waters deals with a man pretty much outside of his surrounding society, in Below Grass Roots his characters are very much products of their time and place, permitting the narrative integration of the historical detail. Also, as W. S. Stratton grows increasingly eccentric, so does the fictional grandfather Rogier, who begins to share several of Stratton's personality traits.

Below Grass Roots depicts Rogier's disintegrating personality and its effect upon the second generation of this family of pioneers. We see Rogier's obsession causing the death of his son-in-law, and his daughter Ona sinking into silent resignation. We also see the boy March growing up amidst these tensions and anxieties. At the end of this volume, Rogier, after a stroke, is a helpless invalid, and we understand that March will have to resolve for himself the family paradoxes he has inherited.

The final volume of the trilogy, The Dust Within the Rock (1940), is undoubtedly the closest thing to an autobiography that Frank Waters will ever write. While not as technically successful as the preceding volume, and now long out of print, it contains a wealth of information about the childhood, adolescence, and young manhood of the author. We see young March in grade school, high school, and in college. We see him selling papers as a Fred Harvey boy at the train depot. We see the young engineering student rebelling against sterile academic confines and fleeing to the Wyoming oil fields, to California, and to the primitive interior of Mexico. But most of all we see young Frank Waters attempting to resolve the multitude of conflicts within him. In Mexico, among the most primitive Native Americans, and ironically enough operating a silver mine, March achieves the long-sought-after synthesis: "I am them both, indivisible and intermingled, adobe and granite." The fusion of adobe (his father's people) and granite (his grandfather's people) is also a fusion of all apparently disparate elements within his psyche, and young March sets forth "Like a religious exile granted the divine concession of a world to be built at his will…."

Soon after completing The Dust Within the Rock, Waters began his most successful work thus far—People of the Valley. In it, he achieved for the first time the story of a character in total harmony with her environment. It is the story of a woman whose inner growth and closeness to her land elevate her above her people and, more significantly, above her own past selves.

People of the Valley is the story of Maria, who lives ninety years in the isolated Mora Valley of New Mexico. She is the orphaned daughter of an Indian mother and a (probably) Mexican "stranger"; she has been raised by two old goatherds, who are themselves killed in a flood when she is still a child. Maria grows up wild and free, surviving by instinct and her wits. She bears a succession of children to a succession of men, raising them with the same survivalist techniques. She is simply a natural product of the land. Her reputation as a curandera and seer grows: the people consult her for both her knowledge of folk medicine and her mystical insights. Near the end of her life, the people are faced with the erection of a flood-control dam, which will require them to give up their land, and they come to Maria.

At first she opposes the dam: "This is the meaning of any dam, that it would obstruct the free flow of faith which renews and refreshes life and gives it its only meaning." But she grows to realize that ages, like all life—people, plants, animals, and mountains—grow, mature, then give way to new life. She sees that to oppose the dam would be equivalent to building one—to obstructing the inevitable flow. She is able to say,

No man can belong to a time until it has also a faith he can belong to. That is what people do not like about this dam. It has no faith behind it to give it meaning. And so you must accept your own time which has a faith until the new time has also given rise to a faith, and you are ready for it.

She finds a temporary solution by securing her people new land in a higher, more remote valley. The story is thus one of the corrupting advance of Anglo technology and also of Maria's spiritual growth.

In this work we see some of Waters's most serious and mature thought. It is significant that this book was originally entitled The Dam. John Farrar (of Farrar and Rinehart) firmly rejected the title, perhaps seeing that Waters had achieved here more than he had attempted; for the story does rise above the portrait of Maria and the somewhat abstract concept of dams to become a revelation both of the plight of people everywhere when one age begins to supersede another and also of all peoples' need for a maturation of consciousness. We are told "Maria believed in fulfillment instead of progress" and that "fulfillment is individual evolution." And we come to understand that Maria saves her people not so much by securing them land (as important as that is) as by securing them time—time to learn to live in the inevitable new age. More importantly, we understand that their salvation is the result of Maria's own personal growth, her evolution of consciousness. We see here the first appearance of a major theme that comes to full fruition many years later in Mexico Mystique, the concept of the evolution of human consciousness and the need for that evolution within each individual. Maria herself accomplishes that evolution and illustrates both the necessity and the possibility of such growth in all people.

But it is in The Man Who Killed the Deer, written in the following year, that Waters is fully able to combine his two major themes of people-land relationship and resolution of conflicting dualities with his ability to handle historical detail. Maria, constantly in tune with her land, had few, if any, internal conflicts. But the central character of Deer, Martiniano, is a young Indian boy who has been forced to leave his pueblo to attend the government "away school." There he has been taught a trade, carpentry. He has also been taught white values and thought processes. He is returned to the pueblo, where he finds himself in constant trouble with the tribal leaders. At the pueblo and in the nearby town, there is little demand for his carpentry skills, and it becomes necessary for him to farm his father's land. Thus, while he is economically dependent upon the land and upon the Indian way of life, he is psychologically estranged from them both. Needing meat for himself and his wife, he shoots a deer. Because he has killed the deer out of season, he has broken the white man's law; because he has failed to ask the deer's permission and to perform the requisite ritual after killing it, he has broken the Indians'. As his troubles increase, Martiniano finds in the deer a kind of psychological scapegoat, onto which he can project all of his problems.

Combined with this story of Martiniano's internal conflicts is the historically accurate but fictionalized account of the Taos Pueblo's attempt to secure the return of their sacred Blue Lake, which had been "confiscated" by the government. For over seven centuries, the Indians had been making pilgrimages to this lake, which they believe to be the point of origin of their people. Their right to the land had been confirmed in 1551 by King Charles of Spain; in 1687 by the Royal Council of the Indies; in 1821 by Mexico, upon gaining her independence from Spain; and in 1848 by the United States, after acquiring the New Mexico area. In 1906, a presidential proclamation had converted Blue Lake and the surrounding area into a National Forest.

The trial of Martiniano by the white authorities becomes the springboard for the tribe's renewed demands for settlement of their land claims. A more significant point of contact of the two stories lies in Martiniano's failure to understand the Indians' closeness to the land, their attunement to total environment. At the heart of his difficulties with the tribal elders is his sense of individuality, which the elders see as his insistence on the illusion of separateness.

Thus Martiniano inadvertently becomes the mechanism for the eventual return of the sacred lake, and at the same time he learns to understand "the inseparableness and mutuality of all seemingly discrete matters" [Lyon]. The process of this growth is slow and painful. Yet the story is simply and beautifully told as Waters leads both his character and his reader to an understanding of Martiniano's complex problems and to an understanding of what is needed for their resolution. In this work Waters successfully combines his mysticism with the historical accuracy of real people, real time, and real place.

The Man Who Killed the Deer was begun in 1940 and finished in 1941. Also in 1941, Waters wrote his first "commercial" book, River Lady. With Houston Branch, who provided the story idea and the necessary historical research, Waters concocted for Hollywood a tale that would make a typical class B movie. It is a blood-and-thunder story of the upper Mississippi mill towns of the late nineteenth century; and while it is of little literary value, it is of scholarly interest in that it shows Waters's flexibility when writing fiction under the restrictions of both the commercial market and Hollywood demands. The central characters were completely out of Waters's control, having been predetermined by the stars chosen to perform the roles. The setting was one with which he was not familiar. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this book is that it was written at all. Of interest is the fact that it was not a total disaster, for while it has little to recommend it as serious literature, it does entertain, if regarded as a summer afternoon's escape reading. Conspicuously absent are any traces of philosophy or mysticism—or of any deep thought. But there is a wealth of Branch's carefully researched historical detail and some good writing. Parts of the subplots (which were under Waters's control), especially those dealing with the growing up of a brother and sister, are well done and are reminiscent of the family interaction in Below Grass Roots and The Dust Within the Rock. However, one feels that while this book was being written, Waters's heart was in the New Mexico pueblo with Martiniano, and perhaps therein lies the book's greatest value. In the way that Midas of the Rockies seems to have functioned as a control for Below Grass Roots, which is the most tightly structured and best written of the Colorado trilogy, so perhaps River Lady may have functioned as a similar control for The Man Who Killed the Deer.

Later in 1941, Waters began The Colorado. Part of the Rivers of America series, it is an examination of the history of the people of the great Colorado Pyramid. In this major work, Waters develops his examination of the relationship between the land and its inhabitants on a grand scale. Here a basic tenet is that the life in the total environment of western America cannot be fully perceived by the usual Western-European rationalistic outlook. Rather, a mystical approach—perception through intuitive awareness—permits a person to experience an attunement that results in personal psychological adjustment. He then applies this concept to the American people: to the Native Americans, whom he suggests had this "apperception" (which Lyon [in "The Works of Frank Waters," a taped lecture for Cassette Curriculum, 1974] calls "perception squared"), and to the waves of white settlers, who did not. The Indian, psychologically in tune with his perceived environment, is patient, intuitive, introvertive, and respectful of the land. The white is quick, eager, extrovertive, rationalistic, and power-oriented. Waters depicts the conflict between the two as something far deeper than military-political. Rather, it is a psychological conflict deep within the character of both. While the conquering whites are depicted as just that—conquerors of people, rivers, land itself—Waters is careful not to depict the Indian as noble savage. Rather, linking these ideas with his belief in the evolution of consciousness, he suggests that overemphasis on either point of view is ultimately destructive, and that what is needed—what is possible—is a synthesis of the apparently opposing points of view into a wholeness in both individual and mankind. (It is significant that Waters wrote most of this work during World War II when he held a government job in Washington, D.C.)

These ideas are developed further in Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism (1947) in which Waters further suggests that the problem is not simply within white orientation or Indian orientation but that the conflicting dualities are present in each individual, in any time or place. The dichotomies are part of human nature, and are part of outer nature as well. Waters suggests that the Pueblo and Navaho Indians have long recognized these conflicting forces which make up the universe and human nature; and recognizing as well the need for internal harmony and harmony with one's environment, they have, for centuries, used ritual to portray the cosmic dualities and to dramatize their equilibrium. Thus the focus of these ceremonies is on universal harmony and on psychic wholeness. In the closing sections of Masked Gods, "Crucible of Conflict," Waters postulates that the Indians have intuitively perceived through their necessary closeness to the forces of nature a universe greatly similar to that being discovered by modern science. He cites the evidence of contemporary atomic physics, biology, and astronomy that describes a universe of interdependence, of mutuality—a "process reality." This is the universe that has been dramatized in dance by the Navahos and Pueblos for centuries. That the Indian view is being approached by modern science Waters sees as hopeful evidence of mankind's achieving the synthesis necessary for its survival and of an evolution of human consciousness already begun.

During the same period that Waters was working on Masked Gods, he wrote Diamond Head, the second of his two Hollywood commercial works, with Houston Branch. Written with most of the methods used in the construction of River Lady, Diamond Head is superior to the earlier attempt in at least one respect: the exciting story line is based on historical fact. During the Civil War, the South hoped to paralyze northern industry by destroying its sources of oil—its whaling fleet. Branch apparently saw the opportunities for an exciting romance of the high seas combined with the glamour of the ante-bellum South; Waters had a freer hand in the creation of his characters, since the actors were not predetermined this time, and in the intricacies of a complex plot and subplots. The result is a well-researched historical romance (typical of the kind then popular in the lending libraries), which was published in British and French editions, as well as American. It suffers from what Lyon has called a "shying away from depth." It is, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyable as light reading, and is of interest to the Frank Waters student because of Waters's treatment of such diverse places as the South Sea Islands and the Arctic seas.

Waters came to grips with a truly serious challenge in the writing of fiction in 1956 when he began work on The Woman at Otowi Crossing and attempted to dramatize as fiction the themes and ideas that had been maturing in The Colorado and Masked Gods. Based on the life of Edith Warner, who ran a tearoom at Otowi Crossing, just below Los Alamos, The Woman at Otowi Crossing becomes the story of Helen Chalmers, who, in tune with her adopted environment and nearby Indian pueblo, was also a close friend of the first atomic scientists. She herself forms a kind of bridge between the two orientations and value systems. On the one hand, Helen Chalmers understands the passive, intuitive, docile nature of the Indians; yet she herself is a product of, and also understands, the power-oriented, aggressive, rational white world.

Early in the novel, a combination of adverse circumstances, "fear, worry, guilt, dread, shame, financial failure" and the discovery that she is dying of cancer, cause a kind of "psychic implosion" very much like the mystical moment of enlightenment. A physicist friend later describes it as if "… her essential inner self,… vaporized and transformed into new elements from its old atomic structure, rose slowly in a new spiritual entity to a new height of comprehension." In the process of dying, Helen learns how to live. She becomes increasingly perceptive, receptive, sensitive. She is not a great mystic, simply "one who knows," a person of insight into the unity and harmony of all life. In terms of Waters's previous works, Helen has become "Indianized" in her ability to perceive universal relationships and mutualities. Thus, the basic assumption of The Woman at Otowi Crossing is drawn from the conclusion of Masked Gods.

Since Helen's initial psychic experience occurs early in the novel, most of the story consists of her day-to-day living, running her tearoom with the help of her Indian friend Facundo, against the background of the birth of the atomic age. Through the comprehension of her physicist friends, Waters suggests that their scientific theorizing may also eventually lead them to similar states of heightened self-awareness.

This attempt to portray mystical enlightenment in fiction is successful, one critic [Lyon] calling it "a tour de force in fusion." Waters creates an Anglo woman who convincingly demonstrates, as did Maria in People of the Valley, that evolution of consciousness through the synthesis of conflicts is possible.

Leon Gaspard, begun in 1958, is Waters's one sustained effort at art criticism. It is also an anecdotal biography of his friend, the great Russian painter, who settled in Taos in 1918. Even in this work, the usual Frank Waters themes emerge, for Gaspard's art becomes a kind of metaphor for Waters's perception of conflicting dualities—this time as synthesized on canvas. Gaspard was familiar with the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppes, as well as with the Indians of the American Southwest, and his work reflects his closeness to the earth and to the primitive peoples. While Gaspard is not a "primitive" in the art historian's usual sense of that word, he captures the color, form, and subject matter—the visual wildness—of the world of those who live close to the land, and Waters is quick to perceive the harmonic blending of colors and forms that at first glance appear to clash. He praises Gaspard for capturing a now-extinct world of barbaric color, form, and content, the world of the wild as opposed to its domestic counterpart.

In 1959, Waters began his Book of the Hopi, living much of the next three years on the Hopi Indian Reservation. His purpose was to record not only the traditional religious beliefs and their accompanying rituals, but also [as he wrote in Pumpkin Seed Point] the Hopi "… instinctive perception of life processes which our rationally extroverted White observers still ignore." Waters calls it "their book of talk" [Book of the Hopi]. The words of some thirty Hopi spokesmen were tape-recorded, translated, then edited and organized by Waters, who added his own eye-witness accounts of the rituals as well as a history of the Hopi people. The result is a complete view of both the literal and mystical aspects of Hopi ceremonialism.

According to the Hopi, our present world is the Fourth World, the preceding three having been destroyed because of the divisiveness, selfishness, greed, and/or materialism of their inhabitants. In each case a few survivors were permitted to emerge to the succeeding world and were reinstructed in proper behavior. After emerging into the present world, they were instructed to divide into groups and undertake a series of migrations before finally settling down in their chosen land. That the chosen land was in a barren, arid desert is not incongruous, for in the preceding worlds comfort and material wealth were inevitably accompanied by spiritual disintegration. According to Hopi prophecy, our Fourth World is in rapid decline, heading for destruction, after which there will be a turn upward and a new age.

The focus of Hopi ceremonialism is on the harmonious unity of all forms of life. Their dances symbolize the interactions of the opposing and conflicting life forces in all creation, perpetuating "the primal harmony of cosmic forces" and literally "holding the world together" [Lyon]. To the Hopi, the ultimate evil is—like Martiniano's in The Man Who Killed the Deer—the illusion of separateness. In his introduction [to Book of the Hopi], Waters comments:

… they speak not as a defeated little minority in the richest and most powerful nation on earth, but with the voice of all that world common-wealth of peoples who affirm their right to grow from their own native roots…. They remind us we must attune ourselves to the need for inner change if we are to avert a cataclysmic rupture between our own minds and hearts. Now, if ever, is the time for them to talk, for us to listen.

The evidence presented by the Hopi elders seems to have confirmed and stabilized Waters's previous theories. More importantly, it seems to have promoted his own increased personal integration. The evidence for the latter is to be found in his next work, Pumpkin Seed Point, the highly subjective story of his personal experience while living among the Hopi. This work, which Waters began in 1965, two years after publishing Book of the Hopi, records the psychic and spiritual growth he had been experiencing through The Colorado, Masked Gods, and The Woman at Otowi Crossing. It reveals Waters's own developed synthesis as he attempts to make personal reconciliation of the multitude of dualities presented by the Hopi teachers. He recognized that the true meaning of the Hopi myths and legends would have to be presented from within, integrated into a personal philosophic system, and in Pumpkin Seed Point he records his experiences as he further evolved this philosophy of fusion.

Little wonder that we Whites, with our desperate reliance upon surface physical reality, seldom perceive that in this Indian sub-stream lies an America we have never known, yet embodying the truths of our own unconscious, the repressed elements of our darker, deeper selves.

That Waters is not completely successful in reconciling the Indian and white worlds is not surprising. But the record of his attempt—and the implications of that attempt—are of much importance. As a reader follows Waters through various stages of growth, he is led to the conclusion that Western civilization itself, in order to survive, must find "a viable fusion between the two great worlds of industrial-mechanical-rational and the organic-spiritual-intuitive" [Lyon], and that the overall movement of our history does seem to be in that direction. Waters suggests that the function of the Hopi teachings can be to show us, by revealing what they have, what it is that we do not.

In 1971, Waters began Pike's Peak, the redaction of the Colorado trilogy. In producing this one-volume work, he found it necessary to cut many pages. The original trilogy totaled 1,511 pages, and Pike's Peak's 743 pages include much new material written expressly for it. Waters eliminated from the earlier volumes much of the unessential material dealing with the family's domestic life, but most of the cutting and rewriting occurs with the material formerly placed in the final volume. The elimination and rewriting of so much of the autobiographical material does sharpen the focus on its central character, grandfather Rogier; and the central conflict between the antagonist Rogier and the protagonist Pike's Peak becomes more clearly the controlling theme. While March still faces the problem of resolving his dual heritage and the tensions left unresolved by his grandfather, the necessary shift in focus from Rogier to young March is here handled with a smoothness and tightness not found in the original third volume. The overall result is the successful blending of a youthful point of view with mature judgment, which focuses on Rogier's self-destructive quest for psychic wholeness outside of himself. It is the story of a man alien to the land, fighting the land—"perhaps epitomic for the whole white European experience in North America" [suggests Lyon].

Perhaps the greatest historic example of such alienation and its effects is to be found in Waters's next work, To Possess the Land (1972), the biography of Arthur Rochford Manby. Manby was one of the most unscrupulous, intelligent, immoral, and mysterious figures in the history of the American West. He seems to have been a mass of contradictions—a brilliant promoter, a sensitive art connoisseur, and a ruthless land-grabber. This biography, which reads like a novel but which is superbly documented, combines three points of view in presenting the Manby story. In his introduction, Waters suggests that the story can be dealt with as a psychological case study, a western mystery story, or a documented history of the unscrupulous land promoters. While Waters modestly suggests that it would be impossible to construct a book that would synthesize all three points of view, that is precisely what he has accomplished.

He begins with the western horror story and, with typical Waters time sense, with the epilogue. Here is related the discovery of Manby's corpse (the body in one room, the head in another) and the immediate appointment of a coroner's jury, which decides that Manby had died of natural causes and that his dog had chewed off his head and carried it to another room—without spilling a drop of blood. The story builds from that point, and at least one of the three storytelling points of view is constantly presented to the reader. While the psychological approach presents a man completely "… possessed by his 'shadow,' that negative and usually repressed aspect of the dual nature of each of us," on a larger scale the work is an indictment of all corporations, railroads, politicians, lawyers, and individual land-grabbers who were quick to realize that the U.S. government had no intention of observing the provisions of its treaty with Mexico protecting the land rights of the Spanish Americans. That is, the book presents Manby's personal corruption against a background of political, economic, and social corruption. In Manby's final degeneration we see a historic illustration of the attitude of all white settlers who regarded the land as "an inanimate treasure house to be exploited for their material benefit" [Waters, "The Western Novel"]—and perhaps of their inevitable fate also.

Almost all of Frank Waters's themes and theories are brought together in his next work, Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness (1975). Here he synthesizes an enormous mass of knowledge about the people of ancient Mexico, their history, myths, symbols, archetypes, cosmology, and astrology, noting in particular the dualities:

The antinomy is expressed in many ways: light and darkness, male and female, good and evil, spirit and matter, instinct and reason, God and Satan, the conscious and unconscious. The conflict between these bi-polar opposites and the necessity for superseding it is the great theme running through the mythology, symbology, and religious philosophy of pre-Columbian America—the Mexico mystique.

He then goes beyond the usual academic integration to relate this material to numerous theosophical systems, to Jungian psychology, to astrology, and to world mythology in general. He suggests that his conclusions

tend to show that the ancient civilization of Mesoamerica was basically religious; that its spiritual beliefs still constitute a living religion perpetuated by the contemporary Pueblos of the Southwest; and that this common religious system of all Indian America embodies the tenets of a global belief expressed in terms of Christianity, Buddhism (and other religious philosophies of the East), and in modern Western analytical psychology.

A large part of the work is focused on explaining and interpreting the ancient Mesoamerican calendar system which measured time in Great Cycles of 5,125 years, each marking the duration of a world or era. According to the astronomical calculations of the Mayas, their last Great Cycle and the present Fifth World began in 3113 B.C., and its end was projected to 2011 A.D. This date also marks the end of the present great 25,920-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. At this time, the Aztecs and Mayas believed the present world would be destroyed by a cataclysm and replaced by a sixth world—a belief similar to the contemporary Hopi prophecy of the end of the Fourth World.

According to Waters, these "worlds" are but dramatic allegories for the successive states of man's ever-expanding consciousness. Other apocalyptic interpretations also allude to what he calls the "coming sixth world of consciousness" as "a new beginning through a convergence of past and present, East and West, the archaic and the civilized" [José Argüelles, "Sacred Calendar and World Order," Shambbala Review (March/April 1976)]. At that time, Waters hopefully suggests, the resolution of our universal paradoxes will begin at a higher level.

Here we have synthesis on a cosmic scale.

In the way that Pumpkin Seed Point followed Book of the Hopi, so Mountain Dialogues, another collection of personal essays, has followed Mexico Mystique. These essays deal with what at first glance appear to be incredibly disparate topics, ranging from the next-door neighbors to the nature and meaning of man. The various themes, however, are tightly interwoven—emerging, disappearing, and reemerging throughout the selections—and the meaning of each separate essay thus becomes ultimately dependent upon what has been said both before and after its appearance in the book. Here Waters acknowledges his sources, major influences, experiences, and interests. Continually enlarging his scope throughout the book, he is able to observe with validity toward its end:

The nature of the world and [the nature] of man as perceived by the great civilizations of the past in Egypt, India, Tibet, China, and Mexico have already been briefly outlined.

Because of its personal nature, Mountain Dialogues reveals more about Waters himself than he has revealed in any of his previous works. At the same time it presents a world view which, while thoroughly that of a western American, is worthy of international consideration.

Accompanying Mountain Dialogues has been another major, scholarly work—the editing (in conjunction with this author) of W. Y. Evans-Wentz's Cuchama and Sacred Mountains (1981) for posthumous publication. This work, while not a definitive study of the sacred mountains of the world, is a monumental attempt by the great scholar of Tibetan Buddhism to correlate Eastern religion with that of Native Americans through their mutual reverence of the sacred earth. Having reposed in a Stanford University safe for fifteen years, the manuscript sorely needed updating and restructuring. Frank Waters has provided not only the internal annotation but the Introduction and Addendum needed to frame this work for a 1981 reading audience. Here, once again, Waters observes the opposing views of the whites and the Indians, two entirely different views of nature, two conflicting attitudes toward the land. He once more reaffirms his faith in inevitable, ultimate synthesis:

This reconciliation will take a long time, but it will inexorably take place, in compliance with the spiritual laws governing the evolution of all life throughout the universe. ["The Indian Renaissance," addendum to Cuchama and Sacred Mountains]