Long Journey from Wikame

Artists' Chance Encounter Begins Fifty Year Journey

When young artist Roy Purcell approached an old blind man at a Native American village in the Mojave Desert near Kingman, AZ, little did he know that the meeting would reverberate for decades through both his personal and professional lives, much less give birth to Long Journey from Wikame, a new book from Las Vegas-based Stephens Press.

The year was 1956. Purcell, a 20-year-old Utah native, had recently been discharged from the army and was visiting his parents, who had moved to land on the Walapai reservation in Arizona. He spent his days exploring the ghost towns and old mines that dotted the region, studying the shapes and colors of the desert that would be his lifelong subject as an artist and poet.

“There was something about the openness, the intensity, and the barrenness,” Purcell explains. “You couldn't hide. You had to face whatever you were. I think that's why the ancient prophets went into the desert. It was a chance to get to know themselves, and get away from extraneous disturbances, interactions with other things. It's just you with nature, with God and that's it.”

One day Purcell wandered into a tumble-down collection of shacks on Highway 66 east of Kingman. There he met Hake-Kate Crozier, a blind Walapai man who was well over 100 years old at the time.

“He began to tell me stories about his youth, about what life was like before the coming of the whites,” Purcell says.

Hake-Kate had been one of the last of the Native American army scouts, and he remembered with clarity the Walapai stories and myths he had been told as a boy. Purcell spent hours listening raptly to Hake-Kate, taking in as much as he could. “The fact that somebody had lived through that much history fascinated me.”

Years later, as director of the museum in Kingman, Purcell used Hake-Kate's story as the background for an entire room devoted to the history of the Walapai. Says Purcell, “I wrote it on flagstone, sand, and used the natural elements in that room to tell the story — that's the first time that I began really writing it down.”

The words of Hake-Kate continued to haunt Purcell even after he had achieved wide success as an artist. “The story was so profound.” Finally, Purcell, best known for the world-famous “Voyage” murals on 2,000 square feet of cliff face near Chloride, AZ, decided to do something about it.

The result is Long Journey from Wikame, a luxuriously produced hardcover book from Stephens Press that combines Purcell's evocative watercolors with his charming, poetic version of the Walapai creation myths told by Hake-Kate.

Long Journey from Wikame begins with Hake-Kate looking back on his boyhood and then segues into the story of the Walapai people and their creation by the gods of Wikame, the holy mountain.

“I put it together and organized the poetry and began seeing images to go with the words, and I began watercoloring, and sketching, trying to come up with something that would capture the flavor of the poetry,” says Purcell.

In Long Journey from Wikame, the reader learns the tale of the young god of Wikame and the people of Mojave, created from pieces of cane. Purcell recounts, among other Native American stories, how Coyote stole the heart of the old god of Wikame and how the Walapai people learned to live in harmony with the sometimes cruel world of the red desert. All of the stories are illustrated by Purcell's characteristically vivid watercolors.

The publisher devoted high production values to the unique edition — pages are printed on textured art paper with a padded cover. An audio CD comes with the book, which includes both the author reading the story in his rich sonorous voice and also an interview with Purcell.

Purcell, who now maintains a gallery and studio in Tubac, AZ, believes that Long Journey from Wikame will appeal not only to his many fans and to students of Native Americans but also to anyone interested in the spiritual aspects of art and life.

After all, as journeys of the spirit go, fifty years really may not be a very long time at all.


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