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Title: Indians of the Enchanted Desert
Author: Crane, Leo
Language: English
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DESERT ***
INDIANS OF
THE ENCHANTED
DESERT
BY
LEO CRANE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1925
TO
those people of the Enchanted Desert who called me
“Chief,”—Indians, employees, missioners, traders,—whose confidence,
loyalty, and devotion made my work among the Hopi and Navajo tribes
possible of success; and to humbler friends, my faithful horses,
Dandy and Barney Murphy, Prince and Frank, that went with me so
many weary miles, and were shot, by my order, to save them from the
miseries of Governmental economy, this book is dedicated.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I Nolens Volens 3
II Across the Plains 11
III Into “Indian Country” 22
IV Old Trails and Desert Fare 30
V Desert Life and Literature 44
VI A Northern Wonderland 54
VII The First Ball of the Season 65
VIII Old Oraibi 78
IX The Making and Breaking of Chiefs 94
X The Provinces of the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” 101
XI The Law of the Realm 113
XII Comments and Complaints 122
XIII A Desert Vendée 142
XIV Soldiers, Indians, and Schools 157
XV An Echo of the Dawn-Men 181
XVI Fiddles and Drums 191
XVII Service Tradition 210
XVIII Buttons and Bonds 224
XIX Our Friends, the Tourists 240
XX The Great Snake-Ceremony 260
XXI Desert Belascos 275
XXII On the Heels of Adventure 287
XXIII The Red Bootleggers 297
XXIV Held for Ransom 312
XXV Wanted at Court 325
XXVI Hopi Annals 336
XXVII L’Envoi 361
ILLUSTRATIONS
Announcing the Snake Dance Frontispiece
Walpi, the Pueblo of the Clouds 12
The Valley and Its Headlands
A Navajo Flock and Its Shepherds 16
Cañon de Chelly, Seen from the Rim
Crossing the Desert below Chimney Butte 58
The Oraibi Wash in Flood-Time
Navajo on Their Way to a Dance 70
A Navajo Hogan and Its Blanket Loom
Outfit of a Well-Digger, the Desert “Water-Witch” 84
Drying Bed of the Little Colorado River
The Hopi Ceremonial Corn-Planting 92
Hopi Gardens in a Spring-Fed Nook of the Desert
Hopi Indian Agency at Keams Cañon 106
Hopi Indian Hospital at Keams Cañon
A Busy Day at the Trading-Post, Keams Cañon 118
Ready for the 105-Mile Trek to the Railroad
Hostin Nez, Navajo Chief and Medicine Man 124
Judge Hooker Hongave of the Indian Court 132
Youkeoma, Antelope Priest and Prophet 162
A Mesa Road—Old Trail to Hotevilla 170
A Pretentious Home at Hotevilla
A Hopi Schoolgirl 178
A Hopi Youth Who Is Preparing for College
The Walpi Headland, Seen from the Orchards 196
The Walpi Stairway, A Rock-Ladder to the Sky 202
The Author, in the Enchanted Desert 230
Old Glory and the Bond Flag at the Agency
Albert Yava: Interpreter 234
Tom Pavatea: Hopi Merchant and Patriot
The Corn Rock, an Ancient Bartering-place 238
Opening the Walpi Snake Dance 250
Dramatic Entry of the Snake Priests
The Gatherer, Handling a Rattlesnake 266
A Patriarch of Snakes
The Chief Snake-Priest 272
The Enchanted Desert and the Moqui Buttes 282
In the Twin-Butte Country 294
Silversmith Jim: a Typical Navajo
Billa Chezzi: Chief of the Northern Navajo 316
Nelson Oyaping: Tewa Chief of Police
A Navajo Boy Who Has Never Been to Any School 322
A Hopi Range-Rider 336
Blue Cañon: A Study in Blue-and-White
A Hopi Shrine 338
A Hopi Weaver of Ceremonial Robes
A Katchina Dance
Hopi Mother in Gala Dress, with Her Child 340
Navajo Mother with Child in Cradle
A New Son of the Desert 344
Hopi Girls Arrayed for a Dance
Hopi Wedding Costume 352
A Hopi Beauty 358
INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT
I
NOLENS VOLENS
It is well for a man to respect his own vocation,
whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold
it and to claim for it the respect it deserves.
—Charles Dickens
They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in
manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer
men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the
Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of
business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some
of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought
of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them.
Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I
sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of
Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things
that weren’t done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they
being from what an Easterner would term the “hinterland,” had he vision
enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have
tales to tell—a hope that never materialized.
When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would
relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if,
seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came
to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their
uncommon experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were
struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath;
that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the
artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner
of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that
which distressed them, and to return whence they came—into the broader,
franker places.
I knew that they were “out of the West,” and this meant—of course it
did—beyond—well, beyond the Mississippi. “The West” is a general term,
and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim
past. Therefore I did not know that this one’s bailiwick contained five
troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three
different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly
four hundred years; that another’s domain included six thousand square
miles of God’s most wonderful creation, having the Marble Cañon of the
Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third’s
territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times,
breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood
through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the
solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one’s home; that still
another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the
silence of uncharted cañons.
No. I did not meet these men in the Smithsonian offices at Washington;
nor were they lecturers before the National Geographic Society. They
were Indian Agents.
They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with
which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills
and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important,
establish hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer
machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They
wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the
frontiers.
Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized
as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in
their efforts by the memory—fact and fiction—of the “ration” days. They
might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service
that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a
dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for
these officials’ existence has produced much sound and fury. The very
title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and
still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists—and
God knows the ignorance of them is astounding—take pen in hand to
picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage,
they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind.
They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged
to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities
of the “glorious past” would long since have engulfed the idealized
protégé but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and
poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming
dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma,
smallpox, measles, syphilis—scourges of the Indian people, whose long
train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant
and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who
daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating
the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men
have no historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be
unknown.
Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the
unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced
and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage
charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the
children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region
few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river
without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in
winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of
transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that
his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened
civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant
notice; occasionally, too, one was killed.
These unromantic facts, having no camouflage of feathers and war paint,
nothing in them of the beating of tom-toms or the chanting of legends,
do not invite a sentimental record; and, it is true, few such things
occur in the “dude season,” when sentimentality, accompanied by its
handmaiden ignorance, takes its neurasthenic outing in the wild.
One of them, a man whose dress spoke rather of the club and office,
invited me thus:—
“Come out with me for a leave. There are deer, and trout streams, and a
hunting-lodge up in the hills.” He was the chap who claimed to have a
census of the grizzlies. “It’ll do you good, and you look as if you
needed a bit of the outside.”
I thanked him casually, and turned aside his invitation with—
“What’s this I hear about the Chief offering you an inspectorship? That
would give you some travel too, and—”
“An inspectorship! Travel!” he snorted. “Why, good God, man! I am the
boss of the Switzerland of America. I wouldn’t trade my post for a seat
in the Cabinet.”
That is the way they talked, and a few of them undoubtedly meant it.
A large bulky man, with a face like a piece of granite, twisted a crude
silver ring on his finger as he extended a similar invitation in an
entirely different way. He was a slow-speaking fellow, of few words and
those of a definite, precise character.
“You’d like it,” he finished, sighing. “The Navajo country is a great
place—a great place—”
He seemed at loss for words to picture his meaning, and I know now why
language failed him.
Said a third, for whom I had unraveled the genealogy of a much
intermarried Indian family, and who was grateful:—
“Why, you’re just the lad for me. All you’ll have to do is ride fences,
armed with a hammer and a pocketful of staples” (I think he really said
“steeples,”) “—and there’s quarters for you; twelve hundred a year too.
You’ll get a lot of dope for stories. That place fairly drips ’em. What
say? I can fix it with the Chief?”
After having had the courtesy to thank them one and all, I leaned back
in the swivel-chair and laughed. While they were present I
good-humoredly laughed with them, and later, at them. You see, in the
Office I was known as the Scribe, ever since that time when the boss of
Indian Territory had rushed in, mad as a hornet, waving a copy of
Harper’s Weekly, and declaring that the essential guts of an article
therein had been stolen from his confidential files. And while I had
purloined them with the Chief’s permission, I realized it was a fine
thing for me not to have lived in the Indian Territory.
While I might spend odd time writing stories of heroic unwashed
cowpunchers battling Dante-nosed cayuses across the vasty early-morning
range, with the frost nipping down the alkali dust, and a pale-rose
tone on the distant range of hills, I knew also that they did it for
forty dollars the month and grub off the wheel. I was then and am to
this day aware that cowmen give little thought to either the vasty
sweep of the broad spaces or to the rose tones. And I was perfectly
able to fake the western landscape, where a man’s a man an’ a’ that,
without removing myself more than five blocks from a café and a steak à
la Bordelaise. I had placed one hundred stories in New York, and a
hundred more on the stocks, without smelling an Indian camp or
subjecting myself to the grave and anxious possibility of getting—well,
inhabited, to say the least of it. I assumed that the dapper fellow was
more of a clerk than a ranger; that the slow-moving granite-faced
individual truly reflected the somber aridity of his monotonous desert;
and the fact that the third had said “steeples” proved to me that I
could never respect him as chief.
“No!” I decided, with a grin. “The Borax mule-team couldn’t drag me
into that life.” And I too meant it.
But—I was brutally launched out of this effete complacency and pitched
into the great Navajo Desert country without disturbing a single mule.
I scrapped for money to purchase the once-despised “critters” to enable
my existence therein. And I have been proud of my mules since.
Without seeming to be missed by those to whom I had thought my going
would be tragedy, without causing a ripple among those few with whom I
found myself, the Wheel turned over, and the vast immutable Desert
received me with as much inscrutable kindness as it offers anyone. I
had prepared the chute myself, and having greased it thoroughly,
slipped and plunged down it, as has many a better man without sliding
any further than his grave.
“See the Chief, and get a berth in the West. Live out o’ doors, rough
it, live on milk and eggs, and don’t come home until I agree to it. You
are two leaps ahead of the lion, and you’ll beat him yet.”
It was the cruel frankness of friendship. I had romped the city streets
with the doctor, attended the same schools, appeared on the same stage
as promoter of histrionic wares; in short, he had been the leader of my
gang. I could recall the local excitement aroused by his first cane,
and had carried his messages to his first girl. He knew how many times
I had been thrashed, and had once turned the trick himself. There was
no need for professional bluff between us.
Next day, perhaps a trifle groggy, I got to my feet in a more
determined spirit, to prepare for the six-months’ battle. The Chief was
very kind.
“Why not take a superintendency?” he suggested. “There’s one vacant,
down in Rainbow Cañon. That’s the Grand Cañon country, you know.
Wonderful place, one of the rarest spots on earth.”
I thanked him for the confidence, knowing that Rainbow Cañon was no
place for an invalid. That Agency is nearly always vacant. New
superintendents negotiate the trail but twice—ignorantly, going in, and
wisely, coming out for ever. Even sure-footed mules have been known to
miscalculate at Suicide Corner, and it is claimed that the bones of one
such beast, entangled in the wires of his last burden,—a cottage
piano,—still furnish a mystic Æolian effect when the wind sweeps below
the place where he faltered. The last superintendent had spent
forty-eight hours in a tree, evading flood-waters that threatened to
carry him on a personally conducted tour through the Grand Cañon
itself. I had arranged his relief by telegraphing the nearest offices
adjacent to his tree, a mere matter of miles, up and down; and I had no
great confidence that anyone would so rapidly arrange mine in similar
circumstances. No! Rainbow Cañon sounded good, quite poetical, indeed;
but none of it for one who required rest and as little exercise as
possible.
So, in accord with my request and at my own valuation, based on my
inexperience, I was formally transferred as a clerk to an Indian Agency
that sits astride the Santa Fe trail—the modern trail connecting the
ancient city of Santa Fe with the Pacific, along which pioneers wended
in the forties.
One week later I had left Washington to make the trek of two thousand
five hundred miles to the Painted Desert and—to me—a most desolate
siding on the banks of the Little Colorado River in Arizona.
II
ACROSS THE PLAINS
Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those
who passed by there in old days at the foot’s pace of oxen,
painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that
unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which
daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it
would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their
advance; no sight for repose or encouragement; but, stage
after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the
mocking, fugitive horizon.—Stevenson: Across the Plains
In the early days, those adventurous times when men pulled out of St.
Louis of an early morning, and the dust of a long train of wagons and
outriders arose; when they followed the Arkansas across to the Cimarron
and Wagon Mound; when they warily entered the Indian country and
somehow existed through the long dusty days and the longer nervous
nights before sighting Santa Fe and safety in a foreign land, I suppose
most of them felt the extraordinary vastness of the West. Certainly
they knew its sterile immensity after a few weeks on that perilous
road. Later, when they began seeking the Coast and the Pacific, leaving
Santa Fe to plunge down La Bajada trail to follow the valley of the Rio
Grande, to skirt the fields of the mysterious Pueblos, to risk thirst
and ambush in the arid lands of the Navajo and Apache, to dare the
flooded rivers and that brazen furnace, the Mohave Desert, all to reach
the painted paradise of golden California, they surely became alive to
the wonderful expanse of that southwestern empire first called New
Spain—the Land of the Conquistadores!
A magic stage having magic scenes, bathed in glorious sunshine; a place
of enchantment, where the rainbow colors linger on the cliffs and never
leave the skies; an ancient garden of the gods, dreamily expecting that
the gods will yet return; presenting ever its sphinx-like riddle;
promising everything and yielding nothing but its lure. Once you have
felt its sorcery, the spell is never broken.
Speaks the old-timer, “The Desert’ll get yeh”; and he doesn’t add
anything about watching-out. The pioneers eluded or fought off
wandering war-parties, but the Desert got them nevertheless.
There is one point in Arizona where, between the Santa Fe Railway and
central Utah, three hundred miles as the crow flies and a weary five
hundred by the trails, there is nothing of civilization other than a
few isolated trading-posts and a solitary Indian Agency, set in a
terraced cañon, eighty miles from a telegraph key. As my train passed
this point in 1910, I did not dream that for more than eight years I
should direct that Indian Agency and its chain of scattered desert
stations, supplying all of progress that the country had, maintaining
all of law and order that its half-wild people knew, isolated, lonely,
well-nigh forgotten.
Only one who has lived thus removed from the turmoil and petty vanity
of cities, apart from careless crowds, unreached by artificiality, can
fully realize the brooding mystery, the savage beauty, the power and
cruelty of the Desert. One must penetrate its solitudes, stand atop the
world to view dead or enchanted cities, pause on the naked brink of
chasms leaning over faery valleys, to know the grandeur of this silent
country. One must grow weary on its heavy trails, feel its hunger,
shrink in its bitter cold, and thirst for the water of the precious
hidden springs. Fairly to hear its ominous hush at blazing noon-time,
to view the scarlet glory of its sunsets, to stand under its velvet
dome at night, lighted by the burning stars, is to have caught a secret
from the universe. To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that
crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is
to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not
peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness,
carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark,
and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. One
must have known the sigh of the night wind in the brush, heard the
chatter of jackals in the snow, felt the sandstorm’s acid lash, and
stopped, spellbound, at the sibilant warning of its gliding Indian god.
Then to have seen the drifting red-bellied rain-clouds that the Snake
priests pray for, the crisp rending lightning at their pouches, the
wild strength of arroyos after cloud-bursts, and the deluge of the
swift midsummer rains, ending in the soft radiance of double rainbows!
One must live as a hermit in the Desert to find its heart.
And only one who has done this may somehow feebly understand those
bronzed people of whom the desert genii have made fatalists—the solemn,
dreaming Indian of the waste lands, whether the Hopi of the mesa
heights and kivas, the Pueblo in his mediæval towns, or the Navajo,
chanting in his lonely, hidden camp. These know all the splendors, feel
all the menace and the mystery, and call the Desert home. Timid, yet
uncaring, ever bent on placating some unseen demon, trusting in songs
and sorceries, they go their Oriental ways on a vast Occidental stage.
The desert spell has touched them, every one.
That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert.
Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who
enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient,
are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology,
a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of
the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like
its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one
thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious
half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed
its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as
their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization
still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little
changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their
Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to
sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too.
One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not
quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the
valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and
through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry
of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in
history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One
can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long
train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars,
mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their head, the great
Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert
shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their
gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the
Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet
were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert
gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty
desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the
West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving
their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma.
Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre
of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio
Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound
of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to
reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung,
those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.
But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty
with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray
touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three
hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand
and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later
civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building
of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more.
“Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great
Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids,
carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads
who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still.
To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to
have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert
people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had
in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will
serve as a reason for this notebook.
Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this
kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it
to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark
all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating
fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an
area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian
inhabitants and few indeed of other men.
For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage
customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but
quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation.
As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a
point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where
Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August
1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this
modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the
older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian
tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to
them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it
had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a
band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of
thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other
troubles on the Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a
pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark
that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward
proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had
departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would
get no civil consolation.
Until then there had been a great show of tactful diplomacy between the
two Governmental representatives; the one of war counseling peace, and
the supposed civilian who had ventured close to war. The Colonel spoke,
for the first time without regard to the gentle traditions of the
Interior Department:—
“Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your
trunk!”
And there is another reason for the telling. Probably no other section
of Indian country is more visited than is the Painted Desert, where the
Snake gods have such influence. From June to October comes a host,
packing cameras and notebooks and sketching-blocks, attired in weird
garments, big with questions, and expecting to find hotels. Most of
them wish to rough it smoothly, and are easily annoyed. They seek the
natural wonders of the Empire, and especially the religious “dances” of
the Indian people, chief of which is the annual Hopi Snake Dance. A
strange crowd, having more of enthusiasm than sense, staggering under
theories, swelled with importance and criticism, generously stuffed by
guides.
A library has been written and vocabularies have been exhausted in
their efforts to explain the beauties and the thrills. Canvas
sufficient to tent a city has been spoiled by those who would capture
the delicate and elusive Desert charm. Historians and ethnologists have
recorded and traced; antiquaries have uncovered and restored. The
museums of the East are filled with looted treasure, while the files at
Washington drip complaints. (“Oblige me by referring to the files.”)
And the Indian as a savage—and a little-understood savage at that—has
been idealized. And those who do not observe this view—berated.
But not a word has been printed, and few spoken without a sneer,
regarding those of the United States Indian Service who keep watch and
ward in the remote places: those who govern and protect, educate and
guide; those who have kept the Indian living, that he may be sketched
and analyzed and gaped at. This work extends beyond the dude season,
through the lonely, bitter winters, embracing at times contagion-camps
among an unreasoning, often unappreciative, and occasionally defiant
population.
To further education among those who do not want it, to advance
medication among fatalists, to attain some show of morals among an
insensible and unmoral people, to demand respect and win affection from
suspicious aliens, to rule absolutely without an army, and, above all,
to keep sane and just without society, call for all of any man’s
ingenuity and resourcefulness, and should arouse something other than
blatant criticism from those who boast intelligence.
Having accomplished these things, every one, I am proud of the record;
and I shall not fail to acknowledge my full indebtedness to those
faithful men and women of the Service who made my efforts possible of
success—employees, traders, missioners, not forgetting those few from
among the heathen who gave their loyalty and confidence. They too have
felt the sneers and insults of the multitude; and the grudging
appreciation of an equally insensible Bureau nearly three thousand
miles away is small reward. Many valued employees have grown old in
this Service without a syllable of commendation from Washington. And I
have prompted at least one Commissioner of Indian Affairs to
acknowledge his feeble debt to a dying physician—dying on his feet,
still nobly making the rounds.
When I left Washington, in 1910, I had no idea that such a future work
would extend my little vacation into the years. Six months out o’
doors, and either I should be reëstablished at the old stand, pounding
the old typewriter, or I should have attended a ceremony that is final
but not interesting to the subject thereof. A simple calendar; not the
first, however, to stand revision.
Morning brought Chicago, to me a grim and sinister city, and a day
spent in its galleries and clubs; then the train again, and its long
crawl across level, heated Kansas. Excellent living on a diner, and
came the thought that wherever this railroad wended would follow good
food, which I required, and service of the best. Vain and
soon-to-be-exploded vision! The railroad carries food and service; the
West sees it go by. In the Desert one has desert fare.
The contrast was outside the windows; on the third morning this
contrast became acute. Instead of hamlets, farms, and country lanes,
there was now the grayish-green of the sage, broken by stunted cedars
on the slopes, with an overtone of brown as the soil reflected light.
There was no indication of complete aridity, so one could not think of
this as a desert. Scant vegetation lived from the brush of the
foreground to the timbered blue of the distant ranges. They did not
appear as lofty mountains, although many peaks lifted against a calm
blue sky. Beyond the little telegraph points, the occasional adobes of
section crews, and water tanks, the landscape held not a sign of
habitation. In the middle distance were strange formations of crumbling
shale, banded with the spectral white of gypsum: queer piles such as
might have been designed by some sardonic humorist. Now straying
cattle, gaunt as the hills, blanket Indians idling at a station, or a
ranger on a shabby mount, were the only things of life. Over all the
golden haze of New Mexico, moistened by the mists of the Rio Grande.
But later in the day this blue-toned view began to change. The sky grew
clearer, the distance more intimate and revealing. Everything snapped
into the brilliancy of sharp relief. Where had been isolated buttes,
now ran barricades of rock, wind-worn, pinnacled, and domed, while the
cold tones—blue and silver—of the river country warmed to the dry
saffrons and parched reds of sun-baked Arizona, the Land of Little
Rain. One could, as the old-timer sings, “see farther and see less”
than on any other stage of the world.
Just at sunset the train slowed into a weather-browned, dust-covered
town, its main street along the tracks and little else in sight. It was
Sunday and the season of the wind. A swirling fog screened everything
as the cars stopped. There is nothing more forlorn than a Southwest
town of a Sunday in the windy season. A long rank of stores and saloons
displayed false fronts, innocent of paint. A few starved trees waved
crippled branches, and were most piteous. Flapping awnings, flying
leaves, waste paper, sand, and cinders filled the air. When the wind
ceased howling for a moment, there fell a deadly silence. It seemed to
me as if that place must have been as it was for a thousand years,
drowsing in the red-gold sunset, abandoned, overlaid by the itinerant
dust of all the ages. A clatter of hoofs, a shot, a crash of glass, and
a man or two by Remington would have completed the picture.
A little to the north of it was Poverty Flat. To the east was the
drying bed of the Little Colorado, a mile in width, lined by withered
cottonwoods, and possessing scarcely enough liquid to demand a
foot-bridge. In the west, a thing of splendor, reared the beautiful San
Francisco range, snow-crowned, radiant, the sun searing down into its
ancient craters. Elsewhere, everywhere, stretched the Desert, sterile,
barren, robing now in the purplish-brown shades of early dusk. Its
unlimited expanse, silent, desolate, suggested something of foreboding,
something of waiting menace.
Thank God! there was one of those splendid railroad hotels at hand. I
hurried into it, a little of civilization such as I knew, glad to shut
out the night that advanced across that empty plain, swallowing as it
came the masses of the Moqui Buttes and all the strange upland country
that a year later I was to call home.
III
INTO “INDIAN COUNTRY”
“Indian country” applies to all lands to which the Indian
title has not been extinguished, even when not within a
reservation expressly set apart for the exclusive occupancy
of Indians. “Indian country” includes reservations set apart
for Indian tribes by treaty, Executive order, or Act of
Congress.—Meritt: The Legal Status of the Indian
The next morning was another day, as I have often heard remarked since;
and whatever the terrors of the night, the crisp, cheerful Arizona
morning brings with it renewed hope and assurance.
The town waked-up; the air held the tonic thrill that comes only from
pine-clad peaks; the yellow dust of yesterday now kept its place. At
this season in Arizona one may expect the wind to rise about noon and
continue its nerve-racking tyranny until sunset. The blessed sunlight
prevents one from remaining depressed, however, and there is always an
end to the windy season, whatever the nerves meantime. When the last
shriek has died away in early summer, it seems there lives a vacuum, a
strange stillness, like that which follows the stopping of a clock.
I found the station platform quite busy that morning. Trains discharged
their hungry freight, and the hotel kitchens fed them in battalions. A
well-stocked news-stand promised that I would not lack for
entertainment. The general spirit of moving life and activity caused
one to forget that the Desert lurked beyond, that these rails were
simply a tiny causeway spanning it for many miles, desolation on either
side.
Chance acquaintance is made easily in the Southwest, and it was not
long before I answered the query of a young man as to where I headed. I
replied that there was a long journey to make, out into the Desert,
among the Indians perhaps. He seemed not to be aware that Indians were
of the immediate locality, and asked: “How far?”
“Oh—about thirty miles.”
“Humph!” he commented, drily; “people in this country go that far to
water a horse.”
The pastime and humor of Arizona is exaggeration. I know now that the
ranchers of the Southwest, and the so-called nomadic Indians, for that
matter, are people of definite localities. An Indian of the Desert will
name and locate his hogan or home camp as specifically as the man of a
city street. Indians are born, live, and frequently die within a very
small area of the Desert. That is why Indians—and you may scoff—are
likely to be lost at night during storms. Their distant travels are
well planned, by daylight, much the same as anyone breaks monotony with
a holiday or business trip. Only those of the most remote desert places
make long journeys as a part of daily routine, and then when need
compels. I have yet to see the man who lived miles from water. Water
decides where any man may live in the Desert—and his animals too.
It was a different story when I aroused a very fat individual who dozed
complacently with his chair propped back against a livery barn. I
inquired about a team for the immense hike I had to make. There were no
automobiles then to traverse the desert, and few were in the little
towns. To-day gasoline and tires, coupled with much swearing, grease,
and shoveling of sand, have conquered most of the desert distances, and
the last time I covered that road was in one of those striped metallic
potato-bugs hatched by that Detroit genius who could not place Benedict
Arnold in his country’s history, but who has made possible thirty miles
the hour as against a former five. Then, or once upon a time, the
horse—or his superior relative, the mule—was indispensable, and the
keeper of a stable was a king of transportation, something akin to Jim
Hill. This one acted just that way. Evidently he had not lost anything
out back.
“Well—” he hummed, doubtfully, “that’s a longish trip, that is. I’ve
made it—” giving me the impression that it had been an unusual effort,
fraught with courage. “I went out there once, but it was two days’ hard
travel, ’cause yeh have to rest the horses over night, returnin’ next
day. That spoils two good days for me, and I have to charge yeh
accordin’. It’ll be thirty dollars. When do yeh want to start?”
“Never, at that rate!” I declared very promptly.
So I went back to the hotel and sent a telegram up the line stating
that I would there remain in comfort until some reasonable means of
travel came in sight. The answer indicated that I had been heard from.
Several days after a rather rough-looking individual called for me and
introduced himself as the Boss.
“I was coming to town anyway,” he said, “but usually I don’t freight my
employees.” Waiving this little matter of custom, I inquired: “How far
is it to the Agency?”
“Twenty-five miles. We’ll make it in less than four hours.”
And we did, for he drove an excellent team of mares, and his reputation
as a driver was like unto that of Jehu.
On the way I explained the purpose and definite length of my visit. He
seemed relieved, for it had been his original suspicion that I, being
from Washington direct, came seeking his job. Having worked in a
newspaper office long enough to learn that one must build absolute
loyalty to the chief, I assured him that his interests were mine, and
thereafter we got along famously. He was a lovable fellow when one had
punctured the sun-dried skin of him, under which there was much to
admire; and not the least was that he felt his tight little Agency to
be the finest spot on earth. And why should he not?
Some few years before this he had drifted into that loop of the Little
Colorado River, a place that for sterile barrenness could not be
matched and that justified few visions. Armed with a single letter of
authority, he had taken charge of the empty landscape. He pitched his
tent beneath an old spreading cottonwood tree. I can imagine his lonely
vigils and his planning under the brilliant desert stars. First, the
well to tap the subcurrent of the river; then, one by one, the
Government buildings, of rough rock quarried from the near-by mesas,
meanwhile engaging and lodging and feeding rougher laborers, and
disputing with contractors, and keeping them all from liquor, until a
little town grew in this river-angle that for centuries had known only
the withered trees, the cooing of many doves, and driftwood. The
grounds were marked and leveled and drained. In springtime the river
flooded the place, but he was not dismayed. An office, warehouses,
shops, and barns were built. Then arose a well-appointed school, with
dormitories for the Indian children, queer desert gamins that for a
time were as frightened rabbits and wept for their smoky camps. There
were kitchens, baths, a laundry, a plant to furnish light and ice and
heat; for while the summer may be broiling, the winter brings its snow
and bitter wind in that unprotected waste. He saw the sick and built a
hospital. There were quarters for his staff of employees. He planted
trees along cement walks; he broke ground for a farm, and planned an
irrigation system with its pumping-plant. His barns held feed against
the winter, and his commissaries flour and clothing. A trader came for
license, and then another; and a grant was made to a little mission
church. Last, but not the least necessary to his desert kingdom, was a
guardhouse for those who disputed his sage counsels. High above it all
floated the Flag, stoutly whipping in the desert wind.
One day he folded up his tent and walked into his capital. The town was
not finished—true; it was not perfect—true. Already he could see the
mistakes of a pioneer hand, similar to those of the Mormons who had
settled in that country generations before, and whose record was a
graveyard. It is not finished to-day, and several successors have added
their work to his. It may eventually be a folly and a failure in the
sense of profits, for where the Mormons failed in those early days of
zealotry who can hope to succeed? Ah! in the sense of material
profits—Yes! But where had been nothing but the blind Desert and the
savage river, nothing but the blow-sand and the horned toad, he had
created an outpost of civilization to reach and serve and protect a
helpless people who, theretofore, had only their desert demons.
As far as he could see to the north, where the red-toned mesas raised
their twisted shoulders above the desert rim, where the dim blue crowns
of monster lava-buttes loomed against the sky, to the edge of the
world, it seemed, the domain was his kingdom. Twelve hundred human
beings hailed him “Nahtahni,” which is Chief, and listened to his
advice. His was the only voice they heeded without suspicion, for had
they not been driven from this land in midwinter, by armed men, packing
their few possessions through the snow? And had it not required a
fighting President of the United States to restore to them this pitiful
inheritance? No less, indeed!
But to them, people of no contrasts, was it not a wonderful
inheritance—that all-embracing stage, from the Red Mesa where the
tumbled rocks stood in rings, “Children at Play”; from the Sapphire
Lakes and the restless river to the country of the Moqui, guarded by
the lava buttes, those somber blue-clad gods of the northern sky? And
was it not the Desert!
Perhaps—no doubt of it—that Great White Father had sent this curious
Nahtahni from his own household. The world has four corner-posts, one
the Desert and one that is Washington. They could remember those nights
when they first gathered around his tent under the gnarled old
cottonwood, the surly river’s murmur in their ears, their glowing fires
matching his against the stars. He had told them of his mission. And he
was not afraid of white men—had sent some of them briskly about their
business. His commission read—they knew it by his action—that all
pertaining to their peace and welfare devolved on him; that he was
responsible for their best interests. His mark upon a “nultsose” was
the money of the land. His police wore the eagle button. Truly this was
a man to be respected; and he was their Chief.
So at his command they brought children to the school, for it seemed he
had a peculiar fondness for children; and yet he had no sheep to herd.
A strange fellow! They came in from their corrals and patches to work
for implements and livestock; they hauled the stores and coal from the
railroad, herding their wiry ponies with many a wild cry; they found
that his queer blue papers could be exchanged for the hard silver
dollars of the West.
And to this Chief they came too with foolish complaints and childish
misfortunes; to him they came when ill and trembling, and him they
sought when old and hungry, shivering against the desert wind, forsaken
by their own cruel kindred, fearing that the jackals would pick their
bones. In all that trading country they knew him as the one who would
not barter.
His real title was—no matter; there must be tags and labels; actually,
by law and practice, he was a desert czar, distributing his bounty,
holding his courts of justice. Of course he was, and so are they all,
each and every one. What came you out to see? A jurist splitting hairs
and fearing to say too much, a ferret of accounts, a listening
politician, a sutler and his bales? How many such can boast that they
have constructed anything? This man had built a sanctuary, and he ruled
a kingdom. He was the “Nahtahni!” That was enough, and what is needed,
in the Desert.
When they did not call him that, affectionately they dubbed him
“Sack-hair,” because he wore a wig, and since one day, to their general
consternation, his scalp had blown off into a bush. From Beck-a-shay
Thlani, the man of many cattle, to the blind old woman of the tribe, he
was counselor and friend. The curious, animal-like children loved him.
They would scramble down the walks to take his hand and toddle by his
side. He was justly proud of his work and of his industrious alien
people; perhaps, in their silent desert way, they were proud of him.
A little of this he told me modestly as we rolled over the road along
the river. The greater part I learned in my own time, as did the
Indians before me. He enlivened the recital by a few choice Southwest
legends, made for and kept alive by greenhorns like myself. He showed
me where the last great flood had eaten away huge sections of the lower
flat and spread all over. The river was now a wide desolation of sand,
glowing, sullen in the sun. In flood time this was no plaything of a
stream. Its mark was on the country, a mile wide. I could have walked
across it dry-shod, and since that time I have crossed it swimming a
horse, and wondering when I should go off to tow at his tail. Tangled
masses of matted greasewood, like shingle of the beaches, and trunks of
cottonwoods, picked clean of bark and twig, white as bleaching bones,
were piled on the bars. Over at one side remained a shallow pool,
holding dull fish as captives; and several lean ponies came to suck
eagerly at the turgid water. Away off in the flat, he pointed out my
first mirage: the pretty view of a marshy place bordered by reeds,
cool, inviting—yet a dusty desert falsehood. Suddenly it faded,
vanished in thin air, to reveal nothing but brilliant sunlight on a
baking floor. Drifting clouds cast long shadows on the sand. A tiny
whirlwind twirled its dust-spout higher and higher and glided across
the plain.
Then, from a little rise, he waved his whip toward a distant object,
black against the western sun. It was very far away, and looked like a
bird-house on a pole.
“That’s the Agency,” he said.
And indeed it was, for without it existence there was impossible. It
was the stand-tank, most necessary thing in that land of precious
water. Just at dark we swung through the gates. I had reached my first
desert camp, on the edge of the Enchanted Empire.
IV
OLD TRAILS AND DESERT FARE
We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized men cannot live without cooks.
—Meredith: Lucile
When I crossed the border of the Enchanted Empire, in the dusk of that
entry to the Agency, I re-lived fancies caught out of Nicholas
Nickleby, his winter journey into Yorkshire, coaching in company with
the incomparable Squeers; his arrival at the bleak and cheerless
Dotheboys Hall, and the atmosphere of that strange institution; and
while there was something forlorn about them, there was also enough of
their humor to keep me alive.
Considering what I have written concerning “the Boss,” who would have
to be Squeers, this may seem a sorry and unkind reflection. But really,
forgetting for the moment his generous heart and his earnest pride in
the little desert kingdom, there was a superficial resemblance to old
Squeers—the odd cock of the head, a certain quaint expression, a
quizzical look after some solemn pronouncement, the rough
exterior,—which in this case belied the man,—and that rare touch of the
grotesque given by his wig: “Sack-hair.” The atmosphere of the Agency
supported these impressions.
The ensemble of an Indian school, the cast of characters, their point
of view, their quarters and customs—is something unique and quite
beyond comparison with normal things. One is often first conscious of
odors; and the Navajo have many sheep. Once a desert station is given
over to Indian school purposes, where a number of children and their
mentors must be fed, it acquires the fragrance of boiled mutton for its
very own. There is nothing else like it. Even an abandoned school
retains this poignant atmosphere for years.
Bare—stark naked—calcimined walls, grim in their poverty and unashamed;
bare pine floors; cheap pine trimmings covered with hideous varnish,
the gloss of which seemed an uncaring grin; the whole sparsely strewn
with Government-contract furniture, feeble in the beginning and now in
the last stages of pathetic senility. This was the quarters for
unmarried employees. And when you take such a scene and thoroughly
impregnate it with the clinging atmosphere of yesterday’s, and last
week’s, and last year’s boiled mutton; animate it with characters
gathered by the grab-bag method from the forty-eight States, persons
warped and narrowed by their monotonous duties, impressed by the savage
rather than impressing him, fulsome with petty gossip and radiating a
cheap evangelical virtue, you have the indescribable—and
invariable—locale of an isolated desert school. Dickens would have made
it immortal, and his gallery of portraits would have gained many
varieties of Bumbles and Mr. Chucksters and Sairey Gamps. I have walked
in the Desert with Dick Swiveller and Mr. Cheggs; Mark Tapley I have
known intimately; and I have dined several times with Pecksniff in the
flesh, he lacking only a large shirt-collar to complete the picture.
Hugh Walpole has glimpsed something similar to this in The Gods and Mr.
Perrin. “It will be all right next term” is the fiscal cry of the
restless, unsatisfied, and for the most part misfitted employees of the
Indian Service. And the Indian stands mute, inarticulate, unable to
express his confused amazement at this bizarre and ever-changing
exhibition.
A strong sense of humor may keep one from going mad, but even the
keenest humor grows blunted after a few months of such stolid
association. If one has no relief in other mental pursuits, he succumbs
finally to a moroseness that is not good in the unchanging, uncaring
Desert.
We sat at a belated meal in the dining-hall. The drive of twenty odd
miles and the tang of the desert air had given me an unusual appetite
that promised the making of weight, when behold! in the doorway giving
on to the kitchen appeared a vision, perhaps I should say an
apparition, the cook! The expression turned on me was intended, I have
no doubt, to be one of welcome; but whatever it was supposed to
register, I have never forgotten the sardonic leer of that unkempt
individual, promising worse to come. And it arrived. Leathery mutton,
cold; baking-powder biscuit, lacking character; coffee, lukewarm,
weakly concocted from the Arbuckle blend that retreated westward after
the Civil War; milk, fresh from tin-plate Holsteins, mixed with water
from an alkali pump; and last, but not least for a sick man’s stomach,
the “bull butter,” innocent of ice, slimy, having the flavor of
kerosene.
Farewell! a long farewell to Maryland cooking!
I remember having been snowed-in, on a time, back in the farthest
Arizona hills, with a Government physician recently from the East. He
had sought Arizona to stimulate a lagging constitution that threatened
to initiate him as one of the Club. He had traveled westward, visioning
the tropic palms, the date trees, the pomegranate hedges of Phœnix; and
there we were at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea-level, with the
snow two feet deep, and a frigid blast coming straight off the range.
He had been lost that night and nearly frozen on the desert where the
roads were obliterated, and only the sense of his team had brought him
to this haven. We tore the harness from them first, and an engineer
helped me to warm him into amiability after the horses were cared for.
The time came for retiring, and I recall his diving between dank sheets
in an unheated room at this little hill station, his teeth chattering,
his lips blue, and the fervid expression of him:—
“Blank! And blankety-double-blank the damned Philadelphia fool who told
me Arizona was warm!”
And as I surveyed that tempting array of victuals, I had the same
feeling toward those kindly disposed men of Washington who, out of a
crass ignorance, had assured me that their desert stations possessed
food.
Later, a couple of obliging employees carried my trunk upstairs to a
room that would have been a credit to a penitentiary. It welcomed one
with four walls and possessed a window. There were also a ceiling and a
floor. These necessary ornaments, together with a bed and a decrepit
chair, which had crashed under many disconsolate employees and had been
skillfully and maliciously fitted together again to lure me, comprised
the generous list of fittings. All and several extras thought to be
necessary to comfort could be supplied by the employee from his salary,
the proportions of which had been established during the administration
of Carl Schurz, and have changed but little since, despite wars and
rumors of wars and the coming of the income tax, “which includes the
quarters as part of the compensation.”
Next morning I was aroused about dawn, or a little before, by the
business of breaking stove-wood, a bombardment of mishandled crockery,
and the hiss of vicious cooking. A thick wave of reanimated
mutton-grease fogged upward and invaded my boudoir, which I sought to
vacate as quickly as possible. I encountered the cook at the foot of
the stairs, and she had not improved during the night.
“Good morning,” I tried to say cheerfully, which caused her to notice
me. “Who cares for the rooms?” I asked. She bent on me a sinister eye,
as if divining my thought.
“You mean, who cleans ‘em, an’ all that?”
“Just so,” I admitted.
“Well—you’ll care for your own.”
And that was that. It was final, with the wall-eyed finality that had
become unwritten law in all properly conducted Agencies.
At table I met an Irrigation Service man who had just returned from a
survey of farther desert conditions. He expressed great joy in having
accomplished his journey without accident or delay, and in successfully
returning to this oasis. He said he was always sure of decent meals at
this place, whereas, at that post from which he had arrived, life was
unbearable because of the atrocious and altogether impossible menu. I
requested that he repeat this statement. There could not be two such
places. But he was certain of his facts, and his wife confirmed the
story. They cautioned me never to go to that other post—an entirely
superfluous piece of advice.
Then I learned that at each of the Government establishments was
maintained a Thing (as Carlyle would have phrased it), a fixture, an
Institution Horrible, that dominated the people and to which they
suffered allegiance. It was termed “a Mess.” And such had been its
ascendancy and its acquired power, that they were more or less proud of
its traditional horrors in due proportion to the misery produced. I
learned that Washington recognized this thing, and actually advertised
it to innocent incoming employees, suppressing with a cautious
diplomacy its evils, and sounding aloud the one thing to be praised—the
small cost per individual. The nomenclature is good. Never before was
an hideous evil so briefly and so thoroughly described.
Having been deceived as to nearly everything concerning this Vale of
Sharon, with the exception of the climate,—there it was before one,
three hundred square miles of it in sight, unlimited, free and untaxed
as yet; I learned of the altitude when I went to purchase a pair of
shoes,—dispatched a telegram for a case of prepared food, the kind that
has everything from soup to nuts in one bottle, and began to debate
whether it would be braver to die unflinchingly silent or to carry my
views to the chief. The bottled food came in, and I tightened my belt
on it for seven days, learning meantime that there was no dairy herd
other than the kind that comes nested forty-eight tin cows to the case;
that only the chief was rich enough to afford poultry, and therefore
there were no eggs; there was no fruit save the oranges that dried at
the trading-post, and an occasional wagonload of melons sold by the
pound. One could buy a very fair sample of undernourished watermelon
for a dollar.
The refrigerator freights, however, booming east from California,
carrying fish and vegetables and fruit, passed that place twice a week
and within thirteen miles. One could see the railroad water-tank from
the mess-kitchen window. But it required three things to procure food
from that refrigerator service, to wit: desire, energy and money; and
they were all noticeably absent from these people. I decided to
protest.
The Chief had wearied of such complaints, as indeed I did later when I
faced the same problem. But it was his duty, nay his very safety, to
settle everything. The skipper of this desert ship had no first-officer
to take the deck with pride and responsibility, to smother complaints,
and to avoid or crush mutinies. He must do it himself. Quelling revolts
was one of his regular tasks; and he had become unusually—not to say
cunningly—proficient in the various methods. Some he roared down, and
others he trapped into submission.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked, sourly.
“Well, sir, I came here to keep alive, and aside from my natural
intelligence, several physicians of the East urged me to absorb
food—food—as little of it tinned as possible. Now I have been out to
survey the can-pile, and have arrived at the conclusion that your
employees must consume several tons of embalmed materials each year.
And too, my food must be cooked. My ancestors quit eating acorns
several centuries ago. The true state of your people is that of slow
starvation. They have somehow got used to it. I shall not last that
long. Their tradition has it that they can maintain life on a meal-bill
of eleven dollars per month—”
“Give ’em credit,” he interrupted, darkly; “they got it down to nine
once.”
“Which recalls your Mormon’s idea of luxury,” I hurried on. “Remember
that story you told me coming in? Said the tourist—‘What would you do
if you had a million dollars?’ ‘A million dollars!’ cried the Mormon,
his eyes shining; ‘I’d buy a six-mule team, pull freight, an’ eat
nothing but canned goods!’ That Mormon was weaned at this mess.”
The Chief rubbed his wig reflectively, and from his rueful smile I knew
that he possessed the remnant of a starved sense of humor. He glanced
furtively about his office, and when he spoke it was in a low, cautious
tone.
“True,” he said; “The mess would drive a goat to suicide. But what can
I do? They like it. It is a dangerous thing, young man, to disturb
anything the proletariat likes. Thank God! I am married and have
separate quarters. It has been a mystery to me for years how they keep
alive, and turn out each morning for work.”
And where Squeers’s face would have cracked into a malevolent leer, the
countenance of the Boss suddenly bubbled over with a wholesome
expression that announced the winning of my case. He slapped his hand
on his knee. He had found a solution—a Machiavellian scheme calculated
to strike down at one blow the system and its latest critic. He leveled
his finger at me.
“I’ll make you manager of the mess!” he cried, triumphantly. “That’s
the ticket. It’ll be up to you to provide real food, cooked, an’ all,
an’—”
Evidently a very hopeful light came into my eyes. He paused, grinned
somewhat shamefacedly, and hastened to advise me.
“Don’t accept too hastily.” He avoided my gaze. “At best it is a
thankless job, this nourishing those who would rather starve that they
may pay installments to California land-boosters. You’ll be no
benefactor. You will find it depressing. You will be ostracized, and it
may even be unsafe for you to stroll around unguarded at night.”
Notwithstanding these perils, I accepted.
The unwritten law, like most futile and messy things requiring the
democratic knowledge of all and the wisdom of none, demanded that a
solemn conclave of those to be fed was necessary in any change of the
routine of it, and that a vote be taken, after devious discussion and
debate. Imagine convening a group of circus lions to inform them that
hereafter, at feeding time—and so on!
The Chief knew that a popular vote would demonstrate the usual popular
row. There are only two kinds of Indian Agents: those who compromise
with everything and have interminable hell on their weakling hands, to
the end that they are respected neither at home nor abroad, and those
who compromise with nothing. The first sort is never defeated, and
never resigns. He remains continually in service, shifted from point to
point, cluttering it with his inefficiency and indecision. Neglected
plants and chaotic systems are monuments, kept at national expense, to
these amiable bench-warmers and trimmers. The second variety rides the
waves for a season or two, and crashes down finally, as all tyrants,
however benevolent, before the clamorous indignation of outraged and
inefficient democracy.
The Chief being one of the last sort, the electorate was disfranchised.
There was no session of Parliament. The whole thing was done in much
the same fashion as had cost Charles the First his head.
Bulletin
Beginning with the first of the coming month, and until further
orders, the Chief Clerk will administer the affairs of the Mess.
It was received in a grim, not to say stony, silence. Like a
tenderfoot, I rushed in where an angel would have sought the cyclone
cellar. Cooks were employed monthly, and it was midway in the month.
That night I gave the cook her time.
Now, having ended one dynasty, it behooved me to create another. I went
to the Chief.
“When can I have the transportation necessary to my duties as maître
d’hôtel hereabouts? I’ll drive in to the railroad town.”
“Do you know the road?” the Boss asked, doubtfully.
“That doesn’t bother me. When do I get a team?”
“To-morrow,” he replied, and left me to my fate.
Now I had traversed the road but once, when coming in a month before.
The doubtful tone in his voice disturbed me. Perhaps the route-finding
would not be so easy as a trick with cards. I sought out the
pleasantest of the range men, and asked his advice concerning the
matter.
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he assured, and as this would
have been very plain indeed, it heartened me. “Keep to the
main-traveled road, and take all the turns to the right—going in.”
This seemed a very simple matter, and I gave no thought to the turns I
might encounter coming out. I was then, of course,—and because of some
mental defect am yet,—notoriously the worst road-finder in all the
Southwest. And when I departed next day, with “the old woman’s team,”
there was no one to crowd additional information on me.
In the city, to lose one’s way may be foolish without being
unfortunate; but in the Desert one must arrive at his destination, or
the results may be serious. And all the road directions from old-timers
are similar. The Plains Indian can be more definite. He may say, “Three
hills and a look.” The Arizona guide is a despair.
“You can’t miss it,” they invariably prelude. “Take the main road until
you reach that little cornfield just beyond the hogan of Benally
Bega’s—remember that draw before you come to Black Mesa? That’s it.
Then the left trail until you reach that scraggy cedar; then head down
across for that old corral, where the sheriff caught Bob Peterson;
then—you know where we nooned in 1913? It’s right east of that; and
then, you can’t miss it—it’s right over from there—” the whole distance
being sixty miles, and no water in the first five townships.
One plunges deeply on the optimism indicated by “you can’t miss it,”
and starts. At midnight, with a tired team and no blankets, one
suddenly realizes that he has missed it, and missed it bad. The sun
sinks to rest, the desert grows black and threatening, he is off the
main-traveled road, and no candle-lights are gleaming through the dark.
There he remains until morning, when, cold and cramped, having kindled
a fire to warm a can of beans that a more sensible man had slung under
the seat, he finds that he has invited in the whole Navajo tribe. Five
minutes after the wisp of smoke and the aroma of the burnt beans, comes
an Indian, and another, and another, each looking earnestly for
breakfast. It never fails. Between many signs and all the beans, not
forgetting the passing of “thathli ibeso,” which is one dollar in hard,
bitable silver, he finds that he is only five miles off the road, and
that his original destination is “right over from there.”
On the cook-side of the board I played in luck. A row occurred in the
short-order section of a Harvey House, and one first-class itinerant
cook was flung headlong out of a job on the morning I reached town. It
might never happen again. And knowing nothing of the back-country, and
especially being ignorant of an Indian Service mess, he embraced the
opportunity to sign up for a desert cruise. It was necessary for him to
pack his belongings, the most precious of which were a trick dog and a
phonograph, together with one record entitled: “She Is the Ideal of My
Dreams”; and this he insisted would occupy him several days. I arranged
for him to meet a team at the Agency freight-station, and next day he
assisted me in the purchase of supplies for the coming month. We bought
nearly a ton of foodstuffs. My vehicle was one of those light spring
wagons, a “desert hack,” rated to carry about one thousand pounds. Like
an Indian freighter who loads pig lead, we never tallied the dead
weight, but piled it in. The wagon groaned in its every joint under the
load; and so I began the return trip.
One could not miss the right direction, for there were the distant
mountains to point it, with the river as an eastern boundary. So long
as one remained west of the river he must arrive somewhere. True. But
for that river, and my sensible determination not to cross its half-dry
bed, I might still be en route.
The roads of the desert are many, and all converge toward a settlement.
Proceeding to town is very simple. But on leaving it the roads begin
diverging in a most puzzling fashion, and there is a decision to be
made at each departure. Of course the main-traveled road is usually
plain and definite—usually. About half way to the Agency I was deceived
by ten yards of bunch grass at a road juncture, and blithely accepted
the branch leading to a river-ford. Nearing sunset, I had reached the
river,—which was no place to be at that time.
“If alone, always tie the horses to the wheel.”
There isn’t anything else in the Desert to tie them to. So I did it,
and started on foot for the nearest rise to make a reconnaissance. The
scene of empty desolation, blurring in the first grays of twilight, was
not inspiring. The scarlet and gold of the sunset behind the ’Frisco
Range did not awaken poetry within me. I was thinking about something
else, and joyfully I hailed a faint gleam on the far middle-distance,
the last rays gilding the Agency tank-roof.
Between my position on the river, and that haven of rest, as the crow
would negotiate it, stretched at least five miles of the Desert. So
short a distance caused me to snort at my former fears. I went back to
the wagon and found that the impatient horses had wound the lines
around that wheel until they resembled a chariot pair reined in at the
finish of an exciting race. With some difficulty I managed to release
them, and climbed in as they plunged off seeking their feed.
The shortest distance between two given points is a straight line, or
so the books have it. I followed my early schooling, and headed
straight for the tank.
The shortest distance between two points in the Desert is not a
straight line. I there and then learned this lesson. Between that
river-ford and the main road, meandering somewhere to the left, were at
least a thousand different obstructions, skillfully concealed by
Nature, deceptive in the half dark, and treacherous traps when night
came on: sand dunes that were as bogs; wide, shallow arroyos; scrubby
slopes cut by wicked little gullies, all flanked and faced by other
sand-meshes. In and through all this the team tugged wearily, at times
stopping of themselves for breath, at times plunging desperately. A
dozen times I lashed the horses to the wheel and went ahead to plot the
way; a dozen times I returned to find them wound back on their
haunches, in their efforts to free themselves from the overloaded wagon
and the fool that had come out of the East. About midnight, after
traveling to every point of the modern compass, I tried a last rise,
determined, if this failed, to unharness and ride in, trusting to the
horses to find their oats. And topping this little ridge was an old,
half-hidden road. It angled away from the river toward the place where
a real road ought to be. We swung down it, and an hour later, at an
easy jog, the axles holding- and groaning-out to the last, we reached
the Agency gate. The sleepy barn-man, an Indian, came out to meet me.
“Where you been?” he asked, with that innocent curiosity his tribe is
noted for. “Have trouble findin’ the road?”
“No,” I told him, feeling a confidence born of relieved anxiety. “Nope!
just started from town late.”
There is nothing like assurance after a distressing evening. And too,
had I not landed a cook? I could not spoil such a triumph by admitting
that I had been lost.
V
DESERT LIFE AND LITERATURE
The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected
to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities
of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he
probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be
remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any
quarter of the globe.—T. B. Macaulay: Johnson
Life in the little stone house to which I had now removed was filled
with books and tobacco smoke and belated plans in futures—that time
when I should be strong again. I had regretted the impossibility of my
packing out a Washington library, but my old friend and bitter critic,
the now astonishing Mr. Mencken, kept my intelligence alive by sending
parcels of the latest publications, and these arrived fresh and
unscorched, though having passed beneath his searing eye and ruthless
pen. Later, my faithful typewriter, a relic of newspaper days, was sent
forward in defiance of medical advice, and I wrote a few stories that,
with their magazines and editors, are now forgotten.
Evenings, swung in a hammock, I studied sunsets and their glories,
masked and reflected by the magnificent San Francisco Range, and
gradually began to absorb the desert peace. To know its moods, those
swift and unexpected changes, having in them often a dream’s
stealthiness and unreality, one must live for a year in a little house
built low against the brown bosom of the Desert.
I remember the peculiar silvern radiance of one evening. The light came
through dust-screens and, filtering across brown levels, limned patches
of greasewood in a lemon pallor. The sentry cottonwoods of the
riverbank were picked out as brilliant etchings of gray trunks and lacy
branches in a glow of apple-green. Night swarmed out of the east in
great blue clouds. Flying before it were cottony puffballs, white and
twisting into the sunset, like masses of fleece, newly washed. But in
the northwest swung a dun-colored curtain, lighted by the afterglow,
suspended from the higher sky, a drifting, heavy drapery, its ragged
edges trailing the tops of the blunted buttes with filmy rain-tresses.
Between this curtain and the middle distance the mesa barricades had
not yet darkened, and they were sharply outlined as gaunt shapes of red
and saffron sandstone.
Now the peaks cooled and the great mountain-range lived in silhouette,
its backbone etched with a line of electric blue. Early night swept
overhead, and a few timid stars peeked out, as if fearing the
thunder-mutter that came on the night wind, sullen herald of a desert
storm. Now pale red flames reflected in the far-away dun-colored
curtain. The storm rushed eastward across the northern heavens, while
above me the night rolled west, bringing its stars into a brighter
glow.
But this storm was fifty miles away and had its prescribed circle to
complete. Soon its gathering vanguard began blotting out the stars. Now
came a dusty shrieking wind; now the purple belly of the sky was rent
by a white-hot wire, and like the crash of a thousand cannon followed
the voices of the storm; now fell a few drops of cold rain, fanned on
the wind into spray; and then—the deluge—a silvery curtain in the
half-light, like a river turned over a new brink, drenching the Desert,
beating all weak things into the sand. Parched as the ground was, the
water could not be absorbed at once, and soon stood as lakes in the
hollows.
It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in
arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such
cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming
in the hot sunlight.
Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an
afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead;
then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and
bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the
stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. But the
observer had the advantage of a view embracing one hundred miles
between the mountain range and the country of the buttes. The wonders
of the heavens passed around him in full circle.
And where could one find such another place for the sight? Probably
nowhere else in this hemisphere, save with a slight advantage in height
and atmosphere at the Lowell Observatory, about sixty miles away, where
the astronomer may have viewed the same spectacle from his study,
perched on a shoulder of the San Francisco Range, having below him that
mystic world of the Indians, the dim, illimitable stretches of the
Painted Desert.
The New England States, all of them, could be gently eased into
Arizona, and there would remain room for Pennsylvania and little
Delaware without crowding. The one reservation that I had charge of
from 1911 to 1919 embraced 3863 square miles, a trifle smaller than
Connecticut, and it was a postage stamp on the broad yellow face of
Arizona, which is in area one twenty-seventh of the entire United
States. One hundred thousand persons, or one fourth of the state’s
estimated population, live in eight of its towns, leaving much less
than three persons per square mile, including Indians and Mexicans, to
inhabit the remaining emptiness. One tenth of the population is Indian,
and one fourth of Arizona’s land area is “Indian country.” The
reservations have 1.5 persons per square mile. The fastest train of the
Santa Fe system requires ten hours to cross Arizona from its eastern
boundary to the Colorado River, a distance of 386 miles. Arizona has
mountains that lift their crests more than 12,000 feet above the sea;
and to present a perfect contrast, it has Yuma and Parker, towns of the
Mohave Desert, cozy places in summer, close to sea level, with
temperatures of 116° to 120° in the shade. Yes, you can eat oranges
from the Phœnix trees while listening to the story of the Yuma man who
found Hell chilly; and you can find snow in June on the upper levels of
the Apache Indian Reserve without scaling a mountain peak. In the
northern Navajo country I have twice experienced thirty degrees below
zero in February, while there is no doubt the American Beauty roses
were blooming in Phœnix gardens. Once I nearly froze to death on the
nineteenth of May in Arizona, the place of palms, and figs, and
pomegranates!
I had expected to be sadly bored, but the steady routine of each
reservation working-day ate up the hours. Time does not hang on one’s
hands; a strange thing too, considering the silence and solitude and
lack of action in the Desert. Some writer has sought to picture this
bustling, speaking emptiness:—“It is a land where one always expects to
find something just around the corner; and there is never anything
around the corner.” Quite so. Therefore, it is a magic place, an
Enchanted Empire, filled ever with a wistful anticipation that lures
without the bitterness of disappointment. There is always another
corner, and another beautiful possibility.
A multitude of office duties caused the four morning-hours to seem as
one. Lunch time, and a bit of gossip with a dozen strange beings, and
the quaint humor that isolation creates. Then the afternoon, filled
with the shrieking wind and the hiss of sand against the panes. A
passing traveler would stop to ask about the river fords and roads to
nowhere; and those employees coming to requisition supplies, whether
engineer or school matron or farrier, would have their talk out. The
warehouses always presented the fascinating search for something, just
to learn if indeed it was there, as the account stated, and in the
exact quantity as the Bureau minutely charged; and when not found,
there would be ample time for the cursing-out of the fellow who had
used it and failed to make the credit to protect the Chief.
“That fencing!” wrathfully declared the Boss. “That wire was issued
five years ago. I remember old Becode Bega got the last spool of it. It
has rusted out by now in the Corn Creek. Hawkins was clerk then, and
damn his eyes, he never expended anything. He had rheumatism, and sang
hymns, and was always telling me that Congressman Floyd Witherspoon, of
Spokane Flats, had married his wife’s second cousin. Send a policeman
up to Becode’s camp, and have that old sinner ride in thirty miles to
sign for that wire. It’s a shame to do it, but who cares in Washington!
They sent Hawkins out, and have him still, somewhere else, twisting
somebody else’s accounts. What’s the next item?”
And so it went. Because under the accounting system then in vogue—a
relic of the War Department days, and which ate up oodles of time and
thousands of dollars in checking and balancing—everything from a quart
of shoe pegs to a locomotive-type of stationary boiler had to be
located and tested and receipted for by the Chief every three months,
come Hades or come high-water!
Without this intense supervision by mail and blue pencil, through
exceptions to accounts submitted, and silly questions, and equally
silly answers, the Chief might have eaten either the shoe-pegs or the
boiler during that odd time when he should have been making brick for
lack of something to occupy him. The state of the Indians themselves,
physically or mentally; the state of their holdings in stock,
implements or gardens; the actual efficiency of the employee corps; the
quality of supplies, and whether on hand or not in sufficient amount to
insure a standard system—no one of these things particularly interested
any Eastern authority to the point of correction; but the property
accounts and the cash accounts were checked until the paper wore out,
and until the Chief neglected everything else to satisfy them.
And dear old careful Uncle, who has wasted more cold cash in archaic
systems than any other organization known to ancient or modern history,
checked the spigot drainings every three months, unmindful of the bung,
and scrupulously filed away the results in the catacombs of Washington,
unaware of the negligence of Hawkins, the clerk, but always decidedly
mindful of that worthy’s relationship to the elected genius of Spokane
Flats. One may now remark that the accounting systems have changed.
They have—after years of travail. But Hawkins and his benevolent
influence have not changed; Uncle has not changed; and the Chief’s time
is still spent checking inefficiency at home and reporting to ignorance
abroad.
Three times a week, in late afternoon, a solitary horseman, jouncing
above his laden saddlebags, would appear over the slight rise beyond
the trading-post, coming from the railroad; and a cry would go up from
the campus:—
“The mail!”
That call would cause a stir. What a thing of interest is a newspaper
five days old, a fresh magazine or catalogue, in those waste places!
And a letter from a friend or loved one is a thing golden. Scarcely
would the distribution have ended, with joy or disappointment, when it
would be sunset, and the Desert cooling and browning into dusk as the
red ball plunged downward into the caverns of the range, trailing
behind it a glory that often compensated for the trials and little
evils of the day.
Sunday brought a pause that seemed unreal, an enforced halt, a marking
of time. For those who did not sing “Beulah Land,” it was a
long-drawn-out monotony. A thousand miles from anywhere inviting a
visit, often without the solace of a kindred spirit, the silence and
loneliness settled into one. The clanking pump was hushed, the boiler
no longer hissed steam, the whistle did not summon, the mail did not
arrive. Everyone arrayed himself in latest fashion, as mail-order
catalogues decreed, and sat around in great discomfort. Where to go?
There was no hunting, fishing—nothing. One had photographed everything
above ground five thousand times. The nearest town was twenty-six miles
off, and on Sunday as dead as Julius Cæsar.
On such a day I became acquainted with the post trader, a half-breed
Navajo, handsome and smiling. I found this lovable fellow in his
quarters off the store. The place was bare enough of comforts, but
along one wall ran shelves, piled with books and magazines—and such
books and magazines! There I found the famous five-foot shelf extended
many feet. And old files of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, and
Scribner’s. Among the books my hand touched Boswell’s Johnson, and I
knew that the volumes I had left behind would be no longer missed. And
Dickens, and Irving, and Macaulay, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Darwin.
“Why, I had not expected to find such books—here—”
He thanked me with a smile.
“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees
lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come
in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old
guy, wasn’t he?”
Criticism, à la Navajo!
Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that
excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were
trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they
had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he
could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society,
read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have
known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to
the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night,
those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could
talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay
down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and
sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew
the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a
gentle skepticism, and his armor was not dented by snatches of the
Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could
be defeated by a quotation, and were.
His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and
people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid
and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled
after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of
that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in
shreds.
As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an
equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical
to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our
own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native
policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all
their skill as trackers and go-betweens. As an interpreter at trials,
he was invaluable, and his knowledge of what a Navajo would do under
given conditions was almost uncanny.
Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police,
this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was
undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to
accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his
reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the
superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other
was the abject parsimony of the United States Government.
I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is
dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan
jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s
chanting—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling
on his tribal gods.
But I know that he met the answer with a smile. For so he would have
joined the long shadowy line of weaving plumes and tossing lances as
the tribe sought new and happier hunting-grounds; or would have entered
the council ring of the chiefs, to advise in reviewing their material
errors, when they saw the white man as a conqueror, rather than as a
friend, and matched his evils with their savage ingenuity.
VI
A NORTHERN WONDERLAND
“To those unaccustomed to desert lands the Navajo country
presents in form and color and grouping of topographic
features a surprising and fascinating variety; and those
familiar with arid regions will find here erosion features
of unusual grandeur and beauty.”—Gregory: The Navajo Country
The nearest place of change was the town, with a dinner at the Harvey
House. I planned to make this trip each month, to have a food spree,
quite as on a time rude gentlemen of the cattle days came in from the
ranges, hungry for sights and pleasures, and devoted themselves to the
swift consumption of raw liquors. But four hours of dragging through
heated sand and sunlight, from one lonely landmark to another, with
nothing of interest between, destroyed much of the anticipated
satisfaction. I recall a bit of Washington advice.
“You will find that country,” said the well-meaning fellow, “covered
with black gramma grass. Buy a pinto pony the very first thing you do.
Its keep will be negligible. A saddle will cost but a few dollars. Thus
you will have transportation at all times. It will be a pleasure to
ride into town after office hours. You’ll enjoy riding above all
things.”
Twenty-six miles—fifty-two miles there and back!
Now I had read Western stories, written by O. Henry and others who knew
less about the subject. Playing the sedulous ape, I had written a few
myself. These epics all mentioned areas of black gramma grass, and made
much of swift-footed cayuses that were camouflaged by Nature and
possessed Dante-like noses and broom tails. There is a wondrous lot of
this in the movies, too, and the joyous bounding of the aforesaid
animals, from prairie rise to prairie rise, pressing the miles behind
them, and the carefree demeanor of their riders, surrounded as they are
by creaking leather, wide-barred shirts, and jingling spurs, appeals to
one.
But when you learn that a cayuse-bronk in northern Arizona eats
imported hay at forty and sometimes sixty dollars the ton, the black
gramma grass and pastures all being three hundred miles to the south;
and when you find that the devil is not to be trusted for an instant,
and that he has to be flayed constantly to produce even an amble; and
when you feel—“feel” is the word—the misery twitching completely
throughout the human system from pounding on the wooden anatomy of the
brute, a large part of this paper-and-film appeal vanishes. Moreover,
dusty shirts, alkali-impregnated handkerchiefs, and the smell of a
harness shop do not combine to flavor one’s meals delicately. Big Bill
Hart may have my share of this, and he is welcome.
But there does come a longing “for to admire and for to see” what is
actually out back. That adventure and romance are not to be found in
the beautiful desert distances seems impossible. The dim blue buttes of
the north, mysterious altars of the gods, promised to yield something
from the land they guarded. And when an Agency mechanic told me that he
had orders to visit the Castle Butte station, a far-away outpost, I
recommended myself as a standard camp-cook, recalling the early
mornings of newspaper days when I fried eggs on a gas-stove. We did not
go to the horse-corral and lay our ropes over two spirited steeds, but
at an early hour wended to the barn and harnessed two sturdy old plugs
to a twelve-hundred-pound farm wagon. They were capable of making four
miles an hour, and the wagon had capacity for a grub-box, for blankets,
shovels, rope, and all the things necessary—perhaps—to our getting
there first, and to accomplishing something afterward.
Have you never wondered how those adventurous fellows of the yarns,
outfitted with nothing but a handkerchief, a saddle, and a lariat,
manage to cover leagues upon leagues with the one horse, and never stop
overnight? A Navajo Indian can do with one blanket and a sheepskin
lashed behind his saddle; but even he contrives to find the
trading-posts of the Desert for his grub, and he always reaches a
friendly camp at nightfall.
Smith cautioned me to take a heavy coat, which I would not have thought
of. Right at the start I committed a serious blunder, one that caused
me to suffer bitterly, and one that I have not repeated since.
Expecting to return next day, I persuaded myself that two sacks of
beck-a-shay nahto, or genuine “cattle” tobacco, would be sufficient for
the trip. But desert plans are subject to change, and desert wisdom is
painfully acquired. I now have drilled myself never to forget matches
and a filled canteen, baling-wire,—otherwise “Arizona silk,”—repair
parts for the lizard, a piece of rope, tools, and a heavy coat of
sheepskin, plus a tobacco factory unless the route is marked by
trading-posts every thirty miles. I arrange these things automatically,
because on that trip I tried to smoke powdered alfalfa in a cob pipe.
Northward we wended all day, one rugged mesa slope and huge flat
succeeding another, always rising. After passing Lone Cottonwood
Spring, where the water was an excellent imitation of thick gray
pea-soup that the horses disdained, we lunched at a delightful place
known as Coyote Springs, one of the ten thousand Southwest waterholes
so named. In the naming of springs and precious water it would seem
that the vocabulary of the pioneers was decidedly limited. But it would
have been the same by any other name. A hole scooped in a soft rock and
sand hill, fenced with crooked and cracking cottonwood branches, as the
Navajo build their corrals, with not a vestige of relieving green
within miles of it. All around the sand was packed hard by the flocks
of sheep that came to water. Overhead was a broiling sun, and this
barren area reflected every bit of the glare and heat that it did not
hold as a stove. The air was heavy with the aroma of sheep, and alkali
showed ghastly white in the spring’s overflow. Nevertheless, it was an
oasis and held water. Here and there were picked and bleaching bones.
The coyotes knew its name.
Many buttes not to be seen from the Agency were now in sight. One lumpy
mound resembled a coiled snake—Rattlesnake Butte; another was shaped as
a pyramid, although no one had heard of Cheops or Chephren; and a
third, which had crumbled, was like a huge four-poster bed that some
forgotten giant had wrecked.
A bite to eat, and on again, lumbering down the yielding banks of
washes, and scrambling up and out of them. Truly a couple of sturdy
plugs were required to drag the wagon up those heavy slopes. Providing
the traveler has time and patience, and is built with a steel-riveted
frame, the old-time farm wagon with three-inch tires is the surest
method of making such a journey. It rolls and pitches as a squat lugger
in a choppy sea, but it gets there.
While the Desert appears as a level sward, one soon finds that there is
no sward to speak of, and that one million tangled hummocks fast follow
the first million, each bunch of sparse grass, each growth of
greasewood or saltbush having its own protecting hillock of sand. A
good road in those days was one that a stout wagon could get over
without being wrecked.
It is quite an experience to travel for hours toward a given point
marked by a solitary pinnacle, a veritable mountain having sheer sides,
and fail to reduce the distance appreciably. The sun was nearly down
when we crawled along a valley between two of these monsters. One,
named Chimney Butte, a huge truncated cone resting on massive
shoulders, was the highest in that country; and the other, Castle
Butte, looked like a ruined mediæval stronghold, having a causeway
flanked by towers, above which loomed dim embattlements and casements.
In the brilliant daylight the height of Chimney Butte is dwarfed by
desert distances; and Castle Butte is not always robed in fancy; but it
was now twilight, the time when the Desert is most sombre and fanciful,
and it was my entrance to that garden of the vanished gods. These two
gigantic piles were as the awesome portals of a ruined gateway, the
pass to an unknown, mysterious country; and the whole setting, fading
into night, gloomy with the menace of silence, held something of the
strange unreality of a dream. And came on suddenly the dark and cold.
How did Smith manage to follow the road? I could no longer see it, and
had more than enough to do to cling to the pitching seat of the wagon.
We headed straight into the blackness. What yawning precipices might be
awaiting us! I became chilled and cramped, and was thankful for that
greatcoat, though it did not pad me against the rude shocks of the
going.
“How much farther is it to this Agency?” I asked.
“Oh! over in the hills a bit—‘bout three miles furder to go yit. It
ain’t an agency, yeh know—nothin’ but a missionary and a log hut.”
And we plunged into another of the dark defiles. Then out of the black,
on a bit of cold wind, came a desert welcome that one never forgets, a
promise of rare comfort when one is hungry and cramped with cold, the
pungent incense of burning cedar. Now from the deep shadow of a
hillside arose a thin column of sparks, glinting, flying jewels of the
night.
“There’s it,” he announced, as if somewhat relieved, himself.
It was a little house, built of boards, having but two rooms, one large
enough for a bed and dresser, the other containing a cookstove, table,
and two chairs. Its outside dimensions could not have been more than
twelve by twenty feet. And when the stove was filled with dry cedar one
was tempted, after a complete toasting on one side, to dispense with
the table. But there was no complaint to make of this on our arrival.
The fire had the cheering crackle of Yuletide, and soon coffee and
bacon added their aroma. The hospitality of the good missionary and his
wife was like all those welcomes extended in the solitary places, when
the visitor is not touring with a notebook and a nose. The meal ended,
and all news exchanged, we said good night and opened the door.
“’Ere’s a go!” one might have exclaimed, without hurting the feelings
of a preacher. It was snowing! And even a preacher would have remarked
further, probably with adjectives, on seeing that Government house in
which we were to spend the night. It was a log hut in truth, built
corral-fashion, the poles set on end, the chinks originally plastered
with adobe. There was but one room, containing a single bunk made of
boards, an old cookstove, and a collection of broken tools and empty
canned-goods cases. The floor was of packed earth. Without
exaggeration, I may say that the roof and the floor were intact; but
practically all the caulking had escaped from the log walls, and the
wind felt its way inside with long icy fingers. The mechanic dropped
into the bunk and was asleep almost instantly; and, after building a
rushing fire in the stove, I rolled myself in Government blankets, and
rolled again, this time under the stove, to pass the night.
But I did not rest in the poetry of the wild. The refulgent moon did
not come up to spill its splendor through the open door, nor even
through the extensive openings of the wall; the perfume of the growing
pines did not soothe with healing balsam, the cry of the loon did not
sound from across the lake, and so forth. The floor, however, was under
that stove; and the floor had not been constructed along those
scientific lines followed in the building of Ostermoor mattresses.
Plastic as is my figure, it refused to conform.
And to add to my distress, someone in all that vast and lonely country
owned an old gray horse. I know he was old, and I know he was gray, for
he acted just like a silly old gray horse. And he was hobbled, and he
was out in the snow, and he had a bell tied to his neck.
Clankety-clank-clank, clang, claaangngng—clankety, clang, clank!
Around and around and around the house he voyaged all that night,
proceeding by hops and plunges as a hobbled horse must, his gait just
enough hampered by the lashings of his two front feet to impart a
syncopated tempo to the discords and jangles of that flat metallic
bell. At times he would pause, as if for breath, and there would be
quiet—deep silence—just sufficient for a doze; then—clankety, clang,
clang, clank! he would break out again.
I have listened to jazz orchestras of various colors and degrees of
crime, and other peace-destroying nuisances meriting death; but I have
never heard anything equal to the nocturnal pilgrimage of that old gray
horse. I would drop off to sleep, and suddenly wake as if feeling his
hobbled feet squarely in the centre of my contracted chest; but he
would be ten yards off, miserably clanking his way to another sector of
the snow-covered terrain. And confused, I would lift my head to listen,
knocking it of course against the bottom of the stove, when a long
icicle would stab through a wall chink and take me fairly in the ear.
Perhaps it was a pleasant night for Smith, who faithfully and
harmoniously snored away the hours.
With the dawn I struggled up. No! I did not bound out joyously to
gambol in the pure air of the stunted cedar-forest. It was a cold gray
dawn with a foot of snow, and there was a dank rheumatic caress in it.
With all speed I began smashing a packing case for kindling. Crash!
down came the axe, and splinters flew wide, when Smith stirred in his
bunk, awakening to duty and the dangers thereof. He blinked his eyes
and spluttered:—
“Watch out for that dynamite.”
“Dynamite?”
“Yes; it’s right under my bunk. Chop your wood furder off.”
I followed these directions to the letter. In fact, I gently carried
all the wood outside and chopped it.
The getting of breakfast, a complete demonstration of my culinary
ignorance, occupied me fully in the half-dark. I walked to and fro
gingerly, fearing to wake the dynamite; and I wondered how that stupid
fellow could have slept and have snored as he did, superimposed above a
quiescent earthquake. Dynamite is a great friend to man in the rocky
gorges of the West, but it should not be permitted to join the family
circle.
When next I opened the door, what a transformation! I had come to this
place in the cold grim darkness, heartened only by the perfume of
burning cedar. Occupied with the wood and the wet-handled axe, I was
dimly aware of a drowsy landscape in the clammy mist of dawn. But now
the sun had lifted, and the scene was a snowy fairyland. The gnarled
cedars of the foreground were laden with dripping snow, their branches
picked out with gems. And where the snow lay in unbroken sheets, pure
white, glistening, the shadows of the dwarfed trees formed rare
patterns. Behind the house were cliffs, and each gaunt angle held its
draping of snow. The time-worn bastions of those lava ledges stood as
gaping at the winter’s cheery Good-morning. It was a stage scene under
the great amber light.
A long valley stretched away to the Bidahoche Plains and the Bad Lands
with their honeycombed hills. Its dim recesses were now painted by the
first plashes of sunshine. To left and right, overhanging the snowy
meadows, reared great buttresses and crags of lava, and all down the
valley ancient promontories loomed amid the fading veils of mist.
Prehistoric ages had seen these as the shelving inner walls of some
vast crater, when they had seared and glazed and baked and colored to
form Nature’s pottery. Now, broken and rent apart, they stood as
fantastic separate monuments, lining that sunlit corridor to the outer
plains.
Dominating the foreground was Squash Blossom Butte, an inverted bloom
that the storms of æons had carved and a million rare sunsets tinted.
The Indians reverence the squash blossom as a symbol of fruition, and
perhaps—who knows—in its delicate bell-shaped flower they see more than
the mere promise of a harvest. It is found in Navajo silver-work,
strung into those massive necklaces of which they are so proud; and
when one goes into Hopi land he finds it imitated in the dressing of
their maidens’ hair. So they named this altar.
It was commanding in the morning light; it was the last thing seen down
the valley, a scarlet head thrust into a sober sky, as that second
night came on. The sunset lavished all its rainbow shades on it.
Richest gold and lavender above, purple tones and lava-green below;
bands of saffron melting into slatey shades; emerald and crimson
deepening into jetty blacks when the afterglow had vanished. An aged
throne of the gods. And clearly sweet, as desert music, came the
half-hushed sound of sheep moving among the cedars; and a young Navajo
girl paused at the edge of a thicket to gaze shyly at our cabin, then
to hurry away, the tiny bells at her belt tinkling, having all the
romance of the gypsies.
There is no finer landscape in the Southwest than this seldom-visited
country of the Moqui Buttes where, according to the Hopi, the one-time
giants had their dwelling places. The wondrous piles and pinnacles of
the Grand Cañon present a chaotic struggle that has ceased in all its
awesome disorder and aged grandeur. It makes man gasp and wonder, but
it does not invite the smile of reverie. This scene about the sunset
throne had that serenity born of isolation. It was small enough to
invite intimacy. Like the kingdom of a fairy tale, the tranquil valley
encompassed its own world, dreaming, smiling in its sleep.
Many times since have I crossed the Butte country, seeing it frozen in
winter and again broiling under a summer sun that scorched from the
cedars their sweetest aromas. I have always found it a haven, full of
peace.
Next day we returned to the Agency, an uneventful retreat, save for a
jouncing box of dynamite that leaped like a thing fiendishly alive
whenever the wheels slammed into a rut. My nerves were not in the best
shape. I had been smoking powdered alfalfa in a pipe. And I would look
back from the high seat, half fearing each time to catch that dynamite
in the very act of going off. But luck was with us; we herded it safely
into the Agency storehouse; and I rushed to the post for a can of real
tobacco.
VII
THE FIRST BALL OF THE SEASON
Of Harrison’s barn, with its muster
Of flags festooned over the wall,
Of the candles that shed their soft lustre
And tallow on headdress and shawl;
Of the steps that we took to one fiddle,
Of the dress of my queer vis-à-vis,
And how I once went down the middle
With the man who shot Sandy McGee.
Bret Harte: “Her Letter”
Among employees of the Desert Indian Service, the Marylander is a
rarity. Back in Maryland the Indian Service is unknown, all readers of
the Sun-paper believing that Indians were originally designed by
Buffalo Bill.
So when a lad seated himself on my porch one night, and announced:
“Why, Ah’m from Maheland too; yes, indeed!” it rather struck me where I
ought to have lived. I was eating at the mess then.
He was out with an irrigation crew, surveying levels, and in a few
months had become obsessed by all things Southwest Indian. He wore
moccasins and a bracelet studded with turquoise, and he could chant
like a cold Navajo on his way home from a Yabachai.
“Ah’m goin’ to get me a gourd-drum, an’ go in for ‘singing,’” he told
me, when we had become better acquainted, and he demonstrated the eerie
half-croon-half-yodel of the Medicine Man. “Say, Nultsose! have yo’
heard them?—Medicine ‘sings’?”
This was my first intimation that a title attached to my position.
“Nultsose—”
He explained it as Navajo for paper or writing, hence; one who writes
on or issues papers pertaining to the mysteries of white men’s wholly
unnecessary accounting. Nearly all clerks wear spectacles, as I did,
and one would think that the Indian, naming his own so often because of
infirmities, would have seized on this defect for a name. But not so;
the check, order, issue-script, permit, or warrant, the paper, the
“nultsose,” is the important thing to him. It means money in hard
dollars, authority perhaps, demand for goods, leave to go on a journey
with recommendation or safe-conduct; or, if fortune has waned, summons
to the Chief.
“And if yo’ go to a ‘sing,’ Nultsose, remember to take change, an’
don’t give the squaws more’n two bits at a time. Yo’ll have to dance
with ’em, yeh know, an’ instead of thankin’ ’em, yo’ pay ’em. Hand out
a dollar, an’ Good-night—they keep the change. Now old Beck-a-shay
Thlani is inviting to one sometime soon. It’ll be a reg’lar hoe-down,
an’ we’ll go.”
The doctor was present, and he grinned uncomfortably. The Nahtahni,
stretched in his hammock, rubbed his wig and grunted.
“Ah! yo’-all come too,” urged Roberts; “It’ll be fun. They all know me,
and I’ll do the interpreting. Every old shemah with a dotter has her
eye cast my way, anyhow. They pick out the handsome boys for the
weddings at ‘sings.’ I’ll have to get me a Piute wedding-basket,
though, next pay-day. There’s a trader over at Red Lake who’s got my
order for it.”
The doctor cautioned me later not to be too hasty in this matter, and I
perceived that he had reason for timidity.
“They’ll get you,” he declared. “They never fail to land a fellow; and
then he has to prance like a fool before five thousand Indians. That’s
all right for Roberts, ’cause he’ll wind up a squaw man; but I’m
advising you.”
And one twilight, when we were again arranged on deck after supper, a
half-dozen little Navajo boys from the school sidled up to the Chief,
daring and timid by turns, their eyes snapping with the fire of hope.
They hung around until he asked:—
“Ah-tish-ah?”
“Dence!” they exclaimed, breathlessly.
“Noki yisconga, epten,” the Nahtahni severely decided.
“Doe-yah-shaunta! She-no-be-hosen. E-yah-tay.”
The Old Man was proud of his linguistic ability, and this was the
complete extent of his Navajo on any topic. The last sentence but one
he had made up, somehow, all by himself. It bore no semblance to
anything any Navajo had ever enunciated; but he knew what it meant. A
free—a very free—translation would run something like this: “Two days
from now, nothing doing. Don’t you dare to do it. It’s bad for you. I
know nothing about it. Yes; all right!”
The last was all the kids wanted. The scrub crackled as they
disappeared into and through it, going as frightened rabbits.
Roberts spoke next.
“That’s old Beck-a-shay Thlani’s ‘sing.’ Say, boss, the Doc and young
Nultsose here are both pinin’ for to shake a toe in that soiree. Let us
have a team, will yeh?”
The Nahtahni grunted.
“You know the horses have worked hard to-day—”
“Yes; let us have a team,” said his stepdaughter, who afterward married
the doctor; and that settled it, and also bound the medico to the
adventures of the evening. There are a few things no different in the
Desert. The Navajo woman of the hogan, the Hopi dowager of the
household on the height, the Pueblo wife of the lower vineyards, all
settle these questions in much the same manner. Man proposes and begins
to make a noise with words, and immediately thereafter attends strictly
to the holding of his peace. Roberts knew this, and without further
parley disappeared in the direction of the barn. Shortly came a farm
wagon, drawn by two solid animals, and a dozen of us piled into it, the
doctor noticeably lagging.
“Don’t forget your change, Nultsose,” called Roberts.
It was no great distance to the river, and soon we were splashing
through shallow waters. Mounting the high farther bank, the wagon began
tossing and rolling over an old desert road. Then the dark laid down
its thick blanket, and the stars burned through overhead. From the next
rise we noticed a faint glow, away off, and this grew larger as we
blundered along. Now a whiff of pungent smoke came on the thin desert
wind. Now the deep shadows began to dissolve into a golden gloom, and
now gleamed the white-hot flare of burning cottonwood. Then a furious
challenge from the dogs, and we saw the camp. As feudal lords were once
accompanied by retainers and shock-headed varlets, so the nomadic lord
of the Desert is followed by a multitude of canines. It seemed that a
thousand of them started up to greet us, a fearsome, throaty bedlam.
Wagons loomed up, their canvas tops lending a touch of the pioneer
days; and in the spaces between the poles were the little
cooking-fires, around which women and children huddled amid pots and
pans, saddles and boxes and water-kegs and tangled harness—all the
clutter of a desert camp. Beyond the huge central fire was a hogan,
that queer house the Navajo builds of logs and plasters with adobe,
domed like a beehive, and from its roof wreathed a thin column of
smoke. There rested the sick man for whom all this preparation had been
made, the cost of which would likely break old Beck-a-shay Thlani, or
at least seriously strain his credit at the trading-posts.
Coarse Navajo rugs were spread close to the fire and, with grave
salutations from the older men and smiles from mothers who convoyed a
bevy of Navajo girls, we were invited to be seated in the place of
honor. This would have impressed any blank-record Easterner, going
about making notes, as rude but wholesome hospitality, and it was; but
the courtesy also enabled the Navajo to indulge himself—and
particularly herself—in a bit of fun. The doctor slipped away into the
shadows; and I noticed that the young men of the Navajo, scores of
them, sat their ponies, a long line of horsemen behind us. They eased
in their saddles, reins hanging, their faces having the grave solemnity
that marks a shy and diffident people.
That is, shy of strangers, before whom they draw on the mask of
gravity, mistaken since the days of Fenimore Cooper for stoicism. But
no one was shy of Roberts; and especially had he friends among the
ladies. Every old shemah greeted him with a smile and exclamations of
pleased surprise. He held the confidence of these people; and well he
might, considering the pains he had been to in acquiring a working
vocabulary of their language, which is probably as difficult to master
as Chinese. And I felt somewhat reassured in having him for sponsor. We
lolled comfortably on the rugs, and the fire burned our faces and
lighted everything as at a play.
“The doc’ has vamoosed,” he said, grinning; “but that won’t do him any
good. They’ll run him down in the scrub, and bring him in hog-tied.
I’ve told a dozen old women that he is stingy with his dancing.
Self-defense—otherwise you an’ me’d have to do it all.”
“Explain this dancing act,” I requested.
“Don’t worry,” Robert replied. “The squaws will attend to everything
for yeh. Just yield gracefully—an’ pay ’em. Don’t forget that.”
Now from the hogan came a band of solemn-featured men, led by an old
gentleman of the tribe who bore a strong resemblance to Rameses III,
straight out of glass case No. 12, as you go down the east corridor,
save that he was slightly animated. He bore a staff, to which a little
gourd-drum was tied. The group formed a wedge behind him. Silently they
swayed together, shoulders touching, for several seconds. Then the old
one tapped the drum and intoned a howl, and with one accord they were
off, like a flock of coon dogs on a cold night. In time with the
curious rhythm they continued swaying, and occasionally did a hop-step
without moving forward. The fire beat upon them and, as they warmed to
the chanting, heads thrown back, mouths agape, and vocal chords never
missing a note, the sweat beaded on their foreheads.
“This,” said Roberts to me, in solemn appreciation, “this is some
singing—I never heard better.” And I agreed with him. It laid over
anything I had ever heard, including a Mott Street theatre choir.
It is impossible to describe the nuances of the Navajo chants. At the
farthest northern trading-post there lives a lady who can translate the
Rain Song, the Prayer before Day, and other of their invocations; and I
know a white man who had a “medicine sing” held over him to comfort his
Navajo wife; but until you meet up with Roberts, properly chaperoned
nowadays in the great Jedito Wash, I pass giving any idea of that weird
combination of sounds. A long sustained note at times, now a crooning
melody, now a sad, half-wild cry, filled with minor effects that would
be the delight and the despair of any jazz artist, it is indeed a song
of the Desert.
And the most astounding thing of all was the endurance of that aged
vocalist, the old Medicine Man. The pitch of his drum simply encouraged
him in new effects. There was an energy, a sustaining confidence in his
efforts that must have had a rare effect on the ailing one within the
hogan. And for two mortal hours the others of the singing band followed
his lead without once rivaling him. When one hesitated, as might be
seen but not heard, the clamor of the pack smothered all defects; and
the faltering one would cough, spit straight upward into the air,
uncaring, and get a fresh start. But the old man was never headed; not
once did he waver, hesitate, or fail in the key. He had begun with that
first flat sounding of the drum, and he continued faithfully unto the
end. He was an artist. I admired him. And when Roberts told me that the
old charlatan would receive at least twenty sheep and five head of cows
for his fee, I began to understand his unflagging spirit. He had a
reputation to sustain.
The Regulations of the Interior Department, issued to Nahtahnis, state
that all such interesting old comedians should be in jail for this
offense against medical ethics. But, mark you! the Interior Department
does not encourage Nahtahni to put him in jail. There are too many of
him. The Navajo number between thirty and forty thousand souls on the
six Navajo reserves, and about every seventh man is a doctor of tribal
medicine. While a lucrative calling, it is not always a desirable one
for the neophyte, since failure to exorcise successfully the evil
spirits enmeshed in the patient has been followed more than once by
swift demise, and the blundering physician did not heal himself later,
nor did he hear the singing.
Once to me came an Inspector from the Department, and he said:—
“Now you have been having trouble with these Indians, and I am
surprised that you have dismissed all your Navajo policemen as
unworthy. You must have a police force to keep the Navajo in line. We
will call a council and select a new outfit to sustain you in this
important work.”
Which we did. There were flour and meat, coffee and sugar, together
with the all-necessary beck-a-shay nahto, cattle tobacco provided for
distribution, and the people came. As usual, the men were diffident and
modest, and no one offered himself for appointment as an officer of the
realm. The nominations were made by head-men, and discussion followed
as to individual merits, influence, bravery, and all those virtues that
are supposed to animate the warrior. The Inspector was finally
satisfied with the selections.
An old-timer sat on the platform with us, acting as interpreter. Ed had
skinned mules across the Zuni Mountains in 1889, and he could take an
old single-action forty-five and keep a tin can moving as if it were
alive. He could roll a saddle-blanket cigarette with one hand, sing a
puncher song, and play the guitar. He was one of the post-traders, and
perhaps the best Navajo interpreter alive. He knew the Navajo Indian,
having had the advantage of a living dictionary in his early days. But
Ed knew when to keep his mouth shut, and aside from faithfully
interpreting from English into Navajo and from Navajo into English he
said nothing at the time. But later:—
“It wasn’t for me, a mere uneducated Indian trader, to give my advice
to a wise guy from the East who was pointing the trails out to a
Nahtahni; but ... every damned one of them new police has ‘medicine
turquoise’ in his ears.”
It was true. Every one of them should have been in jail!
The Navajo are lithe and lean, for the most part, and their dress is
picturesque. One could see all sorts of costume at this “sing.” There
was the old fellow with trousers compiled of flour sacks, the brand
having been arranged as a bit of decoration, and where “OUR BEST” would
show to most advantage; and there was that one satisfied with a pair of
cast-off overalls. But the majority were in rich-toned velveteen
shirts, open at the neck, and with sleeves vented under the armpits;
and desert trousers, loose and flapping garments, Spanish-style, split
below the knee, made of highly colored and figured calico. One fellow’s
legs were a riot of gaudy parrots. The twisted silk handkerchiefs worn
about the head came from the Spanish too, no doubt. Their hair was
drawn back from the forehead and corded in a long knot, a Mongol touch.
Their moccasins were of red-stained buckskin, half-shoe, half-leggin,
warm and noiseless. The young men wore gay shirts and neckerchiefs,
store-bought, and their ponies showed more of decoration than
themselves. Each had a good saddle, most necessary to a desert Romeo,
and the headdresses of the ponies were heavy with silver bands and
rosettes.
Now a middle-aged dandy would strut about, proud of a crimson shirt,
and the firelight would paint him as a figure from old opera. He would
shine whitely of silver—a huge necklace, with turquoise pendants and
many strands of shell and coral; bracelets, and the khado that is still
worn, though the wrist no longer needs protection from the bowstring;
silver rings and silver buttons, all studded with turquoise chips. Not
less than five hundred dollars in metal and workmanship would adorn
these old beaux, and an Indian valuation would be enormous.
Silver and turquoise are the jeweled wealth of the Navajo, the white
metal contrasting with their sunburnt skins and the stone holding the
color of their matchless skies.
The women wore velveteen bodices and curiously full skirts. They too
were weighted with silver ornaments, one having the more of beads and
bandeaux being the favorite wife or daughter. Some of the smaller girls
moved about accompanied by the tinkling of little bells strung to their
moccasins and belts.
All this in the brilliant flare of the cottonwood fire, above which
fanned a mist of sparks like another Milky Way; and there was the
incense of the smoking logs; and the star-pinned dome overhead; and all
around the dark maw of the great lonely Desert.
Suddenly came a halt in these “singing” proceedings. The choir withdrew
somewhere, and the centre of the stage was taken by another old man,
who led a little girl. Other and older girls began to hurry around the
circle, darting here, darting there, as if running something down. At
first the little one seemed a trifle confused and stood in wide-eyed
hesitation; but with a bit of urging from the elder master of the
ceremonies, she made for Roberts. He would lead this german. Grinning,
he permitted her to pull him into the ring, his partner maintaining a
solemnity that was comical.
“Get ready for the next set,” he called to me over his shoulder.
The social features were on, and the girls were hunting partners. Did
the young men of the ponies vie with each other? They did not. They sat
their steeds as if cut from granite. For it would seem that a young man
would likely lose half his finery, certainly all his change, if
captured, and might find himself later up against a breach-of-promise
suit. On foot, he was at a disadvantage; mounted, it was the more
difficult to drag him down. I cannot say that I noticed any chivalry
among those young Navajo fellows.
But Roberts—there was a fine accommodating chap for you. One partner
was not enough for him; he now had two of the tiny ones.
The dance seemed simple enough. It consisted in one’s acting as a
pivot, around which the little squaw, or several of them, turned
backward with rapid scuffling steps. Her one hand tightly gripped the
man’s belt, the other held as tightly her blanket. Her expression was
as sober as a Chinaman’s. But she accomplished the purpose of the
business. After a few moments of that turning, the subject would be too
dizzy to argue out of a donation. It kept up until Roberts was weaving;
but when they stopped he protested that he was a poverty-stricken
wretch—and promptly, without cracking a smile, they began again. He
must shell out at least a quarter to each, which he did finally, and
they scuttled back to their chaperons, who banked the money. And here
he came unsteadily to the blanket we shared, while I suspected several
of the old women casting menacing glances in my direction. There
sounded a scurry in the outer darkness, and a crashing of the
greasewood.
“The doc’ has beat it,” said Roberts, dropping down. I raised to look
around; and just then, from behind, I felt a very muscular hand
grasping my belt. There was nothing to do but yield in the best humor
possible. A wild shout from the Indians, men and women, even from the
ungallant horsemen grouped in the rear, and I was thrust and pulled
forward. They had appointed two of the small girls to me, and their
hold on my belt was like grim death.
And now the shuffle began.
I endeavored to spin without entangling my feet, but there was
something wrong with my action. I was no such success as friend Roberts
had been. Now the master of ceremonies came forward, his wrinkled face
having the benevolence of a grandfather, and with expressive gestures
he explained his sorrow because of my inefficiency. He would give me a
lesson. We used words that neither understood, and made signs at each
other until wholesale laughter retired the teacher. But I was not
retired. I was still in the ring.
The gold-and-orange flares of the fires dazzled one’s eyes, and then
one began to turn faster; the circle of bright figures in the full
light lost outline, and then the wagons and horses and hogan and
Roberts on his blanket blurred into and formed one jumbled
merry-go-round of which I was the centre. A little more of this, and I
cried “Enough!” and very nearly staggered into the fire. Solemnly my
partners waited for and clutched at their two-bit pieces, and I weaved
back to the blanket.
The doctor was not captured that night. Perhaps he managed to hide
until we harnessed the team and started for home; perhaps he walked
into the Agency, as several accused. But this was a “running dance,”
meaning a moving one. A second installment of it was held the next
night at a point ten miles down the river. The doctor was compelled to
go, and there they ran him down and forced his performance. His effort
was not half bad, and I wondered if mine had been as funny.
Affairs of this sort taught me that the desert Navajo are a
good-natured and interesting people, in many ways like our own country
folk at quilting-bees and huskings. They have their renegades and black
sheep, with which the white race is as fully endowed; and my ugly
experiences of later days could not be charged to the tribe.
When a Navajo is ailing, they manage to combine exorcism of the evil
spirits with the amusing dance, and whether or not old Beck-a-shay
Thlani was improved physically, the girls had a good time. It often
helps them to find a husband; and in this case, how were they to know
that Roberts would desert them for an Albuquerque girl, or that in a
few months I would be interested only in solemnizing the marriages of
older sisters and the herding of the remainder into schools?
But I have often wondered, when on those trails leading down into
Beck-a-shay Thlani’s district, and coming suddenly on a shy Navajo
maiden chivvying a band of sheep, if she were one I danced with that
night on the Little Colorado River, when I was simply “Nultsose,” and
the worries and responsibilities of Nahtahni had not been clamped to my
shoulders.
VIII
OLD ORAIBI
But still the drowsy pueblo hears
The voices of the Bells;
They speak as ghosts of other years,
Their message faintly swells
And sighs away above the town,
Echoing history;
The whisper of an old renown
That dwelt at Cochiti.
—“The Bells of Cochiti”
One day, when it was quiet in the office, the Chief became reminiscent.
He spoke of his coming to this station; how he had pitched his tent
under the old cottonwoods at the present well; of the length of time it
had taken to interest Pesh-la-kai Etsetti, the silversmith, and
Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, in his plans; and of the
winter when a posse of whites, led by a county sheriff who is now a
Senator of the United States, drove the Indians through the snow,
packing their few belongings, and across the river, in order that a few
cattlemen who owned everything else might also have this poor
grazing-area. That was before Great Heart quit the Washington helm; and
Great Heart, with characteristic strenuosity, very promptly—one might
say, rudely—dispossessed the self-appointed white inheritors of the
earth.
“I have not had a vacation in six years,” he said, as a wind-up, “And
do you know, I’m tired out, and think I’ll just take one.”
Well, I was not surprised at his being a trifle weary. He seldom had a
moment to himself—except nights, when perhaps he slept. He had just
returned from a long trip in the Butte country, had made numerous
drives to town on business, had assisted in running down a band of
horse-thieves, and only that morning had been on the range to locate
and evict certain trespassers. When such work did not occupy him, there
was the ruined boiler to dally with, a pumping-plant to construct, and
reports to indite; to say nothing of the sessions of the Indian Court,
long and involved and farcical, the dipping of sheep, and the
never-ending complaints of employees—a garrulous, gossiping,
complaining lot.
It was a great life, but he had momentarily weakened.
“Yes, I am tired,” he said; “And I’ll let you run this ranch for a
brief spell, while I go off resting. I have never seen a snake dance,
and the Moqui hold ’em over beyond those Buttes. To-morrow I start.”
Now that is the Southwesterner’s idea of a real vacation. He would
travel about one hundred miles by team, toiling slowly through sand,
probably in rain at this season and its aftermath of treacherous mud;
struggle across arroyos and stream-beds where quicksand might ensnare
his outfit and cause him days of labor; through broiling sunlight
certainly, and general discomfort, to perch himself finally atop an
overheated rock on the edge of a cliff and witness a score of
well-meaning but deluded Hopi Indians juggling their precious
rattlesnakes. Within two hours he could have had a berth on one of the
finest trains in the world, and within twenty-four have reached the
magnificently overadvertised and overgrown city of Los Angeles. Not so!
Across the Desert called an unsatisfied lure, the sorcery of the
unrelieved distances. “Out there somewhere” was something he had not
seen. That was the excuse. Actually he longed to be free, and the
unmapped Desert offered its splendid unbounded freedom.
At that time I had no conception that hard-going, with no cares other
than those of keeping to trail, was the finest sort of rest for an
active man whose routine had been filled with the pettiness of
irritating and never-to-be-settled Governmental farces. I now know that
the way to rest is to remove from telephones and telegraph-lines, from
both superiors and subordinates who wish to pass the buck, from the
hellish routine of menus and meals, from begging complaints and
complaining beggars; to get away from everything, and so far into the
back-country that in case of war, pestilence, or death those interested
are staggered by the idea of reaching you.
One learns to act quickly. Delay half a day, and the incoming mail may
present a dozen obstacles. Promptly at dawn next morning he started,
his camp-outfit lashed to a light buckboard; and on the bulletin-post
he left a notice that my commands would be as the law of the Medes and
Persians during his absence.
I took him at his word, and one very necessary improvement was
immediately set in motion. The place had become an asylum for stray
desert dogs and forlorn disinherited cats. This livestock was promptly
rounded up, and there were interment ceremonies over at the river. The
succeeding nights were filled with a comforting peace.
But it was not all beer and skittles. The boiler did manage to burn out
during his leave, thanks to the careful inattention of an underpaid and
irresponsible Indian stoker; and without a boiler one does not run a
steam-laundry, does not make ice, and most serious of all in the
Desert, does not pump water. This last is the one thing that may not be
done without. So for two days and nights the engineer and helpers
labored with a loyalty that was revelation to me, rolling and
re-rolling the crumbling tubes of that relic of the Dark Ages, while
tank-wagons struggled in from the river with the drinking-supply.
The doctor and I sat in the office and talked of many things.
“When the Chief returns,” he suggested, winking, “We’ll go over there
and have a look-see. How ’bout it?”
“Done!” I agreed. “But do they hold these snake dances every month?”
“Our good friends, the Moqui, hold some sort of shindig every day, from
what I have heard of them, but not all are snake dances. Those are
reserved for serious and important occasions, regulated by the sun,
moon, and stars. They occur once a year at certain fixed points.”
“Then—we must have an object; and—”
“Peaches,” he said, cunningly. “We’ll go to old Oraibi after
peaches—succulent fruit, the gift of the Spanish padres.”
Noting my blank amazement, he hurried into an explanation.
“One of the legal amusements at an Indian Agency is keeping the help
occupied, on the theory that, as with horses, it can think of only one
thing at a time. Now it has been discovered in this Service that a
dozen women paring peaches for preserving not only are happy in the
thought of reducing expenses, but the more easily talk of what ails
’em. We’ll suggest peaches to them, they’ll bring pressure on the Boss,
and we’ll go. Lots of rabbit in that country, and ducks at the Lakes.
Oraibi is some place to visit, too. It was built about the time of
Noah, and hasn’t been cleaned since. Flood didn’t reach it.”
All of which was very interesting to one who wanted to go somewhere,
anywhere, after having been penned up for months. I had viewed the same
draggled trees, the same cement walks, the same old trading-post, for
so long that all judgment was leaving me, and I had begun to buy Navajo
blankets. When one reaches this point, the inoculative powers of the
subtle Desert are beginning to work.
Everything came about just as the doctor had prophesied. The Chief
returned one day at dusk, encrusted with sand and a week’s growth of
beard. While he was shaving, I made a complete report against the
stoker and the boiler, with comment on those in Washington responsible
for both. Then the doctor heard of a terrifically sick Indian over
beyond the Lakes, and the pressure of peaches-and-economy was brought
by the other parties. Next morning, the medico and I made our get-away
before the utter absence of dogs was discovered.
The only thing that tried to affect our escape was a little animal
perched on my walk in the late moonlight. The doctor cautioned me not
to disturb this visitor, and for once I did not neglect a physician’s
advice. The team being harnessed at the barn, we drove to within fair
shooting-distance of this guest, and the doctor handed me the lines,
saying:—
“When I shoot, let ’em go.”
Which he did, and I did.
Later, we regretted this adventure, for the stupid ammoniacal creature
proceeded to dive into the mess cellar, and all food in storage was
strangely savored. A matter of this kind, begun in the innocent
vacation spirit, may be far-reaching. When we returned with our cargo
of peaches, the sewing-circle did not receive us with any fervent
warmth. In fact, it was most broadly insinuated that we, having worked
a leave, had performed this trick on purpose, to the utter horror and
dismay of all unsuspecting persons.
Our going down to the river was through that mysterious half-luminous
light that follows the darkness before dawn. Then the Desert has an
ashen pallor, and a chill and silence that are like winter at whatever
season of the year. The bare spaces seem to be covered with snow. There
are no calls from birds. One moves in a dead world.
At the ford the wheels clattered ominously over flat slabs of rock, and
then the horses splashed through shallow pools to the far bank. We
turned westward, and the mountains showed their volcanic peaks, grim
gray wings in the pallid dawn. They lifted, gaunt and rugged, from a
ruff of pines. There had been a fall of snow on those higher levels
between the timber and the crests, and the shoulders were draped in
white. Now—the very tips of the range were seared with red-gold; and
now—each snowbound crest began warming with a rosy glow, as if blood
were stirring, pulsing, through the masses of icy lava and eroded
stone. And the whole range warmed in a blaze of fresh rose and glinting
gold as it turned to greet the sun.
Down by the river the cottonwoods were still veiled in colorless mist;
above were those radiant wings of the morning; and the birds began
calling, piping, rustling, as a band of crimson broadened across the
gray lips of the east.
Soon we ascended a ridge of the orange-hued mesa I had so long viewed
from the Agency grounds. It was my first close-up of the havoc wrought
in clay and sandstone by the tearing, aging fingers of the Desert.
There were no smooth planes in those tortured hills. They sprawled down
to the river-bottoms in petrified agony, the worn death-mask of that
time when Hell burst from the volcanoes and flowed its molten masses
over the plains.
Slowly we gained the topmost ridge of all, the backbone dividing the
river country from the beyond, and looked north over a vast plain,
fresh in the morning light, holding the Tolani Lakes. Those wide
splotches of bluish green, miles away, seemed as a mirage; but it was
water, where one would least expect to find it, the overflow of the
great Oraibi Wash, trapped in a flat basin, drying until another flood.
The shores were marshy, reed-lined, and invited the migratory birds.
Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.
And reflected in the greenish mirror were the dull red walls of
Monument Point, the end of the great Red Mesa that stretched northward,
rising hugely from the sand dunes and the Desert, flanked and
buttressed as some Babylonian city. Perhaps it was a city of the
ancients, snuffed out as Pompeii. One longed for time to explore its
dead streets. There would be lions, no doubt, slinking down ruined
terraces; and rutted pavements; and broken columns to cast long shadows
under the autumn moon. And was it lifeless—or only enchanted? One
paused and waited for a cry, a rumble of wheels, the far-off blare of a
buccina, to wake its spearmen and send flashes along the walls.
This was my first impression, and eleven years after, not having seen
it again, I went there over the old route to learn if first impressions
fade. I found that the Desert and its visions do not change.
We “nooned” in a barren space that would have graced the Sahara. The
sun burned down on us, but the air was quite stimulating. At these
higher levels the skin browns, but the appetite is not affected. The
fire, a mere handful of chips and twigs, was kindled in the little
shade afforded by the rig. The doctor gave me a lesson in Southwest
camping, just prior to my upsetting the can of peeled potatoes, after
which he considered me impossible. With my usual energy, I had gathered
greasewood branches for the fire, and had brought them from some
distance. They would have made an election-night blaze. The doctor
selected a pitiful handful from this mountain of brush, and briefly
commented:—
“‘Just like a white man,’ Injun says. ‘White man build big fire, sit
far off; Injun make little fire, sit close by.’ You don’t need a
conflagration to boil coffee. I can make camp here with seven sticks
five inches long. Where do you think you are? Up in Canada, hunting
moose?”
All that afternoon we jogged on through the hot sunlight, shooting at
and occasionally hitting a young jack-rabbit. The place was alive with
them. The shadows of the horses grew longer as the sun dipped toward
the Red Mesa. And then came the gray evening, with us peering ahead for
the sign of a well-rig derrick. There were drillers in the valley,
patiently pounding down their drills in the hope of striking the
underflow of the Oraibi Wash. We had helped them outfit at the Agency,
and they were of the I. D. Service. Their location should be somewhere
close to the pueblo of Oraibi, “the town on the high flat rock,” a
place long famous in the annals of the Tusayan provinces, first sighted
by white men nearly four hundred years before.
We gave little thought to the ancient past of Oraibi, and certainly I
did not dream that for more than eight years it would concern me
personally. Pedro de Tovar, that adventurous lieutenant of the great
conquistador Coronado, reached it in 1540, the first year of the
Spanish exploration north of the Rio Grande; and in 1629, or perhaps a
trifle earlier, zealous friars of the Franciscan order built a mission
there and, surrounded by an always suspicious population, far removed
from Spanish headquarters at Santa Fe, had worked and prayed and
governed until the revolt of 1680, when they met martyrdom and the
mission disappeared.
Until recently Oraibi had been the largest pueblo-community in North
America, having had more than one thousand inhabitants, thus exceeding
any of the pueblos of New Mexico. But its leading citizens, one
Tewaquaptewa and one Youkeoma, the first a politician and the second a
natural prophet and witch-charmer, backed by devoted and fanatical
adherents, had prophesied, conjured visions and interpretations of
signs, wrangled among themselves, and defied the Government until
carried into captivity. Their imprisonment had been brief, and they
were now busy making new medicine.
Tewaquaptewa’s portrait appears in that fine book of Indian chants,
edited by Miss Natalie Curtis and published by the Harpers; and his
singing countenance presents a rapt ecstatic expression as he yodels
the Butterfly Song. The translation of his name is there given as
“Sun-down-shining,” and is imperfect as most translations, but just as
good as any other, providing you do not have to consider him on a
Governmental basis. I never dealt with him on a musical scale, and his
undoubted genius in this respect made no appeal to me. As his Indian
Agent, however, I tried for eight long years to make a sensible human
being of him, and failed, for lack of material. After having tried him
as an Indian judge, and then as an Indian policeman, in the hope of
preserving his dignity and authority as hereditary chief, he was found
to be the most negatively contentious savage and unreconstructed rebel
remaining in the Oraibi community, so filled with malicious
mischief-making to his benefit that a group of his own people
petitioned me to exile him from the mesa settlement, in the hope that
they might then exist in peace. Of course, this had little to do with
his “Sun-down-shining” or his Butterfly chanting; but when the folks at
home cannot get along with father, there is something wrong.
Youkeoma, a different type of Hopi, had been defeated by the
Tewaquaptewa faction, and was now in the medicine-man and prophecy
business about seven miles to the west, in his new and already odorous
town of Hotevilla, whence, after the tribal troubles, like another
Moses he had led his faithful. Tradition has it that there will always
be jealousy and enmity among the Oraibans until the pretender to
leadership is martyred; so when Youkeoma was thrown out, he accepted it
as a manifestation of the rules. But that did not prevent both outfits
from resisting the Government, an alien intruder, wholly unmindful of
the sacred prophecies, who entered in to pacify a perfectly legitimate
family scrap.
Kewanimptewa, a third Oraibi factionist, who headed the weakest band of
all, had trekked in another direction, a second upheaval having
resulted in his eviction and retirement from the political field. His
allies went to a little-known cañon, Bacabi, where, but for the prompt
assistance of the Government Agent, the whole lot of Ishmaelites would
have perished. It was winter and they had no harvest. Aid in this case
was gratefully accepted, and out of the truce grew a friendliness now
unbroken. Those who followed Youkeoma, however, remained sullen and
unreconstructed, accepting nothing, acknowledging nothing, rebels and
defiant.
Therefore the original Oraibi, which had been the largest Indian
community, was split into three parts, and the parent place has been
still further reduced by emigration to Moencopi in the farther west. As
will be related later, all this foolish dissension could have been
avoided, and the Government might have saved many thousands of dollars
by a firm and impartial policy toward these Indians. While the
separation weakened them, they had to be followed with the means of
control and education, sanitation, and medicines—a far more expensive
job than a full Oraibi pueblo would have demanded.
This little expedition for peaches I thought would mark my whole
acquaintance with the Hopitu, the “peaceful” wrangling ones. In 1907 I
had written several stories for Harper’s Magazine, one of which
concerned these people. The ethnological facts I had exhumed from the
library of the Indian Office at Washington, and the skeleton on which I
strung these fancies was produced from that fearful thing known as the
writer’s imagination. God forgive me! I have always believed that I was
given charge of the Hopitu as a punishment for that crime against the
verities.
And then, when we were about to confess that the stupid team had taken
the wrong road, to the end that we were strayed, lost, and would
probably be stolen, the well-rig loomed up as a tall gallows at the
roadside. There were calls and hearty greetings.
“Shorty,” a minor water-witch of the Empire, had laid aside his wand
for the day, which is one way of saying that the rig-tower no longer
trembled, the cable no longer jerked, and the drill did not pound in
its hole. Shorty was ready to receive visitors and to relate how he
shot the mountain lion.
It matters not in that country how shabby the guest, how poor the host,
or how wild the place of meeting, there is always a welcome and
entertainment of the board, to be followed by talk of the Empire. A
veteran of the garrison days told me that in his time, on reaching a
post-trader’s, it would be impossible to escape for a week. Every item
of news from the outside would be demanded and paid for in a liquid
coin that is no longer circulated. Then the bowl flowed freely when the
pipes were lit, and the company gathered around a roaring fireplace in
the evening.
“We would gossip and swap lies until we could not see, and then tumble
into the nearest bed to sleep it off. Next day, if he had had enough, a
fellow would call for his horse. Consternation would follow. Everyone
would regret, with much language, that Bonehead Bill had left the
corral-gate open last night, and now not a hoof in all that valley.
“‘’Fore Gad! pardner, they’re clear t’hell an’ gone over into Palisade
Cañon by now. It’ll take two wranglers to git ’em up. Make yourself
t’homelike, ’cause to-morrow’s another day.’”
So there would be no means of travel until the great exchange of ideas
was exhausted, and the whiskey out, when they would speed him onward.
Said the veteran, “Them was times!”
But in Indian country to-day one has to be content with the ensemble
without the olden stimulus.
At this well-camp there were no extra beds, so for the first time I
slept on the open range. We had packed a dozen thick blankets, six for
the ground and three apiece for wrappings. By the time bed was made,
the contrast between that day’s noon and three hours after sunset was a
trifle more than bitter. To remove one’s clothing in that extraordinary
boudoir of a thousand square, open, and draughty miles was a shrinking
bit of business.
Several times during the night I awoke, convinced that I was slowly
freezing; and on one of the occasions I was quite certain that I had
died and reached a certain destination; for at the edge of the Wash a
troop of coyotes had assembled, and they made night hideous. It was my
first close-up of such a chorus, a bedlam of ghoulish chattering.
Fiends might have been braver, but they could not have uttered cries
more horribly depraved. The coyote is very low in the social scale of
the Desert. While the orthodox Navajo will not kill one, even as the
Hopi will seldom slay a snake, this does not mean that he rejoices in
the vicinity of the beast. Notwithstanding the souls of ancestors that
are believed to possess him, “Mi-he,” the coyote, receives little
welcome or respect. There is something so miserably unclean, so
slinkingly evil, in Mi-he, the jackal of the Southwest, that I have yet
to discover anything of sympathy for him under any conditions. He
follows and preys on the sheep and calves, poor, stupid, defenseless
creatures, and in a remote spot I have seen several of him circle a
band of wild ponies, patiently waiting for a colt to drop behind. At
night, when there are mysteries and fancies enough without him, his
mournful howl, followed by ghoulish chattering like unearthly laughter
or the mockery of lost souls, gives the Indian good cause to include
him among the worthless members of a savage mythology.
But morning brought the radiant sun god, and all unclean things fled
away. Warmed into amiability, we covered the last five miles to our
goal. Oraibi occupies a projecting point of a huge tumbled mesa, one
that has known the rack and twist of volcanic convulsion. Below it in
the plain were a Government school, a trading-post, and quite a
settlement of Indians who had been persuaded to remove from the
unsanitary height. To reach the pueblo proper, we drove up a long,
winding sand-road, using the drifts and dunes of centuries for a
ladder. This connected with a rather perilous mesa-ledge road,
overhanging the valley, around the edge of which we found the ancient
town.
The newcomer to the Hopi desert always assumes that the Indian sought
the heights because of view and scenic beauty, purest air, and freedom.
Freedom had something to do with it, for there is no doubt he was
driven to accept the mesa as a citadel. In order that he might have a
chance to defend himself against marauding “Apaches du Navaju,” who
raided his camps and herds, killed his sons, and carried his women into
captivity, he risked the scarcity of water, depending on pools during
sieges, and fortified the mesas. There, with his house built for closer
defense and his flocks under the ledges, he felt secure. The fields of
the tribe, presenting assurance against famine, were of necessity at a
distance from these strongholds, and this handicap trained the Hopi
into the wonderful long-distance runner that he is to-day.
Old Oraibi is not a pretty picture, although its setting relieves much
of squalor and debris. The narrow streets were filled with rubbish and
worse; fowls scratched in the offal, burros herded in doorways, and
lanky, half-starved dogs were legion. Many of the houses had crumbled
and others were being demolished. These were the abandoned homes of the
defeated factionists. There were short alleys and blind courts, while
around a central plaza the dwellings arose to the height of three
stories, reached by little ladders, where a few of the inhabitants were
sunning. The roofs were piled with drying peaches. The place of the
ceremonial kiva sloped away to the mesa edge, and from it one looked
away, many miles, to the dimming river-country. The men were in the
fields, the children at school; the place seemed abandoned, dead. Here
was a perfect picture of the senility of a one-time civilization that
had been decaying for many centuries, and in this our day had reached
very nearly to utter devitalization.
From the edge of the great cliff one looked down on the immense
stretches of the desert. Grazed-out long ago by flocks that were held
too close to the pueblo, the land had become barren, a sea of drifting
sand that stirred and lifted in the winds. But in this sand were the
cornfields and bean patches of the stubborn race. The Hopi, whatever
else he may be, is the greatest dry-farmer on earth. He tills the
unirrigated sand, fighting the drought and the pests and the scorching
winds according to his rituals, and from it produces the corn which is
his staff of life.
A commanding promontory at some distance was the “Judgment Seat,” or
place of accounting, where the spirits of all save Hopi children must
repair on leaving the earthly body. One had to walk but a little way to
stumble on their tombs.
Now here, now there, a broken bowl
Half buried in the sand,
Marks where some pueblo chieftain dreams,
Forgotten by his band.
Those shallow mounds, where age the toys,—
Weak spirits dwell not deep,—
The Desert presses light on them;
The pueblo children sleep.
Our guide directed us to a sheltered angle of the mesa where, among
boulders and sand-drifts, we found the one unperished gift of the
padres, delicious peaches, not so large as California fruit, but having
all the flavor and quality of that grown in Maryland and Delaware. We
bargained with a smiling Hopi, and loaded.
And then, like all wise travelers in the Desert, we started to make “a
long step on the road” while the sun was high; we camped that night in
the greasewood, with well-smoked jack-rabbit for supper, and trundled
into the Agency next evening, tired and hungry, to be received with
coldness and suspicion. Our offering of peaches did not discount this
bitterness. So small a thing as the erratic flight of a confused mammal
may thus strain friendship and affect the most sincere labors.
IX
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF CHIEFS
“You’ll have charge of the district till my successor comes.
I wish they would appoint you permanently; you know the folk.
I suppose it will be Bullows, though. Good man, but too weak
for frontier work; and he doesn’t understand the priests....
Call the Khusru Kheyl men up; I’ll hold my last public
audience.”—Kipling: “The Head of the District.”
A year drifted by in this fashion. The November-December days were
glorious. At a time when the effete East was slopping about in
goloshes, and taking cold and quinine, and sniffling and having
sick-leave, and generally hurrying toward the grave, we were reveling
in sunshine.
January and February brought real crimping winter nights. Spring came
in early March, and quickly the cottonwoods of the river-bank were all
greening again. Then suddenly, as if in a flare of anger, the
springtime wind cried its challenge to the moisture of the sand, and
began driving everything that was loose before it. Then too, suddenly
something happened: the Chief resigned.
A matter like this brings a dramatic pause to those in isolated places.
Something of unexplained dread crept into everyone, from the Indian lad
who curried the horses to the chief Nultsose. A little company of
people, knowing each other thoroughly and marooned in a sense, would
lose the Skipper, the Old Man, the Chief who had attended to most of
their routine thinking, and made decisions, and was responsible, and
caused them generally to exist comfortably whether they were capable of
it or not.
Who would succeed him?
Whatever the faults and frailties of the Chief, they at least knew him,
his humors and his moods. He had not been difficult to analyze. There
had been a time to flatter, and a time to leave him alone; there had
been moments on drives, in camps, and at little social affairs, when
all that was left of the youth—one might say the “boy”—of him returned,
when for a brief space he had ceased to be the Old Man. So they
realized abruptly, forgetting petty differences, that something of
affection had grown up unconsciously between them.
But why abandon a little kingdom? Why, indeed!
He had grown covetous. The pride that the Desert builds in those few
who manage to command it had somehow got the better of his judgment. He
had developed the astounding effrontery to think that he earned and was
justified in demanding a salary of more than thirteen hundred dollars a
year! Think of that—he had come to re-view the value of himself. It was
not honor enough for him to have created a little centre of
civilization. He actually felt that the laborer was worthy of his hire.
It reminded one of a particular scene in Oliver Twist. It was
stupefying. It was downright impudence in the man. Washington had never
heard the like, and confessed itself painfully shocked; in fact, it
became almost infuriated.
Had not a whole series of clerks, working at white heat between
ball-games and vacations, checked his accounts and requested an
explanation of his every action for years, just to keep him from this
very state of mind—to prevent his fondly imagining that he had
accomplished anything? Think of the man who had struggled, under
orders, to that forlorn station in 1908, breasting the wind and the
sand and a falling thermometer, just to demonstrate scientifically how
concrete is mixed in New Jersey. Why, this advising concrete genius
drew only two thousand and a per-diem, a man skilled in methods known
to the Atlantic seaboard, and aside from his having political
influence, was ever ready, under orders, at this pitiful stipend, to
place his all-embracing knowledge at the disposal of this
non-comprehending desert roughneck, who—Words fail one!
As for the Indians to be affected by this change, they were
inarticulate and did not count. Someone would be appointed to the
vacancy, someone just as good—well, anyway, good enough for Indians.
Then came an experience such as a complacent court must suffer when an
old monarch dies. It happens, no doubt, when there is a change of
chiefs anywhere; but it is the more personal and grinding when one has
to live next door to the chief, breakfast with him, lunch with him,
dine with him, face him across a desk, or ride cheek-by-jowl with him
from daylight to dark; in short, to serve him loyally twenty-four hours
the day. Comparisons are not odious; they are hellish. Those so
situated as to be thus dependent on one another for duty and society
must have some bond of sympathy, something of confidence and regard,
respect if nothing more, like unto that which takes the curse off
marriage. The living conditions, the lack of society and amusement, the
introspection that the Desert invites, these things make the casual
word to be an insult and a chance sentence to produce tragedy. Unless
it be aboard ship, I know of no relative situation in which one man can
become so terrible a burden to others as at an isolated desert-station.
Suffice to relate that the period of reconstruction and change brought
many disputes, all of them crushed and smothered by the turgid
heaviness of forty years’ experience. The new Chief was different, and
aged, and sick, a misery to himself and to everyone else. As is
invariably the case, the most valuable of the employees began to
prepare to quit the ship. I have seen a great deal of loyalty in the
West, and the man who is fair may count on men until they drop; but
these same men speak their minds freely, and it is hard for them to
change czars. Old traditions were restored; the cook quit in a flame of
anger, leaving as his vengeance a last meal garnished with a defunct
mouse. The pot boiled fifteen hours the day.
When the thing had become a trifle too thick for me, like a flash from
the blue came an unsought, unexpected telegram:—“WILL YOU ACCEPT
APPOINTMENT SUPERINTENDENT MOQUI SALARY EIGHTEEN HUNDRED BOND THIRTY
THOUSAND WIRE.”
A courteous expression that is now rare: “Will you accept.” The mere
transposition of a word makes all the difference. “You will accept” is
the tone of recent orders—a reaction of the great war against
Prussianism on those who reject with an unctuous civilian horror all
idea of militarism.
And yet there is a certain fine discipline and training in the military
atmosphere, even a copy of it, as practised at the properly conducted
schools and agencies of the farther deserts. One learns to obey in
unpleasant things, and feels something of duty and loyalty in acceding.
Where there is nothing of civilization for one hundred miles in any
direction, not even a telegraph wire, one comes to revere that
refreshing bit of bravery, the Flag, whipping above trees, a symbol of
authority and order; one thrills at the music of the band; and
bugle-calls, in the wine of seven thousand feet above the sea, add a
character-forming stimulation: reveille, mess, retreat, or at the end
of a long day’s drive homeward in the dark, cramped and cold from fifty
miles, to hear the solemn notes of “taps.”
The night hush of the drowsy desert has succeeded all daylight bustle.
The clatter of shops, the hum of machinery, the hiss of steam, have
quieted. There are no more calls from children at play. One by one the
lamps go out on campus and in quarters, and great Orion burns down the
empty spaces to glimpse a scrap of feeble civilization gripped in the
aged everlasting hills. Then, on the cold wind, stealthily, comes the
eerie chant of a Navajo, riding across the mesa, calling on his gods.
“Will you accept ... Moqui—”
That was the country of the Buttes and craggy mesas; of Old Oraibi; of
the Second Mesa and its broad stairway to the dome-like pueblos; of
ancient Walpi and its rocky ladder to the sky; the land of ruins dating
from the misty dawn of history. Across it the Spaniards had marched,
contemporaries of Columbus, their halberds gleaming in the sun; and
there the early padres had ruled, their mission bells now silent. The
“provinces of the Mohoce or Mohoqui,” as Coronado bade his
poet-historian write it down. It was the very heart of the Enchanted
Empire.
There were but two persons to give me a modern view of the situation.
The Navajo interpreter at my present station was one of those
half-educated, half-sullen returned students who would accept the
meagre wage when the trader would not, a part of the economic system
aimed at cheaply teaching grandfather through his unrespected grandson.
He came from that northern country, and his immediate family composed a
most insolent gang—a mere detail I discovered later in time of stress.
“Lots of Navajo up there,” he said. “Those Black Mountain fellows—mean
Indians, too. Down here, quiet, never any trouble, ’cause they liked
the Chief; but up there, always something doing.”
Having little confidence in the fellow, I discounted his words heavily.
But that afternoon came the missionary from down-river.
“Hello!” he called to me. “What’s this I hear? You going to Moqui?
Well, well! I hope you handle that bunch of mean ones over beyond
Oraibi—those Hotevillas. About every four years they flare up. The last
was in 1906, so it’s about due. The present Agent hasn’t Christianized
those Indians, and the one ahead of him was a bit mild. They need the
fear of God put into them. Many Agents? Well, come to think of it, yes.
I can recall several of them. One stayed four years; they average about
two, as a rule. Let me hear from you sometime.”
A combined Indian Agency, half Hopi, half Navajo, and the two ancient
enemies who fraternized on the surface when the Agent was strong enough
to compel it. Ninety miles back in the hills. No telephone and no
telegraph. And agents averaged about two years each of service. What
happened to them? I wondered. Were they buried there, quietly and
without fuss, or did they depart between suns, seeking more peaceful
climes? The padres were not an excellent vision, and the Spaniards had
abandoned the country as hopeless, notwithstanding their usual methods
of domination. True—there was such a thing as having a chap on for the
good of his soul, after the manner of whimsical Arizona.
I debated the matter seriously before answering that wire. My plans
were changing. From six months, my exile had been extended into a year;
and the year was now up. Acceptance would mean a longer stay, an
habitation enforced, as I would be under bond and no longer free to
come and go, with the added chance of failure in an unsought position
of responsibility. I had not envied my old Chief. I do not envy any
Indian Agent to-day.
And yet—the Desert called to me from over beyond those blue-toned
Buttes to come and find that intangible something “just around the
corner.” So finally, like Kipling’s Pagan, I decided:—
And I think it will kill me or cure,
So I think I will go there an’ see.
X
THE PROVINCES OF THE “MOHOCE OR MOHOQUI”
It now remains for me to tell about this city and kingdom
and province, of which the Father Provincial gave your
Lordship an account. In brief, I can assure you in reality
he has not told the truth in a single thing that he said,
but everything is the reverse of what he said, except the
name of the city and the large stone houses.—Don Francisco
Vasquez Coronado to Don Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy
of New Spain, August 3, 1540
I am now glad that I went to the Painted Desert and entered Hopi-land
before the advent of the automobile. The going then was a picturesque
if toilsome journey. After two days in a farm-wagon loaded with my
plunder, I reached the first back-country trading-post, and met the
official I was to succeed. That old store at Indian Wells, with its
back against the hills, seemed a fanciful place in the twilight of a
summer’s day. Across a wide plain lifted purple mesas gashed with red
clays, and Rabbit-ear Butte stuck its two inquisitive peaks into the
evening sky. There was something far removed in the atmosphere and
setting of Indian Wells, something of true desert solitude.
Next day we wended northward across Hauke Mesa, passing the White Cone,
a solitary bleached-out pyramid that marks the southeast corner of the
Hopi Reservation. Two huge white horses drew us; not a very fast pace,
but decidedly a sure one. The vehicle was a mountain spring-wagon, and
its one wide seat served three of us, the driver and I simple figures
in comparison with the gentleman I was to relieve. He was a large,
pompous man, who had sought the Southwest for his health and had not
found all of it, principally because he had not arrived soon enough,
and also because he was continually fretted by the vision of his former
importance. He had come from the East from a much larger Governmental
position. In fact, he had been quite within the shadow of the Cabinet,
and was bulwarked with political tradition. He knew the President
personally, and immediately told one so; and when he came into the
Desert he wore—Suffering Pioneers!—a top hat.
It takes a long time to make forty miles in a wagon of that type,
whatever the entertainment of political conventions and presidential
anecdotes.
In late afternoon we crossed the sandy waste of the Jedito Wash, and
passed out of it by a steep rocky road that ascended a high mesa. A
short distance to the left were the ruins of Awatobi, that once
important pueblo of Tusayan, where Tovar had his first view of and
encounter with the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” of the Spanish chronicles. This
meeting occurred twenty-five years before the settlement of St.
Augustine, and eighty years before the gentlemen from Plymouth reached
the historic New England Rock. He was accompanied by that intrepid
soldier-priest, Fray Juan de Padilla, who later retraced Coronado’s
trail into the mysterious and legendary country of Quivira, there to be
martyred, the first white man to meet death in the present State of
Kansas.
After the conquest of Cibola, or Zuni, Tovar was dispatched by Coronado
to locate the seven cities of the Mohoqui. Notwithstanding the fighting
in the Zuni provinces, the coming of pale men who rode strange animals
and carried sticks that discharged lightning, it would appear that the
Hopi knew nothing of these happenings. Tovar, leading a company of
cavalry and footmen, crossed into their country without discovery, and
encamped one night before a Hopi pueblo. It is recorded that they
approached close enough to hear the people talking in their homes.
Morning revealed the Spanish spears.
A little later came Cardenas, searching for the great cañon of the
West; and Espejo in 1583; and then Onate in 1598, who was the first to
make permanent settlements among the Pueblo Indians. It was Onate who
established the missions, and one was built at Awatobi between 1621 and
1630, so Fray Alonzo de Benavides, the first custodian of missions in
these provinces of New Spain, reported to his King.
Before the founding of Boston by Winthrop, when Charles I was King of
England and Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury, a Franciscan friar named
Porras ministered to the Hopi in the Tusayan provinces. In June 1633 he
died there by poison. In this same year Galileo appeared before the
Inquisition. Strange contrasts!
When the great Pueblo rebellion occurred in 1680, the mission at
Awatobi was destroyed by the Hopi, and its friar, Fray José de
Figueroa, was killed. [1] When came De Vargas, bent on reconquering the
Pueblo people, he halted before Awatobi on November 19, 1692. The
friars planned a return to their duties among the Hopi, and it would
appear that the Awatobans, or a part of them, received these advances.
Because of this the pueblo of Awatobi was suddenly destroyed in the
latter part of 1700 by pagan Hopi from the other mesas. It is said that
many of the warriors were stifled in the ceremonial kivas, and the
women and children were carried off as captives. During the early years
of the eighteenth century, Spanish officials and priests still
contemplated a return to this territory, but the efforts were abortive,
although as late as 1748 friars visited the Second Mesa country to
return fugitive Indians of the Pueblos proper to their homes in the
valley of the Rio Grande. Most of these were Sandias, the remnant of
this band now living close to Albuquerque, New Mexico; and when I took
charge of the Pueblo Indians in 1919, the Sandias above all others
evidenced characteristics that were not new to one who had sat in
council with their ancient hosts.
In 1911 only a series of low walls, the pueblo foundations, were
discernible at Awatobi. The place of the old Spanish mission could not
be determined. The blowing desert sand had quite nearly reclaimed the
site to solitude and unbroken sterility. But following the sacred
customs of their forefathers, the Hopi were still making trouble for
their guardians.
My predecessor told me how he had sought to quiet this antagonism. At
great expense he had taken the old chief, Youkeoma, and several of his
retainers, on a trip to and through the East. At Washington they were
honored by an audience with President Taft. The power and the glory of
the American nation, it was thought, would overwhelm the savage. He
might as well have taken a piece of Oraibi sandrock to see the Pope.
Not even the size of President Taft impressed the old spider-like Hopi
prophet, as he afterward told me in diplomatic confidence. Youkeoma
returned as sullen and determined as before, made some new medicine
with corn meal and feathers, and then repudiated the whole hegira,
including President Taft, telling his people that he had seen nothing
of importance, received no counsel that contained wisdom, and that he
sincerely doubted those men were chiefs of anything. Certainly they
were not the mythical Bohannas that the Hopi—following their own
version of the Messianic legend—expect to come and rule them. And then,
having refused to do that which Washington had urbanely decreed, he sat
down in his warren of a pueblo, amid the sand and the garbage, to await
whatever the white man might see fit to do about it.
That was my inheritance.
Toward evening in the cañon country the sun grows a bit more
burnishing. Ahead of us appeared a space in the cedars, and beyond that
rift one could see a more distant desert, rising as a sunlit moor, but
quite removed—as if one looked across a chasm. A little later the team
tipped forward on a rocky ledge. With brakes applied, we began to grind
downward—it seemed to me, straight down. On the left, walls of rock
arose in sheer plane-faces, and to the right I gathered that there was
nothing at all: just an empty hole, beginning two feet from the outer
wheels, and nicely garnished with huge boulders awaiting some driver’s
bad judgment.
I became more familiar with mesa trails thereafter, but this first one
was a thrill. Sand had blown into the road, and the wheels crunched
through it, and the brakes ground and screeched against the tires.
“When the troops were here last,” said the driver cheerfully, “a
pack-mule went over at this place, and he rolled until he fetched up
against the bottom.”
I silently wished he would attend to his driving.
“And there is your Agency,” said the official, pointing. “You can see
as far as you like from that place, if you look straight up.”
Below in the great gash were the buildings of the plant, gray,
lonely-looking, standing in barren grounds; but large as they were, the
rocky walls of the cañon dwarfed them. So clear was the air that they
appeared as toy houses, cut-outs pasted on a strip of pebbled
cardboard. There was a straight line of them, for the cañon, generous
enough in other dimensions, had not room for grouping at its bottom. It
was a rough trough hewn by quake and flood. For centuries the waters
had torn at it, until their bed was now far below the site of the
buildings; and for centuries the sand had drifted in to form rounded
domes that buttressed the walls. Each season’s tremors disturbed the
shattered rocks, sending some to the bottom in tearing, grinding slides
and posing others at new angles.
It was disappointing—a lonely, dreary place. No trees or hedges
relieved the starved-looking site. There was little to be proud of. As
for the natural beauties, one must grow to feel the majesty of worn
rocks, tinted in all the shades of weathering sandstone, from saffron
through gold to ruddy brown, toned to a thousand delicate hues by the
stunted cedars and diversified cacti that struggled from every crevice.
In the springtime there would be flowers in the crannies, winsome
purple and pink flowers, with here and there the blazing scarlet of the
Indian paintbrush; and in springtime too would come the great flocks of
migratory birds.
Why build in such a place? The answer is that stereotyped one affecting
everything in the Desert—water. At the upper end of this cañon lived
the springs. Water could be brought to the site without great expense.
There was enough to furnish a small settlement, and more than could
have been harnessed cheaply at any other point of the territory when
the plant was built. Water in greater quantity has been discovered
since; but there were no “water-witches” in the provinces of the
Mohoqui prior to 1910.
All that day the thunder had muttered sullenly, and occasionally a few
drops of rain had fallen on us. It was too early in the year to expect
a shower of any consequence, so my guides told me. It was June, and the
red-bellied clouds that the Snake priests watch for do not appear until
late August, when they herald the Snake Dance and prove Hopi wisdom;
then cloudbursts send torrents through these cañons, and flood the
plains, and guarantee the harvest. But, just as we drove up the main
road, came a sharp downpour that settled into a rare thing indeed—a
steady summer rain.
A group of Indians stood close as we alighted. This was a delegation of
welcome, for the tribes are very curious. A Navajo grunted, “Nahtahni.”
And a Hopi said something that brought smiles to their faces; it was
interpreted to me as we shook hands around. He said, “You must be a
good Chief, for you bring the rain.”
The Agency consisted of an office and quarters and shops for the
clerks, farmers, and mechanics, and there was a school for about one
hundred and fifty pupils of the grammar grades. This was a
boarding-school and, in addition to teachers, it had a corps of cooks,
matrons, laundress, and seamstress, all necessary to the work. In the
field, close to the pueblos of the Indians, were five day-schools,
serving from fifty to one hundred and twenty children each, and
stations for physicians, field-nurses, and range men. Therefore the
equipment, furniture, and stores of six small settlements had to be
inventoried and receipted for at any change of directors.
The outgoing Agent was anxious to have his papers signed, that he might
be off to his next post in further search of health. For two weeks we
labored over those accounts, and it seemed that it would require
another three months—as it did—to adjust and compare and reduce them to
something approximating accuracy. So the major part of it was arranged
conditionally between us, and I filed my official signature, together
with bond for thirty thousand dollars, and we two shook hands as
cordially as it was possible for men to do who had been debating for a
fortnight.
In this manner I became Indian Agent for twenty-two hundred Hopi
Indians of the Pueblo stock—maligned under a stupid Departmental label
as “Moqui”—who would call me “Moungwi”; and for a trifle more of
Navajo, the nomads of the desert, who would title me “Nahtahni,” very
likely Nahtahni Yezzi, meaning Little Chief. They had undoubtedly named
my predecessor Nahtahni Tso, Fat Chief.
That time of inventory I recall as a bad dream. Every conceivable
article of useless equipment had been dumped and carefully preserved at
that post. The greatest care had been taken of the most useless. Once,
when the tailors of Chicago were long on swatches, they presented them
to the Indian Service, and to save storage the warehouse custodian had
promptly shipped them to the most distant point, the Moqui Agency, in
the hope and quite sure belief that they would never come back. Aside
from transcontinental railroad charges, Indian wagoners had hauled such
precious supplies from the receiving station, one hundred miles, at a
cartage of one cent per pound. So it was with hundreds of lamp-chimneys
that never fitted a lamp, clothing too small for infants or too large
for giants, machetes that were needed in the Cuban cane-fields, tools
that Noah would have spurned, and broadcast seeders for use where the
Indians plant corn with ceremonial sticks. One warehouse was jammed
with wagon-repair material, spokes, fellies, bolsters, and so on, of
dimensions that must have been current in the period of the pioneers.
Some of this waste had been the result of stupid ordering, while much
of it grew from the system of yearly contracts, neither of which has
changed unto this day. Smith furnishes wagons one year, by virtue of
being the lowest bidder, and one must have Smith’s repair-parts. Next
year Brown has the contract, again by virtue of being the lowest and
therefore cheapest bidder; and part of Smith’s material is a dead loss
to the Service.
The method of checking stores was a grotesque science. Sewing-needles
were counted, the unit being a single needle, whereas darning needles
were accepted by the hundred. Anvils, log-chains, sledges, and
mason-axes were known by weight, other tools by description; still
other tools identified by sets. Each textbook, each library and
reference volume,—and there were thousands,—was known by its more or
less involved title, and so catalogued and counted and charged every
three months.
The technical names that came across Kansas with our forefathers had
not changed. “Eveners” and “whiffle-trees” were recognized; but double
and swingle-trees were taboo.
And there were things that even the Westerners’ Bible could not define.
Apparently no one ever wrote to Montgomery Ward for “crandalls” or
“loop-sticks.” Sometimes Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary
helped to an explanation, and at other times the Encyclopædia
Britannica shed light down the ages to identify an article. It was like
examining and listing the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and we
believed that the mummy of the original Indian Agent would be
discovered in the depths of those cluttered warehouse-shrines.
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
quite so—there were shoes, men’s, women’s, misses’, boys’, youths’ and
children’s, each divided into two sorts: Sunday and everyday; twelve
classifications, and all counted and all charged. There were boxes of
sealing-wax, and cobblers’ wax, and beeswax, in quantity; and in the
attenuated garden, irrigated by the hand-bucket method, grew something
resembling cabbages where free Congressional seeds had been planted.
There were no ships of the keel variety; it was too dry—even the fish
carried canteens; but there were burros, those pack-ships of the
Desert, that cheerfully doubled as “Arizona nightingales.” And there
was one official king, who, if he did not find that crandall the smith
had made in 1893, would have months of explaining to those who did not
know then, and do not know now, what a crandall is.
At the same time the employees of the station were existing in
pasteboard cottages designed for the climate of Southern California,
and winter at that altitude—6600 feet—would bring many nights below
zero. One couple lived in a tent heated by a sheet-iron stove; the
miner lodged in a cupboard, and the chief mechanic’s family occupied a
cellar. They were all, according to the Civil Service announcements,
entitled to “quarters,” and did they not have them?
The returns were received as well from all the field points. Election
night in the editorial rooms is but one night. After thirty days of
this, I felt myself going mad; so I started forth to view the domain.
Having had but little experience in the handling of horses, I selected
one of my Indian interpreters for Jehu, and so he proved. My idea was
that an Indian not only would be a thorough horseman, but would possess
the rare faculty of driving equally well after dark. The Indian has the
eye of the eagle, say the books, and so on; and those winding, narrow,
switchback roads did not invite me after nightfall. Sure enough, my
first return to the cañon was made in pitch blackness; but I lolled in
the buggy, well wrapped-up, enjoying a feeling of perfect security. An
excellent thing to have an eagle’s eye, I thought—when suddenly the
world tipped and heaved. There was a moment of crashing confusion and
complete chaos. The lines and my Indian driver and I were all on the
floor of the buggy together, hopelessly mixed and entangled in the
blankets and foot-brake and nose-bags and halters. The vehicle had
pitched forward, and seemed to have climbed on to the backs of the
struggling horses. Jehu had driven over a six foot bank into an arroyo.
Fortunately, the team had taken it straight over, without swerving and,
fortunately too, those arroyo banks are of crumbling sand.
We scrambled out to catch the heads of the horses.
“What in the blankety-blank did you do that for?” I cried at the dazed
Indian who, like myself, was very much numbed and scared. “Where were
your eyes? Couldn’t you see the crossing to the left?”
“Didn’t you see it?” he mumbled.
“I can’t see in this dark—never pretended to; but you—you’re an Indian,
and—”
“Indian eyes no different from white man’s!” he announced in his
defense, and with complete composure. “I can’t see in the dark,
either.”
Another precious ideal exploded.
XI
THE LAW OF THE REALM
Ko Ko. I want to consult you—
Pooh Bah. Certainly. In which of my capacities? As First
Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-General,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, or Private
Secretary?—The Mikado
A new Agent at the Cañon headquarters, a greenhorn to boot, and
immediately a thousand questions were asked: questions of Indians, of
employees, of missionaries, of traders, of traveling cattlemen and
drummers, of tourists, of everyone having an interest in that country,
even if ever so little. And the new Agent was to answer them all,
promptly, that they might go forth with instructions and permits to do
the things that they felt most necessary to themselves. I had brought a
little book of regulations from Washington, and too, I thought of the
commission. It read:—
All the duties relating to the Moqui schools, Agency, and the
Indians contiguous thereto, are hereby devolved upon you as
Superintendent.
Rather a large order, depending of course on how sincerely and
conscientiously one would view the matter. Here were close to four
thousand square miles of territory, having five thousand people of many
conditions, three fourths of them uncombed savages; and all their
problems devolved upon me.
I remember one particularly worthless Civil Service employee who once
said to me: “But, Mr. Crane, you take these matters too seriously.”
It was necessary for me to cancel his engagement shortly thereafter. I
did this abruptly, for he had shown a strong tendency to go off to
sleep at the scales. He then emitted another philosophical remark,
worthy of a Civil Service employee:—
“Well,” he said, “I will get home just at watermelon time.”
Now one does not have to take the thing seriously. I have followed
several Agents who did not. But there is no traditional “George” in the
Arizona Desert, and the Agent can always be found. He is the official
goat, tagged, manacled, bonded. He may not leave his jurisdiction for
longer than one week without having procured special permission; and
when he goes, the work continues in the hands of irresponsibles under
his responsibility and his bond. I spent several evenings with the
little book of regulations, and answered my own queries.
What are the duties and responsibilities of an Indian Agent?
On a closed reservation, where the Indians are non-citizen wards:
1. He is the Disbursing Officer for all activities, and will
expend $100,000 or more yearly, the reserve’s allotment of
funds, without including the moneys of individual Indians that
may be deposited with him.
2. He directs a corps of employees, persons procured from the
Civil Service grab-bag (persons he does not select), a
gregarious and vagarious outfit, consisting of physicians,
nurses, stockmen, farmers or rangemen, mechanics, teachers; and
he often coöperates with the Irrigation or other services and
their corps.
3. When there is construction work of any kind, from quarters
and schools to roads and bridges, he often designs these
things, always passes on the efficiency, and nearly always
directs the actual work.
4. As Chief Health Officer, he should know enough to advise and
support the physicians, who require more of direction and
guidance than one would imagine; and among the Indians he is in
great measure responsible for the legality of their actions. In
times of epidemic he must lead.
5. He is the Chief of Indian Police.
6. He is a special deputy officer of the Liquor Service, a
branch designed for the suppression of the liquor traffic among
Indians.
7. He is Judge of the Indian Court, with the powers of a
magistrate, unless there is an intelligent Indian who may be
commissioned so to act. Such are not in the Arizona Desert. If
there should be intelligent Indians to act, the Agent has
appellate power.
8. He is the Game Warden.
9. He holds hearings, determines heirs, and probates estates.
10. He often makes allotment of lands to Indians and determines
values.
11. He is Superintendent of Indian Trade, recommends those
persons who seek Governmental license to trade with Indians at
designated trading-posts, and is expected to regulate the
prices of that trade in accordance with market conditions.
12. Should the Indians have moneys accruing from supervised
activities, such as the leasing or sale of lands, or from
stock-selling, and so on, the Agent first sets his approval on
the leases or sales, and thereafter acts as banker of the
money.
13. As banker again, he makes loans to Indians under the
Government’s reimbursable plan, whereby an Indian may purchase
of the Agent livestock, implements, materials, tools, or seed,
with borrowed money, and repay such loans during a period of
years.
14. In the Navajo country he guarantees the genuineness of the
famous Navajo blanket before it goes to market.
15. He should encourage Indian agriculture, seek to improve
their livestock holdings, and generally strengthen their
industries.
16. Under an Act of the Legislature of Arizona, he issues
marriage licenses as a clerk of the court, and may solemnize
marriage.
17. He is to see that all Indian children between the ages of
six and eighteen years attend school; to provide and equip
properly the schools; and to improve if possible the sanitary
and moral conditions of the Indian communities.
18. In some places, and the Moqui Reservation is one, he should
police and protect Indian ceremonies, such as the Snake Dance.
19. He has authority to make minor regulations in good judgment
for the government of Indian country of his jurisdiction; and
in larger measures, if he is informed and possesses a backbone,
he usually sways the policy of the Service as it affects his
people.
20. The laws of the State do not apply directly to his
territory, but serve as guides in those cases not specifically
covered by Federal law, and through him as Agent.
21. Every war-time activity was carried out by Indian Agents,
from the registration of whites and Indians, the observance of
interned aliens, through the good regulations, to bond-selling
and the application of the Income Tax.
Have you had enough?
If these are not sufficient in number to be convincing, there are a few
others in the two thousand amendments issued since 1904.
A white citizen of no responsibility toward others beyond his obeying
the signals of the traffic officer,—the sort who used to quarrel with
belated street-cars,—and who aims to be humorous, might say, “This is
not the description of a Federal official. This is none other than Pooh
Bah!” Exactly so. But the Indians title him “Nahtahni” among the
Navajo, “Moungwi” among the Hopi, “Ah-hin-ti” among the
Spanish-speaking Pueblos of New Mexico, “Mayoro” among the Mohave,
“Ah-tay-ah-pe” among the Sioux, “Ta-ta” among the Apache; to wit:
Chief, or Head-man, or Father. He is no less. His rule is quite feudal
and absolute.
Seldom is his authority disputed by Indians; but it is challenged and
criticized by everyone else on earth, including his superiors, who,
after having commissioned him with these powers, live in mortal dread
that he will prove the sort of man to make use of them.
The Agent’s financial transactions are subject to audit by designated
Governmental auditors, and his other official acts come under the
occasional survey of inspectors. But neither of these officials has the
power to take charge of affairs, or to give directions within the
jurisdiction, without first having had the commissioned Agent suspended
from his office.
Now here is a job sufficient in scope to occupy anyone, whatever the
quality of mentality brought to bear upon it; and few who find
themselves in the position go looking for a clay deposit that they may
make brick in their spare time.
Naturally too, he who endeavors to meet these duties as they arise, and
is surprised when he makes enemies, is one who will look stupidly for
the millennium. By the very nature of things human he must expect to be
viewed by some of those ruled among the Indians, by those seeking their
favor or trade, by those who wish to play with them, paint them, model
them, live with them, beg from them, steal from them—in short, all
those who wish to use Indians or their lands and resources, as a
Meddlesome Matty.
These were the late Colonel Roosevelt’s words. He took a sincere
interest in Indians and their problems as administered by honest Indian
Agents, and he vigorously supported such officials without considering
them either meddlesome or matties, and he personally respected their
regulations when visiting the reserves.
Roosevelt was an exalted Indian Agent. He had no false ideas that the
common people are filled with wisdom, that capitalism oozes virtue,
that labor is sincere, that poverty is an assurance of honesty. But he
did believe that the poor and helpless deserved fair dealing and
protection from predatory interests of whatever kind; and that the mute
required a fearless voice. It was his judgment that Indian country
should be governed very much in line with those suggestions made by
Colonel Kit Carson, who swept rebellion out of the Painted Desert and
the Moqui cañons in 1863. He who follows Carson’s advices in
formulating his policy at an Agency may have trouble with his civil
superiors, with politicians, with critics and tourists, and with a
whole horde of people in office and out; but he will be respected by
the Indians as their Chief, and in a brief time they will give him
their confidence. In the end he will have their affection and loyalty.
In a report dated at Fort Lyon, Colorado Territory, August 1865, Carson
replied to the questions of a Congressional Committee that sought
counsel concerning the future management of the Indian:—
From a long-continued residence among or in the immediate vicinity
of Indians, and from a personal observation of their manners,
customs, and habits, acquired both in private life and the
transaction of official business as an Agent of the Federal
Government, I have been convinced that the only rule to be
successfully applied for their government is one firm, yet just,
consistent and unchangeable.
For the Indian, judging only by the effect of that which appeals to
his senses, as brought directly before his observation, regards
with contempt a weak and indecisive policy as the result of
hesitation, fear, and cowardice, whilst a changeable and capricious
one excites his apprehension and distrust. Both of these courses
should be carefully avoided.
The rule for the government of Indians should be strong enough to
inspire their respect and fear, yet protecting them from both
internal dissension and external aggression.
It is true that Carson thought this power should be vested in the
military, a view that has changed among the elder statesmen without
convincing anyone who knows uneducated and remotely located Indians.
Carson was right. In a brief paragraph he advised against the perfect
picture of a civil Indian Service that for years has worked its
political capriciousness.
It has seldom been firm; it has been most confused and unjust; it has
rarely been consistent; and it is always changing.
More and worse than this—it has at times been cowardly in the face of
political and private buccaneering.
Each new administration, having to pay its pressing political
debts,—those debts that helped boost it into office,—must deliver the
hapless Indian over to a new set of theorizing experimentalists who do
not know a moccasin from a sabot. Men too small for the Cabinet, yet
who have spent anxious years in log-rolling and who must be paid
somehow, offer themselves eagerly to the job of guaranteeing the
destiny of nations of aliens. Problems that puzzle the ethnologist and
sociologist are approached without alarm, with a crude and vicious
confidence, by a politician from Squawk Centre who once crossed an
Indian reservation to shoot ducks.
Finding that methods current in doubtful precincts are of no avail in
this work, and being forced to do something to make a showing, he
proceeds to tear down the work of his predecessor, who had started in
the same way but had learned a little during four years of fumbling;
and when the whole works are fatuously gumbled, it must be done all
over again to reach a point of normalcy, all Indians and their officers
of the field marking time until the new Colonel has learned the
traditions of the old barracks. Imagine John McGraw signing as pitcher
some aspiring village quoit-champion! Conceive of Henry Ford halting
his factories until a needy ward-heeler mastered the mysteries of a
carburetor!
And the Indian, judging only by the effects of vacillation, springs to
the suspicion of chicanery. The many inventions of stupid officials
excite his apprehension and distrust. The Indian comprehends very
little of first or political causes. When he distrusts his superiors he
tends to throw himself on the hungry bosom of sentimentalists. He knows
only the Agent on the ground, and too frequently finds in him a
reflection of that which someone interested wants Washington to
arrange. And no sooner does the Indian find an Agent who will
fearlessly represent him, investigate his complaints, support his
charges, and fight his just battles, and who will have nothing to do
with intrigue, than he expects the removal of that uncompromising and
foolish idealist to other scenes.
To-day the Hopi waits for a reasonably just settlement of his range
problem, and he has been hoping for seventy-five years. He packed the
trail to Santa Fe in 1850 to petition the first Indian Agent of the
Americans, with the same evidence he brings patiently to his present
one. The Navajo who troubles the Hopi in the west of the Empire,
suffers similarly from whites on his eastern lines.
The point is that neither the Indian nor those who best know his actual
condition have any direct voice in matters that affect his very
existence.
XII
COMMENTS AND COMPLAINTS
The seven Moqui pueblos sent to me a deputation who presented
themselves on the sixth day of this month. Their object, as
announced, was to ascertain the purposes and views of the
Government of the United States toward them. They complained,
bitterly, of the depredations of the Navajos.—Report of James
S. Calhoun, First Indian Agent at Santa Fe, October 12, 1850
Now the Indians drifted in to greet their new Chief. Although possessed
by a great curiosity, they came shyly, diffidently, as is the Indian
way. One would suppose that a grand council of braves would have been
called to introduce a new Agent with some semblance of formality, a
thing that impresses a primitive people. But not so. The old Agent, who
was agent no longer, glad that someone else had succeeded to the petty
headaches which are worse than the problems, packed his gear and
departed. It was up to me to meet the savage in the course of business,
and to make what impression I could. There were no individual records
to guide one, and first impressions are not infallible; in fact, the
most serious mistakes of Agents, things that long affect their gaining
the confidence of the people, come about through the necessity of
accepting the Indian at his face value—a slipshod method. The census,
for example, was a string of names, having little accuracy, that had
not been annotated in years.
The prominent men of the several districts were not at all backward in
telling me how influential they were. The Navajo came first, and with
reason, for they held five-sixths of the range by right of might, and
were eager to impress one that they should not be disturbed.
Came Hostin Nez, “Tall Man,” a lean, shrewd genius, who could remember
the captivity after Carson’s campaigns. He stood proudly erect, and yet
had an ingratiating manner that was part of his profession; for besides
dominating a large faction of his people and being the hereditary chief
of all the Navajo, he was a Medicine Man of high degree. Came from the
north old Billa Chezzi, better known as “Crooked Fingers” because of a
crippled hand, who had in him nothing that was sullen or criminal
perhaps, but who pictured a bloodthirsty pirate on a desperate mission.
These two represented communities of Navajo, living and roaming north,
south, east, and west of the Hopi mesa settlements, and by whom the
Hopi have been throttled from the range. There were lesser men, headmen
of groups or families. I remember Senegathe, “Wanderer,” with his gray
hair blowing in long snaky wisps; and Scar Chin, who resembled a
good-natured friar, though a long rip in his face suggested a strenuous
past; and Silversmith Jim, and Yellow-Horse, and Bitani, and Whispering
Bill, each having something of distinction in his manner or personal
eccentricity.
But for the most part, my Navajo business was with Hostin Nez. He was a
Judge of the Indian Court, and carried a “pretty paper,” a ragged
commission, lithographed in bright colors. We had many a long and
dispassionate argument, he rolling cigarettes in pieces of newspaper,
which he evidently preferred to the “saddle-blankets” that came in
packages, and wiping his lips now and then with a Turkish towel that
was draped about his neck—a fashion in neckcloths that he affected. I
never knew Hostin Nez to lose patience, and he would return again and
again to a point at issue in the hope of gaining advantage—in
appearance a Tartar chieftain, in methods a Talleyrand.
“Think of it, Nahtahni,” he said to me, very shortly after our first
meeting, “I have never had a wagon. Here I am, an influential man among
my people, and all the others have been favored. When the children
first went to school, the Agents used to give each father a wagon; but
that was years ago, and my children are men, and I never had a wagon.”
Now this was hard lines, for a Navajo who did not possess a wagon was
prevented from hauling freight, at that time a most lucrative
occupation, and the camp need for a vehicle of some sort was great. The
Navajo has to haul wood and water, and must somehow transport his
products of wool and hides to the trader. So I promised him a wagon
from the next lot received.
This would not be a present. The Indians of the Empire are independent
and self-supporting; they do not receive rations, and the Nahtahnis do
not make presents of implements or other necessary things. The Indians
paid for such issues by laboring on the roads and at other constructive
work of the jurisdiction, and were credited at current rates for
laborers. The “wagon” meant the issue of a full freighting
outfit—everything save the horses, of which the Navajo have a surplus.
He would receive a stout farm-type wagon, having top-box, bows, and
cover; also harness for four horses, all at Government cost-price,
about one half the figure a trader would have quoted it. And at the
appointed time he would assemble from ten to twenty of his clan to
labor out the bill, his followers helping him as he would in turn help
them.
But Hostin Nez sent his son to sign the receipt for the issue. This was
Hostin Nez Bega Number 4, indicating that there were other scions
numbered one, two, and three, and perhaps even others bearing more
fanciful Indian names. A great suspicion dawned on me. The issue-papers
for several years back were examined, and lo! old Talleyrand had worked
that game many times. He had never received a wagon; but each of his
sons had received wagons after the father had made the plea for
himself. When they went for freight the Nez outfit comprised a caravan,
and at the scales their pay-checks totaled hundreds of dollars. Hostin
Nez did not go for freight. He was the main guy, and procured the
wagons!
When I taxed the Chief with this, he was not offended. He smiled
benignly and repeated:
“But, Citcili” (my younger brother), “I have never had a wagon.”
We let it go at that.
Now Billa Chezzi, chief of the northern steppes, was not so clever. He
was a rougher, blustering type of Indian, and lacked finesse. Once I
endeavored to make a census of the Navajo, a very difficult thing of
accomplishment because of their nomadism. Two enumerators cornered old
Billa and insisted that he give up the details of his private life. He
named six wives living, and counted forty-seven sons in various parts
of the Empire. Then he said he was tired, and getting old anyway, and
that his memory did not serve him as once it did. Had he followed the
system of Hostin Nez, he would have crowded the Studebaker wagon-works
to full capacity.
And came Kewanimptewa, chief of that third and weakest faction of the
Oraibi Hopi that had nearly perished in the hills. He was a stolid
fellow, not at all like his name, which signifies Chameleon. He gave me
the once-over, and then said frankly:—
“Well, you are a little man—a very little man. The last one was a big
man—very big man. But—perhaps you will do.”
Hardly had I moved the big desk to a place where I could see the
Indians as they came in at the main door, in order that their pleas
should not have to filter down through clerks, when the quiet of the
summer afternoon was broken by cries of dismay and excited grief. A
Navajo came running, weeping, his manner hysterical. He rushed into the
office and stammered:—
“Charlie Bega, he dead—kill—Charlie Bega!”
For the moment I thought someone had been murdered; and a second
thought did not lessen my dismay, for this man was a miner. His face
was streaked where the tears had washed down through the smudges of
coal-dust. The reservation has large deposits of soft coal, and fuel
for the Government plants is mined by Indians under a skilled white
miner. I had been down the mine that week, and had noted its sagging
pillars under the pressure of that heavy mesa roof. It flashed through
my mind that there had been a tragedy down the drift, and that other
miners were either dead or entombed. But the Navajo interpreter quickly
explained:—
“His son has just died. Their hogan is down the cañon near the mine,
and he came to tell you of it, and he wants a coffin built and a grave
dug.”
The doctor came in to confirm this statement, and added:—
“The carpenter makes coffins for the people. The Navajo have a great
fear of the dead, and they will not bury when it is possible to have
the work done by someone else. We usually send a squad of men to
prepare a grave, and the parson conducts a little service. If you say
so, I will tell him.”
It was late afternoon, and would soon be twilight.
“You may tell the carpenter,” I said to the interpreter; “we will
arrange this funeral for to-morrow morning.”
“Pardon me, sir, but they have queer customs. No member of that family
will eat until the body is disposed of; and they must purify themselves
by sweat-baths and ceremonies. When one dies close to the Agency, we
help them bury at once.”
My first inclination was not to be ruled by such superstition; and then
I thought how little four centuries of progress around them and fifty
years of American influence had changed the Navajo. Like his Desert, he
has remained untouched, unaffected. A hogan that has held the dead is
never afterward occupied by the living. Its wood will not be used to
make a fire, though they come to freezing.
“Very well,” I said. “Have things made ready to-night.”
And I shall never forget my first Indian funeral. At different times
since, and among other tribes and circumstances, I have had more of
excitement and not a little anxiety at funerals; but this was my first
in the Desert.
The carpenter made a substantial box, much too large I thought; but
when the body was placed in it, wrapped in new blankets, decked with
silver ornaments, with the dead boy’s saddle, bridle, and quirt at the
foot, it was none too large. They could ill afford to part with those
blankets and silver things, and especially that saddle. But he must be
caparisoned and equipped for his new life in the ghostly land where he
would go a-roaming.
A half-dozen of the employees climbed into the wagon that would carry
the body to the grave. Among them was a visitor, a noted geologist who
has made the Empire his study, and who took his share of labor along
with the rest. The minister from the Baptist Mission met us at the
gate. The burial ground was a desolate place across the arroyo, in a
little hollow of those great drifted dunes, shunned by the Indians and
not very inviting to anyone. By the time the grave was ready, it was
quite dark and lanterns had been lighted.
“Do you wish a commitment service, sir?” asked the minister. I did not
at once understand him, having to learn that the new Agent decides
everything, and I had thought he would take his place as the man of
prayer without request. He had a short ritual for pagans, and this was
one of them. It was solemn and sufficient.
“Dust to dust ...” and the tossing of earth on the box followed. Four
of the men began filling in the grave. I had looked around for the
relatives of the dead, but as yet none were in evidence, when out of
the dusk came two strange Navajo, leading a pony. It was a very good
animal as desert mounts go. And the missionary presented to me a
serious problem.
“They wish to kill the horse. Will you permit that?”
And there was something in his tone of voice that indicated a hope I
would deny something as an innovation. Again I called for an
explanation.
“The Navajo always kill a horse at the grave,” said the trader.
“It seems a merciless thing to do—that’s a good pony.”
The missionary brightened. He had little use for pagan customs and
longed for an arbitrary decision.
“It is the custom of the people,” said the trader, an honest man who
advised me for many days thereafter. “You may not like it, and—you may
be strong enough to stop it”—there was doubt in his voice;—“but it is
their custom.”
It went against the grain; but there stood the Indians with the animal,
silent, waiting. This problem had been presented to many Agents,
perhaps.
“If we do not kill it mercifully with a gun, they will only go away and
beat it to death with rocks,” said the trader. “It must be done
to-night. I have brought a rifle.”
The desert custom of the Navajo won its first round.
The two Indians led the pony to the head of the grave, and, seeming to
understand that we had settled it, scuttled away in the shadows. The
trader leveled his rifle and shot that very good pony through the
brain. It leaped forward convulsively, and plunged down, knee-deep, in
the soft earth of the grave. The dead had a mount.
It was black night by this time, and we filed back to the Agency, where
I felt better for having the electric lights. There had been something
gruesome in the whole proceeding. But it was a custom of the people, as
the trader had said, and in other ways I learned from him that it is
not wise for a strange Chief at once to take his people by the throat.
Now the first complaints were filed with me, and soon increased to
scores. The Hopi has suffered for many years because of the willful
depredations of his too close neighbor, the Navajo; and the Navajo in
turn has community troubles of his own. There were complaints of damage
to fences, and of ruined crops, and of peeled orchards; of the stealing
of ponies, and the re-branding and butchering of cattle, the pillage of
houses, and the unwarranted seizure and holding of precious
water-holes; complaints of domestic wrangles and social scandals, of
blighted love and too ardent affections; of marriage portions and the
current price of brides, of mothers-in-law—ye Gods! even of witchcraft!
Descent and distribution included not only real and personal property
such as we know, for came a Medicine Man claiming to have inherited the
paraphernalia of a deceased tribal doctor, and requested that I decide
ownership, according to the rules, in the dried head of a dead crane.
The Indian welcomes opportunity to speak his piece in court, and if
permitted will promptly set up as prosecutor and spring to the rapid
cross-examination of witnesses. He will even incriminate himself if
there is chance of making things unpleasant for someone else; and those
of the accused found guilty and sentenced invariably request a chance
to peach on some other poor devil who has evaded punishment. Witchcraft
seldom appears in the open, but I recall one case that was unusual.
The favorite son of a Tewa died, and the father looked about him for
someone on whom to blame this calamity. Indian grief, seldom
long-lived, may be the more quickly assuaged if one can fix the blame.
Suddenly the bereaved father discovered that a certain neighbor was a
witch. He did not like the man anyway. So, finding him prowling around
the house,—urged by a sympathetic curiosity, no doubt,—the parent
seized him and dragged him into the room with the dead.
“Now,” he cried, amid tears, “You see him plainer. Look at him. You are
the one who killed him. You are a witch, and you sickened him with
sorceries and bad medicine. Listen! When we kill anything, we always
eat it. Now you eat him!”
This the alleged doctor shrank from doing, and forthwith the enraged
father administered a terrific beating. The nose of this unfortunate
neighbor was hammered out of all resemblance to a human organ, and
other features of him were sadly damaged. They both appeared before me
the next day. The father then expressed penitence and disavowed a
belief in witches; but I could see that his conversion had been too
rapid. In his troubled heart the witches prevailed. He seemed not to
mind his sentence of a week at hard labor, having had action for his
sorrow.
Having once opened a docket, the word seemed to go forth to the mesas
and the cañons to bring in their complaints. The cases became legion.
One would begin to examine witnesses in so simple a matter as
horse-stealing and record quite a bit of evidence, to discover suddenly
that the animal in question had disappeared eleven years gone, the
complaint having been duly entered by seven different Indian Agents
sitting at this and other Agencies. It became necessary to impose a
statute of limitations.
The first real trial concerned a medicine man and his collar-bone. One
Horace Greeley, of Sitchumnovi, in the First Mesa District, at that
time reputed to be seventy-four years old, and by profession a
bone-setter, had not pleased a member of his tribe. Or perhaps he had
conjured only too well with the misplaced anatomy of the patient, and
charged according to his skill. At any rate, a relative of the patient
took umbrage, and proceeded to handle Horace in a rough and unseemly
manner. Among other things damaged was Horace’s own collar-bone. He
could not very well set this himself, and naturally distrusted his
confreres; so he was forced to send for the Agency physician; otherwise
I should not have heard of the case. But Horace being found with a
fractured collar-bone and numerous contusions, the matter was reported,
and his complaint entered for the next session of court.
The Regulations of the Indian Service direct that the Court of Indian
Offenses shall consist of two or more intelligent and trustworthy
Indians, acting as Judges, whose verdicts shall be reviewed by the
Indian Agent, should an appeal be taken to him. As many Indians do not
understand their right of appeal, the Agent is compelled to be present
either to sustain or to overrule the verdicts.
And did I not have two such Judges, all properly commissioned? Did not
Hostin Nez have a treasured “pretty paper,” and was not Hooker Hongave
an equal Judge? Did not the Government, looking for justice, generously
crowd on each of them the princely salary of seven dollars, each and
every month, “fresh and fresh”? Now was the time to avail myself of
native wisdom.
Judge Hooker was a figure in the First Mesa community. At one time he
had been a Hopi of the Hopi, and had fought the new system of schools
and school regulation with all his crude ability. To prevent his
children from being enrolled, he had walled them up at home; that is,
he placed them in a small room of his house, gave them food and water,
and then walled up the entrance door, hoping that his fresh mortar
would not arouse suspicion. To-day he is hated by pagans because he has
tried to assimilate the doctrines of Christianity, and is looked on by
some Christians as an arch-hypocrite. Such are the trials of the
savage.
Actually he is a childish old fellow who has tried to merit the
confidence of the mission folk, with little concept of where paganism
ends and Christianity begins. His greatest sacrifice in life has been
the abandonment of tribal ceremonies. From his house below the mesa can
be seen the famous Walpi dance-ledge, like a miniature stage high in
the thin air, thronged on pagan festal days with multi-colored
costumes, where faintly sound the chanting and the drums. But he never
attends these feasts of rhythm and song, save at the biennial Walpi
Snake Dance, when he joyfully receives a dispensation from the Agent to
go as an official of the Government, he being a Judge and the
authorized Crier. Many times did he cry down the aimless chatter of
tourists during my administration, that solemn announcements might be
made to the brethren and the visitors cautioned against the making of
vile photographs and unseemly levity. Garbed in a magnificently beaded
waistcoat that had decked some long-vanquished Sioux warrior, and
bearing his staff of office, a knotted club out of Africa, he presents
a strange and not undignified figure on these occasions.
Therefore the two who shared the woolsack were contrasts. Hostin Nez, a
Navajo pagan of the pagans, a Medicine Man, a leader of chants and a
priest of the sand-paintings; Hooker Hongave, a simple-minded savage
who had turned halfway toward the Church, with the low-toned booming of
hide drums in his ears, and in his heart perhaps a longing for the
mysticism of his ancient people.
The day of hearing having been reached, and all assembled, the Judges
listened to the story of old broken Greeley, who had by no means
recovered and was still swathed in bandages. The accused was a burly
fellow under forty, powerful enough to have challenged a middleweight,
who did not deny or extenuate the assault.
“It is a very bad thing this man has done,” said Judge Hooker, clucking
his tongue and shaking his head sadly.
“Yes, my brother,” agreed the Navajo jurist. “It is a serious thing and
it must not happen again. We must make an example of this man so all
the people may know of it.”
“We will,” said Hooker; and they withdrew to frame up a sentence.
From their determined expressions I feared that friend prisoner would
get at least a year in the hoosegow—an embarrassing piece of business,
for the Regulations do not recognize any charge as deserving more than
ninety days, and the Territorial Court had thought three years
sufficient for cold-blooded murder in a recent Indian case. The judges
reappeared.
“He is a bad man,” said Hooker.
“Yes, he is a dangerous fellow,” said Hostin Nez.
“And so we will send him to jail for—ten days.”
“Ten days!” I cried out. “Why, he nearly killed Greeley! That old man
will suffer for weeks. You mean ten weeks, don’t you?”
“No,” they said. “Ten days is a long time in jail.”
The appellate power came into action.
“Your decision, gentlemen, is overruled.”
Hooker brightened, expecting a remission of at least five days, which
would save his face at the mesa and perhaps prevent the prisoner from
hating him for many years.
“The prisoner will be confined for the period of sixty days, and during
that time he will be employed at hard labor.”
Hooker gasped, trembled, and was speechless.
“You are a man without mercy,” declared old Hostin Nez.
That was my last session of the Indian Court in the Hopi-Navajo country
with native judges sitting. One might as well expect justice from a
goose.
For an Agent who wishes to evade responsibility, the “judges” are an
excellent smoke-screen. He can always say—“It was done by the
prisoner’s own people”: Pilate’s method. Aside from its having all the
elements of farce, it breeds dissatisfaction and ill will among the
people, while teaching them nothing. I know of nothing more unjust,
unless it be the trial of an unlettered Indian according to the strict
letter of white man’s law and the unwavering standard of the white
man’s boasted morality.
Thereafter I paid the salaries, and pleasantly chatted with the old
gentlemen when they visited the Agency; but of their legal wisdom I
wanted nothing. The Court proceeded to business without them.
So large an area of country, nearly four thousand square miles,
occupied by two dissimilar tribes and these ancient enemies, should
have some measure of control. The police force I found consisted of
three individuals, two Navajo and one lonesome Hopi. The Agent had
found things so peaceful that he did not need police; which is one way
of saying that he did not bother himself about policing the Empire. And
when the first serious bit of police work became necessary, after five
years of peaceful neglect, the War Department, at the request of the
Secretary of the Interior, detailed one hundred and twenty-five men of
the Twelfth Cavalry as an “escort” to Colonel Hugh L. Scott. This
officer of long experience at Indian diplomacy was sent to review the
situation and conditions. The work completed, he recommended to the
Secretary of the Interior that the Indian Agent should have a force of
not less than twenty men, in charge of a white officer. The Department,
therefore, being unable totally to ignore the opinion of the famous
Colonel Scott, increased my police to eight men, all natives, and left
me to whatever success I could contrive. In 1921 Major-General Hugh L.
Scott told me that he had not changed his opinion.
The Hopi do not make good policemen, and certainly not in a cohort of
one. Their very name implies “the peaceful ones.” Their towns are ruled
largely by pueblo opinion. If a resident acquires the reputation of
being unreasonable and unfeeling, as a policeman often must, his
standing in the outraged community may affect all other phases of his
life. Therefore the Hopi is not likely to become a very zealous officer
when operating alone. And too, the Hopi fear the Navajo, as it is said
the Navajo fear the Ute, and are useless when removed from the
neighborhood of their homes.
But many years ago, when the Hopi were sorely pressed by nomad enemies
and had not even the consolation of telling their woes to an Indian
Agent, they sent emissaries to their cousins, the Pueblo Indians of
what is now New Mexico, and begged for a colony of warriors to reside
with them. In response to this plea, and looking for something to their
advantage, in 1700 came a band of the Tewa from Abiquiu on the Chama
River, from that section where Onate found San Juan de los Caballeros.
To these people the Hopi granted a wide valley west of the First Mesa,
known as the Wepo Wash, providing they would stay and lend their
prowess in future campaigns. They built a village atop the First Mesa,
now called Tewa or Hano, where their descendants live to-day. Some
intermarried with the Hopi, and a few with the near-by Navajo; but they
have not been absorbed, and it is a curious fact that while all the
Tewa speak Hopi and Navajo with more or less fluency, after two
centuries of living side by side few of the Hopi can speak the Tewa
dialect.
The Hopi invited warriors, and the warriors have graduated into
policemen, for one learns to police the Hopi districts, and even to
discipline some of the Navajo, with Tewa officers. They are dependable
and courageous, even belligerent; that is to say, they will fight when
it is necessary and, strange thing among desert Indians, with their
fists, taking a delight in blacking the opponent’s eye. But one has to
learn that the Hopi as policemen are fine ceremonial dancers.
The Navajo cohort had been selected following a frontier fallacy. Many
of the old Agents believed that a good police force could be built from
the “bad men” of the community.
“The cattle-thief will know all other cattle-thieves,” was their
reasoning. “The gambler will not be deceived as to those who waste
their herds and silver playing monte. And the meaner an Indian among
his own, the more respect and fear he will stimulate when garbed in a
uniform and authorized to pack a gun.”
As reasonable as if New York officials should make a special deputy of
Gyp the Blood.
Hoske Yega, commonly known as Old Mike, a tall and unscrupulous Navajo,
carried the Chief’s badge. It was said that he had killed more than one
man; and while I am not so sure of this, certainly he was no example of
righteousness. The second officer was not so mean a specimen, but one
of the same system. They had been policemen of the jurisdiction for
many years, believed themselves entitled to the positions, and knew the
game. A Navajo policeman has nothing to learn from the bulls of the
whites as to methods of graft and the blackmailing use of his badge.
The Indian Service has used native police since 1878, and I will admit
that occasionally one finds a jewel of an officer, of good judgment,
trustworthy, brave, and loyal; but for the most part the Indian
policemen of the Desert are go-betweens and grafters.
Providing that the Indian accused of wrongdoing is not of the
policeman’s clan, providing that the policeman is not afraid of him or
of his clan, providing that there is no witchcraft involved, the Navajo
policeman can serve a warrant and get his man as quickly and as
unerringly as any Sherlock Holmes. A skilled tracker, he can read the
trail as an open book; and often he does not need to follow it. Indians
leave their visiting cards behind them. My first knowledge of this came
when the corral of Clezzi Thlani was relieved of several good ponies,
and Old Mike was sent forth to investigate. He recovered most of the
stock from the open range, and reported:
“They were taken by Sageny Litsoi.”
Sageny’s idea had been the common one among Navajo, dating from
wagon-train days: to run the ponies a little further each night until
distance had convinced him that he actually owned the animals. Then a
little tinkering with a hot wire would so confuse brands as to bring
even the records to his support.
“Why didn’t you bring him in?” I asked.
“Didn’t see him—just got the horses.”
“Then how do you know that Sageny is the thief?”
“Went to corral; saw his tracks. Yisconga dahtsi” (to-morrow perhaps)
“I bring in Sageny.”
“You mean the trail will lead to his hogan?”
“No, No! Went to corral; see his tracks—Sageny’s feet. No two Navajo
have feet alike.”
And when Sageny was brought in, although he had many excuses and
claimed that he had raised the animals, he did admit taking animals
having another’s brand; and he occupied the guardhouse for a period as
a guest of the Empire. Several of my Navajo police graduated later into
the same rest-room, which seemed a humorous proceeding to many, and was
not altogether different from the experiences of some white
lieutenants.
It was when I discovered that Tewa could be depended on that better
police-work followed. The point of view was different. One day I
summoned the tall and spare Tewa chief of police, and said to him:—
“Nelson, I want Hostin Chien Bega. You know him?”
“Yes; me know him—call him ‘Bull-Neck.’”
“‘Bull-Neck’ it is. Can you bring him in?”
“Dahtsi.”
“Well, here are handcuffs. Suppose you try it.”
He took the cuffs and walked away. A short time after he returned, and
I saw that he had buckled on his guns.
“You want ‘Bull-Neck,’” he commented. “He mean Navajo—carry two guns
all the time. Sometimes bring in whiskey. Now, how bad you want him?
You want him dead?”
Well, to be plain about it, I did not want Hostin Chien Bega, alias
Bull-Neck, as a morgue exhibit. He was mean enough in the flesh. And I
foresaw the later experience of a brother superintendent who ruled the
reservation on my west line. His domain was if anything a trifle wilder
than mine, reaching to the Grand Cañon and the most remote places of
the Utah border. Its area was a trifle more than five thousand square
miles, inhabited by at least six thousand Navajo, many of whom had
never touched civilization. One Taddytin had graduated from the police
force into a bully of the countryside, and it became necessary to
impose on him a bit of his own medicine. Taddytin was a giant in
physique and quite the meanest man of that territory. Messages
summoning him to the Agency were of no avail. He pleaded illness, that
cover to which retreat all those who do not wish to testify. Taddytin
not only resisted the persons sent to arrest him, but did his level
Navajo best with a .45 gun to get them before they subdued him. The
Navajo is quite handy with a gun at close range. Most of them go armed
from the time they make money enough to purchase a heavy weapon at the
nearest trading-post—a trade permitted by the Indian Office, although
in utter defiance of both Federal and Arizona State law.
The affair came off in a hogan, which is entirely too restricted a
place for serious shooting. Taddytin’s gun twice missed fire, and the
persons sent to arrest him, having been in line with the gun, became
nervous and, strange to relate, lost their judgment. They should have
reprimanded Taddytin for carrying a defective weapon. Instead, they
felt it necessary to shoot Taddytin several times, and although not
using one of those fancy .22’s that O. Henry was wont to ridicule, the
first two bullets failed to knock him down. Unfortunately the last shot
killed Taddytin, which was entirely opposed to all policies of moral
suasion.
My brother superintendent, who acts as Indian Agent no longer, defended
himself in the Federal Court, first against a murder charge, and then
one of perjury, from the Spring term of 1916 to and including the
Spring term of 1918. He stood quite alone, save for the testimony of
all those who knew anything about Indians and Taddytin in particular.
It cost him quite four thousand dollars in cash, to say nothing of time
and mental disturbance. The full history of this case may be found in a
Congressional Report (House Doc. 1244) to accompany H.R. Bill No. 5639,
dated September 19, 1922—a bill to reimburse the man after his
persecution had ended; a report that is probably forgotten. According
to that report, the superintendent, acting as Indian Agent—
did not receive the support from the Indian Bureau in connection
with this matter to which he was entitled, but instead he was
vigorously, and your committee believes unjustly, prosecuted by the
Federal authorities.
You see, the superintendent became the official goat, and suffered that
a glowing policy of big wind and puffery might not be embarrassed.
As this affair occurred to my next-door neighbor, it had a serious
effect on law-and-order conditions within my by no means peaceful
jurisdiction, to the end that I was once reported as murdered and often
threatened with having the report confirmed.
No; I did not urge my Tewa policeman to give a too realistic picture of
loyalty to my commands.
XIII
A DESERT VENDÉE
One noticeable thing about all the Calhoun letters is the
complaint of inadequate support from Washington.—Abel:
Correspondence of James S. Calhoun
It was a hot sweltering desert day in July when I proceeded westward
from Oraibi to survey for the first time the contentious pueblo of
Hotevilla, Chief Youkeoma’s retreat. I did not expect to meet this
strange personality, but his very name caused me to have an interest in
so rare a character: You-ke-o-ma, or “something quite nearly
complete”—as one might say, “almost perfection.” An American Dalai
Lama.
Several miles beyond the little grotto of the Oraibi war-gods, a
concealed shrine of quaint images, passing that place where Youkeoma’s
adherents lost the contest to decide their traditional rights in the
town of Oraibi, one came to a wall of shattered rock. These Hotevilla
cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by
the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone.
To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly
graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it
was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding
trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from
the masses of tumbled sandstone.
The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of
springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of
deep sand, and more of rock outcroppings, and then appeared the fields
of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing
profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food.
The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the
past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that
bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest.
The pueblo itself was on the westernmost edge of the mesa. There, where
the rocks dropped away again in huge broken steps, overlooking the vast
Dinnebito Wash country, they had built their curious little houses of
stone and mud. If not balanced on the edge of a precipice, apparently
the Hopi are not happy. Fatalists—when the aged or blind plunge over it
is regretted, but not grieved about sufficiently to disparage the site.
Alcoves of the mesa benches were fenced with cottonwood boughs, and
served as hanging balconies for their burro stock. They had no cattle,
few sheep, and fewer horses; in fact they were and are the poorest of
the Hopi people, having rejected all tenders of acquisition and
progress; but in those things that do not run counter to the
traditions, such as cornmeal and burros, they have great wealth.
There was one man with me, and he advised against going down into the
village. Indeed, I was not inclined to insist on it, for coincident
with our topping the last rise the roofs of the highest houses had been
posted with guards, watching, watching us in an ominous manner: a
custom that prevailed for many years, and one that causes the stranger
to feel a trifle less than comfortable.
“Very likely they feel that we slipped up on them,” I said to my
companion.
“Not at all,” he replied. “They have been expecting you for days. They
knew when you arrived at Oraibi yesterday. Be sure of it, old Youkeoma
has gone underground and will remain in hiding until the coast is
clear. Those watching fellows simply want to know where you go and when
you depart. If we sought to take off a kid or two to school, there’d be
a fine row. They know we have no backing. I’ll bet they knew when you
left the Agency and started out this way.”
All of which proved to be true, and I had later to learn to circumvent
and deceive such mysterious methods of information.
We sat on a baking sand-hill and surveyed the place. It was simply a
dirtier duplicate of the other pueblos I have described, without their
picturesque setting. And if there is a place in America where aroma
reaches its highest magnitude, then that distinction must be granted
Hotevilla on a July afternoon. The sun broils down on the heated sand
and rock ledges, on the fetid houses and the litter and the garbage,
and all that accumulates from unclean people and their animals.
Multitudes of burros and chickens and dogs. Hosts of dogs. Lank,
slinking, half-starved, challenging dogs. Poisonous-looking dogs that
would attack one.
Hotevilla’s sloping streets end at the mesa-edge, and below are the
sacred spring and their sunlit fields. Far away in the northwest, as a
dim blue sail on the horizon, showed Navajo Mountain, that peak of
Indian mystery where the last of their secrets have found refuge. The
Hopi had migrated from that country centuries past, south to the Little
Colorado River; and then, like the back-wash of a wave, had drifted and
settled in his present place of stagnation. Perhaps Hotevilla had
proved his Promised Land.
The smell of cooking arose from the houses, a muttony odor,—although it
may have been burro-haunch,—mingled with smoke and the thick incense of
smouldering cedar. In and out of the doorways the women passed at their
tasks, and one sat weaving a reed plaque. They were all indifferent,
with a contemptuous sullen indifference, to the stranger. There was a
perfect swarm of children, wary, watching children, ready to dart and
hide, long-haired and dirty, and most of them as nude as Adam.
At one end of the village, and a little apart from it, stood a house
with a peaked roof. This had been the station of the Mennonite Mission,
but when last threatened, the good people departed. It required a brave
spirit to live close to the hostile Hopi. One was likely to reflect on
the fate of Fray Padre José de Espeleta, of the Kingdom of Navarre, and
the difference in theological teaching lent very little comfort.
Until 1915 the Hotevilla mesa was a very lonely place. The nearest
white neighbors were seven miles away, with rough cañons between, and
no telephone wires; and the nearest authority of the Government, the
Indian Agent, quite fifty miles distant, with no road-condition
assuring speed of rescue in case of trouble. One brave white woman
lived alone on that hilltop until the building of a Government school
brought neighbors. This was Miss Sarah E. Abbott, a field matron. For
many years she had been stationed at the First Mesa, where she had
acquired a knowledge of the Hopi language. She received orders to
confront the Hotevilla, and she did it. But it was necessary for me to
send police several times to arrest those who sought to intimidate her,
and the longest term of imprisonment ever given old Youkeoma himself,
perhaps the longest ever given an Indian at an Indian Agency, was
because of his threatening this woman.
When it grew near to sunset the men began returning from the fields,
plodding in with their sacks and staves and huge planters’ hoes. Many
of them were aged, their long hair matted and snaky-looking; but there
were enough of the burly, thickset fellows to give any official pause
if he contemplated dictating to that outfit. Even those who closely
observe these people wonder at this evidence of physique. The Hopi
lives largely on a vegetable diet. His teeth are blunted and worn down
like a horse’s from the eating of flint-like corn. Because of isolation
and clan ceremonial exclusion they have become devitalized through
centuries of inbreeding, and quickly succumb to disease. And yet these
same Hopi are famed for two things requiring raw strength and sustained
energy: they can lift and pack on their backs the heaviest burdens, and
they are great long-distance runners. Many of their ceremonies include
the foot race, notably the sunrise competition on the day of the Snake
Dance. Given a long desert course, fifty to one hundred miles, and the
Hopi runner will wear down a horse. Their ability to bear burdens comes
from both sides of the house, since for ages the women have packed
water from the springs to the heights, and the men the harvests, the
firewood, and the rock for building. I have seen two moving piles of
wood on a mesa-trail, to discover one a burro-load and the other
covering a man, with small difference between them.
And they must have carried weight over distances that compared with
their runs, for how else were the Spanish Missions roofed? The great
timbers were brought on the backs of men. About 1629 the Hopi, obedient
and enslaved, brought these timbers from the San Francisco Mountains to
Oraibi and other points, a feat equaled only by the Acoma Indians, who
built a huge mission atop their penal height, the beams coming from San
Mateo or Mount Taylor. Each of these packs was more than fifty miles.
One of the unused timbers may be seen to-day in the convento part of
the Acoma Mission. It is a log measuring more than thirty feet in
length and two feet in thickness. Without mechanical equipment, the
raising of it to the mesa-top would tax any man’s ingenuity.
Especially would an official pause in dictation at the time of which I
speak, for the Hopi had defied two former superintendents and for
several years had done exactly as they pleased, in utter disregard of
all admonitions emanating by mail from Washington. Of course official
Washington had not worried, and for the rest of the world the Hopi do
not exist; but the example to about fifteen hundred other and
disciplined Hopi and to several thousand unregulated and undisciplined
Navajo, all in constant touch with these rebels, was not good. The
Agents reaped the effect of this timid policy, and it had given them
concern.
The Hopi had so acted at other times, and the methods adopted to
correct them had not been of the happiest. Officials had threatened
and, when the native did not stir, had offered bribes.
“Your bones will bleach in the sun!” one set had promised—to be
followed by: “Won’t you come in and be good, for a nice new contract
stove?” Now the bleaching process had affected only those so
unfortunate as to die naturally, and the Hotevilla people were content
with their piki stones and adobe fireplaces. The Indian does not
respect those who seek to buy him. When a threat proves as empty as it
is boastful, he is strengthened in no small degree. Washington has been
given to bluffing, and buying.
The Indian Service had not greatly concerned itself about these strange
people until 1887. Between 1847, when the Hopi were acquired as one of
the blessings of the Mexican War, and 1887, when the first school was
planted in Keams Cañon—forty years—they had lived practically as
undisturbed as since their coming from the cliff- and cavern-dwellings
in the northern cañons of the Utah border. A few traders had visited
them often enough to be known; and one of them, Mr. John Lorenzo
Hubbell, has told me of his witnessing a Snake Dance in the seventies,
a solitary white spectator where now several thousands congregate
annually. The tourist was not in those days, and had he been, under the
circumstances of the back-country, it is likely he would have been
going away from a Snake Dance rather than attending one.
In 1890 the defiance of the Oraibi first caused notice. Old
Lo-lo-lo-mi, their good chief, had been to Washington, and had agreed
to place the children of his faction in the school. His counsels were
disregarded by the opposition; in fact they imprisoned the old man and
threatened him with death for this lapse from the traditions.
Lo-lo-lo-mi was “too good,” as his name implied. The sub-Agent, Mr.
Ralph Collins, arrested several of the war-chiefs and sent them to
their Agent at Fort Defiance. When they returned they busied themselves
making more trouble; so troops were sent to pacify and coerce them, and
the first great blunder was made by an army officer. This officer
accompanied Collins to the Oraibi mesa. They were warned that the
hostiles had armed and meant to fight. Believing this to be so much
bluff, they ascended the mesa to the pueblo. A war-chief, who had
refused to attend a council, stepped out on one of the terraced houses.
He was painted for the occasion, carried a rifle, and looked the part
of his office. He was joined by a medicine man, who wore a raw
sheepskin that dripped blood and besmeared his body. These two, knowing
of many sympathizers within the hovels, dared the whites to combat and
greatly abused them. The two white men prudently retired after an
abortive parley.
Then came five troops of cavalry. The commanding officer invited the
hostile headmen to a council below the mesa, and gave his word that
they should be respected. They came, but stubbornly refused to change
their minds as to this white man’s educational propaganda. They were
then seized and bound as prisoners; and were afterward marched up the
pueblo trail as a screen for the soldiers. This was rank betrayal, and
the effects of it live in the Oraibi country to this day.
“Some white men do not keep their word.” And at Oraibi, or at least
among unreconstructed Oraibans, who are now at Hotevilla, it is wisdom
to suspect all white men.
Collins, the civilian and sub-Agent, had no part in this. He advised
against it and deplored it. It would have been better to risk a bit of
bad marksmanship, for which the Hopi is noted; it would have been
better to beat a few worthless war-chiefs and medicine men to death, if
that were actually necessary. One can forgive a battle—but betrayal
rankles in the heart.
The prisoners taken at this time were sent to Fort Wingate. In a few
months they were released on promise to be good, but when they returned
from captivity they too refused to keep the parole given. The goose of
an officer had produced a flock of ganders, and his work was to live
for nearly three decades. In 1894 troops were again in demand at
Oraibi, and nineteen of the Indian leaders were sent as prisoners to
Alcatraz Island. They were imprisoned about eight months, and returned
impenitent.
In 1898 the Hopi suffered from smallpox. It was not so bad as that
epidemic told of by the Spanish, but it was severe enough. Superstition
and fright, combined with fatalism, are hard things to conquer among a
people who know nothing of vaccination, who trust no stranger, but
prefer to die unassisted by aliens. Troops were necessary, to affect
quarantine and to cremate bodies. In 1899, say the records, troops came
again, and once more prisoners were sent to Fort Defiance.
All this time internal dissension was at work among the Oraibans, and
in 1905 differences as to the views of local oracles concerning the
traditions reached a climax. This quarrel involved nearly everyone
within reaching distance. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis
E. Leupp, the best supporter of discipline the Service has had in three
decades, was at odds with his Agent on this station and, to tell the
truth, this Agent had met one Waterloo at the Chimopovi pueblo, where
an outpost of the Oraibi dwelt. His effort to coerce the Hopi with an
enlarged Navajo police force had nearly resulted in bloodshed and real
war; and at the end of this fiasco the Navajo mercenaries threatened
his life because the pay-chest was not promptly thrown open to them.
So the Commissioner came to exert a strong personal influence. And he
found speedily that his personal influence in the great Desert amounted
to very little. The Indians had a keen sense of the fitness of things,
and they resented his appearing to negotiate with them without an
official sponsor.
“Who are you?” asked the troubled Oraibi, when invited to a council
with him.
“I am the Commissioner from Washington,” he stated, a fact that was
known to President Roosevelt, the Grid-iron Club, and the New York
Evening Post, and that should have been patent everywhere.
“Why do you come here without Moungwi, then?” they demanded. “He should
introduce you to us. We do not know you. Moungwi is not here. Why do
you come in the back way, from Winslow, and call a council without
Moungwi?”
Indians are often peculiarly consistent. They did not regret that
recent fracas with Moungwi, when they had seized him by the beard and
threatened to toss him bodily from the gigantic Chimopovi
cliffs,—action prevented only by his Navajo police threatening to open
fire,—but they did know something of official courtesy between and
among all Moungwis or Chiefs, and there is such a thing as having the
proper entrée, even with an Indian tribe in the far-removed hills. Very
likely the Commissioner said something about the respect due his
office; when arose a big Indian, who declaimed to this astonishing
effect:—
“This man comes here alone, and he has a crooked mouth. His words go
two ways. He is no Commissioner of Indian Affairs, or the Moungwi would
be here to tell us. I myself saw this man working with a shovel on the
railroad section-gang not three weeks ago. Don’t listen to him. He will
lead you the wrong trail.”
Now this was a terrible blow to dignity, and hurt all Washington.
Matters did not improve, and by 1906 the trouble had increased to the
point where troops were necessary once again. They came. They rehearsed
their parts perfectly, and prisoners were taken. A special inspector
was sent in to observe matters, and he found himself in a very
embarrassing position. The one hundred captives had arranged a hunger
strike. Receipts for their prison mess-equipment had been demanded of
them, in strict accordance with the farcical methods of accounting then
in vogue. The true Hopi hostile, loyal to high-priest Youkeoma, has
never signed for anything. He is reared to be wary of the white man’s
papers. As he cannot read them for himself, he classes everything in
the nature of a document along with the white man’s word, as
illustrated by the first army officer who betrayed him.
“If they won’t sign, let them starve,” said the soldier in this case,
and he was not at all worried about it. But the special inspector was
very much worried about it. He had to be more careful of his civil job;
so he managed early one morning, with the seductive aroma of boiling
coffee and the alluring scent of fried bacon, to develop a hungry Judas
among the younger men, who signed for the whole lot; and lo! by such
means all tribulation was avoided.
This time seventeen leaders were sent to Fort Huachuca, seventy-two
were put to work on the roads of the reserve, and a lot of younger men,
rebels in embryo, were dispatched to distant Indian schools, in the
belief that enforced education would bring calm to their troubled
spirits. Eight of these young men went to Carlisle. I had to deal with
them when they returned, some seven years later. In fact, the
Commissioner of that time advised me that they would prove a help in
administering the affairs of the reservation. They returned arrayed in
the clothing of the white man, but only three of them showed any signs
of repentance. Those of the Hotevilla, with one exception, shucked the
clothing promptly and went back to the blanket. They were sullen and
suspicious, and they had not lost their memories.
I did not blame them in great measure, for at least four had been
married men when taken from the pueblo. Their wives now had other
consorts, other children. The children of the rebel fathers would not
forgive them, because they repudiated the faithless wives. The fathers
blamed the Government for not protecting their households. And the
women said to me:—
“You took our men. We were left alone. We had to keep the children
alive, and this meant tending the fields and the sheep. Speak not to us
of morals.”
At least that was the English meaning of their argument and reproof,
whatever the Hopi terms of it. Quite so many “’Lispeths”: “You are all
liars, you English”; and in the same manner their sons and daughters
took to their “own unclean people savagely.”
Now a tribal marriage is a legal marriage, or so the courts have
decreed, of course far removed from the haunts of the alien and having
no specific knowledge of him or of his conditions. So, in strict
accordance with sacred property rights and the Great Book of
Platitudes, it was my duty to say to the outfit assembled: “You,
hussies, are guilty of adultery, and many of your children are
illegitimate; while you, impenitent rebels, may not take other wives,
since by so doing you would commit bigamy; and each of you, every one,
all and several, to wit, should have long terms in the guardhouse.”
That is what I should have said; but being of sound mind, and having
very little use for platitudes, especially those courageously hurled by
mail across two thousand miles, I did nothing of the sort. I had a
convenient place in which I kept the sacred book hidden, and had
trained myself into a complete forgetfulness of it.
But notwithstanding my sympathies, I could never soften the hatred of
one of the sons. He hated his father because of his mother’s treatment,
and above all this he hated white men, including me. The stupid sins of
one Moungwi are inherited by another in the line of succession.
“You took my father,” he said to me, “and left my mother to work hard
in the fields; and when I grew big enough to work you took me to
school, so she was left again without help. Then, when my father
returned from Carlisle, he would have nothing to do with my mother. And
you would not let me go home to her. I have no use for these ways of
the white men. I will not cut my hair, and I do not agree to continue
at school. You are strong enough to make me, but I will not do these
things for you.”
He could tell me this in straight English, as at my desert school he
had received a good grammar foundation; and he was not interrupted or
punished, because I encouraged the pupils to come to me and speak their
minds. But, being stronger, I elected to do these things for him,
having in mind his individual interests as separate and apart from the
feuds of the past; but I could not severely blame him for his stubborn
opposition. He was a very bright lad, and became an exceptional
student; but just as surely he returned finally to his “own unclean
people, savagely.” Three weeks on the roads, breaking stone and
wheeling sand, would have done more to cure that father’s rebellious
attitude than those years at Carlisle, exiled from his household and
all of life that he understood and cared for. To be sure,—and to be
fair to his instructors,—the man learned a great deal at Carlisle,
which was a very fine school; and more than this, he saw the wonders of
the white man. He was one of the first to witness an air flight. And
when he told his ancients at the pueblo of these strange and
unbelievable things he had seen in Philadelphia, they arose in wrath,
knocked out their ceremonial pipes, and denounced him as the greatest
liar unhung. So even by the elders, whose lost cause he had espoused
and suffered for, he was repudiated and damned. Few patriots get such
treatment as this. He was completely ostracized at home. To keep him in
food, I employed him as a local policeman, hoping he would revenge
himself; but this commission brought him only additional scorn and
reprobation. For long he lived at Hotevilla as a pelican in the desert;
where else could he live? Was it not home?
But we had reached 1911, with the same old situation burning on the
Oraibi mesa, save that the hostiles were now in a pueblo of their own,
and could be dealt with, however justly or unjustly, without affecting
those who had never actively resisted the Government. It was sheer
nonsense to begin again the farce of supplication and argument, of
cheap bribes and equally impotent threats. No bones had “bleached in
the sun,” and there were not enough native police and loyal employees
to risk an attempt at coercing this sullen horde. I returned to the
Agency and wrote a very impolitic report. Anything of truth that the
Indian Bureau does not wish to know is impolitic.
I recited the facts, and recommended, as the Government had found it
necessary to send in troops so many times before, and always after much
backing and filling and abortive negotiation,—all to the amusement of
the savage,—why not send troops now, and quickly. This recommendation
was dated July 28, 1911.
Government moves with a truly fearsome swiftness. I realize now, after
thirteen years of report-swapping and buck-passing, that some miracle
happened in that my suggestion was considered at all. I have been told
that a friend assured the Secretary of the Interior that I was not a
maniac. But it required until September 27, 1911 to request the
Secretary of War to detail cavalry from a distant point, when troops
were idle at Fort Apache only one hundred and eighty miles away—quite
in the neighborhood, as desert spaces are considered. Another month
drifted by, and on October 28 the Secretary of War detailed Hugh L.
Scott, then Colonel in rank, as an officer of Indian experience likely
to have influence with these strange people. Under date of November 15
I was directed to coöperate with Colonel Scott, and as no allowance was
made for the fact that it was winter and mails likely to be delayed
along the one hundred and five miles of wagon-transport, the great
Indian diplomatist and his officers and men reached the Moqui Agency
before my orders. Four months had been devoted to the delicate
untwisting of red tape that a telephone conversation between
Departments and a telegram to the nearest post would have settled in
twenty-four hours’ time. How comfortable if those Hopi had been Ute,
Apache, Navajo, or Sioux!
XIV
SOLDIERS, INDIANS, AND SCHOOLS
Now it is not good for the Christian’s health
to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles,
and he weareth the Christian down.
—Kipling
If you seek information on an Indian Reservation concerning things
outside the line of routine, never ask the Agent in charge. He will
have the important papers locked away from prying eyes, and will likely
comment that it is none of your business. Why invite this rebuff? Go to
the mess-cook, the farrier, or the seamstress. They will have had all
the essential details from some other post, from a mess-cook, a
farrier, or a seamstress, who will have zealously garnered it from some
leaky official, or mayhap from the telegraph operator. Who told Sitting
Bull that Custer had divided his command? By long odds, it was a camp
cook.
And when the school disciplinarian asked me one morning, as he was
checking his watch with my chronometer, “When do you expect the
troops?” I knew that an unusual order had issued. He was correct in his
assumption, for the laundress had been notified. Now I do not presume
to assert that the Secretary of the Interior had notified the
laundress—but she knew. Perhaps some other laundress had found the
order in the Colonel’s wash. Anyway, the column arrived just when she
predicted.
It made a striking picture filing down the long Cañon hill-road, black
riders against the sky and yellow sand, the field flag and troop
pennant fluttering; and there was about it a certain campaign note that
caused as much consternation throughout the back country as if war had
been declared, with Kit Carson back in the saddle.
Those of the wavering Hopi who lived apart from Youkeoma but leaned
toward his policies when they dared, and who had been awaiting
developments, began to rush their belated children to the schools. The
smiling “friendlies” industriously continued minding their home
affairs. And the Navajo, after one excited survey from the opposite
mesa-wall, completely disappeared from the landscape. Not a Navajo was
to be seen about the Agency for a very long period. Their old chiefs,
such as Hostin Nez and Billa Chezzi, could recall the captivity at the
Bosque Redondo, and the younger men had heard them tell of it. This was
no time for argument with the Nahtahni, and while they had lost nothing
in the back country, still it invited a peaceful hegira far from the
tents and bugles of that column.
The whole affair was against all tradition. Three former Agents had
argued and threatened and waited in vain, and the third had lingered
helplessly at his post until revolt blazed out to singe his beard. Now
this new Nahtahni had said very little; in fact, he had seemed
depressed and a trifle bewildered. But here came the soldiers, a very
different sort of Se-lough from those three uniformed natives he was
thought to depend on. The effect was immediate and lasting. And more
than one official, having actual knowledge of conditions among the
isolated Navajo, has agreed with me that such a column should file
through that country every little while. There would be in both Indians
and white men more of respect for the orders of the Government, and
fewer murders in lonely places.
And then I found the famous Colonel Scott seated at one end of my desk.
I apologized for being so ignorant, having received no Departmental
orders, and supposed that he would be thoroughly informed. Aside from
the request that he coöperate with the Agent in this little frontier
squabble, it appeared that his mission was a survey, and action would
await further instructions. Quarters were arranged for the officers and
a camping-place for the men, and then the Colonel and I sat down to a
discussion of conditions among the Indians of the reserve. Having read
of his career among the warriors of the Plains, I felt that the less I
said to this experienced soldier and tribal expert the better would be
my chances for making no mistakes. I hoped to create an impression of
wisdom by keeping my mouth shut.
But Colonel Scott would have none of that. He had then and has to this
day a most disconcerting method of propounding a question, and then
boring one completely through and through with a pair of gimlet-like
blue-gray eyes that pierce as if made of steel. He could see that I was
very green and young at the business of being an Indian Agent, but he
would not permit me to retreat before his age and superior rank.
“I propose first to go among these Indians, and learn something of
their reasons for this refusal to obey the wishes of the Department,”
he said.
I remained silent.
“I will go alone,” he said.
I said nothing.
“You do not think they will receive me unpleasantly?”
“Oh, no!” I hastened to make up for lost time. “They are peaceful
enough, so long as they are permitted to have their own way. Very
likely they will receive you with much of courtesy and even
hospitality.”
“That is as I thought,” said the Colonel, who has always gone alone
into hostile camps—a method of conciliation that would give most people
pause. “I will reason with them,” he continued, “and I believe I can
bring them to a sensible view of the matter we have to adjust.”
I said nothing.
“What do you think of my plan?”
“Why, Sir, I would not presume to suggest—”
“That is not the question. You should be somewhat familiar with these
Indian people by now. Will my plan succeed?”
His eyes punched through mine, straight back into the brain, out
through the skull of my rear elevation, and I knew they were drilling
on through the stone wall immediately behind me.
“Considering the experiences of former agents, and even soldiers,
Colonel Scott, and—”
“Do you think my plan will succeed?”
“It is a very good plan to try, Colonel. It has been your method with
other tribes, and it may prove successful here.”
“But what do you think?”
There was no way of avoiding the truth. He would have it.
“You will not succeed.”
He studied a moment or two.
“I have dealt with unreasonable Indians,” he said, slowly.
“So I am informed, sir. But you have not dealt with the Hopi Indian,
who is a religious fanatic; and since you pressed me for an opinion, I
had to give it. I can ask only that these people be not promised
anything that will not be fulfilled. That has provoked half the trouble
of the past. The Department has threatened them, and then curled up.
They are accustomed to being betrayed by soldiers. They will talk
endlessly; but if you expect to bring a Hopi to reason without a show
of force, it is too much. You will not accomplish it.”
Whereupon the Colonel seemed satisfied that he had procured an answer
from me, and next day he departed for the pueblo of Hotevilla, with an
interpreter and a striker to attend him. His extraordinary knowledge
and uncanny skill in the sign-language would avail him nothing among
the Hopi, for few of the Southwest Indians use this method of
conversing. The deserted mission house was placed at his disposal. The
troop remained encamped in Keams Cañon at the Agency.
That night the mail brought those belated orders, in duplicate, from
the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to me, and from the Secretary of the
Interior to Colonel Scott. I read them with amazement and a complete
mixture of feelings. They had been drawn without deference to the
facts, and were as completely garbled a set of instructions as one
could imagine. By merely accepting the conditions imposed, the Indians
could win, and the whole expedition be reduced to farce. Washington had
been so careful to preserve a shield between it and the sentimental
critics of the country that, no matter what I proposed doing and no
matter what the officer agreed to assist in doing, the fat was in the
fire if those orders were recognized.
And here were more than one hundred men, with mounts and extra mounts,
and a pack train, and a wagon train en route with additional supplies.
Hay for the horses was being purchased locally at sixty dollars the
ton, and oats in proportion; and these were but two items of the
expense. A very costly piece of humor, indeed.
But the Colonel was at Hotevilla; and there he remained for ten days,
talking, talking, talking, when he was not listening to Youkeoma. I had
one report from a messenger, who found the old chief seated in the
centre of the floor, facing the Colonel on his camp-bed, the
interpreter to one side. It was the seventh day, and Youkeoma, in the
recital of his traditions, had reached a date only four hundred years
removed. To give the old chap credit, he never weakened. The Colonel,
sitting bolt upright, would go into a doze, finish a nap, and pick up
the thread of the discourse immediately on waking, to continue as long
as daylight lasted.
Of course there were breaks in this programme. They invited the officer
to a rabbit-hunt, and gave exhibitions of their fleetness in running
and their skill with the rabbit-club or Hopi boomerang; and he
witnessed some of their ceremonies. But the end of it all was talk—so
many words arranged one after the other, one string in slow, even-toned
English, studied, level, monotonously imperative; the other in
imperturbable Hopi, rising and falling as Chinese, started with a long
intake of the breath and finished in whispers when Indian lungs were
exhausted.
Youkeoma began at a point in his traditions before the period of the
Dawn Men, when they came up from the Underworld. Wells’ Outline of
History is not half so elaborate. And without a break or hesitation,
supporting his statements with pieces of pictured rock offered as
indisputable evidence, much as Moses would have brought forth the
Tables of the Law, he progressed down through the ages. The troop
surgeon, who had joined the Colonel, furnished me a rough transcript of
this legend, which, boiled to a bare consistency, follows:—
HOPI GENESIS ACCORDING TO YOUKEOMA, CHIEF PRIEST OF THE HOTEVILLA
The Hopi came from the Underworld, down in the earth. They had
their chiefs and medicine men, and their villages, in the
Underworld, the same as now and here. But the people drifted away
from the traditions. They had too much love of a good time, and
refused to hear their wise men. They held social dances, and forgot
the old religious ceremonies. First the girls, then the women, and
finally nearly all the Hopi people came under this influence. They
forgot everything else. And even the wives of the priests became
evil.
Then the good chiefs and medicine men held a council. They were
against these evils, and decided to look for another world. They
discussed many methods of leaving the Underworld. And they made
experiments. First they planted pine trees, and by ceremonies grew
these trees very tall. The pine trees grew up to touch the roof of
the sky, but they did not pierce it. Their tops bent over and
spread along the sky. And the good Hopi knew that pine trees could
not help them.
Next they planted sharp-pointed reeds, and these grew tall and
pierced the sky.
Now to find what sort of place was above them. They sent up birds
as messengers, to go out through the holes in the sky and find a
land for the good people. They told the birds to return and tell
what they saw. So they sent humming birds first. These flew up and
up, circling the tall reeds, and resting on them when tired. But
the humming birds became exhausted, and fell back into the
Underworld.
Then they sent up a chicken hawk. It could fly much swifter, but it
too became exhausted. The swallow was sent, but he did not reach
the top of the reeds. Each bird was dispatched by a clan. And
finally the catbird was sent. He flew with such a strange jerky
motion that they never expected him to reach the top—but he did,
and went through the hole in the sky, and came to Oraibi. There he
found the Red-headed Spirit.
The bird asked the Ghost if it would permit the good people of the
Hopi in the Underworld to come and live at Oraibi. And the Spirit
was willing, so the bird returned with this message.
Most of the people were still busy with their social dances; but
the chiefs and medicine men and the good people, when they had the
news, began to climb the reeds. In this they were helped by the two
Gods of Hard Substances, who made the reeds firm. These people
managed to crawl through the hole in the sky. But those who had
given their time to frivolous things were shaken from the reeds by
the chiefs, and they dropped back into the Underworld, and the hole
in the sky was stopped up.
Search for the new home was then begun. But the head chief’s
daughter died. This delayed things. He believed that some powerful
witch had come out of the Underworld with them, so he called the
people together and made some medicine of cornmeal, saying that the
meal would fall on the witch’s head. It did fall on a girl’s head.
The chief then decided to throw this witch back into the
Underworld; but when he looked down through the hole in the sky he
saw his daughter playing there, in the old place, as a little
child; and he knew then that everyone went back to the Underworld
after death.
Now the witch told the chief that if she might live with him he
would be kept from many hardships and difficulties, and that some
day his daughter would return to him. So the witch was spared.
It was utter darkness when the Hopi arrived on the earth. They
counseled, and sought a means to create light. They cut out a round
piece of buckskin, and on it put bits of the hearts of birds and
beasts, and of all the people, and then told the buckskin to give
forth light.
But this was not powerful enough. So they took white cotton cloth,
and put the bits of their hearts on it, and set it in the East for
the Sun. Thus the Sun gave light for every living thing, and to-day
we all welcome its coming up in the East.
The head chief then called the mocking bird, and told him to give
to each group a language. The older brother’s people received the
first language, which is that of the white men.
The clans now went in different directions. The older brother of
the chief, with his people, was directed to go where the Sun rises,
and to stay there. In time of trouble he would be sent for. The
chief told him not to be baptized into any strange fraternity.
Then the clans went their several ways, each to find a country.
They would travel for a distance, and stop to raise a crop of corn,
and then go on. Sometimes they stayed at places two or three years.
And the older brother, with those who made up his company, traveled
fast to the East, and has not yet returned.
The Ghost clan finally arrived at Moencopi, and there too came the
Smoke and the Spider clans. The Bear clan reached Chimopovi. Two
brothers were chiefs of this division, and one of them settled
Oraibi, where the Ghost and other clans later joined them.
Within the Ghost clan were two groups—the Ghost clan proper, and
the Ghost-and-Bird clan. Youkeoma is of the Ghost-and-Bird clan.
They were known as the bravery clan, and acted as guards. When came
a war with the Ute, Navajo, and Apache, the Bear clan and the Ghost
clan tried to win without the aid of these brave men of the
Ghost-and-Bird clan. But they did not succeed, and had to ask their
aid. So the bravest of the warriors then put explosives in pottery,
and threw these bombs among the enemy, and scattered them. Then the
Ghost-and-Bird clan lived at Oraibi, and were taken into the sacred
fraternities, and were known as warriors.
Now the traditions say that a stronger people will come upon the
Hopi, and try to get them to adopt new ways of living. And it is in
the traditions that the Bear clan will yield to these stronger
ones.
Many years ago, when the Spaniards came from the South, they sought
to make the Hopi accept their ways. They were here four years. And
the Bear clan yielded; and the Spider clan yielded; but the
Ghost-and-Bird clan did not yield.
Then the Spanish black-robes came to live at Oraibi; and after four
years these priests of the strangers wanted to baptize the Hopi.
That caused much trouble. It was against the traditions. And the
warriors of the Ghost-and-Bird clan were unwilling to assist the
larger clans, like the Bear and Spider, because they had yielded to
the Spanish. The Ghost-and-Bird clan knew that the sea would
swallow up the land if they accepted these new teachings. Finally,
the Badger clan killed the Spanish black-robes.
Then came a great battle, between the Oraibi people on the one side
and the Spanish helped by the First and Second Mesa Hopi and also
the Navajo on the other. The Oraibans drove the enemy into Skull
Flat, named because of the heads that were piled there. And the
people of Oraibi recognized the Ghost-and-Bird clan as their
bravest men; and they lived in peace for many years.
Next came the white men—at first but a few, looking through the
country; then more; and then they brought a school. This was to
teach the Hopi children new ways—to lead them away from the
ceremonies and the traditions.
Again some of the Oraibi people yielded, and took on the new ways
taught by these white men of the Government. But the Ghost-and-Bird
clan would not yield.
And then came the soldiers of the white men. They have come many
times. Youkeoma has been a prisoner eight times, and has been taken
away to forts where there were many soldiers; but he has not
yielded. Five years ago, because of these troubles among the
people, the Ghost-and-Bird clan left Oraibi and settled here at
Hotevilla. Youkeoma looks on the Oraibans as traitors, for they
have more than once received strangers and yielded to strange
teachings.
In the end, all the enemies will combine against the Ghost-and-Bird
clan. So say the traditions. These things will come to pass.
Youkeoma cannot change it, nor can he go contrary to the
traditions. The talk of the white men is incited by witches. And
Youkeoma knows that these white men are not the true Bohanna, who
will come some day and who will know the Hopi language. These white
men are simply forerunners; they are not the Bohanna. They have
treated him kindly when a prisoner among them, but they have never
encouraged him in his way of living.
Now the way for the white men to conquer the Hopi is to cut off
Youkeoma’s head. The traditions say that the head of one of the
Oraibi chiefs will be cut off, and then the trouble will cease. But
Youkeoma cannot yield; for then the Sea would swallow up the land,
and all would perish.
Ten days of it. Priestcraft and sorcery, superstition and cruelty,
differ very little among primitive peoples. The Hopi beginnings were
very like our own. And in the ages past they had out-talked many
enemies. The old man flattered himself that so long as the Colonel
listened, he was gaining credence; and that when the officer became
completely hypnotized by weariness, he would capitulate, and cry, “You
win, old man! For God’s sake, give me a rest!”
Whereas Colonel Scott was awaiting a reply to a telegram forwarded
through me four days after his arrival at the pueblo. He had
recommended to the Secretary of the Interior that the children of the
village be removed to schools, without further regard to this old
fanatic and his sacred traditions. Youkeoma had confirmed my view of
the situation. At the same time, Colonel Scott had written to me:
“There is no use in arguing with a lunatic. If the Secretary says ‘Take
the children,’ come on with your transportation and police and the
troops.”
These messages were carried by riders to the nearest telegraph point.
To send them by the archaic mail-route would court long delays.
Hotevilla was forty-five miles from the Agency and the railroad eighty
miles south of that, so a round trip required two hundred and fifty
miles of riding.
On the eighth day answers were received in duplicate, repeating the
original conditions. Realizing that the buck was being passed in strict
accordance with our traditions, I forwarded the Colonel’s copy to him
by messenger, and ordered all necessary wagons to Oraibi. The
Lieutenant commanding the cavalry put his men in motion a little before
midnight, to reach and surround the pueblo before dawn of the next day.
Guided by Indian police, and following the shortest trails, they went
directly to Hotevilla and had about it a picket-guard before the
wondrous piece of White Cotton Cloth, holding the hearts of all the
people, swung up out of the East.
I found Colonel Scott at an early breakfast in the little mission
house, and reported to him that everything was right and ready save
one.
“I am directed to read this telegram to Chief Youkeoma and, should he
have brains enough to seize on its provisions, this whole affair will
spell failure.”
“Well, can’t you do these things?” he asked in surprise.
“No one of them can be carried out. The placing of the children in the
boarding-school at the Agency is made contingent on certain equipment
being at hand for their comfort, and the Office knows perfectly that
such equipment is not at hand. I informed the Office to that effect
some time ago, and the Office has not corrected the situation. Then
parents are to be given the privilege of selecting the school in which
their children shall be placed—either at the Cañon or one of the local
day-schools. The day schools are not close enough to permit attendance.
The Indians know it. Should they accept the day-school proposition, it
would require a troop of cavalry to get the pupils in each morning.
Moreover, this whole attitude is equivalent to indulging a group of
contentious savages in the belief that they are to be consulted, and
that they shall have the privilege of decision.”
“What do you propose to do about it?” he asked.
“Why, sir, since it would appear that Washington has none, I would
supply a bit of intelligence and read it into these orders. And there
would be a result.”
“Are my orders the same as yours?”
“Exactly the same—they are in duplicate.”
“Well, I am a soldier, and I do not break orders.”
This came in a tone of utter finality, and I could see that it would be
useless to advance argument.
“Very good, sir. Then I suppose you will withdraw your men. This thing
will go by default.”
But the Colonel had studied old Youkeoma for ten days, and actually he
disliked as much as I did the accepting of stupid instructions issued
by a Department that has a long record in buck-passing. And he felt
that our dilemma might be solved by permitting the obdurate Indian to
hang himself on the horns of it.
“Let us have in Youkeoma,” he said; “and you propose to read the
telegram to him, stating plainly that these are orders from Washington.
If he does not at once accept the conditions, will you be prepared to
collect the children promptly, with a squad of soldiers and your
police?”
“I do not think I shall need the police, and I do not want the soldiers
in the village. If you will keep the picket-guard as it is, and have a
squad ready in case of trouble, I will go into the houses with two
employees who know the people. I will bring out the children for
medical examination. But I certainly do not propose to enter into
debate with each savage as to schools, bedding, and commissary
matters.”
“Will you wish to make prisoners?”
“Not unless there is positive resistance. That has been done before,
and I cannot see that any good resulted. It simply indulged the
ringleaders in their idea of persecution.”
“Very good. Have the old chap in.”
Youkeoma came wrathfully into the council-room. His anger was like that
of a trapped animal; his eyes gleamed with hatred, and he fairly
quivered with rage. All morning he had fumed, realizing that he had
wasted ten days of perfectly good oratory and traditions. He squatted
on the floor.
“This is your Agent,” said Colonel Scott. “He wants to shake hands with
you.”
I held out my hand to him.
Youkeoma looked me over carefully, and drew his blanket around his
shoulders as if he had been insulted.
“I am done with white men,” he said. “I will not shake hands with you
or any other white man.”
“Here is a telegram from Washington. It must be read to you.”
The interpreter explained.
“I do not care to hear anything from Washington.”
“But I must read it to you.” And I straightway began. The interpreter
translated the first sentence, the second—when the old fellow stood up.
He waved his arm toward the soldiers outside, and cried angrily:—
“You have your men here; why not go ahead and do what you want? You can
cut off my head. Why don’t you do it? I will have nothing more to say
to you. I am through with white people.”
He stalked from the council-room, the maddest man in Arizona; and that
was the last of him for many months.
“Now, Colonel, if you please, I will search the pueblo. Will you lend
me your flashlight?”
“What do you want with that? It’s broad day.”
“I shall have to crawl into every corn-crib and cellar in the place,
and none of them have windows.”
He directed that soldiers accompany me through the village, but at the
first house I asked them not to come inside. They remained in the
street. This was followed throughout the search. The two employees who
had some knowledge of this population entered with me.
“There should be three children in this house,” one would say.
There were never any children in sight. The long, narrow, principal
room would seem to have no doors leading from it. Racks of corn,
carefully piled, and blankets and folded skins lined the walls. The
employees, having assisted in such matters before, began lifting down
these blankets and piled furnishings, to reveal usually a small door,
and beyond this door would loom the blackness of a corn-cellar. The
flashlight showed more corn racked up, melons in piles, and filled
sacks; but no children. I would scramble through the little trap to
make a closer investigation, recalling how Judge Hooker had walled up
his brood, years before, when the Hopi of the First Mesa protested
against education.
In the first of these places there was no room for hiding between the
sacks, and when I moved against them I could feel the corn they held. I
prepared to leave the place, and was at the opening, when I heard a
sigh, as if someone had long held his breath and could hold it no
longer. Back I went. No one among the melons, nor behind the racked
corn. I began moving the sacks. Three were filled with corn on the cob;
the fourth—my hand grasped the top of a Hopi head. It was like the jars
of wine and the hidden thieves.
From the sacks we delivered the three children of that household.
When they appeared in the main room, laughing, the father caught them
in his arms; and when they were taken from him, the mother proceeded to
play the same trick. It was easy to break his hold on them, but not so
easy to handle a woman without giving grounds for complaint as to rough
usage—a charge the Hopi like to make. But those three children went
into the street, notwithstanding all this hokum, and other employees
took them before the physicians. There were three doctors present, the
Army surgeon and two physicians of the Indian Service. Each child
received a thorough examination, and only those fit and above the age
of ten years were taken from the village.
I do not know how many houses there are in Hotevilla, but I crawled
into every filthy nook and hole of the place, most of them blind traps,
half-underground. And I discovered Hopi children in all sorts of
hiding-places, and through their fright found them in various
conditions of cleanliness. It was not an agreeable job; not the sort of
work that a sentimentalist would care for.
In but one instance was real trouble threatened. On coming from one
cellar, I found the head of the house sitting in the centre of his
castle with an axe at his feet. He protested against the removal of the
children, and grasped the axe as if to use it. The men with me promptly
removed the implement, and threw him into a corner.
By midday the wagons had trundled away from Hotevilla with fifty-one
girls and eighteen boys. Our survey of the place in July had warranted
an estimate of one hundred and fifty pupils, but in the five months
that had elapsed an epidemic of measles and its terrible aftermath of
bronchial pneumonia had swept the town.
“Where are the others?” the interpreter asked of a villager.
“Dead,” he replied, solemnly.
So much for expediency and Departmental delay.
Of those taken, nearly all had trachoma. It was winter, and not one of
those children had clothing above rags; some were nude. During the
journey of forty-five miles to the Agency many ragged garments went to
pieces; the blankets provided became very necessary as wrappings before
the children reached their destination. It was too late to attempt the
whole distance that afternoon, so the outfit went into camp at the
Oraibi day-school, where a generous meal was provided, and the next day
their travel was completed.
Across the great Oraibi Valley was the pueblo of Chimopovi, perched on
the highest of the mesa cliffs. And this place had a suburb, dominated
by one Sackaletztewa, a direct descendant of the gentleman who had
founded the original Hopi settlement after their emerging from the
Underworld. Sackaletztewa was as orthodox as old Youkeoma, and it was
his following that had given battle to a former Agent and his Navajo
police. I proposed to Colonel Scott that Chimopovi should be visited.
“Take the troop to-morrow morning, and finish it up yourself.”
So next day the same scene was enacted. It was a short job, only three
children being found; but here occurred something like resistance. All
the protestants congregated in the house of Sackaletztewa. When I
entered, a man opened a little cupboard of the wall and produced a
packet of papers. They were offered to me as documents of great value.
And they were strange documents—letters from people of the country who
had read in newspapers of Youkeoma’s visit to Washington, and his
defiance of the Government. I suppose such persons have nothing better
to do, and write letters of sympathy to the members of every Indian
delegation that parades itself eastward in feathers and war-paint to
present a fancied grievance. I recall the words of one of these papers,
from some weak-minded woman:—
Chief Youkeoma: you are a noble man. Do not let the Government have
your children. Their schools are not the place for your Indian lads
who know only the hunt and the open spaces. Resist to the last
gasp. Die rather than submit.
Very like, she is now writing scenarios. Of course this correspondent
had read Fenimore Cooper, and was filled to the neck with the storybook
idea of Indians—lithe, clean, untouched by disease, and painted by
romance. The Southwest has no such Indians; and Indians, whether lithe
or not, are seldom clean and never romantic. She knew nothing of filth
and trachoma and child-prostitution, while the Hopi had brought such
things to a fine degree of perfection. And she lived in Indiana.
Now there is a wide difference between demanding the rights of Indians,
rights that should be sacred under agreements,—and perhaps foreign
treaties, such as those of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico,—and
inciting them to warfare and rebellion when teachers and physicians are
striving to recover them from ignorance and disease. There is a vast
difference between the argument that a title confirmed by three
sovereign Governments be not attacked for the sake of political loot—as
in the case of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico—and denouncing the
educational system of the United States and advising a group of
benighted savages to kill in a distant and lonely desert. That writer
from Indiana should have been a field matron for a little!
I have no sympathy with this type of sentimentalist. I deported some of
them from the Hopi desert country when they appeared with their box of
theoretical tricks.
I handed back the documents, and asked where the children were.
Accompanied by my Tewa policeman, I entered a small room off the main
house and found these three mentioned surrounded by relatives. The room
filled up to its capacity and a harangue began. At Hotevilla we had not
listened to argument, but here I thought it best to placate them, to
explain things, rather more in line with the moral-suasion programme
outlined from Washington. All talk led to one definite answer, growing
sullenly louder and louder: “You cannot take the children.”
We had to make an end. When I proceeded to lift one from the floor, in
a twinkle two lusty Indians were at my throat. The Tewa (Indian police)
came to my assistance, his face expanding in a cheerful grin as he
recognized the opportunity of battle, and three or four others draped
themselves around his form. The sound of the struggle did not at once
get outside. The Tewa began to thresh out with his arms and let his
voice be heard. An employee peered inside and set up a shout. Then in
plunged several very earnest fellows in uniform, and out went the
protestants, scrambling, dragging, and hitting the door jambs. The Tewa
followed to see that these things were properly managed, he being the
local and ranking officer in such affairs. I remained behind to counsel
against this attitude, but did not remain long enough, for on going
outside the house I spoiled a little comedy.
Sackaletztewa, the head man, a sinewy fellow of about fifty years, when
unceremoniously booted forth, had challenged the Tewa policeman to
mortal combat. He declaimed that no Indian policeman could whip him.
The soldiers had greeted this as the first worthy incident of a very
dull campaign.
“You have on a Washington uniform and wear guns,” said Sackaletztewa,
“but without them you are not a match for me. If you did not have those
things, I would show you how a real Hopi fights.”
Now this Tewa always rejoiced in a chance for battle. The fact that no
one at Hotevilla had been arrested had filled him with gloom.
Unbuckling his belt and guns, he handed them to the nearest trooper;
then he promptly shucked himself out of his uniform. Twenty or thirty
of the soldiers made a ring, their rifles extended from hand to hand,
and into this arena Nelson was conducting Sackaletztewa for the beating
of his life. It was a pity to issue an injunction. If I had remained
only five minutes longer in the house, those patient soldiers would
have had something for their pains, and the grudge of the Indian
police, who had suffered in esteem at Chimopovi five years earlier,
would have been wiped from the slate.
Sackaletztewa was a good man physically; he had courage; but he was a
Hopi, and knew nothing of striking blows with his fists. He would have
relied on the ancient grapple method of combat, and the proficient art
of scalp-tearing. Perhaps he would have tried to jerk Nelson’s ears off
by dragging at his turquoise earrings. He would have scratched and
gouged, and, if fortunate enough to get a twist in the neckerchief,
would have choked his man to a finish. All this is permitted by the
desert Indian rules of the game. But unless Nelson had been tied to a
post, he would have accomplished none of these things; for the first
rush would have carried him against a terrific right smash, accompanied
by a wicked left hook. Behind these two taps would have lunged one
hundred and sixty pounds of pure muscle. And a very bewildered Hopi
would have spent the remainder of the day holding a damaged head, and
wondering how he would manage a flint-corn diet without his teeth.
That night, blaming myself for the necessary interference, I joined
Colonel Scott at the Agency.
Now you will please not strive to conjure up a harrowing scene of
terrified children, removed from their parents, lonely and unconsoled.
They were not babies. They were nude, and hungry, and covered with
vermin, and most of them afflicted with trachoma, a very unpleasant and
messy disease. Some of them had attended this Cañon school in the past,
that time before their parents’ last defiance, and they knew what was
in store for them—baths, good food, warm clothing, clean beds and
blankets, entertainment and music, the care of kindly people. There
would be no more packing of firewood and water up steep mesa-trails,
and living for weeks at a time on flint corn, beans, and decaying
melons. There would be meat,—not cut from hapless burros,—and excellent
bread of wheat flour, gingerbread even; and toys and candy at that
wonderful time the Bohannas call Christmas. There would be games for
both boys and girls, and no one at this school would interfere with
their innocent Indian pleasures. Their parents would visit them, and
bring piki bread—and the parents very promptly availed themselves of
the privilege.
So there was nothing of exile or punishment involved in this matter;
and if you have any true regard for childhood and defenceless children,
there will be seen a great deal of protection and happiness in it. I
fancy that many of the girls—especially those who had reached that age
when the maternal uncles, the ogres of the family, assign them in
marriage and as the old men pleased—had been counting the days since
the first news of the troop’s coming.
It was a busy time for the corps of school employees when the wagons
arrived. Seventy-two children had to be recovered from the dirt and
vermin that had accumulated during their long holiday. The less said
about this the better; but I would have been amused to see the critics
at the job of hair-cutting!
Those children spent four years at the Cañon school, and without
vacations. When the school departments were closed in 1915, because
certain buildings showed weaknesses and I feared their collapse, the
Hotevilla children, having reached eighteen years, might decide for
themselves whether or not they wished further education. With few
exceptions, they elected to attend the Phœnix Indian school. They had
no wish to visit Hotevilla, and very frankly told me so. To illustrate
their standpoint, Youkeoma’s granddaughter, an orphan, was not of age
so to elect. She feared that I would consult the old man about the
matter, and she knew that he would insist upon her return to the pueblo
life. So she secreted herself in one of the wagons that would carry the
older pupils to the railroad, and went away without my knowledge.
I had advised against the immediate recall of the troop of soldiers,
and had expected that a sergeant’s squad would remain for some months
to return runaways and to preserve discipline among those who might
risk the power of my army of three policemen. It was not improbable
that a band of Hotevillans would come to the Cañon to demand their
children, once the soldiers were withdrawn. They had staged this play
before, and in 1913 certain Navajo did not hesitate to make off with
pupils. But trouble on the Border called. It was then I sought the
Colonel’s counsel. For a time he evaded a direct statement of his
views, but I was insistent, and he said:—
“I would never permit an Indian to remove his child from the school
against my orders to the contrary. They would find me sitting on the
dormitory steps. Other methods of prevention you must devise for
yourself.”
He concluded with the words I have quoted before: “Young man! you have
an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk.”
Very early the next morning the troop departed. There was a light fall
of snow, to be followed by more and more, until the stark Cañon cliffs
were frozen and white in the drifts. The little campaign in the hills
had closed just in time.
Twice thereafter Colonel Scott, accompanied by the cavalry, came to the
Desert; once to pacify the truculent Navajo at Beautiful Mountain,
after they had threatened the San Juan Agency at Shiprock, New Mexico,
and once to quiet the Ute on our northern borders. But the Moqui
Reservation was left entirely to my ruling. The Department read the
Colonel’s report through a reducing glass, and gave me eight policemen
instead of the twenty he advised. With these and a few determined
employees I contrived to have peace and order within the Hopi-Navajo
country—not always easily or pleasantly, but without actual war. And I
did not pack the proverbial trunk until the latter part of 1919, eight
years later, when ordered to take charge of the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico.
XV
AN ECHO OF THE DAWN-MEN
“According to the law of the Medes and Persians.”
—Daniel, vi, 12
The sending of a small army to one’s home, and the imposing of rigid
Governmental regulations, would seem to be sufficient to give any rebel
pause. But not so Youkeoma. He stood faithfully by the traditions; and
unfortunately for him, the traditions obstructed or became entangled
with everything that a white official proposed for the best interests
of his community. No doubt the old man had been amazed, and I think
somewhat disappointed, when he was not sent away as a prisoner. He
could have made capital of another entry in an already lengthy record
as a political martyr. But he did not propose to soften in
consideration of this amnesty. He very likely thought it an exhibition
of the white man’s weakness, and gave his ancient oracles the credit.
Nothing was heard of him until the next early summer, when came time
for the dipping of sheep on the range. The Hotevilla flocks were the
poorest of all the Hopi stock, which is saying a good deal, since the
Hopi is a disgraceful shepherd at any pueblo. But whatever their
condition, the head man of Hotevilla did not intend to recognize the
sanitary live-stock regulations issued by the peculiar Bohannas. They
paid no attention to the Indian crier who announced the order, and they
did not move their sheep toward the vats. It was necessary to send
police, hire herders, drive the animals to the dip about twenty-five
miles from their village, and return them to the sullen owners.
Naturally, in such a movement, there are losses. Youkeoma came to the
Agency, at the head of a delegation, to file protest against this
action and to present claims for damages. He came modestly clad in one
garment, a union suit, and without other indication of his rank.
During the hearing a few of the Hotevilla children came in to greet
their relatives. It was a satisfied little group of clean and well-fed
youngsters, having no resemblance to the filthy, trachomatous urchins
we had gathered at the pueblo.
“Your people’s children are happy here,” said a clerk.
Youkeoma looked at the girls in their fresh frocks, and noticed their
well-dressed hair, which had not been weeded with a Hopi broom.
“They should be dirty like the sheep,” he answered, “as dirty as I am.
That is the old Hopi way.”
His claims for damage were disallowed, and for much angry disputing he
spent a few days in the jail; then, very much to my surprise, he
promised that he would not counsel resistance to future Governmental
orders.
“I will attend to my affairs hereafter,” he agreed. “For myself, I do
not promise to obey Washington; but the people may choose for
themselves which way to go—with me, or with Washington.”
This was all that was asked of him, and he departed.
A year passed without incident. When the pupils were not returned in
vacation time, the parents filed regular complaints. They very
truthfully admitted that, were their requests granted, they had no
intention of permitting the children to return, so it seemed best to
deny them.
And now the other children of the village were growing up. At the time
of the first gathering, only those above ten years of age were taken;
and given a few years among the Hopi, without epidemic, children spring
up and expand like weeds. A census was taken, not without acrid dispute
and a few blows, which showed that the pueblo held about one hundred
children of age to attend primary grades. So I proposed to build a
complete school-plant close to their homes. This was another terrible
blow to the traditions.
When selecting a site, great care was taken not to appropriate tillable
land or to invade fields. The school stands on a rock-ledge. For a
water-supply it was necessary to develop an old spring, one that the
Hopi had long since abandoned and lost. It is the only Hopi school on
the top of a mesa, and the children do not have to use dangerous
trails.
The villagers watched us very suspiciously as we surveyed the lines for
seven buildings, and they respected the flags marking the site-limits.
But when materials and workmen arrived, and the buildings began to go
up, they uttered a violent protest.
“We do not wish to see a white man’s roof from our pueblo!”
They declared that all such buildings would be burned. Guards were
necessary whenever the workmen left the camp. The school was built,
however, and the smaller children rounded up and into it. Two dozen men
managed what had required a troop of cavalry; but do not think that we
approached it in a spirit of indifference. The town held about one
hundred husky men, and one never knew what might happen. Once again I
had to crawl through the corn-cellars of the place.
The old Chief was not to the front, and his body-guard of elders was
conspicuous by its absence. Great credit was given them for keeping
their word. I flattered myself that the contentious Hopi spirit and the
backbone of rebellion had cracked together. But he was simply waiting
for a more propitious date, in strict accord with prophecy, perhaps.
The fire in the kiva had not burned with a flame of promise; the
cornmeal had not fallen in a certain sign; the auguries were not
auspicious. A little later and these things must have strengthened him,
for one night he appeared at the door of the field matron’s quarters,
accompanied by his cohort, the whole band evidencing an angry mood.
“It is time,” he said, wrathfully. “You have been here long enough. We
will not drive you away to-night, but in the morning do not let us find
you here. There will be trouble, and we may have to cut off your head.”
The field matron was alarmed, but she did not leave as directed. She
waited until they had gone away, and then slipped across the
half-cleared desert space to the school principal’s home. He promptly
saddled a horse and came into the Agency that night. There were no
telephones across the Desert then. Next day he returned with definite
instructions.
It is not wise to permit Indians of an isolated place to indulge
themselves in temper of this kind. One bluff succeeds another, until
finally a mistake in handling causes a flare-up that is not easy to
control, and one is not thanked in Washington for fiascos. I have
pointed out how quickly Washington moves itself to aid when there is
revolt.
A capable field-matron or field-nurse is a good angel among such
people. She supplements daily the work of the visiting physician,
dispensing simple remedies according to his direction; she is
foster-mother to the little children of the camps and to the girls who
return from the schools. All social ills have her attention. She
maintains a bathhouse and laundry for the village people, and a
sewing-room for the women. In times of epidemic, these field matrons
perform extraordinary labors, and have been like soldiers when facing
contagious disease. With one other, Miss Mary Y. Rodger at the First
Mesa, Miss Abbott of Hotevilla ranked as the best in the Service; and
having ordered her to remain on that station, I determined that she
should live at the pueblo of Hotevilla in peace, if every one of the
ten-thousand sacred traditions reaching straight back to the Underworld
went by the board.
It is necessary first to catch your rabbit.
Whenever wanted and diligently sought for, Youkeoma was somewhere else,
and an unknown somewhere. While it was said that he and the other old
men spent their time in the kivas, I had failed to find them there.
Like the coyote that scents gun-oil, he smelt business from afar; and
this time it was business, and I wanted him.
Summoning the Indian police, I dispatched them under two white officers
to attend a Navajo dance in a distant cañon, forty miles east of the
Agency. Hotevilla was directly west from the Agency and about the same
distance removed. Having placed eighty miles between my police and the
scene of action, I informed my office force that I intended visiting
the railroad town on business. This would take me eighty miles to the
south. Others of the white men were sent to work at different range
points. No one suspected a Hotevilla mission. We went our several ways.
But I did not go to the railroad town. A messenger, sent from the
Desert, recalled the two officers and the Indian police from the Navajo
encampment and, going roundabout the trails, they joined me at the
Indian Wells trading-post on the south line of the Reserve. After dark
on the second night we hiked across the southern Desert, avoiding all
Indian camps and settlements, to reach the Second Mesa about midnight.
There we halted for a pot of coffee, and rested an hour or two. Then on
again, crossing the Second Mesa in the wee sma’ hours, we avoided
alarming Oraibi, that always suspicious pueblo. The rangemen were
collected from their different stations. In the black, before the stars
had begun to pale, we arrived at Hotevilla and, without disturbing a
soul, strung out around the town.
With the first streak of red in the east, the Hopi became aware that
strangers were present. A perfect bedlam of noise arose. It seemed that
thousands of dogs came into vociferous action, and made the morning
ring with their challenges. But no man got out of the place.
We found our slippery friend Youkeoma and his supporters. They were
taken to the school and identified as those who had threatened the
matron. And once again the wagons started for the Agency guardhouse.
This time friend Youkeoma joined our Cañon community permanently, for I
had no idea of releasing him while in charge of the post. This occurred
in the summer of 1916 and he remained at the Agency until the autumn of
1919.
He did not complain. In fact he seemed quite contented in his quarters.
He was not imprisoned in the sense of being locked-up, but was given
the work of mess-cook for the other prisoners. This in no way offended
his dignity. The more able of the men were required to work at odd
jobs—the cutting of weeds, the herding of sheep, the tilling of small
fields, and an occasional bit of road-mending.
Life as prisoners was not very irksome for these old men. The
guardhouse was very like their home kiva. Instead of cold stone
benches, they slept on good beds; for rabbit-skin quilts and
sheepskins, they had good blankets; and in place of a central smoky
fire there was an excellent egg-shaped stove. Aside from being clean,
with walls freshly painted and floors scrubbed, it was very like their
kiva indeed. No one disturbed them in it. I fancy their discussions
were the same, and the ceremonies conducted according to the calendar.
Certainly they occupied themselves in weaving belts and other
talismanic articles.
And as prisoners they developed fully some very peculiar tastes.
Required to bathe regularly, they came to like soap and water very
much. I recall the first time Youkeoma found himself under a shower. He
had soap and towels, things considered entirely unessential at home,
and he looked for a tub and water. Suddenly the ceiling opened and the
water came down from Lodore. He was scared speechless at first, and
then began chattering as if this were some rare form of white man’s
magic. And he liked it!
They received new clothing, sufficient for the different seasons, but
they would refuse to don these garments until ordered to do so by
Moungwi. A clerk would make the issue from commissary, and would
succeed in getting them to pack the articles to the guardhouse. Next
morning they would appear in their old rags. When a solemn Governmental
pronunciamento was hurled at them, something smacking of
excommunication, the traditions were satisfied, and forthwith they
would array themselves.
They very diligently prepared and sowed certain fields—small patches of
corn, beans, and melons, such as they used at home. They weeded and
cultivated and watched the plants, until told that the harvest would be
theirs to supplement the guardhouse ration of staples. They refused to
work at once. It was against the traditions. They would not willingly
raise a crop, to accept it as a reward from Washington. Their work must
be wholly in the nature of punishment.
“So be it,” I said, washing my hands of them; and they continued
working those fields faithfully, once they knew that others would
possess the fruits thereof.
One by one, the men were released for good conduct, until only Youkeoma
remained. I told him plainly that he would not return to foment trouble
until I was relieved of authority. Often in the long, drowsy, summer
afternoons I would talk with him. He would sit on my porch-floor,
hugging his knees in his skinny arms, and amaze me by his observations.
“You see,” he would say, “I am doing this as much for you as for my own
people. Suppose I should not protest your orders—suppose I should
willingly accept the ways of the Bohannas. Immediately the Great Snake
would turn over, and the Sea would rush in, and we would all be
drowned. You too. I am therefore protecting you.”
He stated such things as an infallible prophet. There was no malice in
the old chap, and I did not bear him any grudge for his pertinent
reflections.
“Yes; I shall go home sometime. I am not unhappy here, for I am an old
man, little use, and my chief work is ceremonies. But I shall go back
sometime. Washington may send another Agent to replace you, or you may
return to your own people, as all men do. Or you may be dismissed by
the Government. Those things have happened before. White men come to
the Desert, and white men leave the Desert; but the Hopi, who came up
from the Underworld, remain. You have been here a long time now—seven
winters—much longer than the others. And, too—you may die.”
He had many probable strings to his bow of the future. I had to admit
the soundness of his remarks, but I did not relish his last sentence.
There was a little too much of hope in it.
And it came to pass that I was sent to another post. My last official
act as a Moungwi was the dismissing of Youkeoma. Our differences would
not affect the success of a newcomer. We shook hands this time,
pleasantly, and he smiled. I asked him for no promises, and preached
him no sermon. He departed down the Cañon afoot, for his hike of
forty-odd miles. Quite likely he would stop that night with his married
daughter at the settlement of the Five Houses, a Christian family, and
the next night with Sackaletztewa on the Chimopovi cliffs. He was too
old to make the journey in true Hopi fashion, jogging tirelessly. I
venture that he did not visit his hereditary rival, Tewaquaptewa, at
the original stronghold of his people—Oraibi had slipped too far from
the traditions. But I would like to have witnessed his entry into
Hotevilla in the sunset, a tired old man, but steadfast in spirit and
unconquered, and to have heard the talk at that first all-night
conference of the ancients in the kiva.
In 1921 I visited the Agency; and lo! he was in the guardhouse again.
He was squatted on the floor, sifting a pan of flour for the
prison-mess, his old trade. He looked up, to recognize me with a
whimsical, not unwelcoming smile.
“Hello!” he said, “You back?”
When I saw him last, he was talking to Major-General Hugh L. Scott, who
had spent ten days listening to him ten years before. Youkeoma was
again reciting the legend of the Hopi people. Many things had happened
in those wild and unreasonable ten years. The world had suffered
discord and upheaval; merciless war had lived abroad and bitter
pestilence at home. Nations had quite lost identity, and individuals
had become as chaff blown to bits in the terrible winds. Scott had
heard the great guns roar out across Flanders. Nearly everything had
changed except the Desert—and Youkeoma.
He was the same unwavering fanatic, “something nearly complete,” a
gnome-like creature that would have better fitted dim times in the
cavern cities of the Utah border, where his cliff-dwelling forbears
built and defended Betatakin, and Scaffold House, and the Swallow’s
Nest. In those wild days of the Dawn he would have been an evil power;
but now he was simply a belated prophet without honor in his own
country, one who had set his face against progress, and whose medicine
had failed. Quite lonely too, for most of his followers had drifted
from him.
But miserable and impotent as he seemed, and perverted as he proved, we
somehow admire steadfastness of purpose and the driving will that does
not flinch under adversity. This Youkeoma of Hotevilla was not
malicious. He was simply a deluded old savage, possessed by the witches
and katchinas of his clan, living in a lost world of fable. A
Ghost-and-Bird chief. The last of the Hopi caciques. A faint echo of
the Desert Dawn-Men.
XVI
FIDDLES AND DRUMS
For you and I are past our dancing days.—Romeo and Juliet.
Having had charge of the Hopi for a longer period than any other
official of the United States Government,—eight years and two months,
to be exact,—I venture to picture them and their empire. To have
visited and counseled with them, to have wrangled with them, to have
traveled long distances in all sorts of weather because of their
childish factional quarrels; to have arrested and judged and
disciplined them; even married them,—if that may be separately
classed,—to have cared for them in severe illnesses and advised in
times of stress; to have ransomed them from enemies; to have espoused
their uninteresting cause in the face of Departmental opposition; and
when their meagre business of living was over to have buried them—well,
this ought to embrace an angle of vision.
Yet, I hesitate. Reflection cautions me that this may be presumption;
for, after all, what do I know of the Hopi Indians?
During those eight long years I met on the reservation thousands of
visitors—students and their mentors; painters and etchers and sculptors
of distinction, and those who thought they were; photographers and
lens-artists; ethnologists, philologists, and sociologists; ballyhoo
men from Eastern department-stores and half-wits taking an outing;
journalists and authors and publishers; geologists and common
“water-witches”; motion-picture men and others wearing puttees; actors
and lecturers; composers, musicians, and vocalists; museum scouts and
“scratchers”; clergymen and soldiers; Oxford men, Harvard men, men from
Bonn; retired statesmen and unretiring politicians; representatives of
foreign governments; persons from the far-famed city of New York;
tourists, and caparisoned dudes, and simple guides; plain gentlemen and
plainer roughnecks.
Some of them sought me out courteously to explain their missions, some
of them just happened to see me en passant, and a few earnestly avoided
me. The permit system was very irksome to those who did not have a good
excuse. And I listened to many theories concerning the Hopi and their
curious customs, and I made a brave effort to answer in some pleasant
manner ten thousand questions. Finally, I prepared a plea in
avoidance:—
“Don’t ask me. I have lived here only six years. Ask the chap camped
now at the trader’s post—he came last week.”
I plagiarized this method from a brother superintendent who knew much
of the Navajo and their rare designs in weaving.
“Now, my dear Mr. Shelton,” the tourist would ask hopefully, “Doesn’t
that sign indicate the rabbit-foot following the lightning?”
“Make up your own story,” he would gravely reply, “and then you won’t
forget it.”
So with Hopi secrets. The little of their history that is known I have
already related. The rest is speculation. The believed facts of their
ethnology may be had in Smithsonian Reports, moisture proof,
dessicated. The bones of their ceremonies have been diagrammed and
painted, their chants recorded in scaled notebooks, their odd
ceremonial objects looted and catalogued. Sentimental word-pictures one
can procure from those journalists who flitted rapidly in and out
seeking impressions, and who never failed to get them.
But I am not one whit more ignorant than any other white man. Despite
reams of theories, no one has learned anything of Hopi lore that the
Hopi did not want him to know. “Make up your own story, and you won’t
forget it.” When certain Christianized worthies of the tribe have
pretended to expose their knowledge, I have paid little attention,
since I knew the mental calibre of such fellows before conversion, and
the depth of their gray matter was never impressive. The last who gave
evidence proceeded well in his story until, with a foreign fervor, he
began to lie about the Oraibi happenings within my own time, and as I
had taken his testimony under oath in Hopi trials, I knew just how many
Bibles to trust him on.
Moreover, being the recognized Moungwi or Chief of the Hopi, and having
some instinctive conception of the manner in which an alien and
suspicious people should be governed, I respected their privacy and
reticence, to gain and hold their own respect. One cannot play with an
Indian in the morning, and expect to summon him to judgment after noon.
The poorest stick of an Indian Agent I have seen is he whom Indians
address by his first name, or familiarly without a title. When one
lowers himself to an alien’s social level, he seldom achieves more than
the privilege of dipping his food out of the same dish. It was my job
to manage all things for their best interests, against their strenuous
efforts otherwise if that were necessary—as it often was; and I hoped
to restore to them a confidence in white men, whereas they had come to
believe that all white men were a mixture of abnormal curiosity and
treachery, coupled with an astounding rudeness.
As for their psychology, no itinerant will ever grasp the subtlety of
these people. It is something elemental and therefore indescribable.
Those who have lived among Asiatics will know what I mean. Fatalists,
they are as patient and immutable as the Pleiades. Much of this is
vanishing with the elders as they wend their ways from the mesa stages
to the Great Place of Ceremonies that Youkeoma has told me of. The
pastoral peace and solemnity of the desert shrines is passing before
the roar of motors and the harangues of “dude wranglers.”
Now I remember a curious red-haired visitor who came into the Agency
one drowsy afternoon, herding a squad of burros. He looked a figure
from a Conrad novel, and would have graced any one of them. His animals
were packed with matting hampers having an Oriental touch. His flaming
head was bare to the summer sun, his worn and rusty boots of cordovan
preceded war-time styles and spoke of long journeys. The seat was
absent from his trousers. An astonishing man.
His first question of me was: “Who is the new French Premier?”
It just happened that I could tell him. He handed me his credentials,
and I found that this dilapidated tramp represented the French
Government in his wanderings after strange cacti and other plant life.
He strewed the contents of his hampers over my quarters and forgot to
sort the wreckage for a week. Meantime—in my bath—he was analyzing Hopi
corn and rare Indian dyes.
And he related to me strange things. He had been to Lhasa with the
Younghusband expedition. He said that the Hopi were duplicates of the
Tibetans, and that he believed the languages contained similarities.
That fellow knew how to reach the heart of a secretive people. He had
procured seventeen distinct varieties of Hopi corn, and other seed, as
well as old dye-formulæ and samples of ceremonial cotton.
“Zey call me, ze man wi’ ze burros,” he said, naïvely.
You see, he had walked in on their level, prodding his patient beasts,
covered with the desert dust, a wondrous simplicity on his face. He had
touched the Hopi heart. He could have told one things of the Hopi
people—but the opening guns of the Great War summoned him away to die
at Verdun.
Know ye the trail that the Salt bands go?
Close by the Rock where they carved their names?
Know ye the hills of the Navajo
And the barren sands that the Hopi claims?
Dim in the cañons of the dead,
Where the towns are dust and the last scalp dried,
Their swords are rust, and the desert crow
Scarce can tell where the Spaniard died.
Slain at Zuni and Cañon de Chelly, [2]
By the Mesa Black and at Santa Fe;
One of them killed by a Pecos clown,
One of them dropped by Walpi town.
—Song of the Spanish Bell
The Hopi live in northern Arizona, surrounded by the reservations of
the Navajo. They speak a Shoshonian dialect, and are often miscalled
Moqui. The Department for forty years libeled them under this misnomer.
Moqui is a Hopi term, and has been used against them by Navajo to
signify anything inert, unpleasant, cowardly, dead. The dignified
Navajo has another distinct title for the Hopi, and uses it when filled
with courtesy. Moqui is probably a Keresan word originally, since it is
found as “motsi” in Cochiti and San Felipe pueblos of the Rio Grande,
whose warriors and rebels fled to the Hopi country for sanctuary after
the rebellion of 1680.
Near the centre of that huge space on the Arizona map marked “Moqui
Reserve” are the Hopi towns. These were known to the Spanish
conquistadores as the Seven Cities of Tusayan. There are now nine
pueblos.
In that early hour of geologic time when the receding waters carved the
great gorges in the face of northern Arizona, the more resistant
sandstones and clays and coals were left as shattered cliffs, and from
these reach out many bony headlands—long fingers, at the crumbling tips
of which, like villages clinging to a rocky coast, are the eyries of
the Hopi. Below them, as sea-floors, are the sandy valleys and drifting
dunes of the Painted Desert.
These nine little towns are set oddly in groups of three, and so are
the Hopi divided, quite as into three distinct provinces. Three are
balanced on the narrow backbone of the First Mesa, a knife-like
projection that rises hundreds of feet above the valley, and is at one
place not more than twenty feet in width. These are old Walpi, beloved
of etchers, and Tewa of the warriors, and Sitchumnovi. Three are built
on the broad mounds of the Second Mesa, known as Machongnovi,
Chepaulovi, and Chimopovi. And perhaps the oldest and certainly the
youngest of the villages are at Third Mesa—Oraibi, the aged; and tiny
Bacabi; and redolent, sullen Hotevilla.
Their first contact with white men was made in the dark of an autumn
night in 1540, but it was in the next dawn that they realized invasion
by a new and strange enemy. Most of Hopi history has the dawn
atmosphere. Their footprints lead back to the caves of the Dawn Men.
Their homes face the rising sun from the highest point of the
landscape; their ceremonies and hunts begin at sunrise. They are a
dawn-loving people.
Contact with the Spaniards was broken by the revolt of 1680, and
completely ceased with 1700; but the gifts of the enemy remained in
fruits, and wool, and beasts of burden, and perhaps some loot of swords
and Church vessels hidden to this day. The obstinate Hopi were not
worth the effort at reconquest, and later the Mexican Government did
not bother them. For more than one hundred and fifty years the Hopi
knew only the Navajo and Apache and Ute as his enemies. With the close
of the Mexican War and the treaty of 1848, this nearly forgotten tribe
came under the nominal guardianship of the United States. I say
nominal, for their first Agent was located in far-distant Santa Fe, and
unlike the Spanish, he had no missioners to risk martyrdom for the
spreading of his doctrine. In 1849 he accompanied an expedition against
the Navajo, and reached Cañon de Chelly, about sixty miles from the
First Mesa. One year later a delegation of Hopi visited this chief to
petition for protection against the Navajo. I fancy them plodding
afoot, behind their burros, timidly crossing the Navajo country to pass
through the provinces of their kinsmen, the Pueblos, and on to the City
of the Holy Faith. In that same year, 1850, their Agent was prevented
from visiting them, as he wished, because he lacked an escort of
troops.
Many estimates of the Hopi population were made in the early years. The
Spaniard was an expert at overestimating for the benefit of distant
kings. His thousands were always given as tens of thousands, and when
he wanted money and help toward new colonies he stressed the saving of
souls and could easily imagine millions of baptisms. But it is recorded
in 1780 that smallpox had reduced the Hopi to less than 800. In 1899
their first resident Agent stopped guessing and made a count. He found
and listed 1832 Hopi. In one hundred and nineteen years the population
had little more than doubled. In 1912 there were 2068 on the Reserve,
and in the next seven years they gained 217, or 31 per year—15 per
thousand annually. They lost nearly sixty per cent of this seven-years’
gain in 1918, the year of Spanish influenza. In 1919 there were 2158
Hopi on the Reserve, and adding the absent, who had increased and
multiplied in the west, at Moencopi, there were less than 2500 of these
Indians alive. But this handful has interested more distinguished men
and women than have many greater nations.
While there is much of Hebraic resemblance in the Navajo Indians,—their
pastoral life and their religious customs,—a matter that strikes every
thinking visitor and student, there is more of this in Hopi history.
Their retreat southward from the cavern villages, from Betatakin Cave,
from the Swallows’ Nest and Scaffold House—stopping to build a hamlet
here and to reap a harvest there, leaving always testimony in potsherds
and corn refuse—to their present cliffs, was much the same as the
migrations of the Jews. Perhaps, having lost one citadel, they moved on
to the next best position for defense; or perhaps a remnant of a
once-powerful tribe fled; for we do not clearly know whether these
cliff-dwellers migrated from choice, or to escape pestilence, or to
avoid captivity. Across the relatively narrow territory of their hegira
the Navajo and Apache—the once-combined “Apaches du Navaju”—and perhaps
the Ute fought and harried, the Hopi quite as helpless as Judæa between
Egypt and Babylonia. When they retired finally to such a place as old
Walpi, to barricade the narrow causeway at the mesa-end and to defend
the Walpi stairway, just wide enough for one enemy at a time, surely
this was a desperate people making a last desperate stand. I have no
doubt that the Hopi, peaceful as they have been and are named, fought
some worthy fights before the white man was known on this continent.
The determination that wore down the Spaniard must have had its martial
quality when facing enemies armed no better than themselves. It
required a brave war-party to attempt to storm those mesa strongholds.
And their foes must have stood somewhat in awe too of Hopi
incantations, made so impressive by their Snake legends and solemn
mummery. The Snake gods protected them more than once, according to
their priests, and are remembered in the ceremonies.
And the resemblance is not only in fanciful surmises. The daily life of
the people duplicates in many ways the customs of the Judæans. A people
of legends and portents. In the quiet nights they have watched those
burning signals of the heavens that mark wars and the birth of kings.
Perhaps their shepherds too have been summoned by such signs, inspiring
them to missions and pilgrimages, bearing gifts, relating to that
mythical Bohanna who will one day come to redeem and revivify the
people. From the great chart of the heavens they take their calendar.
And certainly, in the sunsets of that quiet and ever-tinted land their
pueblos reflect the Old East, with its donkeys and goat-bells, and
simple gardens by the springs, and the blurring dust of sheep in the
half-tones of desert twilights.
Government reports of to-day give the unqualified fact (?) that the
Hopi have a reservation of 3863 square miles, large enough, in all
sense, for twenty-five hundred people! But the Hopi exist on and use
less than one fifth of this semi-arid land, the remainder being held
and dominated by their old plague, the Navajo. The Hopi Indian Agent
has absolute jurisdiction—on paper—over all those Navajo living within
the boundaries of the Hopi Reserve; but this does not mean that he is
or ever has been able to control that undisciplined element of Navajo
who pillage the peaceful Hopi whenever in the mood. Many bitter and
scathing reports have been sent to Washington concerning this. Agents
have not minced words, and have not always spared themselves in an
effort to get justice—well, let us say, “consideration” for the Hopi.
When reports failed to procure attention, one or two started crusades
against the Navajo, not always successful, that ended in blows and
bruises, to say nothing of the chance of sterner wounds. A difficult
task to find the offender; if found, he was invariably supported by a
gang—his gang. I recall one investigator who stated blandly that it was
similar to conditions often found in cities: that of a corner gang.
Quite so. But the investigator did not ask to see the corner, nor did
he evidence any anxiety to encounter the gang.
The nomadic Navajo have a vast country to make themselves scarce in,
quite 30,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it untracked; there is
no quick communication between the six Agencies established to govern
these people. It has been possible to coördinate business methods, so
as to have uniform stock-regulations, for instance; but nothing has
been arranged to guarantee the peace. There have been numerous murders
in Navajo country. Representatives of the Board of Indian
Commissioners, particularly Major-General Hugh L. Scott, and inspectors
of the Indian Department have fired verbal volleys in support of Hopi
Agents. Navajo have been dragged to the Agency guardhouse, and other
Navajo have been haled before the Federal Courts when the Agent could
arrange locally all the details of the haling. A one-time United States
Marshal, charged with the duty of assisting, remained conspicuous by
his absence from the scene. The matter finally attracted the attention
of a sub-Committee of Congress, and brought about a field investigation
of Hopi conditions, pictured in a printed report. I know that the
report was complete, for I wrote it; in fact, I had prepared that
report in 1918, and placed it before Congress two years prior to the
appearance of the sub-Committee. The gentlemen graciously inserted it
as a tailpiece to their otherwise innocuous comments.
But the wall of political indifference to anything that does not
furnish a vote has not been dented. It is a mere matter between obscure
tribes, a squabble in the hills, which occasionally embarrasses an
Indian Agent and constantly annoys a helpless people who have no other
court of appeal. Neither tribe nor Agent can threaten a politician.
Both tribe and Agent are kept mute by an uncaring Bureau.
Announce, however, that these same Hopi Indians are wont to dance with
live rattlesnakes! Ah! that is a different story, and received with
different emotions. The politician rushes in to view the spectacle. The
Bureau sheds crocodile tears about it. Reams of reports are called for
and written. During the past twelve years the Hopi Snake Dance has
troubled the Solons of the Interior Department far more than any signal
of Hopi distress. The Christian ire of three administrations has been
aroused by this primitive pagan ceremony. Result: the Hopi Snake Dance
is as well advertised as the Grand Cañon of the Colorado!
Most picturesque of the Hopi towns is Walpi. You can procure a fine
appreciation of this, the effect of standing on the roof of the last
Walpi house and viewing the entire First Mesa therefrom, the narrow
rugged top and the deep valleys on either side, the trail down to
Polacca, the whole vast sweep of that distant and beautiful
landscape—simply by visiting the New York Museum of Natural History.
The artists have constructed a wonderful reproduction of that Enchanted
Empire citadel. My friend of various wild spots in Indian country, Mr.
Howard McCormick, magically brought the charm of the Hopi eyrie to the
edge of Central Park.
I recall a particularly drab day in New York, one of those having a
wintry edge that comes only off great waters, when I wandered into the
Museum, seeking this exhibit. I had anticipated something of the usual
order—papier-mâché, plaster, dust, and a ticket; but behold! I found
myself at home, on the mesa-top, below me the First Mesa and the Wepo
Valleys; and to my right would be Huh-kwat-we, the Terrace of the
Winds, and in the dim distance Moits-o-ve, or Yucca Point. I felt that
in a moment I should surely see Harry Shupula, the chief Snake priest,
emerging from his kiva; and half aloud I addressed one of the group as
“Quat-che” (friend). And at the foot of the winding trail, a little
beyond the spring, would be the camp of the water-witch and a desert
welcome—such a welcome as “Mac” and wandering Indian Agents receive. A
great feeling of Heimweh came over me. I wished for a magic carpet,
that I might step instantly from the lonely desert of New York into
crowded, speaking Hopi-land.
I remember a conversation with a clergyman from Canada, as we stood at
the inner edge of the crowd on the Walpi Snake Dance ledge, passing
that bit of ominous wait just before the entrance of the Antelope
priests for the annual ceremony. That is the time when the Hopi Indian
Agent meets most celebrities and makes most of his enemies. Some words
passed concerning the picturesqueness of old Walpi, and the magnificent
view from our position. The plain below was bathed in a lemon light.
“Yes,” I said, casually, “the people would be better off in the valley,
if we could get them to remove.”
“What!” he cried out in pain and direst astonishment. “Would you have
them leave this beautiful place—this beautiful life!”
I had uttered sacrilege. No Hopi of the old school could have bettered
the clergyman’s utter horror at the thought. But the gentleman, I am
sure, gave little attention to many things an Agent sees that are not
beautiful, things of distinct menace, hideous things. Walpi is a scenic
place, a ruined castle in outline, and always steeped in color effects;
but there is the dangerous ledge-road up which all supplies and wood
and water must be packed, a road that has accounted for more than one
Hopi when the brake would not hold. And did he not forget that women
did much of the packing on their backs? And the old and blind, who had
plunged over the sheer face of the cliff? And above all, the constant
danger of the filth-infested houses, where trachoma and tuberculosis
abide? These are things that a tourist does not notice, and when he is
away from the color effects and the sound of drumming chants, they do
not impinge on his vacant—his vacation mind.
Destroy Walpi as a picture? No. But as a human habitation, Yes!
I recall a visit to the Indian Office at Washington shortly after one
of my characteristic reports on this very subject.
“What!” said a Bureau chief who, because he signed a great many letters
daily without reading them, believed himself intelligent. “You
recommended dynamiting the First Mesa—the destruction of that oasis of
beauty, and peace, and—and—”
“And trachoma, and tuberculosis, and child prostitution,” I finished
for him, as he gasped and his words failed, as I knew they would. Words
always fail a Bureau chief. Like the long-range gun of the Germans, he
is accustomed to firing things across the continent, secure in that the
other fellow cannot immediately crash his words back into his teeth.
I had not recommended that. I had simply advocated the destruction of
the road leading to Walpi, since the Government and its Bureau Chief
would not advance sufficient moneys to make the road safe for travel.
That is the viewpoint of tourist and bureaucrat,—the artist has one of
pure sentimentality,—of all those who have viewed the Hopi, who have
been charmed by the color of his life, but who have been utterly blind
to his miseries, and who have contributed nothing to his well-being.
No one has a keener appreciation than I of the artistic value of the
Hopi pueblos—those old streets of worn rock where the bearded Spanish
walked; the curious archways and the irregular little balconies from
which children peer over at one; the thought of phantom Mission bells
from the peach orchards. But I was not stupid enough to overlook that
these same streets contained offal, that the houses were not
ventilated, and that there were various unseemly stenches in the air. A
tourist must leave his olfactory organs at home. And I knew, being in
charge, that all the labor of industrious and conscientious
field-matrons was not enough to keep those quaint streets and
courtyards clean.
I remember another visitor at another Snake Dance, a man sitting on the
parapet of a Hopi kiva, looking down through the ladder entrance. I saw
that a number of dancers were below there, preparing costumes. They had
an array of skins and masks and feathers, with many cans of bright
paints.
“I suppose you know a good bit about that too?” I asked.
“Well, I recognize some of the signs, common to Indian people.”
“Shall we go down? You can give them a hand,” I suggested.
“I should like to, very much; but—won’t they object?”
“Perhaps I can arrange that,” and I started down the ladder. Several of
the Indians glanced up, but, observing it was only Moungwi, said
nothing.
“Here!” I called to them. “Here is a real friend of yours. You may not
know him, but he understands many tribes, and their ways, and their
signs. Put him to work. He can help with those costumes.”
One looked up from a robe he was painting, and thrust forward a brush
and paints, as if to say: “Welcome, brother; fall to!”
The white visitor showed a rare facility. The Indians noticed it.
“You know him?” asked one, pointing to a design.
“Yes,” he said, naming it.
They laughed delightedly, and soon he was friend to them all. I left
him in the kiva, busily working with them and chatting as much as
possible with a limited vocabulary and many descriptive gestures. This
was Ernest Thompson Seton. I have not seen him since, but afterward he
forwarded a letter, thanking me for his entrée to the wardrobe-room of
the First Mesa, and giving some excellent advice concerning the things
we had discussed before he signed on as costume-painter for the Hopi
tribe. Among all the visitors I met in Hopi-land, he was one of very
few who sensed the things that should be done and those not done for
their welfare. Briefly, his idea was that the community life should not
be violently disrupted, for fear of the effect our own isolated rural
populations had suffered; and that efforts should be made to keep alive
all that is best in the social and mesa-plan of living, without
permitting the Indian people narrowly to confine themselves to it. This
of course would include the harmless dances or shows, the social
features that many confuse with ceremonies. I could recall the earnest
efforts made by former Agents to induce the people to leave the mesa
heights—notably that one beginning in 1891, when houses were built for
them in the flats, and later completely furnished. By 1900 at least one
hundred such houses had been placed at Hopi disposal. And I knew that
in 1911 not more than half of those houses were used even temporarily.
The people would return for the society of their kind, drawn, too, by
intense religious feeling for the ancient mesa home.
I could recall two abortive efforts made toward the allotment of these
people in severalty: the scheme to have them accept parcels of land,
many of which were miles from water, and on which it would have been
impossible for families to subsist themselves, to say nothing of
maintaining their sheep and other stock. The first of these allotment
plans blew up in 1894; but the Bureau, wedded to the allotment theory,
was not deterred. A second and most expensive effort died in 1911,
after friends of the Indian plainly showed the farce of the
proceedings, if they said nothing as to the inhuman side of it. This
did not please the allotting agent, eager for his pay and job, nor his
son, nor his assistants, nor the camp cook and the other hangers-on of
an allotting crew. But thank God! it died, nevertheless.
The average bureaucrat, admiring the Allotment Acts, thinks that an
Indian’s head may be jammed into a regulation lathe, and with a few
twists and spins turned out a full-fledged Mid-west agriculturist—just
such a man as Thompson Seton said needed community centres made for
him, to keep him from becoming an inmate of an insane asylum. Just so.
But it cannot be done, my masters, with the speed of the mimeograph
that grinds out your tirades and exhortations. Your Allotment Acts have
been good friends to South Dakotans and others who wished to speculate
in lands; but they have produced untold misery among the Indian
peoples, and have utterly destroyed an innocent and simple phase of
American life.
Now I never agreed with the ecclesiastical gentleman who thought that
the Hopi mesa system was wholly one of beauty and idealism. But the
writing man did force on me a realization of the utility and sanity to
be found in the life that the Hopi had unconsciously adopted. Begun as
a defense against enemies, the result in peace times was for good, if
accompanied by sanitation and the protection of the younger generation.
And I accepted a new view of the Indian ceremony and dance.
Until we furnish something as good in place of the Indian social dance,
why rave about it? We might easily have a large number of low-spirited,
sullen, and even dangerous Indians on our hands if it were not for
these joyous occasions. So long as the dances are clean, can any one
quarrel with a Ya-be-chai of the Navajo, a Corn Dance of the Hopi, or
one of the Pueblo spectacles, half pagan, half Catholic? I have seen
scores of such dances, not as a tourist, but as the man on the ground
in charge, and I have not been able to figure out that they are one bit
worse than a country picnic among our own bucolic population of Texas
or South Dakota, for instance. I have seen a South Dakota Rotary Club
cut as many fool antics as a Southwest Indian clan.
I recall an illustration from my very short stay among the Sioux in
1922. It was the Fourth of July, and I had permitted the old Indians to
hold their dance on the hills. It had long been the custom to stop
their merrymaking at sunset, and a very good ruling too. But this
Fourth was unusually quiet, the booze-runners not having appeared as
per schedule. The Indians petitioned me to permit just a little dancing
after nightfall. It had been very quiet, and my special police force
was large enough, and seemed loyal enough, to assure good order.
“All right,” I said. “But please remember that I shall have a squad of
police there, and I shall be there myself; so don’t start any shines.”
They had a very creditable evening party, and the peace was not broken.
Later I visited the Agency amusement hall where a number of whites,
visitors from the countryside and more than one mixed-blood couple of
education, were enjoying themselves to the latest jazz. Now I am no
authority on dancing and, having lived among Indians, I am not easily
shocked; but the postures and attitudes of those South Dakota whites
were—well, a trifle extreme, to say the least of it.
“We have looked at them both,” said an old Sioux to me, anxiously.
“Au-tay-ah-pe (Father), there may be something wrong with the Indian’s
drum dance, but—I do not like the white man’s fiddle dance.”
I told him very frankly which I thought the worse. There is no use in
trying to bluff an old Indian. He can see through a hypocrite quicker
than any man I know.
This is not a sentimentalist defence of the old Indian dance. I have
bitterly excoriated the “secret” dances of the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico, but could never get sufficient backing from the Department to
end them. Such indecencies may be found among all primitive peoples,
and those of the Pueblos who indulge in them are most primitive—the
barbarians of San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and other decadent backward
pueblos. But I have tried to envision the social side of an alien
people who have no other form of diversion than the spectacle of the
dance. Were the Government to put them on a moving-picture circuit—but
we were discussing the decencies.
And, to repeat: When we have established among them an amusement as
appealing, simple, and inoffensive, it will be time for the
condemnation of those features that are innocuous and foreign. And it
will be long before I shall forget the comparison, by an Indian,
between the dance of the Sioux with drums and sleighbells, a noisy
soul-stirring hullabaloo, and—the seductive, suggestive “white man’s
fiddle dance.”
XVII
SERVICE TRADITION
When first, as an employee of the Government, I answered the
grave salutation of the red man, the buffalo roamed at will
over the great plains of the Sioux country; the iron horse
had not crossed the Minnesota boundary; the dull, plodding
ox was the courier and herald of the culture that was stowed
in embryo in the prairie schooner; Chicago was just beginning
to throw off its swaddling-clothes under a blanket of smoke;
St. Paul was the frontier to the Northwest ... and that was
only a generation ago.—McLaughlin: My Friend, the Indian
The work of this reservation was that of a frontier. Until the late
nineties, army officers, acting as agents, had administered affairs
from Fort Defiance, distant about eighty-five miles from the First Mesa
of the Hopi. The country between these points is rough, and in winter
often impassable. The commanding officer did not make the two days’
journey frequently, and when he did, entertainment at trading-posts
would occupy most of his time. There were no other local stations.
Until 1887 no official of this Government resided permanently within
the Hopi territory; so that, from Spanish times until that date, these
Indians had received little attention.
In 1886 a petition, signed by twenty Hopi head-men, requested
Washington to give them a school, that their children might “grow up
good of heart and pure of breath.” But one of these men, Honani of
Chimopovi, always a friendly chief, is now alive. Shupula, who signed
as Second Chief of the Moki, died, a benign old man, in 1917.
So in 1887 a school was started in Keams Cañon, at the site of one of
Carson’s old camps, a picturesque alcove of the walls having a group of
springs, and where Tom Keams, a trading Englishman, had long kept a
post. Twelve years later a resident Agent, having authority to act as
one in complete charge, was appointed.
Between the years 1890 and 1916, sub-Agents and the later Agents
accomplished much permanent work for the people. The first school was
succeeded by a modern training school in the lower Cañon. An Agency
radiated orders and the tools of civilization. In the field at the
pueblos were six day-schools to care for the younger children. Five
hundred pupils attended regularly. The Indian youngsters advanced from
the kindergarten and primary day-schools to the training school, where
they received some knowledge of trades, and from thence to the larger
non-reservation schools, patterned after Carlisle, such as are at
Albuquerque, New Mexico; Phœnix, Arizona; Riverside, California.
But not only in point of education had there been progress. Tracks of
the reserve had become roads, as the Indians were supplied wagons and
implements; and ascending the rocky mesas, linking the different
villages, were highways that had been cut from the solid rock, and
that, considering the means and cost, were fair pieces of engineering.
The Agents had built and enlarged the schools, and had opened mines to
supply the winter fuel. The live stock of both tribes—for the Navajo
came to this Agency—showed improvement. A most important advance had
been made in medication. Three physicians attended the several
districts. Trachoma had been greatly reduced. There was no longer the
dread of uncontrolled epidemics, such as that one of smallpox that
nearly wiped out the Hopi in 1780. And after 1913 a well-appointed
hospital received the serious cases, especially those requiring
surgical treatment. Between 1911 and 1919 vaccines were freely used to
combat smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, pneumonia, and influenza. The
Pasteur treatment was given. Surgery, minor and major, was a matter of
routine, and with low mortality.
Whereas in 1900 the first Agent had but twenty-one employees, in 1915
there were above one hundred serving the various activities of the
Empire. A force of water-development men, locally known as “witches,”
had greatly augmented the water-supply to the pueblos and their stock,
through enlarging mesa-springs and the drilling of shallow wells in the
washes. The supreme water-witch of the Empire, Mr. A. H. Womack, in
later years discovered artesian flows. And by far the most of this work
was accomplished after 1910.
But of troubles there had been no end. It not only was necessary to
conquer frontier handicaps,—the distance from supplies, the bitter
winters that blighted transportation, and the frequent changes of a
restless and dissatisfied employee-force,—but was also necessary to
fight the superstition and not always negative resistance of a
fanatical and unreasoning people. Five times between 1899 and 1911
troops were sent to this reserve to quell disturbances or to enforce
Governmental regulations.
One of the great reasons for Indian unrest had been that few Agents
remained in charge long enough to influence the people. It requires at
least four years of patient work to know the Hopi, to gain his
confidence, if indeed one ever gets it. And in the thirty-two years
after 1887 there were eleven different officers in charge. Prior to
1911, the longest period of service had been a little more than four
years. Men quit or were transferred before they had made a beginning.
Twenty years of the time were divided among nine officials, little more
than two years for each, scarcely long enough to learn the country and
its divisions. I recall some lonely years in the Desert, when the Cañon
walls seemed a prison, but I am now glad to write that I directed its
Hopi-Navajo population for more than eight years, twice the time of any
other Governmental officer.
Of those who had the early work, there were two who exerted a strong
personal influence: Mr. Ralph Collins, who was twice appointed a
sub-Agent, and Mr. Charles E. Burton, who was the first Indian Agent.
Collins had not complete authority, and his efforts were not always
supported, but much of suspicion among the Hopi could have been avoided
if he had been listened to. Burton, having carried out certain fool
orders, was hounded by sentimentalists during most of his service. But
both these men accomplished things for the Hopi people, and are kindly
remembered among the elders. Their improvements have not entirely
disappeared, and wherever one finds an English-speaking Hopi of middle
age, the credit may be given to one of these men.
But in 1911 two things had not been finished, and one important thing
was only vaguely planned. There was no fixed policy for the development
of the reserve, and no one had succeeded in breaking the power of
Youkeoma, that hostile witch-doctor who had made trouble since 1887.
One could not hope to succeed without the first, and the success of the
first depended largely on the second. The health work had been
sporadic, and was ineffective without a hospital. My predecessor had
procured an allotment of eight thousand dollars with which to construct
one, whereas thirty thousand—considering Service methods—would not have
been too large a sum.
I felt that a consistent policy of control was vitally necessary; that
the country and the people in it, both whites and Indians, must be
brought under strict regulation; that Youkeoma’s influence must be
broken; and I proposed to use the eight thousand dollars, plus whatever
additional sum I could talk out of Washington, plus the resources of
the reserve in cheap labor, stone, sand, and equipment, mixed with
something approximating brains, to have a hospital that would be a
benefit to the Indians and a credit to the Service, which too often has
constructed buildings that were neither.
Regulation and control required only horse-sense and a little vision.
Resolution and earnestness, accompanied by justice and fair-dealing,
make a combination that few Indians can resist. The man who fails in
the Southwest Indian country is the one who ignores his people’s
conception of fair play, and who forgets to keep his word. There have
been white men among the Hopi-Navajo who, unmindful of their own two
thousand years of background, proposed to correct everything in an
afternoon. Discovered in 1540, brought under supervision in the recent
eighties, it was and is too big a job for an afternoon.
And why not view with sympathetic consideration the problems of the
Indian who, having little education and no vote, being practically as
inarticulate as a deaf-mute, childish and incompetent, must trust
someone, and is inclined to trust the only official he knows?
Why not be a decent Indian Agent, out of respect for one’s self?
There are relatively few people who know that the United States Indian
Service has a history, a tradition as it were, to be honored and lived
up to. Few men in the service have the lively curiosity and interest in
their charges that is necessary for success among primitive peoples,
few who rise above personal prejudice, who can resist feeble enmity.
There have been the early-day McLaughlins, Sheltons, and Carrolls, each
of whom built himself a Service name by one efficient means or another;
but those men have been in the minority.
Now the Army officer has a tradition, and the Naval officer has one.
Why ought not other Government officials to view their commissions on
as high a plane? Should a reader interpose to mention “scandals”—why,
to be sure; there have been many; but they have not destroyed the
Indian, and they have not ruined the Service. All Departments of the
Government have had scandals of greater or less degree. There was a
certain Arnold, an army officer of very high rank; but we need not go
back so far. There was enough doing in the year of grace, nineteen
hundred and twenty-four, and enough is sometimes too much. There have
been timber scandals, and land scandals, and oil scandals, as the
wealth of the Indian country has been exploited. And there is the
scandal—or should be—of manipulation of individual Indian moneys. And
the scandal of keeping inefficients in office. And some Indian Agents
have gone to jail, and some should be there, accompanied by those who
have protected them. All true, and granted. Nevertheless, the body of
them have an honorable tradition as old as the United States itself.
In 1786, in the Articles of Confederation, consideration was given to
Indian affairs. Two superintendents were provided for, who had the
“comprehension” of all nations of Indians south of the Ohio River and
all west of the Hudson. Their exact “comprehension” was no doubt much
smaller than their outlined territories.
The Federal Constitution of 1788 deemed it important that the Central
Government should have exclusive power over intercourse with Indian
tribes. The Supreme Court of the United States later amplified this to
include everything that may arise out of our relations with the
Indians.
Congress in 1789 appropriated the first moneys to defray expenses of
negotiating and treating with the Indians. While the Commissioners were
referred to as “agents,” their authorities did not extend beyond
treating with the native.
George Washington, in a letter dated August 29, 1789, instructed
Messrs. Benjamin Lincoln, Cyrus Griffin, and David Humphrey as
“commissioners plenipotentiary for negotiating and concluding treaties
of peace with the independent tribes or nations of Indians within the
limits of the United States south of the Ohio River.” This commission
made a report to the Secretary of War, and from its suggestions grew
the licensed-trader system, although the first traders acted as
factors, and to some extent as agents, for the tribes with which they
were affiliated.
Congress in 1790 provided a method for trading with the Indian tribes
under license, but no Indian Agents would appear to have been
authorized, as such, by law prior to 1796, when were established the
trading-houses on the western and southern frontiers, or in the Indian
country, and the appointment of men to manage them under the direction
of the President.
The factors were the first real Agents for routine Indian business.
This was the first experiment. The law limited it to two years, but its
life was extended from time to time until 1822, when the system of
Government trading-houses was abolished.
Acts of 1800, 1802, and 1806 provided for other experiments; and after
1806 there were actually four types of Indian officials:
1. Governors of the various Territories, who were ex-officio
superintendents of Indian Affairs within their jurisdictions.
2. Certain Agents who were primarily under the direction
of these Governors.
3. A Superintendent of Indian Trade.
4. The Factors under his direction.
When in 1819 and 1820 Congress provided for the employment of persons
to educate the Indians, the appointment of Agents to specific tribes
began.
When the trading-house system expired in 1822, the factors disappeared.
Indian trade is conducted to-day by licensed traders, who are under
bond, and expected to live within Indian country.
In 1824 the Secretary of War, without authority, organized a Bureau of
Indian Affairs, probably to ease his main office of details; and eight
years later the President was authorized by Congress to appoint a
Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
The Act of 1834 conferred upon the officers of Indian country the
authorities they invoke to-day with respect to control of the native
and those who may seek to oppress him. This Act did not apply to the
Territories of Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico. The Agents for the Pueblo
Indians of New Mexico were handicapped in their work until 1913, when
the Supreme Court of the United States clarified that situation by the
Sandoval decision.
In the early days, army officers were designated to perform the duties
of Indian Agents, and the Indians were brought under strict military
rule; and this, taken in connection with the imperative language of the
laws enacted, tended further to increase the powers of the Agent.
By an Act of 1847, directing distribution of annuities and treaty
goods, most Indians were brought to a condition of complete dependence
on the central Government. If prior thereto they had enjoyed any civil
liberty, the fragment was taken from them. Many looked to the guardian
even for food, and when the guardian was aware of him—most Southwest
groups were outside this soup-kitchen zone—it was provided. And then
came opportunity to those who made a scandal of the “ration” days, and
presented Robert Louis Stevenson and other brilliant sentimentalists
with a slur from which the honest Indian Agent has suffered. Wherever
the Government had cognizance of an Indian, he was a child without
rights other than those his Agent permitted him to enjoy. As late as
1922, acting as a Sioux Agent, and being overwhelmed a thousand times
daily by the emasculated title of Major, I signed many permits allowing
old warriors to leave the so-called Reservation—it was really a
sanctuary for whites—for trading- and visiting-trips, a long-obsolete
bit of red tape that the vanquished one still recognized. I could not
very well have prevented his going without a permit, but as he saw fit
to believe in the old system, I signed the papers cheerfully. At least
those older majors of the army had instilled into the elder Sioux a
respect and obedience, without destroying their pride or confidence.
In 1849 the Department of the Interior was organized, and it was
authorized to have supervisory and appellate powers in Indian Affairs
theretofore exercised by the Secretary of War. The Secretary of the
Interior became head of the Indian Department, the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs acting under him.
The local control of reservations remained quite the same. Native
police were authorized in 1878, but the Agent continued to be sole
judge of the guilt or innocence of Indians charged with offenses. In
1883 the Courts of Indian Offenses were devised, an idealistic
experiment, no doubt originating in the far East. It was hoped to
encourage the Indian somehow to discipline himself. But it has proved
farcical, and when used at all is a mere instrument in the hands of the
Agent. During the past fourteen years I have had charge of four Indian
reserves: the “Moqui,”—now correctly named Hopi,—where are many Navajo;
the Pueblo; the Crow Creek Sioux; and the Colorado River Mohave; these
extended into five states, comprising a total population of 14,000
Indians of six different tribes and many local divisions; and among all
these natives I have found but one Indian having the requisite
intelligence and unprejudiced standpoint to warrant his presiding as a
Judge of the Indian Court. It would be unfair not to name this man. He
is Pablo Abeita, of the Isleta tribe of Tihua—Pueblo—Indians in New
Mexico. And after years of loyalty to his honored Agents (not all of
them were honored) he has reaped as his reward tribal enemies, and
political and civil ones. The one man who proved the value of the
experiment was made the goat. Such are the fruits of idealism,
preserved by new leaders who come staggering under many inventions for
the benefit of Poor Lo.
These historical facts have been briefed from an article entitled “The
Evolution of the Indian Agent,” written by the late Kenneth F.
Murchison, one-time Chief Law Clerk for the Office of Indian Affairs,
and printed in the Commissioner’s Annual Report for 1892. The writer
closed with this significant statement:
The Indian Agent now has almost absolute power in the Indian
country, and so far as the people over whom he rules are concerned,
he has none to contest his power. Appointed at first in the
capacity of a commercial agent or consul of the United States in
the country of an alien people, the Indian Agent, under laws
enacted and regulations promulgated, has developed into an officer
with power to direct the affairs of the Indians and to transact
their business in all details and in all relations.
This is a very curious chapter in our history. There is a striking
contrast between “ministers plenipotentiary” appointed by the
United States to treat with powerful Indian nations, and an army
officer, with troops at his command, installed over a tribe of
Indians to maintain among them an absolute military despotism. Yet
our policy of dealing with Indians has swung from one of these
extremes to the other in a strangely vacillating way. Indeed at
present (1892) the Agent among the Five Civilized Tribes performs
rather the functions of a consul in a foreign nation than those of
an agent.... On the other hand, the absolute military rule finds
its illustration in the present condition of things at San Carlos
(Arizona) and in a modified way at Pine Ridge (South Dakota).
Now the superficially informed person will arise to declaim that this
is ancient history. It is true this was written concerning conditions
of and prior to 1892. But only recently were the troops removed from
Fort Apache in the country adjacent to San Carlos; and very recently we
have had cause to regret that the authorities of the Agent for the Five
Civilized Tribes were ever revoked. The Indian Agent for the Pueblo
Indians of New Mexico, considering their recognized forms of tribal
government that the United States Courts have sustained, should perform
the functions of a consul, plus all the duties of an Agent. It is
difficult for the average appointee to perceive this subtle
distinction.
And should the superficially informed person visit the Southwest and a
closed Indian reservation, to witness the Snake Dance of the Hopi, for
instance; to view one of the pageants of the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico; or to hunt on Apache grounds,—and always providing that such
Indians have an Agent not afraid of his political shadow, he will find
that the supervision and control of the Indians, and of the
superficially informed person, is based on the authorities related,
which have not been revoked, and which any Indian Agent may invoke at
any time he thinks necessary. In Arizona the State Legislature has
granted additional powers to Indian Agents, as the residents of this
colossal State have no false ideas with respect to its Indian
inhabitants, and wish them managed in the most efficacious way
consistent with justice.
As instances, Arizona has these laws:
CIVIL CODE.
Section 3837: “All marriages of persons of Caucasian blood, or
their descendants, with negroes, Mongolians or Indians, and their
descendants, shall be null and void.”
Section 3839: “All marriages valid by the laws of the place where
contracted, shall be valid in this state; PROVIDED, that all
marriages solemnized in any other state or country by parties
intending at the time to reside in this state shall have the same
legal consequences and effect as if solemnized in this state;
parties residing in this state cannot evade any of the provisions
of its laws as to marriage by going into another state or country
for the solemnization of the marriage ceremony.”
Arizona and its people have no desire for a population of half-breeds;
and it is a pity that not all the sovereign States of the Union have
been filled with an equal pride. There is one State where it has been
found to be necessary to proscribe by law the usage of the term “squaw
man.”
While the Agents of to-day have not the military with which to coerce
obedience, they have, as Stevenson once wrote of dogs, a strong sense
of their rightness and superior position in action. The moral authority
is theirs, and the legal means has not been emasculated.
The Regulations for the Indian Service, dated 1904, and unamended in so
far as control of closed reservations is concerned, were based very
largely on the Act of 1834. Since these regulations were issued, the
Indian Agents have been engulfed by 2000 additional rules, advices,
warnings, sermons, and remonstrances; but no modification of
law-and-order guides has been encountered; and these original
regulations have been consistently sustained by the United States
District Courts.
An Indian of the Enchanted Empire may be dealt with by his Agent as
surely as were the Sioux of the ’80’s. I had occasion to revive the
permit system for both whites and Indians, to supervise the conduct of
whites within Indian country, to protect native ceremonies, ruins, and
graves, to deport those visitors and Bolsheviks considered of no
immediate benefit to the quiet Indian population, to arrest and arraign
both Indians and whites for offenses, to sentence them, and to see that
the sentence was respected.
Now mark you! This does not mean that every Indian Agent is a
functioning Agent. It may as well be said, frankly, so long as this is
getting out of the family circle, that few Indian Agents perform their
fully authorized duty when it is possible to intimidate them: a process
often recognized by quavering superiors at Washington who hope to
outlast a dying Administration.
But before coming to the field in 1910, I saw three Secretaries of the
Interior steadfastly uphold these Regulations; and as an Indian Agent
in the field I have been strongly supported by three other Secretaries
of the Interior, to the end that my Indian charges, until 1922, were
the best-protected people on earth.
XVIII
BUTTONS AND BONDS
And he sat down over against the treasury, and beheld how the
multitude cast money into the treasury; and many that were rich
cast in much. And there came a poor widow, and she cast in two
mites, which make a farthing.—Mark, xii. 41, 42
I have heard it said by old-timers, and they could very nearly prove
their suspicions through comparison of customs and the dragging in of
the Bible, that the Navajo are the Jews of the Desert, a lost tribe of
Israel. And suffice it to say that the true son of David has never been
able to prosper in their country. The closest approach of these
wanderers to the Navajo has been an invasion by marriage of a certain
part of the Pueblo Indian country in New Mexico. Those who once made
the effort to penetrate the Hopi-Navajo area of the Enchanted Empire
have withdrawn, defeated and outwitted.
But if this is the advantage that the Navajo as a trader has over his
white brother, in what relation does the Hopi stand to the Navajo? I
cast about me for a simile, and find none.
The desert post-trader welcomes the Navajo when he comes on a
purchasing expedition, because the Navajo is a spender and makes for
quick sales and large profits. It is when the Navajo is trading wool
and blankets and silver junk for hard dollars that the post-trader
peels his eye to the nerve, and then hopes he will not get skinned. But
the Hopi is maddening as a buyer. It will take a Hopi longer to spend
two bits than for a Navajo to squander a month’s freight-earnings. An
astute trader once described the Hopi method to me.
“You know,” he said, as if in pain, “an Oraibi will come into my place,
hungry. You can tell he is hungry by the look of him. Hasn’t had his
breakfast. And he will have come to buy something to eat. And then he
will stand before the canned-goods shelves, if I am not watching, and
get a full meal by just looking at the labels. Yes sir! Seen it many a
time—look at a can of pears and lick his lips until satisfied, then go
out without changing a dime. Give me a Navajo every time.”
This same trader at Oraibi—Charlie was murdered by the Navajo, for all
his love of them as customers,—would praise the Hopi as bankers. He was
located ninety miles from his headquarters and several hundred of miles
from his bank. A trader must pay in cash or negotiable checks to
Indians, according to the regulations, and on that reservation they had
to do it. There was no “tin money,” no trade tokens were used. Charlie
would run short of cash.
“I can go to the door, and whistle,” he declared, “and get a thousand
dollars silver from the mesa.”
The Hopi liked him, and trusted him, and once tried to protect him.
The bank the Hopi patronizes is his sand bank, or its equivalent—a hole
in the wall of his stone house, cleverly concealed, a place under the
hearth, or a sack in his corn-cellar.
It is seldom that the Hopi make presents. Curios have a potential value
with the trading public, and the Hopi believes that the laborer is
worthy of his hire. When they think well of one, likely they will wait
until he is leaving the country and then bear what is comparatively a
priceless gift, something different in basketry or pottery from those
hackneyed forms duplicated so often for the touring invaders. Where the
Sioux will impoverish himself in feasting and gifting his friends, the
Hopi regards brotherhood on a different basis. But I have in mind to
show when the flood of his generosity was loosened.
The Great War opened, and later “Washington” was involved. War is a
lost art in the Desert, but old warriors like to think of battles. The
far-removed Indians were interested in more ways than one. The
registration of them, a silly proceeding, caused not a little panic
among the unknowing. While Agents who knew law advised that the
non-competent and non-English-speaking ward would not and could not be
drafted, this made no difference to those who drew up the schedule. It
caused more than annoyance; it caused some little apprehension in the
Desert. Said Navajo chiefs to me:—
“You want soldiers for this war of Washington’s? Very well, we will
select them, and then married men will not be taken from their
families, nor young men from helpless parents. How many do you want?”
Was not their thought a trifle wise?
But it was not to be done that way. Little blue cards had been printed,
and the Indian Agent was nominated registrar for all persons of his
jurisdiction, whites and Indians, including himself. The Navajo simply
evaded; but the Hopi lists were prepared, and so much time and paper
and little blue cards were wasted.
Some of the Hopi took an equally fantastic view of the crisis. At
Oraibi were located the Mennonite missionaries, an earnest people, but
many of them of German extraction. A Hopi delegation waited on them,
saying: “In a few days there will be war. Washington will be at war
with Germany. You are Germans. You will be our enemies then, for we are
supporting Washington. What will you do when Washington sends the order
to kill you?”
This was no doubt a very discouraging vision to have before one.
The Hopi interest in war-time methods and inventions could always be
aroused through the illustrations in the great dailies. My pictorial
sections of the New York Times were in great demand. They would pore
over them, remarking the vast number of soldiers, and would ask for
many explanations. Men were flying as birds through the air, and
carrying the war beneath the waters. They had seen locomotives and
automobiles; and they could believe in the aeroplane and the submarine,
because of white man’s magic. But at wireless they balked.
“No!” said one old Indian, emphatically. “That is too much. The
telephone—yes, I understand, for there is a wire, and the man’s words
go through that wire, inside—I see that. But now you tell me of a man
talking from here to the mesa, twenty miles, without a wire? No—excuse
me, but that is too much.”
Then came the food regulations; and food in the Desert is a limited
fare at best. The Indian menu is slim enough, and much of it in flour.
He had no use for substitutes that the trader was compelled to have him
purchase, and when his horses disdained cornmeal as fodder, the Navajo
began to be aggrieved. He had offered to help Washington with his
prowess, no mean gift, and he could not see how an empty stomach helped
campaigns.
But came the first call for Indian help that could be accepted. A
bazaar was advertised, to be held in Washington, the proceeds to
finance a hospital unit. The Indians were invited to contribute curios.
Knowing Hopi thriftiness, I did not feel that they would respond in
great measure. I sent out the call and waited. When lo! for a time the
sale of pottery to trading-posts ceased. My warehouse began to overflow
with the donations. Hopi pottery is fragile; does not ship well; and I
felt that so generous a response should have good packing for the
journey of twenty-six hundred miles to Washington. I know how much they
gave in clay products, for I personally packed the major part of it.
There was not time to ship by freight, express gave no insurance
against breakage, so it was forwarded by parcel post. There was a
trifle of silverware; a rug or two of Hopi weave; there were reed
plaques, and small baskets, and pottery,—bowls and trays and plates and
odd forms,—hundreds of pieces. A tenderly whimsical thought: the vision
of some wounded lad finding relief through an old Hopi woman’s moulding
and baking clay figures, far from the hysteria of the cities, far from
the guns and stench of war, but contributing the one thing she knew,
while humming some chant, perhaps of ancient battles.
Next came the bond sales.
Now there was a deal of press-shouting anent the millions invested by
Indians in Liberty Bonds; and the Indians did invest millions in these
securities. But an explanation throws an illuminating light on the
Bureau’s puffery. Indian Agents, having Indian moneys in their control,
bought most of those bonds. There is nothing much to shout over, or for
that matter to weep over,—as a certain Commissioner was wont to do when
his emotions slipped,—if an Agent calls in old Jimmie Crowfeet, and
says to him: “Jimmie, you have twenty thousand dollars to your account,
from the sale of your dead children’s lands, the leasing of your own
and your wife’s allotments, and the careful manner in which I have
marketed your cattle. Now you will need but two thousand dollars to
cover the next several years. I propose that you place the remainder of
your money in Government bonds at four per cent. Savvy? You help
Washington. Washington help you sometime mebbeso.”
If Jimmie did not understand all at once, it was done for him anyway.
In any case, it was done. The Bureau directed it. And that’s that. A
trifle different from the story pushed into the Sunday supplement.
But with the Hopi—the Hopi had no moneys in the hands of his Agent. The
Hopi has not had lands for sale—thank God who made the Desert! and the
Hopi has not had lands to lease, thank God who was stingy with the
water. He sells his cattle for himself, and places the results down in
that pocket which is his own.
It would have to be a selling campaign; and I had first to convince the
Hopi, rude, unlettered, and suspicious always of documents, especially
those of Government, that this green paper would prove the same as
fifty or one hundred dollars in hard silver.
He knew of the country’s need and danger. It was easy to explain that
soldiers, armies, must have guns, ammunition, clothes, blankets,
medicines, and grub. The Hopi has to have all of these himself, even on
a peace footing. For him to propose to give curios, manufactures, even
corn, his staff of life, was simple; but the Agent was asking for
money, in lots of fifty, hundreds, and other multiples, the security
being a piece of green paper that the Hopi could not read, that would
be hard to safeguard from fire or theft, and that might prove only as
good as some other promises of our slow-moving Uncle in the East, who
had often forgotten him and at least once betrayed him.
“What shall we do if hard times come, and we must have cash?”
I knew that a Hopi would never be able to grasp market conditions.
Indeed, being of “the sticks,” I had little idea myself that Government
bonds would so quickly slump in value. It was necessary to convince and
sell; and I held the confidence of these people to some degree.
“I will see to it that every man’s bond is redeemed at face value,
should he come to me in need. You will not have to wait for maturity.
These bonds will not go begging.”
And in some cases, I had it to do, regardless of the quotation. But
these instances were few, and to the credit of the Hopi be it said
that, once invested, the major part stood firm, treasuring their green
papers, the first bank-accounts that many of them had ever owned.
It was at the Second Mesa that I held my first meeting, and a whole
group of hold-tights and skeptical were swept into buying through the
example of the poorest and most despised man of that district. They
gathered at the council and asked many questions.
“But we are poor, and we have no money for bonds,” they protested.
“I am not asking you for fifty dollars to-day, or to-morrow. I am
asking you for one dollar, and the promise to pay out the balance in
installments. When you have paid the full fifty dollars, with interest,
I will deliver the bond to you.”
“How can Washington sell a fifty-dollar paper for one dollar?”
“Washington will not. But I will go to the banks at the railroad, and
borrow forty-nine dollars at interest for each man who agrees to buy a
bond. The bank will hold the bond as security until all your payments
are made, and then deliver it.”
They were dubious of that. Said one young fellow: “How can you borrow
so much money? If twenty of us sign for bonds, and pay you one dollar
each, you will have to borrow twenty times forty-nine dollars. Will the
banks lend you that much?”
“With the bonds held as security, yes. Try it out.”
On that basis I hoped to carry my district’s quota; and as a matter of
recorded fact I sold to one hundred and thirty Hopi Indians $11,600 in
bonds, and for the whole reservation, including a few Navajo and many
whites, $36,200 during the five bond-selling campaigns. I three times
held the honor-flag for that county, competing with white men’s towns,
and my last honor-flag had three stars sewn to it, showing that the
Hopi Reserve had sold three times its quota. It snapped in the breeze
very proudly at the Agency, under Old Glory.
But these first prospects of the Second Mesa were holding back. If I
failed here, there would be no use in going to other mesas. Indians are
like sheep. The individual takes his politics from the mob. There was
some suspense.
And then arose an old Hopi. His coat was ragged, and his hat battered.
He had been a captive in Mexico, and spoke Spanish better than his
native tongue. Perhaps he had drifted away in the early days, perhaps
he had been taken prisoner in a Border foray, perhaps he had been one
of those parted with at Corn Rock, quien sabe? He was a butt in the
village because of his grand manner acquired among the Spanish people,
and twice he had appealed to me for justice when the home folks were
treating him unfairly.
“Superintendente!” he spoke out, “I will buy a bond.”
There was a shout of laughter from the Indians. They knew that this
poor fellow had no fifty dollars, that he did not possess a cash
dollar. It was a joke; and Indian ridicule is cruel.
“All right, Wupa—come forward.”
“Señor Superintendente! You will sell me a bond?”
“Yes, I will sell you a bond, as quickly as any one else.”
“Upon the payment of a dollar?” he deliberated, gravely.
“That is right. You pay a dollar down, and I will give you a receipt
for it; then I will borrow the rest for you, holding the bond as
security until you have paid it out.”
He looked around at his tormentors, as if to say: “You see, this man
knows a Spanish gentleman when he meets one.” All his Indian pride,
plus all he had garnered from the Dons, was aroused. He came to the
desk, while they continued to cry him down.
“Where’s your dollar?” they asked mockingly. “You haven’t any dollar!”
And I was much afraid he had not. A fluke would not do. It would mean
losing the lot, and I knew there were many present who could afford to
buy on payments and who would make good.
The old man grinned wisely.
“I will sign the paper for a bond,” he said.
The blank was shoved forward to him. He daubed his right thumb on an
ink-pad to make his thumb-print, the signature the Government accepts
from Indians who cannot write. He pressed it down on the dotted line.
“Now where’s your dollar, old father?” jeered the crowd.
Slowly he reached into his pocket, and drew out a rusty jackknife. He
looked all around him gravely, knowing, as a Spanish-Indian knows, that
he and he only held the centre of the stage. And then, beginning at the
top, he began to cut buttons from his old coat—Navajo silver buttons,
coin of the Empire when in need. He placed them, one by one, on the
desk before me, counting: “Una—dos—tres—”
They were worth fifteen, perhaps twenty cents each, as the desert
market fluctuated. As he laid each button down, he looked at me to see
if the dollar was completed.
“That isn’t money,” said one of the crowd.
“Cinco—” he counted, looking up.
“Buena! Lo-lo-mi! Write a receipt for one dollar, and mark Wupa down as
having bought a bond.”
“Thank you, Quat-che [friend]; you are the first man to help
Washington.”
We shook hands on it, and he was proud of himself. Turning, “You see—”
he motioned to the crowd, and strutted back to his place. The others
were now silent. In a manner of speaking, their bluff had been called;
and by Wupa!
“Now who buys the second bond to help Washington?”
Those who had laughed and mocked the loudest were now quiet. They began
to sway about, hesitating, looking from one to another, and then to
come forward. In the next few minutes, twelve hundred dollars in
Liberty Bonds were sold, most of them for spot cash. The old man from
the border had “helped me out,” as the Indians say, and when the
selling was over I read them a mild lecture on making game of their
first patriot. To my astonishment, several of them then offered to help
him with a fence he was building all alone.
As I drove away, around by the Corn Rock, I heard a shouting behind me.
I pulled up, wondering what I had forgotten. It was the old man, coming
down from his house on the height, bearing a bucket of peaches, the
delicious Hopi peaches that are as a blessing of the Spanish padres. He
put them into the auto and made a bow in the Latin style, hat sweeping,
hand upon his breast.
I shall never forget old Wupa of the Second Mesa, a wanderer in strange
lands, an alien at home, who bought the first Liberty Bond with buttons
from his ragged coat.
At the First Mesa I expected more of attention, because they are the
progressives of the Hopi, albeit they have progressed through being
pushed. The First Mesa and its several settlements are but thirteen
miles from the Agency headquarters, on the direct road to anywhere in
the field, and so their people have received more of regular attention.
The missionaries have made most progress there, and the Indians are
fortunate in having had two field matrons assigned to that station. The
first, Miss Sarah E. Abbott, who later faced down the Hotevilla, had
proceeded to educate and influence them; and the second, Miss Mary Y.
Rodger, has for the past fourteen years not only influenced and
assisted them, but in large measure helped to direct them. They have
also had the benefit of the Desert’s chief water-witch, Mr. A. H.
Womack, who has his office at their mesa, and who has greatly
influenced and improved all the Indians of the Desert.
But in matters of purchase the thrifty Hopi, of whatever location, is
inclined to pursue the label-tasting method. I found myself up against
the same detailed explanations, although knowing that hundreds, perhaps
thousands of dollars should be garnered there. Once again a patriotic
Hopi came to my rescue. This was Tom Pavatea, the full-blood Hopi
merchant. Tom is one of those few Indians who have succeeded without
the handicap of an education. Being a sensible man, he of course
deplores the fact that he decamped as a child from the first school,
and that a busy principal forgot him. Tom conducts an excellent store,
carrying goods of standard quality, and his prices are not calculated
on the altitude scale. Perhaps three-quarters of the Hopi trade in
pottery is dispatched through his hands. He is fairly rich in livestock
on the range, and has saved his money. Finance, however, troubles him
at times, and I hope the last Western bank-crash has not caused him to
suspect white men’s accounting. Years ago he could not fathom the
mystery of interest.
“Please explain,” said Tom, quite perplexed, “Why should that bank pay
me something for keeping my money? They have a strong steel box, and I
get the service, and I should pay them for keeping my money safe.”
Therefore I hope that he will never be deceived; because, on its being
explained to him, he did not seem altogether easy in his mind. He had
been rather of the opinion that his actual money always reposed in the
vaults he had seen in the cities.
As to Liberty Bonds for the winning of the war, Tom had been solicited
by an employee prior to my arrival.
“I’ll match you buying bonds, when the boss comes.”
“Match me?” inquired Tom, not grasping the idea.
“Yes—every dollar you spend, I’ll match you.”
“Dollar for dollar,” said Tom, “one dollar, me; one dollar, you?”
“That’s the game.”
“Well,” said Tommie, who always played as safely as he could, “I don’t
know these games; but you get your check-book ready.”
He patiently waited through my talk to the curious but not over eager
crowd, and then he came forward.
“This man, Leaming,” he announced, indicating the employee,—a gentleman
who has nominated himself in a number of campaigns for the mayoralty of
Polacca, and invariably lost to the water-witch,—“this man wants to
match me in buying bonds. I don’t know about that. I haven’t any cash
to spare to-day,—but will you take him?” The “him” was a piece of
paper. “If you take him, all right with me.”
“Is Mr. Leaming to cover this purchase?” I asked.
“He tell me so. I buy—he matches me.”
“That’s my proposal,” said Mr. Leaming, repressing a strong desire to
view the figures on the slip.
“But, Tommie, this certificate of deposit will not mature for thirty
days. Withdrawal at this time may cost you six months’ interest,
although I think I can arrange it that you will lose no interest. And
another point—I am anxious to sell bonds, but this certificate bears
interest at four and one-half per cent, and your bond will pay only
four per cent. You may lose six months’ interest, and you will surely
lose one-half of one per cent interest each year.”
“I know all that, lo-lo-mi,” he answered; “Washington has a war, and
needs the money. But you see that he covers it.”
“Lo-lo-mi,” I agreed heartily; “Mr. Leaming will please write his check
for one thousand dollars, while Tommie endorses this certificate of
deposit.”
Two thousand in the first sale. It started them. The closest financial
shark of all the Indians present hurried to his sand-bank and came back
with four hundred dollars. And Leaming grinned a golden grin of relief
when he produced his thousand to match the first sale.
“Tommie had me worried,” the genial principal admitted. “I could meet
him for several thousands, but Tom might have sold his herd of cattle,
and I should have lost caste throughout the whole district.”
Another evidence of Hopi thrift and credit is to be found in the
“reimbursable” records. About 1914 the Government instituted a plan of
loaning money to Indians, through their Agents, for the purchase of
livestock, implements, seed, building-materials, and so on. I was not
impressed with this plan, and to-day the Washington Office would like
to have some one advise how to collect its outstanding reimbursables.
The worthy charity provided many Indians with money without interest,
and with practically no security assuring repayment. As an instance of
this, the Mohave Indians found themselves embarrassed by these gifts,
and in 1922 owed more than $34,000, they having had about forty
thousand crowded on to them by a former superintendent. They had been
crushed by debt for years. At least eighty-five per cent of the Mohave
reimbursable was outstanding and delinquent, and with the best of
fortune at least twenty per cent of it a total loss.
The always cautious Hopi approached this experiment gingerly. He is
suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts. When he promises to pay, he expects
to pay; and too, I did not rush forth, laden with money and generosity,
to crowd them into debt. Between 1914 and 1915, my scruples having been
argued away by a squad of non-visioning clerks who now wish that they
had possessed a little less enthusiasm, I did advance $10,627 to the
Hopi Indians. This money was placed in wagons, harness, and livestock.
Within four years they had repaid seventy-five per cent of the advance,
and of the remainder it was estimated that not more than $300 would be
lost.
So the frontier work went on. We were building schools, quarters, and a
hospital; fighting dirt, disease, and superstition; improving
livestock, and selling it, and washing wool; experimenting with trees
and plants; hawking bonds, and lending money, and holding court;
checking traders’ prices and guaranteeing Navajo blankets; policing
Snake Dances, trapping bootleggers, and offending tourists; meantime
struggling with the summer floods, and the mud and quicksands
afterward, and the winter drifts. When the roads were destroyed, we
somehow rebuilt them—and then prepared to rebuild them again.
The Desert was a busy place. And when daylight failed, I reported it
all to an unappreciative, often snarling Bureau, twenty-six hundred
miles away, that understood little and corrected less, while it asked
senseless questions that must be answered, made foolish decisions, and
prepared for the field as many handicaps as distant ignorance and lack
of sympathy could contrive.
There were compensations, however. Drives along the mesa ledges and
across the wide vacant valleys gave time for planning; and each
excursion was an adventure. At five miles the hour a sturdy team does
not demand the alertness that an auto compels at twenty. Traffic did
not bother one. Only an occasional flock of sheep, a straying pony, or
a somnolent freight-team blocked the road. The drowsy hours of midday,
filled with the humming noises of the Desert, blessed by sunshine and
the wondrous panorama of the Empire, could make up for many frontier
irritations.
Sometimes one caught vistas into forgotten ages. Far away across the
lower plain, as at the edge of a greenish sea, lifted those strange
shapes, the Moqui Buttes. I had seen them frozen in a pallid sky; again
half lost in the fog and swirls of dust-storms; and again as drifting
mounds, with the one farthest west like a flat-headed Sphinx, touching
the clouds; and always they had been somnolent headlands, half
obscured. But one November day the sun burnt winter gold, and magic
touched the Desert. It stretched a placid sea along their coast line of
Parrish blue, that richest color of the fairies; and the many peaks
were flat against a golden screen. Some lonely galley, heeling under
old sails, was all it lacked; and I paused on the mesa-ledge to catch
the sound of surf on enchanted beaches. The Coast of Romance! It would
have ensnared that wanderer of the Greeks:—
My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die;
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.
There they were, dreaming, awaiting a belated argosy of the years: the
farthest Happy Isles, where—who knows?—in the days of the great waters,
when the Desert floors were covered, some wily Ulysses may have landed
and heard the songs of Circe.
XIX
OUR FRIENDS, THE TOURISTS
He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting
the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I
really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I
not children, of whom it was my duty to take care.
“Sir, by so doing, you would do what would be of importance
in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre
reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would
be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone
to visit the wall of China.” Boswell’s Johnson
The Grand Cañon of the Colorado was once, in the minds of white men, an
Indian fable. It exists to-day. It is now familiar ground. Getting
there is an easy, quite luxurious journey, if one has the money. The
Santa Fe Railway system has removed all the one-time misery and terror
of the desert route to it. The hostile tribes, the sun and thirst that
plagued Don Pedro de Tovar and Don Garcia Lopez de Cardenas in 1540,
when given leave to discover what truth was in the Cibola stories, have
been subdued by engineers and steam. Coronado’s search for treasure
cities and fabulous mines, for Quivira, ended in weariness, failure,
disillusion; and his record in obscurity. Cardenas saw the Grand Cañon,
while Tovar found something that should endear his name to the
ubiquitous tourist. He located the Hopi Indians under their castellated
cliffs. Now—had Tovar seen a Snake Dance! Although he arrived in
August, that was denied him.
Thus a Wall of China was prepared in America nearly four centuries ago,
and through “spirit and curiosity,” male and female wearing pants,
tourists seek it to-day. When the clans have all gone back to the
Underworld, leaving their educated young to jazz and evangelists, the
wall will retreat northward to the silent cavern-cities and the
monuments of the Utah border, to Betatakin, and Kitsiel, and
Inscription House. When a Service station desecrates the beautiful
Laguna Cañon—the Tsegi—the wall will make a last stand at Rainbow
Bridge—Nunashoshe—that great archway of the triumphant desert gods.
Tourists! Age does not wither them. I remember a very old lady,
traveling alone. Alone she arrived on the mail-stage, obsessed by a
mission, quite as Kim’s lama. Having viewed one hundred miles of desert
beauty from the mail car, she caught a little sleep, and then aroused
me Sunday morning, quite early, with determined cries. Thinking that
someone had been injured, I very nearly greeted her in pajamas, to
learn that her search must be continued, and that it required an
automobile or other conveyance. I referred her to the local trader, who
also slept late of Sundays, and he sleepily turned her over to Ed. Ed
told me of it later. He said that he “packed” her about sixty miles
farther, hither and yon, around the Moqui cliffs and through the tinted
valleys. She granted him not a croak of interest. And when he was
thoroughly tired out, with the gas “about all,” and the hour late
enough to suggest a return to the post, she halted him with:—
“Now, my man, I’ve seen this, and it is very fine indeed; but—I came to
see the Painted Desert.”
“And we had been a-trompin’ it all day!” said Ed.
Nor does their curiosity decay. I recall a party that came upon us one
evening, just at twilight. They erected tents, and stretched around
them the fetish of a hair-rope, though no snake would have ventured
near that camp for many gophers. Their cook banged his pan, and they
came and “got it.” The mail-stage pulled in late that season, and my
miscellaneous collection of letters, newspapers, and books from
everywhere would be dumped in the trader’s private office, a combined
place of business, art gallery, and Agent’s rest. By the open fire I
would dissect this mail, and reduce its bulk to ashes. But this night
“dudes” filled the room and wrangled over a pile of Navajo blankets. An
old man of the party pestered me with searching questions.
“Is this a good blanket—worth forty dollars?” he asked.
“Quite good. You may depend on Mr. Hubbell’s prices.”
“I would rather deal directly with the natives.”
“May I advise you not to? The trader is regulated, the Indian is not.
Many persons have lost their eyeteeth in a rug-deal with the Navajo.
Besides, you have no guaranty from them. That blanket is guaranteed.”
“And by whom?”
“By me, as Agent.”
“But the Hopi,—or is it Moqui?—they are different. One of them offered
to sell me a ceremonial altar at Oraibi.”
“Sorry, sir; but you could not purchase it.”
“Who would object?”
“I would, as Agent.”
“And this prehistoric pottery I have seen—”
“It is recovered from graves, by Indians. It may not be sold or
transported from the State.”
“Who issued that order?”
“When the Office forgot it, I did, for this Reservation.”
“Ah, yes—you are the Agent here. Now what are your authorities?”
“Well, one might say, the supervision of everything.”
“Is that your mail—your official mail?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have many duties?”
“Quite a few.”
“What is your salary?”
I dropped the letter of the Department that I had been trying to
decipher between questions, arose calmly, and led the old gentleman
aside.
“That,” I said in a whisper, “is a State secret. There is an agreement
between the War Department and the Interior Department, entered into
just after the Navajo Treaty of 1868, and concurred in by every
President since Andrew Johnson, that no Indian Agent of the Navajo
country shall ever divulge the exact size of his reward. He may, with
discretion, reduce the sum in speaking of it; but he may not under
liability of extreme penalty, give out the true figures. It might
encourage the native to revolt. You see my position?”
“Naturally,” he said. He wiped his brow. He was simply overpowered. And
he bothered me no more.
But Messrs. Weber and Fields’ famous answer would have been more
appropriate. “I’m ashamed to tell you.”
And in early August come letters to the Agency. The queries are many
and various.
“Please furnish the date of the Snake Dance.”
“Will you send me a permit to Oskaloosa, Michigan?”
“Mail me a permit to the El Tovar, Grand Cañon, where I will meet
my wife and see if she wants to come.”
“Are moving pictures permitted, and if not, why not?”
“What are the rates at the Hopi hotels?”
“Is it good form to carry an umbrella in the Desert?”
“A Hopi woman sold me a loaf of bread in 1895. I want some of that
bread this trip.”
“Please reserve me a room and bath; I will arrive on the
eighteenth.”
All these should be answered, to the effect that the date of the dance
will be given to the press as soon as known; that permits are issued
when the permittee arrives; that there are no hotels; that the Agent
can reserve nothing; that tourists should provide themselves with
camping equipment and come prepared for rain. Does not the Snake Dance
produce rain? The thunder mutters and the rain-clouds lower ominously,
if no rain falls. There will be a drencher in the fortnight of the
Snake Dance, one may be sure; and it often occurs so shortly thereafter
as to cause one to wonder how the priests dope it out. In 1911 the
storm broke just at the close of the ceremony. It broke immediately
over me, as I perched on top of the Dance Plaza rock. That is an
excellent place for an unobstructed view of the whole show, but it has
an enormous—and unforeseen by me—disadvantage, in that one may wish to
get down at a specific moment, as I did. And at that moment, the
tribe’s collection of snakes, scores of them, hissing, writhing,
entangled, were thrown into the sacred-meal circle just below my
dangling feet. I did not get down. I sat there in the rain, and soaked.
A slicker, or oiled-coat such as fishermen wear, is an important part
of a desert outfit. It does not weigh much, it may prove useful in
covering the hood of the engine when bucking flooded washes, and it
will certainly protect its owner after the Hopi prayer for rain. Pack
one in from the railroad towns; for while the desert traders carry
them, the demand is often heavy enough to exhaust stocks. Like the
Texan’s gun, it may not be needed; but if needed, it will be “wanted
damn bad.”
Comes also to the Agent a telegram from the Commissioner: HOPE YOU ARE
DOING NOTHING TO ENCOURAGE HOPI SNAKE DANCE—just that. Already
advertising or lurid press-stories have announced the date in
Washington. The somnolent Bureau, that so often finds it inexpedient to
administer justice, arouses itself and heaves the telegram over three
thousand miles. Never shall it be said that the joys of the savage
should receive sympathetic understanding. By no means permit them to be
happy in their way. Teach them to be happy in our way. Encourage that
broad spirit of charity we invite from Kansas via the Civil Service
examinations. But do these things without hurting the native’s
feelings. Never act so as to arouse or even risk antagonism. “Do
nothing to encourage the Snake Dance,” but remember, if you have an
urge to discourage it, that we have not directed you to do anything. We
have simply expressed the hope that you will successfully do nothing.
And the Agent, whoever he may be, has just finished wrestling with the
last of his fiscal-year accounts, closing June thirtieth and requiring
all of July to assemble. He has signed 7863 papers of different colors
and symbols, all explaining his honesty. He has completed one thousand
calculations forming the statistical section of his Annual Report, long
arrays of figures, giving the exact value of each washtub, proving the
altitude and longitude of everything, from the number of sheep the
Indians devour in a year and why, to the number of tacks used in fixing
the linoleum to his kitchen floor. He will have recently emerged from
the impotent phrases of his narrative Report, a mandatory composition
of past woes and future griefs, destined to fill an Eastern pigeonhole.
These things are fetishes, thieves of time and destroyers of
efficiency, worshiped by the Bureau as the documentary reason for its
existence. Like prefaces, they are hopefully prepared, but seldom read,
and certainly never acted on.
The Agent will pause long enough to sign a permit—a colored slip of
paper printed over with regulations having a local significance. Read
them; for he will not have time to read them to you. He has had them
printed for a purpose—the purpose of relieving him of explanations.
Should the Agent appear a trifle acrid in manner, have patience. He may
have just opened a batch of exceptions to his last year’s accounts,
rebuking him many times for intelligently carrying on the business of
the Government, when absence of intelligence would have been much
cheaper and approved. Or he may have received one of those Departmental
questionnaires, calculated on the abacus of economy, and propounding
solemnly something like this:—
It is noted that you mine coal, and request $3000 annually for the
pay of miners. This seems beyond all reason. The Office has been
informed on good authority that excellent bituminous coal may be
purchased at five dollars the ton, f.o.b. Gallup, New Mexico. Would
it not be advisable to purchase fuel in Gallup? You are directed to
procure bids f.o.b. your station, and transmit them to the Office
for consideration and comparison with your mining costs.
“Yes,” you are startled to hear him comment aloud; “The advanced class
in idiocy will now recite. Required: 2000 tons of coal, now mined
within two miles of the bunkers, costing $1.50 per ton. Would it not be
efficacious, not to say superb and miasmic, to purchase at Gallup, ship
in cars one hundred miles to Holbrook, and thence haul eighty miles in
wagons at one cent per pound cartage? Total cost, $27.00 per ton
delivered, plus handling-losses and slackage. Ask me?”
But this inane query, signed by the Commissioner without reading, as he
talked of the November elections with Congressman Grampus, must be
answered. The record must be fixed in the mausoleum of files. The Agent
will finally deny himself to Indians having real business requiring his
attention, will neglect other duties, while he laboriously composes a
fulsome answer, figuring the cost to five decimal places, and proving
that $1.50 per ton in hand, supervised, is cheaper than $27.00 per ton
on the road. He recommends—of course respectfully—that he be authorized
to continue mining the coal God gave the Indians, until such time as
the field may be leased to a syndicate; and then, with true official
loyalty to those who arrange leases, to purchase from the syndicate,
thus maintaining a perfect parity between whites who need money and
Indians who do not need coal.
Before you harshly judge this desert pessimist, reflect a bit. He will
be found sufficiently educated to issue you a permit. In the long
nights of winter he has time for reading and reflection. The ignorance
of the Desert is slowly disappearing before education; but no one has
endowed a grammar school for the relief of those you place in
Washington.
Classes in simple geography and numbers would help.
Each season more and more people come to view the Prayer for Rain. Not
all are strangers. Many Navajo ride in from the ranges, tribal
differences for the moment forgotten, just as they attend the fiestas
of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; and the Hopi are equally
hospitable with food and fruit at this their gala time. Many white
guests repeat, year after year. Next to our trading friends, the
Hubbells, father and son, who undoubtedly hold the record as to regular
attendance, there is an engineer of the Indian Service who has viewed
more Snake Dances than any other seriously engaged man. My own record
is not insignificant. But this class is at home in the country, with
business or duties or friendship to excuse it.
It is the sort of outing that true sons of Arizona enjoy. Carl Hayden,
of Congress, has kept one eye on a Snake Dance and both ears open to
Hopi conditions. Governors Hunt and Campbell have been found there
repeatedly, and Governor Hunt has sought to preserve its record in
pictures for the State Capitol at Phoenix and the museum of the
University of Arizona at Tucson. In these men the Hopi have had good
friends, and at least one Moungwi found them filled with understanding
of the Desert and its peculiar conditions.
At Walpi one has a fit setting for a theatrical ceremony. Roosevelt
wrote of it, “In all America there is no more strikingly picturesque
sight.”
The place of the dance is a narrow shelf at the very edge of the mesa.
The houses of the people, tier on tier, terraced into little balconies,
form a back-drop. Through these houses, and leading from the shelf, a
tunnel gives on to another street. The ledge is simply a continuation
of the rock roadway that skirts the brink of the village, overhanging
the wide First Mesa Valley. There is a sheer drop from this edge,
straight down at least sixty feet, to the masses of shattered stone and
drifted sand that buttress the mesa and shelve off hundreds of feet
more into the orchards. At each end of this shelf is an underground
kiva, marked by its projecting ladder-poles. A curiously eroded rock
seems to balance at one end of the little plaza, between the houses and
the precipice. Before Walpi was evolved for purposes of defense, this
rock existed. Probably it was because of this freak that the place was
selected for the rites of the tribe.
The ground-area available to spectators and dancers measures about
ninety feet in length and not more than thirty in width. This
approximate twenty-seven hundred square feet must contain about forty
Indian actors and a large percentage of the mob, to say nothing of the
snakes, a most important and active feature of the meeting, among which
are many rattlers. It is like staging a nervous ballet on the cornice
of the Woolworth Building, knowing that fifty mice will be turned loose
on signal.
The wisest of the visitors seek places on the balconies and housetops;
but not all of them can be accommodated there. Many are forced, if they
would see anything, to stand on the ledge with the dancers. Dense
groups mass at each end of the plaza and along the house-walls, and men
and boys, white and red, stand four-deep on the outer edge, facing the
snakes, and with a death-drop behind them. A tourist who would hesitate
about hunting a rattlesnake out of a bush will at this time develop
courage beyond all understanding.
When I first noted the possibility—the probability—of accident at this
unguarded mesa-brink, I proposed stretching a stout rope along it as
some small measure of precaution; and I summoned the old Snake man to
advise him of its purpose. A rope there might easily have been against
the traditions, and I was new at the game of supervision. From the kiva
came a nude figure and stood before me in the sight of the multitude.
The interpreter explained my plan.
“I see,” said the old man, nodding; “these people are your friends, and
you do not want them hurt.”
Now I did not care to vouch for all those present, and so corrected
him.
“No, they are not my friends—not all of them; they are people who
travel about the country and come to see your dance.”
“Didn’t you send them letters—write to them to come?”
“No.”
“Well,” he concluded, “I didn’t send for them. They are no friends of
mine. And you say they are not friends of yours. Why should we care
about it? Let them fall off.”
But notwithstanding his unconcern, every year I had a rope stretched
there, and compelled the daring to stand behind it. This too prevented
them from crowding the dancers, which the Indians appreciated; for when
a man is juggling an angry snake he doesn’t crave close company, and I
have seen an annoyed dancer thrash a tourist across the face, using a
live snake as his whip.
Some day the breaking of house rafters, or a flurry of panic at the
mesa edge may present tragedy as a closing feature of this ceremony.
“Let them fall off” may yet have a grim sound.
The rites are conducted by the Indians with solemnity and reverence. It
is not a show in a juggler’s booth, to be guyed and ridiculed. But when
one of the poisonous snakes has coiled, and is hissing and rattling and
striking, just the time when one would think spectators would become
more tense, that is when taunts are flung and a perfect bedlam of
thoughtless merriment arises. Were there fewer visitors, as at minor
ceremonies, they would be reproved; but the Hopi are a patient people,
and they never insisted that these strangers behave themselves; they
only expected that the visitor would keep his place, and not attempt to
join the dance, a thing that some wild whites—including a few wild
women—are only too ready to do. You now see all the standpoint of the
old priest.
Each tourist packs one of those devices sold by Mr. Eastman. At many of
the ceremonies, particularly the Flute Dance, cameras are barred by the
Hopi, and I had their restriction respected. But when I proposed to
increase the tribe’s revenue by taxing each visitor a dollar for the
camera privilege, the clan thought it good business, and asked me to
arrange it. I had camera tags prepared, and the trails to the top
policed. Each policeman was accompanied by a representative of the
clan, who sold the tags, and who carried a sack of money to change
anything up to a fifty-dollar bill. Usually twenties were thrust
forward, and promptly nineteen hard, cumbersome cart-wheels were dumped
into the canny tourist’s lap. It was disconcerting to those who sought
that form of evasion. Occasionally came one who demanded a decision of
the Supreme Court against this outrage, chanting invariably that he was
a taxpayer, and often adding that he knew Wilson, or whoever happened
to occupy the place of Chief Magistrate. But backing the collector was
the imperturbable Indian policeman, who did not pay taxes and who did
not know Wilson. The policeman knew Moungwi only, who had been found
ready to “stand behind,” as an officer put it. Either pay “una peso,”
“shu-kashe-vah,” “thathli ibeso,” or “one iron-man,” in Spanish, Hopi,
Navajo, or Americanese, whatever language you cared to have it in, or
surrender that black devil-box in which a man’s spirit may be
imprisoned.
One dollar! Yet there were many who sought to evade, and forced
unpleasantness; there were a few who flatly refused to pay and yielded
their kodaks; there was even one who tried to steal a moving-picture
film, who was hunted down at night in the black desert, caught in the
early morning, handcuffed, lodged in the Agency hoosegow, and had his
precious record confiscated for Uncle Samuel, who preserves it in
Washington to-day. This tricky envoy of a famous news-service has
related in a magazine his harrowing experience, giving me full credit
as his one-time host. I have not space in which to analyze his
inaccuracies. Suffice it to say that he cost one very tired and
harassed Moungwi and two hard-boiled rangemen a night’s rest. He should
know that every trail to the railroad was watched, and he would just as
surely have been apprehended and had his outfit confiscated had he
escaped to the Mecca of Los Angeles, that windy city out of which he
worked. The jurisdiction of the Indian Agent extended there, or for
that matter anywhere, in connection with a plot affecting his wards.
There was a midnight conference with the visiting official then acting
as Commissioner, who, surrounded by loneliness and an empty sterility,
not having at his beck a Law Board, seemed bewildered. For once, delay
could not be sought by mail. There was no one to receive the buck. A
Departmental order was being laughed at. Despite the possibility of
ridicule, the visiting mandarin feared that I might jar the gentle
traditions and affect several votes in Southern California.
“I can handle him on the reservation,” I said, anxious to be off. “What
I want to know, and all I want to know, is, do you authorize me to
follow him to the Coast?”
The Acting Commissioner shivered in his pajamas. It is cold at those
altitudes, even on August nights; and when one is standing barefoot,
you know, and being pressed for a warrant—he wavered into the wrong
pew, for he said: “Ask Shelton about it.”
Now Shelton was the most determined Indian Agent that ever wielded
authority in the lonely desert. He and a dozen other Agents were among
my guests. He was that one with a chipped-granite face I had met in the
Office long ago, and whose language had failed when he tried to
describe the subtle beauty of his domain. Roosevelt called him one of
the best Agents in the Service, “who has done more for the Navajo than
any other living man.” He disciplined the criminal element among
Indians, and protected all of them, good and bad, from exploitation.
His Agency was a lovely garden wrested from a sterile immensity, where
the Desert bloomed as a rose. Shelton is gone now. Only the Indians
miss him. His place in the great Desert has not been filled. There are
Nahtahnis and Nahtahnis. And I venture to say that the praise of
Theodore Roosevelt, plus the few words I have written, are all the
record shows for Shelton’s many years in that empire of the San Juan
River, where the Ship Rock trims its great stone sails against the
desert winds.
Shelton rolled out and sat on the edge of his bed. He listened.
“How far to your line?” he asked.
“Nine miles by the road I think he has taken. He’s across the line long
ago, unless the Jedito is running and has stopped him.”
“Do you need me?” he said. He was not a man to waste words.
“No. But there is an early train west. He may be off the reservation.
What would you do?”
“Get him,” said Shelton, and went back to bed.
For it had been ordered that no moving-picture film of the Hopi Snake
Dance should be made, unless by permit of the Secretary of the
Interior; and it had been further decreed that such permission should
be granted to representatives of State and National museums only. The
Governor of Arizona had respected this order. The Commissioner had
declined to request any modification of it. I was therefore anxious to
find the fellow who had slipped in furtively, had procured a
reservation permit by evasion, had been warned not to work, who had
proposed a contract requiring the Secretary’s approval, and who had
broken his word.
For a week I had been on my toes, so to speak. Two thousand tourists,
threescore official guests, including a dozen observing Indian Agents
and the Colonel and everything, had caused me to become a trifle
peevish. The Dance was over; the tumult and the shouting had died, the
captains and the kings were departing. And so was an insolent
crank-operator with a valuable film. Too much is enough.
We got him. He will never forget it.
Because of this untoward happening, and the wild cries of wounded
vanity heard in Washington, the Commissioner became annoyed. He issued
a crushing order that no photographs, still, animated, or out of focus,
should be permitted thereafter. Thus all innocents are restricted to
this day, and the official in charge reaps the criticism. He must
locate and check the cameras on the day of the Snake Dance, a terrible
procedure, bringing him into argument with almost everyone. This must
be done because a few tourists may not be trusted to obey the order. A
very foolish order. Nearly everyone was happy when he could bang away a
roll of films for the family album and for a fee of one dollar. The
tourist loses his chance to vie with Edward Curtis, and the Indians
lose their feast money.
The reason for such an order against the movies? Well, it would never
do to puff, through an entire administration, that all our Indians are
domesticated, tamed, and engaged regularly in singing “Onward Christian
Soldiers,” and then to have a spine-thrilling vision flashed up in
every movie-theatre each September. Some of the mildest of the Hopi are
members of the Snake clan, and go their peaceful ways at Walpi; but
they zealously enact their parts in the pageant every second year; and
to see those fellows painted ferociously, garbed in savage dress, with
snakes held in their mouths—yes, in their mouths; and two or three
active snakes can weave a revolting mask for a painted face—
I can conceive of no more terrible close-up than that of a Snake
Priest, coming toward one with eyes glaring, cheeks and chin painted
black, his mouth a huge white daub, and snakes, some of them with
rattles, feeling around his ears, through his hair, and about his face
and neck. This would never do for general consumption. The public would
accept such a pictorial news-item as proof that these continental
United States contain savages very like those who beat the awesome
drums in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Tourists! I remember the incidents of an Oraibi Snake Dance. At Oraibi
the water-supply is limited. The assembled multitude drank the trader’s
well dry, and it was then a choice between the mesa-spring, an
unsanitary flow, and the water-wagon of the day school. Trip after trip
to a distant well this wagon made, the horses dragging through heavy
sand; and as fast as it arrived the tourists emptied it. Precious
water! But I had to appoint a guard to prevent their leaving the faucet
running. Because my employee objected to several wasting the water, he
was reported to Washington as a villain who had refused a drink to a
suffering traveler in a burning and inhospitable Desert!
Then came an Indian who complained that they were taking his wood. The
Indians at Oraibi have to haul their firewood a distance of ten to
twelve miles. After one has brought in his winter’s supply, he grows
rather petulant to see another man, who rides about in an automobile,
calmly burning it.
“Go back to them, my friend,” I said, “and politely ask for payment.”
“I did that first, but they told me to get out.”
I directed a policeman to go with the Indian, and the policeman
returned to report that he had been received—not to say insulted—with
words. Whereupon the policeman departed a second time, evidently
pleased with his mission, and efficiently led in a very angry
gentleman. The complainant trailed along too.
“This Indian claims that you have burned his wood.”
“Yes, we used some of it.”
“He has to go a long way for that wood.”
“Well, what of it?”
“I understand he has asked for payment. I pay six dollars a cord for
firewood delivered by these Indians.”
“Yes, he did ask for payment—”
“How much?” I inquired, thinking the Indian might have overreached.
“Early this morning he arrived, and demanded fifty cents.”
“A very reasonable charge, don’t you think?”
“Reasonable! We come seventy-five miles into this barren desert, and
are denied firewood! Do you call that hospitality? Is that the way you
educate Indians to view the public that supports them? A fine sense of
courtesy!”
Having delivered himself of this rejoiner, the gentleman turned away to
signify that the interview was finished; but the policeman happened to
be standing at the door.
“Who asked you to come into this desert? This Indian did not invite
you. You arrived without notice or summons. He is under no obligation
to furnish your comfort. And you do not support these Indians. They are
self-supporting. They pay the Government for everything they receive,
other than the education of their children; and I’ll bet your own
children attend a public school. Suppose this Indian came to your town,
camped without asking in your dooryard, and helped himself to your
firewood. You would call him a vagabond, and he would get, very likely,
a magistrate’s sentence. Pay him a dollar.”
“I will pay him nothing.”
“One dollar, or I will show you the line.”
The dollar was paid.
Tourists! Are all of them like this? I answer from a long experience in
the Indian country that a very large percentage of them are just like
this. Outside the reservations they form the bulk of unthinking
sentimentalists, preaching a crusade for dissatisfied and malcontent
Indians, stirring them against real friends and worthy tribesmen,
making a pother and often a hell’s brawl of half-baked accusations and
charges. Recently a crew of them discovered “religious liberty” among
the dangerous barbarians of certain backward pueblos in New Mexico. The
knowledge of men of experience, the views of priests and ministers, the
affidavits of eyewitnesses, the testimony of Indians who had emerged
from the twilight zone and had accepted both education and
Christianity, all availed nothing against those who would demonstrate
that a Pueblo cacique, having a phallic doctrine to uphold, was being
denied his “religious right” to enslave and debase the helpless of his
community. A terrible banner for friends of the Pueblos to raise.
Whose fault?—Washington’s. Washington has known of and winked at this
disgrace for more than a decade.
Permit me to inform you that there are within the United States Indians
as benighted and as evil as those who beat the drums in the Heart of
Darkness. I have had them in charge. I have spent nights in their
villages. I have faced the duty of restraining them. I have seen the
results of their malicious performances. I have taken to hospital the
unfortunates they viciously maltreated. I have arrested and prosecuted
some of the guilty. I have protected a few of those they threatened—but
not all; for I have exhumed their dead.
But do not think for a moment that I was directed to curb these evil
clans of New Mexico. With my Indian police from other and freer
pueblos, with determined employees both white and Mexican, and on one
occasion backed by a United States Marshal’s posse, I was fortunate
enough to get away with it. The United States Court, and the press, and
the wholesome of the community, approved my actions and wished more
power to me as Agent. A respect for law was being established. One New
Mexican disgrace was being eliminated.
But lo! this became embarrassing to the East. Even as Nahtahnis, those
in supreme command change and are different. Imagine being told that
efforts toward control should cease, since the Government would find it
inexpedient to lend support! What mattered it if a man were hanged
until nearly dead, or a woman tortured, by caciques claiming “religious
liberty”? As for violated children—who should presume to disturb the
ancient Indian customs?
XX
THE GREAT SNAKE-CEREMONY
“On with the dance! Let joy be unrefined!”
H. L. Mencken
The ceremony of the Snake Dance begins many days before that public
conclusion the tourist sees. The date of the dance is announced by the
pueblo crier from the housetops. The priests of the Antelope and Snake
clans go to their respective kivas where, amid chants and exorcism, the
wardrobe is looked over and all necessary tools and sacred equipment
are prepared. A certain number of songs are sung each day, according to
a strict ritual. It is during this time that new members are initiated,
whether or not with revolting rites is for those to answer who know.
Then comes the snake-hunt, occupying four days, each day to a different
point of the compass, north, west, south, and east. One would think
that snakes have fixed and respected neighborhoods, so readily do the
hunters procure them; and one monster bull-snake, fully seven feet long
and proportionately thick, must be trained by the Second Mesa devotees,
for it always occupies the centre of the stage at Machongnovi. Very
likely snakes live to participate in many dances.
This facility in procuring snakes caused me to ask a young Hopi how
they were located.
“By tracking,” he answered, pointing to the dusty sand at our feet.
“See! there is a snake’s track. We can follow him home and dig him out,
if you want.”
Well, we didn’t do it, because I had something less dangerous on hand;
and I must confess that I could not discern the delicate trail of the
snake he referred to. But then, too, I have followed Indian trackers as
they sought to run down a man. They would call off his movements as if
reading from a book. As a desert tracker, I was a good Indian Agent.
Armed with a hoe, for excavating the more retiring, with a buckskin
sack of sacred meal,—for this must be sprinkled on the votaries,—a
larger bag in which to carry them, and a snake-whip of feathers, the
hunters go forth. They wear moccasins and a loin-cloth only. An
ordinary member of the snake family, such as a bull snake, no matter
what his size, is picked up with slight ceremonial fuss. But the
rattlesnake often objects. He is most likely to sound his displeasure,
and to coil swiftly for defense. Perhaps he has never attended a Snake
Dance. In this event, the hunter blesses him with meal and proceeds to
attract his attention with caresses of the snake-whip. After several
strokes of the long eagle feathers, the snake uncoils and seeks escape;
but swifter than he is the unerring hand that nips him just back of the
head. He is waved in the air, stroked with a quick pressure along his
spine, and dropped into the sack with the others. And no more attention
is paid to the sack’s contents when carrying it back to the kiva than
if it contained so much corn.
While the Hopi Desert contains large bull snakes and king snakes and
long slender side-winders, the rattlesnake is a short specimen, seldom
more than two feet in length. It is active enough for all purposes,
however, and can produce extraordinary activity of movement on the part
of those not initiated in the Snake clan. Once on a desert road I
alighted from my car to arrange something. I heard a sibilant noise, a
whirring dryish whistle or hiss that, peculiarly enough, is neither.
There is no English word to describe accurately the rattlesnake’s
warning, but it is imperative, and procures immediate attention. In a
thousandth part of a second I discovered the gentleman scuttling
rapidly between my feet. He wished to avoid me, and I shared his
emotions. It is of course impossible to assert exactly how many feet
directly upward and sideward I impelled myself. There was a space of
time in which I was oblivious to everything save the breaking of
leaping records. I came to at a point entirely clear of the road, as my
acquaintance disappeared into the sparse grass at the opposite side.
Then, knowing where he was, and that he was safe and unharmed, I did
not follow to put on any Snake Dance experiments. The swift grasp of
the neck immediately behind the head, the triumphant wave in the air,
the pressure along the spine, and the composure of the snake-gatherer,
all may combine to render said snake harmless or indifferent; but—you
try it!
The public part of the Snake ceremony consumes about twenty minutes of
time. The kisi, a bower of cottonwood boughs, something like a
miniature tepee, is erected midway of the plaza and to one side. The
kisi screens a hole in the rock-floor, and just before the dance begins
a mysterious bag is carried out and placed therein. It contains the
snakes. The hole is covered or roofed by a thick piece of board.
Early in the day the crowd of sightseers has gathered on the mesa-top,
and in late afternoon it begins massing at the Walpi plaza. There is
the usual wrangle over prominent places, and the inevitable bickering
as to who engaged them first. Soon the roofs and terraces and balconies
are hidden by the people. The odd stairways and other points of vantage
cause the crowd to group as if arranged by a stage director. A dozen or
more crown the Snake Rock itself. They wait patiently, expectantly, as
small boys await the head of the circus parade. Old Judge Hooker
arrives, garbed for the occasion, and harangues them with Hopi cries,
announcing to all and several that this great ceremony will positively
be held on this date, once, and once only this season, and imploring
them to grant it the respect it deserves. The Indians present pay
attention to his speech, for on this occasion at least the Judge has
the Agency police within call; but the whites do not know what he has
said, and so care very little about it. This waiting in a too-crowded
place is a monotonous and tiring procedure. There is much stirring
about, leaving a good place and then wishing one had not.
And suddenly comes a distant sounding of rattle-gourds, a faint but
insistent noise, like dried peas blown against glass.
“Here they come!” calls the ever-present small boy, who perches
perilously on a projecting house-pole.
Quietly, ceremoniously, the Antelope priests in single file enter the
plaza. Their gourds sound steadily, and with slow measured steps they
march about the stage four times. When passing the kisi, each man
stamps with his right foot on the board that shelters the snakes. They
sprinkle meal. And they are followed by the guardian of the
bull-roarer, a tall man who carries a huge Indian bow ornamented with
feathers, and who stops in mid-stage to sound his awesome instrument.
With all the force of his arm he whirls that wooden plumb-bob on a
sinew string. It moans with the wind voice of the Desert. Then the
Antelope men form a straight line with the kisi, their backs to the
houses and their faces to the plaza.
Now sounds a hurried noise, much clatter and scuffling, as the Snake
priests approach. They burst into the plaza as if determinedly
answering a call to battle. They are headed by the most robust of the
clan, large powerful men. With rigid faces, fixedly staring, their
elbows set as runners, they stride down the plaza. The crowd massed at
the far end is always in the way. The Snake priests must go to the
farthest end of this shelf on their first round, after which they
shorten each lap until four have been completed. The crowd must fall
back. It has no license to be there at all, and there is nothing in
Snake-clan etiquette signifying change because curiosity has come out
of the East. Their rushing single-file of men is projected straight at
the narrow end of the shelf. Finding that it was impossible to fix such
a throng in place, I would station two guards at that point to warn and
part the spectators. Just what would happen if the whites did not yield
is problematical. I recall that once the head-man of the dancers took
me in the side with his elbow. He did not stop to apologize. It was two
hundred rapidly moving pounds meeting much less than that. I did not
completely recover from the blow until the dance was over. A head-on
crack like that might propel one over the cliff.
These Snake priests are nude to the waist, their upper bodies daubed in
black, with the lightning sign traced in white. Their hair is
disheveled and streaming, and crowned with red feathers. About their
eyes are reddish smears, and a circle of white is thickly painted about
each mouth. They wear ornamented kilts of knee-length, and moccasins;
and with some show of uniformity each man packs all the trumpery the
clan has adopted as part of its regalia. They have armlets and
bracelets of silver, and necklaces of many strands—beads and bone and
turquoise. From the rear of each belt dangle one or more handsome
fox-skins. Fastened just below the right-leg knee are curious clappers
made of tortoise shells. Thus, as they stride tumultuously about, there
sounds above the dry rattling of the Antelope gourds all the hurried
clatter of this moving harness.
Each time they pass the kisi they stamp fiercely on the board. It gives
back a hollow sound. And perhaps the snakes of former spectacles know
that they will soon be wanted on deck. “All hands aloft!”
Then the Snake priests quiet down a bit and align themselves in a long
row, facing the Antelope men. A chant is begun. It is low in tone and
quite ceremonial in spirit. Their bodies sway. A curious waving motion
is made with the hands, one dancer’s wrists engaging his partner’s. The
gourds whir their singing sounds. And an old Indian, a feeble, aged
man, passes down the line with a bowl of water. This he sprinkles at
the kisi. The age of this participant and his evident fervor always
attract notice. He appears and disappears. And it is just at this
point, when the action is most impressive, when all touring eyes are
bulging to a degree, that the inevitable dog wanders into the sanctuary
and begins to investigate. I have never known a Snake Dance that did
not produce its uninvited mongrel at this time. He is never shooed or
kicked away. He is always the most disreputable animal of a people
noted for their impoverished canines. Lank and lean, with a cringing
expression of dog humility on his face, he contrives to spoil the
scene.
There is a noticeable pause. The line of Snake priests breaks into
pairs and, with a curious, half-stamping dance, they pass to the kisi.
The man on the right stoops, plunges his arm into the snake-hole, and
brings forth a snake. The dancer is humped over now, his body bent
forward, his head projecting. The one with him places an arm across his
shoulders, and with a feather-whip attracts the weaving head of the
reptile. The first dancer holds the snake by its middle for a moment,
and then places it in his mouth, permitting the two ends to dangle
freely.
Behind these two steps watchfully the “gatherer,” and follows them
about. With a humping irregular motion the pair dance around the plaza,
and finally the snake is dropped to the ground. The gatherer quickly
retrieves it, if it is a patient, well-behaved snake; but if it is a
rattler and acts unreasonably, proceeding to coil and sound its
warning, the gatherer swiftly acts with the deftness of a juggler. His
eyes never leave the defiant snake. He pinches a bit of meal from his
pouch and sprinkles it toward the unwilling symbol of the gods. Then he
waves his whip over the snake. If it strikes, he will let it alone for
a brief time. There in the little plaza is a fighting rattlesnake, a
vicious coiled spring, fangs darting, restless, angry. The dancers
avoid it. The crowd shrills its approval of the scene.
But the gatherer is watching. Soon the snake gives a quick wriggle and
is off, darting for the mesa edge, and those forming the crowd there
begin anxiously to shift their feet. Another second and the Indian has
pounced down on it, swishing the snake from under the very toes of the
spectators. He waves it through the air in the motion of his capture,
strokes it into limpness as he watches his pair of dancers. Then it
dangles from his left hand, and he proceeds to the next adventure.
Meantime, other couples have approached the kisi and have produced
their snakes. The differences in reptiles now attract attention. There
are long, thin, nervous snakes, and short, fat, sluggish ones. A shout
of amazement goes up when a very large specimen of bull snake is seen,
its tail almost trailing the earth. But varying snakes do not affect
the priests. The Antelope men continue the whirring of their gourds,
and with the Snake men the action becomes faster. Seven or eight
couples are now stamping around, and the gatherers have a busy time of
it.
And then comes the signal that the bag of the kisi is empty. All snakes
have been produced in the open, and danced with, and dropped, and
gathered up. Now two priests describe with meal a large circle on the
ground before the Dance Rock. The dancers approach and throw all the
snakes into this circle. They crowd around it as meal is sprinkled, and
perhaps some exorcism is muttered. For a second they poise there, as if
under a spell; and then certain appointed men thrust their hands into
the squirming mass, catch up as many snakes as possible, and rush from
the plaza to liberate the votaries in the far Desert.
Now one notes the reason for the tunnel leading through the houses to
the west. At First Mesa they may go north, south, and west from the
little plaza; but no dancer jumps off it to the east; the strict ritual
suffers a change to accommodate this natural disadvantage. He seizes
his allotted share of the snakes and proceeds along the edge to some
convenient trail, turning eastward in the lower valley. The uninformed
among the spectators have a happy faculty for packing themselves in
that tunnel. The Indian runner means to go through it, without pausing
or apologies, carrying an armful of active snakes. “Let them fall off”
is his motto.
This distribution of the snake messengers ends what one may term the
intriguing features of the ceremony. Soon the panting runners return to
engage in the so-called “purification” rites, the taking of the emetic;
and a number of the curious follow them to be in at the death. It is
not of importance that one should witness this part of the programme;
it is simply a matter of taste. Physicians may wish to time the potency
of desert brews. The priests are then washed from head to foot by the
women of the clan. Water is poured over them from large bowls.
Dripping, the priests disappear into their kiva. Soon the women are
hurrying there too, bearing in trays all sorts of viands. The dancers,
who have fasted, would absorb a bit of nourishment. God knows they have
earned it!
Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes, the celebrated ethnologist, writes that after
the Snake Dance of 1883 two of the liberated snakes were caught and
taken to the National Museum at Washington for examination. He states
that their fangs and poison-sacs were found to be intact. He does not
accept the belief that these Hopi Indians have an antidote for the
poison of rattlesnakes. It is his view that the desert rattler can
inflict a deadly bite only after coiling and lunging viciously on its
victim. And there is little to the theory that the snakes have been
drugged or dulled into lethargy, since I have many times seen the
rattlesnakes coil and fight wickedly. Several persons, particularly Mr.
Herbert F. Robinson, the Government Engineer for the Navajo and Hopi
country, claim to have seen Snake priests bitten in the dance. I could
not make such a statement. But it is possible that the paint with which
the priests are liberally daubed has, for snakes, a repugnant odor; and
having anointed their hands and arms, and especially their mouths,
faces, and necks with this ointment, they secure a certain immunity.
And the stroking of the snakes, when picked up, may explain the safety
of the gatherer. This action no doubt produces a partial paralysis of
the snake’s muscular system. But this does not answer for those who
thrust bare hands and arms into the snake-bag at the kisi.
If one must see a Snake Dance, the best show is at Walpi in years of
odd numbers. The ceremony is held also at Machongnovi, Chimopovi, and
Hotevilla. Since 1918 there has been no dance at Oraibi, perhaps
because of factional disputes, although a disciple of Christianity has
claimed part of the credit. There is a solemnity observed at Hotevilla,
among the reactionaries, with prophet Youkeoma, the second man in the
line of Antelope priests; but the men of Walpi preserve more of Indian
color and thrill of action in their performance. Perhaps they have
realized the advantage of a good show, well staged and costumed and
vigorously enacted. While they do not invite the tourists, they keep
them coming, and business in Snake Dance week is brisk along all lines.
Not all of the Hopi people are members of the Snake clan. Those of the
uninitiated are as diffident with rattlesnakes as the rest of us. This
lodge has difficulty in keeping up its membership. Sometimes a Hopi is
invited to join, or is ordered to report for duty in the Snake kiva,
and he declines this honor. It is well for him to remain away from
dances thereafter, or he may have to hold a punishment snake as a
penalty.
It was through the courtesy of Mr. John Lorenzo Hubbell, that early
pioneer and baronial trader of the Navajo Desert, that I chanced to
view the most secret of the Snake Dance rites, the baptism or washing
of the snakes in the kiva. This occurs in the morning of the day of the
public ceremony. Perhaps one might call it the consecration of the
messengers; for, as I have understood it, the snakes are the tribe’s
envoys to the gods, bearing its petition for rain and its thanks for
harvests.
Perhaps, as Moungwi, I might have achieved this success earlier, but it
was my method in dealing with the Hopi, an always suspicious people,
not to display an interest in their secrecies. Of necessity—or perhaps
I should say in good judgment—I had to police their dances, to prevent
possible clashes between the non-understanding Indian and the nearly
always unreasonable and overcurious tourist; but I have never asked an
Indian, anywhere, to give me an “inside” concerning his primitive
beliefs. Having to guide and often to judge that same Indian, it would
have been an unfair advantage to take of my position, and would at once
have classed me, the appointed mentor, as a piece of curiosity no
different from the white men he so often wrangled with. Moreover, I had
other means of acquiring information. The traders told me all they had
garnered through the many years of trafficking with Indians, and each
newcomer—tourist, artist, or itinerant official,—presented me with the
varying chaff of his very swift and gullible gleaning.
The always helpful Mr. Hubbell bridged this dilemma by inviting me as
his guest, and I could accept without losing caste. Hubbell had been
admitted to the kiva many years before. Then Dr. Fewkes in 1899, as he
relates, and since then the Indians have received Mr. Roosevelt,
General Hugh L. Scott, and a few others. Perhaps not more than a score
of white men have witnessed this ceremony.
In our little party were a visiting superintendent, an engineer of the
Desert Service, and Mr. Ford Harvey, son of the immortal Fred who
rescued so many hungry travelers along the Santa Fe in early times, and
to whom should be erected a monument of bronze.
From the poles of the kiva ladder flew the feather-plumes that signify
the progress of secret rites. An Indian met us at the top, and we filed
after him down the ladder, into the cool, dim atmosphere of that
underground rock-walled vault. It had a peculiar odor—perhaps an
earthy, perhaps a snaky smell.
Kivas usually are empty places. Bare and cold, unless filled with
eye-stinging smoke from firebrands, I had not found them inviting on my
rounds of the mesas. I had held councils in them when making the first
steps against factional religious persecution. Again I had sat in them,
chatting with the makers of costumes and drums, smoking their bitter
and powerful tobacco—afterward wishing sincerely I had not. Most often
the kiva is the club for retired old men of the tribe, lonely, feeble
fellows, where they curl up to drowse and sleep, or where they weave
some ceremonial scarf. It is not good form to idle in the neighborhood
of kivas when the feather-plumes are displayed, and one very
distinguished gentleman, who has been referred to as “the great
Caucasian marvel,” was most thoroughly bawled out by the chief Snake
Priest for seeking to introduce himself without first requesting leave.
The ladder ended on a stone platform, raised above the main kiva-floor.
In the corners of this platform stood large clay jars, and greeting us,
albeit silently, from the corners and about the jars, were snakes. Not
just a few snakes that had wandered out of their pottery containers,
but congested wads of snakes, piled carelessly in the corners of the
kiva, and with nothing to prevent their leaving when the spirit moved
them. However, they were now quiet, somnolent, save for beady eyes and
an occasional slithery movement that caused one to watch his step.
At the upper end of the kiva was an elaborate sand-painting after the
fashion of the Navajo, no doubt another adoption, of foreign origin. A
sand-painting is a mosaic-like picture of Indian symbols and fetishes,
worked out in colored sands. This was surrounded or fenced by peeled
wands, placed close together on end. And at this ceremonial altar
stood, practically nude, two of my schoolboys, bronzed lads of about
sixteen, who had taken part that morning in the sunrise race.
Under the ladder and on the main floor a number of older Indians were
grouped, having close to them large bowls of clay holding water or
other liquids. And these priests were arrayed for a ceremony. The
sacred-meal pouches were in evidence. Soon a chant was intoned. The
Hopi chants are primitive, but have in them an echo of Catholic
litanies. I have seen a Hopi priest anoint with and toss the sacred
meal just as his forbears saw the padres bless the people. The Hopi is
an assiduous adapter. And while listening to the chanting, I have often
expected to catch the response: “Ora pro nobis.” The padres were
sacrificed to the desert gods in that red revolt of 1680, but their
peaches dry each season on the pueblo housetops, and Hopi ceremonies
carry an unconscious echo of the black-robes who taught the solemnity
of ritual.
Around the walls of the kiva, at the height of one’s head, were wooden
pegs set in the stone, and draped over these were masks and costumes.
As my position at the end of the platform brought me close to one of
these bundles, I leaned against it and the wall, half turned, to give
an eye to the nearest snakes of my corner, and another eye to the
proceedings of the elders. A snake wriggled out from the pile and came
closer; but the Indian who had received us waved him back with a
feather-whip. Someone was watching that sector, and I grew more
confident.
We stood there for a little time in silence. From above came the noises
of the crowd, thronging through the village streets. One could look up
through the square opening of the entrance and see the blue Arizona
sky. The ladder was very comforting. Several of the guests sat down on
the edge of the platform, but I did not. I leaned comfortably against
my pile of regalia, and kept a wide-angled view of the whole interior.
Then one of the Indians crossed the platform, gathered a few snakes and
passed them swiftly to the old men at the bowls. They uttered
invocations, stretched the snakes out, and anointed them with meal, all
the while chanting in a low tone. A number of the men had lined up
against the wall, carrying rattles and insignia. They too began a
chant. And then suddenly the old men plunged the snakes into the water
of the bowls—a quick, unceremonious ducking; the choir raising its
chant to a savage crescendo. It was no longer rhythmic and solemn. It
was like a scream of death, a wild, unreasoning challenge that ended in
a blood-curdling shriek; and at that final cry the snakes were hurled
up the kiva, to fall on the sand-painting. The peeled wands were
knocked over by their swirling bodies. Somnolent before, the snakes now
waked up, and twisted about, seeking escape, their heads raised, their
tongues darting in and out. A hissing and whirring sounded. Their
movements in the sand caused the design to be obliterated.
Now came another handful of snakes, swiftly passed for the baptism, and
again the low chanting, but faster now, faster, and always that wild
ending of the chant, and the throwing of the reptiles. More and more
snakes squirmed on the wrecked sand-painting. All the wands were down
now. And in among the snakes, with a calmness that chilled the blood,
walked my two schoolboys, nude as Adam, hustling back to the sand those
that darted for the walls. Twice snakes reached the stone bench along
the kiva’s end and, climbing it, sought crevices of the upper wall.
Each time a boy reached for the disappearing truant and nonchalantly
dragged him back to his place in this wildest of pagan rites.
Finally all the snakes had been removed from our corners, and several
inches of them made a moving carpet where had been the mosaic. There
came a pause, a significant cessation of action, as if the priests had
reached an unexpected, unforeseen part of the service. There was a
quick consultation among the head-men. One of the boys, Edward, began
looking around. He went to the nearest peg and removed some of the
costumes, dropping a mask to the floor. He examined the mask. Then he
went to another peg and performed this same search. And then he came
straight toward me, at the end of the platform.
“What is it, Edward?” I asked him.
“We had sixty-five rattlesnakes, Mr. Crane,” he replied stolidly, “and
now we count but sixty-four. Let me look through those dresses you are
leaning against. That other one may be—”
“Excuse me,” I said hurriedly, as I went up the ladder.
XXI
DESERT BELASCOS
Of course all Indians should not be forced into the same mould.
Let us try to give each his chance to develop what is best in
him. Moreover, let us be wary of interfering overmuch with
either his work or his play. It is mere tyranny, for instance,
to stop all Indian dances. Some which are obscene or dangerous
must be prohibited. Others should be permitted, and many of
them encouraged. Nothing that tells for the joy of life, in any
community, should be lightly touched.
Roosevelt: A Booklover’s Holidays.
When I first read this, I thought of and began to compare the different
types of Indian dances and ceremonies I had witnessed: the Butterfly,
Basket, and Corn dances, the Snake and Flute Dances of the Hopi; the
Medicine Sings, and squaw dances, and the Ye-be-chai of the Navajo; the
colorful pageants of the Pueblos, after Catholic Mass is celebrated on
the name-days of their patron saints, and the fiesta begins; the
memorial ceremony of the Mohave, and their cremation of the dead. And
those slam-bang, whirlwind dances of the Sioux.
Some of these were commemorative; some were fixed ceremonials; some
were of little moment; some seemed nothing more serious than
masquerades; some were filled with superstition and had just a touch of
smoldering fanaticism under the veneer of paint and feathers. A few
were social gatherings, a break in the monotony of existence, having in
them “the joy of life.” And while all of the native dances should have
thrown around them a thin line of supervision and restraint, many of
them should be by no means “lightly touched.”
The Snake Dance may be dangerous, and it is certainly revolting at
first sight. And perhaps it should be prohibited. That is a point of
view. I am not thoroughly convinced of its danger to Indians, since I
never heard of a Hopi dying from snake-bite. I saw so many Snake Dances
that the edge has been dulled from my original thrill. If tourists were
denied the pleasure of seeing it, I believe the ceremony would soon
languish, and pass away entirely with the going of the elders from the
mesa stage. Certainly I sought to prevent its perpetuation through the
initiation of children, but without result, for I was unsupported in
this, and alone I feared my inability to stifle a pagan war.
But of those things that should be dealt with gently, the tiny shows
that the vacationist seldom sees and the Bureau has never heard of, I
recall the Dance of the Dolls.
One afternoon, at First Mesa, I came along a trail toward the witch’s
camp, meaning to start for home once the team was harnessed. I met an
Indian of the district walking with my interpreter, and was about to
give direction concerning the horses when the latter said:—
“He wants you to stay and see the Dolls’ Dance.”
Now I had quite a collection of Hopi dolls, those quaint figurines
carved with some skill from pieces of cottonwood, and dressed in the
regalia of twig and feather and fur to represent the various katchinas
of the clans. But I had never heard of a dance devoted to these little
mannequins.
“What sort of dance is that?” I asked.
“It is called the Dolls-Grind-Corn dance,” he replied.
“When—to-morrow?” thinking of those monotonous open-air drills, having
various names but scarcely to be distinguished one from the other.
“No. To-night, in the kiva.”
This interested me. I could see that the interpreter longed to remain
overnight among his people, and to take in this show.
“Well,” I said, “is it worth climbing that mesa in the dark?”
“I think you would like it,” he answered; “it is a funny little dance,
and the children go to see it.”
So I did not order up the team.
After supper, when the twilight had faded into that clouded blackness
before the stars appear, I scrambled after my guide up the mesa trail.
When we reached the end of that panting climb, the houses of the people
were murkily lighted by their oil lamps, but most of the householders
were abroad, going toward the various kivas. To the central one we
went, and down the ladder.
The place was lighted by large swinging lamps, borrowed for the
occasion from the trader, lamps that have wide tin shades and may be
quickly turned to brilliancy or darkness by a little wheel at the side.
I had expected to find it a gloomy place, whereas they had arranged
something very like the lighting of a theatre. It was a trifle
difficult to find a place in that crowded vault. The far end was kept
clear, but the two long sides and the ladder-end were packed with Hopi
women and their little ones. Just as I have seen in our theatres, the
children could scarcely repress their nervous interest, now sitting,
now standing on tiptoe, turning and watching, as if this would hasten
matters.
I seated myself on the lower rung of the ladder, believing this place
would be most desirable from my point of view, because from it I had a
view of the kiva’s centre and could most easily make my way to the
upper air when things became too thick. A crowded kiva is rather
foreign in atmosphere when filled to its capacity and with lamps going.
But I soon found that I would be disturbed. From above came the noise
of rattles and the clank of equipment, calls and the shuffling of feet.
A line of dancers descended upon me. I moved to let them pass into the
lighted centre-space. They were garbed in all the color and design of
Hopi imagination, and wore grotesque masks. They lined up, and I sensed
that their mission was one of merrymaking. Two clowns headed the band,
and soon had the audience convulsed. They hopped about, postured, and
carried on a rapid dialogue. There was a great deal of laughter.
I had my usual experience in trying to gain a knowledge of the show
through an interpreter, quite the same as that lady who accompanied an
attaché to hear a speech by Bismarck in the Reichstag. You will
remember that the visitor kept demanding interpretation, whereas the
attaché remained silent, intently listening, as the Iron Chancellor
droned on, monotonously voluble.
“What does he say?” asked the visitor for the fifth time.
“Madam,” replied the attaché, “I am waiting for the verb!”
And that is about as far as I ever got toward exact knowledge of the
clowns in any dance. I have tried it many times. The interpreter always
enjoyed the show for himself, first, and left me in outer darkness.
Occasionally he would attempt to explain some part of the horseplay in
progress, probably such simple portions as he thought my feeble
intellect would rise to.
“You see,” he would begin, pointing, “he is one of the uncles!”
And apparently there are always two, paternal and maternal, I suppose.
The uncle is the great man of the Hopi family. The father does not
amount to much—he can be divorced in a jiffy and, while the mother is
the household boss, she is always dominated by the grandmother, if
living, and dictated to by the uncle in matters concerning alliances
with other families. Perhaps one should call him a social arbiter. He
has a great deal to say about weddings, marriage portions, and the
like. Whenever I have watched the clowns at these smaller dances, and
have asked their rôles in the play, invariably they have been of the
uncles. Perhaps the Hopi in this manner square themselves at the
expense of the family martinet.
I could not see that there was anything to cause suspicion of evil in
this little scene. In old Navajo dances the clowns would often engage
in dialogue that interpreters feared to translate. This is the charge
too against the clowns of certain Pueblo and Zuni dances; and the
clowns of the Hopi have been known to indulge in antics that were not
elevating. I cannot bring myself to believe, however, that the clowns
of the Dolls’ Dance were relating anything other than crude witticisms,
for the little children laughed as loudly as the others, and it seemed
sheer fooling. Had a slapstick been in evidence, I should have been
sure of the nature of the proceedings; but the Indians have not
developed exactly this form of humor.
Then the dancers filed out, up the ladder, and away.
“They go to another kiva,” said my companion.
And almost immediately came another and different set of fun-makers.
They took the centre of the kiva and soon had all laughing at similar
jokes and grimaces. So, I thought, the old tiresome reel over again, to
be continued throughout the night. For I had seen this dancing in
relays last an entire day, only stopping for hasty meals and new
costumes or make-up, and to one who does not understand the differences
in scenes it becomes an intense boredom. As I once heard a man remark:
“They are three days making ready for one day’s dancing, and the rest
of the week getting over it.” This critic was not too severe, for there
is much to be said about the time lost in Hopi spectacles, when one is
seriously engaged in thrusting them along the pathway of progress. I
arose and was about to depart; but my interpreter pulled me down.
“Wait!” he urged. “They will put out the lights.”
This time the dancers did not leave the kiva. One of them came to the
lamp just above me, and at a signal all the lights were dimmed. The
kiva was in thick darkness. One could hear childish sighs of
expectation. Perhaps the lights were off for thirty seconds, although
it did not seem so long. Then they flared up, to reveal a curious
little scene that had been constructed in the dark. I had not noticed
that the dancers packed anything in with them. The setting may have
been in that crowded kiva all the time; but where had it been
concealed?
At any rate, it was a queer little show, quite like that of our old
friend Punch. There was a painted screen of several panels, and in the
centre ones were two dolls, fashioned to represent Hopi maidens. Before
each was the corn-grinding metate. And farther extended on the floor
before them and their stone tubs was a miniature cornfield—the sand,
and the furrows, and the hills of tiny plants.
Hardly had the first sigh of pleased surprise from the children died
away, when, even to my astonishment, the dolls became animated, and
with odd life-like motions began to grind corn, just as the women grind
daily in the houses of the villages, crushing the hard grain between
the stone surfaces of the metate and the mano. These mannequins worked
industriously, and with movements not at all mechanical. Then a little
bird fluttered along the top of the screen, piping and whistling.
Shrills of delight from the youngsters, to be followed by audible
gasps, for from a side panel came twisting a long snake, to dart among
the corn hills of the scenic field, and then to retreat backward
through the hole from which it had appeared. These actions followed
each other in quick succession. The fellow behind the screen was quite
skillful in working his marionettes for the delight of those children
of the tribe.
Perhaps in all this there was some deep-laid symbolism, checking
rigidly with the North Star and the corn harvests of the past and
future. Perhaps it was a primitive object-lesson, to encourage thrift
and industry as a bulwark against famine. But if you ask me, I saw in
it exactly a repetition of the district schoolhouse or the country
chapel at holiday time, when Cousin Elmer obliges with a droll
exhibition of whiskers and sleighbells and cotton snowflakes. Sometimes
the Hopi at these festivals for children give them presents too, and a
handful of piki-bread bestowed by a clown, however bizarre his facial
appearance, has all the gift-wonder of our childhood Santa Claus and
his treasure-pack.
Touch gently! They—all children will be gone soon enough. A little
while and you can rest from anæmic policies and sophist sermons. The
Desert will be lonely without its simple shepherds and their simple
customs. Those who strain to inherit it, through legislation, will pack
with them no poetry and attract no culture. Great cattle- and
sheep-camps, monopolies, grimy oil-rigs, and yawning coal-drifts will
mar the Desert. A few old books, a few paintings,—their creators gone,
too,—will picture what you once possessed, and experimented with, and
auctioned off. For one Shelton, discredited perhaps by a clamor of
sanctimonious mediocrity, you have entrusted these people and their
empire to twenty Bumbles. Twice you have sought to partition their
community life, to make swift the end, to hasten the advent of the
speculator who follows estates and bids for the possessions of the
dead. At length,—because at length you will succeed in selling the
desert heritage,—there will be only the museum case, and dust, and a
ticket.
The days of approach to a major celebration in the Desert, such as the
Snake Dance, were passed in a ferment of preparation and a stew of
unrest. All employees would be imposed on in one way or another. Some
would be called on to act as stewards, others would surrender their
quarters to house unappreciative idlers. And certainly the men would
have to drag cars from muddy sloughs, ferry them across dangerous
washes, repair them when broken, and perhaps by main strength push some
into havens of rest. Certain camps would have to be arranged, and some
supplied. No! we did not welcome these extra duties, so often repaid
with meagre thanks.
But we did enjoy meeting cordial people, both neighbors and visitors,
who, catching the holiday freedom of the moment, invigorated by the
tonic of the fresh desert air, gave us entertainment of a kind that was
relief from long monotonies.
The Snake Dance ends very close to sunset. The crowds leave the
mesa-top, down the trails afoot or mule-back, down the rocky roads in
rough wagons, a scrambling multitude. The sun is gilding the western
walls of First Mesa, throwing the east-side roads and trails in shadow,
and above, the ruined crest of the headland loom black in a gorgeous
halo. The farther eastern valley is bathed in a strange lemon light.
The far-away northern capes gleam luminously in scarlet and gold, and
then suddenly are gone. Huh-kwat-we, the Terrace of the Winds, pales in
lavender and grayish green. Twilight, with its mysterious desert hush,
steals over Hopi-land. Something has been fulfilled in accordance with
an ancient prophecy. The desert gods have been appeased.
Soon it is dark, and stars appear as vesper candles. And then, all
about the foot of the great fortress-like mesa, lighting the sand
dunes, gleaming warmly through the peach trees, grow camp-fires. Where
is usually a heavy silence at evening, broken only by sheep bells, now
one hears laughter, many voices, the sound of the chef at work; and the
smell of cooking rises. Coffee and bacon, desert fare, spread their
aroma, and a ravenous hunger comes to one. Here is a tiny group about a
tented auto, there amid horses and harness and camp dunnage are thirty
around one board. “Come and get it!”
I recall incidents of my introduction to these scenes. Armijo, the
trader’s relative, had brought his treasured violin. I heard its tones
from the trail, and when I came to Hubbell’s camp, there a group of
them, musicians of the posts, were making ready to match their skill
against the melody that tourists bring. Supper put away, the concert
began.
“How do you like this?” asked the master of the bow, and as he swept
the strings, that saddest of memory songs cried poignantly, a song fit
for a desert night and a desert camp: La Golondrina! Such harmonies of
double-stopping I had seldom heard. It seemed to me—or was it desert
magic?—that Kreisler could do no more. Silence. And then applause from
fifty camps.
And Ed’s guitar. Soon the lilting airs of old fandangos would sing
through the stunted trees, and one could imagine that the long-dead
children of the padres made fiesta.
“Now, Doctor,” said someone.
“What do you play, Doctor?” I asked.
“I play the banjo,” he replied—I thought with a shade of mockery in his
voice. Now I had just heard the Spaniard’s violin sob a song that had
swept a nation, and Ed’s lightsome Mexican airs were no mean music for
a summer camp. Night, under the old trees and in the shadow of the mesa
of the gods, brings the romance of serenades, especially soothing after
a long, tiresome day.
But—a banjo! That thumpety, plankety, plunkety thing! I was sorry I had
spoken. He would oblige with something to fit clogs and the levee, and
the whole atmosphere of that evening would vanish, never to return! The
doctor opened a case.
“What would you like to hear?”
That is a terrible question from a banjoist, isn’t it?
“Well—what do you play?”
“Oh! the—anything—popular classic stuff. Now there’s the Melody in F or
Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, Schubert’s Serenade, the Fifth Nocturne—”
“Great God!” I cried. “On a banjo!”
I think he pulled this little joke on all strangers, for, after
allowing it thoroughly to soak in, he brought that wonder instrument
closer to the fire and began strumming the strings of it until its
resonant cadences hushed all the noises of the camps. Then, softly
through the grove, sounded the Melody in F, in organ tones.
Of course you will perceive that I am no musician and no critic. I have
not the ear of the one, nor the language of the other. I am simply one
of those who like to hear what I like—hopeless. The Andante from the
Sonata Pathétique haunted and eluded me for years and, but for a
wandering pianist disguised as an investigator, I might have classed it
with a dream. Sordid duties dull one to accept coarser things on a
phonograph.
“Yes,” said the doctor, “I have played through the East and on Canadian
circuits, but I don’t care for the stage. I took up concert work,
traveling with glee clubs and orchestras, but that wasn’t much better.
Hurried life. I like the quiet places.”
And he was a doctor in the Indian Service!
Someone called: “Play it again!” And he played it again—on a banjo!
Down under the hill were camped a bunch of troubadours that once had
trooped with a second company, passing as the Original New York Cast.
By the light of a lantern they played accompaniments on an old
melodeon, dragged from the schoolhouse. A rousing chorus, and then a
tenor voice: the Irish Love Song. Followed a roar of applause that
brought drowsy Indians to the mesa edge. Strange Americanos! Strange
Bohannas, who mock at drums and chanting, and who then make such queer
music and many cries.
And by midnight the fires would die down, one by one, to mere glows.
The pueblo lights, high up along the mesa cornice, would be blotted
out. Beyond the camps, only the sound of horses munching, the bray of a
desert nightingale from the upper corrals, or the canter of a mounted
policeman through the sand, as he gave a last look around before
rolling in his blanket. Then silence under the dark star-strewn sky, a
tranquil desert silence, to be broken, perhaps—who knows?—by ghostly
sandals, as the padre walked to see that curious company, asleep in his
one-time garden, guests of a pagan feast.
XXII
ON THE HEELS OF ADVENTURE
I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual
flutter, on the heels, as it seems, of some adventure that
should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to
bed at night and called me up again at morning in one
unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me
in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come;
but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen’s
Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the
green shutters of the inn at Burford.
—Stevenson: A Gossip on Romance
Adventure! The Standard Dictionary divides it, like Gaul, into three
parts, peculiarly interrelated, yet thinly divisible from each
other:—(1) A remarkable or hazardous experience; an unexpected or
exciting occurrence. (2) A hazardous or uncertain undertaking; a daring
feat. (3) The encountering of risks; daring and hazardous enterprise.
And the writing of it has come to signify swift dramatic action, having
a spirited and triumphant finale.
But life in the Desert,—for that matter, life anywhere,—does not
advance to a whiplash conclusion. One may not dismiss unwelcome
characters simply because convenience or stark justice demands Finis.
Despite taut emotions and unsavory possibilities, they go on living and
muddling up the action; and the sun rises, and to-morrow is another
day. My personal experiences among the Indians in the lonely places
have not been exactly hazardous or desperately daring from my point of
view, indeed, not half so venturesome as nights I have spent in New
York. One will have to accept these reminiscences as simply unusual and
I hope not uninteresting happenings, with what of thrill they may
inspire. Would you insist that I lug in ghosts or bandits? Should I
stage a massacre? Perhaps I could contrive to have Youkeoma abduct the
trader’s daughter, and arrange a nick-of-time rescue by the cavalry.
But Youkeoma was interested in ceremonies only, as he told me, and the
trader had no daughter. I should therefore libel a sincere pagan and a
bachelor business-man.
Now it strikes me that there is more of nervous drama in Colonel
Scott’s going alone into a half-hostile camp, facing down a band of
sullen fellows, and coming out with obedience to his decisions. It
strikes me, too, that in these desert camps that have known so little
of discipline, with no force in the offing and no hope of one, is the
real drama of an Agent’s life. I can relate my kind of thrill, but
there will be little of dramatic conclusions. Nothing of wild rides,
and pursuits, and ambuscades; nothing of foiled villains, and certainly
nothing of beautiful maidens in distress. This last the Indian Service
does not invite, and if accidentally acquired does not long retain.
The nearest to that sort of adventure I ever came was in meeting the
mail-hack one cold sunset, far from the Agency. It was driven by a
half-frozen Mexican who could speak no English beyond: “Buenas dias,
señor. Mucho frio. No savvy.”
There was a pleasing young woman with him, who said she was a teacher,
ordered to report to the Agent at Keams Cañon. Our meeting-place was
about thirty miles from the last post-house, and quite ninety miles
from the railroad. I can imagine how strange and timid one feels under
such conditions. It had been a bleak day, and a keen night was coming
on. My auto would reach the Agency hours before those two weary bronks
could plod in; so I introduced myself, and said she would travel
quicker to the Agency with me. She looked me over: dingy hat, rusty
puttees, red nose, everything—and decided to remain with the voluble
Mexican.
I can remember leaving Chin Lee one winter’s night, black shadows on
the snow-covered desert and a razor-edged wind coming straight out of
that huge funnel, Cañon de Chelly, to go seventy-five miles to Kayenta,
the most isolated post-office and trading-post in the United States. I
had been bluffed into it by my friend, the Water-Witch, who wanted to
save the morrow’s daylight.
“Can you stand an all-night hike?” he asked, solicitously. “Sing out if
you can’t. There’s a good bed here, and—”
“I’m game for it, if you are,” I said, but without enthusiasm.
The engine of his emaciated Ford clucked, and the snow crunched under
its wheels. For the first hour a brisk conversation kept us illuminated
and fairly warm. Then it grew deadly cold, with that relentless,
piercing cold to be experienced only at night in those cruelly bleak,
windswept, desert wastes. I bit down on my pipe to prevent my teeth
castanetting. I felt of my face to be sure it had not cracked off. And
we rode on and on, paralleling the dim Black Mountain barricade.
Finally, with bitter exasperation, the Witch called out: “Dammit all!
ain’t you cold?”
“Froze,” I gasped.
“Well, there’s a trading-post hiding in this side cañon, if I can find
the road to it. You’ll never sing out. I give up. Let’s make for camp
before we both perish.”
I uttered choking sounds of thanksgiving. And it drearily seemed, for a
space, that he would not be able to find the trail. The snow was
unbroken in the hills. Then we caught a gleam from the black, gave a
hail, and found a cedar-fire welcome.
Those are Arizona adventures.
One may encounter them in boggy flats, or in blinding snowstorms; in
seeking to cross a river in springtime without too much knowledge of
the ford; in facing the hot sand’s lash that stings as powdered glass;
with exhausted horses and far from the town, on hearing the crunch of a
drive-pinion twenty miles the wrong side of home; at nightfall; at
midnight, noon, or dawn. The blush of morning on snow-encrusted cliffs,
the wistful mysteries of summer twilight, the burnished glories of an
autumn sunset, have no appeal then. Simple struggles with the elements
and distances of the lonely Desert, when tired out, cold, hungry. They
are the day’s work, hard, exhausting work. And one does not record such
things in Annual Reports.
But, since adventures are in demand, perhaps I can resurrect a thrill
or two from the notebook. Long ago I listed them as scenery for
stories, meaning to import a few interesting and even beautiful types
as characters, for the honest-to-God, on-the-ground people steadily
refused to become heroic. Relatively mild affairs these, with only two
persons killed, two crippled up a bit, some little blood spilled, and
lots of nervous imagining. My men were uneasy at the time, and I most
scared of all.
If I had thrust these episodes on a New York editor, out of their order
and true atmosphere, garnished with a picaresque dressing, he might
have praised them; but I was not among those killed, and reflection
urges that this would probably make a difference to him. Aside from
having a thumb sprained when an angry Indian tried to wrench it off my
hand, I was not physically hurt; but my nervous system was slightly
warped each time, and I have been reported on as an efficient, but very
profane man. Quite so. I will admit that I never took any saints along
on these trips.
And in every single one of these affairs, the enemy triumphed. “The man
or the hour had not yet come”; and while I have had mounted messengers
of both sexes come to me on both frosty and tepid nights, their
errands, after due investigation, and however irritating, could not be
classed as tragic; but there were times when “the feeling of it had me
to bed and up again” in a round of anticipation and some little
suspense, decidedly not so pleasurable as romantic Stevenson found his.
One undertaking began with Limping Joe paying attention to
Do-hahs-tahhe’s wife. This was not appreciated by either of them, and
the husband first warned, and then threw Limping Joe bodily out of his
neighborhood. This angered the potential home-wrecker, and he returned
with a light rifle. Do-hahs-tahhe was sacking corn in his field close
to his hogan. He saw Limping Joe approaching, and while .22’s are
rabbit-guns, they sometimes go off when least expected and injure
people. Again Do-hahs-tahhe flung himself on Limping Joe; he wrenched
the rifle away from him, threw out the single shell, and smashed the
stock over a stone. Observing then that he held only the barrel, he
whirled it around his head and let go of it. It winged off, end over
end, and down into the wash.
Limping Joe went down into the wash and found the gun. He examined the
lock and saw that a shell would go into it. Pointing it in the air, he
pulled the trigger. Bang! it was all right, even though it had no stock
for the shoulder. Then Limping Joe put in another shell, stalked up the
bank, and shot Do-hahs-tahhe through the lungs.
Therefore the Indian Agent had to forward one physician, one
stenographer, one notary public, and a few police, promptly, hurriedly,
to take the man’s dying statement: the doctor to tell him he was dying,
the stenographer to report him, and the notary to swear them all. The
police meantime grabbed Limping Joe. Do-hahs-tahhe died in a few hours
and Limping Joe sat in the guardhouse with gyves upon his wrists, also
shackles securing his ankles, and a log-chain connecting the two
contrivances. I did not intend that he should—and he did not—get away.
This was in Territorial days, and a Reservation criminal-case came,
strangely enough, within the jurisdiction of the Territorial courts. I
sent for the county sheriff, and he arrived with one huge deputy, both
of them heavily armed.
“Why the arsenal?” I asked of the officer, who had a reputation for
fearlessness.
“Well, I have had Indian prisoners taken from me before,” he said.
Now there had been some little rumor of dissatisfaction among the
relatives and friends of Limping Joe. They felt he should be tried by
the Agent, quite as one who had purloined a sheep, and they expected
that he would receive a mild type of punishment. Gossip had it that
they would oppose his being removed from the Desert.
“I’ll go with you to the Reservation line,” I said to the sheriff, “and
this side of it, they will have to take him away from me.”
“Very good,” replied the officer, “because I wouldn’t fight for him.”
And I made up my mind that neither would I.
We started with the stars still bright in the sky, three o’clock of a
morning, to cover the thirty-five miles to the line. The sheriff and
deputy rode in a buckboard, the prisoner with them. An Indian boy drove
my buggy, and I sat with a gun on the seat. Nothing happened. We did
not see a Navajo on the trip. After lunching at the line, we parted
with the officers, and prepared to return that same day. Seventy miles
for the team would be a hard drive and would bring us in late at night;
but this is in the day’s work too.
All that afternoon the horses jogged homeward. The prisoner off my
hands, I dropped the gun into a bag under the seat. It was getting on
to dark when the team began wearily climbing the last long rise that
separated us from the drop down into Keams Cañon. There was a fringe of
cedars at the top, black as spectres against a dull red sky. The horses
plodded nearer and nearer to the crest of the ridge. One could see the
branches of the old trees now, as if etched on the sky’s plate.
Then came a call, a Navajo cry. My boy pulled in the team with a sudden
wrench. He had been watching the edge of the hill. And from the trees
four or five men stepped quickly into the road. I made a swift clutch
on the seat for the gun, and then realized that it could not be there.
The bag had slipped back into the boot, and was mixed with halters,
nose-bags, and the clutter of a desert buggy. There was a moment—it
seemed a week—of tense chilliness, while they lingered in the dusk, as
if waiting for us. One cannot wheel a buggy in a desert road. It was
either stop or go on. Then they crossed into the cedars, and we heard
them moving off, talking in Navajo. One began to sing. My Indian boy
laughed as if relieved.
“The miners,” he said.
And sure enough, they were my own coal-working gang that had quit the
drift at five o’clock and had reached that point on their way home. But
I had thought, and so had my driver, that friends of Limping Joe were
about to greet us. It was just the right time in the evening, and just
the right color in the sombre landscape; and they had stepped from the
trees, half-waiting, in just that manner.
Limping Joe? The court treated him with customary severity. For this
deliberate, cold-blooded murder he received the terrible sentence of
three years in the penitentiary, and had quite six months off for good
behavior. During his protracted absence I issued rations to his aged
parents and, after quite a little correspondence, some of it acrid in
tone, convinced my Washington critics that I had not persecuted the
poor fellow.
The East contains very few officials having the courage of Roosevelt,
who wrote, with respect to the Navajo particularly:—
These are as a whole good Indians ... although some are very bad
and should be handled rigorously....
For the last quarter of a century the lawless individuals among
them have done much more wrong (including murder) to the whites
than has been done to them by lawless whites. The lawless Indians
are the worst menace to the others among the Navajo and Utes; and
very serious harm has been done by well-meaning Eastern
philanthropists who have encouraged and protected these criminals.
And Francis E. Leupp, one-time Commissioner of Indian Affairs, held
this view:—
Agents and other Government officials, when of the best type, have
done most good; and when not of the right type have done most evil;
and they have never done any good at all when they have been afraid
of the Indians or have hesitated relentlessly to punish Indian
wrongdoers.
Apart from the administration period of these two men, few Indian
Agents have expected to receive support in any effort thoroughly to
punish Indian criminals in the Desert. The tone of the Indian Bureau
this last decade has been largely one of compromise and apology: with
superiors in office; to sentimentalists; with and to discontented or
stupid or evil Indians who blocked progress. Annually, when seeking
appropriations, it has apologized to Congress for asking, and then
apologized most humbly when denied. Charged with the protection and
welfare of incompetent human beings, one would think it dealt in wooden
dolls. Inconsistent, and of little vision, wastefully parsimonious,
ignoring sage advice, ready to compromise, it has been a poor source
for justice and a sorry judge of men. Of timely intelligence it has
demonstrated little, and of sincerity, less. To manœuvre in the winds
of expediency, to trim sail for maintenance in office, to drift
hopefully, has been its course and policy. The distant field has viewed
such variable charts with suspicion and dismay.
Perhaps a parable may prove amusing.
“Colonel” Oldhouse, who had about reached the retirement age, suspected
all new-fangled methods. Behind his desk rested an old hand-made
army-chest, strapped and locked to withstand the strains and bruises of
frontier travel. The Colonel dated from those days when the stage ran
“to the States,” and Santa Fe was an outpost of progress. In that chest
reposed his warrants and accounts, neatly arranged, jacketed, and
briefed. He could go to it in the dark and instantly find Voucher 137
for the second quarter of 1889.
“Colonel,” said a very young man, “Why don’t you order some files for
your papers, with sliding drawers, and rods, and—”
The Colonel snorted.
“They’re no good,” he snapped; “the damned things are made by
machinery!”
Exactly, Colonel; you have accurately described the ineffectiveness of
a filing-case.
XXIII
THE RED BOOTLEGGERS
And I will make it felony to drink small beer.—King Henry VI
The heart of the Enchanted Desert, consisting of the Hopi Reserve and a
wide strip of Navajo country surrounding it as a frame, was not
troubled by the liquor problem among its natives so long as the State
of Arizona remained generously wet. The Hopi Indians have no use for
liquor, and will not tolerate it. On one occasion men of the mesas, who
were without authority to act as policemen, arrested and brought in a
Navajo who had simply exhibited a suspicious bottle; a very singular
thing for Hopi to do, since they are not bold, even when commissioned.
For years Hopi and Navajo freighters packed Government stores from the
railroad town of Holbrook, distant eighty miles from the Agency and
nearly fifty of them outside the reservation, without engaging in
sprees or bootlegging. The Navajo rather likes his beverages, and they
do not improve him as a neighbor; but drunkenness was rare even among
the Navajo in those days.
When the State went dry, the acquisition of liquor presented something
of adventure to those who were naturally lawless. And it was not long
before cargoes of cheering fluids began to arrive in the Navajo country
from New Mexico. The town of Gallup became a point of interest for
Indians who never before had visited it. Gallup is one hundred and five
miles from the Hopi Agency, and of course contraband is not packed
along highroads. When the “special officers” of the Indian Liquor
Service descended on Gallup, the Navajo organized relays to serve the
back country; and the special officers did not follow into the lonesome
places. One might be sure that at every Navajo gathering there would be
boozing, and at points one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles from
the source, and that same distance from special officers. The smugglers
would hide the liquor beyond the great circle of campers, in the black
of some thicket, and along in the early morning hours, when chance
visitors had departed and watchers were tired out, the bibulous would
appear in various stages of intoxication. They were then dangerous.
My police force consisted of eight Indians, half of them Navajo. This
was the “army” granted me in 1911, with due regard for Colonel Scott’s
recommendation that I should have twenty-five men headed by a white
officer. And in 1921, ten years after that first recommendation,
Major-General Scott, retired, of the Board of Indian Commissioners,
reviewed the Hopi-Navajo situation, and again reported:—
In 1882 an Executive Order set apart 2,472,320 acres (3863 square
miles) of land for the Moqui Reservation, for the use and occupancy of
the Hopi and such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior might
designate.
At that time someone with a ruler drew on a map a parallelogram which
represented an area, approximately 75 by 55 miles, for a reservation,
without the least regard to topographical and ethnological conditions,
and misnamed it the “Moqui Reservation.”
It is quite apparent that in 1882 the authorities in Washington either
were densely ignorant of the situation in this country at that time, or
were utterly indifferent to it; and by laying out the reservation with
a desk ruler and an utter disregard of the welfare of the Hopi, they
laid the foundations for trouble and suffering which have developed a
situation that calls for remedial action by the Indian Office.
This whole land is semi-arid, and a large portion of it is absolute
desert. The Navajo are aggressive and independent. There is no doubt
that the majority of those on the Moqui Reserve have come in from all
sides with a deliberate purpose of taking the grazing land which
rightfully belongs to the Hopi. When a Navajo sees a Hopi with anything
he wants, he takes it, and there is no recourse.
For years this preventable situation has continued. In 1911 I was sent
by President Taft to Keams Cañon with troops, to enforce some
regulations of the Indian Office. I then found the Navajo encroaching
on Hopi land and mistreating the Hopi Indians. The Agent, at that time,
was given but three policemen, too poorly paid to attract the right men
with which to maintain order on a reservation having the area of an
empire. I then recommended that he be given twenty-five well-paid
policemen with a white chief. The number was increased to eight without
change of compensation, which number has lately been reduced to six.
This statement is enough to show the absurdity of any expectation that
the superintendent can keep order. The superintendent is powerless to
maintain the dignity of his office, with the result that the authority
and dignity of the Indian Office and of the United States are made a
mock over a large section of Arizona.
You see, my successor was having his troubles too with the gentle
feudists, and the Hopi were petitioning as usual. So the Office changed
the name of the Reservation.
In addition to the eight men that had been granted me, several of the
range employees were commissioned as special officers of the Indian
Liquor Service. Perhaps I should say, “Deputy special-officers of the
Service for the suppression of the liquor traffic among Indians.” But
what is a title among friends? And the commission was a splendid
gratuity, carrying no extra compensation, whereas the employee so
acting, in a true missionary spirit, simply risked his life. Few men
care for this work, and fewer are zealous at it. Those who came into
the regular Service as farmers or stockmen did not relish finding
themselves drafted as policemen. It is dangerous work among such
Indians as the Navajo, and the man, white or Indian, who accepts this
duty expects assurance of consideration and backing should anything
unpleasant occur. And in time they all heard of the Walter Runke case,
plus the charming experiences of that Agent’s faithful subordinates.
Several times my white deputies, aided by Indian police, made arrests
in camps in the wee sma’ hours, and had their prisoners taken from
them. Several times they managed to deliver prisoners at the Agency,
and the apology of a guardhouse failed to retain them. After I had the
window-bars reënforced and the door double-grated, and chained a few
worthies to the wall, the effect of punishment slightly improved. But I
could do this only after having procured the guilty ones, and the
hunting of them was becoming more and more dangerous. One night,
between the hours of ten and two, I searched a number of Navajo camps
in the north, seeking an escaped prisoner. This was probably a
hazardous proceeding, for the innocent Indians felt aggrieved at the
invasion of their privacy, and the guilty had the pleasure of
outwitting me—a very easy performance.
When next a dance was advertised, I assembled the Indian police, the
judges, and a dozen of the influential head-men or chiefs of the tribe.
I counseled them all to assist in this campaign against liquor, which
was ruining their young men; and this they promised to do. Especially
were the older chiefs earnest about it. They did not wish the tribe to
suffer discredit, with the strong probability of a few murders to boot.
About twenty men departed to the place of the dance, all pledged to
exert their very best grade of moral suasion, fatherly counsel, and
peaceful penetration.
Two days later a squad of indignant head-men assembled in my office.
They were evidently angry about something; and the spokesman talked
plainly.
“We have failed,” he said. “After midnight the drunkards began to
appear, and dance and shout and annoy decent people. Several were
arrested by the police, but they were supported by others, and the
police could do nothing without fear of hurting someone. Then we old
men undertook to shame them. They rose against us all, and drove us
headlong from the camp—police, judges, chiefs. This matter places us in
a shameful position before our people. We want you to write to
Washington for soldiers. They have sent soldiers here before, and they
can do so again. We need them. You tell Washington that.”
But just at that time Washington had its hands full of typewriters,
holding the Germans to strict accountability on paper; and one Villa
was scouting along the Border.
My remaining hope was to trap the smugglers before they reached the
scene of disposal. And following this method, it came about that
One-eyed Dan and his partner, hailing from the Fort Defiance district,
were arrested as they traveled north on my reservation. They had a
trunk loaded with the most diabolical booze. It was in standard
bottles, with all seals intact; but the bottoms had been plugged by an
electric process, and the good stuff replaced with a concoction that
suggested Battle-axe tobacco in a solution of nitric acid. Two drinks
of this would cause a jack rabbit to assault a bobcat. And for this
enthusiasm Navajo Indians would cheerfully pay thirty-five dollars the
quart.
We lost little time in questioning these fellows. The Federal Court was
in session at Prescott, Arizona. One-eyed Dan et al., arrested at noon,
were delivered at the Agency by two o’clock; and by three, autos were
rolling with these gentry and witnesses and the evidence, toward the
railroad. We would catch the night train, and make a swift job of it;
one day peddling in the empire, the next in court and ready for
sentence. Dan and his compadre were made comfortable in a back seat,
handcuffed, and shackled together. A Navajo will not hesitate to leap
from a car if free, and then it is either let him go or wing him. It
doesn’t pay to wing him.
But we were delayed. One cannot make an average twenty miles per hour
through that country, and it was close to six o’clock when we reached
the Indian Wells trading-post, just across the reservation line. All
through that district the Navajo are settled upon alternate sections of
land governed by the Leupp Indian Agency, and it is not “reservation”
of a solid block. The intervening sections are “railroad lands,” bonus
grants for building what is now the Santa Fe system. In this fashion
the Government gave the first railway a very large part of the
Southwest, a seemingly unimportant and nonproductive country at that
time, and one could find Santa Fe titles forty miles either side of its
tracks. The Indians knew nothing of these paper records, and roamed
indiscriminately with their camps and sheep, wrangling about water with
range cattlemen who had leased from the railroad, viewing with
suspicion those few men who bought outright; and Washington found
it—still finds it—“a very perplexing question.”
The trading-post was closed, its owner at supper. But sitting on the
stone doorstep was a dejected Navajo who appeared to have had a
desperate and losing battle. His head, face, and shirt were covered
with blood, some of which had dried; and some of the fresh he was still
trying to staunch. Just then the trader appeared.
“Glad you arrived,” he said, seeming relieved. “I was wondering what to
do about this. I saw the whole affair. This man fought with two Navajo
off there in the flat. They were through here several days ago, going
to the railroad for liquor. Seems that they got back with it all right,
and wouldn’t give this chap his share. Anyway, they fought it out,
beating him over the head with their forty-fives. I’ve been washing his
scalp this last half-hour.”
He could give the names of the two, and the location of their home
camp.
“Just back in the hills,” he said, waving. “Not more than two miles at
most. They ought to be cinched.”
“It’s not my jurisdiction,” I said. “Their Agent is fifty miles away,
and one hundred miles roundabout the railroad.”
“Time he gets here,” said the trader, “booze and all will be gone, and
may be another scrap or two; like as not, murder done.”
“Have they been gathering for a sing?” I asked.
“No, nothing scheduled like that. They’re running north into your
country, peddling a little along the way.”
Now it looked as if someone should do something without waiting for
telegrams and a handful of printed tracts. I had One-eyed Dan already
in hand, and three “special deputies” to assist in the capture of those
who had trimmed the fellow on the doorstep. The injured man agreed to
identify and to appear against them. We would bag the whole outfit, and
stand four in court next day. The trail was warm, and the Leupp Agent
could not hope to arrive before the next afternoon. And it was only two
miles over the hill.
“We’ll have some supper, and then get those fellows, if you” (meaning
the trader) “will show the road.”
“I sure will,” he agreed.
After a meal, he led the way in his car, and we followed. Two miles
over the hill! It is true we found one deserted camp. And then we went
on and on. The orders were, silence, and lights out. The road into the
Castle Butte country is winding, over little steep-pitched hills and
down through narrow washes. When we had gone five miles, deep night had
shut down, lighted only by a misty moon that rather obscured things in
those twisted little vales and defiles. Suddenly the trader stopped his
car.
“I believe that’s one of them,” he called.
Ahead of us showed a pony. Two of the deputies jumped out and ran
forward, to find a man and a boy on the one horse. Off came the man,
and the boy too. At the car he was identified as one of the assailants.
The pony was turned loose to graze. The man joined One-eyed Dan et al.
in the rear seat, another pair of handcuffs making the three secure in
one squad.
But we had reckoned without the boy. He was about ten years old, and
these things seemed to him as mysterious, not to say alarming. When he
realized that strange men had chained up his kinsman, he raised a
soul-stirring bawl to Heaven. It was no time or place for explanations,
so we gagged him with a handkerchief and prepared to go on.
“How much farther?” I asked the guide.
“Just over the next hill.”
“Well, this speedometer says we have come seven miles.”
“From the next pitch we shall see the camp,” he assured me,
confidently.
“How many live there?”
“Two families.”
And from the next rise we could see the light of a fire.
“It looks like a larger camp than that,” I told him. “Are you sure
there is no sing going on?”
“Not a sign of it these last several days. That fire’s in the corral,
just beyond their hogans.”
“Then run all three cars fairly close to the gate of it. Keep these
prisoners in the last one, back in the shadow, and don’t make a show of
guns. I’ll go in and investigate. If you fellows hear a row, you can
then come up.”
The light of the fire grew brighter as we crept on, driving the cars as
noiselessly as possible, and one learns to do that in the Desert. The
corral was a large one, the logs set on end, and the firelight streamed
through the crevices. One could not see inside until very close. About
twenty yards from the gate or entrance we lined the cars, throwing the
headlights on that opening. It is trying to face a brilliant auto-lamp,
and those behind it have an advantage. I jumped from the step and went
quickly forward, carrying a quirt.
In a strange country and among strange Indians, a gun may prove a
dangerous weapon; but that does not prevent one from carrying a quirt
having a loaded grip.
If anyone had caught the boy’s cries or had heard our approach, there
was no sign of it. Apparently there was no one to hear. The place
seemed deserted. Outside the corral, one could see only a silent camp,
untenanted, noiseless, painted by a great wave of brilliant light. No
dogs started up. It was very strange, and decidedly unlike most Navajo
camps.
At a brisk walk I went through the corral gate—to face fifty or more
husky Navajo Indians, all males, crowded together, waiting. And each
one of them eyed me as if to ask my business. They knew that I was not
their Nahtahni.
There was no going back. I would have to chance their sober or drunken
condition. I walked up to the fire, and asked, with as much unconcern
as possible to muster: “Where is Bitani Bega?”
Silence—that sullen, contemptuous silence of the suspicious Navajo who
has not come forward to greet one, and who will hide whatever he knows
behind a mask of indifferent and stolid ignorance. I looked them over,
wondering if they were all strangers to me. A colony of my Navajo lived
in the southern line and traded at the Indian Wells post; but not a man
of them could I see. Then, in all that crowd, I sighted an educated
face. One learns to distinguish between the Navajo who has been to
school and the one who has never had a hair-cut. The former has a
keener expression, a brighter cast of countenance, though his hair may
be once again uncared for. I walked up to him, and demanded: “Where did
you go to school?”
He wavered for a moment, as if to deny his knowledge of English, and
then answered: “At Leupp.”
“Why did n’t you speak up before? You know me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember you at Leupp. I was a little boy then, and
you went away. You are superintendent up here somewhere.”
I felt easier now. But I did not care to have any one of them straggle
outside, to learn that I had three Navajo handcuffed in my car, and one
of them their own, to say nothing of a boy who had been gagged. Just
then the trader and one of my deputies, who had waited long enough and
were wondering what had happened to me, appeared in the gateway. I told
them to stop there; and, as I expected, so long as they were there, no
one of the crowd sought to go out.
“You can interpret for me,” I said to the returned student. “I am
looking for a man named Bitani Bega, who lives in this district, and
who runs booze. He beat up another Navajo this afternoon at Indian
Wells. I want to know where he is.”
The young Navajo rattled this off to the crowd.
“Ep-ten,” they began to exclaim, in various tones, shaking their heads,
meaning that this was entirely outside their knowledge.
“Do you see that fellow here?” I called to the trader, wondering what I
should do if he did recognize him. But the trader shook his head.
At one end of the corral was a brush shelter or shed. Under it camp
equipment was scattered: harness, boxes, kegs for water-carrying, and
blanketed bundles.
“Tell them I am going to search the camp,” I said.
“Search for what?” several asked.
“For liquor,” and with no positive assurance that I would be permitted
to continue long, I went about it. It was simply a display, to keep up
appearances. Any quantity of liquor would have been cached outside, and
as all present were sober, it was not likely that any had been brought
in. My sole idea was to bluff them for a little, and then get away. I
sincerely wanted to get away without fuss. Undoubtedly they had
congregated for a drinking bout, and I had one of them, and the second
bootlegger was probably watching from some hillside brush at that
moment. Later in the night they would welcome him and his assortment of
bottled trouble. They moved away from their belongings, and I failed to
find any contraband in the various bales and kegs scattered under the
shelter.
“You tell these men that I am going on to Leupp. If there is any
boozing here, you may expect that Nahtahni will hear of it.”
They received this in silence, but it was a silence that seemed to bode
me no great blessing. The men at the gate swung the cars around to head
away from there, and then I strolled out of the corral, carrying a
belief that I had narrowly missed something. And if you do not grasp my
emotion, if you think I was unnecessarily alarmed, I cannot hope to
convince you or explain how one feels hostility and resentment among
these desert people. I was not welcome in that camp, and very likely it
was a good thing for me that I did not find Bitani Bega.
The road away from the camp was now better known to us, and we did not
waste time. At the first camp we dropped the boy, and he scuttled away
in the shadows, followed by a lecture in Navajo.
“How’s the Cottonwood crossing?” someone asked the trader.
“It’s all right, if you know where to hit it,” he replied. “Go on down
there and wait for me. I’ll get my coat at the store, and a couple of
shovels, and then pilot you across. Don’t attempt it without me. You’ll
get bogged, sure.”
He left us at the next turning, and we went on to the crossing. There
was no bridge in those days, and the Cottonwood was a nasty place. At
times one could go straight across, and at other times he would do well
to go several miles up the wash to cross and return. We drove on
carefully and worked our way to the edge of a hummocky place, and there
was nothing to do but wait for the trader’s return. The night had grown
clearer now; the air was crisp and the stars bright.
“I’ll see if the engine needs any water,” said one of the men.
The three prisoners drowsed in the rear seat. We both got out and
leaned our rifles against a front fender. The driver of the other car
did the same. Having watered the iron horses, we stepped off a few
yards and stood talking, when suddenly, one of the men threw up his
hand and called: “Listen!”
One can hear noises a long way in the open spaces, and we had left the
hills and were now in a great flat. On the quiet air came the sound of
many hoofs, drumming, racing down on us. A quick scramble back to the
cars and the rifles. There was no crossing that wash without a guide.
We swung the cars broadside of the road, and turned off the lights.
Of course, we thought the boy had returned, and they were now about to
rescue their captured neighbor. Naturally they would seek us at the
crossing. I threw the rifle lever and a shell into the breech, and
leaned across the engine. We would have the car between us.
The hoofs pounded nearer, a dozen or more ponies.
“Uptohulloa!” roared the big stockman, a word he could fire like a
broadside. They reined in, a group of shadowy horsemen.
“Where you going?” was pieced out from our smattering of Navajo. Then
one of them rode forward, and we recognized a man from a camp below the
wash.
“Going home,” he said, simply.
We had no fault to find with this, and said so. Their ponies slowly and
gingerly began crossing the bog, following a devious trail. Another
thrill shattered. It is a land where nothing ever happens until,
through misfortune or misunderstanding, the wholly unexpected occurs.
When our guide came up, we too crossed, and three hours later we
reached the Holbrook jail. The deputy sheriff in charge said that all
hotels were filled, and we were too tired to seek lodging elsewhere.
What would do for the prisoners would be gratefully accepted by the
posse. So we all slept that night behind the bars.
Very early I found a physician to examine and dress the wounds of our
battered witness, and I telegraphed the Leupp Indian Agent for
instructions as to the one prisoner from his Bidahoche province. He
replied that he would come for the man. We went on to court with the
liquor cases. [3] There One-eyed Dan and his partner pleaded guilty,
and were sentenced to a rest of several months in jail; whence, having
recuperated and made new plans, they returned to the back-country game
with renewed spirits.
My colleague of the Leupp Agency managed things differently. The
complainant and prisoner were taken to his headquarters, where he heard
the case as Nahtahni, and sentenced the guilty to break rock for a
considerable period. However, this was not nearly so impressive to the
Indian as action in a foreign court, removed from the Indian country;
but it is a pity that the circumstance of capture and the possibility
of crime weigh so little when the Indian culprit is arraigned before
those not conversant with his daily life.
XXIV
HELD FOR RANSOM
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
“Though we know we should defeat you,
We have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
—Songs from English History
For seven long years I lived in a two-penny house at the Agency, the
rooms of which were nine by twelve, and the floors not level. I decided
to increase the size of it, so that three or four visitors might
arrange themselves in one room without compelling their host to step
outside. This necessitated removing several walls, and for months I
slept in a draughty place, surrounded by broken plaster, piles of
lumber, mortar-boards and paint-pots. If one wished to call, he
scrambled up a long plank having cleats nailed to it, fell over the
débris, and projected himself into my bedroom. It was literally all
doorway, and it opened on the Desert.
One morning, about three A.M., I was aroused by a resounding crash.
Some one called earnestly for Moungwi. I turned on a flashlight, and
rescued an Indian policeman from a trap of metal-lathe and scaffolding.
It was one of the Tewa who had ridden in.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked him.
“There’s a man shot in the Wepo Wash—Navajo; and they’re holding a Hopi
for it. Billa Chezzi says must kill him pronto. Come right away and
stop it. Here’s a letter.”
The note he handed me had been hurriedly written by an Indian girl of
the mesa, and she had been so filled with the necessity for my coming
“to stop it” that she had failed to give all the facts. It appeared
however that an unfortunate Hopi, held a prisoner by the Navajo of the
North, was to be butchered by sundown; and the sun had gone down and
was about to come up again.
I aroused the physician and the big stockman from their slumbers.
“We’ll start at daylight, so get ready.”
The stockman routed out the Navajo interpreter, and they began
adjusting a Ford car, in the hope that it would hold together through a
nervous experience.
Just at daybreak a range Navajo rode in with another note. This was
from the redoubtable Ed, trading now in the Bakidbahotzne country of
the central North, and who kept me advised from that distant station.
Billa Chezzi and his gang have a Hopi boy up here, and all last
night they argued to kill him. I advised them to send for you. They
are not in the best of humors. Seems that this Hopi boy shot a
Navajo boy. Bring the doctor. The Navajo is not dead yet.
Now this looked a trifle better, but there was an ominous possibility
in his last sentence. “The Navajo is not dead—yet.”
There were four of us in the car: the physician, the stockman, the
Indian interpreter, and myself. Several policemen clattered their way
over the shorter trails, but I did not feel that they would help
matters much. On reaching the First Mesa we learned that a Hopi lad
named Lidge Palaquoto, the son of Pah-lah, a widow, and who was aged
about fourteen years, had been out with sheep in the upper Wepo Wash.
He had carried a .22 rabbit-gun. When he did not return at nightfall,
search developed that he was in the hands of the Black Mountain Navajo.
He had somehow and for some unknown reason shot a Navajo boy, about two
years older than himself.
We would have to round the First Mesa and go through the Wepo Valley
sand, but at that Henry’s contrivance would make better time than the
traditional bronk. In a novel, requiring at this stage a thrilling
rescue, we should have rushed to the corrals, subdued several chilly
and resisting horses, and consumed four hours pounding through sand and
greasewood, to arrive with a clatter and amid dust and revolver smoke.
We should have dashed down on them, spattered a volley, swept the lad
from the ground in passing, plunged on, and disappeared in a blaze of
glory. Yes, I have written that sort of nerve tonic. But we didn’t do
anything of the kind. We used a Ford. And despite all one’s imagination
and nervous energy, there is no glory in a Ford.
But in the more prosaic manner we could make the trip in two hours,
without saddle-sores, carrying all the believed-necessary tools for any
possible emergency. The doctor had his kit for his method of
life-saving. There were two Winchester carbines, the stockman packed
his cavalry-type .45, and I carried in a spring-sling under my left arm
one of Mr. Colt’s automatic specials. It did not invite attention
there, hampered no one, and could be withdrawn in less than an hour’s
time. The Government officials at Washington consider these adjuncts
altogether unnecessary, and often write words to that effect; and they
are unnecessary in Washington, where the writing officials who frown on
them are usually to be found at desks, nursing plans for future
campaigns. This affair was not billed for Washington. It did not
concern auto traffic. It was to be staged in the upper Wepo Wash, and
Ed’s note had stated that Billa Chezzi stood peevishly at the head of
his gang. One should keep in mind that the Navajo go armed. There would
be plenty of forty-fives and a few heavy rifles in that crowd. I had
prevented their procuring ammunition from the licensed traders of the
reservation, but no one prevented their procuring it off the
reservation, from unregulated traders and in the railroad towns. Both
Federal and Arizona State law decree against the furnishing of either
arms or ammunition to Indians, and despite numerous murders in the
Navajo country, these laws have been the deadest of defunct letters.
Perhaps, trending along the lines of recent admonitions, we should have
carried an outfit for the making of tea, together with several
hymnbooks. However, I had other ideas on this subject. I recalled how
this favored son of the Desert, to wit, Billa Chezzi, had held up
Hubbell the trader, threatening him with a rifle, until disarmed,
overpowered, and chained to a post. How he had started a war against a
former superintendent. How another Arizona pioneer had been forced to
beat Billa nearly to death in defense of his own life. This last affair
had occurred at Fort Defiance. And, of course, to be fair to the chief,
he had been drunk on all occasions; but could I be sure of his sobriety
on this one?
When the car swung around the point of the First Mesa, I counseled the
doctor thus:—
“Ed seems to think this Navajo boy will not live. Let us hope he is
alive when we get there. You examine him and, at first opportunity,
without inviting excitement, tell me about how long he will last. I
shall have just that much time in which to settle things. I may need
it.”
“Suppose he dies?” said the doctor.
“I am hoping he will not die until I have made arrangements. If he
kicks in before that, I don’t know just what will happen.”
And this did not appear to ease the physician’s mind.
Half an hour later we saw them, a large party of Indians in the central
flat. Some of them were mounted, but for the most part they had turned
their ponies loose to graze and were grouped in a throng on foot. It
would be there among them, probably haranguing, that I should find old
Billa Chezzi, alias Crooked Fingers, with a black silk handkerchief
swathed about his head, the perfect picture of a desert bandit. Old,
wrinkled, and yellow-toothed, with bleary eyes that narrowed when he
became sullen, Billa Chezzi was not the pleasantest of the Navajo
chiefs.
“When we get there,” I said to the stockman, “look around for that Hopi
boy. If you see a Hopi boy, and you have an opportunity, put him in the
car; and then you stay with him.”
“What then?” he asked.
“Well, if they want him that badly, compel them to climb into the car
and take him out of it.”
“Do you want me to bean one of those fellows, if they try that?”
“No—that wouldn’t help any. Simply compel them to take him away from
you by force. I’m afraid you will not have the chance. Keep your gun on
the seat, but don’t use it.”
“You mean—just let them see that it’s present?”
“Exactly. But don’t make the mistake of pointing it at any one of them,
even if he does clamber in.”
With the Navajo on his native heath, idle gun-play is a very dangerous
experiment, and may prove a grievous mistake. If one draws a gun, the
Navajo expects that it will be used. He too has one in his belt, the
Government being too pacific to object. There are no delicate
preliminaries, such as the usual invitation to elevate the hands and
behave. The Navajo reasons simply that a gun will explode in his face
anyway, and he hopes to beat one to it. It is not an exhibition of his
courage or judgment; nothing more or less than ignorant fatalism. While
few Indians suicide, often a moody Navajo will announce that he is
about to die, and perhaps, if the genii work upon him strongly enough,
he may step toward the event. It is all right, though, and creates no
comment or offense to have a somnolent gun in plain sight. The Navajo
is used to weapons and the gesture is not one of potential threat.
About sixty yards from the group of Indians we found a shelter at the
roadside. It had been hastily constructed—cottonwood poles, with a
blanket across them to afford a little shade. The doctor stooped and
crawled in to view his patient. Several elders of the family were
there, besides the mother and father of the boy, and I shook hands with
them. In a few moments the stockman was missed, but when next I looked
toward the car he had returned there. Beside him perched a little Hopi
boy.
“I’ve got him,” he called to me.
That part of it was finished nicely, but the question of keeping him
was yet to be decided. Just then the physician crawled out from the
shelter with no joy on his face.
“Bad,” he said. “Shot straight down through the top of the skull. Looks
as if he was fired on from above. He may live an hour—not longer than
that.”
Now from the direction of the mesas the Hopi were gathering. We had
passed a few of them on the road, trudging along determinedly. For the
first time in my experience with them, they were going doggedly into
the debatable country for a council with the old enemy, and with a view
to resisting him if necessary. It looked as if there would be a fight,
unless somebody weakened.
“They are not going to kill Lidge,” announced one sturdy fellow as we
passed him.
“Keep quiet about that,” I cautioned him. “Let me talk with those
fellows.”
So, when I walked toward the group of Navajo, I realized that Hopi were
coming up and making an equally sullen group behind me. The Navajo
crowd parted and old Billa Chezzi stepped out of it. He had a light
rifle in his hand, and a woeful expression on his aged face. He put his
arm around me and besought me as his younger brother. And then tears,
large, globular tears, coursed down the ragged furrows of his cheeks,
as he told me of the senseless crime that had been committed against
them. A small boy wickedly shot down, an innocent slaughtered, a wanton
killing. And so they must have blood for this thing: an eye for an
eye,—though he had no knowledge of the sacred Books. That was the old
law in the Desert. And he did not let go of the rifle. As he wept
copiously on my shoulder, I reached down and took hold of the gun, too.
Then we talked along sympathetic lines, each holding tenaciously to the
weapon. I understood that it was the evidence in the case.
When he went further into his recital, through the interpreter, he came
to mentioning the gun’s part, and it was necessary for me to examine it
closely. He did not want to give it up at first. But he finally yielded
it. I opened the breech, and was glad to find it empty. Then I took it
by the barrel, grounded the stock in the sand, and he never got hold of
it after that. Somehow, I felt a little easier in having it to myself.
In a measure, he had surrendered a bit of his problem into my hands.
And we talked. Finally we sat down on the ground and a number of his
band with us, the rest crowded up, standing. Now I had expected that Ed
would come up. He was the best interpreter in the Navajo country, and
not afraid of them. It was plain that the sympathies of my Indian
interpreter were not with the Hopi in this argument. Aside from the
impending death of the boy, here was another real danger, and one that
most Agents are forced to suffer. Indians cannot be rushed to a
decision. They must have their talk out, and through talking always
weaken their grievances. But untrustworthy interpretation has caused
more than one man’s death. “I will fix it up for you,” silently decides
the ignorant mouthpiece, thus fastening his poor intentions on the one
who will have to accept responsibility in the end. And sometimes he
fixes it entirely too well. Seldom it is that he interprets the full
value of the discourse. He avoids completely translating unpleasant
orders, for that might involve him among his people; and when the break
comes he will surely prove a traitor, and may be found largely
responsible for the break. His sympathies well-up when least expected,
and the emotions of my interpreter in this affair had begun to display
partizanship.
Finally there came a welcome call, and Mr. Thomas E. Thacker, otherwise
known as “Ed,” a square trader and a straight talker, rode up.
“They were at it all last night at the store,” he said. “They had the
boy there and, whether or no, they were for killing him. I told them
they would have to reckon with you first, and next with Washington, and
not to start anything they maybe couldn’t finish. How’s the other boy?”
“The doctor gave him an hour to live, and half of that is gone.”
“Make a deal then, before they savvy it,” advised Ed. “The squaw will
let out a yowl when he dies.”
That was what I had feared. With my back to that little shelter, I had
lived in dread of the Navajo mother’s wild wail.
“But, Citcili,” said Billa Chezzi, for the thirteenth time, “what will
this poor woman do without her son? She will have no boy at home. The
sheep will go untended, and—”
And for the fourteenth time I told him that matters of this kind must
be settled at Washington, that far-away indefinite place where so few
things are ever settled. Washington, to the Indian, has the force of a
legend. It is one of the four Corner-Posts, the city of the Dalai Lama.
The soldiers came from there when the Navajo were herded to the Bosque
Redondo in ’63, and Billa Chezzi could remember that, if his cohort of
sons and neighbors could not.
“Well then, she must keep the Hopi boy,” he decided. “He cannot go back
to his people any more. She must have a son.”
When I glanced at the car I noted that four or five husky Indians would
be leaning against it, talking with the stockman. He had taken the Hopi
boy between his knees. I was afraid something foolish might occur, and
went back.
“They have been over here four times now,” he said; “But they haven’t
quite got up the nerve to start anything.”
At least fifty Hopi Indians had gathered; they stood apart, watching
and waiting.
“Have you men any money with you, cash?” I asked them.
The Hopi can always be counted on to have something for a rainy day,
and it was very likely to storm.
“I’ve got five dollars,” said one.
“Get what you can from the others. One hundred will not be too much.”
And then to others who were stockmen: “Have you fellows any cattle in
this wash?”
“Our cattle are off there,” pointing.
“It’s this way,” I explained. “We can’t fight that gang. The boy will
die soon. I’ll have to buy them off. How many steers can I have from
your several bunches?”
This was quite in line with the Hopi method of dealing with the
aggressive Navajo, who had oppressed them so long. They held a rapid
discussion and came to quick decision.
“What you need for it,” said the spokesman.
“Understand: I don’t think Washington will approve of our being held
up, and I will have you repaid, if that is possible.”
He nodded.
“Take some of the boys and round up those cattle. I may likely require
seven or eight two-year-olds.”
By this time too they had collected a wad of bills. I went back to the
Navajo and began talking again.
“Let us understand this,” I told Billa Chezzi. “This shooting was not
like a fight between two men, enemies. These were boys—children. They
may have been playing together. It was an accident. Of course, that is
a careless boy, and Washington doesn’t want him loose in this country.
Sooner or later, he would likely hurt someone else. And I will send him
to a place where he cannot hurt any more people. We have such places
for bad boys.”
“But what will this poor woman do for a son?” he whined.
“You will have to find her a son from among the Navajo. She wouldn’t
want a Hopi boy. Every time she looked at him she would think of this
happening and be sad. That wouldn’t do. This is what I will do for the
father and mother: I will get money from these Hopi, and what is
lacking I will pay in cattle.”
There was a consultation among them. Some grumbled, but I knew that
most of them would regard cattle as better property than a Hopi lad who
would have to be watched. They saw too that the Hopi stockmen were busy
rounding up the herd. Then they talked a bit with the trader, who was a
man of good advices. Ed spoke to me:—
“They want to know if you will stay with the wounded boy until he
dies—you and the doctor; and then will you have him buried?”
“Yes, we will attend to that.”
“And they want to know if you will pay them now, to-day?”
“Just as soon as the steers are cut out from the bunch.”
Then I drew out the money. They eyed it covetously. We agreed on
approximately five hundred dollars in cash and stock at the current
prices. A dozen Navajo rode off to assist in cutting out the animals,
and I sent a Hopi to make the count. The crowd began dwindling away.
Something had been settled, and they wished to be off before Death
stalked across the plain. The Navajo have an awesome fear of the dead;
but they would rally again at the mourning feast.
Just then the woman raised her wail,—a long, quavering cry.
I have related before in this chronicle that the Navajo shun funerals.
We buried the lad in the sand-dunes close by, and carried Lidge off to
the Agency, giving notice to his mother, en route. A short time after
this I sent him to a non-reservation school. It would be well for him
to be out of the Desert for a few years,—five would be none too
many,—otherwise, he might be found along the trail some morning, gone
to join that other lad he had so strangely hurt.
It was not possible to get from Lidge a connected story of the
shooting. It is my opinion that the Navajo boy rode up, saw the gun,
and wanted it. “When a Navajo sees a Hopi with anything he wants, he
takes it.” Lidge was on foot. No doubt the Navajo boy threw himself off
his pony and came around under the horse’s neck, stooping. Lidge, more
in fright and dismay than in anger, let him have it in the skull.
I prepared a report of this affair for Washington. The details were
recited, and I referred to many reports of Navajo aggression, with the
Hopi always helpless and never supported. Now, in effect at least, they
had made their Agent stand and deliver. When last they had tried
something of this kind, against Agent Reuben Perry of the Navajo
Agency, who was caught in the Chin Lee country and held prisoner for
several days, Commissioner Francis E. Leupp had taken prompt, decisive
action. I could not plead an exactly similar case, for only the Hopi
had lost. But it seemed to me that an effort should be made to recover,
to impress a realization of law on these insolent tribesmen.
I waited patiently. In 1911, with troops on the reservation, it had
required four months to consider a similar injustice, and by that time
the soldiers were gone; and later, with respect to the restricted range
over which the Hopi and Navajo wrangled, the Office had concluded, as a
mild corrective, that “this is a very perplexing question.”
But less time was lost on this occasion. The answer was brief, pointed,
final. It was written on a half-sheet, for paper was being saved to
reduce the national debt.
Dear Mr. Crane:
Your report of —— date received, relating the facts in the case of
a Hopi boy named Lidge, who shot a Navajo of about the same age.
Your action in this matter is approved.
Cordially yours,
XXV
WANTED AT COURT
When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother,
He loves to lie a-basking in the sun;
Ah! take one consideration with another—
The policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
—The Pirates of Penzance
In Keams Cañon, the Moqui—now the Hopi—Agency is built on terraces. The
highroad to anywhere and everywhere passes through this cañon on the
lowest level, and all the visiting world and its wife must pass in
review before the Agent’s office and his home. The grounds were once
barren of trees and shrubbery, and there had been a time, in the season
of swift midsummer rains, when several shallow arroyos would flood the
place. Off the main cañon are bays or alcoves, and a quite large one
immediately behind the buildings of the plant. Its stream-bed would,
once or twice a summer, throw a yellow foamy river into the highroad,
and carry away tons of cinder ballasting that had to be renewed. This
had been tolerated for years, when all necessary to correct it was to
cut a straight channel for the annual flood, raise the highroad-level,
and bridge the point of crossing.
This bridge, having a wooden floor, became my signal of traffic. A
belated freight-team would rumble across it, telling of supplies; the
weary stride of a buggy pair would herald that the doctor or the
stockman had reached home and would soon report. Seldom did it announce
anything after ten o’clock. Then the cañon was an enchanted place,
bathed in summer moonlight or ghastly sheeted in the winter snow,
quiet, sleeping. When a horseman crossed that bridge in the late night
or early morning hours, it was either an Indian drifting homeward,
belated, half asleep, or a messenger to the Agent. A swift driving
canter, and I waited for the slipping of moccasins along a cement walk
and the rattle of a quirt on my door; I was about to say, my shutters.
Now and then the message would have a tragic possibility in it: the
physician wanted, quickly; or the news of a plague among the people.
One would expect the police to pack the most disturbing announcements;
but, strange to relate, in the two cases bordering nearest tragedy the
messengers were women.
One, an employee of the field, came late at night to tell that Indians
proposed to break quarantine and remove patients from a temporary
hospital. This was during one of the plagues; and the Hopi suffer many,
due to their congested and unsanitary mode of living. The mesa villages
welcome every infection. A man should have borne this message, but the
woman had slipped away as the one least likely to be missed, and round
about the trails and roads, twenty-five miles, came for police. The
reservation had no telephone at that time. The swift pace of the pony
across the bridge aroused me. Next I heard rapid steps on the walk,
then someone ascending the verandah steps. But for a wire screen, the
front door stood open.
“What is it?” I asked.
No answer.
“Who is that?”
Silence.
My hand slipped over to the automatic. Threats had been made against me
by Navajo. In 1916 they technically murdered me, and the press carried
the story because of the Indian flavor. I had the unusual experience of
reading my obituary in many papers, and might have felt puffed up about
it had I not recognized a tone of regret when the rumor was exploded.
Now I knew there was someone on the porch, and if the someone had a
good excuse for being there, why not announce it. Just as I prepared to
send a shot across it, out of the silence came a faint gasping, as if
the person sought to speak and could not. The woman was suffering from
bronchitis, and had lost her voice in that cool ride across the desert.
And she might have lost her voice entirely at the end of it.
The second instance happened earlier on a summer evening. This time
someone was riding fast—faster than an Indian goes unless something of
moment has occurred. I found an Indian girl at the door. She was a
returned student who had reported to me a short time before, home from
a non-reservation school. She had gone back to her people’s camp. I had
not recommended that, for her people were among those who sometimes
made trouble. Years before, this one member of a large family had been
sent to school. After three years she had returned and had been again
sent away. It was the only thing to do for her. In dress, training, and
standpoint she had become an alien. When she came home again, she had
ceased to be a savage. I had warned her not to visit the camps.
“Stay at this school for your vacation. Let your people come here to
see you. They will come.”
But she felt that she should go to her mother and sisters.
“Well?” I asked her.
“The men had whiskey,” she told me. “And they didn’t want me there.
They were afraid I would tell you. And I said I would tell you, if they
did not stop drinking. So they beat me, and they beat my sister too.”
“Who beat you?”
“Hoske Nehol Gode.”
“And who is that? I don’t recall that name?”
“He is my cousin.”
I took her to the hospital and the physician reported that she was
badly bruised up. It appeared that she had been given quite a trouncing
by the worthy cousin. The name was strange to me. Perhaps, I thought,
he comes from the Fort Defiance country.
Now it happened that a trading-post had been robbed only a short time
before. The fellow who conducted it was not in my good graces, he
having sought to evade the livestock-buying regulations. I had
confiscated his purchases and closed his place of business. The Indians
knew that this gentleman had lost official standing; so, while he was
absent, seeking a means of reopening,—and this means seeking political
influence sufficient to overawe and intimidate the Agent through
pressure at Washington,—a band of native rascals looted his store. It
was my duty to punish these thieves too, if I could find them. The
police recovered most of the goods, but of course foodstuffs and silver
trinkets were never returned. It was believed by the Indian officers
who investigated that this robbery could be fastened on one Guy, his
brother Jay, and perhaps others of their gang. These men had been to
school long enough to acquire English names. They headed a crew of a
dozen or more bad eggs, gamblers, whiskey-runners, general
mischief-makers, who defied and worried the decent Navajo and troubled
those police who did not protect them.
But I did not connect either Jay or Guy with Hoske Nehol Gode. Who
would? There is little hope of making an accurate census of the nomadic
Navajo; and whenever one does succeed, he will have the joy of
recording three to five names for each adult. The Navajo, in speaking
of or to one another, do not use given names. Too many of their titles
mean infirmities or weaknesses. Some of their names are not delicate;
and by this I mean that they are coarse enough to offend Navajo. One
learns in talking with them through interpreters, to say “this man,” or
“that man,” and to leave the name of him alone. Many of them establish
their identity by relationship. Instead of saying “I am the Man with
the Broken Nose,” he may call himself “Curly-Hair’s Brother-in-Law.”
And therefore, when an official goes looking for an obscure member of
the tribe, seeking him under his real name, he is apt to meet and talk
with Curly-Hair’s Brother-in-Law, or Victor Hugo, if the man has been
to school and had a literary teacher, to learn finally that
Curly-Hair’s relative by marriage, the brilliant French poet, and the
Man with the Broken Nose, are all one and the same person. This game of
hare and hounds is often humorous, unless it chances to be dangerous.
Now it also happened that I was preparing a number of cases for
presenting to the Federal Court. Trips from the remote desert to court
are troublesome and expensive, so one likes to assemble them in batches
and thus clear the docket. I was gathering Hopi and Navajo witnesses,
and chanced to need as one the wife of “the Ghost.” How was I to know
that the Ghost’s wife was a sister of the returned student? This woman
knew something of the robbery. I did not connect the two incidents. And
I did not know that there was still another sister, practically a twin
in appearance of the one wanted. That morning I learned that the
apparition’s better half was weaving a blanket down the cañon. The
Ghost’s wife didn’t want to go to court, and assured me that the person
I needed would be found at the camp where the returned student had met
with her beating. By going there I could kill two birds with one
stone—procure the wife of the Ghost, and the sister of the student who
had suffered also. I did wound two birds, all right; for at that camp I
encountered both Guy and Hoske Nehol Gode.
If I have not confused matters, it will be recalled that I wanted Guy
for burglary, and Hoske Nehol Gode for assaulting two women. Now Guy
and Hoske Nehol Gode were one and the same person. Guy did not know
that I suspected him of looting the trader’s store, but he perfectly
well knew that I might be looking for him to answer the assault-charge.
There were three of us—a Tewa policeman, the big stockman, and myself.
We found the camp a short distance off the main road to Gallup, back in
the trees. It held several women, four or five young fellows who
promptly departed, and one large, heavy-set man who looked twenty-five
years in age, and who was perhaps thirty-five. The Navajo men do not
show their true ages until long past thirty. It is difficult to gauge
their years until the lines begin to set in their faces.
Among the women I recognized a duplicate of the Cañon weaver. Assuming
that this was the person who knew something of the robbery, I began to
question her, using the policeman as interpreter. The Tewa Indians
usually speak three languages: their own and Hopi and Navajo. The big
fellow at the fire pricked up his ears. He feared that she would tell
of the beating, for she was the sister who had been beaten; and lo,
here she was being questioned concerning the blankets he had removed
from the trading-post. I have no doubt that this caused him great
uneasiness, and soon he began to evidence his disapproval of my
questions, claiming that the woman knew nothing about the affair of the
robbery. Several times he interrupted, asking: “Why you want to know
that?”
I had no intention of disturbing this sullen fellow, but when he
interrupted again, I told him to hold his peace. I turned to the old
woman of the outfit.
“Do you know where Hoske Nehol Gode is?”
Neither she nor any one of them knew. The man at the fire sneered and
seemed amused. I suspected that he would know something.
“What is your name?” I asked him.
Of the two evils, he chose the one he thought I knew less about.
“Guy,” he said.
Now did I not want Guy for burglary, although I had not been seeking
him? This was too good an opportunity to be missed.
“Well, I have been looking for you, Guy,” I told him. “You will go back
to the Agency with us.”
The resistance of an Indian is always negative. He stood up, and
started to move off, out of the camp. I therefore of necessity had to
move out of the camp with him, for I had him by the shirt-collar. This
fellow must have weighed two hundred pounds of well-knit muscle, and he
was in perfect fighting trim from roping and handling and riding rough
ponies, and generally leading an Indian’s life in the open. At my best
Arizona weight, aside from determination and official authority, I
tipped the beam at one hundred and eighteen pounds. He walked off with
me just as a range bull would depart with a sixteen-pound Boston
terrier hanging to his muzzle.
The Indian police are always slow to come into action, so Guy had
carried me about fifteen yards before the Tewa added his handicap by
pinioning the Navajo’s arms from behind. To rid one’s self of an
opponent like that, it is necessary to toss him completely over one’s
head; and this the Navajo desperately endeavored to do; but the Tewa
held to him tenaciously and between us Guy—alias Hoske Nehol Gode—was
seriously inconvenienced. He stopped moving out of the camp, and began
to plough up dirt in circles, viciously seeking to rid himself of the
policeman, who, like an Old Man of the Sea, perched between his
shoulder blades. Then the stockman, who had been at the car, arrived to
assist; and once they had him well fastened, I drew a pair of handcuffs
from my pocket, and slung one of them across Guy’s wrist. It locked
down, but he objected to our arranging the other cuff where it
belonged. In the meantime, however, he was not standing still. The four
of us were slipping, side-stepping, puffing, and straining about. The
Tewa did not dare loose his hold of the Navajo’s arms, and his elbow
grip prevented us from forcing his wrists together. Officers in a
different service would have adopted different methods; but we were of
the Indian Service, and had probably followed the wrong course as it
was. We should have reasoned with him, and recited a bedtime story.
Now, in this melee, Guy secured a nice twisting grip on my thumb; and I
received instant notice that he meant to wrench that thumb off my hand.
“Break his hold, quick!” I called out.
Promptly from the stockman’s belt swung a forty-five, and smash, down
it came across Guy’s hand. And very promptly too he released his hold.
Until this time there had been no sound from him, other than his
gasping breath and the noise of struggle. At the blow, he raised a call
for help and, like an infuriated animal, he threshed about and threw us
with him. The dust arose and the chips that carpet a camp flew. The
Tewa swung from side to side; but the Tewa did not let him go.
There was a noise in the fringe of little cedars around us, and several
Navajo appeared. And they advanced. And just then the stockman dropped
his gun.
It fell in the dirt under our feet, and down swung this wild bull of
the pampas, the Tewa balancing between his shoulders, to reach the
weapon. One moment Guy’s feet were on the gun, holding it down, and
next the stockman’s foot would scuffle to scrape it aside. With the
stockman bent down for it, the Navajo would be clawing at his neck or
kicking at his face. It was a furious scramble, and if he ever reached
that automatic gun it was ready to explode.
The sight of the gun, too, seemed to anger and justify those others who
had come up. It seemed probable to me that someone of the party would
be hurt, and I preferred it to be a Navajo. So I stepped back out of
the fuss, drew my gun, and warned those newcomers to keep their
distance. They halted at the camp’s edge.
“Why don’t you smash that animal?” I called.
The haymaker that Hoske Nehol Gode then received in the face would have
staggered Dempsey. It straightened him up, but very much to my
surprise, it did not fell him. The shock, however, caused him to reel
off the gun, and promptly the stockman recovered it.
“Knock him down the next time.”
And smash went the forty-five over Guy’s head. But he did not drop. A
Navajo of the back-country dresses his hair in a thick mattress across
his scalp. Blood began to stream down his face. He let out a wild cry
that he was being killed, a call for the women to help him. The night
before they had sent a messenger for protection from this bully; but
now they responded to his aid. They came forward, ready to claw us; and
just what was the ethical thing to do then, I am not prepared to state.
“Turn him loose!” I called to the policeman.
“He may have a gun!” said the stockman.
“Then we will have to shoot him,” I said; “Turn him loose.”
The Tewa released his hold, and Guy, wearing one bracelet, made a rush
out of the camp. He wanted no more of fighting, but it was evident that
the place was unhealthy for us. We could hear him crashing through the
brush, while we proceeded to the car. The women followed to the edge of
the timber and shrilled their threats. It was probable that Guy would
find a weapon; so we lost no time in vacating that section of the
Desert.
Later in the day the leader of the clan came to see me.
“I have told Guy,” he said, “to make no more trouble.”
“You may return and tell him something more than that,” I replied.
“Tell him to be very careful not to enter this cañon, for I mean to
kill him if he does.”
That was the last I saw of Guy for several years. He kept to the
back-country, after his hand and head had healed, and avoided the
Agency. He filed off the handcuff. Navajo are expert at that. He was
not prosecuted for beating the women, nor for the burglary. You see,
three days after this affair I asked the United States District
Attorney for an indictment on these charges, and a bench warrant was
promised to assure his arrest by the United States Marshal. The Marshal
asked me what success he might expect to have in procuring this
belligerent, and I related our experience.
“He is one of a gang, and it may be necessary to arrest several of
those fellows. I wouldn’t come alone. Of course, you may deputize some
of my employees, but they do not care for that work. And if you ask me
the easiest and most effective way to serve those warrants, I would say
with a squad of uniformed men from Fort Apache. They were playing ball
in Holbrook when I passed through. The Navajo bad-man respects a
soldier, and he doesn’t respect anything else. He will not be awed by
your badge of office. He doesn’t know what it means.”
Evidently the Marshal transmitted my suggestion to his superiors at
Washington, for at once, by telegraph, I was challenged by the
Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who demanded an explanation of my call
for troops! The United States Marshal never appeared on the
reservation. Guy and his assistant thieves and bullies are still at
large, and I suppose they beat women and loot stores whenever the
spirit moves them.
XXVI
HOPI ANNALS
But chiefly I write of Life and Death, and men and women,
and Love and Fate, according to the measure of my ability.
—Kipling to Gobind
The Hopi people are bound up in clanships, rituals, and ceremonies.
Herbert E. Gregory, in his remarkable volume of statistics, entitled
The Navajo Country, has this to say of them:—
These people have maintained themselves and preserved their race
from extinction in a singularly unfriendly environment. With
incredible skill they have practised the art of conservation of
water, and that the mind of the race is intent on this one problem
is shown by the organization of the clans and the elaborate
ceremonies devised to enlist the coöperation of unseen Powers which
are believed to control the rainfall. Endless toil and endless
prayer, both directed to increase and to preserve the precious
water, constitute the life of the Hopi.
We find in their desert cairns of rock something different from an
ordinary monument to mark land or to point a road, having in them
special gifts of feathers or painted sticks. That certain clans may
never be without the feathers of the eagle, these birds are captured
young and reared in cages or at the ends of chains on the housetops. A
curious sight to see: a captive eagle, baleful of eye, morose, sullen,
posed at the edge of a roof, a brooding, vicious prisoner with beak and
talons like razors, a dangerous thing to approach carelessly. These
birds must be reared unharmed, therefore the nests are robbed of the
young. A wounded or crippled sacrifice will not be accepted; for, aside
from being the source of feathers, it is said that eagles are smothered
to death in certain ceremonies.
In distant places, the far-away headlands of the Butte country and the
sky-drifting mountains, it is said the Hopi have altars. There is one,
a young Hopi told me, atop “Sist-ter-vung-ter-we,” or “one that is
farthest west,” in the long line of volcanic piles bordering their
southern boundary. And once I received a handful of round, painted
sticks, a miniature faggot, from the distant Apache Reservation, with
an inquiry from that Agent as to their meaning.
“Yes,” said a Hopi, “they are from the Rain altar down there. The Hopi
go to those places at times. I have no doubt you could find some in the
San Francisco Mountains, if you knew where to look.”
Prayer-sticks, tied in little bundles, offered to the gods. And reflect
for a moment. The Apache was an enemy, a most bitter and sinister
enemy. The most southerly and westerly ruins of Hopi civilization are
to be found along the Rio del Lino, or Flax River, as the Little
Colorado was named by the Spanish. Their dawn settlements are far to
the north, in hidden cañons close to the Utah line; and it is not
likely that their eastern pueblos, those of the Hopi proper, were ever
beyond the upper reaches of the Jedito Wash country. But these
prayer-sticks are found far beyond those limits. They suggest religious
pilgrimages into enemy provinces. Perhaps the early Hopi accepted even
this dangerous means of placating his deities. Primitive knowledge
would have located the sources of rain in the western range, where the
San Francisco peaks lift their snow-capped heads, and in the White
Mountains of the Apache country. The Navajo fastened his legends to
that highest desert elevation, Navajo Mountain, and it is not likely
the Hopi ventured there. But his Rain gods, those powerful to relieve
the aridity of his country and ensure against famine, dwelt in
mountains somewhere, and therefore, trembling perhaps, muttering
incantations, he went to them.
Anything that is strange, and possibly potent, has been absorbed into
their embroidered religion. The clans like to procure colored glass.
They make much of tortoise shells, and other things speaking of the
sea. President Roosevelt was petitioned by them to forward a jar of
sea-water. They have—or had—a Parrot clan, a fantastic touch
reminiscent of some lonely friar who had a mission garden and in it
kept his pets.
Close to their homes are many shrines that excite the curiosity of
tourists and that sometimes get visitors into trouble. Once a couple of
the overly curious were thrashed with whips by Hopi of the Chimopovi
district—for which the guilty were severely punished by the Agent then
in charge. But more than one Agent has ordered busybodies to replace
bahoos and gifts taken from such places. While I had a hand in this,
and finally stopped the plundering of old graves, and once prevented
the sale and removal of an entire Hopi altar, still I must admit that I
never caught a tourist or a “scratcher” pillaging a newly made grave.
Most of the clans must have been intermingled in so small a population.
We have Youkeoma’s statement that there is a Ghost clan, subdivided
into a Ghost-and-Bird clan. A more intelligent member of the tribe once
endeavored to recall for me the numerous fraternities of his people. He
said: “The Sun, Salt, Crow, and Ant clans are dead. There are no more
of those people. The Parrot clan now has but one member, a woman. The
Bear clan is the largest, and next come the Sand and Snake clans. There
are the Spider and Evergreen clans. Some of them go in groups, so we
have the Bear, Spider, and Evergreen clans associated, as is the Rabbit
clan with the Tobacco clan. We have the Eagle, the Horn, the Fire, and
the Flute clan; the Antelope, the Lizard, and the Corn clan.” And when
that group of progressive head-men petitioned Washington in 1886 for a
school, they signed themselves as leaders of the Mountain-sheep clan,
the Coyote and Badger clans, the Rain, the Reed, and the Katchina
clans. But one of these men is living to-day—Honani, of Chimopovi,
always one of the friendlies. The most interesting and impressive of
them, Shupula, father of the chief Snake priest, died July 4, 1916, a
benign old man whose features are preserved in a splendid piece of
modeling by Mr. Emri Kopte, the sculptor who has lived for many years
among the Hopi Indians.
Next to these phases of his religion are the red pages of his
life-calendar. The Hopi is born to a heritage of toil in an unfriendly
environment, and perhaps to misunderstanding and small sympathy; but
the poetry of his life begins at once. The paternal grandmother acts as
his nurse. After bathing the child she anoints it with wood ashes, that
he may have a smooth body. The mother is supposed not to let the sun
shine on her for the period of twenty days, at the end of which time
the child is named. Only the women of the husband’s family are present
at this ceremony. They bring a blanket of Hopi weave, and a bowl of
sacred water to place before the mother. They wash her hair with this
water. Each of these godmothers brings an ear of corn as an offering.
They dip the corn in the water and stroke the head of the infant four
times, making at the same time a wish for its health and happiness.
Each of them suggests a name. The child will belong to the mother’s
clan, but will be named for something denoting the father’s clan. If
the father happens to be a member of the Sand clan, his children will
be named for things common to the desert sand.
On the twenty-first day after the birth these women have assembled and
washed the mother’s hair. This is before sunrise: they are a
dawn-loving people. Then the grandmother takes the infant in one arm
and the mother by the hand. Imagine that little ceremony upon the
craggy mesa-top in the gray chill of the desert morning, high in the
thin air, overlooking all the dim sleeping valleys. They step to the
mesa edge to view the rising sun. Sacred meal, mixed with corn-pollen,
is strewn on the air. Then, as that mellow light flames the farthest
east, radiating from the hearts of all the people, gilding Yucca Point
and the Terrace of the Winds, plashing warmly the cold walls of the
mesa fortress, the grandmother speaks the name she has selected from
those suggested for the child.
If the child be a girl, she will receive another name on reaching
maturity, when her hair will be washed and arranged in the symbolic
whorls as a sign of womanhood. If a boy, he will receive another name
at a certain ceremony entitling him to wear a mask and to dance. These
names then last through life.
One can understand from this little baptismal scene how my friend of
the Second Mesa, Ta-las-we-huma, got his name. It must have been a
beautiful sunrise, and the little fellow must have been well-favored in
the sight of his sponsors; for his name may be translated, “Glow of the
Rising Sun.”
The Hopi do not name their children with the frank vulgarity that so
often is found among the Navajo and other tribes. Many of their titles
are pure poetry. We have Lo-may-ump-tewa—something Going Straight and
Good, as an arrow—and Se-you-ma—one who Carries a Flower. Then there
are many names such as we commonly associate with Indians: Sah-mee or
Green Corn, and Qua-ku-ku, or Eagle Claws.
The Hopi maiden is most frequently given a tender name, and she is
often a pretty little thing deserving it. We find Tawa-mana, or Girl of
the Sun, and Pole-mana and Pole-see, meaning Butterfly Girl and
Butterfly Flowers (buttercups).
They are equally tasteful in naming places. I have already mentioned
Huh-kwat-we, the Terrace of the Winds. Of their closer and more
intimate places we find Ta-wah-pah Spring, the Spring of the Sun, at
one time a most precious waterhole, however roiled and muddy. And
Pah-lots-quabbie, the “place where we get red paint for the face,” a
point of particular interest to the women who wish to preserve their
complexions. Despite their copper-colored skins, the intense rays of
the desert sunlight cause them to take measures for protection. Much of
Indian face-painting is cosmetic, and not for the brilliant
color-scheme that a tourist connects with war-parties and potential
scalpings.
Many of their names are difficult to translate in a word or two, since
they most often describe things fully. The desert Indian is not a
word-maker, and for unfamiliar objects he does not create nouns. There
is Dah-vuph-cho-mah: this spot white men call the Hill of the
Water-Witch, for it is where the Water Development chief has his home,
shops, and office. He calls it a “camp.” Camp or not, it is a haven of
welcome for rare souls, including itinerant artists, poets, and
depressed Indian Agents. A disappointed candidate for the much-coveted
mayoralty of Polacca, probably actuated by bitterness, once dubbed this
prominence Pisgah. The Hopi named it, long before the mystery of
well-rigs and peach-tree wands was known, Dah-vuph-cho-mah: “the place
where we dry rabbit-skins for the quilts.” Quite simple, is it not?
The Hopi once made many robes of rabbit-skins. It was necessary to bury
the pelts in the sand before removal to the mesa-top, a ceremonial
matter; and Dah-vuph-cho-mah was the place to do it. The skins were
then rolled into ropes, thick and soft, and sewed together. I last saw
these coverings at Hotevilla, where so many traditions are preserved.
And this suggests the methods of rabbit-hunting. The Hopi does not seek
bunny with .22 rifle, or bow and arrow, or snares. Actually he drops
the swift creature with the Hopi rabbit-stick or boomerang, a curved
piece of mountain-oak that these Indians throw skillfully. But the
answer to the inquiring tourist is—“He runs the rabbit down.” The Hopi
are fleet of foot, and of course our touring friend devours this
explanation literally. Hopi rabbit-hunts are joyous community-affairs,
and they do run the rabbit down. They encircle a very large area of
desert valley, all runners, all bearing rabbit-sticks. Then they begin
contracting the circle. As the rabbits flee before one advancing line
of beaters, they are turned back by other lines. From every bush, it
seems, Hopi are bobbing up, with menacing blows and wild cries. The
game is thus run down and killed when tiring. Patient burros bear home
the spoils. I have seen these beasts covered with dead rabbits, while
afar in the plain still arose the merry shouts of the running hunters.
The language of the Tewa is composed of shorter terms.
“What do you call these?” I asked, showing some local beans.
“We call them ‘tdo.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘beans.’ When a Tewa means beans, he says ‘beans.’ But when a
Hopi speaks of these, he says: ‘Kotcha-cha-chi-morzree,’ ‘the beans
that are soft when boiled a long time.’” So he described them first,
when experimenting with their cooking, and he has never seen fit to
shorten his nomenclature.
Compared with the stalwart Sioux or the equally tall and vigorous
Navajo of the mountains, men of the horses, the Hopi are at first
glance a little people. This has brought them some sympathy from those
who seize on superficial appearances. The mature Hopi has a thick
figure, not inclined to fatness, but with barrel-like lungs and a
sturdy back. He would make a fine wrestler. As he has accepted things
of civilization via the trader, and absorbed so much from his neighbor,
the Navajo, his costume is not radically different to-day. The curious
dresses of the olden-time, of buckskin, cloth of native weave, and
feathers, such as may be seen in the Harvey collection at Albuquerque,
have disappeared from the mesas and to the younger generation are
unknown. A shirt of velveteen, loose trousers of some light cloth,
often pure white, moccasins of red-stained buckskin and his own
peculiar design, a handkerchief twisted about his head, these form his
costume. Most of his ornaments are bought of the Navajo, save that an
occasional Hopi silversmith will hammer the metal into Hopi patterns,
such as butterflies and snakes with turquoise eyes. When you see these
forms, they are Hopi. The Navajo does not use them.
But in this dress of the men the resemblance to the nomad ceases. The
true Hopi is marked by his short stature, his broader and radically
different physiognomy, and especially by the dressing of his hair. The
Navajo is usually a sloven with his hair. Do not get too close to him.
The Navajo draws his hair tightly back from the brow, and catches it in
a knot or a queue at the back of his head. And there is little
difference between the men and their women. The Hopi wears the bang and
the straight bobbed effect that came out of Egypt. When it is possible,
he takes scrupulous care of his mane. Hair-washing is an important
feature of all ceremonies. He was the first bobbed American.
To-day this effect will be found among the orthodox only. The younger
men, home from schools, have adopted the comb and shears as they drift
away from many fetishes. But hair-cutting has produced some serious
wrangles with the Hopi. Long ago an Agent zealously interpreted a
Washington order to mean that all Indians, not only those in schools,
should be made to cut their hair in white man’s fashion—as if this
would produce civilization overnight. To the elders of the tribe this
was a terrible heresy, and they resisted very naturally. It is too bad
that orders cannot be transmitted in the form of blue-prints.
The women of the tribe are the strongholds of conservatism. I recall
holding a council of mixed sexes, the talk relating to some form of
community improvement along modern lines. And when it was over, I asked
my interpreter:—
“Do you believe they understood?”
“The men, of course,” he replied, emphatically; “but do you think it
possible to get that stuff through a Hopi woman’s head? Epten. The men
will try to carry out your wishes; but they are in for a very
unpleasant time of it with their women. A Hopi woman! She is like a
piece of sandrock. The winds wear it away, but it will take many
years.”
The younger women, who have had schooling, wear the gingham and calico
dresses they have learned to make and launder, and the field matrons
assist them in renewing these garments. But the old ones, and the
students of middle-age, are most likely to be found wearing the ancient
Hopi weaves. A dress may be of thick cloth caught at one shoulder,
leaving the opposite arm bare, belted at the waist with a woven sash,
the wearer’s legs and feet bare most of the time, unless for some
special journey she dons the woman’s wrapping and shoe of buckskin. She
grows thick and fat, her countenance rounding into a broad, complacent
face that can smile pleasantly or become stolidly impervious as the
mood strikes her. Once married, her hair is parted and hangs down her
back in thick plaits. Her hands are thick and coarsened from hard
labor, the making of pottery, and especially from the baking of piki
bread.
This baking is done on a red-hot stone over the fire. The Hopi woman
sits before it, at her side a pan of batter, sometimes colored red or
blue. She dips her hand into the batter and smears it deftly over the
hot stone. Before it has burned and curled, she wipes over it a second
layer. This last cooks perfectly in a thin wafer, quite like
tissue-paper, crinkled and brittle. This she peels off and places in a
pile of such sheets. All day she does this, often until her palm is
perfectly cooked with the bread. The sheets are then rolled, again
resembling a packet of tissue, quite like those we used to buy at
Christmas time for decorations. A dozen of these rolls, and the Hopi
man will take the trail, fully provided with provender.
Some rather reject the thought of eating piki bread, but I have sampled
Indian foods more than once, and with different results. An old Navajo
shemah can broil mutton ribs and prepare a pot of coffee over a hogan
fire in such a way that one who has had a hard trip,—and more of it to
come,—thinks them delicious. And piki bread is not half bad, although
rather flat in taste, and gritty, for the sand will intrude; and I
suppose if one accepted it as a steady diet his teeth would be worn
down in time, like those of the older Hopi. As for the cooked hand, one
should gratefully accept and eat piki without being too curious as to
its making. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Next in the Hopi life-calendar appears the urgent necessity for
marriage. The happy man has very little to do with this affair. The
bride-elect—self-elected—and her mother, a wily dowager who has
contrived a large part of the proceedings, decide most of these things
for themselves. I cannot say how early negotiations have been opened by
the aunts and uncles of both signatories, but of course they have been
consulted. At any rate, on a day the girl and her mother pay a visit to
the eligible young man’s home, and tender his parents a present of piki
bread and cornmeal on a woven-reed plaque. Most Southwest tribes use a
wedding-basket symbol; the Navajo import from another tribe a wedding
basket of definite design, and will use no other. If the boy’s parents
accept these presents and replace them with a portion of mutton on the
same plaque, they have signified their consent to the union. If there
has been dissension between the Montagues and Capulets and a plague on
both houses, so to speak, the disdaining parents give this piki and
meal to others, signifying their lack of interest in mere foreigners,
and these receiving diplomats break the sad news that a perfectly good
offer has been declined.
But if the present is accepted, the uncles of the bride-elect gather at
her home to advise her concerning the duties of a good wife, and at an
appointed time the girl, accompanied by her parents and close
relatives, headed by the one who named her, proceed to the home of the
groom’s parents for a feast. This gathering is held at night, and when
they depart the bride remains. She spends four nights in her husband’s
people’s home, doing the housework for the whole family. Very early in
the morning she begins the corn-grinding, to pay for her husband.
During these four days there is a ceremony of hair-washing, and her
hair is given a peculiar cut to mark her as a married woman. Ever after
she wears it so. And during these four days the boy’s uncles bring in
cotton for her wedding-robe. They are paid for it in meal, and they
depart to the kiva to weave it. While at this weaving, they are fed by
the girl’s family. At the end of the four days the robe is finished.
The uncles heap a wealth of advice on the groom before he departs from
the home of his birth. Then the bride dons the white robe and goes with
her husband to the home of her own parents; that is to say, she is
accompanied by her husband. If he has had any ideas of a home of his
own, away from the precincts of mother-in-law, he has not announced
them, and apparently discretion is the better part of valor.
In this manner a young lady has gone to the home of a desirable young
man, proposed for him, married him, partially paid for him, decked
herself with apparel manufactured by his people, and then led him to
her home in triumph.
There is nothing new under the sun. Vamping was reduced to a precise
science by the Hopi many centuries before the pueblo de Los Angeles was
dreamed of.
“And—hark! As I live, again the villagers!”
All this has not been enough to establish cordial relationship between
the families. There must be something in the nature of a riotous
shivaree. These folk who have captured our darling boy must not be
permitted to crow too loud. So the mother of the groom, his influential
aunts and other female relatives, especially those whose temperaments
will lend verve to the affair, proceed to the rival house. They go upon
an errand of mock-seriousness that may assume proportions. They will
say unpleasant things in loud voices, especially for the benefit of the
neighbors, to the effect that this bride has numerous and glaring
defects, and that, if the truth be told, perhaps their paragon has not
acquired the most beautiful and gracious of the village maidens.
The women of the bride’s household reply in kind, their language not
always the most decorous. Personal references are made, involving the
cleanliness and habits of both parties, and a friendly fight is on.
These ladies proceed to sling mud,—at first verbally, and then
actually,—real mud, over the house and each other. The bride and her
mother will have to have a vigorous house-cleaning after this, and
fresh plastering on the interior walls. Perhaps that is the idea of
it—to make them furbish the domicile.
The masculine element is conspicuous by its utter absence. The men know
better than to appear. Like white men on house-cleaning day, they seek
the highest roof or the lowest cellar, along with their disconsolate
dogs. Woe betide any absent-minded one who strays within the field.
Both parties are likely to turn on him with more than words and mud. It
is not likely that the men will dare come home until after sunset,
when, no doubt, their attention will be distracted by recitals of the
affair, and the condition of the home will cause them much grief.
A friendly, if undignified, roughhouse, to show the world that these
two families, now having common interests, can endure the most
unpleasant conditions and survive.
And would you imagine that the groom is ever to have a home of his very
own, with a fireside, and slippers, and everything? Not unless he has
his Agent behind him and bravely kicks over the sacred traditions,
risking ostracism possibly and at least a great deal of home-town
misery. Just how long Jacob will serve that family for Rachel, I am not
aware; and unlike Jacob, he serves after having been snared. He draws
and transports the water, if he has a wagon; he cuts the wood and
attends the field; he wrangles horses, herds cattle, and helps manicure
the sheep. He is owned by this old mother who directed her daughter’s
attention toward him.
To be fair, sometimes the girl has fancied him for herself, without too
much urging of family; and I recall asking more than one diffident
groom, when about to publish banns:—
“Do you really, of yourself, wish to marry this woman?”
“Well, sir—she wants me to marry her.”
In delicate matters of this kind, the Hopi young man is pleasantly
agreeable and strives to please.
And I succeeded in getting very few of them to take another point of
view. There were several determined Romeos who had selected girls for
themselves, who paid court despite all family disapproval, and who
finally won out in their suits. But they were shrewdly wise to fortify
themselves in Governmental positions: interpreters, policemen,
laborers, or assistants, otherwise they would likely have been
ostracized and come close to starvation. Having joined the Moungwi’s
official family, however, and being endowed with monthly salary “fresh
and fresh,” they could assert a bit of independence, could demand
immunity from the bitterest of traditions; and I suppose they made much
of their closeness to the Big Chief. Most Indians do. “I will tell my
white uncle” has throttled many a threatened unpleasantness.
Then too, they were regarded by those less fortunate as rich men,
having, besides a monthly surety, certain perquisites and a supposed
subtle influence in foreign affairs.
“This Moungwi speaks to Washington by papers and the singing wires; and
do you not know, stupid one, that I often talk with him?”
Their family visitors and retainers increased and were many. Not an
enviable position, a place at court, despite its reflected importance
and privilege. And the fall thereof when, Fate decreeing, the Moungwi
with loud words dismissed one of these believed favorites! A return to
the kiva influences was not a happy experience. Sanctuary had not been
copied or absorbed from those early Spaniards and their holy friars.
Indian ridicule and Indian persecution can be very cruel.
Few of the young men have the wherewithal to build a home or to buy
one, either at the mesa or in the valley, so they are tied for years to
this feudal family-system, waiting to inherit from their elders.
Even when one is so fortunate, so energetic, or so rash as to throw
aside the traditions, he simply accepts bondage without mother-in-law,
since no part of the house nor anything he brings to it, other than his
personal belongings, may be claimed by him. The woman owns and rules
the home, and this includes the children and the harvest. The children
are of the mother’s clan. The man may disport himself, gaily dressed
and agile as a panther, in the ceremonies; he may be a leader in the
hunt; he may declaim in the kiva; but his authority ceases at the
threshold of the Hopi home.
For has not this woman, during the first year of her married life,
ground from one to two thousand pounds of corn meal in payment for her
man and her wedding dress? She has, indeed. And since she has purchased
him, she has the right to divorce him. He may slave in the hot fields
and the sand-blows, running to and from the patches, hoe on shoulder,
to charm a crop of corn. He has planted with ceremony—so many grains
for the hot wind, so many for the field rat, so many for the katchina,
and so many for himself; but once he has harvested it, and packed the
Hopi share to the home cellar, his ponies may starve for the lack of a
hatful of grain if his wife is not generous. One thing with another, I
think the Hopi male has a rather tough time of it. Sometimes he grows a
bit fretful and proceeds to push his wife about, rarely going so far as
to box her jaws, which she very often thoroughly deserves and earns.
Then, if she still likes him, she appeals amid tears to the Agent, with
view to having him reprimanded and, unless it be crop-time, jailed. But
if she does not care for him overmuch, having, as related of an
Ethiopian matron, “entirely lost her taste for that man,” she abruptly
divorces him.
This action calls for no assemblage of the family circle or of
chieftains, no personal complaint, no service of notice, as one might
imagine. Friend husband returns at evening from the sheep-camp or
cornfield, probably crooning an old kiva hymn, at peace with all the
Desert and its demons, to find his saddlegear, his cow-rope, and his
other shirt on the doorstep. The decree is thus handed down, recorded,
and confirmed. There is no appeal. He is out. He hoists his few
belongings on his back and departs away from there.
If a young man, he will likely return to the parental roof; if not, he
becomes a solitary and a wanderer for a season, roosting about where
nightfall catches him, to be found later in company with some divorced
woman or widow, cheerfully toiling to harvest corn for children not his
own. When this thing has been repeated a number of times, and
throughout a whole tribe, the Agent’s job of keeping vital statistics
of clarity begins to loom into proportions. A Hopi genealogical record
resembles a war-map. The keeping of it becomes abstract science, having
both biological and anthropological phases.
I have known Hopi men of middle age who long maintained a fatherly
interest in their children after such a social cataclysm; but they were
not many, most of them growing careless of any and all responsibility;
and I have found women as the heads of households to which—to adjust
the records—I had to assign four husbands, all living and none present.
But to return to the Hopi wedding. After the four days spent in the
home of her husband’s people, and her triumphant return with the
captive to the house of her mother, the bride is supposed to deny
herself the pleasure of all Hopi revelry and ceremony until the next
Neman Katchina Dance. This occurs about a fortnight prior to the Snake
Dance of August, and is an appeal for rain and harvest fruition. Then
she arrays herself once more in the pure white robe, and appears for a
few moments at the ceremony. This is to be her last bid for public
attention and the bride’s centre of the stage, before settling down to
a life of toil certainly, the rearing of many children probably, and
perhaps a number of alliances. But it matters not how troubled her
life, how peaceful, pure, how hectic; this first marriage is the only
one to be distinguished by a ceremony and a symbol. This is the last
time she wears the robe—save one. When next we see her in its white
folds, she, having fulfilled the monotonous duties of a true Hopi or
having, like Emma Bovary, tested all of life’s experiences, is waiting,
peacefully uncaring, to be carried to her last bed in the shadow of the
great, immutable mesa.
My introduction to the importance of the wedding robe came about
through an effort to eliminate the evil power of the tribe’s old women.
The weddings were arranged entirely too early, and operated to defy
both Arizona State Law and Service regulation. It was a foxy method and
held to with savage determination. An appeal to the Bureau would have
brought only the hopeless decision that a tribal marriage had been
declared a legal marriage by great Eastern Solons bent on pushing
Orientals into Occidental grooves. Often too, young people were forced
into these marriages. And the results were highly pleasing to the Hopi
elders, and four-fold: Rachel’s mother procured labor in the form of
Jacob. Jacob’s family received the ton of corn meal that Rachel would
grind. Certainly Rachel, and often both contracting parties, were
prevented from attending the schools, as the old Hopi earnestly
desired; and Hopi traditions as to fruition were completely satisfied.
There was an even more serious result. This grinding of corn meal early
and late, crouched over the stone metate, ended in the young mother’s
losing her first-born. At one time there was no Hopi woman at the First
Mesa whose first-born child was living.
So, as Moungwi, I gave them fair warning that these things must stop.
They did not stop. An Indian, of whatever tribe, will always chance a
test. They are a great people for stolid experiments. My first idea of
punishment was, the child-wife to the boarding-school, the groom and
his father to the Agency jail.
“But,” these male unfortunates finally convinced me, “you are punishing
the wrong persons. We men have had nothing to do with the matter. Get
the old women.”
And when this was done there were lamentations and floods of tears. One
old virago nearly washed me from her home. It was a wet season at the
mesa. And the virus worked about as successfully as a local philosopher
of the Hopi described another’s conversion to Christianity via baptism.
“First time they get him, just like vaccinate him—no take. He
backsliding now—dance all time—old Hopi again. But next time they get
him baptized, mebbeso it take all right—mebbeso.”
Not all of my efforts produced success.
You may ask, Why not secure the girl in school before this untoward
happening? The younger children of the Hopi all attend day schools,
located close to their homes, and often a girl will reach maturity
before the matrons have knowledge of a marriage scheme. With the
child-wife in the boarding-school, caught during those first four days,
there was no procession to mamma’s house, no corn-grinding, no
attendance of the Katchina dance, and no robe. The joy had been taken
out of life. There was mourning in both camps; for, as Jacob was in
jail, there was no water-hauling, no woodcutting, no unpaid laboring in
the field. It was a very sad state of affairs, tribally, and apparently
this strange Moungwi had little sympathy for the human race,—at least
the Hopi division of it, and its urge to perpetuate itself.
One day, about two years after the imposition of such a sentence, I met
an old man at a distant mesa who asked for a talk.
“His daughter is home now,” said the interpreter, “and he wants your
permission to have her robe woven.”
“Robe—you mean a wedding robe?”
“Yes. You recall she had no tribal ceremony; and it is like this: When
the white people marry, they have a ring. The white robe is our ring.
If she dies, there will be no robe to bury her in.”
Such is the stupidity of the alien when he seeks to rule the so-called
heathen. My method was justified to protect the weak and the young, but
I had cast out sentiment.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
Quite so many Lispeths. I promptly gave permission for the weaving of a
robe, and I hope she has had no use for it, nor will have, these many
years.
The mid-West moralist may interpolate a question here. Without their
own service, did you permit them to go unmarried? This had little in it
of the material compared with that robe episode. But as Moungwi, a
commissioned Head of the people, vested also with the authority of the
State of Arizona, I would solemnize a legal ceremony if events had
proved one necessary and the parties had attained a legal age. I never
married a woman to a scoundrel. But I have married four couples in one
morning, issuing first the State license as a deputized clerk of the
court, solemnizing the ceremony as a magistrate, blessing the bride,
and immediately thereafter summoning into open court the groom and all
other guilty persons for trial on a charge of child-prostitution. This
method was drastic, and very wearing on one who had other things to
engage his attention. And it was not a very cheering family-event. But
it finally produced obedience. There came a time when the Hopi would
consult the Agency records as to their children’s ages, and would
inquire about school terms, and what Moungwi thought about it, before
framing-up family alliances.
The happiest of the Hopi marriages were those following my permission
to schoolboys and girls to arrange their own courting, sometimes at the
school, thus breaking down old mesa-lines. Boys of the First Mesa
married Hotevilla girls: a thing that would never have been tolerated
by the parents on either side. Close as are the mesas, housing the one
people, they might as well be separate provinces. Seldom will a First
Mesa marry an Oraibi, for instance, and vice versa. A local form of
derision among the Hopi is to mock the differences in pronunciation and
intonation of their common language. Oraibi is less than thirty miles
from Walpi, and yet an Oraibi is a being recognizing a different
civilization.
When last I visited Phœnix, I entered a shop to make a purchase. A
fine-looking Hopi came forward and greeted me. We talked about the
folks at home, of his summer visit to the mesas, who had died and who
had married.
“Now let me see,” I parleyed, for it is hard to remember all
individuals of a tribe. “You are married—what is your wife’s name?”
“Why, you know her; she was Youkeoma’s granddaughter.”
“Sure enough—Viola—the one who hid in the wagon and ran away to school
at Phœnix, for fear I would send her back to Hotevilla.”
Birth and baptism; marriage and divorce; many dances; a lifetime of
endless toil and endless prayer; many harvests, rich and meagre. Then
comes the time when he has planted his last crop, or she has finished
the last of household labors. Something happens to end things, and to
serve summons to the Judgment Seat, that lonely prominence overlooking
the Oraibi-Dinnebito Washes in the west. The tireless feet will no
longer cover the steep trails to the pueblo on the heights; the mesa
and the valley will know them no more. Death, as to us all, comes as a
surprise. There is a sad wailing that is soon hushed.
A woman of the family prepares the body for burial and washes the hair.
Then someone is nominated to sit with the dead, to express the common
grief. When first I heard of this, he was described as “the one who has
to be angry with the dead.” But the explanation was somewhat distorted.
The person who has this duty does talk to the dead, saying:—
“Oh! why did you leave us? Were you angry with us, that you have gone
away never to return? We are left here, lonely. What was it we did to
make you angry with us—that you have left us....”
If death occurs in the night, the burial is early the next morning. No
food is eaten. The body is arranged for burial in a sitting position. A
corn-planting stick is placed so as to project above its head. Then the
father or nearest male relative carries the body to the sand-mounds
below the mesa where adults are interred and buries it. Young children
have shallow graves in another place, for it is believed that their
spirits are weak, too weak to struggle through deeper soil.
Then the father returns to the home, procures food that he carries to
the grave in a ceremonial bowl, and leaves it there. One finds these
bowls, broken, in the sand; and of course it is expected that they will
not be disturbed. Above the graves of children one may find weathered
toys and the remnants of a doll.
Returning to the house a second time, he gathers all the mourning ones
around a common bowl of food, and they break their fast.
A simple life, simply ended.
These people succumb quickly to disease. Their mode of living invites
infection and spreads contagion. They suffer epidemics periodically,
and these are like the plagues of Egypt. Measles is a scourge; they
have known smallpox many times; the Spanish influenza decimated them.
But while these are swift and virulent enemies, they may be fought
vigorously and checked at last. There is one disease as fateful as
themselves, stealthy, insidious, that cannot be mastered. The white man
ensnared by it finds in the Desert a place of refuge, of hope; but the
Hopi refuge has not been found.
There is among my photographs one of a Hopi girl wearing the tribal
dress, her hair in whorls, a wistful expression on her face. I will not
tell you that this is an Indian princess, for there are no Indian
“princesses” outside vaudeville. She is simply Stella, of the First
Mesa. When she was not more than six years old, I found her on the
mesa-top, very dirty and ill-nourished, an orphan, a waif, being passed
around from one family to another. I packed her off to the Cañon
boarding-school, and almost immediately thereafter, upon advice of the
physician, to a sanatorium. When I next saw her there, she was a
contented little girl, very pretty, with a red bow of ribbon in her
dark hair and a taste for chocolates in her mouth. And then more years
rolled away, and again I visited the place. This time she had grown
swiftly into young womanhood. She had suffered a relapse and was in
bed.
The physician in charge accompanied me through the wards, for a number
of my Hopi were there, and finally we stopped for a little chat with
Stella. She still had a taste for candy, and so informed me. This being
“uncle” to several thousands has its responsibilities.
“She has been here a long time,” I said when we came away.
“Yes—an uneven case, erratic chart; and that sort seldom make a
complete recovery. By the way, did you notice anything peculiar in her
expression?”
“Well,” I replied, “she was a very pretty little child, and she has n’t
quite lost all that. There is something wistfully patient about her—a
half-smiling sadness—”
“The very thing,” said the doctor. “I wondered if you would notice it.
The Mona Lisa look: Fishberg mentions it. Stella is a perfect example.”
But when I last visited the mesa Stella had a home in which to welcome
me. She had tired of the long years at the sanatorium, and they were
many; she had returned, as they all endeavor, to her people on the
mesa-top; and she still liked candy, and she still had that placid,
melancholy expression. [4] I have sought to rescue many Hopi from that
dread disease, with varying success, but she is the only Gioconda I
have found among the Indians.
L’ENVOI
By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent
when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.
—Stevenson: Ordered South
“Keams Cañon!” A commonplace name, because a trading rover had made it
home. Tom Keams has gone roving into shadowy lands. “Lu-kah-des-chin,”
the place of the reeds, is the Navajo name. For nearly three hundred
days of the year it possesses the finest climate in the world, air like
wine, filtered clean and sweet through ten thousand square miles of
unpolluted wilderness.
In those few remaining days are the contrasts. An odd change, at the
close of a sunlit winter day, to have the sky suddenly go drab and
dull, promising a bleak night, and then the added silence of the
falling snow. Stealthily the storm would come upon us, whirling crisp
dry flakes, weaving a magic veil to drape white all the cliffs. A new
hush in the Desert. And at morning, a crystal landscape, glittering
like an old-time Christmas card.
Chattering birds in springtime, pausing for a little from their
travels, gossiping of Mexico and strange Southern lands. They rejoice
in this oasis. The filmy gray of the cottonwoods lends them a screen;
already the swelling buds are pale green against the colder tones of
the Cañon walls. A last patch of snow on a north ledge suddenly seems
to slip, and is gone; and where it was shows the newest bloom, a tiny
bit of desert scarlet.
Now the rains,—little showers and furious deluges,—the cliffs washing
clean as they soak as sponges. The arroyo roars and boils its sudden
surprising current, and each alcove of the high rocks springs its
miniature silvery waterfall. Then the rare aroma of wet cedars and a
thirsty soil, all parched things drinking as gluttons; while above, in
a twilight sky, appear rainbows, katchinas of the heavens.
Can you wonder that tramps and painters, cowpunchers and poets, return
to this Empire of Enchantment? It is one of those fanciful “other
places,” one of the last having an horizon.
The place we’re in is always here,
The other place is there.
I have had something more to say of my Navajo friends, their ways and
ceremonies; of the curious, shy, and altogether lovable Indian children
and their schools; of that strange medley from the Civil Service
grab-bag, the employees; of quarantines, and wars against disease; of
the curse of the medicine-men; of the baronial traders and their
frontier systems; of Indian art and industry; and too, something more
of the Desert itself, its great cañons and monster monuments, the
mammoth jewels of the Empire; and of those crumbling ruins in the
North, beyond the rim of the Black Mountain, long-lost cities of the
dead, picturing the futility of men and the vastness of desert time.
But the book closes. The story of an empire cannot be compressed into
one volume.
In August 1919 I received orders to take charge of the Pueblo Indians
of New Mexico, those dreamy towns along the Rio Grande, in the land of
the Spanish bells. My headquarters would be at Albuquerque, but a few
miles from where Coronado made his winter camp in 1540, on that long
hike to Quivera. It was not until I made this announcement that I fully
knew my host of desert friends. The staff gave me a farewell dinner, of
course, and there was speechmaking and a lot of neighborly merriment
that several times jangled off the key. You see, I had been there a
long time, and whatever my faults and deficiencies, they knew them. As
I have written earlier, it is hard to change czars.
The people of the Desert are seldom effusive or voluble. They rode in,
pairs and groups of them, to wish me good luck and to say good-bye. The
Hopi tried to express his regret; the Navajo stood about diffidently
for a little, and then shook hands without an effort at a word, and
rode away. Those who knew me best brought little presents of rare value
to one who knew their history—a basket, a painted piece of pottery, an
old ceremonial bow. One of them, who liked me well enough, could not
come; so he asked a missionary to write exactly as he dictated.
Dear Mr. Crane,—
Because I have heard that you are about to leave us I am thinking
about you, and I am sorry. You have been good to us. You are a good
chief.
You have helped us with our horses, cattle, and sheep more than any
other chief we have had. You have helped us greatly in sickness,
and I am sorry that you are going to leave us.
I hope to see you before you go, but perhaps I will not get a
chance to see you. I am glad you gave me a work to do, and I have
patched up a number of quarrels, have brought the people together
and made their troubles right.
I am sure I will not forget you. No matter where you go, I will
remember you. The people love you.
Because I think I will not get to see you before you go, I wanted
to say these things to you. You have always been kind to me.
My wish for you is that you have strength and gladness.
Judge Hooker
My relief, a special officer who would await the appointment of my
successor, asked me to supervise that August Snake Dance. So a day or
two before leaving my post I was once more policing the Walpi ledge
among the rattlesnakes. Then I left the “provinces of the Mohoce or
Mohoqui,” and the Indian Agency I had either built or reconstructed. It
was not the barren, cheerless place I had receipted for. It had been my
home in those long, silent, desert years, and I had come to know every
rock, every bush, every tree, or so it seemed; and where once I had
thought to effect escape in a feeling of rare relief, that was not
exactly my emotion. I looked back and saw the Agency as a little town
asleep in the ancient, mellowed cañon, dreaming under turquoise skies.
Some last Indian waved a farewell. Then the car turned one of the
desert “corners,” and while I was not going beyond the Enchanted
Empire,—for the mystic country of the Pueblos is only another wonderful
province,—yet I had left its heart, and its simplest, kindest people.
A long time after that, I heard this story: One of the interpreters,
who for years had been my voice, moped around the Agency for days,
gloomy, half sullen. He had been a merry fellow.
“What’s wrong with you, Quat-che—sick?” asked an employee.
The Indian looked surprised, and seemed to think for a reason.
“I am unhappy,” he said, finally. “Sometimes I listen—and I miss the
boss’s footsteps.”
NOTES
[1] The Hopi joined their kinsmen in the Pueblo rebellion of 1680, and
four Franciscan friars were killed at their missions in the Tusayan
provinces: at Aguatobi (Awatobi), mission of San Bernardino, the
Reverend Padre Fray Joseph de Figueroa, a native of Mexico; at
Xongopavi (Chimopovi), mission of San Bartolome, the Reverend Padre
Fray Joseph de Truxillo; at Oraibi, mission of San Francisco, the
Reverend Padre Fray Joseph de Espeleta, a native of Estela in the
Kingdom of Navarre, and the Reverend Padre Fray Agustin de Santa Maria,
a native of Pasquaro. The pueblos of Machongnovi and Walpi were
visitas.
[2] Pronounced Shay.
[3] Sections 2140 and 2141 of the United States Revised Statutes,
together with later laws and amendments, empower Indian Agents and
their properly commissioned deputies to search for, confiscate, and
destroy intoxicating beverages within Indian country, to seize the
means of transportation, to destroy stills, and to prosecute in the
Federal Courts those persons who violate these statutes. Indian Agents
and their “special deputies” are clothed by law with the authorities of
United States Marshals and their deputies in the prosecution of this
work. The possession of intoxicating liquors in the Indian country is
prima facie evidence of unlawful introduction.
While the provisions of the National Prohibition Act limited these
authorities for a period, the United States Supreme Court has held that
the earlier laws enacted for the control of Indian country are not
inconsistent with and were not repealed by the National Prohibition
Act. To-day, an Indian Agent has practically all the original power
with which to curb the liquor traffic within his jurisdiction.
[4] This facies has been recognized by the laity, and the folklore of
Europe abounds in sayings about the facial expression of the
consumptive. Writers of fiction and painters have also considered it
“interesting,” and make great use of it in their productions. Many of
the classical and modern painters have depicted this cast of
countenance, showing the false euphoria of the smiling, tranquilly
bright, yet melancholy eyes of the consumptive, which are perhaps best
seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda—a picture of a phthisical face
superior to any description that can be given of it.
—Fishberg: Pulmonary Tuberculosis
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