The Indians
of
The Painted Desert Region

WORKS BY

George Wharton James

In and Around the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona.

The Indians of the Painted Desert Region.

The Missions and Mission Indians of California.

Indian Basketry.

In the Heart of the Painted Desert.

The Indians
of the
Painted Desert Region

Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais,
Havasupais

By

George Wharton James

Author of "In and Around the Grand Canyon," etc.

With Numerous Illustrations from Photographs

Boston

Little, Brown, and Company

1903

Copyright, 1903,

By Edith E. Farnsworth

All rights reserved

Published October, 1903

UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON

AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

To my Wife

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTORY

Wild, weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the mind by the very name—the Painted Desert. The sound itself suggests a fabled rather than a real land. Surely it must be akin to Atlantis or the Island of Circe or the place where the Cyclops lived. Is it not a land of enchantment and dreams, not a place for living men and women, Indians though they be?

It is a land of enchantment, but also of stern reality, as those who have marched, unprepared, across its waterless wastes can testify. No fabled land ever surpassed it in its wondrousness, yet a railway runs directly over it, and it is not on some far-away continent, but is close at hand; a portion, indeed, of our own United States.

In our schoolboy days we used to read of the Great American Desert. The march of civilization has marched that "desert" out of existence. Is the Painted Desert a fiction of early geographers, like unto the Great American Desert, to be wiped from the map when we have more knowledge?

No! It is in actual existence as it was when first seen by the white men, about three hundred and fifty years ago, and as it doubtless will be for untold centuries yet to come.

Coronado and his band of daring conquistadors, preceded by Marcos de Niza and Stephen the Negro, reaching out with gold-lustful hands, came into the region from northern Mexico, conquered Cibola—Zuni—and from there sent out a small band to investigate the stories told by the Zunis of a people who lived about one hundred miles to the northwest, whom they called A-mo-ke-vi. The Navaho Indians said the home of the A-mo-ke-vi was a Ta-sa-ûn´—a country of isolated buttes—so the Spaniards called the people Moki (Moqui) and their land "the province of Tusayan," and by those names they have ever since been known.

Yet these names are not the ones by which they designate themselves and their land. They are the Hopituh, which Stephen says means "the wise people," and Fewkes, "the people of peace."

It was in marching to the land of the Hopituh that the Spaniards designated the region "el pintado desierto." And a painted desert it truly is. Elsewhere I have described some of its horrors,[1] for I have been familiar with them, more or less, for upwards of twenty years. I do not write of that of which I have merely heard, but "mine eyes have seen," again and again, that which I describe. I have been almost frozen in its piercing snow-storms; choked with sand in its whirling sand-storms; wet through ere I could dismount from my horse in its fierce rain-storms; terrified and temporarily blinded by the brilliancy of its lightning-storms; and almost sunstruck by the scorching power of the sun in its desolate confines. I have seen the sluggish waters of the Little Colorado River rise several feet in the night and place an impassable barrier temporarily before us. With my horses I have camped, again and again, waterless, on its arid and inhospitable rocks and sands, and prayed for morning, only to resume our exhausting journey in the fiercely beating rays of the burning sun; longing for some pool of water, no matter how dirty, how stagnant, that our parched tongues and throats might feel the delights of swallowing something fluid. And last year (1902), in a journey to the home of the Hopi, my friends and I saw a part of this desert covered with the waters of a fierce rain-storm as if it were an ocean, and the "dry wash" of the Oraibi the scene of a flood that, for hours, equalled the rapids of the Colorado River. We were almost engulfed in a quicksand, and a few days later covered with a sand-storm; all these experiences, and others, in the course of a few days.

Stand with me on the summit of one of the towering mountains that guard the region and you will see such a landscape of color as exists nowhere else in the world. It suggests the thought of God's original palette—where He experimented in color ere He decided how to paint the sunset, tint the sun-kissed hills at dawn, give red to the rose, green to the leaves, yellow to the sunflowers, and the varied colors of baby blue-eyes, violets, portulacas, poppies, and cacti; where He concluded to distribute color throughout His world instead of making it all sombre in grays or black.

Look! here is a vast flat of alkali, pure, dazzling white, shining like a vivid and horrible leprosy in the noon-day sun; close by is an area of volcanic action where a veritable "tintaro"—inkstand—has overflowed in devastating blackness over miles and miles. There are pits of six hundred feet depth full of black gunpowder-like substance, gardens of hellish cauliflowers and cabbages of forbidding black lava, and tunnels arched and square of pure blackness. Yonder is a mural face a half thousand feet high and two hundred or more miles long. It is nearly a hundred miles away, yet it reveals the rich glowing red of its walls, and between it and us are large "blotches" of pinks, grays, greens, reds, chocolates, carmines, crimsons, browns, yellows, olives, in every conceivable shade, and all blending in a strange and grotesque yet attractive manner, and fascinating while it awes. It is seldom one can see a rainbow lengthened out into flatness and then petrified; yet you can see it here. Few eyes have ever beheld a sunset painted on a desert's sands, yet all may see it here.

It is a desert, surely, yet throughout its entire width flows a monster river; a fiendish, evil-souled river; a thievish, murderous river; a giant vampire, sucking the life-blood from thousands of square miles of territory and making it all barren, desolate, desert. And this vampire river has vampire children which emulate their mother in their insatiable thirst. Remorselessly they suck up and carry away all the moisture that would make the land "blossom as the rose," and thus add misery to desolation, devastation to barrenness.

It is a desert, surely, yet planted in its dreary wastes are verdant-clad mountains, on whose summits winter's snows fall and accumulate, and in whose bosoms springs of life are harbored.

It is a desert, surely, yet it is fringed here and there with dense forests, and in the very heart of its direst desolation threads of silvery streams lined with greenish verdure seem to give the lie to the name.

It is desert, barren, inhospitable, dangerous, yet thousands of people make it their chosen home. Over its surface roam the Bedouins of the United States, fearless horsemen, daring travellers, who rival in picturesqueness, if not in evil, their compeers of the deserts by the Nile. Down in the deep canyon water-ways of the desert-streams dwell other peoples whose life is as strange, weird, wild, and fascinating as that of any people of earth.

In the Heart of the Petrified Forest.

This is the region and these the people I would make the American reader more familiar with. Other books have been written on the Painted Desert. One was published a few years ago, written by a clever American novelist, and published by one of America's leading firms, and I read it with mingled feelings of delight and half anger. It was so beautifully and charmingly written that one familiar with the scenes depicted could not fail to enjoy it, although indignant—because of the errors that might have been avoided. It claims only to be fiction. Yet the youth of the land reading it necessarily gain distinct impressions of fact from its pages. These "facts" are, unfortunately, so far from true that they mislead the reader. It would have been a comparatively slight task for the author to have consulted government records and thus have made his references to geography and ethnology correct.

It is needless, I hope, for me to say I have honestly endeavored to avoid the method here criticised. The bibliography incorporated as part of this book will enable the diligent student to consult authorities about this fascinating region.

But now comes an important question. What are the boundaries of the Painted Desert? I am free to confess I do not know, nor do I think any one else does. The Spaniards never attempted to bound it, and no one since has ever had the temerity to do so. In Ives's map of the region he endeavored to explore, and of which he wrote so hopelessly, he places the Painted Desert in that ill-defined way that geographers used to follow in suggesting the location of the Great American Desert.

The conditions of color and barrenness that first suggested the name exist over a large area; you find them in the plateaus of southern Utah and the wild wastes of southern Nevada; they exist in much of New Mexico and southwestern Colorado. In Arizona if you sweep around north, west, south, and east, they are there. Northward—in the cliffs and ravines of the Grand Canyon country, in Blue Canyon, in the red mesas, the coal deposits, and in the lava flows around the San Francisco Mountains; westward—in the wild mountains and wilder deserts that lead to the crossings of the Colorado River, past the craters, lava flows, Calico Mountains, and Mohave Desert of the country adjoining the Santa Fé Route, and the Salton Sea, mud volcanoes, purple cliffs, and tawny sands of the Colorado Desert of the Sunset Route of the Southern Pacific; southward—in the Red Rock country, Sunset Pass, the meteorite beds of Canyon Diablo, the great cliffs of the Mogollon Plateau, the Tonto Basin, the Verdi Valley, and away down, over the Hassayampa, through the Salt River Valley, past the Superstition and other purple and variegated mountains, into the heart of northern Mexico itself; eastward—to the Petrified Forest, across into New Mexico to Mount San Mateo, by the cliffs, craters, lava flows, alkali flats, gorges and ravines of the Zuni Mountain country and as far as the Rio Grande at Albuquerque, where the basalt is scattered about in an irregular way, as if the molten stuff had been washed over the country from some titanic bucket, and left to lie in great inky blots over the bright-colored soils and clays.

To me, all this is Painted Desert region, for much of it is painted and much is desert. Indeed, if one Painted Desert were to be staked off in any one of the above named States, ten others, equally large, could be found in the remaining ones.

It is a wonderful region viewed from any standpoint. Scenic! It is unrivalled for uniqueness, contrasts, variety, grandeur, desolateness, and majesty. Geologic! The student may here find in a few months what a lifetime elsewhere cannot reveal. Artistic! The artist will find it his rapture and his despair. Archæologic! Ruins everywhere, cavate, cliff, and pueblo dwellings, waiting for investigation, and, doubtless, scores as yet undiscovered. Ethnologic! Hopi, Wallapai, Havasupai, Navaho, Apache, and the rest; with mythologies as fascinating and complex as those of old Greece; with histories that lose themselves in dim legend and tradition, and that tell of feuds and wars, massacres and conflicts, that extend over centuries.

In the first chapter I have briefly named some of the wonders and marvels of this fascinating land, and though in barest outline, "the half has not been told."

It will be noticed that I have not rigidly adhered to the subjects as indicated by the heads of the chapters. I have preferred a discursive rather than a rigid style, for I deem it will prove itself the more interesting to the generality of my readers, and I merely call attention to it so that my critics may know it is not done without intent.

Of the Indians of this region I have room to write of four tribes only, viz., the Hopi, the Navaho, the Wallapai, and the Havasupai. Of the former much has been written in late years, owing to the interest centred in their thrilling religious ceremony, the Snake Dance. Of the Navaho considerable is known, but of the Wallapai and Havasupai there is little known and less written. Indeed, of the Wallapai there is nothing in print except the brief and cursory remarks of travellers, and the reports of the teachers of the recently established schools to the Indian Department. No one is better aware than myself of the incomplete and fragmentary character of what I have written, but this book is issued, as others that have preceded it from my pen, in accord with my desire to place in compact form for the general reader reliable accounts of places and peoples in the United States hitherto known only to the explorer and scientist.

To all the writers of the United States Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as those of other departments of the Government who have written on the region, I gratefully acknowledge many indebtednesses, especially to Powell, Fewkes, Matthews, Stephen, Hodge, Hough, Hrdlicka, Cushing, and Shufeldt.

To those who know the persistency and conscientiousness of my labors in my chosen field, and the pains I take both by observation and from the works of authorities to gain accurate knowledge, and my over-willingness to acknowledge by pen and voice those to whom I am indebted, it will not be necessary to state that I have endeavored to make this book a standard. If I have failed to give credit where it was due, I do so now with an open heart.

For the kindly reception my work in the printed page and on the platform has received in the past I hereby express my grateful acknowledgments.

George Wharton James.

Author Amphitheatre,

Bass Camp,

Grand Canyon, Arizona.

THE INDIANS OF THE
Painted Desert Region

CHAPTER I
THE PAINTED DESERT REGION

Civilization and barbarism obtrude themselves delightfully at every turn in this Wonderland of the American Southwest, called the Painted Desert Region.

Ancient and modern history play you many a game of hide-and-seek as you endeavor to trace either one or the other in a study of its aboriginal people; you look upon a ceremony performed to-day and call it modern. In reality it is of the past, so old, so hoary with antiquity that even to the participants it has lost its origin and much of its meaning.

History—exciting, thrilling, tragic—has been made in the Painted Desert Region; was being made centuries before Leif Ericson landed on the shores of Vinland, or John and Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol. History that was ancient and hoar when the band of pilgrims from Leyden battled with the wild waves of the Atlantic's New England shore, and was lapsing into sleepiness before the guns of the minute-men were fired at Lexington or Allen had fallen at Bunker Hill.

In the Painted Desert Region we find peoples strange, peculiar, and interesting, whose mythology is more fascinating than that of ancient Greece, and, for aught we know to the contrary, may be equally ancient; whose ceremonies of to-day are more elaborate than those of a devout Catholic, more complex than those of a Hindoo pantheist, more weird than those of a howling dervish of Turkestan.

Peoples whose origin is as uncertain and mysterious as the ancients thought the source of the Nile; whose history is unknown except in the fantastic, though stirring and improbable stories told by the elders as they gather the young men around them at their mystic ceremonies, and in the traditional songs sung by their high priests during the performance of long and exhausting worship.

Peoples whose government is as simple, pure, and perfect as that of the patriarchs, and possibly as ancient, and yet more republican than the most modern government now in existence. Peoples whose women build and own the houses, and whose men weave the garments of the women, knit the stockings of their own wear, and are as expert with needle and thread as their ancestors were with bow and arrow, obsidian-tipped spear, or stone battle-axe.

Here live peoples of peace and peoples of war; wanderers and stay-at-homes; house-builders and those who scorn fixed dwelling-places; poets whose songs, like those of blind Homer and the early Troubadors, were never written, but enshrined only in the hearts of the race; artists whose paints are the brilliant sands of many-colored mountains, and whose brushes are their own deft fingers.

A Freak of Erosion in the Petrified Forest.

Journeying over the Painted Desert to the Hopi Snake Dance.

Its modern history begins about three hundred and fifty years ago when one portion of it was discovered by a negro slave, whose amorous propensities lured him to his death, and the other by a priest, of whom one writer says his reports were "so disgustful in lyes and wrapped up in fictions that the Light was little more than Darkness."

Of its ancient history who can more than guess? To most questions it remains as silent as the Sphinx. The riddle of the Sphinx, though, is being solved, and so by the careful and scientific work of the Bureau of Ethnology, the riddles of the prehistoric life of our Southwest, slowly but surely, are being resolved.

One of the countries comprised in the Painted Desert Region is the theme of an epic, Homerian in style if not in quality, full of wars and rumors of wars, storming of impregnable citadels, and the recitals of deeds as brave and heroic as those of the Greeks at Marathon or Thermopylæ; a poem recently discovered, after having remained buried in the tomb of oblivion for over two hundred years.

Here are peoples of stupendous religious beliefs. Peoples who can truthfully be designated as the most religious of the world; yet peoples as agnostic and sceptic, if not as learned, as Hume, Voltaire, Spencer, and Ingersoll. Peoples to whom a written letter is witchcraft and sorcery, and yet who can read the heavens, interpret the writings of the woods, deserts, and canyons with a certainty never failing and unerring. Peoples who twenty-five years ago stoned and hanged the witches and wizards they sincerely thought cursed them, and who, ten years ago hanged, and perhaps even to-day, though secretly, hang one another on a cross as an act of virtue and religious faith, after cruelly beating themselves and one another with scourges of deadly cactus thorns.

Here are intelligent farmers, who, for centuries, have scientifically irrigated their lands, and yet who cut off the ears of their burros to keep them from stealing corn.

A land it is of witchcraft and sorcery, of horror and dread of ghosts and goblins, of daily propitiation of Fates and Powers and Princes of Darkness and Air at the very thought of whom withering curses and blasting injuries are sure to come.

Here dwell peoples who dance through fierce, flaming fires, lacerate themselves with cactus whips, run long wearisome races over the scorching sands of the desert, and handle deadly rattlesnakes with fearless freedom, as part of their religious worship.

Peoples who pray by machinery as the Burmese use their prayer wheels, and who "plant" supplications as a gardener "plants" trees and shrubs.

Peoples to whom a smoking cigarette is made the means of holy communion, the handling of poisonous reptiles a sacred and solemn act of devotion, and the playing with dolls the opportunity for giving religious instruction to their children.

Peoples who are pantheists, sun worshippers, and snake dancers, yet who have churches and convents built with incredible labor and as extensive as any modern cathedral.

Peoples whose conservatism in manners and religion surpass that of the veriest English tories; who, for hundreds of years, have steadily and successfully resisted all efforts to "convert" and change them, and who to-day are as firm in their ancient faiths as ever. Peoples whom Spanish conquistadors could not tame with matchlock, pike, and machete, nor United States forces with Gatling gun, rifle, and bayonet.

Peoples to whom fraternal organizations and secret societies, for men and women alike, are as ancient as the mountains they inhabit, whose lodge rooms are more wonderful, and whose signs and passwords more complex than those of any organization of civilized lands and modern times.

Peoples industrious and peoples studiously lazy, honest and able in thievery, truthful and consummate liars, cleanly and picturesquely dirty, interesting and repulsively loathsome, charming and artistically hideous, religious and cursedly wicked, peaceful and unceasingly warlike, lovers of home and haters of fixed habitations.

Here are peoples who dwell upon almost inaccessible cliffs, peoples of the clouds, and, on the other hand, peoples who dwell in canyon depths, where stupendous walls, capable of enclosing Memphis, Thebes, Luxor, Karnak, and all the ruins of ancient Egypt, are the boundaries of their primitive residences.

The Painted Desert Region is a country where rattlesnakes are washed, prayed over, caressed, carried in the mouth, and placed before and on sacred altars in religious worship.

Where the worship of the goddess of reproduction with all its phallic symbolism is carried on in public processionals, dances, and ceremonials by men, women, maidens, and children without shameful self-consciousness, yet where dire penalties, even unto mutilation and death, are visited upon the unchaste.

Where polygamy has been as openly practised as in the days of Abraham, and possibly from as early a time, and where to-day it is as common to see a man who, openly, has two or more wives, as in civilized lands it is common to see him with but one. And yet it is a land in which polygamy is expressly forbidden by United States law, and where numbers of arrests have been made for violation of that law.

Where religious rites are performed, so mystic and ancient that their meaning is unknown even to the most learned of those who partake in them.

Indeed, the Painted Desert Region, though a part of the United States of America, is a land of peoples strange, unique, complex, diverse, and singular as can be found in any similar area on the earth, and the physical contour of the country is as strange and diverse as are the peoples who inhabit it.

It is a land of gloriously impressive mountains, crowned with the snows of blessing and bathed in a wealth of glowing colors, changing hues, and tender tints that few other countries on earth can boast.

On its eastern outskirt is a portion of one of the largest cretaceous monoclines in the world, and near by is a natural inkstand, half a mile in circumference, from which, centuries ago, flowed fiery, inky lava which has now solidified in intensest blackness over hundreds of miles of surrounding country.

It is a land of mountain-high plateaus, edged with bluffs, cliffs, and escarpments that delight the distant beholder with their richness of coloring and wondrous variety of outline, and thrill with horror those who unexpectedly stand on their brinks.

It is a land of laziness and indifferent content, where everything is done "poco tiempo"—"in a little while"—and where "to-morrow" is early enough for all laborious tasks, and yet a land of such tireless energy, never-ceasing work, and arduous labor as few countries else have ever known.

A land where people live in refinement, education, and all the luxuries of twentieth-century civilization side by side with peoples whose dress, modes of living, habits of eating and sleeping, styles of food and cookery are similar to those of the subjects of Boadicea and Caractacus.

In the Painted Desert Region the root of one dangerous-looking prickly cactus is used for soap, and the fruit of another for food.

Here horses dig for water, and mules are stimulated by whiskey to draw their weighty loads over torrid deserts and up mountain steeps.

It is a land of ruins, desolate and forlorn, buried and forgotten, with histories tragic, bloody, romantic; ruins where charred timbers, ghastly bones, and demolished walls speak of midnight attacks, treacherous surprises, and cruel slaughters; where whole cities have been exterminated and destroyed as if under the ancient commands to the Hebrews: "Destroy, slay, kill, and spare not."

A desert country, and yet, in spots, marvellously fertile. Barren, wild, desolate, forsaken it is, and yet, here and there, fertile valleys, wooded slopes, and garden patches may be found as rich as any on earth.

Where atmospheric colorings are so perfect and so divinely artistic in their applications that weary and desolate deserts are made dreams of glory and supremest beauty, and harsh rugged mountains are sublimated into transcendent pictures of tender tints and ever-changing but always harmonious combinations of color.

A land where rain may be seen falling in fifty showers all around, and yet not a drop fall, for a year or more, on the spot where the observer stands.

A land of sculptured images and fantastic carvings. Where water, wind, storm, sand, frost, heat, atmosphere, and other agencies, unguided and uncontrolled by man, have combined to make figures more striking, more real, more picturesque, more ugly, more beautiful, and more fantastic than those of the angels, devils, saints, and sinners that crown and adorn the ancient Pagan shrines of the Orient and the more modern Christian shrines of the Occident;—a veritable Toom-pin-nu-wear-tu-weep—Land of the Standing Rocks—more gigantic, wonderful, and attractive than can be found elsewhere in the world.

Where sand mountains, yielding alike to the fierce winds of winter and the gentle breezes of summer, slowly travel from place to place, irresistibly controlling fresh sites and burying all that obstructs their path.

A land where, in summer, railway trains are often stopped by drifting sands blown by scorching winds over almost trackless Saharas, and where, in winter, the same trains are stopped by drifting snows blown over the same Saharas now made Arctic in their frozen solitude.

A land where once were vast lakes in which disported ugly monsters, and on the surface of which swam mighty fish-birds who gazed with curious wonder upon the enormous reptiles, birds, and animals which came to lave themselves in the cooling waves or drink of their refreshing waters.

But now lakes, fishes, reptiles, and animals have entirely disappeared. Where placid lakes once were lashed into fury by angry winds are now only sand wastes and water-worn rocks where the winds howl and shriek and rave, and mourn the loss of the waters with which they used to sport; and the only remnants of prehistoric fishes, reptiles, and animals are found in decaying bones or fossilized remains deep imbedded in the strata of the unnumbered ages.

Ancient Pottery dug from Prehistoric Ruins on the Painted Desert.

A land where volcanic fires and fierce lava flows, accompanied by deadly fumes, noxious gases, and burning flames, have made lurid the midnight skies, and driven happy people from their peaceful homes.

A land through which a mighty river dashes madly and unrestrainedly to the sea, and yet where, a few miles away, a spring that flows a few buckets of water an hour is an inestimable treasure. Yes indeed, where, in sight of that giant river, thirsty men have gone raving mad for want of water, and have hurled themselves headlong down thousand-feet-high precipices in their uncontrolled desire to reach the precious and cooling stream.

A land of rich and florid coloring where the Master Artist has revelled in matchless combinations. It is a land of color,—sweet, gentle, tender colors that penetrate the soul as the words of a lover; fierce, glaring, bold colors that strike as with the clenched fist of a foe.

It is the stage upon which the bronze and white actors of three hundred and fifty years ago played their games of life with ambitions, high as they were selfish, determined as they were bold, and unscrupulous as they were successful.

CHAPTER II
DESERT RECOLLECTIONS

Of the flora and fauna of the Painted Desert Region I have made no study. That they are fascinating the works of Hart Merriam, Coville, Lemmon, Hough, and others of later days, and of the specialists of the earlier government surveys, abundantly testify. There are cacti of varieties into the hundreds, sagebrush, black and white grama, bunch grass, salt grass, hackberry, buck-brush, pines, junipers, spruces, cottonwoods, and willows, besides a thousand flowering plants. There are lizards, swifts, rattlesnakes, scorpions, Gila monsters, vinegerones, prairie dogs, hedgehogs, turtles, squirrels, cottontail and jack-rabbits, antelope, deer, mountain sheep, wildcats, and some bear.

It is more of its physiographic conditions in a general way, however, that I would here write.

Most people's conception of a desert is a flat, level place of nothing but sand. It is sand instead of water; a desert instead of an ocean. Few deserts conform to this conception,—none, indeed, that I know of in the boundaries of the United States. This Painted Desert Region is wonderfully diversified. There is sand, of course, but much rock, many trees, more canyons, some mountains and lava flows, extinct volcanoes, forests, and pastures. The Grand Canyon runs across its northern borders, and it is the vampire river that flows in that never-to-be-described water-way that drains away the water which leaves this the desert region it is; for the Colorado has many tributaries, and tributaries of tributaries,—the Little Colorado, Havasu (Cataract) Creek, Canyon Padre, Canyon Diablo, Walnut Creek, Oak Creek, Willow Creek, Diamond Creek, and a score or hundred others.

Its great mountains are the San Francisco range, on the shoulders of which Flagstaff is located, Mount San Mateo, seen from the Santa Fé train near Grants in New Mexico, and Williams Mountain, west of Flagstaff, at the foot of which the railway traveller will see the town of Williams.

Near Flagstaff are a number of extinct volcanoes and great masses of lava flow; from the train at Blue Water to the right a few miles one may see the crater Tintaro—the Inkstand. The Zuni Mountains have many craters, chief of which is the Agua Fria crater, and lava flows from the Zuni Mountains and Mount San Mateo meet in the valley, and one rides alongside them for miles coming west beyond Laguna.

South of Canyon Diablo is a wonderful meteoritic mountain, the explanation of whose existence the scientists have not yet determined. From Peach Springs a large meteoric rock was sent to the Smithsonian, and I have one dug out of a hole of its own making in the Zuni Mountains, both of which weigh upwards of a ton.

To the east of the Canyon Diablo Mountain is Sunset Pass, familiar to the readers of Gen. Charles King's thrilling Arizona stories, and beyond it to the south are Hell's Canyon,—which does not belie its name,—the Verdi Valley, and the interesting Red Rock Country, where numerous cliff and cavate dwellings have recently been discovered and explored by Dr. Fewkes.

Indeed, this whole region is one of cliff and cavate and other forsaken dwellings. Everywhere one meets with them. Desert mounds, on examination, prove to be sites of long-buried cities, and hundreds, nay thousands of exquisite vessels of clay, decorated in long-forgotten ways, have been dug up from them and sent to grace the shelves of museums and speak of a people long since crumbled to dust.

The miner has found it a profitable field for his operations, the Jerome and Congress, with the Old Vulture and similar mines, having made great fortunes for their owners. More than half our knowledge of the country came primarily from the daring and courageous prospectors who risked its dangers and deaths in their search for gold.

The roads in the Painted Desert are long and tedious, and the horses drag their weary way over the scorching sands, the wheels of the wagon sinking in, as does also the heart of the sensitive rider who sees the efforts the poor beasts are making to obey his will. Yet the animals seldom sweat. Such is the rapid radiation of moisture in this dry, high atmosphere that one never sees any of the sweat and lather so common to hard-driven horses in lower altitude.

The food question for horses is often serious if one goes far from the beaten path of traders or Indians. A desert is not a pasture, though its scant patches of grass often have to serve for one. The general custom, where possible, is to carry a small amount of grain, which is fed sparingly night and morning. The horses are hobbled and turned loose in as good pasture as can be found. Hence the first questions asked when determining a camping place are, "What kind of pasture and water does it possess?" There are times when one dare not run the risk of turning the horses loose. Thirsty beyond endurance, they will often travel all night, even though closely hobbled, back to where the last water was secured. Then they must be tracked back, and no more exhausting and disheartening occupation do I know than this.

On one occasion we were compelled to camp where there was little pasturage. It rained, and there were two ladies in my party. The covered wagon was emptied and their blankets rolled down in it, so that they could be in shelter. Our driver was a German named Hank. Two of "his horses were mules," and these were tied one to each of the front wheels. The two real horses were tied to the rear wheels. During the night "Pete," one of the mules, got his fore legs over the pole of the wagon, and began to tug and pull so that the ladies were afraid the vehicle might be overturned. Calling to Hank, the poor fellow was compelled to get out of his blankets and in the rain go to Pete's rescue. To their intense amusement the ladies heard him remonstrating with the refractory mule, and almost exploded when he wound up his remonstrances, hitherto couched in quiet and dignified language, "Pete, you are von little tefel."

Some people do not like to hobble a horse, and so they picket him. There are different ways of "picketing" a horse. He may be tied by the halter to a bush, tree, wagon, or stake driven into the ground. But these methods are fraught with danger. I once had a valuable horse at a time when Dr. Joseph LeConte, the beloved professor of geology of the University of California, was spending a month with me in the mountains. We had six horses, and all were "picketed" from the halter, or a rope around the neck. Three times a day we changed them to fresh pasturage. At one of the changing times we found the beautiful black stretched out cold and stiff. In scratching his head the hoof of his hind foot had caught in the rope, and in seeking to free himself he had pulled the rope tighter and tighter until he had strangled himself. The gentle-hearted professor sat down and wept at the tragic end of the noble horse "Duke" he had already learned to love.

To prevent this danger I have often picketed a horse's hind foot to a log heavy enough to drag, so that the hungry animal could move a little in search of food, but not run or get far away. There have been two or three times, however, in my experience, where I could find neither tree, bush, nor stake. Not a rock or log could be found for miles to which the saddle horse I rode could be picketed. What then could I do? Sit up all night to care for my horse? Ride all night? Or do as I heard of one or two men having done, viz., picket the horse to my own foot? I once heard of a man who was dragged to his death that way. His cayuse was startled during the night and started to run. As the rope tightened and he dragged the unhappy wretch attached to him, his fear increased his speed, and not until he was exhausted and breathless did he stop in his wild, mad race. He was found with the corpse, bruised and mangled beyond all recognition, still dragging at the end of the rope.

I had no desire to run such risk. So I did the impossible,—picketed my horse to a hole in the ground.

"Nonsense! Picket a horse to a hole in the ground? It can't be done!"

Indeed! But I did it. Watch me. Cut into the ground (especially if it is a little grassy) and make a hole a little larger than to allow your full fist to enter. As you dig deeper widen the hole below so that it is a kind of a chimney towards the top. Dig fully a foot or a foot and a half down. Then take the rope, which is already fastened at the other end to your horse, wrap the end around a piece of grass, or paper, or a small stone, or anything; put the knot into the hole, and "tamp" in the earth as vigorously as you can. Your horse is then fast, unless he grows desperately afraid and pulls with more than ordinary vigor.

The scarcity of water makes journeying on the Painted Desert a grave and serious problem. The springs are few and far between, and only in the rainy season can one rely upon stony or clay pockets that fill up with the precious fluid. In going from Canyon Diablo to Oraibi there are four places where water may be obtained. First in a small canyon a few miles west of Volz's Crossing of the Little Colorado; then at the Lakes,—small ponds of dirty, stagnant water, where a trading-post is located and where the journey is generally broken for a night. Next day, twenty-two miles must be driven to Little Burro Spring before water is again found, and a few miles further on, on the opposite side of the valley, is Big Burro Spring. Then no more water is found until Oraibi is reached. There are two springs on the western side of the Oraibi mesa, and three miles on the eastern side in the Oraibi Wash is a good well, some sixty feet deep, of cold and good but not over-clear water. There are small pools near Mashonganavi, Shipauluvi, and Shungopavi, but the water is poor at best and very limited in quantity to those who are used to the illimitable flow of ordinary Eastern cities. The whole water supply at Mashonganavi, which is by far the best watered town of the middle mesa, would not more than suffice for the needs of a New York or Boston family of six or eight persons, and consternation would sit upon the face of the mistress of either household if such water were to flow through the faucets of her home.

At Walpi there are three pool springs on the west side, but all flow slowly. One is good (for the desert), another is fair, and the third is horrible. Yet this last is almost equal to the supply on the eastern side, where there are three pool springs, only two of which can be used for domestic purposes.

Storms fearful and terrible often sweep across this desert region. I have "enjoyed" several notable experiences in them, storms of sand, of rain, of wind, of lightning, and of thunder, sometimes one kind alone, other times of a combination of kinds. At one time we were camped in the Oraibi Wash not far from the home of the Mennonite missionary, my friend Rev. H. R. Voth. There were seven of us in my party,—five men, two women. Our general custom on making a camp was first of all to choose the best place for the beds of the ladies, and then the men arranged their blankets in picturesque irregularity around them at some distance away, thus forming a complete guard, not because of any necessity, but to make the ladies feel less timid. As my daughter was one of the ladies, I invariably rolled out my blankets near enough to be called readily should there be any occasion during the night.

We had not been in our blankets long, that night, before a fearful thunder and rain-storm burst upon us. We had all gone to bed tired after our long and weary day watching the Hopi ceremonies, and the camp equipage was not prepared for a storm. It was pitch dark except for the sharp flashes of lightning which occasionally cut the blackness into jagged sections, and the deluge of rain waited for no squeamishness on my part. Hastily jumping up, I ran to and fro in my bare feet and night garments, caught up a big wagon sheet, and endeavored to spread it over the exposed beds of the ladies. The wind was determined I should not succeed, but I am English and obstinate. So I seized camera cases, valises, boxes of canned food, and anything heavy, and placed them upon the edges of the flapping canvas. Running back and forth to the wagon, the lightning every now and again revealed a drenched, fantastic figure, and I could hear suppressed laughter and giggles from under the blankets whence should have issued songs of thankfulness to me. But "it was ever thus!" I succeeded finally in pinning down the canvas, and had just rolled my wet and shivering form in my own drenched blankets, when Mr. Voth, with a lantern in his hand, came and simply demanded that the ladies come over to warmth and shelter in his hospitable house. Hastily wrapping themselves up, they started, blown about by the wind and flaunted by the tempest. The sand made it harder still to walk, and out of breath and wildly dishevelled, they struggled up the bank of the Wash and were soon comfortably ensconsed indoors. Then, strange irony of events, the storm immediately ceased, the heavens cleared, the stars shone bright, the cool night air became delicious to the nostrils and tired bodies, and we who remained outside had a sleep as ineffably sweet as that of healthful babes, while the ladies sweltered and rolled and tossed with discomfort in the moist heat that had accumulated in the closed rooms.

The Painted Desert near the Little Colorado River.

Asleep, Early Morning, on the Painted Desert.

A few years later I was again at Oraibi, and strangely near the same camping place. This time my companions were W. W. Bass, whose early adventures have been recounted in my "In and Around the Grand Canyon," a photographer, and a British friend of his who had stopped off in California on his way home from Japan. Mr. Britisher had contributed a small share towards the expenses of the expedition, but with insular ignorance he had presumed that his small mite would pay the expenses of the whole outfit for a long period. It must be confessed that we had had a most arduous trip. The Painted Desert had shown its ugly side from the very moment we left the railway. Four miles out we had been stopped by the most terrific and vivid lightning-storm it has ever been my good fortune to witness and to be scared half out of my wits with. At Rock Tanks we had another storm. We had been jolted and shaken on our way out to Hopi Point of the Grand Canyon, and had come so near to perishing for want of water that we fell on our knees and greedily drank the vilest liquid from an alkali pool, a standing place of horses, on our way to the Little Colorado. At the old Tanner Crossing of that stream we had had another rain and lightning-storm near unto the first in fury, and in which our British friend had been caught in his blankets and nearly frightened to death. In the Moenkopi Wash he was offended because I left the wagon to ride to the home and accept the hospitality of the Mormon bishop, which he interpreted again with insular ignorance to mean a palace, a place of luxury, exquisite restfulness, good foods, and delicious iced wines, while he was left to beans, bacon, flapjacks, and dried fruit, and a roll of blankets on the rough and uneven ground. (It didn't make any difference that I explained to him next day that I had slept on a grass plot with one quilt and no pillow, cold, shivering, and longing for my good substantial roll of Navaho blankets, left for him to use if he so desired, and that our "banquet" had been coarse bread and a bowl of milk.) Then we had had another storm at Toh-gas-je, which I had partially avoided by riding on ahead in the light wagon of the Indian agent who piloted us, while he—Mr. Britisher—was in the heavier ambulance. The next night we camped, attempting to sleep on the stony slopes of the hillside at Blue Canyon in wretchedness and misery, because it was too late when we arrived to dare to drive down into the canyon. The next day we drove over the Sahara of America, a sandy desert which even to the Hopis is the most a-tu-u-u (hot) of all earthly places. That noon we camped in the dry wash of Tnebitoh, where we had to dig for water, waiting for it slowly to seep into the hole we had dug. It was a sandy, alkaline decoction, but we were glad and thankful for it, and the way the poor horses stood and longingly looked on as we waited for the inflow was pitiable. At night we camped some twelve or fifteen miles farther on, without water, hobbling the horses and turning them loose. I had engaged an Indian to go with us from Blue Canyon as helper and guide, so I sent him, in the morning, to bring in the horses. Two or three hours later he returned, with but one of the animals, and said he had tried to track the others, but could not do so. Imagine what our predicament would have been, in the heart of the desert, without horses and water, and many miles away from any settlement. There was but one thing to be done, and Mr. Bass at once did it. Putting a bridle on the one horse, he rode off barebacked after the runaways. Knowing the character of his mules, he aimed directly for the Tnebitoh. When he arrived at the spot where we had watered the day before, he found that, with unerring instinct, the horses had returned to this spot and had dug new watering places for themselves. Then, scenting the cool grass of the San Francisco Mountains, they had aimed directly west, and, hobbled though they were, the tracks showed they were travelling at a lively rate of speed. Knowing the urgency and desperateness of our case, Bass followed as fast as he could make his almost exhausted animal go, and after an hour's hard riding saw, in the far-away distance, the three perverse creatures "hitting" the trailless desert as hard as they could. Jersey, a knowing mule, was in the lead. He soon saw Bass, and, seeming to communicate with the others, they turned and saw him also. Jack (the other mule) and the horse at once showed a disposition to stop, but Jersey with bite and whinney tried to drive them on. Finding his efforts useless, he stopped with the others, and, when Bass rode up, allowed himself to be "necked" (tied neck to neck) with the other two. Horses and man were as near "played out" as we cared to see them when, later in the day, they returned to camp.

It does not do to go out upon the Painted Desert without some practical person who is capable of meeting all serious emergencies that are likely to arise.

The next day we drove on to Oraibi, in the scorching sun, over the sandy hillocks, where no road would last an hour in a wind-storm unless it were thoroughly blanketed and pegged down. We were all hot, weary, and ill-tempered. Thinking to help out, I volunteered to walk up the steep western trail to the mesa top and secure some corn at Oraibi for our horses, so that they could be fed at once on reaching our stopping place on the east side. When we started I had suggested the hope that we might be able to stop in the schoolhouse below the Oraibi mesa, as I had several times done in times before; but when the wagon arrived there, and I came down from the mesa, it was found to be already occupied by persons to whom it had been promised by the Indian agent. Camping, then, was the only thing left open to us, until I could see the Hopis and rent one of their houses. Down we drove to the camp, where alone a sufficiency of water was to be found. This explains our close proximity to the camp of the earlier year. We were just preparing our meal when a fierce sand-storm blew up. Cooking was out of the question; the fire blew every which way, and the sand filled meat, beans, corn, tomatoes with too much grit for comfort. This was the last straw that broke the back of Mr. Britisher's complacency. He had bemoaned again and again the leaving of his comfortable home to come into this "God-forsaken region," in a quest of what our crazy westernism called pleasure, and now his fury burst upon me in a manner that dwarfed the passion of the heavens and the earth. While there was a refinement in his vituperation, there was an edge upon it as keen as fury, passion, and culture could give it. I was scorched by his scarifying lightnings, struck again and again by his vindictive thunderbolts, tossed hither and thither by his stormy winds, and lifted heavenwards and then dashed downwards by the tornadoes and whirlwinds of his passion. It was dazzling, bewildering, intensely interesting, and then fiercely irritating. I stood it all until he denounced my selfishness. There's no doubt I am selfish, but there is a limit to a fellow's endurance when another fellow claims the discovery and rubs it in upon you until he abrades the skin. So I raised my hand and also my voice: "Stop, that's enough. Dare to repeat that and I'll tie you on a horse and send you back to the railway in charge of an Indian so quickly that you'll wonder how you got there. Selfish, am I? I permitted you to come on this trip as a favor to my photographer. The paltry sum you paid me has not found one-fourth share of the corn for one horse, let alone your own food, the hire of the horses, wagon, and driver. To oblige you I have allowed you the whole way to ride inside my conveyance that you might talk together, while I have sat out in the hot sun. If any help has been needed by Mr. Bass in driving, I have willingly given it instead of calling upon you. I have done all the unpacking and the packing of the wagon at each camp, morning, noon, and night. I have done all the cooking and much of the dish-washing, and yet you have the impudence and mendacity to say I have been selfish. Very well! I'll take myself at your estimate. In future I'll take my seat inside the ambulance; you shall do your share of helping the driver. You shall do your share of the packing; and if you eat another mouthful, so long as you remain in my camp, you shall cook it yourself. I have spoken! And when I thus speak I speak as the laws of the Medes and Persians, which alter not, nor change!"

The Colorado River at Bass Ferry, the Vampire of the Painted Desert.

"Well, —— says you are selfish!" burst out the somewhat cowed man.

"Then I put him on the same plane as I put you; and if ever either of you dares to make that charge again, I will—"

Well, never mind what I, in my, what I still believe to be, just anger threatened. I turned away, went and secured an Indian's house, and that night we removed there.

But I wish I had the space to recount how those two unfortunates and misfortunates cooked their own meals and mine and Bass's. It is a subject fit for a Dickens or a Kipling. No minor pen can do justice to it. How they came and asked with quiet humility, "What are we going to have for supper?" and how I replied, "Raw potatoes, so far as I am concerned!" Neither knew whether a frying-pan was for skimming cream from a can of condensed milk or for making charlotte russes. Neither could boil water without scorching it. But surreptitiously (with my secret connivance) Bass gave the tyros gentle hints and finally "licked them" into fourth-rate cooks, so that I reaped the reward of their labors in selfishly and shamelessly taking some of the concoctions they had slaved over.

I know this plain, unvarnished tale reveals me a "bad man from Bodie," but I started out to give a truthful account of the Painted Desert and its storms, and this "tempest in a frying-pan" in camp cannot well be ignored by a veracious chronicler.

Last year, fate designed that we camp at exactly the same spot. The two wagons came to rest at about the same place where the ambulance stood, and exactly the same wind and sand-storm blew up before we had been there half an hour. I had with me a long, eight-feet-high strip of canvas belonging to a very large circular tent. To ward off the force of some part of the storm we stretched this canvas from the trunk of one cottonwood tree to another, and moved our camp to the sheltered side. That was an insult to the powers of the storm. The wind fairly howled with rage, and pulled and tugged and flapped that canvas in a perfect fury of anger. Then as we huddled in its shelter, a sudden jerk came, and up it was ripped, from top to bottom, in a moment, and the loose ends went wildly flying and flapping every way. In the blowing sand I fled with the ladies to Mr. Voth's ever-hospitable house, but it was as hot as—well! no matter—in there. Outside, the cottonwoods were bowed over in the fury of the wind, and the sand went flying by in sheets. It was easy then to understand the remark of one experienced in the ways of the Painted Desert Region: "If you ever buy any real estate here, contract to have it anchored, or you'll wake up some morning and find it all blown into the next county." The flying sand literally obliterated every object more than a few feet away.

Now in this last case I had the pleasure—as peculiar a pleasure as it is to watch the coming of a hurricane at sea—to see the oncoming of this storm. We were enjoying perfect calm. Suddenly over the Oraibi mesa there came a great brown mass that stretched entirely across the country. It was the tawny sand risen in power and majesty to drive us from its lair. It was so grand, so sublime, so alive, that just as I instinctively rush to my camera at sight of an interesting face, I dashed towards it to secure a photograph of this new, gigantic, living manifestation. But in its fierce fury it swept upon us with such rapidity that I was too late. We were covered with it, buried in it. As darkness leaps upon one and absorbs him, so did this storm absorb us. In an hour or so its greatest fury subsided; then we thought we would build our camp-fire and proceed to our regular cooking. How the wind veered and changed, and changed again as soon as the fire began to ascend. That is a point to watch in building a camp-fire. Be sure and locate it so that its smoke won't blow upon you when you sit down to eat. In this case, however, it would not have mattered. In my notebook I read: "We have changed the camp-fire three times, and no matter where we put it, the smoke swoops down upon us. Even now while I write I am half blinded by the smoke, which ten minutes ago was being blown in the opposite direction." So that if these few pages have an unpleasant odor of camp-fire smoke about them, the reader must charge it to the wilful ways of the wind on the Painted Desert.

Elsewhere I have spoken of the mystery brooding over the peoples of this land. It is also existent in the very colors of it, whether noted in early morning, in the glare of the pitiless Arizona noon, or at sunset; in the storm, with the air full of sand, or in the calm and quiet of a cloudless sky; when the sky is cerulean or black with lowering clouds; ever, always, the color is weird, strange, mysterious. One night at Walpi several of us sat and watched the colorings in the west. No unacquainted soul would have believed such could exist. To describe it is as impossible as to analyze the feelings of love. It was raining everywhere in the west; and "everywhere" means so much where one's horizon is not limited. The eye there roams over what seem to be boundless distances. In all this space rain was falling. The sun had but half an hour more to live, and it flooded the sky with an orange crimson. The rain came down in hairy streaks brilliantly illuminated. The sun could be discerned only as a dimly veiled face, with the light shed below it—none above—in graceful curves. Then the orange and crimson changed to purple, deepening and deepening into blackness until day was done.

Sometimes the lighting up of the desert in the early morning gives it the effect of a sea-green ocean, and then the illusion is indescribably wonderful. At such times, if there are clouds in the sky, the reflections of color are as delicate and beautiful as the tintings of the sea-shells.

One night standing on the mesa at Mashonganavi looking east and south, the vast ocean-like expanse of tawny sand and desert was converted by the hues of dying day into a gorgeous and resplendent sea of exquisite and delicate color. On the further side were the Mogollon Buttes,—the Giant's Chair, Pyramid Butte, and others,—with long walls, which, in the early morning black and forbidding, were now illumined and etherealized by the magic wand of sunset.

If, however, one would know another of the marvellous charms of this Painted Desert Region let him see it in the early summer, after the first rains. This may be the latter part of June or in July and August. Then what a change! One seeing it for the first time would naturally exclaim in protest: "Desert? Why, this is a garden!"

A thin and sparse covering of grass, but enough to the casual observer to relieve the whole land from the charge of barrenness; the black and white grama grasses, with their delicate shades of green; and a host of wild flowers of most exquisite colors in glorious combinations. Here masses of flaming marigolds and sunflowers; yonder patches of the white and purple tinted flowers of the jimson-weed, while its rich green leaves form a complete covering for the tawny sand or rocky desolation beneath. Here are larkspurs, baby blue-eyes, Indian's paint brush, daisies, lilies, and a thousand and one others, the purples, blues, reds, pinks, whites, and browns giving one a chromatic feast, none the less delightful because it is totally unexpected.

Then who can tell of the glory of the hundreds of cacti in bloom, great prickly monsters, barrel shaped, cylindrical, lobe formed, and yet all picked out in the rarest, most dainty flowers the eye of man ever gazed upon? Look yonder at the "hosh-kon," one of the yucca family, a sacred plant to the Navahoes. Its dagger-like green leaves are crowned and glorified with the central stalk, around which cluster a thousand waxen white bells, and this one is only a beginning to the marvellous display of them we shall see as we ride along. The greasewood veils its normal ugliness in revivified leaves and a delicate flossy yellow bloom that makes it charming to the eye. Even the sagebrush attains to some charm of greenness, and where the juniper and cedar and pine lurk in the shades of some of the rocky slopes, the deepest green adds its never-ending comfort and delight to the scene.

Yet you look in vain for the rivers, the creeks, the babbling brooks, the bubbling fountains, the ponds, that charm your eye in Eastern landscapes. Oh, for the Adirondacks,—the lakes and streams which abound on every hand. If only these could be transplanted into this desert to give their peculiar delights without any of their drawbacks, then the Painted Desert Region would be the ideal land.

It would never do to bring the Adirondack flies and gnats and mosquitoes; its hot, sultry nights and muggy, sweltering days. No! These we can do without. We would have its advantages, but with none of its disadvantages.

How futile such wishes; how childish such longings! Each place is itself; and, for myself, I love the Painted Desert even in its waterlessness, its barrenness, and its desolation. Think of its stimulating altitude, its colors, its clear, cloudless sky, its glorious, divine stars, its delicious evening coolness, its never-disturbed solitudes, its speaking silences, its romances, its mysteries, its tragedies, its histories. These are some of the things that make the Painted Desert what it is—a region of unqualified fascination and allurement.

CHAPTER III
FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE HOPI

Three great fingers of rock from a gigantic and misshapen hand, roughly speaking, pointing southward, the hand a great plateau, the fingers mesas of solid rock thrust into the heart of a sandy valley,—this is the home of the Hopi, commonly and wrongly termed the Moki. The fingers are from seven to ten miles apart, and a visitor can go from one finger-nail to another either by descending and ascending the steep trails zigzagged on the fingers' sides, or he can circle around on the back of the hand and thus in a round-about manner reach any one of the three fingers. These mesa fingers are generally spoken of as the first or east mesa, the second or middle mesa, and the third or west mesa. They gain their order from the fact that in the early days of American occupancy Mr. T. V. Keam established a trading-post in the canyon that bears his name, and this canyon being to the east of the eastern mesa, this mesa was reached first in order, the western mesa naturally being third.

On the east mesa are three villages. The most important of all Hopi towns is Walpi, which occupies the "nail" of this first "finger." It is not so large as Oraibi, but it has always held a commanding influence, which it still retains. Half a mile back of Walpi is Sichumavi, and still further back Hano, or, as it is commonly and incorrectly called, Tewa.

About seven miles—as the crow flies—to the west is the second or middle mesa, and here are Mashonganavi, Shipauluvi, and on an offshoot from this second mesa, separated from it by a deep, sand-filled ravine, is Shungopavi.

Ten miles farther to the west is Oraibi, which marks the farthest western boundary of pueblo civilization.

Oh! the pathos, the woe, the untold but clearly written misery of the centuries in these cliff-built houses of the mesas, these residences that are fortresses, these steep trail-approached and precipice-protected homes. In a desert land, surrounded by relentless, wary, and vigilant foes, ever fighting a hard battle with the adverse conditions of their environment, short of water, of firewood, and with food grown in the desert-rescued lands below where at any moment the ruthless marauder might appear, there is no wonder that almost every elderly face is seamed and scarred; furrowed deeply with the accumulated centuries of never-ceasing care. Mystery here seems at first to reign supreme. It stands and faces one as a Presence. It hovers and broods, and you feel it even in your sleep. The air is full of it. The very clouds here are mysterious. Who are these people? From whence came they? What is their destiny? What fearful battles, race hatreds, devastating wars, led them to make their homes on these inaccessible cliffs? How did they ever conceive such a mass of elaborate ceremonial as now controls them? Solitary and alone they appear, a vast question mark, viewed from every standpoint. Whichever way one looks at them a great query stares him in the face. They are the chief mystery of our country, an anachronism, an anomaly in our twentieth-century civilization.

When we see the ruins of Egypt, India, Assyria, we look upon something that is past. Those peoples were: they pertain to the ages that are gone. Their mysteries are of lives lived in the dim ages of antiquity. But here are antique lives being lived in our own day; pieces of century-old civilizations transplanted, in time and place, and brought into our time and place; the past existent in the present; the lapse of centuries forgotten, and the days of thousands of years ago bodily transferred into our commercial, super-cultured, hyper-refined age.

The approach to the first mesa from Keam's Canyon is through a sandy country, which, in places, is dry, desolate, and bare. But here and there are patches of ground upon which weeds grow to a great height, plainly indicating that with cultivation and irrigation good crops could be raised. As we leave the mouth of the canyon the singular character of this plateau province is revealed. To the south the sandy desert, in lonesome desolation, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, its wearisome monotony relieved only by the close-by corn-fields of the Hopis and the peculiar buttes of the Mogollons. With the sun blazing down upon it, its forbidding barrenness is appalling. Neither tree, shrub, blade of grass, animal, or human habitation is to be seen. The sand reflects the sun's rays in a yellow glare which is irritating beyond measure, and which seems as if it would produce insanity by its unchangeableness.

To the right of us are the extremities of the sandstone plateaus, of which the Hopi mesas are the thrust out fingers. Here and there are breaks in the plateau which seem like openings into rocky canyons. Before us, ten or more miles away, is the long wall of the first mesa, its falling precipices red and glaring in the sun. Immense rocks of irregular shape lie about on its summit as if tumbled to and fro in some long-ago-forgotten frolic of prehistoric giants. Right before us, and at about the mid distances of the "finger" from the main plateau, the mesa wall is broken down in the form of a U-shaped notch or gap,—from which Walpi, "the place of the gap," obtains its name; and it is on the extremity of the mesa, beyond this notch, that the houses of the Hopi towns can now clearly be discerned. Just beyond the notch a little heap of houses, apparently of the same color as the mesa itself, appears. Then a little vacant space and another small heap, followed by another vacancy with a larger heap at the extreme end of the mesa. These heaps, beginning at the notch, are respectively Tewa, Sichumavi, and Walpi.

Dotting the slopes of the talus at the foot of the mesa precipices are corn-fields, peach orchards, and corrals for burros, sheep, and goats.

As we approach nearer we see that the first mesa is rapidly losing its distinctively Indian character. The policy of the United States Government, in its treatment of these Indians, is to induce them, so far as possible, to leave their mesa homes and reside in the valley nearer to their corn-fields. As their enemies are no longer allowed to molest them, their community life on these mesa heights is no longer necessary, and the time lost and the energy wasted in climbing up and down the steep trails could far better be employed in working in the fields, caring for their orchards, or attending to their stock. But while all this sounds well in theory, and on paper appears perfectly reasonable, it fails to take into consideration the influence of heredity and the personal passions, desires, and feelings of volitional beings. As a result, the government plan is not altogether a success. The Indian agents, however, have induced certain of the Hopis, by building houses for them, to consent to a partial abandonment of their mesa homes. Accordingly, as one draws nearer, he sees the stone houses with their red-painted corrugated-iron roofs, the schoolhouse, the blacksmith's shop, and the houses of the teachers, all of which speak significantly of the change that is slowly hovering over the Indian's dream of solitude and desolation.

But after our camp is made and the horses sent out in the care of willing Indians to the Hopi pastures, we find that the trails to the mesa summit are the same; the glaring yellow sand is the same; the red and gray rocks are the same; the fleecy and dark clouds that occasionally appear at this the rainy time are the same; the glaring, pitiless sun with its infernal scorching is the same; and we respire and perspire and pant and struggle in our climb to the summit in the same old arduous fashion. Above, in Hano, Sichumavi, and Walpi, the pot-bellied, naked children, the lithe and active young men, the not unattractive, shapely, and kindly-faced young women, with their peculiar symbolic style of hair-dressing, the blear-eyed old men and women, the patient and stolid burros, the dim-eyed and pathetic captive eagles, the quaint terraced-houses with their peculiar ladders, grotesque chimneys, passageways, and funny little steps, are practically the same as they have been for centuries.

There are two trails from the valley to the summit of the first mesa on the east side, one at the point, and three on the west side. We ascend by the northeastern trail, which, on reaching the "Notch" or "Gap," winds close by an enclosure in which is found a large fossil, bearing a rude resemblance to a stone snake. All around this fossil, within the stone enclosure, are to be found "bahos," or prayer sticks, which have been brought by the devout as their offerings to the Snake Divinities. From time immemorial this shrine has been in existence, and no Hopi ever passes it without some offering to "Those Above," either in the form of a baho, a sprinkling of the sacred meal, the ceremonial smoking to the six cardinal points, or a few words of silent but none the less devout and earnest prayer.

At the head of this trail is Hano, and from this pueblo we can gain a general idea of Hopi architecture, for, with differences in minor details, the general styles are practically the same. Where they gained their architectural knowledge it is hard to tell, and who they are is yet an unsolved problem. It is pretty generally conceded, however, that all the pueblo peoples of Arizona and New Mexico—of whom the Hopis are the most western—are the descendants of the race, or races, who dotted these territories and southern Colorado with ruins, and who are commonly known as the Cliff and Cave Dwellers. But this is thrusting the difficulty only a few generations, or scores of generations, further back. For we are at once compelled to the agnostic answer, "I don't know!" when asked who are the Cliff Dwellers. Who they are and whence they came are still problems upon which such patient investigators as J. Walter Fewkes is working. He has clearly confirmed the decision of Bancroft and others which affirmed the identity of the Cliff and Cave Dwellers with the Hopis and other pueblo-inhabiting Indians of the Southwest.

Hano, (Tewa) from the Head of the Trail.

Although of different linguistic stocks and religion, the homes of the pueblo Indians are very similar. Almost without exception the pueblos built on mesa summits are of sandstone or other rock, plastered with adobe mud brought up from the water-courses of the valley. Those pueblos that are located in the valley, on the other hand, are generally built of adobe.

No one can doubt that the Indians chose these elevated mesa sites for purposes of protection. With but one or two almost inaccessible trails reaching the heights, and these easily defendable, their homes were their fortresses. Their fields, gardens, and hunting-grounds were in the valleys or far-away mountains, whither they could go in times of peace; but, when attacked by foes, they fled up the trails, established elaborate methods of defence, and remained in their fortress-homes until the danger was past.

The very construction of the houses reveals this. In none of the older houses is there any doorway into the lowest story. A solid wall faces the visitor, with perhaps a small window-hole. A rude ladder outside and a similar one inside afford the only means of entrance. One climbs up the ladder outside, drops through a hole in the roof, and descends the ladder inside. When attacked, the outer ladder could be drawn up, and thus, if we remember the crude weapons of the aborigines when discovered by the white man, it is evident that the inhabitants would remain in comparative security.

Of late years doors and windows have been introduced into many of the ancient houses.

It is a picturesque sight that the visitor to the Hopi towns enjoys as he reaches the head of the trail at Hano. The houses are built in terraces, two or three stories high, the second story being a step back from the first, so that a portion of the roof of the first story can be used as the courtyard or children's playground of the people who inhabit the second story. The third story recedes still farther, so that its people have a front yard on the roof of the second story. At Zuni and Taos these terraces continue for six and seven stories, but with the Hopis never exceed three. The first climb is generally made on a ladder, which rests in the street below. The ladder-poles, however, are much longer than is necessary, and they reach up indefinitely towards the sky. Sometimes a ladder is used to go from the second to the third story, but more often a quaint little stairway is built on the connecting walls. Equally quaint are the ollas used as chimneys. These have their bottoms knocked out, and are piled one above another, two, three, four, and sometimes five or six high. Some of the "terraces" are partially enclosed, and here one may see a weaver's loom, a flat stone for cooking piki (wafer bread), or a beehive-like oven used for general cooking purposes. Here and there cord-wood is piled up for future use, and now and again a captive eagle, fastened with a rawhide tether to the bars of a rude cage, may be seen. The "king of birds" is highly prized for his down and feathers, which are used for the making of prayer plumes (bahos).

There does not seem to have been much planning in the original construction of the Hopi pueblos. There was little or no provision made for the future. The first houses were built as needed, and then as occasion demanded other rooms were added.

It will doubtless be surprising to some readers to learn that the Hopi houses are owned and built (in the main) by the women, and that the men weave the women's garments and knit their own stockings. Here, too, the women enjoy other "rights" that their white sisters have long fought for. The home life of the Hopis is based upon the rights of women. They own the houses; the wife receives her newly married husband into her home; the children belong to her clan, and have her clan name, and not that of the father; the corn, melons, squash, and other vegetables belong to her when once deposited in her house by the husband. She, indeed, is the queen of her own home, hence the pueblo Indian woman occupies a social relationship different from that of most aborigines, in that she is on quite equal terms with her husband.

In the actual building of the houses, however, the husband is required to perform his share, and that is the most arduous part of the labor. He goes with his burros to the wooded mesas or cottonwood-lined streams and brings the roof-timbers, ladder-poles, and door-posts. He also brings the heavier rocks needed in the building. Then the women aid him in placing the heavier objects, after which he leaves them to their own devices.

Being an intensely religious people, the shamans or priests are always called upon when a new house is to be constructed. Bahos—prayer plumes or sticks—are placed in certain places, sacred meal is lavishly sprinkled, and singing and prayer offered, all as propitiation to those gods whose especial business it is to care for the houses.

It is exceedingly interesting to see the women at work. Without plumb-line, straight line, or trowel they proceed. Some women are hod-carriers, bringing the pieces of sand or limestone rock to the "bricklayers" in baskets, buckets, or dish pans. Others mix the adobe to the proper consistency and see that the workers are kept supplied with it. And what a laughing, chattering, jabbering group it is! Every tongue seems to be going, and no one listening. Once at Oraibi I saw twenty-three women engaged in the building of a house, and I then got a new "side light" on the story of the Tower of Babel; The builders of that historic structure were women, and the confusion of tongues was the natural result of their feminine determination to all speak at once and never listen to any one else.

I photographed the builders at Oraibi, and the next day contributed a new dress to each of the twenty-three workers. Here are some of their names: Wa-ya-wei-i-ni-ma, Mo-o-ho, Ha-hei-i, So-li, Ni-vai-un-si, Si-ka-ho-in-ni-ma, Na-i-so-wa, Ma-san-i-yam-ka, Ko-hoi-ko-cha, Tang-a-ka-win-ka, Hun-o-wi-ti, Ko-mai-a-ni-ma, Ke-li-an-i-ma.

The finishing of the house is as interesting as the actual building. With a small heap of adobe mud the woman, using her hand as a trowel, fills in the chinks, smooths and plasters the walls inside and out. Splashed from head to foot with mud, she is an object to behold, and, as is often the case, if her children are there to "help" her, no mud-larks on the North River, the Missouri, or the Thames ever looked more happy in their complete abandonment to dirt than they. Then when the whitewashing is done with gypsum, or the coloring of the walls with a brown wash, what fun the children have. No pinto pony was ever more speckled and variegated than they as they splash their tiny hands into the coloring matter and dash it upon the walls.

Hopi Women building a House at Oraibi.

Mashonganavi from the Terrace Below.

Inside the houses the walls also are whitewashed or colored, and generally there is some attempt made to decorate them by painting rude though symbolic designs half-way between the floor and ceiling. The floor is of earth, well packed down with water generally mixed with plaster, and the ceiling is of the sustaining poles and cross-beams, over which willows and earth have been placed. Invariably one can find feathered bahos, or prayer plumes, in the beams above, and no house could expect to be prospered where these offerings to "Those Above" were neglected.

The chief family room serves as kitchen, dining-room, corn-grinding-room, bedroom, parlor, and reception-room. In one corner a quaint, hooded fireplace is built, and here the housewife cooks her piki and other corn foods, boils or bakes her squash, roasts, broils, or boils the little meat she is able to secure, and sits during the winter nights while "the elders" tell stories of the wondrous past, when all the animals talked like human beings and the mysterious people—the gods—from the upper world came down to earth and associated with mankind.

The corn-grinding trough is never absent. Sometimes it is on a little raised platform, and is large or small as the size of the family demands. The trough is composed either of wooden or stone slabs, cemented into the floor and securely fastened at the corners with rawhide thongs. This trough is then divided into two, three, four, or more compartments (according to its size), and in each compartment a sloping slab of basic rock is placed. Kneeling behind this, the woman who is the grinder of the meal (the true lady, laf-dig, even though a Hopi) seizes in both hands a narrower flat piece of the same kind of rock, and this, with the motion of a woman over a washboard, she moves up and down, throwing a handful of corn every few strokes on the upper side of her grinder. This is arduous work, and yet I have known the women and maidens to keep steadily at it during the entire day.

When the meal is ground, a small fire is made of corn cobs, over which an earthern olla is placed. When this is sufficiently heated the meal is stirred about in it by means of a round wicker basket, to keep it from burning. This process partially cooks the meal, so that it is more easily prepared into food when needed.

In one corner of the house several large ollas will be found full of water. Living as they do on these mesa heights, where there are no springs, water is scarce and precious. Every drop, except the little that is caught in rain-time or melted from the snows, has to be carried up on the backs of the women from the valley below. In the heat of summer, this is no light task. With the fierce Arizona sun beating down upon them, the feet slipping in the hot sand or wearily pressing up on the burning rocks, the olla, filled with water, wrapped in a blanket and suspended from the forehead on the back, becomes heavier and heavier at each step. Those of us who have, perforce, carried cameras and heavy plates to the mesa tops know what strength and endurance this work requires.

For dippers home-made pottery and gourd shells are commonly used. Now and again one will find the horn of a mountain sheep, which has been heated, opened out into a large spoon-like dipper; or a gnarled or knotty piece of wood, hacked out with flint knife into a pretty good resemblance to a dipper.

Near the water ollas one can generally see a shelf upon which the household utensils are placed. Here, too, when corn is being ground, a half-dozen plaques of meal will stand. This shelf serves as pantry and meat safe (when there is meat), and the hungry visitor will seldom look there in vain for a basket-platter or two piled high with piki, the fine wafer bread for which the Hopis are noted. Piki is colored in a variety of ways. Dr. Hough says the ashes of Atriplex canescens James are used to give the gray color, and that Amaranthus sp. is cultivated in terrace gardens around the springs for use in dyeing it red; a special red dye from another species is used for coloring the piki used in the Katchina dances; and the ashes of Parryella filifolia are used for coloring. Saffron (Carthamus tinctorius) is used to give the yellow color.

It is fascinating in the extreme to see a woman make piki. Dry corn-meal is mixed with coloring matter and water, and thus converted into a soft batter. A large, flat stone is so placed on stones that a fire can be kept continually burning underneath it. As soon as the slab is as hot as an iron must be to iron starched clothes it is greased with mutton tallow. Then with fingers dipped in the batter the woman dexterously and rapidly sweeps them over the surface of the hot stone. Almost as quickly as the batter touches, it is cooked; so to cover the whole stone and yet make even and smooth piki requires skill. It looks so easy that I have known many a white woman (and man) tempted into trying to make it. Once while attending the Snake Dance ceremonials at Mashonganavi, a young lady member of my party was sure she could perform the operation successfully. My Hopi friend, Kuchyeampsi, gladly gave place to the white lady, and laughingly looked at me as the latter dipped her fingers into the batter, swept them over the stone, gave a suppressed exclamation of pain, tried again, and then hastily rose with three fingers well blistered. My cook, who was a white man, was sure he could accomplish the operation, so he was allowed to try. Once was enough. He was a religious man, and bravely kept silence, which was a good thing for us.

When the piki is sufficiently cooked, it is folded up into neat little shapes something like the shredded wheat biscuits. One thing I have often noticed is that a quick and skilful piki maker will keep a sheet flat, without folding, so that she may place it over the next sheet when it is about cooked. This seems to make it easier to remove the newly cooked sheet from the cooking slab.

If you are ever invited into a Hopi house you may rest assured you will not be there long before a piled-up basket of piki will be brought to you, for the Hopis are wonderfully hospitable and enjoy giving to all who become their guests.

Another object seldom absent is the "pole of the soft stuff." This is a pole suspended from the roof beams upon which all the blankets, skins, bedding, and wearing apparel are placed. Once upon a time these were very few and very crude. The skins of animals tanned with the hair on, blankets made of rabbit skins, and cotton garments made from home grown, spun, and woven cotton, comprised their "soft stuff." But when the Spaniards brought sheep into the province of Tusayan, and the Hopis saw the wonderful improvement a wool staple was over a cotton one, blankets and dresses of wool were slowly added to the household treasures, until now the "garments of the old," except antelope, deer, fox, and coyote skins, are seldom seen.

Mashongce, an Oraibi Maiden, drying Corn Meal.

The Trio of Metates, and Hopi Woman about to grind Corn.

It is a remarkable fact that the Hopis wore garments made from cotton which they grew themselves, prior to the time of the Spanish invasion. They also knew how to color the cotton from unfading mineral and vegetable dyes, and in the graves of ancient cliff and cave dwellings, well-woven cotton garments often have been taken.

Sometimes to-day one may see an old man or woman weaving a blanket from the tanned skins of rabbits. Such a garment is far warmer and more comfortable than one would imagine. The dressed pelts are twisted around a home-woven string made of shredded yucca fibre, wild flax, or cotton, and thus a long rope is formed many yards in length. This rope is then woven in parallel strings with cross strands of the same kind of fibre, and a robe made some five or six feet square.

The windows of the ancient Hopi houses were either small open holes or sheets of gypsum. Of late years modern doors and windows have been introduced, yet there are still many of the old ones in existence.

Having thus taken a general and cursory survey of Hano, let us, in turn, visit the six other villages on the mesa heights ere we look further into the social and ceremonial life of this interesting people.

CHAPTER IV
THE HOPI VILLAGES AND THEIR HISTORY

The province of Tusayan is dotted over in every direction with ruins, all of which were once inhabited by the Hopi people. Indeed, even in the "pueblo" stage of their existence they seem to have retained much of the restlessness and desire for change which marked them when "nomads."

Traditionary lore among modern Hopis asserts that the well-known ruin of Casa Grande was once the home of their ancestors, and Dr. Fewkes has conclusively shown a line of ruins extending from the Gila and Salt River valleys to the present Hopi villages. So there is no doubt but that some, at least, of the Hopis came to their modern homes from the South. It is, therefore, quite possible that such ruins as Montezuma's Castle were once Hopi homes. Every indication seems to point to the fact that all these ancient ruins—some of which are caveate, others cliff, and still others independent pueblos, built in the open, away from all cliffs—were occupied by a people in dread of attack from enemies. Every home has its lookout. Every field could be watched. Nearly all the cliff and cave dwellings were naturally fortresses, and the open pueblos were so constructed as to render them castles of defence to their inhabitants on occasion.

In these facts alone we can see an interesting, though to those primarily concerned a tragic state of affairs; a home-loving people, sedentary and agricultural, willing and anxious to live at peace, surrounded and perpetually harassed by wild and fierce nomads, whose delight was war, their occupation pillage, and their chief gratifications murder and rapine. The cliff- or cave-dwelling husband left his home in the morning to plant his corn or irrigate his field, uncertain whether the night would see him safe again with his loved ones, a captive in the hands of merciless torturers, or lying dead and mutilated upon the fields he had planted.

No wonder they are the Hopituh—the people of peace. Who would not long for peace after many generations of such environment? Poor wretches! Every field had its memories of slaughter, every canyon had echoed the fierce yells of attacking foes, the shrieks of the dying, or the exultant shouts of the victors, and every dwelling-place had heard the sad wailing of widows and orphans.

The union of these people, under such conditions, in towns became a necessity—self-preservation demanded cohesion. That isolation and separation were not unnatural or repulsive to them is shown by the readiness with which in later times they branched out and established new towns. These separations often led to bitter and deadly quarrels among themselves, and elsewhere[2] I have related the traditional story of the destruction of a Hopi city, Awatobi, by the inhabitants of rival cities, who in their determination to be "Hopituh"—people of peace—were willing to fight and exterminate their neighbors and thus compel peace.

Of the present seven mesa cities, towns, or villages of the Hopis, it is probable that Oraibi only occupies the same site that it had when first seen by white men in 1540.

It will readily be recalled that when Coronado reached Cibola (Zuni) and conquered it he was sadly disappointed at not finding the piles of gold, silver, and precious stones he and his conquistadors had hoped for. The glittering stories of the gold-strewn "Seven Cities of Cibola" were sadly proven to be mythical. But hope revived when the wounded general was told of seven other cities, about a hundred miles to the northwest. These might be the wealthy cities they sought. Unable to go himself, he sent his ensign Tobar, with a handful of soldiers and a priest, and it fell to the lot of these to be the first white men to gaze upon the wonders of the Hopi villages.

Instead of finding them as we now see them, however, it is pretty certain that the first village reached was that of Awatobi, a town now in ruins and whose history is only a memory. Standing on the mesa at Walpi and looking a little to the right of the entrance to Keam's Canyon, the location of this "dead city" may be seen.

Walpi occupied a terrace below where it now is, and Sichumavi and Hano were not founded. At the middle mesa Mashonganavi and Shungopavi occupied the foothills or lower terraces, and Shipauluvi was not in existence.

What an interesting conflict that was, in 1540, between the few civilized and well-armed soldiers of Coronado and the warrior priests of Awatobi. Tobar and his men stealthily approached the foot of the mesa under the cover of darkness, but were discovered in the early morning ere they had made an attack. Led by the warrior priests, the fighting men of the village descended the trail, where the priests signified to the strangers that they were unwelcome. They forbade their ascending the trail, and with elaborate ceremony sprinkled a line of sacred meal across it, over which no one must pass. To cross that sacred and mystic line was to declare one's self an enemy and to invite the swift punishment of gods and men. But Tobar and his warriors knew nothing of the vengeance of Hopi gods and cared little for the anger of Hopi men, so they made a fierce and sharp onslaught. When we remember that this was the first experience of the Hopis with men on horseback, protected with coats of mail and metal helmets, who fought not only with sharpened swords, but also slew men at a distance with sticks that belched forth fire and smoke, to the accompaniment of loud thunder, it can well be understood that they speedily fell back and soon returned with tokens of submission. Thus was Awatobi taken. After this Walpi, Mashonganavi, Shungopavi, and Oraibi were more or less subjugated.

In 1680, as is well known, Popeh, a resident of one of the eastern pueblos near the Rio Grande, conceived a plan to rid the whole country of the hated white men, and especially of the "long robes"—the priests—who had forbidden the ancient ceremonies and dances, and forcibly baptized their children into a new faith, which to their superstitious minds was a catastrophe worse than death. The Hopis joined in the plan, though Awatobi went into it with reluctance, owing to the kindly ministrations of the humane Padre Porras.

The plot was betrayed, but not early enough to enable the Spaniards to protect themselves, and on the day of Santa Ana, the 10th of August, 1680, the whole white race was fallen upon and mercilessly slain or driven out.

For the next nearly twenty years the more timid of the people lived in dread of Spanish retaliation. Then it was that Hano was founded. Anticipating the arrival of a large force, a number of Tanoan and Tewan people fled from the Rio Grande to Tusayan. Some of the former went to Oraibi, and the latter asked permission to settle at the head of the Walpi trail near to "the Gap."

Possibly about this same time, too, the villages located on the lower terraces or foothills moved to the higher sites, as they were thus afforded better protection.

Sichumavi—"the mound of flowers"—was founded about the year 1750 by Walpians of the Badger Clan, who for some reason or other grew discontented and wished a town of their own. Here they were joined by Tanoans of the Asa Clan from the Rio Grande, who for a time had lived in the seclusion of the Tsegi, as the Navahoes term the Canyon de Chelly in New Mexico.

Exactly when Shipauluvi was founded is not known, though its name—"the place of peaches"—clearly denotes that it must have been after the Spanish invasion, for it was the conquerors who brought with them peaches. Nor were peaches the only good things the Hopis and other American aborigines owed to the hated foreigners. They introduced horses, cows, sheep (which latter have afforded them a large measure of sustenance and given to them and the Navahoes the material with which to make their useful rugs and blankets), and goats, besides a number of vegetables.

Here, then, about the middle of the eighteenth century the Hopi mesa towns were settled as we now find them, and doubtless with populations as near as can be to their present numbers.

Hano we have already visited. Let us now, hastily but carefully, glance at each of the other villages as they appear at the present time.

Passing on to Sichumavi from Hano we find it similar in all its main features to Hano, except that none of its houses are as high. In the centre of the town is a large plaza where, in wet weather, a large body of rain-water collects. This is used for "laundry" purposes, as drink for the burros and goats, and a bathing pond for all the children of the pueblo. It is one of the funniest sights imaginable to see the youngsters playing and frolicking in the water by the hour,—I should have said liquid mud, for the filth that accumulates in this plaza reservoir is simply indescribable. Children of both sexes, their brown, swarthy bodies utterly indifferent to the piercing darts of the sun, lie down in this liquid filth, roll over, splash one another, run to and fro, and enjoy themselves hugely, even in the presence of the white visitor, until a glimpse of the dreaded camera sends them off splashing, yelling, gesticulating, and some of them crying, to the nearest shelter.

That supereminence of Hopi character is conservatism is shown as one walks from Sichumavi to Walpi. Here is a literal exemplification demonstrating how the present generations "tread in the footsteps" of their forefathers. The trail over which the bare and moccasined feet of these people have passed and repassed for years is worn down deep into the solid sandstone. The springy and yielding foot, unprotected except by its own epidermis or the dressed skin of the goat, sheep, or deer, has cut its way into the unyielding rock, thus symbolizing the power of an unyielding purpose and demonstrating the force of an unchangeable conservatism.

Between these two pueblos the mesa becomes so narrow that we walk on a mere strip of rock, deep precipices on either side. To the left are Keam's Canyon and the road over which we came; to the right are the gardens, corn-fields, and peach orchards, leading the eye across to the second mesa, on the heights of which are Mashonganavi and Shipauluvi.

These gardens and corn-fields are the most potent argument possible against the statements of ignorant and prejudiced white men who claim that the Indians—Hopis as well as others—are lazy and shiftless.

If a band of white men were placed in such a situation as the Hopis, and compelled to wrest a living from the sandy, barren, sun-scorched soil, there are few who would have faith and courage enough to attempt the evidently hopeless task. But with a patience and steadiness that make the work sublime, these heroic bronze men have sought out and found the spots of sandy soil under which the water from the heights percolates. They have marked the places where the summer's freshets flow, and thus, relying upon sub-irrigation and the casual and uncertain rainfalls of summer, have planted their corn, beans, squash, melons, and chili, carefully hoeing them when necessary, and each season reap a harvest that would not disgrace modern scientific methods.

All throughout these corn-fields temporary brush sun-shelters are seen, under which the young boys and girls sit, scaring away the birds and watching lest any stray burro should enter and destroy that which has grown as the result of so much labor.

An Oraibi Woman shelling Corn in a Basket of Yucca Fibre.

The "Burro" of Hopi Transportation.

Here, too, in the harvesting time one may witness busy and interesting scenes. Whole families move down into temporary brush homes, and women and children aid the men in gathering the crops. Tethered and hobbled burros stand patiently awaiting their share of the common labor.

Yonder is a group of men busy digging a deep pit. Watch them as it nears completion. It is made with a narrow neck and "bellies" out to considerable width below. Indeed, it is shaped not unlike an immense vase with a large, almost spherical body and narrow neck. In depth it is perhaps six, eight, ten, or a dozen feet. On one side a narrow stairway is cut into the earth leading down to its base, and at the foot of this stairway a small hole is cut through into the chamber. Our curiosity is aroused. What is this subterranean place for? As we watch, the workers bring loads of greasewood and other inflammable material, kindle a fire in the chamber, and fill it up with the wood. Now we see the use of the small hole at the foot of the stairway. It acts as a draught hole, and soon a raging furnace fire is in the vault before us. When a sufficient heat has been obtained, the bottom hole is closed, and then scores of loads of corn on the cob are dropped into the heated chamber. When full, every avenue that could allow air to enter is sealed, and there the corn remains over night or as long as is required to cook it,—self-steam it. It is then removed, packed in sacks or blankets on the backs of the patient burros, and removed to the corn-rooms of the houses on the mesa above.

Other fresh corn is carried up and spread out on the house-tops to dry.

All this is stored away in the corn-rooms, into which strangers sometimes are invited, but oftener kept away from. It is stacked up in piles like cord-wood, and happy is that household whose corn-stack is large at the beginning of a hard winter.

Walpi—the place of the gap—though not a large town, is better known to whites than any of the other Hopi towns. Here it was that the earliest visitors came and saw the thrilling Snake Dance. Its southeastern trail, with the wonderful detached rock leaning over on one side and the cliff on the other, between which the steep and rude stairway is constructed, has been so often pictured, as well as the so-called "Sacred Rock" of the Walpi dance plaza, that they are now as familiar as photographs of Trinity Church, New York, or St. Paul's, London. As one stands on the top of one of the houses he sees how closely Walpi has been built. It covers the whole of the south end of the mesa, up to the very edges of the precipice walls in three of its four directions, and, as already shown, the fourth is the narrow neck of rock connecting Walpi with Sichumavi and Hano. The dance plaza is to the east, a long, narrow place, at the south end of which is the "Sacred Rock." It is approached from south and north by the regular "street" or trail, and one may leave it to the west through an archway, over which is built one of the houses.

Several ruins on the east mesa are pointed out as "Old" Walpi, and the name of one of these—Nusaki—(also known as Kisakobi) is a clear indication that at one time the Spaniards had a mission church there. A Walpian, Pauwatiwa, shows, with pride, an old carved beam in his house which all Hopis say came from the mission when it was destroyed. On the terraces just below the mesa-top—perhaps a hundred or two hundred feet down—are a number of tiny corrals, to and from which, morning and evening, the boys, young men, and sometimes the women and girls may be seen driving their herds of sheep and goats, and in which the burros are kept when not in use. These picturesque corrals from below look almost like swallows' nests stuck on the face of the cliffs.

As we wander about in the narrow and quaint streets of Walpi we cannot fail to observe the ladder-poles which are thrust through hatchways, down which we peer into the darkness below with little satisfaction. These lead to the kivas, or sacred ceremonial chambers, where all the secret rites of the different clans are held. Here we shall be privileged to enter if no ceremony is going on. The kivas are generally hewn out of the solid rock, or partially so, and are from twelve to eighteen feet square. When not otherwise occupied it is no uncommon sight to see in a kiva a Hopi weaver squatted before his rude loom, making a dress for his wife or daughter, or weaving a ceremonial sash or kilt for his own use in one of the many dances.

In every Hopi town one cannot fail to be struck with the nudity of the children of all ages, from the merest babies up to eight and even ten years. With what Victor Hugo calls "the chaste indecency of childhood" these fat, bronze Cupids and embryo Venuses romp and play, as unconscious of their nakedness as Adam and Eve before their fall.

From Walpi we descend to the corn-fields, and, after a slow and tedious drag across the sandy plain to the west, find ourselves at Mashonganavi, or at least at the foot of the trail which leads to the heights above. Here, as at the other mesas, there are two or three trails, all steep, all nerve-wrenching, all picturesque. Arrived at the village, we find Mashonganavi an interesting place, for it is so compactly built that one often hunts in vain (for a while, at least) to find the hidden dance plaza, around which the whole town seems to be built. Some of the houses are three stories high, and there are quaint, narrow alley-ways, queer dark tunnels, and underground kivas as at Walpi. The Antelope and Snake kivas are situated on the southeastern side of the village, on the very edge of the mesa, and with the tawny stretch of the Painted Desert leading the eye to the deep purple of the Giant's Chair and others of the Mogollon buttes, which Ives conceived as great ships in the desert, suddenly and forever arrested and petrified.

About one hundred and fifty feet below the village is a terrace which almost surrounds the Mashonganavi mesa, as a rocky ruff around its neck. This terrace is so connected with the main plateau that one can drive upon it with a wagon and thus encamp close to the village. Here in 1901 the two wagon loads of sightseers and tourists which I had guided to the mysteries and delights of Tusayan, over the sandy and scorched horrors of a portion of the Painted Desert, encamped, during the last days of the Snake Dance ceremonies.

From here a trail—at its head an actual rock stairway—leads down to a spring in the valley, where the government school is situated, and from whence all our cooking and drinking water had to be brought. Each morning and evening droves of sheep and goats passed our camp, coming up from below and going down to the scant pasturage of the valley. Scarcely an hour passed when some Indian—oftener half a dozen—came to our camp, and failed to pass. Especially at meal times, when the biscuits were in the oven, the stew on the fire, the beans in the pot, and the dried fruit in the stew-kettle, did they seem to enjoy visiting us. And they liked to come close, too; far too close for our comfort, as their persons are not always of the most cleanly character, and their habits of the most decorous and refined. Hence rules had to be laid down which it was my province to see observed, one of which was that visiting Indians must keep to a distance, especially at meal times. Another was that if our blankets were allowed to remain unrolled (in order to get the direct benefit of the sun's rays) they were not so left for our Indian friends to lounge upon.

An Aged Hopi at Oraibi.

A Hopi, weaving a Native Cotton Ceremonial Kilt.

We were generally a hungry lot as we sat or squatted around our canvas tablecloth, our table the rocky ground, and there was scant ceremony when ceremony stood in the way of appeasing our appetites. But we were not wasteful. If there were any "scraps" or any small remains on a plate or dish they were "saved for the Indians." So that at length it became a catch-word with us. If there was anything, anywhere, at any time, that we did not like, some one of the party was sure to suggest that it be "saved for the Indians." And that has often since suggested to me our national policy in treating the Amerind. There is too much national "Save that for the Indians." Land that is no good to a white man—save it for the Indians. Beef cattle that white men don't buy—save them for the Indians. Spoiled flour—save it for the Indians. Seeds that won't grow—ship 'em to the Indians.

And that reminds me of a now not undistinguished artist who once accompanied a small party of mine some years ago to the Snake Dance at Oraibi. I came down to camp one day and found him cooking several slices of our finest ham, dishing up our choicest and scarcest vegetables, crackers, and delicacies, with a large pot of our most expensive coffee simmering and steaming by the camp-fire; and when I asked, "For whom?" was coolly told it was for three lazy, fat, lubberly, dirty Oraibis, who sat in delightful anticipation around the pump close by.

My objection to this use of our provisions was expressed in forceful and vigorous Anglo-Saxon, and when I was told it was "none of my business," I emphasized my objection with a distinct refusal to allow my provisions to be thus used. Then for half an hour immediately afterwards, and for days subsequently, at intervals, I was regaled with vocal chastisement worthy to be ranked with Demosthenes' "Philippics." "The Indian was a man and a brother. We were Christians, indeed, and of a truth when we would see our poor red brother starve to death before our sight," etc., ad libitum.

Now between my artist friend's course and the one first named the happy mean lies. I do not believe we should give to the Indian only the scraps that fall from our national table; neither, on the other hand, do I believe we are called upon to give him the very best of our foods and provide special coffee at seventy-five cents a pound.

And this sermon has occupied our time, by the way, as we have walked up the trail, by the Mashonganavi kivas to a spot from which we gain a good view of the village and of Shipauluvi on its higher and detached pinnacle a mile farther back. Again descending the trail to the terrace below, we walk half a mile and then begin the ascent of a steep stone stairway, carefully constructed, that leads us directly to Shipauluvi. This is a small town, occupying almost the whole of the dizzy site, with its few houses built around its rectangular plaza.

Here I was once present at a witchcraft trial. It was a complicated affair, in which the dead and living, Navahoes and Hopis, were intertwined. A Hopi woman accused a Navaho of having bewitched her husband, thus causing his death, and of stealing from him a blanket and some sheep. The evidence showed that the Navaho had met the Hopi, and that soon afterwards he was taken sick and died, whereupon the sheep and blanket were found in the possession of the Navaho. There was little doubt of its being a case of theft, and the Navaho was ordered to return sheep and blanket, but he was exonerated from the charge of witchcraft.

Living in Shipauluvi is one of those singular anomalies so often found in the pueblos, an albino woman. There are a dozen or so living in the other villages. With Hopi face, but white hair and skin, pink eyes, and general bleached-out appearance, they never fail to excite the greatest surprise in the mind of the stranger, and to those who see them often there is still a lingering wonder as to the cause of so singular a variation of physical appearance. At Mashonganavi there are two men albinos, one of them one of the Snake priests. It is claimed by the Indians that these albinos are of as pure Hopi blood as those who are normal in color, and the fact is incontrovertible that they are born of pure-blooded parents on both sides.