Indians of the Enchanted Desert

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INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

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Photo. by W. C. Wilson

ANNOUNCING THE SNAKE DANCE

Priest at sunset removing kiva signal

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INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

BY
LEO CRANE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1925

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Copyright, 1925,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published September, 1925

First Impression September, 1925

The Atlantic Monthly Press
Publications
are published by
Little, Brown, and Company
in association with
The Atlantic Monthly Company

Printed in the United States of America

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TO

those people of the Enchanted Desert who called me “Chief,”—Indians, employees, missioners, traders,—whose confidence, loyalty, and devotion made my work among the Hopi and Navajo tribes possible of success; and to humbler friends, my faithful horses, Dandy and Barney Murphy, Prince and Frank, that went with me so many weary miles, and were shot, by my order, to save them from the miseries of Governmental economy, this book is dedicated. [[vii]]

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CONTENTS

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ILLUSTRATIONS

[Announcing the Snake Dance] Frontispiece

[Walpi, the Pueblo of the Clouds] 12
[The Valley and Its Headlands]

[A Navajo Flock and Its Shepherds] 16
[Cañon de Chelly, Seen from the Rim]

[Crossing the Desert below Chimney Butte] 58
[The Oraibi Wash in Flood-Time]

[Navajo on Their Way to a Dance] 70
[A Navajo Hogan and Its Blanket Loom]

[Outfit of a Well-Digger, the Desert “Water-Witch”] 84
[Drying Bed of the Little Colorado River]

[The Hopi Ceremonial Corn-Planting] 92
[Hopi Gardens in a Spring-Fed Nook of the Desert]

[Hopi Indian Agency at Keams Cañon] 106
[Hopi Indian Hospital at Keams Cañon]

[A Busy Day at the Trading-Post, Keams Cañon] 118
[Ready for the 105-Mile Trek to the Railroad]

[Hostin Nez, Navajo Chief and Medicine Man] 124

[Judge Hooker Hongave of the Indian Court] 132

[Youkeoma, Antelope Priest and Prophet] 162

[A Mesa Road—Old Trail to Hotevilla] 170
[A Pretentious Home at Hotevilla]

[A Hopi Schoolgirl] 178
[A Hopi Youth Who Is Preparing for College]

[The Walpi Headland, Seen from the Orchards] 196

[The Walpi Stairway, A Rock-Ladder to the Sky] 202 [[x]]

[The Author, in the Enchanted Desert] 230
[Old Glory and the Bond Flag at the Agency]

[Albert Yava: Interpreter] 234
[Tom Pavatea: Hopi Merchant and Patriot]

[The Corn Rock, an Ancient Bartering-place] 238

[Opening the Walpi Snake Dance] 250
[Dramatic Entry of the Snake Priests]

[The Gatherer, Handling a Rattlesnake] 266
[A Patriarch of Snakes]

[The Chief Snake-Priest] 272

[The Enchanted Desert and the Moqui Buttes] 282

[In the Twin-Butte Country] 294
[Silversmith Jim: a Typical Navajo]

[Billa Chezzi: Chief of the Northern Navajo] 316
[Nelson Oyaping: Tewa Chief of Police]

[A Navajo Boy Who Has Never Been to Any School] 322

[A Hopi Range-Rider] 336
[Blue Cañon: A Study in Blue-and-White]

[A Hopi Shrine] 338
[A Hopi Weaver of Ceremonial Robes]
[A Katchina Dance]

[Hopi Mother in Gala Dress, with Her Child] 340
[Navajo Mother with Child in Cradle]

[A New Son of the Desert] 344
[Hopi Girls Arrayed for a Dance]

[Hopi Wedding Costume] 352

[A Hopi Beauty] 358 [[1]]

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INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

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I

NOLENS VOLENS

It is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves.—Charles Dickens

They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them.

Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things that weren’t done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they being from what an Easterner would term the “hinterland,” had he vision enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have tales to tell—a hope that never materialized.

When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if, seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their uncommon [[4]]experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath; that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that which distressed them, and to return whence they came—into the broader, franker places.

I knew that they were “out of the West,” and this meant—of course it did—beyond—well, beyond the Mississippi. “The West” is a general term, and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim past. Therefore I did not know that this one’s bailiwick contained five troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly four hundred years; that another’s domain included six thousand square miles of God’s most wonderful creation, having the Marble Cañon of the Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third’s territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times, breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one’s home; that still another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the silence of uncharted cañons.

No. I did not meet these men in the Smithsonian offices at Washington; nor were they lecturers before the National Geographic Society. They were Indian Agents.

They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important, establish [[5]]hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the frontiers.

Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in their efforts by the memory—fact and fiction—of the “ration” days. They might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for these officials’ existence has produced much sound and fury. The very title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists—and God knows the ignorance of them is astounding—take pen in hand to picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage, they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind. They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities of the “glorious past” would long since have engulfed the idealized protégé but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, measles, syphilis—scourges of the Indian people, whose long train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men have no [[6]]historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be unknown.

Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant notice; occasionally, too, one was killed.

These unromantic facts, having no camouflage of feathers and war paint, nothing in them of the beating of tom-toms or the chanting of legends, do not invite a sentimental record; and, it is true, few such things occur in the “dude season,” when sentimentality, accompanied by its handmaiden ignorance, takes its neurasthenic outing in the wild.

One of them, a man whose dress spoke rather of the club and office, invited me thus:—

“Come out with me for a leave. There are deer, and trout streams, and a hunting-lodge up in the hills.” He was the chap who claimed to have a census of the grizzlies. “It’ll do you good, and you look as if you needed a bit of the outside.”

I thanked him casually, and turned aside his invitation with—

“What’s this I hear about the Chief offering you an [[7]]inspectorship? That would give you some travel too, and—”

“An inspectorship! Travel!” he snorted. “Why, good God, man! I am the boss of the Switzerland of America. I wouldn’t trade my post for a seat in the Cabinet.”

That is the way they talked, and a few of them undoubtedly meant it.

A large bulky man, with a face like a piece of granite, twisted a crude silver ring on his finger as he extended a similar invitation in an entirely different way. He was a slow-speaking fellow, of few words and those of a definite, precise character.

“You’d like it,” he finished, sighing. “The Navajo country is a great place—a great place—”

He seemed at loss for words to picture his meaning, and I know now why language failed him.

Said a third, for whom I had unraveled the genealogy of a much intermarried Indian family, and who was grateful:—

“Why, you’re just the lad for me. All you’ll have to do is ride fences, armed with a hammer and a pocketful of staples” (I think he really said “steeples,”) “—and there’s quarters for you; twelve hundred a year too. You’ll get a lot of dope for stories. That place fairly drips ’em. What say? I can fix it with the Chief?”

After having had the courtesy to thank them one and all, I leaned back in the swivel-chair and laughed. While they were present I good-humoredly laughed with them, and later, at them. You see, in the Office I was known as the Scribe, ever since that time when the boss of Indian Territory had rushed in, mad as a hornet, waving a copy of Harper’s Weekly, and declaring that the essential guts of an article therein had been stolen from his confidential [[8]]files. And while I had purloined them with the Chief’s permission, I realized it was a fine thing for me not to have lived in the Indian Territory.

While I might spend odd time writing stories of heroic unwashed cowpunchers battling Dante-nosed cayuses across the vasty early-morning range, with the frost nipping down the alkali dust, and a pale-rose tone on the distant range of hills, I knew also that they did it for forty dollars the month and grub off the wheel. I was then and am to this day aware that cowmen give little thought to either the vasty sweep of the broad spaces or to the rose tones. And I was perfectly able to fake the western landscape, where a man’s a man an’ a’ that, without removing myself more than five blocks from a café and a steak à la Bordelaise. I had placed one hundred stories in New York, and a hundred more on the stocks, without smelling an Indian camp or subjecting myself to the grave and anxious possibility of getting—well, inhabited, to say the least of it. I assumed that the dapper fellow was more of a clerk than a ranger; that the slow-moving granite-faced individual truly reflected the somber aridity of his monotonous desert; and the fact that the third had said “steeples” proved to me that I could never respect him as chief.

“No!” I decided, with a grin. “The Borax mule-team couldn’t drag me into that life.” And I too meant it.

But—I was brutally launched out of this effete complacency and pitched into the great Navajo Desert country without disturbing a single mule. I scrapped for money to purchase the once-despised “critters” to enable my existence therein. And I have been proud of my mules since.

Without seeming to be missed by those to whom I had [[9]]thought my going would be tragedy, without causing a ripple among those few with whom I found myself, the Wheel turned over, and the vast immutable Desert received me with as much inscrutable kindness as it offers anyone. I had prepared the chute myself, and having greased it thoroughly, slipped and plunged down it, as has many a better man without sliding any further than his grave.

“See the Chief, and get a berth in the West. Live out o’ doors, rough it, live on milk and eggs, and don’t come home until I agree to it. You are two leaps ahead of the lion, and you’ll beat him yet.”

It was the cruel frankness of friendship. I had romped the city streets with the doctor, attended the same schools, appeared on the same stage as promoter of histrionic wares; in short, he had been the leader of my gang. I could recall the local excitement aroused by his first cane, and had carried his messages to his first girl. He knew how many times I had been thrashed, and had once turned the trick himself. There was no need for professional bluff between us.

Next day, perhaps a trifle groggy, I got to my feet in a more determined spirit, to prepare for the six-months’ battle. The Chief was very kind.

“Why not take a superintendency?” he suggested. “There’s one vacant, down in Rainbow Cañon. That’s the Grand Cañon country, you know. Wonderful place, one of the rarest spots on earth.”

I thanked him for the confidence, knowing that Rainbow Cañon was no place for an invalid. That Agency is nearly always vacant. New superintendents negotiate the trail but twice—ignorantly, going in, and wisely, [[10]]coming out for ever. Even sure-footed mules have been known to miscalculate at Suicide Corner, and it is claimed that the bones of one such beast, entangled in the wires of his last burden,—a cottage piano,—still furnish a mystic Æolian effect when the wind sweeps below the place where he faltered. The last superintendent had spent forty-eight hours in a tree, evading flood-waters that threatened to carry him on a personally conducted tour through the Grand Cañon itself. I had arranged his relief by telegraphing the nearest offices adjacent to his tree, a mere matter of miles, up and down; and I had no great confidence that anyone would so rapidly arrange mine in similar circumstances. No! Rainbow Cañon sounded good, quite poetical, indeed; but none of it for one who required rest and as little exercise as possible.

So, in accord with my request and at my own valuation, based on my inexperience, I was formally transferred as a clerk to an Indian Agency that sits astride the Santa Fe trail—the modern trail connecting the ancient city of Santa Fe with the Pacific, along which pioneers wended in the forties.

One week later I had left Washington to make the trek of two thousand five hundred miles to the Painted Desert and—to me—a most desolate siding on the banks of the Little Colorado River in Arizona. [[11]]

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II

ACROSS THE PLAINS

Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or encouragement; but, stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the mocking, fugitive horizon.—Stevenson: Across the Plains

In the early days, those adventurous times when men pulled out of St. Louis of an early morning, and the dust of a long train of wagons and outriders arose; when they followed the Arkansas across to the Cimarron and Wagon Mound; when they warily entered the Indian country and somehow existed through the long dusty days and the longer nervous nights before sighting Santa Fe and safety in a foreign land, I suppose most of them felt the extraordinary vastness of the West. Certainly they knew its sterile immensity after a few weeks on that perilous road. Later, when they began seeking the Coast and the Pacific, leaving Santa Fe to plunge down La Bajada trail to follow the valley of the Rio Grande, to skirt the fields of the mysterious Pueblos, to risk thirst and ambush in the arid lands of the Navajo and Apache, to dare the flooded rivers and that brazen furnace, the Mohave Desert, all to reach the painted paradise of golden California, they surely became alive to the wonderful expanse of [[12]]that southwestern empire first called New Spain—the Land of the Conquistadores!

A magic stage having magic scenes, bathed in glorious sunshine; a place of enchantment, where the rainbow colors linger on the cliffs and never leave the skies; an ancient garden of the gods, dreamily expecting that the gods will yet return; presenting ever its sphinx-like riddle; promising everything and yielding nothing but its lure. Once you have felt its sorcery, the spell is never broken.

Speaks the old-timer, “The Desert’ll get yeh”; and he doesn’t add anything about watching-out. The pioneers eluded or fought off wandering war-parties, but the Desert got them nevertheless.

WALPI, THE PUEBLO OF THE CLOUDS

THE VALLEY AND ITS HEADLANDS

There is one point in Arizona where, between the Santa Fe Railway and central Utah, three hundred miles as the crow flies and a weary five hundred by the trails, there is nothing of civilization other than a few isolated trading-posts and a solitary Indian Agency, set in a terraced cañon, eighty miles from a telegraph key. As my train passed this point in 1910, I did not dream that for more than eight years I should direct that Indian Agency and its chain of scattered desert stations, supplying all of progress that the country had, maintaining all of law and order that its half-wild people knew, isolated, lonely, well-nigh forgotten.

Only one who has lived thus removed from the turmoil and petty vanity of cities, apart from careless crowds, unreached by artificiality, can fully realize the brooding mystery, the savage beauty, the power and cruelty of the Desert. One must penetrate its solitudes, stand atop the world to view dead or enchanted cities, pause on the naked brink of chasms leaning over faery valleys, to know [[13]]the grandeur of this silent country. One must grow weary on its heavy trails, feel its hunger, shrink in its bitter cold, and thirst for the water of the precious hidden springs. Fairly to hear its ominous hush at blazing noon-time, to view the scarlet glory of its sunsets, to stand under its velvet dome at night, lighted by the burning stars, is to have caught a secret from the universe. To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness, carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark, and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. One must have known the sigh of the night wind in the brush, heard the chatter of jackals in the snow, felt the sandstorm’s acid lash, and stopped, spellbound, at the sibilant warning of its gliding Indian god. Then to have seen the drifting red-bellied rain-clouds that the Snake priests pray for, the crisp rending lightning at their pouches, the wild strength of arroyos after cloud-bursts, and the deluge of the swift midsummer rains, ending in the soft radiance of double rainbows! One must live as a hermit in the Desert to find its heart.

And only one who has done this may somehow feebly understand those bronzed people of whom the desert genii have made fatalists—the solemn, dreaming Indian of the waste lands, whether the Hopi of the mesa heights and kivas, the Pueblo in his mediæval towns, or the Navajo, chanting in his lonely, hidden camp. These know all the splendors, feel all the menace and the mystery, and call the Desert home. Timid, yet uncaring, ever bent on placating some unseen demon, trusting in songs [[14]]and sorceries, they go their Oriental ways on a vast Occidental stage. The desert spell has touched them, every one.

That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert. Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient, are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology, a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too.

One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars, mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their [[15]]head, the great Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma.

Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung, those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.

But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more. “Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids, carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still. [[16]]

To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will serve as a reason for this notebook.

Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian inhabitants and few indeed of other men.

For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation.

A NAVAJO FLOCK AND ITS SHEPHERDS

CAÑON DE CHELLY, SEEN FROM THE RIM

Where the Navajo retreated before Kit Carson in 1863. The earliest records mention it as a Navajo stronghold. The cliff-dwellers held it before them. There are places where its rock walls tower 1000 feet.

As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August 1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other troubles on the [[17]]Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would get no civil consolation.

Until then there had been a great show of tactful diplomacy between the two Governmental representatives; the one of war counseling peace, and the supposed civilian who had ventured close to war. The Colonel spoke, for the first time without regard to the gentle traditions of the Interior Department:—

“Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk!”

And there is another reason for the telling. Probably no other section of Indian country is more visited than is the Painted Desert, where the Snake gods have such influence. From June to October comes a host, packing cameras and notebooks and sketching-blocks, attired in weird garments, big with questions, and expecting to find hotels. Most of them wish to rough it smoothly, and are easily annoyed. They seek the natural wonders of the Empire, and especially the religious “dances” of the Indian people, chief of which is the annual Hopi Snake Dance. A strange crowd, having more of enthusiasm than sense, staggering under theories, swelled with importance and criticism, generously stuffed by guides.

A library has been written and vocabularies have been exhausted in their efforts to explain the beauties and the thrills. Canvas sufficient to tent a city has been spoiled by those who would capture the delicate and elusive Desert charm. Historians and ethnologists have recorded [[18]]and traced; antiquaries have uncovered and restored. The museums of the East are filled with looted treasure, while the files at Washington drip complaints. (“Oblige me by referring to the files.”) And the Indian as a savage—and a little-understood savage at that—has been idealized. And those who do not observe this view—berated.

But not a word has been printed, and few spoken without a sneer, regarding those of the United States Indian Service who keep watch and ward in the remote places: those who govern and protect, educate and guide; those who have kept the Indian living, that he may be sketched and analyzed and gaped at. This work extends beyond the dude season, through the lonely, bitter winters, embracing at times contagion-camps among an unreasoning, often unappreciative, and occasionally defiant population.

To further education among those who do not want it, to advance medication among fatalists, to attain some show of morals among an insensible and unmoral people, to demand respect and win affection from suspicious aliens, to rule absolutely without an army, and, above all, to keep sane and just without society, call for all of any man’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, and should arouse something other than blatant criticism from those who boast intelligence.

Having accomplished these things, every one, I am proud of the record; and I shall not fail to acknowledge my full indebtedness to those faithful men and women of the Service who made my efforts possible of success—employees, traders, missioners, not forgetting those few from among the heathen who gave their loyalty and confidence. They too have felt the sneers and insults of the multitude; and the grudging appreciation of an equally [[19]]insensible Bureau nearly three thousand miles away is small reward. Many valued employees have grown old in this Service without a syllable of commendation from Washington. And I have prompted at least one Commissioner of Indian Affairs to acknowledge his feeble debt to a dying physician—dying on his feet, still nobly making the rounds.

When I left Washington, in 1910, I had no idea that such a future work would extend my little vacation into the years. Six months out o’ doors, and either I should be reëstablished at the old stand, pounding the old typewriter, or I should have attended a ceremony that is final but not interesting to the subject thereof. A simple calendar; not the first, however, to stand revision.

Morning brought Chicago, to me a grim and sinister city, and a day spent in its galleries and clubs; then the train again, and its long crawl across level, heated Kansas. Excellent living on a diner, and came the thought that wherever this railroad wended would follow good food, which I required, and service of the best. Vain and soon-to-be-exploded vision! The railroad carries food and service; the West sees it go by. In the Desert one has desert fare.

The contrast was outside the windows; on the third morning this contrast became acute. Instead of hamlets, farms, and country lanes, there was now the grayish-green of the sage, broken by stunted cedars on the slopes, with an overtone of brown as the soil reflected light. There was no indication of complete aridity, so one could not think of this as a desert. Scant vegetation lived from the brush of the foreground to the timbered blue of the distant ranges. They did not appear as lofty mountains, although [[20]]many peaks lifted against a calm blue sky. Beyond the little telegraph points, the occasional adobes of section crews, and water tanks, the landscape held not a sign of habitation. In the middle distance were strange formations of crumbling shale, banded with the spectral white of gypsum: queer piles such as might have been designed by some sardonic humorist. Now straying cattle, gaunt as the hills, blanket Indians idling at a station, or a ranger on a shabby mount, were the only things of life. Over all the golden haze of New Mexico, moistened by the mists of the Rio Grande.

But later in the day this blue-toned view began to change. The sky grew clearer, the distance more intimate and revealing. Everything snapped into the brilliancy of sharp relief. Where had been isolated buttes, now ran barricades of rock, wind-worn, pinnacled, and domed, while the cold tones—blue and silver—of the river country warmed to the dry saffrons and parched reds of sun-baked Arizona, the Land of Little Rain. One could, as the old-timer sings, “see farther and see less” than on any other stage of the world.

Just at sunset the train slowed into a weather-browned, dust-covered town, its main street along the tracks and little else in sight. It was Sunday and the season of the wind. A swirling fog screened everything as the cars stopped. There is nothing more forlorn than a Southwest town of a Sunday in the windy season. A long rank of stores and saloons displayed false fronts, innocent of paint. A few starved trees waved crippled branches, and were most piteous. Flapping awnings, flying leaves, waste paper, sand, and cinders filled the air. When the wind ceased howling for a moment, there fell a deadly silence. It seemed to me as if that place must have been as it was [[21]]for a thousand years, drowsing in the red-gold sunset, abandoned, overlaid by the itinerant dust of all the ages. A clatter of hoofs, a shot, a crash of glass, and a man or two by Remington would have completed the picture.

A little to the north of it was Poverty Flat. To the east was the drying bed of the Little Colorado, a mile in width, lined by withered cottonwoods, and possessing scarcely enough liquid to demand a foot-bridge. In the west, a thing of splendor, reared the beautiful San Francisco range, snow-crowned, radiant, the sun searing down into its ancient craters. Elsewhere, everywhere, stretched the Desert, sterile, barren, robing now in the purplish-brown shades of early dusk. Its unlimited expanse, silent, desolate, suggested something of foreboding, something of waiting menace.

Thank God! there was one of those splendid railroad hotels at hand. I hurried into it, a little of civilization such as I knew, glad to shut out the night that advanced across that empty plain, swallowing as it came the masses of the Moqui Buttes and all the strange upland country that a year later I was to call home. [[22]]

[[Contents]]

III

INTO “INDIAN COUNTRY”

“Indian country” applies to all lands to which the Indian title has not been extinguished, even when not within a reservation expressly set apart for the exclusive occupancy of Indians. “Indian country” includes reservations set apart for Indian tribes by treaty, Executive order, or Act of Congress.—Meritt: The Legal Status of the Indian

The next morning was another day, as I have often heard remarked since; and whatever the terrors of the night, the crisp, cheerful Arizona morning brings with it renewed hope and assurance.

The town waked-up; the air held the tonic thrill that comes only from pine-clad peaks; the yellow dust of yesterday now kept its place. At this season in Arizona one may expect the wind to rise about noon and continue its nerve-racking tyranny until sunset. The blessed sunlight prevents one from remaining depressed, however, and there is always an end to the windy season, whatever the nerves meantime. When the last shriek has died away in early summer, it seems there lives a vacuum, a strange stillness, like that which follows the stopping of a clock.

I found the station platform quite busy that morning. Trains discharged their hungry freight, and the hotel kitchens fed them in battalions. A well-stocked news-stand promised that I would not lack for entertainment. The general spirit of moving life and activity caused one to forget that the Desert lurked beyond, that these rails [[23]]were simply a tiny causeway spanning it for many miles, desolation on either side.

Chance acquaintance is made easily in the Southwest, and it was not long before I answered the query of a young man as to where I headed. I replied that there was a long journey to make, out into the Desert, among the Indians perhaps. He seemed not to be aware that Indians were of the immediate locality, and asked: “How far?”

“Oh—about thirty miles.”

“Humph!” he commented, drily; “people in this country go that far to water a horse.”

The pastime and humor of Arizona is exaggeration. I know now that the ranchers of the Southwest, and the so-called nomadic Indians, for that matter, are people of definite localities. An Indian of the Desert will name and locate his hogan or home camp as specifically as the man of a city street. Indians are born, live, and frequently die within a very small area of the Desert. That is why Indians—and you may scoff—are likely to be lost at night during storms. Their distant travels are well planned, by daylight, much the same as anyone breaks monotony with a holiday or business trip. Only those of the most remote desert places make long journeys as a part of daily routine, and then when need compels. I have yet to see the man who lived miles from water. Water decides where any man may live in the Desert—and his animals too.

It was a different story when I aroused a very fat individual who dozed complacently with his chair propped back against a livery barn. I inquired about a team for the immense hike I had to make. There were no automobiles then to traverse the desert, and few were in the little towns. To-day gasoline and tires, coupled with much swearing, grease, and shoveling of sand, have conquered [[24]]most of the desert distances, and the last time I covered that road was in one of those striped metallic potato-bugs hatched by that Detroit genius who could not place Benedict Arnold in his country’s history, but who has made possible thirty miles the hour as against a former five. Then, or once upon a time, the horse—or his superior relative, the mule—was indispensable, and the keeper of a stable was a king of transportation, something akin to Jim Hill. This one acted just that way. Evidently he had not lost anything out back.

“Well—” he hummed, doubtfully, “that’s a longish trip, that is. I’ve made it—” giving me the impression that it had been an unusual effort, fraught with courage. “I went out there once, but it was two days’ hard travel, ’cause yeh have to rest the horses over night, returnin’ next day. That spoils two good days for me, and I have to charge yeh accordin’. It’ll be thirty dollars. When do yeh want to start?”

“Never, at that rate!” I declared very promptly.

So I went back to the hotel and sent a telegram up the line stating that I would there remain in comfort until some reasonable means of travel came in sight. The answer indicated that I had been heard from. Several days after a rather rough-looking individual called for me and introduced himself as the Boss.

“I was coming to town anyway,” he said, “but usually I don’t freight my employees.” Waiving this little matter of custom, I inquired: “How far is it to the Agency?”

“Twenty-five miles. We’ll make it in less than four hours.”

And we did, for he drove an excellent team of mares, and his reputation as a driver was like unto that of Jehu.

On the way I explained the purpose and definite length [[25]]of my visit. He seemed relieved, for it had been his original suspicion that I, being from Washington direct, came seeking his job. Having worked in a newspaper office long enough to learn that one must build absolute loyalty to the chief, I assured him that his interests were mine, and thereafter we got along famously. He was a lovable fellow when one had punctured the sun-dried skin of him, under which there was much to admire; and not the least was that he felt his tight little Agency to be the finest spot on earth. And why should he not?

Some few years before this he had drifted into that loop of the Little Colorado River, a place that for sterile barrenness could not be matched and that justified few visions. Armed with a single letter of authority, he had taken charge of the empty landscape. He pitched his tent beneath an old spreading cottonwood tree. I can imagine his lonely vigils and his planning under the brilliant desert stars. First, the well to tap the subcurrent of the river; then, one by one, the Government buildings, of rough rock quarried from the near-by mesas, meanwhile engaging and lodging and feeding rougher laborers, and disputing with contractors, and keeping them all from liquor, until a little town grew in this river-angle that for centuries had known only the withered trees, the cooing of many doves, and driftwood. The grounds were marked and leveled and drained. In springtime the river flooded the place, but he was not dismayed. An office, warehouses, shops, and barns were built. Then arose a well-appointed school, with dormitories for the Indian children, queer desert gamins that for a time were as frightened rabbits and wept for their smoky camps. There were kitchens, baths, a laundry, a plant to furnish light and ice and heat; for while the summer may be broiling, [[26]]the winter brings its snow and bitter wind in that unprotected waste. He saw the sick and built a hospital. There were quarters for his staff of employees. He planted trees along cement walks; he broke ground for a farm, and planned an irrigation system with its pumping-plant. His barns held feed against the winter, and his commissaries flour and clothing. A trader came for license, and then another; and a grant was made to a little mission church. Last, but not the least necessary to his desert kingdom, was a guardhouse for those who disputed his sage counsels. High above it all floated the Flag, stoutly whipping in the desert wind.

One day he folded up his tent and walked into his capital. The town was not finished—true; it was not perfect—true. Already he could see the mistakes of a pioneer hand, similar to those of the Mormons who had settled in that country generations before, and whose record was a graveyard. It is not finished to-day, and several successors have added their work to his. It may eventually be a folly and a failure in the sense of profits, for where the Mormons failed in those early days of zealotry who can hope to succeed? Ah! in the sense of material profits—Yes! But where had been nothing but the blind Desert and the savage river, nothing but the blow-sand and the horned toad, he had created an outpost of civilization to reach and serve and protect a helpless people who, theretofore, had only their desert demons.

As far as he could see to the north, where the red-toned mesas raised their twisted shoulders above the desert rim, where the dim blue crowns of monster lava-buttes loomed against the sky, to the edge of the world, it seemed, the domain was his kingdom. Twelve hundred human beings hailed him “Nahtahni,” which is Chief, and listened to [[27]]his advice. His was the only voice they heeded without suspicion, for had they not been driven from this land in midwinter, by armed men, packing their few possessions through the snow? And had it not required a fighting President of the United States to restore to them this pitiful inheritance? No less, indeed!

But to them, people of no contrasts, was it not a wonderful inheritance—that all-embracing stage, from the Red Mesa where the tumbled rocks stood in rings, “Children at Play”; from the Sapphire Lakes and the restless river to the country of the Moqui, guarded by the lava buttes, those somber blue-clad gods of the northern sky? And was it not the Desert!

Perhaps—no doubt of it—that Great White Father had sent this curious Nahtahni from his own household. The world has four corner-posts, one the Desert and one that is Washington. They could remember those nights when they first gathered around his tent under the gnarled old cottonwood, the surly river’s murmur in their ears, their glowing fires matching his against the stars. He had told them of his mission. And he was not afraid of white men—had sent some of them briskly about their business. His commission read—they knew it by his action—that all pertaining to their peace and welfare devolved on him; that he was responsible for their best interests. His mark upon a “nultsose” was the money of the land. His police wore the eagle button. Truly this was a man to be respected; and he was their Chief.

So at his command they brought children to the school, for it seemed he had a peculiar fondness for children; and yet he had no sheep to herd. A strange fellow! They came in from their corrals and patches to work for implements and livestock; they hauled the stores and coal from the [[28]]railroad, herding their wiry ponies with many a wild cry; they found that his queer blue papers could be exchanged for the hard silver dollars of the West.

And to this Chief they came too with foolish complaints and childish misfortunes; to him they came when ill and trembling, and him they sought when old and hungry, shivering against the desert wind, forsaken by their own cruel kindred, fearing that the jackals would pick their bones. In all that trading country they knew him as the one who would not barter.

His real title was—no matter; there must be tags and labels; actually, by law and practice, he was a desert czar, distributing his bounty, holding his courts of justice. Of course he was, and so are they all, each and every one. What came you out to see? A jurist splitting hairs and fearing to say too much, a ferret of accounts, a listening politician, a sutler and his bales? How many such can boast that they have constructed anything? This man had built a sanctuary, and he ruled a kingdom. He was the “Nahtahni!” That was enough, and what is needed, in the Desert.

When they did not call him that, affectionately they dubbed him “Sack-hair,” because he wore a wig, and since one day, to their general consternation, his scalp had blown off into a bush. From Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, to the blind old woman of the tribe, he was counselor and friend. The curious, animal-like children loved him. They would scramble down the walks to take his hand and toddle by his side. He was justly proud of his work and of his industrious alien people; perhaps, in their silent desert way, they were proud of him.

A little of this he told me modestly as we rolled over the road along the river. The greater part I learned in [[29]]my own time, as did the Indians before me. He enlivened the recital by a few choice Southwest legends, made for and kept alive by greenhorns like myself. He showed me where the last great flood had eaten away huge sections of the lower flat and spread all over. The river was now a wide desolation of sand, glowing, sullen in the sun. In flood time this was no plaything of a stream. Its mark was on the country, a mile wide. I could have walked across it dry-shod, and since that time I have crossed it swimming a horse, and wondering when I should go off to tow at his tail. Tangled masses of matted greasewood, like shingle of the beaches, and trunks of cottonwoods, picked clean of bark and twig, white as bleaching bones, were piled on the bars. Over at one side remained a shallow pool, holding dull fish as captives; and several lean ponies came to suck eagerly at the turgid water. Away off in the flat, he pointed out my first mirage: the pretty view of a marshy place bordered by reeds, cool, inviting—yet a dusty desert falsehood. Suddenly it faded, vanished in thin air, to reveal nothing but brilliant sunlight on a baking floor. Drifting clouds cast long shadows on the sand. A tiny whirlwind twirled its dust-spout higher and higher and glided across the plain.

Then, from a little rise, he waved his whip toward a distant object, black against the western sun. It was very far away, and looked like a bird-house on a pole.

“That’s the Agency,” he said.

And indeed it was, for without it existence there was impossible. It was the stand-tank, most necessary thing in that land of precious water. Just at dark we swung through the gates. I had reached my first desert camp, on the edge of the Enchanted Empire. [[30]]

[[Contents]]

IV

OLD TRAILS AND DESERT FARE

We may live without poetry, music and art;

We may live without conscience, and live without heart;

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized men cannot live without cooks.

—Meredith: Lucile

When I crossed the border of the Enchanted Empire, in the dusk of that entry to the Agency, I re-lived fancies caught out of Nicholas Nickleby, his winter journey into Yorkshire, coaching in company with the incomparable Squeers; his arrival at the bleak and cheerless Dotheboys Hall, and the atmosphere of that strange institution; and while there was something forlorn about them, there was also enough of their humor to keep me alive.

Considering what I have written concerning “the Boss,” who would have to be Squeers, this may seem a sorry and unkind reflection. But really, forgetting for the moment his generous heart and his earnest pride in the little desert kingdom, there was a superficial resemblance to old Squeers—the odd cock of the head, a certain quaint expression, a quizzical look after some solemn pronouncement, the rough exterior,—which in this case belied the man,—and that rare touch of the grotesque given by his wig: “Sack-hair.” The atmosphere of the Agency supported these impressions.

The ensemble of an Indian school, the cast of characters, their point of view, their quarters and customs—is [[31]]something unique and quite beyond comparison with normal things. One is often first conscious of odors; and the Navajo have many sheep. Once a desert station is given over to Indian school purposes, where a number of children and their mentors must be fed, it acquires the fragrance of boiled mutton for its very own. There is nothing else like it. Even an abandoned school retains this poignant atmosphere for years.

Bare—stark naked—calcimined walls, grim in their poverty and unashamed; bare pine floors; cheap pine trimmings covered with hideous varnish, the gloss of which seemed an uncaring grin; the whole sparsely strewn with Government-contract furniture, feeble in the beginning and now in the last stages of pathetic senility. This was the quarters for unmarried employees. And when you take such a scene and thoroughly impregnate it with the clinging atmosphere of yesterday’s, and last week’s, and last year’s boiled mutton; animate it with characters gathered by the grab-bag method from the forty-eight States, persons warped and narrowed by their monotonous duties, impressed by the savage rather than impressing him, fulsome with petty gossip and radiating a cheap evangelical virtue, you have the indescribable—and invariable—locale of an isolated desert school. Dickens would have made it immortal, and his gallery of portraits would have gained many varieties of Bumbles and Mr. Chucksters and Sairey Gamps. I have walked in the Desert with Dick Swiveller and Mr. Cheggs; Mark Tapley I have known intimately; and I have dined several times with Pecksniff in the flesh, he lacking only a large shirt-collar to complete the picture. Hugh Walpole has glimpsed something similar to this in The Gods and Mr. Perrin. “It will be all right next term” is the fiscal cry of the restless, [[32]]unsatisfied, and for the most part misfitted employees of the Indian Service. And the Indian stands mute, inarticulate, unable to express his confused amazement at this bizarre and ever-changing exhibition.

A strong sense of humor may keep one from going mad, but even the keenest humor grows blunted after a few months of such stolid association. If one has no relief in other mental pursuits, he succumbs finally to a moroseness that is not good in the unchanging, uncaring Desert.

We sat at a belated meal in the dining-hall. The drive of twenty odd miles and the tang of the desert air had given me an unusual appetite that promised the making of weight, when behold! in the doorway giving on to the kitchen appeared a vision, perhaps I should say an apparition, the cook! The expression turned on me was intended, I have no doubt, to be one of welcome; but whatever it was supposed to register, I have never forgotten the sardonic leer of that unkempt individual, promising worse to come. And it arrived. Leathery mutton, cold; baking-powder biscuit, lacking character; coffee, lukewarm, weakly concocted from the Arbuckle blend that retreated westward after the Civil War; milk, fresh from tin-plate Holsteins, mixed with water from an alkali pump; and last, but not least for a sick man’s stomach, the “bull butter,” innocent of ice, slimy, having the flavor of kerosene.

Farewell! a long farewell to Maryland cooking!

I remember having been snowed-in, on a time, back in the farthest Arizona hills, with a Government physician recently from the East. He had sought Arizona to stimulate a lagging constitution that threatened to initiate him as one of the Club. He had traveled westward, visioning the tropic palms, the date trees, the pomegranate [[33]]hedges of Phœnix; and there we were at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea-level, with the snow two feet deep, and a frigid blast coming straight off the range. He had been lost that night and nearly frozen on the desert where the roads were obliterated, and only the sense of his team had brought him to this haven. We tore the harness from them first, and an engineer helped me to warm him into amiability after the horses were cared for. The time came for retiring, and I recall his diving between dank sheets in an unheated room at this little hill station, his teeth chattering, his lips blue, and the fervid expression of him:—

“Blank! And blankety-double-blank the damned Philadelphia fool who told me Arizona was warm!”

And as I surveyed that tempting array of victuals, I had the same feeling toward those kindly disposed men of Washington who, out of a crass ignorance, had assured me that their desert stations possessed food.

Later, a couple of obliging employees carried my trunk upstairs to a room that would have been a credit to a penitentiary. It welcomed one with four walls and possessed a window. There were also a ceiling and a floor. These necessary ornaments, together with a bed and a decrepit chair, which had crashed under many disconsolate employees and had been skillfully and maliciously fitted together again to lure me, comprised the generous list of fittings. All and several extras thought to be necessary to comfort could be supplied by the employee from his salary, the proportions of which had been established during the administration of Carl Schurz, and have changed but little since, despite wars and rumors of wars and the coming of the income tax, “which includes the quarters as part of the compensation.” [[34]]

Next morning I was aroused about dawn, or a little before, by the business of breaking stove-wood, a bombardment of mishandled crockery, and the hiss of vicious cooking. A thick wave of reanimated mutton-grease fogged upward and invaded my boudoir, which I sought to vacate as quickly as possible. I encountered the cook at the foot of the stairs, and she had not improved during the night.

“Good morning,” I tried to say cheerfully, which caused her to notice me. “Who cares for the rooms?” I asked. She bent on me a sinister eye, as if divining my thought.

“You mean, who cleans ‘em, an’ all that?”

“Just so,” I admitted.

“Well—you’ll care for your own.”

And that was that. It was final, with the wall-eyed finality that had become unwritten law in all properly conducted Agencies.

At table I met an Irrigation Service man who had just returned from a survey of farther desert conditions. He expressed great joy in having accomplished his journey without accident or delay, and in successfully returning to this oasis. He said he was always sure of decent meals at this place, whereas, at that post from which he had arrived, life was unbearable because of the atrocious and altogether impossible menu. I requested that he repeat this statement. There could not be two such places. But he was certain of his facts, and his wife confirmed the story. They cautioned me never to go to that other post—an entirely superfluous piece of advice.

Then I learned that at each of the Government establishments was maintained a Thing (as Carlyle would have phrased it), a fixture, an Institution Horrible, that dominated the people and to which they suffered allegiance. [[35]]It was termed “a Mess.” And such had been its ascendancy and its acquired power, that they were more or less proud of its traditional horrors in due proportion to the misery produced. I learned that Washington recognized this thing, and actually advertised it to innocent incoming employees, suppressing with a cautious diplomacy its evils, and sounding aloud the one thing to be praised—the small cost per individual. The nomenclature is good. Never before was an hideous evil so briefly and so thoroughly described.

Having been deceived as to nearly everything concerning this Vale of Sharon, with the exception of the climate,—there it was before one, three hundred square miles of it in sight, unlimited, free and untaxed as yet; I learned of the altitude when I went to purchase a pair of shoes,—dispatched a telegram for a case of prepared food, the kind that has everything from soup to nuts in one bottle, and began to debate whether it would be braver to die unflinchingly silent or to carry my views to the chief. The bottled food came in, and I tightened my belt on it for seven days, learning meantime that there was no dairy herd other than the kind that comes nested forty-eight tin cows to the case; that only the chief was rich enough to afford poultry, and therefore there were no eggs; there was no fruit save the oranges that dried at the trading-post, and an occasional wagonload of melons sold by the pound. One could buy a very fair sample of undernourished watermelon for a dollar.

The refrigerator freights, however, booming east from California, carrying fish and vegetables and fruit, passed that place twice a week and within thirteen miles. One could see the railroad water-tank from the mess-kitchen window. But it required three things to procure food from [[36]]that refrigerator service, to wit: desire, energy and money; and they were all noticeably absent from these people. I decided to protest.

The Chief had wearied of such complaints, as indeed I did later when I faced the same problem. But it was his duty, nay his very safety, to settle everything. The skipper of this desert ship had no first-officer to take the deck with pride and responsibility, to smother complaints, and to avoid or crush mutinies. He must do it himself. Quelling revolts was one of his regular tasks; and he had become unusually—not to say cunningly—proficient in the various methods. Some he roared down, and others he trapped into submission.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked, sourly.

“Well, sir, I came here to keep alive, and aside from my natural intelligence, several physicians of the East urged me to absorb food—food—as little of it tinned as possible. Now I have been out to survey the can-pile, and have arrived at the conclusion that your employees must consume several tons of embalmed materials each year. And too, my food must be cooked. My ancestors quit eating acorns several centuries ago. The true state of your people is that of slow starvation. They have somehow got used to it. I shall not last that long. Their tradition has it that they can maintain life on a meal-bill of eleven dollars per month—”

“Give ’em credit,” he interrupted, darkly; “they got it down to nine once.”

“Which recalls your Mormon’s idea of luxury,” I hurried on. “Remember that story you told me coming in? Said the tourist—‘What would you do if you had a million dollars?’ ‘A million dollars!’ cried the Mormon, his eyes shining; ‘I’d buy a six-mule team, pull freight, an’ [[37]]eat nothing but canned goods!’ That Mormon was weaned at this mess.”

The Chief rubbed his wig reflectively, and from his rueful smile I knew that he possessed the remnant of a starved sense of humor. He glanced furtively about his office, and when he spoke it was in a low, cautious tone.

“True,” he said; “The mess would drive a goat to suicide. But what can I do? They like it. It is a dangerous thing, young man, to disturb anything the proletariat likes. Thank God! I am married and have separate quarters. It has been a mystery to me for years how they keep alive, and turn out each morning for work.”

And where Squeers’s face would have cracked into a malevolent leer, the countenance of the Boss suddenly bubbled over with a wholesome expression that announced the winning of my case. He slapped his hand on his knee. He had found a solution—a Machiavellian scheme calculated to strike down at one blow the system and its latest critic. He leveled his finger at me.

“I’ll make you manager of the mess!” he cried, triumphantly. “That’s the ticket. It’ll be up to you to provide real food, cooked, an’ all, an’—”

Evidently a very hopeful light came into my eyes. He paused, grinned somewhat shamefacedly, and hastened to advise me.

“Don’t accept too hastily.” He avoided my gaze. “At best it is a thankless job, this nourishing those who would rather starve that they may pay installments to California land-boosters. You’ll be no benefactor. You will find it depressing. You will be ostracized, and it may even be unsafe for you to stroll around unguarded at night.”

Notwithstanding these perils, I accepted.

The unwritten law, like most futile and messy things [[38]]requiring the democratic knowledge of all and the wisdom of none, demanded that a solemn conclave of those to be fed was necessary in any change of the routine of it, and that a vote be taken, after devious discussion and debate. Imagine convening a group of circus lions to inform them that hereafter, at feeding time—and so on!

The Chief knew that a popular vote would demonstrate the usual popular row. There are only two kinds of Indian Agents: those who compromise with everything and have interminable hell on their weakling hands, to the end that they are respected neither at home nor abroad, and those who compromise with nothing. The first sort is never defeated, and never resigns. He remains continually in service, shifted from point to point, cluttering it with his inefficiency and indecision. Neglected plants and chaotic systems are monuments, kept at national expense, to these amiable bench-warmers and trimmers. The second variety rides the waves for a season or two, and crashes down finally, as all tyrants, however benevolent, before the clamorous indignation of outraged and inefficient democracy.

The Chief being one of the last sort, the electorate was disfranchised. There was no session of Parliament. The whole thing was done in much the same fashion as had cost Charles the First his head.

Bulletin

Beginning with the first of the coming month, and until further orders, the Chief Clerk will administer the affairs of the Mess.

It was received in a grim, not to say stony, silence. Like a tenderfoot, I rushed in where an angel would [[39]]have sought the cyclone cellar. Cooks were employed monthly, and it was midway in the month. That night I gave the cook her time.

Now, having ended one dynasty, it behooved me to create another. I went to the Chief.

“When can I have the transportation necessary to my duties as maître d’hôtel hereabouts? I’ll drive in to the railroad town.”

“Do you know the road?” the Boss asked, doubtfully.

“That doesn’t bother me. When do I get a team?”

“To-morrow,” he replied, and left me to my fate.

Now I had traversed the road but once, when coming in a month before. The doubtful tone in his voice disturbed me. Perhaps the route-finding would not be so easy as a trick with cards. I sought out the pleasantest of the range men, and asked his advice concerning the matter.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he assured, and as this would have been very plain indeed, it heartened me. “Keep to the main-traveled road, and take all the turns to the right—going in.”

This seemed a very simple matter, and I gave no thought to the turns I might encounter coming out. I was then, of course,—and because of some mental defect am yet,—notoriously the worst road-finder in all the Southwest. And when I departed next day, with “the old woman’s team,” there was no one to crowd additional information on me.

In the city, to lose one’s way may be foolish without being unfortunate; but in the Desert one must arrive at his destination, or the results may be serious. And all the road directions from old-timers are similar. The Plains [[40]]Indian can be more definite. He may say, “Three hills and a look.” The Arizona guide is a despair.

“You can’t miss it,” they invariably prelude. “Take the main road until you reach that little cornfield just beyond the hogan of Benally Bega’s—remember that draw before you come to Black Mesa? That’s it. Then the left trail until you reach that scraggy cedar; then head down across for that old corral, where the sheriff caught Bob Peterson; then—you know where we nooned in 1913? It’s right east of that; and then, you can’t miss it—it’s right over from there—” the whole distance being sixty miles, and no water in the first five townships.

One plunges deeply on the optimism indicated by “you can’t miss it,” and starts. At midnight, with a tired team and no blankets, one suddenly realizes that he has missed it, and missed it bad. The sun sinks to rest, the desert grows black and threatening, he is off the main-traveled road, and no candle-lights are gleaming through the dark. There he remains until morning, when, cold and cramped, having kindled a fire to warm a can of beans that a more sensible man had slung under the seat, he finds that he has invited in the whole Navajo tribe. Five minutes after the wisp of smoke and the aroma of the burnt beans, comes an Indian, and another, and another, each looking earnestly for breakfast. It never fails. Between many signs and all the beans, not forgetting the passing of “thathli ibeso,” which is one dollar in hard, bitable silver, he finds that he is only five miles off the road, and that his original destination is “right over from there.”

On the cook-side of the board I played in luck. A row occurred in the short-order section of a Harvey House, and one first-class itinerant cook was flung headlong out [[41]]of a job on the morning I reached town. It might never happen again. And knowing nothing of the back-country, and especially being ignorant of an Indian Service mess, he embraced the opportunity to sign up for a desert cruise. It was necessary for him to pack his belongings, the most precious of which were a trick dog and a phonograph, together with one record entitled: “She Is the Ideal of My Dreams”; and this he insisted would occupy him several days. I arranged for him to meet a team at the Agency freight-station, and next day he assisted me in the purchase of supplies for the coming month. We bought nearly a ton of foodstuffs. My vehicle was one of those light spring wagons, a “desert hack,” rated to carry about one thousand pounds. Like an Indian freighter who loads pig lead, we never tallied the dead weight, but piled it in. The wagon groaned in its every joint under the load; and so I began the return trip.

One could not miss the right direction, for there were the distant mountains to point it, with the river as an eastern boundary. So long as one remained west of the river he must arrive somewhere. True. But for that river, and my sensible determination not to cross its half-dry bed, I might still be en route.

The roads of the desert are many, and all converge toward a settlement. Proceeding to town is very simple. But on leaving it the roads begin diverging in a most puzzling fashion, and there is a decision to be made at each departure. Of course the main-traveled road is usually plain and definite—usually. About half way to the Agency I was deceived by ten yards of bunch grass at a road juncture, and blithely accepted the branch leading to a river-ford. Nearing sunset, I had reached the river,—which was no place to be at that time. [[42]]

“If alone, always tie the horses to the wheel.”

There isn’t anything else in the Desert to tie them to. So I did it, and started on foot for the nearest rise to make a reconnaissance. The scene of empty desolation, blurring in the first grays of twilight, was not inspiring. The scarlet and gold of the sunset behind the ’Frisco Range did not awaken poetry within me. I was thinking about something else, and joyfully I hailed a faint gleam on the far middle-distance, the last rays gilding the Agency tank-roof.

Between my position on the river, and that haven of rest, as the crow would negotiate it, stretched at least five miles of the Desert. So short a distance caused me to snort at my former fears. I went back to the wagon and found that the impatient horses had wound the lines around that wheel until they resembled a chariot pair reined in at the finish of an exciting race. With some difficulty I managed to release them, and climbed in as they plunged off seeking their feed.

The shortest distance between two given points is a straight line, or so the books have it. I followed my early schooling, and headed straight for the tank.

The shortest distance between two points in the Desert is not a straight line. I there and then learned this lesson. Between that river-ford and the main road, meandering somewhere to the left, were at least a thousand different obstructions, skillfully concealed by Nature, deceptive in the half dark, and treacherous traps when night came on: sand dunes that were as bogs; wide, shallow arroyos; scrubby slopes cut by wicked little gullies, all flanked and faced by other sand-meshes. In and through all this the team tugged wearily, at times stopping of themselves for breath, at times plunging desperately. A dozen times I [[43]]lashed the horses to the wheel and went ahead to plot the way; a dozen times I returned to find them wound back on their haunches, in their efforts to free themselves from the overloaded wagon and the fool that had come out of the East. About midnight, after traveling to every point of the modern compass, I tried a last rise, determined, if this failed, to unharness and ride in, trusting to the horses to find their oats. And topping this little ridge was an old, half-hidden road. It angled away from the river toward the place where a real road ought to be. We swung down it, and an hour later, at an easy jog, the axles holding- and groaning-out to the last, we reached the Agency gate. The sleepy barn-man, an Indian, came out to meet me.

“Where you been?” he asked, with that innocent curiosity his tribe is noted for. “Have trouble findin’ the road?”

“No,” I told him, feeling a confidence born of relieved anxiety. “Nope! just started from town late.”

There is nothing like assurance after a distressing evening. And too, had I not landed a cook? I could not spoil such a triumph by admitting that I had been lost. [[44]]

[[Contents]]

V

DESERT LIFE AND LITERATURE

The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.—T. B. Macaulay: Johnson

Life in the little stone house to which I had now removed was filled with books and tobacco smoke and belated plans in futures—that time when I should be strong again. I had regretted the impossibility of my packing out a Washington library, but my old friend and bitter critic, the now astonishing Mr. Mencken, kept my intelligence alive by sending parcels of the latest publications, and these arrived fresh and unscorched, though having passed beneath his searing eye and ruthless pen. Later, my faithful typewriter, a relic of newspaper days, was sent forward in defiance of medical advice, and I wrote a few stories that, with their magazines and editors, are now forgotten.

Evenings, swung in a hammock, I studied sunsets and their glories, masked and reflected by the magnificent San Francisco Range, and gradually began to absorb the desert peace. To know its moods, those swift and unexpected changes, having in them often a dream’s stealthiness and unreality, one must live for a year in a little house built low against the brown bosom of the Desert.

I remember the peculiar silvern radiance of one evening. [[45]]The light came through dust-screens and, filtering across brown levels, limned patches of greasewood in a lemon pallor. The sentry cottonwoods of the riverbank were picked out as brilliant etchings of gray trunks and lacy branches in a glow of apple-green. Night swarmed out of the east in great blue clouds. Flying before it were cottony puffballs, white and twisting into the sunset, like masses of fleece, newly washed. But in the northwest swung a dun-colored curtain, lighted by the afterglow, suspended from the higher sky, a drifting, heavy drapery, its ragged edges trailing the tops of the blunted buttes with filmy rain-tresses. Between this curtain and the middle distance the mesa barricades had not yet darkened, and they were sharply outlined as gaunt shapes of red and saffron sandstone.

Now the peaks cooled and the great mountain-range lived in silhouette, its backbone etched with a line of electric blue. Early night swept overhead, and a few timid stars peeked out, as if fearing the thunder-mutter that came on the night wind, sullen herald of a desert storm. Now pale red flames reflected in the far-away dun-colored curtain. The storm rushed eastward across the northern heavens, while above me the night rolled west, bringing its stars into a brighter glow.

But this storm was fifty miles away and had its prescribed circle to complete. Soon its gathering vanguard began blotting out the stars. Now came a dusty shrieking wind; now the purple belly of the sky was rent by a white-hot wire, and like the crash of a thousand cannon followed the voices of the storm; now fell a few drops of cold rain, fanned on the wind into spray; and then—the deluge—a silvery curtain in the half-light, like a river turned over a new brink, drenching the Desert, beating all weak things [[46]]into the sand. Parched as the ground was, the water could not be absorbed at once, and soon stood as lakes in the hollows.

It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming in the hot sunlight.

Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead; then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. But the observer had the advantage of a view embracing one hundred miles between the mountain range and the country of the buttes. The wonders of the heavens passed around him in full circle.

And where could one find such another place for the sight? Probably nowhere else in this hemisphere, save with a slight advantage in height and atmosphere at the Lowell Observatory, about sixty miles away, where the astronomer may have viewed the same spectacle from his study, perched on a shoulder of the San Francisco Range, having below him that mystic world of the Indians, the dim, illimitable stretches of the Painted Desert.

The New England States, all of them, could be gently eased into Arizona, and there would remain room for Pennsylvania and little Delaware without crowding. The one reservation that I had charge of from 1911 to 1919 embraced 3863 square miles, a trifle smaller than Connecticut, and it was a postage stamp on the broad yellow face of Arizona, which is in area one twenty-seventh of the entire United States. One hundred thousand persons, or [[47]]one fourth of the state’s estimated population, live in eight of its towns, leaving much less than three persons per square mile, including Indians and Mexicans, to inhabit the remaining emptiness. One tenth of the population is Indian, and one fourth of Arizona’s land area is “Indian country.” The reservations have 1.5 persons per square mile. The fastest train of the Santa Fe system requires ten hours to cross Arizona from its eastern boundary to the Colorado River, a distance of 386 miles. Arizona has mountains that lift their crests more than 12,000 feet above the sea; and to present a perfect contrast, it has Yuma and Parker, towns of the Mohave Desert, cozy places in summer, close to sea level, with temperatures of 116° to 120° in the shade. Yes, you can eat oranges from the Phœnix trees while listening to the story of the Yuma man who found Hell chilly; and you can find snow in June on the upper levels of the Apache Indian Reserve without scaling a mountain peak. In the northern Navajo country I have twice experienced thirty degrees below zero in February, while there is no doubt the American Beauty roses were blooming in Phœnix gardens. Once I nearly froze to death on the nineteenth of May in Arizona, the place of palms, and figs, and pomegranates!

I had expected to be sadly bored, but the steady routine of each reservation working-day ate up the hours. Time does not hang on one’s hands; a strange thing too, considering the silence and solitude and lack of action in the Desert. Some writer has sought to picture this bustling, speaking emptiness:—“It is a land where one always expects to find something just around the corner; and there is never anything around the corner.” Quite so. Therefore, it is a magic place, an Enchanted Empire, [[48]]filled ever with a wistful anticipation that lures without the bitterness of disappointment. There is always another corner, and another beautiful possibility.

A multitude of office duties caused the four morning-hours to seem as one. Lunch time, and a bit of gossip with a dozen strange beings, and the quaint humor that isolation creates. Then the afternoon, filled with the shrieking wind and the hiss of sand against the panes. A passing traveler would stop to ask about the river fords and roads to nowhere; and those employees coming to requisition supplies, whether engineer or school matron or farrier, would have their talk out. The warehouses always presented the fascinating search for something, just to learn if indeed it was there, as the account stated, and in the exact quantity as the Bureau minutely charged; and when not found, there would be ample time for the cursing-out of the fellow who had used it and failed to make the credit to protect the Chief.

“That fencing!” wrathfully declared the Boss. “That wire was issued five years ago. I remember old Becode Bega got the last spool of it. It has rusted out by now in the Corn Creek. Hawkins was clerk then, and damn his eyes, he never expended anything. He had rheumatism, and sang hymns, and was always telling me that Congressman Floyd Witherspoon, of Spokane Flats, had married his wife’s second cousin. Send a policeman up to Becode’s camp, and have that old sinner ride in thirty miles to sign for that wire. It’s a shame to do it, but who cares in Washington! They sent Hawkins out, and have him still, somewhere else, twisting somebody else’s accounts. What’s the next item?”

And so it went. Because under the accounting system then in vogue—a relic of the War Department days, [[49]]and which ate up oodles of time and thousands of dollars in checking and balancing—everything from a quart of shoe pegs to a locomotive-type of stationary boiler had to be located and tested and receipted for by the Chief every three months, come Hades or come high-water!

Without this intense supervision by mail and blue pencil, through exceptions to accounts submitted, and silly questions, and equally silly answers, the Chief might have eaten either the shoe-pegs or the boiler during that odd time when he should have been making brick for lack of something to occupy him. The state of the Indians themselves, physically or mentally; the state of their holdings in stock, implements or gardens; the actual efficiency of the employee corps; the quality of supplies, and whether on hand or not in sufficient amount to insure a standard system—no one of these things particularly interested any Eastern authority to the point of correction; but the property accounts and the cash accounts were checked until the paper wore out, and until the Chief neglected everything else to satisfy them.

And dear old careful Uncle, who has wasted more cold cash in archaic systems than any other organization known to ancient or modern history, checked the spigot drainings every three months, unmindful of the bung, and scrupulously filed away the results in the catacombs of Washington, unaware of the negligence of Hawkins, the clerk, but always decidedly mindful of that worthy’s relationship to the elected genius of Spokane Flats. One may now remark that the accounting systems have changed. They have—after years of travail. But Hawkins and his benevolent influence have not changed; Uncle has not changed; and the Chief’s time is still spent checking inefficiency at home and reporting to ignorance abroad. [[50]]

Three times a week, in late afternoon, a solitary horseman, jouncing above his laden saddlebags, would appear over the slight rise beyond the trading-post, coming from the railroad; and a cry would go up from the campus:—

“The mail!”

That call would cause a stir. What a thing of interest is a newspaper five days old, a fresh magazine or catalogue, in those waste places! And a letter from a friend or loved one is a thing golden. Scarcely would the distribution have ended, with joy or disappointment, when it would be sunset, and the Desert cooling and browning into dusk as the red ball plunged downward into the caverns of the range, trailing behind it a glory that often compensated for the trials and little evils of the day.

Sunday brought a pause that seemed unreal, an enforced halt, a marking of time. For those who did not sing “Beulah Land,” it was a long-drawn-out monotony. A thousand miles from anywhere inviting a visit, often without the solace of a kindred spirit, the silence and loneliness settled into one. The clanking pump was hushed, the boiler no longer hissed steam, the whistle did not summon, the mail did not arrive. Everyone arrayed himself in latest fashion, as mail-order catalogues decreed, and sat around in great discomfort. Where to go? There was no hunting, fishing—nothing. One had photographed everything above ground five thousand times. The nearest town was twenty-six miles off, and on Sunday as dead as Julius Cæsar.

On such a day I became acquainted with the post trader, a half-breed Navajo, handsome and smiling. I found this lovable fellow in his quarters off the store. The place was bare enough of comforts, but along one wall ran shelves, piled with books and magazines—and such books and [[51]]magazines! There I found the famous five-foot shelf extended many feet. And old files of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, and Scribner’s. Among the books my hand touched Boswell’s Johnson, and I knew that the volumes I had left behind would be no longer missed. And Dickens, and Irving, and Macaulay, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Darwin.

“Why, I had not expected to find such books—here—”

He thanked me with a smile.

“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old guy, wasn’t he?”

Criticism, à la Navajo!

Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society, read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night, those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a gentle skepticism, and his armor was [[52]]not dented by snatches of the Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could be defeated by a quotation, and were.

His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in shreds.

As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all their skill as trackers and go-betweens. As an interpreter at trials, he was invaluable, and his knowledge of what a Navajo would do under given conditions was almost uncanny.

Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police, this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other was the abject parsimony of the United States Government.

I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s chanting[[53]]—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling on his tribal gods.

But I know that he met the answer with a smile. For so he would have joined the long shadowy line of weaving plumes and tossing lances as the tribe sought new and happier hunting-grounds; or would have entered the council ring of the chiefs, to advise in reviewing their material errors, when they saw the white man as a conqueror, rather than as a friend, and matched his evils with their savage ingenuity. [[54]]

[[Contents]]

VI

A NORTHERN WONDERLAND

“To those unaccustomed to desert lands the Navajo country presents in form and color and grouping of topographic features a surprising and fascinating variety; and those familiar with arid regions will find here erosion features of unusual grandeur and beauty.”—Gregory: The Navajo Country

The nearest place of change was the town, with a dinner at the Harvey House. I planned to make this trip each month, to have a food spree, quite as on a time rude gentlemen of the cattle days came in from the ranges, hungry for sights and pleasures, and devoted themselves to the swift consumption of raw liquors. But four hours of dragging through heated sand and sunlight, from one lonely landmark to another, with nothing of interest between, destroyed much of the anticipated satisfaction. I recall a bit of Washington advice.

“You will find that country,” said the well-meaning fellow, “covered with black gramma grass. Buy a pinto pony the very first thing you do. Its keep will be negligible. A saddle will cost but a few dollars. Thus you will have transportation at all times. It will be a pleasure to ride into town after office hours. You’ll enjoy riding above all things.”

Twenty-six miles—fifty-two miles there and back!

Now I had read Western stories, written by O. Henry and others who knew less about the subject. Playing the [[55]]sedulous ape, I had written a few myself. These epics all mentioned areas of black gramma grass, and made much of swift-footed cayuses that were camouflaged by Nature and possessed Dante-like noses and broom tails. There is a wondrous lot of this in the movies, too, and the joyous bounding of the aforesaid animals, from prairie rise to prairie rise, pressing the miles behind them, and the carefree demeanor of their riders, surrounded as they are by creaking leather, wide-barred shirts, and jingling spurs, appeals to one.

But when you learn that a cayuse-bronk in northern Arizona eats imported hay at forty and sometimes sixty dollars the ton, the black gramma grass and pastures all being three hundred miles to the south; and when you find that the devil is not to be trusted for an instant, and that he has to be flayed constantly to produce even an amble; and when you feel—“feel” is the word—the misery twitching completely throughout the human system from pounding on the wooden anatomy of the brute, a large part of this paper-and-film appeal vanishes. Moreover, dusty shirts, alkali-impregnated handkerchiefs, and the smell of a harness shop do not combine to flavor one’s meals delicately. Big Bill Hart may have my share of this, and he is welcome.

But there does come a longing “for to admire and for to see” what is actually out back. That adventure and romance are not to be found in the beautiful desert distances seems impossible. The dim blue buttes of the north, mysterious altars of the gods, promised to yield something from the land they guarded. And when an Agency mechanic told me that he had orders to visit the Castle Butte station, a far-away outpost, I recommended myself as a standard camp-cook, recalling the early mornings [[56]]of newspaper days when I fried eggs on a gas-stove. We did not go to the horse-corral and lay our ropes over two spirited steeds, but at an early hour wended to the barn and harnessed two sturdy old plugs to a twelve-hundred-pound farm wagon. They were capable of making four miles an hour, and the wagon had capacity for a grub-box, for blankets, shovels, rope, and all the things necessary—perhaps—to our getting there first, and to accomplishing something afterward.

Have you never wondered how those adventurous fellows of the yarns, outfitted with nothing but a handkerchief, a saddle, and a lariat, manage to cover leagues upon leagues with the one horse, and never stop overnight? A Navajo Indian can do with one blanket and a sheepskin lashed behind his saddle; but even he contrives to find the trading-posts of the Desert for his grub, and he always reaches a friendly camp at nightfall.

Smith cautioned me to take a heavy coat, which I would not have thought of. Right at the start I committed a serious blunder, one that caused me to suffer bitterly, and one that I have not repeated since. Expecting to return next day, I persuaded myself that two sacks of beck-a-shay nahto, or genuine “cattle” tobacco, would be sufficient for the trip. But desert plans are subject to change, and desert wisdom is painfully acquired. I now have drilled myself never to forget matches and a filled canteen, baling-wire,—otherwise “Arizona silk,”—repair parts for the lizard, a piece of rope, tools, and a heavy coat of sheepskin, plus a tobacco factory unless the route is marked by trading-posts every thirty miles. I arrange these things automatically, because on that trip I tried to smoke powdered alfalfa in a cob pipe.

Northward we wended all day, one rugged mesa slope [[57]]and huge flat succeeding another, always rising. After passing Lone Cottonwood Spring, where the water was an excellent imitation of thick gray pea-soup that the horses disdained, we lunched at a delightful place known as Coyote Springs, one of the ten thousand Southwest waterholes so named. In the naming of springs and precious water it would seem that the vocabulary of the pioneers was decidedly limited. But it would have been the same by any other name. A hole scooped in a soft rock and sand hill, fenced with crooked and cracking cottonwood branches, as the Navajo build their corrals, with not a vestige of relieving green within miles of it. All around the sand was packed hard by the flocks of sheep that came to water. Overhead was a broiling sun, and this barren area reflected every bit of the glare and heat that it did not hold as a stove. The air was heavy with the aroma of sheep, and alkali showed ghastly white in the spring’s overflow. Nevertheless, it was an oasis and held water. Here and there were picked and bleaching bones. The coyotes knew its name.

Many buttes not to be seen from the Agency were now in sight. One lumpy mound resembled a coiled snake—Rattlesnake Butte; another was shaped as a pyramid, although no one had heard of Cheops or Chephren; and a third, which had crumbled, was like a huge four-poster bed that some forgotten giant had wrecked.

A bite to eat, and on again, lumbering down the yielding banks of washes, and scrambling up and out of them. Truly a couple of sturdy plugs were required to drag the wagon up those heavy slopes. Providing the traveler has time and patience, and is built with a steel-riveted frame, the old-time farm wagon with three-inch tires is the surest method of making such a journey. It rolls [[58]]and pitches as a squat lugger in a choppy sea, but it gets there.

CROSSING THE DESERT BELOW CHIMNEY BUTTE

THE ORAIBI WASH IN FLOOD-TIME

Where quicksands are ready to engulf a stalled car

While the Desert appears as a level sward, one soon finds that there is no sward to speak of, and that one million tangled hummocks fast follow the first million, each bunch of sparse grass, each growth of greasewood or saltbush having its own protecting hillock of sand. A good road in those days was one that a stout wagon could get over without being wrecked.

It is quite an experience to travel for hours toward a given point marked by a solitary pinnacle, a veritable mountain having sheer sides, and fail to reduce the distance appreciably. The sun was nearly down when we crawled along a valley between two of these monsters. One, named Chimney Butte, a huge truncated cone resting on massive shoulders, was the highest in that country; and the other, Castle Butte, looked like a ruined mediæval stronghold, having a causeway flanked by towers, above which loomed dim embattlements and casements. In the brilliant daylight the height of Chimney Butte is dwarfed by desert distances; and Castle Butte is not always robed in fancy; but it was now twilight, the time when the Desert is most sombre and fanciful, and it was my entrance to that garden of the vanished gods. These two gigantic piles were as the awesome portals of a ruined gateway, the pass to an unknown, mysterious country; and the whole setting, fading into night, gloomy with the menace of silence, held something of the strange unreality of a dream. And came on suddenly the dark and cold.

How did Smith manage to follow the road? I could no longer see it, and had more than enough to do to cling to the pitching seat of the wagon. We headed straight [[59]]into the blackness. What yawning precipices might be awaiting us! I became chilled and cramped, and was thankful for that greatcoat, though it did not pad me against the rude shocks of the going.

“How much farther is it to this Agency?” I asked.

“Oh! over in the hills a bit—‘bout three miles furder to go yit. It ain’t an agency, yeh know—nothin’ but a missionary and a log hut.”

And we plunged into another of the dark defiles. Then out of the black, on a bit of cold wind, came a desert welcome that one never forgets, a promise of rare comfort when one is hungry and cramped with cold, the pungent incense of burning cedar. Now from the deep shadow of a hillside arose a thin column of sparks, glinting, flying jewels of the night.

“There’s it,” he announced, as if somewhat relieved, himself.

It was a little house, built of boards, having but two rooms, one large enough for a bed and dresser, the other containing a cookstove, table, and two chairs. Its outside dimensions could not have been more than twelve by twenty feet. And when the stove was filled with dry cedar one was tempted, after a complete toasting on one side, to dispense with the table. But there was no complaint to make of this on our arrival. The fire had the cheering crackle of Yuletide, and soon coffee and bacon added their aroma. The hospitality of the good missionary and his wife was like all those welcomes extended in the solitary places, when the visitor is not touring with a notebook and a nose. The meal ended, and all news exchanged, we said good night and opened the door.

“’Ere’s a go!” one might have exclaimed, without hurting the feelings of a preacher. It was snowing! And [[60]]even a preacher would have remarked further, probably with adjectives, on seeing that Government house in which we were to spend the night. It was a log hut in truth, built corral-fashion, the poles set on end, the chinks originally plastered with adobe. There was but one room, containing a single bunk made of boards, an old cookstove, and a collection of broken tools and empty canned-goods cases. The floor was of packed earth. Without exaggeration, I may say that the roof and the floor were intact; but practically all the caulking had escaped from the log walls, and the wind felt its way inside with long icy fingers. The mechanic dropped into the bunk and was asleep almost instantly; and, after building a rushing fire in the stove, I rolled myself in Government blankets, and rolled again, this time under the stove, to pass the night.

But I did not rest in the poetry of the wild. The refulgent moon did not come up to spill its splendor through the open door, nor even through the extensive openings of the wall; the perfume of the growing pines did not soothe with healing balsam, the cry of the loon did not sound from across the lake, and so forth. The floor, however, was under that stove; and the floor had not been constructed along those scientific lines followed in the building of Ostermoor mattresses. Plastic as is my figure, it refused to conform.

And to add to my distress, someone in all that vast and lonely country owned an old gray horse. I know he was old, and I know he was gray, for he acted just like a silly old gray horse. And he was hobbled, and he was out in the snow, and he had a bell tied to his neck.

Clankety-clank-clank, clang, claaangngng—clankety, clang, clank! [[61]]

Around and around and around the house he voyaged all that night, proceeding by hops and plunges as a hobbled horse must, his gait just enough hampered by the lashings of his two front feet to impart a syncopated tempo to the discords and jangles of that flat metallic bell. At times he would pause, as if for breath, and there would be quiet—deep silence—just sufficient for a doze; then—clankety, clang, clang, clank! he would break out again.

I have listened to jazz orchestras of various colors and degrees of crime, and other peace-destroying nuisances meriting death; but I have never heard anything equal to the nocturnal pilgrimage of that old gray horse. I would drop off to sleep, and suddenly wake as if feeling his hobbled feet squarely in the centre of my contracted chest; but he would be ten yards off, miserably clanking his way to another sector of the snow-covered terrain. And confused, I would lift my head to listen, knocking it of course against the bottom of the stove, when a long icicle would stab through a wall chink and take me fairly in the ear. Perhaps it was a pleasant night for Smith, who faithfully and harmoniously snored away the hours.

With the dawn I struggled up. No! I did not bound out joyously to gambol in the pure air of the stunted cedar-forest. It was a cold gray dawn with a foot of snow, and there was a dank rheumatic caress in it. With all speed I began smashing a packing case for kindling. Crash! down came the axe, and splinters flew wide, when Smith stirred in his bunk, awakening to duty and the dangers thereof. He blinked his eyes and spluttered:—

“Watch out for that dynamite.”

“Dynamite?”

“Yes; it’s right under my bunk. Chop your wood furder off.” [[62]]

I followed these directions to the letter. In fact, I gently carried all the wood outside and chopped it.

The getting of breakfast, a complete demonstration of my culinary ignorance, occupied me fully in the half-dark. I walked to and fro gingerly, fearing to wake the dynamite; and I wondered how that stupid fellow could have slept and have snored as he did, superimposed above a quiescent earthquake. Dynamite is a great friend to man in the rocky gorges of the West, but it should not be permitted to join the family circle.

When next I opened the door, what a transformation! I had come to this place in the cold grim darkness, heartened only by the perfume of burning cedar. Occupied with the wood and the wet-handled axe, I was dimly aware of a drowsy landscape in the clammy mist of dawn. But now the sun had lifted, and the scene was a snowy fairyland. The gnarled cedars of the foreground were laden with dripping snow, their branches picked out with gems. And where the snow lay in unbroken sheets, pure white, glistening, the shadows of the dwarfed trees formed rare patterns. Behind the house were cliffs, and each gaunt angle held its draping of snow. The time-worn bastions of those lava ledges stood as gaping at the winter’s cheery Good-morning. It was a stage scene under the great amber light.

A long valley stretched away to the Bidahoche Plains and the Bad Lands with their honeycombed hills. Its dim recesses were now painted by the first plashes of sunshine. To left and right, overhanging the snowy meadows, reared great buttresses and crags of lava, and all down the valley ancient promontories loomed amid the fading veils of mist. Prehistoric ages had seen these as the shelving inner walls of some vast crater, when they had seared [[63]]and glazed and baked and colored to form Nature’s pottery. Now, broken and rent apart, they stood as fantastic separate monuments, lining that sunlit corridor to the outer plains.

Dominating the foreground was Squash Blossom Butte, an inverted bloom that the storms of æons had carved and a million rare sunsets tinted. The Indians reverence the squash blossom as a symbol of fruition, and perhaps—who knows—in its delicate bell-shaped flower they see more than the mere promise of a harvest. It is found in Navajo silver-work, strung into those massive necklaces of which they are so proud; and when one goes into Hopi land he finds it imitated in the dressing of their maidens’ hair. So they named this altar.

It was commanding in the morning light; it was the last thing seen down the valley, a scarlet head thrust into a sober sky, as that second night came on. The sunset lavished all its rainbow shades on it. Richest gold and lavender above, purple tones and lava-green below; bands of saffron melting into slatey shades; emerald and crimson deepening into jetty blacks when the afterglow had vanished. An aged throne of the gods. And clearly sweet, as desert music, came the half-hushed sound of sheep moving among the cedars; and a young Navajo girl paused at the edge of a thicket to gaze shyly at our cabin, then to hurry away, the tiny bells at her belt tinkling, having all the romance of the gypsies.

There is no finer landscape in the Southwest than this seldom-visited country of the Moqui Buttes where, according to the Hopi, the one-time giants had their dwelling places. The wondrous piles and pinnacles of the Grand Cañon present a chaotic struggle that has ceased in all its awesome disorder and aged grandeur. It makes man [[64]]gasp and wonder, but it does not invite the smile of reverie. This scene about the sunset throne had that serenity born of isolation. It was small enough to invite intimacy. Like the kingdom of a fairy tale, the tranquil valley encompassed its own world, dreaming, smiling in its sleep.

Many times since have I crossed the Butte country, seeing it frozen in winter and again broiling under a summer sun that scorched from the cedars their sweetest aromas. I have always found it a haven, full of peace.

Next day we returned to the Agency, an uneventful retreat, save for a jouncing box of dynamite that leaped like a thing fiendishly alive whenever the wheels slammed into a rut. My nerves were not in the best shape. I had been smoking powdered alfalfa in a pipe. And I would look back from the high seat, half fearing each time to catch that dynamite in the very act of going off. But luck was with us; we herded it safely into the Agency storehouse; and I rushed to the post for a can of real tobacco. [[65]]

[[Contents]]

VII

THE FIRST BALL OF THE SEASON

Of Harrison’s barn, with its muster

Of flags festooned over the wall,

Of the candles that shed their soft lustre

And tallow on headdress and shawl;

Of the steps that we took to one fiddle,

Of the dress of my queer vis-à-vis,

And how I once went down the middle

With the man who shot Sandy McGee.

Bret Harte: “Her Letter”

Among employees of the Desert Indian Service, the Marylander is a rarity. Back in Maryland the Indian Service is unknown, all readers of the Sun-paper believing that Indians were originally designed by Buffalo Bill.

So when a lad seated himself on my porch one night, and announced: “Why, Ah’m from Maheland too; yes, indeed!” it rather struck me where I ought to have lived. I was eating at the mess then.

He was out with an irrigation crew, surveying levels, and in a few months had become obsessed by all things Southwest Indian. He wore moccasins and a bracelet studded with turquoise, and he could chant like a cold Navajo on his way home from a Yabachai.

“Ah’m goin’ to get me a gourd-drum, an’ go in for ‘singing,’ ” he told me, when we had become better acquainted, and he demonstrated the eerie half-croon-half-yodel of the Medicine Man. “Say, Nultsose! have yo’ heard them?—Medicine ‘sings’?” [[66]]

This was my first intimation that a title attached to my position.

“Nultsose—”

He explained it as Navajo for paper or writing, hence; one who writes on or issues papers pertaining to the mysteries of white men’s wholly unnecessary accounting. Nearly all clerks wear spectacles, as I did, and one would think that the Indian, naming his own so often because of infirmities, would have seized on this defect for a name. But not so; the check, order, issue-script, permit, or warrant, the paper, the “nultsose,” is the important thing to him. It means money in hard dollars, authority perhaps, demand for goods, leave to go on a journey with recommendation or safe-conduct; or, if fortune has waned, summons to the Chief.

“And if yo’ go to a ‘sing,’ Nultsose, remember to take change, an’ don’t give the squaws more’n two bits at a time. Yo’ll have to dance with ’em, yeh know, an’ instead of thankin’ ’em, yo’ pay ’em. Hand out a dollar, an’ Good-night—they keep the change. Now old Beck-a-shay Thlani is inviting to one sometime soon. It’ll be a reg’lar hoe-down, an’ we’ll go.”

The doctor was present, and he grinned uncomfortably. The Nahtahni, stretched in his hammock, rubbed his wig and grunted.

“Ah! yo’-all come too,” urged Roberts; “It’ll be fun. They all know me, and I’ll do the interpreting. Every old shemah with a dotter has her eye cast my way, anyhow. They pick out the handsome boys for the weddings at ‘sings.’ I’ll have to get me a Piute wedding-basket, though, next pay-day. There’s a trader over at Red Lake who’s got my order for it.”

The doctor cautioned me later not to be too hasty in [[67]]this matter, and I perceived that he had reason for timidity.

“They’ll get you,” he declared. “They never fail to land a fellow; and then he has to prance like a fool before five thousand Indians. That’s all right for Roberts, ’cause he’ll wind up a squaw man; but I’m advising you.”

And one twilight, when we were again arranged on deck after supper, a half-dozen little Navajo boys from the school sidled up to the Chief, daring and timid by turns, their eyes snapping with the fire of hope. They hung around until he asked:—

“Ah-tish-ah?”

“Dence!” they exclaimed, breathlessly.

“Noki yisconga, epten,” the Nahtahni severely decided. “Doe-yah-shaunta! She-no-be-hosen. E-yah-tay.”

The Old Man was proud of his linguistic ability, and this was the complete extent of his Navajo on any topic. The last sentence but one he had made up, somehow, all by himself. It bore no semblance to anything any Navajo had ever enunciated; but he knew what it meant. A free—a very free—translation would run something like this: “Two days from now, nothing doing. Don’t you dare to do it. It’s bad for you. I know nothing about it. Yes; all right!”

The last was all the kids wanted. The scrub crackled as they disappeared into and through it, going as frightened rabbits.

Roberts spoke next.

“That’s old Beck-a-shay Thlani’s ‘sing.’ Say, boss, the Doc and young Nultsose here are both pinin’ for to shake a toe in that soiree. Let us have a team, will yeh?”

The Nahtahni grunted.

“You know the horses have worked hard to-day—” [[68]]

“Yes; let us have a team,” said his stepdaughter, who afterward married the doctor; and that settled it, and also bound the medico to the adventures of the evening. There are a few things no different in the Desert. The Navajo woman of the hogan, the Hopi dowager of the household on the height, the Pueblo wife of the lower vineyards, all settle these questions in much the same manner. Man proposes and begins to make a noise with words, and immediately thereafter attends strictly to the holding of his peace. Roberts knew this, and without further parley disappeared in the direction of the barn. Shortly came a farm wagon, drawn by two solid animals, and a dozen of us piled into it, the doctor noticeably lagging.

“Don’t forget your change, Nultsose,” called Roberts.

It was no great distance to the river, and soon we were splashing through shallow waters. Mounting the high farther bank, the wagon began tossing and rolling over an old desert road. Then the dark laid down its thick blanket, and the stars burned through overhead. From the next rise we noticed a faint glow, away off, and this grew larger as we blundered along. Now a whiff of pungent smoke came on the thin desert wind. Now the deep shadows began to dissolve into a golden gloom, and now gleamed the white-hot flare of burning cottonwood. Then a furious challenge from the dogs, and we saw the camp. As feudal lords were once accompanied by retainers and shock-headed varlets, so the nomadic lord of the Desert is followed by a multitude of canines. It seemed that a thousand of them started up to greet us, a fearsome, throaty bedlam.

Wagons loomed up, their canvas tops lending a touch of the pioneer days; and in the spaces between the poles were the little cooking-fires, around which women and [[69]]children huddled amid pots and pans, saddles and boxes and water-kegs and tangled harness—all the clutter of a desert camp. Beyond the huge central fire was a hogan, that queer house the Navajo builds of logs and plasters with adobe, domed like a beehive, and from its roof wreathed a thin column of smoke. There rested the sick man for whom all this preparation had been made, the cost of which would likely break old Beck-a-shay Thlani, or at least seriously strain his credit at the trading-posts.

Coarse Navajo rugs were spread close to the fire and, with grave salutations from the older men and smiles from mothers who convoyed a bevy of Navajo girls, we were invited to be seated in the place of honor. This would have impressed any blank-record Easterner, going about making notes, as rude but wholesome hospitality, and it was; but the courtesy also enabled the Navajo to indulge himself—and particularly herself—in a bit of fun. The doctor slipped away into the shadows; and I noticed that the young men of the Navajo, scores of them, sat their ponies, a long line of horsemen behind us. They eased in their saddles, reins hanging, their faces having the grave solemnity that marks a shy and diffident people.

That is, shy of strangers, before whom they draw on the mask of gravity, mistaken since the days of Fenimore Cooper for stoicism. But no one was shy of Roberts; and especially had he friends among the ladies. Every old shemah greeted him with a smile and exclamations of pleased surprise. He held the confidence of these people; and well he might, considering the pains he had been to in acquiring a working vocabulary of their language, which is probably as difficult to master as Chinese. And I felt somewhat reassured in having him for sponsor. We lolled [[70]]comfortably on the rugs, and the fire burned our faces and lighted everything as at a play.

NAVAJO ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE

A NAVAJO HOGAN AND ITS BLANKET LOOM

“The doc’ has vamoosed,” he said, grinning; “but that won’t do him any good. They’ll run him down in the scrub, and bring him in hog-tied. I’ve told a dozen old women that he is stingy with his dancing. Self-defense—otherwise you an’ me’d have to do it all.”

“Explain this dancing act,” I requested.

“Don’t worry,” Robert replied. “The squaws will attend to everything for yeh. Just yield gracefully—an’ pay ’em. Don’t forget that.”

Now from the hogan came a band of solemn-featured men, led by an old gentleman of the tribe who bore a strong resemblance to Rameses III, straight out of glass case No. 12, as you go down the east corridor, save that he was slightly animated. He bore a staff, to which a little gourd-drum was tied. The group formed a wedge behind him. Silently they swayed together, shoulders touching, for several seconds. Then the old one tapped the drum and intoned a howl, and with one accord they were off, like a flock of coon dogs on a cold night. In time with the curious rhythm they continued swaying, and occasionally did a hop-step without moving forward. The fire beat upon them and, as they warmed to the chanting, heads thrown back, mouths agape, and vocal chords never missing a note, the sweat beaded on their foreheads.

“This,” said Roberts to me, in solemn appreciation, “this is some singing—I never heard better.” And I agreed with him. It laid over anything I had ever heard, including a Mott Street theatre choir.

It is impossible to describe the nuances of the Navajo chants. At the farthest northern trading-post there lives a lady who can translate the Rain Song, the Prayer before [[71]]Day, and other of their invocations; and I know a white man who had a “medicine sing” held over him to comfort his Navajo wife; but until you meet up with Roberts, properly chaperoned nowadays in the great Jedito Wash, I pass giving any idea of that weird combination of sounds. A long sustained note at times, now a crooning melody, now a sad, half-wild cry, filled with minor effects that would be the delight and the despair of any jazz artist, it is indeed a song of the Desert.

And the most astounding thing of all was the endurance of that aged vocalist, the old Medicine Man. The pitch of his drum simply encouraged him in new effects. There was an energy, a sustaining confidence in his efforts that must have had a rare effect on the ailing one within the hogan. And for two mortal hours the others of the singing band followed his lead without once rivaling him. When one hesitated, as might be seen but not heard, the clamor of the pack smothered all defects; and the faltering one would cough, spit straight upward into the air, uncaring, and get a fresh start. But the old man was never headed; not once did he waver, hesitate, or fail in the key. He had begun with that first flat sounding of the drum, and he continued faithfully unto the end. He was an artist. I admired him. And when Roberts told me that the old charlatan would receive at least twenty sheep and five head of cows for his fee, I began to understand his unflagging spirit. He had a reputation to sustain.

The Regulations of the Interior Department, issued to Nahtahnis, state that all such interesting old comedians should be in jail for this offense against medical ethics. But, mark you! the Interior Department does not encourage Nahtahni to put him in jail. There are too many of him. The Navajo number between thirty and forty thousand [[72]]souls on the six Navajo reserves, and about every seventh man is a doctor of tribal medicine. While a lucrative calling, it is not always a desirable one for the neophyte, since failure to exorcise successfully the evil spirits enmeshed in the patient has been followed more than once by swift demise, and the blundering physician did not heal himself later, nor did he hear the singing.

Once to me came an Inspector from the Department, and he said:—

“Now you have been having trouble with these Indians, and I am surprised that you have dismissed all your Navajo policemen as unworthy. You must have a police force to keep the Navajo in line. We will call a council and select a new outfit to sustain you in this important work.”

Which we did. There were flour and meat, coffee and sugar, together with the all-necessary beck-a-shay nahto, cattle tobacco provided for distribution, and the people came. As usual, the men were diffident and modest, and no one offered himself for appointment as an officer of the realm. The nominations were made by head-men, and discussion followed as to individual merits, influence, bravery, and all those virtues that are supposed to animate the warrior. The Inspector was finally satisfied with the selections.

An old-timer sat on the platform with us, acting as interpreter. Ed had skinned mules across the Zuni Mountains in 1889, and he could take an old single-action forty-five and keep a tin can moving as if it were alive. He could roll a saddle-blanket cigarette with one hand, sing a puncher song, and play the guitar. He was one of the post-traders, and perhaps the best Navajo interpreter alive. He knew the Navajo Indian, having had the advantage [[73]]of a living dictionary in his early days. But Ed knew when to keep his mouth shut, and aside from faithfully interpreting from English into Navajo and from Navajo into English he said nothing at the time. But later:—

“It wasn’t for me, a mere uneducated Indian trader, to give my advice to a wise guy from the East who was pointing the trails out to a Nahtahni; but … every damned one of them new police has ‘medicine turquoise’ in his ears.”

It was true. Every one of them should have been in jail!

The Navajo are lithe and lean, for the most part, and their dress is picturesque. One could see all sorts of costume at this “sing.” There was the old fellow with trousers compiled of flour sacks, the brand having been arranged as a bit of decoration, and where “OUR BEST” would show to most advantage; and there was that one satisfied with a pair of cast-off overalls. But the majority were in rich-toned velveteen shirts, open at the neck, and with sleeves vented under the armpits; and desert trousers, loose and flapping garments, Spanish-style, split below the knee, made of highly colored and figured calico. One fellow’s legs were a riot of gaudy parrots. The twisted silk handkerchiefs worn about the head came from the Spanish too, no doubt. Their hair was drawn back from the forehead and corded in a long knot, a Mongol touch. Their moccasins were of red-stained buckskin, half-shoe, half-leggin, warm and noiseless. The young men wore gay shirts and neckerchiefs, store-bought, and their ponies showed more of decoration than themselves. Each had a good saddle, most necessary to a desert Romeo, and the headdresses of the ponies were heavy with silver bands and rosettes.

Now a middle-aged dandy would strut about, proud [[74]]of a crimson shirt, and the firelight would paint him as a figure from old opera. He would shine whitely of silver—a huge necklace, with turquoise pendants and many strands of shell and coral; bracelets, and the khado that is still worn, though the wrist no longer needs protection from the bowstring; silver rings and silver buttons, all studded with turquoise chips. Not less than five hundred dollars in metal and workmanship would adorn these old beaux, and an Indian valuation would be enormous.

Silver and turquoise are the jeweled wealth of the Navajo, the white metal contrasting with their sunburnt skins and the stone holding the color of their matchless skies.

The women wore velveteen bodices and curiously full skirts. They too were weighted with silver ornaments, one having the more of beads and bandeaux being the favorite wife or daughter. Some of the smaller girls moved about accompanied by the tinkling of little bells strung to their moccasins and belts.

All this in the brilliant flare of the cottonwood fire, above which fanned a mist of sparks like another Milky Way; and there was the incense of the smoking logs; and the star-pinned dome overhead; and all around the dark maw of the great lonely Desert.

Suddenly came a halt in these “singing” proceedings. The choir withdrew somewhere, and the centre of the stage was taken by another old man, who led a little girl. Other and older girls began to hurry around the circle, darting here, darting there, as if running something down. At first the little one seemed a trifle confused and stood in wide-eyed hesitation; but with a bit of urging from the elder master of the ceremonies, she made for Roberts. He would lead this german. Grinning, he permitted her [[75]]to pull him into the ring, his partner maintaining a solemnity that was comical.

“Get ready for the next set,” he called to me over his shoulder.

The social features were on, and the girls were hunting partners. Did the young men of the ponies vie with each other? They did not. They sat their steeds as if cut from granite. For it would seem that a young man would likely lose half his finery, certainly all his change, if captured, and might find himself later up against a breach-of-promise suit. On foot, he was at a disadvantage; mounted, it was the more difficult to drag him down. I cannot say that I noticed any chivalry among those young Navajo fellows.

But Roberts—there was a fine accommodating chap for you. One partner was not enough for him; he now had two of the tiny ones.

The dance seemed simple enough. It consisted in one’s acting as a pivot, around which the little squaw, or several of them, turned backward with rapid scuffling steps. Her one hand tightly gripped the man’s belt, the other held as tightly her blanket. Her expression was as sober as a Chinaman’s. But she accomplished the purpose of the business. After a few moments of that turning, the subject would be too dizzy to argue out of a donation. It kept up until Roberts was weaving; but when they stopped he protested that he was a poverty-stricken wretch—and promptly, without cracking a smile, they began again. He must shell out at least a quarter to each, which he did finally, and they scuttled back to their chaperons, who banked the money. And here he came unsteadily to the blanket we shared, while I suspected several of the old women casting menacing glances in my direction. There [[76]]sounded a scurry in the outer darkness, and a crashing of the greasewood.

“The doc’ has beat it,” said Roberts, dropping down. I raised to look around; and just then, from behind, I felt a very muscular hand grasping my belt. There was nothing to do but yield in the best humor possible. A wild shout from the Indians, men and women, even from the ungallant horsemen grouped in the rear, and I was thrust and pulled forward. They had appointed two of the small girls to me, and their hold on my belt was like grim death.

And now the shuffle began.

I endeavored to spin without entangling my feet, but there was something wrong with my action. I was no such success as friend Roberts had been. Now the master of ceremonies came forward, his wrinkled face having the benevolence of a grandfather, and with expressive gestures he explained his sorrow because of my inefficiency. He would give me a lesson. We used words that neither understood, and made signs at each other until wholesale laughter retired the teacher. But I was not retired. I was still in the ring.

The gold-and-orange flares of the fires dazzled one’s eyes, and then one began to turn faster; the circle of bright figures in the full light lost outline, and then the wagons and horses and hogan and Roberts on his blanket blurred into and formed one jumbled merry-go-round of which I was the centre. A little more of this, and I cried “Enough!” and very nearly staggered into the fire. Solemnly my partners waited for and clutched at their two-bit pieces, and I weaved back to the blanket.

The doctor was not captured that night. Perhaps he managed to hide until we harnessed the team and started for home; perhaps he walked into the Agency, as several [[77]]accused. But this was a “running dance,” meaning a moving one. A second installment of it was held the next night at a point ten miles down the river. The doctor was compelled to go, and there they ran him down and forced his performance. His effort was not half bad, and I wondered if mine had been as funny.

Affairs of this sort taught me that the desert Navajo are a good-natured and interesting people, in many ways like our own country folk at quilting-bees and huskings. They have their renegades and black sheep, with which the white race is as fully endowed; and my ugly experiences of later days could not be charged to the tribe.

When a Navajo is ailing, they manage to combine exorcism of the evil spirits with the amusing dance, and whether or not old Beck-a-shay Thlani was improved physically, the girls had a good time. It often helps them to find a husband; and in this case, how were they to know that Roberts would desert them for an Albuquerque girl, or that in a few months I would be interested only in solemnizing the marriages of older sisters and the herding of the remainder into schools?

But I have often wondered, when on those trails leading down into Beck-a-shay Thlani’s district, and coming suddenly on a shy Navajo maiden chivvying a band of sheep, if she were one I danced with that night on the Little Colorado River, when I was simply “Nultsose,” and the worries and responsibilities of Nahtahni had not been clamped to my shoulders. [[78]]

[[Contents]]

VIII

OLD ORAIBI

But still the drowsy pueblo hears

The voices of the Bells;

They speak as ghosts of other years,

Their message faintly swells

And sighs away above the town,

Echoing history;

The whisper of an old renown

That dwelt at Cochiti.

—“The Bells of Cochiti”

One day, when it was quiet in the office, the Chief became reminiscent. He spoke of his coming to this station; how he had pitched his tent under the old cottonwoods at the present well; of the length of time it had taken to interest Pesh-la-kai Etsetti, the silversmith, and Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, in his plans; and of the winter when a posse of whites, led by a county sheriff who is now a Senator of the United States, drove the Indians through the snow, packing their few belongings, and across the river, in order that a few cattlemen who owned everything else might also have this poor grazing-area. That was before Great Heart quit the Washington helm; and Great Heart, with characteristic strenuosity, very promptly—one might say, rudely—dispossessed the self-appointed white inheritors of the earth.

“I have not had a vacation in six years,” he said, as a wind-up, “And do you know, I’m tired out, and think I’ll just take one.” [[79]]

Well, I was not surprised at his being a trifle weary. He seldom had a moment to himself—except nights, when perhaps he slept. He had just returned from a long trip in the Butte country, had made numerous drives to town on business, had assisted in running down a band of horse-thieves, and only that morning had been on the range to locate and evict certain trespassers. When such work did not occupy him, there was the ruined boiler to dally with, a pumping-plant to construct, and reports to indite; to say nothing of the sessions of the Indian Court, long and involved and farcical, the dipping of sheep, and the never-ending complaints of employees—a garrulous, gossiping, complaining lot.

It was a great life, but he had momentarily weakened.

“Yes, I am tired,” he said; “And I’ll let you run this ranch for a brief spell, while I go off resting. I have never seen a snake dance, and the Moqui hold ’em over beyond those Buttes. To-morrow I start.”

Now that is the Southwesterner’s idea of a real vacation. He would travel about one hundred miles by team, toiling slowly through sand, probably in rain at this season and its aftermath of treacherous mud; struggle across arroyos and stream-beds where quicksand might ensnare his outfit and cause him days of labor; through broiling sunlight certainly, and general discomfort, to perch himself finally atop an overheated rock on the edge of a cliff and witness a score of well-meaning but deluded Hopi Indians juggling their precious rattlesnakes. Within two hours he could have had a berth on one of the finest trains in the world, and within twenty-four have reached the magnificently overadvertised and overgrown city of Los Angeles. Not so! Across the Desert called an unsatisfied lure, the sorcery of the unrelieved distances. “Out there [[80]]somewhere” was something he had not seen. That was the excuse. Actually he longed to be free, and the unmapped Desert offered its splendid unbounded freedom.

At that time I had no conception that hard-going, with no cares other than those of keeping to trail, was the finest sort of rest for an active man whose routine had been filled with the pettiness of irritating and never-to-be-settled Governmental farces. I now know that the way to rest is to remove from telephones and telegraph-lines, from both superiors and subordinates who wish to pass the buck, from the hellish routine of menus and meals, from begging complaints and complaining beggars; to get away from everything, and so far into the back-country that in case of war, pestilence, or death those interested are staggered by the idea of reaching you.

One learns to act quickly. Delay half a day, and the incoming mail may present a dozen obstacles. Promptly at dawn next morning he started, his camp-outfit lashed to a light buckboard; and on the bulletin-post he left a notice that my commands would be as the law of the Medes and Persians during his absence.

I took him at his word, and one very necessary improvement was immediately set in motion. The place had become an asylum for stray desert dogs and forlorn disinherited cats. This livestock was promptly rounded up, and there were interment ceremonies over at the river. The succeeding nights were filled with a comforting peace.

But it was not all beer and skittles. The boiler did manage to burn out during his leave, thanks to the careful inattention of an underpaid and irresponsible Indian stoker; and without a boiler one does not run a steam-laundry, does not make ice, and most serious of all in the Desert, does not pump water. This last is the one [[81]]thing that may not be done without. So for two days and nights the engineer and helpers labored with a loyalty that was revelation to me, rolling and re-rolling the crumbling tubes of that relic of the Dark Ages, while tank-wagons struggled in from the river with the drinking-supply.

The doctor and I sat in the office and talked of many things.

“When the Chief returns,” he suggested, winking, “We’ll go over there and have a look-see. How ’bout it?”

“Done!” I agreed. “But do they hold these snake dances every month?”

“Our good friends, the Moqui, hold some sort of shindig every day, from what I have heard of them, but not all are snake dances. Those are reserved for serious and important occasions, regulated by the sun, moon, and stars. They occur once a year at certain fixed points.”

“Then—we must have an object; and—”

“Peaches,” he said, cunningly. “We’ll go to old Oraibi after peaches—succulent fruit, the gift of the Spanish padres.”

Noting my blank amazement, he hurried into an explanation.

“One of the legal amusements at an Indian Agency is keeping the help occupied, on the theory that, as with horses, it can think of only one thing at a time. Now it has been discovered in this Service that a dozen women paring peaches for preserving not only are happy in the thought of reducing expenses, but the more easily talk of what ails ’em. We’ll suggest peaches to them, they’ll bring pressure on the Boss, and we’ll go. Lots of rabbit in that country, and ducks at the Lakes. Oraibi is some place to visit, too. It was built about the time of Noah, and hasn’t been cleaned since. Flood didn’t reach it.” [[82]]

All of which was very interesting to one who wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, after having been penned up for months. I had viewed the same draggled trees, the same cement walks, the same old trading-post, for so long that all judgment was leaving me, and I had begun to buy Navajo blankets. When one reaches this point, the inoculative powers of the subtle Desert are beginning to work.

Everything came about just as the doctor had prophesied. The Chief returned one day at dusk, encrusted with sand and a week’s growth of beard. While he was shaving, I made a complete report against the stoker and the boiler, with comment on those in Washington responsible for both. Then the doctor heard of a terrifically sick Indian over beyond the Lakes, and the pressure of peaches-and-economy was brought by the other parties. Next morning, the medico and I made our get-away before the utter absence of dogs was discovered.

The only thing that tried to affect our escape was a little animal perched on my walk in the late moonlight. The doctor cautioned me not to disturb this visitor, and for once I did not neglect a physician’s advice. The team being harnessed at the barn, we drove to within fair shooting-distance of this guest, and the doctor handed me the lines, saying:—

“When I shoot, let ’em go.”

Which he did, and I did.

Later, we regretted this adventure, for the stupid ammoniacal creature proceeded to dive into the mess cellar, and all food in storage was strangely savored. A matter of this kind, begun in the innocent vacation spirit, may be far-reaching. When we returned with our cargo of peaches, the sewing-circle did not receive us with any fervent warmth. In fact, it was most broadly insinuated that we, having worked a leave, had performed this trick on purpose, [[83]]to the utter horror and dismay of all unsuspecting persons.

Our going down to the river was through that mysterious half-luminous light that follows the darkness before dawn. Then the Desert has an ashen pallor, and a chill and silence that are like winter at whatever season of the year. The bare spaces seem to be covered with snow. There are no calls from birds. One moves in a dead world.

At the ford the wheels clattered ominously over flat slabs of rock, and then the horses splashed through shallow pools to the far bank. We turned westward, and the mountains showed their volcanic peaks, grim gray wings in the pallid dawn. They lifted, gaunt and rugged, from a ruff of pines. There had been a fall of snow on those higher levels between the timber and the crests, and the shoulders were draped in white. Now—the very tips of the range were seared with red-gold; and now—each snowbound crest began warming with a rosy glow, as if blood were stirring, pulsing, through the masses of icy lava and eroded stone. And the whole range warmed in a blaze of fresh rose and glinting gold as it turned to greet the sun.

Down by the river the cottonwoods were still veiled in colorless mist; above were those radiant wings of the morning; and the birds began calling, piping, rustling, as a band of crimson broadened across the gray lips of the east.

Soon we ascended a ridge of the orange-hued mesa I had so long viewed from the Agency grounds. It was my first close-up of the havoc wrought in clay and sandstone by the tearing, aging fingers of the Desert. There were no smooth planes in those tortured hills. They sprawled down to the river-bottoms in petrified agony, the worn [[84]]death-mask of that time when Hell burst from the volcanoes and flowed its molten masses over the plains.

OUTFIT OF A WELL-DIGGER, THE DESERT WATER-WITCH

THE DRYING BED OF THE LITTLE COLORADO RIVER

Showing how the river supplies are inadequate

Slowly we gained the topmost ridge of all, the backbone dividing the river country from the beyond, and looked north over a vast plain, fresh in the morning light, holding the Tolani Lakes. Those wide splotches of bluish green, miles away, seemed as a mirage; but it was water, where one would least expect to find it, the overflow of the great Oraibi Wash, trapped in a flat basin, drying until another flood. The shores were marshy, reed-lined, and invited the migratory birds. Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.

And reflected in the greenish mirror were the dull red walls of Monument Point, the end of the great Red Mesa that stretched northward, rising hugely from the sand dunes and the Desert, flanked and buttressed as some Babylonian city. Perhaps it was a city of the ancients, snuffed out as Pompeii. One longed for time to explore its dead streets. There would be lions, no doubt, slinking down ruined terraces; and rutted pavements; and broken columns to cast long shadows under the autumn moon. And was it lifeless—or only enchanted? One paused and waited for a cry, a rumble of wheels, the far-off blare of a buccina, to wake its spearmen and send flashes along the walls.

This was my first impression, and eleven years after, not having seen it again, I went there over the old route to learn if first impressions fade. I found that the Desert and its visions do not change.

We “nooned” in a barren space that would have graced the Sahara. The sun burned down on us, but the air was quite stimulating. At these higher levels the skin browns, [[85]]but the appetite is not affected. The fire, a mere handful of chips and twigs, was kindled in the little shade afforded by the rig. The doctor gave me a lesson in Southwest camping, just prior to my upsetting the can of peeled potatoes, after which he considered me impossible. With my usual energy, I had gathered greasewood branches for the fire, and had brought them from some distance. They would have made an election-night blaze. The doctor selected a pitiful handful from this mountain of brush, and briefly commented:—

“ ‘Just like a white man,’ Injun says. ‘White man build big fire, sit far off; Injun make little fire, sit close by.’ You don’t need a conflagration to boil coffee. I can make camp here with seven sticks five inches long. Where do you think you are? Up in Canada, hunting moose?”

All that afternoon we jogged on through the hot sunlight, shooting at and occasionally hitting a young jack-rabbit. The place was alive with them. The shadows of the horses grew longer as the sun dipped toward the Red Mesa. And then came the gray evening, with us peering ahead for the sign of a well-rig derrick. There were drillers in the valley, patiently pounding down their drills in the hope of striking the underflow of the Oraibi Wash. We had helped them outfit at the Agency, and they were of the I. D. Service. Their location should be somewhere close to the pueblo of Oraibi, “the town on the high flat rock,” a place long famous in the annals of the Tusayan provinces, first sighted by white men nearly four hundred years before.

We gave little thought to the ancient past of Oraibi, and certainly I did not dream that for more than eight years it would concern me personally. Pedro de Tovar, that adventurous lieutenant of the great conquistador [[86]]Coronado, reached it in 1540, the first year of the Spanish exploration north of the Rio Grande; and in 1629, or perhaps a trifle earlier, zealous friars of the Franciscan order built a mission there and, surrounded by an always suspicious population, far removed from Spanish headquarters at Santa Fe, had worked and prayed and governed until the revolt of 1680, when they met martyrdom and the mission disappeared.

Until recently Oraibi had been the largest pueblo-community in North America, having had more than one thousand inhabitants, thus exceeding any of the pueblos of New Mexico. But its leading citizens, one Tewaquaptewa and one Youkeoma, the first a politician and the second a natural prophet and witch-charmer, backed by devoted and fanatical adherents, had prophesied, conjured visions and interpretations of signs, wrangled among themselves, and defied the Government until carried into captivity. Their imprisonment had been brief, and they were now busy making new medicine.

Tewaquaptewa’s portrait appears in that fine book of Indian chants, edited by Miss Natalie Curtis and published by the Harpers; and his singing countenance presents a rapt ecstatic expression as he yodels the Butterfly Song. The translation of his name is there given as “Sun-down-shining,” and is imperfect as most translations, but just as good as any other, providing you do not have to consider him on a Governmental basis. I never dealt with him on a musical scale, and his undoubted genius in this respect made no appeal to me. As his Indian Agent, however, I tried for eight long years to make a sensible human being of him, and failed, for lack of material. After having tried him as an Indian judge, and then as an Indian policeman, in the hope of preserving his dignity and authority as hereditary chief, he was found to be the most negatively [[87]]contentious savage and unreconstructed rebel remaining in the Oraibi community, so filled with malicious mischief-making to his benefit that a group of his own people petitioned me to exile him from the mesa settlement, in the hope that they might then exist in peace. Of course, this had little to do with his “Sun-down-shining” or his Butterfly chanting; but when the folks at home cannot get along with father, there is something wrong.

Youkeoma, a different type of Hopi, had been defeated by the Tewaquaptewa faction, and was now in the medicine-man and prophecy business about seven miles to the west, in his new and already odorous town of Hotevilla, whence, after the tribal troubles, like another Moses he had led his faithful. Tradition has it that there will always be jealousy and enmity among the Oraibans until the pretender to leadership is martyred; so when Youkeoma was thrown out, he accepted it as a manifestation of the rules. But that did not prevent both outfits from resisting the Government, an alien intruder, wholly unmindful of the sacred prophecies, who entered in to pacify a perfectly legitimate family scrap.

Kewanimptewa, a third Oraibi factionist, who headed the weakest band of all, had trekked in another direction, a second upheaval having resulted in his eviction and retirement from the political field. His allies went to a little-known cañon, Bacabi, where, but for the prompt assistance of the Government Agent, the whole lot of Ishmaelites would have perished. It was winter and they had no harvest. Aid in this case was gratefully accepted, and out of the truce grew a friendliness now unbroken. Those who followed Youkeoma, however, remained sullen and unreconstructed, accepting nothing, acknowledging nothing, rebels and defiant.

Therefore the original Oraibi, which had been the largest [[88]]Indian community, was split into three parts, and the parent place has been still further reduced by emigration to Moencopi in the farther west. As will be related later, all this foolish dissension could have been avoided, and the Government might have saved many thousands of dollars by a firm and impartial policy toward these Indians. While the separation weakened them, they had to be followed with the means of control and education, sanitation, and medicines—a far more expensive job than a full Oraibi pueblo would have demanded.

This little expedition for peaches I thought would mark my whole acquaintance with the Hopitu, the “peaceful” wrangling ones. In 1907 I had written several stories for Harper’s Magazine, one of which concerned these people. The ethnological facts I had exhumed from the library of the Indian Office at Washington, and the skeleton on which I strung these fancies was produced from that fearful thing known as the writer’s imagination. God forgive me! I have always believed that I was given charge of the Hopitu as a punishment for that crime against the verities.

And then, when we were about to confess that the stupid team had taken the wrong road, to the end that we were strayed, lost, and would probably be stolen, the well-rig loomed up as a tall gallows at the roadside. There were calls and hearty greetings.

“Shorty,” a minor water-witch of the Empire, had laid aside his wand for the day, which is one way of saying that the rig-tower no longer trembled, the cable no longer jerked, and the drill did not pound in its hole. Shorty was ready to receive visitors and to relate how he shot the mountain lion. [[89]]

It matters not in that country how shabby the guest, how poor the host, or how wild the place of meeting, there is always a welcome and entertainment of the board, to be followed by talk of the Empire. A veteran of the garrison days told me that in his time, on reaching a post-trader’s, it would be impossible to escape for a week. Every item of news from the outside would be demanded and paid for in a liquid coin that is no longer circulated. Then the bowl flowed freely when the pipes were lit, and the company gathered around a roaring fireplace in the evening.

“We would gossip and swap lies until we could not see, and then tumble into the nearest bed to sleep it off. Next day, if he had had enough, a fellow would call for his horse. Consternation would follow. Everyone would regret, with much language, that Bonehead Bill had left the corral-gate open last night, and now not a hoof in all that valley.

“ ‘’Fore Gad! pardner, they’re clear t’hell an’ gone over into Palisade Cañon by now. It’ll take two wranglers to git ’em up. Make yourself t’homelike, ’cause to-morrow’s another day.’ ”

So there would be no means of travel until the great exchange of ideas was exhausted, and the whiskey out, when they would speed him onward. Said the veteran, “Them was times!”

But in Indian country to-day one has to be content with the ensemble without the olden stimulus.

At this well-camp there were no extra beds, so for the first time I slept on the open range. We had packed a dozen thick blankets, six for the ground and three apiece for wrappings. By the time bed was made, the contrast between that day’s noon and three hours after sunset was a trifle more than bitter. To remove one’s clothing in that [[90]]extraordinary boudoir of a thousand square, open, and draughty miles was a shrinking bit of business.

Several times during the night I awoke, convinced that I was slowly freezing; and on one of the occasions I was quite certain that I had died and reached a certain destination; for at the edge of the Wash a troop of coyotes had assembled, and they made night hideous. It was my first close-up of such a chorus, a bedlam of ghoulish chattering. Fiends might have been braver, but they could not have uttered cries more horribly depraved. The coyote is very low in the social scale of the Desert. While the orthodox Navajo will not kill one, even as the Hopi will seldom slay a snake, this does not mean that he rejoices in the vicinity of the beast. Notwithstanding the souls of ancestors that are believed to possess him, “Mi-he,” the coyote, receives little welcome or respect. There is something so miserably unclean, so slinkingly evil, in Mi-he, the jackal of the Southwest, that I have yet to discover anything of sympathy for him under any conditions. He follows and preys on the sheep and calves, poor, stupid, defenseless creatures, and in a remote spot I have seen several of him circle a band of wild ponies, patiently waiting for a colt to drop behind. At night, when there are mysteries and fancies enough without him, his mournful howl, followed by ghoulish chattering like unearthly laughter or the mockery of lost souls, gives the Indian good cause to include him among the worthless members of a savage mythology.

But morning brought the radiant sun god, and all unclean things fled away. Warmed into amiability, we covered the last five miles to our goal. Oraibi occupies a projecting point of a huge tumbled mesa, one that has known the rack and twist of volcanic convulsion. Below it in the plain were a Government school, a trading-post, [[91]]and quite a settlement of Indians who had been persuaded to remove from the unsanitary height. To reach the pueblo proper, we drove up a long, winding sand-road, using the drifts and dunes of centuries for a ladder. This connected with a rather perilous mesa-ledge road, overhanging the valley, around the edge of which we found the ancient town.

The newcomer to the Hopi desert always assumes that the Indian sought the heights because of view and scenic beauty, purest air, and freedom. Freedom had something to do with it, for there is no doubt he was driven to accept the mesa as a citadel. In order that he might have a chance to defend himself against marauding “Apaches du Navaju,” who raided his camps and herds, killed his sons, and carried his women into captivity, he risked the scarcity of water, depending on pools during sieges, and fortified the mesas. There, with his house built for closer defense and his flocks under the ledges, he felt secure. The fields of the tribe, presenting assurance against famine, were of necessity at a distance from these strongholds, and this handicap trained the Hopi into the wonderful long-distance runner that he is to-day.

Old Oraibi is not a pretty picture, although its setting relieves much of squalor and debris. The narrow streets were filled with rubbish and worse; fowls scratched in the offal, burros herded in doorways, and lanky, half-starved dogs were legion. Many of the houses had crumbled and others were being demolished. These were the abandoned homes of the defeated factionists. There were short alleys and blind courts, while around a central plaza the dwellings arose to the height of three stories, reached by little ladders, where a few of the inhabitants were sunning. The roofs were piled with drying peaches. The place of the [[92]]ceremonial kiva sloped away to the mesa edge, and from it one looked away, many miles, to the dimming river-country. The men were in the fields, the children at school; the place seemed abandoned, dead. Here was a perfect picture of the senility of a one-time civilization that had been decaying for many centuries, and in this our day had reached very nearly to utter devitalization.

Photo. by A. H. Womack

THE HOPI CEREMONIAL CORN-PLANTING

The stick whose twirling prepares the hole will some day be placed by the man’s head in his own grave

HOPI GARDENS IN A SPRING-FED NOOK OF THE DESERT

From the edge of the great cliff one looked down on the immense stretches of the desert. Grazed-out long ago by flocks that were held too close to the pueblo, the land had become barren, a sea of drifting sand that stirred and lifted in the winds. But in this sand were the cornfields and bean patches of the stubborn race. The Hopi, whatever else he may be, is the greatest dry-farmer on earth. He tills the unirrigated sand, fighting the drought and the pests and the scorching winds according to his rituals, and from it produces the corn which is his staff of life.

A commanding promontory at some distance was the “Judgment Seat,” or place of accounting, where the spirits of all save Hopi children must repair on leaving the earthly body. One had to walk but a little way to stumble on their tombs.

Now here, now there, a broken bowl

Half buried in the sand,

Marks where some pueblo chieftain dreams,

Forgotten by his band.

Those shallow mounds, where age the toys,—

Weak spirits dwell not deep,—

The Desert presses light on them;

The pueblo children sleep.

Our guide directed us to a sheltered angle of the mesa where, among boulders and sand-drifts, we found the one unperished gift of the padres, delicious peaches, not so [[93]]large as California fruit, but having all the flavor and quality of that grown in Maryland and Delaware. We bargained with a smiling Hopi, and loaded.

And then, like all wise travelers in the Desert, we started to make “a long step on the road” while the sun was high; we camped that night in the greasewood, with well-smoked jack-rabbit for supper, and trundled into the Agency next evening, tired and hungry, to be received with coldness and suspicion. Our offering of peaches did not discount this bitterness. So small a thing as the erratic flight of a confused mammal may thus strain friendship and affect the most sincere labors. [[94]]

[[Contents]]

IX

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF CHIEFS

“You’ll have charge of the district till my successor comes. I wish they would appoint you permanently; you know the folk. I suppose it will be Bullows, though. Good man, but too weak for frontier work; and he doesn’t understand the priests.… Call the Khusru Kheyl men up; I’ll hold my last public audience.”—Kipling: “The Head of the District.”

A year drifted by in this fashion. The November-December days were glorious. At a time when the effete East was slopping about in goloshes, and taking cold and quinine, and sniffling and having sick-leave, and generally hurrying toward the grave, we were reveling in sunshine.

January and February brought real crimping winter nights. Spring came in early March, and quickly the cottonwoods of the river-bank were all greening again. Then suddenly, as if in a flare of anger, the springtime wind cried its challenge to the moisture of the sand, and began driving everything that was loose before it. Then too, suddenly something happened: the Chief resigned.

A matter like this brings a dramatic pause to those in isolated places. Something of unexplained dread crept into everyone, from the Indian lad who curried the horses to the chief Nultsose. A little company of people, knowing each other thoroughly and marooned in a sense, would lose the Skipper, the Old Man, the Chief who had attended [[95]]to most of their routine thinking, and made decisions, and was responsible, and caused them generally to exist comfortably whether they were capable of it or not.

Who would succeed him?

Whatever the faults and frailties of the Chief, they at least knew him, his humors and his moods. He had not been difficult to analyze. There had been a time to flatter, and a time to leave him alone; there had been moments on drives, in camps, and at little social affairs, when all that was left of the youth—one might say the “boy”—of him returned, when for a brief space he had ceased to be the Old Man. So they realized abruptly, forgetting petty differences, that something of affection had grown up unconsciously between them.

But why abandon a little kingdom? Why, indeed!

He had grown covetous. The pride that the Desert builds in those few who manage to command it had somehow got the better of his judgment. He had developed the astounding effrontery to think that he earned and was justified in demanding a salary of more than thirteen hundred dollars a year! Think of that—he had come to re-view the value of himself. It was not honor enough for him to have created a little centre of civilization. He actually felt that the laborer was worthy of his hire. It reminded one of a particular scene in Oliver Twist. It was stupefying. It was downright impudence in the man. Washington had never heard the like, and confessed itself painfully shocked; in fact, it became almost infuriated.

Had not a whole series of clerks, working at white heat between ball-games and vacations, checked his accounts and requested an explanation of his every action for years, just to keep him from this very state of mind—to prevent his fondly imagining that he had accomplished anything? [[96]]Think of the man who had struggled, under orders, to that forlorn station in 1908, breasting the wind and the sand and a falling thermometer, just to demonstrate scientifically how concrete is mixed in New Jersey. Why, this advising concrete genius drew only two thousand and a per-diem, a man skilled in methods known to the Atlantic seaboard, and aside from his having political influence, was ever ready, under orders, at this pitiful stipend, to place his all-embracing knowledge at the disposal of this non-comprehending desert roughneck, who—Words fail one!

As for the Indians to be affected by this change, they were inarticulate and did not count. Someone would be appointed to the vacancy, someone just as good—well, anyway, good enough for Indians.

Then came an experience such as a complacent court must suffer when an old monarch dies. It happens, no doubt, when there is a change of chiefs anywhere; but it is the more personal and grinding when one has to live next door to the chief, breakfast with him, lunch with him, dine with him, face him across a desk, or ride cheek-by-jowl with him from daylight to dark; in short, to serve him loyally twenty-four hours the day. Comparisons are not odious; they are hellish. Those so situated as to be thus dependent on one another for duty and society must have some bond of sympathy, something of confidence and regard, respect if nothing more, like unto that which takes the curse off marriage. The living conditions, the lack of society and amusement, the introspection that the Desert invites, these things make the casual word to be an insult and a chance sentence to produce tragedy. Unless it be aboard ship, I know of no relative situation in which one man can become so terrible a burden to others as at an isolated desert-station. [[97]]

Suffice to relate that the period of reconstruction and change brought many disputes, all of them crushed and smothered by the turgid heaviness of forty years’ experience. The new Chief was different, and aged, and sick, a misery to himself and to everyone else. As is invariably the case, the most valuable of the employees began to prepare to quit the ship. I have seen a great deal of loyalty in the West, and the man who is fair may count on men until they drop; but these same men speak their minds freely, and it is hard for them to change czars. Old traditions were restored; the cook quit in a flame of anger, leaving as his vengeance a last meal garnished with a defunct mouse. The pot boiled fifteen hours the day.

When the thing had become a trifle too thick for me, like a flash from the blue came an unsought, unexpected telegram:—“WILL YOU ACCEPT APPOINTMENT SUPERINTENDENT MOQUI SALARY EIGHTEEN HUNDRED BOND THIRTY THOUSAND WIRE.”

A courteous expression that is now rare: “Will you accept.” The mere transposition of a word makes all the difference. “You will accept” is the tone of recent orders—a reaction of the great war against Prussianism on those who reject with an unctuous civilian horror all idea of militarism.

And yet there is a certain fine discipline and training in the military atmosphere, even a copy of it, as practised at the properly conducted schools and agencies of the farther deserts. One learns to obey in unpleasant things, and feels something of duty and loyalty in acceding. Where there is nothing of civilization for one hundred miles in any direction, not even a telegraph wire, one comes to revere that refreshing bit of bravery, the Flag, whipping above trees, a symbol of authority and [[98]]order; one thrills at the music of the band; and bugle-calls, in the wine of seven thousand feet above the sea, add a character-forming stimulation: reveille, mess, retreat, or at the end of a long day’s drive homeward in the dark, cramped and cold from fifty miles, to hear the solemn notes of “taps.”

The night hush of the drowsy desert has succeeded all daylight bustle. The clatter of shops, the hum of machinery, the hiss of steam, have quieted. There are no more calls from children at play. One by one the lamps go out on campus and in quarters, and great Orion burns down the empty spaces to glimpse a scrap of feeble civilization gripped in the aged everlasting hills. Then, on the cold wind, stealthily, comes the eerie chant of a Navajo, riding across the mesa, calling on his gods.

“Will you accept … Moqui—”

That was the country of the Buttes and craggy mesas; of Old Oraibi; of the Second Mesa and its broad stairway to the dome-like pueblos; of ancient Walpi and its rocky ladder to the sky; the land of ruins dating from the misty dawn of history. Across it the Spaniards had marched, contemporaries of Columbus, their halberds gleaming in the sun; and there the early padres had ruled, their mission bells now silent. The “provinces of the Mohoce or Mohoqui,” as Coronado bade his poet-historian write it down. It was the very heart of the Enchanted Empire.

There were but two persons to give me a modern view of the situation. The Navajo interpreter at my present station was one of those half-educated, half-sullen returned students who would accept the meagre wage when the trader would not, a part of the economic system aimed at cheaply teaching grandfather through his unrespected grandson. He came from that northern country, and his [[99]]immediate family composed a most insolent gang—a mere detail I discovered later in time of stress.

“Lots of Navajo up there,” he said. “Those Black Mountain fellows—mean Indians, too. Down here, quiet, never any trouble, ’cause they liked the Chief; but up there, always something doing.”

Having little confidence in the fellow, I discounted his words heavily. But that afternoon came the missionary from down-river.

“Hello!” he called to me. “What’s this I hear? You going to Moqui? Well, well! I hope you handle that bunch of mean ones over beyond Oraibi—those Hotevillas. About every four years they flare up. The last was in 1906, so it’s about due. The present Agent hasn’t Christianized those Indians, and the one ahead of him was a bit mild. They need the fear of God put into them. Many Agents? Well, come to think of it, yes. I can recall several of them. One stayed four years; they average about two, as a rule. Let me hear from you sometime.”

A combined Indian Agency, half Hopi, half Navajo, and the two ancient enemies who fraternized on the surface when the Agent was strong enough to compel it. Ninety miles back in the hills. No telephone and no telegraph. And agents averaged about two years each of service. What happened to them? I wondered. Were they buried there, quietly and without fuss, or did they depart between suns, seeking more peaceful climes? The padres were not an excellent vision, and the Spaniards had abandoned the country as hopeless, notwithstanding their usual methods of domination. True—there was such a thing as having a chap on for the good of his soul, after the manner of whimsical Arizona.

I debated the matter seriously before answering that [[100]]wire. My plans were changing. From six months, my exile had been extended into a year; and the year was now up. Acceptance would mean a longer stay, an habitation enforced, as I would be under bond and no longer free to come and go, with the added chance of failure in an unsought position of responsibility. I had not envied my old Chief. I do not envy any Indian Agent to-day.

And yet—the Desert called to me from over beyond those blue-toned Buttes to come and find that intangible something “just around the corner.” So finally, like Kipling’s Pagan, I decided:—

And I think it will kill me or cure,

So I think I will go there an’ see.

[[101]]

[[Contents]]

X

THE PROVINCES OF THE “MOHOCE OR MOHOQUI”

It now remains for me to tell about this city and kingdom and province, of which the Father Provincial gave your Lordship an account. In brief, I can assure you in reality he has not told the truth in a single thing that he said, but everything is the reverse of what he said, except the name of the city and the large stone houses.—Don Francisco Vasquez Coronado to Don Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy of New Spain, August 3, 1540

I am now glad that I went to the Painted Desert and entered Hopi-land before the advent of the automobile. The going then was a picturesque if toilsome journey. After two days in a farm-wagon loaded with my plunder, I reached the first back-country trading-post, and met the official I was to succeed. That old store at Indian Wells, with its back against the hills, seemed a fanciful place in the twilight of a summer’s day. Across a wide plain lifted purple mesas gashed with red clays, and Rabbit-ear Butte stuck its two inquisitive peaks into the evening sky. There was something far removed in the atmosphere and setting of Indian Wells, something of true desert solitude.

Next day we wended northward across Hauke Mesa, passing the White Cone, a solitary bleached-out pyramid that marks the southeast corner of the Hopi Reservation. Two huge white horses drew us; not a very fast pace, but decidedly a sure one. The vehicle was a mountain spring-wagon, [[102]]and its one wide seat served three of us, the driver and I simple figures in comparison with the gentleman I was to relieve. He was a large, pompous man, who had sought the Southwest for his health and had not found all of it, principally because he had not arrived soon enough, and also because he was continually fretted by the vision of his former importance. He had come from the East from a much larger Governmental position. In fact, he had been quite within the shadow of the Cabinet, and was bulwarked with political tradition. He knew the President personally, and immediately told one so; and when he came into the Desert he wore—Suffering Pioneers!—a top hat.

It takes a long time to make forty miles in a wagon of that type, whatever the entertainment of political conventions and presidential anecdotes.

In late afternoon we crossed the sandy waste of the Jedito Wash, and passed out of it by a steep rocky road that ascended a high mesa. A short distance to the left were the ruins of Awatobi, that once important pueblo of Tusayan, where Tovar had his first view of and encounter with the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” of the Spanish chronicles. This meeting occurred twenty-five years before the settlement of St. Augustine, and eighty years before the gentlemen from Plymouth reached the historic New England Rock. He was accompanied by that intrepid soldier-priest, Fray Juan de Padilla, who later retraced Coronado’s trail into the mysterious and legendary country of Quivira, there to be martyred, the first white man to meet death in the present State of Kansas.

After the conquest of Cibola, or Zuni, Tovar was dispatched by Coronado to locate the seven cities of the Mohoqui. Notwithstanding the fighting in the Zuni provinces, [[103]]the coming of pale men who rode strange animals and carried sticks that discharged lightning, it would appear that the Hopi knew nothing of these happenings. Tovar, leading a company of cavalry and footmen, crossed into their country without discovery, and encamped one night before a Hopi pueblo. It is recorded that they approached close enough to hear the people talking in their homes. Morning revealed the Spanish spears.

A little later came Cardenas, searching for the great cañon of the West; and Espejo in 1583; and then Onate in 1598, who was the first to make permanent settlements among the Pueblo Indians. It was Onate who established the missions, and one was built at Awatobi between 1621 and 1630, so Fray Alonzo de Benavides, the first custodian of missions in these provinces of New Spain, reported to his King.

Before the founding of Boston by Winthrop, when Charles I was King of England and Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury, a Franciscan friar named Porras ministered to the Hopi in the Tusayan provinces. In June 1633 he died there by poison. In this same year Galileo appeared before the Inquisition. Strange contrasts!

When the great Pueblo rebellion occurred in 1680, the mission at Awatobi was destroyed by the Hopi, and its friar, Fray José de Figueroa, was killed.[1] When came De Vargas, bent on reconquering the Pueblo people, he halted before Awatobi on November 19, 1692. The friars [[104]]planned a return to their duties among the Hopi, and it would appear that the Awatobans, or a part of them, received these advances. Because of this the pueblo of Awatobi was suddenly destroyed in the latter part of 1700 by pagan Hopi from the other mesas. It is said that many of the warriors were stifled in the ceremonial kivas, and the women and children were carried off as captives. During the early years of the eighteenth century, Spanish officials and priests still contemplated a return to this territory, but the efforts were abortive, although as late as 1748 friars visited the Second Mesa country to return fugitive Indians of the Pueblos proper to their homes in the valley of the Rio Grande. Most of these were Sandias, the remnant of this band now living close to Albuquerque, New Mexico; and when I took charge of the Pueblo Indians in 1919, the Sandias above all others evidenced characteristics that were not new to one who had sat in council with their ancient hosts.

In 1911 only a series of low walls, the pueblo foundations, were discernible at Awatobi. The place of the old Spanish mission could not be determined. The blowing desert sand had quite nearly reclaimed the site to solitude and unbroken sterility. But following the sacred customs of their forefathers, the Hopi were still making trouble for their guardians.

My predecessor told me how he had sought to quiet this antagonism. At great expense he had taken the old chief, Youkeoma, and several of his retainers, on a trip to and through the East. At Washington they were honored by an audience with President Taft. The power and the glory of the American nation, it was thought, would overwhelm the savage. He might as well have taken a piece of Oraibi sandrock to see the Pope. Not even the [[105]]size of President Taft impressed the old spider-like Hopi prophet, as he afterward told me in diplomatic confidence. Youkeoma returned as sullen and determined as before, made some new medicine with corn meal and feathers, and then repudiated the whole hegira, including President Taft, telling his people that he had seen nothing of importance, received no counsel that contained wisdom, and that he sincerely doubted those men were chiefs of anything. Certainly they were not the mythical Bohannas that the Hopi—following their own version of the Messianic legend—expect to come and rule them. And then, having refused to do that which Washington had urbanely decreed, he sat down in his warren of a pueblo, amid the sand and the garbage, to await whatever the white man might see fit to do about it.

That was my inheritance.

Toward evening in the cañon country the sun grows a bit more burnishing. Ahead of us appeared a space in the cedars, and beyond that rift one could see a more distant desert, rising as a sunlit moor, but quite removed—as if one looked across a chasm. A little later the team tipped forward on a rocky ledge. With brakes applied, we began to grind downward—it seemed to me, straight down. On the left, walls of rock arose in sheer plane-faces, and to the right I gathered that there was nothing at all: just an empty hole, beginning two feet from the outer wheels, and nicely garnished with huge boulders awaiting some driver’s bad judgment.

I became more familiar with mesa trails thereafter, but this first one was a thrill. Sand had blown into the road, and the wheels crunched through it, and the brakes ground and screeched against the tires. [[106]]

“When the troops were here last,” said the driver cheerfully, “a pack-mule went over at this place, and he rolled until he fetched up against the bottom.”

I silently wished he would attend to his driving.

“And there is your Agency,” said the official, pointing. “You can see as far as you like from that place, if you look straight up.”

Below in the great gash were the buildings of the plant, gray, lonely-looking, standing in barren grounds; but large as they were, the rocky walls of the cañon dwarfed them. So clear was the air that they appeared as toy houses, cut-outs pasted on a strip of pebbled cardboard. There was a straight line of them, for the cañon, generous enough in other dimensions, had not room for grouping at its bottom. It was a rough trough hewn by quake and flood. For centuries the waters had torn at it, until their bed was now far below the site of the buildings; and for centuries the sand had drifted in to form rounded domes that buttressed the walls. Each season’s tremors disturbed the shattered rocks, sending some to the bottom in tearing, grinding slides and posing others at new angles.

HOPI INDIAN AGENCY AT KEAMS CAÑON

HOPI INDIAN HOSPITAL AT KEAMS CAÑON

Capacity, 40 patients: Designed and constructed by employees of the Agency under Superintendent Crane

It was disappointing—a lonely, dreary place. No trees or hedges relieved the starved-looking site. There was little to be proud of. As for the natural beauties, one must grow to feel the majesty of worn rocks, tinted in all the shades of weathering sandstone, from saffron through gold to ruddy brown, toned to a thousand delicate hues by the stunted cedars and diversified cacti that struggled from every crevice. In the springtime there would be flowers in the crannies, winsome purple and pink flowers, with here and there the blazing scarlet of the Indian paintbrush; and in springtime too would come the great flocks of migratory birds. [[107]]

Why build in such a place? The answer is that stereotyped one affecting everything in the Desert—water. At the upper end of this cañon lived the springs. Water could be brought to the site without great expense. There was enough to furnish a small settlement, and more than could have been harnessed cheaply at any other point of the territory when the plant was built. Water in greater quantity has been discovered since; but there were no “water-witches” in the provinces of the Mohoqui prior to 1910.

All that day the thunder had muttered sullenly, and occasionally a few drops of rain had fallen on us. It was too early in the year to expect a shower of any consequence, so my guides told me. It was June, and the red-bellied clouds that the Snake priests watch for do not appear until late August, when they herald the Snake Dance and prove Hopi wisdom; then cloudbursts send torrents through these cañons, and flood the plains, and guarantee the harvest. But, just as we drove up the main road, came a sharp downpour that settled into a rare thing indeed—a steady summer rain.

A group of Indians stood close as we alighted. This was a delegation of welcome, for the tribes are very curious. A Navajo grunted, “Nahtahni.” And a Hopi said something that brought smiles to their faces; it was interpreted to me as we shook hands around. He said, “You must be a good Chief, for you bring the rain.”

The Agency consisted of an office and quarters and shops for the clerks, farmers, and mechanics, and there was a school for about one hundred and fifty pupils of the grammar grades. This was a boarding-school and, in addition to teachers, it had a corps of cooks, matrons, [[108]]laundress, and seamstress, all necessary to the work. In the field, close to the pueblos of the Indians, were five day-schools, serving from fifty to one hundred and twenty children each, and stations for physicians, field-nurses, and range men. Therefore the equipment, furniture, and stores of six small settlements had to be inventoried and receipted for at any change of directors.

The outgoing Agent was anxious to have his papers signed, that he might be off to his next post in further search of health. For two weeks we labored over those accounts, and it seemed that it would require another three months—as it did—to adjust and compare and reduce them to something approximating accuracy. So the major part of it was arranged conditionally between us, and I filed my official signature, together with bond for thirty thousand dollars, and we two shook hands as cordially as it was possible for men to do who had been debating for a fortnight.

In this manner I became Indian Agent for twenty-two hundred Hopi Indians of the Pueblo stock—maligned under a stupid Departmental label as “Moqui”—who would call me “Moungwi”; and for a trifle more of Navajo, the nomads of the desert, who would title me “Nahtahni,” very likely Nahtahni Yezzi, meaning Little Chief. They had undoubtedly named my predecessor Nahtahni Tso, Fat Chief.

That time of inventory I recall as a bad dream. Every conceivable article of useless equipment had been dumped and carefully preserved at that post. The greatest care had been taken of the most useless. Once, when the tailors of Chicago were long on swatches, they presented them to the Indian Service, and to save storage the warehouse custodian had promptly shipped them to the most distant [[109]]point, the Moqui Agency, in the hope and quite sure belief that they would never come back. Aside from transcontinental railroad charges, Indian wagoners had hauled such precious supplies from the receiving station, one hundred miles, at a cartage of one cent per pound. So it was with hundreds of lamp-chimneys that never fitted a lamp, clothing too small for infants or too large for giants, machetes that were needed in the Cuban cane-fields, tools that Noah would have spurned, and broadcast seeders for use where the Indians plant corn with ceremonial sticks. One warehouse was jammed with wagon-repair material, spokes, fellies, bolsters, and so on, of dimensions that must have been current in the period of the pioneers.

Some of this waste had been the result of stupid ordering, while much of it grew from the system of yearly contracts, neither of which has changed unto this day. Smith furnishes wagons one year, by virtue of being the lowest bidder, and one must have Smith’s repair-parts. Next year Brown has the contract, again by virtue of being the lowest and therefore cheapest bidder; and part of Smith’s material is a dead loss to the Service.

The method of checking stores was a grotesque science. Sewing-needles were counted, the unit being a single needle, whereas darning needles were accepted by the hundred. Anvils, log-chains, sledges, and mason-axes were known by weight, other tools by description; still other tools identified by sets. Each textbook, each library and reference volume,—and there were thousands,—was known by its more or less involved title, and so catalogued and counted and charged every three months.

The technical names that came across Kansas with our forefathers had not changed. “Eveners” and “whiffle-trees” [[110]]were recognized; but double and swingle-trees were taboo.

And there were things that even the Westerners’ Bible could not define. Apparently no one ever wrote to Montgomery Ward for “crandalls” or “loop-sticks.” Sometimes Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary helped to an explanation, and at other times the Encyclopædia Britannica shed light down the ages to identify an article. It was like examining and listing the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and we believed that the mummy of the original Indian Agent would be discovered in the depths of those cluttered warehouse-shrines.

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—

quite so—there were shoes, men’s, women’s, misses’, boys’, youths’ and children’s, each divided into two sorts: Sunday and everyday; twelve classifications, and all counted and all charged. There were boxes of sealing-wax, and cobblers’ wax, and beeswax, in quantity; and in the attenuated garden, irrigated by the hand-bucket method, grew something resembling cabbages where free Congressional seeds had been planted. There were no ships of the keel variety; it was too dry—even the fish carried canteens; but there were burros, those pack-ships of the Desert, that cheerfully doubled as “Arizona nightingales.” And there was one official king, who, if he did not find that crandall the smith had made in 1893, would have months of explaining to those who did not know then, and do not know now, what a crandall is.

At the same time the employees of the station were existing in pasteboard cottages designed for the climate of Southern California, and winter at that altitude—[[111]]6600 feet—would bring many nights below zero. One couple lived in a tent heated by a sheet-iron stove; the miner lodged in a cupboard, and the chief mechanic’s family occupied a cellar. They were all, according to the Civil Service announcements, entitled to “quarters,” and did they not have them?

The returns were received as well from all the field points. Election night in the editorial rooms is but one night. After thirty days of this, I felt myself going mad; so I started forth to view the domain.

Having had but little experience in the handling of horses, I selected one of my Indian interpreters for Jehu, and so he proved. My idea was that an Indian not only would be a thorough horseman, but would possess the rare faculty of driving equally well after dark. The Indian has the eye of the eagle, say the books, and so on; and those winding, narrow, switchback roads did not invite me after nightfall. Sure enough, my first return to the cañon was made in pitch blackness; but I lolled in the buggy, well wrapped-up, enjoying a feeling of perfect security. An excellent thing to have an eagle’s eye, I thought—when suddenly the world tipped and heaved. There was a moment of crashing confusion and complete chaos. The lines and my Indian driver and I were all on the floor of the buggy together, hopelessly mixed and entangled in the blankets and foot-brake and nose-bags and halters. The vehicle had pitched forward, and seemed to have climbed on to the backs of the struggling horses. Jehu had driven over a six foot bank into an arroyo. Fortunately, the team had taken it straight over, without swerving and, fortunately too, those arroyo banks are of crumbling sand.

We scrambled out to catch the heads of the horses. [[112]]

“What in the blankety-blank did you do that for?” I cried at the dazed Indian who, like myself, was very much numbed and scared. “Where were your eyes? Couldn’t you see the crossing to the left?”

“Didn’t you see it?” he mumbled.

“I can’t see in this dark—never pretended to; but you—you’re an Indian, and—”

“Indian eyes no different from white man’s!” he announced in his defense, and with complete composure. “I can’t see in the dark, either.”

Another precious ideal exploded. [[113]]

[1] The Hopi joined their kinsmen in the Pueblo rebellion of 1680, and four Franciscan friars were killed at their missions in the Tusayan provinces: at Aguatobi (Awatobi), mission of San Bernardino, the Reverend Padre Fray Joseph de Figueroa, a native of Mexico; at Xongopavi (Chimopovi), mission of San Bartolome, the Reverend Padre Fray Joseph de Truxillo; at Oraibi, mission of San Francisco, the Reverend Padre Fray Joseph de Espeleta, a native of Estela in the Kingdom of Navarre, and the Reverend Padre Fray Agustin de Santa Maria, a native of Pasquaro. The pueblos of Machongnovi and Walpi were visitas. [↑]

[[Contents]]

XI

THE LAW OF THE REALM

Ko Ko. I want to consult you—

Pooh Bah. Certainly. In which of my capacities? As First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, or Private Secretary?—The Mikado

A new Agent at the Cañon headquarters, a greenhorn to boot, and immediately a thousand questions were asked: questions of Indians, of employees, of missionaries, of traders, of traveling cattlemen and drummers, of tourists, of everyone having an interest in that country, even if ever so little. And the new Agent was to answer them all, promptly, that they might go forth with instructions and permits to do the things that they felt most necessary to themselves. I had brought a little book of regulations from Washington, and too, I thought of the commission. It read:—

All the duties relating to the Moqui schools, Agency, and the Indians contiguous thereto, are hereby devolved upon you as Superintendent.

Rather a large order, depending of course on how sincerely and conscientiously one would view the matter. Here were close to four thousand square miles of territory, having five thousand people of many conditions, three fourths of them uncombed savages; and all their problems devolved upon me.

I remember one particularly worthless Civil Service [[114]]employee who once said to me: “But, Mr. Crane, you take these matters too seriously.”

It was necessary for me to cancel his engagement shortly thereafter. I did this abruptly, for he had shown a strong tendency to go off to sleep at the scales. He then emitted another philosophical remark, worthy of a Civil Service employee:—

“Well,” he said, “I will get home just at watermelon time.”

Now one does not have to take the thing seriously. I have followed several Agents who did not. But there is no traditional “George” in the Arizona Desert, and the Agent can always be found. He is the official goat, tagged, manacled, bonded. He may not leave his jurisdiction for longer than one week without having procured special permission; and when he goes, the work continues in the hands of irresponsibles under his responsibility and his bond. I spent several evenings with the little book of regulations, and answered my own queries.

What are the duties and responsibilities of an Indian Agent?

On a closed reservation, where the Indians are non-citizen wards:

• 1. He is the Disbursing Officer for all activities, and will expend $100,000 or more yearly, the reserve’s allotment of funds, without including the moneys of individual Indians that may be deposited with him.
• 2. He directs a corps of employees, persons procured from the Civil Service grab-bag (persons he does not select), a gregarious and vagarious outfit, consisting of physicians, nurses, stockmen, farmers or rangemen, mechanics, teachers; and he often coöperates with the Irrigation or other services and their corps. [[115]]
• 3. When there is construction work of any kind, from quarters and schools to roads and bridges, he often designs these things, always passes on the efficiency, and nearly always directs the actual work.
• 4. As Chief Health Officer, he should know enough to advise and support the physicians, who require more of direction and guidance than one would imagine; and among the Indians he is in great measure responsible for the legality of their actions. In times of epidemic he must lead.
• 5. He is the Chief of Indian Police.
• 6. He is a special deputy officer of the Liquor Service, a branch designed for the suppression of the liquor traffic among Indians.
• 7. He is Judge of the Indian Court, with the powers of a magistrate, unless there is an intelligent Indian who may be commissioned so to act. Such are not in the Arizona Desert. If there should be intelligent Indians to act, the Agent has appellate power.
• 8. He is the Game Warden.
• 9. He holds hearings, determines heirs, and probates estates.
• 10. He often makes allotment of lands to Indians and determines values.
• 11. He is Superintendent of Indian Trade, recommends those persons who seek Governmental license to trade with Indians at designated trading-posts, and is expected to regulate the prices of that trade in accordance with market conditions.
• 12. Should the Indians have moneys accruing from supervised activities, such as the leasing or sale of lands, or from stock-selling, and so on, the Agent first sets his approval on the leases or sales, and thereafter acts as banker of the money.
• 13. As banker again, he makes loans to Indians under the Government’s reimbursable plan, whereby an [[116]]Indian may purchase of the Agent livestock, implements, materials, tools, or seed, with borrowed money, and repay such loans during a period of years.
• 14. In the Navajo country he guarantees the genuineness of the famous Navajo blanket before it goes to market.
• 15. He should encourage Indian agriculture, seek to improve their livestock holdings, and generally strengthen their industries.
• 16. Under an Act of the Legislature of Arizona, he issues marriage licenses as a clerk of the court, and may solemnize marriage.
• 17. He is to see that all Indian children between the ages of six and eighteen years attend school; to provide and equip properly the schools; and to improve if possible the sanitary and moral conditions of the Indian communities.
• 18. In some places, and the Moqui Reservation is one, he should police and protect Indian ceremonies, such as the Snake Dance.
• 19. He has authority to make minor regulations in good judgment for the government of Indian country of his jurisdiction; and in larger measures, if he is informed and possesses a backbone, he usually sways the policy of the Service as it affects his people.
• 20. The laws of the State do not apply directly to his territory, but serve as guides in those cases not specifically covered by Federal law, and through him as Agent.
• 21. Every war-time activity was carried out by Indian Agents, from the registration of whites and Indians, the observance of interned aliens, through the good regulations, to bond-selling and the application of the Income Tax.

• 1. He is the Disbursing Officer for all activities, and will expend $100,000 or more yearly, the reserve’s allotment of funds, without including the moneys of individual Indians that may be deposited with him.
• 2. He directs a corps of employees, persons procured from the Civil Service grab-bag (persons he does not select), a gregarious and vagarious outfit, consisting of physicians, nurses, stockmen, farmers or rangemen, mechanics, teachers; and he often coöperates with the Irrigation or other services and their corps. [[115]]
• 3. When there is construction work of any kind, from quarters and schools to roads and bridges, he often designs these things, always passes on the efficiency, and nearly always directs the actual work.
• 4. As Chief Health Officer, he should know enough to advise and support the physicians, who require more of direction and guidance than one would imagine; and among the Indians he is in great measure responsible for the legality of their actions. In times of epidemic he must lead.
• 5. He is the Chief of Indian Police.
• 6. He is a special deputy officer of the Liquor Service, a branch designed for the suppression of the liquor traffic among Indians.
• 7. He is Judge of the Indian Court, with the powers of a magistrate, unless there is an intelligent Indian who may be commissioned so to act. Such are not in the Arizona Desert. If there should be intelligent Indians to act, the Agent has appellate power.
• 8. He is the Game Warden.
• 9. He holds hearings, determines heirs, and probates estates.
• 10. He often makes allotment of lands to Indians and determines values.
• 11. He is Superintendent of Indian Trade, recommends those persons who seek Governmental license to trade with Indians at designated trading-posts, and is expected to regulate the prices of that trade in accordance with market conditions.
• 12. Should the Indians have moneys accruing from supervised activities, such as the leasing or sale of lands, or from stock-selling, and so on, the Agent first sets his approval on the leases or sales, and thereafter acts as banker of the money.
• 13. As banker again, he makes loans to Indians under the Government’s reimbursable plan, whereby an [[116]]Indian may purchase of the Agent livestock, implements, materials, tools, or seed, with borrowed money, and repay such loans during a period of years.
• 14. In the Navajo country he guarantees the genuineness of the famous Navajo blanket before it goes to market.
• 15. He should encourage Indian agriculture, seek to improve their livestock holdings, and generally strengthen their industries.
• 16. Under an Act of the Legislature of Arizona, he issues marriage licenses as a clerk of the court, and may solemnize marriage.
• 17. He is to see that all Indian children between the ages of six and eighteen years attend school; to provide and equip properly the schools; and to improve if possible the sanitary and moral conditions of the Indian communities.
• 18. In some places, and the Moqui Reservation is one, he should police and protect Indian ceremonies, such as the Snake Dance.
• 19. He has authority to make minor regulations in good judgment for the government of Indian country of his jurisdiction; and in larger measures, if he is informed and possesses a backbone, he usually sways the policy of the Service as it affects his people.
• 20. The laws of the State do not apply directly to his territory, but serve as guides in those cases not specifically covered by Federal law, and through him as Agent.
• 21. Every war-time activity was carried out by Indian Agents, from the registration of whites and Indians, the observance of interned aliens, through the good regulations, to bond-selling and the application of the Income Tax.

Have you had enough?

If these are not sufficient in number to be convincing, [[117]]there are a few others in the two thousand amendments issued since 1904.

A white citizen of no responsibility toward others beyond his obeying the signals of the traffic officer,—the sort who used to quarrel with belated street-cars,—and who aims to be humorous, might say, “This is not the description of a Federal official. This is none other than Pooh Bah!” Exactly so. But the Indians title him “Nahtahni” among the Navajo, “Moungwi” among the Hopi, “Ah-hin-ti” among the Spanish-speaking Pueblos of New Mexico, “Mayoro” among the Mohave, “Ah-tay-ah-pe” among the Sioux, “Ta-ta” among the Apache; to wit: Chief, or Head-man, or Father. He is no less. His rule is quite feudal and absolute.

Seldom is his authority disputed by Indians; but it is challenged and criticized by everyone else on earth, including his superiors, who, after having commissioned him with these powers, live in mortal dread that he will prove the sort of man to make use of them.

The Agent’s financial transactions are subject to audit by designated Governmental auditors, and his other official acts come under the occasional survey of inspectors. But neither of these officials has the power to take charge of affairs, or to give directions within the jurisdiction, without first having had the commissioned Agent suspended from his office.

Now here is a job sufficient in scope to occupy anyone, whatever the quality of mentality brought to bear upon it; and few who find themselves in the position go looking for a clay deposit that they may make brick in their spare time.

Naturally too, he who endeavors to meet these duties as they arise, and is surprised when he makes enemies, is [[118]]one who will look stupidly for the millennium. By the very nature of things human he must expect to be viewed by some of those ruled among the Indians, by those seeking their favor or trade, by those who wish to play with them, paint them, model them, live with them, beg from them, steal from them—in short, all those who wish to use Indians or their lands and resources, as a Meddlesome Matty.

These were the late Colonel Roosevelt’s words. He took a sincere interest in Indians and their problems as administered by honest Indian Agents, and he vigorously supported such officials without considering them either meddlesome or matties, and he personally respected their regulations when visiting the reserves.

A BUSY DAY AT THE TRADING-POST, KEAMS CAÑON

READY FOR THE 105-MILE TREK TO THE RAILROAD

A trader’s train

Roosevelt was an exalted Indian Agent. He had no false ideas that the common people are filled with wisdom, that capitalism oozes virtue, that labor is sincere, that poverty is an assurance of honesty. But he did believe that the poor and helpless deserved fair dealing and protection from predatory interests of whatever kind; and that the mute required a fearless voice. It was his judgment that Indian country should be governed very much in line with those suggestions made by Colonel Kit Carson, who swept rebellion out of the Painted Desert and the Moqui cañons in 1863. He who follows Carson’s advices in formulating his policy at an Agency may have trouble with his civil superiors, with politicians, with critics and tourists, and with a whole horde of people in office and out; but he will be respected by the Indians as their Chief, and in a brief time they will give him their confidence. In the end he will have their affection and loyalty.

In a report dated at Fort Lyon, Colorado Territory, August 1865, Carson replied to the questions of a Congressional [[119]]Committee that sought counsel concerning the future management of the Indian:—

From a long-continued residence among or in the immediate vicinity of Indians, and from a personal observation of their manners, customs, and habits, acquired both in private life and the transaction of official business as an Agent of the Federal Government, I have been convinced that the only rule to be successfully applied for their government is one firm, yet just, consistent and unchangeable.

For the Indian, judging only by the effect of that which appeals to his senses, as brought directly before his observation, regards with contempt a weak and indecisive policy as the result of hesitation, fear, and cowardice, whilst a changeable and capricious one excites his apprehension and distrust. Both of these courses should be carefully avoided.

The rule for the government of Indians should be strong enough to inspire their respect and fear, yet protecting them from both internal dissension and external aggression.

It is true that Carson thought this power should be vested in the military, a view that has changed among the elder statesmen without convincing anyone who knows uneducated and remotely located Indians.

Carson was right. In a brief paragraph he advised against the perfect picture of a civil Indian Service that for years has worked its political capriciousness.

It has seldom been firm; it has been most confused and unjust; it has rarely been consistent; and it is always changing.

More and worse than this—it has at times been cowardly in the face of political and private buccaneering.

Each new administration, having to pay its pressing political debts,—those debts that helped boost it into office,—must deliver the hapless Indian over to a new [[120]]set of theorizing experimentalists who do not know a moccasin from a sabot. Men too small for the Cabinet, yet who have spent anxious years in log-rolling and who must be paid somehow, offer themselves eagerly to the job of guaranteeing the destiny of nations of aliens. Problems that puzzle the ethnologist and sociologist are approached without alarm, with a crude and vicious confidence, by a politician from Squawk Centre who once crossed an Indian reservation to shoot ducks.

Finding that methods current in doubtful precincts are of no avail in this work, and being forced to do something to make a showing, he proceeds to tear down the work of his predecessor, who had started in the same way but had learned a little during four years of fumbling; and when the whole works are fatuously gumbled, it must be done all over again to reach a point of normalcy, all Indians and their officers of the field marking time until the new Colonel has learned the traditions of the old barracks. Imagine John McGraw signing as pitcher some aspiring village quoit-champion! Conceive of Henry Ford halting his factories until a needy ward-heeler mastered the mysteries of a carburetor!

And the Indian, judging only by the effects of vacillation, springs to the suspicion of chicanery. The many inventions of stupid officials excite his apprehension and distrust. The Indian comprehends very little of first or political causes. When he distrusts his superiors he tends to throw himself on the hungry bosom of sentimentalists. He knows only the Agent on the ground, and too frequently finds in him a reflection of that which someone interested wants Washington to arrange. And no sooner does the Indian find an Agent who will fearlessly represent him, investigate his complaints, support his charges, [[121]]and fight his just battles, and who will have nothing to do with intrigue, than he expects the removal of that uncompromising and foolish idealist to other scenes.

To-day the Hopi waits for a reasonably just settlement of his range problem, and he has been hoping for seventy-five years. He packed the trail to Santa Fe in 1850 to petition the first Indian Agent of the Americans, with the same evidence he brings patiently to his present one. The Navajo who troubles the Hopi in the west of the Empire, suffers similarly from whites on his eastern lines.

The point is that neither the Indian nor those who best know his actual condition have any direct voice in matters that affect his very existence. [[122]]

[[Contents]]

XII

COMMENTS AND COMPLAINTS

The seven Moqui pueblos sent to me a deputation who presented themselves on the sixth day of this month. Their object, as announced, was to ascertain the purposes and views of the Government of the United States toward them. They complained, bitterly, of the depredations of the Navajos.—Report of James S. Calhoun, First Indian Agent at Santa Fe, October 12, 1850

Now the Indians drifted in to greet their new Chief. Although possessed by a great curiosity, they came shyly, diffidently, as is the Indian way. One would suppose that a grand council of braves would have been called to introduce a new Agent with some semblance of formality, a thing that impresses a primitive people. But not so. The old Agent, who was agent no longer, glad that someone else had succeeded to the petty headaches which are worse than the problems, packed his gear and departed. It was up to me to meet the savage in the course of business, and to make what impression I could. There were no individual records to guide one, and first impressions are not infallible; in fact, the most serious mistakes of Agents, things that long affect their gaining the confidence of the people, come about through the necessity of accepting the Indian at his face value—a slipshod method. The census, for example, was a string of names, having little accuracy, that had not been annotated in years.

The prominent men of the several districts were not at all backward in telling me how influential they were. The Navajo came first, and with reason, for they held five-sixths [[123]]of the range by right of might, and were eager to impress one that they should not be disturbed.

Came Hostin Nez, “Tall Man,” a lean, shrewd genius, who could remember the captivity after Carson’s campaigns. He stood proudly erect, and yet had an ingratiating manner that was part of his profession; for besides dominating a large faction of his people and being the hereditary chief of all the Navajo, he was a Medicine Man of high degree. Came from the north old Billa Chezzi, better known as “Crooked Fingers” because of a crippled hand, who had in him nothing that was sullen or criminal perhaps, but who pictured a bloodthirsty pirate on a desperate mission.

These two represented communities of Navajo, living and roaming north, south, east, and west of the Hopi mesa settlements, and by whom the Hopi have been throttled from the range. There were lesser men, headmen of groups or families. I remember Senegathe, “Wanderer,” with his gray hair blowing in long snaky wisps; and Scar Chin, who resembled a good-natured friar, though a long rip in his face suggested a strenuous past; and Silversmith Jim, and Yellow-Horse, and Bitani, and Whispering Bill, each having something of distinction in his manner or personal eccentricity.

But for the most part, my Navajo business was with Hostin Nez. He was a Judge of the Indian Court, and carried a “pretty paper,” a ragged commission, lithographed in bright colors. We had many a long and dispassionate argument, he rolling cigarettes in pieces of newspaper, which he evidently preferred to the “saddle-blankets” that came in packages, and wiping his lips now and then with a Turkish towel that was draped about his neck—a fashion in neckcloths that he affected. I never [[124]]knew Hostin Nez to lose patience, and he would return again and again to a point at issue in the hope of gaining advantage—in appearance a Tartar chieftain, in methods a Talleyrand.

HOSTIN NEZ, NAVAJO CHIEF AND MEDICINE MAN

Judge of the Indian Court

“Think of it, Nahtahni,” he said to me, very shortly after our first meeting, “I have never had a wagon. Here I am, an influential man among my people, and all the others have been favored. When the children first went to school, the Agents used to give each father a wagon; but that was years ago, and my children are men, and I never had a wagon.”

Now this was hard lines, for a Navajo who did not possess a wagon was prevented from hauling freight, at that time a most lucrative occupation, and the camp need for a vehicle of some sort was great. The Navajo has to haul wood and water, and must somehow transport his products of wool and hides to the trader. So I promised him a wagon from the next lot received.

This would not be a present. The Indians of the Empire are independent and self-supporting; they do not receive rations, and the Nahtahnis do not make presents of implements or other necessary things. The Indians paid for such issues by laboring on the roads and at other constructive work of the jurisdiction, and were credited at current rates for laborers. The “wagon” meant the issue of a full freighting outfit—everything save the horses, of which the Navajo have a surplus. He would receive a stout farm-type wagon, having top-box, bows, and cover; also harness for four horses, all at Government cost-price, about one half the figure a trader would have quoted it. And at the appointed time he would assemble from ten to twenty of his clan to labor out the bill, his followers helping him as he would in turn help them. [[125]]

But Hostin Nez sent his son to sign the receipt for the issue. This was Hostin Nez Bega Number 4, indicating that there were other scions numbered one, two, and three, and perhaps even others bearing more fanciful Indian names. A great suspicion dawned on me. The issue-papers for several years back were examined, and lo! old Talleyrand had worked that game many times. He had never received a wagon; but each of his sons had received wagons after the father had made the plea for himself. When they went for freight the Nez outfit comprised a caravan, and at the scales their pay-checks totaled hundreds of dollars. Hostin Nez did not go for freight. He was the main guy, and procured the wagons!

When I taxed the Chief with this, he was not offended. He smiled benignly and repeated:

“But, Citcili” (my younger brother), “I have never had a wagon.”

We let it go at that.

Now Billa Chezzi, chief of the northern steppes, was not so clever. He was a rougher, blustering type of Indian, and lacked finesse. Once I endeavored to make a census of the Navajo, a very difficult thing of accomplishment because of their nomadism. Two enumerators cornered old Billa and insisted that he give up the details of his private life. He named six wives living, and counted forty-seven sons in various parts of the Empire. Then he said he was tired, and getting old anyway, and that his memory did not serve him as once it did. Had he followed the system of Hostin Nez, he would have crowded the Studebaker wagon-works to full capacity.

And came Kewanimptewa, chief of that third and weakest faction of the Oraibi Hopi that had nearly perished in the hills. He was a stolid fellow, not at all like [[126]]his name, which signifies Chameleon. He gave me the once-over, and then said frankly:—

“Well, you are a little man—a very little man. The last one was a big man—very big man. But—perhaps you will do.”

Hardly had I moved the big desk to a place where I could see the Indians as they came in at the main door, in order that their pleas should not have to filter down through clerks, when the quiet of the summer afternoon was broken by cries of dismay and excited grief. A Navajo came running, weeping, his manner hysterical. He rushed into the office and stammered:—

“Charlie Bega, he dead—kill—Charlie Bega!”

For the moment I thought someone had been murdered; and a second thought did not lessen my dismay, for this man was a miner. His face was streaked where the tears had washed down through the smudges of coal-dust. The reservation has large deposits of soft coal, and fuel for the Government plants is mined by Indians under a skilled white miner. I had been down the mine that week, and had noted its sagging pillars under the pressure of that heavy mesa roof. It flashed through my mind that there had been a tragedy down the drift, and that other miners were either dead or entombed. But the Navajo interpreter quickly explained:—

“His son has just died. Their hogan is down the cañon near the mine, and he came to tell you of it, and he wants a coffin built and a grave dug.”

The doctor came in to confirm this statement, and added:—

“The carpenter makes coffins for the people. The Navajo have a great fear of the dead, and they will not [[127]]bury when it is possible to have the work done by someone else. We usually send a squad of men to prepare a grave, and the parson conducts a little service. If you say so, I will tell him.”

It was late afternoon, and would soon be twilight.

“You may tell the carpenter,” I said to the interpreter; “we will arrange this funeral for to-morrow morning.”

“Pardon me, sir, but they have queer customs. No member of that family will eat until the body is disposed of; and they must purify themselves by sweat-baths and ceremonies. When one dies close to the Agency, we help them bury at once.”

My first inclination was not to be ruled by such superstition; and then I thought how little four centuries of progress around them and fifty years of American influence had changed the Navajo. Like his Desert, he has remained untouched, unaffected. A hogan that has held the dead is never afterward occupied by the living. Its wood will not be used to make a fire, though they come to freezing.

“Very well,” I said. “Have things made ready to-night.”

And I shall never forget my first Indian funeral. At different times since, and among other tribes and circumstances, I have had more of excitement and not a little anxiety at funerals; but this was my first in the Desert.

The carpenter made a substantial box, much too large I thought; but when the body was placed in it, wrapped in new blankets, decked with silver ornaments, with the dead boy’s saddle, bridle, and quirt at the foot, it was none too large. They could ill afford to part with those blankets and silver things, and especially that saddle. But he must be caparisoned and equipped for his new life in the ghostly land where he would go a-roaming. [[128]]

A half-dozen of the employees climbed into the wagon that would carry the body to the grave. Among them was a visitor, a noted geologist who has made the Empire his study, and who took his share of labor along with the rest. The minister from the Baptist Mission met us at the gate. The burial ground was a desolate place across the arroyo, in a little hollow of those great drifted dunes, shunned by the Indians and not very inviting to anyone. By the time the grave was ready, it was quite dark and lanterns had been lighted.

“Do you wish a commitment service, sir?” asked the minister. I did not at once understand him, having to learn that the new Agent decides everything, and I had thought he would take his place as the man of prayer without request. He had a short ritual for pagans, and this was one of them. It was solemn and sufficient.

“Dust to dust …” and the tossing of earth on the box followed. Four of the men began filling in the grave. I had looked around for the relatives of the dead, but as yet none were in evidence, when out of the dusk came two strange Navajo, leading a pony. It was a very good animal as desert mounts go. And the missionary presented to me a serious problem.

“They wish to kill the horse. Will you permit that?”

And there was something in his tone of voice that indicated a hope I would deny something as an innovation. Again I called for an explanation.

“The Navajo always kill a horse at the grave,” said the trader.

“It seems a merciless thing to do—that’s a good pony.”

The missionary brightened. He had little use for pagan customs and longed for an arbitrary decision. [[129]]

“It is the custom of the people,” said the trader, an honest man who advised me for many days thereafter. “You may not like it, and—you may be strong enough to stop it”—there was doubt in his voice;—“but it is their custom.”

It went against the grain; but there stood the Indians with the animal, silent, waiting. This problem had been presented to many Agents, perhaps.

“If we do not kill it mercifully with a gun, they will only go away and beat it to death with rocks,” said the trader. “It must be done to-night. I have brought a rifle.”

The desert custom of the Navajo won its first round.

The two Indians led the pony to the head of the grave, and, seeming to understand that we had settled it, scuttled away in the shadows. The trader leveled his rifle and shot that very good pony through the brain. It leaped forward convulsively, and plunged down, knee-deep, in the soft earth of the grave. The dead had a mount.

It was black night by this time, and we filed back to the Agency, where I felt better for having the electric lights. There had been something gruesome in the whole proceeding. But it was a custom of the people, as the trader had said, and in other ways I learned from him that it is not wise for a strange Chief at once to take his people by the throat.

Now the first complaints were filed with me, and soon increased to scores. The Hopi has suffered for many years because of the willful depredations of his too close neighbor, the Navajo; and the Navajo in turn has community troubles of his own. There were complaints of damage to fences, and of ruined crops, and of peeled orchards; of [[130]]the stealing of ponies, and the re-branding and butchering of cattle, the pillage of houses, and the unwarranted seizure and holding of precious water-holes; complaints of domestic wrangles and social scandals, of blighted love and too ardent affections; of marriage portions and the current price of brides, of mothers-in-law—ye Gods! even of witchcraft! Descent and distribution included not only real and personal property such as we know, for came a Medicine Man claiming to have inherited the paraphernalia of a deceased tribal doctor, and requested that I decide ownership, according to the rules, in the dried head of a dead crane.

The Indian welcomes opportunity to speak his piece in court, and if permitted will promptly set up as prosecutor and spring to the rapid cross-examination of witnesses. He will even incriminate himself if there is chance of making things unpleasant for someone else; and those of the accused found guilty and sentenced invariably request a chance to peach on some other poor devil who has evaded punishment. Witchcraft seldom appears in the open, but I recall one case that was unusual.

The favorite son of a Tewa died, and the father looked about him for someone on whom to blame this calamity. Indian grief, seldom long-lived, may be the more quickly assuaged if one can fix the blame. Suddenly the bereaved father discovered that a certain neighbor was a witch. He did not like the man anyway. So, finding him prowling around the house,—urged by a sympathetic curiosity, no doubt,—the parent seized him and dragged him into the room with the dead.

“Now,” he cried, amid tears, “You see him plainer. Look at him. You are the one who killed him. You are a witch, and you sickened him with sorceries and bad medicine. [[131]]Listen! When we kill anything, we always eat it. Now you eat him!”

This the alleged doctor shrank from doing, and forthwith the enraged father administered a terrific beating. The nose of this unfortunate neighbor was hammered out of all resemblance to a human organ, and other features of him were sadly damaged. They both appeared before me the next day. The father then expressed penitence and disavowed a belief in witches; but I could see that his conversion had been too rapid. In his troubled heart the witches prevailed. He seemed not to mind his sentence of a week at hard labor, having had action for his sorrow.

Having once opened a docket, the word seemed to go forth to the mesas and the cañons to bring in their complaints. The cases became legion. One would begin to examine witnesses in so simple a matter as horse-stealing and record quite a bit of evidence, to discover suddenly that the animal in question had disappeared eleven years gone, the complaint having been duly entered by seven different Indian Agents sitting at this and other Agencies. It became necessary to impose a statute of limitations.

The first real trial concerned a medicine man and his collar-bone. One Horace Greeley, of Sitchumnovi, in the First Mesa District, at that time reputed to be seventy-four years old, and by profession a bone-setter, had not pleased a member of his tribe. Or perhaps he had conjured only too well with the misplaced anatomy of the patient, and charged according to his skill. At any rate, a relative of the patient took umbrage, and proceeded to handle Horace in a rough and unseemly manner. Among other things damaged was Horace’s own collar-bone. He could not very well set this himself, and naturally distrusted his confreres; so he was forced to send for the Agency [[132]]physician; otherwise I should not have heard of the case. But Horace being found with a fractured collar-bone and numerous contusions, the matter was reported, and his complaint entered for the next session of court.

The Regulations of the Indian Service direct that the Court of Indian Offenses shall consist of two or more intelligent and trustworthy Indians, acting as Judges, whose verdicts shall be reviewed by the Indian Agent, should an appeal be taken to him. As many Indians do not understand their right of appeal, the Agent is compelled to be present either to sustain or to overrule the verdicts.

And did I not have two such Judges, all properly commissioned? Did not Hostin Nez have a treasured “pretty paper,” and was not Hooker Hongave an equal Judge? Did not the Government, looking for justice, generously crowd on each of them the princely salary of seven dollars, each and every month, “fresh and fresh”? Now was the time to avail myself of native wisdom.

Photo. by Emri Kopte

JUDGE HOOKER HONGAVE

Indian Court of First Mesa District

Judge Hooker was a figure in the First Mesa community. At one time he had been a Hopi of the Hopi, and had fought the new system of schools and school regulation with all his crude ability. To prevent his children from being enrolled, he had walled them up at home; that is, he placed them in a small room of his house, gave them food and water, and then walled up the entrance door, hoping that his fresh mortar would not arouse suspicion. To-day he is hated by pagans because he has tried to assimilate the doctrines of Christianity, and is looked on by some Christians as an arch-hypocrite. Such are the trials of the savage.

Actually he is a childish old fellow who has tried to merit the confidence of the mission folk, with little concept of where paganism ends and Christianity begins. His greatest [[133]]sacrifice in life has been the abandonment of tribal ceremonies. From his house below the mesa can be seen the famous Walpi dance-ledge, like a miniature stage high in the thin air, thronged on pagan festal days with multi-colored costumes, where faintly sound the chanting and the drums. But he never attends these feasts of rhythm and song, save at the biennial Walpi Snake Dance, when he joyfully receives a dispensation from the Agent to go as an official of the Government, he being a Judge and the authorized Crier. Many times did he cry down the aimless chatter of tourists during my administration, that solemn announcements might be made to the brethren and the visitors cautioned against the making of vile photographs and unseemly levity. Garbed in a magnificently beaded waistcoat that had decked some long-vanquished Sioux warrior, and bearing his staff of office, a knotted club out of Africa, he presents a strange and not undignified figure on these occasions.

Therefore the two who shared the woolsack were contrasts. Hostin Nez, a Navajo pagan of the pagans, a Medicine Man, a leader of chants and a priest of the sand-paintings; Hooker Hongave, a simple-minded savage who had turned halfway toward the Church, with the low-toned booming of hide drums in his ears, and in his heart perhaps a longing for the mysticism of his ancient people.

The day of hearing having been reached, and all assembled, the Judges listened to the story of old broken Greeley, who had by no means recovered and was still swathed in bandages. The accused was a burly fellow under forty, powerful enough to have challenged a middleweight, who did not deny or extenuate the assault.

“It is a very bad thing this man has done,” said Judge Hooker, clucking his tongue and shaking his head sadly. [[134]]

“Yes, my brother,” agreed the Navajo jurist. “It is a serious thing and it must not happen again. We must make an example of this man so all the people may know of it.”

“We will,” said Hooker; and they withdrew to frame up a sentence.

From their determined expressions I feared that friend prisoner would get at least a year in the hoosegow—an embarrassing piece of business, for the Regulations do not recognize any charge as deserving more than ninety days, and the Territorial Court had thought three years sufficient for cold-blooded murder in a recent Indian case. The judges reappeared.

“He is a bad man,” said Hooker.

“Yes, he is a dangerous fellow,” said Hostin Nez.

“And so we will send him to jail for—ten days.”

“Ten days!” I cried out. “Why, he nearly killed Greeley! That old man will suffer for weeks. You mean ten weeks, don’t you?”

“No,” they said. “Ten days is a long time in jail.”

The appellate power came into action.

“Your decision, gentlemen, is overruled.”

Hooker brightened, expecting a remission of at least five days, which would save his face at the mesa and perhaps prevent the prisoner from hating him for many years.

“The prisoner will be confined for the period of sixty days, and during that time he will be employed at hard labor.”

Hooker gasped, trembled, and was speechless.

“You are a man without mercy,” declared old Hostin Nez.

That was my last session of the Indian Court in the [[135]]Hopi-Navajo country with native judges sitting. One might as well expect justice from a goose.

For an Agent who wishes to evade responsibility, the “judges” are an excellent smoke-screen. He can always say—“It was done by the prisoner’s own people”: Pilate’s method. Aside from its having all the elements of farce, it breeds dissatisfaction and ill will among the people, while teaching them nothing. I know of nothing more unjust, unless it be the trial of an unlettered Indian according to the strict letter of white man’s law and the unwavering standard of the white man’s boasted morality.

Thereafter I paid the salaries, and pleasantly chatted with the old gentlemen when they visited the Agency; but of their legal wisdom I wanted nothing. The Court proceeded to business without them.

So large an area of country, nearly four thousand square miles, occupied by two dissimilar tribes and these ancient enemies, should have some measure of control. The police force I found consisted of three individuals, two Navajo and one lonesome Hopi. The Agent had found things so peaceful that he did not need police; which is one way of saying that he did not bother himself about policing the Empire. And when the first serious bit of police work became necessary, after five years of peaceful neglect, the War Department, at the request of the Secretary of the Interior, detailed one hundred and twenty-five men of the Twelfth Cavalry as an “escort” to Colonel Hugh L. Scott. This officer of long experience at Indian diplomacy was sent to review the situation and conditions. The work completed, he recommended to the Secretary of the Interior that the Indian Agent should have a force of not less than twenty men, in charge of a white officer. The [[136]]Department, therefore, being unable totally to ignore the opinion of the famous Colonel Scott, increased my police to eight men, all natives, and left me to whatever success I could contrive. In 1921 Major-General Hugh L. Scott told me that he had not changed his opinion.

The Hopi do not make good policemen, and certainly not in a cohort of one. Their very name implies “the peaceful ones.” Their towns are ruled largely by pueblo opinion. If a resident acquires the reputation of being unreasonable and unfeeling, as a policeman often must, his standing in the outraged community may affect all other phases of his life. Therefore the Hopi is not likely to become a very zealous officer when operating alone. And too, the Hopi fear the Navajo, as it is said the Navajo fear the Ute, and are useless when removed from the neighborhood of their homes.

But many years ago, when the Hopi were sorely pressed by nomad enemies and had not even the consolation of telling their woes to an Indian Agent, they sent emissaries to their cousins, the Pueblo Indians of what is now New Mexico, and begged for a colony of warriors to reside with them. In response to this plea, and looking for something to their advantage, in 1700 came a band of the Tewa from Abiquiu on the Chama River, from that section where Onate found San Juan de los Caballeros. To these people the Hopi granted a wide valley west of the First Mesa, known as the Wepo Wash, providing they would stay and lend their prowess in future campaigns. They built a village atop the First Mesa, now called Tewa or Hano, where their descendants live to-day. Some intermarried with the Hopi, and a few with the near-by Navajo; but they have not been absorbed, and it is a curious fact that while all the Tewa speak Hopi and Navajo with more or [[137]]less fluency, after two centuries of living side by side few of the Hopi can speak the Tewa dialect.

The Hopi invited warriors, and the warriors have graduated into policemen, for one learns to police the Hopi districts, and even to discipline some of the Navajo, with Tewa officers. They are dependable and courageous, even belligerent; that is to say, they will fight when it is necessary and, strange thing among desert Indians, with their fists, taking a delight in blacking the opponent’s eye. But one has to learn that the Hopi as policemen are fine ceremonial dancers.

The Navajo cohort had been selected following a frontier fallacy. Many of the old Agents believed that a good police force could be built from the “bad men” of the community.

“The cattle-thief will know all other cattle-thieves,” was their reasoning. “The gambler will not be deceived as to those who waste their herds and silver playing monte. And the meaner an Indian among his own, the more respect and fear he will stimulate when garbed in a uniform and authorized to pack a gun.”

As reasonable as if New York officials should make a special deputy of Gyp the Blood.

Hoske Yega, commonly known as Old Mike, a tall and unscrupulous Navajo, carried the Chief’s badge. It was said that he had killed more than one man; and while I am not so sure of this, certainly he was no example of righteousness. The second officer was not so mean a specimen, but one of the same system. They had been policemen of the jurisdiction for many years, believed themselves entitled to the positions, and knew the game. A Navajo policeman has nothing to learn from the bulls of the whites as to methods of graft and the blackmailing [[138]]use of his badge. The Indian Service has used native police since 1878, and I will admit that occasionally one finds a jewel of an officer, of good judgment, trustworthy, brave, and loyal; but for the most part the Indian policemen of the Desert are go-betweens and grafters.

Providing that the Indian accused of wrongdoing is not of the policeman’s clan, providing that the policeman is not afraid of him or of his clan, providing that there is no witchcraft involved, the Navajo policeman can serve a warrant and get his man as quickly and as unerringly as any Sherlock Holmes. A skilled tracker, he can read the trail as an open book; and often he does not need to follow it. Indians leave their visiting cards behind them. My first knowledge of this came when the corral of Clezzi Thlani was relieved of several good ponies, and Old Mike was sent forth to investigate. He recovered most of the stock from the open range, and reported:

“They were taken by Sageny Litsoi.”

Sageny’s idea had been the common one among Navajo, dating from wagon-train days: to run the ponies a little further each night until distance had convinced him that he actually owned the animals. Then a little tinkering with a hot wire would so confuse brands as to bring even the records to his support.

“Why didn’t you bring him in?” I asked.

“Didn’t see him—just got the horses.”

“Then how do you know that Sageny is the thief?”

“Went to corral; saw his tracks. Yisconga dahtsi” (to-morrow perhaps) “I bring in Sageny.”

“You mean the trail will lead to his hogan?”

“No, No! Went to corral; see his tracks—Sageny’s feet. No two Navajo have feet alike.”

And when Sageny was brought in, although he had many [[139]]excuses and claimed that he had raised the animals, he did admit taking animals having another’s brand; and he occupied the guardhouse for a period as a guest of the Empire. Several of my Navajo police graduated later into the same rest-room, which seemed a humorous proceeding to many, and was not altogether different from the experiences of some white lieutenants.

It was when I discovered that Tewa could be depended on that better police-work followed. The point of view was different. One day I summoned the tall and spare Tewa chief of police, and said to him:—

“Nelson, I want Hostin Chien Bega. You know him?”

“Yes; me know him—call him ‘Bull-Neck.’ ”

“ ‘Bull-Neck’ it is. Can you bring him in?”

“Dahtsi.”

“Well, here are handcuffs. Suppose you try it.”

He took the cuffs and walked away. A short time after he returned, and I saw that he had buckled on his guns.

“You want ‘Bull-Neck,’ ” he commented. “He mean Navajo—carry two guns all the time. Sometimes bring in whiskey. Now, how bad you want him? You want him dead?”

Well, to be plain about it, I did not want Hostin Chien Bega, alias Bull-Neck, as a morgue exhibit. He was mean enough in the flesh. And I foresaw the later experience of a brother superintendent who ruled the reservation on my west line. His domain was if anything a trifle wilder than mine, reaching to the Grand Cañon and the most remote places of the Utah border. Its area was a trifle more than five thousand square miles, inhabited by at least six thousand Navajo, many of whom had never touched civilization. One Taddytin had graduated from the police force into a bully of the countryside, and it [[140]]became necessary to impose on him a bit of his own medicine. Taddytin was a giant in physique and quite the meanest man of that territory. Messages summoning him to the Agency were of no avail. He pleaded illness, that cover to which retreat all those who do not wish to testify. Taddytin not only resisted the persons sent to arrest him, but did his level Navajo best with a .45 gun to get them before they subdued him. The Navajo is quite handy with a gun at close range. Most of them go armed from the time they make money enough to purchase a heavy weapon at the nearest trading-post—a trade permitted by the Indian Office, although in utter defiance of both Federal and Arizona State law.

The affair came off in a hogan, which is entirely too restricted a place for serious shooting. Taddytin’s gun twice missed fire, and the persons sent to arrest him, having been in line with the gun, became nervous and, strange to relate, lost their judgment. They should have reprimanded Taddytin for carrying a defective weapon. Instead, they felt it necessary to shoot Taddytin several times, and although not using one of those fancy .22’s that O. Henry was wont to ridicule, the first two bullets failed to knock him down. Unfortunately the last shot killed Taddytin, which was entirely opposed to all policies of moral suasion.

My brother superintendent, who acts as Indian Agent no longer, defended himself in the Federal Court, first against a murder charge, and then one of perjury, from the Spring term of 1916 to and including the Spring term of 1918. He stood quite alone, save for the testimony of all those who knew anything about Indians and Taddytin in particular. It cost him quite four thousand dollars in cash, to say nothing of time and mental disturbance. [[141]]The full history of this case may be found in a Congressional Report (House Doc. 1244) to accompany H.R. Bill No. 5639, dated September 19, 1922—a bill to reimburse the man after his persecution had ended; a report that is probably forgotten. According to that report, the superintendent, acting as Indian Agent—

did not receive the support from the Indian Bureau in connection with this matter to which he was entitled, but instead he was vigorously, and your committee believes unjustly, prosecuted by the Federal authorities.

You see, the superintendent became the official goat, and suffered that a glowing policy of big wind and puffery might not be embarrassed.

As this affair occurred to my next-door neighbor, it had a serious effect on law-and-order conditions within my by no means peaceful jurisdiction, to the end that I was once reported as murdered and often threatened with having the report confirmed.

No; I did not urge my Tewa policeman to give a too realistic picture of loyalty to my commands. [[142]]

[[Contents]]

XIII

A DESERT VENDÉE

One noticeable thing about all the Calhoun letters is the complaint of inadequate support from Washington.—Abel: Correspondence of James S. Calhoun

It was a hot sweltering desert day in July when I proceeded westward from Oraibi to survey for the first time the contentious pueblo of Hotevilla, Chief Youkeoma’s retreat. I did not expect to meet this strange personality, but his very name caused me to have an interest in so rare a character: You-ke-o-ma, or “something quite nearly complete”—as one might say, “almost perfection.” An American Dalai Lama.

Several miles beyond the little grotto of the Oraibi war-gods, a concealed shrine of quaint images, passing that place where Youkeoma’s adherents lost the contest to decide their traditional rights in the town of Oraibi, one came to a wall of shattered rock. These Hotevilla cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone. To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from the masses of tumbled sandstone.

The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of deep sand, and more of rock [[143]]outcroppings, and then appeared the fields of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food. The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest.

The pueblo itself was on the westernmost edge of the mesa. There, where the rocks dropped away again in huge broken steps, overlooking the vast Dinnebito Wash country, they had built their curious little houses of stone and mud. If not balanced on the edge of a precipice, apparently the Hopi are not happy. Fatalists—when the aged or blind plunge over it is regretted, but not grieved about sufficiently to disparage the site. Alcoves of the mesa benches were fenced with cottonwood boughs, and served as hanging balconies for their burro stock. They had no cattle, few sheep, and fewer horses; in fact they were and are the poorest of the Hopi people, having rejected all tenders of acquisition and progress; but in those things that do not run counter to the traditions, such as cornmeal and burros, they have great wealth.

There was one man with me, and he advised against going down into the village. Indeed, I was not inclined to insist on it, for coincident with our topping the last rise the roofs of the highest houses had been posted with guards, watching, watching us in an ominous manner: a custom that prevailed for many years, and one that causes the stranger to feel a trifle less than comfortable.

“Very likely they feel that we slipped up on them,” I said to my companion.

“Not at all,” he replied. “They have been expecting you for days. They knew when you arrived at Oraibi [[144]]yesterday. Be sure of it, old Youkeoma has gone underground and will remain in hiding until the coast is clear. Those watching fellows simply want to know where you go and when you depart. If we sought to take off a kid or two to school, there’d be a fine row. They know we have no backing. I’ll bet they knew when you left the Agency and started out this way.”

All of which proved to be true, and I had later to learn to circumvent and deceive such mysterious methods of information.

We sat on a baking sand-hill and surveyed the place. It was simply a dirtier duplicate of the other pueblos I have described, without their picturesque setting. And if there is a place in America where aroma reaches its highest magnitude, then that distinction must be granted Hotevilla on a July afternoon. The sun broils down on the heated sand and rock ledges, on the fetid houses and the litter and the garbage, and all that accumulates from unclean people and their animals. Multitudes of burros and chickens and dogs. Hosts of dogs. Lank, slinking, half-starved, challenging dogs. Poisonous-looking dogs that would attack one.

Hotevilla’s sloping streets end at the mesa-edge, and below are the sacred spring and their sunlit fields. Far away in the northwest, as a dim blue sail on the horizon, showed Navajo Mountain, that peak of Indian mystery where the last of their secrets have found refuge. The Hopi had migrated from that country centuries past, south to the Little Colorado River; and then, like the back-wash of a wave, had drifted and settled in his present place of stagnation. Perhaps Hotevilla had proved his Promised Land.

The smell of cooking arose from the houses, a muttony [[145]]odor,—although it may have been burro-haunch,—mingled with smoke and the thick incense of smouldering cedar. In and out of the doorways the women passed at their tasks, and one sat weaving a reed plaque. They were all indifferent, with a contemptuous sullen indifference, to the stranger. There was a perfect swarm of children, wary, watching children, ready to dart and hide, long-haired and dirty, and most of them as nude as Adam.

At one end of the village, and a little apart from it, stood a house with a peaked roof. This had been the station of the Mennonite Mission, but when last threatened, the good people departed. It required a brave spirit to live close to the hostile Hopi. One was likely to reflect on the fate of Fray Padre José de Espeleta, of the Kingdom of Navarre, and the difference in theological teaching lent very little comfort.

Until 1915 the Hotevilla mesa was a very lonely place. The nearest white neighbors were seven miles away, with rough cañons between, and no telephone wires; and the nearest authority of the Government, the Indian Agent, quite fifty miles distant, with no road-condition assuring speed of rescue in case of trouble. One brave white woman lived alone on that hilltop until the building of a Government school brought neighbors. This was Miss Sarah E. Abbott, a field matron. For many years she had been stationed at the First Mesa, where she had acquired a knowledge of the Hopi language. She received orders to confront the Hotevilla, and she did it. But it was necessary for me to send police several times to arrest those who sought to intimidate her, and the longest term of imprisonment ever given old Youkeoma himself, perhaps the longest ever given an Indian at an Indian Agency, was because of his threatening this woman. [[146]]

When it grew near to sunset the men began returning from the fields, plodding in with their sacks and staves and huge planters’ hoes. Many of them were aged, their long hair matted and snaky-looking; but there were enough of the burly, thickset fellows to give any official pause if he contemplated dictating to that outfit. Even those who closely observe these people wonder at this evidence of physique. The Hopi lives largely on a vegetable diet. His teeth are blunted and worn down like a horse’s from the eating of flint-like corn. Because of isolation and clan ceremonial exclusion they have become devitalized through centuries of inbreeding, and quickly succumb to disease. And yet these same Hopi are famed for two things requiring raw strength and sustained energy: they can lift and pack on their backs the heaviest burdens, and they are great long-distance runners. Many of their ceremonies include the foot race, notably the sunrise competition on the day of the Snake Dance. Given a long desert course, fifty to one hundred miles, and the Hopi runner will wear down a horse. Their ability to bear burdens comes from both sides of the house, since for ages the women have packed water from the springs to the heights, and the men the harvests, the firewood, and the rock for building. I have seen two moving piles of wood on a mesa-trail, to discover one a burro-load and the other covering a man, with small difference between them.

And they must have carried weight over distances that compared with their runs, for how else were the Spanish Missions roofed? The great timbers were brought on the backs of men. About 1629 the Hopi, obedient and enslaved, brought these timbers from the San Francisco Mountains to Oraibi and other points, a feat equaled only by the Acoma Indians, who built a huge mission atop [[147]]their penal height, the beams coming from San Mateo or Mount Taylor. Each of these packs was more than fifty miles. One of the unused timbers may be seen to-day in the convento part of the Acoma Mission. It is a log measuring more than thirty feet in length and two feet in thickness. Without mechanical equipment, the raising of it to the mesa-top would tax any man’s ingenuity.

Especially would an official pause in dictation at the time of which I speak, for the Hopi had defied two former superintendents and for several years had done exactly as they pleased, in utter disregard of all admonitions emanating by mail from Washington. Of course official Washington had not worried, and for the rest of the world the Hopi do not exist; but the example to about fifteen hundred other and disciplined Hopi and to several thousand unregulated and undisciplined Navajo, all in constant touch with these rebels, was not good. The Agents reaped the effect of this timid policy, and it had given them concern.

The Hopi had so acted at other times, and the methods adopted to correct them had not been of the happiest. Officials had threatened and, when the native did not stir, had offered bribes.

“Your bones will bleach in the sun!” one set had promised—to be followed by: “Won’t you come in and be good, for a nice new contract stove?” Now the bleaching process had affected only those so unfortunate as to die naturally, and the Hotevilla people were content with their piki stones and adobe fireplaces. The Indian does not respect those who seek to buy him. When a threat proves as empty as it is boastful, he is strengthened in no small degree. Washington has been given to bluffing, and buying. [[148]]

The Indian Service had not greatly concerned itself about these strange people until 1887. Between 1847, when the Hopi were acquired as one of the blessings of the Mexican War, and 1887, when the first school was planted in Keams Cañon—forty years—they had lived practically as undisturbed as since their coming from the cliff- and cavern-dwellings in the northern cañons of the Utah border. A few traders had visited them often enough to be known; and one of them, Mr. John Lorenzo Hubbell, has told me of his witnessing a Snake Dance in the seventies, a solitary white spectator where now several thousands congregate annually. The tourist was not in those days, and had he been, under the circumstances of the back-country, it is likely he would have been going away from a Snake Dance rather than attending one.

In 1890 the defiance of the Oraibi first caused notice. Old Lo-lo-lo-mi, their good chief, had been to Washington, and had agreed to place the children of his faction in the school. His counsels were disregarded by the opposition; in fact they imprisoned the old man and threatened him with death for this lapse from the traditions. Lo-lo-lo-mi was “too good,” as his name implied. The sub-Agent, Mr. Ralph Collins, arrested several of the war-chiefs and sent them to their Agent at Fort Defiance. When they returned they busied themselves making more trouble; so troops were sent to pacify and coerce them, and the first great blunder was made by an army officer. This officer accompanied Collins to the Oraibi mesa. They were warned that the hostiles had armed and meant to fight. Believing this to be so much bluff, they ascended the mesa to the pueblo. A war-chief, who had refused to attend a council, stepped out on one of the terraced houses. He was painted for the occasion, carried a rifle, [[149]]and looked the part of his office. He was joined by a medicine man, who wore a raw sheepskin that dripped blood and besmeared his body. These two, knowing of many sympathizers within the hovels, dared the whites to combat and greatly abused them. The two white men prudently retired after an abortive parley.

Then came five troops of cavalry. The commanding officer invited the hostile headmen to a council below the mesa, and gave his word that they should be respected. They came, but stubbornly refused to change their minds as to this white man’s educational propaganda. They were then seized and bound as prisoners; and were afterward marched up the pueblo trail as a screen for the soldiers. This was rank betrayal, and the effects of it live in the Oraibi country to this day.

“Some white men do not keep their word.” And at Oraibi, or at least among unreconstructed Oraibans, who are now at Hotevilla, it is wisdom to suspect all white men.

Collins, the civilian and sub-Agent, had no part in this. He advised against it and deplored it. It would have been better to risk a bit of bad marksmanship, for which the Hopi is noted; it would have been better to beat a few worthless war-chiefs and medicine men to death, if that were actually necessary. One can forgive a battle—but betrayal rankles in the heart.

The prisoners taken at this time were sent to Fort Wingate. In a few months they were released on promise to be good, but when they returned from captivity they too refused to keep the parole given. The goose of an officer had produced a flock of ganders, and his work was to live for nearly three decades. In 1894 troops were again in demand at Oraibi, and nineteen of the Indian leaders [[150]]were sent as prisoners to Alcatraz Island. They were imprisoned about eight months, and returned impenitent.

In 1898 the Hopi suffered from smallpox. It was not so bad as that epidemic told of by the Spanish, but it was severe enough. Superstition and fright, combined with fatalism, are hard things to conquer among a people who know nothing of vaccination, who trust no stranger, but prefer to die unassisted by aliens. Troops were necessary, to affect quarantine and to cremate bodies. In 1899, say the records, troops came again, and once more prisoners were sent to Fort Defiance.

All this time internal dissension was at work among the Oraibans, and in 1905 differences as to the views of local oracles concerning the traditions reached a climax. This quarrel involved nearly everyone within reaching distance. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis E. Leupp, the best supporter of discipline the Service has had in three decades, was at odds with his Agent on this station and, to tell the truth, this Agent had met one Waterloo at the Chimopovi pueblo, where an outpost of the Oraibi dwelt. His effort to coerce the Hopi with an enlarged Navajo police force had nearly resulted in bloodshed and real war; and at the end of this fiasco the Navajo mercenaries threatened his life because the pay-chest was not promptly thrown open to them.

So the Commissioner came to exert a strong personal influence. And he found speedily that his personal influence in the great Desert amounted to very little. The Indians had a keen sense of the fitness of things, and they resented his appearing to negotiate with them without an official sponsor.

“Who are you?” asked the troubled Oraibi, when invited to a council with him. [[151]]

“I am the Commissioner from Washington,” he stated, a fact that was known to President Roosevelt, the Grid-iron Club, and the New York Evening Post, and that should have been patent everywhere.

“Why do you come here without Moungwi, then?” they demanded. “He should introduce you to us. We do not know you. Moungwi is not here. Why do you come in the back way, from Winslow, and call a council without Moungwi?”

Indians are often peculiarly consistent. They did not regret that recent fracas with Moungwi, when they had seized him by the beard and threatened to toss him bodily from the gigantic Chimopovi cliffs,—action prevented only by his Navajo police threatening to open fire,—but they did know something of official courtesy between and among all Moungwis or Chiefs, and there is such a thing as having the proper entrée, even with an Indian tribe in the far-removed hills. Very likely the Commissioner said something about the respect due his office; when arose a big Indian, who declaimed to this astonishing effect:—

“This man comes here alone, and he has a crooked mouth. His words go two ways. He is no Commissioner of Indian Affairs, or the Moungwi would be here to tell us. I myself saw this man working with a shovel on the railroad section-gang not three weeks ago. Don’t listen to him. He will lead you the wrong trail.”

Now this was a terrible blow to dignity, and hurt all Washington. Matters did not improve, and by 1906 the trouble had increased to the point where troops were necessary once again. They came. They rehearsed their parts perfectly, and prisoners were taken. A special inspector was sent in to observe matters, and he found himself in a very embarrassing position. The one hundred [[152]]captives had arranged a hunger strike. Receipts for their prison mess-equipment had been demanded of them, in strict accordance with the farcical methods of accounting then in vogue. The true Hopi hostile, loyal to high-priest Youkeoma, has never signed for anything. He is reared to be wary of the white man’s papers. As he cannot read them for himself, he classes everything in the nature of a document along with the white man’s word, as illustrated by the first army officer who betrayed him.

“If they won’t sign, let them starve,” said the soldier in this case, and he was not at all worried about it. But the special inspector was very much worried about it. He had to be more careful of his civil job; so he managed early one morning, with the seductive aroma of boiling coffee and the alluring scent of fried bacon, to develop a hungry Judas among the younger men, who signed for the whole lot; and lo! by such means all tribulation was avoided.

This time seventeen leaders were sent to Fort Huachuca, seventy-two were put to work on the roads of the reserve, and a lot of younger men, rebels in embryo, were dispatched to distant Indian schools, in the belief that enforced education would bring calm to their troubled spirits. Eight of these young men went to Carlisle. I had to deal with them when they returned, some seven years later. In fact, the Commissioner of that time advised me that they would prove a help in administering the affairs of the reservation. They returned arrayed in the clothing of the white man, but only three of them showed any signs of repentance. Those of the Hotevilla, with one exception, shucked the clothing promptly and went back to the blanket. They were sullen and suspicious, and they had not lost their memories.

I did not blame them in great measure, for at least four [[153]]had been married men when taken from the pueblo. Their wives now had other consorts, other children. The children of the rebel fathers would not forgive them, because they repudiated the faithless wives. The fathers blamed the Government for not protecting their households. And the women said to me:—

“You took our men. We were left alone. We had to keep the children alive, and this meant tending the fields and the sheep. Speak not to us of morals.”

At least that was the English meaning of their argument and reproof, whatever the Hopi terms of it. Quite so many “’Lispeths”: “You are all liars, you English”; and in the same manner their sons and daughters took to their “own unclean people savagely.”

Now a tribal marriage is a legal marriage, or so the courts have decreed, of course far removed from the haunts of the alien and having no specific knowledge of him or of his conditions. So, in strict accordance with sacred property rights and the Great Book of Platitudes, it was my duty to say to the outfit assembled: “You, hussies, are guilty of adultery, and many of your children are illegitimate; while you, impenitent rebels, may not take other wives, since by so doing you would commit bigamy; and each of you, every one, all and several, to wit, should have long terms in the guardhouse.”

That is what I should have said; but being of sound mind, and having very little use for platitudes, especially those courageously hurled by mail across two thousand miles, I did nothing of the sort. I had a convenient place in which I kept the sacred book hidden, and had trained myself into a complete forgetfulness of it.

But notwithstanding my sympathies, I could never soften the hatred of one of the sons. He hated his father [[154]]because of his mother’s treatment, and above all this he hated white men, including me. The stupid sins of one Moungwi are inherited by another in the line of succession.

“You took my father,” he said to me, “and left my mother to work hard in the fields; and when I grew big enough to work you took me to school, so she was left again without help. Then, when my father returned from Carlisle, he would have nothing to do with my mother. And you would not let me go home to her. I have no use for these ways of the white men. I will not cut my hair, and I do not agree to continue at school. You are strong enough to make me, but I will not do these things for you.”

He could tell me this in straight English, as at my desert school he had received a good grammar foundation; and he was not interrupted or punished, because I encouraged the pupils to come to me and speak their minds. But, being stronger, I elected to do these things for him, having in mind his individual interests as separate and apart from the feuds of the past; but I could not severely blame him for his stubborn opposition. He was a very bright lad, and became an exceptional student; but just as surely he returned finally to his “own unclean people, savagely.” Three weeks on the roads, breaking stone and wheeling sand, would have done more to cure that father’s rebellious attitude than those years at Carlisle, exiled from his household and all of life that he understood and cared for. To be sure,—and to be fair to his instructors,—the man learned a great deal at Carlisle, which was a very fine school; and more than this, he saw the wonders of the white man. He was one of the first to witness an air flight. And when he told his ancients at the pueblo of these strange and unbelievable things he had seen in Philadelphia, [[155]]they arose in wrath, knocked out their ceremonial pipes, and denounced him as the greatest liar unhung. So even by the elders, whose lost cause he had espoused and suffered for, he was repudiated and damned. Few patriots get such treatment as this. He was completely ostracized at home. To keep him in food, I employed him as a local policeman, hoping he would revenge himself; but this commission brought him only additional scorn and reprobation. For long he lived at Hotevilla as a pelican in the desert; where else could he live? Was it not home?

But we had reached 1911, with the same old situation burning on the Oraibi mesa, save that the hostiles were now in a pueblo of their own, and could be dealt with, however justly or unjustly, without affecting those who had never actively resisted the Government. It was sheer nonsense to begin again the farce of supplication and argument, of cheap bribes and equally impotent threats. No bones had “bleached in the sun,” and there were not enough native police and loyal employees to risk an attempt at coercing this sullen horde. I returned to the Agency and wrote a very impolitic report. Anything of truth that the Indian Bureau does not wish to know is impolitic.

I recited the facts, and recommended, as the Government had found it necessary to send in troops so many times before, and always after much backing and filling and abortive negotiation,—all to the amusement of the savage,—why not send troops now, and quickly. This recommendation was dated July 28, 1911.

Government moves with a truly fearsome swiftness. I realize now, after thirteen years of report-swapping and buck-passing, that some miracle happened in that my [[156]]suggestion was considered at all. I have been told that a friend assured the Secretary of the Interior that I was not a maniac. But it required until September 27, 1911 to request the Secretary of War to detail cavalry from a distant point, when troops were idle at Fort Apache only one hundred and eighty miles away—quite in the neighborhood, as desert spaces are considered. Another month drifted by, and on October 28 the Secretary of War detailed Hugh L. Scott, then Colonel in rank, as an officer of Indian experience likely to have influence with these strange people. Under date of November 15 I was directed to coöperate with Colonel Scott, and as no allowance was made for the fact that it was winter and mails likely to be delayed along the one hundred and five miles of wagon-transport, the great Indian diplomatist and his officers and men reached the Moqui Agency before my orders. Four months had been devoted to the delicate untwisting of red tape that a telephone conversation between Departments and a telegram to the nearest post would have settled in twenty-four hours’ time. How comfortable if those Hopi had been Ute, Apache, Navajo, or Sioux! [[157]]

[[Contents]]

XIV

SOLDIERS, INDIANS, AND SCHOOLS

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down.

—Kipling

If you seek information on an Indian Reservation concerning things outside the line of routine, never ask the Agent in charge. He will have the important papers locked away from prying eyes, and will likely comment that it is none of your business. Why invite this rebuff? Go to the mess-cook, the farrier, or the seamstress. They will have had all the essential details from some other post, from a mess-cook, a farrier, or a seamstress, who will have zealously garnered it from some leaky official, or mayhap from the telegraph operator. Who told Sitting Bull that Custer had divided his command? By long odds, it was a camp cook.

And when the school disciplinarian asked me one morning, as he was checking his watch with my chronometer, “When do you expect the troops?” I knew that an unusual order had issued. He was correct in his assumption, for the laundress had been notified. Now I do not presume to assert that the Secretary of the Interior had notified the laundress—but she knew. Perhaps some other laundress had found the order in the Colonel’s wash. Anyway, the column arrived just when she predicted.

It made a striking picture filing down the long Cañon [[158]]hill-road, black riders against the sky and yellow sand, the field flag and troop pennant fluttering; and there was about it a certain campaign note that caused as much consternation throughout the back country as if war had been declared, with Kit Carson back in the saddle.

Those of the wavering Hopi who lived apart from Youkeoma but leaned toward his policies when they dared, and who had been awaiting developments, began to rush their belated children to the schools. The smiling “friendlies” industriously continued minding their home affairs. And the Navajo, after one excited survey from the opposite mesa-wall, completely disappeared from the landscape. Not a Navajo was to be seen about the Agency for a very long period. Their old chiefs, such as Hostin Nez and Billa Chezzi, could recall the captivity at the Bosque Redondo, and the younger men had heard them tell of it. This was no time for argument with the Nahtahni, and while they had lost nothing in the back country, still it invited a peaceful hegira far from the tents and bugles of that column.

The whole affair was against all tradition. Three former Agents had argued and threatened and waited in vain, and the third had lingered helplessly at his post until revolt blazed out to singe his beard. Now this new Nahtahni had said very little; in fact, he had seemed depressed and a trifle bewildered. But here came the soldiers, a very different sort of Se-lough from those three uniformed natives he was thought to depend on. The effect was immediate and lasting. And more than one official, having actual knowledge of conditions among the isolated Navajo, has agreed with me that such a column should file through that country every little while. There would be in both Indians and white men more of respect for the [[159]]orders of the Government, and fewer murders in lonely places.

And then I found the famous Colonel Scott seated at one end of my desk. I apologized for being so ignorant, having received no Departmental orders, and supposed that he would be thoroughly informed. Aside from the request that he coöperate with the Agent in this little frontier squabble, it appeared that his mission was a survey, and action would await further instructions. Quarters were arranged for the officers and a camping-place for the men, and then the Colonel and I sat down to a discussion of conditions among the Indians of the reserve. Having read of his career among the warriors of the Plains, I felt that the less I said to this experienced soldier and tribal expert the better would be my chances for making no mistakes. I hoped to create an impression of wisdom by keeping my mouth shut.

But Colonel Scott would have none of that. He had then and has to this day a most disconcerting method of propounding a question, and then boring one completely through and through with a pair of gimlet-like blue-gray eyes that pierce as if made of steel. He could see that I was very green and young at the business of being an Indian Agent, but he would not permit me to retreat before his age and superior rank.

“I propose first to go among these Indians, and learn something of their reasons for this refusal to obey the wishes of the Department,” he said.

I remained silent.

“I will go alone,” he said.

I said nothing.

“You do not think they will receive me unpleasantly?”

“Oh, no!” I hastened to make up for lost time. “They [[160]]are peaceful enough, so long as they are permitted to have their own way. Very likely they will receive you with much of courtesy and even hospitality.”

“That is as I thought,” said the Colonel, who has always gone alone into hostile camps—a method of conciliation that would give most people pause. “I will reason with them,” he continued, “and I believe I can bring them to a sensible view of the matter we have to adjust.”

I said nothing.

“What do you think of my plan?”

“Why, Sir, I would not presume to suggest—”

“That is not the question. You should be somewhat familiar with these Indian people by now. Will my plan succeed?”

His eyes punched through mine, straight back into the brain, out through the skull of my rear elevation, and I knew they were drilling on through the stone wall immediately behind me.

“Considering the experiences of former agents, and even soldiers, Colonel Scott, and—”

“Do you think my plan will succeed?”

“It is a very good plan to try, Colonel. It has been your method with other tribes, and it may prove successful here.”

“But what do you think?”

There was no way of avoiding the truth. He would have it.

“You will not succeed.”

He studied a moment or two.

“I have dealt with unreasonable Indians,” he said, slowly.

“So I am informed, sir. But you have not dealt with [[161]]the Hopi Indian, who is a religious fanatic; and since you pressed me for an opinion, I had to give it. I can ask only that these people be not promised anything that will not be fulfilled. That has provoked half the trouble of the past. The Department has threatened them, and then curled up. They are accustomed to being betrayed by soldiers. They will talk endlessly; but if you expect to bring a Hopi to reason without a show of force, it is too much. You will not accomplish it.”

Whereupon the Colonel seemed satisfied that he had procured an answer from me, and next day he departed for the pueblo of Hotevilla, with an interpreter and a striker to attend him. His extraordinary knowledge and uncanny skill in the sign-language would avail him nothing among the Hopi, for few of the Southwest Indians use this method of conversing. The deserted mission house was placed at his disposal. The troop remained encamped in Keams Cañon at the Agency.

That night the mail brought those belated orders, in duplicate, from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to me, and from the Secretary of the Interior to Colonel Scott. I read them with amazement and a complete mixture of feelings. They had been drawn without deference to the facts, and were as completely garbled a set of instructions as one could imagine. By merely accepting the conditions imposed, the Indians could win, and the whole expedition be reduced to farce. Washington had been so careful to preserve a shield between it and the sentimental critics of the country that, no matter what I proposed doing and no matter what the officer agreed to assist in doing, the fat was in the fire if those orders were recognized.

And here were more than one hundred men, with mounts and extra mounts, and a pack train, and a wagon [[162]]train en route with additional supplies. Hay for the horses was being purchased locally at sixty dollars the ton, and oats in proportion; and these were but two items of the expense. A very costly piece of humor, indeed.

But the Colonel was at Hotevilla; and there he remained for ten days, talking, talking, talking, when he was not listening to Youkeoma. I had one report from a messenger, who found the old chief seated in the centre of the floor, facing the Colonel on his camp-bed, the interpreter to one side. It was the seventh day, and Youkeoma, in the recital of his traditions, had reached a date only four hundred years removed. To give the old chap credit, he never weakened. The Colonel, sitting bolt upright, would go into a doze, finish a nap, and pick up the thread of the discourse immediately on waking, to continue as long as daylight lasted.

YOUKEOMA, ANTELOPE PRIEST AND PROPHET

Who told the tale of the Dawn Men

Of course there were breaks in this programme. They invited the officer to a rabbit-hunt, and gave exhibitions of their fleetness in running and their skill with the rabbit-club or Hopi boomerang; and he witnessed some of their ceremonies. But the end of it all was talk—so many words arranged one after the other, one string in slow, even-toned English, studied, level, monotonously imperative; the other in imperturbable Hopi, rising and falling as Chinese, started with a long intake of the breath and finished in whispers when Indian lungs were exhausted.

Youkeoma began at a point in his traditions before the period of the Dawn Men, when they came up from the Underworld. Wells’ Outline of History is not half so elaborate. And without a break or hesitation, supporting his statements with pieces of pictured rock offered as indisputable evidence, much as Moses would have brought forth the Tables of the Law, he progressed down through [[163]]the ages. The troop surgeon, who had joined the Colonel, furnished me a rough transcript of this legend, which, boiled to a bare consistency, follows:—

Hopi Genesis according to Youkeoma, Chief Priest of the Hotevilla

The Hopi came from the Underworld, down in the earth. They had their chiefs and medicine men, and their villages, in the Underworld, the same as now and here. But the people drifted away from the traditions. They had too much love of a good time, and refused to hear their wise men. They held social dances, and forgot the old religious ceremonies. First the girls, then the women, and finally nearly all the Hopi people came under this influence. They forgot everything else. And even the wives of the priests became evil.

Then the good chiefs and medicine men held a council. They were against these evils, and decided to look for another world. They discussed many methods of leaving the Underworld. And they made experiments. First they planted pine trees, and by ceremonies grew these trees very tall. The pine trees grew up to touch the roof of the sky, but they did not pierce it. Their tops bent over and spread along the sky. And the good Hopi knew that pine trees could not help them.

Next they planted sharp-pointed reeds, and these grew tall and pierced the sky.

Now to find what sort of place was above them. They sent up birds as messengers, to go out through the holes in the sky and find a land for the good people. They told the birds to return and tell what they saw. So they sent humming birds first. These flew up and up, circling the tall reeds, and resting on them when tired. But the humming birds became exhausted, and fell back into the Underworld.

Then they sent up a chicken hawk. It could fly much swifter, but it too became exhausted. The swallow was sent, [[164]]but he did not reach the top of the reeds. Each bird was dispatched by a clan. And finally the catbird was sent. He flew with such a strange jerky motion that they never expected him to reach the top—but he did, and went through the hole in the sky, and came to Oraibi. There he found the Red-headed Spirit.

The bird asked the Ghost if it would permit the good people of the Hopi in the Underworld to come and live at Oraibi. And the Spirit was willing, so the bird returned with this message.

Most of the people were still busy with their social dances; but the chiefs and medicine men and the good people, when they had the news, began to climb the reeds. In this they were helped by the two Gods of Hard Substances, who made the reeds firm. These people managed to crawl through the hole in the sky. But those who had given their time to frivolous things were shaken from the reeds by the chiefs, and they dropped back into the Underworld, and the hole in the sky was stopped up.

Search for the new home was then begun. But the head chief’s daughter died. This delayed things. He believed that some powerful witch had come out of the Underworld with them, so he called the people together and made some medicine of cornmeal, saying that the meal would fall on the witch’s head. It did fall on a girl’s head. The chief then decided to throw this witch back into the Underworld; but when he looked down through the hole in the sky he saw his daughter playing there, in the old place, as a little child; and he knew then that everyone went back to the Underworld after death.

Now the witch told the chief that if she might live with him he would be kept from many hardships and difficulties, and that some day his daughter would return to him. So the witch was spared.

It was utter darkness when the Hopi arrived on the earth. They counseled, and sought a means to create light. They cut out a round piece of buckskin, and on it put bits of the [[165]]hearts of birds and beasts, and of all the people, and then told the buckskin to give forth light.

But this was not powerful enough. So they took white cotton cloth, and put the bits of their hearts on it, and set it in the East for the Sun. Thus the Sun gave light for every living thing, and to-day we all welcome its coming up in the East.

The head chief then called the mocking bird, and told him to give to each group a language. The older brother’s people received the first language, which is that of the white men.

The clans now went in different directions. The older brother of the chief, with his people, was directed to go where the Sun rises, and to stay there. In time of trouble he would be sent for. The chief told him not to be baptized into any strange fraternity.

Then the clans went their several ways, each to find a country. They would travel for a distance, and stop to raise a crop of corn, and then go on. Sometimes they stayed at places two or three years. And the older brother, with those who made up his company, traveled fast to the East, and has not yet returned.

The Ghost clan finally arrived at Moencopi, and there too came the Smoke and the Spider clans. The Bear clan reached Chimopovi. Two brothers were chiefs of this division, and one of them settled Oraibi, where the Ghost and other clans later joined them.

Within the Ghost clan were two groups—the Ghost clan proper, and the Ghost-and-Bird clan. Youkeoma is of the Ghost-and-Bird clan. They were known as the bravery clan, and acted as guards. When came a war with the Ute, Navajo, and Apache, the Bear clan and the Ghost clan tried to win without the aid of these brave men of the Ghost-and-Bird clan. But they did not succeed, and had to ask their aid. So the bravest of the warriors then put explosives in pottery, and threw these bombs among the enemy, and scattered them. Then the Ghost-and-Bird clan lived at Oraibi, [[166]]and were taken into the sacred fraternities, and were known as warriors.

Now the traditions say that a stronger people will come upon the Hopi, and try to get them to adopt new ways of living. And it is in the traditions that the Bear clan will yield to these stronger ones.

Many years ago, when the Spaniards came from the South, they sought to make the Hopi accept their ways. They were here four years. And the Bear clan yielded; and the Spider clan yielded; but the Ghost-and-Bird clan did not yield.

Then the Spanish black-robes came to live at Oraibi; and after four years these priests of the strangers wanted to baptize the Hopi. That caused much trouble. It was against the traditions. And the warriors of the Ghost-and-Bird clan were unwilling to assist the larger clans, like the Bear and Spider, because they had yielded to the Spanish. The Ghost-and-Bird clan knew that the sea would swallow up the land if they accepted these new teachings. Finally, the Badger clan killed the Spanish black-robes.

Then came a great battle, between the Oraibi people on the one side and the Spanish helped by the First and Second Mesa Hopi and also the Navajo on the other. The Oraibans drove the enemy into Skull Flat, named because of the heads that were piled there. And the people of Oraibi recognized the Ghost-and-Bird clan as their bravest men; and they lived in peace for many years.

Next came the white men—at first but a few, looking through the country; then more; and then they brought a school. This was to teach the Hopi children new ways—to lead them away from the ceremonies and the traditions.

Again some of the Oraibi people yielded, and took on the new ways taught by these white men of the Government. But the Ghost-and-Bird clan would not yield.

And then came the soldiers of the white men. They have come many times. Youkeoma has been a prisoner eight times, and has been taken away to forts where there were many [[167]]soldiers; but he has not yielded. Five years ago, because of these troubles among the people, the Ghost-and-Bird clan left Oraibi and settled here at Hotevilla. Youkeoma looks on the Oraibans as traitors, for they have more than once received strangers and yielded to strange teachings.

In the end, all the enemies will combine against the Ghost-and-Bird clan. So say the traditions. These things will come to pass. Youkeoma cannot change it, nor can he go contrary to the traditions. The talk of the white men is incited by witches. And Youkeoma knows that these white men are not the true Bohanna, who will come some day and who will know the Hopi language. These white men are simply forerunners; they are not the Bohanna. They have treated him kindly when a prisoner among them, but they have never encouraged him in his way of living.

Now the way for the white men to conquer the Hopi is to cut off Youkeoma’s head. The traditions say that the head of one of the Oraibi chiefs will be cut off, and then the trouble will cease. But Youkeoma cannot yield; for then the Sea would swallow up the land, and all would perish.

Ten days of it. Priestcraft and sorcery, superstition and cruelty, differ very little among primitive peoples. The Hopi beginnings were very like our own. And in the ages past they had out-talked many enemies. The old man flattered himself that so long as the Colonel listened, he was gaining credence; and that when the officer became completely hypnotized by weariness, he would capitulate, and cry, “You win, old man! For God’s sake, give me a rest!”

Whereas Colonel Scott was awaiting a reply to a telegram forwarded through me four days after his arrival at the pueblo. He had recommended to the Secretary of the Interior that the children of the village be removed to schools, without further regard to this old fanatic and his [[168]]sacred traditions. Youkeoma had confirmed my view of the situation. At the same time, Colonel Scott had written to me: “There is no use in arguing with a lunatic. If the Secretary says ‘Take the children,’ come on with your transportation and police and the troops.”

These messages were carried by riders to the nearest telegraph point. To send them by the archaic mail-route would court long delays. Hotevilla was forty-five miles from the Agency and the railroad eighty miles south of that, so a round trip required two hundred and fifty miles of riding.

On the eighth day answers were received in duplicate, repeating the original conditions. Realizing that the buck was being passed in strict accordance with our traditions, I forwarded the Colonel’s copy to him by messenger, and ordered all necessary wagons to Oraibi. The Lieutenant commanding the cavalry put his men in motion a little before midnight, to reach and surround the pueblo before dawn of the next day. Guided by Indian police, and following the shortest trails, they went directly to Hotevilla and had about it a picket-guard before the wondrous piece of White Cotton Cloth, holding the hearts of all the people, swung up out of the East.

I found Colonel Scott at an early breakfast in the little mission house, and reported to him that everything was right and ready save one.

“I am directed to read this telegram to Chief Youkeoma and, should he have brains enough to seize on its provisions, this whole affair will spell failure.”

“Well, can’t you do these things?” he asked in surprise.

“No one of them can be carried out. The placing of the children in the boarding-school at the Agency is made contingent on certain equipment being at hand for their [[169]]comfort, and the Office knows perfectly that such equipment is not at hand. I informed the Office to that effect some time ago, and the Office has not corrected the situation. Then parents are to be given the privilege of selecting the school in which their children shall be placed—either at the Cañon or one of the local day-schools. The day schools are not close enough to permit attendance. The Indians know it. Should they accept the day-school proposition, it would require a troop of cavalry to get the pupils in each morning. Moreover, this whole attitude is equivalent to indulging a group of contentious savages in the belief that they are to be consulted, and that they shall have the privilege of decision.”

“What do you propose to do about it?” he asked.

“Why, sir, since it would appear that Washington has none, I would supply a bit of intelligence and read it into these orders. And there would be a result.”

“Are my orders the same as yours?”

“Exactly the same—they are in duplicate.”

“Well, I am a soldier, and I do not break orders.”

This came in a tone of utter finality, and I could see that it would be useless to advance argument.

“Very good, sir. Then I suppose you will withdraw your men. This thing will go by default.”

But the Colonel had studied old Youkeoma for ten days, and actually he disliked as much as I did the accepting of stupid instructions issued by a Department that has a long record in buck-passing. And he felt that our dilemma might be solved by permitting the obdurate Indian to hang himself on the horns of it.

“Let us have in Youkeoma,” he said; “and you propose to read the telegram to him, stating plainly that these are orders from Washington. If he does not at once accept [[170]]the conditions, will you be prepared to collect the children promptly, with a squad of soldiers and your police?”

“I do not think I shall need the police, and I do not want the soldiers in the village. If you will keep the picket-guard as it is, and have a squad ready in case of trouble, I will go into the houses with two employees who know the people. I will bring out the children for medical examination. But I certainly do not propose to enter into debate with each savage as to schools, bedding, and commissary matters.”

“Will you wish to make prisoners?”

“Not unless there is positive resistance. That has been done before, and I cannot see that any good resulted. It simply indulged the ringleaders in their idea of persecution.”

“Very good. Have the old chap in.”

Youkeoma came wrathfully into the council-room. His anger was like that of a trapped animal; his eyes gleamed with hatred, and he fairly quivered with rage. All morning he had fumed, realizing that he had wasted ten days of perfectly good oratory and traditions. He squatted on the floor.

“This is your Agent,” said Colonel Scott. “He wants to shake hands with you.”

I held out my hand to him.

A MESA ROAD—OLD STYLE

The trail to Hotevilla

A PRETENTIOUS HOME AT HOTEVILLA

Youkeoma looked me over carefully, and drew his blanket around his shoulders as if he had been insulted.

“I am done with white men,” he said. “I will not shake hands with you or any other white man.”

“Here is a telegram from Washington. It must be read to you.”

The interpreter explained.

“I do not care to hear anything from Washington.” [[171]]

“But I must read it to you.” And I straightway began. The interpreter translated the first sentence, the second—when the old fellow stood up. He waved his arm toward the soldiers outside, and cried angrily:—

“You have your men here; why not go ahead and do what you want? You can cut off my head. Why don’t you do it? I will have nothing more to say to you. I am through with white people.”

He stalked from the council-room, the maddest man in Arizona; and that was the last of him for many months.

“Now, Colonel, if you please, I will search the pueblo. Will you lend me your flashlight?”

“What do you want with that? It’s broad day.”

“I shall have to crawl into every corn-crib and cellar in the place, and none of them have windows.”

He directed that soldiers accompany me through the village, but at the first house I asked them not to come inside. They remained in the street. This was followed throughout the search. The two employees who had some knowledge of this population entered with me.

“There should be three children in this house,” one would say.

There were never any children in sight. The long, narrow, principal room would seem to have no doors leading from it. Racks of corn, carefully piled, and blankets and folded skins lined the walls. The employees, having assisted in such matters before, began lifting down these blankets and piled furnishings, to reveal usually a small door, and beyond this door would loom the blackness of a corn-cellar. The flashlight showed more corn racked up, melons in piles, and filled sacks; but no children. I would scramble through the little trap to make a closer investigation, [[172]]recalling how Judge Hooker had walled up his brood, years before, when the Hopi of the First Mesa protested against education.

In the first of these places there was no room for hiding between the sacks, and when I moved against them I could feel the corn they held. I prepared to leave the place, and was at the opening, when I heard a sigh, as if someone had long held his breath and could hold it no longer. Back I went. No one among the melons, nor behind the racked corn. I began moving the sacks. Three were filled with corn on the cob; the fourth—my hand grasped the top of a Hopi head. It was like the jars of wine and the hidden thieves.

From the sacks we delivered the three children of that household.

When they appeared in the main room, laughing, the father caught them in his arms; and when they were taken from him, the mother proceeded to play the same trick. It was easy to break his hold on them, but not so easy to handle a woman without giving grounds for complaint as to rough usage—a charge the Hopi like to make. But those three children went into the street, notwithstanding all this hokum, and other employees took them before the physicians. There were three doctors present, the Army surgeon and two physicians of the Indian Service. Each child received a thorough examination, and only those fit and above the age of ten years were taken from the village.

I do not know how many houses there are in Hotevilla, but I crawled into every filthy nook and hole of the place, most of them blind traps, half-underground. And I discovered Hopi children in all sorts of hiding-places, and through their fright found them in various conditions of [[173]]cleanliness. It was not an agreeable job; not the sort of work that a sentimentalist would care for.

In but one instance was real trouble threatened. On coming from one cellar, I found the head of the house sitting in the centre of his castle with an axe at his feet. He protested against the removal of the children, and grasped the axe as if to use it. The men with me promptly removed the implement, and threw him into a corner.

By midday the wagons had trundled away from Hotevilla with fifty-one girls and eighteen boys. Our survey of the place in July had warranted an estimate of one hundred and fifty pupils, but in the five months that had elapsed an epidemic of measles and its terrible aftermath of bronchial pneumonia had swept the town.

“Where are the others?” the interpreter asked of a villager.

“Dead,” he replied, solemnly.

So much for expediency and Departmental delay.

Of those taken, nearly all had trachoma. It was winter, and not one of those children had clothing above rags; some were nude. During the journey of forty-five miles to the Agency many ragged garments went to pieces; the blankets provided became very necessary as wrappings before the children reached their destination. It was too late to attempt the whole distance that afternoon, so the outfit went into camp at the Oraibi day-school, where a generous meal was provided, and the next day their travel was completed.

Across the great Oraibi Valley was the pueblo of Chimopovi, perched on the highest of the mesa cliffs. And this place had a suburb, dominated by one Sackaletztewa, a direct descendant of the gentleman who had founded the original Hopi settlement after their emerging from the [[174]]Underworld. Sackaletztewa was as orthodox as old Youkeoma, and it was his following that had given battle to a former Agent and his Navajo police. I proposed to Colonel Scott that Chimopovi should be visited.

“Take the troop to-morrow morning, and finish it up yourself.”

So next day the same scene was enacted. It was a short job, only three children being found; but here occurred something like resistance. All the protestants congregated in the house of Sackaletztewa. When I entered, a man opened a little cupboard of the wall and produced a packet of papers. They were offered to me as documents of great value. And they were strange documents—letters from people of the country who had read in newspapers of Youkeoma’s visit to Washington, and his defiance of the Government. I suppose such persons have nothing better to do, and write letters of sympathy to the members of every Indian delegation that parades itself eastward in feathers and war-paint to present a fancied grievance. I recall the words of one of these papers, from some weak-minded woman:—

Chief Youkeoma: you are a noble man. Do not let the Government have your children. Their schools are not the place for your Indian lads who know only the hunt and the open spaces. Resist to the last gasp. Die rather than submit.

Very like, she is now writing scenarios. Of course this correspondent had read Fenimore Cooper, and was filled to the neck with the storybook idea of Indians—lithe, clean, untouched by disease, and painted by romance. The Southwest has no such Indians; and Indians, whether lithe or not, are seldom clean and never romantic. She knew nothing of filth and trachoma and child-prostitution, [[175]]while the Hopi had brought such things to a fine degree of perfection. And she lived in Indiana.

Now there is a wide difference between demanding the rights of Indians, rights that should be sacred under agreements,—and perhaps foreign treaties, such as those of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico,—and inciting them to warfare and rebellion when teachers and physicians are striving to recover them from ignorance and disease. There is a vast difference between the argument that a title confirmed by three sovereign Governments be not attacked for the sake of political loot—as in the case of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico—and denouncing the educational system of the United States and advising a group of benighted savages to kill in a distant and lonely desert. That writer from Indiana should have been a field matron for a little!

I have no sympathy with this type of sentimentalist. I deported some of them from the Hopi desert country when they appeared with their box of theoretical tricks.

I handed back the documents, and asked where the children were. Accompanied by my Tewa policeman, I entered a small room off the main house and found these three mentioned surrounded by relatives. The room filled up to its capacity and a harangue began. At Hotevilla we had not listened to argument, but here I thought it best to placate them, to explain things, rather more in line with the moral-suasion programme outlined from Washington. All talk led to one definite answer, growing sullenly louder and louder: “You cannot take the children.”

We had to make an end. When I proceeded to lift one from the floor, in a twinkle two lusty Indians were at my [[176]]throat. The Tewa (Indian police) came to my assistance, his face expanding in a cheerful grin as he recognized the opportunity of battle, and three or four others draped themselves around his form. The sound of the struggle did not at once get outside. The Tewa began to thresh out with his arms and let his voice be heard. An employee peered inside and set up a shout. Then in plunged several very earnest fellows in uniform, and out went the protestants, scrambling, dragging, and hitting the door jambs. The Tewa followed to see that these things were properly managed, he being the local and ranking officer in such affairs. I remained behind to counsel against this attitude, but did not remain long enough, for on going outside the house I spoiled a little comedy.

Sackaletztewa, the head man, a sinewy fellow of about fifty years, when unceremoniously booted forth, had challenged the Tewa policeman to mortal combat. He declaimed that no Indian policeman could whip him. The soldiers had greeted this as the first worthy incident of a very dull campaign.

“You have on a Washington uniform and wear guns,” said Sackaletztewa, “but without them you are not a match for me. If you did not have those things, I would show you how a real Hopi fights.”

Now this Tewa always rejoiced in a chance for battle. The fact that no one at Hotevilla had been arrested had filled him with gloom. Unbuckling his belt and guns, he handed them to the nearest trooper; then he promptly shucked himself out of his uniform. Twenty or thirty of the soldiers made a ring, their rifles extended from hand to hand, and into this arena Nelson was conducting Sackaletztewa for the beating of his life. It was a pity to issue an injunction. If I had remained only five minutes [[177]]longer in the house, those patient soldiers would have had something for their pains, and the grudge of the Indian police, who had suffered in esteem at Chimopovi five years earlier, would have been wiped from the slate.

Sackaletztewa was a good man physically; he had courage; but he was a Hopi, and knew nothing of striking blows with his fists. He would have relied on the ancient grapple method of combat, and the proficient art of scalp-tearing. Perhaps he would have tried to jerk Nelson’s ears off by dragging at his turquoise earrings. He would have scratched and gouged, and, if fortunate enough to get a twist in the neckerchief, would have choked his man to a finish. All this is permitted by the desert Indian rules of the game. But unless Nelson had been tied to a post, he would have accomplished none of these things; for the first rush would have carried him against a terrific right smash, accompanied by a wicked left hook. Behind these two taps would have lunged one hundred and sixty pounds of pure muscle. And a very bewildered Hopi would have spent the remainder of the day holding a damaged head, and wondering how he would manage a flint-corn diet without his teeth.

That night, blaming myself for the necessary interference, I joined Colonel Scott at the Agency.

Now you will please not strive to conjure up a harrowing scene of terrified children, removed from their parents, lonely and unconsoled. They were not babies. They were nude, and hungry, and covered with vermin, and most of them afflicted with trachoma, a very unpleasant and messy disease. Some of them had attended this Cañon school in the past, that time before their parents’ last defiance, and they knew what was in store for them—baths, good food, warm clothing, clean beds and [[178]]blankets, entertainment and music, the care of kindly people. There would be no more packing of firewood and water up steep mesa-trails, and living for weeks at a time on flint corn, beans, and decaying melons. There would be meat,—not cut from hapless burros,—and excellent bread of wheat flour, gingerbread even; and toys and candy at that wonderful time the Bohannas call Christmas. There would be games for both boys and girls, and no one at this school would interfere with their innocent Indian pleasures. Their parents would visit them, and bring piki bread—and the parents very promptly availed themselves of the privilege.

A HOPI SCHOOLGIRL

This same girl is shown in native dress opposite page [358]

A HOPI YOUTH WHO IS PREPARING FOR COLLEGE

His ambition is to be a physician

So there was nothing of exile or punishment involved in this matter; and if you have any true regard for childhood and defenceless children, there will be seen a great deal of protection and happiness in it. I fancy that many of the girls—especially those who had reached that age when the maternal uncles, the ogres of the family, assign them in marriage and as the old men pleased—had been counting the days since the first news of the troop’s coming.

It was a busy time for the corps of school employees when the wagons arrived. Seventy-two children had to be recovered from the dirt and vermin that had accumulated during their long holiday. The less said about this the better; but I would have been amused to see the critics at the job of hair-cutting!

Those children spent four years at the Cañon school, and without vacations. When the school departments were closed in 1915, because certain buildings showed weaknesses and I feared their collapse, the Hotevilla children, having reached eighteen years, might decide for themselves whether or not they wished further education. With few exceptions, they elected to attend the Phœnix [[179]]Indian school. They had no wish to visit Hotevilla, and very frankly told me so. To illustrate their standpoint, Youkeoma’s granddaughter, an orphan, was not of age so to elect. She feared that I would consult the old man about the matter, and she knew that he would insist upon her return to the pueblo life. So she secreted herself in one of the wagons that would carry the older pupils to the railroad, and went away without my knowledge.

I had advised against the immediate recall of the troop of soldiers, and had expected that a sergeant’s squad would remain for some months to return runaways and to preserve discipline among those who might risk the power of my army of three policemen. It was not improbable that a band of Hotevillans would come to the Cañon to demand their children, once the soldiers were withdrawn. They had staged this play before, and in 1913 certain Navajo did not hesitate to make off with pupils. But trouble on the Border called. It was then I sought the Colonel’s counsel. For a time he evaded a direct statement of his views, but I was insistent, and he said:—

“I would never permit an Indian to remove his child from the school against my orders to the contrary. They would find me sitting on the dormitory steps. Other methods of prevention you must devise for yourself.”

He concluded with the words I have quoted before: “Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk.”

Very early the next morning the troop departed. There was a light fall of snow, to be followed by more and more, until the stark Cañon cliffs were frozen and white in the drifts. The little campaign in the hills had closed just in time.

Twice thereafter Colonel Scott, accompanied by the [[180]]cavalry, came to the Desert; once to pacify the truculent Navajo at Beautiful Mountain, after they had threatened the San Juan Agency at Shiprock, New Mexico, and once to quiet the Ute on our northern borders. But the Moqui Reservation was left entirely to my ruling. The Department read the Colonel’s report through a reducing glass, and gave me eight policemen instead of the twenty he advised. With these and a few determined employees I contrived to have peace and order within the Hopi-Navajo country—not always easily or pleasantly, but without actual war. And I did not pack the proverbial trunk until the latter part of 1919, eight years later, when ordered to take charge of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. [[181]]

[[Contents]]

XV

AN ECHO OF THE DAWN-MEN

“According to the law of the Medes and Persians.”—Daniel, vi, 12

The sending of a small army to one’s home, and the imposing of rigid Governmental regulations, would seem to be sufficient to give any rebel pause. But not so Youkeoma. He stood faithfully by the traditions; and unfortunately for him, the traditions obstructed or became entangled with everything that a white official proposed for the best interests of his community. No doubt the old man had been amazed, and I think somewhat disappointed, when he was not sent away as a prisoner. He could have made capital of another entry in an already lengthy record as a political martyr. But he did not propose to soften in consideration of this amnesty. He very likely thought it an exhibition of the white man’s weakness, and gave his ancient oracles the credit.

Nothing was heard of him until the next early summer, when came time for the dipping of sheep on the range. The Hotevilla flocks were the poorest of all the Hopi stock, which is saying a good deal, since the Hopi is a disgraceful shepherd at any pueblo. But whatever their condition, the head man of Hotevilla did not intend to recognize the sanitary live-stock regulations issued by the peculiar Bohannas. They paid no attention to the Indian crier who announced the order, and they did not move their sheep toward the vats. It was necessary to send police, hire herders, drive the animals to the dip about twenty-five [[182]]miles from their village, and return them to the sullen owners. Naturally, in such a movement, there are losses. Youkeoma came to the Agency, at the head of a delegation, to file protest against this action and to present claims for damages. He came modestly clad in one garment, a union suit, and without other indication of his rank.

During the hearing a few of the Hotevilla children came in to greet their relatives. It was a satisfied little group of clean and well-fed youngsters, having no resemblance to the filthy, trachomatous urchins we had gathered at the pueblo.

“Your people’s children are happy here,” said a clerk.

Youkeoma looked at the girls in their fresh frocks, and noticed their well-dressed hair, which had not been weeded with a Hopi broom.

“They should be dirty like the sheep,” he answered, “as dirty as I am. That is the old Hopi way.”

His claims for damage were disallowed, and for much angry disputing he spent a few days in the jail; then, very much to my surprise, he promised that he would not counsel resistance to future Governmental orders.

“I will attend to my affairs hereafter,” he agreed. “For myself, I do not promise to obey Washington; but the people may choose for themselves which way to go—with me, or with Washington.”

This was all that was asked of him, and he departed.

A year passed without incident. When the pupils were not returned in vacation time, the parents filed regular complaints. They very truthfully admitted that, were their requests granted, they had no intention of permitting the children to return, so it seemed best to deny them.

And now the other children of the village were growing up. At the time of the first gathering, only those above [[183]]ten years of age were taken; and given a few years among the Hopi, without epidemic, children spring up and expand like weeds. A census was taken, not without acrid dispute and a few blows, which showed that the pueblo held about one hundred children of age to attend primary grades. So I proposed to build a complete school-plant close to their homes. This was another terrible blow to the traditions.

When selecting a site, great care was taken not to appropriate tillable land or to invade fields. The school stands on a rock-ledge. For a water-supply it was necessary to develop an old spring, one that the Hopi had long since abandoned and lost. It is the only Hopi school on the top of a mesa, and the children do not have to use dangerous trails.

The villagers watched us very suspiciously as we surveyed the lines for seven buildings, and they respected the flags marking the site-limits. But when materials and workmen arrived, and the buildings began to go up, they uttered a violent protest.

“We do not wish to see a white man’s roof from our pueblo!”

They declared that all such buildings would be burned. Guards were necessary whenever the workmen left the camp. The school was built, however, and the smaller children rounded up and into it. Two dozen men managed what had required a troop of cavalry; but do not think that we approached it in a spirit of indifference. The town held about one hundred husky men, and one never knew what might happen. Once again I had to crawl through the corn-cellars of the place.

The old Chief was not to the front, and his body-guard of elders was conspicuous by its absence. Great credit [[184]]was given them for keeping their word. I flattered myself that the contentious Hopi spirit and the backbone of rebellion had cracked together. But he was simply waiting for a more propitious date, in strict accord with prophecy, perhaps. The fire in the kiva had not burned with a flame of promise; the cornmeal had not fallen in a certain sign; the auguries were not auspicious. A little later and these things must have strengthened him, for one night he appeared at the door of the field matron’s quarters, accompanied by his cohort, the whole band evidencing an angry mood.

“It is time,” he said, wrathfully. “You have been here long enough. We will not drive you away to-night, but in the morning do not let us find you here. There will be trouble, and we may have to cut off your head.”

The field matron was alarmed, but she did not leave as directed. She waited until they had gone away, and then slipped across the half-cleared desert space to the school principal’s home. He promptly saddled a horse and came into the Agency that night. There were no telephones across the Desert then. Next day he returned with definite instructions.

It is not wise to permit Indians of an isolated place to indulge themselves in temper of this kind. One bluff succeeds another, until finally a mistake in handling causes a flare-up that is not easy to control, and one is not thanked in Washington for fiascos. I have pointed out how quickly Washington moves itself to aid when there is revolt.

A capable field-matron or field-nurse is a good angel among such people. She supplements daily the work of the visiting physician, dispensing simple remedies according to his direction; she is foster-mother to the little children of the camps and to the girls who return from the [[185]]schools. All social ills have her attention. She maintains a bathhouse and laundry for the village people, and a sewing-room for the women. In times of epidemic, these field matrons perform extraordinary labors, and have been like soldiers when facing contagious disease. With one other, Miss Mary Y. Rodger at the First Mesa, Miss Abbott of Hotevilla ranked as the best in the Service; and having ordered her to remain on that station, I determined that she should live at the pueblo of Hotevilla in peace, if every one of the ten-thousand sacred traditions reaching straight back to the Underworld went by the board.

It is necessary first to catch your rabbit.

Whenever wanted and diligently sought for, Youkeoma was somewhere else, and an unknown somewhere. While it was said that he and the other old men spent their time in the kivas, I had failed to find them there. Like the coyote that scents gun-oil, he smelt business from afar; and this time it was business, and I wanted him.

Summoning the Indian police, I dispatched them under two white officers to attend a Navajo dance in a distant cañon, forty miles east of the Agency. Hotevilla was directly west from the Agency and about the same distance removed. Having placed eighty miles between my police and the scene of action, I informed my office force that I intended visiting the railroad town on business. This would take me eighty miles to the south. Others of the white men were sent to work at different range points. No one suspected a Hotevilla mission. We went our several ways.

But I did not go to the railroad town. A messenger, sent from the Desert, recalled the two officers and the Indian police from the Navajo encampment and, going roundabout the trails, they joined me at the Indian Wells [[186]]trading-post on the south line of the Reserve. After dark on the second night we hiked across the southern Desert, avoiding all Indian camps and settlements, to reach the Second Mesa about midnight. There we halted for a pot of coffee, and rested an hour or two. Then on again, crossing the Second Mesa in the wee sma’ hours, we avoided alarming Oraibi, that always suspicious pueblo. The rangemen were collected from their different stations. In the black, before the stars had begun to pale, we arrived at Hotevilla and, without disturbing a soul, strung out around the town.

With the first streak of red in the east, the Hopi became aware that strangers were present. A perfect bedlam of noise arose. It seemed that thousands of dogs came into vociferous action, and made the morning ring with their challenges. But no man got out of the place.

We found our slippery friend Youkeoma and his supporters. They were taken to the school and identified as those who had threatened the matron. And once again the wagons started for the Agency guardhouse. This time friend Youkeoma joined our Cañon community permanently, for I had no idea of releasing him while in charge of the post. This occurred in the summer of 1916 and he remained at the Agency until the autumn of 1919.

He did not complain. In fact he seemed quite contented in his quarters. He was not imprisoned in the sense of being locked-up, but was given the work of mess-cook for the other prisoners. This in no way offended his dignity. The more able of the men were required to work at odd jobs—the cutting of weeds, the herding of sheep, the tilling of small fields, and an occasional bit of road-mending.

Life as prisoners was not very irksome for these old [[187]]men. The guardhouse was very like their home kiva. Instead of cold stone benches, they slept on good beds; for rabbit-skin quilts and sheepskins, they had good blankets; and in place of a central smoky fire there was an excellent egg-shaped stove. Aside from being clean, with walls freshly painted and floors scrubbed, it was very like their kiva indeed. No one disturbed them in it. I fancy their discussions were the same, and the ceremonies conducted according to the calendar. Certainly they occupied themselves in weaving belts and other talismanic articles.

And as prisoners they developed fully some very peculiar tastes. Required to bathe regularly, they came to like soap and water very much. I recall the first time Youkeoma found himself under a shower. He had soap and towels, things considered entirely unessential at home, and he looked for a tub and water. Suddenly the ceiling opened and the water came down from Lodore. He was scared speechless at first, and then began chattering as if this were some rare form of white man’s magic. And he liked it!

They received new clothing, sufficient for the different seasons, but they would refuse to don these garments until ordered to do so by Moungwi. A clerk would make the issue from commissary, and would succeed in getting them to pack the articles to the guardhouse. Next morning they would appear in their old rags. When a solemn Governmental pronunciamento was hurled at them, something smacking of excommunication, the traditions were satisfied, and forthwith they would array themselves.

They very diligently prepared and sowed certain fields—small patches of corn, beans, and melons, such as they used at home. They weeded and cultivated and watched the plants, until told that the harvest would be theirs to [[188]]supplement the guardhouse ration of staples. They refused to work at once. It was against the traditions. They would not willingly raise a crop, to accept it as a reward from Washington. Their work must be wholly in the nature of punishment.

“So be it,” I said, washing my hands of them; and they continued working those fields faithfully, once they knew that others would possess the fruits thereof.

One by one, the men were released for good conduct, until only Youkeoma remained. I told him plainly that he would not return to foment trouble until I was relieved of authority. Often in the long, drowsy, summer afternoons I would talk with him. He would sit on my porch-floor, hugging his knees in his skinny arms, and amaze me by his observations.

“You see,” he would say, “I am doing this as much for you as for my own people. Suppose I should not protest your orders—suppose I should willingly accept the ways of the Bohannas. Immediately the Great Snake would turn over, and the Sea would rush in, and we would all be drowned. You too. I am therefore protecting you.”

He stated such things as an infallible prophet. There was no malice in the old chap, and I did not bear him any grudge for his pertinent reflections.

“Yes; I shall go home sometime. I am not unhappy here, for I am an old man, little use, and my chief work is ceremonies. But I shall go back sometime. Washington may send another Agent to replace you, or you may return to your own people, as all men do. Or you may be dismissed by the Government. Those things have happened before. White men come to the Desert, and white men leave the Desert; but the Hopi, who came up from the Underworld, remain. You have been here a long time now[[189]]—seven winters—much longer than the others. And, too—you may die.”

He had many probable strings to his bow of the future. I had to admit the soundness of his remarks, but I did not relish his last sentence. There was a little too much of hope in it.

And it came to pass that I was sent to another post. My last official act as a Moungwi was the dismissing of Youkeoma. Our differences would not affect the success of a newcomer. We shook hands this time, pleasantly, and he smiled. I asked him for no promises, and preached him no sermon. He departed down the Cañon afoot, for his hike of forty-odd miles. Quite likely he would stop that night with his married daughter at the settlement of the Five Houses, a Christian family, and the next night with Sackaletztewa on the Chimopovi cliffs. He was too old to make the journey in true Hopi fashion, jogging tirelessly. I venture that he did not visit his hereditary rival, Tewaquaptewa, at the original stronghold of his people—Oraibi had slipped too far from the traditions. But I would like to have witnessed his entry into Hotevilla in the sunset, a tired old man, but steadfast in spirit and unconquered, and to have heard the talk at that first all-night conference of the ancients in the kiva.

In 1921 I visited the Agency; and lo! he was in the guardhouse again. He was squatted on the floor, sifting a pan of flour for the prison-mess, his old trade. He looked up, to recognize me with a whimsical, not unwelcoming smile.

“Hello!” he said, “You back?”

When I saw him last, he was talking to Major-General Hugh L. Scott, who had spent ten days listening to him ten years before. Youkeoma was again reciting the legend [[190]]of the Hopi people. Many things had happened in those wild and unreasonable ten years. The world had suffered discord and upheaval; merciless war had lived abroad and bitter pestilence at home. Nations had quite lost identity, and individuals had become as chaff blown to bits in the terrible winds. Scott had heard the great guns roar out across Flanders. Nearly everything had changed except the Desert—and Youkeoma.

He was the same unwavering fanatic, “something nearly complete,” a gnome-like creature that would have better fitted dim times in the cavern cities of the Utah border, where his cliff-dwelling forbears built and defended Betatakin, and Scaffold House, and the Swallow’s Nest. In those wild days of the Dawn he would have been an evil power; but now he was simply a belated prophet without honor in his own country, one who had set his face against progress, and whose medicine had failed. Quite lonely too, for most of his followers had drifted from him.

But miserable and impotent as he seemed, and perverted as he proved, we somehow admire steadfastness of purpose and the driving will that does not flinch under adversity. This Youkeoma of Hotevilla was not malicious. He was simply a deluded old savage, possessed by the witches and katchinas of his clan, living in a lost world of fable. A Ghost-and-Bird chief. The last of the Hopi caciques. A faint echo of the Desert Dawn-Men. [[191]]

[[Contents]]

XVI

FIDDLES AND DRUMS

For you and I are past our dancing days.—Romeo and Juliet.

Having had charge of the Hopi for a longer period than any other official of the United States Government,—eight years and two months, to be exact,—I venture to picture them and their empire. To have visited and counseled with them, to have wrangled with them, to have traveled long distances in all sorts of weather because of their childish factional quarrels; to have arrested and judged and disciplined them; even married them,—if that may be separately classed,—to have cared for them in severe illnesses and advised in times of stress; to have ransomed them from enemies; to have espoused their uninteresting cause in the face of Departmental opposition; and when their meagre business of living was over to have buried them—well, this ought to embrace an angle of vision.

Yet, I hesitate. Reflection cautions me that this may be presumption; for, after all, what do I know of the Hopi Indians?

During those eight long years I met on the reservation thousands of visitors—students and their mentors; painters and etchers and sculptors of distinction, and those who thought they were; photographers and lens-artists; ethnologists, philologists, and sociologists; ballyhoo men from Eastern department-stores and half-wits taking an outing; journalists and authors and publishers; geologists and [[192]]common “water-witches”; motion-picture men and others wearing puttees; actors and lecturers; composers, musicians, and vocalists; museum scouts and “scratchers”; clergymen and soldiers; Oxford men, Harvard men, men from Bonn; retired statesmen and unretiring politicians; representatives of foreign governments; persons from the far-famed city of New York; tourists, and caparisoned dudes, and simple guides; plain gentlemen and plainer roughnecks.

Some of them sought me out courteously to explain their missions, some of them just happened to see me en passant, and a few earnestly avoided me. The permit system was very irksome to those who did not have a good excuse. And I listened to many theories concerning the Hopi and their curious customs, and I made a brave effort to answer in some pleasant manner ten thousand questions. Finally, I prepared a plea in avoidance:—

“Don’t ask me. I have lived here only six years. Ask the chap camped now at the trader’s post—he came last week.”

I plagiarized this method from a brother superintendent who knew much of the Navajo and their rare designs in weaving.

“Now, my dear Mr. Shelton,” the tourist would ask hopefully, “Doesn’t that sign indicate the rabbit-foot following the lightning?”

“Make up your own story,” he would gravely reply, “and then you won’t forget it.”

So with Hopi secrets. The little of their history that is known I have already related. The rest is speculation. The believed facts of their ethnology may be had in Smithsonian Reports, moisture proof, dessicated. The bones of their ceremonies have been diagrammed and painted, [[193]]their chants recorded in scaled notebooks, their odd ceremonial objects looted and catalogued. Sentimental word-pictures one can procure from those journalists who flitted rapidly in and out seeking impressions, and who never failed to get them.

But I am not one whit more ignorant than any other white man. Despite reams of theories, no one has learned anything of Hopi lore that the Hopi did not want him to know. “Make up your own story, and you won’t forget it.” When certain Christianized worthies of the tribe have pretended to expose their knowledge, I have paid little attention, since I knew the mental calibre of such fellows before conversion, and the depth of their gray matter was never impressive. The last who gave evidence proceeded well in his story until, with a foreign fervor, he began to lie about the Oraibi happenings within my own time, and as I had taken his testimony under oath in Hopi trials, I knew just how many Bibles to trust him on.

Moreover, being the recognized Moungwi or Chief of the Hopi, and having some instinctive conception of the manner in which an alien and suspicious people should be governed, I respected their privacy and reticence, to gain and hold their own respect. One cannot play with an Indian in the morning, and expect to summon him to judgment after noon. The poorest stick of an Indian Agent I have seen is he whom Indians address by his first name, or familiarly without a title. When one lowers himself to an alien’s social level, he seldom achieves more than the privilege of dipping his food out of the same dish. It was my job to manage all things for their best interests, against their strenuous efforts otherwise if that were necessary—as it often was; and I hoped to restore to them a confidence in white men, whereas they had come to believe that all [[194]]white men were a mixture of abnormal curiosity and treachery, coupled with an astounding rudeness.

As for their psychology, no itinerant will ever grasp the subtlety of these people. It is something elemental and therefore indescribable. Those who have lived among Asiatics will know what I mean. Fatalists, they are as patient and immutable as the Pleiades. Much of this is vanishing with the elders as they wend their ways from the mesa stages to the Great Place of Ceremonies that Youkeoma has told me of. The pastoral peace and solemnity of the desert shrines is passing before the roar of motors and the harangues of “dude wranglers.”

Now I remember a curious red-haired visitor who came into the Agency one drowsy afternoon, herding a squad of burros. He looked a figure from a Conrad novel, and would have graced any one of them. His animals were packed with matting hampers having an Oriental touch. His flaming head was bare to the summer sun, his worn and rusty boots of cordovan preceded war-time styles and spoke of long journeys. The seat was absent from his trousers. An astonishing man.

His first question of me was: “Who is the new French Premier?”

It just happened that I could tell him. He handed me his credentials, and I found that this dilapidated tramp represented the French Government in his wanderings after strange cacti and other plant life. He strewed the contents of his hampers over my quarters and forgot to sort the wreckage for a week. Meantime—in my bath—he was analyzing Hopi corn and rare Indian dyes.

And he related to me strange things. He had been to Lhasa with the Younghusband expedition. He said that the Hopi were duplicates of the Tibetans, and that he [[195]]believed the languages contained similarities. That fellow knew how to reach the heart of a secretive people. He had procured seventeen distinct varieties of Hopi corn, and other seed, as well as old dye-formulæ and samples of ceremonial cotton.

“Zey call me, ze man wi’ ze burros,” he said, naïvely.

You see, he had walked in on their level, prodding his patient beasts, covered with the desert dust, a wondrous simplicity on his face. He had touched the Hopi heart. He could have told one things of the Hopi people—but the opening guns of the Great War summoned him away to die at Verdun.

Know ye the trail that the Salt bands go?

Close by the Rock where they carved their names?

Know ye the hills of the Navajo

And the barren sands that the Hopi claims?

Dim in the cañons of the dead,

Where the towns are dust and the last scalp dried,

Their swords are rust, and the desert crow

Scarce can tell where the Spaniard died.

Slain at Zuni and Cañon de Chelly,[1]

By the Mesa Black and at Santa Fe;

One of them killed by a Pecos clown,

One of them dropped by Walpi town.

—Song of the Spanish Bell

The Hopi live in northern Arizona, surrounded by the reservations of the Navajo. They speak a Shoshonian dialect, and are often miscalled Moqui. The Department for forty years libeled them under this misnomer. Moqui is a Hopi term, and has been used against them by Navajo to signify anything inert, unpleasant, cowardly, dead. The dignified Navajo has another distinct title for the [[196]]Hopi, and uses it when filled with courtesy. Moqui is probably a Keresan word originally, since it is found as “motsi” in Cochiti and San Felipe pueblos of the Rio Grande, whose warriors and rebels fled to the Hopi country for sanctuary after the rebellion of 1680.

Near the centre of that huge space on the Arizona map marked “Moqui Reserve” are the Hopi towns. These were known to the Spanish conquistadores as the Seven Cities of Tusayan. There are now nine pueblos.

In that early hour of geologic time when the receding waters carved the great gorges in the face of northern Arizona, the more resistant sandstones and clays and coals were left as shattered cliffs, and from these reach out many bony headlands—long fingers, at the crumbling tips of which, like villages clinging to a rocky coast, are the eyries of the Hopi. Below them, as sea-floors, are the sandy valleys and drifting dunes of the Painted Desert.

THE WALPI HEADLAND, SEEN FROM THE DESERT ORCHARDS