The Story of Hawawk opens with an interesting reference to the favorite
Pima game of football. The ball was about two and one half inches in
diameter, merely a heavy pebble coated thick with black greasewood
gum. Sometimes it was decorated with little inlays of shell. It was
thrown by the lifting of the naked or sandaled foot, rather than
kicked. Astonishing tales are told of the running power and endurance
of the older Indians. White and red men agree in the testimony.
Emory says of the Maricopa interpreter, Thirsty Hawk, before alluded
to, that he came running into their camp on foot and "appeared to
keep pace with the fleetest horse." Whittemore, the missionary, says:
"Some young women could travel from forty to fifty miles in sixteen
hours, and there were warriors who ran twenty miles, keeping a horse
on a canter following them." G. W. Mardis, the trader at Phoenix,
told me he had known Indians to run all day, and my interpreter told
me of Pimas running forty to seventy miles in a day, hunting horses on
the mountains. Others ran races with horses and with a little handicap
and for moderate distance often beat them. On these long runs after
horses the men took their footballs and kept them going, saying it
made the journey amusing and less tiresome. And undoubtedly it was,
in the practice of this sport, that their powers were developed. Beside
the usual foot-races, in which all Indians delight, it often happened
that two champions would, on a set day, start in different directions
and chase their footballs far out on the desert, perhaps ten miles
and then return. The one who came in first was winner. The whole
tribe, in two parties, on horseback as far as they could get mounts,
followed the champions, as judges, assistants, critics and friends
and there was profuse betting and picturesque excitement and display.
But the fine old athletic games seem to have all died out now.
Stories of miraculous conception are not uncommon in Indian tradition,
and this story of the bewitching of the young girl into motherhood
thru the agency of the football is an instance.
This gruesome and graphic tale is full of insight into Indian thought
and fancy. In reading it we are reminded of many familiar old nursery
tales of kidnapped child, pig or fowl ("the little red hin" of Irish
legend for instance) and of Were-Wolf and Loup-Garou.
And here reappears the old myth of some god's or hero's footstep
printed in solid rock.
Here is a hint, too, of transmigration in the various adventures of
the soul of Hawawk.
My Indian hosts cooked me a pot of choohookyuh greens, and I found
them very palatable.
The reference to the pottery making reminds me of Pima arts. Today the
Maricopas have almost a monopoly of pottery making, tho the Quohatas
make some good pottery too. It is shaped by the hands (no potters
wheel being known) and smoothed and polished by stones, painted red
with a mineral and black with mezquite gum and baked in a common
fire. It is often very artistic in a rude way, in form and decoration.
The Papagoes do most of the horse-hair work, chiefly bridles, halters
and lariat ropes, and make mats and fans from rushes.
The Pimas make the famous black and white, watertight baskets, which
are too well known to need description. The black in these is shreds
of the dead-black seed pod of the devil-claw and not some fibre dyed
black, as some suppose.
There seems to have been no original bead work among Pima Indians.