But still the drowsy pueblo hears
The voices of the Bells;
They speak as ghosts of other years,
Their message faintly swells
And sighs away above the town,
Echoing history;
The whisper of an old renown
That dwelt at Cochiti.
—“The Bells of Cochiti”
One day, when it was quiet in the office, the Chief became reminiscent.
He spoke of his coming to this station; how he had pitched his tent
under the old cottonwoods at the present well; of the length of time it
had taken to interest Pesh-la-kai Etsetti, the silversmith, and
Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, in his plans; and of the
winter when a posse of whites, led by a county sheriff who is now a
Senator of the United States, drove the Indians through the snow,
packing their few belongings, and across the river, in order that a few
cattlemen who owned everything else might also have this poor
grazing-area. That was before Great Heart quit the Washington helm; and
Great Heart, with characteristic strenuosity, very promptly—one might
say, rudely—dispossessed the self-appointed white inheritors of the
earth.
“I have not had a vacation in six years,” he said, as a wind-up, “And
do you know, I’m tired out, and think I’ll just take one.”
Well, I was not surprised at his being a trifle weary. He seldom had a
moment to himself—except nights, when perhaps he slept. He had just
returned from a long trip in the Butte country, had made numerous
drives to town on business, had assisted in running down a band of
horse-thieves, and only that morning had been on the range to locate
and evict certain trespassers. When such work did not occupy him, there
was the ruined boiler to dally with, a pumping-plant to construct, and
reports to indite; to say nothing of the sessions of the Indian Court,
long and involved and farcical, the dipping of sheep, and the
never-ending complaints of employees—a garrulous, gossiping,
complaining lot.
It was a great life, but he had momentarily weakened.
“Yes, I am tired,” he said; “And I’ll let you run this ranch for a
brief spell, while I go off resting. I have never seen a snake dance,
and the Moqui hold ’em over beyond those Buttes. To-morrow I start.”
Now that is the Southwesterner’s idea of a real vacation. He would
travel about one hundred miles by team, toiling slowly through sand,
probably in rain at this season and its aftermath of treacherous mud;
struggle across arroyos and stream-beds where quicksand might ensnare
his outfit and cause him days of labor; through broiling sunlight
certainly, and general discomfort, to perch himself finally atop an
overheated rock on the edge of a cliff and witness a score of
well-meaning but deluded Hopi Indians juggling their precious
rattlesnakes. Within two hours he could have had a berth on one of the
finest trains in the world, and within twenty-four have reached the
magnificently overadvertised and overgrown city of Los Angeles. Not so!
Across the Desert called an unsatisfied lure, the sorcery of the
unrelieved distances. “Out there somewhere” was something he had not
seen. That was the excuse. Actually he longed to be free, and the
unmapped Desert offered its splendid unbounded freedom.
At that time I had no conception that hard-going, with no cares other
than those of keeping to trail, was the finest sort of rest for an
active man whose routine had been filled with the pettiness of
irritating and never-to-be-settled Governmental farces. I now know that
the way to rest is to remove from telephones and telegraph-lines, from
both superiors and subordinates who wish to pass the buck, from the
hellish routine of menus and meals, from begging complaints and
complaining beggars; to get away from everything, and so far into the
back-country that in case of war, pestilence, or death those interested
are staggered by the idea of reaching you.
One learns to act quickly. Delay half a day, and the incoming mail may
present a dozen obstacles. Promptly at dawn next morning he started,
his camp-outfit lashed to a light buckboard; and on the bulletin-post
he left a notice that my commands would be as the law of the Medes and
Persians during his absence.
I took him at his word, and one very necessary improvement was
immediately set in motion. The place had become an asylum for stray
desert dogs and forlorn disinherited cats. This livestock was promptly
rounded up, and there were interment ceremonies over at the river. The
succeeding nights were filled with a comforting peace.
But it was not all beer and skittles. The boiler did manage to burn out
during his leave, thanks to the careful inattention of an underpaid and
irresponsible Indian stoker; and without a boiler one does not run a
steam-laundry, does not make ice, and most serious of all in the
Desert, does not pump water. This last is the one thing that may not be
done without. So for two days and nights the engineer and helpers
labored with a loyalty that was revelation to me, rolling and
re-rolling the crumbling tubes of that relic of the Dark Ages, while
tank-wagons struggled in from the river with the drinking-supply.
The doctor and I sat in the office and talked of many things.
“When the Chief returns,” he suggested, winking, “We’ll go over there
and have a look-see. How ’bout it?”
“Done!” I agreed. “But do they hold these snake dances every month?”
“Our good friends, the Moqui, hold some sort of shindig every day, from
what I have heard of them, but not all are snake dances. Those are
reserved for serious and important occasions, regulated by the sun,
moon, and stars. They occur once a year at certain fixed points.”
“Then—we must have an object; and—”
“Peaches,” he said, cunningly. “We’ll go to old Oraibi after
peaches—succulent fruit, the gift of the Spanish padres.”
Noting my blank amazement, he hurried into an explanation.
“One of the legal amusements at an Indian Agency is keeping the help
occupied, on the theory that, as with horses, it can think of only one
thing at a time. Now it has been discovered in this Service that a
dozen women paring peaches for preserving not only are happy in the
thought of reducing expenses, but the more easily talk of what ails
’em. We’ll suggest peaches to them, they’ll bring pressure on the Boss,
and we’ll go. Lots of rabbit in that country, and ducks at the Lakes.
Oraibi is some place to visit, too. It was built about the time of
Noah, and hasn’t been cleaned since. Flood didn’t reach it.”
All of which was very interesting to one who wanted to go somewhere,
anywhere, after having been penned up for months. I had viewed the same
draggled trees, the same cement walks, the same old trading-post, for
so long that all judgment was leaving me, and I had begun to buy Navajo
blankets. When one reaches this point, the inoculative powers of the
subtle Desert are beginning to work.
Everything came about just as the doctor had prophesied. The Chief
returned one day at dusk, encrusted with sand and a week’s growth of
beard. While he was shaving, I made a complete report against the
stoker and the boiler, with comment on those in Washington responsible
for both. Then the doctor heard of a terrifically sick Indian over
beyond the Lakes, and the pressure of peaches-and-economy was brought
by the other parties. Next morning, the medico and I made our get-away
before the utter absence of dogs was discovered.
The only thing that tried to affect our escape was a little animal
perched on my walk in the late moonlight. The doctor cautioned me not
to disturb this visitor, and for once I did not neglect a physician’s
advice. The team being harnessed at the barn, we drove to within fair
shooting-distance of this guest, and the doctor handed me the lines,
saying:—
“When I shoot, let ’em go.”
Which he did, and I did.
Later, we regretted this adventure, for the stupid ammoniacal creature
proceeded to dive into the mess cellar, and all food in storage was
strangely savored. A matter of this kind, begun in the innocent
vacation spirit, may be far-reaching. When we returned with our cargo
of peaches, the sewing-circle did not receive us with any fervent
warmth. In fact, it was most broadly insinuated that we, having worked
a leave, had performed this trick on purpose, to the utter horror and
dismay of all unsuspecting persons.
Our going down to the river was through that mysterious half-luminous
light that follows the darkness before dawn. Then the Desert has an
ashen pallor, and a chill and silence that are like winter at whatever
season of the year. The bare spaces seem to be covered with snow. There
are no calls from birds. One moves in a dead world.
At the ford the wheels clattered ominously over flat slabs of rock, and
then the horses splashed through shallow pools to the far bank. We
turned westward, and the mountains showed their volcanic peaks, grim
gray wings in the pallid dawn. They lifted, gaunt and rugged, from a
ruff of pines. There had been a fall of snow on those higher levels
between the timber and the crests, and the shoulders were draped in
white. Now—the very tips of the range were seared with red-gold; and
now—each snowbound crest began warming with a rosy glow, as if blood
were stirring, pulsing, through the masses of icy lava and eroded
stone. And the whole range warmed in a blaze of fresh rose and glinting
gold as it turned to greet the sun.
Down by the river the cottonwoods were still veiled in colorless mist;
above were those radiant wings of the morning; and the birds began
calling, piping, rustling, as a band of crimson broadened across the
gray lips of the east.
Soon we ascended a ridge of the orange-hued mesa I had so long viewed
from the Agency grounds. It was my first close-up of the havoc wrought
in clay and sandstone by the tearing, aging fingers of the Desert.
There were no smooth planes in those tortured hills. They sprawled down
to the river-bottoms in petrified agony, the worn death-mask of that
time when Hell burst from the volcanoes and flowed its molten masses
over the plains.
Slowly we gained the topmost ridge of all, the backbone dividing the
river country from the beyond, and looked north over a vast plain,
fresh in the morning light, holding the Tolani Lakes. Those wide
splotches of bluish green, miles away, seemed as a mirage; but it was
water, where one would least expect to find it, the overflow of the
great Oraibi Wash, trapped in a flat basin, drying until another flood.
The shores were marshy, reed-lined, and invited the migratory birds.
Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.
And reflected in the greenish mirror were the dull red walls of
Monument Point, the end of the great Red Mesa that stretched northward,
rising hugely from the sand dunes and the Desert, flanked and
buttressed as some Babylonian city. Perhaps it was a city of the
ancients, snuffed out as Pompeii. One longed for time to explore its
dead streets. There would be lions, no doubt, slinking down ruined
terraces; and rutted pavements; and broken columns to cast long shadows
under the autumn moon. And was it lifeless—or only enchanted? One
paused and waited for a cry, a rumble of wheels, the far-off blare of a
buccina, to wake its spearmen and send flashes along the walls.
This was my first impression, and eleven years after, not having seen
it again, I went there over the old route to learn if first impressions
fade. I found that the Desert and its visions do not change.
We “nooned” in a barren space that would have graced the Sahara. The
sun burned down on us, but the air was quite stimulating. At these
higher levels the skin browns, but the appetite is not affected. The
fire, a mere handful of chips and twigs, was kindled in the little
shade afforded by the rig. The doctor gave me a lesson in Southwest
camping, just prior to my upsetting the can of peeled potatoes, after
which he considered me impossible. With my usual energy, I had gathered
greasewood branches for the fire, and had brought them from some
distance. They would have made an election-night blaze. The doctor
selected a pitiful handful from this mountain of brush, and briefly
commented:—
“‘Just like a white man,’ Injun says. ‘White man build big fire, sit
far off; Injun make little fire, sit close by.’ You don’t need a
conflagration to boil coffee. I can make camp here with seven sticks
five inches long. Where do you think you are? Up in Canada, hunting
moose?”
All that afternoon we jogged on through the hot sunlight, shooting at
and occasionally hitting a young jack-rabbit. The place was alive with
them. The shadows of the horses grew longer as the sun dipped toward
the Red Mesa. And then came the gray evening, with us peering ahead for
the sign of a well-rig derrick. There were drillers in the valley,
patiently pounding down their drills in the hope of striking the
underflow of the Oraibi Wash. We had helped them outfit at the Agency,
and they were of the I. D. Service. Their location should be somewhere
close to the pueblo of Oraibi, “the town on the high flat rock,” a
place long famous in the annals of the Tusayan provinces, first sighted
by white men nearly four hundred years before.
We gave little thought to the ancient past of Oraibi, and certainly I
did not dream that for more than eight years it would concern me
personally. Pedro de Tovar, that adventurous lieutenant of the great
conquistador Coronado, reached it in 1540, the first year of the
Spanish exploration north of the Rio Grande; and in 1629, or perhaps a
trifle earlier, zealous friars of the Franciscan order built a mission
there and, surrounded by an always suspicious population, far removed
from Spanish headquarters at Santa Fe, had worked and prayed and
governed until the revolt of 1680, when they met martyrdom and the
mission disappeared.
Until recently Oraibi had been the largest pueblo-community in North
America, having had more than one thousand inhabitants, thus exceeding
any of the pueblos of New Mexico. But its leading citizens, one
Tewaquaptewa and one Youkeoma, the first a politician and the second a
natural prophet and witch-charmer, backed by devoted and fanatical
adherents, had prophesied, conjured visions and interpretations of
signs, wrangled among themselves, and defied the Government until
carried into captivity. Their imprisonment had been brief, and they
were now busy making new medicine.
Tewaquaptewa’s portrait appears in that fine book of Indian chants,
edited by Miss Natalie Curtis and published by the Harpers; and his
singing countenance presents a rapt ecstatic expression as he yodels
the Butterfly Song. The translation of his name is there given as
“Sun-down-shining,” and is imperfect as most translations, but just as
good as any other, providing you do not have to consider him on a
Governmental basis. I never dealt with him on a musical scale, and his
undoubted genius in this respect made no appeal to me. As his Indian
Agent, however, I tried for eight long years to make a sensible human
being of him, and failed, for lack of material. After having tried him
as an Indian judge, and then as an Indian policeman, in the hope of
preserving his dignity and authority as hereditary chief, he was found
to be the most negatively contentious savage and unreconstructed rebel
remaining in the Oraibi community, so filled with malicious
mischief-making to his benefit that a group of his own people
petitioned me to exile him from the mesa settlement, in the hope that
they might then exist in peace. Of course, this had little to do with
his “Sun-down-shining” or his Butterfly chanting; but when the folks at
home cannot get along with father, there is something wrong.
Youkeoma, a different type of Hopi, had been defeated by the
Tewaquaptewa faction, and was now in the medicine-man and prophecy
business about seven miles to the west, in his new and already odorous
town of Hotevilla, whence, after the tribal troubles, like another
Moses he had led his faithful. Tradition has it that there will always
be jealousy and enmity among the Oraibans until the pretender to
leadership is martyred; so when Youkeoma was thrown out, he accepted it
as a manifestation of the rules. But that did not prevent both outfits
from resisting the Government, an alien intruder, wholly unmindful of
the sacred prophecies, who entered in to pacify a perfectly legitimate
family scrap.
Kewanimptewa, a third Oraibi factionist, who headed the weakest band of
all, had trekked in another direction, a second upheaval having
resulted in his eviction and retirement from the political field. His
allies went to a little-known cañon, Bacabi, where, but for the prompt
assistance of the Government Agent, the whole lot of Ishmaelites would
have perished. It was winter and they had no harvest. Aid in this case
was gratefully accepted, and out of the truce grew a friendliness now
unbroken. Those who followed Youkeoma, however, remained sullen and
unreconstructed, accepting nothing, acknowledging nothing, rebels and
defiant.
Therefore the original Oraibi, which had been the largest Indian
community, was split into three parts, and the parent place has been
still further reduced by emigration to Moencopi in the farther west. As
will be related later, all this foolish dissension could have been
avoided, and the Government might have saved many thousands of dollars
by a firm and impartial policy toward these Indians. While the
separation weakened them, they had to be followed with the means of
control and education, sanitation, and medicines—a far more expensive
job than a full Oraibi pueblo would have demanded.
This little expedition for peaches I thought would mark my whole
acquaintance with the Hopitu, the “peaceful” wrangling ones. In 1907 I
had written several stories for Harper’s Magazine, one of which
concerned these people. The ethnological facts I had exhumed from the
library of the Indian Office at Washington, and the skeleton on which I
strung these fancies was produced from that fearful thing known as the
writer’s imagination. God forgive me! I have always believed that I was
given charge of the Hopitu as a punishment for that crime against the
verities.
And then, when we were about to confess that the stupid team had taken
the wrong road, to the end that we were strayed, lost, and would
probably be stolen, the well-rig loomed up as a tall gallows at the
roadside. There were calls and hearty greetings.
“Shorty,” a minor water-witch of the Empire, had laid aside his wand
for the day, which is one way of saying that the rig-tower no longer
trembled, the cable no longer jerked, and the drill did not pound in
its hole. Shorty was ready to receive visitors and to relate how he
shot the mountain lion.
It matters not in that country how shabby the guest, how poor the host,
or how wild the place of meeting, there is always a welcome and
entertainment of the board, to be followed by talk of the Empire. A
veteran of the garrison days told me that in his time, on reaching a
post-trader’s, it would be impossible to escape for a week. Every item
of news from the outside would be demanded and paid for in a liquid
coin that is no longer circulated. Then the bowl flowed freely when the
pipes were lit, and the company gathered around a roaring fireplace in
the evening.
“We would gossip and swap lies until we could not see, and then tumble
into the nearest bed to sleep it off. Next day, if he had had enough, a
fellow would call for his horse. Consternation would follow. Everyone
would regret, with much language, that Bonehead Bill had left the
corral-gate open last night, and now not a hoof in all that valley.
“‘’Fore Gad! pardner, they’re clear t’hell an’ gone over into Palisade
Cañon by now. It’ll take two wranglers to git ’em up. Make yourself
t’homelike, ’cause to-morrow’s another day.’”
So there would be no means of travel until the great exchange of ideas
was exhausted, and the whiskey out, when they would speed him onward.
Said the veteran, “Them was times!”
But in Indian country to-day one has to be content with the ensemble
without the olden stimulus.
At this well-camp there were no extra beds, so for the first time I
slept on the open range. We had packed a dozen thick blankets, six for
the ground and three apiece for wrappings. By the time bed was made,
the contrast between that day’s noon and three hours after sunset was a
trifle more than bitter. To remove one’s clothing in that extraordinary
boudoir of a thousand square, open, and draughty miles was a shrinking
bit of business.
Several times during the night I awoke, convinced that I was slowly
freezing; and on one of the occasions I was quite certain that I had
died and reached a certain destination; for at the edge of the Wash a
troop of coyotes had assembled, and they made night hideous. It was my
first close-up of such a chorus, a bedlam of ghoulish chattering.
Fiends might have been braver, but they could not have uttered cries
more horribly depraved. The coyote is very low in the social scale of
the Desert. While the orthodox Navajo will not kill one, even as the
Hopi will seldom slay a snake, this does not mean that he rejoices in
the vicinity of the beast. Notwithstanding the souls of ancestors that
are believed to possess him, “Mi-he,” the coyote, receives little
welcome or respect. There is something so miserably unclean, so
slinkingly evil, in Mi-he, the jackal of the Southwest, that I have yet
to discover anything of sympathy for him under any conditions. He
follows and preys on the sheep and calves, poor, stupid, defenseless
creatures, and in a remote spot I have seen several of him circle a
band of wild ponies, patiently waiting for a colt to drop behind. At
night, when there are mysteries and fancies enough without him, his
mournful howl, followed by ghoulish chattering like unearthly laughter
or the mockery of lost souls, gives the Indian good cause to include
him among the worthless members of a savage mythology.
But morning brought the radiant sun god, and all unclean things fled
away. Warmed into amiability, we covered the last five miles to our
goal. Oraibi occupies a projecting point of a huge tumbled mesa, one
that has known the rack and twist of volcanic convulsion. Below it in
the plain were a Government school, a trading-post, and quite a
settlement of Indians who had been persuaded to remove from the
unsanitary height. To reach the pueblo proper, we drove up a long,
winding sand-road, using the drifts and dunes of centuries for a
ladder. This connected with a rather perilous mesa-ledge road,
overhanging the valley, around the edge of which we found the ancient
town.
The newcomer to the Hopi desert always assumes that the Indian sought
the heights because of view and scenic beauty, purest air, and freedom.
Freedom had something to do with it, for there is no doubt he was
driven to accept the mesa as a citadel. In order that he might have a
chance to defend himself against marauding “Apaches du Navaju,” who
raided his camps and herds, killed his sons, and carried his women into
captivity, he risked the scarcity of water, depending on pools during
sieges, and fortified the mesas. There, with his house built for closer
defense and his flocks under the ledges, he felt secure. The fields of
the tribe, presenting assurance against famine, were of necessity at a
distance from these strongholds, and this handicap trained the Hopi
into the wonderful long-distance runner that he is to-day.
Old Oraibi is not a pretty picture, although its setting relieves much
of squalor and debris. The narrow streets were filled with rubbish and
worse; fowls scratched in the offal, burros herded in doorways, and
lanky, half-starved dogs were legion. Many of the houses had crumbled
and others were being demolished. These were the abandoned homes of the
defeated factionists. There were short alleys and blind courts, while
around a central plaza the dwellings arose to the height of three
stories, reached by little ladders, where a few of the inhabitants were
sunning. The roofs were piled with drying peaches. The place of the
ceremonial kiva sloped away to the mesa edge, and from it one looked
away, many miles, to the dimming river-country. The men were in the
fields, the children at school; the place seemed abandoned, dead. Here
was a perfect picture of the senility of a one-time civilization that
had been decaying for many centuries, and in this our day had reached
very nearly to utter devitalization.
From the edge of the great cliff one looked down on the immense
stretches of the desert. Grazed-out long ago by flocks that were held
too close to the pueblo, the land had become barren, a sea of drifting
sand that stirred and lifted in the winds. But in this sand were the
cornfields and bean patches of the stubborn race. The Hopi, whatever
else he may be, is the greatest dry-farmer on earth. He tills the
unirrigated sand, fighting the drought and the pests and the scorching
winds according to his rituals, and from it produces the corn which is
his staff of life.
A commanding promontory at some distance was the “Judgment Seat,” or
place of accounting, where the spirits of all save Hopi children must
repair on leaving the earthly body. One had to walk but a little way to
stumble on their tombs.
Now here, now there, a broken bowl
Half buried in the sand,
Marks where some pueblo chieftain dreams,
Forgotten by his band.
Those shallow mounds, where age the toys,—
Weak spirits dwell not deep,—
The Desert presses light on them;
The pueblo children sleep.
Our guide directed us to a sheltered angle of the mesa where, among
boulders and sand-drifts, we found the one unperished gift of the
padres, delicious peaches, not so large as California fruit, but having
all the flavor and quality of that grown in Maryland and Delaware. We
bargained with a smiling Hopi, and loaded.
And then, like all wise travelers in the Desert, we started to make “a
long step on the road” while the sun was high; we camped that night in
the greasewood, with well-smoked jack-rabbit for supper, and trundled
into the Agency next evening, tired and hungry, to be received with
coldness and suspicion. Our offering of peaches did not discount this
bitterness. So small a thing as the erratic flight of a confused mammal
may thus strain friendship and affect the most sincere labors.