“You’ll have charge of the district till my successor comes.
I wish they would appoint you permanently; you know the folk.
I suppose it will be Bullows, though. Good man, but too weak
for frontier work; and he doesn’t understand the priests....
Call the Khusru Kheyl men up; I’ll hold my last public
audience.”—Kipling: “The Head of the District.”
A year drifted by in this fashion. The November-December days were
glorious. At a time when the effete East was slopping about in
goloshes, and taking cold and quinine, and sniffling and having
sick-leave, and generally hurrying toward the grave, we were reveling
in sunshine.
January and February brought real crimping winter nights. Spring came
in early March, and quickly the cottonwoods of the river-bank were all
greening again. Then suddenly, as if in a flare of anger, the
springtime wind cried its challenge to the moisture of the sand, and
began driving everything that was loose before it. Then too, suddenly
something happened: the Chief resigned.
A matter like this brings a dramatic pause to those in isolated places.
Something of unexplained dread crept into everyone, from the Indian lad
who curried the horses to the chief Nultsose. A little company of
people, knowing each other thoroughly and marooned in a sense, would
lose the Skipper, the Old Man, the Chief who had attended to most of
their routine thinking, and made decisions, and was responsible, and
caused them generally to exist comfortably whether they were capable of
it or not.
Who would succeed him?
Whatever the faults and frailties of the Chief, they at least knew him,
his humors and his moods. He had not been difficult to analyze. There
had been a time to flatter, and a time to leave him alone; there had
been moments on drives, in camps, and at little social affairs, when
all that was left of the youth—one might say the “boy”—of him returned,
when for a brief space he had ceased to be the Old Man. So they
realized abruptly, forgetting petty differences, that something of
affection had grown up unconsciously between them.
But why abandon a little kingdom? Why, indeed!
He had grown covetous. The pride that the Desert builds in those few
who manage to command it had somehow got the better of his judgment. He
had developed the astounding effrontery to think that he earned and was
justified in demanding a salary of more than thirteen hundred dollars a
year! Think of that—he had come to re-view the value of himself. It was
not honor enough for him to have created a little centre of
civilization. He actually felt that the laborer was worthy of his hire.
It reminded one of a particular scene in Oliver Twist. It was
stupefying. It was downright impudence in the man. Washington had never
heard the like, and confessed itself painfully shocked; in fact, it
became almost infuriated.
Had not a whole series of clerks, working at white heat between
ball-games and vacations, checked his accounts and requested an
explanation of his every action for years, just to keep him from this
very state of mind—to prevent his fondly imagining that he had
accomplished anything? Think of the man who had struggled, under
orders, to that forlorn station in 1908, breasting the wind and the
sand and a falling thermometer, just to demonstrate scientifically how
concrete is mixed in New Jersey. Why, this advising concrete genius
drew only two thousand and a per-diem, a man skilled in methods known
to the Atlantic seaboard, and aside from his having political
influence, was ever ready, under orders, at this pitiful stipend, to
place his all-embracing knowledge at the disposal of this
non-comprehending desert roughneck, who—Words fail one!
As for the Indians to be affected by this change, they were
inarticulate and did not count. Someone would be appointed to the
vacancy, someone just as good—well, anyway, good enough for Indians.
Then came an experience such as a complacent court must suffer when an
old monarch dies. It happens, no doubt, when there is a change of
chiefs anywhere; but it is the more personal and grinding when one has
to live next door to the chief, breakfast with him, lunch with him,
dine with him, face him across a desk, or ride cheek-by-jowl with him
from daylight to dark; in short, to serve him loyally twenty-four hours
the day. Comparisons are not odious; they are hellish. Those so
situated as to be thus dependent on one another for duty and society
must have some bond of sympathy, something of confidence and regard,
respect if nothing more, like unto that which takes the curse off
marriage. The living conditions, the lack of society and amusement, the
introspection that the Desert invites, these things make the casual
word to be an insult and a chance sentence to produce tragedy. Unless
it be aboard ship, I know of no relative situation in which one man can
become so terrible a burden to others as at an isolated desert-station.
Suffice to relate that the period of reconstruction and change brought
many disputes, all of them crushed and smothered by the turgid
heaviness of forty years’ experience. The new Chief was different, and
aged, and sick, a misery to himself and to everyone else. As is
invariably the case, the most valuable of the employees began to
prepare to quit the ship. I have seen a great deal of loyalty in the
West, and the man who is fair may count on men until they drop; but
these same men speak their minds freely, and it is hard for them to
change czars. Old traditions were restored; the cook quit in a flame of
anger, leaving as his vengeance a last meal garnished with a defunct
mouse. The pot boiled fifteen hours the day.
When the thing had become a trifle too thick for me, like a flash from
the blue came an unsought, unexpected telegram:—“WILL YOU ACCEPT
APPOINTMENT SUPERINTENDENT MOQUI SALARY EIGHTEEN HUNDRED BOND THIRTY
THOUSAND WIRE.”
A courteous expression that is now rare: “Will you accept.” The mere
transposition of a word makes all the difference. “You will accept” is
the tone of recent orders—a reaction of the great war against
Prussianism on those who reject with an unctuous civilian horror all
idea of militarism.
And yet there is a certain fine discipline and training in the military
atmosphere, even a copy of it, as practised at the properly conducted
schools and agencies of the farther deserts. One learns to obey in
unpleasant things, and feels something of duty and loyalty in acceding.
Where there is nothing of civilization for one hundred miles in any
direction, not even a telegraph wire, one comes to revere that
refreshing bit of bravery, the Flag, whipping above trees, a symbol of
authority and order; one thrills at the music of the band; and
bugle-calls, in the wine of seven thousand feet above the sea, add a
character-forming stimulation: reveille, mess, retreat, or at the end
of a long day’s drive homeward in the dark, cramped and cold from fifty
miles, to hear the solemn notes of “taps.”
The night hush of the drowsy desert has succeeded all daylight bustle.
The clatter of shops, the hum of machinery, the hiss of steam, have
quieted. There are no more calls from children at play. One by one the
lamps go out on campus and in quarters, and great Orion burns down the
empty spaces to glimpse a scrap of feeble civilization gripped in the
aged everlasting hills. Then, on the cold wind, stealthily, comes the
eerie chant of a Navajo, riding across the mesa, calling on his gods.
“Will you accept ... Moqui—”
That was the country of the Buttes and craggy mesas; of Old Oraibi; of
the Second Mesa and its broad stairway to the dome-like pueblos; of
ancient Walpi and its rocky ladder to the sky; the land of ruins dating
from the misty dawn of history. Across it the Spaniards had marched,
contemporaries of Columbus, their halberds gleaming in the sun; and
there the early padres had ruled, their mission bells now silent. The
“provinces of the Mohoce or Mohoqui,” as Coronado bade his
poet-historian write it down. It was the very heart of the Enchanted
Empire.
There were but two persons to give me a modern view of the situation.
The Navajo interpreter at my present station was one of those
half-educated, half-sullen returned students who would accept the
meagre wage when the trader would not, a part of the economic system
aimed at cheaply teaching grandfather through his unrespected grandson.
He came from that northern country, and his immediate family composed a
most insolent gang—a mere detail I discovered later in time of stress.
“Lots of Navajo up there,” he said. “Those Black Mountain fellows—mean
Indians, too. Down here, quiet, never any trouble, ’cause they liked
the Chief; but up there, always something doing.”
Having little confidence in the fellow, I discounted his words heavily.
But that afternoon came the missionary from down-river.
“Hello!” he called to me. “What’s this I hear? You going to Moqui?
Well, well! I hope you handle that bunch of mean ones over beyond
Oraibi—those Hotevillas. About every four years they flare up. The last
was in 1906, so it’s about due. The present Agent hasn’t Christianized
those Indians, and the one ahead of him was a bit mild. They need the
fear of God put into them. Many Agents? Well, come to think of it, yes.
I can recall several of them. One stayed four years; they average about
two, as a rule. Let me hear from you sometime.”
A combined Indian Agency, half Hopi, half Navajo, and the two ancient
enemies who fraternized on the surface when the Agent was strong enough
to compel it. Ninety miles back in the hills. No telephone and no
telegraph. And agents averaged about two years each of service. What
happened to them? I wondered. Were they buried there, quietly and
without fuss, or did they depart between suns, seeking more peaceful
climes? The padres were not an excellent vision, and the Spaniards had
abandoned the country as hopeless, notwithstanding their usual methods
of domination. True—there was such a thing as having a chap on for the
good of his soul, after the manner of whimsical Arizona.
I debated the matter seriously before answering that wire. My plans
were changing. From six months, my exile had been extended into a year;
and the year was now up. Acceptance would mean a longer stay, an
habitation enforced, as I would be under bond and no longer free to
come and go, with the added chance of failure in an unsought position
of responsibility. I had not envied my old Chief. I do not envy any
Indian Agent to-day.
And yet—the Desert called to me from over beyond those blue-toned
Buttes to come and find that intangible something “just around the
corner.” So finally, like Kipling’s Pagan, I decided:—
And I think it will kill me or cure,
So I think I will go there an’ see.
X