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, 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, 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 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 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.
“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.”