“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.
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.
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, 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 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” 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—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.
“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.