One noticeable thing about all the Calhoun letters is the
complaint of inadequate support from Washington.—Abel:
Correspondence of James S. Calhoun
It was a hot sweltering desert day in July when I proceeded westward
from Oraibi to survey for the first time the contentious pueblo of
Hotevilla, Chief Youkeoma’s retreat. I did not expect to meet this
strange personality, but his very name caused me to have an interest in
so rare a character: You-ke-o-ma, or “something quite nearly
complete”—as one might say, “almost perfection.” An American Dalai
Lama.
Several miles beyond the little grotto of the Oraibi war-gods, a
concealed shrine of quaint images, passing that place where Youkeoma’s
adherents lost the contest to decide their traditional rights in the
town of Oraibi, one came to a wall of shattered rock. These Hotevilla
cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by
the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone.
To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly
graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it
was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding
trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from
the masses of tumbled sandstone.
The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of
springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of
deep sand, and more of rock outcroppings, and then appeared the fields
of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing
profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food.
The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the
past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that
bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest.
The pueblo itself was on the westernmost edge of the mesa. There, where
the rocks dropped away again in huge broken steps, overlooking the vast
Dinnebito Wash country, they had built their curious little houses of
stone and mud. If not balanced on the edge of a precipice, apparently
the Hopi are not happy. Fatalists—when the aged or blind plunge over it
is regretted, but not grieved about sufficiently to disparage the site.
Alcoves of the mesa benches were fenced with cottonwood boughs, and
served as hanging balconies for their burro stock. They had no cattle,
few sheep, and fewer horses; in fact they were and are the poorest of
the Hopi people, having rejected all tenders of acquisition and
progress; but in those things that do not run counter to the
traditions, such as cornmeal and burros, they have great wealth.
There was one man with me, and he advised against going down into the
village. Indeed, I was not inclined to insist on it, for coincident
with our topping the last rise the roofs of the highest houses had been
posted with guards, watching, watching us in an ominous manner: a
custom that prevailed for many years, and one that causes the stranger
to feel a trifle less than comfortable.
“Very likely they feel that we slipped up on them,” I said to my
companion.
“Not at all,” he replied. “They have been expecting you for days. They
knew when you arrived at Oraibi yesterday. Be sure of it, old Youkeoma
has gone underground and will remain in hiding until the coast is
clear. Those watching fellows simply want to know where you go and when
you depart. If we sought to take off a kid or two to school, there’d be
a fine row. They know we have no backing. I’ll bet they knew when you
left the Agency and started out this way.”
All of which proved to be true, and I had later to learn to circumvent
and deceive such mysterious methods of information.
We sat on a baking sand-hill and surveyed the place. It was simply a
dirtier duplicate of the other pueblos I have described, without their
picturesque setting. And if there is a place in America where aroma
reaches its highest magnitude, then that distinction must be granted
Hotevilla on a July afternoon. The sun broils down on the heated sand
and rock ledges, on the fetid houses and the litter and the garbage,
and all that accumulates from unclean people and their animals.
Multitudes of burros and chickens and dogs. Hosts of dogs. Lank,
slinking, half-starved, challenging dogs. Poisonous-looking dogs that
would attack one.
Hotevilla’s sloping streets end at the mesa-edge, and below are the
sacred spring and their sunlit fields. Far away in the northwest, as a
dim blue sail on the horizon, showed Navajo Mountain, that peak of
Indian mystery where the last of their secrets have found refuge. The
Hopi had migrated from that country centuries past, south to the Little
Colorado River; and then, like the back-wash of a wave, had drifted and
settled in his present place of stagnation. Perhaps Hotevilla had
proved his Promised Land.
The smell of cooking arose from the houses, a muttony odor,—although it
may have been burro-haunch,—mingled with smoke and the thick incense of
smouldering cedar. In and out of the doorways the women passed at their
tasks, and one sat weaving a reed plaque. They were all indifferent,
with a contemptuous sullen indifference, to the stranger. There was a
perfect swarm of children, wary, watching children, ready to dart and
hide, long-haired and dirty, and most of them as nude as Adam.
At one end of the village, and a little apart from it, stood a house
with a peaked roof. This had been the station of the Mennonite Mission,
but when last threatened, the good people departed. It required a brave
spirit to live close to the hostile Hopi. One was likely to reflect on
the fate of Fray Padre José de Espeleta, of the Kingdom of Navarre, and
the difference in theological teaching lent very little comfort.
Until 1915 the Hotevilla mesa was a very lonely place. The nearest
white neighbors were seven miles away, with rough cañons between, and
no telephone wires; and the nearest authority of the Government, the
Indian Agent, quite fifty miles distant, with no road-condition
assuring speed of rescue in case of trouble. One brave white woman
lived alone on that hilltop until the building of a Government school
brought neighbors. This was Miss Sarah E. Abbott, a field matron. For
many years she had been stationed at the First Mesa, where she had
acquired a knowledge of the Hopi language. She received orders to
confront the Hotevilla, and she did it. But it was necessary for me to
send police several times to arrest those who sought to intimidate her,
and the longest term of imprisonment ever given old Youkeoma himself,
perhaps the longest ever given an Indian at an Indian Agency, was
because of his threatening this woman.
When it grew near to sunset the men began returning from the fields,
plodding in with their sacks and staves and huge planters’ hoes. Many
of them were aged, their long hair matted and snaky-looking; but there
were enough of the burly, thickset fellows to give any official pause
if he contemplated dictating to that outfit. Even those who closely
observe these people wonder at this evidence of physique. The Hopi
lives largely on a vegetable diet. His teeth are blunted and worn down
like a horse’s from the eating of flint-like corn. Because of isolation
and clan ceremonial exclusion they have become devitalized through
centuries of inbreeding, and quickly succumb to disease. And yet these
same Hopi are famed for two things requiring raw strength and sustained
energy: they can lift and pack on their backs the heaviest burdens, and
they are great long-distance runners. Many of their ceremonies include
the foot race, notably the sunrise competition on the day of the Snake
Dance. Given a long desert course, fifty to one hundred miles, and the
Hopi runner will wear down a horse. Their ability to bear burdens comes
from both sides of the house, since for ages the women have packed
water from the springs to the heights, and the men the harvests, the
firewood, and the rock for building. I have seen two moving piles of
wood on a mesa-trail, to discover one a burro-load and the other
covering a man, with small difference between them.
And they must have carried weight over distances that compared with
their runs, for how else were the Spanish Missions roofed? The great
timbers were brought on the backs of men. About 1629 the Hopi, obedient
and enslaved, brought these timbers from the San Francisco Mountains to
Oraibi and other points, a feat equaled only by the Acoma Indians, who
built a huge mission atop their penal height, the beams coming from San
Mateo or Mount Taylor. Each of these packs was more than fifty miles.
One of the unused timbers may be seen to-day in the convento part of
the Acoma Mission. It is a log measuring more than thirty feet in
length and two feet in thickness. Without mechanical equipment, the
raising of it to the mesa-top would tax any man’s ingenuity.
Especially would an official pause in dictation at the time of which I
speak, for the Hopi had defied two former superintendents and for
several years had done exactly as they pleased, in utter disregard of
all admonitions emanating by mail from Washington. Of course official
Washington had not worried, and for the rest of the world the Hopi do
not exist; but the example to about fifteen hundred other and
disciplined Hopi and to several thousand unregulated and undisciplined
Navajo, all in constant touch with these rebels, was not good. The
Agents reaped the effect of this timid policy, and it had given them
concern.
The Hopi had so acted at other times, and the methods adopted to
correct them had not been of the happiest. Officials had threatened
and, when the native did not stir, had offered bribes.
“Your bones will bleach in the sun!” one set had promised—to be
followed by: “Won’t you come in and be good, for a nice new contract
stove?” Now the bleaching process had affected only those so
unfortunate as to die naturally, and the Hotevilla people were content
with their piki stones and adobe fireplaces. The Indian does not
respect those who seek to buy him. When a threat proves as empty as it
is boastful, he is strengthened in no small degree. Washington has been
given to bluffing, and buying.
The Indian Service had not greatly concerned itself about these strange
people until 1887. Between 1847, when the Hopi were acquired as one of
the blessings of the Mexican War, and 1887, when the first school was
planted in Keams Cañon—forty years—they had lived practically as
undisturbed as since their coming from the cliff- and cavern-dwellings
in the northern cañons of the Utah border. A few traders had visited
them often enough to be known; and one of them, Mr. John Lorenzo
Hubbell, has told me of his witnessing a Snake Dance in the seventies,
a solitary white spectator where now several thousands congregate
annually. The tourist was not in those days, and had he been, under the
circumstances of the back-country, it is likely he would have been
going away from a Snake Dance rather than attending one.
In 1890 the defiance of the Oraibi first caused notice. Old
Lo-lo-lo-mi, their good chief, had been to Washington, and had agreed
to place the children of his faction in the school. His counsels were
disregarded by the opposition; in fact they imprisoned the old man and
threatened him with death for this lapse from the traditions.
Lo-lo-lo-mi was “too good,” as his name implied. The sub-Agent, Mr.
Ralph Collins, arrested several of the war-chiefs and sent them to
their Agent at Fort Defiance. When they returned they busied themselves
making more trouble; so troops were sent to pacify and coerce them, and
the first great blunder was made by an army officer. This officer
accompanied Collins to the Oraibi mesa. They were warned that the
hostiles had armed and meant to fight. Believing this to be so much
bluff, they ascended the mesa to the pueblo. A war-chief, who had
refused to attend a council, stepped out on one of the terraced houses.
He was painted for the occasion, carried a rifle, and looked the part
of his office. He was joined by a medicine man, who wore a raw
sheepskin that dripped blood and besmeared his body. These two, knowing
of many sympathizers within the hovels, dared the whites to combat and
greatly abused them. The two white men prudently retired after an
abortive parley.
Then came five troops of cavalry. The commanding officer invited the
hostile headmen to a council below the mesa, and gave his word that
they should be respected. They came, but stubbornly refused to change
their minds as to this white man’s educational propaganda. They were
then seized and bound as prisoners; and were afterward marched up the
pueblo trail as a screen for the soldiers. This was rank betrayal, and
the effects of it live in the Oraibi country to this day.
“Some white men do not keep their word.” And at Oraibi, or at least
among unreconstructed Oraibans, who are now at Hotevilla, it is wisdom
to suspect all white men.
Collins, the civilian and sub-Agent, had no part in this. He advised
against it and deplored it. It would have been better to risk a bit of
bad marksmanship, for which the Hopi is noted; it would have been
better to beat a few worthless war-chiefs and medicine men to death, if
that were actually necessary. One can forgive a battle—but betrayal
rankles in the heart.
The prisoners taken at this time were sent to Fort Wingate. In a few
months they were released on promise to be good, but when they returned
from captivity they too refused to keep the parole given. The goose of
an officer had produced a flock of ganders, and his work was to live
for nearly three decades. In 1894 troops were again in demand at
Oraibi, and nineteen of the Indian leaders were sent as prisoners to
Alcatraz Island. They were imprisoned about eight months, and returned
impenitent.
In 1898 the Hopi suffered from smallpox. It was not so bad as that
epidemic told of by the Spanish, but it was severe enough. Superstition
and fright, combined with fatalism, are hard things to conquer among a
people who know nothing of vaccination, who trust no stranger, but
prefer to die unassisted by aliens. Troops were necessary, to affect
quarantine and to cremate bodies. In 1899, say the records, troops came
again, and once more prisoners were sent to Fort Defiance.
All this time internal dissension was at work among the Oraibans, and
in 1905 differences as to the views of local oracles concerning the
traditions reached a climax. This quarrel involved nearly everyone
within reaching distance. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis
E. Leupp, the best supporter of discipline the Service has had in three
decades, was at odds with his Agent on this station and, to tell the
truth, this Agent had met one Waterloo at the Chimopovi pueblo, where
an outpost of the Oraibi dwelt. His effort to coerce the Hopi with an
enlarged Navajo police force had nearly resulted in bloodshed and real
war; and at the end of this fiasco the Navajo mercenaries threatened
his life because the pay-chest was not promptly thrown open to them.
So the Commissioner came to exert a strong personal influence. And he
found speedily that his personal influence in the great Desert amounted
to very little. The Indians had a keen sense of the fitness of things,
and they resented his appearing to negotiate with them without an
official sponsor.
“Who are you?” asked the troubled Oraibi, when invited to a council
with him.
“I am the Commissioner from Washington,” he stated, a fact that was
known to President Roosevelt, the Grid-iron Club, and the New York
Evening Post, and that should have been patent everywhere.
“Why do you come here without Moungwi, then?” they demanded. “He should
introduce you to us. We do not know you. Moungwi is not here. Why do
you come in the back way, from Winslow, and call a council without
Moungwi?”
Indians are often peculiarly consistent. They did not regret that
recent fracas with Moungwi, when they had seized him by the beard and
threatened to toss him bodily from the gigantic Chimopovi
cliffs,—action prevented only by his Navajo police threatening to open
fire,—but they did know something of official courtesy between and
among all Moungwis or Chiefs, and there is such a thing as having the
proper entrée, even with an Indian tribe in the far-removed hills. Very
likely the Commissioner said something about the respect due his
office; when arose a big Indian, who declaimed to this astonishing
effect:—
“This man comes here alone, and he has a crooked mouth. His words go
two ways. He is no Commissioner of Indian Affairs, or the Moungwi would
be here to tell us. I myself saw this man working with a shovel on the
railroad section-gang not three weeks ago. Don’t listen to him. He will
lead you the wrong trail.”
Now this was a terrible blow to dignity, and hurt all Washington.
Matters did not improve, and by 1906 the trouble had increased to the
point where troops were necessary once again. They came. They rehearsed
their parts perfectly, and prisoners were taken. A special inspector
was sent in to observe matters, and he found himself in a very
embarrassing position. The one hundred captives had arranged a hunger
strike. Receipts for their prison mess-equipment had been demanded of
them, in strict accordance with the farcical methods of accounting then
in vogue. The true Hopi hostile, loyal to high-priest Youkeoma, has
never signed for anything. He is reared to be wary of the white man’s
papers. As he cannot read them for himself, he classes everything in
the nature of a document along with the white man’s word, as
illustrated by the first army officer who betrayed him.
“If they won’t sign, let them starve,” said the soldier in this case,
and he was not at all worried about it. But the special inspector was
very much worried about it. He had to be more careful of his civil job;
so he managed early one morning, with the seductive aroma of boiling
coffee and the alluring scent of fried bacon, to develop a hungry Judas
among the younger men, who signed for the whole lot; and lo! by such
means all tribulation was avoided.
This time seventeen leaders were sent to Fort Huachuca, seventy-two
were put to work on the roads of the reserve, and a lot of younger men,
rebels in embryo, were dispatched to distant Indian schools, in the
belief that enforced education would bring calm to their troubled
spirits. Eight of these young men went to Carlisle. I had to deal with
them when they returned, some seven years later. In fact, the
Commissioner of that time advised me that they would prove a help in
administering the affairs of the reservation. They returned arrayed in
the clothing of the white man, but only three of them showed any signs
of repentance. Those of the Hotevilla, with one exception, shucked the
clothing promptly and went back to the blanket. They were sullen and
suspicious, and they had not lost their memories.
I did not blame them in great measure, for at least four had been
married men when taken from the pueblo. Their wives now had other
consorts, other children. The children of the rebel fathers would not
forgive them, because they repudiated the faithless wives. The fathers
blamed the Government for not protecting their households. And the
women said to me:—
“You took our men. We were left alone. We had to keep the children
alive, and this meant tending the fields and the sheep. Speak not to us
of morals.”
At least that was the English meaning of their argument and reproof,
whatever the Hopi terms of it. Quite so many “’Lispeths”: “You are all
liars, you English”; and in the same manner their sons and daughters
took to their “own unclean people savagely.”
Now a tribal marriage is a legal marriage, or so the courts have
decreed, of course far removed from the haunts of the alien and having
no specific knowledge of him or of his conditions. So, in strict
accordance with sacred property rights and the Great Book of
Platitudes, it was my duty to say to the outfit assembled: “You,
hussies, are guilty of adultery, and many of your children are
illegitimate; while you, impenitent rebels, may not take other wives,
since by so doing you would commit bigamy; and each of you, every one,
all and several, to wit, should have long terms in the guardhouse.”
That is what I should have said; but being of sound mind, and having
very little use for platitudes, especially those courageously hurled by
mail across two thousand miles, I did nothing of the sort. I had a
convenient place in which I kept the sacred book hidden, and had
trained myself into a complete forgetfulness of it.
But notwithstanding my sympathies, I could never soften the hatred of
one of the sons. He hated his father because of his mother’s treatment,
and above all this he hated white men, including me. The stupid sins of
one Moungwi are inherited by another in the line of succession.
“You took my father,” he said to me, “and left my mother to work hard
in the fields; and when I grew big enough to work you took me to
school, so she was left again without help. Then, when my father
returned from Carlisle, he would have nothing to do with my mother. And
you would not let me go home to her. I have no use for these ways of
the white men. I will not cut my hair, and I do not agree to continue
at school. You are strong enough to make me, but I will not do these
things for you.”
He could tell me this in straight English, as at my desert school he
had received a good grammar foundation; and he was not interrupted or
punished, because I encouraged the pupils to come to me and speak their
minds. But, being stronger, I elected to do these things for him,
having in mind his individual interests as separate and apart from the
feuds of the past; but I could not severely blame him for his stubborn
opposition. He was a very bright lad, and became an exceptional
student; but just as surely he returned finally to his “own unclean
people, savagely.” Three weeks on the roads, breaking stone and
wheeling sand, would have done more to cure that father’s rebellious
attitude than those years at Carlisle, exiled from his household and
all of life that he understood and cared for. To be sure,—and to be
fair to his instructors,—the man learned a great deal at Carlisle,
which was a very fine school; and more than this, he saw the wonders of
the white man. He was one of the first to witness an air flight. And
when he told his ancients at the pueblo of these strange and
unbelievable things he had seen in Philadelphia, they arose in wrath,
knocked out their ceremonial pipes, and denounced him as the greatest
liar unhung. So even by the elders, whose lost cause he had espoused
and suffered for, he was repudiated and damned. Few patriots get such
treatment as this. He was completely ostracized at home. To keep him in
food, I employed him as a local policeman, hoping he would revenge
himself; but this commission brought him only additional scorn and
reprobation. For long he lived at Hotevilla as a pelican in the desert;
where else could he live? Was it not home?
But we had reached 1911, with the same old situation burning on the
Oraibi mesa, save that the hostiles were now in a pueblo of their own,
and could be dealt with, however justly or unjustly, without affecting
those who had never actively resisted the Government. It was sheer
nonsense to begin again the farce of supplication and argument, of
cheap bribes and equally impotent threats. No bones had “bleached in
the sun,” and there were not enough native police and loyal employees
to risk an attempt at coercing this sullen horde. I returned to the
Agency and wrote a very impolitic report. Anything of truth that the
Indian Bureau does not wish to know is impolitic.
I recited the facts, and recommended, as the Government had found it
necessary to send in troops so many times before, and always after much
backing and filling and abortive negotiation,—all to the amusement of
the savage,—why not send troops now, and quickly. This recommendation
was dated July 28, 1911.
Government moves with a truly fearsome swiftness. I realize now, after
thirteen years of report-swapping and buck-passing, that some miracle
happened in that my suggestion was considered at all. I have been told
that a friend assured the Secretary of the Interior that I was not a
maniac. But it required until September 27, 1911 to request the
Secretary of War to detail cavalry from a distant point, when troops
were idle at Fort Apache only one hundred and eighty miles away—quite
in the neighborhood, as desert spaces are considered. Another month
drifted by, and on October 28 the Secretary of War detailed Hugh L.
Scott, then Colonel in rank, as an officer of Indian experience likely
to have influence with these strange people. Under date of November 15
I was directed to coöperate with Colonel Scott, and as no allowance was
made for the fact that it was winter and mails likely to be delayed
along the one hundred and five miles of wagon-transport, the great
Indian diplomatist and his officers and men reached the Moqui Agency
before my orders. Four months had been devoted to the delicate
untwisting of red tape that a telephone conversation between
Departments and a telegram to the nearest post would have settled in
twenty-four hours’ time. How comfortable if those Hopi had been Ute,
Apache, Navajo, or Sioux!