Youkeoma looked me over carefully, and drew his blanket around his
shoulders as if he had been insulted.
“I am done with white men,” he said. “I will not shake hands with you
or any other white man.”
“Here is a telegram from Washington. It must be read to you.”
The interpreter explained.
“I do not care to hear anything from Washington.”
“But I must read it to you.” And I straightway began. The interpreter
translated the first sentence, the second—when the old fellow stood up.
He waved his arm toward the soldiers outside, and cried angrily:—
“You have your men here; why not go ahead and do what you want? You can
cut off my head. Why don’t you do it? I will have nothing more to say
to you. I am through with white people.”
He stalked from the council-room, the maddest man in Arizona; and that
was the last of him for many months.
“Now, Colonel, if you please, I will search the pueblo. Will you lend
me your flashlight?”
“What do you want with that? It’s broad day.”
“I shall have to crawl into every corn-crib and cellar in the place,
and none of them have windows.”
He directed that soldiers accompany me through the village, but at the
first house I asked them not to come inside. They remained in the
street. This was followed throughout the search. The two employees who
had some knowledge of this population entered with me.
“There should be three children in this house,” one would say.
There were never any children in sight. The long, narrow, principal
room would seem to have no doors leading from it. Racks of corn,
carefully piled, and blankets and folded skins lined the walls. The
employees, having assisted in such matters before, began lifting down
these blankets and piled furnishings, to reveal usually a small door,
and beyond this door would loom the blackness of a corn-cellar. The
flashlight showed more corn racked up, melons in piles, and filled
sacks; but no children. I would scramble through the little trap to
make a closer investigation, recalling how Judge Hooker had walled up
his brood, years before, when the Hopi of the First Mesa protested
against education.
In the first of these places there was no room for hiding between the
sacks, and when I moved against them I could feel the corn they held. I
prepared to leave the place, and was at the opening, when I heard a
sigh, as if someone had long held his breath and could hold it no
longer. Back I went. No one among the melons, nor behind the racked
corn. I began moving the sacks. Three were filled with corn on the cob;
the fourth—my hand grasped the top of a Hopi head. It was like the jars
of wine and the hidden thieves.
From the sacks we delivered the three children of that household.
When they appeared in the main room, laughing, the father caught them
in his arms; and when they were taken from him, the mother proceeded to
play the same trick. It was easy to break his hold on them, but not so
easy to handle a woman without giving grounds for complaint as to rough
usage—a charge the Hopi like to make. But those three children went
into the street, notwithstanding all this hokum, and other employees
took them before the physicians. There were three doctors present, the
Army surgeon and two physicians of the Indian Service. Each child
received a thorough examination, and only those fit and above the age
of ten years were taken from the village.
I do not know how many houses there are in Hotevilla, but I crawled
into every filthy nook and hole of the place, most of them blind traps,
half-underground. And I discovered Hopi children in all sorts of
hiding-places, and through their fright found them in various
conditions of cleanliness. It was not an agreeable job; not the sort of
work that a sentimentalist would care for.
In but one instance was real trouble threatened. On coming from one
cellar, I found the head of the house sitting in the centre of his
castle with an axe at his feet. He protested against the removal of the
children, and grasped the axe as if to use it. The men with me promptly
removed the implement, and threw him into a corner.
By midday the wagons had trundled away from Hotevilla with fifty-one
girls and eighteen boys. Our survey of the place in July had warranted
an estimate of one hundred and fifty pupils, but in the five months
that had elapsed an epidemic of measles and its terrible aftermath of
bronchial pneumonia had swept the town.
“Where are the others?” the interpreter asked of a villager.
“Dead,” he replied, solemnly.
So much for expediency and Departmental delay.
Of those taken, nearly all had trachoma. It was winter, and not one of
those children had clothing above rags; some were nude. During the
journey of forty-five miles to the Agency many ragged garments went to
pieces; the blankets provided became very necessary as wrappings before
the children reached their destination. It was too late to attempt the
whole distance that afternoon, so the outfit went into camp at the
Oraibi day-school, where a generous meal was provided, and the next day
their travel was completed.
Across the great Oraibi Valley was the pueblo of Chimopovi, perched on
the highest of the mesa cliffs. And this place had a suburb, dominated
by one Sackaletztewa, a direct descendant of the gentleman who had
founded the original Hopi settlement after their emerging from the
Underworld. Sackaletztewa was as orthodox as old Youkeoma, and it was
his following that had given battle to a former Agent and his Navajo
police. I proposed to Colonel Scott that Chimopovi should be visited.
“Take the troop to-morrow morning, and finish it up yourself.”
So next day the same scene was enacted. It was a short job, only three
children being found; but here occurred something like resistance. All
the protestants congregated in the house of Sackaletztewa. When I
entered, a man opened a little cupboard of the wall and produced a
packet of papers. They were offered to me as documents of great value.
And they were strange documents—letters from people of the country who
had read in newspapers of Youkeoma’s visit to Washington, and his
defiance of the Government. I suppose such persons have nothing better
to do, and write letters of sympathy to the members of every Indian
delegation that parades itself eastward in feathers and war-paint to
present a fancied grievance. I recall the words of one of these papers,
from some weak-minded woman:—
Chief Youkeoma: you are a noble man. Do not let the Government have
your children. Their schools are not the place for your Indian lads
who know only the hunt and the open spaces. Resist to the last
gasp. Die rather than submit.
Very like, she is now writing scenarios. Of course this correspondent
had read Fenimore Cooper, and was filled to the neck with the storybook
idea of Indians—lithe, clean, untouched by disease, and painted by
romance. The Southwest has no such Indians; and Indians, whether lithe
or not, are seldom clean and never romantic. She knew nothing of filth
and trachoma and child-prostitution, while the Hopi had brought such
things to a fine degree of perfection. And she lived in Indiana.
Now there is a wide difference between demanding the rights of Indians,
rights that should be sacred under agreements,—and perhaps foreign
treaties, such as those of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico,—and
inciting them to warfare and rebellion when teachers and physicians are
striving to recover them from ignorance and disease. There is a vast
difference between the argument that a title confirmed by three
sovereign Governments be not attacked for the sake of political loot—as
in the case of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico—and denouncing the
educational system of the United States and advising a group of
benighted savages to kill in a distant and lonely desert. That writer
from Indiana should have been a field matron for a little!
I have no sympathy with this type of sentimentalist. I deported some of
them from the Hopi desert country when they appeared with their box of
theoretical tricks.
I handed back the documents, and asked where the children were.
Accompanied by my Tewa policeman, I entered a small room off the main
house and found these three mentioned surrounded by relatives. The room
filled up to its capacity and a harangue began. At Hotevilla we had not
listened to argument, but here I thought it best to placate them, to
explain things, rather more in line with the moral-suasion programme
outlined from Washington. All talk led to one definite answer, growing
sullenly louder and louder: “You cannot take the children.”
We had to make an end. When I proceeded to lift one from the floor, in
a twinkle two lusty Indians were at my throat. The Tewa (Indian police)
came to my assistance, his face expanding in a cheerful grin as he
recognized the opportunity of battle, and three or four others draped
themselves around his form. The sound of the struggle did not at once
get outside. The Tewa began to thresh out with his arms and let his
voice be heard. An employee peered inside and set up a shout. Then in
plunged several very earnest fellows in uniform, and out went the
protestants, scrambling, dragging, and hitting the door jambs. The Tewa
followed to see that these things were properly managed, he being the
local and ranking officer in such affairs. I remained behind to counsel
against this attitude, but did not remain long enough, for on going
outside the house I spoiled a little comedy.
Sackaletztewa, the head man, a sinewy fellow of about fifty years, when
unceremoniously booted forth, had challenged the Tewa policeman to
mortal combat. He declaimed that no Indian policeman could whip him.
The soldiers had greeted this as the first worthy incident of a very
dull campaign.
“You have on a Washington uniform and wear guns,” said Sackaletztewa,
“but without them you are not a match for me. If you did not have those
things, I would show you how a real Hopi fights.”
Now this Tewa always rejoiced in a chance for battle. The fact that no
one at Hotevilla had been arrested had filled him with gloom.
Unbuckling his belt and guns, he handed them to the nearest trooper;
then he promptly shucked himself out of his uniform. Twenty or thirty
of the soldiers made a ring, their rifles extended from hand to hand,
and into this arena Nelson was conducting Sackaletztewa for the beating
of his life. It was a pity to issue an injunction. If I had remained
only five minutes longer in the house, those patient soldiers would
have had something for their pains, and the grudge of the Indian
police, who had suffered in esteem at Chimopovi five years earlier,
would have been wiped from the slate.
Sackaletztewa was a good man physically; he had courage; but he was a
Hopi, and knew nothing of striking blows with his fists. He would have
relied on the ancient grapple method of combat, and the proficient art
of scalp-tearing. Perhaps he would have tried to jerk Nelson’s ears off
by dragging at his turquoise earrings. He would have scratched and
gouged, and, if fortunate enough to get a twist in the neckerchief,
would have choked his man to a finish. All this is permitted by the
desert Indian rules of the game. But unless Nelson had been tied to a
post, he would have accomplished none of these things; for the first
rush would have carried him against a terrific right smash, accompanied
by a wicked left hook. Behind these two taps would have lunged one
hundred and sixty pounds of pure muscle. And a very bewildered Hopi
would have spent the remainder of the day holding a damaged head, and
wondering how he would manage a flint-corn diet without his teeth.
That night, blaming myself for the necessary interference, I joined
Colonel Scott at the Agency.
Now you will please not strive to conjure up a harrowing scene of
terrified children, removed from their parents, lonely and unconsoled.
They were not babies. They were nude, and hungry, and covered with
vermin, and most of them afflicted with trachoma, a very unpleasant and
messy disease. Some of them had attended this Cañon school in the past,
that time before their parents’ last defiance, and they knew what was
in store for them—baths, good food, warm clothing, clean beds and
blankets, entertainment and music, the care of kindly people. There
would be no more packing of firewood and water up steep mesa-trails,
and living for weeks at a time on flint corn, beans, and decaying
melons. There would be meat,—not cut from hapless burros,—and excellent
bread of wheat flour, gingerbread even; and toys and candy at that
wonderful time the Bohannas call Christmas. There would be games for
both boys and girls, and no one at this school would interfere with
their innocent Indian pleasures. Their parents would visit them, and
bring piki bread—and the parents very promptly availed themselves of
the privilege.
So there was nothing of exile or punishment involved in this matter;
and if you have any true regard for childhood and defenceless children,
there will be seen a great deal of protection and happiness in it. I
fancy that many of the girls—especially those who had reached that age
when the maternal uncles, the ogres of the family, assign them in
marriage and as the old men pleased—had been counting the days since
the first news of the troop’s coming.
It was a busy time for the corps of school employees when the wagons
arrived. Seventy-two children had to be recovered from the dirt and
vermin that had accumulated during their long holiday. The less said
about this the better; but I would have been amused to see the critics
at the job of hair-cutting!
Those children spent four years at the Cañon school, and without
vacations. When the school departments were closed in 1915, because
certain buildings showed weaknesses and I feared their collapse, the
Hotevilla children, having reached eighteen years, might decide for
themselves whether or not they wished further education. With few
exceptions, they elected to attend the Phœnix Indian school. They had
no wish to visit Hotevilla, and very frankly told me so. To illustrate
their standpoint, Youkeoma’s granddaughter, an orphan, was not of age
so to elect. She feared that I would consult the old man about the
matter, and she knew that he would insist upon her return to the pueblo
life. So she secreted herself in one of the wagons that would carry the
older pupils to the railroad, and went away without my knowledge.
I had advised against the immediate recall of the troop of soldiers,
and had expected that a sergeant’s squad would remain for some months
to return runaways and to preserve discipline among those who might
risk the power of my army of three policemen. It was not improbable
that a band of Hotevillans would come to the Cañon to demand their
children, once the soldiers were withdrawn. They had staged this play
before, and in 1913 certain Navajo did not hesitate to make off with
pupils. But trouble on the Border called. It was then I sought the
Colonel’s counsel. For a time he evaded a direct statement of his
views, but I was insistent, and he said:—
“I would never permit an Indian to remove his child from the school
against my orders to the contrary. They would find me sitting on the
dormitory steps. Other methods of prevention you must devise for
yourself.”
He concluded with the words I have quoted before: “Young man! you have
an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk.”
Very early the next morning the troop departed. There was a light fall
of snow, to be followed by more and more, until the stark Cañon cliffs
were frozen and white in the drifts. The little campaign in the hills
had closed just in time.
Twice thereafter Colonel Scott, accompanied by the cavalry, came to the
Desert; once to pacify the truculent Navajo at Beautiful Mountain,
after they had threatened the San Juan Agency at Shiprock, New Mexico,
and once to quiet the Ute on our northern borders. But the Moqui
Reservation was left entirely to my ruling. The Department read the
Colonel’s report through a reducing glass, and gave me eight policemen
instead of the twenty he advised. With these and a few determined
employees I contrived to have peace and order within the Hopi-Navajo
country—not always easily or pleasantly, but without actual war. And I
did not pack the proverbial trunk until the latter part of 1919, eight
years later, when ordered to take charge of the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico.