THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA
They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a
sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and
down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said
that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has
said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted
Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream
Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and
deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart
business tricks of modern Yankeedom.
Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old
pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there
was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off
that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish,
present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted
pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First
march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to
leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn.
Back at Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one
of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet
hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish dons are
followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides
the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700,
sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of
the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me
whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa--called
Enchanted--or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of
the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is--pagan
hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with
the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed
these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.
Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors
have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a
winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can
imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and
necklaces and turquoise-set buttons down trouser leg, scouring below
these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the
Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts
and crafts of the Hopi people--silver work, weaving, basketry--into the
Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether
the raid took place a minute before midday, or a second after
nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads
over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and
Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took
refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find.
There you can see their cities and towns to this day.
And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost
in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line
from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and
Laguna and Acoma and Zuni and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and
Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will
find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will,
which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not
even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some
of these ruins--in the Manzanos and in western Arizona--would house a
modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they:
council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once
peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you
not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert,
this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than
picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?
[Illustration: A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among
the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household]
There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel
as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But
if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff
Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from
the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand
Canyon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously
known as Moki, Zuni, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and
life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them,
though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can
visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but
Isleta has been so frequently "toured" by sightseers, I preferred to go
to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the
western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the
Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can
cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.
Up to the present, the inconvenience of reaching Acoma will effectually
prevent it ever being "toured." When you have to take a local train that
lands you in an Indian town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in
the morning, or else take a freight, which you reach by driving a mile
out of town, fording an irrigation ditch and crawling under a barb wire
fence--there is no immediate danger of the objective point being rushed
by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the
traffic. If anything as unique and wonderful as Acoma existed in Egypt
or Japan, it would be featured and visited by thousands of Americans
yearly. As it is, I venture to say, not a hundred travelers see Acoma's
Enchanted Mesa in a year, and half the number going out fail to see it
properly owing to inexperience in Western ways of meeting and managing
Indians. For instance, the day before I went out, a traveler all the way
from Germany had dropped off the transcontinental and taken a local
freight for the Hopi towns. When a tourist wants to see things in
Germany, he finds a hundred willing palms out to collect and point the
way; but when a tourist leaves the beaten trail in America, if he asks
too many questions, he is promptly told to "go to--" I'll not say where.
That German wasn't in a good mood when he dropped off the freight train
at Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the Marmons, but there is no
regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good
Westerner, you will carry your own luncheon, or take cheerful pot luck
as it comes; but the German wasn't a good Westerner; and it didn't
improve his temper to have butter served up mixed with flies to the tune
of the landlady's complaint that "it didn't pay nohow to take tourists"
and she "didn't see what she did it for anyway."
They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from
twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once,
Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as
easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his
temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity
leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart
rock and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course,
missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is
a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could
not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at
Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the
crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too
fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically
characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own
advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a
good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a
month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff--and thousands of
travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma,
literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world;
and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to
put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder
people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw
away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round
that way so you could see it by moonlight.
* * * * *
Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me _very_ seriously to rise
at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile
to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an
_acequia_ ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.
The desert sunrise atoned for all--air pure wine, the red-winged
blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the
overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough
to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of
the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man
edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the
true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and shirts seen on the figures
moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in
diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed
brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed
fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less
than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue,
brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder
straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments
completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet
cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep
stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are
now affecting the latter.
The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible
drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie
dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost
knocks you off your feet.
The railroad passes almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that
when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story
houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get
off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of
Laguna are past. Long ago--in the fifties or thereabouts--the dam to the
lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of
flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away
for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged
herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated
here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology
that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all
that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town
limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds;
or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme
a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is
female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his
saddle and bridle, and leave.
"I marry, yes," said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, "and I have one
girl--her," pointing to a pretty child, "but my man, I guess he--a bad
boy--he leave me."
If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and
bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.
I set this fact down because a whole school of modern sex sociologists,
taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an
Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution of
woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality
among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.
At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you
must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance
luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr.
Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the
Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has
usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower
people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the
pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi
communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of
the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early
seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married
Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After
almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879
succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to
school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading
citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce
children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day,
there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and
Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen
hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you
may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of
downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through
the roof.
[Illustration: _Copyright by H. S. Poley_
A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave]
Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet
straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of
doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant--Marie
Iteye--speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching
and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets--1st, 2nd
and 3rd, they call them--of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a
white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all
whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the
first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but
then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the
porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling,
purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the
sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these
third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the
floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways
opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy
being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads
and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of
the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians
curiously discouraged about results.
"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one
teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."
"Doubt if it ever does much good?" I should like to take that teacher
and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and
then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not
be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and
sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has
barely begun--well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four
winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could
barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large
pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer. At Acoma, you
feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and
traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking
your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid
and degenerate.
* * * * *
Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma;
and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as
you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a
motor if you have one.
Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the
yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes
straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous,
voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and
carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf,
miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod--gorgeous
desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was
an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have
not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.
Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of
Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jose River,
jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been,
or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of
the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull
steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods
over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy
river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and
the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat
topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant
sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It
dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.
Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split
by the shimmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors,
transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam
shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus shines with
the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern
conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild
poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars,
they draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like
bits of heaven, because their faces shine with the light of an unclouded
sky from dawn to dark.
You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses
belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on
horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the
figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses
and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in
Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off
earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids
enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an
Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and
lilac light and heat haze shimmering and unreal as a poet's vision.
It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the
planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to shimmer and
shift and lift from earth in mirage altogether.
You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of
herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not
poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready
money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches
suffice for meal.
Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pass into a
large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow
_tufa_ walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky
and unreal. Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when
you lift your eyes, and there--straight ahead--lies an enchanted island
in this lake of light, shimmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical
yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three
Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of
perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or
sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple
sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.
Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. "The
Enchanted Mesa," he says.
I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man
has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a
race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge
rock? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Are there pottery remnants of
a dead city? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Both men climbed the
rock, though Hill Ki tells me confidentially they "were very scare,"
when it came to throwing a rope up over the end of the rock, to pull the
climber up as if by pulley. Marmon and Pratt have both been up; and Hill
Ki tells me so have two venturesome white women climbers, whose names he
does not know, but "they weren't scare." As we pass from the end to the
side of the Enchanted Mesa, it is seen to be an oblong slab utterly cut
off from all contact but so indented halfway up at one end as to be
ascended by a good climber to within distance of throwing a rope over
the top. The quarrel between Lummis and Hodge has waxed hotter and
hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa without any finale to the dispute; and
far be it from an outsider like myself to umpire warfare amid the gods
of the antiquarian; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acoma
Indians may explain the whole matter; and that both men may be partly
right? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports
that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony. Before a
youth reaches manhood, while he is still being instructed in the
mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council room or _kiva_, it is
customary for the Acomas to blindfold him and send him to the top of the
Enchanted Mesa for a night's lonely vigil with a jar of water as
oblation to the spirits. These jars explain the presence of pottery,
which Lummis describes. They would also give credence to at least
periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of house ruins, on the
other hand, would explain why Hodge scouted Lummis' theory. The Indians
explained to Miss McLain that a boy could climb blindfolded where he
could not go open-eyed, a fact that all mountain engineers will
substantiate.
[Illustration: A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona]
But what matters the quarrel? Is not the whole region an Enchanted Mesa,
one of the weirdest bits of the New World? You have barely rounded the
Enchanted Mesa, when another oblong colossus looms to the fore, sheer
precipice, but accessible by tiers of sand and stone at the far end;
that is, accessible by handhold and foothold. Look again! Along the top
of the walled precipice, a crest to the towering slab, is a human wall,
the walls of an adobe streetful of houses, little windows looking out
flush with the precipice line like the portholes of a ship. Then you see
something red flutter and move at the very edge of the rock top--Hopi
urchins, who have spied us like young eagles in their eyrie, and shout
and wave down at us, though we can barely hear their voices. It looks
for all the world like the top story of a castle above a moat.
At the foot of the sand-hill, I ask Hill Ki, why, now that there is no
danger from Spaniard and Navajo, the Hopi continue to live so high up
where they must carry all their supplies sheer, vertical hundreds of
feet, at least 1,500 if you count all the wiggling in and out and around
the stone steps and stone ladders, and niched handholds. Hill Ki grins
as he unhitches his horses, and answers: "You understan' when you go up
an' see!" But he does not offer to escort me up.
As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little
Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.
Though she cannot speak one word of English and I cannot speak one word
of Hopi we keep up a most voluble conversation by gesture. Don't ask how
we did it! It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. She is
dressed in white, home-woven skirt with a white rag for a head
shawl--badge of the good girl; and her stockings come only to the
ankles, leaving the feet bare. The feet of all the Hopi are abnormally
small, almost monkey-shaped; and when you think of it, it is purely
cause and effect. The foot is not flat and broad, because it is
constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the
Hopi women look at my broad-soled, box-toed outing boots in amazement.
At hard spots in the climb, they would turn and point to my boots and
offer me help till I showed them that the sole, though thick, was
pliable as a moccasin.
The little girl signaled; did I want to go up?
I nodded.
She signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; or the long,
easy path by the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well
as foothold, and the sand promised to roll you back fast as you climbed
up, I signaled the hard way; and off we set. I asked her how old she
was; and she seemed puzzled how to answer by signs till she thought of
her fingers--then up went eight with a tap to her chest signifying self.
I asked her what had caused such sore inflammation in her eyes. She
thought a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winnowed one hand as of
wind--the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation up for three
hours without a word being spoken; but by this, a little hand sought
mine in various affectionate squeezes, and a pair of very sore eyes
looked up with confidence, and what was lacking in words, she made up in
shy smiles. Poor little Hopi kiddie! Will your man "be bad boy," too, by
and by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white
civilization that is encroaching on your tenacious, conservative race?
After all, you are better off, little kiddie, a thousand fold, than if
you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York.
By this, what with wind, and sand, and the weight of a kodak and a
purse, and the hard ascent, one of the two climbers has to pause for
breath; and what do you think that eight-year-old bit of small humanity
does? Turns to give me a helping hand. That is too much for gravity. I
laugh and she laughs and after that, I think she would have given me
both hands and both feet and her soul to boot. She offers to carry my
kodak and films and purse; and for three hours, I let her. Can you
imagine yourself letting a New York, or Paris, or London street gamin
carry your purse for three hours? Yet the Laguna people had told me to
look out for myself. I'd find the Acomas uncommonly sharp.
That climb is as easy to the Acomas as your home stairs to you; but it's
a good deal more arduous to the outsider than a climb up the whole
length of the Washington Monument, or up the Metropolitan Tower in New
York; but it is all easily possible. Where the sand merges to stone, are
handhold niches as well as stone steps; and where the rock steps are too
steep, are wooden ladders. At last, we swing under a great overhanging
stone--splendid weapon if the Navajos had come this way in old days, and
splendid place for slaughter of the Spanish soldiers, who scaled Acoma
two centuries ago--up a tier of stone steps, and we are on top of the
white limestone Mesa, in the town of Acoma, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
streets, and its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd story houses, the first roof reached
by a movable ladder, the next two roofs by stone steps.
I shall not attempt to describe the view from above. Take Washington's
Shaft; multiply by two, set it down in Sahara Desert, climb to the top
and look abroad! That is the view from Acoma. Is the trip worth while?
Is mountain climbing worth while? Do you suppose half a hundred people
would yearly break their necks in Switzerland if climbing were not worth
while? As Hill Ki said when I asked him why they did not move their city
down now that all danger of raid had passed, "You go up an' see!" Now I
understood. The water pools were but glints of silver on the yellow
sands. The flocks of sheep and goats looked like ants. The rampart rocks
that engirt the valley were yellow rims below; and across the tops of
the far mesas could be seen scrub forests and snowy peaks. Have
generations--generations on generations--of life amid such color had
anything to do with the handicrafts of these people--pottery, basketry,
weaving, becoming almost an art? Certainly, their work is the most
artistic handicraft done by Indians in America to-day.
Boys and girls, babies and dogs, rush to salute us as we come up; but my
little guide only takes tighter hold of my hand and "shoos" them off. We
pass a deep pool of waste water from the houses, lying in the rocks, and
on across the square to the twin-towered church in front of which is a
rudely fenced graveyard. The whole mesa is solid, hard rock; and to make
this graveyard for their people, the women have carried up on their
backs sand and soil enough to fill in a depression for a burying place.
The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally
a bank of human limestone.
[Illustration: At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the
pueblos in New Mexico]
I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma
who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the
square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red
skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise
ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak
such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It
is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another
shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.
She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the
finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above
sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest
gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the
railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out
in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at
the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for
ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.
Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and
chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier
of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third
story room; and a cleaner room I have never seen in a white woman's
house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window
between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle
might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking
water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement,
and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is
spotless.
"Where do you sleep, Marie?" I ask.
"Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime."
And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her
father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone
through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.
And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact
testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon
and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as
different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the
Bowery.
All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting
wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts
of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as
the Acomas descend.
We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps,
preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act
took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours'
visit amid the gamins of New York, or London? At the foot of the cliff,
we shook hands all round and said good-by; and when I looked back up the
valley, the children were still waving and waving. If this be humble
Indian life in its Simon pure state, with all freedom from our rules of
conduct, all I have to say is it is infinitely superior to the hoodlum
life of our cities and towns.
One point more: I asked Marie as I had asked Mr. Marmon, "Do you think
your people are Indians, or Aztecs?" and the answer came without a
moment's hesitation--"Aztecs; we are not Indian like Navajo and
Apaches."
Opposite the Enchanted Mesa, I looked back. My little guide was still
gazing wistfully after us, waving her shawl and holding tight to a coin
which I trust no old grimalkin pried out of her hand.