inhabited town within our borders, though how old the archæologists
have been unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Certain it is
that it was ancient when the Great Navigator set foot on the beach of
San Salvador; that it was hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain
and his mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera Cruz for the
taking of Mexico. One needs to be very close under its beetling cliffs
before any sign of the village can be detected, as the houses are of the
same color and, indeed of the same material as the rock upon which they
stand and so far above the plain that, as old Casteñeda, the chronicler
of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, records, “it was a very good musket
that could throw a ball as high.” The lofty situation of the town and
the effect of bleakness produced by the entire absence of vegetation
and by the cold, grey rock of which it is built reminded me of San
Marino, that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the Apennines,
while in the startling abruptness with which the mesa rears itself out
of the desert there is a suggestion of those strange monasteries of
Metéora, perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian plain. The
village proper consists of three parallel blocks of houses running east
and west perhaps a thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact,
primeval apartment-houses, each block being partitioned by cross-walls
into separate little homes which have no interior communication with
each other. Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer
wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like a flight of
three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo of Taos, a hundred miles or
so to the northward, this novel architectural scheme has been carried
even further by building the houses six and even seven stories high
and terracing them on all four sides so that they form a pyramid.) The
second story is set well back on the roof of the first, thus giving
it a broad, uncovered terrace across its entire front, and the third
story is similarly placed upon the second. In Acoma, which has about
seven hundred people, there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground;
and these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens who, not
satisfied with what was good enough for their fathers, must be for ever
experimenting with some new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent
innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the only access to
a house being by a rude ladder to the first terrace. If you are making
a call on the occupants of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny
trap-door in the floor of the second and literally drop in upon them—so
literally that your hosts see your feet before they see your face. It is
a novel experience ... yes, indeed. You gain access to the first floor of
an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship—by
climbing a ladder to the deck and then descending through a hatchway.
If you wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor apartment
or if you have a hankering to see the view from the topmost roof, you
can ascend quite easily by means of queer little steps notched in the
division walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the senior members
of the family, the second terrace is allotted to the daughter first
married, and the upper flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next.
If there are other married daughters they must seek apartments elsewhere
or live with grandpa and grandma in the basement.
Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly impressed with the
cleanliness of its inhabitants and the neatness of their homes. I don’t
like to shatter any illusions, but it struck me that the much-vaunted
neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering their beds with
scarlet blankets and whitewashing their walls. I have heard visitors
exclaim enthusiastically as they peered in through an open doorway: “Why,
I wouldn’t mind sleeping there at all.” They are perfectly welcome to
so far as I am concerned. As for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and
the open mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of the elements
of sanitation as a Congo black. If you doubt it, visit one of these sky
cities on a scorching summer’s day when there is no wind blowing. As an
old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me: “Say, friend, I’d ruther
have a skunk hangin’ round my tent than to have to spend a night to
leeward o’ one of them there Hopi towns.”
Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path to Acoma too steep to
climb, for when I was there not a soul in the place spoke a word of
English. There was a daughter of the village who had been educated at
Carlisle—Marie was her name, I think—but she was away on a visit. Perhaps
she couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only civilised person in
the community. That is one of the deplorable features incident to our
system of Indian education. A youth is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or
Riverside, as the case may be, and after being broken to the white man’s
ways is sent back to his own people on the theory that, by force of
example, he will alter their mode of living. But he rarely does anything
of the sort, for his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to
introduce innovations or treat him with the same contemptuous tolerance
with which the hidebound residents of a country village regard the youth
who is “college l’arned.” So, after a time, becoming discouraged by the
futility of attempting to teach his people something that they don’t want
to know, he either goes out into the world to earn his own livelihood as
best he may or else he again leaves his shirt tails outside his breeches,
daubs his face with paint on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a
fork and napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his fathers.
But you mustn’t get the idea that Acoma is wholly uncivilised, for it
isn’t. One household has an iron bed with large brass knobs, another
boasts a rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine. But the
most convincing proof that these untutored children of the sky possess a
strain of culture is in the fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to
greet the visitor with the raucous strains of “Every Little Movement” and
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
ACOMA HUNTER HOME FROM THE HUNT.]
In many respects the most remarkable feature of Acoma is its immense
adobe church, built upward of three centuries ago. It is remarkable
because every stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the
heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains three hundred feet
below on the backs of patient Indians. There are timbers in that church
a foot and a half square and forty feet long, brought by human muscle
alone from the mountains a long day’s march away. And it is no tiny
chapel, remember, but a building of enormous proportions, with walls
ten feet thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground than any
modern church in America. As a monument of patient toil it is hardly less
wonderful than the Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children
of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above its gaudy altar
hangs a royal gift, the town’s most treasured possession—a painting of
San José, presented to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his Most
Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon and Castile. Faded and
time-dimmed though it is, that picture once nearly caused an Indian
war. Some years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering from
drought and cattle sickness and all manner of disasters, looked on the
prosperity of Acoma and ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San
José. So Laguna, believing that if the saint could bring prosperity to
one pueblo, he could bring it to another, asked Acoma for the loan of
the picture, and, after a tribal council, the request was granted. Their
confidence in the saint was justified, for no sooner had the picture
been transferred to the walls of Laguna’s bell-hung, mud-walled mission
church than the rains came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve,
and the tourists, leaning from their car windows, bought more pottery
and blankets than they ever had before. After a time, however, Acoma
gently intimated to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked for the
return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas retorted that if possession
was nine points of the law in the white man’s country, in the Indian
country it was ten points—and then some, and that if the Acomas wanted
the picture they could come and take it—if they could. For several weeks
there was much sharpening of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both
pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma resounded to those same war
chants which preceded the massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the
saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these hill-folk are at
heart a peaceable people, and they were induced to submit the dispute
over the picture to the arbitrament of the white man’s courts. Perhaps it
was well for the peace of central New Mexico that Judge Kirby Benedict,
who heard the case, decided in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the
picture restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messengers sent from
Acoma to bring the sacred treasure back arrived at Laguna they found that
the picture had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding dejectedly
back to Acoma to break the news of the calamity they discovered under
a mesquite bush, midway between the two pueblos—God be praised!—the
missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised, of course, that San
José, released from bondage, had started homeward of his own volition
and had doubtless sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush until
the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once more on the wall of the
ancient church, just where he did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from
Madrid, and every morning the hill people file in and cross themselves
before him and mutter a little prayer.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The pottery painter.
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The blanket weaver.
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The turquoise driller.
ACOMA ARTISANS.]
In front of the church is the village graveyard, a depression in the rock
forty feet deep and two hundred square, filled with earth brought on the
backs of women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty years to
make it. Is it any wonder that the patient, moccasined feet of centuries
have sunk their imprint in the rock six inches deep? And the work was
done by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes carrying enough dirt in
sacks to the top of the Metropolitan Building to make a graveyard there.
The bones lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of human
limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum and you would doubtless
find among the myriads of bleached and grinning skulls some that had been
cleft by sword-blade or pierced by bullet—grim reminders of that day, now
three centuries agone, when Oñate’s men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm
and put three thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the Spanish
custom. A funeral in Acoma’s sun-seared graveyard is worth journeying
a long, long way to see. When the still form, wrapped in its costliest
blanket, has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among the
skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above it has been broken
the symbolic jar of water; when the relatives have brought forth pottery
and weapons and clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they
may go with their departed owner; when all these weird rites have been
performed the wailing mourners file away to those desolate houses where
the shamans are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find
the trail of the soul which has set out on its four days’ journey to the
Land That Lies Beyond the Ranges. It is a strange business.
American dominion has not yet resulted in destroying the picturesque
costumes of the Acomas, and I hope to Heaven that it never will.
Civilisation has enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely
garments of Europe for the beautiful and becoming costumes of China and
Japan. In Acoma the people always look as though they were dressed up
for visitors, although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the
sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of colours. The tendencies of a
man may be pretty accurately gauged by the manner in which he wears his
shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a dyed-in-the-wool
conservative, and you can make up your mind that he has no glass in
_his_ windows or doors to _his_ ground floor. But if he tucks it into
his trousers, white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that he is
a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it were, in which case he
usually goes a step further by hiding the picturesque _banda_, with
its suggestion of the buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too
large. On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives alike discard
their shirts and trousers for the primitive breech-clouts of their
savage ancestors, streak and ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and
yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic
head-dresses, and transform themselves into very ferocious and repellent
figures indeed. A Hopi in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a
bad dream.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“DANCE MAD!”
“On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with
red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with
fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into the creatures of a
bad dream.”]
The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, somewhat resembling that worn
by their cousins on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the
neck and one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well chosen, for
the Acomas have the finest necks and busts of any women that I know.
This is due, no doubt, to the fact that they carry all the water used
in their houses from the communal reservoir in _tinajas_ balanced on
their heads, frequently up a ladder and two steep flights of stairs,
thus unconsciously developing a litheness of figure and a mould of form
that would arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoulders is
drawn a little shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then there is more
scarlet in the kilts which reach from the waist to the knees and a
contrast in the black stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare
their dainty feet—the smallest and prettiest women’s feet that I have
ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk are abnormally small, the
result, doubtless, of the constant clutching of the uneven rock. The
picturesqueness of the women’s costumes is enormously increased by the
quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery which they affect,
which tinkles musically when they walk. This jewellery, which they
hammer out of Mexican _pesos_, obtaining the turquoises from the rich
and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the Acomas’ chief
sources of revenue, for they sell great quantities of it to the agents
of the curiosity dealers along the railway and these resell it to the
tourists on the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hundred per
cent. They make several other forms of decorative wares: blankets, for
example—though the Hopi blankets are not to be spoken of in the same
breath with the beautiful products of the looms of their unfriendly
Navajo neighbours—and pottery jars which they patiently decorate in fine
grey-black designs and burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered,
their work is probably the most artistic done by any Indians in America
to-day.
But to return to the highway of narrative from which I find that I
have inadvertently wandered. When a girl is old enough to get married,
which is usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth birthday,
she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue-black hair in two large
whorls, like doughnuts, one on each side of her dainty head. The whorl
is supposed to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi emblem of
maidenhood. To arrange this complicated coiffure is a long day’s task,
and after it is once made the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by
sleeping on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it. When a girl
marries, which she generally does very early in her teens, she must no
longer wear the _nash-mi_, as the whorls are called. Instead, her hair
is done up in two pendent rolls, symbolical of the ripened squash, which
is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after you have seen the litters
of fat, brown babies which gambol like puppies before every door, and
the rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that there must be some virtue
in this symbolical hair-dressing after all.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“When a girl is old enough to get married she is expected to arrange her
lustrous, blue-black hair in two large whorls.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“Rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
sun-baked housetop.”
YOUNG ACOMANS.]
Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst’s dream come true. From time beyond reckoning the
women have possessed the privileges and power for which their pale-faced
sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is Mrs. Acoma the ruler
of her household but she is absolute owner of the house and all that is
in it. In fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all, and if
his wife wishes to put him out of her house she may. Instead of a woman
taking her husband’s name after marriage, he takes hers, and the children
that they have also take the name of their mother. In other words, if Mr.
Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes Mr. Jones and their children are the
little Joneses. And the men accept their feminine rôles even to playing
nursemaid while the women do the work, it being not the exception but
the rule to see even the governors and war captains dandling squalling
papooses on their knees or toting them up and down the main street on
their backs. A comic artist couldn’t raise a smile in Acoma, for he would
find that all his pet jokes are there accepted facts.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
His first riding lesson.
_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
The dancing lesson.
_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
The history lesson.
THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI.]
Even more interesting than Acoma, from an architectural standpoint,
is the pyramid pueblo of Taos (pronounced as though it were spelled
“_tous_,” if you please). This strange town—in many respects the most
extraordinary in the world—is built on the floor of a mountain-girdled
valley, some seventy miles due north from Santa Fé, and can best
be reached by leaving the main line of the railway at Barrancas or
Servilleta and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage. Though it
is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa Fé in a single day, the
journey is a very fatiguing one, it being much better to spend the night
at the ranch-house at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in comfort
the next morning. There are really two towns—the white man’s and the
Indian’s—four miles apart. White man’s Taos consists of little more than
a sun-swept plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican houses of adobe,
while running off from the plaza are numerous dim and narrow alleys,
likewise lined by humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of which
that immortal hero of American boyhood, Kit Carson, lived and died.
For Taos, you must understand, was long the terminus of that historic
trail by which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Missouri went
down into the Southwest. Here, then, came such famous frontiersmen as
Carson and Jim Bridger, and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter
beads and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and furs. Save for
a few greybeards who dwell in their memories of the exciting past, the
frontiersmen have all passed round that dark turning from which no man
returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their spurs and the clatter
of their high-heeled boots no more. In their stead have come another
breed of men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who confront the
Indian with brushes instead of bowie-knives; for Taos, because of its
extraordinary wealth of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple
mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become the rendezvous
for a group of brilliant painters who are perpetuating on canvas the red
men of the terraced houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early
dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low, squat pyramids at
Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of two huge pyramidal structures,
one six the other seven stories high, with a stream meandering between.
In their general construction the houses of Taos are like those of
Acoma, but instead of being terraced only on the front, they are built
in two huge squares which are terraced on all four sides, looking from
a little distance like the pyramids which children erect with stone
building-blocks. These two huge apartment houses together accommodate
upward of eight hundred souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only
be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder after him being
the Pueblo’s way of bolting his door. Though it needs iron muscles and
leathern lungs to reach the apartments at the top, the view over the
surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos presents, I suppose,
the nearest approach to socialistic life that this country has yet known,
for the houses are built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens,
grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and if there is a
surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the community.
The communal form of government existing among the Hopi has proven so
successful in practice that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since
adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Although these Indians
of the terraced houses are wards of the nation, to use a term which has
become almost ironic, the white man’s law stops short at the boundaries
of their pueblos, for they make their own laws, enforce them with their
own police, maintain their own courts of justice, and inflict their own
peculiar punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are still used
as a punishment for misdemeanours, though the Indians go the Puritans
one better by clamping down the culprit’s head as well as his hands
and feet. At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an elected
governor, known as the _cacique_, whose word is law with a capital L.
Associated with him is a council of wise men called _mayores_, whose
powers are a sort of cross between those of a board of aldermen and a
college faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council frequently
assume an almost parental character, it being customary for it to advise
the young men of the pueblo when to marry—and whom. If an Indian gets
into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in the county court,
but differences between themselves are settled according to their own
time-honoured customs. Though the police force of Acoma consists of but
a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord around the crown of
his sombrero, he takes himself quite as seriously as a member of the
Broadway traffic squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique and
the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from his hip, I doubt not
that he would prove quite as efficient in an emergency.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
THE PYRAMID-PUEBLO OF TAOS.
“At Taos the novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by
building the houses five and even six stories high and terracing them on
all four sides, so that they form a sort of pyramid.”]
The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the administration of those
laws regulating the conduct of the community as were the Old Testament
prophets. When a member of the tribe plays football with the public
morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is tried by the _mayores_
and, if found guilty, is expelled from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The
system is as efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had an
opportunity to see this novel form of punishment in operation. I was
descending from the mesa at Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the
absence of Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter. He was
a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my memory serves me faithfully,
was Kill Hi. It should have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the
precipitous path my attention was attracted by a crowd, composed of the
major portion of the pueblo’s population, which was stolidly watching
four Indians—the constable and three others—loading a woman whose hands
and feet were bound with ropes into a wagon. Despite her screams and
struggles, they tossed her in as indifferently as they would a sack of
meal.
“Who is she? What’s the matter?” I asked Kill Hi.
“Oh, nothin’ much,” was the indifferent answer. “She damn bad woman. They
no want her here. They tell her to get out quick—vamoose. She no go. So
they take her off in wagon like you see.”
“But what are they going to do with her?”
“Oh, I don’ know. Dump her out in desert, mebbe.”
“But what will happen to her?” I persisted. “Won’t she starve to death?”
“Oh, I don’ know,” said Kill Hi carelessly, cramping the buckboard so
that I could get in. “Mebbe. P’raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like
other people.”
He was quite right—they certainly are _not_.
III
CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW