Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LV
MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
[Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPER.]
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
OCTOBER, 1899.
THE HELP THAT HARMS.
BY THE RIGHT REVEREND HENRY C. POTTER.
The analogies between the life of an individual and that other
organism which we call civilized society are as interesting as for any
other reason because of their inexhaustible and ever-fresh variety.
The wants, the blunders, the growth, the perils of the individual are
matched at every step by those other wants and dangers and
developments which rise in complexity and in variety as the individual
and the social organism rise in intelligence, in numbers, and in
wealth. It ought to interest us, if it never has, to consider from how
much that is mischievous and dangerous we should be delivered if we
could revert from the civilized to the savage state; and it is
undoubtedly true that serious minds have sometimes been tempted to
question whether civilization is quite worth all that it has cost us
in its manifold departures from a simple and more primitive condition.
Such a question may, at any rate, not unnaturally arise when we ask
ourselves the question, What, on the whole, is the influence upon
manhood--by which I mean, here and for my present purpose, the
qualities that make courage, self-reliance, self-respect, industry,
initiative--in fact, those independent and aggressive characteristics
by which great races, like great men, have climbed up out of earlier
obscurity and inferiority into power, leadership, and distinction;
what is the influence upon these of conditions which tend, apparently
by an inevitable law, to beget or to encourage indolence, inertia,
parasitic dependence?
One can not but be moved to such a question by either of two papers
which have recently appeared in these pages: I mean that entitled
Abuse of Public Charity, by Comptroller Bird S. Coler; and that by
Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, of Columbia University, on Public Charity
and Private Vigilance. The community whose capable and efficient
servant he is has reason to be thankful that, in the person of a
public official intrusted with such large responsibilities, it has a
thoughtful and far-seeing student of problems whose grave importance
he has so opportunely pointed out. It needs the courage and the
knowledge of such a one to affirm that "it is easier for an
industrious and shrewd professional beggar to live in luxury in New
York than to exist in any other city in the world," which, if any
social reformer or minister of religion or mere critic of the social
order had said it, would probably have been denounced as an
atrabilious and unwarranted exaggeration.
Concerning the comptroller's indictments of certain charitable
societies and organizations as expensive mechanisms for the
consumption of appropriations or contributions largely spent upon
their salaried officials, I am quite willing to recognize the force of
Professor Giddings's demurrer to the effect that a so-called
charitable society may now and then rightly exist, and expend its
income largely, if not wholly, upon the persons whom it employs as its
agents, since these agents are the vigilant committees whose office it
is to detect, discourage, and expose unworthy objects, whether of
public or private charity. But that, besides such agencies, there are
constantly called into being wholly spurious organizations, which
profess to exist for the relief of certain classes of sufferers or of
needy people; that these succeed, sooner or later, in fastening
themselves upon the treasury of the city and of the State; and that
they are, in a great many cases, monuments of the most impudent and
unscrupulous fraud, there can be no smallest doubt.
Well, it may be asked, What are you going to do about it? Will you
accept the inevitable evils that march in the rear of all public or
private charity, or will you sweep all the various agencies, which
have relieved such manifold varieties of human want and alleviated to
such an incalculable degree human misery, out of existence? Will you
care to contemplate what a great city like New York or London would be
if to-morrow you closed the doors of all the hospitals, _crèches_,
homes of the aged, asylums for the crippled, the blind, the insane,
and the like, and turned their inmates one and all into the street?
That is certainly a very dramatic alternative to present; but suppose
that we look at it a little more closely. And, in order that we may, I
shall ask my reader to go back with me, not to that primitive or
barbaric era to which I began by referring, but only to a somewhat
earlier stage in our own social history, with which many persons now
living are abundantly familiar. One of the interesting and startling
contrasts which might be presented to one anxious to impress a
stranger with our American progress would be to take only our present
century, and group together, out of its statistics, the growth and
development, in its manifold varieties, during that period in any
city, great or small, of institutional charity. But if such a one were
just he would have, first of all, to put upon his canvas some
delineation of that situation which, under so many varying conditions
and amid such widely dissimilar degrees of privilege or of
opportunity, preceded it. I listened the other day to the story of a
charming woman, of marked culture and refinement, as she depicted,
with unconscious grace and art, the life of a gentlewoman of her own
age and class--she was young and fair and keenly sympathetic--on a
Southern plantation before the civil war. One got such a new
impression of those whom, under other skies and in large ignorance of
their personal ministries or sacrifices, we had been wont to picture
as indolent, exclusive, indifferent to the sorrow and disease and
ignorance that, on a great rice or cotton or sugar plantation in the
old days, were all about them; and one learned, with a new sense of
reverence for all that is best in womanhood, how, in days that are now
gone forever, there were under such conditions the most skillful
beneficence and the most untiring sympathies.
But, in the times of which I speak, the service on the plantation for
the sick slave (which, an ungracious criticism might have suggested,
since a slave was ordinarily a valuable piece of property, had
something of a sordid element in it) was matched in communities and
under conditions where no such suspicion was possible. No one who
knows anything of life in our smaller communities at the beginning of
the century can be ignorant of what I mean. There was no village or
smallest aggregation of families that had not its Abigail, its "Aunt
Hannah," its "Uncle Ben," who, when there was sickness or want or
sorrow in a neighbor's house, was always on hand to sympathize and to
succor. I do not forget that it is said that, even under our greatly
changed conditions, in modern cities this is still true of the very
poor and of their kindness and mutual help to one another; and I thank
God that I have abundant reason, from personal observation, to know
that it is. But, happily, neither great cities nor small are largely
made up of the very poor, and the considerations that I am aiming to
present to those who will follow me through these pages are not
concerned with these. What I am now aiming to get before my readers is
that there was a time, and that it was not so very long ago, when that
vast institutional charity which exists among us to-day, and which I
believe to be in so many aspects of it so grave a menace to our
highest welfare, did not exist, because it had no need to exist. The
ordinary American community, East or West, had, as distinguishing it,
however small its numbers and narrow its means, two characteristics
which our modern systems of institutional charity are widely
conspiring to extinguish and destroy. One of these was that resolute
endurance of straitness and poverty of which there is so fine and true
a portraiture in Miss Wilkins's remarkable story Jerome. I venture to
say that the charm of that rare book, to a great many of the most
intelligent and appreciative of its readers, lay in the fact that they
could match it, or something like it, in their own experience; that
they had known silent and proud women, and brave and proud boys, to
whom, whatever the hard pinch of want that they knew, to accept a dole
was like accepting a blow, and who covered their poverty alike from
the eye of inquisitive stranger or kin with a robe of secrecy that was
at once impenetrable and all-concealing. Life to them was a battle,
and they could lose it, as heroes have lost it on the tented field,
without a murmur; but to sue for bread to some other, even if that
other were of the same blood, would have smitten them as with the
stain of personal dishonor.
And over against such, in the days and among the communities of which
I speak, were those whose gift and ministry it was--without an
intrusive curiosity, without a vulgar ostentation, without a word or
look that implied that they guessed the sore need to which they
reached out--yet somehow to discover it, to succor it, and then to
help, finest and rarest of all, to hide it.
Now, then, behind such a condition of things there was a sure and wise
discernment, even if it was only instinctive, of a profound moral
truth, which was this: that you can not help me, nor I you, without
risk. For the most sacred thing in either of us is our manhood or
womanhood--that thing which differentiates us from any mere mechanism,
that thing in us which says, _I can, I ought, I will_. Take that out
of human nature and what is left is not worth considering, save as one
might consider any other clever mechanism. But the power to choose,
the power to act, and the consciousness that choice and action are to
be dominated by something that answers to the instinct of loyalty to
God, to self-respect, to the ideals of honor and righteousness--that
is what makes life worth living, and any conceivable thing worth
seeking or doing. Now, the moment that the question of our mutual
relations enters we have to be concerned with the way in which they
will act on this power, quality, characteristic--call it what you
will--that makes manhood. It is not enough, for example, that my
impulse to give you a pint of gin is a benevolent impulse, if certain
tendencies in you make it antecedently probable that a pint of gin
will presently convert you from the condition of a rational being into
that of a beast. And so of any impulse of mine in the direction of
beneficence which, in its gratification, threatens manhood--that is,
self-reliance, self-respect, independence, the right and faithful use
of powers in me.
And here we come to the problem which lies at the basis of the whole
question of charitable relief, for whatever class and in whatever
form. The wholesome elements in that earlier situation, to which I
have just referred, were threefold, and in our modern situation each
one of them is sorely attenuated, if not wholly absent:
1. In the first place, there was a relative uniformity of condition.
In other words, at the beginning of the present century in almost all
communities, whether industrial or agricultural, the disparities of
estate were inconsiderable. There was perhaps the rich man of the
village or town, or two or three or half a dozen of them; but they
were rich only relatively, and they were marked exceptions. The great
majority of the people were of comparatively similar employments and
circumstances. Among these there were indeed considerable varieties of
task work, but work and wage were not far apart; and, what was of most
consequence, a certain large identity of condition brought into it a
certain breadth of sympathy and mutual help, out of which came the
outstretched hand and the open door for the man who was out of work
and was looking for it.
2. Yes, _who was looking for it_. For here again was a distinguishing
note of those earlier days of which I am speaking. Idleness was a
distinct discredit, if not dishonor. In communities where everybody
had to work, an idler or a loafer was an intolerable impertinence, and
was usually made to feel it.
3. And yet, again, there was the vast difference in those days from
ours that the industries of the world had not taken on their immensely
organized and _mechanized_ characteristics. A mechanic--e. g., out of
a job--then could turn his hand to anything that ordinary tools and
muscle and intelligence could do. But an ordinary mechanic now must be
a skilled mechanician in a highly specialized department, and when he
is out of a job there, he is ordinarily out of it all along the line.
I might, as my reader will have anticipated me in recognizing, go on
almost indefinitely in this direction; but I have said enough, I
trust, to prepare him for the point which I want to make in connection
with our modern charities and their mischief. Our modern social order,
in a word, has become more complex, more segregated, more
specialized. A whole class of people in cities--those, I mean, of
considerable wealth--with a few noble exceptions (which, however, in
our greater cities, thank God, are becoming daily less rare), live in
profound ignorance of the condition of their fellow-citizens. Now and
then, by some sharp reverse in the financial world or some national
recurrence of "bad times," they are made aware that large numbers of
their neighbors are out of work and starving. And, at all times, they
are no less reminded that there is a considerable class--how
appallingly large it is growing to be in New York Mr. Coler has told
us--who need help, or think they do, and who, at any rate, more or
less noisily demand it in the street, at the door, by begging letter,
or in a dozen other ways that make the rich man understand why the
prayer of Agur was, "Give me neither poverty nor riches."[1]
[Footnote 1: Proverbs xxx, 8.]
Well, something must be done, they agree. What shall it be? Shall the
State do it, or the Church, or the individual? If only they could, as
to that, agree! But it has been one of the most pathetic notes of our
heedless and superficial treatment of a great problem that, here,
there has not been from the beginning even the smallest pretense of a
common purpose or any moderately rational course of action.
Undoubtedly it is true that there is no imaginable mechanism that
could relieve any one of these agencies from responsibility in the
matter of relief to the unfortunate, nor is it desirable that there
should be. Sometimes it has been the Church that has undertaken the
relief of the poor and sick, sometimes it has been largely left to the
individual, and sometimes it has been as largely left to the State.
But, in any case, the result has been almost as often as otherwise
mischievous, or corrupt and corrupting. For, in fact, the ideal mode
of dealing with the problems of sickness, destitution, and disablement
should be one in which the common endeavor of the State, the Church,
and the individual should be somehow unified and co-ordinated. But,
incredible as it ought to be, the history of the best endeavors toward
such co-ordination has been a history of large inadequacy and of
meager results. As an illustration of this it is enough to point to
the history of the Charity Organization Society in New York, which, I
presume, is not greatly different from that of similar societies
elsewhere. Antecedently it would have seemed probable that such a
society, which aims simply to discourage fraud, to relieve genuine
want, and to protect the community from being preyed upon by the idle
and the vicious, would have the sympathy of that great institution,
some of whose teachings are, "If any man will not work, neither shall
he eat"; "Stand upright on thy feet"; "Provide things honest in the
sight of all men"; "Not slothful in business"; and the like. But, as a
matter of fact, such societies have had no more bitter antagonists
than the churches, and no more vehement opponents than ministers of
religion. In a meeting composed of such persons I have heard one of
their number denounce with the most impassioned oratory any agency
which undertook, by any mechanism, to intrude into the question of the
circumstances, resources, or worthiness of those who were the objects
of ecclesiastical almsgiving. Who, he demanded, could know so well as
the clergy all the facts needed to enable them wisely and judiciously
to assist those worthy and needy brethren who were of their own
household of faith? Nothing could sound more plausible or probable;
but in a little while it happened that a woman who had for years been
a beneficiary of this very pastor died, leaving behind her, among her
effects, sundry savings-bank books which showed her to be possessed of
some thousands of dollars, which she bequeathed to relatives in a
distant land. Still more recently a case of a similar character has
occurred in which a still larger amount having been paid over in small
sums through a long series of years by a church, the whole, with
interest, has been found to have been hoarded, the recipient having
been a person entirely capable of self-support, and, as a matter of
fact, during the whole period self-supporting, and the large
accumulations are at present the subject of a suit in which the church
is endeavoring to recover what it not unnaturally regards as its own
misappropriated money.
And yet, as any one knows who knows anything of the delicacy,
vigilancy, and thoroughness with which a well-organized society
conducts its work, any such grotesque and deplorable result would,
with a little wise co-operation between the Church and such a society,
have been rendered impossible. I know how impatient many good people
are of the services of any such association, and we have all heard _ad
nauseam_ of their protests against a "spy system which invades the
sacred privacy of decent poverty," and the rest; but, in fact, such
persons never seem to realize that, in one aspect of it, the Church
stands, or, as a matter of common honesty, as the administrator of
trust funds, ought to stand, on the same equitable basis, at least, as
a life-insurance company. Now, when I seek the benefits of a
life-insurance company I am asked certain questions which affect not
only my physical resources but my diseases, my ancestry and their
diseases, my personal habits, infirmities, and the like. If the
company has the right, in the just interests of its other clients, to
ask these questions, as administering a large trust, has not the
Church, which is also the administrator of a trust no less in the
interest of other clients?
But, indeed, this is the lowest aspect of such a question, and I
freely admit it. The title of this paper points to that gravest aspect
of it, with which I am now concerned. The largest mischief of
indiscriminate almsgiving is not its wanton waste--it is its
inevitable and invariable degradation of its objects. I have spoken of
the grave antagonism of the Church to wisely organized charity, but it
is but the echo of the hostility of the individual, and often of the
best and wisest men and women. Elsewhere (but not, I think, in print)
I have related an incident in this connection of which one is almost
tempted to say _ex uno disce omnes_. Approaching one day, when I was a
pastor in a great city, the door of one of my clerical brethren, I
observed a woman leaving it who, though she hastily turned her back
upon me, I recognized as a member of my own congregation. On entering
my friend's study I said to him:
"I beg your pardon, but was not that Mrs. ---- whom I saw leaving your
door a moment ago?"
"Yes."
"What was she after, may I ask?"
My friend--now, alas! no longer living--was a man distinguished by
singular delicacy and chivalry of character and bearing, and he turned
upon me with some surprise and _hauteur_ and said:
"Well, yes, you may ask; but I do not know that, in the matter of the
sad and painful circumstances of one of my own parishioners, I am
called upon to answer."
"Precisely," I replied; "but, as it happens, she isn't your
parishioner."
"What do you mean, sir?" he exclaimed, with some heat. "Do you suppose
that I don't know the members of my own flock?"
"On the contrary," I said, "I have no doubt that you know not only
them but the members of a great many other flocks, as in the instance
of the person who has just left your door, who, as it happens, has
been a member of the church of which I am rector for some fifteen
years."
The remark and the abundant evidence with which I was able to
re-enforce it at last persuaded my friend to institute further
inquiries, which resulted in the discovery that the subject of those
inquiries maintained similar relations with some seven parishes, from
every one of which she was receiving, as a poor widow, a monthly
allowance! And yet my reverend brother was one of the most strenuous
opponents of any system or society, any challenge or interrogation
which, as he said, came between him and _his_ poor. Alas! though in
one sense they were his poor, in another they were as remote from him
as if they and he had been living in different hemispheres. With every
sympathy for their distresses, he had not come to recognize that,
under those complex conditions of our modern life, to which I have
already referred, a real knowledge of the classes upon whom need and
misfortune and the temptations to vice and idleness press most heavily
has become almost a science, in which training, experience, most
surely a large faith, but no less surely a large wisdom, are
indispensable.
In this work there is undoubtedly a place for institutional charity,
and also for that other which is individual. The former affords a
sphere for a wise economy, for prompt and immediate treatment or
relief, and for the utilization of that higher scientific knowledge
and those better scientific methods which the home, and especially the
tenement house, can not command. But over against these advantages we
are bound always to recognize those inevitable dangers which they
bring with them. The existence of an institution, whether hospital,
almshouse, or orphanage, to the care of which one may easily dismiss a
sick member of the household, or to which one may turn for gratuitous
care and treatment, must inevitably act as strong temptations to those
who are willing to evade personal obligations that honestly belong to
them. In connection with an institution for the treatment of the eye
and ear, with which I happen to be officially connected, it was found,
not long ago, that the number of patients who sought it for gratuitous
treatment was considerably increased by persons who came to the
hospital in their own carriages, which they prudently left around the
corner, and whose circumstances abundantly justified the belief that
they were quite able to pay for the treatment, which, nevertheless,
their self-respect did not prevent them from accepting as a dole. Such
incidents are symptomatic of a tendency which must inevitably degrade
those who yield to it, and which is at once vicious and deteriorating.
How widespread it is must be evident to any one who has had the
smallest knowledge of the unblushing readiness with which
institutional beneficence is utilized in every direction. A young
married man in the West, I have been told, wrote to his kindred in the
East: "We have had here a glorious revival of religion. Mary and I
have been hopefully converted. Father has got very old and helpless,
and so we have sent him to the county house." One finds himself
speculating with some curiosity _what_ religion it was to which this
filial scion was converted. Certainly it could not have been that
which is commonly called Christian!
And at the other end of the social scale the situation is often little
better. In our greater cities homes have been provided for the aged,
and especially for that most deserving class of gentlewomen who,
having been reared in affluence, come to old age, after having
struggled to maintain themselves by teaching, needlework, and the
like, with broken powers and empty purses. But it has, I am informed,
been often impossible to find places for them in institutions
especially created for their care, because its lady managers have
filled their places with their own worn-out servants, who, having
spent their years and strength in their employer's service, are turned
over in their old age, with a shrewd frugality which one can not but
admire, to be maintained at the cost of other people. It is impossible
to confront such instances, and they might be multiplied indefinitely,
without recognizing how enormous are the possibilities of mischief
even in connection with the most useful institutional charity.
And yet these are not so great as those which no less surely follow,
as it is oftenest administered, in the train of individual
beneficence. In an unwritten address, not long ago, I mentioned an
illustration of this which I have been asked to repeat here. While a
rector in a large city parish, I was called upon by a stranger who
asked for money, and who, as evidence of his claims upon my
consideration, produced a letter from my father, written some
twenty-five years before, when he was Bishop of Pennsylvania. The
writer had, when this letter was placed in my hands, been dead for
some twenty years, but, in a community in which he had been greatly
loved and respected, his words had not, even in that lapse of time,
lost their power. The letter was a general letter, addressed to no
one, and therein lay its mischief. When read, it had in each instance
been returned to its bearer, and he soon discovered that he had in it
a talisman that would open almost any pocket. He was originally a
mechanic who had been temporarily disabled by a fit of sickness; when
I saw him, however, he was obviously, and doubtless for years had
been, in robust health. But he had discovered that if he were willing
to beg he need not work, and he had long before made his choice on the
side of ease and indolence. After reading the letter which he
produced, and looking at its date and soiled condition, both revealing
the long service that it had performed, I said to him, "No, I will not
give you anything, but I will pay you ten dollars if you will let me
have that letter." It would not be easy to describe the leer of
cunning and contempt with which he promptly took it out of my hand,
folded it, placed it in his pocketbook, and left the room. He was not
so innocent as to surrender his whole capital in trade!
Now, here was a man to whom a well-meaning but inconsiderate act of
kindness had been the cause of permanent degradation. The highest
qualities in such a one--manhood, self-respect, frugal and industrious
independence--had been practically destroyed, and an act of charity
had made of one who was doubtless originally an honest and
hard-working young man, a mendicant, a loafer, and a fraud.
And yet for a sincere and self-sacrificing purpose to help our less
fortunate fellow-men there were never so many inspiring and
encouraging opportunities. Along with the undeniably increasing
complexity of our modern life there have arisen those attractive
instrumentalities for a genuine beneficence which find their most
impressive illustrations in the improvements of the homes of the poor
in college settlements, in young men's and young girls' clubs in
connection with our mission churches, in the kindergartens and in the
cooking schools founded by these and other beneficent agencies, in
juvenile societies for teaching handicrafts and encouraging savings,
and, best of all, in that resolute purpose to know how the other half
live, of which the noble service of Edward Denison in England; of
college graduates in England and in America, who have made the college
and university settlements their post-graduate courses; of such women
here and in Chicago as Miss Jane Addams, and the charming group of
gentlewomen living in the House in Henry Street, New York, maintained
with such modest munificence by Mr. Jacob Schiff; of such laborious
and discerning scrutiny and sympathy as have been shown in the studies
and writings of my friend Mr. Jacob Riis--are such noble and
enkindling examples.
These and such as these are indicating to us the lines along which our
best work for the relief of ignorance and suffering and want may
to-day be done, and the more closely they are studied, and the more
intimately the classes with which they are concerned are known, the
more abundantly they will vindicate themselves. For these latter have
in them, far more commonly than we are wont to recognize, those higher
instincts of self-respect and of manly and womanly independence that,
in serving our fellow-men, we must mainly count upon. There are
doubtless instinctive idlers and mendicants among the poor, as, let us
not forget, there are chronic idlers, borrowers, "sponges," among the
classes at the other end of the social scale. But the same divine
image is in our brother man everywhere, and the better, more truly,
more closely we know him, the more profoundly we shall realize it.
During some six weeks spent, a few years ago, in the most crowded ward
in the world, among thousands of people who lived in the narrowest
quarter and upon the most scanty wage, I gave six hours every day to
receiving anybody and everybody who came to me. During that time I
had visits from dilapidated gentlemen from Albany and Jersey City and
Philadelphia and the like, who supposed that I was a credulous fool
whose money and himself would be soon parted, and who gave me what
they considered many excellent reasons for presenting them with five
dollars apiece. But, during that whole period, not one of the many
thousands who lived in the crowded tenements all around me, and to
hundreds of whom I preached three times a week, asked me for a penny.
Not one! They came to me by day and by night, men and women, boys and
girls, for counsel, courage, sympathy, admonition, reproof, guidance,
and such light as I could give them--but never, one of them, for
money. They are my friends to-day, and they know that I am theirs;
and, little as that last may mean to the weakest and the worst of
them, I believe that, in the case of any man or woman who tries to
understand and hearten his fellow, it counts for a thousandfold more
than doles, or bread, or institutional relief.
THE HOPI INDIANS OF ARIZONA.
BY GEORGE A. DORSEY.
As one approaches the center of Arizona, along the line of the Santa
Fé Railroad, whether he come from the east or from the west, his
attention is sure to be arrested by several tall, spire-like hills
which are silhouetted against the sky to the far north. These peaks
are the Moki Buttes, and to the north of them lies the province of
Tusayan, the land of the Mokis, or the Hopis, as they prefer to be
called. That country to-day contains more of interest to the student
of the history of mankind than any other similar-sized area on the
American continent. But very few of the great throng that roll by on
the Santa Fé trains every year in quest of pleasure, of recreation, of
new scenes and strange, stop off at Holbrook or Winslow to take the
journey to the Hopis, and very few even know of the existence of these
curiously quaint pueblos of this community, which to-day lives pretty
much as it did before Columbus set out on his long voyage to the
unknown West.
The term _pueblo_, a Spanish word meaning town, is by long and
continued use now almost confined to the clusters of stone and adobe
houses which to-day shelter the sedentary Indians of New Mexico and
Arizona. Not only are these Indian towns called "pueblos," but we
speak of the Indians themselves as the Pueblo Indians, and of the
culture of the people--for they all have much in common--as the pueblo
culture. This similarity of culture is not due to unity of race or
of language, but is the resultant of a peculiar environment. In recent
times, the limits of the pueblo-culture area have contracted to meet
the demands of the white man; we know also that before the advent of
the Spaniard many once populous districts had been abandoned, and as a
result there came to be fewer but larger villages. We know also, both
from tradition and from archæological evidence, that in former days
the pueblo people inhabited many of the villages of southern Colorado
and Utah, and that the Hopis and their kin were numerous in many parts
of Arizona. The silent houses of the cliffs, the ruins of central
Arizona, and the great crumbling masses of adobe of the Salt and Gila
River valleys and in northern Chihuahua are all former habitations of
the Pueblo Indian. To-day there are no representatives of these people
in Utah or Colorado, while the seven Hopi towns of Tusayan alone
remain in Arizona. But there are still many pueblos scattered along
the Rio Grande, Jemez, and San Juan Rivers in New Mexico. Alike in
culture, we may divide the existing pueblos into four linguistic
groups--namely, the Hopis of Arizona, the Zuñis of New Mexico, the
Tehuas east of the Rio Grande, and the Queres to the west of the Rio
Grande. Of the earlier home of the last three stocks we know but
little. The ancestors of the Hopis we know came from different
directions--some from the cliff dwellings of the north, others from
central Arizona. To-day, however, they form a congeries of clans
united and welded into a unit by similarity of purpose and by the more
powerful influence of a peculiar environment.
The opinion was held until within a very few years that the Hopis
represented a small branch of the Shoshonean division of the
Uto-Aztecan stock, but Dr. Fewkes, our greatest authority on the Hopi,
has questioned the accuracy of this classification, and it can be
stated that the true affinities of the Hopi have not yet been
discovered.
The province of Tusayan, or the Moqui Reservation, as it is officially
known to-day, contains about four thousand square miles and about two
thousand Indians. It is in the northeastern part of Arizona, and its
towns are about eighty miles by trail from the railroad. The present
inhabitants are grouped in seven pueblos, located on three parallel
_mesas_, or table-lands, which extend southward like stony fingers
toward the valley of the Little Colorado River. The first or east mesa
contains the pueblos of Walpi, Sitcomovi, and Hano; on the second or
middle mesa are Miconinovi, Cipaulovi, and Cuñopavi; and on the third
or west mesa stands Oraibi, largest and most ancient of all Hopi
pueblos, and in many respects the best preserved and most interesting
community in the world. A community without a church, separated by a
broad, deep valley from its nearest neighbor, with but a single white
man within twenty miles, removed nearly thirty-five miles from a
trading post, isolated, proud, spurning the advances of the
Government, Oraibi could maintain its independence if every other
community on the earth were blotted out of existence.
The journey from Winslow to Oraibi is not without great interest. The
beautiful snow-capped peaks of the San Francisco Mountain are always
in sight far away to the west, and when the eye tires of the rigid and
immovable desert their graceful outlines check the often rising
feeling of utter helplessness. Then there is a sweep and barrenness of
the plain which is impressive and often awe-inspiring, and which at
times produces a feeling similar to that created by the sea. Save for
the stunted cottonwoods along the Little Colorado River, there is
scant vegetation to relieve the bright reds, yellows, and blues of the
painted desert over which the sun's heat quivers and dances, revealing
here and there mirages of lakes and forests of wonderfully deceptive
vividness. Arising out of the plain here and there are brief expanses
of table-lands, with the soft under strata crumbled away and the
higher strata having fallen down the sides, producing often the
appearance of a ruined castle. At the foot of the mesas are clumps of
sagebrush and grease wood, while the plain is dotted here and there
with patches of cactus and bright-colored flowers. Foxes and wolves
are common enough, and we are rarely out of sight or sound of the
coyote, bands of which make night hideous with their shrill, weird
cry.
Although the Navajo country proper is to the north and east of
Tusayan, their _hogans_, or thatched-roofed dugouts, are met with here
and there along the valley of the river. The Navajos are the Bedouins
of America. We often see the women in front of the hogans weaving, or
the men along the trail tending their flocks of sheep and goats, for
they are great herders and produce large quantities of wool, part of
which they exchange to the traders; the remainder the women weave into
blankets, which are in general use throughout the Southwest and which
find their way through the trade to all parts of the relic-loving
world. They raise, in addition, great quantities of beans, which they
also send out to the railroad. They are better supplied with ponies
than the Hopi, and with them make long journeys, for the Navajos do
not live a communal life as do the pueblo people, but are scattered
over an extensive territory, each family living alone and being
independent of its neighbors.
After a long and tiresome journey of four days we arrive at the foot
of the mesa and begin the long, upward climb, for Oraibi is eight
hundred feet above the surrounding plain and seven thousand feet above
the level of the sea. Just before the crest is reached the trail for
fifty or more feet is simply a path along and up the base of a rocky
precipice, its steps worn deep by the never-ending line of Indians
passing to and fro. Once upon the summit we have an unobstructed view
over the dry, arid, sun-parched valleys for many miles--a view which,
in spite of its desolation, is extremely fascinating.
[Illustration: STREET SCENE, ORAIBI.]
We often speak of this or of that town as the oldest on the continent.
But here we are in the streets of a town which antedates all other
cities of the United States--a pueblo which occupied this very spot
when, in 1540, Coronado halted in Cibola and sent Don Pedro de Tobar
on to the west to explore the then unknown desert. Imagine seven
rather irregularly parallel streets about two hundred yards long, with
here and there a more open spot or plaza, lined on each side with
mud-plastered, rough-laid stone houses, and you have Oraibi. The
houses rise in the form of terraces to a height of two or three
stories. As a rule there is no opening to the ground-floor dwellings
save through a small, square hatch in the roof. Leading up to this
roof are rude ladders, which in a few rare instances are simply steps
cut in a solid log, differing in nowise from those found leading into
the chambers of the old cliff ruins of southern Colorado. The roof of
the first row or terrace of houses forms a kind of balcony or porch
for the second terrace, and so the roof of the second-story houses
serves a similar useful purpose for the third-story houses.
[Illustration: TERRACE SCENE, STREETS OF ORAIBI.]
Two things impress one on entering a Hopi home for the first time--the
small size of the rooms, with their low ceilings, and the cleanness of
the floors. Both floors and walls are kept fresh and bright by
oft-renewed coats of thin plaster, which is always done by the woman,
for she owns the house and all within it; she builds it and keeps it
in repair. The ceiling is of thatch held up by poles, which in turn
rest on larger rafters. Apart from the mealing bins and the _piki_
stones, to be described later, there is no furniture--no table, no
chairs, no stools, simply a shelf or two with trays of meal or bread,
and near the wall a long pole for clothing, suspended by buckskin
thongs from the rafters. Their bed is a sheepskin rug and one or two
Navajo blankets spread on the floor wherever there may be a vacant
space. In one corner may be a pile of corn stacked up like cordwood,
and in another corner melons or squashes and a few sacks of dried
peaches or beans. Between the thatch and rafters you will find bows
and arrows, spindles, hairpins, digging-sticks, and boomerangs, and
from the wall may hang a doll or two, children's playthings. Such is
an Oraibi home; but it always seems a happy home, and the traveler is
always welcome.
[Illustration: STREET SCENE, ORAIBI.]
A prominent feature of almost every pueblo plaza is a squarish,
boxlike elevation which extends about two feet above the level of the
earth and measures about six feet in length, with a two-foot hole in
the center, from which projects to a considerable height the posts of
a ladder. If you descend this ladder you will find yourself in a
subterranean chamber, rectangular in shape, and measuring about
twenty-five feet in length by about fifteen feet in breadth, with a
height from the floor to the ceiling of about ten feet. This
underground room is the _kiva_, or the _estufa_ of the Spaniards. Here
are held all the secret rites of religious ceremonies, and here the
men resort to smoke, to gossip, to spin, and weave. The floor, to an
extent of two thirds of the entire length, except for a foot-wide
space extending around this portion, is excavated still farther to a
depth of a foot and a half. The remaining elevated portion is for the
spectators, while the banquette around the excavation is used by the
less active participants in the ceremonies. Just under the hatchway
and in front of the spectators' floor is a depression which is used as
a fire hearth. The walls are neatly coated with plaster, and the
entire floor is paved with irregularly shaped flat stones fitted
together in a rough manner. There is sometimes inserted in the floor,
at the end removed from the spectators, a plank with a circular hole
about an inch and a half in diameter; this hole is called the
_sipapu_, and symbolizes the opening in the earth through which the
ancestors of the Hopi made their entrance into this world. The roof of
the kiva is supported by great, heavy beams, which are brought from
the San Francisco Mountain with infinite trouble and labor. In Oraibi
there are thirteen kivas, each probably in the possession of some
society, one of which belongs to women, who there erect their altar in
the _mamzrouti_ ceremony. Oraibi has the largest number of kivas of
any of the Hopi pueblos; in a single plaza there are no less than four
kivas. This plaza is on the west side of the village, and one of the
kivas is of special interest, for in it are held the secret rites of
the weird snake ceremony. A little to the west of this plaza is a
small bit of the mesa, standing apart and separated from the main mesa
by a depression. This is known as "Oraibi rock," whence the pueblo
takes its name. The etymology of this name "Oraibi" is lost in a misty
past, but the rock is still held in great veneration. On it stands a
rude shrine, where one may always find sacrificial offerings of
prayer-sticks, pipes, sacred meal, cakes, etc.
[Illustration: ORAIBI ROCK, UPON WHICH STANDS KATCIN KIKU, THE
PRINCIPAL ORAIBI SHRINE.]
The roof of a Hopi house is always of interest. Here we may see corn
drying in the sun or loads of fagots ready for use, women dressing
their hair or fondling their babies, or groups of children playing or
roasting melon seeds in an old broken earthenware vessel which rests
on stones over a fire. From the projecting rafters are ears of corn
hung up to dry, or pieces of meat placed there to be out of reach of
the dogs, or bunches of yarn just out of the dye pot. When a ceremony
is being performed in some one of the plazas the roofs near by present
a scene which is animated in the extreme, every square foot of space
being occupied by a merry, good-natured throng of young and old. As
one looks from one group to another it is impossible not to notice the
stunted and dwarfed appearance of the women, which is in marked
contrast to that of the men, who are beautifully formed, of medium
height, and of well-knit frames. There is not, however, the same
powerful ruggedness or splendid development among these pueblo
dwellers which we find among the plains Indians, for the days of the
Hopi women are spent in carrying water and grinding corn, while the
men in summer till their fields and in winter spin and weave.
In considering the routine life of the Hopi it is hard to draw a sharp
line between what we may call his regular daily occupations and his
religious life, for they are closely interwoven. He is by nature a
religionist, and he never forgets his allegiance and obligations to
the unseen forces which control and command him.
[Illustration: AN ORAIBI MOTHER AND CHILDREN.]
In nothing is the primitiveness or the absence from contamination of
the Hopi better revealed than in the children, for here, as elsewhere,
is it shown that they are the best conservators of the habits and
customs of ancestral life. What utter savages the little fellows are!
Stark naked generally, whether it be summer or winter, dirty from head
to foot, their long black hair disheveled and tangled and standing out
in every direction, their head often resembling a thick matted bunch
of sagebrush. They are never idle; now back of the village behind tiny
stone ramparts eagerly watching their horsehair bird snares, or
engaged in a sham battle with slings and corncobs, or grouped in
threes or fours about a watermelon, eagerly and with much noise
gorging themselves to absolute fullness, or down on the side of the
mesa playing in the clay pits. A not uncommon sight is that of two or
three little fellows trudging off in pursuit of imaginary game, armed
with miniature bows and arrows or with boomerangs and digging-sticks.
In their disposition toward white visitors they are extremely shy and
reticent, but they are also very inquisitive and curious, and,
furthermore, they have a sweet tooth, and one only need display a
stick of candy to have half the infantile population of the pueblo at
his heels for an hour at a time. If perchance one of the little
fellows should die, he is not buried in the common cemetery at the
foot of the mesa, but he is laid away among the rocks in some one of
the innumerable crevices which are to be found on all sides near the
top of the mesa, for the Hopis, in common with many other native
tribes of America, believe that the souls of departed children do not
journey to the spirit land, but are born again.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF CHILD IN ROCK CREVICE.]
As the girls reach the age of ten or twelve they distinguish
themselves by dressing their hair in a manner which is both striking
and absolutely unique on the face of the earth. The hair is gathered
into two rolls on each side of the head, and then, at a distance of
from one to two inches, is wound over a large U-shaped piece of wood
into two semicircles, both uniting in appearance to form a single
large disk, the diameter of which is sometimes as much as eight
inches. After marriage the hair is parted in the middle over the
entire head, and is gathered into two queues, one on each side, which
are then wound innumerable times by a long hair string beginning a few
inches from the head and extending about four inches. The ends of the
queues are loose. Hopi maidens are, as a rule, possessed of fine,
regular features, slender, lithe, and graceful bodies, and are often
beautiful. But with the early marriage comes a daily round of
drudgery, which prevents full development and stunts and dwarfs the
body. But to old age she is generally patient, cheerful, nor does she
often complain. Lines produced by toil and labor may show in her face,
but rarely those of worry or discontent. Even long before marriage she
has not only learned to help her mother in the care of her younger
brothers and sisters, but she has already trained her back to meet
the requirements of the low-placed corn mills. From her tenth year to
her last it has been estimated that every Hopi woman spends on an
average three hours out of every twenty-four on her knees stooping
over a _metate_, or corn-grinder, for corn forms about ninety per cent
of the vegetable food of the Hopis.