LAGUNA AND ACOMA
In spite of Toby’s making the slight error of driving fourteen miles
with the emergency brake on, we seemed to have placed misadventure
behind us for a brief season at least. We coasted the twenty-three
switch backs of La Bajada hill, now an old story, and returned for the
night to the Harvey hotel at Albuquerque, where the transcontinental
traveler gets his first notion of Western heat, and wonders if he is
in any danger from the aborigines selling pottery on the railroad
platforms, and speculates as to whether the legs of the squaws
can possibly fill the thick buckskin leggins they parade in so
nonchalantly. If it is his first visit West, he little realizes how
Harveyized these picturesque creatures have become, and he snatches
eagerly at what he thinks may be his last chance to pick up some
curios. The pottery, from the village of Acoma, is genuine, though
of a tourist quality. The white doeskin legs are also genuine,
although many pueblo women have ceased to wear them except to meet
the twelve o’clock. They always inspire in me an awed respect, worn
under the burning sun with such _sang froid_. The explanation for
this indifference to discomfort lies in the fact that a lady’s social
prominence is gaged by the number of doeskin wrappers she displays, as
the Breton peasant is measured by her heavy petticoats, and a Maori
belle by her tattooing: _il faut souffrir pour être belle_.
The Indians furnished the most entertaining spectacle of modern,
prosperous Albuquerque, whose solid virtues intrigue the hobo but
little. We took advantage of her porcelain bathtubs, and then hastened
on into a more primitive region, which became wilder and wilder as
we neared the Arizona boundaries. Only two little adventures befell;
neither had a proper climax. A two day old lamb, wobbly and frightened,
had lost its mother, and wandered bleating pitifully from one sheep to
another, who treated it with cold disdain. It finally approached our
car as if it had at last reached its goal; but asking for nourishment,
it received gasoline, and seeking woolly shelter, it was startled by
metal walls. Piteously weak and terrified, the thumping of its heart
visibly stirring its coat, it fled away in distress, with us at its
frail little heels. Yet run our fastest, we could not catch it, though
we tried every subterfuge. We baa-ed as if we were its mother, and
it approached cautiously, to scamper off when our hands shot out to
catch it. Poor little fool! It had not the courage to trust us, though
it longed to, and after a hot and weary hour, we had to leave it to
starve. As we started off, another car shot past us, challengingly,
its very tail light twinkling insolence. A dark and handsome face
leered back at us, with a full-lipped, sinister smile. At the next
settlement, where we stopped to buy food, this half-breed Mephisto was
there lounging against the counter, and looking at us with the look
that is like a nudge. When we left, he swaggered after, and kept his
car for some miles close behind ours. The country was so wild that we
saw a coyote sneaking through the sage, and not long after, a wildcat
disappeared into a clump of piñon. Beyond the orange cliffs we saw
in the distance, we could expect no human assistance, and it was
uncomfortably near nightfall. Then, to our relief, the road branched,
one fork leading to a silver mine. Our Mexican shot into it, giving us
a parting grimace. Slight enough, this was our first and last encounter
with that particular sort of danger.
At sunset we came to Laguna, ancient and gray as the rocks on which it
sprawled, its church tower picked out against a golden sky. This is
the first Kersian pueblo met going from east to west. Ancient as it
seems, it is the offspring of the parent pueblo of Acoma, which itself
descended from an older town situated on the Enchanted Mesa. “Laguna”
seems a sad misnomer for this waste of sand and rock. But years ago,
what is now desert was a country made fertile by a great lake. When
a dissension arose in old Acoma, as frequently happened among these
“peaceful” Indians, the dissatisfied members of the tribe left Acoma,
and settled near the lake. Here they stayed from habit long after the
lake had dried and its green shores became barren sand-heaps, until the
new town became as weather-beaten as its parent. This is why, unlike
most pueblos, Laguna and Acoma share the same dialect.
[Illustration: PUEBLO WOMEN GRINDING CORN IN METATE BINS. The women are
the millers who grind the varied colored corn in lava bins.]
[Illustration: PUEBLO WOMAN WRAPPING DEER-SKIN LEGGINS. A lady’s social
prominence is gauged by the thickness of doeskin wrappers she displays.]
Laguna, built on a solid ledge of mother rock, attracts attention
by the notched beauty of its skyline. It is entertainingly terraced
on irregular streets, forced to conform to the shape of its rock
foundation. A ramble about town brings unexpected vistas. You start on
what seems to be the street, trail along after a shock haired little
savage in unbuttoned frock, and suddenly find yourself in a barnyard,
gazing with a flea bitten burro upon the intimacies of Pueblo family
life on the roof of the house next door. Through the village come
sounds of the leisurely tasks of the evening. The mellow, throaty boom
of the tombé, and syncopated rhythm of the corn-grinding song come from
the open doors, framed in the warm glow of firelight. A dead coyote,
waiting to be dressed, hangs by the tail from a _vega_. Children play
in the streets. The shifting hills of shimmering sand, moonlight silver
in the frosted air of morning, and golden at noon, turn from rose to
violet. Above the village rise pencilled lines of smoke from ancient
fireplaces. Towering above everything stands the white mass of the old
mission, with a gleaming cross of gold cutting sharply against the
glory of the west.
Laguna owns no hotel, so Toby and I sought out the missionary, whose
ruddy, white-haired countenance and stalwart frame bespoke his Vermont
origin, and whose hospitality bore the hearty flavor of Green Mountain
farmhouses. At something less than what is called a pittance, he had
worked for years among the Indians of the pueblo, and at the nearby
tubercular sanitarium for government Indians. He seemed to feel no
superiority over his charges, and showed none of the complacent
cant and proselyting zeal which distinguishes too many reservation
missionaries. He had retained with delightful fidelity the spirit
of the small community pastor working on terms of equality with his
flock,--raising the mortgage, furnishing the church parlor, encouraging
the Sewing Circle exactly as he would have done back in Vermont. As
he told us of his work the yellow waste and glaring sunshine, squat
’dobe houses and alien brown figures faded, and we seemed to see a
white spire with gilded weathervane, and cottages with green blinds;
we smelled lilacs and ginger cookies, and walked in a lane of flaming
maples.
“The work is slow here,” he said. “One needs patience. Yet looking back
over the years results are gratifying. Gratifying. Souls who walked
in darkness have been won to Christ. Only last night, I attended the
bedside of a dear sister,--the oldest person I believe in the state.
Her years number one hundred and twenty-six. She confessed her faith
and will die in Christ.”
“Have you had many conversions?” we asked.
“Well,--as numbers go,--not so many. Perhaps forty, possibly more.
They will go back to their own ways. Yet they are a splendid people to
work with,--a delightful people. I have many real friends among them.
The parish is slowly improving. We have paid off the mortgage, and are
now putting an addition on the church. The men have erected the frame,
and when the ladies of the parish finish planting, they will put the
plaster on the walls.”
Thus imperceptibly had the good man merged New Mexico with New England.
At the village school next morning we saw another phase of the white
man’s standards grafted upon the red man. The teacher, a Pueblo
Indian woman and a graduate of Carlisle, wife of a white man in the
neighborhood, in spotless print dress and apron was showing twenty
little Indians the locality of Asia Minor. They were neat and shining
and flatteringly thrilled by the presence of visitors.
“And now,” said their beaming teacher, when we had heard their bashful
recitations, “you must hear the children sing.”
We heard them. The difficulty would have been to avoid hearing them.
Bursting with delight, each of the twenty opened their mouths to
fullest capacity, and twenty throats emitted siren tones,--not the
sirens of the Rhineland, but of a steel foundry. They began on “Come,
Little Birdie, Come,” though it is doubtful if anything less courageous
than a bald-headed eagle would have dared respond to the invitation.
Toby clutched me, and I her, and thus we kept each other from bolting
out of the door. We even managed a frozen smile of approbation as we
listened to the discordant roar, like the voices of many hucksters,
which issued from their mouths. A white child would have warped his
throat permanently after such effort, but these roly-poly babies
finished in better condition than they began.
“I am going to let them sing one more song,” said the teacher when we
rose hastily. “They don’t have visitors every day.”
They sang “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” and if Sweet Afton had been
Niagara it would have wakened Mary less than the stertorous warning
which bellowed from that schoolroom. Then a dozen brown hands waved in
the air, and a clamor arose for other bits of their repertoire to be
heard. Teacher was smilingly indulgent, proud of her pupils and anxious
to give them and the visitors a good time. So we were treated to Old
Black Joe, and Juanita, and other sad ditties, which never seemed
sadder than now.
“And now you must show these ladies you are all good Americans,” said
the teacher. We all stood and sang the Star Spangled Banner. The
children showed individuality; they did not keep slavishly to one
key. Each child started on the one that suited him best, and held it
regardless of the others. By the time they were well started, every
note in the scale was represented, including most of the half notes.
Our patriotism ended in a dismal polychromatic howl, and the sudden
silence which followed nearly deafened us. We had forgotten there was
such a thing as silence.
What a pity the government does not encourage the Indian to cultivate
his own arts, instead of these alien and uncomprehended arts of the
white man! In his ceremonial dances, he is lithe, graceful, and
expressive; when he tries the one-step and waltz he is clumsy and
ludicrous. His voice, strident, discordant and badly-placed when
he attempts second-rate “civilized” music, booms out mellow and
full-throated, perfectly placed in the nasal cavity, when he sings
Indian melodies whose tantalizing syncopations, difficult modulations,
and finely balanced tempo he manages with precision. His music fits
his surroundings. To hear it chanted in a wide and lonely desert
scene, to watch its savage, untamed vigor move feet and bodies to a
climax of ecstatic emotion, until it breaks all bounds and produces
the passion it is supposed to symbolize is to understand what music
meant to the world, before it was tamed and harnessed and had its teeth
extracted. To wean the Indian of this means of self-expression, and
nurse him on puerile, anaemic melodies,--it is stupid beyond words, and
unfortunately, it is of a piece with the follies and stupidities our
government usually exhibits in its dealings with its hapless wards.
If I seemed to laugh it was not at those enthusiastic brown babies,
rejoicing in their ability to produce civilized discords, but at the
pernicious system which teaches them to be ignorant in two languages.
We finally left the strains of patriotism behind us, as we drove across
the level plain to Acoma. Two tracks in a waste of sand made the road
to the Sky City. A day sooner, or a day later, the wind would shift
the fine grained beach sand, left there by some long vanished ocean,
and block the road with drifted heaps; today, by the aid of our guide
Solomon’s shovel, we were just able to plough through it.
Dotting the lonely landscape, flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats
were tended by Indian boys with bows and arrows. They fitted the
pastoral scene; for a thousand years, perhaps, the ancestors of these
same flocks were watched over by the ancestors of these boys in blue
overalls. Suddenly to our left, rising from the flat plain, we saw
blocked against the sky a shimmering tower of soft blue and gold,
seeming too evanescent for solid rock. Its sheer walls thrust upward
like the shattered plinth of a giant’s castle from a base of crumbling
tufa, in itself a small mountain. It was the mesa of Old Acoma, called
by the Indians the Enchanted Mesa.
I believe that two Harvard students of archæology once reached the
summit of this perpendicular rock, by means of a rope ladder shot
to the top. But no white man by himself has for centuries gained a
foothold on its splintered walls. Yet once, from legend borne out by
bits of broken pottery and household utensils found at the base of the
mesa, a large and flourishing Indian village lived on its summit in
safety from marauders. A stairway of rock, half splintered away from
the main rock was the only means of access to the village. A similar
stairway may be seen today in the Second Mesa of the Hopi villages.
Up these stairs, old women toiled with filled _ollas_ on their heads,
and little boys and men clambered down them to work in the fields
below. It is their ghosts the Indians fear to meet between sunset
and sunrise. For one day, while the men were absent plowing or
tending their herds, a bolt of lightning struck the stairway and in
a moment it lay the same crumbling heap of splintered rock one sees
today at the base of the mesa. To envision the horrors that followed
imagine a sudden catastrophe destroying all stairways and elevators
in the Flatiron building, while the men were away at lunch, and the
stenographers left stranded on the top floor. The case of Old Acoma was
even more pitiful, for those left on the top were old men, helpless
from age, women and babies. They lived, ghastly fear and despair
alternating with hope as long as their supply of corn stored in the
barren rock held out,--perhaps a month, perhaps longer. Then one by
one they died, while their men on the plain below tried frantically to
reach them, and at last gave up hope. No wonder that when the towering
mass which is their monument fades from blue and gold to grayish
purple, the Indians turn their ponies’ heads far to one side, and make
a loop rather than be found in its neighborhood.
[Illustration: ACOMA, NEW MEXICO. Dotting the lonely landscape flocks
of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indian boys with bows
and arrows.]
[Illustration: BURROS LADEN WITH FIRE-WOOD, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.]
Across the plateau a few miles from the Enchanted Mesa stands another
mesa, longer and lower than the other, reached from the ground by
several paths. Here the survivors transferred their shattered lives,
built a village like the old one, and in time became the ancestors of
the present Acomans. While we drove toward it, listening to the story
our guide told of that early tragedy in his exact Carlisle English,
we nearly added three more ghosts to those already haunting the
plain. Ahead of us the road had caved in over night, as roads have a
way of doing in this country, leaving a yawning canyon thirty feet
deep, toward which we sped at twenty miles an hour. Our brakes stopped
us at the edge. I hastened to back, and make a side detour around the
chasm, where in time our tracks would become the road, until some other
freshet should eat into and undermine the porous ground. Roads in New
Mexico are here today and gone tomorrow, cut off in their flower by
a washout or a sandstorm, or simply collapsing because they weary of
standing up. A miss is always as good as a mile, and our close escape
was worth singling out from a dozen others only because of its dramatic
reminder of what happened in the dim past from almost the same cause,
on that magnificent rock. Both the Enchanted Mesa and the gaping hole
behind us pointed out the uncertainty of life, which seemed so eternal
in that brilliant spring sunshine.
Less dominating than the haunted mesa, New Acoma, which is, by the way,
the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States, reveals
its towering proportions only at closer range. To view it best, it
should be approached from the direction of Acomita. It stands 357 feet
above the floor of the desert. Under its buttressed cliffs, a sheep
corral and a few herder’s huts help to measure its great height. In the
lee of the rock we left the car to the mercy of a group of slightly
hostile women filling their waterjars at the scum-covered spring.
The Acomans are not noted for pretty manners or lavish hospitality.
Probably if a second bolt of lightning were to approach Acoma, a
committee from the Governor would refuse it admittance unless it paid a
fee of five dollars. It is said that since the San Diego Exposition,
when the Acomans acquired an inflated idea of the cash value of their
picturesqueness, tourist gold must accompany tourist glances at their
persons, their pottery, their village, their children, and even the
steep, hard trail up to their little stronghold.
We thought we had almost earned the freedom of the town by our toilsome
climb, first over a young mountain of pure sea sand in which we sank
ankle deep, and then hand over hand up a steep ledge of rock, where
ancient grooves were worn for fingers and toes to cling to. Centuries
of soft shod feet had hollowed these footholds, and centuries of women
and men had carried food and water and building materials over this
wearisome trail. Yet the Acoman may be right in demanding toll. He has
gone to infinite trouble through generations of hard labor to perfect
the little stronghold where he preserves his precious individuality.
The giant beams in his old church, the mud bricks and stone slabs for
his houses, the last dressed sheep and load of groceries, the very dirt
that covers his dead were brought to the summit on the backs of his
tribe. Acoma to the native is not an insignificant village of savages,
but by treaty with the United States an independent nation; proud of
its past, serenely confident of its future. It is almost as large as
Monte Carlo, or the little republic of Andorra; with the assertive
touchiness which so often goes with diminutive size, both in people and
nations. Being a nation, why should it not have the same right to say
who shall enter its gates, and under what conditions, as the United
States; that parvenu republic surrounding it?
[Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL, ACOMA. (Enchanted Mesa in
middle distance.) Less dominating than the haunted Mesa, New Acoma
reveals its towering proportions only on nearer approach.]
[Illustration: THE ENCHANTED MESA, ACOMA, NEW MEXICO. A shimmering
tower of blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock.]
Nevertheless the Acoman is not popular, even among Indians of other
villages. Though neighboring towns, Laguna and Acoma always have
swords drawn. The Acoman has a wide reputation for being surly and
inhospitable, and I am willing to admit he does his best to live up to
that reputation.
Many tourists have made the journey across the desert, and the climb
to the mesa’s top, only to be turned back or admitted at exorbitant
fees. Luck was with us. We arrived on a day when the governor and all
the men of the village were at work in the fields of Acomita, and only
the women and children, as on the fateful day when the Enchanted Mesa
was struck, remained in the village. Our guide, being from Laguna,
spoke the dialect of the Acomans, and proved a doughty aid. Hardly
had our heads shown above the rocky stairs when the gray landscape
was suddenly peopled by women and children; the children clad in one
gingham garment, or, if of tender age, in nothing save the proverbial
string of beads, for even the smile was missing from their faces. Most
of the women, short-skirted, with brilliant floating scarves on their
heads, carried babies slung in knotted shawls. Their clamor at sight
of Toby’s camera required no knowledge of Acomese to be recognized as
vituperative. They seemed as anxious to be photographed as a burglar is
to have his thumb-prints taken. They were in fact so uncomplimentary
that we recalled uneasily the Spanish monk who visited the town to
make converts, and was hustled down to the plain by the short trail.
No tourist uses this trail if he can help himself. It leads off the
walled edge of the graveyard into space for three hundred odd feet, and
ends on the rocks below. With great presence of mind the monk made a
parachute of his flowing skirts, and alighted unhurt on the desert.
Wearing khaki breeches, we closed the camera regretfully.
An Indian’s prejudice against the camera arises logically from his
theological belief that nature abhors a duplicate. With keenest powers
of observation, he has noted that no two trees, no two leaves, no
animals, even no blades of grass are exactly alike. Hence, when he
makes a rug, a basket or an _olla_, he never duplicates it absolutely.
Therefore he fears the camera’s facsimile of Nature. If he allows
himself to be photographed, he believes that something of himself
passes into the black box, and thereafter his soul is halved of its
power. If he afterward falls sick, undergoes misfortune or dies, he
attributes it to this sin against an inexorable law of Nature. It all
sounds childishly crude, yet a much respected man named Plato held a
somewhat similar belief.
The difference between Plato and the Pueblo Indians lies less in
their theology than in the ease with which a piece of silver changes
its effectiveness. Among the river Pueblos, we could manufacture
free-thinkers for a quarter apiece, but at Acoma, the process
threatened to be as expensive as a papal dispensation. We appeased
their gods by putting away our camera, but having satisfied the
Church, we still had to deal with the State. The boldest and fattest
citizeness of the Sky City, girt round with a sash of Kelly green,
triumphantly produced a paper. Contrary to her manifest expectation, it
did not shrivel us. It was written in sprawly Spanish on the reverse
of a grocer’s bill, and even at present prices no grocer’s bill could
intimidate us; we had seen too many of them. Solomon deciphered it as a
command _in absentia_ from the Governor to pay five dollars a head or
decamp at once.
Meanwhile the women, from ten years up, had brought us offerings--at
a price--of pottery, in the making of which the Acomans excel all
other tribes. Seeing a chance for a strategic compromise, through our
faithful and secretly sympathetic Solomon, we announced we would either
buy their pottery or pay the governor’s toll, but we would not do both.
We succeeded in maintaining an aspect of firm resolve, and after many
minutes of debate, or what sounded like debate in any tongue, they
wisely concluded that what was theirs was their own, and what was the
governor’s was something else entirely. We instantly compounded a crime
against the State, and acquired many barbaric and gorgeously designed
_ollas_.
We were now permitted to wander freely about the village, though
the women after they sold their pottery retired to their houses and
kept the doors closed. At the head of the village near where the
trail enters, stands the old stone church, forbidding and bare as a
Yorkshire hillside, built of giant timbers and small stones wedged hard
together. It has stood there, looking off over the cliff, since 1699.
Its ungracious front, unsoftened by ornament and eloquent of gruelling
labor, fits the hard little village. Its really magnificent proportions
tell a story of incredible effort; no wonder it looks proudly down on
the desert from the height which it has conquered. Each timber, some
large enough to make a burden for fifty men, each rock, each fastening
and bolt, came up the trail we had taken nearly an hour to climb, on
the shoulders of a little people hardly more than five feet tall. It
is the only Indian mission I can remember built entirely of stone
slabs, due perhaps to the difficulty of carrying up mud and water in
sufficient quantities for the great eight foot thick walls and giant
towers.
Between the church facade and the parapet which over-looks the desert
is a crowded graveyard, containing in deep layers the bones of many
generations of Acomans. Even the soil in which they rest was brought
from the plain to form a bed over the mother rock of the mesa. Each
year the level of the graveyard comes a trifle nearer the top of
the parapet. Bits of pottery clutter the surface of the graveyard,
not accidentally, as we at first imagined, but due to the Indian
custom of placing choice ollas at the head and feet of the dead, to
accompany them on their long journey. It is a bleak God’s Acre: not
a tree shades the bare surface. The four winds of heaven sweep it
mercilessly, and the hot sun beats down on it. Yet a few feet beyond it
becomes glorious, “with the glory of God, whose light is like unto a
stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.” For
the desert below is not a waste of sand, arid and monotonous, but a
filtered radiance of light broken into pure color. Those who know only
the beauty of green fields and blue waters cannot vision the unreal
and heavenly splendor we saw from the Acoma churchyard, as convincing
to the inner self as if Earth, that old and dusty thought of God,
dissolved before our eyes and crystallized again into a song of light
and color, as it was at the beginning.
[Illustration: A STREET IN ACOMA, NEW MEXICO. A flock of ducks splashed
in a rainpool in the middle of the road.]
[Illustration: THE ACOMA MISSION, NEW MEXICO. At the head of the
village stands the old stone church, built with giant timbers.]
Acoma, different as it was, reminded me oddly of the New England
nature. At its heart lay a spiritual beauty,--this intense beauty of
the desert,--and wrapped about it a shell of hard, chill unloveliness.
The three little streets, dribbling off to the edge of the rock, had
no welcome for us. Its houses, two and three tiered, slabbed with
flint instead of the more pleasing adobe, closed tight to our approach.
The windows were mean and tiny, made before the era of glass, of
translucent slabs of mica, roughly set in the walls. The houses, bleak
and blackened, were roughly masoned of the same flint-like stone as the
church. The few interiors we saw were barely furnished; a few bowls
on the dirt floor, a lava corn bin,--nothing more. A flock of ducks
splashed in a rainpool in the middle of the road; a mangy mongrel
yapped at us, and women on the housetops scolded whenever Toby ventured
to produce her camera. With their colored veils, red skirts and bright
sashes they gave the village its only animation, as they brought out
more and more bits of pottery to tempt us, carrying it carelessly on
their heads down the ladders of the houses.
Solomon, the only man in sight, took every opportunity to efface
himself whenever the bargaining raised a cross-ruff of feeling. He
even ducked around a corner when a very stout lady, having sold us all
her pottery, again brought up the subject of our paying five dollars
admission. We appeased her by offering her a bribe to carry our
purchases down to the car. While we were still halfway down, lifting
our feet laboriously from the heavy sand, we saw her, a tiny round dot,
with the _ollas_ balanced above her floating turquoise scarf, stepping
blithely and lightly over the desert floor.
“What a pity we couldn’t get any pictures,” I said to Toby, as we raced
a thunder-cloud back to Laguna.
“H’m!” said Toby. “I took a roll of pictures while you kept them busy
selling pottery. I got a beauty of the fat woman who made such a fuss.
I must say it would be an improvement if half of _her_ passed into the
camera.”