CHAPTER VIII

THE STORIED LAND OF THE NAVAJO

The Navajos are the Bedouins of our Southwest, and there are about 22,000 of them—a fine, independent tribe of Indians occupying a semi-desert, mountainous reservation in northwestern New Mexico, northeastern Arizona and a small corner of Utah. Indeed they occupy somewhat more, for they are confirmed rovers and are frequently found setting up their _hogans_, shepherding their sheep, and weaving their blankets, well across their government-fixed borders. One is sure to see some of them in Gallup, where they come to trade—the men generally in dark velveteen shirts worn loose outside the trousers, their long, black, uncut hair filleted about with red _bandas_ and caught up behind in a club or knot. Both men and women are expert riders, sitting their ponies as firmly as centaurs; and both are extravagantly fond of silver jewelry, of which they often wear small fortunes in necklaces, belts, bracelets, rings and buttons hammered by their own silversmiths from coin of Mexico. If you see them wearing blankets, as you will when the weather requires it, these will be the gaudy products of Yankee looms, which they buy for less than the price they receive for their own famous weave. So, thrifty traders that they are, they let the white folk have the latter and content themselves with the cheaper machine-made article bought from an American merchant.

It is part of the fun of a visit to the Hopi towns that you must cross a section of the Navajo Reservation and thus get a glimpse of life in the latter; but there is a special trip which I would like to recommend from Gallup as a starting point, that brings one more intimately into touch with the tribe. That is to Chin Lee and the Cañon de Chelly,[45] about 100 miles northwest of Gallup. There is a choice of roads, so that the going and returning may be by different routes. The trip may be done by time economists in an automobile in two or three days, but a more enjoyable plan for easy-going folk is to take eight or ten days to it by horseback or wagon, camping by the way. And do it preferably in September or early October, for then the mid-year rains are usually over, the air clear and sparkling, and feed for horses sufficiently abundant. The elements that enter into the landscape are primarily those that go to the making of the grandeur of the Grand Cañon region, but scattered and distant, not concentrated. There is a similar sculpturing of the land into pinnacles and terraces, cones perfect or truncated, battlemented castles and airy spires, appearing, when afar, mistily in an atmosphere of amethyst and mauve and indefinite tones of yellow and pink. Now the road threads open, sunny forests of pine and oak, the latter in autumnal dress of crimson and gold and surprising you with acorns as sweet as chinquapins. Again, it traverses broad, unwatered, semi-desert plains dotted with fragrant sage-brush and riotous sunflowers, the only animated things in sight being prairie dogs and jackrabbits, or an occasional band of Navajo ponies. As the morning advances, cumulus clouds rise in stately squadrons above the horizon and move across the sky dropping drifting shadows; at noon over a fire of sage stumps you heat up your beans and brew your coffee in the grateful shade of your wagon; night finds you at some hospitable trader’s post, or enjoying your blankets at the sign of _La belle étoile_. Only at long intervals will you come upon sign of human life. At Fort Defiance, 30 miles north of Gallup, is a Government Reservation school for the Navajos, and a mile from it an Episcopal medical mission—a living monument to the loving interest of Miss Eliza Thackara in these Indians. Eight miles south of Fort Defiance is the Franciscan Mission of St. Michael’s to the Navajo, where, if you are interested, the hospitable Brothers can show you what sort of a job it is to transform an ungroomed savage into Christian semblance. At Ganado, Arizona, 45 miles from Gallup, is the trading post of Mr. J. L. Hubbell, whose name for a generation has in that part of the world been a synonym for hospitality.[46]

Nevertheless, there is more life than you see, for the native _hogan_, or one-roomed dwelling of logs covered with earth, is so inconspicuous that you may pass within a few rods of one and never detect it. The Navajos do not congregate in villages but each family wants a lot—miles, indeed—of elbow room.

Chin Lee, mentioned above, is not Chinese as it sounds, but the Navajo name of a spacious valley into which Cañon de Chelly debouches. If you have a taste for mythology, it will interest you to know that here, according to tradition, Estsán-atlehi (the chief goddess of the Navajo pantheon and wife of the Sun-god), traveling from the east once camped with her attendant divinities for a great ceremony and a footrace. She was on her way to her home in the great water of the west, where in a floating house she still lives, and receives her lord the Sun every evening when his daily work is finished.[47] There is a trading post at Chin Lee, and beyond the broad flat in front of it is the entrance to Cañon de Chelly. This is a narrow, tortuous rift in the earth, some 20 miles long, whose perpendicular sides of red sandstone rise 800 to 1000 feet. Opening into it are two side gorges, Monument and Del Muerto Cañons. A shallow stream of sweet water—sometimes, however, hidden beneath the sands—creeps along the cañon floor, widens in the plain into the Rio de Chelly, and flowing northward joins the San Juan in southern Utah. So in time does it contribute its bit to the tawny flood that pours through the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.[48]

The interests that hold the visitor in Cañon de Chelly are several. There is, first, the stupendous scenery. Men and animals traversing this level floor seem pygmies at the foot of the smooth, vertical walls, carved and stained by the master-artist Time working through who knows how many milleniums. The windings of the gorge keep one in perpetual expectancy of something going to happen just around the corner, and create an atmosphere of mystery that is little short of thrilling. In places the cañon widens out in sunlit coves and wild-grass meadows, where clustered reeds[49] rustle and wild flowers bloom. Quite as often, though, the walls are so close together that the sunshine never reaches the bottom and the grim surroundings suggest some overwhelming picture of Doré’s.

Then there are the ancient dwellings in the cliffs—little, crumbling cities of the dead. Perched high up in shallow cavities of the flat wall, some are inaccessible except by ladders; others, may be reached by scrambling up talus slopes. One famous one, known as Mummy Cave, in Cañon del Muerto, should by all means be visited; but even more striking is one in the main cañon called _La Casa Blanca_ or the White House. The upper story of this majestic ruin, which strikingly resembles some medieval castle, is colored white; and the whole line of the immense edifice set high above the earth and projected against the dark background of a natural cavity in the enormous cliff, makes a dramatic picture. The effect is heightened when we learn that in Navajo folk-lore it plays a part as the abode of certain genii or minor divinities who, the faithful believe, still haunt the edifice.

In places the cliffs are prehistoric art galleries, adorned with pictographs of unheard-of birds and animals, human hands outspread, geometrical designs, and attenuated figures of men in various attitudes.

Lastly, there is the interest of a present-day Indian life, for the cañon is the free, joyous home of numerous Navajo families, that come and go as fancy dictates. Their _hogans_, often with a hand-loom for blanket weaving[50] swung from a nearby tree are set inconspicuously here and there at the base of the towering cliffs, wherever there is a bit of land suitable for the raising of corn, beans and melons. Peach orchards, too, are here, from seed of Spanish introduction centuries ago. Flocks of sheep and goats are continually on the move up and down the cañon, which is musical with their bleatings and the wild melody of the shepherds’ songs. It is a picturesque sight at evening to see the homing bands crowding into the primitive folds which sometimes are a mere crevice in the rock walls with a rude fence thrown across the opening.

During the wars which for many years marked the intercourse of the Navajos with the whites—both Spaniards and Americans—the Cañon de Chelly was a notable stronghold of the red men. It was here that in 1864 Kit Carson and his troopers at last succeeded in breaking the backbone of the Indian resistance. Today the Navajos are as peaceable as the Pueblos.

According to Navajo legends, the boundaries of their land were marked out for them by the gods who brought them up through the great reed from the lower world.[51] These landmarks were in the form of mountains especially created for the purpose of earth brought from the lower world, and were seven in number. Of these the Sacred Mountain of the East is believed to be Pelado Peak, 20 miles northeast of Jemes pueblo and it was made fast to the earth by a bolt of lightning; the Sacred Mountain of the South is known to be Mount San Matéo, 20 miles or so northwest of Laguna pueblo, held in place by a great stone knife thrust through it from summit to base; the Sacred Mountain of the West, is the San Francisco Mountain, 12 miles north of Flagstaff, Arizona, fastened down by a sunbeam; and the Sacred Mountain of the North is some one of the San Juan range, which a rainbow held in place. The other three are peaks of the mid-region, only one of which, Hosta Butte in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has been identified.[52] Two of these mountains are plainly visible from the Santa Fe Railway trains and by motorists following the National Old Trails transcontinental highway—namely, the San Francisco Mountain (12,611 feet) and Mount San Matéo (11,389 feet). Both are extinct volcanoes. The vicinity of Mount San Matéo (which is also known as Mount Taylor)[53] is the scene of a thrilling tradition. There it was that the Navajo Gods of War (children of the Sun and of the Waterfall), mounted upon a rainbow, met and slew with lightning bolts the boy-eating giant, Ye-itso. The latter was a monster so huge that the spread of his two feet was a day’s journey for a man, his footfalls were as thunder, and when he drank his draught exhausted a lake. His head, cut off by the War-gods and tossed away, was changed into El Cabezon, a truncated cone of a mountain visible 40 miles northeast from San Matéo; and his blood flowing in a deluge to the south and west is what we white folk in our ignorance call a hardened lava-flow, as we watch it from the car window for miles westward from McCarty’s. Look at it again with the eyes of faith, and is not its semblance that of coagulated, blackened blood?

So you see in this glorious Southwest we may still follow in the very footsteps of the gods, and regard the world as it seems through the eyes of a primitive and poetic race—see in the lightning the weapon of the red gods, in the rainbows their bridges to traverse chasms withal, in the sunbeams their swift cars of passage. There is something rather exhilarating, I think, to know that in our materialistic America there is a region where the Ancient Ones still haunt as in the youth of the world. To be sure the white man’s schools are operating to break up this primitive faith; but the ingrained genius of a race is not made over in a generation. One may stumble still upon Navajo religious ceremonies, held in the open, with their picturesque rites and maskings and wild music. They differ markedly from the ceremonies of the Pueblos, and are, as a rule, undertaken under the charge of medicine men primarily for the cure of the sick. There are no fixed dates for any of these ceremonies, and casual travelers do not often see them, as they are most likely to be held during the cold weather, when few visitors care to penetrate into the country. An exceedingly interesting adjunct of many of the Navajo rites is the dry sand painting, of a symbolic character and often of striking beauty, made in color upon a prepared flooring of sand. The design is “drawn” on this by dribbling upon it the dry ground pigments—white, red, yellow, black and gray—from between the artist’s thumb and fore-finger. The picture must be done in one day, several men sometimes working upon it at once. When completed the sick man is placed upon it and treated; and after that, the picture is obliterated.[54]