Part 1

INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

BY LEO CRANE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1925

TO

those people of the Enchanted Desert who called me “Chief,”—Indians, employees, missioners, traders,—whose confidence, loyalty, and devotion made my work among the Hopi and Navajo tribes possible of success; and to humbler friends, my faithful horses, Dandy and Barney Murphy, Prince and Frank, that went with me so many weary miles, and were shot, by my order, to save them from the miseries of Governmental economy, this book is dedicated.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I Nolens Volens 3 II Across the Plains 11 III Into “Indian Country” 22 IV Old Trails and Desert Fare 30 V Desert Life and Literature 44 VI A Northern Wonderland 54 VII The First Ball of the Season 65 VIII Old Oraibi 78 IX The Making and Breaking of Chiefs 94 X The Provinces of the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” 101 XI The Law of the Realm 113 XII Comments and Complaints 122 XIII A Desert Vendée 142 XIV Soldiers, Indians, and Schools 157 XV An Echo of the Dawn-Men 181 XVI Fiddles and Drums 191 XVII Service Tradition 210 XVIII Buttons and Bonds 224 XIX Our Friends, the Tourists 240 XX The Great Snake-Ceremony 260 XXI Desert Belascos 275 XXII On the Heels of Adventure 287 XXIII The Red Bootleggers 297 XXIV Held for Ransom 312 XXV Wanted at Court 325 XXVI Hopi Annals 336 XXVII L’Envoi 361

ILLUSTRATIONS

Announcing the Snake Dance Frontispiece

Walpi, the Pueblo of the Clouds 12 The Valley and Its Headlands

A Navajo Flock and Its Shepherds 16 Cañon de Chelly, Seen from the Rim

Crossing the Desert below Chimney Butte 58 The Oraibi Wash in Flood-Time

Navajo on Their Way to a Dance 70 A Navajo Hogan and Its Blanket Loom

Outfit of a Well-Digger, the Desert “Water-Witch” 84 Drying Bed of the Little Colorado River

The Hopi Ceremonial Corn-Planting 92 Hopi Gardens in a Spring-Fed Nook of the Desert

Hopi Indian Agency at Keams Cañon 106 Hopi Indian Hospital at Keams Cañon

A Busy Day at the Trading-Post, Keams Cañon 118 Ready for the 105-Mile Trek to the Railroad

Hostin Nez, Navajo Chief and Medicine Man 124

Judge Hooker Hongave of the Indian Court 132

Youkeoma, Antelope Priest and Prophet 162

A Mesa Road—Old Trail to Hotevilla 170 A Pretentious Home at Hotevilla

A Hopi Schoolgirl 178 A Hopi Youth Who Is Preparing for College

The Walpi Headland, Seen from the Orchards 196

The Walpi Stairway, A Rock-Ladder to the Sky 202

The Author, in the Enchanted Desert 230 Old Glory and the Bond Flag at the Agency

Albert Yava: Interpreter 234 Tom Pavatea: Hopi Merchant and Patriot

The Corn Rock, an Ancient Bartering-place 238

Opening the Walpi Snake Dance 250 Dramatic Entry of the Snake Priests

The Gatherer, Handling a Rattlesnake 266 A Patriarch of Snakes

The Chief Snake-Priest 272

The Enchanted Desert and the Moqui Buttes 282

In the Twin-Butte Country 294 Silversmith Jim: a Typical Navajo

Billa Chezzi: Chief of the Northern Navajo 316 Nelson Oyaping: Tewa Chief of Police

A Navajo Boy Who Has Never Been to Any School 322

A Hopi Range-Rider 336 Blue Cañon: A Study in Blue-and-White

A Hopi Shrine 338 A Hopi Weaver of Ceremonial Robes A Katchina Dance

Hopi Mother in Gala Dress, with Her Child 340 Navajo Mother with Child in Cradle

A New Son of the Desert 344 Hopi Girls Arrayed for a Dance

Hopi Wedding Costume 352

A Hopi Beauty 358

INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT

I

NOLENS VOLENS

It is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves. —Charles Dickens

They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them.

Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things that weren’t done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they being from what an Easterner would term the “hinterland,” had he vision enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have tales to tell—a hope that never materialized.

When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if, seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their uncommon experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath; that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that which distressed them, and to return whence they came—into the broader, franker places.

I knew that they were “out of the West,” and this meant—of course it did—beyond—well, beyond the Mississippi. “The West” is a general term, and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim past. Therefore I did not know that this one’s bailiwick contained five troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly four hundred years; that another’s domain included six thousand square miles of God’s most wonderful creation, having the Marble Cañon of the Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third’s territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times, breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one’s home; that still another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the silence of uncharted cañons.

No. I did not meet these men in the Smithsonian offices at Washington; nor were they lecturers before the National Geographic Society. They were Indian Agents.

They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important, establish hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the frontiers.

Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in their efforts by the memory—fact and fiction—of the “ration” days. They might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for these officials’ existence has produced much sound and fury. The very title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists—and God knows the ignorance of them is astounding—take pen in hand to picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage, they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind. They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities of the “glorious past” would long since have engulfed the idealized protégé but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, measles, syphilis—scourges of the Indian people, whose long train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men have no historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be unknown.

Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant notice; occasionally, too, one was killed.

These unromantic facts, having no camouflage of feathers and war paint, nothing in them of the beating of tom-toms or the chanting of legends, do not invite a sentimental record; and, it is true, few such things occur in the “dude season,” when sentimentality, accompanied by its handmaiden ignorance, takes its neurasthenic outing in the wild.

One of them, a man whose dress spoke rather of the club and office, invited me thus:—

“Come out with me for a leave. There are deer, and trout streams, and a hunting-lodge up in the hills.” He was the chap who claimed to have a census of the grizzlies. “It’ll do you good, and you look as if you needed a bit of the outside.”

I thanked him casually, and turned aside his invitation with—

“What’s this I hear about the Chief offering you an inspectorship? That would give you some travel too, and—”

“An inspectorship! Travel!” he snorted. “Why, good God, man! I am the boss of the Switzerland of America. I wouldn’t trade my post for a seat in the Cabinet.”

That is the way they talked, and a few of them undoubtedly meant it.

A large bulky man, with a face like a piece of granite, twisted a crude silver ring on his finger as he extended a similar invitation in an entirely different way. He was a slow-speaking fellow, of few words and those of a definite, precise character.

“You’d like it,” he finished, sighing. “The Navajo country is a great place—a great place—”

He seemed at loss for words to picture his meaning, and I know now why language failed him.

Said a third, for whom I had unraveled the genealogy of a much intermarried Indian family, and who was grateful:—

“Why, you’re just the lad for me. All you’ll have to do is ride fences, armed with a hammer and a pocketful of staples” (I think he really said “steeples,”) “—and there’s quarters for you; twelve hundred a year too. You’ll get a lot of dope for stories. That place fairly drips ’em. What say? I can fix it with the Chief?”

After having had the courtesy to thank them one and all, I leaned back in the swivel-chair and laughed. While they were present I good-humoredly laughed with them, and later, at them. You see, in the Office I was known as the Scribe, ever since that time when the boss of Indian Territory had rushed in, mad as a hornet, waving a copy of Harper’s Weekly, and declaring that the essential guts of an article therein had been stolen from his confidential files. And while I had purloined them with the Chief’s permission, I realized it was a fine thing for me not to have lived in the Indian Territory.

While I might spend odd time writing stories of heroic unwashed cowpunchers battling Dante-nosed cayuses across the vasty early-morning range, with the frost nipping down the alkali dust, and a pale-rose tone on the distant range of hills, I knew also that they did it for forty dollars the month and grub off the wheel. I was then and am to this day aware that cowmen give little thought to either the vasty sweep of the broad spaces or to the rose tones. And I was perfectly able to fake the western landscape, where a man’s a man an’ a’ that, without removing myself more than five blocks from a café and a steak à la Bordelaise. I had placed one hundred stories in New York, and a hundred more on the stocks, without smelling an Indian camp or subjecting myself to the grave and anxious possibility of getting—well, inhabited, to say the least of it. I assumed that the dapper fellow was more of a clerk than a ranger; that the slow-moving granite-faced individual truly reflected the somber aridity of his monotonous desert; and the fact that the third had said “steeples” proved to me that I could never respect him as chief.

“No!” I decided, with a grin. “The Borax mule-team couldn’t drag me into that life.” And I too meant it.

But—I was brutally launched out of this effete complacency and pitched into the great Navajo Desert country without disturbing a single mule. I scrapped for money to purchase the once-despised “critters” to enable my existence therein. And I have been proud of my mules since.

Without seeming to be missed by those to whom I had thought my going would be tragedy, without causing a ripple among those few with whom I found myself, the Wheel turned over, and the vast immutable Desert received me with as much inscrutable kindness as it offers anyone. I had prepared the chute myself, and having greased it thoroughly, slipped and plunged down it, as has many a better man without sliding any further than his grave.

“See the Chief, and get a berth in the West. Live out o’ doors, rough it, live on milk and eggs, and don’t come home until I agree to it. You are two leaps ahead of the lion, and you’ll beat him yet.”

It was the cruel frankness of friendship. I had romped the city streets with the doctor, attended the same schools, appeared on the same stage as promoter of histrionic wares; in short, he had been the leader of my gang. I could recall the local excitement aroused by his first cane, and had carried his messages to his first girl. He knew how many times I had been thrashed, and had once turned the trick himself. There was no need for professional bluff between us.

Next day, perhaps a trifle groggy, I got to my feet in a more determined spirit, to prepare for the six-months’ battle. The Chief was very kind.

“Why not take a superintendency?” he suggested. “There’s one vacant, down in Rainbow Cañon. That’s the Grand Cañon country, you know. Wonderful place, one of the rarest spots on earth.”

I thanked him for the confidence, knowing that Rainbow Cañon was no place for an invalid. That Agency is nearly always vacant. New superintendents negotiate the trail but twice—ignorantly, going in, and wisely, coming out for ever. Even sure-footed mules have been known to miscalculate at Suicide Corner, and it is claimed that the bones of one such beast, entangled in the wires of his last burden,—a cottage piano,—still furnish a mystic Æolian effect when the wind sweeps below the place where he faltered. The last superintendent had spent forty-eight hours in a tree, evading flood-waters that threatened to carry him on a personally conducted tour through the Grand Cañon itself. I had arranged his relief by telegraphing the nearest offices adjacent to his tree, a mere matter of miles, up and down; and I had no great confidence that anyone would so rapidly arrange mine in similar circumstances. No! Rainbow Cañon sounded good, quite poetical, indeed; but none of it for one who required rest and as little exercise as possible.

So, in accord with my request and at my own valuation, based on my inexperience, I was formally transferred as a clerk to an Indian Agency that sits astride the Santa Fe trail—the modern trail connecting the ancient city of Santa Fe with the Pacific, along which pioneers wended in the forties.

One week later I had left Washington to make the trek of two thousand five hundred miles to the Painted Desert and—to me—a most desolate siding on the banks of the Little Colorado River in Arizona.

II

ACROSS THE PLAINS

Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or encouragement; but, stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the mocking, fugitive horizon.—Stevenson: Across the Plains

In the early days, those adventurous times when men pulled out of St. Louis of an early morning, and the dust of a long train of wagons and outriders arose; when they followed the Arkansas across to the Cimarron and Wagon Mound; when they warily entered the Indian country and somehow existed through the long dusty days and the longer nervous nights before sighting Santa Fe and safety in a foreign land, I suppose most of them felt the extraordinary vastness of the West. Certainly they knew its sterile immensity after a few weeks on that perilous road. Later, when they began seeking the Coast and the Pacific, leaving Santa Fe to plunge down La Bajada trail to follow the valley of the Rio Grande, to skirt the fields of the mysterious Pueblos, to risk thirst and ambush in the arid lands of the Navajo and Apache, to dare the flooded rivers and that brazen furnace, the Mohave Desert, all to reach the painted paradise of golden California, they surely became alive to the wonderful expanse of that southwestern empire first called New Spain—the Land of the Conquistadores!

A magic stage having magic scenes, bathed in glorious sunshine; a place of enchantment, where the rainbow colors linger on the cliffs and never leave the skies; an ancient garden of the gods, dreamily expecting that the gods will yet return; presenting ever its sphinx-like riddle; promising everything and yielding nothing but its lure. Once you have felt its sorcery, the spell is never broken.

Speaks the old-timer, “The Desert’ll get yeh”; and he doesn’t add anything about watching-out. The pioneers eluded or fought off wandering war-parties, but the Desert got them nevertheless.

There is one point in Arizona where, between the Santa Fe Railway and central Utah, three hundred miles as the crow flies and a weary five hundred by the trails, there is nothing of civilization other than a few isolated trading-posts and a solitary Indian Agency, set in a terraced cañon, eighty miles from a telegraph key. As my train passed this point in 1910, I did not dream that for more than eight years I should direct that Indian Agency and its chain of scattered desert stations, supplying all of progress that the country had, maintaining all of law and order that its half-wild people knew, isolated, lonely, well-nigh forgotten.

Only one who has lived thus removed from the turmoil and petty vanity of cities, apart from careless crowds, unreached by artificiality, can fully realize the brooding mystery, the savage beauty, the power and cruelty of the Desert. One must penetrate its solitudes, stand atop the world to view dead or enchanted cities, pause on the naked brink of chasms leaning over faery valleys, to know the grandeur of this silent country. One must grow weary on its heavy trails, feel its hunger, shrink in its bitter cold, and thirst for the water of the precious hidden springs. Fairly to hear its ominous hush at blazing noon-time, to view the scarlet glory of its sunsets, to stand under its velvet dome at night, lighted by the burning stars, is to have caught a secret from the universe. To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness, carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark, and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. One must have known the sigh of the night wind in the brush, heard the chatter of jackals in the snow, felt the sandstorm’s acid lash, and stopped, spellbound, at the sibilant warning of its gliding Indian god. Then to have seen the drifting red-bellied rain-clouds that the Snake priests pray for, the crisp rending lightning at their pouches, the wild strength of arroyos after cloud-bursts, and the deluge of the swift midsummer rains, ending in the soft radiance of double rainbows! One must live as a hermit in the Desert to find its heart.

And only one who has done this may somehow feebly understand those bronzed people of whom the desert genii have made fatalists—the solemn, dreaming Indian of the waste lands, whether the Hopi of the mesa heights and kivas, the Pueblo in his mediæval towns, or the Navajo, chanting in his lonely, hidden camp. These know all the splendors, feel all the menace and the mystery, and call the Desert home. Timid, yet uncaring, ever bent on placating some unseen demon, trusting in songs and sorceries, they go their Oriental ways on a vast Occidental stage. The desert spell has touched them, every one.