Part 7

“‘Just like a white man,’ Injun says. ‘White man build big fire, sit far off; Injun make little fire, sit close by.’ You don’t need a conflagration to boil coffee. I can make camp here with seven sticks five inches long. Where do you think you are? Up in Canada, hunting moose?”

All that afternoon we jogged on through the hot sunlight, shooting at and occasionally hitting a young jack-rabbit. The place was alive with them. The shadows of the horses grew longer as the sun dipped toward the Red Mesa. And then came the gray evening, with us peering ahead for the sign of a well-rig derrick. There were drillers in the valley, patiently pounding down their drills in the hope of striking the underflow of the Oraibi Wash. We had helped them outfit at the Agency, and they were of the I. D. Service. Their location should be somewhere close to the pueblo of Oraibi, “the town on the high flat rock,” a place long famous in the annals of the Tusayan provinces, first sighted by white men nearly four hundred years before.

We gave little thought to the ancient past of Oraibi, and certainly I did not dream that for more than eight years it would concern me personally. Pedro de Tovar, that adventurous lieutenant of the great conquistador Coronado, reached it in 1540, the first year of the Spanish exploration north of the Rio Grande; and in 1629, or perhaps a trifle earlier, zealous friars of the Franciscan order built a mission there and, surrounded by an always suspicious population, far removed from Spanish headquarters at Santa Fe, had worked and prayed and governed until the revolt of 1680, when they met martyrdom and the mission disappeared.

Until recently Oraibi had been the largest pueblo-community in North America, having had more than one thousand inhabitants, thus exceeding any of the pueblos of New Mexico. But its leading citizens, one Tewaquaptewa and one Youkeoma, the first a politician and the second a natural prophet and witch-charmer, backed by devoted and fanatical adherents, had prophesied, conjured visions and interpretations of signs, wrangled among themselves, and defied the Government until carried into captivity. Their imprisonment had been brief, and they were now busy making new medicine.

Tewaquaptewa’s portrait appears in that fine book of Indian chants, edited by Miss Natalie Curtis and published by the Harpers; and his singing countenance presents a rapt ecstatic expression as he yodels the Butterfly Song. The translation of his name is there given as “Sun-down-shining,” and is imperfect as most translations, but just as good as any other, providing you do not have to consider him on a Governmental basis. I never dealt with him on a musical scale, and his undoubted genius in this respect made no appeal to me. As his Indian Agent, however, I tried for eight long years to make a sensible human being of him, and failed, for lack of material. After having tried him as an Indian judge, and then as an Indian policeman, in the hope of preserving his dignity and authority as hereditary chief, he was found to be the most negatively contentious savage and unreconstructed rebel remaining in the Oraibi community, so filled with malicious mischief-making to his benefit that a group of his own people petitioned me to exile him from the mesa settlement, in the hope that they might then exist in peace. Of course, this had little to do with his “Sun-down-shining” or his Butterfly chanting; but when the folks at home cannot get along with father, there is something wrong.

Youkeoma, a different type of Hopi, had been defeated by the Tewaquaptewa faction, and was now in the medicine-man and prophecy business about seven miles to the west, in his new and already odorous town of Hotevilla, whence, after the tribal troubles, like another Moses he had led his faithful. Tradition has it that there will always be jealousy and enmity among the Oraibans until the pretender to leadership is martyred; so when Youkeoma was thrown out, he accepted it as a manifestation of the rules. But that did not prevent both outfits from resisting the Government, an alien intruder, wholly unmindful of the sacred prophecies, who entered in to pacify a perfectly legitimate family scrap.

Kewanimptewa, a third Oraibi factionist, who headed the weakest band of all, had trekked in another direction, a second upheaval having resulted in his eviction and retirement from the political field. His allies went to a little-known cañon, Bacabi, where, but for the prompt assistance of the Government Agent, the whole lot of Ishmaelites would have perished. It was winter and they had no harvest. Aid in this case was gratefully accepted, and out of the truce grew a friendliness now unbroken. Those who followed Youkeoma, however, remained sullen and unreconstructed, accepting nothing, acknowledging nothing, rebels and defiant.

Therefore the original Oraibi, which had been the largest Indian community, was split into three parts, and the parent place has been still further reduced by emigration to Moencopi in the farther west. As will be related later, all this foolish dissension could have been avoided, and the Government might have saved many thousands of dollars by a firm and impartial policy toward these Indians. While the separation weakened them, they had to be followed with the means of control and education, sanitation, and medicines—a far more expensive job than a full Oraibi pueblo would have demanded.

This little expedition for peaches I thought would mark my whole acquaintance with the Hopitu, the “peaceful” wrangling ones. In 1907 I had written several stories for Harper’s Magazine, one of which concerned these people. The ethnological facts I had exhumed from the library of the Indian Office at Washington, and the skeleton on which I strung these fancies was produced from that fearful thing known as the writer’s imagination. God forgive me! I have always believed that I was given charge of the Hopitu as a punishment for that crime against the verities.

And then, when we were about to confess that the stupid team had taken the wrong road, to the end that we were strayed, lost, and would probably be stolen, the well-rig loomed up as a tall gallows at the roadside. There were calls and hearty greetings.

“Shorty,” a minor water-witch of the Empire, had laid aside his wand for the day, which is one way of saying that the rig-tower no longer trembled, the cable no longer jerked, and the drill did not pound in its hole. Shorty was ready to receive visitors and to relate how he shot the mountain lion.

It matters not in that country how shabby the guest, how poor the host, or how wild the place of meeting, there is always a welcome and entertainment of the board, to be followed by talk of the Empire. A veteran of the garrison days told me that in his time, on reaching a post-trader’s, it would be impossible to escape for a week. Every item of news from the outside would be demanded and paid for in a liquid coin that is no longer circulated. Then the bowl flowed freely when the pipes were lit, and the company gathered around a roaring fireplace in the evening.

“We would gossip and swap lies until we could not see, and then tumble into the nearest bed to sleep it off. Next day, if he had had enough, a fellow would call for his horse. Consternation would follow. Everyone would regret, with much language, that Bonehead Bill had left the corral-gate open last night, and now not a hoof in all that valley.

“‘’Fore Gad! pardner, they’re clear t’hell an’ gone over into Palisade Cañon by now. It’ll take two wranglers to git ’em up. Make yourself t’homelike, ’cause to-morrow’s another day.’”

So there would be no means of travel until the great exchange of ideas was exhausted, and the whiskey out, when they would speed him onward. Said the veteran, “Them was times!”

But in Indian country to-day one has to be content with the ensemble without the olden stimulus.

At this well-camp there were no extra beds, so for the first time I slept on the open range. We had packed a dozen thick blankets, six for the ground and three apiece for wrappings. By the time bed was made, the contrast between that day’s noon and three hours after sunset was a trifle more than bitter. To remove one’s clothing in that extraordinary boudoir of a thousand square, open, and draughty miles was a shrinking bit of business.

Several times during the night I awoke, convinced that I was slowly freezing; and on one of the occasions I was quite certain that I had died and reached a certain destination; for at the edge of the Wash a troop of coyotes had assembled, and they made night hideous. It was my first close-up of such a chorus, a bedlam of ghoulish chattering. Fiends might have been braver, but they could not have uttered cries more horribly depraved. The coyote is very low in the social scale of the Desert. While the orthodox Navajo will not kill one, even as the Hopi will seldom slay a snake, this does not mean that he rejoices in the vicinity of the beast. Notwithstanding the souls of ancestors that are believed to possess him, “Mi-he,” the coyote, receives little welcome or respect. There is something so miserably unclean, so slinkingly evil, in Mi-he, the jackal of the Southwest, that I have yet to discover anything of sympathy for him under any conditions. He follows and preys on the sheep and calves, poor, stupid, defenseless creatures, and in a remote spot I have seen several of him circle a band of wild ponies, patiently waiting for a colt to drop behind. At night, when there are mysteries and fancies enough without him, his mournful howl, followed by ghoulish chattering like unearthly laughter or the mockery of lost souls, gives the Indian good cause to include him among the worthless members of a savage mythology.

But morning brought the radiant sun god, and all unclean things fled away. Warmed into amiability, we covered the last five miles to our goal. Oraibi occupies a projecting point of a huge tumbled mesa, one that has known the rack and twist of volcanic convulsion. Below it in the plain were a Government school, a trading-post, and quite a settlement of Indians who had been persuaded to remove from the unsanitary height. To reach the pueblo proper, we drove up a long, winding sand-road, using the drifts and dunes of centuries for a ladder. This connected with a rather perilous mesa-ledge road, overhanging the valley, around the edge of which we found the ancient town.

The newcomer to the Hopi desert always assumes that the Indian sought the heights because of view and scenic beauty, purest air, and freedom. Freedom had something to do with it, for there is no doubt he was driven to accept the mesa as a citadel. In order that he might have a chance to defend himself against marauding “Apaches du Navaju,” who raided his camps and herds, killed his sons, and carried his women into captivity, he risked the scarcity of water, depending on pools during sieges, and fortified the mesas. There, with his house built for closer defense and his flocks under the ledges, he felt secure. The fields of the tribe, presenting assurance against famine, were of necessity at a distance from these strongholds, and this handicap trained the Hopi into the wonderful long-distance runner that he is to-day.

Old Oraibi is not a pretty picture, although its setting relieves much of squalor and debris. The narrow streets were filled with rubbish and worse; fowls scratched in the offal, burros herded in doorways, and lanky, half-starved dogs were legion. Many of the houses had crumbled and others were being demolished. These were the abandoned homes of the defeated factionists. There were short alleys and blind courts, while around a central plaza the dwellings arose to the height of three stories, reached by little ladders, where a few of the inhabitants were sunning. The roofs were piled with drying peaches. The place of the ceremonial kiva sloped away to the mesa edge, and from it one looked away, many miles, to the dimming river-country. The men were in the fields, the children at school; the place seemed abandoned, dead. Here was a perfect picture of the senility of a one-time civilization that had been decaying for many centuries, and in this our day had reached very nearly to utter devitalization.

From the edge of the great cliff one looked down on the immense stretches of the desert. Grazed-out long ago by flocks that were held too close to the pueblo, the land had become barren, a sea of drifting sand that stirred and lifted in the winds. But in this sand were the cornfields and bean patches of the stubborn race. The Hopi, whatever else he may be, is the greatest dry-farmer on earth. He tills the unirrigated sand, fighting the drought and the pests and the scorching winds according to his rituals, and from it produces the corn which is his staff of life.

A commanding promontory at some distance was the “Judgment Seat,” or place of accounting, where the spirits of all save Hopi children must repair on leaving the earthly body. One had to walk but a little way to stumble on their tombs.

Now here, now there, a broken bowl Half buried in the sand, Marks where some pueblo chieftain dreams, Forgotten by his band. Those shallow mounds, where age the toys,— Weak spirits dwell not deep,— The Desert presses light on them; The pueblo children sleep.

Our guide directed us to a sheltered angle of the mesa where, among boulders and sand-drifts, we found the one unperished gift of the padres, delicious peaches, not so large as California fruit, but having all the flavor and quality of that grown in Maryland and Delaware. We bargained with a smiling Hopi, and loaded.

And then, like all wise travelers in the Desert, we started to make “a long step on the road” while the sun was high; we camped that night in the greasewood, with well-smoked jack-rabbit for supper, and trundled into the Agency next evening, tired and hungry, to be received with coldness and suspicion. Our offering of peaches did not discount this bitterness. So small a thing as the erratic flight of a confused mammal may thus strain friendship and affect the most sincere labors.

IX

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF CHIEFS

“You’ll have charge of the district till my successor comes. I wish they would appoint you permanently; you know the folk. I suppose it will be Bullows, though. Good man, but too weak for frontier work; and he doesn’t understand the priests.... Call the Khusru Kheyl men up; I’ll hold my last public audience.”—Kipling: “The Head of the District.”

A year drifted by in this fashion. The November-December days were glorious. At a time when the effete East was slopping about in goloshes, and taking cold and quinine, and sniffling and having sick-leave, and generally hurrying toward the grave, we were reveling in sunshine.

January and February brought real crimping winter nights. Spring came in early March, and quickly the cottonwoods of the river-bank were all greening again. Then suddenly, as if in a flare of anger, the springtime wind cried its challenge to the moisture of the sand, and began driving everything that was loose before it. Then too, suddenly something happened: the Chief resigned.

A matter like this brings a dramatic pause to those in isolated places. Something of unexplained dread crept into everyone, from the Indian lad who curried the horses to the chief Nultsose. A little company of people, knowing each other thoroughly and marooned in a sense, would lose the Skipper, the Old Man, the Chief who had attended to most of their routine thinking, and made decisions, and was responsible, and caused them generally to exist comfortably whether they were capable of it or not.

Who would succeed him?

Whatever the faults and frailties of the Chief, they at least knew him, his humors and his moods. He had not been difficult to analyze. There had been a time to flatter, and a time to leave him alone; there had been moments on drives, in camps, and at little social affairs, when all that was left of the youth—one might say the “boy”—of him returned, when for a brief space he had ceased to be the Old Man. So they realized abruptly, forgetting petty differences, that something of affection had grown up unconsciously between them.

But why abandon a little kingdom? Why, indeed!

He had grown covetous. The pride that the Desert builds in those few who manage to command it had somehow got the better of his judgment. He had developed the astounding effrontery to think that he earned and was justified in demanding a salary of more than thirteen hundred dollars a year! Think of that—he had come to re-view the value of himself. It was not honor enough for him to have created a little centre of civilization. He actually felt that the laborer was worthy of his hire. It reminded one of a particular scene in Oliver Twist. It was stupefying. It was downright impudence in the man. Washington had never heard the like, and confessed itself painfully shocked; in fact, it became almost infuriated.

Had not a whole series of clerks, working at white heat between ball-games and vacations, checked his accounts and requested an explanation of his every action for years, just to keep him from this very state of mind—to prevent his fondly imagining that he had accomplished anything? Think of the man who had struggled, under orders, to that forlorn station in 1908, breasting the wind and the sand and a falling thermometer, just to demonstrate scientifically how concrete is mixed in New Jersey. Why, this advising concrete genius drew only two thousand and a per-diem, a man skilled in methods known to the Atlantic seaboard, and aside from his having political influence, was ever ready, under orders, at this pitiful stipend, to place his all-embracing knowledge at the disposal of this non-comprehending desert roughneck, who—Words fail one!

As for the Indians to be affected by this change, they were inarticulate and did not count. Someone would be appointed to the vacancy, someone just as good—well, anyway, good enough for Indians.

Then came an experience such as a complacent court must suffer when an old monarch dies. It happens, no doubt, when there is a change of chiefs anywhere; but it is the more personal and grinding when one has to live next door to the chief, breakfast with him, lunch with him, dine with him, face him across a desk, or ride cheek-by-jowl with him from daylight to dark; in short, to serve him loyally twenty-four hours the day. Comparisons are not odious; they are hellish. Those so situated as to be thus dependent on one another for duty and society must have some bond of sympathy, something of confidence and regard, respect if nothing more, like unto that which takes the curse off marriage. The living conditions, the lack of society and amusement, the introspection that the Desert invites, these things make the casual word to be an insult and a chance sentence to produce tragedy. Unless it be aboard ship, I know of no relative situation in which one man can become so terrible a burden to others as at an isolated desert-station.

Suffice to relate that the period of reconstruction and change brought many disputes, all of them crushed and smothered by the turgid heaviness of forty years’ experience. The new Chief was different, and aged, and sick, a misery to himself and to everyone else. As is invariably the case, the most valuable of the employees began to prepare to quit the ship. I have seen a great deal of loyalty in the West, and the man who is fair may count on men until they drop; but these same men speak their minds freely, and it is hard for them to change czars. Old traditions were restored; the cook quit in a flame of anger, leaving as his vengeance a last meal garnished with a defunct mouse. The pot boiled fifteen hours the day.

When the thing had become a trifle too thick for me, like a flash from the blue came an unsought, unexpected telegram:—“WILL YOU ACCEPT APPOINTMENT SUPERINTENDENT MOQUI SALARY EIGHTEEN HUNDRED BOND THIRTY THOUSAND WIRE.”

A courteous expression that is now rare: “Will you accept.” The mere transposition of a word makes all the difference. “You will accept” is the tone of recent orders—a reaction of the great war against Prussianism on those who reject with an unctuous civilian horror all idea of militarism.

And yet there is a certain fine discipline and training in the military atmosphere, even a copy of it, as practised at the properly conducted schools and agencies of the farther deserts. One learns to obey in unpleasant things, and feels something of duty and loyalty in acceding. Where there is nothing of civilization for one hundred miles in any direction, not even a telegraph wire, one comes to revere that refreshing bit of bravery, the Flag, whipping above trees, a symbol of authority and order; one thrills at the music of the band; and bugle-calls, in the wine of seven thousand feet above the sea, add a character-forming stimulation: reveille, mess, retreat, or at the end of a long day’s drive homeward in the dark, cramped and cold from fifty miles, to hear the solemn notes of “taps.”

The night hush of the drowsy desert has succeeded all daylight bustle. The clatter of shops, the hum of machinery, the hiss of steam, have quieted. There are no more calls from children at play. One by one the lamps go out on campus and in quarters, and great Orion burns down the empty spaces to glimpse a scrap of feeble civilization gripped in the aged everlasting hills. Then, on the cold wind, stealthily, comes the eerie chant of a Navajo, riding across the mesa, calling on his gods.

“Will you accept ... Moqui—”

That was the country of the Buttes and craggy mesas; of Old Oraibi; of the Second Mesa and its broad stairway to the dome-like pueblos; of ancient Walpi and its rocky ladder to the sky; the land of ruins dating from the misty dawn of history. Across it the Spaniards had marched, contemporaries of Columbus, their halberds gleaming in the sun; and there the early padres had ruled, their mission bells now silent. The “provinces of the Mohoce or Mohoqui,” as Coronado bade his poet-historian write it down. It was the very heart of the Enchanted Empire.

There were but two persons to give me a modern view of the situation. The Navajo interpreter at my present station was one of those half-educated, half-sullen returned students who would accept the meagre wage when the trader would not, a part of the economic system aimed at cheaply teaching grandfather through his unrespected grandson. He came from that northern country, and his immediate family composed a most insolent gang—a mere detail I discovered later in time of stress.

“Lots of Navajo up there,” he said. “Those Black Mountain fellows—mean Indians, too. Down here, quiet, never any trouble, ’cause they liked the Chief; but up there, always something doing.”

Having little confidence in the fellow, I discounted his words heavily. But that afternoon came the missionary from down-river.

“Hello!” he called to me. “What’s this I hear? You going to Moqui? Well, well! I hope you handle that bunch of mean ones over beyond Oraibi—those Hotevillas. About every four years they flare up. The last was in 1906, so it’s about due. The present Agent hasn’t Christianized those Indians, and the one ahead of him was a bit mild. They need the fear of God put into them. Many Agents? Well, come to think of it, yes. I can recall several of them. One stayed four years; they average about two, as a rule. Let me hear from you sometime.”