Chapter I: Front Matter (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.

That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert. Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient, are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology, a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too.

One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars, mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their head, the great Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma.

Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung, those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.

But De Vargas waived the kingdom of the Farther West. Until the treaty with the Navajo in 1868, little more than solitude or bitter foray touched the heart of the Enchanted Empire of which I write. Three hundred years of Spanish steel and ritual were drifted down into sand and silence. One marks this chapter but a desert dream. Later civilization and progress moved north and south around it. The building of the frontier posts assured a pathway to the Coast and nothing more. “Fort Defiance” explains this desert challenge. And while the great Civil War was crashing in the East, Kit Carson made his desert raids, carried ruthless war into the cañon strongholds, to break the nomads who, desert-trained, keep their secrets still.

To have been thrust, a sickly tenderfoot, into this environment, to have observed the aftermath of these periods, to have known the desert people intimately, to have followed Coronado’s trails, and to have had in charge quite nearly all that Spain controlled in 1600, perhaps will serve as a reason for this notebook.

Just as the early Spanish found it necessary to dominate and rule this kingdom of the Desert clans, so do the Indian Agents who govern it to-day. A Government post here, another one hundred miles away, mark all of civilization that one can find, held against the obliterating fingers of the hungry, unchanging Desert. Here is the last frontier, an area of fifty thousand square miles, having fifty thousand Indian inhabitants and few indeed of other men.

For the most part the native people are pagan barbarians, having savage customs, jealously guarding their secret mysteries, slow to obey, but quick to resent interference, feeling all the power of their isolation.

As late as 1911 a troop of United States cavalry was breaking camp at a point in Keams Cañon, of the Moqui Reservation, not a mile from where Kit Carson, with his New Mexican volunteers, made his camp in August 1863, during that famous march to Cañon de Chelly. Ostensibly this modern troop had acted as an escort to another famous Colonel of the older frontier Army—that gentleman who has out-talked so many Indian tribes, with his sign-weaving fingers if his words sound strange to them, with men of the plainest diction when all else fails. Actually it had served as a show of force, trooping in frontier fashion against a band of unreconstructed rebels of the hills. A bloodless campaign of thirty days was ending. Washington orders, irrevocable, called to other troubles on the Border. The support lent to the Indian Agent, still a pallid tenderfoot, was about to be withdrawn. He ventured to remark that the serenity of the moment might be followed by untoward proceedings, once the uncombed native learned that the soldiers had departed. He asked for military advice, knowing full well that he would get no civil consolation.

Until then there had been a great show of tactful diplomacy between the two Governmental representatives; the one of war counseling peace, and the supposed civilian who had ventured close to war. The Colonel spoke, for the first time without regard to the gentle traditions of the Interior Department:—

“Young man! you have an empire to control. Either rule it, or pack your trunk!”

And there is another reason for the telling. Probably no other section of Indian country is more visited than is the Painted Desert, where the Snake gods have such influence. From June to October comes a host, packing cameras and notebooks and sketching-blocks, attired in weird garments, big with questions, and expecting to find hotels. Most of them wish to rough it smoothly, and are easily annoyed. They seek the natural wonders of the Empire, and especially the religious “dances” of the Indian people, chief of which is the annual Hopi Snake Dance. A strange crowd, having more of enthusiasm than sense, staggering under theories, swelled with importance and criticism, generously stuffed by guides.

A library has been written and vocabularies have been exhausted in their efforts to explain the beauties and the thrills. Canvas sufficient to tent a city has been spoiled by those who would capture the delicate and elusive Desert charm. Historians and ethnologists have recorded and traced; antiquaries have uncovered and restored. The museums of the East are filled with looted treasure, while the files at Washington drip complaints. (“Oblige me by referring to the files.”) And the Indian as a savage—and a little-understood savage at that—has been idealized. And those who do not observe this view—berated.

But not a word has been printed, and few spoken without a sneer, regarding those of the United States Indian Service who keep watch and ward in the remote places: those who govern and protect, educate and guide; those who have kept the Indian living, that he may be sketched and analyzed and gaped at. This work extends beyond the dude season, through the lonely, bitter winters, embracing at times contagion-camps among an unreasoning, often unappreciative, and occasionally defiant population.

To further education among those who do not want it, to advance medication among fatalists, to attain some show of morals among an insensible and unmoral people, to demand respect and win affection from suspicious aliens, to rule absolutely without an army, and, above all, to keep sane and just without society, call for all of any man’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, and should arouse something other than blatant criticism from those who boast intelligence.

Having accomplished these things, every one, I am proud of the record; and I shall not fail to acknowledge my full indebtedness to those faithful men and women of the Service who made my efforts possible of success—employees, traders, missioners, not forgetting those few from among the heathen who gave their loyalty and confidence. They too have felt the sneers and insults of the multitude; and the grudging appreciation of an equally insensible Bureau nearly three thousand miles away is small reward. Many valued employees have grown old in this Service without a syllable of commendation from Washington. And I have prompted at least one Commissioner of Indian Affairs to acknowledge his feeble debt to a dying physician—dying on his feet, still nobly making the rounds.

When I left Washington, in 1910, I had no idea that such a future work would extend my little vacation into the years. Six months out o’ doors, and either I should be reëstablished at the old stand, pounding the old typewriter, or I should have attended a ceremony that is final but not interesting to the subject thereof. A simple calendar; not the first, however, to stand revision.

Morning brought Chicago, to me a grim and sinister city, and a day spent in its galleries and clubs; then the train again, and its long crawl across level, heated Kansas. Excellent living on a diner, and came the thought that wherever this railroad wended would follow good food, which I required, and service of the best. Vain and soon-to-be-exploded vision! The railroad carries food and service; the West sees it go by. In the Desert one has desert fare.

The contrast was outside the windows; on the third morning this contrast became acute. Instead of hamlets, farms, and country lanes, there was now the grayish-green of the sage, broken by stunted cedars on the slopes, with an overtone of brown as the soil reflected light. There was no indication of complete aridity, so one could not think of this as a desert. Scant vegetation lived from the brush of the foreground to the timbered blue of the distant ranges. They did not appear as lofty mountains, although many peaks lifted against a calm blue sky. Beyond the little telegraph points, the occasional adobes of section crews, and water tanks, the landscape held not a sign of habitation. In the middle distance were strange formations of crumbling shale, banded with the spectral white of gypsum: queer piles such as might have been designed by some sardonic humorist. Now straying cattle, gaunt as the hills, blanket Indians idling at a station, or a ranger on a shabby mount, were the only things of life. Over all the golden haze of New Mexico, moistened by the mists of the Rio Grande.

But later in the day this blue-toned view began to change. The sky grew clearer, the distance more intimate and revealing. Everything snapped into the brilliancy of sharp relief. Where had been isolated buttes, now ran barricades of rock, wind-worn, pinnacled, and domed, while the cold tones—blue and silver—of the river country warmed to the dry saffrons and parched reds of sun-baked Arizona, the Land of Little Rain. One could, as the old-timer sings, “see farther and see less” than on any other stage of the world.

Just at sunset the train slowed into a weather-browned, dust-covered town, its main street along the tracks and little else in sight. It was Sunday and the season of the wind. A swirling fog screened everything as the cars stopped. There is nothing more forlorn than a Southwest town of a Sunday in the windy season. A long rank of stores and saloons displayed false fronts, innocent of paint. A few starved trees waved crippled branches, and were most piteous. Flapping awnings, flying leaves, waste paper, sand, and cinders filled the air. When the wind ceased howling for a moment, there fell a deadly silence. It seemed to me as if that place must have been as it was for a thousand years, drowsing in the red-gold sunset, abandoned, overlaid by the itinerant dust of all the ages. A clatter of hoofs, a shot, a crash of glass, and a man or two by Remington would have completed the picture.

A little to the north of it was Poverty Flat. To the east was the drying bed of the Little Colorado, a mile in width, lined by withered cottonwoods, and possessing scarcely enough liquid to demand a foot-bridge. In the west, a thing of splendor, reared the beautiful San Francisco range, snow-crowned, radiant, the sun searing down into its ancient craters. Elsewhere, everywhere, stretched the Desert, sterile, barren, robing now in the purplish-brown shades of early dusk. Its unlimited expanse, silent, desolate, suggested something of foreboding, something of waiting menace.

Thank God! there was one of those splendid railroad hotels at hand. I hurried into it, a little of civilization such as I knew, glad to shut out the night that advanced across that empty plain, swallowing as it came the masses of the Moqui Buttes and all the strange upland country that a year later I was to call home.

III

INTO “INDIAN COUNTRY”

“Indian country” applies to all lands to which the Indian
title has not been extinguished, even when not within a
reservation expressly set apart for the exclusive occupancy
of Indians. “Indian country” includes reservations set apart
for Indian tribes by treaty, Executive order, or Act of
Congress.—Meritt: The Legal Status of the Indian

The next morning was another day, as I have often heard remarked since; and whatever the terrors of the night, the crisp, cheerful Arizona morning brings with it renewed hope and assurance.

The town waked-up; the air held the tonic thrill that comes only from pine-clad peaks; the yellow dust of yesterday now kept its place. At this season in Arizona one may expect the wind to rise about noon and continue its nerve-racking tyranny until sunset. The blessed sunlight prevents one from remaining depressed, however, and there is always an end to the windy season, whatever the nerves meantime. When the last shriek has died away in early summer, it seems there lives a vacuum, a strange stillness, like that which follows the stopping of a clock.

I found the station platform quite busy that morning. Trains discharged their hungry freight, and the hotel kitchens fed them in battalions. A well-stocked news-stand promised that I would not lack for entertainment. The general spirit of moving life and activity caused one to forget that the Desert lurked beyond, that these rails were simply a tiny causeway spanning it for many miles, desolation on either side.

Chance acquaintance is made easily in the Southwest, and it was not long before I answered the query of a young man as to where I headed. I replied that there was a long journey to make, out into the Desert, among the Indians perhaps. He seemed not to be aware that Indians were of the immediate locality, and asked: “How far?”

“Oh—about thirty miles.”

“Humph!” he commented, drily; “people in this country go that far to water a horse.”

The pastime and humor of Arizona is exaggeration. I know now that the ranchers of the Southwest, and the so-called nomadic Indians, for that matter, are people of definite localities. An Indian of the Desert will name and locate his hogan or home camp as specifically as the man of a city street. Indians are born, live, and frequently die within a very small area of the Desert. That is why Indians—and you may scoff—are likely to be lost at night during storms. Their distant travels are well planned, by daylight, much the same as anyone breaks monotony with a holiday or business trip. Only those of the most remote desert places make long journeys as a part of daily routine, and then when need compels. I have yet to see the man who lived miles from water. Water decides where any man may live in the Desert—and his animals too.

It was a different story when I aroused a very fat individual who dozed complacently with his chair propped back against a livery barn. I inquired about a team for the immense hike I had to make. There were no automobiles then to traverse the desert, and few were in the little towns. To-day gasoline and tires, coupled with much swearing, grease, and shoveling of sand, have conquered most of the desert distances, and the last time I covered that road was in one of those striped metallic potato-bugs hatched by that Detroit genius who could not place Benedict Arnold in his country’s history, but who has made possible thirty miles the hour as against a former five. Then, or once upon a time, the horse—or his superior relative, the mule—was indispensable, and the keeper of a stable was a king of transportation, something akin to Jim Hill. This one acted just that way. Evidently he had not lost anything out back.

“Well—” he hummed, doubtfully, “that’s a longish trip, that is. I’ve made it—” giving me the impression that it had been an unusual effort, fraught with courage. “I went out there once, but it was two days’ hard travel, ’cause yeh have to rest the horses over night, returnin’ next day. That spoils two good days for me, and I have to charge yeh accordin’. It’ll be thirty dollars. When do yeh want to start?”

“Never, at that rate!” I declared very promptly.

So I went back to the hotel and sent a telegram up the line stating that I would there remain in comfort until some reasonable means of travel came in sight. The answer indicated that I had been heard from. Several days after a rather rough-looking individual called for me and introduced himself as the Boss.

“I was coming to town anyway,” he said, “but usually I don’t freight my employees.” Waiving this little matter of custom, I inquired: “How far is it to the Agency?”

“Twenty-five miles. We’ll make it in less than four hours.”

And we did, for he drove an excellent team of mares, and his reputation as a driver was like unto that of Jehu.

On the way I explained the purpose and definite length of my visit. He seemed relieved, for it had been his original suspicion that I, being from Washington direct, came seeking his job. Having worked in a newspaper office long enough to learn that one must build absolute loyalty to the chief, I assured him that his interests were mine, and thereafter we got along famously. He was a lovable fellow when one had punctured the sun-dried skin of him, under which there was much to admire; and not the least was that he felt his tight little Agency to be the finest spot on earth. And why should he not?

Some few years before this he had drifted into that loop of the Little Colorado River, a place that for sterile barrenness could not be matched and that justified few visions. Armed with a single letter of authority, he had taken charge of the empty landscape. He pitched his tent beneath an old spreading cottonwood tree. I can imagine his lonely vigils and his planning under the brilliant desert stars. First, the well to tap the subcurrent of the river; then, one by one, the Government buildings, of rough rock quarried from the near-by mesas, meanwhile engaging and lodging and feeding rougher laborers, and disputing with contractors, and keeping them all from liquor, until a little town grew in this river-angle that for centuries had known only the withered trees, the cooing of many doves, and driftwood. The grounds were marked and leveled and drained. In springtime the river flooded the place, but he was not dismayed. An office, warehouses, shops, and barns were built. Then arose a well-appointed school, with dormitories for the Indian children, queer desert gamins that for a time were as frightened rabbits and wept for their smoky camps. There were kitchens, baths, a laundry, a plant to furnish light and ice and heat; for while the summer may be broiling, the winter brings its snow and bitter wind in that unprotected waste. He saw the sick and built a hospital. There were quarters for his staff of employees. He planted trees along cement walks; he broke ground for a farm, and planned an irrigation system with its pumping-plant. His barns held feed against the winter, and his commissaries flour and clothing. A trader came for license, and then another; and a grant was made to a little mission church. Last, but not the least necessary to his desert kingdom, was a guardhouse for those who disputed his sage counsels. High above it all floated the Flag, stoutly whipping in the desert wind.

One day he folded up his tent and walked into his capital. The town was not finished—true; it was not perfect—true. Already he could see the mistakes of a pioneer hand, similar to those of the Mormons who had settled in that country generations before, and whose record was a graveyard. It is not finished to-day, and several successors have added their work to his. It may eventually be a folly and a failure in the sense of profits, for where the Mormons failed in those early days of zealotry who can hope to succeed? Ah! in the sense of material profits—Yes! But where had been nothing but the blind Desert and the savage river, nothing but the blow-sand and the horned toad, he had created an outpost of civilization to reach and serve and protect a helpless people who, theretofore, had only their desert demons.

As far as he could see to the north, where the red-toned mesas raised their twisted shoulders above the desert rim, where the dim blue crowns of monster lava-buttes loomed against the sky, to the edge of the world, it seemed, the domain was his kingdom. Twelve hundred human beings hailed him “Nahtahni,” which is Chief, and listened to his advice. His was the only voice they heeded without suspicion, for had they not been driven from this land in midwinter, by armed men, packing their few possessions through the snow? And had it not required a fighting President of the United States to restore to them this pitiful inheritance? No less, indeed!

But to them, people of no contrasts, was it not a wonderful inheritance—that all-embracing stage, from the Red Mesa where the tumbled rocks stood in rings, “Children at Play”; from the Sapphire Lakes and the restless river to the country of the Moqui, guarded by the lava buttes, those somber blue-clad gods of the northern sky? And was it not the Desert!

Perhaps—no doubt of it—that Great White Father had sent this curious Nahtahni from his own household. The world has four corner-posts, one the Desert and one that is Washington. They could remember those nights when they first gathered around his tent under the gnarled old cottonwood, the surly river’s murmur in their ears, their glowing fires matching his against the stars. He had told them of his mission. And he was not afraid of white men—had sent some of them briskly about their business. His commission read—they knew it by his action—that all pertaining to their peace and welfare devolved on him; that he was responsible for their best interests. His mark upon a “nultsose” was the money of the land. His police wore the eagle button. Truly this was a man to be respected; and he was their Chief.

So at his command they brought children to the school, for it seemed he had a peculiar fondness for children; and yet he had no sheep to herd. A strange fellow! They came in from their corrals and patches to work for implements and livestock; they hauled the stores and coal from the railroad, herding their wiry ponies with many a wild cry; they found that his queer blue papers could be exchanged for the hard silver dollars of the West.

And to this Chief they came too with foolish complaints and childish misfortunes; to him they came when ill and trembling, and him they sought when old and hungry, shivering against the desert wind, forsaken by their own cruel kindred, fearing that the jackals would pick their bones. In all that trading country they knew him as the one who would not barter.

His real title was—no matter; there must be tags and labels; actually, by law and practice, he was a desert czar, distributing his bounty, holding his courts of justice. Of course he was, and so are they all, each and every one. What came you out to see? A jurist splitting hairs and fearing to say too much, a ferret of accounts, a listening politician, a sutler and his bales? How many such can boast that they have constructed anything? This man had built a sanctuary, and he ruled a kingdom. He was the “Nahtahni!” That was enough, and what is needed, in the Desert.

When they did not call him that, affectionately they dubbed him “Sack-hair,” because he wore a wig, and since one day, to their general consternation, his scalp had blown off into a bush. From Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, to the blind old woman of the tribe, he was counselor and friend. The curious, animal-like children loved him. They would scramble down the walks to take his hand and toddle by his side. He was justly proud of his work and of his industrious alien people; perhaps, in their silent desert way, they were proud of him.

A little of this he told me modestly as we rolled over the road along the river. The greater part I learned in my own time, as did the Indians before me. He enlivened the recital by a few choice Southwest legends, made for and kept alive by greenhorns like myself. He showed me where the last great flood had eaten away huge sections of the lower flat and spread all over. The river was now a wide desolation of sand, glowing, sullen in the sun. In flood time this was no plaything of a stream. Its mark was on the country, a mile wide. I could have walked across it dry-shod, and since that time I have crossed it swimming a horse, and wondering when I should go off to tow at his tail. Tangled masses of matted greasewood, like shingle of the beaches, and trunks of cottonwoods, picked clean of bark and twig, white as bleaching bones, were piled on the bars. Over at one side remained a shallow pool, holding dull fish as captives; and several lean ponies came to suck eagerly at the turgid water. Away off in the flat, he pointed out my first mirage: the pretty view of a marshy place bordered by reeds, cool, inviting—yet a dusty desert falsehood. Suddenly it faded, vanished in thin air, to reveal nothing but brilliant sunlight on a baking floor. Drifting clouds cast long shadows on the sand. A tiny whirlwind twirled its dust-spout higher and higher and glided across the plain.

Then, from a little rise, he waved his whip toward a distant object, black against the western sun. It was very far away, and looked like a bird-house on a pole.

“That’s the Agency,” he said.

And indeed it was, for without it existence there was impossible. It was the stand-tank, most necessary thing in that land of precious water. Just at dark we swung through the gates. I had reached my first desert camp, on the edge of the Enchanted Empire.

IV

OLD TRAILS AND DESERT FARE

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized men cannot live without cooks.

—Meredith: Lucile

When I crossed the border of the Enchanted Empire, in the dusk of that entry to the Agency, I re-lived fancies caught out of Nicholas Nickleby, his winter journey into Yorkshire, coaching in company with the incomparable Squeers; his arrival at the bleak and cheerless Dotheboys Hall, and the atmosphere of that strange institution; and while there was something forlorn about them, there was also enough of their humor to keep me alive.

Considering what I have written concerning “the Boss,” who would have to be Squeers, this may seem a sorry and unkind reflection. But really, forgetting for the moment his generous heart and his earnest pride in the little desert kingdom, there was a superficial resemblance to old Squeers—the odd cock of the head, a certain quaint expression, a quizzical look after some solemn pronouncement, the rough exterior,—which in this case belied the man,—and that rare touch of the grotesque given by his wig: “Sack-hair.” The atmosphere of the Agency supported these impressions.

The ensemble of an Indian school, the cast of characters, their point of view, their quarters and customs—is something unique and quite beyond comparison with normal things. One is often first conscious of odors; and the Navajo have many sheep. Once a desert station is given over to Indian school purposes, where a number of children and their mentors must be fed, it acquires the fragrance of boiled mutton for its very own. There is nothing else like it. Even an abandoned school retains this poignant atmosphere for years.

Bare—stark naked—calcimined walls, grim in their poverty and unashamed; bare pine floors; cheap pine trimmings covered with hideous varnish, the gloss of which seemed an uncaring grin; the whole sparsely strewn with Government-contract furniture, feeble in the beginning and now in the last stages of pathetic senility. This was the quarters for unmarried employees. And when you take such a scene and thoroughly impregnate it with the clinging atmosphere of yesterday’s, and last week’s, and last year’s boiled mutton; animate it with characters gathered by the grab-bag method from the forty-eight States, persons warped and narrowed by their monotonous duties, impressed by the savage rather than impressing him, fulsome with petty gossip and radiating a cheap evangelical virtue, you have the indescribable—and invariable—locale of an isolated desert school. Dickens would have made it immortal, and his gallery of portraits would have gained many varieties of Bumbles and Mr. Chucksters and Sairey Gamps. I have walked in the Desert with Dick Swiveller and Mr. Cheggs; Mark Tapley I have known intimately; and I have dined several times with Pecksniff in the flesh, he lacking only a large shirt-collar to complete the picture. Hugh Walpole has glimpsed something similar to this in The Gods and Mr. Perrin. “It will be all right next term” is the fiscal cry of the restless, unsatisfied, and for the most part misfitted employees of the Indian Service. And the Indian stands mute, inarticulate, unable to express his confused amazement at this bizarre and ever-changing exhibition.

A strong sense of humor may keep one from going mad, but even the keenest humor grows blunted after a few months of such stolid association. If one has no relief in other mental pursuits, he succumbs finally to a moroseness that is not good in the unchanging, uncaring Desert.