Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

It was commanding in the morning light; it was the last thing seen down the valley, a scarlet head thrust into a sober sky, as that second night came on. The sunset lavished all its rainbow shades on it. Richest gold and lavender above, purple tones and lava-green below; bands of saffron melting into slatey shades; emerald and crimson deepening into jetty blacks when the afterglow had vanished. An aged throne of the gods. And clearly sweet, as desert music, came the half-hushed sound of sheep moving among the cedars; and a young Navajo girl paused at the edge of a thicket to gaze shyly at our cabin, then to hurry away, the tiny bells at her belt tinkling, having all the romance of the gypsies.

There is no finer landscape in the Southwest than this seldom-visited country of the Moqui Buttes where, according to the Hopi, the one-time giants had their dwelling places. The wondrous piles and pinnacles of the Grand Cañon present a chaotic struggle that has ceased in all its awesome disorder and aged grandeur. It makes man gasp and wonder, but it does not invite the smile of reverie. This scene about the sunset throne had that serenity born of isolation. It was small enough to invite intimacy. Like the kingdom of a fairy tale, the tranquil valley encompassed its own world, dreaming, smiling in its sleep.

Many times since have I crossed the Butte country, seeing it frozen in winter and again broiling under a summer sun that scorched from the cedars their sweetest aromas. I have always found it a haven, full of peace.

Next day we returned to the Agency, an uneventful retreat, save for a jouncing box of dynamite that leaped like a thing fiendishly alive whenever the wheels slammed into a rut. My nerves were not in the best shape. I had been smoking powdered alfalfa in a pipe. And I would look back from the high seat, half fearing each time to catch that dynamite in the very act of going off. But luck was with us; we herded it safely into the Agency storehouse; and I rushed to the post for a can of real tobacco.

VII

THE FIRST BALL OF THE SEASON

Of Harrison’s barn, with its muster
Of flags festooned over the wall,
Of the candles that shed their soft lustre
And tallow on headdress and shawl;
Of the steps that we took to one fiddle,
Of the dress of my queer vis-à-vis,
And how I once went down the middle
With the man who shot Sandy McGee.

Bret Harte: “Her Letter”

Among employees of the Desert Indian Service, the Marylander is a rarity. Back in Maryland the Indian Service is unknown, all readers of the Sun-paper believing that Indians were originally designed by Buffalo Bill.

So when a lad seated himself on my porch one night, and announced: “Why, Ah’m from Maheland too; yes, indeed!” it rather struck me where I ought to have lived. I was eating at the mess then.

He was out with an irrigation crew, surveying levels, and in a few months had become obsessed by all things Southwest Indian. He wore moccasins and a bracelet studded with turquoise, and he could chant like a cold Navajo on his way home from a Yabachai.

“Ah’m goin’ to get me a gourd-drum, an’ go in for ‘singing,’” he told me, when we had become better acquainted, and he demonstrated the eerie half-croon-half-yodel of the Medicine Man. “Say, Nultsose! have yo’ heard them?—Medicine ‘sings’?”

This was my first intimation that a title attached to my position.

“Nultsose—”

He explained it as Navajo for paper or writing, hence; one who writes on or issues papers pertaining to the mysteries of white men’s wholly unnecessary accounting. Nearly all clerks wear spectacles, as I did, and one would think that the Indian, naming his own so often because of infirmities, would have seized on this defect for a name. But not so; the check, order, issue-script, permit, or warrant, the paper, the “nultsose,” is the important thing to him. It means money in hard dollars, authority perhaps, demand for goods, leave to go on a journey with recommendation or safe-conduct; or, if fortune has waned, summons to the Chief.

“And if yo’ go to a ‘sing,’ Nultsose, remember to take change, an’ don’t give the squaws more’n two bits at a time. Yo’ll have to dance with ’em, yeh know, an’ instead of thankin’ ’em, yo’ pay ’em. Hand out a dollar, an’ Good-night—they keep the change. Now old Beck-a-shay Thlani is inviting to one sometime soon. It’ll be a reg’lar hoe-down, an’ we’ll go.”

The doctor was present, and he grinned uncomfortably. The Nahtahni, stretched in his hammock, rubbed his wig and grunted.

“Ah! yo’-all come too,” urged Roberts; “It’ll be fun. They all know me, and I’ll do the interpreting. Every old shemah with a dotter has her eye cast my way, anyhow. They pick out the handsome boys for the weddings at ‘sings.’ I’ll have to get me a Piute wedding-basket, though, next pay-day. There’s a trader over at Red Lake who’s got my order for it.”

The doctor cautioned me later not to be too hasty in this matter, and I perceived that he had reason for timidity.

“They’ll get you,” he declared. “They never fail to land a fellow; and then he has to prance like a fool before five thousand Indians. That’s all right for Roberts, ’cause he’ll wind up a squaw man; but I’m advising you.”

And one twilight, when we were again arranged on deck after supper, a half-dozen little Navajo boys from the school sidled up to the Chief, daring and timid by turns, their eyes snapping with the fire of hope. They hung around until he asked:—

“Ah-tish-ah?”

“Dence!” they exclaimed, breathlessly.

“Noki yisconga, epten,” the Nahtahni severely decided. “Doe-yah-shaunta! She-no-be-hosen. E-yah-tay.”

The Old Man was proud of his linguistic ability, and this was the complete extent of his Navajo on any topic. The last sentence but one he had made up, somehow, all by himself. It bore no semblance to anything any Navajo had ever enunciated; but he knew what it meant. A free—a very free—translation would run something like this: “Two days from now, nothing doing. Don’t you dare to do it. It’s bad for you. I know nothing about it. Yes; all right!”

The last was all the kids wanted. The scrub crackled as they disappeared into and through it, going as frightened rabbits.

Roberts spoke next.

“That’s old Beck-a-shay Thlani’s ‘sing.’ Say, boss, the Doc and young Nultsose here are both pinin’ for to shake a toe in that soiree. Let us have a team, will yeh?”

The Nahtahni grunted.

“You know the horses have worked hard to-day—”

“Yes; let us have a team,” said his stepdaughter, who afterward married the doctor; and that settled it, and also bound the medico to the adventures of the evening. There are a few things no different in the Desert. The Navajo woman of the hogan, the Hopi dowager of the household on the height, the Pueblo wife of the lower vineyards, all settle these questions in much the same manner. Man proposes and begins to make a noise with words, and immediately thereafter attends strictly to the holding of his peace. Roberts knew this, and without further parley disappeared in the direction of the barn. Shortly came a farm wagon, drawn by two solid animals, and a dozen of us piled into it, the doctor noticeably lagging.

“Don’t forget your change, Nultsose,” called Roberts.

It was no great distance to the river, and soon we were splashing through shallow waters. Mounting the high farther bank, the wagon began tossing and rolling over an old desert road. Then the dark laid down its thick blanket, and the stars burned through overhead. From the next rise we noticed a faint glow, away off, and this grew larger as we blundered along. Now a whiff of pungent smoke came on the thin desert wind. Now the deep shadows began to dissolve into a golden gloom, and now gleamed the white-hot flare of burning cottonwood. Then a furious challenge from the dogs, and we saw the camp. As feudal lords were once accompanied by retainers and shock-headed varlets, so the nomadic lord of the Desert is followed by a multitude of canines. It seemed that a thousand of them started up to greet us, a fearsome, throaty bedlam.

Wagons loomed up, their canvas tops lending a touch of the pioneer days; and in the spaces between the poles were the little cooking-fires, around which women and children huddled amid pots and pans, saddles and boxes and water-kegs and tangled harness—all the clutter of a desert camp. Beyond the huge central fire was a hogan, that queer house the Navajo builds of logs and plasters with adobe, domed like a beehive, and from its roof wreathed a thin column of smoke. There rested the sick man for whom all this preparation had been made, the cost of which would likely break old Beck-a-shay Thlani, or at least seriously strain his credit at the trading-posts.

Coarse Navajo rugs were spread close to the fire and, with grave salutations from the older men and smiles from mothers who convoyed a bevy of Navajo girls, we were invited to be seated in the place of honor. This would have impressed any blank-record Easterner, going about making notes, as rude but wholesome hospitality, and it was; but the courtesy also enabled the Navajo to indulge himself—and particularly herself—in a bit of fun. The doctor slipped away into the shadows; and I noticed that the young men of the Navajo, scores of them, sat their ponies, a long line of horsemen behind us. They eased in their saddles, reins hanging, their faces having the grave solemnity that marks a shy and diffident people.

That is, shy of strangers, before whom they draw on the mask of gravity, mistaken since the days of Fenimore Cooper for stoicism. But no one was shy of Roberts; and especially had he friends among the ladies. Every old shemah greeted him with a smile and exclamations of pleased surprise. He held the confidence of these people; and well he might, considering the pains he had been to in acquiring a working vocabulary of their language, which is probably as difficult to master as Chinese. And I felt somewhat reassured in having him for sponsor. We lolled comfortably on the rugs, and the fire burned our faces and lighted everything as at a play.

“The doc’ has vamoosed,” he said, grinning; “but that won’t do him any good. They’ll run him down in the scrub, and bring him in hog-tied. I’ve told a dozen old women that he is stingy with his dancing. Self-defense—otherwise you an’ me’d have to do it all.”

“Explain this dancing act,” I requested.

“Don’t worry,” Robert replied. “The squaws will attend to everything for yeh. Just yield gracefully—an’ pay ’em. Don’t forget that.”

Now from the hogan came a band of solemn-featured men, led by an old gentleman of the tribe who bore a strong resemblance to Rameses III, straight out of glass case No. 12, as you go down the east corridor, save that he was slightly animated. He bore a staff, to which a little gourd-drum was tied. The group formed a wedge behind him. Silently they swayed together, shoulders touching, for several seconds. Then the old one tapped the drum and intoned a howl, and with one accord they were off, like a flock of coon dogs on a cold night. In time with the curious rhythm they continued swaying, and occasionally did a hop-step without moving forward. The fire beat upon them and, as they warmed to the chanting, heads thrown back, mouths agape, and vocal chords never missing a note, the sweat beaded on their foreheads.

“This,” said Roberts to me, in solemn appreciation, “this is some singing—I never heard better.” And I agreed with him. It laid over anything I had ever heard, including a Mott Street theatre choir.

It is impossible to describe the nuances of the Navajo chants. At the farthest northern trading-post there lives a lady who can translate the Rain Song, the Prayer before Day, and other of their invocations; and I know a white man who had a “medicine sing” held over him to comfort his Navajo wife; but until you meet up with Roberts, properly chaperoned nowadays in the great Jedito Wash, I pass giving any idea of that weird combination of sounds. A long sustained note at times, now a crooning melody, now a sad, half-wild cry, filled with minor effects that would be the delight and the despair of any jazz artist, it is indeed a song of the Desert.

And the most astounding thing of all was the endurance of that aged vocalist, the old Medicine Man. The pitch of his drum simply encouraged him in new effects. There was an energy, a sustaining confidence in his efforts that must have had a rare effect on the ailing one within the hogan. And for two mortal hours the others of the singing band followed his lead without once rivaling him. When one hesitated, as might be seen but not heard, the clamor of the pack smothered all defects; and the faltering one would cough, spit straight upward into the air, uncaring, and get a fresh start. But the old man was never headed; not once did he waver, hesitate, or fail in the key. He had begun with that first flat sounding of the drum, and he continued faithfully unto the end. He was an artist. I admired him. And when Roberts told me that the old charlatan would receive at least twenty sheep and five head of cows for his fee, I began to understand his unflagging spirit. He had a reputation to sustain.

The Regulations of the Interior Department, issued to Nahtahnis, state that all such interesting old comedians should be in jail for this offense against medical ethics. But, mark you! the Interior Department does not encourage Nahtahni to put him in jail. There are too many of him. The Navajo number between thirty and forty thousand souls on the six Navajo reserves, and about every seventh man is a doctor of tribal medicine. While a lucrative calling, it is not always a desirable one for the neophyte, since failure to exorcise successfully the evil spirits enmeshed in the patient has been followed more than once by swift demise, and the blundering physician did not heal himself later, nor did he hear the singing.

Once to me came an Inspector from the Department, and he said:—

“Now you have been having trouble with these Indians, and I am surprised that you have dismissed all your Navajo policemen as unworthy. You must have a police force to keep the Navajo in line. We will call a council and select a new outfit to sustain you in this important work.”

Which we did. There were flour and meat, coffee and sugar, together with the all-necessary beck-a-shay nahto, cattle tobacco provided for distribution, and the people came. As usual, the men were diffident and modest, and no one offered himself for appointment as an officer of the realm. The nominations were made by head-men, and discussion followed as to individual merits, influence, bravery, and all those virtues that are supposed to animate the warrior. The Inspector was finally satisfied with the selections.

An old-timer sat on the platform with us, acting as interpreter. Ed had skinned mules across the Zuni Mountains in 1889, and he could take an old single-action forty-five and keep a tin can moving as if it were alive. He could roll a saddle-blanket cigarette with one hand, sing a puncher song, and play the guitar. He was one of the post-traders, and perhaps the best Navajo interpreter alive. He knew the Navajo Indian, having had the advantage of a living dictionary in his early days. But Ed knew when to keep his mouth shut, and aside from faithfully interpreting from English into Navajo and from Navajo into English he said nothing at the time. But later:—

“It wasn’t for me, a mere uneducated Indian trader, to give my advice to a wise guy from the East who was pointing the trails out to a Nahtahni; but ... every damned one of them new police has ‘medicine turquoise’ in his ears.”

It was true. Every one of them should have been in jail!

The Navajo are lithe and lean, for the most part, and their dress is picturesque. One could see all sorts of costume at this “sing.” There was the old fellow with trousers compiled of flour sacks, the brand having been arranged as a bit of decoration, and where “OUR BEST” would show to most advantage; and there was that one satisfied with a pair of cast-off overalls. But the majority were in rich-toned velveteen shirts, open at the neck, and with sleeves vented under the armpits; and desert trousers, loose and flapping garments, Spanish-style, split below the knee, made of highly colored and figured calico. One fellow’s legs were a riot of gaudy parrots. The twisted silk handkerchiefs worn about the head came from the Spanish too, no doubt. Their hair was drawn back from the forehead and corded in a long knot, a Mongol touch. Their moccasins were of red-stained buckskin, half-shoe, half-leggin, warm and noiseless. The young men wore gay shirts and neckerchiefs, store-bought, and their ponies showed more of decoration than themselves. Each had a good saddle, most necessary to a desert Romeo, and the headdresses of the ponies were heavy with silver bands and rosettes.

Now a middle-aged dandy would strut about, proud of a crimson shirt, and the firelight would paint him as a figure from old opera. He would shine whitely of silver—a huge necklace, with turquoise pendants and many strands of shell and coral; bracelets, and the khado that is still worn, though the wrist no longer needs protection from the bowstring; silver rings and silver buttons, all studded with turquoise chips. Not less than five hundred dollars in metal and workmanship would adorn these old beaux, and an Indian valuation would be enormous.

Silver and turquoise are the jeweled wealth of the Navajo, the white metal contrasting with their sunburnt skins and the stone holding the color of their matchless skies.

The women wore velveteen bodices and curiously full skirts. They too were weighted with silver ornaments, one having the more of beads and bandeaux being the favorite wife or daughter. Some of the smaller girls moved about accompanied by the tinkling of little bells strung to their moccasins and belts.

All this in the brilliant flare of the cottonwood fire, above which fanned a mist of sparks like another Milky Way; and there was the incense of the smoking logs; and the star-pinned dome overhead; and all around the dark maw of the great lonely Desert.

Suddenly came a halt in these “singing” proceedings. The choir withdrew somewhere, and the centre of the stage was taken by another old man, who led a little girl. Other and older girls began to hurry around the circle, darting here, darting there, as if running something down. At first the little one seemed a trifle confused and stood in wide-eyed hesitation; but with a bit of urging from the elder master of the ceremonies, she made for Roberts. He would lead this german. Grinning, he permitted her to pull him into the ring, his partner maintaining a solemnity that was comical.

“Get ready for the next set,” he called to me over his shoulder.

The social features were on, and the girls were hunting partners. Did the young men of the ponies vie with each other? They did not. They sat their steeds as if cut from granite. For it would seem that a young man would likely lose half his finery, certainly all his change, if captured, and might find himself later up against a breach-of-promise suit. On foot, he was at a disadvantage; mounted, it was the more difficult to drag him down. I cannot say that I noticed any chivalry among those young Navajo fellows.

But Roberts—there was a fine accommodating chap for you. One partner was not enough for him; he now had two of the tiny ones.

The dance seemed simple enough. It consisted in one’s acting as a pivot, around which the little squaw, or several of them, turned backward with rapid scuffling steps. Her one hand tightly gripped the man’s belt, the other held as tightly her blanket. Her expression was as sober as a Chinaman’s. But she accomplished the purpose of the business. After a few moments of that turning, the subject would be too dizzy to argue out of a donation. It kept up until Roberts was weaving; but when they stopped he protested that he was a poverty-stricken wretch—and promptly, without cracking a smile, they began again. He must shell out at least a quarter to each, which he did finally, and they scuttled back to their chaperons, who banked the money. And here he came unsteadily to the blanket we shared, while I suspected several of the old women casting menacing glances in my direction. There sounded a scurry in the outer darkness, and a crashing of the greasewood.

“The doc’ has beat it,” said Roberts, dropping down. I raised to look around; and just then, from behind, I felt a very muscular hand grasping my belt. There was nothing to do but yield in the best humor possible. A wild shout from the Indians, men and women, even from the ungallant horsemen grouped in the rear, and I was thrust and pulled forward. They had appointed two of the small girls to me, and their hold on my belt was like grim death.

And now the shuffle began.

I endeavored to spin without entangling my feet, but there was something wrong with my action. I was no such success as friend Roberts had been. Now the master of ceremonies came forward, his wrinkled face having the benevolence of a grandfather, and with expressive gestures he explained his sorrow because of my inefficiency. He would give me a lesson. We used words that neither understood, and made signs at each other until wholesale laughter retired the teacher. But I was not retired. I was still in the ring.

The gold-and-orange flares of the fires dazzled one’s eyes, and then one began to turn faster; the circle of bright figures in the full light lost outline, and then the wagons and horses and hogan and Roberts on his blanket blurred into and formed one jumbled merry-go-round of which I was the centre. A little more of this, and I cried “Enough!” and very nearly staggered into the fire. Solemnly my partners waited for and clutched at their two-bit pieces, and I weaved back to the blanket.

The doctor was not captured that night. Perhaps he managed to hide until we harnessed the team and started for home; perhaps he walked into the Agency, as several accused. But this was a “running dance,” meaning a moving one. A second installment of it was held the next night at a point ten miles down the river. The doctor was compelled to go, and there they ran him down and forced his performance. His effort was not half bad, and I wondered if mine had been as funny.

Affairs of this sort taught me that the desert Navajo are a good-natured and interesting people, in many ways like our own country folk at quilting-bees and huskings. They have their renegades and black sheep, with which the white race is as fully endowed; and my ugly experiences of later days could not be charged to the tribe.

When a Navajo is ailing, they manage to combine exorcism of the evil spirits with the amusing dance, and whether or not old Beck-a-shay Thlani was improved physically, the girls had a good time. It often helps them to find a husband; and in this case, how were they to know that Roberts would desert them for an Albuquerque girl, or that in a few months I would be interested only in solemnizing the marriages of older sisters and the herding of the remainder into schools?

But I have often wondered, when on those trails leading down into Beck-a-shay Thlani’s district, and coming suddenly on a shy Navajo maiden chivvying a band of sheep, if she were one I danced with that night on the Little Colorado River, when I was simply “Nultsose,” and the worries and responsibilities of Nahtahni had not been clamped to my shoulders.

VIII

OLD ORAIBI

But still the drowsy pueblo hears
The voices of the Bells;
They speak as ghosts of other years,
Their message faintly swells
And sighs away above the town,
Echoing history;
The whisper of an old renown
That dwelt at Cochiti.

—“The Bells of Cochiti”

One day, when it was quiet in the office, the Chief became reminiscent. He spoke of his coming to this station; how he had pitched his tent under the old cottonwoods at the present well; of the length of time it had taken to interest Pesh-la-kai Etsetti, the silversmith, and Beck-a-shay Thlani, the man of many cattle, in his plans; and of the winter when a posse of whites, led by a county sheriff who is now a Senator of the United States, drove the Indians through the snow, packing their few belongings, and across the river, in order that a few cattlemen who owned everything else might also have this poor grazing-area. That was before Great Heart quit the Washington helm; and Great Heart, with characteristic strenuosity, very promptly—one might say, rudely—dispossessed the self-appointed white inheritors of the earth.

“I have not had a vacation in six years,” he said, as a wind-up, “And do you know, I’m tired out, and think I’ll just take one.”

Well, I was not surprised at his being a trifle weary. He seldom had a moment to himself—except nights, when perhaps he slept. He had just returned from a long trip in the Butte country, had made numerous drives to town on business, had assisted in running down a band of horse-thieves, and only that morning had been on the range to locate and evict certain trespassers. When such work did not occupy him, there was the ruined boiler to dally with, a pumping-plant to construct, and reports to indite; to say nothing of the sessions of the Indian Court, long and involved and farcical, the dipping of sheep, and the never-ending complaints of employees—a garrulous, gossiping, complaining lot.

It was a great life, but he had momentarily weakened.

“Yes, I am tired,” he said; “And I’ll let you run this ranch for a brief spell, while I go off resting. I have never seen a snake dance, and the Moqui hold ’em over beyond those Buttes. To-morrow I start.”

Now that is the Southwesterner’s idea of a real vacation. He would travel about one hundred miles by team, toiling slowly through sand, probably in rain at this season and its aftermath of treacherous mud; struggle across arroyos and stream-beds where quicksand might ensnare his outfit and cause him days of labor; through broiling sunlight certainly, and general discomfort, to perch himself finally atop an overheated rock on the edge of a cliff and witness a score of well-meaning but deluded Hopi Indians juggling their precious rattlesnakes. Within two hours he could have had a berth on one of the finest trains in the world, and within twenty-four have reached the magnificently overadvertised and overgrown city of Los Angeles. Not so! Across the Desert called an unsatisfied lure, the sorcery of the unrelieved distances. “Out there somewhere” was something he had not seen. That was the excuse. Actually he longed to be free, and the unmapped Desert offered its splendid unbounded freedom.

At that time I had no conception that hard-going, with no cares other than those of keeping to trail, was the finest sort of rest for an active man whose routine had been filled with the pettiness of irritating and never-to-be-settled Governmental farces. I now know that the way to rest is to remove from telephones and telegraph-lines, from both superiors and subordinates who wish to pass the buck, from the hellish routine of menus and meals, from begging complaints and complaining beggars; to get away from everything, and so far into the back-country that in case of war, pestilence, or death those interested are staggered by the idea of reaching you.

One learns to act quickly. Delay half a day, and the incoming mail may present a dozen obstacles. Promptly at dawn next morning he started, his camp-outfit lashed to a light buckboard; and on the bulletin-post he left a notice that my commands would be as the law of the Medes and Persians during his absence.

I took him at his word, and one very necessary improvement was immediately set in motion. The place had become an asylum for stray desert dogs and forlorn disinherited cats. This livestock was promptly rounded up, and there were interment ceremonies over at the river. The succeeding nights were filled with a comforting peace.

But it was not all beer and skittles. The boiler did manage to burn out during his leave, thanks to the careful inattention of an underpaid and irresponsible Indian stoker; and without a boiler one does not run a steam-laundry, does not make ice, and most serious of all in the Desert, does not pump water. This last is the one thing that may not be done without. So for two days and nights the engineer and helpers labored with a loyalty that was revelation to me, rolling and re-rolling the crumbling tubes of that relic of the Dark Ages, while tank-wagons struggled in from the river with the drinking-supply.

The doctor and I sat in the office and talked of many things.

“When the Chief returns,” he suggested, winking, “We’ll go over there and have a look-see. How ’bout it?”

“Done!” I agreed. “But do they hold these snake dances every month?”

“Our good friends, the Moqui, hold some sort of shindig every day, from what I have heard of them, but not all are snake dances. Those are reserved for serious and important occasions, regulated by the sun, moon, and stars. They occur once a year at certain fixed points.”

“Then—we must have an object; and—”

“Peaches,” he said, cunningly. “We’ll go to old Oraibi after peaches—succulent fruit, the gift of the Spanish padres.”

Noting my blank amazement, he hurried into an explanation.

“One of the legal amusements at an Indian Agency is keeping the help occupied, on the theory that, as with horses, it can think of only one thing at a time. Now it has been discovered in this Service that a dozen women paring peaches for preserving not only are happy in the thought of reducing expenses, but the more easily talk of what ails ’em. We’ll suggest peaches to them, they’ll bring pressure on the Boss, and we’ll go. Lots of rabbit in that country, and ducks at the Lakes. Oraibi is some place to visit, too. It was built about the time of Noah, and hasn’t been cleaned since. Flood didn’t reach it.”

All of which was very interesting to one who wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, after having been penned up for months. I had viewed the same draggled trees, the same cement walks, the same old trading-post, for so long that all judgment was leaving me, and I had begun to buy Navajo blankets. When one reaches this point, the inoculative powers of the subtle Desert are beginning to work.

Everything came about just as the doctor had prophesied. The Chief returned one day at dusk, encrusted with sand and a week’s growth of beard. While he was shaving, I made a complete report against the stoker and the boiler, with comment on those in Washington responsible for both. Then the doctor heard of a terrifically sick Indian over beyond the Lakes, and the pressure of peaches-and-economy was brought by the other parties. Next morning, the medico and I made our get-away before the utter absence of dogs was discovered.

The only thing that tried to affect our escape was a little animal perched on my walk in the late moonlight. The doctor cautioned me not to disturb this visitor, and for once I did not neglect a physician’s advice. The team being harnessed at the barn, we drove to within fair shooting-distance of this guest, and the doctor handed me the lines, saying:—

“When I shoot, let ’em go.”

Which he did, and I did.

Later, we regretted this adventure, for the stupid ammoniacal creature proceeded to dive into the mess cellar, and all food in storage was strangely savored. A matter of this kind, begun in the innocent vacation spirit, may be far-reaching. When we returned with our cargo of peaches, the sewing-circle did not receive us with any fervent warmth. In fact, it was most broadly insinuated that we, having worked a leave, had performed this trick on purpose, to the utter horror and dismay of all unsuspecting persons.

Our going down to the river was through that mysterious half-luminous light that follows the darkness before dawn. Then the Desert has an ashen pallor, and a chill and silence that are like winter at whatever season of the year. The bare spaces seem to be covered with snow. There are no calls from birds. One moves in a dead world.

At the ford the wheels clattered ominously over flat slabs of rock, and then the horses splashed through shallow pools to the far bank. We turned westward, and the mountains showed their volcanic peaks, grim gray wings in the pallid dawn. They lifted, gaunt and rugged, from a ruff of pines. There had been a fall of snow on those higher levels between the timber and the crests, and the shoulders were draped in white. Now—the very tips of the range were seared with red-gold; and now—each snowbound crest began warming with a rosy glow, as if blood were stirring, pulsing, through the masses of icy lava and eroded stone. And the whole range warmed in a blaze of fresh rose and glinting gold as it turned to greet the sun.

Down by the river the cottonwoods were still veiled in colorless mist; above were those radiant wings of the morning; and the birds began calling, piping, rustling, as a band of crimson broadened across the gray lips of the east.

Soon we ascended a ridge of the orange-hued mesa I had so long viewed from the Agency grounds. It was my first close-up of the havoc wrought in clay and sandstone by the tearing, aging fingers of the Desert. There were no smooth planes in those tortured hills. They sprawled down to the river-bottoms in petrified agony, the worn death-mask of that time when Hell burst from the volcanoes and flowed its molten masses over the plains.

Slowly we gained the topmost ridge of all, the backbone dividing the river country from the beyond, and looked north over a vast plain, fresh in the morning light, holding the Tolani Lakes. Those wide splotches of bluish green, miles away, seemed as a mirage; but it was water, where one would least expect to find it, the overflow of the great Oraibi Wash, trapped in a flat basin, drying until another flood. The shores were marshy, reed-lined, and invited the migratory birds. Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.

And reflected in the greenish mirror were the dull red walls of Monument Point, the end of the great Red Mesa that stretched northward, rising hugely from the sand dunes and the Desert, flanked and buttressed as some Babylonian city. Perhaps it was a city of the ancients, snuffed out as Pompeii. One longed for time to explore its dead streets. There would be lions, no doubt, slinking down ruined terraces; and rutted pavements; and broken columns to cast long shadows under the autumn moon. And was it lifeless—or only enchanted? One paused and waited for a cry, a rumble of wheels, the far-off blare of a buccina, to wake its spearmen and send flashes along the walls.

This was my first impression, and eleven years after, not having seen it again, I went there over the old route to learn if first impressions fade. I found that the Desert and its visions do not change.

We “nooned” in a barren space that would have graced the Sahara. The sun burned down on us, but the air was quite stimulating. At these higher levels the skin browns, but the appetite is not affected. The fire, a mere handful of chips and twigs, was kindled in the little shade afforded by the rig. The doctor gave me a lesson in Southwest camping, just prior to my upsetting the can of peeled potatoes, after which he considered me impossible. With my usual energy, I had gathered greasewood branches for the fire, and had brought them from some distance. They would have made an election-night blaze. The doctor selected a pitiful handful from this mountain of brush, and briefly commented:—

“‘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?